Luckily, this sect, which like a malicious growth seemed to have gathered to itself all the stubbornness, insensibility, and rude obstinacy of the nation, was counterbalanced by a refined and intellectual nobility, which was inspired by the new artistic and philosophical thought of the Renaissance, and seemed to foresee, if not fully to recognize, what a mine of poetry the English theatre of those times was destined to be. Thanks to men like Sir Francis Walsingham, Lords Leicester, Nottingham, Strange, and Sussex, the drama resisted for a time the violent and unwearied attacks of the Puritans. Most fortunately for the actors also, Queen Elizabeth, as well as her successors, James I and Charles I, was fond of plays and favorably inclined toward their performers.
Elizabeth rendered a great service to the actors by placing them under the patronage of the nobility. The municipal authorities, who were frequently Puritan, considered neither dramatic art nor dramatic poetry as an acceptable means of livelihood; consequently, those who cultivated these noble arts easily exposed themselves to being treated as "masterless men," unless they could give a reference to some distinguished aristocratic name.
The Queen ordered by law—in a statute which has often been misunderstood—"that all common players of interludes wandering abroad, other than players of interludes belonging to any baron of this realme, or any other honorable personage of greater degree, to be authorized to play under the hand and seale of arms of such baron or personage, shall be adjudged and deemed rogues and vagabonds"; in other words, the Queen urged all actors, for their own sakes, to place themselves under the patronage of some nobleman, in order to protect them against the persecution of the Puritan citizens.
But even such mighty protection could not entirely shield them, and it was this very power of the London corporation to injure the actors that caused the establishment of the first London theatre.
In the year 1572 the plague broke out in London; it killed many thousands of people, and kept recurring at certain intervals during the next twenty or thirty years, carrying horror and death with it. Under these circumstances all dramatic performances were prohibited for a time in London, a precaution which was reasonable enough, as the dense crowding of people might have helped to spread the disease. But the magistrate seems to have caught eagerly at this opportunity of interfering.
In Harrison's Description of England the event is reported as follows: "Plaies are banished for a time out of London, lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it, being already begonne. Would to God these comon plaies were exiled for altogether as seminaries of impiety, and their theatres pulled downe as no better than houses of baudrie. It is an evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so rich that they can build suche houses. As moche I wish also to our comon beare baitinges used on the Sabaothe daies."
We cannot help noticing the predilection of the Puritans for the coarse bear-fights, which in their opinion were only displeasing to God when performed on a Sabbath, whereas the playhouses at any time were no better than the "ill-famed stews" in Southwark. It cannot be denied, however, that under the prevailing circumstances it was quite right that the playhouses should be temporarily forbidden.
But the sudden and unwarranted expulsion of all dramatic performances from the precincts of London a few years later, 1575, cannot be accounted for otherwise than by the increasing popularity which these plays enjoyed among the non-Puritan public, and the envy with which the clergy saw the people crowding much more to the places where actors interpreted the rising poets than to those where the preachers themselves enunciated their gloomy doctrine.
In the year 1574 the actor James Burbage, with four other actors, all belonging to the retinue of the Earl of Leicester, had received permission from the Queen to perform all kinds of plays anywhere in England, "for the recreation of her beloved subjects as well as for her own comfort and pleasure, if it should please her to see them."
Perhaps it was a counter-move on the part of the Puritan community when the lord mayor and the corporation in the following year straightway forbade all plays within the precincts of the town. If so, it proved a failure. James Burbage resolutely hired a liberty outside the city, and here, in 1576, on the premises of an ancient Roman Catholic priory, he built the first English playhouse, which he named "The Theatre."