Note 1725 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)
Reading edition
Field (1583, App. C, No. xxxi), ‘Those flagges of defiance against God’; Vennar’s apology (1614) for England’s Joy (1602, cf. ch. xxiii). ‘The report of gentlemen and gentlewomens actions, being indeed the flagge to our theatre, was not meerely falcification’; A Mad World, my Masters (1604–6), I. i. 38, III. iii. 143, ‘’Tis Lent in your cheeks; the flag’s down’.... ‘The hair about the hat is as good as a flag upo’ th’ pole, at a common play-house, to waft company’; Dekker, Raven’s Almanac (1609, Works, iv. 210), ‘Another ciuill warre doe I finde will fal betweene players.... For it is thought that Flag will be aduanced (as it were in mortall defiance against Flag)’; Work for Armourers (1609, Works, iv. 96), ‘Play-houses stand ... the dores locked vp, the flagges ... taken down’; Curtain-Drawer of the World (1612), ‘Each play-house advanceth his flag in the aire, whither quickly at the waving thereof are summoned whole troops of men, women, and children’. The maps regularly show flags on the theatres. The Globe fire in 1613 ‘did not spare the silken flagg’ (cf. p. 421). Heywood, Apology, 22, mistranslates Ovid’s ‘Tunc neque marmoreo pendebant vela theatro’ as:
In those days from the marble house did waive No sail, no silken flag, no ensign brave.