And if sometimes notorious evil-doers are held up to reprobation on the stage, it seems to the preachers that such rebuke might more suitably come from the pulpit, since in a theatre the appeal must needs be made to an audience hardly fit to be judges in any man's cause.[814] Gosson and Munday, having been playwrights, and having presumably suffered at the hands of their masters, pay off old scores with another argument. If plays had really a moral influence, would not this be apparent in the lives of those who are most conversant with them, the players themselves. Yet the players are not only extremely insolent and swaggering persons, but notoriously practise in real life the very vices which they represent on the stage. Moreover, they take young boys and bring them up in shamelessness. How can it be expected that good shall be done, where there is no will in the agent to do good?[815] The inconclusiveness of the discussion was of course largely due to the fact that the Puritan and the humanist disputants were not talking about quite the same thing. Obviously the influence of a play, if any, upon conduct must depend on the manner of handling and on the dramatic idea involved; and it may be taken for granted that the ideal comedy and tragedy, which the humanists praised and which some of them tried to realize, were often very imperfectly represented by the actual pieces put before a London audience. This is to some extent admitted on both sides. Sidney is frankly contemptuous of the popular stage. Whetstone speaks of his 'commendable exercise' as 'discredited with the tryfels of yonge, unadvised, and rashe witted wryters'. Lodge and the author of The Play of Plays are fully conscious of abuses, which must be remedied if the drama is to take the place assigned to it in the humanist scheme of things. On the other hand, Gosson is fair-minded enough to admit that certain plays, principally his own, are beyond reproach; and even that, as compared with an earlier period than that of which he wrote, there had been some purging of the language used on the boards.[816] Yet, when all allowance has been made on this score, it would seem that there must still remain some fundamental incompatibility between the views of the Puritans and those of the humanists as regards the psychological effects of the drama upon conduct. Perhaps this is hardly to be wondered at. After all, the psychological effect of a drama, or of any other work of art, is not a simple thing, but depends upon an incalculable relation between what the artist puts into his work and what the spectator brings to the contemplation of it. And it may fairly be assumed that what a Sidney brought and what a limb of Limehouse brought were sufficiently different things. Were this a philosophic work on the drama and not merely a history of the stage, it might be appropriate to dwell upon the fact that, however much the Puritans and the humanists might disagree, they were at one in referring their judgement of the drama to purely ethical standards of value, and that the conception of aesthetic value, which means so much for modern thought, was in the main beyond the scope of Elizabethan criticism.

So far as the character of the particular plays put on the stage was material, the case for the defence grew stronger as these approached more nearly to literature. Thus Thomas Nashe, whose Pierce Penilesse His Supplication (1592) contains by far the most effective of the apologies for the drama from a popular point of view, is in a position, not only to vaunt the respectability of English actors as compared with the 'squirting baudie comedians' of beyond the seas, to repudiate the idea that rowdy apprentices were wanted in the theatres at all, and to claim a distinct superiority for play-going over gaming, whoreing and drinking as a pastime for courtiers and other idle men; but also to give point to his glorification of the moral purpose of tragedy and comedy by a special reference to the chronicle plays then at the height of their success, 'wherein our forefathers valiant acts, that haue line long buried in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes, are reuiued, and they themselues raised from the graue of obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged honours in open presence; than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate, effeminate dayes of ours?' Nashe can even illustrate his contention from the Talbot scenes of Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI; and it is indeed the ultimate paradox of the Puritan controversy that a movement, which was undoubtedly designed in the interests of honest and clean living, would have had the result, if it had been successful, of shutting out the world from the possibilities of a Shakespeare.

