Note 231 — NOTE ON SYMBOLS (continued 2)

Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Vennor. The only extant Swan play is Middleton’s Chaste Maid in Cheapside of 1611. Chamber scenes are III. i, ii, iii; IV. i; V. ii. Some of these would probably have been treated in a sixteenth-century play as threshold scenes. But III. ii, a child-bed scene, would have called for curtains. In Chaste Maid, however, the opening s.d. is ‘A bed thrust out upon the stage; Allwit’s wife in it’. We cannot therefore assume curtains; cf. p. 113. The room is above (ll. 102, 124) and is set with stools and rushes. In V. iv, two funeral processions meet in the street, and ‘while all the company seem to weep and mourn, there is a sad song in the music-room’.