Epilogues went out of fashion with pigtails, the public having at last decided that neither of these appendages was really necessary or particularly ornamental; but a considerable time elapsed before this opinion was definitively arrived at.  The old English moralities or moral plays usually concluded, as Mr. Payne Collier notes, with an epilogue in which prayers were offered up by the actors for the king, queen, clergy, and sometimes for the commons; the latest instance of this practice being the epilogue to a play of 1619, “Two Wise Men and All the Rest Fools.”  “It resteth now,” says the “epiloguiser,” “that we render you very humble and hearty thanks, and that all our hearts pray for the king and his family’s enduring happiness, and our country’s perpetual welfare. Si placet, plaudite.” So also the dancer entrusted with the delivery of the epilogue to Shakespeare’s “Second Part of King Henry IV.” may be understood as referring to this matter, in the concluding words of his address:  “My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good-night:  and so kneel down before you—­but, indeed, to pray for the queen.”  And to this old custom of loyal prayer for the reigning sovereign has been traced the addition of the words, “Vivat rex,” or “Vivat regina,” which were wont to appear in the playbills, until quite recent times, when our programmes became the advertising media of the perfumers.

The main object of the epilogue, however, was as Massinger has expressed it in the concluding address of his comedy, “Believe as you List”—­

    The end of epilogues is to inquire
    The censure of the play, or to desire
    Pardon for what’s amiss;

and as Theseus states the matter in “The Midsummer Night’s Dream:”  “No epilogue, I pray you, for your play needs no excuse.”  Sometimes a sort of bluntness of speech was affected, as in the epilogue to one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s comedies: 

    Why there should be an epilogue to a play
    I know no cause.  The old and usual way
    For which they were made was to entreat the grace
    Of such as were spectators.  In this place
    And time, ’tis to no purpose; for I know,
    What you resolve already to bestow
    Will not be altered, whatsoe’er I say
    In the behalf of us, and of the play;
    Only to quit our doubts, if you think fit,
    You may or cry it up or silence it.

It was in order, no doubt, the more to conciliate the audience that epilogues assumed, oftentimes, a playfulness of tone that would scarcely have been tolerated in the case of prologues.  The delivery of an epilogue by a woman (i.e. by a boy playing the part of a woman) was clearly unusual at the time of the first performance of “As You Like It.”  “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue,” says Rosalind; “but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue.  If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that