Note 1710 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)

The Fortune company, c. 1617 (H. P. 85), offer to employ a dismissed ‘gatherer’ as ‘a nessessary atendaunt on the stage’ and to mend garments. On 27 Dec. 1624 the Master of Revels (Var. iii. 112; Herbert, 74) issued a warrant of protection for Nicholas Underhill, Robert Pallant, John Rhodes, and eighteen others ‘all imployed by the kings maiesties servantes in theire quallity of playinge as musitions and other necessary attendantes’. In Devil’s Charter (1607), 3016, is the s. d. ‘Alexander vnbraced betwixt two Cardinalls in his study looking vpon a booke, whilst a groome draweth the curtaine’. Is this ‘groom’ a character or an ‘attendant’? In any case attendants were naturally, with musicians and even ‘gatherers’ (on whom cf. ch. xi), used at need for supernumeraries; cf. the gatherers in the Frederick and Basilea plot (1597, H. P. 136) and 2 If You Know Not Me (1606), p. 297, ‘Enter ... the waits in sergeants’ gowns’. The long list of men and boys in the procession at the end of 1 Tamar Cham (1602, H. P. 148) must have taxed all such resources. For the use of boys as attendants, cf. Bartholomew Fair, V. iii. 65, ‘Ha’ you none of your pretty impudent boyes, now; to bring stooles, fill Tabacco, fetch Ale, and beg money, as they haue at other houses?’ Seventeenth-century gossip (Centurie of Prayse, 417) made Shakespeare join the stage as a ‘serviture’.