The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

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.

The functions thus assigned to the Master of the Revels came to be of the first importance in the history of the stage. But for the moment the result of their stroke can hardly have satisfied the expectations of the Council. The Corporation were not so ready to retreat from an untenable position as they had been seven years before. Either in ignorance of the Master's commission, or with the deliberate intention of asserting the privileges ignored therein, they seem to have definitely committed themselves, in the course of 1582, to the policy, long advocated by their spiritual advisers, of a complete suppression of the stage. The method of attack adopted was, so far as any records yet published disclose, a new one. Instead of relying upon their licensing powers, now very doubtful and in any case of no validity in the suburbs, they issued on 3 April a precept to the City guilds, enjoining them to charge all freemen with the responsibility of keeping their servants and other dependants from repairing to any play, whether in city or in suburbs, upon penalty of punishment both for the offending servant and for his master. This is presumably the 'late inhibition' against playing after evening prayer on holidays, which the Privy Council asked the Lord Mayor to revoke by a letter of 11 April, in which they expressed the opinion that in the absence of infection such playing might be used 'without impeachment of the service of God whereof we have a speciall care', provided always that Sundays should be excepted, and that fit persons should be appointed by the Corporation to 'consider and allowe of such playes onely as be fitt to yeld honest recreacion and no example of euell'. It is to be observed that the Council do not suggest that the allowance shall be done by the Master of the Revels or make any allusion to the powers conferred by his patent. Perhaps this indicates some willingness to come to a compromise. The Lord Mayor's reply, written two days later, is in its turn not otherwise than conciliatory. He suggests that the Council may perhaps not be fully aware of the difficulties entailed by plays on holidays. He has found that either he has to tolerate the admission of the audience during the times of prayer, or else the plays must continue until a very inconvenient time of night for servants and children to be abroad. He also calls attention to the growth of the plague, which seems to him to justify the continuance of the restraint for the present, and finally hints that later on he will fall in with the views of the Council and duly appoint suitable licensers. Plague was in fact rife during 1582, and perhaps left the Council no choice but to drop the question for a time. In July the Lord Mayor apologized on the ground of infection for refusing a request from the Earl of Warwick that a servant of his might be allowed to give a public display of fencing at the Bull in Bishopsgate. All that he could promise was to let the man pass through the City with his company and drum on the way to the Theatre or some other place in the suburbs. Possibly the correspondence of April was only a cloak for the real intentions of the Corporation; or possibly they miscalculated the Council's reasons for not carrying it further. At any rate, still profiting by the continuance of the plague, they determined in the course of the autumn to risk another step in advance. The plan for working through the guilds was ill-conceived, and had probably failed; obviously masters could not effectively prevent their apprentices from slipping off to Finsbury or Southwark on holiday afternoons. At any rate nothing more is heard of it. To this date probably belongs an Act of Common Council, which after dealing with other matters of civic government, briefly enacted that public plays should 'wholly be prohibited as ungodly', and that suit should be made to the Council for a like prohibition 'in places near unto the city'.

It was not long before an opportunity for opening the projected campaign against the outside houses presented itself. On Sunday, 13 January 1583, eight persons were killed by the fall of a scaffold during a bear-baiting at Paris Garden in Surrey. John Field, Leicester's correspondent of 1581, was quick to point the Puritan moral in A Godly Exhortation dedicated to the Corporation. But already, on the day after the accident, the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Blank, had written to Lord Burghley to urge that this interposition of the hand of God called for redress of the abuse of the Sabbath day, and to beg for Burghley's good offices with the Surrey Justices, some of whom were willing to take action but alleged that they lacked commission. Burghley promised that the Council would consider the matter, and suggested that it was within the scope of the Corporation's authority to make a general order against the attendance of Londoners at Sunday entertainments. The previous year's experience, however, had probably impressed the Corporation with the difficulty of securing that such an order should not be a dead letter outside their own jurisdiction; and although the Council Register is deficient at this point, it is certain that the event at Paris Garden did in fact result in the extension by the Council itself of the prohibition against Sunday performances from the City to the counties. But this was not until after the Lord Mayor had again pressed the question in a letter to the Council of 3 July, in which he alleged the attractions of unlawful spectacles as a reason for the decay of archery, of which the Council had complained, and declared that Paris Garden was rebuilt and the Sunday bear-baitings in full swing, and that blame was thrown upon the City authorities in Paul's Cross sermons and elsewhere, 'to our shame and greif, when we cannot remedie it'. If the Council yielded on this point, they remained quite firm on the general question of the toleration of plays, on all days other than Sundays, within the City as well as without. We do not know what steps, if any, they took to enforce the licensing powers of the Master of the Revels. But it is likely that the formation from the existing companies of the Queen's men in the March of 1583 was a deliberate and to some extent a successful attempt to overawe the City by the use of the royal name. It may be inferred from letters of the Lord Mayor to Richard Young of Middlesex and to Sir Francis Walsingham in April and May that plague prevented plays during the greater part of the year. But on 26 November the Council wrote that there was now no infection, and that Her Majesty's players were to be suffered to play as usual until the following Shrovetide. The Corporation, for all their Act of Common Council, made no open resistance, but they qualified the permission by limiting it to holy days, and it took a further letter from Sir Francis Walsingham on 1 December to get it extended to ordinary working days.

