walks, meet courtiers, soldiers and poets at dinner, stroll at night in
the dark streets of the city and fall in with the watch. Here, again,
Dekker paints from life scenes with which he was familiar, and we have
but to follow his footsteps to become acquainted with the haunts of the
Bohemians of his time, and of the great men too, of Jonson and
Shakespeare themselves.

The scene at the theatre is the most original and lively of all. The
serio-comic advice to the gallant how he "should behave himself in a
playhouse"[305] is a perfect picture of what was daily taking place, be
the play Shakespeare's "Hamlet" or Dekker's "Patient Grissil."[306] Of
course the gallant must sit on the stage and "on the very rushes," which
in the theatre, and also in palaces and houses, continued as in the
Middle Ages to serve for carpets;[307] he will not care for the
disapprobation of the groundlings, but must plant himself valiantly,
"beating downe the mewes and hisses of opposed rascality.

"For do but cast up a reckoning; what large commings-in are pursd up by
sitting on the stage? First a conspicuous eminence is gotten; by which
meanes, the best and most essencial parts of a gallant (good cloathes, a
proportionable legge, white hand, the Persian lock, and a tollerable
beard), are perfectly revealed."

Of course you must choose with the greatest care your time to come in.
"Present not your selfe on the stage especially at a new play until the
quaking Prologue hath, by rubbing, got [colour] into his cheekes and is
ready to give the trumpets their cue that hees upon point to enter; for
then it is time, as though you were one of the properties, or that you
dropt out of ye hangings, to creepe from behind the arras, with your
tripos or three-footed stoole in one hand and a teston (_i.e._, six
pence) mounted betweene a forefinger and a thumbe in the other; for if
you should bestow your person upon the vulgar when the belly of the
house is but halfe full, your apparell is quite eaten up, the fashion
lost ..."[308]

When the play is well begun, there is also a special behaviour to
observe: "It shall crowne you with rich commendation to laugh alowd in
the middest of the most serious and saddest scene of the terriblest
tragedy; and to let that clapper your tongue, be tost so high that all
the house may ring of it: your lords use it; your knights are apes to
the lords, and do so too ... be thou a beagle to them all.... [At]
first, all the eyes