Note 1686 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)

Most of the allusions to 6d. charges relate to private houses (cf. p. 556), but Beaumont’s grammar lecture (cf. ch. xxiii) gives this price for the Bankside, and T. M. Black Book (1604, Bullen, Middleton, viii. 41) has ‘I give and bequeath to you Benedick Bottomless, most deep cut-purse, all the benefit of ... the sixpenny rooms in play-places, to cut, dive and nim’. Later, The Actors Remonstrance (1643) professes that the players will not admit into their ‘sixpenny rooms those unwholesome enticing harlots that sit there merely to be taken up by prentices or lawyers’ clerks’; cf. Lawrence, i. 36, who thinks that the lord’s rooms became the sixpenny rooms. For the 1s. charge, cf. p. 533, n. 1, and Malcontent (1604), ind. 63, ‘I say, any man that hath wit may censure, if he sit in the twelve-penny room’; Dekker, G. H. B. (1609), ‘When at a new play you take up the twelve-penny rome next the stage; (because the Lords and you may seeme to be haile fellow wel-met) there draw forth this booke, read alowd, laugh alowd, and play the Antickes, that all the garlike mouthed stinkards may cry out, Away with the fool’; Hen. VIII (1613), prol., ‘may see away their shilling’; Overbury, Characters (ed. Rimbault, 154, The Proud Man), ‘If he have but twelvepence in ’s purse he will give it for the best room in a play-house’.