The protesting players represent Henslowe's dealings with them as governed by a desire to be what the modern capitalist calls 'master in his own house'. They declare that he gave the reason of his often breaking with them in his own words, 'Should these fellowes come out of my debt, I should have noe rule with them'. The principle is plausible enough, and is familiar to tradesmen in all poor neighbourhoods. The man burdened with debt must lose the fruits of his labour, because he is not free to revise his contracts on terms more beneficial to himself. Once the players got out of debt and accumulated a reserve fund, they would acquire their own theatre, and Henslowe's might stand empty. If the charges were justified—and as Dr. Greg points out, we have not Henslowe's answer—he certainly resorted to oppressive devices to prevent the Lady Elizabeth's men from achieving independence. It must not be too hastily assumed that he followed a similar policy in his earlier dealings with the Admiral's men. So far as we know, they brought no accusation against him, and the connexion seems to have been advantageous to both parties. The Admiral's men held together, and maintained a standing hardly inferior to that of their principal rivals, the Chamberlain's men. They had Alleyn for a fellow; and it may be that Alleyn, whose 'industrie and care', according to the deposition of a common acquaintance, 'were a great meanes of the bettering of the estate of the said Philip Henslowe', was able to give his partner advice, more equitable and perhaps in the long run not less profitable, even from the capitalist point of view, than was afterwards forthcoming from 'intemperate Mʳ. Meade'.[1021] At any rate there is an agreement which shows that a compromise was arrived at after Henslowe's death with Alleyn and Meade upon the question of the disputed debt.[1022] I am not Henslowe's biographer, and am therefore not concerned either to whitewash or to vilify his character. But it is fair to say that, outside the Articles of Grievance and Oppression, there is not much, in the mass of papers which have descended to us, that necessarily bears an unfavourable interpretation. Henslowe's private loans to players and poets were innumerable. They were generally, but not always, repaid, and it would be difficult to prove that he even exacted interest in such cases, although it is possible that the full sums entered in his accounts did not really change hands. On the other hand, too much stress must not be laid on the expressions of esteem with which his debtors approached him. Thus Daborne dwells on 'your tried curtesy' and 'the great love I have felt from you', and Field, addresses him as 'Father Hinchlow' and signs himself 'your loving son', as if he were Ben Jonson.[1023] An application for money is, however, not even an affidavit. In his will he appears to have stated that he had not used his wife very well and would make amends;[1024] but his private correspondence reveals family affection and a turn for pious sentiment, probably sincere. Neither quality is necessarily inconsistent with unscrupulous methods of business. Whether Henslowe was a good or a bad man seems to me a matter of indifference. He was a capitalist. And my object is to indicate the disadvantages under which a company in the hands of a capitalist lay, in respect of independence and economic stability, as compared with one conducted upon the lines originally laid down by the Burbages for the tenants of the Globe. Not being owners of their own theatre, such a company were liable to eviction, and were drained to a large extent of the profits of their prosperous years. Relying upon their financier to meet in the first instance all extraordinary expenditure, they had no occasion to build up a reserve fund, and constantly tended to drift into debt. Organized upon a legal basis which made an act of association between the members of less importance than individual contracts entered into by sharers and hirelings alike with the capitalist, they were at his mercy if, for purposes of his own, he chose to use his powers under those contracts to bring about their dissolution.[1025]

