Merry Milkmaids.’” If it so chanced that the players were refractory, then “the benches, the tiles, the lathes, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally; and as there were mechanics of all professions, everyone fell to his own trade, and dissolved a house on the instant, and made a ruin of a stately fabric.  It was not then the most mimical nor fighting man could pacify; prologues nor epilogues would prevail; the Devil and the Fool [evidently two popular characters at this time] were quite out of favour; nothing but noise and tumult fills the house,” &c. &c.

Concerning the dramatist of the time, upon the occasion of the first performance of his play, his anxiety, irascibility, and peculiarities generally, Ben Jonson provides sufficient information.  “We are not so officiously befriended by him,” says one of the characters in the Induction to “Cynthia’s Revels,” “as to have his presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the bookholder [or prompter], swear at our properties, curse the poor tireman, rail the musick out of tune, and sweat for every venial trespass we commit as some author would.”  While, in the Induction to his “Staple of News,” Jonson has clearly portrayed himself.  “Yonder he is,” says Mirth, in reply to some remark touching the poet of the performance, “within—­I was in the tiring-house awhile, to see the actors dressed—­rolling himself up and down like a tun in the midst of them ... never did vessel, or wort, or wine, work so ... a stewed poet!... he doth sit like an unbraced drum, with one of his heads beaten out,” &c.  The dramatic poets, it may be noted, were admitted gratis to the theatres, and duly took their places among the spectators.  Not a few of them were also actors.  Dekker, in his “Satiromastix,” accuses Jonson of sitting in the gallery during the performance of his own plays, distorting his countenance at every line, “to make gentlemen have an eye on him, and to make players afraid” to act their parts.  A further charge is thus worded:  “Besides, you must forswear to venture on the stage, when your play is ended, and exchange courtesies and compliments with the gallants in the lords’ rooms (or boxes), to make all the house rise up in arms, and cry:  ’That’s Horace! that’s he! that’s he! that’s he that purges humours and diseases!’”

Jonson makes frequent complaint of the growing fastidiousness of his audience, and nearly fifty years later, the same charge against the public is repeated by Davenant, in the Prologue to his “Unfortunate Lovers.”  He tells the spectators that they expect to have in two hours ten times more wit than was allowed their silly ancestors in twenty years, who

                        to the theatre would come,
    Ere they had dined, to take up the best room;
    There sit on benches not adorned with mats,
    And graciously did vail their high-crowned hats
    To every half-dressed player, as he still
    Through the hangings peeped