But it
was the fashion to be late: to enter the theatre noisily, when the
play was half over, and even then to pay little attention to the
players. In Fielding's farce of "Miss Lucy in Town," produced in 1742,
when the country-bred wife inquires of Mrs. Tawdry concerning the
behaviour of the London fine ladies at the playhouses, she is
answered: "Why, if they can they take a stage-box, where they let the
footman sit the two first acts to show his livery; then they come in
to show themselves--spread their fans upon the spikes, make curtsies
to their acquaintance, and then talk and laugh as loud as they are
able."
CHAPTER X.
FOOT-LIGHTS.
As the performances of the Elizabethan theatres commenced at three
o'clock in the afternoon, and the public theatres of the period were
open to the sky (except over the stage and galleries), much artificial
lighting could not, as a rule, have been requisite. Malone, in his
account of the English stage prefixed to his edition of "Shakespeare,"
describes the stage as formerly lighted by means of two large branches
"of a form similar to those now hung in churches.
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