"1

2

ordinary places for all masterless men and vagabond persons that haunt the highways to meet together. Two years later the Mayor again complained that the theatres were the haunts of "thieves, horsestealers, whoremongers, cozeners, coney-catchers, contrivers of treason, and other idle and dangerous persons. In 1572 Harrison in his Chronology wrote, "Would to God these comon plaie(r)s were exiled for altogether as seminaries of impiety, and their theatres pulled down as no better than houses of bawdrie. The behaviour of the players must have been abnormally vicious to have shocked the robust susceptibilities of Elizabethan London. That they succeeded in overstepping the bounds is testified by the fact that in the interests of order and decency the City forbade the erection of playhouses within its precincts. this reason "The Globe" at Southwark, “The Curtain at Shoreditch and other wellknown houses were erected outside the boundaries in suburban districts within swift access of sanctuaries such as " Alsatia," and "The Clink. " Gabriel Harvey describes these playhouse localities as " filthie haunts." 3 For a woman to enter a theatre meant the loss of her character. Actors, classed with mountebanks, zanies and buffoons' were regarded as mere caterpillars of the commonwealth, "a very superfluous sort of men. Under the Poor Law of 1572 they were, unless licensed, deemed to be " rogues, vacabounds, and sturdye beggars. On first conviction they were ordered "to bee grevouslye whipped and burnte

I City of London MSS. Outlines p. 214.

2 Elizabethan England, Scott Library, p. 268.

3 Four Letters, 1592.

For

through the gristle of the right eare with an hot yron of the compasse of an ynch about, manifestinge his or her rogyshe kind of lyef." i A second offence was adjudged felony; a third entailed death. In order to evade the stringencies of the law, the unhappy actors "foolish beasts," Nash terms them, "mocked and flouted at in every man's common talk" " sheltered themselves by enlisting as the servants of some great man. There is a popular impression that aristocrat and actor fraternised together, but as Dyce asserts "plays were scarcely recognised as literature," and " authors seldom presumed to approach the mansions of the aristocracy. Even the festive students of Grays Inn (after the Twelfth Night fiasco, at which it is not unlikely that Shakespeare was present) protested against the insult of having had foisted upon them "a company of base and common fellows, to wit, professional players.

"3

The contemptible estimation in which actors were held and the low status of the theatres are both reflected in Ben Jonson's Poetaster.

Tucca. "Whats he that stalks by there boy?

2 Pyr. Tis a player, Sir.

Tucca. A player! call him, call the lousy slave hither; what, will he sail by and not once strike or vail to a man of war? ha! Do you hear you player, rogue, stalker, come back here! (enter Histrio). No respect to men of

worship you slave! what you are proud you rascal, are you proud, ha? you grow rich do you and purchase, you twopenny tearmouth?"

The " twopenny tearmouth " protests he saw

not the captain, but on tendering satisfaction is invited to a supper where possibly he may meet the son of "a man of worship who may be persuaded to furnish a play.

Tucca. "If he pen for thee once thou shalt not need to travel with thy pumps full of gravel any more after a blind jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel heads to an old cracked trumpet."

As an observes,

attraction to the captain the player

"We have as much ribaldry in our plays as can be, as you would wish Captain: all the sinners in the suburbs come and applaud our action daily.

Tucca. Well, go thy ways, pursue thy projects, let me alone with this design: my Poetaster shall make thee a play and thou shalt be a man of good parts in it."

Eventually the invitation is extended to other distinguished members of the profession.

Тисса. << Marry, you may bring Frisker, my zany; he's a good skipping swaggerer ; and your fat fool there, my Mango, bring him but let him not beg rapiers, nor scarfs, in his over familiar playing face, nor roar out his barren bold jests with a tormenting laughter, between drunk and dry. Do you hear, stiff-toe? Give him warning, admonition, to forsake his saucy glavering grace and his goggle eye; it

does not become him, sirrah; tell him so. (Act. III. Sc. 1) 1601-1602.

The impression conveyed by this satire accords so precisely with other contemporary testimony that there is little reason to question its truthfullness. "It offends me to the soul," says Hamlet, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise..... O there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

One is induced to think it probable that the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in A Midsummer Night's Dream was founded upon fact, and that Bottom and his company of clowns were limned from life. The most popular favourites seem, in many cases, to have been ex-tradesmen. Webster is described as a merchant tailor; Burbage, whose roaring for a horse has rendered him immortal, is said to have been a carpenter; Dekker is supposed to have been a shoemaker, and Tradition has it that Shakespeare was apprenticed to a butcher.

With the exception of Alleyne none of the Elizabethan actors seem to have been men of

I Here and subsequently where two dates are given the first implies the year in which the work was first heard of, the second the year of its publication.

exalted character. Messrs Seccombe and Allen in The Age of Shakespeare, remind us that, "Of the early actors it is important to observe that the most noted were low comedians or buffoons, such as Tarleton, Wilson, and Kemp, most of whom were adepts at farcical improvisation.” 1

2

He

The early playwrights seem also to have been men whose lives were in perfect sympathy with their surroundings. A typical example of the Elizabethan actor-dramatist is Robert Greene. is assumed to have collaborated with Shakespeare, and to have shared in the literary and philosophic feasts at the Mermaid Tavern. "Whoredome, says Greene," was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight, and, he adds, though "famoused for an archplaymaking poet, his companions were lightly the lewdest persons in the land, apt for pilfering, perjury, forgery, or any villainy, who came still to my lodgings, and these would continue quaffing, carousing, and surfeiting with me all day long. Gabriel Harvey, though personally unacquainted with Greene, makes some pertinent observations about him;

"3

"O Lord, what a pregnant occasion were here presented to display leaud vanity in his lively coullours, and to decipher the very misteries of that base arte! Petty cooseners are not woorth the naming: he, they say, was the monarch of crosbiters, and the very empereur of shifters. of shifters. I was altogether unacquainted with the man, and never once saluted

1 Vol. 11. p. 16.

2 The Repentance of Robert Greene.

3 Shakespeare and His Predecessors. (Boas) p. 36.