Stage: The word "stage" has both concrete and an abstract senses. On the one hand, it is, as Johnson writes, both a "floor raised to view on which any show is exhibited" and the "theatre" in general, "a place of scenick entertainments." Shading into the abstract, a stage it is also "[a]ny place where any thing is publickly transacted or performed" (from A Dictionary of the English Language). For instance, Tyburn Square and the Royal Exchange are as much stages as the Little Haymarket. Finally, stage, particularly in the manner used here, can also refer to the dynamic between audience and performance; more generally, it can refer to the overall (emotional, aesthetic, political, ideological) state of the theater. For example, many 18th-century theatrical critics, essayists, and people of letters referred to the vitiation of the British stage in the same way they refer to the vitiation of the British taste or aesthetic sensibility. Thus, Fielding is not merely speaking about the stage upon which The Author's Farce is to be performed; rather, he is also referring to the "theatre" as an abstract concept, a discursive social space. In a similar way, the "Tragick Muse" is not merely the generic form of tragedy; it also refers to the symbolic systems through which people think of tragedy.