The struggle, however, was only deferred, and the real crisis came in 1584. During Whit-week there were frays amongst the knots of serving-men and prentices who hung about the doors of the Theatre and Curtain. The Corporation approached the Council and, although there seems to have been no plague, obtained sanction, in spite of the opposition of the Lord Chamberlain and Vice-Chamberlain, to the suppression of both houses. When the winter came round the Queen's men brought their case before the Council, and pointed out that the time of their service was at hand, that for the sake thereof as well as of their living they needed to exercise, and that the season of the year was past to play at any of the theatres outside the City. They petitioned for letters to the Lord Mayor to admit them to London, and also for an order to the Middlesex Justices, doubtless to revoke the suppression of the previous summer. Their case was set out more fully in a body of annexed articles. Unfortunately these are lost, but their tenor can be gathered from the City rejoinder. This took the form partly of an historical summary and partly of a detailed reply to the contentions of the players. The Corporation recited the reluctant toleration granted in 1574, the disregard of the rule against receiving spectators during divine service, the continued prevalence of abuses and the agitation of the preachers, the Act of Common Council conjecturally assigned to 1582, and finally the ruin of Paris Garden and the abolition of Sunday plays to which it led. The analysis of the arguments of the Queen's men is in a mercilessly critical vein, very different to the reasonable regulations of 1574, and may perhaps be ascribed to the malicious wit of Recorder Fleetwood. The writer deals first with the alleged need for exercise before playing at Court, and suggests that exercise in private houses might suffice, as it was unsuitable, let alone the danger of bringing infection into the royal presence, to offer to Her Majesty pieces already produced before the basest assemblies of London and Middlesex. As to the stay of the players' living, the view, which must surely have gone back some decades for its justification, is put forward that in times past it had not been thought meet that players should look to playing for a living, 'but men for their lyvings using other honest and lawfull artes, or reteyned in honest services, have by companies learned some enterludes for some encreasce to their profit by other mens pleasures in vacant time of recreation'. The players had claimed in their first article that the Lord Mayor's order of toleration on holy days should continue; but the Act of Common Council had cancelled this, and moreover the provision against the reception of audiences before the end of common prayer had been disregarded. Nor was it comely for youth to run 'streight from prayer to playes, from Gods service to the Deuells'. The second article had dwelt on the difficulty in a dark and foul season of either going into the fields for plays, or deferring them until after evening prayer; but the true remedy was 'to leave of that unnecessarie expense of time, wherunto God himself geveth so many impediments'. The third article had proposed to make plays permissible, so long as the deaths from plague were below fifty a week. The reply is that 'to play in plagetime is to encrease the plage by infection: to play out of plagetime is to draw the plage by offendinges of God upon occasion of such playes'. But if the number of deaths from plague were to be taken as the basis of toleration, it must be remembered that this number was an inadequate measure of the danger of infection amongst the living, and to wait until it rose to fifty would be to run too great a risk for the sake of a few 'whoe if they were not her Maiesties servants shold by their profession be rogues'. The normal weekly number of deaths out of plague-time was between forty and fifty, and commonly under forty; surely it would be enough to allow plays when the rate from all causes had been for two or three weeks together under fifty. Toleration was only claimed for the Queen's players. But this had been so in the previous winter, and all the playing-places had been filled with players calling themselves the Queen's men. Any letters or warrants for toleration should set out the number and names of the company. Much of this dialectic could hardly be taken seriously; it was accompanied by some suggested remedies of a practical character. The City still thought the limitation to private houses the better course. Failing that, the regulations of 1574 should be revived, subject to the conditions that playing should only be allowed when the total deaths had been under fifty a week for twenty days together, that no plays should be given on the Sabbath or before the close of evening prayer on holy days, that the audience should not be received during prayer-time, that the performances should be short enough to let the audience get home before dark, and that the Queen's men alone should be tolerated and should not be allowed to divide themselves into several companies. It was apparently contemplated that these conditions should apply to city and county alike.

