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 noted, and the discussion of a difficulty may be deferred. Some entrances were of considerable size; an animal could be ridden on and off. There were practicable and fairly solid doors; in A Knack to Know an Honest Man, a door is taken off its hinges. And as the doors give admittance indifferently to hall scenes and to out-of-door scenes, it is obvious that the term, as used in the stage directions, often indicates a part of the theatrical structure rather than a feature properly belonging to a garden or woodland background.

Some observations upon the heavens have already been made in an earlier chapter. I feel little doubt that, while the supporting posts had primarily a structural object, and probably formed some obstacle to the free vision of the spectators, they were occasionally worked by the ingenuity of the dramatists and actors into the 'business' of the plays. The hints for such business are not very numerous, but they are sufficient to confirm the view that the Swan was not the only sixteenth-century theatre in which the posts existed. Thus in a street scene of Englishmen for my Money and in an open country scene of Two Angry Women of Abingdon we get episodes in which personages groping in the darkness stumble up against posts, and the second of these is particularly illuminating, because the victim utters a malediction upon the carpenter who set the post up, which a carpenter may have done upon the stage, but certainly did not do in a coney burrow. In Englishmen for my Money the posts are taken for maypoles, and there are two of them. There*