A Book of the Play: Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and CharacterCook, Dutton
History
A Book of the Play: Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character
Cook, Dutton
Theater -- Great Britain -- History
The money received was placed in a box, and there seems to have been
one person specially charged with this duty. Dekker, dedicating one of
his plays to his "friends and fellows," the queen's servants, wishes
them "a full audience and one honest doorkeeper." Even thus early the
absolute integrity of the attendants of the theatre would appear to
have been a subject of suspicion. "Penny galleries" are referred to by
some early writers, and from a passage in the "Gull's Horn Book,"
1609--"Your groundling and gallery commoner buys his sport for a
penny"--it is apparent that the charges for admission to the yard,
where the spectators stood, and to the galleries, where they sat on
benches, were the same. In Dekker's "Satiromastix," one of the
characters speaks scornfully of "penny bench theatres," where a
gentleman or an honest citizen "might sit with his squirrel by his
side cracking nuts." But according to the Induction to Ben Jonson's
"Bartholomew Fair," first acted in 1614, at the Hope, a small dirty
theatre on the Bankside, which had formerly been used for
bear-baiting, the prices there ranged from sixpence to half-a-crown.
"It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen'worth, his twelve
pen'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 ... Marry, if he drop but sixpence at the door, and will censure a
crown's worth, it is thought there is no conscience or justice in
that." It is probable, however, that the dramatist was referring to
the prices charged at the first representation of his play. Sixpence
might then be the lowest admission; on other occasions, twopence, or
even one penny. The prologue to "Henry VIII." states:
Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree,
The play may pass; if they be still and willing,
I'll undertake, may see away their shilling
Richly in two short hours.
And there is evidence that in Shakespeare's time one shilling was the
price of admission to the best rooms or boxes. Sir Thomas Overbury
writes in his "Characters," published in 1614: "If he have but twelve
pence in his purse he will give it for the best room in a playhouse."
And the "Gull's Horn Book," 1609, counsels, "At a new play you take up
the twelvepenny room next the stage, because the lords and you may
seem to be hail-fellow well met!"
But it is plain that the tariff of admission was subject to frequent
alterations, and that as money became more abundant, the managers
gradually increased their charges. In the "Scornful Lady" "eighteen
pence" is referred to as though it were the highest price of admission
to the Blackfriars Theatre. Sir John Suckling writes, about the middle
of the seventeenth century:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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