[Footnote 46:  Some of the ancient Scenarie were printed in 1661, by Flaminius Scala, one of their great actors.  These, according to Riccoboni, consist of nothing more than the skeletons of Comedies; the canevas, as the French technically term a plot and its scenes.  He says, “They are not so short as those we now use to fix at the back of the scenes, nor so full as to furnish any aid to the dialogue:  they only explain what the actor did on the stage, and the action which forms the subject, nothing more.”]

[Footnote 47:  The passage in Livy is, “Juventus, histrionibus fabellarum actu relicto, ipsa inter se, more antiquo, ridicula intexta versibus jactitare caepit.”  Lib. vii. cap. 2.]

[Footnote 48:  As these Atellanae Fabulae were never written, they have not descended to us in any shape.  It has, indeed, been conjectured that Horace, in the fifth Satire of his first Book, v. 51, has preserved a scene of this nature between two practised buffoons in the “Pugnam Sarmenti Scurrae,” who challenges his brother Cicerrus, equally ludicrous and scurrilous.  But surely these were rather the low humour of the Mimes, than of the Atellan Farcers.]

[Footnote 49:  Melmoth’s Letters of Cicero, B. viii. lett. 20; in Graevius’s edition, Lib. ix. ep. 16.]

[Footnote 50:  This passage also shows that our own custom of annexing a Farce, or petite piece, or Pantomime, to a tragic Drama, existed among the Romans:  the introduction of the practice in our country seems not to be ascertained; and it is conjectured not to have existed before the Restoration.  Shakspeare and his contemporaries probably were spectators of only a single drama.]

[Footnote 51:  Storia Critica del Teatri de Signorelli, tom. iii. 258.—­Baretti mentions a collection of four thousand dramas, made by Apostolo Zeno, of which the greater part were comedies.  He allows that in tragedies his nation is inferior to the English and the French; but “no nation,” he adds, “can be compared with us for pleasantry and humour in comedy.” Some of the greatest names in Italian literature were writers of comedy.  Ital.  Lib. 119.]

[Footnote 52:  Altieri explains Formica as a crabbed fellow who acts the butt in a farce.]

[Footnote 53:  I refer the reader to Steevens’s edition, 1793, vol. ii. p. 495, for a sight of these literary curiosities.]

[Footnote 54:  The commencement of the “Platt” of the “Seven Deadly Sinnes,” believed to be a production of the famous Dick Tarleton, will sufficiently enlighten the reader as to the character of the whole.  The original is preserved at Dulwich, and is written in two columns, on a pasteboard about fifteen inches high, and nine in breadth.  We have modernised the spelling:—­

“A tent being placed on the stage for Henry the Sixth; he in it asleep.  To him the lieutenant, and a pursuivant (R.  Cowley, Jo.  Duke), and one warder (R.  Pallant).  To them Pride, Gluttony, Wrath, and Covetousness at one door; at another door Envy, Sloth, and Lechery.  The three put back the four, and so exeunt.