Note 1339 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 3)
Reading edition
Wither, Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613), i. 1,
‘His poetry is such as he can cull From plays he heard at Curtain or at Bull’;
Albumazar, II. i. 16, ‘Then will I confound her with compliments drawn from the plays I see at the Fortune and Red Bull, where I learn all the words I speak and understand not’; Gayton, 24, ‘I have heard that the poets of the Fortune and Red Bull had always a mouth-measure for their actors (who were terrible tear-throats) and made their lines proportionable to their compass, which were sesquipedales, a foot and a half’.