After the publication of the Anatomie of Abuses in 1583 there was some slackening in the literary warfare carried on by the Puritans. The duty of abstinence from plays becomes a commonplace of treatises on morals and devotion, and the preachers continue to complain, but the only specialist pamphlet during the next quarter of a century is the comparatively unimportant Mirrour of Monsters (1587) by another cast playwright, William Rankins. It must be doubtful whether this was due to any decrease in the strength of the sentiment against the stage. But the trial of forces was over, and for a time there was little further advance to be made. Something, as will be seen in the next chapter, had been won, so far as the observance of Sunday was concerned; on the other hand, the main issue had been pretty definitely lost. Moreover, there were other things to be thought of; firstly the Martin Marprelate controversy, which for a while absorbed much ink and paper, and secondly, the persecution which recusants had to undergo at the hands of the dominant party in Church and State. Aggressive at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, by its close Puritanism had to stand on its defence. A corresponding change in its relations with the stage was inevitable. From an assailant, it became an object of assault. The players had never been disposed to endure criticism without hitting back. Lewis Wager, as early as 1566, has his word against the hypocrites, who slander plays from fear lest their own wickedness should be revealed in public; and one may be sure that the actor's side of the question was as remorselessly pressed from the scaffold as that of the Puritan from the pulpit. This tendency can only have gathered impetus from the official encouragement given for a time to the players to intervene against Martin Marprelate.[817] The tone of the later apologists for the stage has become insolent rather than deprecatory. Nashe, always ready to carry any war into the enemy's quarter, boldly ascribes the attacks upon plays to the envy felt by vintners, alewives, and victuallers for more respectable places of entertainment than their own, and to the indifference to greatness of avaricious citizens, who 'know when they are dead they shall not be brought upon the stage for any goodness, but in a merriment of the Usurer and the Diuel, or buying Armes of the Herald'. So, too, Henry Chettle, in his Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), puts into the mouth of the ghost of Tarleton, not only the usual serious defence of the moral value of plays and an appeal to the youth of the city not to disturb the peace of the theatres, but also a mock protest from the keepers of bowling-alleys, dicing-houses, and brothels against the competition of actors with their trades, and the discovery in jig and jest of 'our crosse-biting, our conny-catching, our traines, our traps, our gins, our snares, our subtilties'. Nashe and Chettle are perhaps tilting rather at some of the civic allies of the Puritans, than at the Puritans themselves. But the latter had to bear their full share of the stage's revengeful triumph. The printer of Th' Overthrow of Stage Playes in 1599 notes in his preface how some 'haue not bene afraied of late dayes to bring vpon the stage the very sober countenances, graue attire, modest and matronelike gestures & speaches of men & women to be laughed at as a scorne and reproch to the world'. A detailed analysis of the satire of Puritanism in later Elizabethan and in Jacobean comedy would pass beyond the limits of this study. For a sample may be taken the figure of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614). Busy has a scruple against eating pig at the fair, 'for the very calling it a Bartholmew-pigge, and to eat it so, is a spice of Idolatry, and you make the Fayre, no better than one of the high Places'. But the lust of the flesh overcomes him, and he eats 'two and a half to his share' and drinks 'a pailefull'. This, however, does not dispose him to be lenient to the pride of the eyes at the fair. He condemns a doll with 'See you not Goldylocks, the purple strumpet, there? in her yellow gowne, and greene sleeues?' and pulls down a pile of gingerbread cakes as 'this idolatrous groue of images, this flasket of idols'. Naturally, his extreme wrath is against the puppet, which he calls Dagon, and 'a beame in the eye of the brethren; a very great beame, an exceeding great beame; such as are your Stage-players, Rimers, and Morrise-dancers, who have walked hand in hand, in contempt of the Brethren, and the Cause'. He disputes with the puppet, and produces the 'old stale argument' of the male putting on the apparel of the female and the female of the male, and is finally refuted when the puppet 'takes up his garment', and reveals that it has no sex.[818]