A few figures bearing on the actual profits of playing can be brought together. And first for the 'house'. Henslowe's takings at the Rose, as disclosed by the diary, seem to have averaged about 30s. a day during 1592-7. A short season at Newington Butts brought him in no more than 9s. a day. As the Rose was normally open for about 240 days in the year, his total annual receipts may be estimated at £360. No doubt the cost of upkeep was substantial. The landlord had to find a site, build a house, maintain it in repair, and take out a licence. The ground-rent of the Rose was £7, of the Globe £14 10s., of the Fortune £16. The total rent of the site and building of the Blackfriars was £40. The building of the Fortune in 1600 cost £520, and its rebuilding in 1622 £1,000; the rebuilding of the Globe in 1613 about £1,400; the conversion of the Bear Garden into the Hope in 1613, £360. There was probably some set-off in all these cases for the profits from taphouses and other tenements attached to the theatres; this was estimated at from £20 to £30 for the Globe and Blackfriars together in 1635. There were also occasional lettings to outsiders.[1026] The housekeepers in 1635 complained of the 'chargeable reparacions'; in earlier years, when theatres were built largely of wood, they must have been more chargeable still. The Rose was not built earlier than 1587, but Henslowe had to spend £108 on it in 1592. The fee charged by the Master of the Revels for licensing a theatre rose during 1592-9 from £1 to £3 a month. The only estimates of net profits are for the King's men and of rather late date. The pleadings in Ostler v. Heminges (1615) give a single housekeeper's profits as £20 from one-fourteenth of the Globe and £20 from one-seventh of the Blackfriars, thus indicating £280 and £140 as the total annual value of the 'houses' at the Globe and Blackfriars respectively; those in Witter v. Heminges and Condell (1619), coming from a less trustworthy witness, allege that the Globe was worth £420 to £560 before the fire and more after the rebuilding.[1027] The bearing of the figures is complicated by our ignorance of the proportions in which the King's men made use of their two theatres. By 1635 the importance of the Blackfriars had outstripped that of the Globe. Its 'house' then yielded £700-£800 a year; that of the Globe about 54s. a day, nearly twice as much as the Rose half a century earlier.

As to the earnings of a sharer we have even less information. One of the disputants in 1635 put them at no more than 3s. a day at the Globe; another at £180 a year from all sources. If both were accurate, the Blackfriars must by that date have been doing far better business than the Globe, even after allowing for the inclusion in the £180 of a share of the fees for private performances at Court and elsewhere. The customary Court fee was £10, or £6 13s. 4d. if the King was not present. Private performances were ordinarily at night, and did not interfere with public performances in the afternoon. If the Court was out of London, however, the theatre had to be closed. No special allowance seems to have been made for this until about 1631, when the fee was doubled for a performance in the daytime or away from London.[1028] The King's men got the principal share of the Court work, being called on in 1611-12 for as many as twenty-two plays. Their Court fees during 1603-16 amounted on an average to £125 a year.[1029] The exact number of sharers is not known; it was probably not more than twelve. All things considered, it is not unreasonable to put the earnings of a sharer in the King's men during the first decade of the seventeenth century at about £100 to £150 a year, to which, if he were a 'housekeeper' with an interest in both houses, he might be able to add another £40 or £50. This estimate agrees with Sir Henry Herbert's valuation of the shares which he held before the war in the companies other than the King's at £100 each on an average.[1030] Sir Sidney Lee's figure of £700 for Shakespeare's total professional income, which includes £40 for the books of his plays, seems to me vastly overestimated.[1031] Even the more modest £200 or so was a handsome income for the time, since the purchasing power of money in the seventeenth century is variously reckoned at from five to eight times as much as at present. Of course, in times of inhibition from plague or other cause the income vanished altogether, and was very inadequately replaced by the meagre gains of travelling, together with the allowance made by King James to his men for private practice during the infection.