I have described these arguments in some detail, because of the clearness with which they set out the divergent views. Unfortunately the documents from which they are drawn do not record any decision upon them. But whether the remedies were accepted, wholly or in part, or not, there can be no doubt whatever that the attempt to enforce an absolute prohibition had utterly failed, and that for several years afterwards the companies continued to find their winter quarters within London itself. Henceforward it became the settled policy of the Corporation to defer to the authority of the Privy Council, and to content themselves with doing their best to influence that body in the direction of their own ideals. There came a day when they were destined to reach some measure of success along these lines. For the time, however, events followed a quiet course. During two or three years there is a blank in the correspondence. Plays were suspended in London and Surrey during the summer of 1586, at the Lord Mayor's request, on the ground that the growing heat might breed a plague, and a similar measure in 1587 had an additional provocation in disturbances which had taken place at the play-houses. In both years the inhibition was declared early in May, and in 1587 it was fixed to terminate at the end of August. On 29 October the Council had to call the attention of both the Surrey and the Middlesex Justices to the imperfect observance of the order against Sunday plays. There was, of course, an undercurrent of Puritan discontent during these years at the lame issue of the anti-stage agitation. This is well shown by a grumbling letter from a correspondent of Walsingham's in January 1587, in which 'the daily abuse of stage-plays' is represented as still 'an offence to the godly'. The redress of Sabbath-breaking is acknowledged, but still 'two hundred proud players jet in their silks' under the protection of various lords, as well as of Her Majesty. The writer proposes that every stage shall be required to pay a weekly subsidy in aid of the poor. The flood of pamphlets had, however, subsided. The Mirror of Monsters, published by William Rankins in 1587, is of markedly less importance than its predecessors. In November 1587 the City sent a deputation to the Privy Council in the hope of securing the suppression of plays within their boundaries; so far as is known, they were unsuccessful. A year or two later new combative relations were established between the players and the Puritans as an outcome of the Martin Marprelate controversy, which began with a series of anonymous pamphlets attacking the principles of episcopacy, and continued throughout 1589 and 1590. The players were not at first particularly concerned against their hereditary enemies. Tarlton, who died on 3 September 1588, is said himself to have satirized the existing ecclesiastical order in a mock discovery of Simony 'in Don John of Londons cellar'. And indeed the ribald style in which Martin Marprelate canvassed the bishops was held to be modelled on the manners of the theatre. 'The stage is brought into the church; and vices make play of church matters', said one episcopalian writer, and described Martin as declaring on his death-bed, 'All my foolery I bequeath to my good friend Lanam and his consort, from whom I had it'. Bacon also condemned 'this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage'.[861] But before long the vigour of the attack drove the bishops to seek on their side for an equally effective literary retort. They hired writers, including John Lyly and Thomas Nashe; and these not only answered Martin in his own vein, but also made use of the theatres for what must have been the congenial task of producing scurrilous plays against him. To this campaign there are many allusions in the pamphlets belonging to the controversy. The Puritans hit back with all their old contempt of the rogues and vagabonds dressed in the Queen's liveries; but the laugh was on the other side when Martin was brought dressed like a monstrous ape on the stage, and wormed and lanced to let the blood and evil humours out of him, or when Divinity appeared with a scratched face, complaining of the assaults received in the hideous creature's attacks upon her honour. Vetus Comoedia, the savage Aristophanic invective, was assuredly in full swing upon the English boards. Nashe professed to have another device ready, in which Martin was to figure in a grotesque pageant called the May-Game of Martinism; but the scandal was now getting too great, and the Government was obliged to disavow its own instruments. According to Nashe, it was by 'sly practice' that the comedies which had been penned were not allowed to be played. However this may have been, we find the Lord Mayor writing to Lord Burghley on 6 November 1589 that, in accordance with what he understood from a letter of his lordship to Mr. Young of Middlesex to be his desire, he had stayed plays in the City, in that the Master of the Revels 'did utterly mislike the same'. Almost immediately afterwards, on 12 November, the Privy Council issued three letters from 'the Starre Chamber' to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor, and the Master of the Revels, directing the Master to join with a divine and with a person 'learned and of judgement' nominated by the other two, and form a commission for allowing the books of plays and striking out or reforming 'suche partes and matters as they shall fynde unfytt and undecent to be handled in playes, both for Divinitie and State'. Perpetual disabilities are threatened to players who produce any pieces not so allowed.

