or in modern phrase 'green-room', a necessary adjunct of every theatre. The Theatre depositions of 1592 speak of this as 'the attyring housse or place where the players make them readye'. The drawing indicates nothing in the way of hangings over either wall or doors, but in some theatres these certainly existed. Thus Peacham, in his Thalia's Banquet (1620) referring to much earlier days, tells us that
Tarlton when his head was onely seene,
The Tire-house doore and Tapistrie betweene,
Set all the multitude in such a laughter,
They could not hold for scarce an hour after.<ref>Peacham, however, may be merely versifying the story of the choleric
justice and the provincial audience which laughed when he 'first peept
out his head' in Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (Works, i. 188), and reading in
a feature, in the process, of the stage as known to himself; and the same
applies to Davenant, The Unfortunate Lovers (c. 1638), prol., on the play-*goers
of old times:
<poem>
For they, he swears, to the theatre would come,
Ere they had din'd, to take up the best room;
There sit on benches, not adorn'd with mats,
And graciously did vail their high-crown'd hats
To every half-dress'd player, as he still
Through the hangings peeped to see how the house did fill.
For Caroline practice, cf. T. Goffe, Careless Shepherdess ind.:
I never saw Rheade peeping through the curtain,
But ravishing joy entered into my heart;
also Tatham's prologue for the Fortune players, when they moved to the Red Bull in 1640:
Forbear
Your wonted custom, banding tile and pear
Against our curtains, to allure us forth;
I pray, take notice, these are of more worth;
Pure Naples silk, not worsted.
I defer a full consideration of stage hangings to the chapters on staging; cf. vol. iii, p. 78.</ref> </poem>
The front of the tiring-house is the 'scene' in the Renaissance sense, and its characteristics will be of great concern in later chapters.[1] The Fortune tire-house was to be within*
- ↑ For the classical sense of Scaena, cf. the passage from Vitruvius quoted in vol. iii, p. 3. Florio, Dictionary (1598), s.v. Scena, 'a skaffold, a pavillion, or forepart of a theatre where players make them readie, being trimmed with hangings, out of which they enter upon the stage', points to the identity of scene and tire-house front. This structure has therefore precisely the double function of the 'domus' of the court plays; cf. ch. xix. I owe the quotation to Graves, 15, who adds, The Englysshe Mancyne upon the foure Cardynale Vertues (c. 1520), 'a disgyser yt goeth into a secret corner callyd a sene of the pleyinge place to chaunge his rayment', and Palsgrave, Acolastus (1540), prol., 'our scenes, that is to saye, our places appoynted for our players to come forth of'. The English 'Mancyne' is a translation, earlier than A. Barclay's, of Dominic Mancini's De Quatuor Virtutibus (1516), and the original has only 'Histrio, qui in scaenam vadit'. The notion of scena as not a mere wall, but a shelter