The gross takings of the sharers were naturally much greater. But they were subject to heavy outgoings. The King's men reckoned these in 1635 at £3 a day or from £900 to £1,000 a year for hired 'journeymen' and boys, music, lights, and so forth, in addition to 'extraordinary' charges for apparel and poets.[1032] The wages of a hireling are given by Gosson in 1579 as 6s. a week; some of Henslowe's agreements of 1597 provide for wages of 5s., 6s. 8d., and 8s.[1033] There was some economy to be secured by doubling small parts.[1034] How far this was facilitated by any use of masks is open to doubt.[1035] Boys were regularly employed to take female parts, and although it would be going rather too far to say that a woman never appeared upon an Elizabethan stage, women were not included in the ordinary companies.[1036] The boys were apprenticed to individuals, and their masters had to pay rather than receive premiums. In return they charged wages to the company. Henslowe gave £8 for a boy in 1597 and got 3s. a week from the Admiral's for his wages. John Shank in 1635 claimed that he had had to give £40 for a single boy, and £200 in all.[1037] Contributions to local rates came to about £5 a year.[1038] The cost of apparel and properties is difficult to estimate. A company bought or accumulated a stock, and might also have at its disposal a stock belonging to the owner of its theatre. Individual actors may have had their private wardrobes.[1039] Fresh purchases were only necessitated by new productions, but these were frequent. The special mounting of Court performances was helped out by the Revels Office.[1040] The actor in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592) boasted that his share of apparel would not be sold for £200, but he was fictitious. Richard Jones, in fact, sold his share in a stock of apparel, play-books, instruments, and other commodities for £37 10s. in 1589. The cost of such things has a tendency to grow. If the sums of from £50 to £80 received by retiring sharers early in the seventeenth century may be taken as representing their interests in the stocks, the total value of the contents of a tiring-house might be anything from £500 to £1,000. Henslowe sold the stock of the Lady Elizabeth's men for £400 in 1615; apparently this did not include their play-books, which they valued at £200. I reckon that in 1597-1603 Henslowe spent in all £1,317 for the Admiral's men, or about £1 for each day of playing; of this play-books accounted for £652, apparel and properties for £561, and miscellaneous expenses for £103. The garments, by Henslowe's time at least, had become costly enough, as much as £19 being given for a single cloak, while a tailor was employed to make up satin at 12s. 6d. and velvet at £1 a yard.[1041] Second-hand finery was sometimes to be obtained from a serving-man or a needy courtier.[1042] It was probably the lavish use of apparel, more than anything else, which led both friends and foes to dwell upon the stately furnishing of the English theatres.[1043] Strictly scenic effects were limited by the structural conditions of the stage, and Henslowe's inventories do not suggest that any vast stock of movable properties was kept.[1044] Animals and monsters were freely introduced.[1045] Living dogs and even horses may have been trained; but your lion or bear or dragon was a creature of skin and brown paper.[1046]

