iii. 62), burlesques the point of view in a story of the visit of the

Queen's ape to Looe in Cornwall. The showman approached the mayor, who did visit and 'put off his hat and made a leg', and there was a proclamation, 'These are to will and require you, and every of you, with your wives and families, that upon the sight hereof, you make your personall appearance before the Queenes Ape, for it is an Ape of ranke and quality, who is to bee practised through her Majesties dominions, that by his long experience amongst her loving subjects, hee may bee the better enabled to doe her majesty service hereafter; and hereof faile you not, as you will answer the contrary'.]

[Footnote 835: App. D, No. liv.]

[Footnote 836: Hawarde, 48, records that in a Star Chamber case of cozening on 18 June 1596 'The Lord Treasurer would haue those yᵗ make the playes to make a comedie hereof, & to acte it with these names'; cf. p. 244. In _Hatfield MSS._ vii. 270 is a 'lewd saucy letter' of 25 June 1597 from Sir John Hollis to Burghley, who on the last Star Chamber day had pronounced Hollis's great-grandfather 'an abominable usurer, a merchant of broken paper, so hateful and contemptible a creature that the players acted him before the King [Henry VII or VIII] with great applause'. It is printed in H. Walpole, _Royal and Noble Authors_ (ed. Park, ii. 283).]

[Footnote 837: App. C, No. xlv. Was this the Chapel _Game of the Cards_ on 26 Dec. 1582, or was it the play in which Tarlton (cf. ch. xv) glanced at Raleigh as the knave commanding the queen?]

[Footnote 838: These interventions were the Admiral's men in 1600 and for Oxford's and Worcester's men in 1602 (cf. App. D, Nos. cxvii, cxxx).]

IX

THE STRUGGLE OF COURT AND CITY

[_Bibliographical Note._--Most of the material for the present chapter is collected in Appendix D. An outline of the subject was given in _Tudor Revels_ (1906), and it is well and fully treated in V. C. Gildersleeve, _Government Regulation of the Elizabethan Drama_ (1908). G. M. G., _The Stage Censor_ (1908), and F. Fowell and F. Palmer, _Censorship in England_ (1913), are perhaps more valuable on later periods. Vagabond life and legislation may be studied in G. Nicholls, _History of the English Poor Law_² (1898), C. J. Ribton-Turner, _History of Vagrants and Vagrancy_ (1887), E. M. Leonard, _Early History of English Poor Relief_ (1900), and F. Aydelotte, _Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds_ (1913), and the working of local government in C. A. Beard, _The Office of Justice of the Peace in England_ (1904), and E. Trotter, _Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish_ (1919).]

The foregoing chapter has endeavoured to define the practical and spiritual forces which underlay the controversy between Puritanism and the stage; it remains to study the working of the constitutional forms through which, as a resultant of those forces, the 'quality' of the player ultimately established itself as a recognized constituent of the polity. And first, for the social status of the players. The wittier Puritans were fond of twitting them, on the ground that, if all men had their rights, they would count as no better than vagabonds. There is little more than a verbal truth in the taunt. No doubt, in certain circumstances, players, like minstrels before them, might fall within the danger of a series of statutes which, in the course of formulating the provisions of a nascent poor-law, attempted also to regulate the wandering elements of society. It was part of the mediaeval conception of things to assign to every individual a definite function in the social organism and to expect from him the regular fulfilment of that function. To such a theory the migratory beggar and the masterless man were naturally repugnant. But it was primarily a shortage of labour towards the end of the fourteenth century which brought about the first serious endeavour to check vagabondage by legislation, and to compel the able-bodied vagrant, through the machinery of local government, to return to the village of his domicile and there take up again the service which he had abandoned. This policy was continued and developed by the Tudors. The principal act which was operative, when Elizabeth came to the throne, had been passed under Henry VIII in 1531. It provided that any able-bodied beggar or idle vagrant, having no land or master, and using no lawful merchandise, craft, or mystery for his living, should be brought before a justice of the peace, or in a corporate town the mayor, who should see him whipped at the cart-tail, and then, if a beggar, returned to his place of birth or residence, there to work as a true man ought to do, or if an idle person but no beggar, either put to labour or set in the stocks until he found surety to go to service. This statute was replaced by one of greater severity in 1547, under which vagabonds were to be branded and put to forced labour as slaves. But it was revived in 1550 and kept in force by frequent renewals, of which the last was under Elizabeth herself in 1563. In these Acts there is no mention by name either of players or of minstrels.[839] It may, however, be assumed that the quality of a player would no more be regarded than that of a tinker or a pedlar as a merchandise, craft or mystery, and the fact that some of the early companies were composed of men for whom playing had originally been subsidiary to a regular craft would hardly serve them, after they had obviously deserted that craft and were travelling abroad to make a living by the arts of migratory entertainment.[840] Their actual safeguard was quite a different one. By definition the vagabond was a masterless man, and with the exception of a few bodies of town players, who probably did not wander far from their settled habitations, the Tudor companies were not masterless. They were all under the protection of some nobleman or gentleman of position, as whose 'servants' they passed, bearing with them, no doubt, at any rate after this was required by a proclamation of 1554, a 'certificate' or letter of recommendation as proof of identity.[841] No doubt the relation in the larger companies of lord and servants was little more than a nominal one. The strict regulations of Henry VII against retainers who were not household servants had become relaxed with the disappearance of the conditions which necessitated them.[842] The players would wear a livery or badge, and would do some courtesy of attendance on festival occasions. The lord might intervene to help them if they got into an undeserved difficulty, and would see to it that they did not bring his name into bad repute. There was no economic dependence; the players lived by their earnings, not by wages. But they were not reckoned as masterless men.

A secure status, however, did not mean complete absence of control. The players had no free hand to play just when and where and what they liked. They were subject to certain conveniences as to times and seasons and localities, to precautions against breaches of the peace and dangers to public health and safety. Above all, in a time of political and ecclesiastical ferment, the sentiments of their plays had to be such as would stand the scrutiny of a government by no means tolerant of criticism. On these matters it was not, except in so far as heresy was constituted by Acts of Uniformity and the like, with statutes that they had to deal, but with the administrative regulations of the local and central executives. All over the country there were bodies charged with a general responsibility for public order, public safety, and public decency, as the Elizabethans conceived it. In the rural districts there were the justices of the peace, with powers more considerable than clearly defined; in the towns there were mayors and corporations, also acting as justices, but armed with a further authority derived both from custom and from charters, and with a very clear intention to use this authority to the full in the government of their communities. The regulation of amusements had always been regarded as falling within the scope of municipal activity, and in the end it proved a fortunate thing for the players, in London at any rate, that the central authority found itself driven by the pressure of circumstances to take over a large measure of the responsibility for stage control from the hands of the corporations.

For it need hardly be said that in the Tudor scheme of things the power of the local authorities was an immediate rather than an ultimate one. Both the justices of the peace and, for all their charters, the corporations had to reckon with a considerable and growing measure of central control, resting upon the royal prerogative, and claiming not merely to further define, but also in some respects to replace, dispense with, or override legislative enactments. This development of regulation from the centre is, of course, an established feature of sixteenth-century history. It arose out of many convergent causes, the strength of the monarchy in face of the great houses weakened by civil contention, the personal qualities of the Tudor sovereigns, the urgent need of fresh machinery to deal with problems created by ecclesiastical changes, by the growth of the press, by the growth of the stage itself, for which the legal and administrative traditions of the Middle Ages provided no solution. And if it was largely unconstitutional and destined ultimately to bring the prerogative to perdition, this did not in the meantime affect the position of the actor, who would certainly be fined and imprisoned if he did not obey, or to any great extent that of the justices or corporations, who might prove recalcitrant or at least argumentative, but in the long run found it profitable to obey also. There were three main avenues through which the royal prerogative found exercise. The first of these was the ancient procedure of Chancery. The will of the sovereign might be expressed in a writ or mandate, directed to the subject, and stamped for greater solemnity with the impression of the Great Seal of England. Such a writ was generally used in granting licences, in conferring offices, or in issuing commissions to execute functions on behalf of the Crown. It took the form of letters patent, so called because they were intended as open communications to all whom they might concern. These were handed to the recipient after an elaborate diplomatic process during which they passed successively under the royal Sign Manual, the Signet, the Privy Seal, and the Great Seal itself, while a copy was enrolled in the Court of Chancery, and thus became matter of public record.[843] Secondly, there was the proclamation. This was in theory the formal announcement either of an executive act, or of the royal intention as to the enforcement or interpretation of a statute. In practice it tended more and more, during the Tudor period, itself to take the place of a statutory enactment. Proclamations were made by direction of the sovereign in council, and were enrolled, like the patents, in Chancery. Both proclamations and, at a comparatively late stage, patents were made use of in the process of regulating players. But they were largely supplemented by the third method through which the royal prerogative expressed itself, namely that day-by-day activity of the Privy Council in the general co-ordination and supervision of affairs, which has already been described.[844] The Council Register itself and the local archives, especially those of London, are full of letters from head-quarters to justices and corporations, directing them as to the allowance or inhibition of plays in general, or calling for special action in cases in which a company of players had provoked a breach of the peace or had brought themselves under suspicion of heresy or sedition. No doubt the corporations, in particular, would often have preferred to act upon their own discretion. Sometimes they argued or protested or deferred compliance. But the Council had the powers of the Star Chamber behind them; and if in the end they resorted to more direct ways of control, this was probably rather for the sake of avoiding administrative friction than because they found any ultimate difficulty in imposing their will by means of correspondence upon reluctant magistrates.

It was, of course, until plague and Puritanism became serious preoccupations, with the subject-matter of plays, rather than the details of times and places, that the central government mainly concerned itself; and it was apparently the disturbed ecclesiastical position of the later years of Henry VIII that directed attention to the drama as a subject of state instead of merely local concern. I have dealt elsewhere with the encouragement given to controversial interludes by Cromwell and Cranmer, with the swing of the pendulum when the controversialists began to apply themselves, not merely to points of church government which Henry desired to alter, but with heresies which he was not prepared to adopt, and with the proclamations and counter-proclamations and the interventions by the Privy Council to which the problem gave rise under Edward VI and Mary.[845] Some additional material which has more recently been published throws light upon the regulative functions of the City of London in particular during 1549 and 1550.[846] More than once the prevalence of 'lewd' and 'naughty' plays on this side or that led to the complete inhibition of all performances for a season. There is also some trace of a system of licences for particular companies. It is not clear why Lord Dorset should have thought it necessary to obtain a special authorization from the Council for his men to play in his presence only in 1551.[847] A forged licence taken from some players and sent to Sir William Cecil in 1552 may perhaps have purported to have been nothing more than such a certificate from a lord as was required by the proclamation of 1554.[848] Two general conclusions may be drawn from these early records. One is that, although the local authorities were certainly responsible for the regulation of plays as a matter of public order, they were not always in a position to make their control effective without an appeal to head-quarters. The performances were popular and the players had inherited from the minstrels a prescriptive right to municipal encouragement and reward, rather than interference. And if they bore the badge of some great personage, himself perhaps a privy councillor, one may be sure that Dogberry and Verges would think twice before they ventured on a rebuff. Even in London the Lord Mayor had to appeal to the Privy Council in 1543 to get certain joiners imprisoned and reprimanded for playing on a Sunday.[849] And if this was so in London, where the Lord Mayor had certainly a firm seat in his saddle, it was naturally still more so in the county areas, whose looser methods of government ultimately proved to have a very marked significance for the history of the London theatres. The weak position of the Surrey justices, for example, is illustrated by a letter from Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, to Sir William Paget, Secretary of State, written on 5 February 1547, shortly after the death of Henry VIII. He asks that Paget or the Protector will intervene to prevent Lord Oxford's men, who have threatened 'to try who shall have most resort, they in game or I in earnest', from giving a play in Southwark at the moment when he sings his _Dirige_ for the dead king; and he reports that one Master Acton, a justice of the peace, has attempted to stop the assembly, but the players 'smally regard' him, and 'press him to a peremptory answer, whether he dare lett them play or not; whereunto he answereth neither yea nor nay as to the playing'.[850]

The second point is that, although the Privy Council might intervene to help the magistrates, their own primary interest at this time was in the exclusion of heresy and sedition from plays. This shows itself in two ways. Individual plays are brought before the Council itself, and lead to disciplinary measures. But there is also the germ of a censorship. At first it is exercised through the local authorities. The London aldermen in 1549 appoint two of the Corporation officers, known as the Secondaries of the Compters, who are bound under recognizances to 'peruse' plays and report upon them to the Lord Mayor. But in the following year the London players themselves are bound only to perform plays licensed by the King himself or the Privy Council, and this too is the basis of Edward's proclamation of 1551 and Mary's of 1553.[851] The former requires a licence 'in writing vnder his maiesties signe, or signed by vj of his highnes priuie counsail'; the latter 'her graces speciall licence in writynge for the same'. By 1557, however, another change has taken place, and the duty of licensing is apparently delegated to the ecclesiastical authorities, that is to say the Commissioners for Religion.[852] These licences are of course for individual plays, and distinct from any general licences needed by a company in order to enable it to play at all.

When Elizabeth came to the throne she was perhaps more able than her predecessor to rely upon the municipalities in carrying out her ecclesiastical policy. It is true that the _Act of Uniformity_, like Edward's before her, forbade any words in the derogation, depraving or despising of the Book of Common Prayer, and committed the enforcement of this prohibition to the ecclesiastical ordinary as well as to the justices of assize and the civic mayors. It is true also that the general powers of jurisdiction in cases of sedition given to the High Commission by the patent of 19 July 1559 are wide enough to cover 'words or showings' as well as 'books'. But the elaborate provisions for a literary censorship under the Commission contained in the ecclesiastical _Injunctions_ of the same year extend to printed matter only, and for the detailed supervision of plays the Government was at first content to look to the magistrates.[853] There seem to have been two proclamations. The first, which is not extant, is said to have been made on 7 April 1559 and to have restrained plays for a stated period. The second, of the following 16 May, was intended as a permanent regulation. After noting that the usual season for interludes was now over until 1 November, and the inconvenience of some recently given, it goes on to forbid any, whether in public or private, which have not been licensed by the Mayor in a town, or in a shire by the Lord Lieutenant or two justices for the immediate locality. The licensing authorities are enjoined to allow no handling of matters of religion or state in plays, and the nobility and gentry are warned to take order that 'their seruantes being players' shall respect the proclamation. It will be observed that only the licensing of plays and not the status of players was covered. Status was left as the Act of 1531, which was still in force and was explicitly confirmed in 1563, had left it. The position was then as follows. Players, at any rate when they performed away from home, must have a licence either from their lord or possibly from the local magistrates. Whether at home or abroad, they were subject to the regulation of the magistrates as to times and places, and the precautions needed to secure public health and order. In addition, the magistrates had a special responsibility under the proclamation for allowing their individual plays, but this, in rural areas where there were many Justice Shallows, might alternatively be exercised by the Lord Lieutenant for the county as a whole. It is, I suppose, a licence for their repertory rather than for their travelling that Lord Robert Dudley asked for his men from the Earl of Shrewsbury, who as President of the North stood in the place of a Lord Lieutenant for Yorkshire, about a month after the issue of the proclamation. He calls it, indeed, a licence to play, but he dwells on the 'tollerable and convenient' character of their pieces, and it is easy to see how one conception of the purpose for which a licence was required would slip into another.

The history of play-licensing in London, which must now be followed in detail, really turns upon an attempt of the Corporation, goaded by the preachers, to convert their power of regulating plays into a power of suppressing plays, as the ultimate result of which even the power of regulation was lost to them, and the central government, acting through the Privy Council and the system of patents, with the Master of the Revels as a licenser, took the supervision of the stage into its own hands. The issue does not define itself very clearly until the 'seventies, perhaps partly because the Puritan sentiment took some time to grow, and partly because the earlier years are much less fully documented than the later ones.

As with all narratives pieced together out of fragmentary records, care must be taken not to lay too much stress on merely negative evidence with regard to any particular point. The two chief sources of information are the _Register_ of the Privy Council, which contains minutes of letters written to the City Corporation or the Justices of Middlesex and Surrey and of other action taken by the Council with regard to plays, and the City _Remembrancia_, a book containing copies of letters passing between the Corporation and the Council or other persons of importance. But neither record is continuous during the whole controversy, and although the two frequently help each other out, some of the gaps unfortunately synchronize. In particular there is a comparative absence of information upon the first part of the reign, since the _Register_ only begins to help in 1573 and the _Remembrancia_ in 1580. It is possible, therefore, that the Court and the City may have come to grips on the vexed question of stage-control in London somewhat earlier than is now apparent.

It is certain, indeed, that some negotiations had taken place between the two authorities before the period to which the documents mainly relate. These are appealed to in a City letter of 1574, and it is claimed that, in view of the objections of the Corporation, the Council had 'long since' refrained from pressing a proposal that some private person should be nominated to license playing-places within the City. This is the first mention of a new type of 'licence', distinct from those of companies as such, or of plays as such, and presumably owing its origin to the general local regulative powers of the magistrates. The date of the proposal is not given, and as regards the years 1558-71, there is only occasional evidence of any serious interference, other than such as was necessitated by plague, with the activities of the players, although it is clear that the rulers of the City were exercising the powers of supervision with which the proclamation of 1559 invested them. There is an indication that plays were suspended by a precept from the Lord Mayor in the September of the first and greatest of the Elizabethan plague-years, 1563; and in the following February Edmund Grindal, the Bishop of London, wrote to Sir William Cecil, pointing out that the players set up their bills daily, and especially on holidays, and that the excessive resort of young people to their performances could only be a cause of infection. Both on religious and on hygienic grounds, he urged the desirability of inhibiting plays by proclamation, either permanently or at least for a complete year, and not only within the City, but for a circuit of three miles outside its boundaries. Penalties should, he thought, be imposed for disobedience, not only upon the players, but also upon the owners of the houses where they played. The cessation of the plague probably made it unnecessary for Cecil to entertain the suggestion seriously; but it is interesting to observe that the policy of the Puritans, with whom Grindal was in sympathy, was already in 1564 one of complete suppression, and also that the comparative inefficacy of measures limited to the City, in view of the populous suburbs outside the London jurisdiction and subject only to the Middlesex or Surrey Justices and to the Privy Council, had been already realized.

