in 1579 as 6s. a week; some of Henslowe's agreements of 1597 provide for wages of 5s., 6s. 8d., and 8s.[1] There was some economy to be secured by doubling small parts.[2] How far this was facilitated by any use of masks is open to doubt.[3] Boys were regularly employed to take female parts, and although it would be going rather too far to say that a woman never appeared upon an Elizabethan stage, women were not included in the ordinary companies.[4] The boys were apprenticed to individuals, and their masters had to pay rather than receive premiums. In return they charged wages to the company. Henslowe gave £8 for a boy in 1597 and got 3s. a week from the Admiral's for his wages. John Shank in 1635 claimed that he had had to give £40 for a single boy, and £200 in all.[5] Contributions to local rates came to about £5 a year.[6] The cost of apparel and properties is difficult to estimate. A company bought or accumulated a stock, and might also have at its disposal a stock belonging to the owner of its theatre. Individual actors may have had their private wardrobes.[7] Fresh purchases were only necessitated by new productions, but these were frequent. The special mounting of Court performances was helped out by the Revels Office.[8] The actor in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592) boasted that his share of apparel would not be sold for
- ↑ Cf. p. 363 and ch. xiii (Admiral's).
- ↑ Cf. W. W. Greg in T. L. S. (12 Feb. 1920) and his analysis of the Dulwich 'plots' (H. P. 152). Here also we find the tireman, gatherers, and attendants used as 'supers'.
- ↑ Puttenham, i. 14, says that Roscius 'brought vp these vizards, which we see at this day vsed'. In The Longer Thou Livest, 1748, 1796, God's Judgement has 'a terrible visure' and Confusion 'an ill fauowred visure', and in All For Money, 389, 1440, 1462, Damnation, Judas, and Dives have vizards. But this is early evidence, and perhaps drawn from the private stage. Harington, Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596, An Anatomy, 5), speaks of 'an ill-favoured vizor, such as I have seen in stage plays, when they dance Machachinas', but this rather tells against the use by ordinary actors at that date.
- ↑ Women only began to act regularly at the Restoration; cf. Ward, iii. 253. There had been occasional earlier examples; even in 1611 Coryat, Crudities, i. 386, says that at Venice 'I saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hathe beene sometimes used in London'. The exceptions are, I think, such as prove the rule; private plays such as Hymen's Triumph, Venner's gulling show of England's Joy, the Italian tumblers of 1574, the virago Moll Frith at the Fortune (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker, Roaring Girl). On 22 Feb. 1583 Richard Madox 'went to the theater to see a scurvie play set out al by one virgin, which there proved a fyemarten without voice, so that we stayed not the matter' (Cotton MSS. App. xlvii, f. 6^v; cf. S. P. Colonial, E. Indies, 221). As to the skill of the boys, cf. Ben Jonson on Richard Robinson in The Devil is an Ass, II. viii. 64.
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 316.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xvi (Swan).
- ↑ Cf. ch. xiii (Admiral's).
- ↑ Cf. ch. vii.
