Note 1712 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)

Malcontent, ind. 89. The additions for the King’s are ‘to entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of music in our theatre’. But ‘abridge’ only means shorten, and there are s. ds. for music between the acts of Sejanus (Globe, 1603) and in the plot of Dead Man’s Fortune (Admiral’s, c. 1590, H. P. 133); cf. Dekker, Belman of London (1608, Works, iii. 76), ‘These were appointed to be my Actes, in this goodly Theater, the musicke betweene, were the Singers of the Wood’. But such evidence is rare, and Lawrence, i. 75, and Cowling, 67, do not discriminate sufficiently the practice of the public theatres from that of the private theatres on the one hand and the early neo-classic court plays on the other. Here music is an integral part of the intermedii or dumb-shows, which are little more than survivals in the full-blown public drama; cf. F. A. Foster in E. S. xliv. 8, and Hamlet, III. ii. 13, ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’.