During the next few years there is little to record, although if _The Children of the Chapel Stript and Whipt_, alleged to have been printed in 1569, were ever recovered, it might throw more light upon the growing flood of Puritan sentiment than is afforded by Warton's scanty quotations. There was some plague in each of the three years 1568, 1569, and 1570, and in the summer of 1569 the City suspended plays, as a precautionary measure, from the last day of May to the last day of September. There was another suspension on 27 November 1571, for which plague is not alleged as a reason, but a few days later the Corporation appear to have changed their minds and licences were issued during this winter for performances by Leicester's and Abergavenny's men.

The year 1572 is marked by two measures of government, each of which had its reaction on the _status_ of players throughout the country. The first entailed some regularization of the position of noblemen's companies. The fifteenth-century struggle between the power of the Crown and that of the great feudal houses had led to enactments forbidding subjects to attach to themselves, by the giving and taking of a livery or badge, retainers who were not in some bona-fide sense their own household servants or officers. The Acts against retainers had been continued up to the reign of Henry VII, who had confirmed them in 1487; and had then, upon the firm establishment of the royal supremacy by the Tudors, largely fallen into desuetude, in spite of a proclamation of 1545, already noticed, which was intended to call renewed attention to them. They were, however, still technically operative, and a proclamation of 3 January 1572 announced an intention to enforce them from the following 20 February. Their relation to the players is shown by the fact that the company which had been performing under the Earl of Leicester's name immediately wrote to their lord, and, while making it clear that they did not expect any wages beyond the livery to which they had been accustomed, begged for a definite appointment as his household servants and for a licence to certify the same as a security against interference under the revived statutes during their annual travels in the provinces. A second proclamation of the same character was issued on 19 April 1583. More important than the proclamation, but probably representing the same policy, was the repeal by Parliament of the Vagabond Act of 1531 and the substitution of a new statute, which came into force upon 24 August. This included in a definition of vagabonds, not only 'juglers, pedlars, tynkers and petye chapmen', but also 'fencers, bearewardes, comon players in enterludes, and minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realme, or towardes any other honorable personage of greater degree'. Specific power was, however, given for the issue of local travelling licences by mayors and county justices. So far as noblemen's players were concerned, the Act was presumably no more than declaratory of their existing position. But the knight or plain gentleman lost his privilege of protection altogether; and in future, if his servants wished to travel as players, they had to get their licence from the magistrates. As a matter of fact, with the exception of those forming part of the royal household itself, practically all the companies of professional players which appeared in London during Elizabeth's reign were noblemen's servants. A few performances were given at Court in early years by Sir Robert Lane's men, but these disappeared or transferred their services to a more honourable personage upon the legislation of 1572.[854] The most important of the provincial companies which did not come to London also bore the names of noblemen, and although many others were entertained by mere knights and gentlemen, it is probable that, at any rate after 1572, these did not range very widely from their head-quarters.[855] The necessity of procuring a fresh licence for every shire would doubtless, as was its intention, afford an obstacle to free circulation.[856] Apart from its defining clause, the main object of the Act of 1572 was to try once more the experiment, which had failed under Edward VI, of treating vagabondage with an increased severity. The summary whipping by individual magistrates was abolished except for children. An adult offender was to be committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and then, unless he could find a master to take him for a year's service, to be whipped and branded as a rogue by boring through the ear. On a second offence he was to be adjudged a felon, unless he could secure service for two years, and a third offence was to be treated as felony without benefit of clergy. The classification of unlicensed minstrels as rogues led to the insertion of a clause confirming the ancient privilege of the house of Dutton to issue licences within the county of Chester;[857] and another qualifying provision, the importance of which in connexion with players has been overlooked, safeguarded the validity, as overriding the statute, of licences passed under the Great Seal of England. It is in 1572 also that symptoms of a conflict of judgement between the City and the Privy Council first declare themselves. The annalist Harrison records that in this year plays were 'banished' out of London for fear of infection, and on 20 May a minute of the Court of Aldermen records that letters had been received from the Council for renewed allowance under reasonable conditions, and that, in place of immediate compliance, a letter of protest, based on the peril of assemblies during a hot summer, was to be sent to Lord Burghley. A somewhat similar situation seems to have developed in 1573, which made it necessary in July for the Council to write two letters to the Corporation, of which the second had a peremptory note about it, in order to obtain permission for some Italian players to exhibit an 'instrument of strange motions', or puppet-show. The following year was evidently one of considerable friction. On 2 March the Corporation wrote to the Lord Chamberlain with reference to a suggestion that the licensing of playing-places within the City should be put in the hands of one Holmes. They maintained their earlier refusal, already mentioned, to commit such a matter to any private person, and added that they had other offers for the licensing rights on terms that would be profitable 'to the relefe of the poore in the hospitalles'. The terms of the letter make it clear that they regarded the plan as one which, besides being practically inconvenient, would entail a precedent 'farre extending to the hart of our liberties'. In the meantime plays were apparently inhibited, for on 22 March the Council wrote to inquire the causes of the restraint, 'to thintent their Lordships may the better aunswer suche as desyre to have libertye for the same'. It may be conjectured that the reply was unsatisfactory, for in May a remedy for which provision had been made by anticipation in the Vagabond Act of 1572 was resorted to, and a patent under the Great Seal was issued to the Earl of Leicester's men, which over-ruled the proclamation of 1559 and ignored the position of the Corporation altogether. By this the company received permission to play during the royal pleasure either within London itself or within or without any other town throughout the country. The licence was only subject to two provisions. One was that there should be no performance during common prayer or during plague times in London; the other that all plays should be seen and allowed by the Master of the Revels. As the Master of the Revels was an officer of the royal household, subordinate to the Lord Chamberlain, the action taken practically amounted to a transference of control, so far as this particular company was concerned, from the Corporation to the Court itself. Nothing specific was said in the patent about the allowing of playing-places as distinct from the allowing of plays, and it may have left the Corporation with some reasonable discretion on this point. It is not known that a similar licence was issued to any other Elizabethan company besides Leicester's men, although this could hardly be definitely asserted without a complete examination of the Patent Rolls for the reign. My own impression is that the issue of the patent served its purpose by bringing the Corporation to a more reasonable frame of mind, and that it was not found necessary to repeat the experiment, at any rate exactly in the same form. On 22 July the Council issued a passport to 'the comedie plaiers' to go to London, and also wrote to the Corporation requiring their admission and favourable usage. I feel little doubt that the company in question were the Italians who had been at Windsor and Reading during the progress. In any case it may be taken for granted from the events of the following winter that the Corporation were now beaten, and yielded. But it can only have been with reluctance. The enforced toleration of the Italian players, who seem to have brought with them some female acrobats, had added strength to the Puritan criticisms. Thomas Norton, the City Remembrancer, writing a preface to a summary of City customs for the use of the new Lord Mayor, James Hawes, and dwelling on the need for better regulations against the contagion of the plague, lays special stress on the danger of 'the unnecessarie and scarslie honeste resorts to plaies' and of such assemblies as those attracted by 'the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tomblinge of the Italion weomen'. With a characteristic touch of Puritan logic he adds, 'To offend God and honestie, is not to cease a plague'. In fact, the increase of plague gave London a respite from plays during the winter. On 15 November the Privy Council wrote to the Justices of Middlesex, Essex, and Surrey to inhibit assemblies within ten miles of London until Easter; and the City hardly needed the stimulus of an 'admonition' from their lordships to persuade them to adopt a similar course. They used the interval to enact an elaborate code for the regulation of plays, whose continuance in their midst, whether they liked it or not, they now saw to be inevitable. This took the form of an Act of Common Council, which is dated on 6 December 1574. The preamble sets out the various 'disorders and inconvenyences' which from the civic point of view had arisen from plays in the past, the unchaste and seditious speeches, the waste of money and interference with divine service, the accidents due to the fall of wooden structures and to the use of firearms upon the stage, the opportunities afforded by the performances for frays and quarrels, for purse-cutting, for the corruption of youth by 'previe and unmete contractes', for incontinency in the inner chambers of the 'greate innes' to which the stages were adjacent. It then proceeds to recite the recent inhibition for plague, and the need to provide against the renewal of such 'enormyties' upon the expected withdrawal of God's hand of sickness by securing that 'the laweful, honest and comelye use of plaies, pastymes and recreacions' should alone be permitted. The actual regulations are six in number. No unchaste, seditious, or otherwise improper plays were to be performed, upon a penalty of fourteen days' imprisonment and a fine of £5 for each offence. No play was to be shown which had not first been perused and allowed by such persons as the Lord Mayor and Aldermen might appoint. All playing-places and the persons in control of them were to be licensed by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. All licensees were to be bound to the City Chamberlain for the keeping of good order. No licence was to be operative during a restraint for sickness or other good reason, nor were plays to be given or spectators received during the usual times for divine service on Sundays and holidays. Every licensee was to make such contributions to the poor and sick of the City as might be agreed upon with the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. Machinery was provided for the recovery of penalties, which were also to be for the benefit of the poor and sick, and an exception was made for plays in private houses for which no money was taken. The only regulation to which these were to be subject was that against the introduction of unchaste and seditious matters.

It is often stated that the regulations of 1574 were followed in 1575 by a decree of the Corporation banishing players totally and finally from the confines of the City. This is, however, a mistake due to an erroneous endorsement of date upon some documents which belong in reality to about 1584. The regulations remained operative for a considerable number of years. It is true that, reasonable and moderate as they were, they were not accepted as satisfactory either by the players or by their critics. After all, they left a good deal in working to the discretion of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen for the time being; and the players seem to have come to the conclusion that it would be better to be independent, as far as possible, of the risks attaching to this discretion. They turned to the easier conditions afforded by the lax county government of the suburbs. Within two or three years after the issue of the regulations two houses had been built expressly for playing in the liberty of Halliwell, which was within the jurisdiction of Middlesex; the Theatre in 1576 and the Curtain either in the same year or early in 1577. A third house, at Newington Butts on the Surrey side, was already obsolete about 1592, and seems to have been in existence by 1580. Exactly upon what considerations the private house in the Blackfriars was established, also in 1576, is less certain. But at any rate, as a result of the action of the Corporation in 1574, the main locality of the popular drama was shifted from the courtyards of the London inns to the specialized suburban theatres. It must not, of course, be supposed that the inns fell altogether into disuse. The new arrangement was not without its inconveniences for the players. During the summer months it was no hardship for pleasure-seekers to cross the river or the fields in search of a spectacle. But the short evenings and dirty lanes of winter left an advantage to the inns in the heart of the City, which was not lightly to be forgone. It was still, therefore, a matter of importance for the companies to maintain their footing in the City, even if this meant compliance with harassing restrictions, and they were ready to use all their influence with the masters whose liveries they wore, with the Lord Chamberlain, and with the Privy Council, in opposition to any further limitation of their privileges. So far as the summer was concerned, the building of the suburban theatres was a serious check to the policy of the Corporation. It was still the young folk of the City who crowded the audiences; nor could the greater distance diminish the danger of infection, the neglect of divine service, the waste of time and money, or the likelihood of falling into bad company by the way. In future it was not sufficient to make salutary regulations for London; it was necessary to secure, by invoking the goodwill of the county justices, or in default of that even the aid of the Privy Council itself, that similar order should be taken outside the liberties. In this direction the City never met with more than very partial success. The county government was naturally not as closely organized as their own, and it was in the hands of officials and local gentlemen to whom the business considerations and the growing Puritan instincts of the City tradesmen did not appeal. Richard Young, in particular, who was a prominent member of the Middlesex bench for many years, earned an evil reputation as a persecutor of Puritans.[858] On the other hand, the Corporation might look for the co-operation of his colleague William Fleetwood, who was their own Recorder,[859] and machinery had been established between the two areas in the form of a joint committee or court of assistants for dealing with the control of plays and other matters of 'good order'.[860]

And if the players needed a refuge from the regulations of 1574, these must have been far from satisfactory to the Puritans. They fell very far short of the wholesome Genevan model. There was still toleration for the infamous _histriones_. Plays were not even wholly forbidden on Sundays and holy days, and the crowd flocked to the inn-yard gates, already open in spite of the regulation, while the bells were still ringing for divine service in the empty churches. And although the Corporation certainly did not mean to commit the licensing of plays to the Master of the Revels or to any court nominee, there is nothing to show that they had any intention of leaving it to the ministers. The rise of the 'sumptuous' theatres, monuments of triumphant wickedness, in the fields, could only add fuel to the wrath of the moralists. With Thomas White's Paul's Cross sermon and John Northbrooke's _Treatise_ of 1577 begins a period of active diatribe in pulpit and pamphlet, the deliberate intention of which was to stir the 'magistrate' to a stronger sense of the moral responsibilities of government, so that in London at least the letters of commendation furnished by godlessly-minded nobles for their servants might be disregarded and the accursed thing driven from the gates. And if only, through a Sidney or a Walsingham or a Leicester or a Burghley, the heart of the Council could be touched, it might perhaps even be driven from the suburbs also.

For some time after 1574 the relations between Whitehall and Guildhall were comparatively peaceful. Such plague as prevailed in 1575 and 1576 seems to have affected Westminster rather than the City. In 1577, however, an outbreak led the Corporation to suspend plays, and the Council ordered the Middlesex Justices to do the same from August to Michaelmas. The Theatre may have been open again by 5 October, although plague seems to have been still prevalent in November. It was over by January, and on the 13th of that month the Council instructed the Lord Mayor to let the famous Italian actor Drusiano Martinelli and his company perform in the City until the beginning of Lent. The autumn of 1578 again proved plaguesome, and on 10 November the Council ordered the Surrey Justices to inhibit plays in Southwark. On 23 December, however, a further order was issued to London, Middlesex, and Surrey, permitting the exercise of plays, subject to certain orders appointed against infection. This was followed on the next day by another letter to the Lord Mayor, specifying six companies who were summoned to Court and to whom therefore the privilege of exercising in public was to be limited. In the spring of the following year the Council appear to have been disturbed at the neglect of Lent, and on 13 March they wrote both to the Lord Mayor and to the Middlesex Justices, to direct that no plays should be allowed during the penitential season, either in that or in any subsequent year. By 1580 the battery of 'the preachers dayly cryeng against the Lord Maior and his bretheren' seems to have had its effect upon the civic conscience. Naturally most of the sermons against the stage were never printed, but an example, in addition to that of Thomas White, is to be found in the Paul's Cross sermon of John Stockwood on 24 August 1578. Gosson's _Schoole of Abuse_ had followed Northbrooke's _Treatise_ in 1579, and in 1580 itself appeared the _Second and Third Blast of Retrait_, the conspicuous civic arms upon which are perhaps significant of the attitude now adopted by the Corporation. On 6 April there was an earthquake, which was seized upon by the controversialists as a sign of God's wrath against plays. The series of civic letters contained in the _Remembrancia_ begins in this year, and shows a spirit of hostility towards the stage far more pronounced than was indicated by the regulations of 1574. Under the stimulus of further pamphlets, Gosson's _Playes Confuted_ in 1582 and Stubbes's _Anatomy of Abuses_ in 1583, this tendency continued to grow, and finally landed the Corporation in a state of acute conflict with the Council. The earliest letter preserved is from the Lord Mayor to the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas Bromley, on 12 April 1580. In this he took occasion, on the strength of a recent disturbance at the Theatre, of the admonition of the hand of God in the earthquake, and of a charge from the Council to avoid uncleanness and pestering of the city, to point out that players were 'a very superfluous sort of men and of such facultie as the lawes have disalowed', and to suggest the desirability of an order by which they should be 'wholy stayed and forbidden', both within and without the liberties. The disturbance at the Theatre was probably a fray between the Inns of Court and Oxford's men, which led to the imprisonment of some of the latter by the Council. Some months before John Brayne and James Burbage had been indicted for bringing about a breach of the peace by causing unlawful assemblies. There was not in fact much plague this summer, but the Council assented to a temporary inhibition until Michaelmas and called upon the Middlesex and Surrey Justices to extend it to Newington Butts and other places in their jurisdictions. Perhaps emboldened by his success, the Lord Mayor wrote a second letter on 17 June to Lord Burghley, in which he expressed the opinion that the haunting of unchaste plays in the suburbs was a serious danger to the City, and again proposed their restraint as part of a series of measures in the interests of the public health. Burghley's answer is not upon record. Presumably plays went on as usual during the winter of 1580. An incident of the following year makes it apparent that, at some uncertain but probably recent date, the Corporation had attempted to render the code of 1574 more stringent by forbidding performances upon Sundays. Lord Berkeley's men, who claimed to be ignorant of this, performed upon Sunday, 9 July 1581, and became involved in a fray with some Inns of Court men, which led to the committal of both parties to the Counter. On the very next day the Privy Council wrote to London and to Middlesex, and directed an inhibition of plays on the ground of plague until Michaelmas. The City responded by a suspension for an indefinite period on 13 July. They seem to have taken advantage of this to press their point about Sundays. On 14 November the Mayor issued a precept against the setting up of bills for plays within the ward jurisdictions of the aldermen. On 18 November a letter was received from the Council pointing out that the infection had ceased, and that 'theis poore men the players' should now be permitted to exercise within the City for their 'releife' and 'redinesse with convenient matters for her highnes solace this next Christmas'. Nothing is here said about Sundays, but the Council Register contains a minute for a letter of 3 December to the Mayor, distinct, unless there is some confusion of date, from that of 18 November, of which there is no entry in the Register, and referring to a petition from the players, and a stipulation made with them that Sundays should be excluded, and performances limited to holy days and other week-days. This looks as if the Corporation had questioned the first mandate and had secured a concession as the price of submission. It must count as a victory for the Puritans, but they were not content, and one of the London ministers, John Field, took occasion to address a letter of reproach to the Earl of Leicester for yielding to the players, 'to the great greife of all the godly'.

