Note 1688 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)
Reading edition
E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), ep. 53:
See you him yonder, who sits o’re the stage, With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth?
In E. M. O. (1599), 1390 (Q1), Brisk is said to speak of lords ‘as familiarlie as if hee had ... ta’ne tabacco with them ouer the stage i’ the Lords roome’. Dekker-Wilkins, Jests to Make you Merry (1607, Works, ii. 292), has a jest of ‘one that sat ouer the stage’ on a wench in the two-penny room. Farmer-Chetham MS. (seventeenth-century, ed. Grosart, i. 104) has an epigram on Spongus, who ‘Plays at Primero over the stage’.