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and much new Satten is there dambd, by being smothred to death in darknesse.'

I return to the guidance of De Witt. The boarding between the yard and the lower gallery, which in the Fortune was overlaid with iron pikes, presumably to prevent the groundlings from climbing over, shows two apertures, to right and left of the stage, one of which is marked 'ingressus'. From these steps lead to the lower gallery itself, and we may infer the presence of a passage to staircases behind, by which the upper galleries were reached. The contracts show that the Fortune, like the Globe, and the Hope, like the Swan, were to have external staircases. Perhaps this accounts for the greater diameter of the lower part of the Globe in the London maps. Of external doors there were only two at the Globe, which caused trouble at the time of the fire, and two also at the Fortune, when Alleyn leased a share of it to Henslowe in 1601. One of these would in each case have been a door to the tiring house, giving access to the stage and the lord's room, while the other served the body of the theatre. Those bound for the galleries paid their pennies at the theatre door, passed through the yard to the 'ingressus', and made additional payments there and in the 'rooms', according to the places selected. The custom explains itself by the arrangement between the sharers of companies and the housekeepers of theatres, which gave the latter a proportion of gallery takings in lieu of rent. 'Gatherers', appointed by the persons interested, collected the money, and although this was put into a locked box, whence the modern term 'box-office', there were abundant opportunities for fraud. At need, the gatherers could serve as supernumeraries on the stage.

At the back of the stage, and forming a chord to an arc of the circular structure of the play-house, runs a straight wall, pierced by two pairs of folding doors, on which De Witt has written 'mimorum aedes'. Above it is the gallery or lord's room already described. This wall is the 'scene', in the primary sense; it is also the front of the 'tire-house',