I will hasten to the money-box
    And take my shilling out again;
    I’ll go to the Bull or Fortune, and there see
    A play for twopence and a jig to boot.

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.  “It shall be lawful for any man to judge his six pen’worth, his twelve pen’worth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half-a-crown, to the value of his place; provided always his place get not above his wit ...  Marry, if he drop but sixpence at the door, and will censure a crown’s worth, it is thought there is no conscience or justice in that.”  It is probable, however, that the dramatist was referring to the prices charged at the first representation of his play.  Sixpence might then be the lowest admission; on other occasions, twopence, or even one penny.  The prologue to “Henry VIII.” states: 

            Those that come to see
    Only a show or two, and so agree,
    The play may pass; if they be still and willing,
    I’ll undertake, may see away their shilling
    Richly in two short hours.

And there is evidence that in Shakespeare’s time one shilling was the price of admission to the best rooms or boxes.  Sir Thomas Overbury writes in his “Characters,” published in 1614:  “If he have but twelve pence in his purse he will give it for the best room in a playhouse.”  And the “Gull’s Horn Book,” 1609, counsels, “At a new play you take up the twelvepenny room next the stage, because the lords and you may seem to be hail-fellow well met!”

But it is plain that the tariff of admission was subject to frequent alterations, and that as money became more abundant, the managers gradually increased their charges.  In the “Scornful Lady” “eighteen pence” is referred to as though it were the highest price of admission to the Blackfriars Theatre.  Sir John Suckling writes, about the middle of the seventeenth century: