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.
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