THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE
VOL. I

Oxford University Press

London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen
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Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

Emery Walker ph. sc.

Wedding Mask of Sir Henry Unton

National Portrait Gallery

Printed in England

[vii]

PREFACE

In 1903 I explained the origin of The Mediaeval Stage out of preliminary investigations for a little book on Shakespeare. That little book is still unwritten, and perhaps it was only a mirage, since working days have their term, and all that I can now offer, after an interval of twenty years, is another instalment of prolegomena. It has been in hand, more or less, throughout that period, which now ends felicitously with the tercentenary of the First Folio. But it has often been laid aside for other literary diversions, and still more often through the preoccupations of a life mainly concerned with activities remote from letters. As a result, I have constantly had to take account of new material furnished by the research or the speculations of others; and I only hope that in the process of revision I have succeeded in achieving a reasonable completeness of statement and a reasonable consistency in the conclusions of chapters drafted at very different dates.

Much in these volumes is of course mere archaeology, but the historian may find some interest in the development of the stage as an institution, and in the social and economic conditions which made such a development possible. My First Book is devoted to a description, perhaps disproportionate, of the Elizabethan Court, and of the ramifications in pageant and progress, tilt and mask, of that instinct for spectacular mimesis, which the Renaissance inherited from the Middle Ages, and of which the drama is itself the most important manifestation. The Second Book gives an account of the settlement of the players in London, of their conflict, backed by the Court, with the tendencies of Puritanism, and of the place which they ultimately found in the monarchical polity. To the Third and Fourth belong the more pedestrian[viii] task of following in detail the fortunes of the individual playing companies and the individual theatres, with such fullness as the available records permit. The Fifth deals with the surviving plays, not in their literary aspect, which lies outside my plan, but as documents helping to throw light upon the history of the institution which produced them. I have not for the most part carried my investigations beyond the death of Shakespeare, and although I have sometimes regretted that I did not push on to the closing of the theatres, the decision not to do so has long been irretrievable.

Obviously I am treading a region far more carefully charted by predecessors than that of The Mediaeval Stage; but the progress of Elizabethan scholarship during recent years has been so great as to render a fresh attempt at a synthesis justifiable. I am conscious of a deeper debt than I can express to many fellow-workers, notably to my friends Dr. W. W. Greg and Mr. A. W. Pollard and Professor Feuillerat of Rennes, and to a growing band of American students, of whom I may name Professor C. W. Wallace and Mr. J. T. Murray as examples.

E. K. C.

January, 1923.

[ix]

CONTENTS

[xiii]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Wedding Mask of Sir Henry Unton. From picture in National Portrait Gallery  Vol. i, frontispiece

[xiv]

NOTE ON SYMBOLS

I HAVE found it convenient, especially in Appendix A, to use the symbol <, following a date, to indicate an uncertain date not earlier than that named, and the symbol >, followed by a date, to indicate an uncertain date not later than that named. Thus 1903 <> 23 would indicate the composition date of any part of this book. I have sometimes placed the date of a play in italics, where it was desirable to indicate the date of production rather than publication.

[xv]

LIST OF AUTHORITIES

[General Bibliographical Note. The few books here named are mainly those whose range is sufficiently wide to cover the greater part of my own ground. Others, more limited in their scope, are reserved for mention in the preliminary notes to the chapters upon whose subject-matter they directly bear; and in particular the bibliography of the drama, as distinct from the stage, receives full treatment in Book V. The scanty Restoration notices of the pre-Restoration stage are to be found in R. Flecknoe, A Short Discourse of the English Stage (1664), the anonymous Historia Histrionica (1699) ascribed to James Wright, and J. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708). W. R. Chetwood's General History of the Stage (1749) is of no value, and its honesty is suspect. The first scholar to attempt a systematic history was E. Malone, in his Account of our Ancient Theatres (1790) and Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage (1790), of which a revised version, with much fresh matter, was included by J. Boswell in the Third Variorum Shakespeare (1821). Something was added by G. Chalmers in the Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage which forms part of his Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-Papers (1797), and in an enlarged shape of his Supplemental Apology (1799). The first edition of J. P. Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage appeared in 1831. Thereafter Collier made many further contributions to the subject, in the publications of the Shakespeare Society, and in his New Facts regarding the Life of Shakespeare (1835), New Particulars regarding the Works of Shakespeare (1836), and Farther Particulars regarding Shakespeare and his Works (1839). These abound in forgeries, of which some are analysed in C. M. Ingleby, A Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy (1861), and which have not all been excluded from the current edition of the History (1879). Some new ground was broken by F. G. Fleay, who gave real stimulus to investigation by the series of hasty generalizations and unstable hypotheses contained in his On the Actor Lists, 1578-1642 (R. H. Soc. Trans. ix. 44), On the History of Theatres in London, 1576-1642 (R. H. Soc. Trans. x. 114), Shakespeare Manual (1876, 1878), Introduction to Shakespearian Study (1877), Life and Work of Shakespeare (1886), Chronicle History of the London Stage (1890), and Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama[xvi] (1891). Little is added to or corrected in Fleay by H. Maas, Äussere Geschichte der englischen Theatertruppen (1907). Some useful documents were brought together by W. C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes (1869). An interesting account from the French point of view is given of the earlier part of the period by J. J. Jusserand, Le Théâtre en Angleterre depuis la Conquête jusqu'aux prédécesseurs immédiats de Shakespeare (1878, 1881). R. A. Small, The Stage-quarrel between Ben Jonson and the So-called Poetasters (1899), and G. P. Baker, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist (1907), are also valuable studies. Light is thrown upon stage-history by other specialist books about Shakespeare, particularly J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1881, 1890), and S. Lee, Life of William Shakespeare (1898, 1915, 1922). In recent years fresh material has been brought together by various researchers, notably by J. T. Murray in English Dramatic Companies (1910) and by C. W. Wallace in The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars (1908), The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare (1912), and in a number of papers in the Nebraska University Studies and elsewhere. The Dulwich documents originally published by J. P. Collier in Memoirs of Edward Alleyn (1841), Alleyn Papers (1843), and Henslowe's Diary (1845) have been more scientifically edited by W. W. Greg in Henslowe's Diary (1904-8) and Henslowe Papers (1907), and the Extracts from Accounts of Revels at Court (1842) by P. Cunningham have been superseded and supplemented by A. Feuillerat, Documents relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (1908) and Documents relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (1914). The work of gathering together miscellaneous documents and studies passed from The Shakespeare Society's Papers (1844-9) to the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society (1874-92), and is now carried on by the Collections (1907-13) of the Malone Society. A summary of both the older and the recent learning will be found in A. H. Thorndike, Shakespeare's Theater (1916), and a full account of the theatres in J. Q. Adams, Shakespearean Playhouses (1917). Little importance need be attached to H. B. Baker, The London Stage (1889, 1904), or to C. Hastings, The Theatre: its Development in France and England (1901), or to R. F. Sharp, A Short History of the English Stage (1909), or to M. Jonas, Shakespeare and the Stage (1918). But J. Genest, Some Account of the English Stage (1832), is still valuable on the Restoration period, of which a modern account is given in R. W. Lowe, Thomas Betterton (1891), while W. J. Lawrence,[xvii] The Elizabethan Playhouse (1912, 1913), and A. Thaler, Shakspere to Sheridan (1922), help to trace the connexion with Elizabethan days.—The chief histories of the Elizabethan drama are A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (1875, 1899), J. A. Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama (1884, 1900), F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama (1908), C. F. T. Brooke, The Tudor Drama (1912). A special aspect is dealt with in F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (1914), and a daughter period in G. H. Nettleton, English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1914). The drama of modern Europe generally is treated in J. Klein, Geschichte des Dramas (1865-75), and R. Prölss, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (1881-3), both of which are now of less value than the comprehensive Geschichte des neueren Dramas (1893-1916) of W. Creizenach, from which part of the English section has been translated as The English Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1916). Treatises on contemporary foreign stages are A. d'Ancona, Origini del Teatro italiano (1891), E. Rigal, Le Théâtre français avant la période classique (1901), and H. A. Rennert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (1909).—Of general histories of English literature the most important are Hazlitt-Warton, History of English Poetry, from the Twelfth to the close of the Sixteenth Century (1871), H. A. Taine, History of English Literature (1890), H. Morley, English Writers (1887-95), J. J. Jusserand, Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais (1894-1904), G. Körting, Grundriss der Geschichte der englischen Literatur (1910, mainly of bibliographical value), W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry (1895-1910), and The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907-16), of which vols, v and vi are wholly devoted to the pre-Restoration drama. The social conditions of the period may be best studied in Shakespeare's England (1916). The most valuable bibliographical data are in W. W. Greg, A List of English Plays (1900) and A List of Masques, Pageants, &c. (1902), and in the Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, edited by E. Arber (1875-94), for 1554-1640, and by G. E. B. Eyre (1913-14) for 1640-1708. The Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference. Of the periodicals in which dissertations on the stage and drama have been published, the most important are, in England, The Modern Language Quarterly (1896-1902) and its successor The Modern Language Review (1905-22), Notes and Queries (1850-1922), and The Library (1889-1922); in America, Modern Philology (1903-22), Modern Language Notes (1886-1922), The Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1886-1922), The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1897[xviii]-1921), and Studies in Philology (1915-22); and in Germany, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (1865-1921), Englische Studien (1877-1922), Anglia (1878-1922), and Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen (1848-1922).

The following list of books is mainly intended to elucidate the references in the foot-notes, and has no claim to bibliographical completeness or accuracy.]

BOOK I

THE COURT

[1]

I
ELIZABETH AND JAMES

AT the close of the Middle Ages, the mimetic instinct, deep-rooted in the psychology of the folk, had reached the third term of its social evolution. After colouring the liturgy of the Church and the festival celebrations of the municipal guilds, it had attached itself, in an outgrowth of minstrelsy, to the household of the sovereign, which had now definitely become, with the advent of the Tudors, the centre of the intellectual and artistic life of the country. It will be manifest, in the course of the present treatise, that the palace was the point of vantage from which the stage won its way, against the linked opposition of an alienated pulpit and an alienated municipality, to an ultimate entrenchment of economic independence. On the literary side the milieu of the Court had its profound effect in helping to determine the character of the Elizabethan play as a psychological hybrid, in which the romance and the erudition, dear to the bower and the library, interact at every turn with the robust popular elements of farce and melodrama. It is worth while, therefore, to attempt to recover something of the atmosphere of the Tudor Court, and to define the conditions under which the presentation of plays formed a recurring interest in its bustling many-coloured life.

In every court the personality of the sovereign is naturally a dominant factor. Who shall say with what bitter discretion learnt in the hard school of adversity, or with what burden of secret policy for the shaping of the nation's destiny in critical hours, Elizabeth mounted the steps of her throne when her summons came in 1558. Our concern, at least, is with externalities. Elizabeth, at twenty-five, was a young and attractive queen, with her full share of the sensuous Tudor blood, and of her father's early gust for colour and for amusement, for jewels and for pageantry. 'Regina tota[4] amoribus dedita est venationibusque, aucupiis, choreis et rebus ludicris insumens dies noctesque,' wrote one of her own subjects in 1563; and the dispatches of the Spanish and Venetian diplomatists strike the same note.[1] Although these things had their appeal for her to the end, she was perhaps not so utterly absorbed in them, even at the beginning, as the observers thought. Yet it was assuredly the love of excitement and spectacle, no less than the desire to win the heart of London, that led her to encourage by her presence the revived folk-festivals of the citizens and the lawyers, the morris dances and May-games by land and water, and the Midsummer watch, which she hurried from Richmond to behold incognita from the Earl of Pembroke's house at Baynard's Castle. There was much talk of marriage for her in these early years. Philip of Spain himself, incredible as it now sounds, the Kings of Denmark and Sweden, the Archdukes Charles and Ferdinand of Austria, the Duke of Nemours, the Earl of Arran, and of her own subjects, the Earl of Arundel, Lord Robert Dudley, Sir William Pickering, were some of the possible consorts whose names passed from mouth to mouth. The gaiety of Whitehall was enhanced by the outward show of courtship, the embassies and their trains, the gifts and compliments, the receptions and banquets. But it soon became apparent that, from policy or from temperament, the Queen had no serious intention of trusting herself in marriage. Gradually the troops of suitors faded away. Dudley alone was left, and with Dudley the Tudor lack of reticence, which had already brought Elizabeth into trouble as a girl, permitted familiarities wherein hostile and interested critics soon found material for a scandal. Whether her heart or her senses, now or at any time, were touched cannot be said. After all, Dudley had, as time went on, to share her favours, such as they were, with Hatton and with Oxford, with Heneage and with Raleigh and with Blount. But it is to our purpose that, when the embassies were gone, and Elizabeth became more and more involved in the web of political intrigues, and began to lose her looks and her health, the court which had started so brilliantly might well have sunk into the commonplace of middle age, had it not been for the presence of a band of high-spirited youths, bound in the interests of their careers to maintain the traditions of official gallantry, and above all to incur no small expense in leading the revels for the recreation of an imperious and critical[5] mistress. For although Elizabeth loved magnificence, she loved economy more. The repair of a ruined exchequer was one of the primary objects and triumphs of her statecraft. Her household, although stately, was by no means on her father's, or even her sister's, scale of expenditure. The splendours of her jewel-house and even of her wardrobe largely owed their origin to the strenae of successive New Years. A similar policy governed the ordering of her amusements. Her Christmas annals afford no parallels to the costly masks, with their marvels of architectural decoration, which had glorified the court of Henry and were to glorify that of James. Her masks, at least those she paid for, were dances, not pageants. The great spectacles of the reign were liturgies, undertaken by her gallants, or by the nobles whose country houses she visited in the course of her annual progresses. The most famous of all, the 'Princely Pleasures of Kenilworth' in 1575, was at the expense of Dudley, to whom the ancient royal castle had long been alienated. Gradually, no doubt, the financial stringency was relaxed. Camden notes a growing tendency to luxury about 1574; others trace the change to the coming of the Duke of Alençon in 1581.[2] Elizabeth had found the way to evoke a national spirit, and at the same time to fill her coffers, by the encouragement of piratical enterprise, and the sumptuous entertainments prepared for the welcome of Monsieur were paid for out of the spoils brought back by Drake in the Golden Hind.[3] The Alençon negotiations, whether seriously intended or not, represent Elizabeth's last dalliance with the idea of matrimony. They gave way to that historic pose of unapproachable virginity, whereby an elderly Cynthia, without complete loss of dignity, was enabled to the end to maintain a sentimental claim upon the attentions, and the purses, of her youthful servants. The strenuous years, which led up to the final triumph over the Armada in 1588, spared but little room for revels and for progresses. They left Elizabeth an old woman. But with the removal of the strain the spirit of gaiety awoke. The entertainments during the progresses of 1591 and 1592 hardly yield to those of 1575 in the cost and ingenuity of their symbolical devices. Essex, the darling of these later years, perhaps found it easier to keep the court alive with tilts and masks, than to play his required part in the sentimental comedy. The love of the dance endured with Elizabeth[6] to the verge of the grave. Her share in the Twelfth Night revels of 1599 was reported to Spain with the sarcastic comment that 'the head of the Church of England and Ireland was to be seen in her old age dancing three or four gaillards'. A year or so later, she was still dancing 'gayement et de belle disposition' at the wedding of Anne Russell, and in April 1602 she trod two gaillards with the Duke of Nevers.[4] It was near the end of her life, too, when her desire to see Falstaff in love inspired Shakespeare, to the regret of those who sentimentalize over Falstaff, with the racy English farce of The Merry Wives of Windsor. During these last years of all, there was a touch of fever in her restless activity. She needed much entertainment both within doors and without in the course of 1600, and her wearied statesmen resented the arduousness of the progress upon which she resolved on the verge of sixty-seven. She went a-Maying at Highgate in 1601 and at Lewisham in 1602. During the next winter her councillors provided a special series of festivities, with the object of inducing her to spend Christmas in London, instead of at Richmond; and we learn that the Court 'flourisht more then ordinarie' with plays, only a month before the indomitable lady took to her bed, and died of no very clearly ascertained disease, but in 'a settled and unremoveable melancholy'.

When James came to London he adopted the traditional splendours of the English Court, in place of the simpler style of living to which he had been accustomed in Edinburgh. His scale of expenditure, indeed, was from the beginning far in excess of Elizabeth's, and landed him before long in considerable embarrassment of the purse. For this there were various reasons: the necessity of keeping up supplementary establishments for a queen consort and an heir apparent, the personal inclination of Anne of Denmark for ostentatious prodigality, the crowd of hungry Scots demanding provision for their needs; above all, no doubt, the absence of any statesmanlike instinct for financial control. There is plenty of evidence that the dignity and sobriety which, on the whole, had characterized Elizabeth's Court soon vanished under the lax rule of her successors. But extravagance and wantonness, although deplorable in themselves, are not necessarily unfriendly to the arts. The transference of the leading companies of players to the direct service of the royal households made it clear that the drama would occupy no less[7] important a place in the new order of things than it had done in the old. And in fact the yearly tale of performances at court soon doubled and trebled that which had sufficed for the Christmas 'solace' of Elizabeth. Doubtless the King had some personal taste for the drama, though perhaps less than other members of his family.[5] He had long entertained the English actor, Laurence Fletcher, into his service and shown him high favour, and Jonson is our authority for the statement that Shakespeare's plays did 'take', not only 'Eliza' but 'our James'. But his great preoccupation was the hunt, to which he hurried on every opportunity, regardless of the discontent of London and even of the claims of business. Anne, on the other hand, brought up in a court which had been one of the first to come under the influence of the English players abroad, and wedded into a court from which the Kirk had never succeeded in expelling the French habits of amusement domiciled by Mary Queen of Scots, found her chief pleasure in the spectacular arts; and to her influence is mainly due that great development of the Jacobean mask, which gave such scope to the exercise of courtly pens, and to the remarkable decorative genius of Inigo Jones.[6] Anne's interest in all forms of the drama, which even led her to the innovation of visiting a theatre, was fully shared by the royal children, and combined in Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, with a passion for the knightly exercise of the tilt to prolong into the seventeenth century the Renaissance tradition of spectacular feats of arms. The death of this beloved prince, to whom the thoughts of England, disillusioned of his father, turned as the hope of the future, fell near the end of our period. The splendour of the Court festivities reached a climax with the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, and faded even before the death of Anne herself in 1619. It had its revival under Henrietta Maria.

The Court was a movable institution, constituted by the actual presence of the sovereign. Abundant choice both of 'standing houses' or 'houses of abode' and of country[8] manors was available.[7] The most important palaces, under Elizabeth, were five in number, Whitehall, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, and Windsor. All of these stood upon the river, and all except Windsor and in part Greenwich dated structurally from the reign of Henry VII or that of Henry VIII. The ancient palace of Westminster, with its royal chapel of St. Stephen and its great hall built by William Rufus and rebuilt by Richard II, served for coronations and for the housing of Parliament and the courts of justice. But it was no longer used as a royal residence, and the name of one of its principal chambers, the 'white hall', had been transferred to the neighbouring structure of York Place, originally begun by Wolsey, and surrendered to Henry VIII, a fruitless sacrifice, at the moment of the great Cardinal's downfall in 1530.[8] This was the metropolitan palace. It was an extensive and irregular pile, covering many acres. Through its centre ran the highway from London to Westminster, piercing two arched gateways, of which the northern one was the work of Holbein. The hall and chapel, with the royal lodgings, galleries, and privy garden, stood on the east, and were connected with the river by a flight of privy stairs. On the west, reached by galleries over the gateways, were many additional lodgings, grouped round a cockpit, a tennis-court, and a tilt-yard. At the back of these lay St. James's Park.[9] Richmond and Hampton Court, a few miles up the river, and Greenwich, a few miles down, were all accessible by river as well as by road, and the royal barge lay ready in its bargehouse opposite Whitehall, off Paris Garden on the Surrey side. Both for Court and city the Thames was a frequented water-way. Richmond had been[9] built by Henry VII to replace the older palace of Sheen, destroyed by fire in 1497.[10] Hampton Court, also upon the site of an earlier royal manor-house, was like Whitehall a monument of the architectural taste of Wolsey, and like Whitehall became part of the spoil of Henry VIII, by whom it was completed.[11] Greenwich owed its origin to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who gave it the name of 'Placentia' or 'Pleasaunce'. It had been enlarged by Henry VII and was the birthplace and the favourite habitation of Henry VIII.[12] Windsor, on the other hand, which stood in a wide hunting domain some score or more of miles up the river, was an ancient fortress of the English kings. William the Conqueror had built it; William of Wykeham had added to it for Edward III, who established the college of St. George within its walls upon an older foundation of Henry I, and made it the habitation of his chivalric Order of the Garter. Elizabeth modified the mediaeval aspect of the castle, by adding a library and a garden terrace.[13]

Some older royal residences in London had long been converted to other purposes. The Tower served as a wardrobe or storehouse and a prison, but was only occupied by the sovereign on the eve of a coronation.[14] The Wardrobe on St. Andrew's Hill was assigned to the Master of the Wardrobe as an office and personal lodging.[15] The Savoy held a hospital, together with various sets of lodgings.[16] Baynard's Castle had been granted to the Herberts, nominally as keepers, in 1546.[17]

[10]

Crosby Hall was the abode of wealthy merchants.[18] Somerset House, the unfinished palace of the Protector on the Strand, had been made over to Elizabeth as princess by Edward VI in 1552. She sometimes occupied it, in order to be near the city, but more usually kept it available for foreign visitors or favoured courtiers.[19] For the latter purpose it was supplemented by Durham House, farther westwards on the Strand, which Henry VIII had acquired by exchange from the see of Durham in 1536.[20] Most of the ecclesiastical buildings, which had reverted to the Crown on the dissolution of the religious orders, such as the Blackfriars, the Whitefriars, and the Charterhouse, had been alienated.[21] Elizabeth [11]retained the priory of St. John in Clerkenwell, and placed there some of the minor Household offices, including that of the Revels.[22] Somewhat retired from the press of city life lay St. James in the Fields, built on the site of an old leper hospital by Henry VIII in 1532. It ranked almost as a country house. A park, enclosed in 1537 and adorned with the artificial water known as Rosamund's Pool, separated it from Whitehall, and on the other side of it stretched the enclosures of Hyde and Marylebone Parks.[23] There were many country houses still farther afield. Oatlands, on the Surrey border of Windsor Forest, served for hunting.[24] To this, and to Nonsuch in Surrey, the Queen often made resort.[25] Eltham, in Kent, was another hunting ground, convenient of access from Greenwich. Visits were paid from time to time to Havering Bower in Essex, Enfield in Middlesex, Hatfield, where Elizabeth had lived as a princess, in Hertfordshire, the monastic spoil of Reading Abbey in Berkshire, Woodstock in Oxfordshire, and the ancient capital of Winchester in Hampshire.[26] But for the most part these, and yet other royal castles and manors in more distant counties, slept peacefully under the privileged sway of their constables and keepers.[27] There were some changes at the succession of [12]James. Somerset House was assigned to Queen Anne, and a not very successful attempt was made to re-name it Queen's Court. This appellation was revived when the creation of an Earl of Somerset in 1613 seemed suggestive of confusion, and then abandoned in favour of Denmark House.[28] Nonsuch, Havering, and Hatfield, with many other manors, were also assigned to Anne as part of her dowry. Hatfield was exchanged in 1607 with Lord Salisbury for Theobalds, to which James rather than Anne appears to have taken a fancy, and the transfer gave occasion for a characteristic entertainment by Ben Jonson. Oatlands was given to Anne in 1611 and Greenwich in 1613.[29] At the beginning of the reign Oatlands had been the royal nursery for Henry and Elizabeth, and it continued to be Henry's country home for some years.[30] Elizabeth, however, was soon placed in the charge of Lord Harington, first at Exton in Rutlandshire and then at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire. When she came to Court in 1608, a house was found for her at Kew. Both she and Henry sometimes resided at Hampton Court and at Whitehall,[13] where they were lodged in that part of the palace known as the Cockpit, on the border of St. James's Park.[31] But St. James's Palace itself was reserved for the ultimate use of Henry, and here he set up his establishment as Prince of Wales in 1610 and died in 1612. Richmond and Woodstock were given him for country houses, and at his death he was also buying up interests in Sheen House and Kenilworth.[32] For Charles Holdenby or Holmby House in Northamptonshire was bought in 1605, and on his brother's death he succeeded to St. James's.[33] The King was thus left with Whitehall, Hampton Court, and Windsor as his principal palaces. Naturally those of his wife and son remained available for occasional visits, and the hunting facilities of Theobalds and Woodstock were an agreeable addition to those of Hampton Court and Windsor themselves.[34] But they did not suffice for James, who set about providing himself with hunting quarters in various localities. The most important of these was Royston Priory, on the borders of Cambridgeshire and Herts., which he bought after a year's trial in 1604 and enlarged into a house of some pretensions.[35] Others were at Newmarket, Thetford, Hinchinbrook, Ware, and Woking, while stables were kept up at St. Albans and Reading.[36] Theobalds, Royston, and Newmarket were all reached by a private road, maintained, like the King's Road to Hampton Court and another to Greenwich, by James himself.[37]

The arrangement of the principal rooms of a Tudor palace can be well studied on the plan of Hampton Court.[38] There is a great Hall, and at the back of it the entrance to a Great Chamber. At Hampton Court and Richmond this appears to have served also as a Guard or Watching Chamber, but[14] at Whitehall the Guard Chamber and the Great Chamber were distinct.[39] Out of the Great Chamber opens the Presence Chamber, and out of this again the Privy Chamber, which gives admittance to the private apartments of the sovereign. These included one or more Parlours or Withdrawing Chambers, as well as the Bed Chamber.[40] From the opposite end of the Great Chamber runs a gallery, which passes round two sides of a court and leads to the royal Closet, overlooking and forming part of the Chapel. Into this gallery also opens the Council Chamber. The Presence Chamber and the Privy Chamber were the essential elements of the scheme, and had to be contrived, no matter how humbly the Court was lodged.[41] The Presence Chamber seems to have been open to any one who was entitled to appear at Court at all. Access to the Privy Chamber, on the other hand, where Elizabeth dined and supped and sat with her ladies, was jealously reserved for privy councillors and other favoured persons.[42] At Whitehall there were also a Privy Gallery and a Privy Garden, which counted as parts of the Privy Chamber.[43] Occasionally ambassadors or distinguished foreign visitors might have audience there, or even in a Withdrawing Chamber.[44] But ordinarily presentations were made in the Presence Chamber, and here the crowd of courtiers waited on Sundays for the ceremony of the Queen's going to chapel. Paul Hentzner has described the scene as he saw it at Greenwich in 1598.[45]

[15]

In the Presence Chamber, too, Hentzner saw the royal table laid and the ceremony of tasting performed, before the royal dishes were carried to a more private apartment. An ancient custom by which the sovereign occasionally dined in state in the Presence Chamber, and was served by great nobles of the realm upon the knee, from cupboards of massy plate, had fallen into disuse, but was revived by James.[46] In the Hall, or if more convenient in the Great Chamber, plays were given.[47] For this purpose the dimensions, in the larger palaces, were fully adequate. The hall of Hampton Court is 115 ft. × 40 ft., that of Windsor 108 ft. × 33 ft., that of Eltham, locally known as King John's Barn, 100 ft. × 36 ft. These alone survive, but the hall of Richmond is known to have been 100 ft. × 40 ft., and that of Whitehall 100 ft. × 45 ft.[48] But for an exceptional entertainment, such as a great banquet or mask, more space was desirable, and temporary structures, known as banqueting-houses, were erected as required. The device had already been employed by Henry VIII. A banqueting-house had been one of the splendours at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, and two others, one of which was called the 'long house', or 'disguising house', were decorated by Holbein for the reception of a French embassy at Greenwich in 1527.[49] Edward VI also had had a banqueting-house in Hyde Park for the reception of another French embassy in 1551.[50] In the first year of Elizabeth's reign she used four banqueting-houses, one for the French ambassadors at Westminster in May, two others at Greenwich and Cobham Hall in July,[51] and a fourth at Horsley in August. A later one, prepared at Whitehall in June 1572 for the reception of the Duke of Montmorency, required 116 workmen to decorate it at a cost of £224. It[16] was hung with birch and ivy, and garnished with bushels of roses and honeysuckles from the royal gardens.[52] Finally, one even more elaborate was erected, also at Whitehall, for the coming of Alençon's ambassadors in 1581.[53] This, although only constructed of fir and deal, was strong enough to stand until 1606. James then had it pulled down and replaced by a new one of brick and stone, which was ready in time for the Christmas festivities of 1607.[54] This in its turn stood [17]until 12 January 1619, when it was destroyed by fire, and in its place arose the stately edifice of Inigo Jones, which still glorifies Whitehall.[55] A supplementary room of more temporary character was put up for the Princess Elizabeth's wedding in 1613.[56]

The mediaeval court had been largely an ambulatory one. The principal feasts, at which the King wore his crown, were generally kept in one of the great cities—Westminster, Winchester, Gloucester; and for the rest of the year the household passed by short 'removes' from castle to castle and manor to manor throughout the realm. For this there were economic as well as political reasons. Many mouths had to be fed, and it was easier and less onerous upon the country to devour one local storehouse after another, than to organize an effective transport from the various sources of supply to a single capital. But with the new political stability and the enhanced royal wealth, which followed the coming of the Tudors, a more settled order of things prevailed. Henceforward the greater part of the year was spent at one or other of the 'standing houses' within reach of the administrative head-quarters on the Thames, and the wanderings were confined to a 'progress' of one or two summer months, during which the sovereign took the air, and hunted, and made his presence familiar to his outlying subjects. Under Elizabeth the year may be said to have begun in the middle of November, when she returned to London, generally by road from one of the Surrey palaces through Chelsea. The event, at any rate during the later years of the reign, almost took rank as a ceremony of state. The Queen came by night, with the Master of the Horse leading her palfrey by the bridle and a great noble carrying the sword. Ambassadors were invited to be present, and the Lord Mayor and citizens were called[18] upon to don their rich gowns and chains and give a torchlight welcome.[57] The date was no doubt determined, partly by the approach of winter, partly by that of Accession Day or, as it was often but incorrectly called, Coronation Day, on 17 November. This anniversary, from 1570 onwards, was kept with a solemn celebration, which appears to have originated spontaneously in or near Oxford, to have been adopted throughout the country, to have been revived during the next reign as an indication of popular discontent with James, and to have been still traceable in the form of a holiday at the Exchequer and at the schools of Westminster and Merchant Taylors in 1827.[58] It was on this day that the tilt-yard of Westminster blazed with the pageantry and rang with the spears of the manhood of England, gathered under the leadership of Sir Henry Lee to do honour to the virgin Queen. The Earl of Essex gave the final touch of flattery to the occasion in 1592 by appearing in his collar of SS, 'a thing unwonted', except on days of the most solemn ceremony.[59] In 1588, after the Armada, Elizabeth ordered a renewal of the tilting upon 19 November, which happened[19] to be St. Elizabeth's day, but this second triumph seems to have been only occasional.[60]

Christmas was ordinarily kept at Whitehall; the occasional substitution of Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court, or even Windsor is sometimes to be explained by the prevalence of the plague in London, sometimes perhaps by nothing more than a royal whim. But during the years of strain which preceded the Armada Elizabeth appears to have shunned Whitehall as much as possible, not merely at Christmas but at all times, probably from a sense that her personal security could be better provided for in some more compact and less accessible abode.[61] Whether in Whitehall or elsewhere, the twelve days of Christmas, from the Nativity to the Epiphany, were a season of high revels. I do not find that Elizabeth, like her father and brother, ever appointed a Lord of Misrule, although there is some trace of an election of a King of the Bean on the last and greatest day of all, Twelfth Night.[62] But Twelfth Night itself, with St. Stephen's, St. John's, Innocents', and New Year's Day, were regularly appointed for plays and masks, which often overflowed on to other nights during the period. Sometimes, too, there was another tilt, or a barriers in the hall or banqueting-room. And on New Year's Day it was etiquette for the lords and ladies at Court and many of the officers of the household to present the Queen with the New Year gifts or strenae which had been immemorial in European courts since the days of the Roman Empire, while she in turn rewarded the donors with gilt plate from the royal jewel house and distributed largess amongst her personal attendants and other customary recipients.[63]

[20]

The revels were renewed for Candlemas (2 Feb.) and for Shrovetide, either at the Christmas head-quarters or at some other palace to which the Court had meanwhile removed. Some part of the early spring was nearly always spent away from Westminster, and during her later years Elizabeth not infrequently left part of the household behind her and made a short 'by progress' to the house of Lord Burghley at Theobalds or that of Sir Thomas Gresham at Osterley or some other favoured courtier. The rest of the spring and summer was divided between Westminster and the river palaces, to and from which the Queen went by land or water, dining on the way, often at Chelsea or at the house of one John Lacy at Putney, and breaking the long journey from Greenwich to Richmond or Hampton Court by a night's rest, generally at the archiepiscopal abode of Lambeth. It was customary to ring the church bells as she entered or left a parish, and the entries of payments to ringers in the accounts of churchwardens serve as a convenient clue to her comings and goings. Easter, with the distribution of alms and washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, and Whitsuntide were kept as ecclesiastical, rather than secular, feasts. On 23 April, St. George's Day, the Queen went in procession about the Court with the Knights of the Garter and the Chapel in their copes. This was the occasion for the choosing of new knights, but their subsequent installation at a Garter feast took place without the Queen at Windsor, whither they rode in great and costly splendour.[64] During the summer there might be another tilt, and the Queen is recorded to have kept 'Mayings' on 1 May and to have taken part from time to time in other survivals of the ancient folk festivals.[65] About July she started for her 'progress', which might occupy from one to two months, according to her fancy, or if there was to be no regular progress, departed for one of the more sequestered houses, Windsor or Reading, Oatlands or Nonsuch, where she delighted to spend the autumn. During this period fell her birthday, on 7 September.[66]

[21]

The Jacobean calendar underwent certain modifications, largely determined by the King's sporting instincts. James kept his Court for the most part at Whitehall, Hampton Court, and Windsor. After the winter of 1603, when plague held him at Hampton Court, his Christmasses and Shrovetides were invariably at Whitehall, and hither he always proceeded at the end of October, in time for the celebration of All Saints' Day on 1 November.[67] On 5 November was kept, after 1605, the anniversary of Gunpowder Plot, and to this day, in course of time, the winter bonfires of folk custom transferred themselves.[68] The Twelve Nights, with Candlemas and Shrovetide, remained the chief seasons for plays and masks, but the plays were greatly increased in number. One was often given on All Saints' Day (1 Nov.) to usher in the winter, and others were called for at intervals during the winter months. James was also regularly at Whitehall on his Accession Day, 24 March, which, like his predecessor, he honoured with a tilt.[69] He maintained the tradition of the progress, generally choosing the direction of such hunting grounds as Sherwood, Wychwood, the New Forest, or Salisbury Plain; and during the course of his progress, on 5 August, he celebrated another anniversary, that of his delivery from the Gowry conspiracy in 1600. On this day ambassadors were expected to pursue him from London and offer their congratulations.[70] The progress generally ended at Havering early in September.[71] Thereafter the household was established at Windsor or Hampton Court until winter began again. But James's personal life was a far less settled one than that of Elizabeth. He disliked London, and at all times of the year, and wherever the Court might be, he was constantly leaving the greater part of it behind, referring the transaction of business to the Privy Council, and betaking himself with the Master of the Horse[22] and Sir Thomas Lake, a clerk of the signet who acted as his private secretary, to Theobalds or Royston, or some other hunting box, at which his favourite pursuit might be conveniently enjoyed. From thence he would hurry back, often for a day or two only, when some office of state or Court ceremony urgently demanded his attendance. There is abundant evidence that this abnormal passion for the chase had much to do with the early unpopularity of James. It led to neglect of business, the grave inconvenience of ministers, excessive purveyance, and the trampling of crops; and the popular discontent soon found vent in libels on the stage and elsewhere. But James said that he could not lead a sedentary life and must study his health above all things.[72]

During both reigns the normal tenor of Court life was naturally disturbed from time to time by some exceptional event. Parliaments required to be opened in state, although neither Sovereign was fond of summoning Parliaments.[73] The thanksgiving for the Armada on 24 November 1588 was a notable day of triumph for Elizabeth. James did not win battles, but he created his son Prince of Wales in 1610 and married his daughter in 1613 with considerable pomp. In 1607, being in need of a loan, he fluttered city life by dining with the Lord Mayor on 12 June and the Merchant Taylors on 16 July.[74] The arrival of extraordinary ambassadors or other foreign visitors of importance necessitated frequent provision for their entertainment. The constant relations which Elizabeth maintained with France led to a number of special missions, for one purpose or another, diplomatic or complimentary, throughout the reign. The most interesting of these, from the point of view of an annalist of Court revels, were concerned with the negotiations, already referred to, for a marriage with the Duke of Alençon, afterwards Duke of Anjou and 'Monsieur' of France, the brother of Henri III. These began in 1578 and came to a head in 1581, when a visit by Francis de Bourbon, Dauphin de Montpensier, and other commissioners in the spring was followed by another by Anjou himself in November, which lasted over Christmas to the following February. Both occasions were honoured with sumptuous tilts and other entertainments. Before and[23] after Monsieur came in 1572 Francis Duke of Montmorency and Marshal of France, in 1601 Marshal Biron, and in 1602 the Duke of Nevers. Biron appears to have been a substitute for his master, Henri IV, whom Elizabeth would have welcomed, but who apparently could not bring himself to face the perils of the Channel crossing. Chapman puts the comment in the Queen's mouth:

Of visitors from other lands than France may be noted Cecilia, Margravine of Baden and sister of the King of Sweden, in 1565, Feother Pissenopscoia, an ambassador in search of a bride for Ivan I, Tsar of Muscovy, in 1583, and Ludovic Verreyken, ambassador from the archiducal court of Flanders in 1600. Visits were expected from Mary of Scots in 1562 and from James in 1590, but in fact Mary never came until she was a fugitive or James until he was King.[76] Elizabeth, however, on her side, sent complimentary embassies for the intended wedding of James in 1589, and the baptism of his son Henry in 1594. The most important visitor to James himself was the Queen's brother, Christian, King of Denmark, who came twice. His elaborate state visit in July and August 1606 left several unpleasant memories behind it. The Kings fell out over James's indifference to Christian's sister. Hunting bored Christian and James disliked being outshone by his brother-in-law in running at the ring. Nor did the subjects more readily mix, for the Danes thought the English haughty, and the English thought the Danes gross; and in particular the heavy drinking habits of the north, although by no means uncongenial to James personally, led to scenes which were scandalous in the eyes[24] of all who remembered the austerer fashions of Elizabeth.[77] It was a general relief when Christian decided to abridge the period originally set down for his stay. He came again, briefly and informally, in 1614. Other Jacobean visitors were the Duke of Holstein, another brother of the Queen, in 1604, the Prince de Joinville in 1607, the Prince of Brunswick, a nephew of the Queen, in 1610, the Duc de Bouillon in 1612, and the Elector Palatine, for his wedding with the Princess Elizabeth, in the same year. James received congratulations on his accession from ambassadors extraordinary sent by the Emperor and the Kings of France and Spain, as well as from other representatives of minor powers. Subsequently Juan de Velasco, Constable of Castile, came as ambassador extraordinary from Spain, with other Spanish and Flemish commissioners, for the signing of a treaty of peace in 1604, and had the honour of being waited upon by Shakespeare as groom of the chamber.[78]

In addition to extraordinary ambassadors there were generally also permanent or 'lieger' ambassadors in residence. These varied in number with the shifting diplomacies of the time. France was the foreign country most constantly represented at Elizabeth's Court.[79] There was generally also a Scottish ambassador. Diplomatic relations with Spain were broken off in 1584;[80] and there were no Italian ambassadors,[25] in spite of overtures to Venice, until the last few months of the reign, when the Doge and Senate sent over the Secretary Scaramelli.[81] The accession of James and the peace with Spain brought about a considerable change in international relations, and henceforward there were regularly 'lieger' ambassadors from France, Spain, Venice, and Flanders, as well as ambassadors or agents from the Dutch states, Savoy and Florence. For the entertainment of these an occasional dinner or supper with the King sufficed, together with invitations to such ceremonies of state, revels, and tilts as were held in ordinary course. But the revels were perturbed and an infinity of trouble given to the officials who organized them by the persistent jealousies and disputes for precedence which prevailed amongst the diplomatic representatives themselves. The records of these intrigues, which especially centred round the great Court masks, and often determined the dates on which they were held, occupy much space in the dispatches sent home to Paris and to Venice, and furnished Sir John Finet in 1656 with material for the curious pages of his Philoxenis. The rival claims of the 'Catholic' King of France and the 'most Christian' King of Spain to be regarded as the first Sovereign in Christendom had already caused[26] trouble as far back as 1564.[82] The question had naturally been in abeyance during the rupture with Spain. Under James it broke out again, and each ambassador had the strictest order from his government not to abate a jot or tittle of his full claims to precedence. James, being rex pacificus, had no desire to commit himself to a decision on so knotty a point, and did his best to evade it, by not inviting both ambassadors to the same festivity. But even then one festivity differed from another in glory, and the attempt to keep an even balance gave rise to endless tracasseries. During the earlier years it seems clear that a variety of causes, amongst which must be counted his own superior astuteness, a liberal distribution of bribes, the Spanish proclivities of Anne, and probably also the deliberate trend of James's foreign policy, enabled Juan de Taxis to snatch more than one advantage from his French rivals. He secured an invitation to the Queen's mask both in 1604 and 1605. This double rebuff led to a change in the French embassy, and a similar success of De Taxis in 1608 so infuriated Henri IV that he threatened to withdraw his ambassador altogether, until James judged it discreet to call his attention to the still unpaid financial obligations which he had incurred to the English Crown in the previous reign. After the death of Henri in 1610 and the consequent rapprochement between France and Spain, the balance of political forces shifted, and, for a time at least, the English Court laid itself out to gratify rather than humiliate the French. Minor bones of precedence were worried between Venice and Flanders, and between Florence and Savoy, while the Spanish ambassador took offence if he was asked to appear in public with the representative of the revolted Spanish provinces of the Netherlands.[83]

[27]

II
THE ROYAL HOUSEHOLD

THE ordering of court life and ceremonial was in the hands of a group of departments which made up the somewhat complicated establishment of the royal Household. But the Household, at a time when the personal capacity of the Crown was as yet imperfectly differentiated from its national capacity, was not merely a domestic organization; it was still to a large extent an instrument of central executive government. It must in fact be regarded as the direct descendant of the eleventh-century curia regis, through which all the important functions, deliberative, judicial, financial, and administrative, had been carried out. The curia had consisted partly of the territorial magnates, earls, and barons, who had been, or whose fathers had been, the King's comitatus in battle; partly of knights still in attendance upon the King's person, and hoping some day, in reward for their services, to become territorial magnates in turn; partly, and to an increasing extent as government became more complicated and difficult, of clerks whose trained skill with the pen and with figures made them more practically useful than the lay knights in all those branches of affairs which entailed book-keeping and correspondence. All the members of the curia, in smaller or greater numbers, according to the magnitude of the business to be transacted and the willingness of the lords to leave their estates, sat with the King from time to time, and advised him as his consilium; but except on great occasions of state it was left to the knights to wait at his table and order his servants about, and to the clerks to write and send his letters, and to act as his assessors or his deputies in the exercise of justice or the collection and spending of his revenue. In course of time some of the functions of the original curia had become specialized in distinct departments, which acquired a permanent habi[31]tation at Westminster, ceased to follow the King's wanderings, and were no longer regarded as part of the personal Household. Thus the curia as a judicial body became the Courts of Law; the curia as a financial body became the Exchequer; while at a somewhat later date the Chancery undertook the double function of issuing royal grants and other formal correspondence of the Crown, and of supplementing the Courts of Law by exercising an equitable jurisdiction in cases which ordinary law was inadequate to cover. To the central curia or Household, still composed of lay and clerical officers lodged in the King's palace and eating in his hall, wherever that might happen to be, three things were left. It ministered to the material well-being and splendour of the Sovereign himself; it exercised under his personal direction such functions of administration, for example the control of foreign policy and war, as had not passed to the specialized departments; and, perhaps most important of all, it remained potentially able to resume at his will the exercise of functions precisely analogous to those which had so passed. This paradox of the duplicate exercise of royal functions, through the specialized departments and through the Household, lies at the bottom of an understanding of mediaeval government.