An old 'book' could be bought for £2, but the value to the company might be much more. A good stock piece was a perpetual 'get-penny' and could, of course, be furbished up from time to time.[1047] In Downton v. Slater (1598) the Admiral's men valued a misappropriated book at £13 6s. 8d. and claimed £30 damages for withholding it. The court awarded £10 10s. New plays cost more, and entailed fees of 7s. each to the Master of the Revels for licensing.[1048] A play by Greene would fetch £6 13s. 4d. about 1592. The prices paid by the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's men between 1597 and 1603 ranged from £4 to £10 10s.; a fee of £6 may be taken as about normal. 'An they'll give me twenty pounds a play, I'll not raise my vein', says Antonio Balladino, who is Anthony Munday, in The Case is Altered, a play of about 1598.[1049] In 1613 Robert Daborne was bargaining for plays with Henslowe at rates of from £10 to £20, and boasting that he could get £25 elsewhere. It seems likely that Henslowe charged a commission on these prices to the company. There are some traces of the system, used at a later date, by which the author was entitled to a 'benefit' night shortly after the production of a new play.[1050] He was also entitled to free admission to the house.[1051] The poets received their fees from Henslowe in instalments, drawing £1 or so in 'earnest' when the commission was given, and as each batch of sheets was handed in, and the balance when the play was finished. This plan proved disastrous to them. The instalments often found them in a debtor's prison, and some of them became mere bond-slaves.[1052] Thus both Henry Porter and Henry Chettle were reduced to making agreements which pledged them to write for no other company than the Admiral's. The device is familiar to the modern publisher. Robert Daborne's correspondence with Henslowe is eloquent of the straits to which a hack playwright might be brought. Daborne was a man of good family, and had lawsuits about his 'estate', which added to his embarrassments. He had been interested in the management of the Queen's Revels, and it may have been the absorption of this company by the Lady Elizabeth's men that brought him into contact with Henslowe. His letters preserved at Dulwich run from April 1613 to July 1614.[1053] During this period he was engaged upon at least four plays. The history of one of them, the tragedy of Machiavel and the Devil, may be taken as typical. On 17 April 1613 he signed an agreement to complete it by the end of May for an 'earnest' of £6 down, £4 on completion of three acts, and £10 'vpon delivery in of yᵉ last scean perfited'; and for the observance of the agreement he gave a bond of £20. On 25 April he wrote to borrow £1 from Henslowe, explaining that he was 'vpon yᵉ sodeyn put to a great extremity in bayling my man committed to Newgate vpon taking a possession for me', and had unfortunately taken 'less money of my kinsman a lawier that was with me then servd my turn'. On 3 May he got another £1, although the three acts were not yet finished; another on 8 May; and another on 16 May, making £11 in all. 'Sir,' he wrote, 'my occations of expenc have bin soe great & soe many I am ashamed to think how much I am forct to press you.' On 19 May he had probably handed in his three acts, as he then signed an acquittance for £16 received up to date, noting at the foot 'This play to be delivered in to Mr. Hinchlaw with all speed'. It was not, however, ready by 31 May, and on 5 June came a piteous appeal for an advance of £2 'which stands me vpon to send over to my counsell in a matter concerns my whole estate'. Henslowe shall not be the loser by his kindness: 'wher I deale otherways then to your content may I & myne want ffryndship in distress'. By 10 June, 'yᵉ necessity of term busines exacts me beyond my custom to be trublesome vnto you', to the tune of yet another £1. By this time Henslowe was evidently calling out for the play; and Daborne protests, 'I perceav you misdoubt my readynes. Sir, I would not be hyred to break my ffayth with you; before God they shall not stay one hour for me.' He was still protesting on 25 June; but soon after must have brought Machiavel and the Devil to an end and drawn the £1 still due to him on balance, since on 18 June he was already beginning to negotiate for his next play, The Arraignment of London. And so the correspondence goes on; the instalments always anticipated, the applications always larded with declarations of his own honesty and with mingled flattery and complaint of a patron who, generous as he was, showed an inexplicable tendency to 'meat' Daborne 'by yᵉ common measuer of poets'. The result was inevitable. Daborne's terms came down from £20 to £12 and even £10 a play; and in addition to reselling to the company at a profit, Henslowe seems on one occasion at least to have squeezed out of Daborne 'half my earnings in the play', by which, I take it, the proceeds of his benefit are meant. By the end of 1613 Daborne was in considerable distress; 'if you doe not help me to tenn shillings by this bearer, by the living God I am vtterly disgract'. There is not much more of the correspondence. It is clear from another source that Daborne did not for some time get free, for when Henslowe lay on his death-bed, Mrs. Daborne called for some papers belonging to her husband, and Henslowe gave her a bond for £20 of which she was ignorant, possibly the very bond signed for Machiavel and the Devil, saying, 'I knowe you and with all my hart doe freely forgive you all that you owe me'.[1054] By 1618 Daborne had taken orders. He became Chancellor of Waterford and Prebendary and Dean of Lismore, and thus, as a contemporary poem has it, 'died amphibious by the ministry'.

