sixpenny and twelvepenny rooms by 1604.[1] These may have been the same private rooms at varying prices, according as the play was old or new. I take it that you only got a single seat, even in a 'private' room, for your 6d. or 12d., and not the whole room. Overbury or another gives 12d. as the price of the 'best room' as late as about 1614, but in the same year the ordinary scale of charges was greatly exceeded throughout the house on the production of Bartholomew Fair at the Hope, where a speaker in the induction says, 'it shall be lawful to judge his six-penny-worth, his twelve-penny-worth, so to his eighteen-pence, two shillings, half-a-crown, to the value of his place, provided always his place get not above his wit'. This must have been a quite exceptional occasion, not merely a new play, but a new play at a new house. Similarly, when Richard Vennar brought the gulls to his swindle of England's Joy in 1602, 'the price at cumming in was two shillings or eighteenpence at least'.
A special compartment in one of the galleries was not the only privilege offered to the more fashionable playgoer. He might, at one time or another, sit 'over the stage' and on the stage. De Witt's drawing shows, at the back of the stage, a raised gallery divided into six small boxes, in each of which one or two spectators appear to be placed.[2] It is reasonable to suppose that these are sitting 'over the stage'.[3]*
- ↑ Most of the allusions to 6d. charges relate to private houses (cf. p. 556), but Beaumont's grammar lecture (cf. ch. xxiii) gives this price for the Bankside, and T. M. Black Book (1604, Bullen, Middleton, viii. 41) has 'I give and bequeath to you Benedick Bottomless, most deep cut-purse, all the benefit of . . . the sixpenny rooms in play-places, to cut, dive and nim'. Later, The Actors Remonstrance (1643) professes that the players will not admit into their 'sixpenny rooms those unwholesome enticing harlots that sit there merely to be taken up by prentices or lawyers' clerks'; cf. Lawrence, i. 36, who thinks that the lord's rooms became the sixpenny rooms. For the 1s. charge, cf. p. 533, n. 1, and Malcontent (1604), ind. 63, 'I say, any man that hath wit may censure, if he sit in the twelvepenny room'; Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), 'When at a new play you take up the twelve-penny rome next the stage; (because the Lords and you may seeme to be haile fellow wel-met) there draw forth this booke, read alowd, laugh alowd, and play the Antickes, that all the garlike mouthed stinkards may cry out, Away with the fool'; Hen. VIII (1613), prol., 'may see away their shilling'; Overbury, Characters (ed. Rimbault, 154, The Proud Man), 'If he have but twelvepence in 's purse he will give it for the best room in a play-house'.
- ↑ They include women, and certainly look more like spectators than actors or musicians.
- ↑ E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), ep. 53:
See you him yonder, who sits o're the stage,
With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth?In E. M. O. (1599), 1390 (Q_{1}), Brisk is said to speak of lords 'as familiarlie as if hee had . . . ta'ne tabacco with them ouer the stage i' the Lords
