Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 3).pdf/92

 Trial of Chivalry, although it is not until the seventeenth century that three doors are in so many words enumerated. We get entrance 'at every door', however, in ''The Downfall of Robin Hood'', and this, with other more disputable phrases, might perhaps be pressed into an argument that even three points of entrance did not exhaust the limits of practicability. It should be added that, while doors are most commonly indicated as the avenue of entrance, this is not always the case. Sometimes personages are said to enter from one or other 'end', or 'side', or 'part' of the stage. I take it that the three terms have the same meaning, and that the 'end' of a stage wider than its depth is what we should call its 'side'. A few minor points about doors may besets the Castell gate wide ope'. Then follows dialogue, interspersed with the s.ds. 'Musique whyle he opens the door' 'From one end of the Stage enter an antique Into the Castell Exit' 'From the other end of the Stage enter another Antique Exit into the Castell' 'From under the Stage the third antique Exit into the Castell' 'The fourth out of a tree, if possible it may be  Exit into the Castell'. Then John a Cumber 'Exit into the Castell, and makes fast the dore'. John a Kent enters, and 'He tryes the dore'. John a Cumber and others enter 'on the walles' and later 'They discend'. For an earlier example of 'end', cf. Cobler's Prophecy (p. 35, n. 1), and for a later The Dumb Knight (Whitefriars), i, iv. In 2 Return from Parnassus (Univ. play), i begins 'Sir Radericke and Prodigo, at one corner of the Stage, Recorder and Amoretto at the other'.]