who fitted the dresses and the beards, furnished stools, and in the private theatres took charge of the lights;[1] the stage-*keeper;[2] the grooms and 'necessary attendants', waiting to draw curtains, to thrust out beds, and to carry benches and banquets on and off.[3] Here, too, was the head-quarters of the music, although in the public theatres the music was largely incidental, and was often played on, or above, or even below the stage, as might seem most appropriate to any particular action.[4] Music between the acts was not
- [Footnote: stare (God blesse us,) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors misse
their entrance'; R. J. I. iv. 7,
Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance.
The actor's signal for entrance was already his 'cue'; cf. M. N. D. III. i. 77, 'And so every one according to his cue'; Isle of Gulls, ii. 2, 'you know your que'; ii. 3, 'She hath entred the Dutches iust at her que'.]*
- ↑ 2 Ant. Mellida, II. i. 30, 'The tiring man hath not glued on my beard half fast enough'. A tireman appears in the inductions to Malcontent, 'Enter W. Sly, a Tire-man following him with a stool', and to What You Will, 'Enter Tireman with lights'. 'Steven the tyerman' of the Admiral's in 1596 is probably the Steven Magett of other entries by Henslowe (i. 31, 44, 45).
- ↑ Speakers in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) are the Booke-*Holder and the Stage-Keeper, who 'kept the Stage in Master Tarletons time', and whose work is 'sweeping the Stage? or gathering vp the broken apples for the beares within?'
- ↑ The Fortune company, c. 1617 (H. P. 85), offer to employ a dismissed 'gatherer' as 'a nessessary atendaunt on the stage' and to mend garments. On 27 Dec. 1624 the Master of Revels (Var. iii. 112; Herbert, 74) issued a warrant of protection for Nicholas Underhill, Robert Pallant, John Rhodes, and eighteen others 'all imployed by the kings maiesties servantes in theire quallity of playinge as musitions and other necessary attendantes'. In Devil's Charter (1607), 3016, is the s. d. 'Alexander vnbraced betwixt two Cardinalls in his study looking vpon a booke, whilst a groome draweth the curtaine'. Is this 'groom' a character or an 'attendant'? In any case attendants were naturally, with musicians and even 'gatherers' (on whom cf. ch. xi), used at need for supernumeraries; cf. the gatherers in the Frederick and Basilea plot (1597, H. P. 136) and 2 If You Know Not Me (1606), p. 297, 'Enter . . . the waits in sergeants' gowns'. The long list of men and boys in the procession at the end of 1 Tamar Cham (1602, H. P. 148) must have taxed all such resources. For the use of boys as attendants, cf. Bartholomew Fair, V. iii. 65, 'Ha' you none of your pretty impudent boyes, now; to bring stooles, fill Tabacco, fetch Ale, and beg money, as they haue at other houses?' Seventeenth-century gossip (Centurie of Prayse, 417) made Shakespeare join the stage as a 'serviture'.
- ↑ Lawrence, i. 75, ii. 159; Wegener, 150; G. H. Cowling, Music on the Shakespearian Stage, 29, 70, 80. I refer to Cowling and to E. W. Naylor, Shakespeare and Music, for discussions of the instruments used—drums, timbrels, bells (percussion instruments), sackbuts, trumpets, horns (brass instruments), cornets, hautboys, recorders, fifes (wood instruments), viols, lutes, citterns, pandores (string instruments)—of such terms as 'flourish', 'sennet', 'tucket', 'peal', 'alarum', 'consort', and of other technical matters with which I am not qualified to deal. The Admiral's
