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and the insolent poets and pamphleteers classed him with the groundlings as a 'stinkard'.[1] His domain certainly included the top gallery, but about the other galleries I am not sure. There are some puzzling allusions to penny galleries and rooms, but probably, these are not distinct from the 'twopenny' ones, and the explanation is to be found in the practice of paying the twopence in two instalments, one on entrance, the other at the gallery door.[2] It did not long remain possible to get one of the best seats for the 3d. quoted by Platter, even if there was not already in his time a higher charge for 'the priuate roomes of greater price'.[3] There were both

  • [Footnote: for your two pence a peice agen before Ile loose your company. . . . Good

night, my twopenny Tenants'; Mad World, my Masters (c. 1604-6), v. ii. 36, 'some . . . that . . . took a good conceit of their parts into th' twopenny room'; Woman Hater (1607), prol. 5, 'I do pronounce this, to the utter discomfort of all twopenny Gallery men, you shall have no bawdery'; Fleire (1607), ii. 30, 'They (like your common players) let men come in for twopence a peece'; Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 96), 'You may take him . . . in the afternoones, in the twopeny roomes of a Play-house, like a Puny, seated Cheeke by Iowle with a punke', Seven Deadly Sins (1606, ii. 53), 'Sloth . . . will come and sit in the two-*pennie galleries amongst the gentlemen, and see their knaveries and their pastimes', The Dead Term (1608, iv. 55), 'Players . . . prostitute themselues to the pleasures of euery two-penny drunken Plebeian', Lanthorn and Candle-Light (1608, iii. 216), 'Pay thy twopence to a Player, in his gallerie maist thou sitte by a Harlot', Raven's Almanac (1609, iv. 184), 'As if you sat in the moste perspicuous place of the two-penny gallerie in a play-house'; Roaring Girl (1611), v. 1, 'One of them is a nip; I took him once i' the two-penny gallerie at the Fortune'; &c., &c.]

  1. Dekker, Seven Deadly Sins (1606, Works, ii. 53), 'Their houses smoakt euery after noone with Stinkards who were so glewed together in crowdes with the steames of strong breath, that when they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had beene per boyld', Raven's Almanac (1609, iv. 194), 'Hee shall be glad to play three houres for two pence to the basest stinkard in London, whose breth is stronger than garlicke, and able to poison all the twelve penny roomes', Work for Armourers (1609, iv. 96), 'tearme times, when the Twopeny Clients and Peny Stinkards swarme together to heere the Stagerites'; vide n. 2, infra, and p. 534, n. 1.
  2. Satiromastix (1602), 1669, 'a Gentleman or an honest Cittizen shall not sit in your pennie-bench Theaters, with his Squirrell by his side cracking nuttes . . . but he shall be Satyr'd and Epigram'd vpon'; T. M. Black Book (1604), 'penny-rooms at theatres'; T. M. Ant and Nightingale (1604), 'stinkards sitting in the penny galleries of a theatre, and yawning upon the players'; Dekker, Gull's Horn Book (1609, Works, ii. 208), 'thou . . . hast vouchsafed to be acquainted with penny galleries'; Wit Without Money (c. 1614), iv. 1, 'break in at plays like prentices for three a groat, and crack nuts with the scholars in peny rooms again'.
  3. A. Copley, Wits, Fits and Fancies (1595; ed. 1614, p. 124), tells of a man cast off by his brother, an actor, who sent him sixpence in a sheet of paper, to show that, 'though his brother had vowed not in seven years to see him, yet he for his sixpence could come and see him upon the stage at his pleasure'. If Platter's 3d. was the highest normal charge in the sixteenth century, the 6d. may represent a first night's charge.