There are indications that in the next year or two a considerable increase took place in the number of plays given during each week. Other kinds of amusement, no less than more serious occupations, suffered, and in a letter of 25 July 1591 to London, Middlesex, and Surrey, the Privy Council had not merely to insist once more upon the due observance of Sunday, but also to forbid plays on Thursdays, on the ground that on this day bear-baiting and other like pastimes, maintained for the royal pleasure if occasion should require, had 'ben allwayes accustomed and practized'. In the following year the Corporation were moved to approach Archbishop Whitgift with a view to obtaining some redress of their grievances through his influence. By a letter of 25 February they set out the evils of plays in the familiar terms, expressing themselves as moved by the 'earnest continuall complaint' of the preachers and declaring that by no one thing was the government of the City 'so greatly annoyed and disquieted'. They explained the difficulty in which they were put by the authority conferred upon the Master of the Revels, who had licensed the playing-houses, 'which before that time lay open to all the statutes for the punishing of these and such lyke disorders', and begged the Archbishop to confer with the Master as to the possibility of providing for the Queen's recreation without the necessity of public performances. A second letter of 6 March thanks the Archbishop for his advice, which apparently was, quite frankly, to bribe the Master. A committee of the Corporation was appointed on 18 March to treat with Tilney, but the scheme fell through for financial reasons. On 22 March the Court of the Merchant Taylors Company discussed a 'precepte' from the Lord Mayor, which called attention to the evils of plays and suggested 'the payment of one anuytie to one Mr. Tylney, mayster of the revelles of the Queenes house, in whose hands the redresse of this inconveniency doeth rest, and that those playes might be abandoned out of this citie'. The Court sympathized, but 'wayinge the damage of the president and enovacion of raysinge of anuyties upon the Companies of London', declined to unloose their purse-strings. On 12 June the Lord Mayor reported to Lord Burghley a disturbance in Southwark, the pretence for which had been furnished by a gathering at a play, held in defiance of orders on a Sunday. Anticipation of a renewal of disorder on Midsummer Day led the Council on 23 June to impose an inhibition on plays until the following Michaelmas. Three undated papers in the Henslowe-Alleyn collection at Dulwich may perhaps suggest that later in the summer they became willing to relax their severity. The first of these is a petition to the Council from Lord Strange's men, begging to be allowed to use their play-house on the Bankside, both for their own sake, as otherwise they would have to travel at considerable charge, and for that of the watermen who 'nowe in this long vacation' look for relief through ferrying spectators to and from the plays. The second is a petition from the watermen themselves to the same effect. The third is a copy of a warrant from the Council, setting out that not long since they had restrained Lord Strange's men from playing at the Rose and enjoined them to play at Newington Butts, and removing the injunction, 'by reason of the tediousness of the waie and that of longe tyme plaies have not there bene used on working daies'. If these documents really belong to 1592, which must remain doubtful, the permission to resume playing was almost certainly rendered nugatory by a plague more serious than any that had devastated London since 1563. In fact Henslowe's Diary shows no performances at the Rose between 22 June and 29 December, and the short winter season that followed was abruptly broken off by a renewed outbreak and an order from the Privy Council on 28 January for the suppression of all assemblies for purposes of amusement within seven miles of London. This was probably renewed in April, and the companies, who had waited for some months in hopes of relaxation, had perforce to travel. On 29 April and 6 May the Council itself issued warrants of authorization to Lord Sussex's and Lord Strange's men respectively to assist them in taking this course. Probably the theatres remained closed during the greater part of the next eighteen months. Henslowe's Diary only indicates performances from 27 December 1593 to 6 February 1594, evidently interrupted by another restraint within five miles of London under a Council order of 3 February, and then a few more in April and in May. The Countess of Warwick's men seem to have been negotiating with the City for toleration on 10 May. Regular playing, however, was not resumed on Bankside until 3 June. The plague was now fairly over, and the shattered companies began to reconstruct themselves. In October Lord Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor begging permission for his men to use the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street. In November