noted, and the discussion of a difficulty may be deferred.[1] Some entrances were of considerable size; an animal could be ridden on and off.[2] There were practicable and fairly solid doors; in A Knack to Know an Honest Man, a door is taken off its hinges.[3] And as the doors give admittance indifferently to hall scenes and to out-of-door scenes, it is obvious that the term, as used in the stage directions, often indicates a part of the theatrical structure rather than a feature properly belonging to a garden or woodland background.[4]
Some observations upon the heavens have already been made in an earlier chapter.[5] I feel little doubt that, while the supporting posts had primarily a structural object, and probably formed some obstacle to the free vision of the spectators, they were occasionally worked by the ingenuity of the dramatists and actors into the 'business' of the plays. The hints for such business are not very numerous, but they are sufficient to confirm the view that the Swan was not the only sixteenth-century theatre in which the posts existed. Thus in a street scene of Englishmen for my Money and in an open country scene of Two Angry Women of Abingdon we get episodes in which personages groping in the darkness stumble up against posts, and the second of these is particularly illuminating, because the victim utters a malediction upon the carpenter who set the post up, which a carpenter may have done upon the stage, but certainly did not do in a coney burrow.[6] In Englishmen for my Money the posts are taken for maypoles, and there are two of them. There*
- ↑ Cf. p. 98.
- ↑ Soliman and Perseda, I. iv. 47, 'Enter Basilisco riding of a mule' . . . (71) 'Piston getteth vp on his Asse, and rideth with him to the doore'; cf. 1 Rich. II (quoted p. 61, n. 3), and for the private stage, Liberality and Prodigality, passim, and Summer's Last Will and Testament, 968. W. J. Lawrence, Horses upon the Elizabethan Stage (T. L. S. 5 June 1919), deprecates a literal acceptance of Forman's notice of Macbeth and Banquo 'riding through a wood', attempts to explain away the third example here given, and neglects the rest. I think some kind of 'hobby' more likely than a trained animal. In the Mask of Flowers, Silenus is 'mounted upon an artificiall asse, which sometimes being taken with strains of musicke, did bow down his eares and listen with great attention'; cf. T. S. Graves, The Ass as Actor (1916, South Atlantic Quarterly, XV. 175).
- ↑ Knack to Know an Honest Man, sc. ix. 1034 (cf. p. 60, n. 3).
- ↑ Leir, 2625 (open country scene near a beacon), 'Mumford followes him to the dore'; cf. p. 60, supra.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xviii, p. 544.
- ↑ 2 Angry Women, sc. x. 2250, 'A plague on this poast, I would the Carpenter had bin hangd that set it vp for me. Where are yee now?'; Englishmen for my Money, scc. vii-ix (continuous scene), 1406, 'Take heede, sir! hers a post' . . . (1654) 'Watt be dis Post? . . . This Post; why tis the May-pole on Iuie-bridge going to Westminster. . . . Soft,