The wrongs of authors are not inarticulate, and they have an appeal to posterity from the injustice of their age. The exploitation of poets by the playing companies brought about some cross-currents in the tone of the allusions to the theatre, which are so frequent in occasional literature. On the one hand, the pamphleteers, and in a less degree the satirists, are with the players as against their enemies the Puritans; on the other hand, they have their own grievances to publish and avenge. A note of hostility makes its appearance not long after the first invasion of the province of stage-writing by the university wits; and by the embittered close of Robert Greene's reckless life the relations were acute. Thomas Lodge in 1589 swore to abandon dramas and 'pennie-knaves delight.'[1055] Thomas Nashe canvassed the players in his prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon (1589), and Greene himself, with humour in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), and in his autobiographical romances of Never Too Late (1590) and Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592), and with unsparing invective in the warning To those Gentlemen his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their Wits in making Plaies, which he appended to the latter. In these pamphlets the 'vaine glorious tragedians' are twitted with their mouthings on the stage, with their chameleon-like shifting from the service of one lord to that of another,[1056] with the contrast between their rapid rise to wealth and their obscurity when they carried their fardles afootback upon the roads, with the romances and morals—Delphrigus and The King of the Fairies, Man's Wit, and the Dialogue of Dives—that formed their stock-in-trade before the masters of arts came to their rescue. But the real gravamen is that they live on the wits of scholars. They are 'apes', 'buckram gentlemen', 'a company of taffaty fooles' tricked up with poets' feathers, 'puppits that speake from our mouths', 'anticks garnisht in our colours'. They cleave like burrs to their victims. An alleged comparison by Cicero of the Roman actor Roscius to the crow in Aesop is called in aid, and the taunt of 'vpstart crow, beautified with our feathers' is not spared to an actor before whose dramatic genius that of Greene and his fellows was to fade as a rush-light before the sun.[1057] The actors had something on their side to complain of, with Greene no less than with Daborne. In a remorseful moment he tells us of the 'arch-plaimaking poet' Roberto, how 'what euer he fingered aforehand was the certaine meanes to vnbinde a bargaine'; and a detractor accuses him of selling the same play to two companies, and defending himself by maintaining that no faith was to be kept with players.[1058] During the seventeenth century, it is mainly Dekker, as critic of the players, no less than in other ways, who carries on the tradition of Greene and Nashe.[1059] Himself an active playwright, it is with black looks that he stands by, in thronged term-time or at the coming of ambassadors, and watches the companies battening upon the fruits of divine poetry, like swine on acorns; and when plague arrives, although his own occupation be gone, it is with savage glee that he sees the flag hauled down and the doors closed, and his gloomy paymasters setting out once more on the hard life of 'strowlers'.

One interesting result of the feud between poets and players was that some of the former were led to encourage and even acquire financial interests in a rival type of theatrical organization which for a time at least entered into successful competition with the professional companies. This organization rested upon the use of boy actors. I have elsewhere expounded the important share taken by school plays in the earlier development of the Renaissance drama.[1060] The grammar schools of Eton, Westminster, and Merchant Taylors and the song schools of the Chapel Royal, Windsor, St. Paul's and the private chapel of the Earl of Oxford continued, far into Elizabeth's reign, to give their performances at Court side by side with the growing companies of noble and royal servants. It was not until the professionals called upon the university wits and began to mingle literary with popular elements in their productions that the destinies of the drama passed definitely into their hands. The earlier boy companies died out soon after 1590. A decade later the Paul's and Chapel companies were revived, the latter at least under somewhat new economic conditions. Formerly the plays had been managed by schoolmasters and song-masters, as by-activities of institutions primarily established for other objects. For the revived Paul's plays, so far as we know, Edward Pearce, the choirmaster, was similarly responsible. The Chapel children, on the other hand, were placed upon a more regular business footing. The official Master of the Children, Nathaniel Giles, took part in the undertaking; and the royal commission to impress singing boys, which he held, was unscrupulously used to compel the services of boys who could not sing, and were only needed as recruits for the stage. But long before James had come to the decision that on religious grounds the connexion between the Chapel and the plays must be broken, the actual control of the organization had passed from the Master to a financial syndicate, associated much on the principle adopted by the ordinary playing companies, whose members hired a theatre, charged themselves with the maintenance of the boys and of the performances, and divided up the profits as their reward. During the history of the Chapel boys and of the group of Revels companies which succeeded them, several of these syndicates came into existence, and shares in one or other of them were held by Marston, Drayton, Barry, Mason, Daborne, and very possibly also by other dramatists. The articles of association of the King's Revels company in 1608 may perhaps be taken as typical. One of the sharers, Martin Slater the actor, who was evidently a kind of manager, is to have lodgings in the theatre, which was the Whitefriars, and the right to sell refreshments, and is to travel with the children if necessary, in which event he is to enjoy a share and a half in the profits. The children are to be apprenticed to him for three years each, and he is to bind himself in £40 not to transfer the indentures. The 'whole chardges of the howse, the gatherers, the wages, the childrens bourd, musique, booke keeper, tyreman, tyrewoman, lights, the Maister of the revells duties, and all other things needefull and necessary' are to be deducted in due proportions from each day's takings, so that the company may not run into debt. No sharer is to take away any apparel or other common property, or print any play-book, on pain of losing his interest.

