Note 1714 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)

Alphonsus, prol., ‘after you haue sounded thrise, let Venus be let downe from the top of the Stage’; Heywood, Four Prentices, prol., ‘Do you not know that I am the prologue? Do you not see the long black velvet coat upon my back? Have I not all the signs of the prologue about me? Have you not sounded thrice?’; Dekker, Satiromastix, epist., ‘In steed of the trumpets sounding thrice, before the play begin, it shall not be amisse ... first to beholde this short Comedy of Errors’; G. H. B. (cf. App. H), ‘untill the quaking prologue hath (by rubbing) got cullor into his cheekes, and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that hee’s upon point to enter’; E. M. O. (Q1), 107, ‘Inductio, sono secundo’, 402, ‘Sound the third time. Enter Prologue’. Jonson has a similar arrangement (F1) in the private house plays Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, but probably the trumpets were here replaced by more elaborate music; cf. 1 Ant. Mellida, ind. 1, ‘the music will sound straight for entrance’; What You Will, ind. 1 (s. d.), ‘Before the music sounds for the Act’; C. Revels (Q1), 1435, ‘Like an unperfect Prologue, at third musique’. Surely this is the origin of the ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ (or ‘curtain tune’) music of the Restoration and eighteenth-century overtures, described by Lawrence, ii. 155. Exceptionally the prologue in Percy’s C. and C. Errant is between the second and third sounding.