[31a] Cf. Hales, Notes on Shakespeare, 1884, pp. 1-24.
[31b] The common assumption that Richard Burbage, the chief actor with whom Shakespeare was associated, was a native of Stratford is wholly erroneous. Richard was born in Shoreditch, and his father came from Hertfordshire. John Heming, another of Shakespeare’s actor-friends who has also been claimed as a native of Stratford, was beyond reasonable doubt born at Droitwich in Worcestershire. Thomas Greene, a popular comic actor at the Red Bull Theatre early in the seventeenth century, is conjectured to have belonged to Stratford on no grounds that deserve attention; Shakespeare was in no way associated with him.
[32a] Blades, Shakspere and Typography, 1872.
[32b] Cf. Lord Campbell, Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements, 1859. Legal terminology abounded in all plays and poems of the period, e.g. Barnabe Barnes’s Sonnets, 1593, and Zepheria, 1594 (see Appendix IX.)
[32c] Commonly assigned to Theophilus Cibber, but written by Robert Shiels and other hack-writers under Cibber’s editorship.
[38a] The site of the Blackfriars Theatre is now occupied by the offices of the ‘Times’ newspaper in Queen Victoria Street, E.C.
[38b] Cf. Exchequer Lay Subsidies City of London, 146/369, Public Record Office; Notes and Queries, 8th ser. viii. 418.
[38c] Shakespeare alludes to the appearance of men or boys in women’s parts when he makes Rosalind say laughingly to the men of the audience in the epilogue to As you like it, ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many,’ etc. Similarly, Cleopatra on her downfall in Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 220 seq., laments:
the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us . . . and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.
Men taking women’s parts seem to have worn masks. Flute is bidden by Quince play Thisbe ‘in a mask’ in Midsummer Night’s Dream (I. ii. 53). In French and Italian theatres of the time women seem to have acted publicly, but until the Restoration public opinion in England deemed the appearance of a woman on a public stage to be an act of shamelessness on which the most disreputable of her sex would hardly venture. With a curious inconsistency ladies of rank were encouraged at Queen Elizabeth’s Court, and still more frequently at the Courts of James I and Charles I, to take part in private and amateur representations of masques and short dramatic pageants. During the reign of James I scenic decoration, usually designed by Inigo Jones, accompanied the production of masques in the royal palaces, but until the Restoration the public stages were bare of any scenic contrivance except a front curtain opening in the middle and a balcony or upper platform resting on pillars at the back of the stage, from which portions of the dialogue were sometimes spoken, although occasionally the balcony seems to have been occupied by spectators (cf. a sketch made by a Dutch visitor to London in 1596 of the stage of the Swan Theatre in Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen Bühne von Karl Theodor Gaedertz. Mit der ersten authentischen innern Ansicht der Schwans Theater in London, Bremen, 1888). Sir Philip Sidney humorously described the spectator’s difficulties in an Elizabethan playhouse, where, owing to the absence of stage scenery, he had to imagine the bare boards to present in rapid succession a garden, a rocky coast, a cave, and a battlefield (Apologie for Poetrie, p. 52). Three flourishes on a trumpet announced the beginning of the performance, but a band of fiddlers played music between the acts. The scenes of each act were played without interruption.