The differentiation of the Courts of Law, the Exchequer, and the Chancery from the Household was complete by the thirteenth century; but the same tendency towards the budding off of quasi-independent departments of state from the administrative nucleus continued to manifest itself in a minor degree up to and even, for all their centralizing instinct, within the period of the Tudors. Moreover, as the scale of the Household became larger and its individual ministers began to require assistance, there grew up a corresponding tendency towards the formation of separate offices within the nucleus itself. The staffing of these offices with servants of various grades, their responsibilities and interrelations, and the control of them through the chief officers of the Household, were determined by royal ordinances, which go into minute detail, and reveal a complex organization, based upon long-standing tradition, and at the same time flexible in its capacity of adaptation to shifting circumstances. The main structure of the Household, as we find it under Elizabeth, appears to have been already fixed in the time of Edward IV and even in that of Edward II, although minor changes had been introduced, largely through Tudor imitation of the French hôtel du roi, just as there had been minor changes under Richard II and his Lancastrian successors,[32] some of which are noted to our advantage by a clerk of literary tastes, who about 1478 bethought him to compile in the so-called Liber Niger a systematic account or rationale of the establishment in which doubtless he played a part. And the beginnings of the same structure can be traced back farther still, through ordinances of Edward I in 1279 to the Constitutio Domus Regis as it stood at the end of Henry I's reign in 1135, and even perhaps, so far as the principal officers are concerned, to the Normanized Anglo-Saxon Court of pre-Conquest days. And after Elizabeth's reign the structure lasted, again with modifications of detail, for nearly two centuries more, until it was somewhat severely overhauled, in a moment of reforming zeal, by what is known as Burke's Act of 1782.[84] This conservatism of structure may perhaps justify us in finding an explanation of the tripartite character which the organization of the Household at every stage displays, as arising naturally out of the local arrangement of a primitive royal habitation. The palace stood in a court-yard, and it consisted essentially of a hall where the King feasted and took counsel with his comitatus, and of a chamber where he retired to sleep and to be private, and where he probably kept his treasure-chest. The duties of his personal servants fell either in the court-yard or in the hall or in the chamber. In the court-yard the constabularii drilled the royal body-guard and the marescalli looked after the horses; in the hall the dapiferi and the pincernae ministered food and drink; in the chamber the camerarii or cubicularii, aided as time went on by the clerici, watched the King's treasure and his bed, and stood ready to receive and transmit his personal mandates. Originally, it would seem, there were several officers of each class. Afterwards they were reduced to one, or one was chosen as magister over the rest; whatever the process, a single chief officer, with a group of subordinates beneath him, emerges as representative of each of the three departments. Perhaps the change was assisted by the demand of the barons, jealous of the rise in their absence of new men at Court, to have Household posts conferred upon them as part of their hereditaments. By the middle of the twelfth century there were already a hereditary Great Chamberlain, a High Steward, a High Constable, a Chief Butler, and an Earl Marshal.[85] But, [33]obviously, if the King was in the habit of appointing two chamberlains or two stewards, he could make one of each pair hereditary, and still have another at his own appointment. And he could call on the hereditary officer to officiate on state occasions and the appointed officer to officiate in daily life. The hereditary man would have the greater dignity and the appointed man the greater power. This, rather than deputation by the hereditary officers, seems to be the explanation of the existence of a Chamberlain of the Household side by side with the Lord Great Chamberlain and of a Steward of the Household side by side with the Lord High Steward. It is really only another example of the duplication of functions, through officers of state on the one hand, and Household officers on the other, to which attention has already been called; with the added feature that in this case the officers of state seem to have had sinecures from the beginning.

The tripartite organization is traceable clearly enough in the Household of Elizabeth, as in that of her predecessors. There was, of course, a close co-operation at many points between the different departments; and, indeed, the simplicity of the original scheme had inevitably been interfered with, as the sovereigns began more and more to retire from their hall and to subdivide their chamber in order to adapt it to the complicated needs of an increasingly luxurious private life. The department of the court-yard, moreover, would appear, long before Elizabeth's time, to have shed many of what must be supposed to have been its original functions. The hereditary Lord High Constable had left no constabularius behind him at court, and although the Earl Marshal, also hereditary, continued to exercise certain functions, such as an oversight over the heralds, he was in no sense the head of a Household department. The Knight Marshal, who exercised a jurisdiction over breaches of peace within the verge (virgata) of twelve leagues round the court, was nominally at least his deputy, but the only other marshals[34] in the Household were officers of the Hall. Similarly the oversight of the guard seems to have passed to the Chamberlain. Nor had the Marshal any longer the responsibility for the stable which the etymology of his name suggests.[86] The Stable was, indeed, still a distinct department, but its head was the Master of the Horse, who, although he ranked as one of the three chief officers of the Household, was of comparatively recent origin.[87]

By a somewhat troublesome variation in the use of terms, the Lord Steward's department is sometimes called the 'Household' in a very narrow sense, which excludes the Chamber and the Stable. The author of the Liber Niger distinguishes it as the domus providentiae from the Chamber as the domus magnificentiae.[88] Roughly speaking, it concerned itself with the material necessities, the food and drink, the lighting and the fuel, of the Sovereign and his court, while all else that ministered to his personal life and the dignity of his state, his lodging and his apparel, his entertainments, his study and his recreations, fell within the sphere of the Chamber. Its original nucleus was still represented under Elizabeth by the officers of the Hall, Marshals, Sewers, and Surveyors; but the Hall had shrunk in importance since the Sovereign had ceased to dine in it, and some of these posts had long been duplicated within the Chamber itself, and even there were tending to become honorific rather than effective.[89] The real functions of the department were now [35] exercised in the subsidiary offices of provision, which had grown up round the Hall. Of these there were twenty, each under a Serjeant or other head with an appropriate staff of clerks, yeomen, grooms, pages, and children. They were the Kitchen, the Bake-house, the Pantry, the Cellar, the Buttery, the Pitcher-house, the Spicery, the Chandlery, the Wafery, the Confectionery, the Ewery, the Laundry, the Larder, the Boiling-house, the Accatry, the Poultry, the Scalding-house, the Pastry, the Scullery, and the Woodyard. The department also included the Almonry under a Lord High Almoner, who was an ecclesiastic, and the Porters. Administrative control was exercised by the Board of Green Cloth, consisting of the Treasurer and Comptroller of the Household, and the Cofferer or household cashier.[90] These had the assistance of a staff of clerks and clerk comptrollers, known as the Counting House. Above all was the chief officer of the department, the Lord Steward of the Household. The Steward, whose name seems to be an exact equivalent for both the Latin terms dapifer and Senescallus, is not likely to have had in the beginning any priority over the camerarius; but historical reasons had brought him to the forefront towards the end of the thirteenth century, and thereafter he continued to rank as first officer of the Household. Henry VIII, following a French analogy, had renamed him Grand Master of the Household, but the new term had not permanently succeeded in establishing itself. Under Elizabeth the post was sometimes left vacant. But it was always filled during the session of a Parliament, for it was the ancient custom for the lords of Parliament to dine at the Lord Steward's table in the court.[91] In the absence [36] of a Lord Steward, the department was managed, under some general supervision from the Lord Chamberlain, who then became first officer, by the Treasurer and Comptroller, who were important personages with seats on the Privy Council. The original dapiferi had had as colleagues the pincernae, but the Chief Butlership was now an hereditary sinecure, and the duties were divided between the subordinate office of the Cellar and the Cupbearer, who was an officer of the Chamber.

We come now to the Lord Chamberlain, incomparably the most important figure at court in all matters concerned with entertainments. The camerarii and cubicularii are discernible before the Conquest, and the corresponding Anglo-Saxon terms appear to be burþegn, bedþegn, and hræglþegn. Perhaps the hrægl or wardrobe was already becoming separated from the bur or bed-chamber.[92] In the days of William Rufus one Herbert was regis cubicularius et thesaurarius.[93] This was before the Exchequer under its Lord High Treasurer had branched off as a separate department of state, but the post of Chamberlain of the Exchequer continued for many centuries to testify to the original location of the treasure chest in the camera. About 1135 there was a magister camerarius, the equal in salary and allowances of the cancellarius, the dapiferi, the magister pincerna, the thesaurarius, and the constabularii. There were also other camerarii of lower degrees taking turns of duty, and a special camerarius candelae, ranking lower still.[94] Presumably the magister camerarius became the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain, whose coronation services, which are connected with the charge of the King's bed-chamber, the handing of a basin and towel at the banquet, and the preparation of the royal oblations, afford a sufficient indication of the duties of the court office.[95] And on the retirement of the hereditary officer from court, it seems probable that one of the other camerarii advanced to the position of acting magister. At any rate, when the treatise known as Fleta was compiled about 1290, there was a single camerarius with a sub-minister and other officers beneath him. Perhaps he was by this time barely the equal of the senescallus, to whom he sat as assessor in the court de placitis[37] Aulae Regis, although he had also an independent jurisdiction over his own officers and those of the Wardrobe, who were exempt from the Steward's court.[96] On the other hand he was, as Robert of Westminster calls him, 'custos capitis regis', and the author of Fleta tells us in another connexion that 'in hospitio pro regula habetur, quod quanto propinquior sit quis Regi, tanto dignior'.[97] On the whole it seems probable that, whatever his traditional status may have been, the practical tendency of the extensive political use made by Edward I of the Steward and the clerical officers of the Wardrobe was to throw the Chamberlain into the background.[98] We also learn from Fleta that it was the business of the Chamberlain to look after the King's bed and chamber, and that as fees he had his keep in court, fines from ecclesiastic and lay homagers, the disused plenishings of the camera, and a share of all gifts and offerings of food made to the King.[99]

[38]

After the break-up of the power of the Wardrobe in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, the propinquity of the Chamberlain to the King gave him an increasing political importance, and attempts were made by the barons to secure his appointment in Parliament. Both in that assembly and in the Privy Council he frequently served as the royal mouthpiece, and he became the regular channel through which petitions for the exercise of the royal prerogative of pardon reached the King.[100] But he continued to discharge his domestic responsibilities, which are detailed both in the Liber Niger about 1478 and in early Tudor documents.[101] The Tudor change in the relation between the Crown and the nobility is well indicated by the fact that, while in the fourteenth century the Chamberlain had been a banneret or even a simple knight, in Elizabeth's time the office was an object of ambition for earls and barons. But the dual functions, political and domestic, remained unaltered. The 'Lord' Chamberlain, as he was now generally called, was in regular attendance at court, where his power and responsibility were alike considerable.[102] He gave personal attention to the distribution of[39] lodgings in the palace.[103] He made the arrangements for the progress.[104] He received the ambassadors and others entitled to a royal audience and conducted them into the presence.[105] He was liable to be rated by the Queen if there was not enough plate on the cupboard.[106] He not merely planned the revels but himself kept order in the banqueting-hall. And for this purpose the white staff, which was the symbol of his office, was a practical instrument ready to his hand.[107] The delivery of this white staff to him by the Sovereign constituted his appointment, which was during pleasure; and at its[40] determination he delivered it up again. The Lord Steward and the Treasurer and Comptroller of the Household were similarly appointed, and it is a picturesque touch that at the funeral of the Sovereign the Household officers broke their white staves over the bier.[108] Elizabeth's Chamberlains had a fee of £133 6s. 8d. and a table and other allowances at court; also a livery from the Great Wardrobe of fourteen yards of tawny velvet, which had been converted by 1606 into an additional fee of £16.[109]

Elizabeth's first Lord Chamberlain was her great-uncle, Lord William Howard, a younger son of the second Duke of Norfolk, who had been created Lord Howard of Effingham in 1554.[110] He was appointed by 20 November 1558, and resigned on becoming Lord Privy Seal in July 1572. His successor was Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex, who appears to have held office continuously, in spite of occasional absence from his duties, until his death on 9 June 1583. Then came Charles, second Lord Howard of Effingham, for a short period from Christmas 1583 or earlier until his appointment as Lord Admiral about June 1585; and then on 4 July 1585 Elizabeth's first cousin, Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, who established and handed down to his son the famous company of players which included William Shakespeare. Hunsdon was himself a soldier rather than a courtier.[111] He died on 22 July 1596, and the Chamberlainship passed to William Brooke, seventh Lord Cobham. But on 5 March 1597 Cobham himself died, and the office reverted to the house of Hunsdon in the person of George Carey, second lord, who retained it to the end of the reign. By this time he was in ill health, and although he was at first formally continued in his post with the rest of the household, he was replaced on 4 May 1603 by Thomas, Lord Howard of Walden, who on the following 21 July was created Earl of Suffolk. He died on 9 September 1603. Suffolk remained Lord Chamberlain during the palmy days of the Jacobean[41] revels. But in 1614 he became Lord Treasurer, and on 10 July the Chamberlainship was conferred upon the then reigning royal favourite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, much to the disappointment of Shakespeare's patron, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who had to content himself with a promise of the reversion.[112] This, however, fell in sooner than might have been hoped for. Somerset came to disaster for his share in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1615, and on 2 November, shortly before he was sent to the Tower, Lord Wotton, the Comptroller of the Household, came from the King to demand his seals and the white staff. He handed over the seals, says our informant, the Venetian ambassador, 'and as for the staff, which he pointed out to him in a corner of the room, he might take it'. Lord Wotton replied that the King did not order him to take it, but Somerset to give it, 'which he did'.[113] Pembroke was appointed on 23 December 1615 and remained Lord Chamberlain until 3 August 1626, when he was succeeded by his brother Philip Earl of Montgomery.[114]

The illness, or employment elsewhere, of a Lord Chamberlain sometimes rendered necessary the appointment of a deputy. Both Howard of Effingham and Hunsdon appear to have acted in this capacity during Sussex's tenure of office; Howard in 1574-5 and Hunsdon in 1582. Similarly Howard de Walden acted without having the white staff during the second Lord Hunsdon's illness in 1602, and again for a month before his own appointment in 1603.[115] There was indeed provision for the regular assistance of the Lord Chamberlain by a Vice-Chamberlain, an officer who had existed at least as far back as the fourteenth century, and is probably indeed the 'subminister' of the thirteenth.[116] Elizabeth's fee lists provide for a Vice-Chamberlain at a fee of £66 13s. 4d. and a table at court. But the post was not always filled up. Sir Edward Rogers held it from 1558 to 1559, Sir Francis[42] Knollys from 1559 to 1570, Sir Christopher Hatton from 1577 to 1587, and Sir Thomas Heneage from 1589 to 1595. There seem to have been vacancies from 1570 to 1577 and from 1595 to 1601, although Sir William Pickering's appointment was under consideration in 1572 and Sir Henry Lee's in 1597. During Hunsdon's illness there was much speculation as to the probability of a Vice-Chamberlain being appointed. Sir Walter Raleigh hoped for the post, but in February 1601 it was given to Sir John Stanhope, afterwards Lord Stanhope of Harrington, who kept it until 1616.[117]

The Chamber was less divided up into semi-independent working sections than the Lord Steward's department, although three of these, the Jewel House under a Master, and the Wardrobe of Robes and the Removing Wardrobe of Beds, each under a Yeoman, looked after the Queen's plate and jewels, her clothes, and the furniture of the Chamber respectively.[118] But there was an elaborate hierarchy of individual officers and groups of officers, each with definite and recognized functions to perform under the general superintendence of the Lord Chamberlain. The main basis of grading goes back to the social organization of the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century every lay household officer fell within one or other of five well-defined grades. He was a knight banneret, a knight bachelor, an esquire (scutifer, armiger) or serjeant (serviens), a yeoman (valettus), or a groom (garcio). Pages and boys were later additions.[119] Each grade had its uniform rates of salary and allowances, and there was regular promotion from one to another. And while some officers of each grade were definitely assigned to special duties (mestiers), others were more loosely attached either to the Household as a whole or to the camera in particular. The clerical officers were similarly arranged in grades distinct from, but parallel to, those of the laymen. But between the fourteenth century and the sixteenth a good many changes had come about. The most important of these were due to the early Tudors, who had not merely made a distinction within the Chamber itself between the Privy Chamber and the Outer or Presence Chamber and their respective staffs, but[43] had also, perhaps following a French model, brought into existence two hybrid grades in the Gentlemen and Grooms of the Privy Chamber.[120] 'Gentleman' has the same significance [44] as 'Esquire', but this particular group, whose members were intended to be the personal companions of the Sovereign, seems to have been an amalgamation of two groups belonging to the earlier establishment, one squirely, the Esquires of the Household, the other knightly, the Knights of the Body. And if the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were more nearly knights than esquires, the Grooms of the Privy Chamber were in like manner more nearly esquires than grooms or even yeomen.[121] Probably, however, they replaced an earlier group of Yeomen of the Chamber. The duties of the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, in addition to those of companionship, seem to have consisted chiefly in dressing and undressing the Sovereign. The Grooms attended to the orderliness of the rooms, and were supervised, under the Chamberlain, by officers holding a very ancient post, the hostiarii camerae or Gentlemen Ushers.[122] Obviously the normal staffing of the Privy Chamber required some modification in the case of a virgin queen. Elizabeth appears usually to have had no more than two or three Gentlemen and from five to ten Grooms, in place of the eighteen Gentlemen and fourteen Grooms provided for in the fee lists, and to have supplemented these by making feminine appointments in corresponding grades. There were Ladies or Gentlewomen, some of the Bedchamber and some of the Privy Chamber, and beneath these Chamberers, who appear also to have been known as 'the Queen's Women'.[123] The First Lady of the Privy Chamber acted as Mistress of the Robes, and she or another of the[45] Ladies took charge of the jewels actually in use by the Queen and accounted for them to the Jewel-house.[124] In addition there were the six Maids of Honour, who were not salaried officers, but girls of good birth, for whom the court served as a finishing school of manners, and who attended the Queen in public, sat and walked with her in the Privy Chamber and Privy Garden, and kept her entertained with the dancing which she delighted to witness. They were generally dressed in white, and were lodged in the Coffer Chamber under the care of a lady called the Mother of the Maids.[125] And they learnt other things at the court besides manners. Gossip is full of the troubles which Elizabeth underwent in the attempt to establish the cult of Cynthia amongst the maids of honour and the younger ladies of the Privy Chamber.[126] A few older ladies of rank, some of them relatives of the Queen, were also assigned lodgings in court, and were apparently known as Ladies of the Presence Chamber.[127]

The Outer Chamber was also supervised by Gentlemen Ushers, some in daily, others in quarterly waiting, with Grooms of the Chamber, headed by a Groom Porter, and Pages of the Chamber under them to maintain the apartments in order, Yeomen Ushers to keep the doors, and a body of Messengers of the Chamber, ranking with the Yeomen, who besides their domestic uses were at the disposal of the Privy Council and the Secretaries for political purposes, and become very numerous by the end of the reign.[128] The [46] Gentlemen Ushers also took part in the arrangements for lodging the court during progresses, in co-operation with a Knight Harbinger and four subordinate Harbingers who went in advance as billeting officers.[129] To the Outer Chamber, moreover, belonged the Esquires of the Body, who slept in the Presence Chamber, and took charge of the whole Chamber after the ceremony known as the All Night at nine o'clock, and a group of officers 'for the mouth', including Carvers, Cupbearers, Sewers for the Queen, and Surveyors of the Dresser.[130] These had anciently been of importance, all ranking as esquires, and the Carvers and Cupbearers from the fifteenth century as knights.[131] But their functions had dwindled, like those of the Hall officers at an earlier date, when the Tudor sovereigns ceased as a rule to dine even in the Presence Chamber, and by the end of the reign the posts of Carver and Cupbearer were claimed by great nobles as dignified sinecures.[132] The actual service of Elizabeth's meals was done by her ladies.[133] Similarly the Sewers for the Chamber, who apparently represent those of the Esquires of the Household who did not become Gentlemen of the Chamber, had probably neither duties nor salaries under Elizabeth.[134] It had long proved convenient to the Crown to entertain a number of nominal servants, who without giving actual attendance in the household upon ordinary occasions, could be called upon for the great ceremonies of state or for the household array in times of battle, and at other times helped to increase the royal prestige and to strengthen the royal hold upon the localities in which they lived.[135] And naturally there were [47] many aspirants to the status and the protection which even a nominal membership of the royal household afforded. Survivals, such as the Sewerships for the Chamber, were well adapted to this purpose, but it was also possible to meet it by appointing supernumerary members to effective groups.[136] Elizabeth certainly made many 'extraordinary' as well as 'ordinary' appointments, especially of Esquires of the Body and Grooms of the Chamber, and a status midway between the ordinary and extraordinary Grooms seems to have been assigned to the players belonging to companies under the royal patronage.[137] It may be that the 'extraordinary' appointments were sometimes of the nature of grants in reversion, and that the holders looked forward to passing on to 'ordinary' posts in due course.[138]

Duties in the Outer Chamber were also fulfilled by the various bodies of royal guards. Of these there were three. The oldest was constituted by the Serjeants-at-Arms, who held the rank of Esquires, and were appointed by investment with the collar of SS at the hands of the Sovereign on the way to chapel.[139] They are little heard of under Elizabeth, and their posts were probably to a large extent honorific. The Yeomen of the Guard were a foot-guard established by Henry VII in 1485. The Yeomen Ushers of the Chamber were selected from amongst them, and on their establishment an older body of Yeomen of the Crown, itself in origin a guard of archers, seems to have been allowed to lapse.[140] The Yeomen were the working palace guard, and were under a Captain, a Standard Bearer, and a Clerk of the Cheque.[141] The Gentlemen Pensioners or 'Spears' were a horse-guard established by Henry VIII in 1509.[142] Both these Tudor guards seem to [48] have been modelled on analogous French establishments. The Pensioners had a Captain, a Lieutenant, a Standard Bearer, and a Clerk of the Cheque. They were gentlemen of good birth, and to them the Court looked for its supply of accomplished tilters. They attended the Queen, bearing gilded battle-axes, on her way to chapel, and in public processions.[143] By the sixteenth century the control of the guards clearly fell within the sphere of the Lord Chamberlain. Both the Hunsdons themselves acted as Captains of the Pensioners, and the Captaincy of the Yeomen was sometimes, although not always, attached to the Vice-Chamberlainship.

The Secretaries, with the Clerks of the Signet and Privy Council, the Master of the Posts, and the Masters of Requests, although they had grown out of the Chamber, and were still, like the Lords Treasurer, Chancellor, Admiral, and Privy Seal, lodged in the Household, cannot at this period be regarded as under the Lord Chamberlain.[144] But he had some responsibility for the royal Chaplains, the Chapel, the Vestry, and the Clerks of the Closet, whence the Queen heard prayers, especially after Elizabeth suppressed the Deanship of the Chapel.[145] And he controlled the physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, the astronomer, the serjeant-painter, the surveyor of ways, the various hunting equipages, the rat-taker and mole-taker, and a number of artificers ministering to the diverse needs of the Queen and the palace. Probably he controlled the royal fools and other survivals of that characteristic mediaeval interest in mental and physical abnormality.[146] And, what is more to our purpose, he certainly controlled the players, and the extensive establishment of musicians. Amongst these the old royal ministralli or [49] histriones of the Middle Ages, with their marescallus, were still represented by a body of trumpeters under a serjeant.[147] But the personal taste of Henry VIII for music had brought a stream of new performers to court, and this had continued under Elizabeth. Many of them were of foreign extraction, and certain families, such as the Laniers, the Ferrabosci, the Bassani of Venice, or rather, as their name denotes, of Bassano in the Veneto, the Lupi of Milan, formed little dynasties of their own at court, father, son, and grandson succeeding each other, in the royal service through the best part of a century. At the end of her reign Elizabeth was entertaining at least seven distinct bodies of musicians, whose members numbered in all between sixty and seventy. For wind instruments there were, besides the trumpeters, the recorders, the flutes, and the hautboys and sackbuts; for string instruments the viols or violins and the lutes. There were also an organist attached to the chapel and possibly players on the virginals.[148] The most important of these were the lutenists, who sang as well as played, and often composed their own songs, and appear to have been of higher standing than the mere instrumentalists. One of them was specially designated as the Lute of the Privy Chamber.[149] It seems probable that some of the superfluous Sewerships for the Chamber were conferred on them, and Alfonso Ferrabosco may have been about 1575 a Groom of the Chamber.[150]

Finally, there were a number of offices, called in Elizabethan parlance 'standing offices', each under a Master or other head of its own, which can only be regarded as on the borderline of the Household. These were the Great Wardrobe, the Revels, the Tents, the Toils, the Works, the Armoury, the Ordnance, and the Mint. They were financed separately from the Household, and had their various head-quarters in London away from the palace. But their officers were[50] regarded as members of the Household, and although largely independent, they were in many or all cases subject to some kind of supervision by the Lord Chamberlain.[151] Probably the explanation of their origin is given by a phrase used about 1478 by the writer of the Liber Niger. Here the Wardrobe is spoken of as 'an office of chaumbre outward'.[152] In these standing offices, and also in the Secretariat, we seem to have examples of that budding off from the main administrative organization by which those great departments of state, the Exchequer and the Chancery, had already come into existence. Doubtless the process was facilitated, when considerations of practical convenience and a desire to reduce the number of mouths to be provided for in the palace led to the location of particular branches of work in permanent and independent premises. The history of the Revels Office, which will form the subject of another chapter, well serves to illustrate the kind of development involved.[153]

Members of the standing offices were generally appointed for life, those of the regular Household during the royal pleasure. The former received letters patent; the latter were only sworn in before one or other of the chief officers, and as most of the early records of the Lord Chamberlain's department have perished, no complete list of them is upon record. The uniform rates of pay and allowances for each grade of officer which prevailed in the fourteenth century had undergone many complications by the middle of the sixteenth. Each officer had, of course, his fee or wages, payable either at the Exchequer or by the Treasurer of the Chamber, whose functions will shortly be described, or, as in the case of most of the regular officers of Household and Chamber, by the Cofferer of the Household. The rates had gradually increased, perhaps with a decrease in the purchasing power of money. Those for the recently established Tudor posts were reckoned in pounds; the older ones in marks. Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and Pensioners got £50, Esquires of the Body £33 6s. 8d. (fifty marks), Gentlemen Ushers of the Privy Chamber £30, Grooms of the Privy Chamber £20, Grooms of the Chamber £2 13s. 4d. (four marks). These may serve for examples. Obsolete mediaeval rates of[51] so many pence a day still survived here and there.[154] The Grooms and Pages of the Chamber had also a traditional 'great reward' of £100 among them at Christmas, while the fees payable to the officers of the Chamber by lay and ecclesiastic homagers were not—and are not yet—extinct.[155] Exceptional 'rewards', from foreign visitors of rank and so forth, were naturally forthcoming from time to time, and, as naturally, largesse often became indistinguishable from bribe. The allowances, other than salary, were of several kinds. Firstly, there was diet, that is to say, dinner and supper at the appointed tables in hall or chamber. Most of the officers of the regular Household enjoyed this; a few, whose attendance was not required daily or at all times in the day, received instead a money allowance from the Cofferer known as 'board wages'.[156] Secondly, there was, 'bouche of court', a commons of bread and ale, candles and fuel, served only to those of sufficient rank to be lodged in the palace itself.[157] It is probably an evidence, not of economy, but of change of social habits, that in the sixteenth century ale had replaced the wine of the fourteenth. Originally the 'bouche of court' had to suffice for breakfast, but under Elizabeth the Maids of Honour and a few other favoured groups were allowed to share the queen's breakfast of beef.[158] Thirdly, there was 'livery' in the narrow sense, clothes or the material for clothes from the Great Wardrobe, or a money payment in lieu thereof. Even in the fourteenth century there was already much commutation of livery, which in the case of yeomen and grooms also included an allowance for shoes, known as calciatura. By the end of the fifteenth century it was definitely thought derogatory for men of rank to wear even the sovereign's livery, except in some quite symbolical form.[159] Under Elizabeth some of the salaries seem to have [52] had livery allowances added on to them. The process of commutation can still be traced. But liveries were issued in kind to the yeomen, messengers, grooms, pages, and stable footmen. These seem to have been of two kinds; 'watching' liveries issued from the Wardrobe in the winter, and 'summer' liveries, for which payment was made direct from the Exchequer.[160] The latter were gorgeous and costly, of scarlet cloth, with spangles and embroidery of Venice gold, taking the shape of a rose and crown and the letters 'E. R.', with some distinction between yeomen and grooms. The present costume of the Yeomen of the Guard, or 'beef-eaters', is a later modification of this livery.[161] In their capacity as Grooms of the Chamber the royal players were entitled to wear the Queen's 'coat'.[162] The officers of the standing offices had livery or livery allowance, if it was appropriate to their rank. They did not have diet or 'bouche of court'. But they were in some cases entitled to supplement their fees by charging 'wages' for actual days of service in the accounts which their Masters annually rendered to the Exchequer.[163] 'Extraordinary' officers probably got no salaries or allowances of any kind, unless they were called up for special duty. But it must be added that all royal servants, whatever their office, and whether 'ordinary' or 'extraordinary', received a customary allowance of red cloth at the coronation and of black cloth at a royal funeral, and that the schedules of recipients on these occasions form the most complete establishment lists available.

The accession of James did not materially alter the general structure of the Household. The chief changes were in the Privy Chamber. The Wardrobe of Robes was placed under a Gentleman, afterwards called a Master. The Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were increased in number, reduced to quarterly terms of waiting, and deprived of salary.[164] The salaries of the Lord Chamberlain, Gentlemen Ushers, and[53] Grooms were raised. And what was practically a new department was brought into existence in the Bedchamber, which had a staff of Gentlemen, Grooms, and Pages, independent of the Lord Chamberlain and controlled by their own First Gentleman, who was also known as Groom of the Stole.[165] The Bed Chamber, chiefly composed of Scots, furnished James with his most confidential servants.[166] As might be expected, James enlarged his hunting establishment, and one of his new appointments was a Cockmaster.[167] He had a conspicuous Fool in Archie Armstrong.[168] And he instituted in the Lord Chamberlain's department an officer known as the Master of the Ceremonies, whose function was to look after the lodgings and the general well-being of ambassadors, and to grapple with the knotty problems entailed by their inveterate stickling for precedence and etiquette.[169] A separate household was formed for the Queen, to which the various grades of ladies[54] found at Elizabeth's court were transferred.[170] There were minor households for the royal children. That of Henry was much enlarged when he was created Prince of Wales in 1610, and in many respects, especially on the literary and artistic side, came to rival his father's.

One other officer, whose name has already been mentioned, must now, in virtue of his special relation to the playing companies, be fully considered. This is the Treasurer of the Chamber. His history affords an admirable example of that capacity of duplicating the functions of the departments of state, which was inherent in the Household as the successor in a direct line of the undifferentiated curia regis. After the development of the Exchequer was completed in the course of the twelfth century, the great bulk of the royal revenue was dealt with by that organization, and payments into and out of the royal account were made through the clerks of the branch known as the Receipt of the Exchequer. The posts of camerarius and thesaurarius were now distinct. But the change was never quite exhaustively carried out. Presumably the sovereign found it convenient to retain a certain residue of his funds under his personal control. Side by side with the Exchequer and its great officer it is still possible to trace into the thirteenth century a thesaurus camerae regis and a thesaurarius camerae; and the Pipe Rolls continue to refer to payments made in camera curiae, or ipsi regi in camera curiae, and to receipts taken by debtors de camera curiae, both of which were certified to the Exchequer per breve regis and put on final record there.[171] There were also clerici camerae, who probably wrote these brevia, and it is conjectured that the privy seal, as distinct from the great[55] seal of Chancery, came into existence as a means of authenticating the brevia as impressed with royal authority. Thus the camera was able to duplicate the functions of the Chancery as well as those of the Exchequer.[172] About the middle of the thirteenth century the Pipe Rolls take to referring to the exceptional financial transactions as taking place not in the camera but in the garderoba. There are clerici garderobae and a chief officer called indifferently the custos and the thesaurarius garderobae.[173] Presumably the garderoba or 'wardrobe' was at first merely that apartment of the camera in which the financial work was done, and there are still indications of some such early relationship in the position of the Wardrobe when we first get a clear view of the operations at the very end of the century.[174] But by this time its scope had greatly increased, owing to the policy of Henry III and Edward I, who found in it a financial and administrative instrument, both more ready to hand and less subject to baronial control and criticism than either the Exchequer or the Chancery. Much of the revenue had come to pass through its hands, under a system of tallies, which were issued to it in block by the Exchequer on the authority of a royal warrant dormant, exchanged for incomings with accountants, and ultimately presented as vouchers at the Exchequer of Account. As part of the same process, the clerical head of the Wardrobe had acquired an importance almost equal to that of the Chamberlain. Indeed, so far as he was controlled by any lay officer, it was less the Chamberlain than the Steward, under whom he sat at the daily review of household expenditure which formed a feature of the Wardrobe system, and was continued into Tudor times by the Board of Green Cloth. Here also sat a consocius of the Treasurer, the contrarotulator, who kept duplicates of his accounts as a check upon him, and had the charge of the privy seal. The Wardrobe held not only the money and jewels of the King, but also his 'secrets'. Its officers were his secretarii in the earlier unspecialized sense, his confidential agents, both in finance and in diplomacy and other affairs of state. The extant account-books show that it not merely defrayed the expenses of his household, his alms, and his amusements, but also those[56] entailed by the fortification and victualling of his castles, and the wages and equipment of his army and navy and his ambassadors and other nuntii.

During the reign of Edward II the power of the Wardrobe was broken up, partly by the direct action of baronial hostility, partly by a discreet process of reorganization within the household, in the face of baronial criticism. The responsibilities of the Treasurer and Comptroller were limited to the purely domestic expenditure of the Steward's department, much as we find them in Tudor times. The charge of the privy seal was dissociated from the Comptrollership; its use, like that of the great seal before it, was subjected to regulation in the baronial interest; and it soon became superfluous. Offices, such as the Great Wardrobe for the purveyance of cloth, furs, and other bulky commodities, which had recently come into existence as branches of the Wardrobe, were now placed on an independent footing, and began to account direct to the Exchequer. And now once more, after remaining in obscurity for the best part of a century, emerges into renewed activity the financial organization of the Chamber. To it appears to have been assigned, as part of the scheme of reform, such expenditure as could not with propriety be withdrawn from the personal supervision of the sovereign.[175] With this as a nucleus, it was not particularly difficult to convert the Chamber into just such a financial and administrative organ as the Wardrobe had been before it. The funds at its disposal were gradually increased, as opportunities offered themselves of adding to them the revenues of one escheated manor after another. Its clerks in turn became the secretarii, out of whom the royal Secretaries in the Tudor sense were in course of time developed. Even the lost privy seal proved capable of replacement by a series of other small seals, the 'secret' seal under Edward II, the 'griffin' seal under Edward III, and finally the 'signet', which remained to the end in the hands of the Secretaries. It was only up to a point that the trained bureaucrats, with the power of knowledge behind them, proved amenable to baronial control. It is probably only up to a point that they will prove amenable to democratic control.

The actual use made of the Chamber varied considerably[57] in different reigns. It flourished at the end of the reign of Edward II, and again during the first half of that of Edward III. Soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, it lost much of its political status, owing to the separation from it of the Secretaries, who now had their own clerks in the Signet Office, and on the financial side it was for long little more than a privy purse in strict subordination to the Exchequer. It was still, however, capable at need of serving as a medium of war expenditure, and with the appointment of Thomas Vaughan by Edward IV in 1465 its financial importance began to revive.[176] Up to the end of the fourteenth century, its financial officers are generally called Receivers of the Chamber; during the next the double title of Treasurer of the Chamber and Keeper of the King's Jewels establishes itself.[177] They are sometimes, although perhaps not always, appointed by patent, and at any rate from the time of Henry IV are only accountable to the King in person.[178] On the execution of Vaughan in 1583 the posts of Treasurer of the Chamber and Keeper of the Jewels were divided; and it may serve as an illustration of the conservatism of courts that this was still a subject of grievance in the Jewel House two hundred years later.[179]

At the beginning of Henry VII's reign the functions of Treasurer of the Chamber were discharged by Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Lovell.[180] On his appointment as Treasurer [58] of the Household in August 1592, he was succeeded by John, afterwards Sir John, Heron, who had in fact acted as his assistant and kept his books from 1487.[181] Under the Tudors, with their general tendency to elaborate the personal control of government by the sovereign, the post remained one of first-class importance. It was regulated in 1511 by a statute, the recital of which sets out that it had been the practice for certain Receivers of royal lands to account before persons appointed by Henry VII 'for the more speedy payment of his revenues and the accounts of the same to be more speedily taken than could have been after the course of the Exchequer', and after accounting to pay sums to the use of the King in his chamber.[182] The record of these transactions, signed by the King or 'his trusty servant John Heron' had been no legal discharge to the accountants in the Exchequer. Henry VIII had set up by patent a body of General Surveyors and Approvers of the King's Lands to take the accounts, and the statute confirms this proceeding and appoints John Heron to be Treasurer of the Chamber, and to be answerable, with his successors, direct to the King, and not to the Exchequer.[183] John Heron continued in office until 1521.[184] His successor [59] was John Miklowe, who had been Comptroller of the Household.[185] But Miklowe's tenure of office must have been short, for in 1523 a statute, passed in renewal of that of 1511, names as Treasurer Sir Henry Wyatt, who was the father of the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt.[186] In 1526 Wyatt was placed on the Privy Council[187]; and on 13 April 1528 he was succeeded as Treasurer by Sir Brian Tuke, who held office until 1545.[188] In 1541 a new statute was passed which erected the Surveyors of the King's Lands into a court of record, appointed the Treasurer of the Chamber as Treasurer of the Court, and required him to account before the Court or such other persons as the King might appoint, both in this capacity and also for 'all and every the receytes issues profyttes dettes and thinges concernyng his office of Treasurership of the Kinges Chamber'.[189] Tuke was succeeded on 25 November 1545 by Sir Anthony Rous, to whom one John Dawes acted as deputy[190]; and Rous on 19 February 1546, by Sir William Cavendish, to the disappointment of Stephen Vaughan, Henry's financial agent at Antwerp, who had hoped for the post. Cavendish also had the assistance of a deputy, Robert Oliver.[191] During Cavendish's tenure of office, two further changes in the position of the Treasurership took place. A patent of 1547, subsequently confirmed by statute under[60] Edward VI in 1553, dissolved alike the Court of Surveyors and the analogous Court of Augmentations, created to deal with the revenues of surrendered religious houses in 1535, and established in place of these a combined Court of Augmentation and Revenues of the King's Crown, of which the Treasurer of the Chamber was to continue to act as Treasurer.[192] Hardly, however, had this readjustment received legislative sanction, when it was upset again. A patent of 1554, under the authority of an Act of Mary's first Parliament, suppressed the Court of Augmentation, by annexing its business to the Exchequer, and directed the revenues to be paid into the Exchequer and accounts to be audited there, as before the Court was set up.[193] Cavendish did not find the Treasurership a bed of roses. On Tuke's death it was anticipated that his successor would receive a legacy of official debts.[194] A book containing copies of 'certificates' or reports made by Cavendish to the Privy Council show that he soon had occasion to be perturbed.[195] About Lady Day 1546 he represented that his receipts had been dislocated to the extent of about £14,000, and that in view of his liabilities, which he detailed, there was urgent need to consider the state of the office. In another paper he called attention to the enormous number of securities for old debts to the Crown, some of them dating from the time of Henry VII, with which he found from Tuke's books that he was charged; and, as 'a yonge officer not long exercised in the same', prayed that these might be reviewed, and a decision arrived at as to how much of the total nominal amount of £322,980 covered by them stood for 'sperat' and how much for 'desperat' debts. The book also contains summaries of his liabilities during 1547, at the end of 1548, when he declared that he had debts of £14,000 and no ready money in the office, and finally at Lady Day 1554. This last item does not disclose how far his revenue had in the interval been made sufficient for his needs. It is possible that it had been made more than sufficient, for on 17 August 1556 the Privy Council called upon him to appear before them with 'Cade his clerc', and on 9 October 1557 they returned his book of account, stating that he owed £5,237 5s. 0-3/4d. and[61] must appear and answer particularities, either in person or, if ill, by his clerks.[196] It seems clear that the Tudor period had seen a very considerable increase in the scope of the financial transactions with which the Treasurer of the Chamber had to deal. In addition to privy purse expenditure in the narrower sense, such as the royal pocket-money, alms and oblations, largesse and rewards, and the like, he became responsible for many wages and annuities, some of which, including those of the royal players, had formerly been charged direct upon the Exchequer.[197] He purchased the jewels and costly stuffs in which much of the Tudor wealth was invested. He financed or helped to finance the Surveyor of Works, the Great Wardrobe, and even for a time the Cofferer of the Household. And beyond the limits of anything which could be called domestic expenditure, he undertook much that was concerned with 'the King's outward causes', the maintenance of posts and ambassadors, royal loans, secret service; even, it would appear, although perhaps out of a special account, the service of war. His income, originally derived from the Exchequer, was put on to an independent basis, by the direct assignment to him of numerous revenues, both ordinary and extraordinary, including most of the new sources of wealth on which the financial policy of Henry VII had firmly based the power of the Crown. Some of his payments were made in accordance with old established custom or under household ordinances or other standing instructions.[198] But the great majority depended upon the personal authority of the sovereign, communicated either by word of mouth or by warrant under the sign manual or the signet, or in course of time through the medium of a minister such as Wolsey or the Privy Council. Similarly he rendered his accounts at first to the King in person, and the early books bear the signatures of Henry VII and Henry VIII in token of audit on many pages.[199] The responsibility grew to be a very heavy one, with a turnover of some £100,000 in the course of a year, and we find Brian Tuke in 1534 writing of it as 'a charge that far surmounteth any in England', and pressing 'that for things ordinary I may have for payments an ordinary warrant, and that for things extraordinary I may always have special warrant or else some such way as I, dealing truly, may be truly discharged', lest if there were any misunderstanding, 'I might be undone in a day, lacking any warrant when I sue for it'. It would[62] appear to have been the special difficulty of the Treasurer's position which led to the system of audit by means of a 'Declared Account', as a substitute at once for the cumbrous method of the earlier Exchequer, and the more recent practice of personal verification by the sovereign. When Sir Henry Wyatt left office he was directed to declare his account before a General Surveyor of the King's Lands, and this method was adopted when the Surveyors became a statutory court in 1541 and ultimately passed after the dissolution of the special courts into ordinary Exchequer practice.[200]

Sir William Cavendish, who was ill when the Privy Council asked for details of his account on 9 October, died on 25 October 1557. An account for 1 April to 31 December 1557 is in the name of Edmund Felton, perhaps only an interim administrator.[201] The Treasurership of the Chamber, together with the Mastership of the Posts, was granted by patent on 29 October 1558 to Sir John Mason, with a fee of £240 and 1s. a day.[202] Mason was continued in office by Elizabeth, and on 23 December 1558 the Lord Chamberlain, the Comptroller of the Household, the Secretary, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were appointed as a committee of the Privy Council 'to survey the office of the Treasurer of the Chamber and to assigne order of paymente'.[203] As a result, considerable changes seem to have been made, which reversed the policy of the last half-century and much reduced the Treasurer's responsibilities. On the one hand, the funds assigned to the Cofferer of the Household, the Surveyor of Works, the Master of Posts, and the Ambassadors no longer passed through his account; on the other, a separate account was established for the more personal expenditure of the Queen, which was put into the charge of a Groom of the Privy Chamber, acting as keeper of the Privy Purse. Both accounts seem to have become subject to audit and declaration at the Exchequer; but while that of the Treasurer of the Chamber was declared annually, the only extant Privy Purse account of the reign is one for the ten years 1559-69 declared after the death of the first keeper, John Tamworth.[204] This was [63] a small account, mainly fed by New Year and other gifts to the Queen. The expenditure out of it only averaged about £2,500 a year. Most of it was upon gifts and rewards, which were detailed in a book of particulars under the sign manual, unfortunately not preserved. A payment of £5,000 to the Earl of Moray suggests that it proved a convenient channel for secret service funds. It also includes items for the keep of the royal fool, for the purchase of jewels, and for certain annuities, wages, riding charges, and expenses of the stable and hunt. The Treasurer of the Chamber, under the new arrangement, spent about £12,000 a year.[205] Out of this he defrayed the royal alms, certain rewards, wages, annuities, and riding charges, the maintenance of prisoners, and the expenses of 'apparelling' the Queen's houses and keeping her gardens. Obviously the two accounts come very near overlapping at several points. One may suppose that in the main the Treasurer of the Chamber was responsible for customary payments and such as could be made on the authority of officers of state or household; the Keeper of the Privy Purse with those which depended on the personal pleasure of the sovereign. The officers borne on the Treasurer of the Chamber's wage list were those who belonged neither to the household proper nor to the 'standing' offices; the Yeomen of the Guard, the Watermen, the Apothecaries, the Musicians and Players, the Hunt, the Footmen and Boys of the Stable, the Artificers, the Rat and Mole Takers, the Keepers of Paris Garden, the Surveyor of Gates and Bridges, the Chester Post. That they should also have included the officers of the Jewel House is explicable from the original connexion between these and the Treasurer. The Treasurer's own salary and his office expenses also appear in his account.

