Actors and clergy came into direct collision, when, at the accession of Edward VI. (1547), the Bishop of Winchester announced "a solemn dirge and mass," in honour of the lately deceased king, Henry VIII. The indiscreet Southwark actors thereupon gave notice that at the time announced for the religious service they would act a "solempne play" to try, as the bishop remarks in a letter to Paget, "who shall have most resort, they in game or I in earnest." The prelate urgently requests the interference of the Lord Protector, but with what effect, the records in the State Paper Office afford no information.
Some of these Southwark actors were the "servants" of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, whose mansion was on the opposite side of the river. In 1551 he was promoted to the dukedom of Suffolk, but his poor players were then prohibited from playing anywhere, save in their master's presence.[3]
Severity led to fraud. In the autumn of the following year Richard Ogle forwarded to the Council a forged licence, taken from the players—a matter which was pronounced to be "worthy of correction." The young king's patronage of his own "servants" was not marked by a princely liberality; the salary of one of his players of interludes, John Brown, was five marks yearly as wages, and one pound three shillings and fourpence for his livery.
Of the party dramatists of this reign, that reverend prelate, "Bilious Bale," was the most active and the least pleasant-tempered. Bale had been a Romanist priest, he was now a Protestant bishop (of Ossory), with a wife to control the episcopal hospitality. Bale had "seen the world." He had gone through marvellous adventures, of which his adversaries did not believe a word; and he had converted the most abstruse doctrinal subjects into edifying semi-lively comedies. The bishop did not value his enemies at the worth of a rush in an old king's chamber. He was altogether a Boanerges; and when his "John, King of England," was produced, the audience, comprising two factions in the Church and State, found the policy of Rome towards this country illustrated with such effect, that while one party hotly denounced, the other applauded the coarse and vigorous audacity of the author.
So powerful were the influences of the stage, when thus applied, that the government of Queen Mary made similar application of them in support of their own views. A play, styled "Respublica," exhibited to the people the alleged iniquity of the Reformation, pointed out the dread excellence of the sovereign herself (personified as Queen Nemesis), and exemplified her inestimable qualities, by making all the Virtues follow in her train as Maids of honour.
Such, now, were the orthodox actors; but the heretical players were to be provided against by stringent measures. A decree of the sovereign and council, in 1556, prohibited all players and pipers from strolling through the kingdom; such strollers—the pipers singularly included—being, as it was said, disseminators of seditions and heresies.
The eye of the observant government also watched the resident actors in town. King Edward had ordered the removal of the king's revels and masques from Warwick Inn, Holborn, "to the late dissolved house of Blackfriars, London," where considerable outlay was made for scenery and machinery—adjuncts to stage effect—which are erroneously supposed to have been first introduced a century later by Davenant. There still remained acting a company at the Boar's Head, without Aldgate, on whom the police of Mary were ordered to make levy. The actors had been playing in that inn-yard a comedy, entitled a "Sack full of News." The order of the privy council to the mayor informs his worship, that it is "a lewd play;" bids him send his officers to the theatre without delay, and not only to apprehend the comedians, but to "take their play-book from them and send it before the privy council."
The actors were under arrest for four-and-twenty hours, and were then set free, but under certain stipulations to be observed by them "and all other players throughout the city,"—namely: they were to exercise their vocation of acting "between All Saints and Shrovetide" only; and they were bound to act no other plays but such as were approved of by the Ordinary. This was the most stringent censorship to which the stage has ever been subjected.
Although Edward had commanded the transfer of the company of actors from Warwick Inn to Blackfriars, that dissolved monastery was not legally converted into a theatre till the year 1576, when Elizabeth was on the throne. In that year[4] the Earl of Leicester's servants were licensed to open their series of seasons in a house, the site of which is occupied by Apothecaries' Hall and some adjacent buildings. At the head of the company was James, father of Richard Burbage, the original representative of Richard III. and of Hamlet, the author of which tragedies, so named, was, at the time of the opening of the Blackfriars' theatre, a lad of twelve years of age, surmounting the elementary difficulties of Latin and Greek in the Free School of Stratford-on-Avon.