The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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