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It was inner room, upper room, window, balcony, battlements, hillside, Mount Olympus, any place, in fact, that was supposed to be separated from and above the scene of the main action. It was in this balcony, for instance, that Sly and his attendants sat while they witnessed the performance of The Taming of the Shrew.

The wardrobes of the principal theatres were rich, varied, and costly. It was customary to buy for stage use slightly worn court dresses and the gorgeous robes used at coronations. Near the end of the last century, Steevens tells us, there was "yet in the wardrobe of Covent Garden Theatre a rich suit of clothes that once belonged to James I." Steevens saw it worn by the performer of Justice Greely in Massinger's New Way to pay Old Debts. The Allen Papers and Henslowe's Diary* inform us fully upon this point. In the latter there is a memorandum of the payment of £4 145. (equal to $120) for a single pair of hose; and by the former we see that £16 (equal to $400) was paid for one embroidered velvet cloak, and £20 10s. (equal to $512) for another. Costume of conventional significance was also worn; for Henslowe records the purchase, at the large price of £3 10s., of "a robe for to goo invisibell."

A comparison of the prices paid for dresses with those paid for the plays in which they were

* Both printed by the Shakespeare Society.

worn shows us that the absence of scenery and of stage decoration, to which it has been supposed we owe much of the rich imagery in the Elizabethan drama, was due only to poverty of resource, and not to the higher value set by the public, and consequently by the theatrical proprietors, upon the intellectual part of their entertainment. The highest sum which Henslowe records. as having been paid by him before 1600 as the full price of a play is £8, not half what was given for a cloak that might have been worn in it; the lowest sum is £4, not as much as the hero's hose might have cost. By 1613 theatrical competition had raised the price of a play by a dramatist of repute to £20, which, being equal to $500 of the present day, was perhaps quite as much as the proprietors could afford, and was not an inadequate payment for such plays as went to make up the bulk of the dramatic productions of the day. Happily, nearly all of these have perished, and of those which have survived, the best claim the attention of posterity only because Shakespeare lived when they were written.

THE END.

Cambridge Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.