The boys played in what were called 'private' houses, and it is not quite clear how far they were amenable to the usual principles of stage regulation; an order by the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor to suppress plays during the Lent of 1601 was obviously intended to be enforced against them. Their performances, especially while they were novel, proved a serious menace to the prosperity of the adult companies. The classical allusions on the subject are that of Jonson in The Poetaster to the winter of 1600-1, which made the players poorer than so many starved snakes,[1061] and the elaborate apology for the travelling of the company in Hamlet, which is so germane to the matter now under discussion that it must, however familiar, be given in full:[1062]

The be-rattling of the common stages and their spirited replies, thought by some to include a 'purge' in Troilus and Cressida, with which Shakespeare 'put down' Ben Jonson, form an element in the literary conflict known as 'the war of the theatres', in which, however, this issue is much complicated with others arising from the personalities of the dramatists engaged, and notably from that of Ben Jonson himself.[1063] Thus is explained the apparent paradox by which plays as well as pamphlets become the vehicle of attacks upon players. Three such plays, Histriomastix, The Poetaster, and the second part of The Return from Parnassus, call for special attention. The player-scenes in Histriomastix seem to belong mainly, though not wholly, to the original form of the play, which I regard as an outcome of the campaign of Robert Greene and his fellows about 1590, although the extant text, not printed until 1610, represents a later recension, probably undertaken by Marston, as one of the 'musty fopperies of antiquity' produced by the Paul's boys about 1600.[1064] The piece is of the nature of a political morality, and the scenes in question serve as one illustration of its general theme, which is that of the cyclical rotation of society through the successive stages of Peace, Plenty, Pride, Envy, War, Poverty, and so to Peace again. Many side-lights are thrown upon the methods of company organization which have already been described in these pages. In Act I some idle and drunken artisans, Gulch, Clout, Belch the beard-maker, Gut the fiddle-string-maker, Incle the pedlar, combine to form a company. Their poet is Master Posthaste, whom they call a gentleman scholar, but who is evidently a caricature of Anthony Munday, dramatist and Messenger of the Chamber. A scrivener is called in to 'tye a knott of knaves togither', and Bougie the mercer will furnish them with 'rich stuff' at a price. They call themselves Sir Oliver Owlet's men, and take his badge of an owl in an ivy-bush. In Act II they appear on the steps of a market cross and 'cry' a play to be given in the town-house at three o'clock. Their repertory includes The Lascivious Knight, Lady Nature, Mother Gurton's Needle (a tragedy), The Devil and Dives (a comedy), A Russet Coat and a Knight's Cap (an infernal), A Proud Heart and a Beggar's Purse (a pastoral), The Widow's Apron Strings (a nocturnal).[1065] Posthaste is also working on 'the new plot of the Prodigall Childe', with a prologue 'for lords' and an epilogue. They are invited to play before Lord Mavortius, and thereupon throw over 'the town play', and attend him, singing:

