The boxes O woe is me t'have seen what I have seen seeing what I see. Shakespear [sic] / [graphic]

"A view of a narrow section of the auditorium of Covent Garden theatre, with the 'pigeon-holes' along the upper margin, and the heads and shoulders of persons in the pit forming a base to the design. The audience is proletarian. In two pigeon-holes are a few elderly persons trying to hear or see, in another sit birds resembling owls or spectacled old men, with broad collars inscribed 7/s (reversed). From the fourth box a bird with a similar collar is flying. The two-shilling gallery below is absurdly low and constricted. One man vomits from it on to the head of a sub-human creature in the box beneath. In the third tier (the hated 'Private Boxes') couples kiss or drink together; there are two fat liveried servants. Occupants of the two lower tiers are rowdily ill-mannered. Two men and two women in the pit are engaged in a scuffle; other men are dour and ill-tempered, except one, who prods with his umbrella the posterior of a young woman in a box. There are various decorative emblems on the spaces between the boxes: A cupid and a large key (see No. 11421), bull's horns enclosed in a wreath, a cock and a hare, a satyr fighting with women, and, above the lowest tier, a fat man dragging an unwilling ass, inscribed 'From N to O [New Prices to Old] Jack [Kemble] you must Go'."--British Museum online catalogue