And It Is The Tenants In This Upper Gallery
Who, For Their Shilling, Make All That Noise And Uproar For Which
The English Play-Houses Are So Famous.
I was in the pit, which
gradually rises, amphitheatre-wise, from the orchestra, and is
furnished with benches, one above another, from the top to the
bottom.
Often and often, whilst I sat there, did a rotten orange,
or pieces of the peel of an orange, fly past me, or past some of my
neighbours, and once one of them actually hit my hat, without my
daring to look round, for fear another might then hit me on my face.
All over London as one walks, one everywhere, in the season, sees
oranges to sell; and they are in general sold tolerably cheap, one
and even sometimes two for a halfpenny; or, in our money,
threepence. At the play-house, however, they charged me sixpence
for one orange, and that noways remarkably good.
Besides this perpetual pelting from the gallery, which renders an
English play-house so uncomfortable, there is no end to their
calling out and knocking with their sticks till the curtain is drawn
up. I saw a miller's, or a baker's boy, thus, like a huge booby,
leaning over the rails and knocking again and again on the outside,
with all his might, so that he was seen by everybody, without being
in the least ashamed or abashed. I sometimes heard, too, the people
in the lower or middle gallery quarrelling with those of the upper
one.
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