Every Elizabethan theatre possessed a tiring house or a tiring room, as it is generally named. The word is an abbreviation of attiring house: the place where the actors dressed or attired themselves. From the very earliest times the tiring room was a part of theatrical equipment. In the early days of the Greek drama, the Coryphæus mounted on a table, surrounded by choristers, who danced and chanted the dithyrambs in the orchestra. This was the name given to the flat service enclosed between the stage buildings and the inside boundary of the auditorium. It was called the orchestra, or dancing place, because in Greek theatres it was reserved for the performance of the chorus.
Thespis, who first introduced an actor on the scene, in the latter part of the sixth century B.C., erected a booth at the back of the orchestra in order to facilitate the changing of his costume. As this one actor impersonated all the characters in the play, it can easily be imagined how necessary the tiring room became. In later years, when the dramas of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were produced, regular stage buildings, with ample accommodation for the actors, were then in vogue. The tiring house of the Globe Theatre was in all probability constructed at the back or on the side of the lower stage. Some critics would also allot a space on the first floor for a second tiring room, adjoining the music room, which was known to be situated in that part of the building. There can be no doubt that in the engraving of the so-called “Inside of the Red Bull Theatre,” spectators are watching the play from these rooms, but it is not safe to deduce any dogmatic conclusions from this drawing: one critic would place the tiring room behind the proscenium doors on the ground floor, and the second room behind the balcony windows on the first floor. It would also seem, by a quotation from Melton’s Astrologaster, 1620, that the tiring room was used for preparing scenic illusion. “While Drummer’s made thunder in the Tyring-house.” The whole subject of the exact situation and the uses of this room is beset with difficulties, and no one so far has grappled with them successfully. That an actors’ dressing room did exist is a positive certainty. The most convenient place would be at the back of the lower stage, and, until further proof is forthcoming, there it must be located. This is the only instance in which Shakespeare uses the word.
TRAGEDY.
Mary, if he that writ it had play’d Pyramus and hanged himself in Thisbe’s garter, it would have been a fine tragedy; and so it is, truly and very notably discharged.
V, 1, 367.
By the above quotation, the word discharge bore some theatrical meaning, but I have failed to trace the use of the word as connected specially with the stage.
TRAGICAL.
Very tragical mirth. Merry and tragical.
V, 1, 57.