The prologue-speaker of the Elizabethan stage entered after the trumpets had sounded thrice, attired in a long cloak of black cloth or velvet, occasionally assuming a wreath or garland of bays, emblematic of authorship.  In the “Accounts of the Revels in 1573-74,” a charge is made for “bays for the prologgs.”  Long after the cloak had been discarded it was still usual for the prologue-speaker to appear dressed in black.  Robert Lloyd, in his “Familiar Epistle to George Colman,” 1761, writes: 

    With decent sables on his back
    (Your ‘prologuisers’ all wear black)
    The prologue comes; and, if it’s mine
    It’s very good and very fine. 
    If not—­I take a pinch of snuff,
    And wonder where you got such stuff.

Upon this subject, Mr. Payne Collier notes a stage direction in the Induction to Heywood’s “Four ’Prentices of London,” 1615:  “Enter three, in black cloaks, at the doors.”  Each of them advancing to speak the prologue, the first exclaims—­“What mean you, my masters, to appear thus before your times?  Do you not know that I am the prologue?  Do you not see this long black velvet cloak upon my back?  Have you not sounded thrice?” So also, in the Induction to Ben Jonson’s “Cynthia’s Revels,” two of the children of the chapel contend for the privilege of speaking the prologue, one of them maintaining his claim by pleading “possession of the cloak.”

The custom of regarding the “prologuiser” as the author or his representative, seems gradually to have been departed from, and prologues came to be delivered by one of the chief actors in the play, in the character he was about to undertake, or in some other assumed for the occasion.  A certain solemnity of tone, however, was usually preserved in the prologue to tragedy—­the goodwill and merciful consideration of the audience being still entreated for the author and his work, although considerable licence was permitted to the comedy prologue.  And the prologues acquired more and more of a dramatic nature, being divided sometimes between two and three speakers, and less resembling formal prologues than those Inductions of which the early dramatists, and especially Ben Jonson, seem to have been so unreasonably fond.  The prologue to “The Poetaster” is spoken, in part, by Envy “rising in the midst of the stage,” and, in part, by an official representative of the dramatist.  So, the prologue to Shakespeare’s Second Part of “King Henry IV.” is delivered by Rumour, “painted full of tongues;” a like office being accomplished by Gower and Chorus, in regard to the plays of “Pericles” and “King Henry V.”  It is to be noted that but few of Shakespeare’s prologues and epilogues have been preserved.  Malone conjectures that they were not held to be indispensable appendages to a play in Shakespeare’s time.  But Mr. Collier is probably more correct in assuming that they were often retrenched by the printer, because they could not be brought within the compass of a page,