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The distinction now drawn between the Treasury of the Chamber and the Privy Purse must have had the effect of putting the Treasurer in a position analogous to that of the Secretaries. He was on the way to becoming an officer of state rather than an officer of the household.

The order of payment determined upon by the Privy Council appears to have been that salaries chargeable to the Treasurer of the Chamber should be payable upon 'warrants dormant', 'riding charges' for messengers upon warrants from the Secretary, and miscellaneous payments, such as rewards for plays at court, upon warrants from the Privy Council itself.[206] Sir Francis Knollys became Treasurer of the Chamber when Mason died upon 21 April 1566[207]; and Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Heneage, when Knollys was appointed Treasurer of the Household, on 15 February 1570.[208] Knollys, throughout his period of office, and Heneage, from 1589, combined the Treasurership with the duties of Vice-Chamberlain of the Household. Heneage died in October 1595, and there was some delay before a successor was appointed.[209] A trial of strength seems to have taken place between Essex and Burghley, who regarded the filling of the vacancy, together with the much more important vacancy in the Secretaryship, as critical to his chances of prolonging his dynasty. Burghley's candidate was John Stanhope; Essex's Sir Henry Unton, to whom he wrote about his prospects on 24 October 1595, telling him that Robert Cecil was troubled at the competition, and thought that neither would carry it.[210] I am not sure that Cecil had been quite straightforward with Essex. Another aspirant was Sir Edward Wotton.[211] There is gossip about the matter in Rowland Whyte's letters to Sir Robert Sidney.[212] On 29 October he wrote, 'Probi is comanded to [65] wayt at court; hath spoken with her Majestie, and is sayd he shall haue the Disbursing of the Treasory of the Chamber, till her Majestie be pleased to bestow yt. Sir H. Umpton and Mr. John Stanhope, stands for yt.' On 5 November, 'Peter Proby paies the money till a Treasorer of the Chamber be chosen, which will not be in hast'. Peter Proby was a useful hanger-on of Burghley's, and had been his barber. On 20 November 'Sir Thomas Heneges Funerals were solemnised, his Offices all vnbestowed'. By 7 December Whyte ventures a prophecy:

Whyte was wrong, however. William Killigrew was a mere stop-gap.[213] On 20 December, Whyte has an inkling of what is going on, and commits his new information to cipher.

It was not until 5 July that, according to an amused letter from Anthony Bacon, 'Elephas peperit' with the swearing in of Sir Robert Cecil as Secretary and John Stanhope as Treasurer of the Chamber, 'so that now the old man may say with the rich man in the gospel requiescat anima mea'.

Burghley himself notes the appointment without comment in his diary.[214] John Stanhope, who was knighted on his appointment and created Lord Stanhope of Harrington on 4 May 1605, did not get the Vice-Chamberlainship until 1601. He remained Treasurer until his death in 1617. There was some characteristic Stuart traffic in the reversion. Sir Thomas Overbury held it at his death in 1613. Lord Rochester then bought it from Stanhope for £2,000, and offered it to Sir Henry Neville, who declined to take it from a subject. Finally it passed to Sir William Uvedale, who in fact became Treasurer in succession to Stanhope.[215]

During Stanhope's tenure of office, some changes in the 'order of payment' took place. The account for 1607-8 recites a privy seal of 27 January 1608 as authority for the transfer from the Privy Purse to the Treasurer of the Chamber[66] of certain payments made on warrants from the Lord Chamberlain. Similar payments thereafter form a regular section of the account from year to year. By a later privy seal of 11 October 1614, still extant, an additional sum of £1,500 a year is put at the disposal of the Treasurer to enable him to meet them.[216] His total assignment was thus increased to about £20,000 or rather more than half as much again as the office had cost under Elizabeth. That of the Privy Purse was now about £6,000.[217] We have seen that there had been possibilities of overlapping between the two accounts, but it is rather odd that amongst the items transferred should be specified allowances for plays, bear-baitings and other sports, since such allowances had regularly been paid by the Treasurer of the Chamber for something more than a century past. It is, however, the case that from 1614-15 onwards, the payments were made on warrants from the Lord Chamberlain instead of the Privy Council.

It is rather surprising that the Privy Council, whose members were carrying out duties roughly analogous to those of a modern Cabinet, should at any time have concerned itself with such trifling matters of domestic routine as the signature of certificates authorizing the payment of rewards at recognized rates to companies of actors and other entertainers. The explanation, however, is that the Privy Council, like the Household and the Departments of State themselves, was a direct representative of the Norman curia regis, and that the curia regis had been the organization through which the King's subjects and servants gave him assistance in all his affairs, small and great, domestic as well as political.[218] For all practical purposes, indeed, the Elizabethan Privy Council consisted of little more than the chief officers of the State departments and Household, sitting together, and acting collectively. The great territorial magnates, who at certain periods of its history had turned it into an instrument for the control rather than the exercise of the royal prerogative,[67] were now, unless they happened to hold official positions, rarely sworn amongst its members; but upon it, side by side with the Chancellor and the Treasurer, the Admiral and the Privy Seal, sat not only the Secretaries, but also the Steward and the Chamberlain, the Master of the Horse, the Treasurer and Comptroller of the Household, and often the Vice-Chamberlain or the Treasurer of the Chamber. It was therefore natural enough, to Tudor no less than to mediaeval ways of thinking, that among its numerous and imperfectly defined activities should be included some which give it the aspect of a Household board of control. It was in fact by means of a Household ordinance that Henry VIII regulated the composition of the Privy Council and directed the constant attendance of the members upon his own person[219]; and throughout Elizabeth's reign we find the Council in the closest possible association with the Court, following it from palace to palace, and even from stage to stage of the progress, so that the record of its meetings serves practically as a royal itinerary, and sitting under the most direct Household influences in some convenient apartment of the Privy Chamber. There was even no longer, as in the time of Henry VIII, a 'council at London' as well as a 'council with the King', with the exceptions that, if the Court was very far from head-quarters, a few of the lords sometimes stayed behind to look after current affairs, and that the council as a whole seems occasionally to have met at Westminster when the Court was not there, either in connexion with the sittings of the Star Chamber, or for special business in the lodgings of one or other of its members.[220] This tradition of propinquity between the Sovereign and his council was, however, broken through by James, who at an early date in his reign took to leaving the lords to transact business at court, while he went hither and thither on his endless hunting journeys.

In the absence of any contemporary ordinale for the Privy Council, some idea of its methods can be gathered from the register of transactions kept by its clerks and from other sources.[221] It is probable that the Queen sometimes sat with [68] the lords, although her attendance is never recorded in the register.[222] The usual president was the Lord Chancellor; the earlier Tudor post of President of the Council was rarely, if ever, filled up by Elizabeth.[223] But the general supervision of the clerks and the preparation of business for consideration, other than that which lay directly within the department of some particular officer, seems to have fallen to the Secretary. The number of councillors was gradually reduced from twenty-four at the beginning to thirteen at the end of the reign. Of these not more than half were generally present at any one sitting. But there appears to have been no fixed quorum; occasionally only two members or even one transacted business. At first three meetings a week sufficed; later they were often held daily, both by morning and afternoon, and even on Sundays. Wednesday and Friday were generally set aside for petitions and other private business, and the remaining days devoted to public affairs. Drafts of proclamations were passed by the Council before they received the royal sign manual, and thus became of the nature of Orders in Council.[224] Where a proclamation was not in question, the conclusions arrived at by the Council were embodied in a minute, and submitted through the Secretary for royal approval. When this had been obtained, any executive action was then taken in the form of warrants or letters to administrative officers, central or local, or to individuals, according to the nature of the business. These required the signature of not less than six councillors, who were not necessarily those present when the business was discussed. Before they were put forward for signature they were subscribed by the Secretary or one of the clerks. Warrants to the Treasurer of the Chamber or other paymasters were also impressed by the clerk with the special seal of the council. The minutes were ultimately placed in the council chest, which is unfortunately lost. But copies or abstracts of those which related to public affairs, or in some cases copies of the letters finally issued, were made by the clerks and from time to time bound up in volumes, of which a series, far from[69] continuous, is preserved.[225] Even at their fullest, however, these 'Acts of the Council' cannot be supposed to form a complete record of its proceedings. Council letters are to be found in many local archives of which no note exists in the register. There were four or five Clerks of the Council who took duty, two at a time, according to a monthly rota, and it is clear that some of them were more business-like than others. But it is also probable that much business of a confidential character was deliberately left without record. In addition to the clerks, there was a Keeper of the Council Chamber door, probably one of the Ushers of the Chamber, and the Messengers of the Chamber were available to carry such letters as could not conveniently be entrusted to the regular staff of the Master of Posts.[226]

The ordinary sittings of the Privy Council were of course held in private, and each member took a special oath of secrecy upon appointment. But on each Wednesday and Friday during term time they resolved themselves into the Court of Star Chamber, and held a public sitting to inquire into cases of riot, libel, disregard of proclamations, and the like. Herein they were exercising the old power of the curia regis to duplicate the functions of the law courts.[227] For Star Chamber purposes they associated with themselves judges, who ranked as 'ordinary' but not 'privy' councillors.[228] 'Ordinary' councillors also were the Queen's 'counsel learned in the law', who included the Attorney- and Solicitor-Generals and the Queen's Serjeants, and the Masters of Requests who, by another exercise of curial jurisdiction, sat in the old 'white hall' at Westminster to deal, under the general direction of the Privy Council, with civil cases arising out of the suits of poor men or of royal servants.[229] The political functions of the Privy Council lie beyond the scope of this study, but their concern with all matters affecting breach of the peace, sedition, heresy, and public health entailed, under more than one of these heads, a general supervision of the stage, which[70] will be the subject for discussion in a later chapter.[230] Similarly, the players, or those of them who were royal servants, came as such under the jurisdiction of the Court of Requests, and some interesting information as to their contracts and disputes is derived from the records of that tribunal.[231]

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III
THE REVELS OFFICE

ONE of the 'standing' offices which, from the general oversight exercised over them by the Lord Chamberlain, may also be regarded as 'offices outward of the Chamber' was the Revels Office. This, in its fullest establishment, consisted of a Master, a Clerk Comptroller, and a Clerk, whose services it shared with the analogous Office of Tents, a Yeoman, and a Groom. It was of Tudor origin. The first mention of a Master of Revels is in a Household order of 31 December 1494.[232] But the post appears to have been at this period a purely temporary one, conferred upon some existing officer of the Household, who had been selected to supervise and defray the expenses of the revels for a particular feast. Several of these ad hoc Masters are recorded at the court of Henry VIII; the most prominent was Sir Henry Guildford,[72] who held various offices, including that of Comptroller of the Household. The Masters appear to be distinct from the Lords of Misrule, who were also appointed pro hac vice during the Christmas season, but whose duties were ceremonial and quasi-dramatic, rather than administrative.[233] In dealing with the details of Revels organization, the transitory and fluctuating Masters had, from the beginning of the reign, the assistance of a permanent official, who belonged originally to the establishment of the Wardrobe. It was his business to carry into effect the general directions of the Master; to obtain stuffs from mercers or from the Wardrobe itself, and ornaments from the Jewel House and the Mint; to engage architects, carpenters, painters, tailors and embroiderers; to superintend the actual performances in the banqueting-hall or the tilt-yard, and attempt to preserve the costly and elaborate pageants from the rifling of the guests; to have the custody of dresses, visors, and properties; and finally, to render accounts and obtain payment for expenses from the Exchequer. These duties, with others of like character, were long performed by one Richard Gibson, whose careful accounts, compiled in an execrable orthography, preserve many curious details of forgotten pageantries, including the employment of none other than Hans Holbein in the decoration of a banqueting-hall at Greenwich. Gibson had a double qualification for his functions. In addition to his office as Porter and Yeoman Tailor of the Wardrobe, he had been, as far back as 1494, one of the King's players.[234] He had apparently the art of making himself indispensable, for he gradually accumulated both posts and pensions. He held the ancient office of Pavilionary or Serjeant of Tents, and in this capacity made the arrangements for the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. By 1526 he was one of the royal Serjeants-at-Arms.[235] Machyn, who records the burning of his son for heresy at Smithfield in 1557, describes him as 'sergantt Gybsun, sergantt of armes, and of the reywelles, and of the kynges tenstes'.[236] It is not, however, clear that he held a distinct post as Serjeant of Revels, and when a patent was issued to his successor, John Farlyon, in 1534, it was not as Serjeant, but only as Yeoman.[237] Farlyon also became in course of time Serjeant of Tents, and the traditional connexion between Tents and Revels was never wholly broken.

[73]

Whether John Travers, who became Serjeant of Tents on Farlyon's death in 1539, had any supervision over John Bridges, who became Yeoman of Revels, is rather doubtful.[238] But the position becomes quite clear in 1545, when the Serjeantship of Tents was converted into a Mastership, and its holder, Sir Thomas Cawarden, was also appointed, under a separate patent of 11 March 1545, to an entirely new post as a permanent Master of the Revels, to whom the Yeoman naturally became subordinate.[239] This continued to be John Bridges until 1550, when he was succeeded by John Holt, who had acted as his deputy since 1547.[240] Cawarden enlarged the establishment by securing the appointment of a Clerk Comptroller to check and of a Clerk to keep the books, thus leaving the Yeoman free to devote himself to the practical side of the business.[241] Both these officers served, and continued throughout our period to serve, alike for the Tents and the Revels. John Barnard was Clerk Comptroller from 1545 to 1550, when he was succeeded by Richard Lees.[242] The first Clerk was Thomas Philipps, who was appointed in 1546, and held his post until 1560.[243] But from 1551 most of the duties were performed by a deputy, Thomas Blagrave, who succeeded to the Clerkship on 25 March 1560.[244] Blagrave was a personal 'servant' of Cawarden, who probably saw to it that all the subordinate officers appointed after the retirement of Bridges were his own nominees. Each, however, held his post under a patent direct from the Crown, and this arrangement bore the promise of administrative complications when the personal relation with the Master had terminated. The following document illustrates the organization of the office as settled by Cawarden about 1546:[245]

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In Farlyon's time the Revels stuff had been housed at the royal mansion of Warwick Inn in the City.[246] Cawarden moved it in 1547 to the Blackfriars, where various parts of the old Priory buildings served at different times as store-rooms and work-rooms or as residences for the officers.[247] Much material bearing upon the activities of the Revels during 1544-59 is preserved at Loseley Hall, amongst the papers of Cawarden's executor, Sir William More, who also acquired his interest in the Blackfriars. Cawarden lived just long enough to superintend the festivities at Elizabeth's coronation. After his death on 29 August 1559, his offices were distributed.[248] The Mastership of the Tents was given to Henry Sackford of the Privy Chamber. Banqueting houses, however, which had originally been the concern of the Tents, seem now to have[75] been put in charge of the Revels. The Mastership of the Revels was given, by a patent dated 18 January 1560, to Sir Thomas Benger.[249] The Clerk Comptroller and Clerk continued as in former years to be joint officers for the Tents and the Revels. Benger is a somewhat shadowy personage. It is upon record that he gave Elizabeth a ring as a New Year's gift in 1562; that the Westminster boys rehearsed the Heautontimoroumenos and Miles Gloriosus before him in 1564 and spent 6d. on 'pinnes and sugar candee'; that he got a licence to export 300 tons of beer in 1566; that he had players of his own at Canterbury in 1569-70; and that the corporation of Saffron Walden spent 3s. 6d. upon a 'podd' of oysters for him at Elizabeth's visit to Audley End in 1571.[250] Apparently he began his administration with good intentions. The following note is affixed to his first Revels' estimate, that for the Christmas of 1559-60:

The cast garments were a perquisite of the officers, and were sold by them, doubtless to actors. The change in the Mastership led also to a change in the local habitation of the Revels. It is to be supposed that the buildings with which Cawarden had supplemented the official storehouse were no longer available after they had passed to his executors. In any case, it is clear from the survey of 1586-7 described [76]below that upon Cawarden's death the Office of the Revels was removed to the 'late Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem' in Clerkenwell. Probably the transfer had taken place by 10 June 1560, as an inventory was drawn up on that date of 'certeyne stuff remaynynge in the Black Fryers in London'.[252] The Tents, as well as the Revels, seem to have been moved to St. John's.[253]

In accordance with Benger's request, a survey of the Revels was undertaken, under a warrant from the Privy Council of 27 April 1560, by Sir Richard Sackville and Sir Walter Mildmay, the Under Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a draft of a document submitted to them is preserved at Loseley.[254] This contains a detailed account of the transactions of the Office since the last audit in 1555, as a result of which Cawarden's executors established a claim for a balance or 'surplusage' of £740 13s. 10½d. against the Exchequer. The total expenditure of the Office for the period covering Elizabeth's coronation and first Christmas had been £602 11s. 10d. To the account are appended inventories showing the sets of masking garments which existed in 1555, the materials since issued from the Wardrobe, the use made of both of these in the fashioning of new garments and the 'translation' of old ones, and the sets found in the Office at the time of the survey. These are marked as either 'serviceable' or 'not serviceable' or 'chargeable', but 'fees', and the warrant from the Council instructs the commissioners that cast garments 'being fees incydente to the saide office may be taken by yᵉ Master of yᵉ Revelles & dystributed in soche sorte as haue bene accostomed'. Probably the officers sold them to players.[255] No further detailed accounts are available until the last year of Benger's Mastership, but there are summaries which show an average annual expenditure of about £570.[256] For some reason, there was a great increase [77]of cost in 1571-2, which is the first of a series of years for which elaborate accounts exist in the Record Office. These are of a detailed nature, much like that of Cawarden's accounts at Loseley, and arranged more or less under heads. Schedules of the plays and masks given during the periods to which they relate are in some cases attached. A brief analysis of the account for 1571-2 will show the general character of the entries. I can only dwell here upon those which relate to the organization of the Revels Office, and not upon those of merely dramatic or scenic interest. The main account runs from the end of Shrovetide, 1571, to the end of Shrovetide, 1572, and covers, firstly, a period of nine months from March to November, during which the occupation of the Office was limited to the airing and safeguard of 'stuff' and attendance upon the Master during the progress, and, secondly, an active three months of revels and preparation for revels, from December to February. This expenditure is accounted for under two main heads, Wages and Allowances and Emptions and Provisions. It may be abstracted as follows:

In many cases reference is made to the bills of the tradesmen for further details. At the end of the account is appended a supplementary account, amounting to £26 3s. 2d., for the three months from March to May, 1572, during which a further airing took place. The airings involved an elaborate process of what would now be called the 'spring-cleaning' of all the stuff in the office. There is also a list of six plays and six masks performed during Christmas and Shrovetide. The plays were acted by companies of men or children who were 'apparelled and ffurnished', and provided with 'apt howses, made of canvasse, fframed, ffashioned and paynted accordingly' by the Revels Office. It is noted that the six plays were 'chosen owte of many and ffownde to be the best that then were to be had; the same also being often perused and necessarely corrected and amended by all the afforeseide officers'. Four of the masks were new; the other two 'were but translated and otherwise garnished being of the former number by meanes wherof the chardge of workmanshipp and attendaunce is cheefely to be respected'. It will be observed that the Account does not include any items for the fees of the officers or for the hire of lodgings or storehouses. The[79] former were payable under their patents at the Exchequer, the latter provided in the royal house of St. John's. The officers get an allowance for diet when on active duty, either in the time of airings or in that of revels; and this is fixed, for each day or night, at 4s. for the Master, 2s. for the Clerk Comptroller, 2s. for the Clerk, and 2s. for the Yeoman. There is a similar allowance of 1s. for a Porter, described more fully in a later account as the Porter of St. John's Gate. His name was John Dauncy.[257] The Account discloses some changes in the establishment since 1559. Thomas Blagrave is still Clerk. Richard Lees had been succeeded as Clerk Comptroller on 30 December 1570 by Edward Buggin.[258] During the earlier part of the period John Holt is still Yeoman, but exercises his functions through a deputy, William Bowll, a Yeoman of the Chamber; he was replaced by John Arnold on 11 December 1571.[259] There is a letter to Cecil from William Bowll, written at some date after March 1571, in which he recites that he has recently delivered to Cecil letters from the Lord Treasurer (the Marquis of Winchester), Sir Thomas Benger, and John Holt, for a joint grant of the Yeomanship to himself and John Holt; that he has long served as Holt's deputy and paid him money on a composition as well as meeting some of the debts of the Office; that Holt is now dead and that he and his family will be undone unless Cecil procures him the post.[260] His suit, however, was obviously unsuccessful. Holt's tenure of the Yeomanship had thus extended from 1547 to 1571. He may himself have been an actor, if, as seems likely, he is the 'John Holt, momer', who received rewards for attendance on the Westminster boys at a pageant in 1561.

If Arnold was appointed in the winter of 1571, it was against him, rather than against Holt or his deputy Bowll, that a complaint was lodged with Burghley about a year later by one Thomas Giles. Giles was one of the tradesmen of the Revels. He is described in the Accounts as a haberdasher, and purchases of vizards were made from him. The burden of his complaint was that the officers of the Revels, and particularly the Yeoman, who had the custody of the masking garments, were in the habit of letting these out on hire, to their manifest deterioration, and, one fears, also to the injury of Giles's business. He enumerates twenty-one occasions upon which masks, including the new cloth of gold,[80] black and white, and murrey satin ones, made for the Queen's delectation during the previous Christmas, had been so let out to lords, lawyers, and citizens, in town and country, between January and November 1572.[261]

It is probable that Burghley, who became Lord Treasurer in July 1572, took early steps to look into the administration of the Revels Office, for which the death of Sir Thomas Benger about June of the same year afforded an opportunity.[262] Certainly there was no possibility of bringing about any immediate economy, for the embassy of the Duc de Montmorency from France had already caused a great increase of cost. The Revels bill for 1572-3 amounted to £1,427 12s. 6½d. or very little less than that for 1571-2. Of this about £1,000 was directly due to Montmorency's visit. Moreover, the greater part of the expenditure upon revels was not directly defrayed through the Office. They bought some stuff in the open market, and employed some workmen. But they had also large supplies from the Great Wardrobe, while the structure of banqueting-houses and the like was undertaken by the Office of Works. The total cost, therefore, for any one year would have to be pieced together from the accounts of all three offices. This task has never been essayed, but on Montmorency's coming an imprest of £200 was made to Lewis Stocket, Surveyor of the Works, and another of £300 to John Fortescue, Master of the Great Wardrobe, while a memorandum in Burghley's papers cites a warrant of 12 July 1572 which authorizes the delivery by Fortescue to Benger of stuffs to no less value than £1,757 8s. 1½d.[263]

Pending Burghley's investigation no patent was issued for a successor to Benger. During the Christmas of 1573, the oversight of the Office was committed jointly to Fortescue and to Henry Sackford, the Master of the Tents, and the whole of the account for the period from 1 June 1572 to 31 October 1573 is signed by them, together with the inferior officers of the Revels. There are signs of an ambition towards economy in entries showing that on several occasions during the year claims upon the Office were reduced after examination[81] by the Comptroller and other officers.[264] The auditors in their turn had an eye upon the Office. A sum of £50 was originally included in the account with the explanation:

To this is appended a note:

It may be admitted that the cost of the Revels would have been less if the officers had been in a position to pay for the goods supplied to them in ready money. They probably got small 'imprests' or advances at the beginning of the year when they could, but for the most part they had to obtain credit and satisfy their tradesmen with debentures, redeemable when the accounts had been audited and a warrant under the privy seal for the payment of the certified expenses issued. Elizabeth succeeded to an exchequer already burdened with the debt of past reigns, and the issue of these warrants was often delayed. William Bowll had made it part of his claim to be appointed Yeoman in succession to John Holt that he had made advances for 'payment to the workemen and other poore creditors for mony due unto them in the said office, accordinge to thear necessities before any warant graunted, only for to mayntayn the credit of the said office'. An undated letter is preserved amongst Burghley's papers in which he makes an attempt to recover a sum of £236 due to him for goods supplied over a period of two years and nine months.[266] A similar letter, written on behalf of the creditors and artificers serving the office, and signed by 'Poore Bryan Dodmer a creditour, to saue the labour of a great number whose exclamacion is lamentable', refers specifically to the unpaid balance of the office account on 28 February 1574, which stood at £1,550 5s. 8d.[267] Bryan Dodmer had received[82] a legacy from Sir Thomas Cawarden in 1559, and is shown by the account of 1571-2 to have been at that time occupied in the affairs of the Revels Office, although not on the establishment. To 1573 and 1574 may be ascribed three memoranda, which were evidently prepared for Burghley's assistance in considering schemes of reform. Two of these, although longer than can be printed here, are singularly illuminating to students of departmental history. One, in particular, gives a very capable summary of the situation, and is informed by a good deal of sound administrative sense.[268] It begins with a short historical notice of the origin and foundation of the Revels and a suggestion for a fresh amalgamation of the Mastership with those of the Tents and Toils. The writer then considers the possibility of either farming out the office, or fixing a definite allowance for all ordinary charges, and rejects both proposals as impracticable. Nor does he see much room for economy in the 'airings', or in a reduction in the number of officers; on the contrary, he is in favour of supplementing the Master, who must give attendance at Court, by a working head of the Office with the rank of Serjeant. He lays stress on the importance of co-operation amongst the officers, and while not prepared to abrogate the quasi-independence of the Master which the appointment of the inferior officers by patent gave them, submits an elaborate draft of new ordinances provisionally dated in the regnal year 1572-3, and intended to replace those which he understands to have been delivered 'before my time' to some of the Queen's Privy Council.[269] This deals, not only with the functions of each officer, but also with the time-table of the year's work, the control of the artificers, the economical employment of wardrobe stuff, the books to be kept, and the avoidance of debt by a liberal imprest. An historian of the stage can wish that the suggestion had been adopted for order to be annually given 'to a connynge paynter to enter into a fayer large ligeard booke in the manner of limnynge the maskes and shewes sett fourthe in that last seruice, to thende varyetye may be vsed from tyme to tyme'. I think that the author of this document was probably Buggin, the Clerk Comptroller, since the two other memoranda are clearly on internal evidence the work of Blagrave, the Clerk, and one of the Yeomen, and Burghley is likely to have given each officer[83] a chance of expressing his views. It might, however, have been Henry Sackford, in view of the suggestion for amalgamation with the Tents, and in any case Buggin probably had Sackford's interests in mind, not to speak of his own chances of obtaining the contemplated Serjeanty. Blagrave's proposals are in matters of detail not unlike Buggin's, but he does not endorse the suggestion of a Serjeant, and is less skilful in keeping his personal ambitions in the background.[270]

The Yeoman's Memorandum is short enough to be given in full.[271]

This is endorsed,

The documents are proposals for reform rather than statements of existing practice; but proposals for reform made by permanent officials are not generally very sweeping, and I think it may be taken that we get a pretty fair notion of the actual working of a Government department in the sixteenth century, not without certain hints of jealousies and disputes between the various officers as to their respective functions and privileges, which in those days as in these occasionally tended to interfere with the smooth working of the machine. The determination of these functions and privileges by regulation; the keeping of regular books, inventories, journals, and ledgers; the institution of a system of finance which would avoid the necessity of employing credit; the prohibition of the hiring-out of Revels stuff; these are amongst the improvements in organization which suggested themselves to practical men who were not in the least likely to suggest the transference of the duties of their own rather superfluous Office to the Office of Works or the Wardrobe. Both Buggin and Blagrave ask that the hands of the officers might be strengthened by a commission; that is, apparently, a warrant entitling them to enforce service on behalf of the Crown, such as the Master of the Children of the Chapel had to 'take up' singing-boys, and other departments of the Household, including probably the Tents, had for the purveyance of provisions and cartage. Probably the Revels had already enjoyed this authority upon special occasions. The Account for the banqueting house of 1572 includes an item for 'flowers of all sortes taken up by comyssion and[85] gathered in the feeldes'.[272] At the bottom of the documents there is a feeling that the weak point in the organization is the Mastership. The Master had to be a courtier, dancing attendance on the Queen and the Lord Chamberlain, and was likely to have the qualities and failings of a courtier; and then he came to the office, and gave instructions to people who knew their own business much better than he did.

Blagrave's ambitions to become Master of the Office were not wholly gratified. He was allowed to act as Master for some years, but he never received a patent, and after Benger's death he had the mortification of seeing the post given to another, while he was left to content himself with his much despised Clerkship. His regency lasted from November 1573 until Christmas 1579, and his signature stands alone or heads those of the other officers upon the Accounts relating to that period, with the exception of the last, on which the name of the incoming Master appears.[273] His appointment was presumably from year to year. It is stated in the Account for 1573-4 to have been made by 'her Majestie's pleasure signefyed by the right honorable L. Chamberlaine', and in that for 1574-5 to appear from 'sundry letters from the Lorde Chamberlayne'. And the vacancy emphasized the dependence of the Revels upon that great branch of the tripartite Household, the Chamber, over which the Lord Chamberlain presided. All Blagrave's activities were subject to control by his superior officer. He and his subordinates were constantly going by boat or horse to Richmond, or wherever the Court might be, to take instructions from the Lord Chamberlain, to submit patterns of masks and alterations of plays, and to obtain payment of expenses.[274] Blagrave himself had a house at Bedwyn in Wiltshire, and couriers were sometimes sent after him when his presence in London was urgently needed.[275] Upon his entrance into office the officers were called together 'for colleccion and showe of eche thinge prepared for her Maiesties regall disporte and recreacion as also the store wherewith to ffurnish, garnish and sett forth the same; wherof, as also of the whole state of the office the L. Chamberlayne according to his honours appointment was throughly advertised'.[276] The store was also carefully perused and the inventories checked upon the[86] death of John Arnold the Yeoman, and the appointment on 29 January 1574 of Walter Fish in his room.[277] The Accounts continue to include allowances for the diet of the Clerk as well as that of the Master. I have no doubt that Blagrave was quite capable of drawing them both; but it is also likely enough that some unestablished person undertook the duties of 'Acting' Clerk. If so, this was most probably Bryan Dodmer, who was very useful on financial business during 1573-4 and 1574-5. After this year he disappears from the Accounts and his place is apparently taken by John Drawater. William Bowll, the ex-Deputy-Yeoman and silkweaver, and Thomas Giles, the haberdasher, in spite of their complaints against the Office, continue to supply it with goods.[278]

The general character of the Accounts, both under Fortescue and Sackford, and under Blagrave, is much the same as that of the one, already analysed, for 1571-2. Periods of activity, mainly at Christmas and Shrovetide, still alternate with periods of quiescence, stock-taking, and 'airing'. Occasionally the Office has to bestir itself to accompany a progress.[279] Some unusually detailed entries in 1576-7 give interesting information as to the rates of wages ordinarily paid to workmen. The head tailor got 20d. for each day or night, and other tailors 12d. Carpenters got 16d.; the Porter and other attendants 12d. Painters, haberdashers, property-makers, joiners, carvers, and wire-drawers were paid 'at sundrie rates'. In a later year, 1579-80, the first and second painter got 2s. and 20d. respectively, and the rest 18d. The first wire-drawer got 20d., and the rest 16d.[280] The payments for night-work really represent double wages for overtime, since we learn from Buggin and Blagrave that the length of a night was reckoned at about half that of a day. The workmen who waited on the mask before Montmorency in 1572 got extra rewards, because they 'had no tyme to eat theyer supper'; and while the banqueting-house was building Bryan Dodmer had to buy bread and cheese 'to serve the plasterers that wroughte all the nighte and mighte not be spared nor trusted to go abrode to supper'.[281] An important function of the Office consisted in 'calling together of sundry players and pervsing, fitting and reformyng theier matters (otherwise not convenient to be showen before her Maiestie)'.[282] Dodmer paid 40s. in 1574-5 for 'paynes in pervsing and reformyng[87] of playes sundry tymes as neede required for her Maiestie's lyking', and it is a pity that the name of the payee is left blank in the Account.[283] When the plays had been chosen and knocked into shape, they had to be rehearsed. Now and then they were taken before the Lord Chamberlain for this purpose; but as a rule the rehearsals went on in the presence of the officers at St. John's. Here were a 'greate chambere where the workes were doone and the playes rezited', a storehouse, and the mansions of the officers. The Clerk had an office with a nether room next the yard.[284] Fish complains of the inconvenience of having only one room for every kind of artificer to work in. Items for yellow cotton to line 'the Monarkes gowne' and for his jerkin and hose perhaps point to the use of a lay figure.[285] One Nicholas Newdigate was extremely useful in hearing and training the children who frequently performed.[286] Naturally these gave a good deal of trouble. At Shrovetide 1574 nine of them were employed for a mask at Hampton Court. They had diet and lodging at St. John's, 'whiles thay learned theier partes and jestures meete for the mask'. They were taken from Paul's Wharf to Hampton Court in a barge with six oars and two 'tylt whirreys'. They arrived on Monday, but the Queen would not see them until the Tuesday, and they were lodged for the two nights at Mother Sparo's at Kingston. An Italian woman and her daughter were employed to dress their heads. When they got back to London on Ash-Wednesday, 'sum of them being sick and colde and hungry', fire and victuals were provided at Blackfriars. Each child received a reward of 1s.[287] Trouble was caused also sometimes by the behaviour of the courtiers who took part in festivities. Six horns garnished with silver were provided at a cost of 18s., for a mask of hunters on 1 January 1574, and there is a note in the Account that these horns 'the maskers detayned and yet dooth kepe them against the will of all the officers'. This sort of difficulty was traditional. It was already perplexing the worthy Gibson more than half a century before.[288] That the practice of lending out the Revels stuff was not wholly abandoned is shown by an application from Magdalen College, Oxford, to Tilney in 1592 for furniture for a play.[289] Finance was also a cause of trouble. On his appointment in 1573 Blagrave succeeded in obtaining a 'prest' of £200 to begin the year upon. In 1574 he did the same, but not[88] until Dodmer had applied in vain to the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Treasurer, and Mr. Secretary Walsingham, and was finally 'after long attendaunce (and that none of the afore-named coulde get the Queenes Maiestie to resolve therin) dryven to trouble her Maiestie himselfe and by special peticion obtayned as well the grawnt for ccˡᶦ in prest as the dettes to be paid'. At the end of each year there were formalities and delays to be gone through before the bills could be paid. The accounts had to be made up, to be passed by the auditors, and to be declared before the Lord Treasurer and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Then a royal warrant had to be obtained for a privy seal, then the privy seal itself, and finally actual payment at the Exchequer. All these processes necessitated constant fees and gratuities. In 1579 the estimated charges for audit and payment amounted to £8. For his considerable financial services in 1574-5 Bryan Dodmer demanded £13 6s. 8d., but this was ruthlessly cut down by the officers to £6 13s. 4d. They in their turn found the auditor disallowing a small payment because it had been entered in the books after the sum had been cast, and was not properly certified. Dodmer had advanced the money, but he could not be repaid until the following year.[290]

A letter of 8 April 1577 from Leicester to Burghley reminds him that a certain suit of Sir Jerome Bowes and others 'touching plays' had been referred to them, together with the Lord Chamberlain, by the Queen for consideration. They had 'myslyked of the perpetuytie they sutors desierd', but a report still had to be made.[291] There is nothing to show the nature of this 'suit', but it is not unnatural to conjecture that it arose in some way out of the vacancy in the Mastership. No more, however, is heard of Sir Jerome Bowes in this connexion. It was not until seven years after Benger's death that Blagrave met with the rebuff of finding himself passed over in favour of an outsider, and reduced to his former position of Clerk, with its subordinate duties and its miserable allowances for the 'ordynary grene cloth, paper, incke, counters, deskes, standishes', and so forth. The new Master was Edmund Tilney, who had dedicated to Elizabeth, in 1568, a dialogue on matrimony under the title of The Flower of Friendship. Tilney was a connexion of Lord Howard of Effingham, to whose influence at Court he probably owed his appointment. His patent is dated on 24 July 1579, but the fee was to run from the previous Christmas, and[89] he may therefore have formally assumed his duties at that period. His signature is attached with those of Blagrave and the other officers to the Account for the whole of the period from 14 February 1578 to 31 October 1579, but the details do not afford any evidence that he took a personal share in the work of the Office.[292] In 1581 he was spoken of as a possible ambassador to Spain, but this does not appear to have led to anything.[293]

Only a few detailed Accounts belonging to Tilney's Mastership are in existence. These are made up regularly from each 1 November to the following 31 October. They do not disclose any noteworthy change in the previous routine of the Office. On 8 August 1580 Thomas Sackford, a Master of the Requests, and Sir Owen Hopton, the Lieutenant of the Tower, were instructed by the Council to take a view of the Revels stuff upon the appointment of the new Master, and to deliver inventories of the same to Tilney. Accordingly, a charge of 40s. 'for the ingrossinge of three paire of indentid inventories' appears in the Account.[294] Blagrave appears to have sulked at first, for in 1581 the employment of a professional scribe to make up the accounts was explained by the absence of a clerk. The auditors, very properly, made a marginal note of surprise, and Blagrave resumed his duties.[295] In 1582-3 considerable repairs were required at the Revels Office, owing to the fact that a chamber which formed part of Blagrave's lodging had fallen down. An office and a chamber for the Master seem for a time to have been provided at Court during the attendance of the Master, and warmed with billets and coals at the expense of the Revels, but by 1587-8 they had been crowded out, and an allowance of 10s. was made for the hire of rooms.[296] Another entry for 1582-3 marks an epoch of some importance in the history of the Elizabethan stage. On 10 March 1583 Tilney was summoned to Court by a letter from Mr. Secretary [Walsingham] 'to choose out a companie of players for her Maiestie'. Horse hire and charges on the journey cost him 20s.[297] Outside the Accounts there is one document of considerable interest belonging to the early years of Tilney's rule. This is a patent, dated 24 December 1581, and giving to the Master of the Revels such a 'commission' or grant of exceptional powers over the subjects of the realm, as had been stated in the Memoranda[90] of 1573 to be eminently desirable in the interests of the office.[298] The Master is authorized to take and retain such workmen 'at competent wages', and take such 'stuff, ware, or merchandise', 'at price reasonable', together with such 'carriages', by land and by water, as he may consider to be necessary or expedient for the service of the Revels. He or his deputy may commit recalcitrant persons to ward. He may protect his workmen from arrest, and they are not to be liable to forfeit if their service in the Revels obliges them to break outside contracts for piece-work. The licensing powers also conferred upon the Master by this patent are considered elsewhere.[299]

Tilney's accession to office coincided with the beginning of the period of heightened splendour in Court entertainments, due to the negotiations for Elizabeth's marriage with the Duke of Anjou.[300] A magnificent banqueting-house was built at Whitehall, and Sidney, Fulke Greville, and others, equipped as the Foster Children of Desire, besieged the Fortress of Perfect Beauty in the tilt-yard. One might have expected to find a considerably larger expenditure accounted for by the officers of the Revels. But this was not so, except for the one winter of Anjou's visit. The cost of the Office, which in 1571-3 had grown to about £1,500 a year, rapidly fell again. In 1573-4 it was about £670; in 1574-5 about £580; and thereafter it generally stood at not more than from £250 to £350. In 1581-2, however, it reached £630.[301] It is probable that the figures do not point to any real reduction of expenditure, but only mean that, after the experience of John Fortescue, the Master of the Wardrobe, as Acting Master of the Revels in 1572-3, it was found economical to supply the needs of the Office, to a greater extent even than in the past, through the organization of the Wardrobe and the Office of Works, instead of by the direct purchase of goods or employment of labour in the open market. Stowe records, for example, that the banqueting-house of 1581 cost £1,744 19s., but no part of this appears in the Revels Account, although the banqueting-house of 1572 had cost the Office £224 6s. 10d.[302] Probably it was all met by the Office of Works. About 1596 a further reform in the interests of economy was attempted, by the establishment of a fixed annual allowance for expenses, including the 'wages' or 'diet' hitherto allowed to the officers for each day or night of actual attendance at 'airings' or at the rehearsals or performances of plays. The last payment[91] under the old system was made on 30 May 1594 by a warrant to Tilney for a sum of £311 2s. 2d. in respect of works and wares and officers' wages for 1589-92, together with an imprest of £100 for 1592-3.[303] The next warrant was made out on 25 January 1597, and directed the payment of £200 for 1593-6, together with an annual payment of £66 6s. 8d., 'as composition for defraying the charges of the office for plays only, according to a rate of a late reformation and composition for ordinary charges there'.[304] The amount of £311 2s. 2d. paid for the three years 1589-92 is so small as to suggest that the distinction between 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary' charges may have already existed during the period, and may thus have preceded the reduction of 'ordinary' charges to a 'composition'. The warrant of 25 January 1597, however, never became operative. There is an entry of it in the Docquet Book of the Signet Office, and in the margin are the notes 'Remanet: neuer passed the Seales' and 'Staid by the Lord Threasorer: vacat'. Fortunately we are able to trace the causes which led to this interposition by Burghley. It will perhaps be remembered that Edward Buggin, in his Memorandum of 1573, had considered a possible reform of the administration of the Revels Office on lines very similar to those now adopted, and had decided that it was impracticable.[305] Doubtless the same view was held by the officers of 1597, and after the manner of permanent officials they took steps to ensure that it should be impracticable. Disputes arose between the Master and the inferior officers as to the distribution of the sum allowed for ordinary charges, and, pending a settlement of these, all payments out of the Office were suspended. The result was a memorial to Burghley from the 'creditors and servitors' of the Revels, which called attention to the fact that five years' arrears due to them were withheld 'only throughe the discention amoungest the officers'.[306]

This was in the first instance referred to Tilney for his observations, and he writes:

The document was then referred to Burghley, with the following summary of its contents:

Burghley then gave this direction:

W. Burghley.

The document is then further endorsed with the report of Burghley's referees:

[93]

Hereon Burghley comments:

