Chair of Ease

Chair with a hole in it, for someone suffering a fistula.

Appears in Middleton’s Game of Chess. Illustrated in this contemporary pamphlet, one of Middleton’s sources..

Stage direction: “the players brought Gondomar on to the stage in his little litter almost to the life, and seated on his chair with a hole in it.” Cited R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage, (Stanford: 1985), p. 125.

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