Note 1740 — BOOK IV THE PLAY-HOUSES (continued 5)
Reading edition
Dekker, G. H. B. (1609, Works, ii. 201), ‘you can neither shake our Comick Theater with your stinking breath of hisses, nor raise it with the thunder-claps of your hands’ (cf. also App. H); Isle of Gulls, ind., ’Tis growne into a custome at playes if anyone rise (especially of any fashionable sort) about what serious busines soeuer, the rest thinking it in dislike of the play, tho he neuer thinks it, cry “Mew! by Jesus, vilde!” and leaue the poore hartlesse children to speake their Epilogue to the emptie seates’. Later a Gent. says, ‘See it be baudy, or by the light I and all my friends will hisse’, and the Prologue replies, ‘You shoulde not deale gentlemanlike with us els’; E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), prol. to Sat., ‘It is the grand hisse to a filthy play’; Roaring Girl, prol., ‘If that he finds not here, he mews at it’; T. and C., epil.:
my fear is this, Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss;
Downfall of Robin Hood, ad fin.:
if I fail in this, Then let my pains be baffled with a hiss;
Devil an Ass, III. v. 41:
If I could but see a piece... Come but to one act, and I did not care— But to be seene to rise, and goe away, To vex the Players, and to punish their Poet— Keepe him in awe!