[832] Occasionally players were of use as spies. On 30 March 1603 four players gave information of an alleged proclamation of Lord Beauchamp as king by Lord Southampton (Hist. MSS. xiii. 4. 126).
[833] Cf. App. D, Nos. xl, liii, lviii, lxxi, lxxiii, lxxv, lxxxiv, lxxxv, ci, cxiv. The notion of the need of the public, as distinct from that of the Queen, for dramatic recreation gradually makes its appearance (cf. especially App. D, No. cii); but imperial Rome might have taught its lesson of panem et circenses.
[834] Taylor, Wit and Mirth (1629, Hazlitt, Jest Books, iii. 62), burlesques the point of view in a story of the visit of the Queen's ape to Looe in Cornwall. The showman approached the mayor, who did visit and 'put off his hat and made a leg', and there was a proclamation, 'These are to will and require you, and every of you, with your wives and families, that upon the sight hereof, you make your personall appearance before the Queenes Ape, for it is an Ape of ranke and quality, who is to bee practised through her Majesties dominions, that by his long experience amongst her loving subjects, hee may bee the better enabled to doe her majesty service hereafter; and hereof faile you not, as you will answer the contrary'.
[835] App. D, No. liv.
[836] Hawarde, 48, records that in a Star Chamber case of cozening on 18 June 1596 'The Lord Treasurer would haue those yᵗ make the playes to make a comedie hereof, & to acte it with these names'; cf. p. 244. In Hatfield MSS. vii. 270 is a 'lewd saucy letter' of 25 June 1597 from Sir John Hollis to Burghley, who on the last Star Chamber day had pronounced Hollis's great-grandfather 'an abominable usurer, a merchant of broken paper, so hateful and contemptible a creature that the players acted him before the King [Henry VII or VIII] with great applause'. It is printed in H. Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors (ed. Park, ii. 283).
[837] App. C, No. xlv. Was this the Chapel Game of the Cards on 26 Dec. 1582, or was it the play in which Tarlton (cf. ch. xv) glanced at Raleigh as the knave commanding the queen?
[838] These interventions were the Admiral's men in 1600 and for Oxford's and Worcester's men in 1602 (cf. App. D, Nos. cxvii, cxxx).
[839] Aydelotte, 58, misrepresents the Act of 1531 on this point. The clearest proof that the unprotected player was a vagabond is in a Privy Council letter of 30 April 1556 to Lord Shrewsbury (Lodge, i. 260), which, after directing that Sir Francis Leek shall not let his servants travel as players, adds, 'And in case any person shall attempt to set forth these sort of games or pastimes at any time hereafter, contrary to this order; and do wander, for that purpose, abroad in the country; your Lordship shall do well to give the Justices of the Peace in charge to see them apprehended out of hand, and punished as vagabonds, by virtue of the statute made against loitering and idle persons'.
[840] Cf. App. C, s.vv. Gosson (1582), 215; Cox (1591); App. D, No. lxxv (2) (b). An Act of 1552 (5 & 6 Edw. VI, c. 21) required every travelling 'Pedler, Tynker, or Pety Chapman' to have a licence from two justices of the shire in which he resided (Statutes, iv. 155). This was merged in the Act of 1572 (App. D, No. xxiv), but not formally repealed until 1 Jac. I, c. 25, in 1604 (Statutes, iv. 1052).
[841] Procl. 455; cf. Dasent, v. 73; Machyn, 69.