Francis Langley, one of the alnagers for London, was planning a new theatre, the Swan, on the Bankside, and the Lord Mayor once more detailed the objections to plays in a letter of protest to Lord Burghley. This was followed up on 13 September 1595 by a formal petition from the Corporation for 'the present stay and finall suppressing' of plays in Middlesex and Surrey. Herein the origin of yet another prentice riot was traced to the obnoxious performances. Obviously the request was not acceded to. Henslowe's Diary shows no break in the sequence of plays, except for Lent, until the July of 1596, when plague once more called for an inhibition. At about the same time the balance of parties on the Privy Council was seriously disturbed by the death of Henry Lord Hunsdon, who had been Lord Chamberlain since 1585. His successor, Lord Cobham, was less favourable to the players. In the course of the long vacation Thomas Nashe wrote of them as 'piteously persecuted by the Lord Maior and the Aldermen: and however in their old Lord's tyme they thought there state setled it is now so uncertayne they cannot build upon it'. In November there was a petition from inhabitants of the Blackfriars against the erection of a theatre in the precinct, which recited how 'all players being banished by the Lord Mayor from playing within the city by reason of the great inconveniences and ill rule that followeth them, they now think to plant themselves in liberties.' At last the City had gained the point denied them in 1574 and again in 1584. Their importunity, in season and out of season, had moved the hearts of the autocratic body at Whitehall. Hence-forward, although play-houses might stand thick enough within the rapidly growing suburbs beyond the gates, there were to be none, or at any rate none but 'private' houses, within the closely guarded circuit of the liberties. A fuller account of the transaction, without any clear indication of its date, is given many years later by Richard Rawlidge in A Monster Lately Found Out, or The Scourging of Tipplers (1628), and five play-houses are enumerated as pulled down and suppressed under authority from the Queen and Council by the 'religious senators'.[862]

The events of the next year must have given the Corporation high hopes of making an equally clean sweep in the suburbs. They had by now learnt that, although there were many abuses of the stage to which the Council would turn a blind eye, any interference in politics or encouragement, direct or indirect, to civil commotion, was not one of them. On 28 July 1597 they were able, in renewing their appeal for a 'present staie and fynall suppressinge' of the Middlesex and Surrey theatres, to add to their summary of 'inconveniences' a definite statement of a recent confession by some unruly apprentices that plays had served as the 'randevous' of their 'mutinus attemptes'. On the same day the Council wrote to the Middlesex and Surrey Justices, ordering not merely that there should be a restraint of plays within three miles of the City until Allhallowtide, but also that the owners of the theatres should be required 'to pluck downe quite the stages, gallories and roomes that are made for people to stand in, and so to deface the same as they maie not be ymploied agayne to suche use'. As their reason they cited the disorders, due partly to the 'confluence of bad people' at the play-houses, and partly to the handling of 'lewd matters' on the stage. There is reason to suppose that their action was not altogether determined by the representations of the City. A 'seditious' play called The Isle of Dogs had been shown on one of the Bankside stages.[863] This had been brought to their notice by the famous heretic-hunter and informer, Richard Topcliffe, and was, according to Henslowe's Diary, the cause of the restraint. The players and one of the makers of the play had been committed to prison; the other, Thomas Nashe, had fled to Yarmouth, leaving incriminating papers in his lodgings. On 15 August a commission was issued to Topcliffe and others to examine further into the matter and ascertain how far the 'lewd' play had been spread abroad. The second writer has recently been found to be Benjamin Jonson, who thus makes his stormy entry into a field of activity which he was destined, more than any other save one, to illustrate and adorn. It is natural to suppose that, in ordering the complete gutting of the theatres, the Council contemplated the continuance of the restraint even beyond Allhallowtide. But if so, they again changed their minds, and the City were disappointed. On 3 October a warrant was sent to the Keeper of the Marshalsea for the release of Jonson and of the offending players, and Henslowe's Diary notes the resumption of playing a week later. Evidently the Council had satisfied themselves, perhaps under the influence of another new Lord Chamberlain, George Lord Hunsdon, who had succeeded Lord Cobham in the course of the year, that it was after all impossible, in view of the amenities of the royal Christmas, wholly to dispense with plays.