W. Burghley.

Here the minutes stop, but Burghley must have been satisfied and must have allowed the arrangement to go forward, for on 10 January 1598 a new warrant was issued, in the place of that previously stayed, for the £200 due on account of 1593-6, and for the annual £66 6s. 8d., 'by way of composition for defraying the ordinary services of plays only'. Apparently the fixed rate was made retrospective for 1593-6.[307] Two or three points of interest arise from the document just printed. It seems curious that no share in the composition is awarded to the Clerk. Possibly Blagrave, old and disappointed, was in practical retirement at Bedwyn; but in that case he would naturally have appointed and claimed allowance for a deputy. On the other hand, a new post, of Groom of the Revels, corresponding to that of Groom of the Tents which had existed since 1544, seems to have been created, probably for the benefit of Thomas Clatterbocke, who, unless two generations are involved, had served the Office continuously as a foreman tailor since 1548;[308] and it is to be gathered that some redistribution of duties and emoluments between the Yeoman and the Groom was in progress. The Porter of St. John's Gate, also, now seems to be classed as an officer, or perhaps rather a 'servitor', of the Revels; and in this post John Dauncy has been succeeded since 1588-9 by John Griffeth.[309] The sum of £66 6s. 8d. allowed for ordinary charges was evidently made up of £40 for officers' 'wages' and £26 6s. 8d. for tradesmen's bills and miscellaneous expenses. This last sum is so small as to suggest that the Office had been relieved both of the emption of stuffs and of the payment of tailors and property-makers. After paying £19 to the inferior officers, Tilney had £21 left for his own 'wages'. This amount is out of proportion to the double rate, of 4s. as against the 2s. paid to each inferior officer, which the Master had been accustomed to receive for each day's or night's attendance. But the accounts for 1582-3, 1584-5, and 1587-8 show that the attendances made by Tilney, who possibly exercised a much more detailed supervision of his Office than either Benger or Cawarden had attempted, were far in excess, during those years, of those of his subordinates. Every officer attended for the twenty[94] annual days of 'airing' and for the actual nights, which were sixteen in 1582-3, and fourteen in 1584-5 and 1587-8, of the performances. In addition, Tilney attended for 106, 117, and 116 days respectively, and the other officers for only 60, 51, and 28 (in the case of the Yeoman, 38) days respectively, in these three years.[310] Probably he liked to be at Court, whether there was much to do or not. The average allowances for wages had therefore been about £29 10s. a year for the Master and £7 10s. a year for each inferior officer, so that the composition was by no means unduly in Tilney's favour. Moreover, he had introduced a practice of taking to Court a doorkeeper and three other attendants, and charging 1s. a day as diet for each. Probably these were his personal servants, and he got no further allowance for them under the composition. The precedence of the Master of the Revels at Court was fixed by a certificate of the Heralds in 1588, which directed that in the procession to St. Paul's for a thanksgiving after the Armada he should walk with the Knights Bachelor.[311]

Of course, the 'wages' dealt with by the composition and charged to the Revels Account were quite distinct from the 'fees' payable to the officers out of the Exchequer in virtue of their patents. These had been settled in Cawarden's time, and, so far as the inferior officers were concerned, do not appear to have been varied since. The Clerk Comptroller was entitled to 8d. a day, together with four yards of woollen cloth, worth 6s. 8d. each, from the Wardrobe. In practice, however, the livery had been replaced by a money allowance of 26s. 8d. charged half on the Revels and half on the Tents.[312] The Clerk had 8d. a day, and a money payment from the Treasury of 24s. a year in lieu of livery; the Yeoman 6d. a day, and a livery 'such as Yeomen of the household have' at the Wardrobe. The Master's fee, alike in the patents of Cawarden, Benger, and Tilney, is given as £10. But Tilney, according to a statement made by his successor about 1611, received £100 'for a better recompence'.[313] In addition to fee and wages, each of the officers was entitled under his patent to an official residence. The Master held his place 'cum omnibus domibus mansionibus regardis proficuis iuribus libertatibus et advantagiis eidem officio quovismodo pertinentibus sive spectantibus vel tali officio pertinere sive spectare debentibus'. The Clerk Comptroller could claim a house, 'ubi[95] paviliones ... positi sunt aut erunt' to be assigned by the Master of the Tents; the Clerk, one at the staura of the Revels or the Tents, to be assigned by the Master of one or other Office; the Yeoman 'one sufficient house or mancion such as hereafter shall be assigned to him' for the keeping of the vestures. Cawarden had provided these houses at the Blackfriars and had taken allowances in his accounts of £10 for his own and £5 each for those of his three subordinates, as well as one of £6 13s. 4d. for the work and store rooms of the Office.[314] After his death suitable lodgings were available at St. John's. During the interregnum the Master's lodging was utilized as a supplementary storehouse. It was consequently not ready for Tilney on his appointment, and he was allowed £13 6s. 8d. a year for lodgings elsewhere.[315] An undated letter from him at the Revels Office to Sir William More, complaining of the conduct of a neighbour, suggests that he found these at the Blackfriars, and here he seems to have remained, at any rate until 1582.[316] But by 1586-7 he had moved to St. John's, where he occupied not his proper lodging but that of the Comptroller, for which he paid £16 a year. This we learn from a careful survey made at that date by Thomas Graves, Surveyor of the Office of Works.[317] He was comfortably housed enough, for he had thirteen chambers, with a parlour, hall, kitchen, stable and other appurtenances, and a 'convenient garden'. The Clerk had eleven rooms and a stable, and the Yeoman seven and a barn. The addition of the Master's lodging to the space available for official purposes had presumably removed the difficulties of accommodation of which Fish had complained in 1574. In addition to the 'Great Hall' and a 'great chamber', there were a cutting house and three 'woorking housez' below the hall. It may be added that there had been some changes during Tilney's Mastership, both of Clerk Comptroller and of Yeoman. On 15 October 1584 William Honing was[96] appointed Comptroller in place of Edward Buggin.[318] On 25 June 1596, Honing having resigned, Edmund Pakenham was appointed as from 29 September 1595.[319] The last Yeoman of the reign was Edward Kirkham. His patent, in succession to Walter Fish, then dead, is dated on 28 April 1586.[320] But it refers to his 'service done in the Revels', and it is clear from the account for 1582-3 that he was already employed during that year, probably as deputy to Fish, in whose place he signed the book.[321] Fish signed that for 1580-1, and that for 1581-2 is missing. Kirkham's activities as a member of the syndicate formed to finance the Chapel plays in 1601 are a matter for discussion elsewhere.[322]

Tilney remained Master of the Revels until his death on 20 August 1610. But with the new reign he appears to have exercised most of his functions through his nephew, Sir George Buck, as his deputy and prospective successor. Buck had been in the Cadiz expedition of 1596, and was not improbably the Mr. Buck who carried dispatches for Cecil to Middelburgh in the Low Countries and afterwards in England during the autumn of 1601.[323] At the funeral of Elizabeth he received livery as an Esquire of the Body, probably extraordinary.[324] Hopes of the Mastership seem to have been held out to him as early as 1597, to the despair of another Esquire of the Body, John Lyly, the dramatist, who considered that he had claims upon the reversion to the Mastership, and pretty clearly regarded the bestowal of it upon another as a distinct breach of faith on the part of the Queen. Several letters of his referring to the matter are preserved at Hatfield and elsewhere. The earliest and most important of these is dated 22 December 1597 and addressed to Sir Robert Cecil. Herein Lyly says:

[97]

To the Queen herself Lyly wrote:

The date of this petition is probably 1598, since a second letter to Cecil, dated 9 September 1598, specifies the same period of 'ten yeres', during which Lyly had had 'nothing applied to my wantes but promises'. On 27 February 1601, a third letter to Cecil, asking for his aid in obtaining a grant out of property forfeited after the Essex conspiracy, suggests that 'after 13 yeres servic and suit for the Revells, I may turne all my forces & frends to feed on the Rebells'. This was written in connexion with a second petition to the Queen, in which occurs the following passage:

The general drift of these documents is fairly clear. It would seem that Lyly received promises of advancement from Elizabeth about 1585, probably as a result of the success of his plays; that in 1588 he was 'entertained the queen's servant', with a more or less authorized expectation of place in the Revels; that in 1597 his claims were set aside in favour of Buck; and that, after unavailing protests, he made the best of the situation and attempted to obtain what compensation he could for his disappointment. I find some confirmation of the view that about 1588 Lyly came to be regarded, possibly on account of the aid rendered by his pen to the bishops against Martin Marprelate, as having some right of succession to a place at Court, in an allusion of Gabriel Harvey, who in his Advertisement for Papp-Hatchett, dated 5 November 1589, but not published until it was included in his Pierce's[98] Supererogation of 1593, says of Papp-Hatchett, who is almost certainly Lyly, 'He might as truly forge any lewd or villanous report of any one in England; and for his labour challenge to be preferred to the Clerkship of the whetstone'; and again, 'His knavish and foolish malice palpably bewrayeth itself in most odious actions; meet to garnish the foresayd famous office of the whetstone'.[326] The actual phrasing of Lyly's letters is, of course, characteristically obscure. It is possible that the 'keper' referred to in the first of them is the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, to whom, if Collier may be trusted, Buck sent, in 1605, a copy of a poem called ΔΑΦΝΙΣ ΠΟΛΥΣΤΕΦΑΝΟΣ, with some lines referring to an obligation of long standing towards his patron.[327] The allusion to 'Tentes and Toyles' may mean that, after giving up hope of the Mastership of the Revels, Lyly had turned his thoughts to the Mastership of the Tents and Toils, the actual holder of which, in 1601, Henry Sackford, had been appointed to the Tents as far back as 1559, and must therefore have been an oldish man; or possibly that, if he could not have the higher place, Lyly would have been content with the reversion of one of the two subordinate appointments, the Clerkship or the Clerk Comptrollership, which the Revels shared with the Tents.[328]

I may complete the story by pointing out that Buck, no less than Lyly, was making interest with Cecil. As a connexion of the Howards, he had of course a powerful influence behind him, and after the death of Nicasius Yetswiert, French Secretary and Clerk of the Signet, Lord Howard of Effingham had written to Cecil on 28 April 1595[329]:

Four years later, on 1 June 1599, Buck himself wrote to the Secretary[330]:

This may reasonably be taken as referring to the Mastership of the Revels, and makes it clear that, whatever Elizabeth had said or done in 1597, she had not given Buck any irrecoverable promise. Very likely she never did. But early in the new reign, on 23 June 1603, Buck received a formal grant by patent of the reversion to Tilney.[331] On the same day was issued a new commission for the office, similar to that of 1581, but in Buck's name instead of Tilney's, from which it is to be inferred that he had become the acting Master.[332] On 23 July 1603 he was knighted.[333] Tilney, however, continued to render the accounts, which, with two exceptions, only exist for the whole of the reign of James in a summary form. The account for 1609-10 is by Tilney's executor, Thomas Tilney; and from 1610-11 onwards Buck is accounting officer, and in full enjoyment of the Mastership.[334] One of the two detailed accounts is Tilney's for 1604-5, the other Buck's for 1611-12. These are made interesting by their schedules of Court performances, the authenticity of which may now be regarded as fairly vindicated.[335] They show that the establishment remained precisely upon its sixteenth-century lines. The close of Elizabeth's reign witnessed the termination by death of Blagrave's fifty-seven years' service in the Revels.[336] William Honing, the former Comptroller, returned to the Office as Clerk in his room, under a patent made retrospective to 25 March 1603.[337] He was still there, as was Edward Kirkham, the [100]Yeoman, in 1617.[338] On the other hand there was a rather rapid succession of Clerk Comptrollers: Edmund Pakenham to 1605-6, Edmund Fowler from 1606-7 to 1608-9, William Page in 1609-10, and Alexander Stafford from 24 April 1611 to 1617 or later.[339] The Groom or Purveyor, like the Porter of St. John's, appears to have been a servitor and not an officer by patent. During 1603-15 he was Stephen Baile, who had succeeded Thomas Clatterbocke. The Porter of St. John's, during the same period, was Richard Prescot.[340]

The change of reign brought with it another change in the financial arrangements for the office. The 'composition' introduced by Burghley in 1597 was abandoned, and henceforth the Master regularly received an imprest of £100 at the beginning of each financial year, together with the balance due on an account rendered by him for all charges since the time of the last imprest. The total amount passing through his hands was not large. During the earlier years of the reign it varied from £150 to £300, and during 1611-15 from £300 to £500.[341] In 1617 the 'ordinary' issues for the Revels were still estimated at £300.[342] Nor was there any special need for 'extraordinary' issues, since the organization of the masks, in which Jacobean Court extravagance centred, was not entrusted to the Revels at all, but to some nominated officer, under the direct supervision of the Lord Chamberlain and the Master of the Horse, who received funds direct from the Treasury for any expenditure which did not fall within the provinces of the Wardrobe or the Office of Works.[343] The Revels Officers continued indeed to give their personal attendance on mask nights, and to charge for their diet accordingly. But their actual responsibility for the entertainments appears to have been limited to the supervision of the fittings, such as the 'music house' in the hall or banqueting-house, and in particular of the elaborate arrangements for lighting. The wire-drawer's bill is the chief outgoing represented in the annual accounts. There is very little else except the personal allowances for the officers and the Master's four servants, their office expenses and boat-hire, the audit and exchequer costs, and occasional repairs to the 'tiring-house' used for[101] rehearsals and other parts of the premises which they occupied. The Master charges diet for himself and his men for every day between All Hallows and Ash Wednesday, together with an extra amount for each actual night of play or mask, and for a varying number of days of tilting and running at the ring and twenty days of 'airing' in the summer. The Comptroller, Clerk, and Yeoman get £13 6s. 8d. each and the Groom £6 13s. 4d. for the whole of their required attendance. Beyond a stray property or garment here and there, there is nothing spent on emptions of stuff or on tailors and the like. I think it is clear that the result of the policy initiated by Burghley had been to reduce the Revels, regarded as a branch of the Household organization, to comparative insignificance. Henceforward its domestic duties sink into the background of the quasi-political functions given to the Master as stage censor by the commissions of 1581 and 1603. But these functions were peculiar to the Master, who carried them out with the aid of his personal servants.[344] The other Revels officers had no claim to share in them, and though Tilney and Buck built up a considerable income out of licensing fees, which probably accounts for the discontinuance in Buck's case of the 'better recompense' of £100 granted by Elizabeth to Tilney, no penny of these fees ever passed through the Revels Accounts.

The slight increase of cost observable in course of time is mainly due to charges for lodgings. The want of accommodation at Hampton Court in the winter of 1603-4 obliged the officers to rent rooms at Kingston for a month at a cost of £4.[345] In 1607 a far more serious problem was presented by the impending loss of St. John's. This had remained in Crown hands throughout Elizabeth's time, although on 31 October 1601 we find John Chamberlain writing to Dudley Carleton, 'The Quene sells land still and the house of St. Johns is at sale'.[346] James, however, after leasing the Gatehouse for life to Sir Roger Wilbraham in 1604, carried out his predecessor's intention by selling the greater part of the[102] Priory to Ralph Freeman on 9 May 1607.[347] Presumably the premises which had been assigned to the Revels were not covered by this sale, for of these the King made a gift in the same year to his cousin Esmé Stuart, eighth Lord Aubigny.[348] The Revels therefore had to be dispossessed. But the Office had to be housed somewhere; and the officers were all entitled to official residences under the terms of their patents. It was doubtless in connexion with this transaction that the following memorandum, which is preserved amongst Sir Julius Caesar's papers and endorsed 'Mr. Tilney's writinge touching his Office', was drawn up.[349]

The difficulty was met by a plan which had served before in the history of the Revels. The officers were allowed to provide their own lodgings, and to charge £15 each for the purpose in the Office account. A similar allowance (£20) was made[103] to the Master for the provision of an office.[350] The actual removal, so far as the office was concerned, took place in the spring of 1608. The accounts show expenses 'in providing a place for th'office of the Revells' between 10 February and the middle of April, and there is independent evidence that on the 10th of March, it was located next door to the Whitefriars theatre.[351] Tilney's personal allowance first appears in the account for 1608-9, and is made retrospective to Michaelmas 1607. Perhaps the Clerk and Yeoman were not disturbed quite so soon. Their allowances first appear in 1610-11, and are retrospective to Hallowmas 1608.[352] It may be assumed that the Comptroller's lodging was treated as a charge on the Tents. On Tilney's death, Buck was allowed £30 to cover both the Office and his own lodging, and the payment antedated to Michaelmas 1608. He protested that he had in fact to pay a rent of £50, and although Salisbury probably turned a deaf ear, his appeal was allowed when his Howard connexions, Suffolk and Northampton, became Treasury Commissioners in 1612, and the allowance was finally fixed at £50.[353] It should be added that Buck also secured in 1612-13, and very likely in other years, a quite distinct allowance of £16, under a warrant from the Lord Chamberlain to the Treasurer of the Chamber, as compensation for the absence of a lodging for him at a crowded Court during the winter revels season.[354] The Office cannot have stayed long in the Whitefriars, for on 24 August 1612 Buck dedicated a treatise on The Third University in England to Sir Edward Coke 'from his Majesties office of the Revels, upon St. Peter's Hill'.[355] This is an account of the seats of learning in London, [104]and was printed by Howes as an appendix to the 1615 edition of Stowe's Annales. Chapter 47 is Of the Art of Revels, and is worth quoting:

It is matter for deep regret that Buck's 'particular commentary' is lost. He made other contributions to letters, writing commendatory verses to Thomas Watson's ΕΚΑΤΟΜΠΑΘΙΑ (c. 1582) and to Camden's Britannia (1607), and a poem called ΔΑΦΝΙΣ ΠΟΛΥΣΤΕΦΑΝΟΣ (1605).[357] His History of the Life and Reigne of Richard III was published posthumously in 1607.[358]

Reversions of the Mastership were granted during Buck's lifetime to Edward Glasscock in 1603, to John, afterwards Sir John, Astley or Ashley on 3 April 1612, to Benjamin Jonson on 5 October 1621, and to William Painter on 29 July 1622.[359] His actual successor was Sir John Astley. On 30 March 1622 John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton, 'Old Sir George Buck, master of the revels, has gone mad'.[360] On 29 March 1622 a warrant was issued by the Lord Chamberlain to swear Astley in as Master, followed on 16 May by[105] a letter requiring Buck to deliver up the books and other property of the Office.[361] His death took place on 20 September 1623.[362] Astley almost immediately sold his office to Sir Henry Herbert, whose tenure of it belongs to the history of the Caroline stage.

[106]

IV
PAGEANTRY

THE tradition of pageantry had its roots deep in the Middle Ages. But it made its appeal also to the Renaissance, of which nothing was more characteristic than the passion for colour and all the splendid external vesture of things; while the ranging curiosity of the Renaissance was able to stimulate into fresh life the fading imaginative energies of the past, weaving its new fancies from classical mythology, from epic and pastoral, from the explorations of history and folk-lore,[107] no less delightfully than incongruously, into the old mediaeval warp of scripture and hagiology and allegory. So that the Tudor kings and queens came and went about their public affairs in a constant atmosphere of make-believe, with a sibyl lurking in every court-yard and gateway, and a satyr in the boscage of every park, to turn the ceremonies of welcome and farewell, without which sovereigns must not move, by the arts of song and dance and mimetic dialogue, to favour and to prettiness.

The fullest scope for such entertainments was afforded by the custom of the progress, which led the Court, summer by summer, to remove from London and the great palaces on the Thames and renew the migratory life of earlier dynasties, wandering for a month or more over the fair face of the land, and housing itself in the outlying castles and royal manors, or claiming the ready hospitality of the territorial gentry and the provincial cities. This was a holiday, in which the sovereign sought change of air and the recreation of hunting and such other pastimes as the country yields.[363] But it cannot be doubted that it had also a political object, in the strengthening, by the give and take of gracious courtesies, of the bonds of personal affection and loyalty upon which much of the wisdom of Elizabeth's domestic statecraft so securely rested. And accordingly the procedure retained much of the solemnity of a state function. The Queen went on horseback or in a coach or litter, attended by her bodyguards and the great officers of state, with the Master of the Horse leading her bridle and a great noble carrying the sword before her.[364] The sheriff met her at the boundary of each county, and as she entered a castle or a city the constables offered up their keys and the corporations their maces, and received them again at her hands. And with the Queen came the Household in a body, Hall and Chamber and Stable, followed by a long train of carts bearing the royal 'stuff' which was destined to supply the needs of the household offices, and to furnish[108] the often empty walls of temporary lodgings, where were reproduced, if only on a miniature scale, the conventional ordering of presence chamber, privy chamber, and the like, which were the essentials of a royal dwelling.[365] Careful arrangements had, of course, to be made in advance; on the one hand for the maintenance of communications with London and the transaction or postponement of business during the absence of Queen and Council, and on the other for the housing and provisioning of so great a multitude in the country districts.[366] The latter had of old been the care of a special group of Hall officers known as the Harbingers.[367] These still exercised functions of detail. But the general control, like so much else, had passed into the hands of the Lord Chamberlain. Early in the summer, as soon as the royal decision as to the direction and duration of the progress could be obtained, a document was drawn up, known as the 'gestes' or 'jestes', by which must be understood, I think, not a chronicle of res gestae, but a table of the 'gysts' or gîtes appointed for each night's lodging, which is what in fact it contained.[368] Copies of the 'gestes' were signed by the Lord Chamberlain and given with warrants from himself to Gentlemen Ushers of the Chamber, who took them as instructions to the mayors of towns, and doubtless also to the lord-lieutenants of counties, through which the progress would pass. The Ushers were directed to view and report upon the lodgings[109] available.[369] The royal Waymaker studied the roads, and the Guard the security of the neighbourhood.[370] The local officials were required to see that a sufficient provision of food, drink, and fuel was secured, and to furnish that important safeguard, a certificate that their districts were free from the dangerous infection of the plague.[371] The 'gestes' were also published in the household, and individual courtiers hastened to send them to their friends, and to give advice to those scheduled as royal hosts about the kind of entertainment which the sovereign would expect. There is plenty of evidence in the private correspondence of the period that the honour of a royal visit was not anticipated without some anxieties. That of Sir William More at Loseley contains several references to the subject. There is a letter from Sir Anthony Wingfield, who tells More that he has reported to the Lord Chamberlain 'what fewe smal romes and howe unmete your howes was for the Quenes majesty'. She had decided to go to a manor-house of her own, but had again changed her mind. Wingfield had spoken to Lord Admiral Clinton, 'for that ytt shalbe a grete trouboul and a henderanes to you', and advises More to try his influence with Leicester. This must have been written before the present fine house at Loseley, built during 1562-8, was sufficiently completed to house the Queen. More, however, had a visit in 1567, and another in 1576, after which his neighbour, Henry Goringe of Burton, who expected one in 1577, wrote to ask him 'what order was taken by her Maiesties offycers at that tyme that her grace was with youe, and whether your howse were furnyshed with her highnes stufe, wyne, beer, and other provycion, or that you purveyd for the same or any parte thereof'. He had a third in 1583, of which he was warned by Sir Christopher Hatton in a letter of 4 August, directing him to see everything well ordered, and the house 'sweete and cleane'. There had been a 'brute' of infection, but this was now reported as 'a misinformation'. On 24 August, Hatton wrote again. More should 'avoyd' his family, and make everything ready 'as to your owne discretion shall seeme most needefull for her maiesties good[110] contentation'. The sheriff was not to attend her on this occasion, but More and some other gentlemen had better meet her in Guildford. Finally, he had one in 1591, and one Mr. Constable came with a letter from Lord Hunsdon, asking for More's help in selecting suitable lodgings on the way to Petworth or Cowdray.[372] To these letters can be added others from various sources. In 1572 Sir Nicholas Bacon wrote to Burghley from Gorhambury that he understood 'by comen speche' that the Queen was coming, and being uncertain of the date and desirous to 'take that cours that myght best pleas her maiestie', begged for advice 'what you thinke to be the best waye for me to deale in this matter: ffor, in very deede, no man is more rawe in suche a matter then my selfe'.[373] Only a few days later Burghley also had a letter from the Earl of Bedford, then on his way to Woburn Abbey to make preparations. He wishes his rooms and lodgings were better, and says, 'I trust your Lordship will have in remembraunce to provide and helpe that her Maiesties tarieng be not above two nights and a daye; for, for so long tyme do I prepare'.[374] In the following year, 1573, it was the turn of Archbishop Parker to be both flattered and perturbed by the intimation of a visit to Canterbury. He can lodge the Queen, he tells Burghley, and also, at any rate 'for a progresse-tyme', the Treasurer himself, the Chamberlain, Leicester, and Hatton, 'thinking that your Lordships will furnisshe the places with your owne stuffe'. The house, indeed, was 'of an evill ayer, hanging upon the churche and having no prospect to loke on the people: but yet, I trust, the convenience of the building would serve'. Possibly the Queen would prefer 'her owne pallace at St. Austens', and the lords could go to the dean and prebendaries, several of whom have offered to take Burghley. In any case he would wish to dine the Queen, and the nobles and her train in 'my bigger hall'. Meanwhile he will write to the Lord Chamberlain on some things that concern his office.[375] In 1577 it was the Lord Chamberlain himself, the Earl of Sussex, who received a touching appeal from Lord Buckhurst for 'some certenty of[111] the progres, yf it may possibly be'. Will the Queen come to Lewes, and if so, for how long? All the provision in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex is already taken up by the Earl of Arundel, Viscount Montagu and others, and he will have to send over to Flanders. Unless the Queen will 'presently determin', he does not see how he can perform that 'which is du and convenient.' And may it please God 'that the hous do not mislike her; that is my cheif care'. Apparently Buckhurst, like More a decade earlier, was building, for he adds, 'But yf her Highness had taried but on yere longer, we had ben to to happy; but Gods will and hers be doon'.[376] Sussex, though called upon to advise others, had his own subjects for reflection. He had offered the Queen hospitality at New Hall, apparently at short notice on some change of programme, and she replied that 'it were no good reason and less good manners' to trouble him. In forwarding her message Leicester had added, perhaps maliciously, for there was no love lost between him and Sussex, 'Nevertheless, my lord, for mine own opinion, I believe she wil hunt, and visit your house, coming so neer. Herein you may use the matter accordingly, since she would have you not to look for her.' Attempts were being made to dissuade her from having a progress at all, 'But it much misliketh her not to go some wher to have change of air', and the progress was 'most like to go forward, since she fancieth it so greatly herself'.[377] However, there was a good deal of plague about, and in the end the progress was abandoned, doubtless to the relief of both Sussex and Buckhurst. Perhaps the most amusing letter of all, in its delicate attempt to balance deprecation with loyalty, is one written by Sir William Cornwallis to Walsingham in 1583, on behalf of the Earl of Northumberland at Petworth. The earl wished to learn 'as much certeinty as he can' of the expected visit, and after mentioning 'the shortness of the tyme' for provision and the illness of Lady Northumberland, Cornwallis continues, 'Notwithstanding, Sir, this is very trew, yet it may not be advertysed, lest it might be thought to give impediment to her Majesties coming, wherof I perceyve my lord very glade and desirous'. Finally he ventures a discreet hint on his own account, fearing that 'her Majestie will never thank him that hath perswaded this progreyse, nor those lords that shall receive her, how great entertaynment soever they give her, considering the wayes by which she must come to them, up the hill and down the hill, so as she shall not be able to use ether coche or litter[112] with ease, and those ways also so full of louse stones, as it is carefull and painfull riding for anybody, nether can ther be in this cuntrey any wayes devysed to avoyd those ould wayes. In truth, Sir, thus I find it, and I wyshe some others knew it, so I wear not the author; who though I write it for care of the Queen, yet might it be interpreted otherwise.'[378] Northumberland had at this time good reason to be diplomatic. Probably he was already under Walsingham's suspicion, and before the end of the year he was in the Tower, for his participation in the Throgmorton plot. Against all this uneasiness may be set the genuine spirit of welcome and personal affection for the Queen which appears to have prevailed in the much visited household of Lord Norris of Rycote. Leicester reports to Hatton in 1582 his own 'piece of cold entertainment' at the hands of Lady Norris, because he and Hatton 'were the chief hinderers of her Majesty's coming hither, which they took more unkindly than there was cause indeed'. Inverting Cornwallis's plea, he had alleged 'the foul and ragged way' as an excuse, and adds as his comment, 'A hearty noble couple are they as ever I saw towards her Highness'.[379]

Much additional inconvenience was evidently caused to voluntary and involuntary hosts alike by the characteristic indecision which led Elizabeth, in small things as well as great, to be constantly chopping and changing her plans. The 'gestes' might be set down, but they were never final, to the last minute. The good city of Leicester was warned four times to make preparation, in 1562, 1575, 1576, and 1585, and never had the felicity of beholding its sovereign at all.[380] The point comes out clearly enough in the letters already quoted; perhaps even more clearly in a final group written in August 1597 by one of Burghley's secretaries, Henry Maynard, from London to another, Michael Hicks, who was in fluttered anticipation of a visit at Ruckholt in Essex. Maynard wrote three times in the course of five days. On the 10th he warned Hicks to expect the Queen in the following week, 'if the iestes hold, which after manie alterations is so sett downe this daie'. He will let him know if[113] there is any further change, 'for wee are greatlie aferd of Theobalds'. On the 12th there had been no change as yet and Hicks had better come to court for advice. There was still danger of Theobalds, 'but as yett it is not sett downe'. With a sigh, Maynard adds, 'This progresse much trowbleth mee, for that we knowe not what corse the Queen will take'. On the 15th he can at last announce that no change was now expected. He had told the Lord Chamberlain that Hicks was troubled at the insufficient accommodation he could provide for the royal train. 'His awnsweare was that you weare unwise to be at anie such charge: but onelie to leave the howse to the Quene: and wished that theare might be presented to hir Majestie from your wief sum fine wastcoate, or fine ruffe, or like thinge, which he said would be acceptablie taken as if it weare of greate price.' Maynard was still anticipating a descent on Theobalds, although nothing had been said about it.[381] As a matter of fact, his anticipation was justified, and Theobalds was visited in the course of September. In 1599 there was a scare lest the short progress planned should be extended, 'by reason of an intercepted letter, wherein the giving over of long voyages was noted to be sign of age'.[382]

Contact with the great is not ordinarily, for the plain man, a bed of roses; and there is no reason to suppose that it was otherwise in the spacious times of Elizabeth. You probably got knighted, if you were not a knight already, which cost you some fees, and you received some sugared royal compliments on the excellence of your entertainment and the appropriateness of your 'devices'. But you had wrestled for a month with poulterers and with poets. You had 'avoided' your house, and made yourself uncomfortable in a neighbouring lodge. You had seen your trim gardens and terraces encamped upon by a locust-swarm of all the tag-rag and bobtail that follows a court. And with your knowledge of that queer streak in the Tudor blood, you had been on tenterhooks all the time lest at some real or fancied dislike the royal countenance might become clouded, and the compliments give way to a bitter jest or to open railing. 'I have had hitherto a troublesome progress,' writes Cecil to Parker in 1561, 'to stay the Queen's majesty from daily offence conceived against the clergy, by reason of the undiscreet behaviour of the readers and ministers in these countries of[114] Suffolk and Essex.'[383] Parker himself was something of a favourite with Elizabeth, yet John Harington can record an incredible insult to his wife on the doorstep of Lambeth.[384] And Richard Topcliffe, hunter of recusants, describes with indecent glee how the hospitality of Edward Rookwood in 1578 was rewarded with a committal to prison and a public obloquy on his religion.[385] The arrogance of the royal train had always to be reckoned with. As far back as 1526 Henry VIII had issued a formal household order against the spoliation of houses in progress.[386] In 1574 Leicester instigated[115] a surprise visit to Berkeley Castle, which was not in the 'gestes', and so ruined the head of deer by killing twenty-seven in one day that Lord Berkeley in a passion disparked the estate. This appears to have been a deliberate scheme by Leicester to bring Berkeley into disfavour and secure the castle himself.[387] The Stuart households were probably just as bad. After Anne's visit in 1603, the Leicester corporation had to pursue the court 'aboute lynnyns and pewter that was myssinge'.[388]

It is not quite clear how far these annoyances were aggravated by the financial burden of the royal entertainment. There is some evidence that, so far as the essentials of food and drink and fuel were concerned, the household was prepared to pay its way, and that, although the hosts had to make provision of these necessaries, they were entitled to recoupment for the cost by the Cofferer.[389] Certainly the progress, once an economy for the Crown, had become an expense.[390] Burghley's papers contain an estimate, based on the accounts of 1573, showing an 'increase of chardgies in the time of progresse' to the extent of £1,034, 'which should not be if her Majestie remeynid at her Standing Howses within XX myles of London'.[391] This is not wholly conclusive, because in any case part of the time was usually spent, not in private houses, but at royal manors or even in inns.[392] But[116] its indication is confirmed, so far as civic visits are concerned, by entries in corporation accounts, which appear to be limited to expenditure upon the hire or purchase of plenishing, the repair of streets and pavements and painting of gates and public buildings, the provision of a fairly costly gift in the form of a gold cup with money in it, and the payment of fees to the queen's waymaker for inspecting the roads, and to various officers of the chamber, hall, and stable. The visit of 1575 cost the city of Worcester £173, raised partly out of corporation funds, partly by a special levy. The city of Leicester met that of 1612 with a levy of £74 1s. 9d., while that of 1614 cost them £102 12s. 6½d.[393] Anything in the way of a mimetic entertainment would probably fall by civic custom on the guilds.[394] And the establishment of the Revels, which followed the progress, was ready to help at need, with a mask or banqueting house.[395] There are definite statements as to the recoupment of the cost of light, rushes, and fuel at Oxford in 1566, and of beer when Prince Charles passed through Leicester in 1604.[396] Of course, the Crown used its feudal right of purveyance; that is to say, of purchase within the verge at rates fixed by itself; and for this purchase a local jury was empanelled to assist the Clerk of the Market in drawing up a tariff and supervising weights and measures.[397]

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But the abuses of purveyance, which included the impressment of vehicles by the royal cart-takers, cannot have borne very heavily upon districts rarely visited, although the home counties, which were more often traversed and contained standing houses, had no doubt their grievances.[398]

The Hicks correspondence suggests that, even in 1597, the household was still prepared to provision itself, at any rate in the smaller private houses. But there is a good deal of evidence to show that, where persons of wealth were concerned, a different practice grew up. A visit to Gorhambury in 1577 cost Sir Nicolas Bacon £577.[399] Parker's son recorded that his father's entertainment of the Queen at Canterbury and other houses, with his gifts to her and the lords and ladies, cost him above £2,000, and that in addition he spent £170 at Canterbury in rewards to the officers of the household.[400] Burghley's domestic biographer tells us that the twelve visits to Theobalds cost him 'two or three thousand pounds every tyme', which sufficiently explains why his adherents were not particularly anxious for a visit in 1597.[401] Parker had to find many nights' lodging, as the Queen passed up and down stream, and at Canterbury Elizabeth is known to have occupied a house of her own. But Burghley's heavy expenditure must surely have covered more than the mere gifts and the spectacular side of his entertainments. A visit to the Marquis of Winchester in 1601 was 'with more charge than the constitution of Basing may well bear'.[402] For that to Harefield in 1602 the bills are preserved, and amount to £2,013 18s. 4d., of which £1,255 12s. 0d. was apparently for[118] provisions, £199 9s. 11d. for temporary buildings, and the balance presumably for gifts, spectacles, and the like. There is no indication of any repayments by the royal Cofferer, although Sir Thomas Egerton's friends came nobly to his assistance, and sent in innumerable presents, including no less than eighty-six stags and bucks, eleven oxen, sixty-five sheep, and forty-one sugar-loaves, as well as birds, fish, oysters, Selsea cockles, cheese-cakes, sweetmeats, wine, wheat, and salt.[403] Finally we have the definite statement of the French ambassador La Mothe Fénelon in 1575, that at Kenilworth Leicester 'a deffrayé toute la court a cent soixante platz d'assiette, l'espace de douze jours'.[404] And we have that of the Venetian ambassador Foscarini in 1612, that 'his Majesty's charges are borne by the owners of the houses where he lodges'. Foscarini had accompanied the progress to Belvoir, and was much struck with the large numbers, more than a thousand, who were housed there, and with the costly style in which things were done, 'far exceeding that of the court when in London or a neighbouring palace'. He found personally, as others have found since his day, that visiting was much more expensive than staying at home, on account of the largesse expected.[405] I am inclined to think that we have come here upon a point of honour, and that, while it was not in theory incumbent upon a poor man to feed as well as lodge his mistress, it gradually became customary for rich men to give a special proof of their devotion by omitting to claim the recoupment to which they were strictly entitled. And if this was so, of course in the long run the poor men had to follow suit. Sir William Clarke in 1602 was counted a churl, for he 'neither gives meat nor money to any of the progressors. The house Her Majesty has at commandment, and his grass the guard's horses eat, and this is all.'[406] The right to occupy the house of a subject was indeed a matter of feudal tradition. All manors were ultimately held of the Crown. We find Elizabeth dating from 'our manor of Cheneys' in 1570, although Chenies had long been in the hands of the Russells; and it was an obiter dictum[119] of Lord Northampton in a Star Chamber case of 1606 that 'the kinge by his prerogative may take vp any howse in his progres'.[407]

Those who accompanied the progress had their own woes to bear. There was a good deal of 'roughing it'. The rate of advance, at ten or twelve miles a day, broken by a dinner at some wayside mansion or in a temporarily constructed 'dining house', was inevitably slow. The weather and the roads were often unkind; nor was the advance guard of two hundred and twenty carts carrying baggage likely to have mended the condition of the latter.[408] The numbers were great, and if accommodation was scant, some had to make shift with tents and booths. The commissariat was not always perfect. Even the Queen might come off badly. On one occasion Leicester reported to Burghley that the beer had been unsatisfactory. 'Hit did put her very farr out of temper, and almost all the company beside.' Happily, a better brew had been discovered. 'God be thanked she is now perfectly well and merry.'[409] Burghley himself was apparently timed to join the progress at Dudley, and he received a discreet hint from Walsingham that a change of programme would bring the Queen there earlier than had been expected, 'whereuppon your Lordship may take some just cause to excuse you not coming thither'.[410] No doubt Burghley's duties as Lord Treasurer often kept him at Westminster. But the fact is that the sixteenth-century growth of luxury was making a migratory court something of an anachronism.[411] The progress was by no means always on the same scale of elaboration. In some years it was limited to a month or so in the counties nearest to London; in others it extended over three or four months, and the Queen went fairly far afield. During the earlier years the most important progresses were those of 1564 and 1566, which included visits to Cambridge and to Oxford respectively. In 1562, 1563, and 1565 there were no progresses at all, owing to plague or other reasons. The period of the great progresses was the second decade of the[120] reign; and it culminated in the 'Princely Pleasures' of Kenilworth of 1575. During 1572, 1574, and 1575 Elizabeth covered a large part of the Midlands; during 1573 Kent and Sussex; during 1578 East Anglia. She reached Southampton in 1560 and 1569, Dover in 1573, Bristol in 1574, Stafford and Chartley in 1575. Farther north or west I do not find her; visits were planned to the chief towns of the Presidencies of Wales and of the North, to Shrewsbury in 1575 and to York in 1584, but these never came off. Progresses were practically suspended during the troublous decade before the Armada, when the Queen's life was hardly ever safe from plots, and she generally spent the autumn quietly at Oatlands or Nonsuch. In 1591 and 1592 the old custom was revived; Southampton was revisited in the former year, Oxford and the Cotswolds in the latter. There was another revival towards the end of the reign, and there were short progresses in 1597, 1600, 1601, and 1602. Two unsuccessful plans were made to get as far as Wiltshire. Elizabeth's strength was failing, but the restlessness of her latter years was upon her, and she would not have it said that she was too old to travel. She had to reckon, however, with courtiers who had learnt to love their ease. 'The Lords are sorry for it,' wrote Rowland White to Sir Robert Sidney, when she determined to set out from Nonsuch in 1600, 'butt her majestie bids the old stay behind, and the young and able to goe with her. She had just cause to be offended, that at her remove to this place she was soe poorely attended; for I never saw so small a train.'[412] At all times, and particularly during the later years, the formal progresses were supplemented by short visits of a few days, or even a few hours, to favoured courtiers, sometimes by way of a 'by-progress' in spring or autumn, sometimes in the course of a remove from one standing house to another, sometimes merely to relieve a continuous residence at the same palace.[413] Several of the twelve visits to Theobalds, for which Elizabeth had evidently a liking, and which had been rebuilt to accommodate her, were by progresses. The household did not always accompany her on these occasions. Within London itself, she also occasionally paid a visit. In the last winter of her life, several entertainments were carefully arranged for her, in the hope of keeping her at Whitehall.[414] In 1601 and 1602 she went a-Maying at Highgate[121] and Lewisham. Another day's visit, probably of 1600, is elaborately described by Sir Robert Sidney to Sir John Harington.[415]

With the arrival of James and his horde of hungry Scots, and the setting-up of supernumerary establishments for Anne and the royal children, the progress became a more unwieldy institution than ever. During the greater part of 1603 the court was abroad. The triumphal descent of the King in April and May was practically a progress. So was that of Anne in June. There was a regular progress in August and September, and the prevalence of plague compelled the prolongation of this throughout the autumn, until the weary court sank into its winter quarters at Christmas. A groan went up to Lord Shrewsbury from Robert Lord Cecil at Woodstock, which he found an 'unwholesome' and 'uneaseful' house, not able to lodge more than the King and Queen, the privy chamber ladies, and some three or four of the Scottish Council. 'Neither Chamberlain, nor one English counsellor have a room, which will be a sour sauce to some of your old friends that have been merry with you in a winter's night, from whence they have not removed to their bed in a snowy storm.' The plague was driving the court up and down. 'God bless the king, for once a week one or other dies in our[122] tents.'[416] In the same strain wrote Levinus Muncke a little later to Winwood from Wilton of 'these arrant removes', in which 'we endure misserie apace and want of all things, which I never thought the country so unable to supply us'.[417] Nevertheless, James maintained the tradition, and devoted a month or two in each year to a progress, which, but for the occasional presence of the queen or prince, and the attendance, not quite invariable, of the council and household, did not differ much in character from his far more frequent hunting journeys. His direction was generally determined by the existence of hunting facilities, and such districts as the New Forest, Wychwood and Sherwood Forests, and Salisbury Plain figure again and again in the 'gestes'. He had reached Southampton and even the Isle of Wight in 1603, and probably repeated his visit in 1607 and 1611. He also touched the sea at Lulworth in 1615. He visited Oxford from Woodstock in 1605 and Cambridge twice during hunting journeys in 1615. Anne made an independent progress to the west, for the sake of the Bath waters, in 1613, and got as far as Bristol.