It is difficult to resist the belief that a measure taken during this same December arose from a desire of the Council to counteract the growing recalcitrancy of the Corporation by a device similar to that which had been successful in 1574. The precedent set in the issue of a patent to Leicester's men was not, however, exactly followed. The position was now dealt with in a more comprehensive fashion, by the issue of a commission under a patent to the Master of the Revels himself. The object of this commission was in part to invest the Master with authority to press workmen and wares for the service of the Revels. But it also empowered him to call upon players and playmakers to appear before him and recite their pieces, presumably with a view to their consideration for performance at Court. And, as it were incidentally to the exercise of such a power, the patent went on to declare in the most general terms that the Master of the Revels was thereby appointed 'of all suche showes plaies plaiers and playmakers together with their playing places to order and reforme auctorise and put downe as shalbe thought meete or unmeete unto himselfe or his said deputie in that behalfe'. Like the licence of 1574, the commission of 1581 is expressed as being 'any acte statute ordynance or provision' to the contrary notwithstanding.

The functions thus assigned to the Master of the Revels came to be of the first importance in the history of the stage. But for the moment the result of their stroke can hardly have satisfied the expectations of the Council. The Corporation were not so ready to retreat from an untenable position as they had been seven years before. Either in ignorance of the Master's commission, or with the deliberate intention of asserting the privileges ignored therein, they seem to have definitely committed themselves, in the course of 1582, to the policy, long advocated by their spiritual advisers, of a complete suppression of the stage. The method of attack adopted was, so far as any records yet published disclose, a new one. Instead of relying upon their licensing powers, now very doubtful and in any case of no validity in the suburbs, they issued on 3 April a precept to the City guilds, enjoining them to charge all freemen with the responsibility of keeping their servants and other dependants from repairing to any play, whether in city or in suburbs, upon penalty of punishment both for the offending servant and for his master. This is presumably the 'late inhibition' against playing after evening prayer on holidays, which the Privy Council asked the Lord Mayor to revoke by a letter of 11 April, in which they expressed the opinion that in the absence of infection such playing might be used 'without impeachment of the service of God whereof we have a speciall care', provided always that Sundays should be excepted, and that fit persons should be appointed by the Corporation to 'consider and allowe of such playes onely as be fitt to yeld honest recreacion and no example of euell'. It is to be observed that the Council do not suggest that the allowance shall be done by the Master of the Revels or make any allusion to the powers conferred by his patent. Perhaps this indicates some willingness to come to a compromise. The Lord Mayor's reply, written two days later, is in its turn not otherwise than conciliatory. He suggests that the Council may perhaps not be fully aware of the difficulties entailed by plays on holidays. He has found that either he has to tolerate the admission of the audience during the times of prayer, or else the plays must continue until a very inconvenient time of night for servants and children to be abroad. He also calls attention to the growth of the plague, which seems to him to justify the continuance of the restraint for the present, and finally hints that later on he will fall in with the views of the Council and duly appoint suitable licensers. Plague was in fact rife during 1582, and perhaps left the Council no choice but to drop the question for a time. In July the Lord Mayor apologized on the ground of infection for refusing a request from the Earl of Warwick that a servant of his might be allowed to give a public display of fencing at the Bull in Bishopsgate. All that he could promise was to let the man pass through the City with his company and drum on the way to the Theatre or some other place in the suburbs. Possibly the correspondence of April was only a cloak for the real intentions of the Corporation; or possibly they miscalculated the Council's reasons for not carrying it further. At any rate, still profiting by the continuance of the plague, they determined in the course of the autumn to risk another step in advance. The plan for working through the guilds was ill-conceived, and had probably failed; obviously masters could not effectively prevent their apprentices from slipping off to Finsbury or Southwark on holiday afternoons. At any rate nothing more is heard of it. To this date probably belongs an Act of Common Council, which after dealing with other matters of civic government, briefly enacted that public plays should 'wholly be prohibited as ungodly', and that suit should be made to the Council for a like prohibition 'in places near unto the city'.

It was not long before an opportunity for opening the projected campaign against the outside houses presented itself. On Sunday, 13 January 1583, eight persons were killed by the fall of a scaffold during a bear-baiting at Paris Garden in Surrey. John Field, Leicester's correspondent of 1581, was quick to point the Puritan moral in _A Godly Exhortation_ dedicated to the Corporation. But already, on the day after the accident, the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Blank, had written to Lord Burghley to urge that this interposition of the hand of God called for redress of the abuse of the Sabbath day, and to beg for Burghley's good offices with the Surrey Justices, some of whom were willing to take action but alleged that they lacked commission. Burghley promised that the Council would consider the matter, and suggested that it was within the scope of the Corporation's authority to make a general order against the attendance of Londoners at Sunday entertainments. The previous year's experience, however, had probably impressed the Corporation with the difficulty of securing that such an order should not be a dead letter outside their own jurisdiction; and although the Council _Register_ is deficient at this point, it is certain that the event at Paris Garden did in fact result in the extension by the Council itself of the prohibition against Sunday performances from the City to the counties. But this was not until after the Lord Mayor had again pressed the question in a letter to the Council of 3 July, in which he alleged the attractions of unlawful spectacles as a reason for the decay of archery, of which the Council had complained, and declared that Paris Garden was rebuilt and the Sunday bear-baitings in full swing, and that blame was thrown upon the City authorities in Paul's Cross sermons and elsewhere, 'to our shame and greif, when we cannot remedie it'. If the Council yielded on this point, they remained quite firm on the general question of the toleration of plays, on all days other than Sundays, within the City as well as without. We do not know what steps, if any, they took to enforce the licensing powers of the Master of the Revels. But it is likely that the formation from the existing companies of the Queen's men in the March of 1583 was a deliberate and to some extent a successful attempt to overawe the City by the use of the royal name. It may be inferred from letters of the Lord Mayor to Richard Young of Middlesex and to Sir Francis Walsingham in April and May that plague prevented plays during the greater part of the year. But on 26 November the Council wrote that there was now no infection, and that Her Majesty's players were to be suffered to play as usual until the following Shrovetide. The Corporation, for all their Act of Common Council, made no open resistance, but they qualified the permission by limiting it to holy days, and it took a further letter from Sir Francis Walsingham on 1 December to get it extended to ordinary working days.

The struggle, however, was only deferred, and the real crisis came in 1584. During Whit-week there were frays amongst the knots of serving-men and prentices who hung about the doors of the Theatre and Curtain. The Corporation approached the Council and, although there seems to have been no plague, obtained sanction, in spite of the opposition of the Lord Chamberlain and Vice-Chamberlain, to the suppression of both houses. When the winter came round the Queen's men brought their case before the Council, and pointed out that the time of their service was at hand, that for the sake thereof as well as of their living they needed to exercise, and that the season of the year was past to play at any of the theatres outside the City. They petitioned for letters to the Lord Mayor to admit them to London, and also for an order to the Middlesex Justices, doubtless to revoke the suppression of the previous summer. Their case was set out more fully in a body of annexed articles. Unfortunately these are lost, but their tenor can be gathered from the City rejoinder. This took the form partly of an historical summary and partly of a detailed reply to the contentions of the players. The Corporation recited the reluctant toleration granted in 1574, the disregard of the rule against receiving spectators during divine service, the continued prevalence of abuses and the agitation of the preachers, the Act of Common Council conjecturally assigned to 1582, and finally the ruin of Paris Garden and the abolition of Sunday plays to which it led. The analysis of the arguments of the Queen's men is in a mercilessly critical vein, very different to the reasonable regulations of 1574, and may perhaps be ascribed to the malicious wit of Recorder Fleetwood. The writer deals first with the alleged need for exercise before playing at Court, and suggests that exercise in private houses might suffice, as it was unsuitable, let alone the danger of bringing infection into the royal presence, to offer to Her Majesty pieces already produced before the basest assemblies of London and Middlesex. As to the stay of the players' living, the view, which must surely have gone back some decades for its justification, is put forward that in times past it had not been thought meet that players should look to playing for a living, 'but men for their lyvings using other honest and lawfull artes, or reteyned in honest services, have by companies learned some enterludes for some encreasce to their profit by other mens pleasures in vacant time of recreation'. The players had claimed in their first article that the Lord Mayor's order of toleration on holy days should continue; but the Act of Common Council had cancelled this, and moreover the provision against the reception of audiences before the end of common prayer had been disregarded. Nor was it comely for youth to run 'streight from prayer to playes, from Gods service to the Deuells'. The second article had dwelt on the difficulty in a dark and foul season of either going into the fields for plays, or deferring them until after evening prayer; but the true remedy was 'to leave of that unnecessarie expense of time, wherunto God himself geveth so many impediments'. The third article had proposed to make plays permissible, so long as the deaths from plague were below fifty a week. The reply is that 'to play in plagetime is to encrease the plage by infection: to play out of plagetime is to draw the plage by offendinges of God upon occasion of such playes'. But if the number of deaths from plague were to be taken as the basis of toleration, it must be remembered that this number was an inadequate measure of the danger of infection amongst the living, and to wait until it rose to fifty would be to run too great a risk for the sake of a few 'whoe if they were not her Maiesties servants shold by their profession be rogues'. The normal weekly number of deaths out of plague-time was between forty and fifty, and commonly under forty; surely it would be enough to allow plays when the rate from all causes had been for two or three weeks together under fifty. Toleration was only claimed for the Queen's players. But this had been so in the previous winter, and all the playing-places had been filled with players calling themselves the Queen's men. Any letters or warrants for toleration should set out the number and names of the company. Much of this dialectic could hardly be taken seriously; it was accompanied by some suggested remedies of a practical character. The City still thought the limitation to private houses the better course. Failing that, the regulations of 1574 should be revived, subject to the conditions that playing should only be allowed when the total deaths had been under fifty a week for twenty days together, that no plays should be given on the Sabbath or before the close of evening prayer on holy days, that the audience should not be received during prayer-time, that the performances should be short enough to let the audience get home before dark, and that the Queen's men alone should be tolerated and should not be allowed to divide themselves into several companies. It was apparently contemplated that these conditions should apply to city and county alike.

I have described these arguments in some detail, because of the clearness with which they set out the divergent views. Unfortunately the documents from which they are drawn do not record any decision upon them. But whether the remedies were accepted, wholly or in part, or not, there can be no doubt whatever that the attempt to enforce an absolute prohibition had utterly failed, and that for several years afterwards the companies continued to find their winter quarters within London itself. Henceforward it became the settled policy of the Corporation to defer to the authority of the Privy Council, and to content themselves with doing their best to influence that body in the direction of their own ideals. There came a day when they were destined to reach some measure of success along these lines. For the time, however, events followed a quiet course. During two or three years there is a blank in the correspondence. Plays were suspended in London and Surrey during the summer of 1586, at the Lord Mayor's request, on the ground that the growing heat might breed a plague, and a similar measure in 1587 had an additional provocation in disturbances which had taken place at the play-houses. In both years the inhibition was declared early in May, and in 1587 it was fixed to terminate at the end of August. On 29 October the Council had to call the attention of both the Surrey and the Middlesex Justices to the imperfect observance of the order against Sunday plays. There was, of course, an undercurrent of Puritan discontent during these years at the lame issue of the anti-stage agitation. This is well shown by a grumbling letter from a correspondent of Walsingham's in January 1587, in which 'the daily abuse of stage-plays' is represented as still 'an offence to the godly'. The redress of Sabbath-breaking is acknowledged, but still 'two hundred proud players jet in their silks' under the protection of various lords, as well as of Her Majesty. The writer proposes that every stage shall be required to pay a weekly subsidy in aid of the poor. The flood of pamphlets had, however, subsided. The _Mirror of Monsters_, published by William Rankins in 1587, is of markedly less importance than its predecessors. In November 1587 the City sent a deputation to the Privy Council in the hope of securing the suppression of plays within their boundaries; so far as is known, they were unsuccessful. A year or two later new combative relations were established between the players and the Puritans as an outcome of the Martin Marprelate controversy, which began with a series of anonymous pamphlets attacking the principles of episcopacy, and continued throughout 1589 and 1590. The players were not at first particularly concerned against their hereditary enemies. Tarlton, who died on 3 September 1588, is said himself to have satirized the existing ecclesiastical order in a mock discovery of Simony 'in Don John of Londons cellar'. And indeed the ribald style in which Martin Marprelate canvassed the bishops was held to be modelled on the manners of the theatre. 'The stage is brought into the church; and vices make play of church matters', said one episcopalian writer, and described Martin as declaring on his death-bed, 'All my foolery I bequeath to my good friend Lanam and his consort, from whom I had it'. Bacon also condemned 'this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage'.[861] But before long the vigour of the attack drove the bishops to seek on their side for an equally effective literary retort. They hired writers, including John Lyly and Thomas Nashe; and these not only answered Martin in his own vein, but also made use of the theatres for what must have been the congenial task of producing scurrilous plays against him. To this campaign there are many allusions in the pamphlets belonging to the controversy. The Puritans hit back with all their old contempt of the rogues and vagabonds dressed in the Queen's liveries; but the laugh was on the other side when Martin was brought dressed like a monstrous ape on the stage, and wormed and lanced to let the blood and evil humours out of him, or when Divinity appeared with a scratched face, complaining of the assaults received in the hideous creature's attacks upon her honour. _Vetus Comoedia_, the savage Aristophanic invective, was assuredly in full swing upon the English boards. Nashe professed to have another device ready, in which Martin was to figure in a grotesque pageant called the _May-Game of Martinism_; but the scandal was now getting too great, and the Government was obliged to disavow its own instruments. According to Nashe, it was by 'sly practice' that the comedies which had been penned were not allowed to be played. However this may have been, we find the Lord Mayor writing to Lord Burghley on 6 November 1589 that, in accordance with what he understood from a letter of his lordship to Mr. Young of Middlesex to be his desire, he had stayed plays in the City, in that the Master of the Revels 'did utterly mislike the same'. Almost immediately afterwards, on 12 November, the Privy Council issued three letters from 'the Starre Chamber' to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor, and the Master of the Revels, directing the Master to join with a divine and with a person 'learned and of judgement' nominated by the other two, and form a commission for allowing the books of plays and striking out or reforming 'suche partes and matters as they shall fynde unfytt and undecent to be handled in playes, both for Divinitie and State'. Perpetual disabilities are threatened to players who produce any pieces not so allowed.

