At the date of Shakespeare's birth, 1564, no permanent theatre as yet existed in England. But there had long existed a class of professional actors, descended partly from the mystery and the miracle-playing artisans of the Middle Ages, partly from the strolling players, equilibrists, jugglers, and jesters. Professional Italian actors, players of the commedia dell' arte, who in the sixteenth century spread their gay and varied art all over Europe, also supplied English players with that touch of professional technique in which their somewhat vacillating and half-amateurish arts were still wanting.

While, however, as far as France is concerned, the Italian influence must strike everybody who studies the stage history of the country, the evidence of a fertilization of English scenic art by the commedia dell' arte is scanty. Yet I think it is sufficient to deserve more attention than has hitherto been bestowed upon it.

In any case there is sufficient evidence to prove that Italian professional actors penetrated into England and exercised their art there.

In January, 1577, an Italian comedian came to London with his company. The English called him Drousiano, but his real name was Drousiano Martinelli, the same who, with his brother Tristano, visited the court of Philip II, and there is no reason to suppose that he was either the first or the last of his countrymen who tried to carry off English gold from merry London. The typical Italian masks are quite well known to the authors of that period. Thus Thomas Heywood mentions all these doctors, zanies, pantaloons, and harlequins, in which the French, and still more the Italians, distinguished themselves. In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and in Ben Jonson's The Case is Altered, mention is made of the Italian improvised comedy, and a few of the well-known types of character in the dramatic literature of the time bear distinct traces of having been influenced by Italian masks, e.g., Ralph Roister Doister in Udall's comedy of that name; as well as the splendid Captain Bobadill and his no less amusing companion, Captain Tucca, in Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour and The Poetaster, all of which are reproductions of the typical capitano.

However, it is not these literary testimonies that I consider the most striking evidence of the influence of Italian professional technique on English professional actors. It is a remarkable discovery made by the highly esteemed Shakespearean archaeologist, Edmund Malone, about a century ago, in Dulwich College, that mine of ancient English dramatic research, founded by the actor Edward Alleyn.

Among the notes left by the old pawnbroker and theatrical manager, Henslowe, and the various papers, letters, parts, accounts, etc., of his son-in-law, the famous and very wealthy actor Alleyn, among these rare documents, to which we owe a great part of our knowledge of the Shakespearean stage, Malone found four remarkable card-board tables, on which the plots of as many plays were put down, together with the names of the persons represented, their entrances and exits, cues for music, sonnets, etc.

According to Collier's description, these tables—one of which only is preserved, the three others having disappeared through the carelessness and disorder which at that time prevailed in the Dulwich treasury—were about fifteen inches in length and nine in breadth. They were divided into two columns, and between these, toward the top of the table, there was a square hole for hanging it up on a hook or some such thing. They bore the following titles:

  1. The Plotte of the Deade Man's Fortune.
  2. The Plotte of the First Parte of Tamar Cain.
  3. The Plotte of Frederick and Basilea.
  4. The Plotte of the Second Parte of the Seven Deadlie Sinns.

The last-mentioned play is known for certain to have been composed by the excellent comic actor, Richard Tarlton. Gabriel Harvey, the astrologist, and the implacable antagonist of Thomas Nash, tells us in his letters how Tarlton himself in Oxford invited him to see his celebrated play on The Seven Deadly Sins; Harvey asked him which of the seven was his own deadly sin, and he instantly replied, "By G——, the sinne of other gentlemen, lechery."

Tarlton died in the year 1588, and some of the other plays, especially The Dead Man's Fortune, are considered to be a good deal older than his. They belong, therefore, to an early period of the English Renaissance stage.