The sweat of learned Jonson’s brain,
    And gentle Shakespeare’s easier strain,
    A hackney-coach conveys you to,
    In spite of all that rain can do,
    And for your eighteenpence you sit,
    The lord and judge of all fresh wit.

It must always be doubtful, however, as to the precise portion of the theatre these writers intended to designate.  As Mr. Collier suggests, the discordances between the authorities on this question arise, probably, from the fact that “different prices were charged at different theatres at different periods.”

In our early theatres, the arrangements for receiving the money of the playgoers were rather of a confused kind.  There would seem to have been several doors, one within the other, at any of which visitors might tender their admission money.  It was understood that he who, disapproving the performance, withdrew after the termination of the first act of the play, was entitled to receive back the amount he had paid for his entrance.  This system led to much brawling and fraud.  The matter was deemed important enough to justify royal intervention.  An order was issued in 1665, reciting that complaints had been made by “our servants, the actors in the Royal Theatre,” of divers persons refusing to pay at the first door of the said theatre, thereby obliging the doorkeepers to send after, solicit, and importune them for their entrance-money, and stating it to be the royal will and pleasure, for the prevention of these disorders, and so that such as are employed by the said actors might have no opportunity of deceiving them, that all persons thenceforward coming to the said theatre should at the first door pay their entrance-money, which was to be restored to them again in case they returned the same way before the end of the act.  The guards attending the theatre, and all others whom it might concern, were charged to see that this order was obeyed, and to return to the Lord Chamberlain the names of such persons as offered “any violence contrary to this our pleasure.”

Apparently the royal decree was not very implicitly obeyed by the playgoers.  At any rate we find, under date January 7th, 1668, the following entry in Mr. Pepys’s “Diary” bearing upon the matter:  “To the Nursery, but the house did not act to-day; and so I to the other two playhouses, into the pit to gaze up and down, and there did by this means for nothing see an act in the ‘School of Compliments,’ at the Duke of York’s house, and ‘Henry IV.’ at the King’s House; but not liking either of the plays, I took my coach again and home.”  At the trial of Lord Mohun, in 1692, for the murder of Mountford, the actor, John Rogers, one of the doorkeepers of the theatre, deposes that he applied to his lordship and to Captain Hill, his companion, “for the overplus of money for coming in, because they came out of the pit upon the stage.  They would not give it.  Lord Mohun said if I brought any of our masters he would slit their noses.”