The Elizabethan dramatists often took occasion in their prologues to
lecture the audience upon their conduct in the theatre, exhorting them
to more seemly manners, and especially informing them that nothing of
an indecorous nature would be presented upon the scene. The prologue
to "The Woman Hater," above mentioned, pronounces "to the utter
discomfort of all twopenny gallery men," that there is no impropriety
contained in the play, and bids them depart, if they have been looking
for anything of the kind. "Or if there be any lurking amongst you in
corners," it proceeds, "with table books who have some hope to find
fit matter to feed his malice on, let them clasp them up and slink
away, or stay and be converted." Of the play, it states: "Some things
in it you may meet with which are out of the common road: a duke there
is, and the scene lies in Italy, as those two things lightly we never
miss." The audience, however, are warned not to expect claptraps, or
personal satire. "You shall not find in it the ordinary and overworn
way of jesting at lords and courtiers and citizens, without taxation
of any particular or new vice by them found out, but at the persons of
them; such, he that made this, thinks vile, and for his own part vows
that he never did think but that a lord, lord-born, might be a wise
man, and a courtier an honest man.
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