This winter of 1597-8 is really an important turning-point in the history of stage-control. The events of the past two years, following upon a long period of vexatious conflict, seem to have brought the Government to the conclusion that the method of regulation through the magistrates had now broken down, and that the time had come for the resettlement of the matter upon the more centralized basis already foreshadowed by the commission to the Master of the Revels in 1581. Of this there are two indications. And first, for the county as a whole, a new Vagabond Act, replacing that of 1572, had been called for by the progressive development of the Elizabethan poor-law policy on the humane lines of a local rate, and the consequent possibility of discriminating more closely between the deserving poor and the idle vagrants. The latter class were again to be treated with greater severity. Summary whipping was reinstated and might be inflicted in future by local constables as well as justices. The more dangerous rogues were to be transported, and treated as felons if they returned. These were the main objects of the statute, but incidentally the status of players and minstrels was affected. The power of justices to license travelling was taken away. Before long even John Dutton had to prove his claim to his Cheshire privilege. The right of noblemen to protect their servants was not interfered with, and indeed must now have become even more important, as they acquired a monopoly; but it must be exercised under hand and seal and, although this point is not dealt with in the statute, must presumably be endorsed by the Master of the Revels. As regards London and its suburbs in particular, the Privy Council, with the Master of the Revels as an adviser and agent, took the control into its own hands, and decided that the companies to be licensed should be limited to two. It seems likely that this policy took shape in a solemn order in Star Chamber, although the document itself has not reached us.[864] At any rate the rule is set out and confirmed in a letter written by the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral to the Justices and the Master of the Revels on 19 February 1598, in which complaint is made of the intrusion of a third company, not included in the Council's sanction and not bound to the Master of the Revels for observance of the conditions imposed. In principle it continued to prevail until the end of the reign, although in practice it was not found very easy to restrict the number of companies, and still less that of theatres. On the Surrey side, indeed, an element of local feeling adverse to the stage began to show itself, which perhaps owed its origin to little more than a dispute about the liability of the players to contribute to local assessments. It took shape in a petition from the vestry of St. Saviour's, Southwark, to the Council on 19 July 1598 for the closing of the play-houses in the parish, on account of the enormities that came thereby. But on 28 March 1600 the vestry were content that the churchwardens should 'talk with the players for tithes for their playhouses and for money for the poor, according to the order taken before my lords of Canterbury and London and the Master of the Revels'. In Middlesex, on the other hand, the growth of the western suburbs and their convenience for theatrical purposes led to divers new enterprises. The most important of these was the erection of the Fortune in St. Giles's, Cripplegate, by Edward Alleyn during 1600. The Council seem to have been in two minds about the desirability of the scheme. In January the project had been encouraged by a personal letter from the Lord Admiral to the Middlesex Justices. Some of the inhabitants, however, raised a protest, and in March the Council ordered the Justices in nowise to permit the building, as that would be inconsistent with the order for the plucking down of theatres given them 'not longe sithence'. If this means the order of 28 July 1597, the Council seem to have forgotten that their own action later in the same year had rendered it nugatory; nor were they very consistent when, on 15 May 1600, they allowed the use of the Swan, which certainly should have been plucked down in 1597, for feats of activity by Peter Bromvill, an acrobat specially recommended to Elizabeth by the French king. Ultimately the question of the Fortune received a final reconsideration. The inhabitants, just as in Southwark, were squared by the promise of liberal contributions towards poor relief. Possibly, also, the Queen herself intervened in Alleyn's favour, and on 8 April the consent of the Council was signified by a further letter to the justices. On 22 June the allowance was explained and the principle adopted in 1597 reaffirmed by an Order in Council, which was not, however, passed without some 'question and debate'. There were to be two houses and no more, the Fortune in Middlesex for the Admiral's men and the Globe in Surrey for the Chamberlain's. In addition to the old prohibitions of plays on Sunday, in Lent or during infection, two new restrictions make their appearance. No plays were in future to be given in any 'common inn', and neither of the privileged companies was to play more than twice a week. A few months before, on 1 April 1600, the Middlesex Justices had stopped a contemplated play-house in East Smithfield on the strength of the Star Chamber order. But the twice-repeated limitation of the Privy Council, for all