There are indications that in the next year or two a considerable increase took place in the number of plays given during each week. Other kinds of amusement, no less than more serious occupations, suffered, and in a letter of 25 July 1591 to London, Middlesex, and Surrey, the Privy Council had not merely to insist once more upon the due observance of Sunday, but also to forbid plays on Thursdays, on the ground that on this day bear-baiting and other like pastimes, maintained for the royal pleasure if occasion should require, had 'ben allwayes accustomed and practized'. In the following year the Corporation were moved to approach Archbishop Whitgift with a view to obtaining some redress of their grievances through his influence. By a letter of 25 February they set out the evils of plays in the familiar terms, expressing themselves as moved by the 'earnest continuall complaint' of the preachers and declaring that by no one thing was the government of the City 'so greatly annoyed and disquieted'. They explained the difficulty in which they were put by the authority conferred upon the Master of the Revels, who had licensed the playing-houses, 'which before that time lay open to all the statutes for the punishing of these and such lyke disorders', and begged the Archbishop to confer with the Master as to the possibility of providing for the Queen's recreation without the necessity of public performances. A second letter of 6 March thanks the Archbishop for his advice, which apparently was, quite frankly, to bribe the Master. A committee of the Corporation was appointed on 18 March to treat with Tilney, but the scheme fell through for financial reasons. On 22 March the Court of the Merchant Taylors Company discussed a 'precepte' from the Lord Mayor, which called attention to the evils of plays and suggested 'the payment of one anuytie to one Mr. Tylney, mayster of the revelles of the Queenes house, in whose hands the redresse of this inconveniency doeth rest, and that those playes might be abandoned out of this citie'. The Court sympathized, but 'wayinge the damage of the president and enovacion of raysinge of anuyties upon the Companies of London', declined to unloose their purse-strings. On 12 June the Lord Mayor reported to Lord Burghley a disturbance in Southwark, the pretence for which had been furnished by a gathering at a play, held in defiance of orders on a Sunday. Anticipation of a renewal of disorder on Midsummer Day led the Council on 23 June to impose an inhibition on plays until the following Michaelmas. Three undated papers in the Henslowe-Alleyn collection at Dulwich may perhaps suggest that later in the summer they became willing to relax their severity. The first of these is a petition to the Council from Lord Strange's men, begging to be allowed to use their play-house on the Bankside, both for their own sake, as otherwise they would have to travel at considerable charge, and for that of the watermen who 'nowe in this long vacation' look for relief through ferrying spectators to and from the plays. The second is a petition from the watermen themselves to the same effect. The third is a copy of a warrant from the Council, setting out that not long since they had restrained Lord Strange's men from playing at the Rose and enjoined them to play at Newington Butts, and removing the injunction, 'by reason of the tediousness of the waie and that of longe tyme plaies have not there bene used on working daies'. If these documents really belong to 1592, which must remain doubtful, the permission to resume playing was almost certainly rendered nugatory by a plague more serious than any that had devastated London since 1563. In fact Henslowe's _Diary_ shows no performances at the Rose between 22 June and 29 December, and the short winter season that followed was abruptly broken off by a renewed outbreak and an order from the Privy Council on 28 January for the suppression of all assemblies for purposes of amusement within seven miles of London. This was probably renewed in April, and the companies, who had waited for some months in hopes of relaxation, had perforce to travel. On 29 April and 6 May the Council itself issued warrants of authorization to Lord Sussex's and Lord Strange's men respectively to assist them in taking this course. Probably the theatres remained closed during the greater part of the next eighteen months. Henslowe's _Diary_ only indicates performances from 27 December 1593 to 6 February 1594, evidently interrupted by another restraint within five miles of London under a Council order of 3 February, and then a few more in April and in May. The Countess of Warwick's men seem to have been negotiating with the City for toleration on 10 May. Regular playing, however, was not resumed on Bankside until 3 June. The plague was now fairly over, and the shattered companies began to reconstruct themselves. In October Lord Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor begging permission for his men to use the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street. In November Francis Langley, one of the alnagers for London, was planning a new theatre, the Swan, on the Bankside, and the Lord Mayor once more detailed the objections to plays in a letter of protest to Lord Burghley. This was followed up on 13 September 1595 by a formal petition from the Corporation for 'the present stay and finall suppressing' of plays in Middlesex and Surrey. Herein the origin of yet another prentice riot was traced to the obnoxious performances. Obviously the request was not acceded to. Henslowe's _Diary_ shows no break in the sequence of plays, except for Lent, until the July of 1596, when plague once more called for an inhibition. At about the same time the balance of parties on the Privy Council was seriously disturbed by the death of Henry Lord Hunsdon, who had been Lord Chamberlain since 1585. His successor, Lord Cobham, was less favourable to the players. In the course of the long vacation Thomas Nashe wrote of them as 'piteously persecuted by the Lord Maior and the Aldermen: and however in their old Lord's tyme they thought there state setled it is now so uncertayne they cannot build upon it'. In November there was a petition from inhabitants of the Blackfriars against the erection of a theatre in the precinct, which recited how 'all players being banished by the Lord Mayor from playing within the city by reason of the great inconveniences and ill rule that followeth them, they now think to plant themselves in liberties.' At last the City had gained the point denied them in 1574 and again in 1584. Their importunity, in season and out of season, had moved the hearts of the autocratic body at Whitehall. Hence-forward, although play-houses might stand thick enough within the rapidly growing suburbs beyond the gates, there were to be none, or at any rate none but 'private' houses, within the closely guarded circuit of the liberties. A fuller account of the transaction, without any clear indication of its date, is given many years later by Richard Rawlidge in _A Monster Lately Found Out, or The Scourging of Tipplers_ (1628), and five play-houses are enumerated as pulled down and suppressed under authority from the Queen and Council by the 'religious senators'.[862]

The events of the next year must have given the Corporation high hopes of making an equally clean sweep in the suburbs. They had by now learnt that, although there were many abuses of the stage to which the Council would turn a blind eye, any interference in politics or encouragement, direct or indirect, to civil commotion, was not one of them. On 28 July 1597 they were able, in renewing their appeal for a 'present staie and fynall suppressinge' of the Middlesex and Surrey theatres, to add to their summary of 'inconveniences' a definite statement of a recent confession by some unruly apprentices that plays had served as the 'randevous' of their 'mutinus attemptes'. On the same day the Council wrote to the Middlesex and Surrey Justices, ordering not merely that there should be a restraint of plays within three miles of the City until Allhallowtide, but also that the owners of the theatres should be required 'to pluck downe quite the stages, gallories and roomes that are made for people to stand in, and so to deface the same as they maie not be ymploied agayne to suche use'. As their reason they cited the disorders, due partly to the 'confluence of bad people' at the play-houses, and partly to the handling of 'lewd matters' on the stage. There is reason to suppose that their action was not altogether determined by the representations of the City. A 'seditious' play called _The Isle of Dogs_ had been shown on one of the Bankside stages.[863] This had been brought to their notice by the famous heretic-hunter and informer, Richard Topcliffe, and was, according to Henslowe's _Diary_, the cause of the restraint. The players and one of the makers of the play had been committed to prison; the other, Thomas Nashe, had fled to Yarmouth, leaving incriminating papers in his lodgings. On 15 August a commission was issued to Topcliffe and others to examine further into the matter and ascertain how far the 'lewd' play had been spread abroad. The second writer has recently been found to be Benjamin Jonson, who thus makes his stormy entry into a field of activity which he was destined, more than any other save one, to illustrate and adorn. It is natural to suppose that, in ordering the complete gutting of the theatres, the Council contemplated the continuance of the restraint even beyond Allhallowtide. But if so, they again changed their minds, and the City were disappointed. On 3 October a warrant was sent to the Keeper of the Marshalsea for the release of Jonson and of the offending players, and Henslowe's _Diary_ notes the resumption of playing a week later. Evidently the Council had satisfied themselves, perhaps under the influence of another new Lord Chamberlain, George Lord Hunsdon, who had succeeded Lord Cobham in the course of the year, that it was after all impossible, in view of the amenities of the royal Christmas, wholly to dispense with plays.

This winter of 1597-8 is really an important turning-point in the history of stage-control. The events of the past two years, following upon a long period of vexatious conflict, seem to have brought the Government to the conclusion that the method of regulation through the magistrates had now broken down, and that the time had come for the resettlement of the matter upon the more centralized basis already foreshadowed by the commission to the Master of the Revels in 1581. Of this there are two indications. And first, for the county as a whole, a new Vagabond Act, replacing that of 1572, had been called for by the progressive development of the Elizabethan poor-law policy on the humane lines of a local rate, and the consequent possibility of discriminating more closely between the deserving poor and the idle vagrants. The latter class were again to be treated with greater severity. Summary whipping was reinstated and might be inflicted in future by local constables as well as justices. The more dangerous rogues were to be transported, and treated as felons if they returned. These were the main objects of the statute, but incidentally the status of players and minstrels was affected. The power of justices to license travelling was taken away. Before long even John Dutton had to prove his claim to his Cheshire privilege. The right of noblemen to protect their servants was not interfered with, and indeed must now have become even more important, as they acquired a monopoly; but it must be exercised under hand and seal and, although this point is not dealt with in the statute, must presumably be endorsed by the Master of the Revels. As regards London and its suburbs in particular, the Privy Council, with the Master of the Revels as an adviser and agent, took the control into its own hands, and decided that the companies to be licensed should be limited to two. It seems likely that this policy took shape in a solemn order in Star Chamber, although the document itself has not reached us.[864] At any rate the rule is set out and confirmed in a letter written by the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral to the Justices and the Master of the Revels on 19 February 1598, in which complaint is made of the intrusion of a third company, not included in the Council's sanction and not bound to the Master of the Revels for observance of the conditions imposed. In principle it continued to prevail until the end of the reign, although in practice it was not found very easy to restrict the number of companies, and still less that of theatres. On the Surrey side, indeed, an element of local feeling adverse to the stage began to show itself, which perhaps owed its origin to little more than a dispute about the liability of the players to contribute to local assessments. It took shape in a petition from the vestry of St. Saviour's, Southwark, to the Council on 19 July 1598 for the closing of the play-houses in the parish, on account of the enormities that came thereby. But on 28 March 1600 the vestry were content that the churchwardens should 'talk with the players for tithes for their playhouses and for money for the poor, according to the order taken before my lords of Canterbury and London and the Master of the Revels'. In Middlesex, on the other hand, the growth of the western suburbs and their convenience for theatrical purposes led to divers new enterprises. The most important of these was the erection of the Fortune in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, by Edward Alleyn during 1600. The Council seem to have been in two minds about the desirability of the scheme. In January the project had been encouraged by a personal letter from the Lord Admiral to the Middlesex Justices. Some of the inhabitants, however, raised a protest, and in March the Council ordered the Justices in nowise to permit the building, as that would be inconsistent with the order for the plucking down of theatres given them 'not longe sithence'. If this means the order of 28 July 1597, the Council seem to have forgotten that their own action later in the same year had rendered it nugatory; nor were they very consistent when, on 15 May 1600, they allowed the use of the Swan, which certainly should have been plucked down in 1597, for feats of activity by Peter Bromvill, an acrobat specially recommended to Elizabeth by the French king. Ultimately the question of the Fortune received a final reconsideration. The inhabitants, just as in Southwark, were squared by the promise of liberal contributions towards poor relief. Possibly, also, the Queen herself intervened in Alleyn's favour, and on 8 April the consent of the Council was signified by a further letter to the justices. On 22 June the allowance was explained and the principle adopted in 1597 reaffirmed by an Order in Council, which was not, however, passed without some 'question and debate'. There were to be two houses and no more, the Fortune in Middlesex for the Admiral's men and the Globe in Surrey for the Chamberlain's. In addition to the old prohibitions of plays on Sunday, in Lent or during infection, two new restrictions make their appearance. No plays were in future to be given in any 'common inn', and neither of the privileged companies was to play more than twice a week. A few months before, on 1 April 1600, the Middlesex Justices had stopped a contemplated play-house in East Smithfield on the strength of the Star Chamber order. But the twice-repeated limitation of the Privy Council, for all the formality of its expression, seems to have had the shortest of lives. By October 1600 it had already been broken by Pembroke's men, who began to play in that month as a third company at the Rose. During the same year the Chapel boys and those of St. Paul's were also performing, although no doubt these were technically located in 'private' houses. Blackfriars, where the Chapel plays were given, was not yet in the full sense part of the City; it was, however, to the Lord Mayor that the Council gave instructions on 11 March 1601 to stop plays in the Blackfriars, as well as at St. Paul's, during Lent. In May the Curtain was open, and although the Council suppressed a particular play there, they did not suppress the house. By the end of 1601 the order of the previous year had fallen into complete disregard. There were a 'multitude of play-howses' and a daily concourse of people to the plays. The Corporation complained and were informed by the Council on 31 December that the fault lay largely with themselves and their predecessors, as they had failed to see to the execution of their lordships' directions. These were renewed, and a reminder was also sent to the county Justices. It has been suggested that the attitudes of the Corporation and the Council had now been reversed, and that the former had become favourably disposed towards the players.[865] I find no evidence of this. Probably the City policy was to show that the Council's attempt at regulation had broken down, and that complete prohibition had become the only remedy. On 31 March 1602 the Council wrote again to the Lord Mayor, who had reported some amendment of the abuses, and announced that, 'upon noteice of her Maiesties pleasure at the suit of the Earle of Oxford', a third company, made up of the Earl's servants and of those of the Earl of Worcester, were to be tolerated, and were to have the Boar's Head as their sole playing-place.

Plays were suspended by the Council on 19 March 1603 during the illness of the Queen, which terminated fatally on 24 March. Their resumption was anticipated on the coming of James, one of whose first acts was to issue on 7 May a proclamation against plays or bear-baiting on Sundays. But plague intervened, a plague more deadly even than that of 1592-4; and it was not until after the Lent of 1604 that on 9 April the Council authorized the three companies of players to the King, Queen, and Prince to perform at the Globe, Curtain, and Fortune, so long as the weekly plague-deaths should not exceed thirty. These were the former companies of the Chamberlain's, Worcester's, and the Admiral's men, now taken directly into the royal service. By a piece of generosity not paralleled during the late reign, the King's men had received a payment of £30 from the Treasurer of the Chamber in February for their 'maintenance and relief', in view of the prohibition of performances during the plague. The attachment of the three companies to the royal households is to be regarded as something a little more than a mere honour bestowed upon them. It signified a further advance on the lines already laid down in 1597 and 1600 of direct royal control in affairs theatrical. In favour of the King's men, the precedent set for Leicester's men in 1574 was revived, and their privileges, formerly dependent upon orders of the Privy Council, were conferred upon them by a licence under letters patent. A similar patent was drafted for Queen Anne's men, but was not at the time executed. In 1606 a provincial detachment of these men was using a letter of recommendation from the Queen herself as a warrant; they did not receive a licence under letters patent until 1609. Gradually, however, the issue of a patent became the normal Jacobean method of licensing the privileged London players. The Children of the Queen's Revels received theirs in 1604 and a new one in 1610, the Prince's men in 1606, the Duke of York's in 1610, the Lady Elizabeth's in 1611, and the Elector Palatine's in 1613. In 1615 a patent of an exceptional type was issued to Philip Rosseter and his partners for a new theatre at Porter's Hall in the Blackfriars. In the patents for companies the model of the 1574 patent is in the main followed, but as a rule the 'usual howse' in which the company will play is named. This, however, does not seem to be meant to fetter their discretion to use some other convenient house, and a general authority to play in the provinces is, except in the case of the Revels Children, always added. There is no such limitation on playing to two days a week as was imposed on the companies by the Council order of 1600. Most of the patents contain a clause reserving 'all auctoritie power priuiledges and profittes' appertaining to the Master of the Revels under his patent or commission. This is omitted in the licence for the King's men and in both of those for the Revels Children, whose 1604 patent contains a special clause requiring their plays to have the 'approbacion and allowaunce' of Samuel Daniel, whom Queen Anne had appointed for that purpose.[866] It became the duty of the Master to scrutinize the phraseology of plays in the light of an _Act to Restrain Abuses of Players_, passed in May 1606, which imposed a penalty of £10 for any profane or jesting use of the names of God, Christ Jesus, the Holy Ghost, or the Trinity, in any stage-play, interlude, show, May-game, or pageant. This statute, even if not always literally observed, entailed much revision of existing dramatic texts.

If the system of patents did not render the London players independent of the Master of the Revels, still less did it abrogate from the ultimate authority of the King in Council. There is evidence that the theatres were closed in the autumn of 1605, during which plague was prevalent, and in this matter the responsibility for action still rested with the Council.[867] Unfortunately the full Register for the period 1603-13 is missing. A letter of 12 April 1607 from the City asking for a restraint is addressed to the Lord Chamberlain, whose function it would no doubt be to move the Council. In this or some later year the Whitefriars vestry seem also to have made a protest against the dumping of a play-house in their precinct.[868] That plague interfered with plays in 1608-9, and 1609-10 also, is indicated by payments made to the King's men 'for their private practice' during these years. After 1610 London was no more troubled by the plague until 1625. Other reasons for inhibiting plays sometimes presented themselves. Some bad political indiscretions of 1608, which will require consideration in the next chapter, led to a temporary suspension of performances and a royal threat of permanent suppression. The untimely death of Prince Henry on 7 November 1612 threw a shadow upon all mirth, and the Council declared that 'these tymes doe not suite with such playes and idle shewes, as are daily to be seene in and neere the cittie of London, to the scandall of order and good governement at all occasions when they are most tollerable'. On 29 March 1615 the Council summoned representatives of all the London companies before them, to answer for playing in Lent, contrary to the express direction of the Lord Chamberlain given through the Master of the Revels. The records of suburban administration show the Middlesex Justices trying William Claiton, an East Smithfield victualler, on 20 December 1608, for suffering plays to be performed in his house during the night season, and on 1 October 1612 making an Order for Suppressing Jigs at the End of Plays, on the ground that the lewd jigs, songs, and dances so used at the Fortune led to the resort of cutpurses and other ill-disposed persons and to consequent breaches of the peace. Generally speaking, the problem of metropolitan stage-control may be said, during the reign of James I, to have reached a condition of comparative stability.

As regards the provinces there has been some misapprehension. The royal patents of course ran there, and there is one example of a patent issued to a company which actually had its head-quarters in a provincial town, that to the Children of the Queen's Chamber of Bristol, granted through the influence of Queen Anne, who had visited Bristol on her progress in 1613. But in the provinces the patented companies had no monopoly; side by side with them still wandered both unlicensed vagrants and the protected servants of noblemen. It is true that a Vagabond Act of 1604, which in the main and with certain exceptions, such as dropping the experiment of transportation, continued the policy of that of 1597, has been supposed to have withdrawn the privilege of protection.[869] But the provincial records show that in fact the noblemen's companies were still afoot, and the provision of the statute itself, when carefully read, bears quite another interpretation.[870] It professes to be declaratory of that of Elizabeth on which 'divers doubtes and questions' had arisen, and after reciting the catalogue of persons who were to be classed as vagrants, which includes not only players of interludes, but also fencers, bearwards, minstrels, begging scholars and sailors, palmists, fortune-tellers, proctors, and others, it lays down that no authority shall be given by noblemen to 'any other person or persons'; that is surely, to any of the persons named in the catalogue, other than the players of interludes belonging to the noblemen and authorized under their hands and seals, for whom exception is specifically made therein.[871] The system of patents lent itself to certain abuses by travelling companies. Exemplifications were taken out in duplicate, and while the regular company remained in London, a quite distinct one would go on tour with one of the duplicates and, if necessary, an instrument of deputation from the man named in the patent of which it was a copy.[872] This practice was condemned in 1616 by a warrant of the Lord Chamberlain, to whose department the supervision of the issue of playing patents, as well as the general supervision of the Master of the Revels, appears to have been entrusted. The same document also condemns a company which had been travelling under a 'warrant,' by which is apparently meant a licence under the royal sign manual or signet, used instead of an elaborate and doubtless expensive patent.[873] The signet licences were, however, such an obvious convenience that it was not long before they came to be regularly issued to players under the administration of the Lord Chamberlain himself.[874] This is a topic which lies rather beyond my purview. Nor can I dwell at any length on the evidence which shows that the licences given to players, like other assumptions of the royal prerogative, did not pass altogether without criticism from contemporary constitutionalists. I do not know whether it was a weak point that the statutory sanction taken for the patents in 1572 was not re-enacted in 1597. Their wording purported clearly enough to give the holders an authority to play both within and without the liberties and freedoms of any cities, towns, and boroughs. But Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, charging a Norwich jury on 4 August 1606, appears to have told the justices that the remedy of the abuses due to players was entirely in their hands--'they hauing no commission to play in any place without leaue: and therefore, if by your willingnesse they be not entertained, you may soone be rid of them'.[875] Too much stress must not be laid upon this, for Coke vigorously repudiated the accuracy of the printed edition of his charge from which the passage is taken.[876] But Prynne seems to insinuate a very similar argument in his _Histriomastix_ of 1633,[877] and in any event the validity of the patents was terminated by the final ordinance for the suppression of plays passed by the Long Parliament on 9 February 1648, which enacted that 'all stage-players, and players of interludes, and common playes, are hereby declared to be, and are, and shall be taken to be, rogues, ... whether they be wanderers or no, and notwithstanding any license whatsoever from the King or any person or persons to that purpose'.[878] We, however, are now concerned, not with the decadence of the stage, but with its palmy days under Elizabeth and James.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 839: Aydelotte, 58, misrepresents the Act of 1531 on this point. The clearest proof that the unprotected player was a vagabond is in a Privy Council letter of 30 April 1556 to Lord Shrewsbury (Lodge, i. 260), which, after directing that Sir Francis Leek shall not let his servants travel as players, adds, 'And in case any person shall attempt to set forth these sort of games or pastimes at any time hereafter, contrary to this order; and do wander, for that purpose, abroad in the country; your Lordship shall do well to give the Justices of the Peace in charge to see them apprehended out of hand, and punished as vagabonds, by virtue of the statute made against loitering and idle persons'.]