We have had sufficient peeps behind the court arras to give a pleasantly sub-acid flavour of irony to the effusive accounts of royal receptions contained in official chronicles, or in the semi-official narratives of poets who were anxious to preserve the memory of the verses and devices contributed by themselves.[418] These in their turn enable us to recapture something of whatever rapture the rather artless forms of mimesis employed may have awakened in Renaissance breasts; although of course the few devices of which details have reached us are but a tithe of those on whose fantasy and grace the dust of oblivion has for centuries lain thick. It was naturally at the visits to private houses that the spirit of sheer entertainment had fullest scope, and a glance at the diaries for Kenilworth in 1575 or for Elvetham in 1591 will show the variety of pastime which ministered spectacle to the eyes and flattery to the self-esteem of Oriana on her holidays. The visit to Kenilworth extended over three weeks. The Queen arrived on 9 July and was greeted with speeches by Sibylla, by a porter as Hercules, and by the Lady of the Lake, and that she might not forget that she was a scholar, with a Latin speech by a Poet. July 10 was a Sunday, and[123] after divine service there was a display of fireworks. On 11 July the Queen hunted, and on her return listened to an out-of-door dialogue between a Savage Man—the mediaeval folk-personage known as the 'wodwose'—and the classical Echo. July 12 was a day of rest, and 13 July was again devoted to hunting. On 14 July came a bear-baiting, another display of fireworks, and acrobatic feats by an Italian. After two days' interval, the sports began again on 17 July, with country shows of a bride-ale, a quintain, and the Coventry Hock-Tuesday play.[419] This was followed in the evening by a play and banquet. A mask was held in readiness, but not used. On 18 July, after a hunt, came the principal show, an aquatic one of the Delivery of the Lady of the Lake, with the classical Arion riding on a dolphin; and the Queen held an investiture, and 'touched' poor folk for the 'evil'. On 19 July the Coventry show was repeated, and by this time the weather had broken up, and the royal zest for spectacles was perhaps exhausted. A projected show of Zabeta and a device of an ancient minstrel were laid aside, and the final week was uneventful, until the departure on 27 July after a show in farewell by Silvanus. All this was described, for the benefit of such of the Queen's lieges as had not the fortune to be present, in a printed narrative by George Gascoigne, who shared with William Hunnis of the Chapel Royal the main responsibility for the mimetic devices, and in another, racy and full of vivid detail, by one Robert Laneham, keeper of the council chamber door, who was in attendance as an officer of the household.[420] The entertainment at the much shorter visit to the Earl of Hertford at Elvetham in Hampshire, sixteen years later, was on very similar lines. The house was small, and a temporary 'room of estate' and other buildings had been constructed in the park, near an artificial pond, containing a Ship Isle, a Fort, and a Snail Mount. The Queen was greeted on arrival with a Latin speech by a Poet, and a ditty by the Graces and the Hours. A salute was fired from the pond. After supper there was a concert with a pavane by Thomas Morley. On the second day, after the Countess had made her offering in the morning, there was a great water-show on the pond, with Silvanus and the sea-gods Neptune, Oceanus, Nereus, and Neaera, which served to introduce further gifts. On the third day Elizabeth was awakened with a pastoral song of Phyllida and Corydon. After dinner there was an exhibition game of 'board and cord', which must have been a very close anticipation of[124] lawn-tennis, and in the evening a banquet in the garden and a display of fireworks. On the fourth morning came Aureola, the fairy queen, with a round of dancing fairies, and as the Queen departed there were Nereus and Sylvanus and their companies at the pond, the Hours and Graces weeping, a speech from the Poet dressed in black, and a farewell ditty at the park gate.[421] I have set the Kenilworth and Elvetham entertainments side by side, partly to illustrate the permanence of type, and partly because, if any actual sea-maid and fireworks gave Shakespeare a hint for Oberon's famous speech in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, it must surely have been those which were comparatively fresh in the memories of his hearers.[422]

The medley of Kenilworth and Elvetham repeats itself elsewhere; nor is the imaginative range a very wide one. Classical, romantic, pastoral, and folk-lore elements blend in quite sufficient congruity. The pagan divinities called upon are the out-of-door ones, Pan and Ceres at Bisham, Apollo and Daphne at Sudeley; and these, with the Nymphs (Orpington, Cowdray, Harefield) and Satyrs (Harefield, Althorp), may make easy acknowledgement of fundamental kinship with Aureola or Queen Mab and the native fairies (Woodstock, Norwich, Hengrave, Althorp) and woodwoses (Cowdray, Bisham). So, too, the rustic revelry of morris or country dance (Warwick, Cowdray, Althorp, Wells) or the choosing of the Cotswold Queen (Sudeley) passes readily enough into the manner of the formal pastoral, as we find it in Sidney's Lady of the May (Wanstead) or his sister's later dialogue of Thenot and Piers; which in turn have their affinities to the mediaeval débat, surviving in the dialogue of Constancy and Inconstancy (Woodstock), and in the 'contentions' of Sir John Davies between a Gentleman Usher and a Poet, and a Maid, a Wife, and a Widow.[423] To a modern taste, perhaps the most attractive entertainments are the simple ones in which the Gardener and the Mole-catcher or the Bailiff and the Dairymaid offer the naïve welcome of the[125] rustic folk, or those to which the circumstances of place and time give something of a personal touch; as at Theobalds, where the hermit's cell typifies the temporary retirement of Burghley from public life, or at Rycote, where messengers bring in letters and jewels from sons and daughters of the house in Ireland, Flanders, France, and Jersey. Only fragments are preserved of the Harefield entertainment in 1602, but here a delicate fancy must have governed the devices, suggesting, for example, the presentation of a robe of rainbows on behalf of St. Swithin, and the personification of Harefield itself as Place 'in a partie-colored robe, like the brick house', accompanied by Time 'with yeollow haire, and in a green roabe, with an hower glasse, stopped, not runninge'. Here, too, was repeated the pretty notion of Elvetham, and at the royal departure there was Place again 'attyred in black mourning aparell', to bid farewell. In many instances the mimesis is so contrived as to lead to the introduction of the gift, which we may gather from the Hicks correspondence to have been looked upon as an obligatory rite of hospitality. The frugal and ostentatious soul of Elizabeth loved gifts; but James is said, at any rate on his first coming, to have thought it the more kingly part to decline them.[424] The mimetic entertainment itself, indeed, seems to have lost something of its vogue with the change of reign; possibly the King was less tolerant than his predecessor of pedantries other[126] than his own. There are, of course, the three Sibyls at Oxford in 1605, which are said to have given a hint for Macbeth, and the amazing Queen of Sheba show in 1606, which has been preserved for us by the wicked wit of Sir John Harington.[425] And there are three examples from the pen of Ben Jonson, to whose ingenuity and learning the genre made a natural appeal, and who had the art to give dramatic life and point even to such trifles. These are the Satyr, with which Lord Spencer welcomed Anne and Henry at Althorp in 1603, the Penates, written when James, like Elizabeth before him, went a-Maying with Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate in 1604, and the graceful Theobalds entertainment, in which the Genius of the house, first weeping for the loss of his master, and then consoled by Mercury, Good Event, and the Parcae, made symbolical delivery of it to the Queen on its exchange by Lord Salisbury with James for Hatfield in 1607.

The civic entertainments naturally followed more formal lines than those in private houses. The citizens rode in their official gowns of black or scarlet. There was a learned oration by the recorder, and very likely also by the schoolmaster or a promising scholar of the grammar school. In a cathedral town there was divine service to be attended in state. The gift was no fantastic trifle, but a solid cup with angels in it. The mimesis, too, was of a more old-fashioned type. Mercury or a nymph might be there, but there were also the traditional pageants of the guilds, bearing their scenes from the miracle plays, or more modern allegories, or representations of local history and industry. At Coventry, in 1566, stood the Corpus Christi cars of the Tanners, Drapers, Smiths, and Weavers.[426] The variegated Norwich entertainment of 1578 included a speech by King Gurgunt, a pageant of the Commonwealth, with local craftsmen working at their looms, and a pageant of the City of Norwich, with Deborah, Esther, Judith, and Queen Martia.[427] Even as late as 1613, it was with scriptural pageants, curiously contaminated with intrusive classical themes, that the citizens of Wells greeted Queen Anne when she visited them from the Bath. The Hammermen furnished the Building of the Ark, Vulcan, Venus, and Cupid, and part of St. George; the Tanners, Chandlers, and Bakers, St. Clément and his Friar, part of Actaeon and Diana, and 'a carte of old virgines' in hides; the Cordwainers Saints Crispin and Crispinian; the Tailors Herodias and John Baptist; and the Mercers the remaining parts of St. George and of Actaeon and Diana. Three morrises also accompanied[127] the pageants.[428] George Ferebe's shepherd's song, as the Queen had crossed the Wansdyke at Bishop's Cannings, two months before, had struck a more up-to-date note.

In the university cities, municipal eloquence was redoubled by that of public orators and professors. The sovereign was expected to attend sermons and the academic exercise of disputations, and perhaps to wind up the latter with a Latin speech. The spectacles generally took the form of regular plays in Latin and occasionally in English. As the academic drama lies rather aside from the main purpose of this book, I confine myself to a brief chronicle. Elizabeth's first and only visit to Cambridge was from 5 to 10 August 1564.[429] The plays took place in the chapel of King's College, since the hall had been found unsuitable, and the two provided by the University were directed by Dr. Roger Kelke, the Master of Magdalene, with the aid of five others, one of whom was Thomas Legge of Trinity, himself a dramatist. On Sunday, 6 August, the Aulularia of Plautus was given by actors selected from colleges other than King's. Courtiers ignorant of Latin were wearied, but Elizabeth sat through the three hours' performance without sign of fatigue. On 7 August came Dido, a Latin tragedy by Edward Halliwell, formerly Fellow of King's, and on 8 August Ezechias, an English comedy by Nicholas Udall, who was an Oxford man. Both these plays were performed by King's men and both are lost. Elizabeth's patience was now exhausted, and she gave some disappointment by declining to hear a Latin translation of the Ajax Flagellifer of Sophocles, which men of various colleges had been appointed to give on 9 August. A contemporary letter from the Spanish ambassador gives an account of a singular epilogue to the royal visit. On 10 August Elizabeth had made her farewells, picking out Thomas Preston of King's for special favour on account of his performances both in the disputation and as an actor in Dido, and had reached the next stage in her progress, Sir Henry Cromwell's at Hinchinbrook.

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Hither she was pursued by some of the scholars with what appears to have been a mask, originally intended to serve as an afterpiece to the Ajax Flagellifer. They were allowed to present it, but it proved to have been conceived in a spirit unsuited to the colour of the Queen's Protestantism, and gave considerable offence. It was, in fact, a burlesque of the Mass.[430] Two years later, from 31 August to 6 September 1566, it was the turn of Oxford.[431] The plays were in Christ Church Hall, and in them the University had the assistance of Richard Edwardes, formerly Student of Christ Church, and now Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. At the first, a Latin prose comedy called Marcus Geminus, on 1 September, the Queen was not present. But she attended Edwardes's Palamon and Arcite, an English play in two parts, given on 2 and 4 September, and expressed high appreciation of the play and the acting. The fact that three persons were killed by the fall of a wall near the entrance door was not allowed to interfere with the representation.[432] She also attended James Calfhill's[129] Latin tragedy Progne on 5 September. The plays were all written by Christ Church men, but the actors appear to have been drawn in part from other colleges. John Rainolds of Corpus, afterwards a bitter opponent of the academic stage, played Hippolyta in Palamon and Arcite.[433] All the plays are unfortunately lost. The Spanish ambassador reported that there had been nothing about religion in them, and delivered himself of the compliment, 'Memorabilia profecto sunt Oxoniensium spectacula'.[434] More deserving, more felicitous, or less audacious than Cambridge, Oxford received the honour of a second royal visit in 1592.[435] It lasted from 22 to 28 September.[436] The plays, given on 24 and 26 September, were Leonard Hutten's Bellum Grammaticale and Gager's Rivales. Both performances were at Christ Church, but probably actors from other colleges took part. A jaundiced Cambridge visitor described them as 'but meanely performed'. Elizabeth, however, was gracious, and before departing 'schooled' John Rainolds, who had recently been fulminating against Gager,[130] for 'his obstinate preciseness'. It was, perhaps, as a result of the mirth shown at Oxford, that both Universities were invited to produce English plays at Court during the following Christmas. This, however, Cambridge at any rate declined to do, giving as their excuse the shortness of time, but more particularly the customary limitation of their academic plays to the Latin tongue.[437] There is no evidence, and little probability, that Oxford were any more amenable.

James passed through the outskirts of Oxford in 1604, but plague deferred his formal visit until 1605, when he came with the Queen and Henry, and stayed from 27 to 31 August.[438] As he came down St. Giles', he was greeted from St. John's with Matthew Gwynne's device of the Tres Sibyllae. The plays were in Christ Church hall, and apparel was hired from the King's Revels company in London. Inigo Jones, 'a great traveller', was employed to furnish special machinery for changing the scenes, but opinions differed as to his success, and also as to the extent to which the King kept awake during the performances. Of these there were four. On 27 August a piece, variously named Alba and Vertumnus, and written in part by Robert Burton, was acted by Thomas Goodwin and other Christ Church men.[439] On 28 August actors from various colleges gave an Ajax Flagellifer, not apparently a translation from Sophocles, but an independent play. On 29 August St. John's men gave a play by Gwynne, also called Vertumnus, sive Annus Recurrens. These three, of which only the last survives, were in Latin. On 30 August, for the sake of the ladies, the fourth play, again by men of various colleges,[131] was in English. It was Daniel's Arcadia Reformed, afterwards published as The Queen's Arcadia. The King was not present on this occasion. It is a little surprising that he did not visit Cambridge until 1615. He had been preceded by Henry, who was there with the Elector Palatine in 1613, and saw performances by Trinity men in their college hall of Samuel Brooke's Adelphe and Scyros on 2 and 3 March respectively.[440] James went from Royston, and stayed from 7 to 11 March 1615.[441] The plays, given in Trinity College hall, were successively Edward Cecil's Latin Aemilia, by St. John's men, which is lost, Ruggle's Ignoramus, by men from Clare Hall and other minor colleges, and Tomkis's Albumazar and Brooke's Melanthe, both by Trinity men. King's had prepared Phineas Fletcher's Sicelides, but the King did not stay long enough to hear it. The visit evoked an outburst of satirical verses, both from Oxford and from the lawyers, who were stung by the wit of Ignoramus, with which the King was so pleased that, after a vain attempt to get the actors to Whitehall, he paid another visit to Cambridge, and saw it again on 13 May.[442] In March 1616 Cambridge men played before him at Royston; the name of the play is not known.[443] Oxford did not get its chance again until 1618, which falls outside the scope of this record.

The opportunities for spectacular display, which provincial towns enjoyed during a progress, fell to London chiefly at the time of a coronation, when on the day before the actual ceremony the sovereign passed in state from the Tower to Westminster, through the principal streets of the city which claimed to be, in a special sense, the royal[132] 'Chamber'.[444] The outstanding architectural features of these streets, St. Paul's, the gates at Ludgate and Temple Bar, the conduits in Cornhill and Fleet Street, the great and little conduits, the Standard, and the Cross in Cheapside, were recognized stations for music, speechifying, and pageantry. At some of them temporary arches, adorned with symbolical devices and hung with verses, spanned the highway. When Elizabeth started, in a slight snow-storm, on 14 January 1558, the City companies, in their black and red hoods, lined both sides of the way from Fenchurch to the Cross. The Queen, a coronetted and golden figure, rode in a litter, surrounded by her train of pensioners bearing their axes, and yeomen of the guard in their scarlet liveries with the Tudor rose and crown upon their backs. Behind came the Master of the Horse, leading a white hackney, and the Lords of the Council.[445] There were seven pageants, each with its verses in English or Latin and a child for interpreter. At the first, on a scaffold near Fenchurch, the child delivered a speech of welcome. At the upper end of Gracechurch Street was an arch bearing 'The Uniting of the two Houses of Lancaster and York'; at the Cornhill conduit another, with 'The Seat of Worthy Governance'; at the great conduit a third, with 'The Eight Beatitudes'. The first bore representations of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth herself; the other two allegorical figures of the morality type. At the Cross stood the Mayor and Aldermen, with a speech by the Recorder, and a thousand marks in a purse. At the little conduit was the fourth and principal arch, with sterile and green mounts symbolizing 'A Ruinous and a Flourishing Commonweal'; and Time and Truth presented the Queen as she went by with an English Bible. At the door of the school in St. Paul's Churchyard, a boy of Colet's foundation delivered a Latin speech. At the Fleet Street conduit was 'Deborah, with her Estates, consulting for the good Government of Israel'. At St. Dunstan's church was another speech by a child of the hospital. And, finally, at Temple Bar stood those ancient folk-figures and palladia of the City, without whose beneficent presence no holiday could be complete, the giants Gotmagot and Corineus.[446] When James was crowned on 25 July 1603, a state entry on the traditional lines was planned, but when the arches were already up it was decided that the risk of plague was too great, and the ceremony was put off, first to the[133] opening of a parliament contemplated in October, and ultimately to the following spring.[447] It took place on 15 March 1604. Jonson, Dekker, and Middleton were employed to furnish verses and devices, and the structure of the five pageants provided by the City was entrusted to Stephen Harrison, a joiner.[448] There were three additional ones, of which two were contributed by the Italian and Dutch traders in London, and the third, erected outside the City boundary, by the City of Westminster and the Savoy Liberty. The Venetian ambassador was perhaps prejudiced in reporting that the Italian pageant excelled the others in design and workmanship. But all the pageants, although they were enlivened by speeches and songs, for which the services of trained actors were enlisted, appear to have relied more upon architectural embellishment and less upon allegorical symbolism than those of 1559.[449] The order was as follows: At Fenchurch were the Genius of London and Thamesis, impersonated by Edward Alleyn of the Prince's men and a boy from the Queen's Revels; at the Exchange the Dutch and Italian arches, in neither of which a definite theme is traceable; at Soper Lane end 'Arabia Britannica', with a speech by a Paul's choir-boy and the song 'Troynovant is now no more a city'. In Cheapside stood once more the civic dignitaries, with a speech by the Recorder and three cups of gold for the King, Queen, and Prince. At the Cross were Sylvanus and Vertumnus, with the 'Garden of Eirene and Euporia'. In Paul's Churchyard the choristers sang, and a boy from the grammar school was ready with his Latin. The pageant at Fleet conduit, where William Borne of the Prince's had a speech as Zeal, represented the 'Globe of the World'; that at Temple Bar the 'Temple of Janus'; that of Westminster and the Savoy in the Strand the Rainbow, Sun, Moon, and Pleiades. Jonson seems to have been responsible[134] for the devices at Fenchurch, Temple Bar, and the Strand; Dekker for those at Soper Lane and the Cross; Middleton for at any rate a part of that in Fleet Street. A few London entertainments of less importance are upon record. When Elizabeth first came to the Tower on 28 November 1558, there were 'in serten plasses chylderyn with speches, and odur places, syngyng and playing with regalles'.[450] When James first came to London on 7 May 1603, Dekker had prepared a show of the Genius Loci and Saints George and Andrew for performance at the Bars beyond Bishopsgate, which he afterwards printed; but he was disappointed, for James entered by another route, direct from Stamford Hill to the Charterhouse.[451] On 31 July 1606 he brought the King of Denmark to see the City, and there was an arch with Neptune, Mulciber, Concord, and the Genius of London, and a Summer Bower with a shepherd and shepherdess on the Fleet Street conduit.[452] On 16 July 1607 he dined with Henry at the hall of the Merchant Taylors, who spent £1,000 on the festivity. Ben Jonson wrote verses to be spoken by John Rice, then a boy actor at the Globe, as an angel of gladness, with a taper of frankincense in his hand, and the hall was filled with music. There were lutenists in the windows, wind-instruments on the screen, and three singers in a ship hanging aloft. The court musicians, Thomas Lupo and Mr. Lanier, and Nathaniel Giles and the Chapel were amongst those who made melody.[453] London was to the fore again in welcome to Prince Henry on his creation as Prince of Wales, sending the barges of the Lord Mayor and the companies to meet him, as he came up by river from Richmond on 31 May 1610, with Corinea on a whale to offer salutation on behalf of Cornwall at Chelsea, and Amphion on a dolphin to do the same for Wales at Whitehall. The speeches were written by Anthony Munday and delivered by Richard Burbage and John Rice.[454] A month earlier, on 23 April, another show in Henry's honour had been held at Chester. It was devised[135] by Robert Amerie, an ex-sheriff of the town, and consisted of a horse-race on the Roodeye, after a procession in which the bearers of the bells that served as prizes were accompanied by St. George and his dragon pursuing a Green man or 'wodwose', while speeches were uttered by Fame, Mercury, Chester, Britain, Cambria, Rumour and Peace, and Joy composed a débat between Love and Envy.[455]

Even in the absence of the sovereign, London had pageantry for its own delight; folk-pageantry in the May-games, morrises and lords of misrule, which sometimes made their way to Court;[456] municipalized folk-pageantry in the Midsummer and St. Peter's Eve 'watches', which barely survived into Elizabeth's reign;[457] municipal pageantry fully established in the ceremony which has come down to our own day of the Lord Mayor's show. The Mayor was installed on St. Simon and St. Jude's Day, 28 October, and on 29 October he went by water to Westminster Hall to be admitted before the barons of the Exchequer in the Exchequer chamber. On his return he was met by his guildsmen and other citizens at the waterside, and escorted to dinner in the Guildhall, and after dinner to service in St. Paul's and back to his own house. There had been pageants on this occasion in the fifteenth century, but these were suppressed in 1481, and during the earlier part of the sixteenth century the spectacular element was limited to a 'foyst or wafter' upon the river, such as that with a device of a crowned falcon on a mount environed with white and red roses, which the City provided by royal command for the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533.[458] But shortly after, and perhaps as a result of, the discontinuance of the 'watches' in 1538, the installation pageant makes its appearance again. It can be traced in 1540, and then, with the accompaniment of speeches, fireworks, devils, and wodwoses', in the pages of Machyn's diary during most years from[136] 1553 to 1562.[459] Many details are preserved of the Merchant Taylors' pageant of 1561 for Sir William Harper, and of the Ironmongers' pageant of 1566 for Sir James Draper, in the device of which James Peele, clerk of Christ's Hospital, and father of George Peele, had a hand. On both occasions the speeches and songs were entrusted to boys from Westminster, under the 'Mʳ of the quirysters', John Taylor.[460] Some speeches are preserved from the Merchant Taylors' pageant of St. John Baptist for Sir Thomas Roe in 1568, while James Peele was again engaged by the Ironmongers to prepare a device, which, however, came to nothing, for Sir Alexander Avenon in 1569.[461] It must be doubtful whether there was a pageant in every year, but when William Smythe described the installation ceremonies in 1575, he included as regular features the 'deveils and wyldmen' which met the returning mayor at Paul's Wharf, and 'the pageant of Tryumphe rychly decked, whervppon by certayne fygures and wrytinges (partly towchinge the name of the sayd mayor) some matter towchinge justice and the office of a magestrate is represented'.[462] Von Wedel saw the Drapers' pageant for Sir Thomas Pullison in 1584.[463] Custom seems to have assigned the provision of the pageant to the 'bachelors' of the Lord[137] Mayor's company, that is to say, those freemen who were not yet advanced to be members of the 'livery' or governing body. The Ironmongers paid for the printing of their pageant in 1566, but the first printed description now extant is that of the Skinners' pageant for Woolstan Dixie in 1585, which was written by George Peele. Peele seems to have inherited his father's connexion, for he had, according to the Merry Jests, 'all the oversight of the pageants', and certainly he devised the Drapers' pageant for Martin Calthorpe in 1588, which is now lost, and the Descensus Astraeae of the Salters for William Webbe in 1591. The Fishmongers' pageant for John Allot in 1590 was, however, by one T. Nelson, a stationer. The absence of Elizabethan prints later than these does not necessarily mean that pageants fell out of use. There was one in 1600;[464] the Merchant Taylors had one for Sir Robert Lee in 1602; there would have been one in 1603 but for the plague; and there was probably one in 1604.[465] On the other hand, it can hardly be inferred from the chaff of Munday as a 'peeking pageanter' in Histriomastix and as 'pageant-poet to the city of Milan' in The Case is Altered that he stepped regularly into Peele's shoes about 1591. Jonson's reference, at least, is subsequent to Munday's first 'book' of a pageant, which was, so far as we know, the Merchant Taylors' Triumphs of Reunited Britannia for Sir Leonard Holliday in 1605. I do not know on what evidence Campbell, or the Ironmongers' Fair Field, for Thomas Campbell in 1609, the only known copy of which has lost its title-page, is sometimes ascribed to him. But he was responsible for the Goldsmiths' Chryso-Thriambos for Sir James Pemberton in 1611, the Drapers' Himatia Poleos for Sir Thomas Hayes in 1614 and their Metropolis Coronata for Sir John Jolles in 1615, and the Fishmongers' Chrysanaleia for John Leman in 1616. His chief competitors in civic favour were Dekker and Middleton, the former of whom prepared the Merchant Taylors' Troja Nova Triumphans for Sir John Swinnerton in 1612, and the latter the Triumphs of Truth for Sir Thomas Middleton in 1613, to the 'book' of which he annexed an account of a quite exceptional entertainment on occasion of the opening of Hugh Middleton's New River on 29 September 1613.

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Middleton's title-page refers scornfully to the 'common writer' of mayoral pageants, which may perhaps indicate Munday. A full analysis of all this municipal imagery would be extremely tedious. The original single pageant with its devils and 'wodwoses' underwent much elaboration in the seventeenth century. 'By this light', says a character in Greenes Tu Quoque (1611-12), 'I do not think but to be Lord Mayor of London before I die, and have three pageants carried before me, besides a ship and an unicorn.' Dekker's Troja Nova Triumphans has three movable 'land-triumphs', a chariot of Neptune, a chariot of Virtue, and a House of Fame, which met the Mayor successively at Paul's Chain, Paul's Churchyard, and the Cross in Cheapside, while the little conduit was transformed into a Castle of Envy, and met an assault with fireworks. Sometimes the old 'foist' was revived, and part of the spectacle took place on the water. Or one of the land pageants was designed in the form of a ship. There were personages mounted on strange beasts. Speeches and dialogues afforded opportunities for laudation of the Lord Mayor and his brethren. There was generally some theme bearing upon the history of the company or the industry to which it was related. The Fishmongers made play, both in 1590 and 1616, with Sir William Walworth; the Drapers, both in 1614 and 1615, with Sir Henry Fitz Alwine, and with the Ram with the Golden Fleece. The Merchant Taylors, on whose roll Prince Henry had been inscribed at the dinner of 1607, proudly displayed an impersonation of him in 1611. Often the mimesis was renewed on the way to St. Paul's in the afternoon, or at the Lord Mayor's house in the evening. The Ironmongers have preserved an interesting series of coloured designs for Chrysanaleia, the notes on which indicate that the pageants were preserved as permanent decorations for the company's hall. The ship, which held musicians at the Merchant Taylors' dinner of 1607, was probably a relic of their pageant of 1602.

The growing maritime power of England during the sixteenth century and the significance of the river as a highway between London and the palaces up and down stream led naturally to a development of pageantry by water. There was a water triumph, with an assault of a castle, on Midsummer Day, 1561, and another, arranged by Captain Stukeley, when Elizabeth went down to Greenwich in June 1563.[466] Christian of Denmark gave James a show of the Burning of the Seven Deadly Sins' in 'wildfire' near his flag-ship at Gravesend on 11 August 1606.[467] The creation of Henry was[139] celebrated by a mock sea-fight between merchantmen and Turkish pirates on 6 June 1610, and the effect of this spectacle was also enhanced by a display of fireworks. On the previous 31 May Henry had been given the welcome of the City, as he came up the river, with a device by Anthony Munday, in which Burbage and Rice of the King's men rode upon two great fishes to deliver the speeches. Burbage, as Amphion, represented Wales, and Rice, as Corinea, Cornwall.[468] Similarly the festivities at the Princess Elizabeth's wedding in 1613 included a fight between Venetian and Turkish galleys on 11 February and a firework representation of St. George delivering the Amazonian Queen Lucida from Mango the Necromancer.[469] The City had to find a pension for a man who was maimed in this triumph.[470] Bristol, the second seaport of the realm, also favoured water shows, welcoming Elizabeth in 1574 with an assault on the forts of Peace and Feeble Policy, and Anne in 1613 with a version of the more modern theme of merchantman and pirate.[471] We do not know the nature of the Devises of Warre prepared by Thomas Churchyard for one of Sir Thomas Gresham's entertainments of Elizabeth at Osterley; but an example of the conversion of military training into mimesis is afforded by the archery show of Prince Arthur with his Knights of the Round Table, which was displayed by Hugh Offley before the Queen between Merchant Taylors and Mile End in 1587.[472]

More than two centuries before this, when Edward III associated this same Round Table with the foundation of his chivalric order of the Garter, pageantry had already begun to cast its mantle over the mediaeval exercises of knightly feats of arms. As the actual practice of warfare dissociated itself more and more from the domination of the mail-clad horseman, the spectacular tendency had naturally grown. Not that, even at Whitehall, the tournament had ever become a mere pageant and nothing more. It had still its value, both as part of the courtly training of a gentleman and as a test of physical endurance; and it was chiefly about the[140] preliminaries, the challenge and the entrance of the knights into the lists, that the decorative fancy of the Renaissance gave itself free play. The double appeal of vigorous exercise and sumptuous spectacle was irresistible to the youthful temperament of Henry VIII, and the pages of Halle gleam with his tiltings as Cœur Loyal in 1511, of which a fine heraldic record is preserved, and with the international splendours of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520.[473] It was largely to a desire to maintain the tradition of the spear that the existence of the Pensioners as an element in the royal household must be ascribed. Elizabeth had much of her father's blood in her, and to the end took delight in the strength of a man and a horse, so that it was still possible for an aspiring youth, such as Sir Henry Lee or Sir Robert Carey, to win his way to Court favour by the accuracy of his seat or the appropriateness of his trappings, no less than by his proficiency in the gentler antics of the mask. The rules for courtly combat had been laid down by John Tiptoft, Earl of Warwick and Constable of England in 1466, and revised for Elizabeth in 1562.[474] The generic term 'jousts of peace' covered three distinct varieties of exercise. The most important was the tilt, in which horsemen met in the shock of blunted spears across the 'tilt' or toile, a barrier covered with cloths, which ran longitudinally down the centre of the 'lists' or space staked out for the encounter. A record was kept of the courses run, in which marks were credited to the competitors for spears fairly broken or for 'attaints' on the head or body, and corresponding deductions made for spears ill broken. The tourney was also on horseback, with swords instead of spears; while in the foot-tourney or 'barriers' the assailants were dismounted and fought alternately with push of pike and stroke of sword across a wooden obstacle.[475]

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The tilt and tourney took place by daylight. Henry VIII constructed a tiltyard in Whitehall, which was improved and closed in by Elizabeth in 1561.[476] It ran between the highway and St. James's Park, from the stables on the site of the present Admiralty to the tennis court and cockpit on the site of the present Treasury buildings, and at the south end was a gallery for spectators, communicating by another across the highway with the privy apartments. The sentries in the courtyard of the Horse Guards have been officially known to recent times as the Tiltyard guards. There were permanent tiltyards also at Greenwich and at Hampton Court; at the latter spectators were accommodated in five small towers, of which one still survives.[477] The less serious exercise of the barriers was sometimes conducted by torchlight, and even within doors, on the floor of a banqueting house.[478] Thus it could be introduced, in a purely mimetic form, as an episode in a mask, or even a play.[479] Tilts took place in almost every year of Elizabeth's reign.[480] The custom was for a few picked champions to issue a challenge for a given day, on which they would be prepared to meet the onset of all who chose to offer themselves as 'answerers' or defendants. Sussex, Leicester, Hunsdon, and of the next generation Oxford and Arundel, are prominent amongst the challengers. I do not find that any particular season was at first especially appropriated to tilts. There was often one early in the new year, but just as often one in the spring or summer. But at some date, possibly as early as 1570, and almost certainly as early as 1581, Sir Henry Lee was forward in establishing an annual tilt on Queen's Day, the anniversary of the accession on 17 November. He may have enrolled some kind of guild of tilters; certainly he undertook to appear personally as challenger year by year, and for this purpose received or assumed the designation of Knight of the Crown. In his devices he appears under the personal name of Loricus.[481]

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Only occasional examples of the pageantry used at tilts are upon record. An account of the proceedings on the occasion of the wedding of Ambrose Earl of Warwick and Anne Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford, on 11 November 1565 will show how it was introduced. The challenge took place in August, at the churching of the Princess Cecilia of Baden. York Herald introduced Richard Edwardes of the Chapel, who assumed the character of a post sent from four strange knights, and announced their challenge to be defended before the Queen and Cecilia in November. On 11 November the Queen was in the gallery at the end of the tiltyard. Edwardes entered with a trumpeter, and delivered another speech. Then the challengers rode in from the mews, each accompanied by a patron and by an Amazon with his spare horse. They circled round the tilt and took up their position at the Queen's end, to await the defendants, hanging their shields on posts beneath her window. Then the actual tilting began. The programme, although departed from, was one which seems to have been conventional, of one day for tilt, one for tourney, and one for barriers.[482] The women leading the horses by their bridles perhaps appear more frequently in earlier hastiludia than in those of the sixteenth century.[483] They represent, I think, the 'damsels' of the ladies in whose names the knights fought, and whose colours they were accustomed to wear. Elizabeth's personal colours for this purpose were black and white.[484] It was a function of the ladies to award to the most successful of the defendants a jewel provided by the challengers. The principal opportunities for mimetic speechifying were afforded by the challenge, which was sometimes delivered in person, sometimes, as in the 1565 example, by deputy, and was probably also[143] hung up on the court gates, and by the shields which bore imprese or mottoed emblems, and called for interpretation by the squires or pages who bore them.[485] Often, moreover, the tilters themselves entered in elaborately mimetic caparisons, incongruous enough to a modern taste with the vigorous manly exercise to which they were a preliminary, but no doubt attractive to that of the Renaissance, which for all its literary talk about 'decorum' cared at heart but little for congruity. The speechifying might be resumed when the tilting was over, or at the banquet which closed the day's festivity.[486] I gather together the few details of this tilt pageantry which have escaped a perhaps merited oblivion. There were speeches, and a chariot with a damsel and an[144] old knight made their appearance at the torchlight tourney for the Duc de Montmorency in 1572.[487] In 1579 Oxford and his fellow challengers prepared a device, 'prettier than it happened to be performed', the nature of which is not specified.[488] In 1581 Arundel issued a challenge on 6 January, under the name of Callophisus, for a tilt which took place on 22 January, and there were 'devices in the mean season', to which some documents in a romantic vein amongst the Lansdowne MSS. probably belong.[489] The coming of the French commissioners in 1581 was the occasion of spectacular entertainments on an elaborate scale. There appear to have been two distinct jousts. One, at Hampton Court, probably on 6 and 7 May, is described in a French report. An antique tower with a triangular lantern at the top was rolled forward. Out of this issued a snake, which endeavoured to climb fruit-laden trees. Then followed six eagles, concealing musicians, and two Irish youths dressed in floating robes of silver tiffany, with long gilded hair and mounted on gilded horses. Finally came a triumphal car moving backwards, on which were the Fates, holding prisoner in a golden chain a knight in brown velvet and golden armour. The next day furnished new devices, including little coaches drawn by asses sewn up in white satin.[490] The second, at Whitehall on 15 and 16 May, is the famous triumph in which Sir Philip Sidney tilted before 'that sweet enemy, France'. The royal gallery was transformed into a Fortress of Perfect Beauty, and the four challengers, Arundel, Windsor, Sidney, and Fulke Greville, besieged it before each day's tilting as the Four Foster Children of Desire, finally making their submission, through a boy clad in ash-colour and bearing an olive-branch, to the unconquerable occupant. Each of the twenty-one defendants also had his 'invention' and speech, including Sir Thomas Perrot and Anthony Cooke, 'both in like armour, beset with apples and fruit, the one signifying Adam, the other Eve, who had hair hung all down her helmet'. In the midst of the first day's tilting came in Sir Henry Lee as an unknown[145] knight, broke his spears, and departed in true romantic fashion without revealing his identity.[491] In 1587, when the tilting on Queen's Day was 'not so full of devises and so riche as I have seene', is a mention of books given 'for a token' to the spectators[492]; and to 1590 belongs such a book in the extant Polyhymnia of George Peele.[493] This was a notable occasion, for upon it Sir Henry Lee, now past his youth, resigned the post of challenger to the Earl of Cumberland. Peele describes the imprese of the tilters. But the principal device took place after the courses had been run. A Temple of Vesta rose out of the earth, and at its door Lee's emblem of the crowned pillar. An appropriate song was sung, the well-known

'My golden locks time hath to silver turned,'

and the Vestal Virgins presented the Queen with a veil and cloak and safeguard; after which Lee doffed his armour, put it on Cumberland as his successor, and himself assumed, as a sign of his retirement, a side coat of black velvet and a buttoned cap of the country fashion. He continued, however, by the royal direction, to attend the annual Queen's day, as a kind of Master of the Ceremonies. Cumberland, who took the name of the Knight of Pendragon Castle, probably remained knight of the crown until the end of the reign, but may have been rather overshadowed by the reputation, both as a courtier and a tilter, of the popular and magnificent Earl of Essex.[494] Robert Carey also claims to have played a considerable figure in the jousts, and tells us how in 1593 he appeared and made the Queen a present as 'the forsaken knight that had vowed solitarinesse' at a cost of £400.[495] To 1595 belongs the device of Eros and Philautia, in which Essex is believed to have had the assistance of no less a hand than that of Francis Bacon.[496] In 1598 it is noted that[146] Queen's day passed 'without any extraordinarie matter more than running and ringing'. In 1600 Essex, then under a cloud, was, contrary to expectation, 'no actor in our triumphs', but Cumberland delivered a speech in the capacity of a Melancholy Knight. In 1602 one Garret came disguised, like Carey in 1593, and gave the Queen his scutcheon and impresa.[497] In 1601 there seems to have been a barriers, for which Sir John Davies was invited by Sir Robert Cecil through Cumberland to write an introductory speech.[498]

James transferred the annual tilting to his own accession day, and it continued to be regularly observed on 24 March. Shows 'costly and somewhat extraordinary' are recorded on this day in 1605.[499] In 1607 the French ambassador comments that there were 'plus de beaux habits que de bons gendarmes'.[500] In 1609 Sir Richard Preston made a sensation 'in a pageant which was an elephant with a castle on his back'.[501] James himself was no tilter; his horsemanship was considerable, but he employed it in the chase rather than in the onset. It is noteworthy that running at the ring, which was quite a subsidiary sport at the court of Elizabeth, tends under her successor to replace the more hazardous jousts. And even at the ring the marked inferiority of James to his brother-in-law Christian of Denmark during the latter's visit in 1606 became the subject of popular comment, and did not tend to improve the relations between the sovereigns. The 'incomparable pair of brethren', William Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Earl of Montgomery, shone in the tilt-yard[502]; and it was a fall from his horse at a joust that first attracted the King's attention to Robert Carr, afterwards Earl of Somerset.[503] But the most prominent man-at-arms, during the earlier years of the reign, was James's cousin, Ludovic Stuart, Duke of Lennox. He led on one side for Truth, against the Earl of Sussex for Opinion on the other, at a barriers given to celebrate the wedding of the Earl of Essex on 6 January 1606, and the invaluable Jonson wrote a dialogue of Truth and Opinion as a setting for the combat.[504] Later in the same[147] year Lennox was at the head of a plan to honour the visit of King Christian by a challenge to be issued by certain knights of the Fortunate Island, who fabled themselves to be inspired by the adventure of the Lucent Pillar, foretold by Merlin, and declared their intention to joust on behalf of certain amorous propositions in the valley of Mirefleur. The original idea was to publish the challenge in the courts of Europe, but this feature was dropped, somewhat to the relief of the French ambassador, who had received instructions from Paris to discourage it, as a coming royal baptism there would make sufficient demands on shrunken French pockets, and feats of arms had, moreover, fallen into disuse in France since the days of Henri II. A challenge was in fact proclaimed, for England only, in the royal presence and the public places of Greenwich, on 1 June. Then the death of the child-princess Mary supervened, and although there was a tilt, in which Christian took part, on 5 August, it does not appear that the romantic setting was used.[505] Merlin, however, was utilized by Jonson, some years later, when Prince Henry, to whom knightly exercises were as congenial as they were repugnant to his father, made his first public appearance in the barriers of 6 January 1610.[506] He issued his challenge under the name of Meliadus, Lord of the Isles, and Jonson's device, in which Merlin and the Lady of the Lake hail him as the awakener of Chivalry from her cave, reflects something of the enthusiasm with which Englishmen were beginning to look forward to the future of the high-spirited prince.[507] There was a joust on 6 June 1610, after Henry's creation as Prince of Wales, although Henry did not himself take part in it.[508] He was tilting daily in January 1612, and a challenge by Lennox, Southampton, Pembroke, and Montgomery is dated[148] in this year.[509] But the chivalric revival was fated to be dashed for ever by the untimely death of its princely patron on the following 6 November. The Accession tilt of 1613 is made memorable by the fact that the Earl of Rutland had the signal honour of being furnished with an impresa by the united genius of Shakespeare and Burbage, whom we must presume to have been the poet and the painter respectively.[510] At Elizabeth's wedding in 1613 there was ringing only.[511] One more device by Jonson, with Cupids and Hymen, introduced a tilt on 1 January 1614, after the wedding of the Earl of Somerset, and my chronicle must end with the Accession tilt of 1616, for which again Burbage furnished the Earl of Rutland with a shield, although the name of Shakespeare, then probably on his death-bed, does not appear.[512]

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V
THE MASK

THE mask is not primarily a drama; it is an episode in an indoor revel of dancing. Masked and otherwise disguised persons come, by convention unexpectedly, into the hall, as a compliment to the hosts or the principal guests. Often they bring them gifts; always they dance before them, and then invite them to join the dance. They bring torch-bearers and musicians, who light and accompany the choric evolutions. Their intention lends itself to elaboration by spokesmen or presenters, and to such spectacular decoration as a pageant or scene affords; thus it readily assumes a mimetic setting. It is necessary to lay stress on the fact that the guests mingle with the maskers in the dance. This intimacy between performers and spectators differentiates the mask[150] from the drama to the end; its goal is the masked ball, not the opera. And as a corollary to this intimacy, the performers are of the same social standing as the audience; the mask is an amateur and not a professional performance.

I have attempted elsewhere to indicate a possible folk origin for the mask in the visits of excited worshippers, with fragments of a divine and immolated animal, from house to house of a village, in order that all may share the direct contact of the beneficent and potent thing. Those persistent vizards and torches may perhaps recall, the one the head and skin of the sacrificed victim, the other the brand snatched from the sacrificial fire, itself perhaps the survival of a sunshine charm even older than the sacrifice.[513] Obviously in the humanist and even sceptical court of Elizabeth any consciousness of the 'luck' of the mask must have been quite subliminal. It was a custom, like the rest, belonging of right to the twelve days of the Christmas rejoicing, but adaptable readily enough to a wedding or any other occasion of mundane festivity. As a medium of courtly compliment to a sovereign it is already well established in the fourteenth century. When Prince Richard, afterwards Richard II, was keeping Candlemas at Kennington in 1377, citizens of London, to the number of 130, rode to visit him with musicians and torch-bearers. They wore vizards and were dressed to represent the members of an imperial and a papal court. Entering the hall, they diced with the prince and his company for jewels, using loaded dice so as to be sure of losing. After the dicing the music sounded, and 'the prince and the lordes danced on the one syde and the mummers on the other a great while and then they dronck and tooke their leaue'. The whole proceeding is called 'mumming'.[514] It is to be noted that the 'lucky' character of the gifts is emphasized by the show of dicing, and that the fraternization of maskers and spectators in the dance is clearly marked. This is important, because during the changes of the fifteenth century this particular and primitive element was apparently forgotten. It was a period of literary and spectacular elaboration. The dance in disguise attracted to itself other forms of courtly entertainment that were then in vogue; the speech and dialogue of allegorical or mythological personages, the architectural pageant, the mimic tournament, even the interlude.[515] Splendid devices were shown in Westminster Hall before the sovereigns under their cloths of estate at the wedding of[151] Prince Arthur and Katharine of Aragon in 1501.[516] On the first night three great pageants were successively wheeled in. The first was a castle drawn by four beasts and bearing eight disguised ladies. The second was a ship with mariners, whose 'counteynaunces speaches and demeanor' doubtless furnished an element of comedy. They brought Hope and Love, who were ambassadors from the third pageant, a Mount of Love, which bore eight knights. These descended and assaulted the castle, and finally the ladies yielded and knights and ladies danced together. On the second night the pageants represented an arbour and a lanthorn; on the third two mountains; on the fourth, at Richmond, a chapel. Very similar to these revels of Henry VII's reign are those described by the chronicler Halle during the early years of that of Henry VIII.[517] Many variations are possible. There is not always a pageant. The comic element may take the form of a 'morris'. The whole thing may form a setting or afterpiece to an interlude. Occasionally a dicing is introduced, and to this variety the term 'mumming' or 'mummery' appears by the sixteenth century to have been specialized.[518] The more generic term is 'disguising'. For all its elaboration, the early sixteenth-century disguising retained many of its original features. Vizards and torches are employed. The disguisers come in suddenly, as a surprise to the guests. But[152] unlike the visitors of Richard II in 1377, they do not, so far as the records show, call upon the guests to take a part in the dancing. This characteristic feature of the primitive ceremony seems, under these particular conditions, to have dropped out. Generally, though not always, there are two sets of disguised persons, lords and ladies, corresponding to the 'double mask' of later days, and these dance together. When they go out, the guests very likely dance amongst themselves, before the 'void', or refreshment of wine and spices, comes in. But of direct contact between disguisers and guests, except in the old-fashioned 'mummery' with its dice-play, there is nothing.

