familiarity with courtiers, that he talked of them as if he had "taken
tobacco with them over the stage, in the lords' room."

Among the general audience of the theatre smoking seems to have been
usual also. The anti-tobacconists among those present, few of whom
were men, must have suffered by the practice. In that admirable
burlesque comedy by Beaumont and Fletcher, "The Knight of the Burning
Pestle," 1613, the citizen's wife, addressing herself either to the
gallants on the stage, or to her fellow-spectators sitting around her,
exclaims: "Fy! This stinking tobacco kills men! Would there were none
in England! Now I pray, gentlemen, what good does this stinking
tobacco do you? Nothing, I warrant you; make chimneys a' your faces!"
But many women viewed tobacco differently, as we shall see in the
chapter on "Smoking by Women." Moreover, this good woman herself, in
the epilogue to the burlesque, invites the gentlemen whom she has
before abused for smoking, to come to her house where she will
entertain them with "a pottle of wine, and a pipe of tobacco."

Hentzner, the German traveller, who visited London in 1598, speaks of
smoking being customary among the audience at plays, who were also
supplied with "fruits, such as apples, pears and nuts, according to
the season, carried about to be sold, as well as ale and wine." He was
struck with the universal prevalence of the tobacco-habit. Not only at
plays, but "everywhere else," he says, the "English are constantly
smoking tobacco," and then he proceeds to describe how they did it:
"They have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the further end of
which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder; and
putting fire to it, they draw the smoak into their mouths, which they
puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it
plenty of phlegm and defluxions from the head." This suggests that