[Footnote 840: Cf. App. C, s.vv. Gosson (1582), 215; Cox (1591); App. D, No. lxxv (2) (_b_). An Act of 1552 (_5 & 6 Edw. VI_, c. 21) required every travelling 'Pedler, Tynker, or Pety Chapman' to have a licence from two justices of the shire in which he resided (_Statutes_, iv. 155). This was merged in the Act of 1572 (App. D, No. xxiv), but not formally repealed until _1 Jac. I_, c. 25, in 1604 (_Statutes_, iv. 1052).]

[Footnote 841: _Procl._ 455; cf. Dasent, v. 73; Machyn, 69.]

[Footnote 842: Cf. _M. S. C._ i. 350; Aydelotte, 14. _Procl._ 273 laid down (1545) 'that noe person of what estate, degree or condicion soever he be, doe in any wise hereafter name or avowe any man to be his servant, unles he be his houshold servant, or his bailiffe or keeper, or such other as he may keepe and retayne by the lawes and statutes of this realme, or be retayned by the kings maiestys licence' (Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 7). But the laws against retainers had fallen into desuetude again by 1572; cf. App. D, No. xix.]

[Footnote 843: Scargill-Bird³, 80; W. R. Anson, _Law and Custom of the Constitution_, ii. 1. 55; H. Hall, _Studies in English Official Historical Documents_, 263; _M. S. C._ i. 260. The stages of a patent, as settled by _27 Hen. VIII_, c. 11 (1535), were (_a_) a Petition setting out the grant desired, and (_b_) a direction by the Sovereign for the preparation of (_c_) a King's Bill. In this the wording of the intended patent was settled, and this wording was followed, with varying initial and final _formulae_, in the subsequent instruments. The King's Bill received the royal Sign Manual and became the authority for the issue by a Clerk to the Signet of (_d_) a Signet Bill. This was sent to the Lord Privy Seal, who based upon it (_e_) a Writ of Privy Seal, which was addressed to the Lord Chancellor, and became in its turn the authority for the issue of (_f_) the actual Letters Patent under the Great Seal. These were handed to the recipient, while the Writ of Privy Seal passed on to the Six Clerks in Chancery, for (_g_) an Enrolment of its contents upon the Patent Roll.]

[Footnote 844: Cf. ch. ii.]

[Footnote 845: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 216.]

[Footnote 846: Cf. App. D, Nos. ii-v.]

[Footnote 847: Dasent, iii. 307.]

[Footnote 848: _S. P. D. Edw. VI_, xv. 33. By _5 & 6 Edw. VI_ of 1552 (_Statutes_, iv. 155) travelling tinkers and pedlars could hold a licence from two justices of the peace. This arrangement is continued by the Act of 1572 (_vide infra_), and tinkers and pedlars are there grouped with players. Possibly therefore such local licences had also been issued to players who were not 'servants', even before 1572.]

[Footnote 849: Dasent, i. 104, 109, 110, 122. The nature of the joiners' offence is clear; three of those imprisoned were named Hawtrell, Lucke, and Lucas. They had played 'wythowt respect ether off the day or the ordre whiche was knowen openlye the Kinges Highnes intended to take for repressinge off playes'. At the same time the Lord Warden's men were committed 'for playing contrary to an ordre taken by the Mayour'.]

[Footnote 850: P. F. Tytler, _England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary_, i. 21, from _S. P. D. Edw. VI_, i. 5.]

[Footnote 851: Gildersleeve, 5, points out that I was misled by Collier, i. 119, into citing the Marian proclamation in _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 220, under 1533 as well as 1553. I regret the error.]

[Footnote 852: Dasent, vi. 102. The Lord Mayor is to send offending players 'to the Commissioners for Religion to be by them further ordered, and also to take ordre that no playe be made hencefourthe within the Citie except the same be first seen and allowed and the players aucthorised'.]

[Footnote 853: Cf. ch. xxii and App. D, Nos. ix, xii, xiii. The Commission had also an authority over vagrants in or near London, which apparently disappeared after the legislation of 1572 (_vide infra_).]

[Footnote 854: There is a doubtful notice of a Court play by the servants of George Evelyn of Wotton in 1588. Sir Percival Hart's sons played in 1565.]

[Footnote 855: The list of small travelling companies in Murray, ii. 77, 113, includes 14 belonging to knights and 3 to gentlemen in 1558-72, and 8 belonging to knights and 2 to gentlemen in 1573-97; also 7 companies under the names of their towns only in 1558-72 and 11 in 1573-97. Alexander Houghton of Lea in Lancashire wrote on 3 Aug. 1581 (G. J. Piccope, _Lancashire and Cheshire Wills_, ii. 238), 'Yt ys my wyll that Thomas Houghton of Brynescoules my brother shall have all my instrumentes belonginge to mewsyckes and all maner of playe clothes yf he be mynded to keppe and doe keppe players. And yf he wyll not keppe and maynteyne playeres then yt ys my wyll that Sir Thomas Heskethe Knyghte shall haue the same instrumentes and playe clothes. And I moste hertelye requyre the said Syr Thomas to be ffrendlye unto Foke Gyllome and William Shakshafte now dwellynge with me and ether to take theym unto his servyce or els to helpe theym to some good master'. Was then William Shakshafte a player in 1581?]

[Footnote 856: _S. P. D. Eliz._ clx. 48; clxiii. 44, record a dispute in 1583 between Sir Walter Waller and Mr. Potter, a J.P. of Kent. Waller, summoned before the Council, denies that his servants played an interlude at Brasted, and is confirmed by the constable and parishioners, who assert that Mr. Potter factiously sent the men to gaol as rogues. Lord Cobham made a vain attempt to reconcile the parties.]

[Footnote 857: Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 259, on the history of this privilege. The reservation was continued by _39 Eliz._ c. 4, § 10 (1598). By _43 Eliz._ c. 9, § 2 (1601), it was made dependent on a certificate by the Lords Justices to the validity of Dutton's claim. Presumably this was obtained as the privilege was reserved unconditionally by _1 Jac. I_, c. 7, § 8 (1604). There were several Elizabethan actors of the name of Dutton (cf. ch. xv), but it is not known whether they belonged to the Cheshire house.]

[Footnote 858: For documents addressed to Richard Young or mentions of him, cf. App. D, Nos. lxviii, lxxiv, xc. He is often referred to in the _Hatfield MSS._, in connexion with a monopoly of starch which he held, and otherwise. In 1593 (iv. 393) he writes 'from my house, Stratford the Bowe'. On 30 Nov. 1594 (v. 25) he wrote to the Queen, 'in these my aged and extreme or last days' with notes of many examinations, chiefly of papists, taken by him. On the other hand, Carter, _Shakespeare Puritan and Recusant_, 145, quotes an inscription on the coffin of Roger Rippon, who died in Newgate in 1592, 'his blood crieth for speedy vengeance against ... Mʳ. Richard Young, a justice of the peace in London, who in this and many like points hath abused his power for the upholding of the Romish Antichrist, Prelacy and Priesthood'.]

[Footnote 859: Cf. p. 265. Collier, i. 254, quotes an epigram calling Fleetwood 'the enemy of all poor players'. John Field dedicates his _Godly Exhortation_ (1583) to him as a Middlesex and Surrey Justice.]

[Footnote 860: Cf. App. D, Nos. xxxvii, lxviii.]

[Footnote 861: Bacon, _On the Controversies of the Church_ (Spedding, viii. 76).]

[Footnote 862: Cf. ch. xvi, introduction.]

[Footnote 863: Cf. ch. xxiii, s.vv. Jonson, Nashe.]

[Footnote 864: Cf. App. D, No. cxx.]

[Footnote 865: Wallace, ii. 162.]

[Footnote 866: There is no reference to licensing in the later Queen's Revels patent of 1610. That for the Queen's men in 1609 has the usual provision for licensing by the Master of the Revels. This was, however, not inconsistent with 'a kind of gouernment and suruey ouer the said players' by the Chamberlain of the Queen's Household (cf. ch. xiii).]

[Footnote 867: Philip Gawdy (_Letters_, 160) writes on 28 Oct. 1605 of his nephew in London, 'Playes he was never at any, for they are all put downe'; cf. App. D, Nos. cxxxix, cxl.]

[Footnote 868: Cf. ch. xvii.]

[Footnote 869: Some interesting light is thrown on the workings of the Vagabond Acts in the North Riding of Yorkshire by the presentations in _Quarter Sessions Records_ (_North Riding Record Soc._), i. 204, 260; ii. 110, 119, 197. At Topcliffe on 2 Oct. 1610 Thomas Pant, apprentice to Christopher Simpson of Egton, shoemaker and recusant, was released from his indentures on complaining that he had been 'trayned up for these three yeres in wandering in the country and playing of interludes'. At Helmesley on 8 July 1612 Christopher Simpson, late of Egton, was presented and fined as a player, and Richard Dawson, tanner and constable of Stokesley, for allowing Christopher and also Robert Simpson of Staythes, shoemaker, Richard Hudson of Hutton Bushell, weaver, and Edward Lister of Allerston, weaver, to wander as common players of interludes. A similar charge was made against William Blackborne, labourer and constable of Marton, as regards Robert Simpson, Richard Knagges of Moorsham, William Fetherston of Danby, and James Pickering of Bowlby, mason. At Helmesley on 9 Jan. 1616 a number of gentlemen and yeomen were presented for receiving players in their houses and giving them bread and drink. John, Richard, and Cuthbert Simpson, recusants, of Egton, Robert Simpson, of Staythes, and four other players were fined 10_s._ each. There were similar cases at Hutton Bushell on 4 April 1616, at Thirsk on 10 April 1616 and 7 April 1619, and at Helmesley on 9 July 1616. Presumably the Simpsons were the same men who brought Sir John Yorke into trouble with the Star Chamber in 1614 (cf. p. 328).]

[Footnote 870: Gildersleeve, 28, 35, 38. The origin of the error is probably in the shoulder-note 'No Licence by any Noblemen shall exempt Players' to _1 Jac. I_, c. 7, § 1, in the R. O. edition of the _Statutes_.]

[Footnote 871: The players of Lords Berkeley, Chandos, Dudley, Evers, Huntingdon, and Mounteagle (Murray, ii. 28, 32, 43, 45, 49, 57), as well as those of the Duke of Lennox (cf. ch. xiii), are still traceable after 1604.]

[Footnote 872: Cf. App. D, No. clviii, and ch. xiii, s.v. Anne's.]

[Footnote 873: Cf. ch. xii, s.v. King's Revels. A later warrant of 20 Nov. 1622 deals with the same abuse of players and others who 'without the knowledge and approbacon of his maiesties office of the Revels' travel 'by reason of certaine grants comissions and lycences which they haue by secret meanes procured both from the Kings Maiestie and also from diuerse noblemen' (Murray, ii. 351).]

[Footnote 874: _M. S. C._ i. 284; Murray, ii. 192.]

[Footnote 875: _The Lord Coke his Speech and Charge. With a Discouerie of the Abuses and Corruption of Officers_ (1607) H₂. There is an epistle to the Earl of Exeter signed R. P., said (_D. N. B._) to be Robert Pricket.]

[Footnote 876: Coke, _Preface to 7th Report_, 'libellum quendam ... rudem et inconcinnum ... quem sane contestor non solum me omnino insciente fuisse divulgatum, sed ... ne unam quidem sententiolam eo sensu et significatione, prout dicta erat, fuisse enarratam'; cf. Gildersleeve, 40; J. Haslewood in _Gentleman's Magazine_, lxxxvi. 1. 205; _1 N. Q._ vii. 376, 433.]

[Footnote 877: Prynne, 492, 497.]

[Footnote 878: Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 67.]

X

THE ACTOR'S QUALITY

[_Bibliographical Note._--This chapter mainly rests upon the official documents in Appendix D, the plague-data in Appendix E, and the detailed accounts of individual companies in Book III. To the books and dissertations cited for those sections and for chapter viii may be added, as studies of the stage in its political aspect, R. Simpson, _The Political Use of the Stage in Shakespeare's Time_ and _The Politics of Shakespere's Historical Plays_ (1874, _N. S. S. Trans._ 371, 396), S. R. Gardiner, _The Political Element in Massinger_ (1875-6, _N. S. S. Trans._ 314), S. Lee, _The Topical Side of the Elizabethan Drama_ and _Elizabethan England and the Jews_ (1887-92, _N. S. S._ 1, 143), J. A. de Rothschild, _Shakespeare and his Day_ (1906), T. S. Graves, _Some Allusions to Religious and Political Plays_ (1912, _M. P._ ix. 545), and _The Political Use of the Stage during the Reign of James I_ (1914, _Anglia_, xxxviii. 137). The fragments of Sir Henry Herbert's office-book, showing the working of the censorship from 1623 to 1642, usually cited from the _Shakespeare Variorum_ (1821), and G. Chalmers, _Supplemental Apology_ (1799), are now conveniently collected in J. Q. Adams, _The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert_ (1917). A useful study has recently appeared in A. Thaler, _The Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England_ (1920, _M. P._ xvii. 489).]

The history detailed in the foregoing chapter represents, from the point of view of the playing companies, a vexed progress towards that state of regulative security which, in the case of any industry dependent upon a permanent habitation and the outlay of capital, is the first condition of economic stability. More than once in the course of the struggle was an approach made to a settlement before it was actually reached. The rather obscure period of the first attempts of the companies to establish themselves in London was closed by the experimental patent to Leicester's men and the fairly reasonable City regulations of 1574. But the building of the suburban theatres on the one hand and the aggressiveness of the preachers on the other broke down the equilibrium; and there followed a period of acute conflict, of which the commission to the Master of the Revels in 1581, the City prohibition of 1582, the appointment of the Queen's men in 1583, and the controversy before the Privy Council in 1584 formed the final stages. The players were victorious, and the result of their victory was an assured position under the Council and the Master of the Revels, which was not indeed wholly accepted by the City, and was seriously threatened in 1596 and 1597, but only to be the more firmly established in the latter year when the central government assumed direct responsibility for the regulation of the stage throughout the London area. I think that 1597 must be regarded as the critical moment at which complete stability was attained; the substitution under James I of letters patent for Star Chamber orders as the licensing machinery was of comparatively slight importance. From 1597 onwards it was definitely the Crown and not the local authorities which determined the companies to whom, subject to the detailed administrative control of the Privy Council, the Lord Chamberlain, and his subordinate the Master of the Revels, the privilege of playing within the neighbourhood of London should be conceded. And the policy of the Crown, alike under Elizabeth and under the Stuarts, was consistently in favour of such solace and recreation for the Sovereign and the subjects as the players ministered.

And so, tentatively up to 1584, and thereafter with a security which received final confirmation in 1597, the actor's occupation began to take its place as a regular profession, in which money might with reasonable safety be invested, to which a man might look for the career of a lifetime, and in which he might venture to bring up his children. As early as 1574 the patent to Leicester's men refers to playing as an 'arte and facultye'. In 1581 the Privy Council call it a 'trade'; in 1582 a 'profession'; in 1593 a 'qualitie'. The order of 1600 explicitly recognizes that it 'may with a good order and moderacion be suffered in a well gouerned estate'. So that when Fleetwood takes occasion in 1584 to recall that originally interludes were merely the by-work of 'men for their lyvings using other honest and lawfull artes, or reteyned in honest services', his argument has already become anachronistic, not wholly justified even as an antiquarian quibble, and still less as a serious appreciation of the administrative facts with which the writer had to deal. The player of the seventeenth century is in fact as necessary a member of the polity as the minstrel of the twelfth or the fourteenth; with this distinction that, in London at least, he is a householder and not a vagrant, and is therefore able to perform his function on a larger scale and with a fuller use of the methods and advantages of co-operation.

Obviously the player's status, like any other status in a civilized community, depended upon the observance on his side of certain obligations. He had to get his formal authority or licence for the exercise of his art. He had to respect certain prescribed limitations of times and seasons. He had to shoulder certain responsibilities imposed upon him as a subject and a citizen. To each of these aspects of his calling some measure of detailed consideration is due.