The actual performance, perhaps owing to a Marstonian interpolation, consists of a fragment of The Prodigal Child, together with a fragment of a piece on Troilus and Cressida. At the end Posthaste extemporizes on a 'theame' and the company are rewarded with 3s. 4d. In Act III a Marstonian passage introduces them to a new poet Chrisoganus, who asks ten pounds a play. But 'our companie's hard of hearing of that side', and they will be content with their goose-quillian Posthast'. Chrisoganus rates their pride and the 'windy froth of bottle-ale' which passes muster for poetry on the stage. The 'proud statute rogues' also refuse an offer from Mavortius of 13s. 4d. or even £1 6s. 8d. for another performance, and in view of their 'expense in sumptuous clothes' they must have 'ten pound a play, or no point comedy'. Their insolence is condemned:

In Act IV they are rehearsing, and fine Posthaste 1s. for coming late. And they quarrel amongst themselves. Clout is discontented with his half-share, and will have 'a whole share, or turn camelion'. Acts V and VI bring Nemesis. As they set up their bills, they are pressed for the wars. There is no remedy. They have alienated the town officers by refusing the town's reward. The 'master-sharers' must even provide their equipment out of their own purses. The soldiers loot their apparel. They will be the sharers now, and the players the hired men. They bid one who 'would rend and tear a cat upon a stage' not to 'march like a drowned rat', but 'look up and play the Tamburlaine'. The hostess claims her shot, 'The sharers dinners sixpence a piece. The hirelings —— pence'; and the hamper has to be searched for a cloak to pawn. The constable demands his dues for tax-money to relieve the poor, and the excuse that but fifteen pence was shared last week is not accepted in face of the idle and immoral lives that the rascals have led. In the end they are shipped off remorselessly to serve beyond the seas. It will be obvious that, while most of the points of criticism taken by the dramatist are those familiar to the literary pamphleteers, he is also not unsympathetic to the Puritan view of players as a canker in the state.

Jonson wrote his Poetaster in the spring of 1601. He had already heard of the intention of the Chamberlain's men against him, which afterwards took shape in Dekker and Marston's Satiromastix, and got in the first blows by depicting his assailants as 'a sort of copper-lac't scoundrels' in ancient Rome and their poets as Demetrius 'a dresser of plaies about the town here' and Crispinus 'poetaster and plagiary'. Some of his matter has its reminiscences of Histriomastix; some probably rests on details with regard to individual Chamberlain's men which are now irrecoverable.[1066] His allusions to their poor winter season of 1600-1 and to the accumulation of shares by leading actors have already been quoted. The chief scene devoted to the players is that in which Histrio is bullied by Tucca, the huffing captain, who calls him 'stalker', 'gulch', 'stiffe toe', 'twopenny teare-mouth', and 'penny-biter', bids him turn fiddler again, get a bass violin at his back and march in a tawny coat with one sleeve to Goose Fair, and accuses his company of being usurers and brokers, who prey upon younger sons and citizens, and furnish facilities at their house for immoral practices. Tucca would bring his 'cockatrice' to see a bawdy play, but the players have nothing but humours, revels, and satires; to which Histrio replies that he is confusing them with 'the other side of Tyber', for 'we haue as much ribaldries in our plaies, as can bee, as you would wish, Captaine: all the sinners, i' the suburbs, come, and applaud our action, daily'. Crispinus is introduced as one who will teach the actors to tear and rant. Tucca bids Histrio give him forty shillings in earnest, since 'if hee pen for thee once, thou shalt not need to trauell, with thy pumps full of grauell, any more, after a blinde iade and a hamper: and stalke vpon boords, and barrell heads, to an old crackt trumpet'. Yet inasmuch as some of the players are 'honest gent'men-like scoundrels, and suspected to ha' some wit', Histrio may make Tucca a supper, and bring Frisker 'my zany' and Mango 'your fat fool', so long as he does not laugh too much or beg rapiers or scarfs; but by no means 'your eating plaier' Polyphagus, nor 'the villanous-out-of-tune fiddler' Aenobarbus, nor Aesop, 'your politician'. Later in the play Histrio and Aesop inform against Ovid and Horace, who is Jonson, to the government, and although Tucca promises Aesop 'a monopoly of playing, confirm'd to thee and thy couey, vnder the Empirours broad Seale, for this seruice', his actual reward is to be whipped.[1067] In the Apologetical Dialogue printed with the play Jonson admits his hostility to the players:

