Note 1684 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)

Satiromastix (1602), 1669, ‘a Gentleman or an honest Cittizen shall not sit in your pennie-bench Theaters, with his Squirrell by his side cracking nuttes ... but he shall be Satyr’d and Epigram’d vpon’; T. M. Black Book (1604), ‘penny-rooms at theatres’; T. M. Ant and Nightingale (1604), ‘stinkards sitting in the penny galleries of a theatre, and yawning upon the players’; Dekker, Gull’s Horn Book (1609, Works, ii. 208), ‘thou ... hast vouchsafed to be acquainted with penny galleries’; Wit Without Money (c. 1614), iv. 1, ‘break in at plays like prentices for three a groat, and crack nuts with the scholars in peny rooms again’.