A company of players was not in form, like a company of merchants, a guild or association of independent men. Its constitution had a mediaeval element, by which the derivation of playing from minstrelsy is strongly recalled. The nature of the licence which it must hold, at any rate if it desired to secure itself from the arbitrary discretion of local justices, was determined by statute. And this licence, whether it took the form of a warrant from a nobleman with the confirmation of the Master of the Revels, or of a royal licence by patent, was always such as to set up a relation of service between the company and a 'lord'. Nor is this relation to be dismissed as a mere empty formality. Probably the players of many country nobles and gentlemen continued to the end to consist of their ordinary household servants, who played only at Christmas and other times of recreation, and mainly at their lord's expense.[879] With the regular travelling companies, and particularly with the London companies, it was different. Financially, at least, they were independent. But even of these the 'service', though largely a legal fiction, was not wholly so. The Statutes of Retainers, kept alive by the proclamations of 1572 and 1583, forbade the maintenance of retainers who were not in some real sense household servants. The consequent application made by his players to the Earl of Leicester in 1572 does not suggest that the distinction was a very vital one. Certainly they guard themselves against being supposed to be asking their lord for a fee. But I think it is clear that the lord was expected to take some responsibility for the conduct of those who used his name, and to exercise some discipline in cases of misdemeanour. It was so in 1559, when the proclamation against unlicensed plays expressly called upon noblemen and gentlemen having players to see that it received attention from their servants. And it must still have been so in 1583, when the ill behaviour of Worcester's men at Norwich was effectively checked by a threat to certify their lord of their contempt. On the other hand there is abundant evidence that the lord might be looked to, in time of need, to intervene for the active furtherance of the interests of his players, over and above the general recommendation to favour for his sake, which is common form in the warrants of protection and even in the royal patents. Thus Leicester is found writing to the President of the North on behalf of his men in 1559, Berkeley and Hunsdon to the City in 1581 and 1594 respectively, Nottingham to Middlesex in 1600, Lennox for his men in 1604; while the toleration of Oxford's and Worcester's men as a third London company in 1602 is expressly stated by the Privy Council to be due to the suit of the Earl of Oxford to the Queen. On their side the players no doubt had reciprocal courtesies, if no more, to pay. They wore the lord's livery and bore his badge.[880] Leicester's men refer to their livery in their letter of 1572, and in 1588 they had occasion to make their complaint to the Norwich Corporation of a local cobbler 'for lewd woords uttered ageynst the ragged staff'. A practice of offering up a prayer for the lord's well-being at the end of a performance was probably of ancient derivation, although whether it survived in the public theatres may perhaps be doubted.[881] There are instances, moreover, which suggest that, if the lord had need of players for the celebration of a wedding or other festivity, it was to his own servants that he would naturally turn. Thus Leicester had his company with him on his expedition to the Netherlands in 1585, and it was the Chamberlain's men who were called upon to play _Henry IV_ at Hunsdon's house in the Blackfriars when he entertained the Flemish ambassador Verreyken in 1600. Similarly the royal companies, under both Elizabeth and James, formed integral parts of the royal household. They were attached to the Lord Chamberlain's department, and ranked as Grooms of the Chamber. And on one occasion at least, the visit of the Constable of Castile in 1604, the King's and Queen's men were actually assigned, in their capacity as Grooms, to the service of the distinguished strangers. Their exact status is, however, a matter of some difficulty. The old interlude players had held an independent position as such, with fees charged originally on the Exchequer and afterwards on the Chamber, at higher rates than those of Grooms of the Chamber, and the liveries not of Grooms but of Yeomen. When they died out, they were replaced by the Queen's men of 1583. Howes tells us that these 'were sworn the queen's servants and were allowed wages and liveries as grooms of the chamber'. Howes is not quite a contemporary authority, and makes at least a technical mistake when he adds that until 1583 'the queene had no players'. If by 'wages' he means such annual fees as the interlude players had received, his statement is not confirmed by the Chamber Accounts, and it is not very likely that such payments were put back upon the Exchequer. It is true that fee-lists, not only Elizabethan but Jacobean, continue to include eight players of interludes at £3 6_s._ 8_d._ each, but I doubt whether this can be safely taken as evidence that the vacancies were filled.[882] No doubt, however, Howes was accurate on the main point, for Tarlton is described in a document of 1587 as an 'ordenary grome off her majestes chamber', and both Tarlton and Johnson as 'groomes of her majesties chamber' in another of 1588. I may add that in a list of the sixteen ordinary grooms who received allowances at Elizabeth's funeral are to be found the names of George Brian and John Singer.[883] These had been respectively a Chamberlain's and an Admiral's man, but both seem to have left playing before the date of the list, and I suspect that they retired on taking up these active Household appointments. For the King's players there is fuller testimony, although most of it is Caroline rather than Jacobean. The players are not called Grooms of the Chamber in their patents of appointment; but this proves nothing, as most of the Household posts were conferred, not by patent, but by swearing-in before the Lord Chamberlain or other high officer. But they received payment as 'his Maiesties Groomes of the Chamber and Players', when they waited upon the Spanish ambassador in 1604, and are entered in the Chamber Accounts for this payment as a distinct group, apart from the seven ordinary and four extraordinary grooms who were also assigned to the ambassador's service. The Queen's men, who waited upon the Flemish commissioners, are similarly described as being 'Groomes of the Chamber and the Queenes Players'. A few months before the King's, Queen's, and Prince's players had all received 4½ yards of red cloth each as a livery at the time of James's coronation procession.[884] Nearly a quarter of a century later we find very similar liveries furnished for both the King's and the Queen's men by a series of Lord Chamberlain's warrants to his Wardrobe, which begin in 1622.[885] These liveries were renewed every two years and consisted at first of three, and afterwards of four, yards of bastard scarlet for a cloak, and a quarter of a yard of crimson velvet for a cap. These were of course state liveries, not the 'watching' liveries of medley-coloured cloth, at 5_s._ a yard as against the 26_s._ 8_d._ paid for the scarlet.[886] The Chamberlain's books of the same period also contain warrants for the swearing-in of new members of the King's and other companies, and in these the players are directed to be sworn as 'grooms of the chamber in ordinary without fee'.[887] These are, as I say, Caroline records, but if we may assume that the procedure which they disclose was no novelty, and that the royal players from 1583 onwards held this intermediate position as 'grooms in ordinary without fee' between the ordinary and the extraordinary Grooms of the Chamber, we get an explanation of their status which, on the assumption that Howes was not quite well informed, is at least consistent with all the few known facts.

The times and seasons at which plays might be given formed, of course, one of the chief battle-grounds in the controversy with the preachers; and it was here that the Puritans, routed on the main issue of the campaign, were able to secure their principal victory. From the beginning it was an understood thing that plays must not be given during the hours of divine service, either on Sundays, or on the Saints' days, which continued long after the Reformation to be observed as public holidays. This, however, did not prevent the audiences from gathering, so that the play-houses were already full, while the bells were still ringing in the empty services.[888] The City regulations of 1574 attempted to remedy this scandal by extending the prohibition to the opening of the doors. The same point is made in the 'Remedies' put forward by the City advocates in 1584. But there was a practical difficulty, which increased when the theatres in the distant fields or over the water came into use. Afternoon prayer did not begin until 2 p.m., and if the theatres waited until 4 p.m., the performances were not over, except in the height of summer, before dark, and the audiences must make their way home as best they could. The City 'Remedy' for this was a shortening of the plays; but in 1594 Lord Hunsdon suggested that to begin at 2 instead of 4 p.m. might after all be the least of two evils, and this seems to have been the solution ultimately adopted.[889] The proviso against playing in time of common prayer, which finds a place in the licence to Leicester's men of 1574, is not repeated in any of the Jacobean licences, with the exception of Queen Anne's personal warrant to her provincial company in 1606.

Obviously the clash with divine service became of minor importance when the Puritans had made good their protest against plays on Sundays, and when, on the other hand, the theatres came to be open on every week-day, instead of principally on holidays. Both of these processes were complete before the final settlement of the status of players was arrived at.[890] It was the failure to exclude Sundays that above all things made the City regulations of 1574 inadequate in the eyes of the preachers, and formed the leading topic of their railings against the lukewarmness of the 'magistrates'. In the City itself they had gained this point at least by 1581, with the assent of the Privy Council, who, while pressing for the toleration of plays both on ordinary week-days and on holidays, was quite prepared to concede the sanctity of the Sabbath. With the potent aid afforded by the ruin of Paris Garden at a Sunday baiting, the City were able about 1583 to get the principle extended to the suburbs, although both in 1587 and in 1591 the Privy Council had to call the attention of the county justices to the neglect of the regulation.[891] In Southwark there is mention of a disturbance at a play on Sunday as late as 11 June 1592, but as the Lord Mayor intervened, this can hardly have been at a regular theatre, for there was only the Rose, which was outside his jurisdiction. On the other hand, the evidence of Henslowe's _Diary_, as interpreted by Dr. Greg, shows that the prohibition was strictly observed at the theatres under his control between 1592 and 1597, and also that the Sunday abstinence was fully compensated for by continuous playing on every other day of the week.[892] It is probable that the proclamation against Sunday plays, issued by James I as one of the first acts of his reign, did no more, so far as London was concerned, than reaffirm an already accepted practice. More puzzling is the provision in the Council order of 1600, whereby each of the two privileged companies was limited to performances on two days in each week. It must be exceedingly doubtful whether this limitation was ever in fact observed. There is no evidence in Henslowe's _Diary_ of any slackening in the output of new plays by the Admiral's men after 1600. And there is no corresponding limitation in the Jacobean patents. Moreover, an agreement entered into by Queen Anne's men in June 1615 specifically contemplates performances upon six days a week.

The companies were also expected not to play during Lent. This limitation may have been traditional. It first becomes explicit in the Privy Council's permit of 1578 to the Italian company of Martinelli Drusiano, which is expressed as lasting to the first week in Lent. In the following year a general inhibition for the coming and all subsequent Lents was decreed by the Council. The entries in Henslowe's _Diary_ show some observance of the rule during the last decade of the sixteenth century. Strange's men in 1592 played right through Lent, with the exception of Good Friday. The Admiral's men, on the other hand, during 1595 to 1600, seem regularly to have broken off for some weeks during Lent. In 1595 and 1596 the interval covered all but the first few days; in 1597 it was less than three weeks, and thereafter the company played three days a week up to Easter. A reservation was made for Lent by the Council order of 1600, and in 1601 the Council sent a special instruction to the Lord Mayor to stop plays at St. Paul's and the Blackfriars during the penitential season. Presumably the same practice prevailed under James I, for the permission to resume playing in April 1604 is expressed as motived by 'the time of Lent being now passt', while on 29 March 1615 representatives of the London companies were summoned before the Privy Council, to answer for playing in Lent contrary to an express direction given them by the Lord Chamberlain through the Master of the Revels.[893] Some light is thrown on this proceeding by the fact that two years later each of the companies undertook to pay the Master of the Revels 44_s._ 'for a Lenten dispensation'.[894]

A Privy Council letter of 1591 imposes one other curious limitation, with which the Puritans at any rate can have had nothing to do, upon the players. They are to lie idle upon Thursdays and leave that day free for bear-baitings and similar pastimes, which were 'allwayes accustomed and practized upon it'. I am not sure whether the claim of the bearwards to Thursday really went back beyond 1583, when it seems to have become desirable, owing to the impulse to Puritan sentiment given by the Paris Garden accident, to substitute some other day for the Sunday upon which baitings had formerly been usual. Nor does it seem that the attempt to give a special protection to the royal 'game' permanently maintained itself. The Admiral's men, in spite of Edward Alleyn's interest in the Bear Garden, certainly did not yield the Thursdays from 1594 to 1597, and when about 1614 Henslowe and Jacob Meade had occasion to combine playing and baiting in the Hope, they had to insert special stipulations in their agreements with the actors, in order to secure one day a fortnight for the bears.[895]

Obviously the privileges given to players were not intended to exempt them from the ordinary duties and responsibilities of citizenship. In the first place, they were called upon to make their contributions to local burdens in the districts in which they set up their play-houses. To this they had probably no objection; on the contrary, they more than once found that a readiness to pay their tithes for the use of the poor was an effective method of smoothing away difficulties with local officials.[896] Nor had they less to gain than others from a reasonable expenditure of money on the repair of the highways.[897]

And secondly, they had to exercise a constant watchfulness against the danger of allowing their play-houses to become the centres of riot and sedition, and the cognate danger of allowing matter to creep into their plays which was contrary to public morals as conceived by those who were not Puritans, or displeasing to persons of importance, or inconsistent with the views of Tudor and Stuart governments upon religious and political questions. The disturbances which form a count in the sixteenth-century indictments of theatres are not particularly conspicuous in the seventeenth. There were bad characters enough, both male and female, amongst the audience. Pockets might be picked and even modesty endangered; and occasionally brawls and bloodshed were the result.[898] But in the more important theatres, such as the Globe and the Fortune, which made their appeal to the well-to-do and the fashionable, no less than to the groundlings, the maintenance of order was at least as much in the interests of the players themselves as in that of any other section of the community. In avoiding subject-matter of offence, so far as the texts of their plays were concerned, the companies had of course the assistance of the Master of the Revels, upon whom, in view of the unwillingness of the City either to appoint licensing officers themselves or to accept a nominee of the Privy Council, the functions of a stage censor had, as an alternative policy, been conferred.[899] The employment of a royal official for this purpose was in effect a resumption by the central government of a responsibility which it had already attempted to discharge during the earlier Tudor reigns, and had then delegated to the local justices by the proclamation of 1559. The selection of the Master of the Revels explains itself naturally enough as an extension of the duties which already fell to him of scrutinizing and, if need be, 'reforming' the plays proposed for presentation at Court.[900] The actual establishment of his authority appears to have been a gradual process. It is tentative and limited to the plays of one company in the patent for Leicester's men of 1574. It is as wide as possible in the commission issued to the Master in 1581, overriding the proclamation of 1559, and giving him a complete control, not only over individual plays, but over players, playmakers, and playing-places generally. Shortly afterwards, in 1584, the Leicester archives record that the credentials of Worcester's men at that date included, in addition to the warrant from their lord, a licence from the Master of the Revels, from the terms of which it appears that the company were 'bound to the orders prescribed' by him, and in particular that all their plays were to be 'allowed' by him, and to have 'his hand at the latter end of the said booke they doe play'.[901] In London, on the other hand, the correspondence of 1582-4 between the Privy Council and the City makes no mention of the Master, and the Council are still pressing for the appointment of fit persons to consider and allow of plays by the City itself. In 1589, however, the Lord Mayor cited the Master's 'mislike' of the Martin Marprelate plays as a reason for suppressing them, and a step forward was probably taken by the appointment in the same year of a commission to 'allow' plays, consisting of the Master himself and of two assessors nominated by the Lord Mayor and the Archbishop of Canterbury. I find no later reference to these assessors and it may be that before long the Master succeeded in divesting himself of their assistance.[902] In any case, their functions did not go beyond the 'allowing' of the actual plays. The general licensing of companies and of play-houses remained with the Master, and by 1592 we find the City acknowledging their powerlessness to redress the 'inconvenience' of the stage without him and debating the advisability of approaching him with a bribe. Henslowe's _Diary_ discloses the Master between 1592 and 1597 as regularly licensing both theatres and plays, and taking fees, which appear to have amounted to 7_s._ for each new play produced, and 5_s._, 6_s._ 8_d._, and ultimately 10_s._ for each week during which a theatre was open.[903] To some extent the assumption of a more direct control by the Privy Council in 1597 must have limited his responsibility. But he continued to act as the agent of the Privy Council or the Lord Chamberlain in transmitting inhibitions and other orders to the companies.[904] Bonds had still to be given to him for the due observance of the regulations.[905] And he still drew fees from the theatres which were in fact again advanced in 1599 from 10_s._ to 15_s._ a week. Due reservation is regularly made for his 'aucthoritie power priuiledges and profittes' in the majority of the Jacobean patents issued to the London companies.[906] He continued to license those travelling companies which held no direct royal authority; and in the course of the seventeenth century he succeeded in establishing his jurisdiction over many travelling entertainers who were not strictly players.[907] Above all, it still rested with him to 'allow' the production, even by the patented companies, of individual plays, and about 1607 he undertook also the allowance of plays for the press, which had previously been in the hands of licensers appointed under the High Commission for London.[908] A few manuscripts of plays are extant which have been submitted to the Master of the Revels for purposes of censorship, notably those of _Sir Thomas More_ (_c._ 1600) and _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_ (1611), and give interesting indications of the manner in which he apprehended his duties.[909] Tilney, in dealing with _Sir Thomas More_, was perturbed by two features. The play, as submitted to him, began with a dispute between Londoners and certain Lombard aliens, leading up to the riots of 'ill May day' and the reputation won by Sir Thomas More as the restorer of peace. This was still a ticklish subject at the end of the sixteenth century, for there had been comparatively recent disturbances on the alien question, directed against Frenchmen rather than Lombards, and Tilney therefore went carefully through the earlier pages, altering here and there 'Frenchman' or 'straunger' into 'Lombard', and marking for omission or alteration certain passages which might be read as suggestions to the citizens to take matters into their own hands. In the margin of one passage he wrote 'Mend this'. Presumably the effect of these 'reformations' did not satisfy him, for at the beginning of the first scene he has inserted what Dr. Greg calls 'a very conditional licence', but what is in fact a direction for the complete recast of the first part of the play by the omission of the dangerous episodes.[910] Similarly he was pulled up by a later scene in which More's refusal to sign articles sent him by the King seemed to be of bad precedent for subjects, and here he drew a line through a substantial section of the dialogue, and added a note that all must be altered. _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_ is a Jacobean, not an Elizabethan, play, and the censor was Sir George Buck. He, too, is on the look-out for political criticism, and political criticism in 1611 was likely to be criticism of King and Court. The passages, therefore, amended by Buck or at his instigation are a few which speak lightly of courtiers and knights and ladies of high position, and one in particular which seemed to him to dwell with too much point and detail upon the delicate theme of tyrannicide. But this was merely verbal caution. He did not attempt to eliminate tyrannicide from the plot, in which it formed an essential element, and returned the copy duly endorsed with a licence over his signature that it 'may with the reformations bee acted publikely'. One more point shows some development of censorial practice as between Tilney and Buck. The latter, presumably with the _Act to Restrain Abuses of Players_ in his mind, concerns himself not only with politics but with propriety. It is a perfunctory business enough. In half a dozen places such expletives as 'life' and 'heart' are excised; in many more these and others, such as 'mass' and 'faith', which one would have supposed to be as much or as little objectionable, remain unquestioned.[911]

