Seeing that the Austrian troops now coming down from Friuli are about to enter the Trevisan province, to which some of the French troops may also move, and it being according to the zealous forethought of the government to remove all inducements which give individuals of the troops the desire to come still nearer to these lagoons, the Council of Ten, considering that one inducement might be the reopening of the theatre, orders you to put it off as long as may seem best to the prudence of the Heads of the said Council. Given in our Ducal Palace on the twenty-seventh of September in the fifteenth year of the Indiction, 1796. [I find that the year of the Indiction does not correspond with the date.] There was another magistracy which also had to do with the theatres. The ‘Provveditori di Commun’ [Sidenote: _Mutinelli, Lessico, ‘Teatro.’_] fixed the price of the libretto of the play. It was Council of Ten, however, that named the hour at which the performance was to begin and end. The lighting of the theatres was wretched and the boxes were completely dark, which appears to have [Sidenote: _Molmenti, Nuovi Studi._] given the ladies a considerable sense of security, for I find that in 1756 the noble dame Pisani Grimani, who owned the theatre of San Benedetto, was forbidden by the Inquisitors of State to stand at the door of her box in a costume which might ‘produce grave disorder.’ In 1776 the government made an effort to limit such extreme views of comfort in warm weather, and an edict was issued commanding ladies to wear modest dresses, with domino and hood, at the theatre. The noble ladies Maria Bon Toderini and Elisabetta Labia Priuli were put under arrest in their own houses in the following year for having, in their boxes, thrown back their hoods and allowed them to slip down upon their shoulders. The musicians’ desks were lighted with candles of Spanish wax, from Segovia in Castile. The stage was illuminated by lamps fed with olive oil. In the dim house there seems to have been a good deal of rough play, and the patricians in the boxes occasionally threw ‘projectiles’--possibly hard sweet-meats are meant--at the people in the pit. The lights were put out as soon as the curtain fell on the last act, and the spectators groped their way out in the dark as they could, helped by the big brass lanterns which the gondoliers brought to the door when they came to wait for their masters.