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 A. SQUARE THEATRE (Proportions of Fortune)

Juliet bids him shut the door. Here, no doubt, the Friar may have looked out and seen Juliet through a back window, and she may have entered by a back door. But in an earlier scene, where we get the stage-direction 'Enter Nurse and knockes', and the knocking is repeated until the Nurse is admitted to the cell, we are, I think, bound to suppose that the entry is in front, in the sight of the audience, and antecedent to the knocking. Perhaps an even clearer case is in Captain Thomas Stukeley, where Stukeley's chamber in the Temple is certainly approached from the open stage by a door at which Stukeley's father knocks, and which is unlocked and locked again. Yet how can a door be inserted in that side of a chamber which is open to the stage and the audience. Possibly it was a very conventional door set across the narrow space between the arras and the back wall