It has been the experience of many governments that the most rigid censorship of the 'books' of plays does not afford a complete guarantee of the inoffensiveness of the performances actually given upon the stage. A few lines of 'gag' are easily inserted; an emphasis, a gesture, a 'make-up' may fill with malicious intention a scene which read harmlessly enough in the privacy of the censor's study. And as nothing draws like topical allusions, it sometimes happened that the activities of the Master of the Revels did not prevent the players from overstepping the boundaries of what the somewhat arbitrary susceptibilities of the government would tolerate. It must not be supposed that the Elizabethan injunction against any intermeddling with politics or religion on the stage was to be taken with absolute literalness. Up to a point the players had a fairly free hand even with contemporary events. They might represent, if they would, such feats of English arms as the siege of Turnhout with all realism.[912] They might mock at foreign potentates, if they did not, as was sometimes the case, embarrass Elizabeth's diplomacy in so doing.[913] It has already been made clear that at the beginning of the reign Cecil made use of interludes, after the manner of his master Cromwell, as a political weapon against Philip of Spain and the Catholics; and many years after both Philip and James of Scotland had their grievances against the freedom with which their names were bandied by the London comedians.[914] Similarly, when it was desired that Puritanism should be unpopular, the players were not debarred from satirizing Puritans.[915] But if the public discussion of religious controversies became a scandal, as in the case of the Marprelate plays, and still more if freedom of speech turned to criticism of the government itself, as probably happened in _The Isle of Dogs_, it very soon became apparent that the time for toleration was over, and the punishment which fell upon the companies was swift and sharp and undiscriminating. Sometimes it even happened, in spite of the special pains of the Master of Revels, that a play was brought to Court which gave offence. Such a play had to be stopped incontinently during the Christmas of 1559, and another is recorded at a much later date, which drew some displeasing political morals from the suits of a pack of cards, and would have brought the performers into serious disgrace but for the friendly intervention of a councillor with a sense of humour.[916] In addition to the susceptibilities of the government itself, there were also those of powerful individuals to be considered. Cecilia of Sweden, who had outstayed her welcome, complained that her husband was mocked by the players in her presence.[917] Tarlton, although a _persona grata_ at Court, got into trouble for his hits at Leicester and Raleigh, possibly in the very play on the pack of cards already mentioned.[918] A protest from a descendant of Sir John Oldcastle obliged Shakespeare to change the original name of his Falstaff. And on 10 May 1601 the Privy Council sent an order to the Middlesex justices to examine and, if need be, suppress a play at the Curtain, in which were presented 'the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive, under obscure manner, but yet in such sort as all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and of the persons that are meant thereby'. A rather inexplicable part was taken by players in the wild scenes that closed the career of Robert Earl of Essex in 1601. Essex was a popular hero, and as the prologue to _Henry V_ shows, a name to conjure with in the theatre. Bacon records how in August 1599, after his return from Ireland, 'did fly about in London streets and theatres seditious libels'.[919] That he should become an object of ridicule rather than of honour on the boards was one of the bitterest stings in his disgrace. 'Shortly', he wailed to Elizabeth on 12 May 1600, 'they will play me in what forms they list upon the stage.'[920] And when the last mad step of rebellion was taken in February 1601 it was a play, none other than Shakespeare's _Richard II_, to which the plotters looked to stir the temper of London in their favour.[921] The curious thing is that in this case, although Essex and more than one of his followers lost life or liberty, no very serious results seem to have followed to the company involved. The incident has been thought to have inspired the references to an 'innovation' and the consequent travelling of the players in _Hamlet_. But in fact the Chamberlain's men cannot be traced in the provinces during 1601, and they were admitted to give their full share of Court performances during the following Christmas.[922]

For some years after the coming of James, the freedom of speech adopted by the stage, in a London much inclined to be critical of the alien King and his retinue of hungry Scots, was far beyond anything which could have been tolerated by Elizabeth. The uncouth speech of the Sovereign, his intemperance, his gusts of passion, his inordinate devotion to the chase, were caricatured with what appears incredible audacity, before audiences of his new subjects. 'Consider for pity's sake,' writes Beaumont, the French ambassador, on 14 June 1604, 'what must be the state and condition of a prince, whom the preachers publicly from the pulpit assail, whom the comedians of the metropolis bring upon the stage, whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband.'[923] Beaumont's evidence is confirmed by a letter of 28 March 1605 from Samuel Calvert to Ralph Winwood, in which he writes that 'the play[er]s do not forbear to represent upon their stage the whole course of this present time, not sparing either King, state, or religion, in so great absurdity, and with such liberty, that any would be afraid to hear them'.[924] That in spite of all the companies continued to enjoy a substantial measure of royal favour, while speaking well for the good sense of the government, may perhaps also justify the inference that by the seventeenth century the theatre had so far established itself as an integral part of London life that a vindictive measure of suppression had become impracticable. From time to time, however, the blow fell upon some unusually indiscreet company, or playwright, and at one moment, owing to diplomatic complications, the prospect of suppression became, as will be seen, an imminent danger. Possibly the countenance given by Queen Anne to the comedians may have been in part responsible for the long-suffering with which their insolence was met. It could have been no object for James to underline by any public action the strained relations between King and Consort which already embarrassed the conduct of Court life. One of the companies, indeed, which was most frequently in trouble, was that which had been taken in 1604 under the direct protection of the Queen, with the title of 'Children of the Queen's Revels'. This was a company of boys, in a sense attached to the Court itself and formerly known as the Children of the Chapel, which played at the 'private' house of the Blackfriars under conditions not quite the same as those of the public theatres. The patent under which this company was reconstructed in 1604 had exempted its plays from the jurisdiction of the Master of the Revels, possibly because the Master was an officer of the King's Household from which that of the Queen was distinct, and had committed the licensing of them to the poet Samuel Daniel, who had been nominated by Anne for the purpose. Daniel was extremely unfortunate in the exercise of his functions. Before a year was out, offence had already been given by the play of _Philotas_, of which he was himself the author. In 1605 followed _Eastward Ho!_ with some audacious satire upon the Scottish nation, which brought Jonson and Chapman into prison, although they maintained that the offending 'clawses' were due not to their pens, but to those of their collaborator Marston, who had apparently made his escape. As a result of the misdemeanour of _Eastward Ho!_ Anne appears to have been induced to withdraw her direct patronage of the company, which for a time was known, not as the Children of the Queen's Revels, but as the Children of the Revels pure and simple. But it was allowed to go on playing at the Blackfriars, and here in February 1606 was produced Day's _Isle of Gulls_, another satire on the relations of English and Scots, which landed some of those responsible in Bridewell. Further irregularities took place in 1608, of which a lively account is given in a dispatch of the French ambassador, M. de la Boderie. The company produced two offending plays in rapid succession. Of one, now lost, which satirized James in person, the author was probably John Marston. The other, which provoked the ambassador to protest by its allusions to the domestic arrangements of the French king, was Chapman's _Byron_.[925] A general inhibition of plays was now ordered, but De La Boderie correctly anticipated that James's anger would soon be mollified, especially as the four other London companies had offered an indemnity which he estimates at what seems the incredibly high figure of 100,000 francs. He thought that similar episodes would be prevented in future by refusing allowance to plays whose subjects were taken from contemporary history. This may, in fact, have been the solution adopted, as a standing order against the representation of any 'modern Christian King' on the stage is quoted in 1624.[926] Clearly, however, it left the even more dangerous resources of allegory and of historical parallel still open to the 'seditious' playwright.[927] The Revels boys seem again to have been in trouble in 1610 owing to an offence taken by Lady Arabella Stuart at a passage of Ben Jonson's _Epicoene_, which she seems to have misunderstood.

The Paul's boys vaunt their abstention from libels in the prologue to their _Woman Hater_ of 1606. But it must not be supposed that the dramatic indiscretions were limited to a single company. Even the King's men themselves, though probably without any intention to offend, sometimes misjudged the limits of what was permissible. The Earl of Northampton haled Ben Jonson before the Privy Council for his _Sejanus_ of 1603. On 18 December 1604 a Court gossip writes of a play of _Gowry_, no longer extant, that 'whether the matter or the manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that Princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great councellors are much displeased with it, and so 'tis thought shall be forbidden'.[928] A somewhat vague allusion to an 'unwilling error' of players and a consequent restraint, contained in the epilogue for a revival of _Mucedorus_, first published in 1610, may possibly relate to some later episode not otherwise recorded, but possibly only to the _Byron_ episode, with which the King's men had nothing directly to do. Nor do we know who were the 'much-suffering actors' of Daborne's 'oppressed and much-martird Tragedy', _A Christian Turned Turk_, of about the same date. Conceivably this is itself the play for which _Mucedorus_ apologizes. Even provincial plays sometimes brought their promoters before the Star Chamber. Sir Edward Dymock was imprisoned and fined £1,000 in May 1610 for a scurrilous play against the Earl of Lincoln on a Maypole green.[929] And what seems a curiously belated incident is recorded in 1614, when Sir John Yorke suffered a similar fate for encouraging some vagrant players to perform an interlude in favour of the Popish religion.[930]

And when players had got their warrants and their licences, and signed their recognizances to the Master of the Revels, and paid their tithes, and made up their minds to observe the taboos of Sunday and of Lent, and to purge their plays of all perilous stuff, they had still to encounter the ordinary changes and chances incident to all mortality. The profits swelled in term time and dwindled in vacation.[931] Easter, Whitsuntide, Bartholomew Fair, were recurring seasons of prosperity.[932] Were the streets full for such an occasion as the entry of an ambassador, the theatres reaped their harvest.[933] A period of public mourning, on the other hand, as at the deaths of Elizabeth and of Prince Henry, meant the cessation of business.[934] Political changes--although, like the other elements of Stuart society, the players probably paid little attention to the forces that were gathering for their ultimate overthrow--might prove more disastrous still. But the dreaded enemy, in whose mysterious workings the Puritans recognized a direct expression of the wrath of God, was undeniably the plague. The menace, and too often the actual reality, of plague, in a city whose growth had far outstripped the advance of sanitary knowledge, was one of the principal domestic preoccupations of Elizabethan administrators. And the precaution, which was always resorted to, of forbidding public assemblies as probable centres of infection, reacted terribly upon theatrical enterprise. A study of the plague calendar which forms an appendix to the present volumes will show that there were three grave visitations of plague during the years which it covers, in 1563, in 1592-4, and in 1603; that in the long period 1564 to 1587 following the first visitation, and in the shorter period 1604 to 1609 following the third visitation, plague had become endemic, generally showing itself from July to November and reaching its maximum in September or October; that during these periods certain years, such as 1579 and 1580 in the one and 1604 in the other were comparatively free; and that probably during 1588-91, and certainly during 1595-1602 and 1610-16, plague was so far absent as to be practically negligible. In fact, after 1609 plague did not again become a serious factor in London life until 1625. The greatest developments of the Elizabethan drama thus coincide with the longest periods of exemption, and perhaps this simple physical fact has something to do with the break-down of the Puritan opposition and the settlement of theatrical conditions in 1597. Certainly the plaguesome years 1564-87 are marked by a series of inhibitions of plays on account of plague, some of which seem to be hardly justified by the actual state of things prevailing, and suggest that the Privy Council occasionally found it convenient to avoid controversy with the City by acquiescing in an inhibition for which the dread of infection was little more than the ostensible reason. This tendency seems to have come very near to bringing about a regular autumnal close season for plays. Ultimately, however, a different principle of regulation was adopted. This was based upon the showings of the plague-bill, a weekly summary of deaths from plague and from other causes respectively, prepared from returns rendered on behalf of each of the 109 parishes within the City area and a few of those in the suburbs.[935] The first indication of an appeal to this criterion is to be found in the documents belonging to the inquiry of 1584, to which the players appear to have contributed the proposal that their activities should continue to be tolerated so long as the deaths from plague in any one week did not exceed fifty. The City questioned the security afforded by this figure, and as an alternative offered toleration whenever the deaths from all causes should have remained below fifty for three weeks together. It is difficult to say whether this reply was intended to be taken seriously. Probably not, in view of the general attitude adopted in the argument of which it forms part. If it had been applied to the years 1578-82, for which plague-bills are extant, there would have been only fifteen weeks of playing during the five years, six weeks in 1580, and nine weeks in 1581.[936] The precise issue of the discussion of 1584 is unknown; but the principle then mooted is found in effective operation during the seventeenth century. Most of the patents do not make any specific reservation for times of plague, but that for the King's men, issued during the plague of 1603, and the unexecuted draft for the Queen's men are expressed as coming into operation 'when the infection of the plague shall decrease', and more precisely in the case of the Queen's men 'when the infeccion of the plague shall decrease to the nomber of thirtie weekly within our Citie of London and the liberties therof'. Similarly the Privy Council letter of 9 April 1604 in allowance of the resumption of plays is guarded by the proviso 'except there shall happen weeklie to die of the plague aboue the number of thirtie within the Cittie of London and the liberties therof; att which time we think it fitt they shall cease and forbeare any further publicklie to playe untill the sicknes be again decreaced to the saide number'. This criterion of thirty deaths was much less favourable to the players than that of fifty which they had themselves suggested in 1584. It appears to have ruled until about 1607 and then to have been replaced by the more liberal allowance of forty, which is the number specified in the later patents of 1619 and 1625 to the King's men.[937]

It is clear that a plague, if at all prolonged, hit the players very hard, partly because it was customary to divide up the profits weekly or even daily, and the companies, as distinct from prudent individuals, seem to have kept no reserve funds. In particular the plague of 1592-4 forms a regular watershed in the history of the companies. Some went under altogether; others, such as the famous Queen's men, failed for ever after to recover a foothold in the metropolis. The reconstructed organizations of 1594 have practically no continuity with those in existence up to 1592. The obvious resource in a time of inhibition was to travel, since a London plague did not necessarily extend far into the provinces.[938] It was a regrettable necessity. In favourable economic conditions, the London companies tended to grow, to effect amalgamations, to occupy more than one theatre.[939] Travelling, for more than a few summer weeks, meant the reduction of establishments to the level of provincial profits, the breaking up of partnerships, the division of books and apparel, the dismissal of hired men.[940] But plague was inexorable. Reluctantly the drums and trumpets were bought, the last stoup was quaffed at the Cardinal's Hat, and the rufflers of London streets resigned themselves to the hard life of country 'strowlers'.[941] On the road, with his wagon, the actor necessarily laid aside the conditions of a householder, and reverted to those of his grandfather, the minstrel.[942] And it is fair to say that, as a rule, although there were Puritans in the provinces as well as in London, he received a minstrel's welcome. His advent, about 1574, to a western borough is thus described by one R. Willis, in a half-autobiographical, half-religious, treatise entitled _Mount Tabor_, published in 1639:[943]

'In the City of _Gloucester_, the manner is (as I think it is in other like corporations) that when Players of Enterludes come to towne, they first attend the Mayor, to enforme him what noble-mans servants they are, and so to get licence for their publike playing; and if the Mayor like the Actors, or would shew respect to their Lord and Master, he appoints them to play their first play before himselfe, and the Aldermen and common Counsell of the City; and that is called the Mayors play, where every one that will comes in without money, the Mayor giving the players a reward as hee thinks fit, to shew respect unto them. At such a play my father tooke me with him, and made me stand betweene his leggs, as he sate upon one of the benches, where wee saw and heard very well.'

The account given by Willis receives general confirmation from the numerous entries with regard to players exhumed from the municipal archives not only of Gloucester itself, but of many other towns, and notably Canterbury, Dover, Southampton, Winchester, Exeter, Plymouth, Barnstaple, Oxford, Abingdon, Marlborough, Bath, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Chester, York, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry, Stratford-on-Avon, Maldon, Ipswich, Cambridge, and Norwich.[944] As a rule the information consists of a record in the annual accounts rendered by the Chamberlains or other borough treasurers of the 'rewards' paid to the companies for performing the 'Mayor's play'. These are often stated to have been paid at the 'appointment' of the Mayor, or of the Mayor and the Aldermen or other body who were his 'brethren'. The name of the company is generally given; sometimes the date of the performances, and more rarely the name of the play or some other detail which struck the fancy of the Chamberlains, is added. Sometimes, moreover, there is subsidiary expenditure to record; a stage has to be put up and lit;[945] damage done has to be repaired;[946] the players are entertained with the municipal courtesy of 'wine and sugar', or with a 'drinkinge', 'banket', or 'breakfast' at their inn.[947] At Gloucester the entertainment, of 'wine and chirries', took place in the house of 'Mr. Swordbearer', an official of the corporation. In the main the customs of the different towns seem to have been singularly uniform, but here and there variations of detail present themselves. Thus the mayor's play was not everywhere, as at Gloucester, open to all comers. A 'free' play is noted at Newcastle; at Bath and Canterbury on the other hand there was a 'gathering', supplemented by the town's reward.[948] At Leicester the same arrangement prevailed up to the end of the sixteenth century. The 'gathering' was levied upon the members of the two councils known as the 'Twenty-four' and the 'Forty-eight'; and orders are upon record limiting this liability to performances by the royal companies or the servants of privy councillors.[949] In 1590-1 collections were also taken 'at the hall dore'.