When Puritanism gathered head again under James, it was the sting of caricature which directly led to the renewal of the old controversy. Two hypocrites in The Puritan (c. 1606) had been christened after the churches of St. Antholin and St. Mary Overies, which were known to be the principal centres in London of Puritan faith and practice. William Crashaw, the father of the poet, protested in a sermon at Paul's Cross. Two years later, he again rebuked the players for their opposition to the Virginian expedition, which he declared to be due to pique at the godly determination of the adventurers to take no company to their plantation. There were other 'seditious sectists' at work, and a leading actor of the Queen's men, who was also a prolific dramatist, Thomas Heywood, took up the cudgels for his 'quality' against these 'over-curious heads' in an elaborate Apology for Actors, which must have been written about 1608, but was not published until 1612. This resumes, effectively enough, most of the arguments both of the humanists and of popular disputants such as Nashe, but does not contribute anything very novel upon a subject as to which, indeed, little novel remained to be said, with the exception of a reminder to the preachers that, whatever the Fathers may have thought about the Roman ludi, nothing had been said against them by either Christ or his Apostles.[819] Heywood dwells, of course, upon the established position to which by his time actors had attained in the favour both of English and of foreign sovereigns. But he is not blind to the abuses of his profession, and while lauding many of his fellows as men 'of substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-keepers, and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', regrets the licentiousness of others, as well as a growing tendency to inveigh upon the stage both against 'the state, the court, the law, the citty', and against 'private men's humors'.[820] Heywood was answered by one I. G. in A Refutation of the Apologie for Actors (1615), which in its turn covered much ground already trod; and a year later another actor, Nathan Field, was moved to a Remonstrance by some personal attacks levelled at himself and the rest of the King's men by Thomas Sutton, minister of St. Mary Overies. This brings us to the limit of the Shakespearian period, and in the distance still lie the final and portentous presentation of the whole Puritan case in Prynne's Histriomastix (1633), the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament, and the reaction of the Restoration under which men looked back to the stage of James and Charles as a model of decency and order.[821]

There is one clear heritage of English Puritanism from the Genevan theocracy, and that is the claim of the ministers, not only to direct the consciences of their flocks, but also to call upon the municipal authorities to put down with the might of the secular arm whatever in the life of the community did not conform to the religious and ethical standards which they preached. Most of the sermons and pamphlets of 1576-83 are quite deliberately addressed to the 'magistrate', with a view to the exercise of the regulative powers conferred by the proclamation of 1559 and the statute of 1572 for the remedy of the abuses of playhouses, and if possible to the complete suppression of playing. The City fathers, although Gosson railed against their 'sleepiness', were by no means deaf to these appeals.[822] Many of them had themselves adopted Puritanic principles. And apart from strictly religious considerations, they had their own reasons for looking with disfavour upon plays. They were husbands and employers, and their wives and apprentices wasted both time and money in gadding abroad to theatres, at a risk to their virtue and even their honesty. They were dignitaries, and were not invariably treated with respect upon the boards. They were the health authority, and even if plays did not stir the divine wrath to send a plague or an earthquake, the crowded assemblies certainly helped to spread infection, and the rickety structures brought hazard to life and limb.[823] They were responsible for the maintenance of law and order, and plays were not only the occasions for frays and riots, but also brought bad characters together, and were suspected of affording secret opportunities for the hatching of sedition. It must be borne in mind that, so far as the external abuses of theatres go, the complaints of their bitterest enemies are fairly well supported by independent evidence. The presence of improper persons in the theatres is amply testified to by the satirists, and by references in the plays themselves.[824] Intrigues and other nefarious transactions were carried on there[825]; and careful mothers, such as Lady Bacon, anxiously entreated their sons to choose more salutary neighbourhoods for their lodgings.[826] Some serious disturbances of the peace of which theatres were the centres will require attention in the next chapter, while law-court and other records preserve the memory of both grave crimes and minor misdemeanours of which they were the scenes.[827] Like the bawdy-houses, they appear to have been at the mercy of the traditional rowdiness of the prentices on Shrove Tuesday.[828]

