Pays all debts, cures all diseases,
And at once three senses pleases.
Welcome all who lead or follow
To the oracle of Apollo!”
The merchants conducted their business in the Royal Exchange, but the tavern was the place where the lesser traders, and the shopkeepers, and the people who came up from the country met, to arrange bargains and business of all kinds over a flask of Canary.
CHAPTER VII
THEATRES
The latter half of the sixteenth century presents a remarkable development of the Drama and of the Theatres in London. This development was like the rising tide: it advanced with a force that was irresistible. The Mayor and Aldermen did their best to drive out plays and players from their boundaries; they went, but they established themselves beyond the limits of the City jurisdiction. Preachers denounced the theatre; moralists wrote pamphlets against it; yet it flourished more and more. John Stockwood, preaching at Paul’s Cross, says:—
“Have we not houses of purpose, built with great charges for the maintenance of them, and that without the liberties, as who shall say, ‘There, let them say what they will, we will play.’ I know not how I might, with the godly-learned especially, more discommend the gorgeous playing place erected in the Fields, than term it, as they please to have it called, a Theatre.” In the same sermon he asks: “Wyll not a fylthye playe wyth the blast of a trumpette sooner call thyther a thousande than an houres tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred? Nay, even heere in the Citie, without it be at this place and some other certaine ordinarie audience, where shall you find a reasonable company? Whereas if you resorte to the Theatre, the Curtayne, and other places of players in the Citie, you shall on the Lord’s Day have these places, with many other that I cannot reckon, so full as possible they can throng.”