This same divorce between performers and spectators seems to rule in the momeries and entremets, which correspond to the English disguisings in fifteenth-century France and Burgundy, and in many of the intermedii and trionfi of fifteenth-century Italy.[519] But somewhere in Italy, possibly in the carnival masks of Florence, the primitive practice must have survived; and from Italy it made its way back again to France, and also to England, under the rather unjustifiable colour of a novelty.[520] It was on the Twelfth Night of 1512,[153] according to Halle, that 'the Kyng with xi other wer disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not seen afore in Englande, thei were appareled in garmentes long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold, and after the banket doen, these maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearyng staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were content, and some that knew the fashion of it refused, because it was not a thyng commonly seen. And after thei daunced and commoned together, as the fashion of the maskes is, thei toke their leave and departed, and so did the Quene, and all the ladies.'[521] There has been much dispute as to what the precise nature of the innovation of 1512 was. I formerly thought that it lay in the introduction of some Italian detail of costume, probably the 'long gowns and hoods with hats' of which the contemporary Revels Account speaks.[522] But after a careful review of the earlier descriptions of disguisings, I now feel little doubt that those are right who find the point precisely in that 'commoning' between maskers and spectators which remained a characteristic feature of the mask throughout the days of its most sumptuous development, and which the good Halle could hardly be expected to recognize as merely a reversion to a fourteenth-century English usage.[523] Nor is there any reason to doubt that the impulse to the new-old mode, and perhaps also the name which, although in an English form, accompanied it, had an immediate origin in Italy.[524] Ronsard makes a similar acknowledgement for France:[525]

[154]

And in fact it is an Italian festivity of 1492 that furnishes the only clear account of a revel in which disguised persons took the ordinary guests out to dance that I have yet come across between 1377 and 1512.[526]

For some time the mask and the old-fashioned disguising are traceable side by side at the court of Henry VIII. Ultimately they amalgamated. By the end of the reign, 'mask' has become the official name, and 'disguising' is obsolete.[527] The 'commoning' between maskers and guests is firmly established. And the mask has taken to itself the elaborations of the disguisings, the introductory speeches, the pageant, the mimic fight, the double sets of dancers, the close association with the interlude.[528] Or, more strictly speaking, it can be either simple or elaborate, a mere masked[155] dance, or a far-fetched and costly device, as occasion and economy may demand. As far as I can see, the whole evolution of the form, as we find it in the seventeenth century, was already complete under Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn, in 1532, led the first recorded mask in which women took lords out to dance.[529] Even the fixed scene had made its appearance, as an alternative to the movable pageant, before the end of the reign.[530]

The mask retained its vogue under Edward VI and Mary, and Elizabeth, with her special love of dancing, was not likely to neglect it.[531] The annals of her court, indeed, have left us few such detailed descriptions of masks as Halle affords for that of Henry VIII and the mask-writers themselves for that of James I. This may be an accident, or it may be that either economy or taste led Elizabeth to a preference for the mask simple over the mask spectacular, which most invites description. The story of the Elizabethan mask has to be pieced together from the account-books of the Revels Office, or, where these fail, from scattered sources. But though we would gladly have more detail, especially on the literary and dramatic side, the result of such a survey is sufficient to show that this particular type of mimesis contributed at least as much to the Christmas entertainment of Gloriana as to that of either her father or her successor.

The first mask of the reign was on Twelfth Night, 1559. Some of its details recall, across a space of two centuries, those of the Kennington 'mumming' of 1377. In both cases the performers represented ecclesiastical personages, and in both there was the somewhat exceptional feature of a parade in the streets. Naturally the Elizabethan show, with its crows, asses, and wolves dressed as cardinals, bishops, and abbots, made a characteristic sixteenth-century appeal to the sympathies of a reviving Protestantism.[532] But even in 1377[156] the satirical element had not been lacking, for after emperor and pope came riding at the end of the procession '8 or 10 arayed and with black vizerdes like deuils, nothing amiable, seeming like legates'. The 1559 mask appears to have been on a much larger scale than was customary. There were at least four cardinals and six priests. There were popes, monks, summoners, and vergers. And there were friars, in black, white, yellow, russet, and green, apparently a pair of each colour. The russet friars wore velvet garments, with sleeves of yellow velvet and purple satin 'partie paned'; the popes and cardinals rochets of white sarcenet; the monks kirtles and cowls of black taffeta with sleeves of purple satin. The Revels Office was careful to provide hats for the cardinals and 'croger-staves' for the bishops. Four other masks followed during the same winter. Two formed part of the festivities accompanying the coronation, which took place on 15 January. These were a mask, probably of Conquerors in white cloth of silver, on 16 January, and a mask, probably of six Moors, on 22 January. The Moors had apparel of cloth of gold and blue velvet, with sleeves of silver sarcenet and 'bases' of red satin. On their heads was curled hair made of black lawn and wreathed with red gold sarcenet and silver lawn. Their limbs and faces were of black velvet, and of these it is recorded that 'the lords that masked toke awey parte'. They carried darts of 'tree and paste paper gilded', and as the Revels Office also prepared bells and staves, it is probable that a morris was introduced. The torch-bearers to this mask were eight Moorish friars, with head-pieces of crimson satin. The remaining two masks were at Shrovetide. On the Sunday was a double mask, with an assault in it. The Queen's maids were rifled and rescued again.[533] One party consisted of eight Swart Rutters, in black and white jerkins and long breeches, with laced hats, dags, and silvered and gilded partisans; the other probably of six Hungarians in blue and purple cloth of gold. The torch-bearers were six Almayns, and the music a drum and fife. On the Tuesday was another double mask, but of women, being six Fisher Wives and eight Market Wives, dressed in bodies and kirtles of various cloths of gold and silver, with elaborate trimmings, and wearing wicker head-pieces painted with red and silver, and hats covered with gold lawn. They[157] seem to have had Fishermen for torch-bearers, and six minstrels in yellow damask, as well as a drum and fife.

Four masks were given during the summer of 1559. One was on 24 May in a banqueting house built at Westminster, for the entertainment of the Duke of Montmorency, Constable of France, who came to ratify a treaty. This was of Astronomers, in long robes of Turkey red cloth of gold, with torch-bearers in green damask. The second was in a banqueting house at Greenwich on 11 July, after a tilt by the Queen's pensioners. The other two were in August during the progress. One was given by the Earl of Arundel at Nonsuch on 6 August.[534] The other was in a specially built banqueting house at Lord Admiral Clinton's place of West Horsley. This last was a double mask of Shipmen, appropriate to an Admiral, in blue cloth of gold, and Country Maids. Two 'grasyers or gentillmen of the cuntrye', whose black damask gowns appear in a Revels inventory, may have acted as presenters.

The winter masks of 1559-60 were five in number. On New Year's day was a mask of six Barbarians, in red cloth of gold, with Venetian commoners in white damask for torch-bearers. On Twelfth Night was a double mask, of six Venetian Patriarchs in green, with purple head-pieces, and six Italian Women in white and crimson. They were accompanied by torch-bearers and a drum and fife. On Shrove Tuesday was another double mask, of an elaborate mythological character, for which a device of 'a rocke of founteyne' was employed. The women represented Diana in purple and three pairs of Huntress Nymphs, in carnation, purple, and blue respectively; the men Actaeon and his six fellows, in purple, with orange buskins and gilt boar-spears. They had a drum and fife and, as torch-bearers, eight Maidens in purple with variously coloured kirtles, and eight Hunters in yellow with murrey buskins. And they were accompanied by twelve hounds. It is noted in the Revels inventory that Actaeon's garments were 'all to cutt in small panes and steyned with blood'. There were also a mask on New Year's Eve and a second mask at Shrovetide.[535] One of these was of six Nusquams, allegorical personages in white, crimson, and yellow, having the breasts of their scapulars 'steyned with the posy of poco a poco'. Their torch-bearers were six Turkish commoners in murrey and white. The other was of eight Clowns in red[158] and green, with flails and spades of gilt wood, black high-laced shoes made out of the limbs of the previous year's Moors, hedging mittens, and white gold sarcenet aprons, which were 'gyven awaye by the maskers in the queenes presence'. They had eight Hinds for torch-bearers, and a shepherd for a minstrel.[536]

[159]

The absence of Revels Accounts renders it impossible to construct a full catalogue of masks between the Shrovetide of 1560 and the Christmas of 1571; but there is every reason to suppose that they were given yearly, and a number of scattered notices have survived. Brantôme, who came to court during October 1561, in the train of the Grand Prior Francis of Lorraine, describes a mask of Wise and Foolish Virgins, performed by Elizabeth's maids of honour, who did the Frenchmen the courtesy of taking them out to dance.[537] There was a mask at Baynard's Castle when Elizabeth visited the Earl of Pembroke on 15 January 1562, a 'grett maske' at Whitehall on 18 January after the performance of Gorboduc by the Inner Temple, and on 1 February 'the goodlyest masket that ever was seen', which came in procession from the city to the court.[538] During May 1562 elaborate masks were in preparation for a projected meeting between Elizabeth and Mary of Scots at Nottingham Castle.[539] The meeting never came off, but a scheme for the masks is preserved, and is sufficiently detailed to show the point which had been reached in the evolution of the form. It covers the entertainment of three successive nights. On the first a prison of Extreme Oblivion, under the keepership of Argus or Circumspection, is to be made in the hall. A mask of six or eight ladies is to enter, leading Discord and False Report captive, and preceded by Pallas riding on a unicorn and Prudentia and Temperantia on two lions. Pallas is to declare the intention[160] to the queen in verse; Discord and False Report are to be committed to the prison; and 'then the trompettes to blowe, and thinglishe ladies to take the nobilite of the straunger and daunce'. On the second night the structure in the hall is to be a castle called the Court of Plenty, whereof Ardent Desire and Perpetuity, serving respectively Prudentia and Temperantia, are to be porters. The mask proper is again to consist of six or eight ladies, accompanied by Friendship on an elephant, drawing Peace in a chariot to dwell in the castle. Friendship is to speak explanatory verses. 'Then shall springe out of the cowrte of plentie condittes of all sortes of wynes, duringe which tyme thinglishe lordes shall maske with the Scottishe ladyes.' The third night's mask is to be a double one. Disdain and Prepensed Malice are to draw in six or eight lady maskers, sitting in an orchard of golden apples, and to demand on behalf of Pluto the surrender either of Discord and False Report, or of Peace. These are to be followed by six or eight lords, with Discretion and Valiant Courage or Hercules. Discretion is to offer the services of Valiant Courage as champion. Prudentia and Temperantia are to let down tokens of peace from their castle, a grandgarde and a girdle and sword, which are to be laid at the feet of the queens. There is to be an assault between Valiant Courage and Disdain and Prepensed Malice. 'After this shall come out of the garden, the vj, or viij, ladies maskers, with a song, that shalbe made herevppon, as full of armony, as maye be devised.' One may note the allegorical theme, the use both of fixed and of movable pageants, the persistent episode of the assault at arms, the gifts to the principal spectators, and the somewhat formal speeches of the presenters, eked out on the last night with a song, but not yet broken up into dramatic dialogue. The draft makes it clear that English and Scots are to mingle in the dance, but not quite so clear that the invitation is to come from the maskers, although that was probably the intention.[540]

There were 'gret mummeres and masks' again at Baynard's Castle on each of the four days, 17-20 February 1563, devoted to celebrating the double wedding of Lord Herbert of Cardiff to Lady Catherine Talbot and of Lord Talbot to Lady Anne Herbert. But we are not told that Elizabeth was present, although it is not improbable.[541] On 9 June 1564 there was a device for the entertainment of Artus de Cossé, Seigneur[161] de Gonnor, who came as ambassador from France to confirm the treaty of Troyes. It was of a martial character and entailed the preparation of a castle and an arbour and three masks, and a total cost of £87 9s. 6d.[542] A month later, on 5 July, Elizabeth was entertained at the house of Sir Richard Sackville by maskers in her colours of black and white, who presented a sonnet in her honour. The host was the father of Thomas Sackville, afterwards Earl of Dorset, one of the authors of Gorboduc and of The Mirror for Magistrates.[543] During the winter of 1564-5 there were several masks, apparently given in close relation to the plays of the same season. One was at Christmas and another, of Hunters and Muses, on 18 February, while at Shrovetide no less than four were made ready, although only two, of Tilters and of Satyrs, were actually seen.[544] On 16 July 1565 Elizabeth attended the marriage at Durham Place of Henry, son of Sir Francis Knollys, to Margaret, daughter of Sir Ambrose[162] Cave; and the entertainment included two masks.[545] Similarly, at Shrovetide 1566, she was present at the marriage of Henry Earl of Southampton, to Mary Browne, daughter of Anthony Lord Montague, and on 1 July 1566 at that of Thomas Mildmay to Frances, sister of Thomas Earl of Sussex, and on each occasion there was a mask with an oration 'spoken and pronounced' by Mr. Pound of Lincoln's Inn. The July mask introduced Venus, Diana, Pallas, and Juno.[546] We know that there were four masks during the winter of 1567-8, and that there were masks during those of 1568-9, 1569-70, and 1570-1, but practically we know no more.[547] For 1571-2, however, fuller information is available, since with this winter begins the series of detailed Revels Accounts, which extends, with occasional interruptions, to 1589. There were six masks, on unspecified dates. For two of these the costumes were 'translated' from old sets. Four were new made; one of yellow cloth of gold, with torch-bearers in red and yellow changeable taffeta; one of crimson, purple, and green cloth of gold, with torch-bearers in red damask; one of white and black branched loom-work, with torch-bearers in blue and yellow changeable taffeta; and one in murrey satin, with torch-bearers in changeable taffeta of an unspecified colour. The maskers were six or eight in number in each case, and wore vizards, gloves, at 6d. a pair, and strange heads. Devices of canvas were made for some or all of them. One set carried flowers of silk and gold, and before them went a child dressed as Mercury, with two special torch-bearers, who made a speech, and offered the Queen three similar flowers, signifying victory, peace, and plenty.[548] On 15 June 1572 an elaborate mask was given in honour of another French embassy under the Duc de Montmorency. The theme evidently bore some resemblance to the abandoned devices of 1562.[549] A vizard was made for Argus and a collar and shackles and curls of black silk for Discord. There were two pageants, a castle upon which[163] Lady Peace was brought in, and a chariot measuring 14 ft. by 8 ft. with a rock and fountain for Apollo and the nine Muses. These were probably the dancers. The performance is called both a 'mask' and a 'triumph'. The total cost was £409 3s. 2d., exclusive of the value of stuffs supplied by the Wardrobe, and it is recorded that the chariot was broken and spoiled. Payments were made to a Mistress Swego, apparently for head-dressing, and to a 'muzisian that towghte the ladies'; also to Haunce Eottes for 'patternes', and to Petrucio, for his 'travell and paynes' taken in the preparations.[550] This is doubtless Petrucio Ubaldini, and it may also be assumed that the 'Mʳ. Alphonse', who apparently had the general direction or 'apoyntment' of the proceedings, and wore a pair of cloth-of-gold buskins, was Alfonso Ferrabosco, the musician.

This example attests the continuance of the spectacular element in the mask. Its literary aspect also finds illustration during 1572. The scene was again a house of Lord Montague, who was celebrating the double wedding of his son and daughter to those of Sir William Dormer. The dancers were eight kinsmen of the host, dressed as Venetians. There was a long introductory narrative, spoken by a boy-actor. The motive of this was suggested by the supposed community of blood between the Montagues of England and the Montagues of Venice. The actor represented a boy of the English house, who had been taken prisoner by the Turks, together with four English soldiers, who were the torch-bearers. He had been rescued by Italian Montagues, who were returning with him to Italy, when a storm drove them on the shores of Kent, and they took the opportunity to visit their kinsmen in London. After the mask there was a shorter speech by Master Thomas Browne, whom the actor drew from the company, and presented to the maskers to replace him as their 'trounchman', and the maskers then took their leaves. The author of the verses was George Gascoigne. They contain no indication that Elizabeth was present, and therefore she probably was not. But they furnish a very good example of the way in which introductory speeches, still stiff and undramatic, were used to give topical point and meaning to the disguises assumed by maskers.[551] With this Montague mask may be compared that at the wedding of Henry Unton, represented in one of[164] the scenes from his life and death by which his portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, is surrounded. The wedding party is shown at table in a great chamber, overlooking a hall below, in which sit six minstrels. At each end of the hall are steps, and up and down these and over the floor of the chamber passes the mask procession, a drummer, a 'trounchman' with a paper in his hand, Mercury, Diana, six Nymphs, and ten Cupids, five white and five black, as torch-bearers.[552]

Finally, a curious document of this same year, 1572, indicates the widespread popularity which the mask had acquired, as a form of social entertainment. It is preserved amongst Lord Burghley's papers, and is a complaint by one Thomas Giles against the Yeoman of the Revels, who had the custody of the Queen's masks, and made a practice of letting them out on hire to persons of all degrees, noble and mean, both in the city and in the country.[553] Thomas Giles was a haberdasher, and from time to time supplied goods to the Revels. He bases his complaint mainly on the damage done to the royal property, but at the end he allows it to appear that he himself made a business of letting out masking apparel for hire, and found his prices undercut by those of the Yeoman. He appends a list of a score of occasions during the past year on which loans had taken place. The garments lent appear to have been mostly those made for the Court festivities of the previous winter. One set is described as 'the coper clothe of golde gownes which was last made'. This must have been the mask of Muses given on 15 June. It was lent with another mask, 'into the contre to the maryage of the dowter of my lorde Montague', at some date between 15 September and 6 October. This was the occasion of Gascoigne's verses just described, although it must have been the other mask, a mask of men, which those verses presented.

It may be collected from scattered items of expenditure that the Court masks of 1572-3 were two in number.[554] There[165] was a mask of Janus on 1 January, with a snow-storm of comfits and a presentation of snowballs, made out of sponges covered with fine lamb's-wool, to the Queen. And on some later date there was a double mask of men and women, representing Fishermen and probably Fruit-women. Haunce Eottes is again said to have painted 'patternes' for the masks. There are some traces of a mask, with women, as well as Mariners and Turks, in it, when Elizabeth received the French ambassador Mareschal de Retz at Canterbury during the progress of 1573; and there was one at Greenwich, probably not at the royal expense, for the marriage of William Drury in the following November or December.[555] For the winter of 1573-4 a complete list is preserved.[556] There was a mask of Lance Knights in blue satin, with torch-bearers in black and yellow taffeta, on 27 December; a mask of Foresters in green satin and cloaks of crimson sarcenet, with Wild Men in moss and ivy as torch-bearers, on New Year's Day; and a mask of Sages in 'counterfeit' cloth of gold, with torch-bearers in red damask, on Twelfth Night. There were six maskers in each case. The Foresters were equipped with a hollow tree and with comfits made to resemble wild fruits; also with horns garnished with silver, 'which hornes', says the Revels account, 'the maskers detayned and yet doeth kepe them against the will of all the officers'. At Candlemas Haunce Eottes made designs for a mask of six ladies in green satin and gold sarcenet, representing Virtues, and carrying lights and 'properties', including a silk tree, in specially made candlesticks. Perfumes were prepared to burn at the end of matches, and speeches for delivery to Her Majesty written in fair text. But after all the mask was not shown 'for the tediusnesse of the playe that night'. Finally there were two masks on Shrove Tuesday. One was of seven Warriors, with a shipmaster to utter a speech, and six torch-bearers; the other of seven ladies, also with a 'tronchwoman', and torch-bearers. Probably this was a double mask, and in some way there came into it nine children, who had been drilled and taught their speeches by one Nicholas Newdigate, and in various ways gave a good deal of trouble.[557] During[166] the winter of 1574-5 I can only trace with confidence one mask, on an uncertain date. It was a mask of six Pedlars, who had little hampers, and looking-glasses with posies written on them in fine yellow paint.[558] There were not improbably others, the details of which cannot now be disentangled in the Revels Accounts from those relating to plays. A mask, 'for riches of aray, of an incredibl cost', was planned as part of the Kenilworth festivities of July 1575; but was not in the end performed.[559] Nothing is known of the masks during the winter of 1575-6, for the Revels Accounts are missing. For Twelfth Night 1577 a 'longe' mask was prepared, of six dancers in murrey satin, with torch-bearers in crimson damask. There were to have been seven speeches 'framed correspondent to the daie', and Nicholas Newdigate again trained boys to deliver these. But for some reason the mask was put off, and given on Shrove Tuesday without any speeches at all.[560] The Revels Accounts of 1577-8 are missing. A mask by Henry Goldingham was given at Norwich on 21 August 1578 during the progress. It was of Gods and Goddesses, who entered the privy chamber with a presenter, torch-bearers, and musicians, marched about the room and gave characteristic gifts, but apparently did not dance.[561] On 11 January 1579 there was a double mask for the entertainment of the French ambassador, M. de Simier, who had come about the Alençon marriage. Patterns of the mask were submitted for approval to the Lord Chamberlain. One party consisted of six Amazons, the other of six Knights.[562] Each party had its torch-bearers and a 'troocheman', who made a speech to the Queen and delivered her a table with the speech written upon it. These speeches had been translated into Italian and inscribed upon the tables by Petruchio Ubaldini. The Amazons and Knights danced together and afterwards fought at barriers. Some of the plumes which had been hired for the Knights were 'dropt with torches', and the Revels Office had to pay damages for them. Patterns were also shown to the Lord Chamberlain of a 'Mores' mask[167] intended for Shrove Tuesday, but this seems to have fallen through.[563] I do not know whether the invention of the Court poets had failed, or whether for some other reason Elizabeth had become discontent with masks; but, although there are full Revels Accounts for the winters of 1579-80 and 1580-1, and although plays were numerous, no single performance of a mask is recorded. But the spirit of revelry awoke in 1581, at the coming of French commissioners to complete negotiations for the Anjou marriage in the spring, followed by that of Anjou himself in the autumn. Patterns of masks were prepared and the construction of a mount begun in March.[564] These were not proceeded with at the time, and the famous tilt before the Fortress of Perfect Beauty was substituted as an entertainment for the commissioners. But in the winter there were two masks, and amongst the devices employed were a mount with a castle on the top of it, a dragon, an artificial tree, an artificial lion, and a horse made of wood.[565] These details suggest a revival of the scheme abandoned in the previous spring, for the personal delectation of Anjou.

Court masks are but little in evidence during the next few years. There was one of ladies, with torch-bearers and eight boys, on 5 January 1583, and during the same winter one of Seamen was prepared, but not brought into use.[566] There was a mask in 1583-4, of which no details are given; while for 1585-6 and 1586-7 no information, in the absence of the Revels Accounts, is forthcoming.[567] The accounts for 1584-5 and 1587-8 have a general reference to masks in their headings, which may be no more than common form.[568] In September 1589, however, a mask was prepared to be sent into Scotland, as a compliment to James VI on the occasion of his wedding to Anne of Denmark.[569] It does not appear to have been a very sumptuous affair, and only cost the Revels Office £17 10s. 10d. We are not told what the maskers represented.

[168]

There were six of them, with vizards and falchions, in purple coats, crimson bases, and orange and purple and white mantles. They had torch-bearers in red and yellow damask, and four persons garlanded with flowers 'to vtter speches'. The description of the torch-bearers reads uncommonly like that of the torch-bearers to the abandoned mask of Seamen, and if they wore 'translated' garments of 1583, there cannot have been much masking in the interval.

After 1589 the Revels Accounts altogether fail us, and although it is probable that the mask shared in the general renewal of festivity which followed the passing of the Spanish peril, we have only side-lights upon it during the last decade of the reign. Certainly it was still flourishing in the winter of 1594-5, when one Arthur Throgmorton planned to use it, with a rather skilful introduction of some personal abasement and the gift of a jewel, as a means of recovering the forfeited favour of the Queen. The occasion seems to have been the wedding of William Earl of Derby, and Lady Elizabeth Vere, granddaughter of Burghley, on 26 January 1595.[570] It was in this same winter, too, that a very magnificent Shrovetide mask was brought to Court by the men of Gray's Inn, as a wind-up to their notable Christmas revels under the Prince of Purpoole. Of this a detailed account is preserved in the Gesta Grayorum, with songs and speeches which can be assigned respectively to Thomas Campion and Francis Davison. These had for theme a controversy between certain adventurous knights and the sea-god Proteus, and for object[169] the flattery of Elizabeth, the virtue of whose presence obliges Proteus to release the knights from their durance in an Adamantine Rock.[571] Of the place of this mask in the history of the literary form something will be said at a later point.

The gallantry of Gray's Inn was emulated a few years later by the Middle Temple, who, after presenting several masks in their own hall during the Christmas revels of their Prince d'Amour, did their devoir at Court on Twelfth Night with a mask in which the nine Passions issued from a Heart. The mask was followed by a barriers, and preceded by a cavalcade through the streets of a type of which examples have already been noted in 1377 and 1559.[572] In the summer of 1600 one of Elizabeth's maids of honour, Anne, daughter of Elizabeth Lady Russell, left the Court to be married to Henry Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Worcester. The Queen was present at the wedding on 16 June. She dined at Lady Russell's house in Blackfriars, and supped and lodged for the night in that of Lord Cobham hard by. After supper a mask came in. Eight Muses, represented by maids of honour and others, were come to seek their lost companion. After they had done their performance, they wooed the Queen to dance. She was not proof against the ready tongue of Mary Fitton, and complied. 'Elle dansa gayement et de belle disposition,' says the French ambassador, M. de Boississe, who was present.[573]

[170]

Finally, in the spring of 1602, negotiations were passing between Sir Robert Cecil and Sir John Popham on behalf of the Middle Temple, for some entertainment to gratify the Queen, for which the benchers were prepared to contribute 200 marks.[574] Probably this was a mask, but whether and when it actually came off is not known. It may have been designed to celebrate the coming of the Duke of Nevers and other Frenchmen in the following April, and it may have been the mask a song from which was copied by John Manningham, a member of the Middle Temple, on a fly-leaf of his diary with the date 'Nov. 2'.[575]

Under James I the material for tracing the history of the mask becomes remarkably abundant, owing to the regular practice, of which the Gesta Grayorum is the only Elizabethan example, of issuing elaborate descriptions, with copies of the songs and speeches used, for the information of those unable to be present, and the incidental glorification of performers, poets, and producers.[576] In view of the full details compiled from these descriptions and other sources in the bibliographical appendix, a brief chronicle will suffice for a conclusion of this chapter. The main factors to be borne in mind are, firstly, the personal participation of Queen Anne, who took a special delight in all kinds of spectacle and revelry;[577] secondly, the[171] employment of such poets as Jonson, Campion, Daniel, Beaumont, and Chapman, to give the masks their literary setting;[578] and thirdly, the great development of the scenic element through the mechanical and decorative genius of Inigo Jones. Anne gave her first mask, of which no details are preserved, as a welcome to Prince Henry, when he came to join the Court at Winchester during the plague-stricken wanderings which filled the autumn of 1603. An English official describes it as 'a gallant mask', and the French ambassador, more critically, as less a 'ballet' than a 'masquarade champêtre'. At any rate it whetted the appetite of the Court for more to come, and there was soon talk of the splendours foreshadowed for the following Christmas.[579] This, still owing to the plague, was held at Hampton Court. The principal mask was danced by the Queen, with Lady Bedford and other ladies of the court, on 8 January. Through the influence of Lady Bedford, Samuel Daniel was employed as poet, and produced his Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. Queen Elizabeth's wardrobe was ransacked to provide material for the costumes. The lords of the Court, led by the Duke of Lennox, danced a mask of Indian and Chinese knights on 1 January, and certain Scotchmen one resembling a sword dance on Twelfth Night; but of neither of these has a full description been preserved. The masks of subsequent Christmases took place at Whitehall, where in 1607 the old timber banqueting house of 1581 gave way to a permanent structure designed to house them with magnificence. The Queen's mask of 1604-5 was the Mask of Blackness, and began the long and fruitful co-operation of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. It was on Twelfth Night, and did honour to the creation of Prince Charles as Duke of York. A mask of Juno and Hymenaeus[172] given on 27 December by friends of Sir Philip Herbert, in celebration of his marriage to Lady Susan Vere, has not been preserved. The only Christmas masks of the next two winters were of similar origin. Jonson's Hymenaei was given at the wedding of Robert Earl of Essex and Lady Frances Howard on 5 January 1606, and a mask of the Knights of Apollo by Thomas Campion, who had had a share in the verses for the Gray's Inn mask of 1595, at that of James Lord Hay and Honora Denny on 7 January 1607. As a mask must be accounted, I suppose, the extraordinary exhibition of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba before James and Christian of Denmark at Theobalds in July 1606, of which a description is forthcoming from the satirical pen of Sir John Harington.[580] By the winter of 1607-8 the new banqueting house was ready, and the series of Queen's masks was resumed with Jonson's[173] Mask of Beauty on 10 January. In a second mask, sometimes called, although not by its author, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, for the wedding of John Viscount Haddington and Lady Elizabeth Radcliffe on 9 February, Jonson appears to have considered that he took a definite step forward in the evolution of the mask-form, by the introduction of an antimask or group of grotesque dancers as a foil to the mask proper. The Queen's mask for 1608-9 was Jonson's Mask of Queens at Candlemas, and there was no other. During the winter of 1609-10, which was devoted to Prince Henry's mimetic barriers, there was no mask at all, unless indeed the anonymous and undated Mask of the Twelve Months belongs to this year. But on the following 5 June came Daniel's Tethys' Festival, which was the Queen's contribution to the festivities attending the creation of Henry as Prince of Wales. In 1610-11 there was a Queen's mask, Jonson's Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, on 3 February, and also a Prince's mask, Jonson's Oberon, on 1 January. Jonson's Love Restored was a Prince's mask of 6 January 1612. The masks of 1612-13 were all given in celebration of the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, Frederick V, at Shrovetide. There were three of them. Campion's Lords' Mask was danced by lords and ladies of the Court on the actual day of the wedding, 14 February. The other two were contributed by the Inns of Court, and each was preluded by a public procession or triumph, such as had been found natural in earlier years when a mask came from London to the palace. The Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn came by road on 15 February with a mask of Virginians by George Chapman; the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn by water on 16 February, with a mask of Olympian Knights by Francis Beaumont. This, however, they were not able to dance until 20 February. Jonson took no part in these hymeneal festivities, and may have been abroad. The masks for the wedding of Robert Earl of Somerset and Lady Frances Howard on 26 December 1613 almost vied in magnificence, and more than vied in number, with those given for the princess. The bride had passed through stormy days since Jonson's Hymenaei hailed her first marriage in 1606, and was to pass through stormier still. Campion was again selected as the poet for the actual wedding day. In his mask, sometimes called the Mask of Squires, and danced by lords and gentlemen of the Court, he had the assistance, not of Jones, but of Constantine de' Servi, who does not appear to have been very successful. Jonson's Irish Mask, which was given on 29 December and repeated on 3 January, was a comparatively slight performance, danced by five Englishmen[174] and five Scots. Thomas Middleton's Mask of Cupid, unfortunately lost, was an exceptional performance given not at Court, but by the City in the Merchant Taylors' hall on 4 January, after a request from the King that they should do honour to the earl. Finally the Mask of Flowers, the authors of which are only known by the initials I. G., W. D., and T. B., was given by Gray's Inn on 6 January, at the charges of Sir Francis Bacon, who had already taken an active part in promoting the joint Inner Temple and Gray's Inn mask of the previous year. When Anne married her favourite maid of honour, Jane Drummond, to Lord Roxborough on 2 February, she perhaps thought that another mask would be something of an anti-climax, and the performance in a little paved court at Somerset House took the shape of a pastoral, Daniel's Hymen's Triumph.

After the wedding carnivals of two successive years, the masks of 1614-15 and 1615-16 were comparatively insignificant, and even their chronology is not quite certain. To one of these winters belongs Jonson's Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists, but it is not certain to which, and to the other his Golden Age Restored. In each year there were duplicate performances, on 6 and 8 January 1615 and on 1 and 6 January 1616. Both masks were danced by lords and gentlemen of the Court. That of 1615 was contrived to serve the interests of George Villiers, who was soon to replace the already tottering Somerset in the esteem of his royal master. A mask, of which no details are known, seems also to have been given by the Spanish ambassador in February 1615. Of masks elsewhere than at Court during 1603-16 there are few to record. The Princess Elizabeth seems, on at least one occasion, to have had a mask for her private delectation.[581] One by John Marston formed part of the entertainment given by the Earl of Huntingdon to Alice Countess of Derby, at Ashby in August 1607, and one by Campion part of that given by Lord Knollys to Anne at Caversham on 27 April 1613. William Browne's Ulysses and Circe glorified the Inner Temple feast on 13 January 1615. The palmy days of the Jacobean mask close with our period. Henry was dead; Elizabeth was gone. Anne, ailing and retired during her later years, died in 1619. She had danced her last mask in 1611. Charles made his début as an adult masker in 1618, and most of the Court masks to the end of the reign are Prince's masks. But it takes a Queen to make a Court, and the English mask had to wait for its renouveau until the coming of Henrietta Maria.

[175]

VI
THE MASK (continued)

THE historical sketch given in the last chapter needs to be supplemented by some analysis of the stage of development which the mask had reached, in relation to its origins, by the Jacobean period. And first of all, on the side of scenic effect. Looking back over the reign of Henry VIII, in the light of what followed, we may discover two fairly distinct types of masks. There is the mask simple, in which the dancers, with their richly hued and sparkling costumes, their torch-bearers and their musicians, may be regarded as furnishing their own decoration. There is the mask spectacular, to which added éclat is given by the pageant, mobile, or towards the end of the reign stationary, with its additional lights, its carvings and mouldings, its gilt and colours, and the elements of illusion and surprise afforded by its facilities for the concealed entry of personages. Elizabeth, perhaps as has been hinted upon grounds of economy, perhaps from the more legitimate and attractive motive of a special interest in the dancer's art, used mainly the mask simple. But the pageant was not altogether forgotten, and recurs from time to time amongst the preparations for festivities on some exceptionally elaborate scale. The most notable example is perhaps to be found in the devices for the contemplated meeting with Mary of Scots in 1562, which involved the construction of a prison, a castle, and an orchard, and of which even Henry VIII would have had no reason to be ashamed. We hear also of a rock of fountain for the mask of Diana and Actaeon in 1560, of a castle and arbour at the visit of Artus de Cossé in 1564, of a rock with a veil of sarcenet for the mask of hunters in 1565, of a chariot and castle for the visit of the Duc de Montmorency in 1572, and of a mount, a castle, an orange tree, and a house for that of the Duc d'Anjou in 1581. The Gray's Inn maskers of 1595 had their Rock Adamantine, and those of the Middle Temple about 1598 sallied forth from a Heart.

I do not know that any special inferences need be drawn from the fact that on most of these occasions the English Court was putting its best foot foremost to entertain a visitor from France, for in fact during the greater part of Elizabeth's[176] reign France was the only continental country of the first importance with which she maintained constant diplomatic relations.[582] Nor is enough known of the development of the French mask in the middle of the sixteenth century to make it possible to say how far, if at all, that country then gave the lead to England.[583] Brantôme reports how Catherine de Médicis would amuse herself by inventing 'quelques nouvelles danses ou quelques beaux ballets, quand il faisoit mauvais temps', and the writings of Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais and of the Pléiade contain several sets of verses composed for the purposes of 'mommeries' and 'mascarades'.[584] I should suppose that the distinction drawn by M. de Beaumont in 1603 between a 'mascarade' and a 'ballet' corresponds pretty closely with that made above between the mask simple and the mask spectacular. The history of the 'ballet' proper in France seems to begin under Italian influences during the last quarter of the century. Its pioneer was one Baldassarino da Belgiojoso, a groom of the chamber to Catherine de Médicis and to her son Henri III, who came to France about 1555 and gallicized his name as Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx. When Henri, not yet King of France, left Paris to receive the crown of Poland in 1573, Baldassarino arranged the spectacle for his farewell. Sixteen nymphs issued from a movable rock, offered gifts, and danced in the hall. A printed description by Jean Dorat contains engravings of the rock and the dances, and verses in Latin and French, to which Ronsard and Amadis de Jamyn contributed.[585] This appears to have been a mask on lines already familiar in both France and England. But eight years later Baldassarino got an opportunity for a far more elaborate undertaking. His Balet Comique de la Royne was devised for the wedding of the Queen's sister, Mlle de Vaudemont, to the Duc de Joyeuse on 15 October 1581.[586] His own share seems to have lain in the invention of the general scheme of the entertainment[177] and in the dances; he had the assistance of M. de la Chesnaye for the verses, Lambert de Beaulieu for the music, and Jacques Patin for the painting. The Queen herself led the dancers. There was an intricate combination of choregraphy and mythological setting. The maskers proper were twelve Naiads in white and four Dryads in green; the presenters Circe, a Fugitive from her garden, Glaucus, Thetis, Mercury, Pan, Minerva, Jupiter; the musicians mermaids, tritons, satyrs, virtues, and others; the torch-bearers twelve pages. At the top of the hall was a daïs for the royal seats, and to the right and left in front places for ambassadors. Behind, and also lower down the hall, were tiers of seats, and above them two galleries; in all 9,000 or 10,000 spectators were present. On the left of the hall was a Gilded Vault for musicians, on the right the Grove of Pan, and at the foot the Garden of Circe, both veiled by curtains. In the roof, between the Vault and the Grove, hung a cloud. On each side of the Garden, trellises covered the entrance. After a preliminary episode between Circe and the Fugitive, the Naiads appeared on a movable fountain, and danced twelve geometrical figures as the 'première entrée du ballet'. They were then enchanted by Circe, and taken to her garden, with Mercury, who dropped from the cloud in a vain attempt at rescue. After two 'intermèdes' of music and song, during which the Dryads entered and the Grove of Pan was disclosed, came Minerva on a chariot, and called Jupiter from the cloud and Pan from the Grove for an assault on the Garden. Circe was captured, and her wand presented to the King. Then the Naiads and Dryads danced fifteen 'passages' as the 'entrée du grand ballet', and forty more of a geometrical character for the 'grand ballet' itself. Finally, they presented the King and gentlemen with 'choses de mer' and appropriate 'devises' or mottoes, and took them out for 'le grand bal' followed by 'bransles' and other dances.

So far as published documents go, the Balet Comique is closely the prototype of the fully developed 'ballet' or court mask, as we find it both in France and in England.[587] The Gray's Inn mask of 1595, with its printed description and its theme of enchantment, confesses an influence; and[178] there were only two directions in which the devisers of Henri IV and of James I were able to make any notable advance upon Baldassarino's model. One of these was the introduction of the antimask, to which it will be necessary to return; the other was the concentration of the scenic setting. The setting of the Balet Comique is not concentrated but dispersed. It is not even all stationary. The interest of the spectators is not merely divided amongst the Garden of Circe at the foot of the hall, the Grove of Pan on the right, the musicians' vault on the left, and the cloud overhead. It is claimed at certain points by the movable fountain upon which the maskers enter and the chariot of Minerva. This dispersed setting recurs in the first of Queen Anne's great masks, Daniel's Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, in 1604. A mountain stood at the lower end of the hall in Hampton Court, and at the upper end a Cave of Sleep on one side and a Temple of Peace on the other. A contemporary observer notes an inconvenience of this arrangement. 'The Halle was so much lessened by the workes that were in it', writes Dudley Carleton, 'so as none could be admitted but men of apparance.' This difficulty proved fatal to the dispersed setting, and in all later Jacobean masks the setting was concentrated in a scene erected at the lower end of the hall, and ample space was thus left both for the evolutions of the dancers and for the seating of the spectators.[588]

This change at least synchronizes with the emergence of Inigo Jones and the beginning of the architectural domination which for nearly half a century he was destined to exercise over the mask. His is the first outstanding name which we can associate with the history of English scenic decoration. Under Elizabeth and her predecessors the apparel and pageantry of a mask were the care of the Revels officers, and they naturally called in such painters and other men of taste about the court as were likely to prove useful. These were often foreigners. Alfonso Ferrabosco, the musician, seems to have had the general oversight of an important mask in 1572, and amongst his collaborators was another Italian, Petruccio Ubaldini, while Hans Eottes drew the patterns. Eottes was similarly employed in 1573 and 1574, and Ubaldini was called upon again in 1579 to write out the speeches of a mask in his native Italian.[589] The responsibilities [179] of Inigo Jones were much wider than those of any of these predecessors. His singular name has an Italian ring, but he was born of London parentage in 1573 and is said to have been apprenticed to a joiner.[590] Through the generosity of the third Earl of Pembroke he had opportunities of travel, and spent much of his early life in Italy and in the service of Christian IV of Denmark. He seems to have been back in England by 28 June 1603, when the accounts of the Earl of Rutland record a payment of £10 to 'Henygo Jones, a picture maker'. He is not known to have taken part in the masks of the following winter, but Jonson acknowledges that 'the bodily part' of the Mask of Blackness on 6 January 1605 was his 'design and act', and in August of the same year he took charge of the plays given before James in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford, and contrived their changes of scene with the aid of revolving triangular screens of Italian design. His place as an architect of court masks was now assured, and even the poets, to whom the descriptions of the performances naturally fell, found it impossible to conceal the fact that his functions were at least as important as their own. Jonson in his earlier descriptions is punctilious in rendering due credit to his colleague.[591] So too are Daniel and Campion.[592]

[180]

It was not until Caroline days that the smouldering antagonism between Jonson and Jones broke out into open warfare, and stung Jonson to various indiscretions, amongst them the ironical outburst of the famous Expostulation—

Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque![593]

Of thirteen spectacular masks given at court from 1605 to 1613 nine were certainly contrived by Jones, and there is no positive evidence that the other four were not his.[594] He had also a share in the preparations for Prince Henry's barriers of 1610. When the prince set up his household in the following December Jones was appointed surveyor of his works. After Henry's death he obtained a reversion of a similar appointment in the royal Office of Works, but this reversion did not fall in until the death of Simon Basil on 1 October 1615, and after the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613 Jones paid a visit of some duration to Italy. He therefore took no part in the masks for the Somerset wedding during the following winter. For one at least of these, Campion's Mask of Squires, his substitute was Constantine de' Servi, a Florentine who had also been in the service of Henry as his architect; but Campion was not pleased with his coadjutor, and wrote that 'he being too much of himself, and no way to be drawn to impart his intentions, failed so far in the assurance he gave that the main invention, even at the last cast, was of force drawn into a far narrower compass than was from the beginning intended'. Jones was back in England by 29 January 1615, and was to plan many more masks before his death in 1652. But none can be definitely ascribed to him before Jonson's Mask of Christmas in 1617. During the latter part of his career he was busy as an architect, and the present banqueting-house in Whitehall, built during 1619-22, represents a fragment of one of his grandiose schemes for the complete reconstruction of the old palace.