On divers grounds therefore the Corporation of London seem to have reached the conclusion, about 1582 if not before, that the only way to reform the theatres was to end them. Probably they were influenced by the views of some of their permanent officials, of whom Thomas Norton, Remembrancer from 1571 to 1584, although himself a part-author of the tragedy of Gorboduc, and William Fleetwood, Recorder from 1571 to 1594, are known to have been determined opponents of the stage. The voluminous reports on city affairs, which Fleetwood was in the habit of sending to Lord Burghley, add much to our knowledge of a critical period.[829] Had the matter rested wholly with the Corporation, the policy of prohibition would doubtless have been brought into effective operation. But it did not rest wholly with them. Not only were the most important theatres, from 1576, outside the limits of their jurisdiction, but also account had to be taken of an authority greater even than that of the City of London, the authority, ill-defined but imperative, of the Privy Council. And the Privy Council was, as a rule, swayed by principles and personalities by no means enamoured of prohibition. Of this the anti-stage pamphleteers show themselves fully conscious. Gosson, addressing his Schoole of Abuse to the Lord Mayor for the time being, acknowledges the difficulties which the 'letters of commendations' held by the companies put in the way of reform, and laments that players share the natures of the cuttle-fish and the torpedo, so that 'how many nets so euer ther be layde to take them, or hookes to choke them, they haue ynke in their bowels to darken the water, and sleights in their budgets, to dry up the arme of euery magistrate'. In Playes Confuted, he prayed for 'some noble Scipio in the courte' to drive the 'daunsing chaplines of Bacchus' out of England, and in a prefatory epistle to Sir Francis Walsingham he declared that the cleansing of the Augean stable was only possible for 'some Hercules in the court, whom the roare of the enimy can never daunt'. No doubt he hoped that the combined functions of a Scipio and of a Hercules would be undertaken by Walsingham himself.[830] Anthony Munday is even more explicit. He urges the city not to be daunted by 'particular men of auctoritie', and inveighs against the nobility who 'restraine the magistrates from executing their office', in order to pleasure servants whom they are unwilling to maintain themselves, and therefore license to roam throughout the country, publishing their 'mametree' in every temple of God, and begging alms in their masters' names from house to house.[831] The Council, however, were by no means disposed to give the City a free hand, and with themselves the policy of prohibition made little headway. They had, indeed, to reconcile conflicting considerations. They too, like the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, feared the opportunities for riots and seditions which the theatres afforded;[832] and the danger of the spread of plague was their constant preoccupation. Moreover, they were especially concerned to see that the players did not touch upon matters of state or religion, and to visit with sharp chastisement any offences in these directions. They frequently, therefore, thought it well to intervene with temporary inhibitions of plays, particularly during hot summers when the anticipations of plague were at their greatest. But they were never prepared to assent to the chronic request of the City that these inhibitions should be made permanent. After all, the people must have their recreation, and, what was more, the Queen must have hers.[833] And if her majesty's 'solace' at Christmas was to be provided upon economical terms, it was necessary that the players should be allowed facilities for 'exercise', and incidentally for earning their living, through public performances.[834] In a sense, therefore, it was really the Court play which saved the popular stage, and enabled the companies to establish themselves in a position which neither preachers nor aldermen could shake. One may suppose that the members of the Privy Council did not all quite see eye to eye on the theatrical question; and there were occasional fluctuations of policy which caused alarm in the tiring-rooms. Even in the high quarters where the natural attitude to the drama was that of humanism, Puritan sympathies were sometimes to be found. Leicester, indeed, who frequently curried favour with the Puritans, failed them in this respect, as may be seen from a letter written in 1581 by John Field, minister of the word of God, and author of an Exhortation on the fall of Paris Garden, in which he rebukes Leicester for his patronage of plays 'to the great greife of all the godly'.[835] Burghley may have been personally inclined to the views of his friend and correspondent William Fleetwood, although even at the end of his long life he had not forgotten the services of the stage to his earlier statecraft.[836] It was to Walsingham that Gosson looked as a Scipio and a Hercules in the dedication of his Playes Confuted in 1583, but Gosson was unlucky in his dedications, and in the following year Walsingham was officially concerned in the formation of the company of Queen's players. One would gladly know who was the 'notable wise counseller' dead in 1591, who, according to Sir John Harington, stood up for the play of The Cards, against those who thought that it was 'somewhat too plaine'. I should not be surprised if this were Walsingham.[837] By virtue of their offices, the Lord Chamberlain and Vice-Chamberlain, who were responsible for Court entertainments, were almost bound to take the players' part. But there was a moment of trepidation when Lord Cobham, who was known to be touched with Puritanism, succeeded for a few months in 1596 the 'old lord', Henry Lord Hunsdon, on whom the companies had learnt to rely. There is nothing to show that Elizabeth, beyond holding out for her 'solace', took any personal interest in the controversy. That very irritating document, the Acts of the Privy Council, which is little more than a letter-book, does not record whether she was present or not at the Council meetings at which theatrical affairs were discussed. But it must be assumed that the general attitude of the Council had her concurrence. Certainly she had no Puritan tendencies, and on the rare occasions on which her interference can be traced she was acting in the interests of one or other favoured company.[838]

IX
THE STRUGGLE OF COURT AND CITY

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.