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62 CHILDREN OF THE CHAPEL AT BLACKFRIARS a 
Blackfriars pit is seated with an allowance of 18 x 30 inches 
for each person. Ample aisle space is allowed for handling the — 
The Fortune yard was used only as standing room, 
It is possible for average men to stand on a space 18 x 20 inches © 
or, by closer crowding, t8 x 18 inches. 
for two or three hours’ endurance requires as much as 24 x 24 
audience. 
inches, as allowed. 
It is generally supposed that the audience stood on all three 
sides of the public theatre stage. 
of 1672 seems to indicate this. 
leries at the Fortune,* 
piaces and the stage. 
Contrary to the common impression that the. stage was in the , 
middle of the yard, with the audience fairly distributed on three 4 
sides of it, any sort of plat is serviceable in showing that very — 
little of the audience could have been at right and left of the stage, ~ 
even with the aisles packed, and that the maior portion of it was — 
in front in similar relation to the stage as in the present day. 
Qn a conservative and reasonable basis therefore the Fortune, q 
probably a little larger than the Globe, could accommodate 1320 — 
gestive plat of Blackfriars shows besides — 
the habitués of the stage a capacity of 528, or a total of ca. 558 q 
spectators, while the sug 
to 608. 
There is no known picture of Blackfriars theatre.? 
the more expensive sections of the 
house. But the majority of seats 
are about 18 inches. 
*The entrance to the two upper 
galleries is indicated in the Fortune 
contract as from the outside. It is 
probably on account of the need 
of wider rear passageways to and 
from these outside entrances that 
the two upper galleries were con- 
structed ten inches wider than the 
lower gallery. 
166 
Such may have been the condi- — 
tion earlier at the Globe, Fortune, and others, but it is doubtful. 
The entrance to the first gallery, the narrowest of the three gal- — 
seems to have been from the inside. In- 
fact the Van Buchell—De Witt sketch of the Swan shows this en- — 
- trance in the passage at right and left of the stage. 
that the yard-crowd was allowed to block the passage to the gen- — 
tlemen’s rooms, or to bob and sweat between these privileged 
But comfortable space — 
Indeed the Red Bull picture 
It is unlikely — 
¥ 
% 
*Professor G. P. Baker has re- 
cently published a picture, which he ~ 
believes to be authentic, in Beau- — 
mont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s 
Tragedy and Philaster (ed. A. H. — 
Thorndike, 1906, Belles-Lettres Se- 
ries, ed. GP: Baker) frontispiece; 
and again in his The Development 
of Shakespeare as a ,Dramatist 
(1907), 78. In the latter work (p. 
44) he says in a note, “The print 
seems to have been lost sight of, 
