Note 234 — NOTE ON SYMBOLS (continued 2)

Cf. p. 30; vol. i, p. 231. On the removal of bodies W. Archer (Quarterly Review, ccviii. 454) says, ‘In over a hundred plays which we have minutely examined (including all Shakespeare’s tragedies) there is only a small minority of cases in which explicit provision is not made, either by stage-direction or by a line in the text, for the removal of bodies. The few exceptions to this rule are clearly mere inadvertences, or else are due to the fact that there is a crowd of people on the stage in whose exit a body can be dragged or carried off almost unobserved’. In Old Fortunatus, 1206, after his sons have lamented over their dead father, ‘They both fall asleepe: Fortune and a companie of Satyres enter with Musicke, and playing about Fortunatus body, take him away’. Of course, a body left dead in the alcove need not be removed; the closing curtains cover it.