Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/79

 Sometimes, in a scene which employs the 'Let us in!' formula, or on other ground looks like a threshold scene, we are suddenly pulled up either by a suggestion of the host that we are 'in' his house or under his roof, or by an indication that persons outside are to be brought 'in'. The first answer is, I think, that the threshold is not always a mere doorstep opening from the street; it may be something of the nature of a porch or even a lobby, and that you may fairly be said to be under a man's roof when you are in his porch. The second is that in some threshold scenes the stage was certainly regarded as representing a courtyard, shut off from the street or road by an outer gate, through which strangers could quite properly be supposed to come 'in'. Such courtyard scenes are not out of place, even

(738) 'Get you in Here put them in at doore'; sc. vii. 894 (Lelio's), 'Underneath this wall, watch all this night: If any man shall attempt to breake your sisters doore, Be stout, assaile him'; sc. vii. 828 (a Senator's), 'What make you lingering here about my doores?'; sc. ix. 1034 (Lelio's), 'Heaue me the doores from of the hinges straight'; sc. xv. 1385 (Lelio's), 'my door doth ope' (cf. p. 62, on the courtyard scene in the same play).]*
 * [Footnote: (Bristeo's), 'Come breake vp the doore'; sc. vii. 662, 'Enter Annetta and Lucida with their worke in their handes Here let vs sit awhile'