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In addition to the traditional and appropriate sports of the season, there were, as Stowe tells us, divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all day long, and towards evening stage-plays and bonfires in the streets.

'What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet, he looked sternly, almost angrily on me, and said, 'Madam, what have ends of stage-plays, and the idle talk of a lovesick girl about her lover's name and the names of flowers, I say, what have these vanities to do with a glorious divine thing like the Christian's Day of Rest?

And it is also true that the lechery, which he flings so acridly in the face of the pagans, the gross stage-plays, the songs, dances, and even prostitution, were all more or less included in the essence of paganism. The theatre, like the games of the arena and circus, was a divine institution. At certain feasts, and in certain temples, fornication became sacred.

It is not at all suitable that a Maitland should be on a common stair like a travelling tinker looking for lodgings." Hearing which the neat, shining, dimpling little Advocate turned his bright eyes from one to the other of us, and tapped his tortoise-shell snuffbox with a kind of elvish joy. It was clear that we were better than many stage-plays to him.

Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and writers existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards.

Paul's, nor stage-plays anywhere, save at Blackfriars play-house, which was roofed against the weather.

"Besides those solemn revels, or measures aforesaid," says Dugdale, concerning the old usages of the 'Middle Temple, "they had wont to be entertained with Post Revels performed by the better sort of the young gentlemen of the society, with galliards, corrantoes, and other dances, or else with stage-plays; the first of these feasts being at the beginning, and the other at the latter end of Christmas.

XI. He presented the people with a great number and variety of spectacles, as the Juvenal and Circensian games, stage-plays, and an exhibition of gladiators. In the Juvenal, he even admitted senators and aged matrons to perform parts. In the Circensian games, he assigned the equestrian order seats apart from the rest of the people, and had races performed by chariots drawn each by four camels.

Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.

Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on the boards.