ad been
discarded it was still usual for the prologue-speaker to appear
dressed in black. Robert Lloyd, in his "Familiar Epistle to George
Colman," 1761, writes:

With decent sables on his back
(Your 'prologuisers' all wear black)
The prologue comes; and, if it's mine
It's very good and very fine.
If not--I take a pinch of snuff,
And wonder where you got such stuff.

Upon this subject, Mr. Payne Collier notes a stage direction in the
Induction to Heywood's "Four 'Prentices of London," 1615: "Enter
three, in black cloaks, at the doors." Each of them advancing to speak
the prologue, the first exclaims--"What mean you, my masters, to
appear thus before your times? Do you not know that I am the prologue?
Do you not see this long black velvet cloak upon my back? Have you not
sounded thrice?" So also, in the Induction to Ben Jonson's "Cynthia's
Revels," two of the children of the chapel contend for the privilege
of speaking the prologue, one of them maintaining his claim by
pleading "possession of the cloak."

The custom of regarding the "prologuiser" as the author or his
representative, seems gradually to have been departed from, and
prologues came to be delivered by one of the chief actors in the play,
in the character he was about to undertake, or in some other assumed
for the occasion. A certain solemnity of tone, however, was usually
preserved in the prologue to tragedy--the goodwill and merciful
consideration of the audience being still entreated for the author and
his work, although considerable licence was permitted to the comedy
prologue. And the prologues acquired more and more of a dramatic
nature, being divided sometimes between two and three speakers, and
less resembling formal prologues than those Inductions of which the
early dramatists, and especially Ben Jonson, seem to have been so
unreasonably fond. The prologue to "The Poetaster" is spoken, in part,
by Envy "rising in the midst of the stage," and, in part, by an
official representative of the dramatist. So, the prologue to
Shakespeare's Second Part of "King Henry IV." is delivered by Rumour,
"painted full of tongues;" a like office being accomplished by Gower
and Chorus, in regard to the plays of "Pericles" and "King Henry V."
It is to be noted that but few of Shakespeare's prologues and
epilogues have been preserved. Malone conjectures that they were not
held to be indispensable appendages to a play in Shakespeare's time.
Bu