[409] Cf. ch. xxii.
[410] M. N. D. III. ii. 463 (F1), ‘They sleep all the Act’; i. e. all the act-interval (cf. p. 131). So in Catiline the storm with which Act III ends is still on at the beginning of Act IV, and in Alchemist Mammon and Lovewit are seen approaching at the ends of Acts I and IV respectively, but in both cases the actual arrival is at the beginning of the next act.
[411] F. A. Foster, Dumb Show in Elizabethan Drama before 1620 (E. S. xliv. 8).
[412] Jonson has a ‘Chorus—of musicians’ between the acts of Sejanus, and the presenter of Two Lamentable Tragedies bids the audience ‘Delight your eares with pleasing harmonie’ after the harrowing end of Act II. Some other examples given in Lawrence, i. 75 (Music and Song in the Elizabethan Drama), seem to me no more than incidental music such as may occur at any point of a play. Malone (Var. iii. 111) describes a copy of the Q2 of R. J. in which the act endings and directions for inter-act music had been marked in manuscript; but this might be of late date.
[413] Malcontent, ind. 89.
[414] Henslowe Papers, 127.
[415] Catiline, I. i.
[416] Second Maidens Tragedy, 1719, ‘Exit’ the Tyrant, four lines from the end of a court scene, and 1724 ‘Enter the Tirant agen at a farder dore, which opened, bringes hym to the Toombe’ (cf. p. 110, n. 8). So in Woman Killed with Kindness (Queen’s), IV. ii, iii (continuous scene), Mrs. Frankford and her lover retire from a hall scene to sup in her chamber, and the servants are bidden to lock the house doors. In IV. iv Frankford enters with a friend, and says (8) ‘This is the key that opes my outward gate; This the hall-door; this the withdrawing chamber; But this ... It leads to my polluted bedchamber’. Then (17) ‘now to my gate’, where they light a lanthorn, and (23) ‘this is the last door’, and in IV. v Frankford emerges as from the bedchamber. Probably sc. iv is supposed to begin before the house. They go behind at (17), emerge through another door, and the scene is then in the hall, whence Frankford passes at (23) through the central aperture behind again.
[417] Wily Beguiled, prol. The Prologus asks a player the name of the play, and is told ‘Sir you may look vpon the Title’. He complains that it is ‘Spectrum once again’. Then a Juggler enters, will show him a trick, and says ‘With a cast of cleane conveyance, come aloft Jack for thy masters advantage (hees gone I warrant ye)’ and there is the s.d. ‘Spectrum is conveied away: and Wily beguiled, stands in the place of it’.
[418] Most of the examples in Lawrence, i. 43 (Title and Locality Boards on the Pre-Restoration Stage) belong to Court or to private theatres; on the latter cf. p. 154, infra. But the prologue to 1 Sir John Oldcastle begins ‘The doubtful Title (Gentlemen) prefixt Upon the Argument we have in hand May breede suspence’. The lost Frankfort engraving of English comedians (cf. vol. ii, p. 520) is said to have shown boards.