The concentrated setting, as it took shape in the first period[181] of Inigo Jones, appears to have been regularly designed on the principle of what is sometimes called the 'picture-stage'.[595] It was framed by a proscenium arch, from side to side of which stretched, at first view, a curtain. This arch was of a familiar Renaissance type. On either side were pilasters, or statuesquely modelled figures, or a combination of the two, which bore up a frieze. The decorations were in harmony with the theme of the mask and the frieze might contain a scroll or panel setting forth its title.[596] It cannot perhaps be demonstrated that Jones invariably used a proscenium from the beginning, but at any rate by 1608 (Haddington Mask) 'the arch' appears to have been a recognized element of a setting. The most elaborate description of a proscenium is that written by Jones himself for Tethys' Festival in 1610. On this occasion the proscenium was itself covered by a curtain until the audience were seated. It is possible, however, that it sometimes framed a front curtain. The use of curtains was, of course, no innovation. They had served, when concealment and revelation were required, both in the mobile and in the fixed settings of earlier days. Thus for an Elizabethan mask of 1565, of which the pageant was 'a rock or hill for the ix musses to singe vppone', the Revels Office had provided 'a vayne of sarsnett drawen vpp and downe before them'.[597] The Jacobean curtain itself might form part of the setting. It was painted to represent a wooded 'landtschap' (Blackness), clouds (Hay Mask, Tethys' Festival), night (Beauty), a red cliff (Haddington Mask), a city wall and gate (Flowers). But at an early moment it was removed, to 'discover' a more solidly constructed scene within. Often it is called a 'traverse', and when it is 'drawne' it may either 'slide away', or 'sink down' (Marston's Mask).[598] I have not come across a certain case in which it was drawn up, either directly by a roller, or diagonally by cords towards the corners of the proscenium; but these methods may also have been employed. In some masks the drawing of the curtain 'discovered' the maskers on the scene; in others their entry was deferred and variously contrived. The maskers, and sometimes the presenters, had, before the[182] actual dances began, to come forward through the proscenium arch to the dancing place, which was on the floor of the hall, or on a stage only slightly raised above it, and was regularly laid with green cloth by the official 'mattleyer' of the court.[599] This advance was managed in divers ways. The old device of a movable pageant might be revived, as an element subsidiary to the fixed scene, and the maskers brought in on a chariot (Queens, Oberon), or enthroned on a floating isle (Beauty). They might be let down by a cloud from the upper part of the scene (Hymenaei, Lords' Mask). For the Mask of Blackness Jones made an artificial sea on a wheeled stage, which lifted them forwards in a concave shell. It was quite effective as a spectacle, if they stepped in their bravery down a slope (Hay Mask) or a double stairway (Chapman's Mask, Squires) leading from the scene to the lower level of the dancing place.

The adoption of the concentrated setting was a matter of convenience; it did not mean that the mask could dispense with the variety of interest which the multiplied scenes of the dispersed setting had afforded. Jones's chief problem as a producer was that of securing this variety of interest under new conditions, and if possible with some added sensation of curiosity or surprise. One device was to retain the multiplied scenes, and to juxtapose them, or to superimpose one upon another within the frame of the proscenium. It was easy enough to divide the curtain either vertically or horizontally and to 'draw' the sections separately. Thus in the Hymenaei, which was a double mask, the altar of Hymen and the globe containing the men maskers were first discovered below. Subsequently the 'upper part of the scene' opened, and the women maskers floated out on nimbi. In Lord Hay's Mask there was a 'double veil' of which the lesser part covered a Bower of Flora on the right of the stage, and the greater part covered a House of Night on the left, and a grove and hill crowned by a Tree of Diana in the centre. This method paid homage to the tradition of the dispersed setting; another, which could be used in combination with the first, was capable of more intricate development. The manœuvre of the front curtain might be repeated. The whole, or a fragment, of the inner scene might be shifted, so as to discover a new vision which had at first been concealed. Often this was only a local and particular transformation. Thus it was in the two masks just cited, when the globe behind the altar of Hymen revolved and showed the maskers[183] seated in a cave, or the trees in the grove of Diana were drawn into the ground, and the maskers appeared out of their cloven tops. Similarly the splitting of a rock, to let out personages concealed therein, is an incident which recurs in more than one mask (Haddington Mask, Oberon, Chapman's Mask). The development of the antimask, with the emphatic contrast between the grotesque and the magnificent which this implied, seems to have been the motive which led to the introduction of more wholesale changes of scene. In the Mask of Queens the background for the antimask was a Hell, and when it was over 'the whole face of the scene altered, scarce suffering the memory of such a thing', and in place of the Hell appeared a House of Fame. In Mercury Vindicated, again, the Laboratory of the antimasks gave way to a Bower of Nature for the mask proper. In Oberon the antimask was before a cliff with a rising moon, and thereafter the scene twice opened, to disclose, first the 'frontispiece' and then the interior of a palace of Fays. The art of transformation was perhaps carried to its greatest extent during this period in the Lords' Mask for the Princess Elizabeth's wedding, of which the Venetian ambassador in his report to the Signory especially noted the three changes of scene as an outstanding feature. This elaborate spectacle affords examples of nearly all the devices of juxtaposition, superimposition, partial and complete transformation, by which a variety of scenic interest is reconciled with a concentrated setting. The original scene was horizontally divided. The lower half, which was first discovered, contained side by side a wood, a thicket of Orpheus, and a cave of Mania. Before this danced the antimask. Then a curtain fell from the upper part of the scene, and discovered amongst clouds Prometheus and eight Stars. The Stars were individually transformed to men maskers, and the clouds to the House of Prometheus. Beneath torch-bearers emerged and danced, still in front of the wood. The whole face of the scene was then overspread with a cloud on which the men maskers descended. The lower part of the scene was then changed from a wood to a façade of niches containing statues, which were individually transformed into women maskers. The mask proper followed, and when the dancing was over, there was a final change of the whole scene to a porticoed perspective, leading up to the obelisk of Sibylla. Even by 1613 the art of Jones had handsomely accomplished its task of ministering to the pride of the eyes. In his later or Caroline period he advanced to even greater triumphs, and did not shrink from the decorative and mechanical difficulties[184] entailed by as many as five changes of scene.[600] The actual mechanism employed by Jones to obtain his effects is perhaps better known to us for this later period, in view of the numerous plans and designs preserved at Chatsworth and elsewhere, than for the earlier one. The action of a mask was in all cases 'continuous', and therefore he was happily debarred from the awkward modern convention of a drop-curtain. Jones ultimately worked out a system of back-cloths and shutters or flats, arranged and painted so as to produce a perspective and an illusion of solid scenery. These ran in horizontal grooves, so that those belonging to one scene could be placed close behind those belonging to another, and each set could be successively removed by lateral withdrawal. It was, in fact, a multiplied use of the primitive 'traverse' or sliding curtain. This system may have already been at his disposal in the Jacobean period; it was well adapted, in particular, for the splitting of a rock. But it is clear that he also used a device based upon a different principle, a machina versatilis, which by means of a circular motion was capable of displaying successively the different faces of a comparatively solid decorative structure placed upon it. Jonson applies the term machina versatilis to the House of Fame in the Mask of Queens. Presumably the rotating globe in Hymenaei and the rotating throne of Beauty in the Mask of Beauty are other examples; and yet another is furnished by Tethys' Festival, where however the truc was used, not to carry scenery, but to cover a change of scene by directing the attention of the spectators to three whirling circles of lights and glasses. It is hardly necessary to dwell upon such subsidiary devices as the trapdoors in the floor of the stage, or the pulleys by which floating clouds were let down from the heavens, for such obvious and primitive machinery had been familiar, long before the advent of Jones, as an element in the rudimentary technique of the popular theatre.[601]

The approximation of mask to drama entailed by the adoption of the concentrated setting was not the only point of interaction between these parallel forms of mimesis. In the first instance it was perhaps the drama, rather than the mask, which underwent an influence. The various forms of spectacular entertainment with which the mask became entangled during the fifteenth century might be introduced at more than one moment in the long story of a Renaissance festival. They were equally well adapted to enliven the[185] intervals between the courses of a meal, and the intervals between the parts of an organized dramatic performance. The detached character of the Senecan chorus, and the Roman practice of dividing up tragedies and comedies into acts, which was itself a departure from the Greek principle of continuous action, facilitated this intrusive development; and in the history of the Italian stage, as it shaped itself at Ferrara and elsewhere from 1486 until the middle of the next century, nothing is more remarkable than the tendency to bury the actual play, tragedy or comedy, classical or modern, in a wilderness of decorative intermedii, ordinarily consisting of dances and song, framed in some ingenuity of allegorical, mythological, or other device.[602] It is, I think, a true affiliation which traces to the intermedii the analogous dumb-shows of English usage.[603] These belong primarily to the learned court drama, with its admitted classical and Italian inspiration. To some extent they found their way also on to the popular stage, which had, moreover, its own simpler devices for the avoidance of monotony in the way of 'jigs' and 'themes'.[604] But the influence of the dumb-show upon the drama is not wholly to be measured by the extent to which it was adopted as a formal element in the structure of plays. It introduced a spectacular tendency, which continued to prevail long after the position of the dumb-show as an interact had been surrendered. Indeed, the extreme Italian development of the intermedii constituted a danger against which the lovers of a purer dramatic art were soon in protest.[605] If tragedy and comedy had not succeeded in absorbing spectacle, they would have been overwhelmed by it. The first battle was won when it was admitted that the subjects of the intermedii ought to be related to the theme of the drama, which was by no means always the case at Ferrara; the second when the spectacle was taken out of the intervals between the acts and treated as an integral part of the action. This is the normal, although not of course the invariable, Elizabethan practice. Elizabethan drama is abundantly spectacular, and often enough the spectacle is irrelevant or excessive, but as a rule it is, formally at least, within the plot. There are the drums and tramplings of battles and trials and funerals. There are the divine epiphanies in mythological pieces. There are the endless opportunities afforded[186] for song and dance by banquets, weddings, and rustic merry-makings. And if all else fails, what more easy than to introduce a dumb-show in a dream or as a specimen of the magician's art?[606] A somewhat paradoxical type of incorporated spectacle is the play within the play, as we find it, for example, in Hamlet, where indeed the inner play has the further elaboration of its accompanying dumb-show.[607] And with the play within the play comes the mask within the play. In the intermedii the mask, as already suggested, tended to lose its individuality. There were dancers, no doubt, and the dancers were disguised, and might be masked; and there are signs of an extended use of the term 'mask' to cover such an entertainment.[608] But the characteristic feature of the mask proper, the taking out of spectators to dances, did not lend itself to the conditions of performances given while the spectators sat at meat, or of performances on the raised and isolated stage of an interlude. When a mask proper was closely associated with an early Tudor play, it was as an afterpiece rather than as an inter-act. The dancers of the intermedii kept to themselves, and if the sexes intermingled it was in a 'double' choir. But when the spectacles became episodes, instead of intermedii, the central incident of the mask could be restored. Dancers who were personages of a play could obviously 'take out' spectators who were also personages of the same play; and the introduction of a mask, generally as a revel in a royal feast or wedding banquet, becomes a regular dramatic device at least from the last decade of the sixteenth century onwards. Perhaps the first example is in an academic play, Gager's Ulysses Redux of 1592, where at the beginning of Act II 'Proci larvati alicunde prodeunt, saltantque in scena', and as we learn from the criticism of Rainolds, some of Penelope's handmaids, seated amongst the audience, were 'entreated by the wooers to rise[187] and danse upon the stage'.[609] Shakespeare has a mask in Love's Labour's Lost, and another in Romeo and Juliet, to which the episode is handed down from the ultimate source in Italian narrative.[610] Another early example is in 1 Richard II (iv. 2). Munday has a mask in his Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598; ii. 2), Dekker (ii. 204) in his Whore of Babylon (c. 1607) and his Satiromastix (1601; l. 2302), and Tourneur, if it was Tourneur, in his Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1607; v. 3). These are examples from the public theatres. When the boys' companies came into existence at the end of the century, dance and song proved well within their means; and their principal writers, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Field, Jonson, all make use of the mask.[611] So do Beaumont and Fletcher, both in plays for boys and in plays for men.[612] But the enumeration of earlier names is of itself enough to dispose of the theory that to Beaumont and Fletcher is due, in some special way, the transference of the court mask to the popular stage, and in particular the introduction of Shakespeare to the supposed new idea. Doubtless the mask in A Maid's Tragedy is set out with somewhat greater elaboration of presentment than was usual in earlier plays, and doubtless the antimask of Beaumont's contribution to the Princess Elizabeth's wedding was furbished up again for the delight of a popular audience in The Two Noble Kinsmen. But it hardly follows that Shakespeare, after using the mask in Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, had anything to learn from his younger rivals before he used it in The Tempest, and a writer who can assert that Ben Jonson 'did not mix his masques and plays' must have simply forgotten Cynthia's Revels.[613] The mask in this play is of [188] special interest, because it is Elizabethan and antedates by some four years the first of the long series of Jonson's Jacobean masks. It occupies, in the quarto version, the greater part of the last seven scenes of the play. In iv. 5 Arete, a principal lady at court, desires revels for Cynthia, and Amorphus proposes a 'masque'. Arete undertakes to send for Criticus, and get his advice.[614] In iv. 6 Criticus hesitates to write for such revellers as Amorphus and his crew. Arete encourages him. The presence will restrain them when they are masked, and Cynthia needs the opportunity to reform them. Criticus then invokes Apollo and Mercury. In v. 1 Cynthia, awaiting the mask, holds flattering discourse with Arete on its author. In v. 2 enters 'the first masque'. Cupid 'disguised like Anteros', presents four virgins from the palace of Perfection, Storge, Aglaia, Euphantaste, and Apheleia. He interprets their devices, and presents on their behalf a crystal, in which Cynthia sees her own image. In v. 3 Cynthia discusses the mask with Criticus and Arete. In v. 4 enters 'the second masque'. Mercury presents and interprets the four sons of Eutaxia, who are Eucosmos, Eupathes, Eutolmos, and Eucolos. In iv. 5 'the masques joyne'. They dance the first, second, and third 'straine', while Cupid and Mercury converse, outside the cadre of the mask. The dancers do not proceed to 'take out' spectators, but that is presumably because they are interrupted by Cynthia, who bids them unmask and administers her reproof.

The masks inserted in plays are rarely described with anything like the fullness of Cynthia's Revels, although there is a fair amount of detail in The Maid's Tragedy and a somewhat less amount in Your Five Gallants and in No Wit, no Help, like a Woman's. It must be borne in mind that the main action of a mask was mute, and that the stage directions of the printed texts are not intended to be descriptive. Moreover, the structural place of the mask in a plot often leads, as in Cynthia's Revels, to its abrupt termination. The disguises cover an intrigue of murder (2 Antonio and Mellida, Revenger's Tragedy) or of robbery (A Mad World, my Masters), or of elopement (A Woman is a Weathercock). Or a quarrel breaks out (Dutch Courtesan), or a masker is discovered to be dead (Satiromastix). As a rule, too, the presenters' speeches[189] are omitted or cut short, since it is spectacle, and not mere dialogue, that is required.[615] Nevertheless, in its main features, the dramatized mask confirms what we know of the mask from other sources. It has its dancers, its presenters, its torch-bearers, and its music.[616] Your Five Gallants adds 'shield boys' to carry the 'devices'. When the performers have finished their measures, they generally take out the ladies. At the end they unmask, 'honour' the guests (A Women is a Weathercock), and depart, or proceed to a banquet. And in some interesting points the dramatized mask supplements other information. To begin with, it is a simpler type of mask than is represented by the full Jacobean descriptions. For obvious reasons architectural pageantry could hardly be introduced. In The Maid's Tragedy there is a rock, in Satiromastix a chair; in May Day Cupid 'descends', a feat, as already noted, well within the compass of an ordinary theatre. And that is about all. You get the mask as it was practised at Elizabeth's court, rather than at that of James. Then there are sometimes subsidiary scenes, which throw light upon aspects of the mask, not much dwelt on in the Jacobean descriptions. Often there is a scene of preparation, when the 'maskery' is planned, and a 'device', 'imprezza', or 'mott' ordered of the painter, or 'a few tinsel coats' of the vizard-maker (1 Antonio and Mellida, Insatiate Countess, A Mad World, my Masters, Your Five Gallants, A Woman is a Weathercock). Or there is a scene of bustle, when a 'state' and canopy are set up in the 'presence' (Satiromastix) and room is made for the dancers, either by the cry of 'A hall, a hall!' (Romeo and Juliet, May Day) or by the more violent ministrations of the torch-bearers (A Woman is a Weathercock) or of court officials. Thus in The Maid's Tragedy the mask is preluded by the activities of Calianax, the lord chamberlain, who 'would run raging among them, and break a dozen wiser heads than his own in the twinkling of an eye', and of Diagoras the gentleman usher, who is keeping the doors against the impatient crowd without, and placing the ladies, all except those who come in 'the king's troop', in a gallery 'above'. There[190] is a similar scene in Beaumont and Fletcher's Four Plays in One, a piece which consists of three short playlets, divided by 'triumphs' or intermedii, and concluded by a mask. This may be regarded as an experiment, in which the influence of the mask-tradition has exceptionally modified the typical structure of the drama. Nor does it stand quite alone. Peele's Arraignment of Paris is of course spectacular throughout, and the last scene, in which the golden apple is handed to Elizabeth, is clearly, in its recognition of the audience, a divergence from the normal detachment of the drama.[617] Perhaps the same may be said of the epithalamic end of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, but as a rule the element of mask remains an episode, and does not dominate the play which admits it.

The debt of the mask to the play may be traced in the increased skill in which the later masks are arranged around a 'device' or dramatic idea. The mask had had its presenters as far back as Lydgate. Even in a learned court, the more recondite forms of allegory or mythology sometimes require explanation. The maskers proper seem to have been traditionally mum and therefore unable to explain themselves. Let us remember that they were not professional actors, but English men and women of good birth and breeding, and that therefore their limbs could more easily be trained than their wits and voices. If explanation was required, it must be given in an introductory speech by a subsidiary performer. Such a spokesman seems to have been known to the Elizabethan Revels as a 'truchman' or interpreter.[618] In addition to his function of elucidation he became the natural vehicle of whatever compliment was to be paid by the mask, and when Arthur Throgmorton wished to turn the heart of[191] Elizabeth in 1595, we find him undertaking the part himself. The Elizabethan truchmen do not seem to have got much beyond formal speeches, and the child dressed as Mercury or Cupid became rather banal through much repetition. If anything more dramatic was attempted, either through the presenters, or by dividing the dancers into a double mask, it was apt to be based upon the mediaeval idea of an assault. In the device for the abortive masks of 1562 the presenters were to do most of the fighting. In 1559, on the other hand, it was successive bands of maskers that rifled and rescued the Queen's maids. How far the mask of Diana and Actaeon in the following winter took a dramatic form we do not know. The development of the mask on dramatic lines seems to have been a slow business. Even Jonson, in Cynthia's Revels, has not got beyond Cupid and Mercury and the formal speeches. On the other hand, the Gray's Inn mask, which preceded Cynthia's Revels by some years, and nearly all the Jacobean masks, especially Jonson's, show a marked progress in this respect. A dramatic idea is nearly always dominant, and there is ingenuity in grouping the fixed elements of the mask about it. A comparison between Gascoigne's treatment of a wedding mask in 1572 and Jonson's in 1608 may serve to illustrate this. Gascoigne's maskers are Montagues of Italy, who have been driven by a storm to the shores of England, and take the opportunity to visit their English kinsmen, in whose house the wedding happens to be taking place. The idea is not without point, but it is all expounded in a single and inevitably tedious speech by the truchman, during which the dancers must remain motionless. When Jonson has to celebrate the wedding of James Ramsay and Elizabeth Radcliffe in 1608 he proceeds very differently. Even the curtain introduces the hymeneal theme with its graceful symbolism of a red cliff. From the top of this Venus descends with her Graces. She is in search of her son, and bids the Graces ask whether he is concealed in the eyes or between the swelling breasts of the ladies in the audience. The Graces sing their appeal for the discovery of 'Venus' runaway'. Cupid now emerges, with a train of Joci and Risus, each bearing two torches, who dance a dance of triumph. Venus captures Cupid, and demands the cause of his jubilation. He slips away, but the explanation is given by Hymen, in a speech of flattery to the King on the 'state', to the bridegroom who saved the King's life, and to the maid of the Red Cliff, who is the bride. Hymen is followed by Vulcan, who splits the cliff, and discloses a concave fashioned by his art, in which sit the maskers. They are the twelve Signs of[192] the Zodiac, to each of whom is assigned some influence upon marriage. They advance and dance their measures, while Vulcan's attendants, the Cyclopes, Brontes and Steropes, beat time with their sledges, and in the pauses of the dancing the musicians, dressed as priests of Hymen, sing the verses of an epithalamion. How neatly it is all done! The maskers, the presenters, the torch-bearers, the musicians, all have their place in the scheme, and contribute towards the complimenting of the bridal pair.

It would perhaps be difficult to say how far the approximation to drama in the Jacobean masks was due to the subconscious mental processes of mask poets who were themselves playwrights, and how far to a deliberate intention to combine two arts.[619] As a rule it is safe to credit Jonson, at least, with fully conscious artistry. And here too the model set by Baldassarino's Balet Comique must not be neglected. The printed description of this contains a preface, in which Baldassarino justifies his use of the term 'comique' on the ground that he has arranged his 'balet' in acts and scenes like a comedy, and claims to be an innovator in this interweaving of poetry with the dance, to which 'le premier tiltre et honneur' are still left. The Jacobean poets did not essay a treatment by acts and scenes, which indeed has no great significance even in the Balet Comique. But Baldassarino's[193] main idea, of the inhibition of the dance by the magic of Circe until the gods come to the rescue, may fairly be regarded as responsible for the several episodes of disenchantment or transformation which recur in the work of his successors.[620]

Jonson's mask for the Ramsay-Radcliffe wedding in 1608 represents a stage of importance in the evolution of the dramatic form. The entry of the maskers is preluded by a dance of the torch-bearing Joci and Risus. In describing his Mask of Queens of the following year, Jonson says, 'And because her majesty (best knowing that a principal part of life in these spectacles lay in their variety) had commanded me to think on some dance, or shew, that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil, or false masque, I was careful to decline, not only from others, but mine own steps in that kind, since the last year, I had an antimasque of boys; and therefore now devised that twelve women, in the habit of hags or witches, sustaining the persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, &c., the opposites to good Fame, should fill that part, not as a masque, but a spectacle of strangeness, producing multiplicity of gesture, and not unaptly sorting with the current and whole fall of the device'. I am not quite sure what Jonson intends by the distinction here drawn between a 'masque' and a 'spectacle', for in fact the Hags dance 'a magical dance full of preposterous change and gesticulation', which is interrupted by a burst of loud music and an alteration in the face of the scene, heralding the introduction of the Queens in the House of Fame. However this may be, Jonson's innovation, with its obvious advantages of added variety, must have been immediately successful, for in practically all subsequent examples of the period the antimask appears as a fixed element in the scheme, preceding and setting off what Beaumont calls the 'maine' mask, and usually divided from it by a change of scene.[621] There are some slight further elaborations to record. In Oberon, in the Lords' Mask, and in Chapman's Mask, the antimask is followed by a dance of torch-bearers, to which also Chapman gives the name of 'antimask'. Beaumont's Mask, the Mask of Squires, Mercury Vindicated, and Browne's Mask have each two regular[194] antimasks, and in the Mask of Squires the second antimask is interpolated in the middle of the dances of the main mask. There is only one antimask in The Twelve Months, but two dances are assigned to it. The Mask of Flowers has, besides the antimask 'of dances', a preliminary antimask 'of song'. The name 'antimask' has given some trouble. Jonson's references to 'a foil, or false masque' and to 'opposites' suggest clearly enough that he used the prefix 'anti' to indicate an antithesis or contrast. But in Tethys' Festival Daniel uses the form 'antemasque', and this spelling, probably due to a misunderstanding by the worthy Daniel of the point of the innovation, recurs in Chapman's Mask and in The Twelve Months.[622] The Mask of Flowers, again, affords a third variation, in 'anticke-maske', and this also, I think, pace Dr. Brotanek, must have its origin in a misunderstanding.[623] An 'antic' dance is a grotesque dance, and this epithet is often applied to the personages of the antimasks and their evolutions, from the Haddington Mask onwards, since the characteristic antithesis which the antimask renders possible is precisely the antithesis between the grotesque prelude and the splendour of the main mask that follows.[624] I want to emphasize the point that this element of contrast introduced by the juxtaposition of mask and antimask is analogous to what critics have always regarded as a special feature of the Elizabethan, and particularly the Shakespearian drama, the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy, either in the form of what is called tragicomedy, or by the inclusion of scenes of 'comic relief' in tragedy proper. It is perhaps worth noting that in the French masks of 1610 and 1612 printed by Lacroix we find side by side with the 'grand ballet' elements variously described as the 'première et plaisante entrée' (1610) and 'la bouffonnerie' (1612), which appear to serve just the same purpose as the English antimask.[625] But, of course, I do not mean to suggest that either in France or in England the grotesque made its way into the mask for the first time during the seventeenth century. The clowns, mariners, 'wodwoses' and so forth of the earlier Elizabethan revels must have lent themselves to humorous treatment, and indeed mirth has at all times been of the essence of revels. There[195] is some reason to think that a traditional form of grotesque mask at court was the morris. This is of course a familiar type of folk-dance, and may owe its Tudor name to the moresche, which were dances introduced as intermedii into Italian plays.[626]

The spectacular and literary elaboration of the Jacobean mask must not be allowed to blind our eyes to the fact that after all it was not a dramatic illusion but a choregraphic compliment which remained the central purpose of the entertainment. Scenery and speech and song occupy perhaps a disproportionate share of the attention of the poets who, to their own glorification and that of the architects, wrote the descriptions; but the greater part of the considerable number of hours during which the mask lasted was devoted to the actual dancing. And the dancing involved an intimacy, and not a detachment, in the relation between performers and spectators. It is true that some of the traditional features which accompanied the mask, when court ceremonial first took it up from folk custom, tended under the new conditions to pass into the state of survivals. Thus the torch-bearers, whether or not their burning brands represent some original element of ritual in the folk festival, were certainly de rigueur as a concomitant of the mask during the sixteenth century. They had two clear functions. They provided, in dim halls, the abundance of light which was so necessary to give full value to the bright stuffs and metallic spangles worn by the dancers. And their own costumes, harmonized or contrasting with those of the dancers, afforded the variety of interest which otherwise, while the presenters were still limited to one or two 'truchmen', might have been lacking. They were always kept in strict subordination to the maskers proper. They were their attendants; Hinds in a mask of Clowns, Almains in a mask of Swart Rutters, Moorish friars in a mask of Moors. Their garments were inferior, taffeta, as against satin or cloth of gold. When George Ferrers, as Lord of Misrule in 1552, had occasion to complain of the apparel furnished by the Master of the Revels for his councillors, he wrote that the gentlemen who were to take the parts 'wolde not be seen in London so torchebererlyke disgysed for asmoche as they ar worthe or hope to be worthe'.[627] And when the measures began, they had little to do, but to stand[196] and look on.[628] In the seventeenth century they were not so indispensable, either for illumination, which could be better supplied by fixed lights upon the scene, or for variety.[629] And with the multiplication of other purposes the room which they took up could ill be spared. In Tethys' Festival, given exceptionally during the heat of summer, there were no torch-bearers, on the ground that 'they would have pestered the roome, which the season would not well permit'. And therewith begins a tendency either, as already indicated, to merge them in the antimask, or to omit them altogether.[630] The vizard again and the ceremonial unvizarding at the end of the performance, although usual, and of course essential parts of the tradition, do not appear to have been quite invariable under James I.[631] As early as the Mask of Blackness in 1605, blackened faces and arms were substituted, which, says a contemporary writer, were 'disguise sufficient' and an 'ugly sight', and the experiment was not repeated. I do not know that for any historic period there is evidence that the maskers regularly brought gifts with them, although they sometimes did, and one may suspect that such gifts represented the 'luck' of the primitive custom. A jewel was all very well when Arthur Throgmorton wanted to use a mask as a medium for recovering the lost favour of Elizabeth.[632] But it may be assumed that Elizabeth would think it a useless expense, when a mask was only conventionally a surprise visit, and was really designed on her own instructions in her own Office of the Revels. And although James did on one[197] occasion pay no less than £40,000 for the jewel used in the mask of Indian and Chinese Knights, this was in the first year of his reign, when his predecessor's hoarded wealth was still there for the lavishing, and the special purpose was to be served of impressing Henri IV through his diplomatic representative.[633] When there were gifts, they were as a rule trifling, and incidental to the 'device' of the mask. The abortive scheme of 1562 provides for a grandguard and a sword and girdle. Elizabeth got on one occasion flowers of silk and gold, signifying victory, peace, and plenty; on another snowballs of lamb's wool sweetened with rose-water in a mask of Janus; on a third looking-glasses with posies inscribed on them in a mask of Pedlars. In The Twelve Goddesses the maskers presented their emblems, and Sibylla laid them in the temple. In the Mask of Blackness the Daughters of Niger presented their fans. In Tethys' Festival there were a trident for James and a sword, worth 20,000 crowns, and a scarf for Henry. In the Mask of Squires Anne plucked a bough from a golden tree, wherewith to disenchant the Knights. Often the gifts were represented by the merely conventional offering of a copy of verses, or of shields bearing imprese or painted allegorical devices, such as were also brought by the runners in tilts.[634] These sometimes required interpretation and led to some preliminary 'commoning' with the guests of honour. Interchanges of wit at this stage between Elizabeth and Mary Fitton in 1600 and James and Philip Herbert in 1604 are upon record. But of course the chief 'commoning' was when the maskers 'took out' the principal spectators of the opposite sex to dance. Whether the Jacobean maskers kissed the ladies whom they took out I do not know, but this was the earlier custom.[635] At any rate the 'taking out' is the critical moment of intimacy between performers and spectators in the mask, and serves, even more than the gifts and even more than the personal compliments in theme and speech, to distinguish it[198] from the drama.[636] The period of 'intermixed' dancing (Hymenaei), which it introduced, served as a sequel to the greater part of the mask proper, and is sometimes described as 'the revels' (Love Freed; Twelve Months). More precisely, the order of the dancing, subject to minor variations, was as follows. After the dialogue of presentation and the antimask, the maskers entered and began a series of 'masque dances' (Oberon; Love Freed), 'changes' (Malecontent; Insatiate Countess), or 'strains' (Hymenaei; Cynthia's Revels; A Woman is a Weathercock). These are also called the 'single' dances, to distinguish them from the 'intermixed' dances (Blackness) or more usually and simply, the maskers 'own' dances or the 'new' dances. Sometimes the 'first' dance is distinguished from the 'main' dance (Twelve Months; Lords' Mask; Mercury Vindicated; Golden Age). After one, two, or three 'new' dances, the maskers 'dissolved' (Hymenaei) and 'took out' for the 'revels'. Finally they gathered again for their 'going off' (Twelve Months), the 'last', 'parting', 'departing' or 'retiring' dance, which sometimes took them 'into the work' (Oberon). If they did not dance back 'into the work', they probably unmasked at this stage, after a ceremonial reverence to the company, known as the 'honour' (Hay Mask; Your Five Gallants; A Woman is a Weathercock).[637] The revels consisted partly of the solemn figured dances known as 'measures', partly of 'lighter' dances (Hay Mask). Those most often mentioned are the galliard, coranto, and lavolta; others were the brawl (Browne's Mask), duretto (Beaumont's Mask; Mask of Flowers), and morasco (Mask of Flowers).[638] Of course, only 'ordinary' measures (Indian and Chinese Knights) and familiar court dances were available for the revels. The mask dances proper, on the other hand, as the epithet 'new' indicates, were specially designed and carefully learnt for each occasion. They appear to have always been 'measures'. Baldassarino regards 'meslanges geometriques' as being of the essence of the mask. The dances were a technical matter, with which the poets were not much concerned, and they do not as a rule attempt any notation, or even detailed description of the figures. An occasional literary touch was, however, to their fancy. In Hymenaei some of the figures were 'formed into[199] letters very signifying to the name of the bridegroom', and again in the Mask of Queens one of the dances was 'graphically disposed into letters, and honouring the name of the most sweet and ingenious Prince, Charles, Duke of York'. These graphic dances, which Bacon deprecates, were also used in the French Ballet de Monseigneur le Duc de Vandosme of 1610.[639]

It is of a piece with the intimacy between maskers and spectators that the former appear always to have been volunteers, and that to dance in a mask, at any rate at court, was not derogatory even to persons of the highest rank. I have no proof that Queen Elizabeth ever masked in person, as her father and brother certainly did, but in view of her notorious fondness for the exercise of the dance it is extremely probable. Unfortunately we know very little of the personnel of the Elizabethan masks. The Revels Accounts, a source of generous information on many points, never name the maskers. Scattered notices elsewhere suggest that they may not infrequently have been the maids of honour. It was so when Brantôme was present in 1561, and at Anne Russell's wedding in 1600, when Elizabeth, contrary to the ordinary rule of sex-exchange, was 'taken' out by Mary Fitton. Among the stray names of revellers that have floated to us down the stream of time are those of George Brooke, who came to the scaffold in 1603, and Sir Robert Carey, who boasts of his share in all court triumphs in 1586.[640] Naunton is the authority for the statement that Sir Christopher Hatton first appeared before Elizabeth in one of the masks which were sent from time to time as the contributions of the Inns of Court to the royal gaiety.[641] Lists of the dancers in most of the Jacobean masks are preserved. That of James himself is not among them; he was ungainly and indolent except on horseback. But Anne danced in her own 'Queen's' masks of 1604, 1605, 1608, 1609, 1610, and probably 1611, and allowed herself to be 'taken out' as a compliment to her hosts at Caversham as late as the summer of 1613. With her in 1610 was the Princess Elizabeth, and in 1608 and 1610 the Lady Arabella Stuart. Henry was 'taken out' as a boy and 'tost from hand to hand like a tennis bal' by the ladies in the Twelve Goddesses of 1604.

[200]

He masked himself in Oberon (1611) and in the undatable Twelve Months. The only appearance of Charles before 1618 was as Zephyrus amongst the presenters of Tethys' Festival (1610). Next to Anne herself, the most conspicuous performer in the Queen's masks was perhaps Lucy Countess of Bedford, who had already won her reputation as a 'fine dancing dame' at the end of the previous reign, and whose costume in one at least of her extant portraits is conjectured to represent masking attire.[642] Other names which recur frequently in the lists are those of Elizabeth Countess of Derby and her sister Susan Countess of Montgomery, Alethea Countess of Arundel, Anne Countess of Dorset, and Audrey Lady Walsingham; while amongst the men shone the two brothers Herbert, William Earl of Pembroke and Philip Earl of Montgomery, and that most splendid and extravagant of all the Jacobean courtiers, James Lord Hay. The Earl of Somerset does not appear to have been a dancer, but when the star of George Villiers was rising in 1615 his friends were careful to give him his opportunity of shining in a mask. It is not surprising to find that the numerous sons and daughters of the Earl of Suffolk, Lord Chamberlain, and the Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse, who shared the official oversight of the masks, were not seldom called upon to display their skill. One fears that there must often have been heart-burnings. Lady Hatton's pique at being left out in 1605 contributed something to the strained relations with her husband, Lord Coke, which long made mirth for London.[643]

The masks could not dispense altogether with professional assistance. In the Mask of Beauty the torch-bearing Cupids were 'chosen out of the best and ingenious youth of the kingdom'. In Tethys' Festival the presenters included, in addition to the Duke of York, two gentlemen 'of good worth and respect', who played the Tritons, and the antimask included eight 'little ladies, all of them the daughters of Earls or Barons'. But this mask was for the exceptional occasion of the creation of Henry as Prince of Wales, and Daniel expressly boasts that 'there were none of inferior sort mixed among these great personages of state and honour (as usually there have been); but all was performed by themselves with a due reservation of their dignity'. The normal practice seems to have been to hire players and their[201] boys for the antimask and for the speaking parts, which of course required a trained elocution.[644] Sometimes, however, a part might be taken by one of the numerous persons employed as devisers or trainers. I do not know that the statement that 'Ben Jonson turned the globe of the earth standing behind the altar' in Hymenaei necessarily implies Jonson's personal presence on the stage, actor though he had been, for in fact the globe seems to have been moved by unseen machinery, without even the apparent assistance of a presenter. But the dance-masters Thomas Giles and Jerome Heron certainly played the Cyclopes in the Haddington Mask, and Giles also played Thamesis in the Mask of Beauty. The musicians again, some or all of whom were generally disguised, were a professional body, of which the nucleus was probably formed by members of the various bands of the royal households. Thus John Allen, who sang in the Mask of Queens and the Mask of Squires, was 'her majesty's servant', and Nicholas Lanier, who also sang in the Mask of Squires, was one of the King's flutes. Both musicians and dancing-masters had other important functions in connexion with the masks, outside the actual performances. The former had to compose the airs and set them for the musical instruments and the dances; the latter had to arrange the dances and to drill the dancers.[645] Campion, being a composer as well as a poet, was naturally responsible for his own music, and the musical element in his masks tended to be predominant. Jonson seems generally to have obtained the co-operation of Alfonso Ferrabosco, probably a son of the Ferrabosco who was devising masks for Elizabeth about 1572.[646] He was originally a lutenist, but at the time of his death in 1627 'enjoyed four places, viz. a musician's place in general, a composer's place, a violl's place, and an instructor's place to the prince in the art of musique'.[647] Amongst the musicians who gave minor assistance, either as composers or[202] as executants, were Thomas Ford (Chapman's Mask), John Cooper (Lords; Squires), the lutenists Robert Johnson (Oberon; Love Freed; Lords; Chapman's Mask), John and Robert Dowland (Chapman's Mask), and Philip Rossiter (Chapman's Mask), and the violinists Thomas Lupo the elder (Hay Mask; Oberon; Love Freed; Lords), Rowland Rubidge (Oberon), and Alexander Chisan (Oberon).[648] As dancing-masters we hear of Thomas Cardell under Elizabeth in 1582;[649] and under James of Jerome Heron (Haddington Mask; Queens; Oberon; Lords), Confess (Oberon; Love Freed), Bochan (Love Freed; Lords), and Thomas Giles (Hymenaei; Beauty; Haddington Mask; Queens; Oberon; Lords), who was musician and teacher of the dance to Henry, and may be identical with the Thomas Giles who became Master of the Paul's boys in 1584.[650]

The court masks ordinarily took place in what was called the banqueting-house, but might with more appropriateness have been called the masking-house, at Whitehall.[651] The occasional exceptions readily explain themselves. Whitehall was under the ban of plague in the winter of 1604, and the masks were in the great hall of Hampton Court. During the winter of 1606, when the Elizabethan banqueting-house had been pulled down and the Jacobean one was not yet ready, the great hall of Whitehall itself was used. Here also was given Chapman's Mask, on the second night of the Princess Elizabeth's wedding, doubtless because the banqueting-house was still encumbered with the scenery belonging to the Lords' Mask of the previous night. The hall had also been assigned to Beaumont's Mask on the third night, but when this was put off for a few days, the greater dignity of the banqueting-house was granted as a compensation for the disappointment of the dancers. The aspect of the room and its arrangements are well described in 1618, only a year before the first Jacobean banqueting-house was burnt down, by Orazio Busino, almoner to the Venetian ambassador, Piero Contarini.[652] This may be supplemented by Campion's description [203] of the great hall at Whitehall as arranged for the mask at Lord Hay's wedding, and by the careful note of John Finett, then an assistant to the Master of the Ceremonies, upon the seating of the ambassadors in 1616.[653] At the lower or screen end was the scene; at the upper end, and divided from the scene by the dancing-place, was the royal 'state', on a raised daïs and under a canopy. Behind the state, along the sides of the room to right and left of the dancing-place, and in galleries above, were tiers of seats, some of which were divided into boxes. James himself seems always to have been present, returning if necessary from his hunting journeys for mask nights, and sometimes starting off again the next morning at daybreak. Busino's account suggests that he liked to see vigorous and sustained dancing; but his patience failed him when he was asked to sit through three masks on successive nights in 1613, and he insisted on putting off the third, although the maskers had already come, telling Sir Francis Bacon, who protested that this was to bury them quick, that the alternative was to bury him quick, for he could last no longer. On the other hand, he was sufficiently gratified by the Irish Mask in 1613 and Mercury Vindicated in 1615 to be willing to call for a second performance in each case. With the King sat members of the royal family and sometimes ambassadors or other specially honoured guests. Finett records that in 1616 the French, Venetian, and Savoyard ambassadors were all on the King's right hand, but in places[204] of nicely graded dignity, 'not right out, but byas forward'. The ambassadorial suites appear to have been accommodated in boxes raised above the level of the state, to the right and left. Guests of honour, but of lesser honour, might be placed on special benches assigned to lords and privy councillors. Evidently the masks were solemn occasions, and the laws of precedence strictly followed. An allusion in The Maid's Tragedy suggests that ladies, other than those ladies of the court and ambassadors' wives who formed the king's 'troop', were ordinarily seated in the galleries.[654] One of the principal objects of the masks was the entertainment of ambassadors, and the jealousies amongst them were constantly involving James and his Council in awkward diplomatic questions.[655] These have recently been the subject of a special study, and need not here be described in detail.[656] By far the most important was the standing conflict for precedence between the representatives of France and Spain. James consistently refused to commit himself to either claim, and was careful not to invite both ambassadors to the same function.[657] But some occasions were more honourable than others, and it seems clear that in the minds of the ambassadors themselves the bestowal or withholding of an invitation often counted for a diplomatic triumph or rebuff. Matters were complicated during the earlier years of the reign by Anne's far from discreet advocacy of the Spanish cause, and the dispatches of M. de Beaumont in 1605 and M. de la Boderie in 1608 are largely occupied with the embarrassment caused to James and the humiliation inflicted upon those ambassadors themselves by the Queen's determination that her masks should be graced by the presence of the astute and courtly Spaniard, Juan de Taxis. In the latter year James had to stave off an open rupture with Henri IV by an opportune demand for the repayment of a long-standing debt. The relations between France and Spain were paralleled by similar feuds for precedence between Venice and Flanders and between Florence and Savoy, while the King of Spain was naturally unwilling that his representative should be received on terms of equality with the representative of Holland and thus appear to acknowledge the claims of rebellious provinces to[205] rank as a sovereign state. Occasional visitors of rank had their own points of etiquette to raise. Thus in 1604 the Duke of Holstein stood for three hours rather than sit below the Venetian ambassador. Generally speaking, indeed, the newly established office of Master of the Ceremonies must have been anything but a bed of roses. The chief mask of the year, which every ambassador intrigued to attend, was traditionally danced on Twelfth Night; but often it was put off to a later date, in order to meet diplomatic exigencies.[658]

The banqueting-house, with the 'state' in it, was probably regarded as technically part of the Presence Chamber. At any rate, it was under the supervision of the Lord Chamberlain and the officers of the Chamber, headed by the Gentleman Usher. They seated the audience, kept the doors against the turbulent crowds knocking for admission, cleared the dancing-place when the King was seated, and supplied the principal guests with programmes or abstracts of the device prepared by the poet.[659] The Chamberlain's white staff was no mere symbol when there was whiffling to be done, and even Ben Jonson, 'ushered by my Lord Suffolk from a mask' on 6 January 1604, the year before his own sovereignty over masks began, required to be consoled by his fellow in misfortune, Sir John Roe, with the reminder,—

Obviously, as John Chamberlain suggests in a letter to Dudley Carleton, to be befriended at court was to secure the easier admission. But subject to the limitations of space and the discretion of the door-keepers, the performances seem to have been open to all comers, although the wicked wit of the dramatists is apt to suggest that citizens' wives sometimes[206] found access more readily than the citizens themselves.[661] It is difficult to say how many the room would hold. One of De la Boderie's dispatches speaks of 10,000, which was probably a considerable over-estimate.[662] Many of those who besieged the doors must of course have been disappointed, and perhaps many of those who got in experienced more satisfaction than comfort.[663] In order to save space, it was decreed in 1613 that no ladies should be admitted in farthingales, and the repetition of the Irish Mask of 1613 and the Mercury Vindicated of 1615 may have been due in part to an unsatisfied demand for seats as well as to the intrinsic merit of the performances.