the formality of its expression, seems to have had the shortest of lives. By October 1600 it had already been broken by Pembroke's men, who began to play in that month as a third company at the Rose. During the same year the Chapel boys and those of St. Paul's were also performing, although no doubt these were technically located in 'private' houses. Blackfriars, where the Chapel plays were given, was not yet in the full sense part of the City; it was, however, to the Lord Mayor that the Council gave instructions on 11 March 1601 to stop plays in the Blackfriars, as well as at St. Paul's, during Lent. In May the Curtain was open, and although the Council suppressed a particular play there, they did not suppress the house. By the end of 1601 the order of the previous year had fallen into complete disregard. There were a 'multitude of play-howses' and a daily concourse of people to the plays. The Corporation complained and were informed by the Council on 31 December that the fault lay largely with themselves and their predecessors, as they had failed to see to the execution of their lordships' directions. These were renewed, and a reminder was also sent to the county Justices. It has been suggested that the attitudes of the Corporation and the Council had now been reversed, and that the former had become favourably disposed towards the players.[865] I find no evidence of this. Probably the City policy was to show that the Council's attempt at regulation had broken down, and that complete prohibition had become the only remedy. On 31 March 1602 the Council wrote again to the Lord Mayor, who had reported some amendment of the abuses, and announced that, 'upon noteice of her Maiesties pleasure at the suit of the Earle of Oxford', a third company, made up of the Earl's servants and of those of the Earl of Worcester, were to be tolerated, and were to have the Boar's Head as their sole playing-place.

Plays were suspended by the Council on 19 March 1603 during the illness of the Queen, which terminated fatally on 24 March. Their resumption was anticipated on the coming of James, one of whose first acts was to issue on 7 May a proclamation against plays or bear-baiting on Sundays. But plague intervened, a plague more deadly even than that of 1592-4; and it was not until after the Lent of 1604 that on 9 April the Council authorized the three companies of players to the King, Queen, and Prince to perform at the Globe, Curtain, and Fortune, so long as the weekly plague-deaths should not exceed thirty. These were the former companies of the Chamberlain's, Worcester's, and the Admiral's men, now taken directly into the royal service. By a piece of generosity not paralleled during the late reign, the King's men had received a payment of £30 from the Treasurer of the Chamber in February for their 'maintenance and relief', in view of the prohibition of performances during the plague. The attachment of the three companies to the royal households is to be regarded as something a little more than a mere honour bestowed upon them. It signified a further advance on the lines already laid down in 1597 and 1600 of direct royal control in affairs theatrical. In favour of the King's men, the precedent set for Leicester's men in 1574 was revived, and their privileges, formerly dependent upon orders of the Privy Council, were conferred upon them by a licence under letters patent. A similar patent was drafted for Queen Anne's men, but was not at the time executed. In 1606 a provincial detachment of these men was using a letter of recommendation from the Queen herself as a warrant; they did not receive a licence under letters patent until 1609. Gradually, however, the issue of a patent became the normal Jacobean method of licensing the privileged London players. The Children of the Queen's Revels received theirs in 1604 and a new one in 1610, the Prince's men in 1606, the Duke of York's in 1610, the Lady Elizabeth's in 1611, and the Elector Palatine's in 1613. In 1615 a patent of an exceptional type was issued to Philip Rosseter and his partners for a new theatre at Porter's Hall in the Blackfriars. In the patents for companies the model of the 1574 patent is in the main followed, but as a rule the 'usual howse' in which the company will play is named. This, however, does not seem to be meant to fetter their discretion to use some other convenient house, and a general authority to play in the provinces is, except in the case of the Revels Children, always added. There is no such limitation on playing to two days a week as was imposed on the companies by the Council order of 1600. Most of the patents contain a clause reserving 'all auctoritie power priuiledges and profittes' appertaining to the Master of the Revels under his patent or commission. This is omitted in the licence for the King's men and in both of those for the Revels Children, whose 1604 patent contains a special clause requiring their plays to have the 'approbacion and allowaunce' of Samuel Daniel, whom Queen Anne had appointed for that purpose.[866] It became the duty of the Master to scrutinize the phraseology of plays in the light of an Act to Restrain Abuses of Players, passed in May 1606, which imposed a penalty of £10 for any profane or jesting use of the names of God, Christ Jesus, the Holy Ghost, or the Trinity, in any stage-play, interlude, show, May-game, or pageant. This statute, even if not always literally observed, entailed much revision of existing dramatic texts.