while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and---- * "Kempe, the actor, in his 'Nine Days' Wonder,' a. d. 1600, compares a man to 'such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage for all the people to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.'" ("Shakespeare," by Richard Grant White, Vol. I., p. 183.) {260}pipes of tobacco with which to regale themselves. * "Practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest, was utterly unknown, ** and it is thought that the actors relied on barely more than the written action of the piece for their guidance. In the plays of this period we come continually on such stage directions as "Here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "All speak "Here they all talke," etc., *** which proves that much of the dialogue was trusted to the inspiration of the moment--to which inspiration the gallants and pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed. * Ibid. ** Whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, which supposes "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert with confidence, that the same was written in or after 1662, up to which date there was no such thing as practicable machinery. In the original edition of "The Tempest," for instance, there is no intimation, by way of stage direction, that the first scene occurs on shipboard. In the first edition of "As You Like It" there is no mention of a forest in the stage direction. Nor in the early quartos of "Romeo and Juliet" is there any intimation that Juliet makes love in a balcony. "What child is there, that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?" says Sidney, in his "Defence of Poesie."--(R. G. White's "Shakespeare's Scholar," p. 489, note.) Trap-doors, however, were probably in very early use; at least, we find in a comedy by Middleton and Dekkar a character called "Trap-door." There seems, also, to have been pillars that turned about, and a writer in the times of James I. mentions that "the stage varied three times in one tragedy." *** These stage directions are taken from Greene's "Tu Quoque," a. d. 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, and long after, according to the commentators, he had ceased writing for the stage.