A Bridgnorth order of 1570 that no charge should be put upon the town fund appears to be exceptional at this date, and did not prove permanent.[950] The 'rewards' entered in the accounts are generally round sums; where they are broken, they probably went to make up the results of the 'gatherings' to round sums. At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign the amounts often do not exceed a few shillings, but a general tendency to increase is apparent throughout the next half-century, and by 1616 rewards of £2 and even £3 are not uncommon. The establishment of the Queen's men in 1583 led to a rise in the rate of reward for that company, which in course of time brought about increased generosity to others.[951] The highest sums I have noted were £4 to the Queen's men at Ipswich in 1599, and to various companies at Coventry from 1612 onwards. Nottingham distinguished itself by economy, and did not go beyond 20_s._ at the best. In most places the rates fluctuate considerably to the end; being determined partly by the importance of the 'lord' and his relations to the town, partly in all probability by the opinion of the stage held by the mayor or the town, partly, one may hope, by the merits of individual plays and their interpreters. Commonly enough, the mayor's play took place in the guild-hall, in spite of the criticisms of those who, whatever their real motives, alleged the damage done and the interruption to municipal business.[952] For subsequent performances other quarters had often to be found. These were ordinarily in an inn;[953] occasionally in the church itself or the churchyard.[954] Great Yarmouth had its specially provided 'game house'; a theatre contemplated at York in 1608-9 was to have its own company, as 'a means to restrayne the frequent comminge of other stage players', but the scheme was never actually carried out.[955]

To some extent the evidence of the accounts can be eked out by that of other records throwing a more direct light upon the responsibilities assumed by the civic authorities in regard to plays. Singularly interesting is the register of the Mayor's Court at Norwich, in which are recorded the attendances of players on their arrival in the town to submit their credentials and obtain leave for their performances.[956] The patent companies produced their letters patent in original or in exemplification, in addition to which the Court seems to have expected some instrument of deputation, if none of the men actually named in the document were present.[957] The nature of the evidence forthcoming from other companies is not so clearly specified, but no doubt it consisted of the warrant of appointment by their lord, and after 1581 of the confirmatory licence from the Master of the Revels. Worcester's men were in a difficulty at Leicester in 1583 because, although they could produce the warrant from their lord, their licence from the Master had been purloined by another company.[958] It was probably as a quite special privilege that, when Strange's and Sussex's men travelled in 1593, they carried with them letters of assistance from the Privy Council itself. It may be gathered from the terms of the Norwich entries that the Court regarded its own permission or 'licence' as essential before players were entitled to set up their 'bills' or give their performances within its jurisdiction. The lord's warrant might protect his servants from the penalties of vagabondage; but it was not necessarily accepted, in the provinces any more than in London, as overriding the traditional right of the municipal governments to control the entertainments which might have serious results both upon the morality and the order of their areas. On the other hand, even if the plays had been less popular than they were, the livery of the Queen or of a powerful noble was not a thing to be lightly flouted. Perhaps the difficulty was solved by taking the warrant at its face value as a courteous letter of recommendation, and letting the licence to play and the 'reward' stand as return courtesies from the corporation to their very good lord. This fiction, however, can hardly have been applicable to the terms in which the Master of the Revels may be supposed to have worded his licence, and still less to those of the royal patents, which claimed to give direct authority to play 'within anie town halls or moute halls or other conveniente places within the liberties and freedoms of any cittie, vniversitie, towne or boroughe whatsoever within our realmes and domynions'. The corporations were not very likely to act upon the advice attributed to the Lord Coke in 1606 that such licences from the Crown were _ultra vires_.[959] No doubt they remained the arbiters as to what places were 'conveniente'. They also prescribed times and seasons, forbidding plays at their discretion on Sunday[960] or at night,[961] or in Lent,[962] or during divine service,[963] and laying down for each company the number of days during which it was at liberty to perform, or the interval which must elapse between one visit and the next. At Norwich the number of days ranged from one to eight, sometimes one performance and sometimes two being allowed on each day. The royal signet warrants which came into use about 1616 authorized the companies holding them to stay fourteen days in any one town. Sometimes Dogberry and Verges found good reason for refusing leave to play. It was a season of plague or of social disturbance in the town.[964] In 1603 when the Admiral's men visited Canterbury, 'it was thought fit they should not play at all in regard that our late Queen was then ether very sick or dead as they supposed'. Or even if the public playing was allowed, the corporation might be too busy for a Mayor's play to be appropriate. In either event the players generally got their fee all the same, and the Chamberlain, if punctilious, entered it not as a 'reward' but as a 'gratuity', and noted in his book that the company 'did not playe'.[965] Certain indications show themselves here and there that the Puritan controversy had spread to the provinces, and even that the desire to have done with plays altogether was not wholly confined to London. As early as 1590 there was a dispute in the corporation of Maldon between an ex-bailiff of the town and certain colleagues whom he abused as 'a sort of precisians and Brownists' because they forbade a performance on a Sunday evening.[966] In 1596 the Chester corporation made an order for the suppression of plays, and fixed a 'gratuity' of 20_s._ for the Queen's men, and 6_s._ 8_d._ for those of any noble. But it does not seem that the resolution was persisted in, and in 1615 the city was still suffering from 'the common brute and scandal' of 'obscene and unlawfull plaies or tragedies', and did no more than bar them out from the Common Hall and confine them to the day-time.[967] At Hull too fines were enacted against citizens resorting to plays and landlords harbouring them in 1598.[968] The players did not always prove conformable to municipal discipline. Several cases are recorded at Norwich, in which companies played contrary to orders, and were punished by committal to prison, or by threats that their lord should be certified of their contempt, and that they should never more have reward of the city.[969] One of the mutinous companies in 1583 was Worcester's, who in the following year repeated their offence at Leicester, going 'with their drum and trumppytts thorowe the towne in contempt of Mr. Mayor' and using 'evyll and contemptyous words' of that dignitary, who had given them an angel (3_s._ 4_d._) towards their dinner. The threat of reporting them to their lord reduced them to submission, and after all they were allowed to play, and made a public apology to Mr. Mayor as a prologue.

The worst of travelling was that, after all the tramping of bad roads, and all the wrangling with jacks-in-office, there was but a scanty living to be made out of it, even with the aid of the few shillings to be picked up in the larger villages, from such a windfall as is described in _Ratseis Ghost_,[970] or from the generous hospitality of a friendly manor.[971] The competition was considerable, for in the provinces the London companies found rivals in the shape of other companies which rarely or never came to London at all, but were none the less substantial and permanent organizations. Thus Queen Elizabeth's men travelled for years between their last London appearance in 1594 and the end of the reign, and continued all the time to secure the exceptionally high rates of 'reward' which were due to the royal name. Other famous provincial companies, each of which can be traced through a period of years, were those of the Duchess of Suffolk (1548-63), and the Lords Mountjoy (1564-78), Stafford (1574-1604), Sheffield (1577-86), Berkeley (1578-1610), Chandos (1578-1610), Morley (1581-1602), Darcy (1591-1603), Mounteagle (1593-1616), Huntingdon (1597-1606), Evers (1600-13), and Dudley (1600-36). Some of these had a comparatively limited range; others covered the whole country. Their presence in the field, and that of many minor companies, must have made it difficult for the Londoners.[972] The charge of travelling, again, as Strange's men complained to the Privy Council about 1592, was intolerable, and the necessity for dividing the larger companies, so as to cover more ground, led to disorganization. Pembroke's men, when they travelled in 1593, could not save their charges, and had to pawn their apparel and return home. The years of plague and travellings were the lean years which sent the books of plays into the hands of the publishers.[973] And for a company to part with the books and garments that formed its stock in trade was a confession of failure.

The wanderings of English actors were by no means confined to England itself. They crossed the border to Scotland, where towards the end of the sixteenth century they incurred the hostility of the Kirk Sessions, which did not prevent James I from appointing one or more of them as Court comedians, and bringing them back with him in 1603 to figure in the lists of the patented royal companies.[974] Somewhat later they braved the Irish Channel, and are found at Youghal.[975] And on the Continent they ranged far and wide.[976] Notices of them in France, indeed, are rarer than might be expected, perhaps because of the barrier of religion, perhaps because the Italians had already occupied the ground, perhaps only because the archives have not been thoroughly searched. To Italy and to Spain they just penetrated. In northern Europe, on the other hand, in the Netherlands, in Germany, even in Denmark, Sweden, and Poland, they found a constant welcome, until their movements were checked by the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1620. A pioneer company, which made its way from Leicester's head-quarters at Utrecht to the Courts of Copenhagen and Dresden in 1586, included members who afterwards became fellows of Shakespeare as Lord Chamberlain's men. The shifting relations of the numerous bands which followed them are beyond research, but the initiative in organizing the raids seems to have been largely taken by two men. One of these was Robert Browne, who paid not less than five visits abroad between 1590 and 1620, and appears to have had many associates, of whom the most important was John Green. The other was John Spencer, who first appears in 1604, and whose operations were probably quite independent of Browne's. The industry of German scholars has made it possible to trace in outline the stories of Spencer and of a group of companies owing their origin more or less directly to Browne. Their adventures were clearly much facilitated by the existence of numerous petty German courts, under cultivated rulers who were glad to take a troop of actors into their service for a year or two at a time, and then let them go for a while on their travels from one to another of the great towns. Conspicuous amongst such patrons were the Electors Joachim Frederick (1598-1608) and John Sigismund (1608-91) of Brandenburg, the Electors Christian I (1586-91), Christian II (1591-1611), and John George (1611-56) of Saxony, Henry Julius (1589-1613) Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and Maurice (1592-1627) Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. Naturally, also, the actors made their way to Heidelberg, whither the Elector Palatine Frederick V brought his English bride in 1613. These were Protestant princes, but Catholic Germany, although less often visited, was not closed to the English, who found particular favour with the house of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, afterwards the Emperor Ferdinand II. Of the great cities of Germany the most hospitable to actors, so far as our knowledge goes, were Cologne, Strassburg, Ulm, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and above all Frankfort, where the two great marts or fairs held annually at Easter and in the autumn served as a rallying-point for travellers and entertainers of every species. The early successes of the English in Germany are reported by Fynes Moryson, who was at Frankfort for the autumn fair of 1592:

'Germany hath some fewe wandring Comeydians, more deseruing pitty then prayse, for the serious parts are dully penned, and worse acted, and the mirth they make is ridiculous, and nothing lesse then witty (as I formerly haue shewed). So as I remember that when some of our cast dispised stage players came out of England into Germany, and played at Franckford in the tyme of the Mart, hauing nether a complete number of Actours, nor any good Appareil, nor any ornament of the Stage, yet the Germans, not vnderstanding a worde they sayde, both men and women, flocked wonderfully to see theire gesture and Action, rather then heare them, speaking English which they vnderstoode not, and pronowncing peeces and patches of English playes, which my selfe and some English men there present could not heare without great wearysomenes. Yea my selfe comming from Franckford in the company of some cheefe marchants Dutch and Flemish, heard them often bragg of the good markett they had made, only condoling that they had not the leasure to heare the English players.'

In the Netherlands the English players, according to Moryson, brought themselves into a singular difficulty. Here, too, was no native stage:

'For Commedians, they litle practise that Arte, and are the poorest Actours that can be imagined, as my selfe did see when the Citty of Getrudenberg being taken by them from the Spanyards, they made bonsfyers and publikely at Leyden represented that action in a play, so rudely as the poore Artizans of England would haue both penned and acted it much better. So as at the same tyme when some cast players of England came into those partes, the people not vnderstanding what they sayd, only for theere action followed them with wonderfull concourse, yea many young virgines fell in loue with some of the players, and followed them from citty to citty, till the magistrates were forced to forbid them to play any more.'[977]

Moryson's account finds confirmation in the praise lavished upon English acting by German writers, such as Erhard Cellius in 1605, Joannes Rhenanus about 1610, and Daniel von Wensin in 1613.[978] Undoubtedly the German stage, which had been slow to develop on professional lines, owed a great impetus to the invasions. Germans attached themselves to the English companies, and in course of time imitated the English methods in companies of their own. The English plays served as models for German dramatists, of whom Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick and Jacob Ayrer of Nuremberg were the best known.[979] On the other hand, the invaders themselves became denizened, at any rate to the extent of learning to give their performances in the German tongue. Moryson found Browne's company handicapped by their use of English at Frankfort in 1592. A Münster chronicler tells us that an anonymous company which visited his town in 1601 still played 'in ihrer engelschen Sprache', but that between the acts the clown amused the audience with 'bôtze und geckerie' in German.[980] In 1605 actors who petition for leave to appear at the Frankfort fair advertise their intention to give their comedies and tragedies 'in hochteutscher sprache', and there can be little doubt that, whatever may have been the case in Anglomaniac courts, theirs was the practice which ultimately prevailed in the cities.[981] Such portions of the repertories of the English actors as have been preserved are without exception in German. They are of singularly little literary value, fully bearing out Moryson's description of them as no more than 'peeces and patches' of English plays. But occasionally one of them possesses a critical interest as representing a play now lost or some earlier version of its model than that extant in an English text. In addition to actual plays, enough lists of performances are upon record to give a fair notion of the range of the travelling repertories. Both recent productions of the London stage and more old-fashioned pieces were drawn upon for adaptation. The choice was doubtless determined by the availability of prompter's copies or printed texts, as the case might be, when a company was collecting a stock-in-trade for its adventure. Sometimes variety was obtained by using the experiments of a German dramatist, or one of those scriptural comedies, _Susanna and the Elders_, _The Prodigal Son_, _Dives and Lazarus_, which had been the delight of the German, even more than the English, Renaissance.

The most obvious thing about the life of the English actor on the road in Germany is that it was uncommonly like his life on the road in England. Perhaps this is hardly surprising when it is borne in mind that, as already pointed out, the player away from his permanent theatre reverted to the status of the minstrel, and that throughout the ages the minstrel had been cosmopolitan. That in a land of alien speech, even more than at home, the strict arts of comedy and tragedy had to be eked out with music and buffoonery and acrobatics goes without saying. Even as late as 1614 and at the court of Berlin the terms on which actors were engaged bound them to render service 'mit Springen, Spielen und anderer Kurzweil', as their lord might require.[982] Away from court, in Germany as in England, they were mainly dependent upon the goodwill of the civic magistrates, to whom on approaching each town they addressed elaborate petitions, of which many are preserved, in which they recited their own merits, and made play with the names of any princes whose servants they were entitled to call themselves, or whose recommendation some successful display had enabled them to gain. There was always the chance that, on the strength of plague or some other pretext, they might be refused admission altogether. At the best, they must expect to have the length of their stay, the days and hours of their performances, the sums they might charge for standing-room and seats, most thoughtfully and minutely regulated for them. And when all the preliminaries were gone through, and the Rathaus or an inn-yard put at their disposal, and the creaking boards set up, and the tattered frippery extracted from the hamper, it might perhaps after all, as at Brunswick in 1614, be a case of 'kein Volk' and the Council might give them a thaler out of charity and send them on their way.[983] In Germany too, as in England, they had to make their account with the wise, to whom their performances were folly, and the 'unco' guid', to whom they were an offence.[984] Evidently they were not always discreet in their choice of themes. At Elbing in 1605 a company received a gratification of twenty thalers for a performance before the Council; and the record continues, '... daneben aber auch ihnen zu untersagen, dass sie nunmehr zu agiren aufhören sollen in Anmerkung, dass sie gestern in der Comödie schandbare Sachen fürgebracht'.[985] Even princes sometimes got into trouble by encouraging these foreigners of doubtful respectability. There was glee in Cassel when Landgrave Maurice decided to disband the 'verfluchten' English in 1602. Possibly in this case it was the taxpayer rather than the Puritan who felt relief; but when the Duke of Pommern-Wolgast and his mother allowed the Schlosskirche at Lötz to be used for a performance in 1606 they brought upon themselves a shower of letters from Hofprediger Gregorius Hagius, which precisely re-echo the familiar English diatribes of Stephen Gosson and John Rainolds.[986] Presumably the whole business paid its way, or Browne would not have gone over four or five times or Spencer spent fifteen years in the country. A recent investigator, who has made a far more elaborate analysis of all the financial material than I have room for, calculates that, what with court salaries, and what with admission fees to public performances at the rate of about three kreuzers or less than a penny a head, an actor might hope to make on the average about £60 a year.[987] This was enough to live upon, even if, as was sometimes the case, wife and children accompanied the expedition. It seemed attractive enough to poor Richard Jones, who was making at home 'some tymes a shillinge a day and some tymes nothinge'. But it hardly bears out the statement of Erhard Cellius that the English returned home 'auro et argento onusti'. And in fact those who essayed a career in Germany were the failures of London. 'Some of our cast dispised stage players', Moryson calls them, and many years later, in 1625, the same tale is told by the words put into the mouths of actors in _The Run-away's Answer_: 'We can be bankrupts on this side and gentlemen of a company beyond the sea: we burst at London, and are pieced up at Rotterdam.'[988] There were, indeed, those who made their fortunes abroad, but they were those who, like Thomas Sackville, forsook the stage and devoted their energies to an honest trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 879: Murray, ii. 77, gives records of seventy-nine 'Lesser Men's Companies', many of which appear at one town only, while all have a narrow range. Naturally the names of the great nobles carried weight over a wider area. The players in _Ratseis Ghost_ (Halliwell-Phillipps,