Roaring Boys by Judith Cook Page B

very well get you the price of a good dinner.
    After lunch then where else but to the playhouse? Not to mention advice on how to ruin the performance of an actor, or the reputation of a dramatist, from one who must have suffered the latter at first hand. It must all be planned beforehand. First, the would-be wrecker must not stand with
    the common groundlings and gallery commoners, who buy their sport by the penny. . . . Whether you visit a private or public theatre, arrive late. Do not enter until the trumpet has sounded twice. Announce to all that you will sit on the stage, and then haggle loftily over the cost of your stool. Let no man offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of insolent, overweening, coxcomb. Then push with noise, through the crowds to the stage.
    So having reached the stage, you clamber on to it, stand in the middle and:
    ask loudly whose play it is. If you know not the author rail against him and so behave yourself as to enforce the author to know you. By sitting on the stage, if a knight you may haply get a mistress; if a mere Fleet Street gentleman, a wife; but assure yourself by your continual residence, the first and principal man in election to begin ‘we three’. By spreading your body on the stage and being a Justice in the examining of plays, you shall put yourself in such authority that the Poet [dramatist] shall not dare present his piece without your approval.
    Before the play actually begins it is a good idea to set up a card game with the others who are seated on the stage:
    As you play, shout insults at the gaping ragamuffins and then throw the cards down in the middle of the stage, just as the last sound of trumpet rings out, as though you had lost. [Then, as the] quaking Prologue rubs his cheeks for colour and gives the trumpets their cue for him to enter, point out to your acquaintances a lady in a black-and-yellow striped hat, or some such, shouting to us all that you had ordered the very same design for your mistress and that you had it from your tailor but two weeks since and had been assured there was no other like it . . . then, as the Prologue begins his piece again, pick up your stool and creep across the stage to the other side.
    After some more chat and fidgeting, as soon as the actors appear:
    take from your pocket tobacco, and your pipe and all the stuff belonging to it and make much of filling and lighting it. [Then, as the leading actor strides on to begin his great opening speech] comment loudly on his little legs, or his new hat, or his red beard. Take no notice of those who cry out ‘Away with the fool!’ It shall crown you with the richest commendation to laugh aloud in the midst of the most serious and saddest scenes of the terriblest tragedy and to let that clapper, your tongue, be tossed so high the whole house may ring with it. Lastly you shall disgrace the author of this piece worst, whether it is a comedy, pastoral or tragedy, if you rise with a screwed and discontented face and be gone. No matter whether the play be good or not, the better it is the more you should dislike it. Do not sneak away like a coward, but salute all your gentle acquaintance that are spread out either on the rushes or on the stools behind you, and draw what troop you can from the stage after you. The Poet may well cry out ‘and a pox go with you!’ but care not you for that; there’s no music without frets.
    So, with the feeling of a job well done, it is time for the evening meal. There is, however, one problem. By now there is no money to pay for it:
    So you will need to find, to pay your reckoning for you, some young man lately come into his inheritance who is in London for the first time; a country gentleman who has brought his wife up to learn the fashions, see the tombs in Westminster, the lions in the Tower or to take physic; or else some farmer who has told his wife back home he has a suit at law and is come to town to pursue his lechery – for all these will have money