The Return from Parnassus is of less significance, as being a Cambridge, not a London, play, and merely an echo of the main controversy. It was acted during the Christmas of 1601-2, and is a satire of things in general from the university point of view. Amongst other topics the relations of scholarship to the stage are touched upon. Burbadge and Kempe come in, boasting of their victory over Ben Jonson, and trying to recruit poets into their service.[1068] The scholars resent such thraldom:

And in the end they decide rather to take the road as fiddlers:

It is the old burden of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe once more.[1069]

The disturbance of theatrical conditions due to the revival of the boy companies became in time less acute. No doubt, the novelty of their performances wore off. Moreover, the companies were not very successful in holding together, partly because of the indiscretions of their managers and the inadequacy of their finance to stand the strain of plague years, but more because the boys, as might perhaps have been expected, grew up and ceased to be boys. Already about 1608 the Blackfriars boys 'were masters themselves' of their own company, and when this arrangement broke down, they began to be drafted into the adult associations. Other boy companies followed, but these were subject to the same difficulties, and the vogue of the original 'little eyases' was never quite recaptured.[1070] But, after all, the competition had not disappeared, but had merely taken another form. The younger generation was knocking at the gates; Field and Taylor waiting in eager rivalry for Burbadge's shoes, and meanwhile forming new combinations of their own which, however unstable, at least cut at the profits of their more firmly established rivals. The 'monopoly' offered by Jonson in jest would no doubt have been welcomed by the principal companies in earnest. The policy of the Privy Council from 1597 to 1600 pointed in this direction, but for whatever reason was not brought into effective operation. There are several indications of the pressure of competition during the earlier part of the seventeenth century. In 1609 it was worth the while of the Queen's Revels and the King's men to unite in buying off the Paul's boys at the cost of £20 a year. Dekker in the same year prophesies that the contention of the two houses of York and Lancaster will be as nothing to that of the three houses, by which he means the Globe, the Fortune, and the Red Bull.[1071] Finally, in 1610, the preacher William Crashaw, commenting upon the hostility shown by the players to the plantation of Virginia, declares explicitly that it was motived by the fact that they were so multiplied in England that one could not live by another, and by the refusal of the promoters of the colony to give any of them a chance of trying their fortunes in the new world.[1072]

The palmy days of playing lasted beyond the formal limits set to this investigation. But they did not last for ever. The coming of the end can here only be adumbrated. It perhaps shows itself first in an increasing unwillingness amongst the provincial corporations to hear the players. It was in 1623, the year of the publication of the First Folio, that the City of Norwich took the step of making a representation to the Privy Council and obtaining leave not to suffer any players within their liberties. It is true that the inhibition was not strictly carried out and that the authority was renewed in 1640. Nevertheless it is a sign of the times. Other cities, Chester in 1615, Southampton in 1623, Worcester in 1627, closed their public buildings to performances.[1073] From this time onwards the entries of payments to players in municipal accounts tend more and more to take the form of 'gratuities' given them 'because they should not play' or 'to dismiss them', or 'to put them off', or in more emphatic terms still 'to rid the town of them'.[1074] Meanwhile the Puritan controversy breaks out again, winding up to that alarming compilation of learning and argument in Prynne's Histriomastix of 1633, which indeed cost its author his ears, but must none the less have hung like a shadow of fate upon the doomed stage for ever after. And in 1642 the shadow moved, and on the outbreak of war came that dignified ordinance of 2 September, which waved frivolity aside, what time the nation girded itself for matters of moment:[1075]