The mask, beginning after supper, was prolonged far into the night. That at Sir Philip Herbert's wedding lasted three hours; Tethys' Festival was not over until hard upon sunrise. The pent-up audience dissolved in some confusion. Apparently the Tudor custom of finishing the proceedings by rifling the pageant and the dresses of their decorations had not been wholly abandoned.[664] A hardly less riotous scene followed. A banquet was spread in another room, the great chamber in 1605, the presence chamber in 1616, the specially[207] built 'marriage' room in 1613. It was not etiquette for the King to partake of this with his guests, but he usually conducted the maskers to the tables, and took a survey of them before he retired. Then the fray began. The banquet was 'dispatched with the accustomed confusion', says a chronicler in 1604. In 1605 it 'was so furiously assaulted that down went tables and tressels before one bit was touched'. Tethys' Festival in 1610 closed with 'views and scrambling'. At Beaumont's mask in 1613, 'after the King had made the tour of the tables, everything was in a moment rapaciously swept away'.[665] Tired and unfed, the ladies made their way out into the courtyards of the palace, perhaps to find, as in 1604, that chains and jewels were gone, and that they were even 'made shorter by the skirts'.[666]

Next day the poets sat down to turn the programmes into books, which the stationers could print and sell at sixpence each, and so save them from being pestered for copies of the verses.[667] And the Lord Chamberlain's Secretary sat down to compare his expenses with his imprests, and to draw up his accounts for endorsement by his lord and the Master of the Horse, and presentation at the Exchequer. Any estimate of the cost of masking that we can now form must be approximate in character. Under Elizabeth, so long as masks were the care of the Revels, their expenses naturally appear in the accounts of that office; but in part only, since requisitions appear to have been made upon the Wardrobe and the Office of Works, and the services rendered by these departments not charged to the Revels. Moreover, the methods of bookkeeping employed by the officers of the Revels did not provide for distinguishing expenditure upon masks and upon plays when, as was usually the case, both types of entertainment were in concurrent preparation.[668] It is therefore rarely that the cost of an Elizabethan mask can be isolated, and still more rarely that it can be assumed to be complete. Four masks in the winter of 1559 only cost the Revels £127 11s. 2d., and it was estimated that two more at Shrovetide would cost another £100. The spectacular mask in June 1572 cost £506 11s. 8d., but it is noted that the 'Warderobe stuf' was 'excepted'[208] from the reckoning. An estimate for another spectacular mask in April 1581 amounts to about £380, and again it is clear that the materials for garments are not included. It is rather surprising to find that a mask intended to accompany the embassy to Scotland at the time of James VI's wedding cost no more than £17 10s. 10d., but this was a simple mask without a pageant, and garments already in store were 'translated' for the purpose.[669] Nor did Elizabeth desire to do any excessive honour to her cousin. On the other hand, the accounts, and particularly the inventories attached to those for the earliest years of the reign, show that the richest materials were used without stint to deck out the maskers. Clothes of gold and silver, shot with innumerable hues and often further enriched with embroidered 'works', velvets and sarcenets, satins, taffetas, and damasks; all recur in a truly royal profusion, and at a cost of anything up to a guinea or so a yard. The cheaper stuffs were no doubt used for torch-bearers, and there was room for economy in the Cologne and Venice gold and silver and other forms of tinsel that served for fringes and trimmings.[670] Copper lace, as the Duke of Newcastle gravely informed Charles II at the Restoration, looked as well as gold for the two or three nights before it tarnished: 'All Queen Elizabethes dayes shee had itt, & Kinge James.'[671] Burghley's reorganization of the Revels in 1597 apparently left the office without any responsibility for the preparation of masks, and it is not clear what arrangements were made for these during the last few years of the reign. Under James the Revels claimed fees for the personal attendance of the officers at masks, for the lighting of the banqueting-house, for small repairs to its fittings, and for no more.[672] Small sums also appear in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber for services of the mat-layer in making ready the dancing-floor, and of Grooms of the Chamber in attendance on the maskers, and in those of the Office of Works for the erection of stages and scaffolds. The incidence of the main expenditure of course depended upon whether[209] the mask was ordered by James himself, or contributed out of the loyalty of others. James appears to have paid, in whole or in part, for at least fourteen of the twenty-five court masks traceable during the years 1603-16. These include the six Queen's masks (Twelve Goddesses, Blackness, Beauty, Queens, Tethys' Festival, Love Freed), two Prince's masks (Oberon, Love Restored), and five other masks by lords and gentlemen, one at the first Christmas of the reign (Indian and Chinese Knights), one at his daughter's wedding (Lords), one at Somerset's (Squires), and two of later date (Mercury Vindicated, Golden Age Restored). He may also have paid for the Mask of Scots in 1604 and the Irish Mask in 1613, but these were probably non-spectacular and cheap. As to the finance of the Winchester mask of 1603 and of the Twelve Months nothing is known, or whether the latter, evidently planned for a Prince's mask, was ever in fact performed. To Oberon and Love Restored James contributed amounts of at least £387 and at least £280 respectively, but so far as Oberon is concerned this was by no means the whole cost, for a sum of £1,076 6s. 10d. was charged to Henry's personal account, and it is probable that the burden of Love Restored was similarly divided. I have no evidence that Anne's personal account was ever charged with any part of the cost of the Queen's masks. Certainly it was not so with Love Freed in 1611, for of this mask, and of this alone, a full balance-sheet happens to be available. It was a comparatively cheap mask, deliberately so, because Tethys' Festival in the summer before had been 'excessively costly'. It was intended that it should cost no more than £600. In fact the total expenditure came to £719 1s. 3d. Of this £238 16s. 10d. went to Inigo Jones on 'his byll', doubtless for the scenery; £69 17s. 5d. in minor items of costume; £292 in 'rewards', making a total of £600 14s. 3d., of which £400 had already been received from the Exchequer. This agrees closely with the original estimate, but there was a further amount of £118 7s. due to the Master of the Wardrobe for materials which he had supplied for costumes, and the document concludes with a memorandum signed by the Earls of Suffolk and Worcester to the effect that this amount, over and above the £600 14s. 3d., is payable. These lords, one as Lord Chamberlain, the other as Master of the Horse, seem regularly to have had the supervision of 'emptions and provisions for masks given at the royal expense'.[673] The financial procedure was as follows. At an early date, the King directed a warrant under the privy[210] seal to the Exchequer, in which the names of the supervising officers were set out, and the Treasurer was authorized to make payments upon certificates by them.[674] A letter of 1608 suggests that up to that date it had been usual to name a maximum cost in the warrant, but thenceforward the supervising officers seem normally to have had a free hand.[675] Their own methods varied. Sometimes they asked the Exchequer, as occasion arose, to pay small sums direct to Inigo Jones and others; sometimes they wrote acknowledgements on the bills of furnishers, and sent these forward for Exchequer payment; sometimes they authorized a subordinate officer to draw one or two large sums and meet the expenditure out of these. For 'rewards' no doubt the last was the more convenient way. We find one Bethell, a gentleman usher of the chamber, thus designated as payee in 1608, Henry Reynolds in 1609, Meredith Morgan in 1612, 1613, 1614, and 1616, Walter James in 1615, and Edmund Sadler in 1616.[676] The balance-sheet for Love Freed, although it contains items for the dresses of the presenters, antimaskers, and musicians, contains none which can be assigned to those of the main maskers, and there is other evidence for thinking that, even in a royal mask, the lords or ladies who danced were expected to dress themselves. Thus John Chamberlain tells us of the Mask of Squires that the King was to bear the charge, 'all saving the apparel'. The practice, however, was probably not invariable, for the Exchequer documents relating to Tethys' Festival contain a silkman's bill for lace used for the dresses of fourteen ladies. For the Twelve Goddesses warrants were issued to Lady Suffolk and Lady Walsingham to take Queen Elizabeth's robes from the wardrobe in the Tower. The list of 'rewards' for Love Freed can be supplemented from similar lists for Oberon and the Lords' Mask and a few scattered records. The largest amounts went to the poets and the architect. Jones had £50 for the Lords' Mask and £40 each for Love Freed and Oberon, Jonson £40 for Love Freed, Daniel £20 for Tethys' Festival, Campion, being both poet and musician, £66 13s. 4d. for the Lords' Mask. Dancers and composers got from £10 to £40; lutenists and violinists £1 or £2; players £1 each. For the total cost we are mainly reduced to guess-work, although contemporary gossip, sometimes[211] a little disturbed at the extravagance, may help us, if it was not itself based on guess-work.[677] We hear of £2,000 to £3,000 for the Twelve Goddesses and the two other masks of the first winter, £3,000 and 25,000 scudi for Blackness, 6,000 or 7,000 and later 30,000 scudi for Beauty, £1,500 for Mercury Vindicated, £2,000 for Queens, which, however, M. Reyher estimates from Exchequer documents which he does not print, at more than £4,000.[678] These figures probably include the contributions of the Wardrobe, as these were to be repaid out of the special allowances in 1611. There is yet one other source of information. A return of extraordinary disbursements of the Exchequer for 1603-9, during which period there were six or seven royal masks, gives £4,215 under this head, and a similar return for 1603-17, during which there were from fourteen to sixteen, including the Vision of Delight in 1617, gives £7,500.[679] But this last figure is specifically stated not to include 'the provisions had out of the Warderobe and materials and workmen from the Office of the Works'. At a venture, I should say that a royal mask cost about £2,000 on the average. Something may also be gleaned about the finance of those masks that were not wholly charged on the Exchequer. Oberon, to which both James and Henry contributed, was supervised by the chamberlain of Henry's household, Sir Thomas Chaloner. The Inns of Court masks brought to the Princess Elizabeth's wedding were paid for out of admission fees to chambers and levies raised upon the members of the Inns, according to their status. Chamberlain estimated the cost of the two masks as 'better than £4,000', and the accounts that have been preserved show that in fact Chapman's mask cost Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple £1,086 8s. 11d. each, and Beaumont's cost Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple over £1,200 each. On the other hand, the whole cost of the Mask of Flowers, given by Gray's Inn at the Earl of Somerset's wedding, being over £2,000, was met by Sir Francis Bacon, who refused an offered contribution of £500 from Sir Henry Yelverton. The masks at the weddings of Sir Philip Herbert, Lord Essex, Lord Hay, and Lord Haddington were all, certainly or probably, complimentary offerings of friends of the hymeneal couples. Lady Rutland, who danced in Hymenaei, paid £80 to Bethell, and £26 11s.[212] more for her own apparel. The Haddington Mask cost each of the twelve dancers £300, and must therefore have been one of the most expensive masks of the period. Obviously the highest estimates for the masks do not include the value of the jewels with which the dancers bedizened themselves. In the Twelve Goddesses Anne is said to have worn £100,000 worth and the other ladies £20,000 worth. Of Hymenaei John Pory says, 'I think they hired and borrowed all the principall jewels and ropes of perle both in court and citty. The Spanish ambassador seemed but poore to the meanest of them.' Even this Chamberlain could cap for Beauty. 'One lady, and that under a baroness, is said to be furnished for better than a hundred thousand pounds. And the Lady Arabella goes beyond her; and the queen must not come behind.' Thus they revelled it.

[213]

VII
THE COURT PLAY

THE foregoing chapters have illustrated the overflow of the Renaissance passion for drama, taking shape in the spectacular enrichment of elements in court life which were not originally mimetic in their intention; the welcome, the exercise of arms, the dance. They are subordinate in their interest to us, as they were in fact subordinate by reason of their occasional character to the play itself, which formed, both in Elizabeth's reign and in that of James, the staple amusement of the court winter. The ordinary season for plays was a comparatively restricted one. Traditionally it began with All Saints, but Elizabeth at least rarely reached her winter quarters by the beginning of November, and her revels began with the Christmas festival itself, the twelve days of ancient licence in Calends and Saturnalia that extended from Nativity to Epiphany.[680] Within this period the three feasts of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Innocents, with New Year's Day and Twelfth Night, were nearly always gladdened by play or mask. Sometimes one of them was omitted, and sometimes, in substitution or addition, another day, often the Sunday in Christmas week, was selected. I know no record of a play on Christmas Day itself. Chamberlain writes in January 1608, 'The king was very earnest to have one on Christmas night, though, as I take it, he and the prince received that day, but the Lords told him it was not the fashion. Which answer pleased him not a whit, but said, "What do you tell me of the fashion? I will make it a fashion."'[681] But the Chamber accounts show that he dropped the point. After Twelfth Night there was a lull, broken perhaps by an occasional play, notably on February 2 at Candlemas, until a group of two or three at Shrovetide brought revelling to a conclusion before the rigours of Lent. This was the close of the official season, and the Revels office had now little to think of but the annual airing of the wardrobe stuff, at any rate until the progress came round.

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The longest number of plays given before Elizabeth in any one winter was probably in 1600-1, when there were eleven. During the greater part of the reign the number ranged from six to ten. For some of the earliest years only two or three are on record. It is possible that a few may have escaped notice owing to the absence of a 'reward', or conceivably the charge of a reward to funds other than those covered by the very complete accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber.[682] Naturally, if an Inn of Court or gentlemen such as the sons of Sir Percival Hart played, they did not take a money payment. The schoolboys of Eton and Westminster did, but the latter perhaps not from the very beginning. The only winter for which the Treasurer of the Chamber records no rewards is that of the plague year 1563-4. But the Revels Office provided for three plays at Windsor, and if it was thought dangerous to bring companies from London or elsewhere to court, Eton or the Windsor choir would have been the natural substitutes. In 1574 again the Revels Office were furnishing plays at Windsor and Reading by Italians, no payments to whom can be traced. Elizabeth occasionally ordered a mask outside the winter season, for some such purpose as the entertainment of an ambassador. I do not find clear evidence that she ever ordered a play. But, both in winter and in summer, she was from time to time present at a play given by some one else, in progress or at a wedding or banquet in London.[683]

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James gave the impression, when he first came to England, of taking, unlike Queen Anne and Prince Henry, 'no extraordinary pleasure' in plays.[684] But he had a great many more than his predecessor, and reverted in some years to the early practice of opening the play season at the beginning of November. Nor, on the other hand, was he strict in his observance of Lent, and in some years the performances continued at intervals until after Easter. During his first winter he saw eleven plays and gradually increased this number, reaching a maximum of twenty-three in 1609-10. Up to 1615 he never saw less than eleven, except during 1612-13, the winter of Henry's death, when the number fell to seven. Moreover, even when he himself escaped to a hunting-box, he was liberal in ordering additional plays for the prince and court, and yet others seem to have been charged to the private funds of Anne and the royal children.[685] The records do not in all years give the dates of individual performances; but in 1611-12, to take one example, the programme was as follows. The King himself was present at plays on October 31, November 1, and November 5, on the four nights after Christmas, on January 5, on Candlemas, and on Shrove Sunday and Tuesday. On January 6 was the mask. Most of the intervening days he spent in visits to his various hunting quarters. Meanwhile there were at least twenty-six other plays before one or more of the royal children, at which Anne was probably also present. Two of these were in November, one in the middle of December, one in Christmas week, eight in January after Twelfth night, and nine in February, both before and after Lent had begun. Two plays at the end of March and three in April, none of these in the King's presence, exhausted the official supply, but not the enthusiasm of Prince Henry. He spent a fortnight with Anne at Greenwich during January, and there was 'every night a play', some of which the Queen probably paid for; and in March he was entertained by the Marquis of Winchester at supper, again with plays.[686] Occasionally James ordered a play during the summer; there were four for the entertainment of the King of Denmark in 1606, of which one,[216] by the Paul's boys, is not traceable in the Chamber accounts, and one for the Duke of Savoy's ambassador in 1613. All plays at the Jacobean court was given by professional companies; if the lawyers came to court, it was not in a play, but a mask.

Whether the revels were kept at Westminster, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, or Windsor, sufficient accommodation could be afforded for a play in the great hall, which thus for a brief space resumed its ancient glories as the state apartment of the sovereign. At the first three of those palaces, there is definite evidence of the use of the hall. But Whitehall, at least, was spacious enough to offer other alternatives. The banqueting-house might be available, if it was not occupied by the preparations for a mask. And performances were sometimes given in the 'great chamber', which at Whitehall was distinct from both the presence chamber and the 'guard' or 'watching' chamber which served as an ante-room to the presence.[687] It seems also that provision could be made, perhaps only on the less public and crowded occasions when the King was not present, for a stage in the octagonal cockpit, which stood on the edge of St. James's Park, in the western extension of the palace.[688] As a courtesy to a royal visitor, a play was given in 1565 at the Savoy, where the Lady Cecilia of Sweden was housed, and in 1614 Anne's pastoral of Hymen's Triumph took place in 'a little square paved court' at Somerset House.

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It is a curious illustration of the functions of the Privy Council as a household board that, during the whole of Elizabeth's time and the greater part of that of James, the actors could not get their fee or 'reward', except through the medium of a formal warrant addressed by that body to the Treasurer of the Chamber. These warrants are not in existence, but their issue is noted, rather irregularly and inaccurately, in the collection of minutes known as the Council register, and they are recited, with their dates and places of signature, and the names of the actors or managers to whom they appointed payment to be made on behalf of the companies, in the annual accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber as audited and declared before the Exchequer.[689] The amount of the reward was, subject to certain historical developments, a uniform one. It had been fixed, early in the reign of Henry VIII, at ten marks (£6 13s. 4d.) a play, and this rate continued to rule, when Elizabeth came to the throne, and for some years thereafter. But in 1572 a tendency to an increase shows itself, and up to 1575 the amounts are irregular. Sometimes the normal fee is paid, sometimes a double fee of £13 6s. 8d., sometimes an intermediate one of £10. The Treasurer of the Chamber records various explanations of the extra sums. They are 'a more rewarde by her maiesties owne comaundement', or they are paid in respect of special charges incurred by the companies, as for example when Farrant had to bring his boys from Windsor to Whitehall. And after 1575 things had evidently settled down on the basis of a normal £10, which was conventionally regarded as made up of £6 13s. 4d. 'for presentinge' the play, and £3 6s. 8d. 'by way of speciall reward'. The formulas in the accounts are not invariably the same, but they all come to this; and the shadowy distinction between the two amounts[218] is preserved in the practice by which, if a play was ordered and then counter-ordered, the £6 13s. 4d. was paid, but not the £3 6s. 8d. The £10 rate was maintained, with insignificant exceptions, during the rest of Elizabeth's reign, and was taken over as 'the usuall allowaunce' or 'the ordinary rates formerly allowed' by James.[690] If, however, a play was ordered for the Prince only and not the King, the 'speciall rewarde' was omitted, so far as the Treasurer of the Chamber was concerned, although it is quite possible that the Prince may have supplied it out of his privy purse.[691] A quite exceptional amount of £30 was paid to the King's men for a play at Wilton in December 1603, to cover their 'paynes and expences' in coming from Mortlake to give the performance. Plague was raging, and they were probably practicing at Mortlake for the court entertainments of the following Christmas. It may be added that the King's company, and that alone, received a subsidy of £30 from the Treasurer of the Chamber, in aid of its maintenance during this plague-winter. Similar payments, of £40 and £30 respectively, were made after the plague-winters of 1608-9 and 1609-10.[692]

In 1614 there was an innovation in the procedure, by which the responsibility for signing warrants for allowances to players was transferred from the Privy Council to the Lord Chamberlain; and thenceforward the payments are recorded[219] in a special section of the Treasurer's accounts, devoted to expenditure which the Chamberlain had power to authorize, and most of which had been at one time charged to the Privy Purse.[693] An example from a later date of a Lord Chamberlain's warrant for payment is preserved, together with a schedule of the plays covered by the amount paid. The warrant refers to the 'acquittance for the receipt' of the money, which the Treasurer would take from the players, and is in fact endorsed with receipts by one of them for the successive instalments paid, and with a final one for the whole sum due.[694] References in the Chamber Accounts for 1605-6 and 1609-10 to similar schedules in or annexed to the warrants show that, at an earlier date, the Privy Council had evidence before them, perhaps from the Lord Chamberlain, perhaps from the Master of the Revels, as to the number of plays which a company had given.[695] It is a pity that the Treasurer of the Chamber only on rare occasions thought it worth while to record the name of the play for which he was paying. A chance memorandum of Henslowe's tells us that, as perhaps we might have guessed, some of the money stuck to the hands of officials in the form of fees. To get the £10 due to Worcester's men for a play in 1601-2, Henslowe had had to give the Clerk of the Council 7s. for 'geatynge the cownselles handes to' the warrant, and 10s. 6d. 'for fese' to one Mr. Moysse 'at the receuinge of the mony owt of the payhowsse'.[696] On the other hand, the players got their money pretty quickly; the warrants were generally signed within a month or so, sometimes within a day or so, of the performances to which they relate. Considerable delays during the years 1596-9 possibly reflect the disorganization of the Revels Office by the disputes of the officers; just as similar delays about 1615-17 probably reflect the general disorganization of Jacobean finance.

Plays were given in private houses, as well as at court, and[220] not only when there was a royal guest to be entertained. As the public theatres were open by daylight, the companies were easily available for private engagements after supper. Naturally the record of such occasions has in most cases perished with the domestic account-books in which it was entered. But Sir Edward Hoby invited Sir Robert Cecil to a performance of Richard II—at least, I think so—in 1595.[697] The gossip of Rowland Whyte informs us of the banquets and plays given in honour of Sir Robert Cecil by Sir Walter Raleigh and other friends on the eve of his mission to France in 1598, of the two plays at a supper about the same date by Sir Gilly Meyrick at the rival political head-quarters of Essex House, and of the performances of Henry IV under its original title of Sir John Oldcastle, when Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon feasted the Flemish ambassador Louis Verreyken in 1600.[698] Similarly, in 1606 John Chamberlain went to a play at Sir Walter Cope's, now Holland House, and 'had to squire his daughter about, till he was weary', and in 1613 Sir Robert Rich had a play for the delectation of the Savoyard ambassador after a supper in Holborn.[699] An amusing side-light on the improvised stage-arrangements necessary in private houses is given by a stage-direction in Percy's Aphrodysial, 'Here went furth the whole Chorus in a shuffle as after a Play in a Lord's howse'.[700] Wealthy citizens, if they were not too puritanically disposed, could well afford to follow the lead of the nobles and gentry of the court. And in the years before the controversy between[221] the corporation and the actors became acute, a play was thought no inappropriate accompaniment to the annual feast of a guild, or the welcome or valediction of a civic dignitary.[701] The domestic plays of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges had their origin in the Renaissance theories of education, and dispensed with the professional mimes. A detailed study of them lies outside the scope of these volumes.[702] The Inns of Court men, too, could hold their own upon the boards at will. But for their ordinary solace they were accustomed to take the easier course of calling in professional aid. At the Inner Temple, Beaumont mentions a Christmas show of Lady Amity, probably not long after his admission in 1600, and the Treasurer's accounts of the Inner Temple, which are extant from 1605, show that from that year to 1611 there was always a play, at a cost of £5, either upon Candlemas or upon All Saints' Day, and in some years on both dates. At Candlemas 1611, something must have gone wrong, for on February 10 the Benchers passed a decree:

At the following feast of All Saints the only expenditure entered by the Treasurer is of £2 10s. for a 'consort' of music and £2 for antics and puppets. These must have proved but inadequate substitutes, for on November 24 the period of austerity was brought to an end by the withdrawal of the interdict.

The payments are now resumed, and continue twice a year, generally at the increased rate of £6 13s. 4d. At Candlemas 1613 some misunderstanding seems to have led to a supplementary[222] payment to 'another company of players which were appointed to play the same day'. On All Saints 1614 and both Candlemas and All Saints 1615, the players are specified to have been the King's men.[703] From the other Inns the story is more fragmentary. The devices for the famous Gray's Inn Christmas of 1594-5, reported in the Gesta Grayorum, were mainly due to the fertile imagination of the lawyers themselves. In addition to the continuous burlesque of state ceremonies in the court of Purpoole and the mask sent to Whitehall at Shrovetide, they included a special show of Amity for the reception of the ambassador of Templaria on January 3. But this had its origin in the disorders of an earlier revel on Innocents' Day, when the confusion was so great that the Inner Temple men left in dudgeon, and the show then intended was not given. To supply its place, 'a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players. So that night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.' On the following day there was a trial, and a supposed sorcerer or conjurer was arraigned on the charge amongst others 'that he had foisted a Company of base and common Fellows, to make up our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions'.[704] Similarly the Middle Temple in 1597-8 varied their own fooling with plays on 28 December and 2 January, which from the absence of details in the narrative were probably supplied by professional actors.[705] And this house, too, must have been accustomed to keep Candlemas with a play, for a note of February 1602 in John Manningham's diary makes mention of Twelfth Night as given 'at our feast'.[706] The same practice, known as the Post Revels, prevailed at Lincoln's Inn. Here the notices are of an earlier date, and preserve the memory[223] of performances by the Chapel boys in 1565, 1566, and 1580, and by Lord Roche's, or more probably Lord Rich's, men in 1570.[707]

I have digressed somewhat from the ways of the court. The arrangements for performances were in the hands of the Revels, and are therefore only traceable in detail before 1589, after which year the extant accounts of that office are very summary. As Christmas drew near, symptoms of bustle began to show themselves in the work-rooms. A good deal of time was spent in the discovery and preparation of suitable pieces. It would seem that the available companies were invited to submit the various plays in which they had exercised themselves by public performance, that these were then recited, and a selection made from them to the number which her majesty intended to hear.[708] Both in 1574-5 and in 1576-7 the accounts record the trying over of plays that were not ultimately given. These 'rehearsals' or 'proofs' took place in the hall or the 'great chamber' of St. John's, or the Master's lodgings, and were of an elaborate character, for it was thought worth while to bring in cumbrous properties[224] for them and to employ musicians. When the selection had been made, further rehearsals were required, especially as the texts had to undergo a process of 'reforming' or editing, in order that they might be 'convenient' for her majesty's hearing. There had been a bad blunder at the second Christmas of the reign when 'the plaers plad shuche matter that they wher commondyd to leyff off'.[709] Sometimes the office called in special aid to make such alterations; sometimes, as we learn from Henslowe's diary, the companies employed their own poets to carry them out, or to write special prologues or epilogues.[710] At first the perusal of plays appears to have been a common responsibility of the officers.[711] While Blagrave was in charge, it was supervised by the Lord Chamberlain, for whose satisfaction rehearsals sometimes took place at court. Tilney was encouraged by his commission of 1581 to treat it as his personal function, and charged wages for attendance at the office, with a porter and three other servitors, but as a rule without his colleagues, on nearly every day between All Saints and Christmas for the purpose of carrying it out.[712] All the officers, on the other hand, were concerned with the provision of the fittings of the stage and the properties and apparel necessary to furnish a sumptuous appearance for the players. The details of this provision are so mixed up in the accounts with those for the masks that they can only occasionally be assigned to individual plays. The wording of certain entries suggests that, while some plays required a complete outfit, for others the Revels was only called upon to supplement what the companies already possessed.[713] Probably the stuffs employed[225] were less expensive than those lavished on the masks. Certain articles, such as armour, were generally hired. Elaborate properties, which might entail the designing of special 'patterns', had often to be constructed. The fixed 'composition' of £66 6s. 8d. for all the ordinary charges of plays imposed upon the office in 1598 cannot have left much margin for apparel and properties.[714] But probably by this date the companies were themselves better equipped.

When the actual night of performance arrived, all the officers gave personal attendance at Court. Here they had, in Tilney's time, until they were crowded out and driven to hire for themselves, an office and a chamber for the Master, both of which they kept supplied with fuel and rushes.[715] They had also to superintend the conveyance of the 'stuff', either by wagon or by barge and tiltboat, to fit the players with the gloves which seem to have been de rigueur at a Court performance, and to furnish such amenities of the tiring-house as 'an iron cradle to make fire in' and a close-stool.[716] With the officers came a doorkeeper and three servitors, who probably acted as dressers.[717] As the court performances were always at night, beginning about 10 p.m. and ending about 1 a.m., the arrangements for lighting were a constant preoccupation.[718] From the wire-drawers' bills incorporated in the accounts we can gather that use was made of candlesticks of various kinds and sizes, of lanterns, and of branches large and small. Candelabra were formed of as many as twenty-four branches, each bearing four lights, and hung upon wires strained across the hall.[719] But here again the precise provision made for plays cannot be disentangled from that made for masks. There is no special reference to footlights.

Except for the lighting and the maintenance of a 'music-house', the situation of which is unknown, the functions of the Revels do not appear to have extended beyond the[226] tiring-house and the decorative enrichment of the stage.[720] The fabric, both of the stage and of the seating for spectators, was a matter for the Works.[721] The 'apparelling' of the room was under the supervision of the Gentleman Usher of the Chamber, and in the marshalling of the audience the Lord Chamberlain could count on the assistance of the 'white staves' of the Household, and of the few officers who still survived from the once important office of the Hall.[722] No picture or detailed description of the auditorium survives.[723] A brief notice of 1594 shows us Elizabeth conspicuous 'in a high throne, richly adorned', and next to her chair the Earl of Essex, 'with whom she often devised in sweet and favourable manner'.[724] This high throne was no doubt the 'state', which was brought into the action of The Arraignment of Paris. Something more may be gleaned from the narratives of royal visits to the universities. That to Cambridge in 1564, indeed, affords no very close analogy, for the structure of the stage was of quite an abnormal type.[725] It was not in a hall, but in the chapel of King's College, and[227] was built five feet high right across the nave from wall to wall. The 'state' for the Queen was placed on the stage itself, against the south wall. She reached it by a bridge from the choir door. At the other end of the stage, under the north wall, stood the actors, with two side chapels to serve for their entrances and exits. Cecil and Dudley, as Chancellor and High Steward of the University, 'vouchsafed to hold both books on the scaffold themselves, and to provide that sylence might be kept with quietness'. I am not quite clear whether these books were prompt-books, or copies of the texts, provided in order that the Queen or her train, if they thought fit, might help out their Latinity. When the Westminster boys brought the Miles Gloriosus to Court in 1565, they spent 11s. on 'one Plautus geuen to the Queenes maiestie and fowre other unto the nobilitie', and the Sapientia Salomonis which they gave Elizabeth in 1565-6 is still extant.[726] Only a few other privileged spectators were allowed on the King's College stage, at the north end. Seats were provided for ladies and gentlemen in the rood loft, and for the chief officers of the Court at 'the twoe loer Tables' below the rood loft. The only lighting was provided by the torches of the guard, who were aligned along the sides of the stage. At Oxford, on the other hand, where the plays were given in Christ Church hall, it is reasonable to assume that the arrangements were directly modelled upon those prevalent in the palaces.[727] There was, however, one exceptional feature, due to the desire to enable the Queen to reach the hall, without being incommoded by the press of spectators. A temporary[228] door was cut in the side of the hall and a 'proscenium' or 'porch' built in front of it, which was approached by a wooden 'bridge' or stairway, adorned with a painted roof and hung with greenery.[728] It was a wise precaution, for undergraduates were not excluded, as they had been at Cambridge, and the press on the main staircase of the hall was so great that one of the low bounding walls was broken down and killed a college cook and two other persons.[729] The interior appearance of the hall is fully described by Bereblock. The stage was at the upper or western end, raised high above a flight of steps. The Queen had a high seat beneath a gilded state, the exact location of which is not specified. The lords and ladies were accommodated on scaffolds round the walls, and the lesser personages in galleries above them. Every kind of lighting device seems to have been utilized, including 'ramuli' and 'orbes', in which we may see the 'branches' and 'plates' of the Revels Accounts. The Christ Church hall, with a stage at its upper end, was used again when James came in 1605, and we hear of a dispute between the academic functionaries and those of the Household as to the placing of the King's chair. The latter complained that it was fixed so low that only His Majesty's cheek would be visible to the auditory; the latter attempted to explain that, by the laws of perspective, the King would have a much better view than if he sat higher. There was a solemn debate in the council chamber, resulting in the decision that a King must not merely see, but be seen, and the state was moved to the middle of the hall, twenty-eight feet from the stage, which in fact proved too far, as he could not well hear or understand the long speeches. The Queen and Prince shared the state with the King; in front, but on a lower level, were seats for ladies; the state itself was ringed with lights; on either side were placed nobles; and the populace thronged around the walls.[730]

I think it may be taken that this seating, with the sovereign in the middle of the floor and directly opposite the stage, was that ordinarily employed. It may be illustrated by a French engraving of Louis XIII in Richelieu's Palais Royal theatre of the mid-seventeenth century, which also shows very clearly the seating round the walls and the lighting by means of suspended chandeliers.[731] I notice that Mr. Ernest Law,[229] in tracing the outlines of the vanished hall of Whitehall, places the stage at the lower or screen end of the building, and suggests that the pantry was utilized as a tiring-room.[732] He may have evidence as to this in reserve; but the Christ Church analogy, for what it is worth, points to a stage at the upper or daïs end. The Revels Accounts contain many items bearing upon the scenic decoration of the plays; but, as they were compiled, unfortunately, to satisfy the financial appetite of contemporary auditors, rather than to elucidate the archaeological problems of posterity, they not unnaturally take for granted a familiarity with the general system of that decoration which we do not happen to possess. The discussion of the problems, which cannot be dissociated from those presented by the public theatres, must be left for treatment, with the aid of the evidences furnished by plays themselves, in a later chapter.[733] But the actual information furnished by the accounts may conveniently be summarized at this point. The outstanding features were evidently certain 'houses', appropriate to the action of the plays, and specially prepared, with considerable trouble and expense, for each production, although no doubt the Revels officers, as in the case of masking garments, exercised their economical ingenuity where possible in the 'translation' of old material.[734] These houses appear to have been structures in relief, presumably practicable for entrances and exits, and perhaps also on occasion for interior action. Wooden frame-works, fitted with hooped tops, were covered with painted cloths of canvas, which was strained on with nails or pins, and was sometimes fringed.[735] From the amount of canvas[230] used, it may be judged that they were of considerable size.[736] The painting of the cloths was a matter of skilled workmanship. William Lyzarde, with thirty assistants, was employed upon it in 1571.[737] In 1572-3 'patternes' were prepared for the play of Fortune.[738] In most of the earlier accounts the houses are only mentioned incidentally and generically. But in 1567-8 they are stated to have consisted of 'Stratoes howse, Gobbyns howse, Orestioes howse, Rome, the Pallace of Prosperitie, Scotland and a gret Castell one thothere side'.[739] And when Edmund Tilney became Master of the Revels in 1579, he introduced, perhaps under pressure from the auditors, a practice, which lasted for some years, of including in the preliminary schedule of plays, with which his accounts began, a note of the specific houses constructed for each. Thus in 1579-80, there were a country house and a city for The Duke of Milan and the Marquis of Mantua, a city and a battlement for Alucius, a city and a mount for The Four Sons of Fabius, a city and a battlement for Scipio Africanus, a city and a country house for an unnamed play, a city and a town for Portio and Demorantes, a city for a play on the Soldan and a duke, and a great city, a wood, and a castle for Serpedon.[740] In 1580-1 there were a city and a battlement for Delight, a great city and a senate house for Pompey, a city and a battlement for each of two unnamed plays, a house and a battlement for a third, a city and a palace for a fourth, and a great city for a fifth.[741] In 1582-3 there were four pavilions for A Game of the Cards, a cloth and a battlement of canvas for Beauty and Housewifery, and a city and a battlement of canvas for each of four other plays.[742] In 1584-5 there were a great curtain, a mountain, and a great cloth of canvas for Phillida and Corin, a battlement and a house of canvas for Felix and Philiomena, a great cloth and a battlement, well, and mount of canvas for Five Plays in One, a house and a battlement for Three Plays in One, and a house for an unnamed play.[743] It is evident that decorative variety was sought after. Even when several successive plays could be fitted into the normal scheme of a city and a battlement, the stage architects had to prepare a separate device for each.

[231]

I think that when the Elizabethans spoke of 'houses' on the stage, they were perhaps regarding them primarily as the habitations of the actors rather than of the personages whom these represented. They were the tiring-houses, in which the actors remained when they were not in action and to and from which they made their exits and their entrances. At any rate, the term in its technical use seems wide enough to cover, not merely the palaces and the more humble domestic edifices which made appropriate backgrounds to the comings and goings of individual kings and citizens—of an Orestes, a Dobbyn—but also more elaborate and composite structures of 'battlements' and 'cities', of which the former doubtless represented the external view of the walls and gates of a town or castle, and the latter some internal town scene, a street or market-place, perhaps before the doors of more than one house in the narrower sense. We hear of such specialized forms of 'house' as 'pavilions' or tents, the 'Senat howse' used for Quintus Fabius in 1573-4 and the 'prison' which must have formed part of the 'cittie' for The Four Sons of Fabius in 1579-80. These, and probably other houses, were no doubt sufficiently practicable for personages to be seen, and in some cases also heard, inside them; and the senate house was veiled by curtains, which doubtless remained closed until the proper moment for interior action to take place. There are other references to curtains, the mechanism by which they were drawn, and the sarcenet of which they were made.[744] It has been suggested that some of these were front curtains, but there is no reason, so far as the evidence in the Revels Accounts is concerned, why they should not all, like the senate house curtain, have been veils for individual 'houses', such as were used in masks, and had been used in the corresponding domus of miracle-plays. It is possible, although not certain, that some of the 'great cloths' provided may have been for hangings to the back and side walls of the stage, rather than for covering houses. There is no reason why these should not have been painted in perspective, but the extent to which, if at all, perspective was employed is one of the points on which we are most in the dark.[745] Subsidiary structures, hollow trees, arbours, gibbets, altars, wells, gave variety to the action, and helped out the decorative[232] effect of the houses.[746] For these also timber frames and canvas served. The hollow tree was doubtless a feature of the wood scenes, in which the painter's art, whether in relief or in perspective, was supplemented by the natural foliage of holly and ivy.[747] Elaborate rocks, such as are familiar in the masks, were also constructed. That for The Knight in the Burning Rock in 1578-9 required much timber, carried a chair, and was reached by a scaling ladder. The effect of burning was produced by lighted aqua vitae.[748] I am not quite sure whether a cloud drawn up and down by a cord and pulleys in the same year belonged to this play or to a mask, but obviously there was much give and take between the methods of plays and masks.[749] Spectacular elements were freely introduced into plays. A 'monster' of hoops and canvas, with a man moving inside it, was as easy for the managers of a Perseus and Andromeda in 1572-3 as for those of a Peter Pan in our own day; and doubtless the character was equally popular.[750] Hounds' heads were 'mowlded' for the cynocephali in The History of the Cenofalles of 1576-7.[751] The mediaeval 'devices for hell, and hell mowthe' were still in vogue in 1571-2, and in the same year Narcissus was enlivened by thunder and lightning and by the sounds of a hunt which rang through the palace court-yard, and Paris and Vienna by a tourney and barriers, in which players mounted on hobby-horses contended for a 'christall sheelde'.[752][233] So far as minor properties and apparel are concerned, it is often difficult to distinguish the respective needs of masks and plays in the long lists of provisions which the Revels officers detail.[753]

Something may be gleaned, to eke out the rather tantalizing indications of the account-books, from the more descriptive accounts of performances at the universities. The process is legitimate, because the organization of such productions was largely in the hands of Revels and Works experts brought from London by the Lord Chamberlain, who would naturally employ or adapt the methods already found successful at the Court itself. But even the university writers take a good deal of contemporary knowledge for granted. Of the Cambridge visit in 1564 we learn no more than that two chapels before which the stage was set served for 'houses'; of the Oxford visit in 1566 that 'palatia' and 'aedes' were built up 'ex utroque scenae latere', and that a temple in a wood was staged for an out-of-doors episode; of the Oxford visit of 1592 nothing.[754] Greater detail is forthcoming in 1605. The chroniclers were interested by the experiments of 'one Mʳ. Jones, a great Traveller', the result of which was stupendous in the eyes of the Oxford Public Orator, although an envious spy from Cambridge declared that he 'performed very little to that which was expected'. The stage on this occasion was slightly raked, so that the actors as they entered appeared to be coming down hill. At the back was a false wall, with a space of five or six paces behind it, 'for their howses and receipt of the actors'. In this wall Jones had set revolving pillars or peripetasmata, obviously based on the triangular [Greek: periaktoi] of Vitruvius, whereby 'with the help of other painted clothes', he was able to change the face of the scene twice in the course of each play. Thus in Ajax Flagellifer the scene successively represented first 'Troia et littus Sigaeum', then 'Sylvae et solitudines horrenda antra et furiarum domicilia', and finally 'Tentoriorum naviumque facies'. The machines which worked these changes were[234] painted 'motantibus quasi nubibus, ut eas, Sole Britannico statim ingressuro, aufugientes putares'.[755]

The changing stage of 1605 was obviously an advance from the Elizabethan methods of twenty years before. But it can hardly be assumed that the new principles were regularly adopted in the Jacobean Court. In 1614-15 the Revels office was still buying 'canvas for the boothes and other necessaries for a play called Bartholmewe Faire', and the entry seems to suggest 'houses' of the old type.[756] Possibly Inigo Jones was not sufficiently successful with his Oxford mechanism to inspire confidence. It is not until much later, in Caroline days, that we can clearly discern him beginning to apply to the presentation of Court plays the proscenium arch and the other perfected results of his studies in the mask.[757] There is no obvious trace of the new methods even in his interesting design for the new Cockpit at Court, which may date from about 1632. This shows a building 58 feet square without and octagonal within. Five sides of the octagon are occupied by the auditorium, which contains a pit with balconies above, and apparently a royal box at the back; the other three by a stage 35 feet wide and 16 deep, which stands 4½ feet above the pit level, and has a 5-foot apron and a semicircular back wall of a 15-foot radius. This does not appear to be adapted either for hangings or for shifting scenes, but is a Palladian façade of two stories in solid architecture adorned with niches and busts and a tablet inscribed 'Prodesse et delectare'. It is pierced below by a large archway and four other doors, and above the archway is a single window.[758]

[235]

BOOK II
THE CONTROL OF THE STAGE

[236]

VIII
HUMANISM AND PURITANISM

THE investigations of my opening book have shown clearly enough that in the Tudor, as in the mediaeval, scheme of things there was ample room for the stage and its players. The revelling instinct survived, and the old native love of mimesis and spectacle had been reinforced by a literary delight in the revival of classical drama and in every form of the give and take of dialogue. Nor was the appreciation of the folk for the ruder forms of sensational and farcical entertainment less keen; and a period of general acceptance of the stage as an element in social life might have been anticipated, in which it stood greatly to gain by the more settled and less migratory habits of the royal household and the possibilities of building up a permanent head-quarters for itself in London which resulted from the change. Unfortunately, however, events moved otherwise. A new factor emerged, which militated against anything like general acceptance; and the period of the greatest literary vitality in the development of the English drama proved to be also a period of embittered conflict with widespread ethical and religious tendencies, which in fact ranged over the whole of social life and was[237] ultimately destined to shatter, not only the stage, but the Tudor scheme of things itself. In its main outlines the issue was that which had been set ever since the decadent theatre of Greece and Rome came face to face with Semitic asceticism and barbarian indifference. The traditional dislike and contempt of the moralist for the mime had still to find their last expression. But it is a noteworthy aspect of this new revival of the secular struggle, that the attack came less from official churchmanship than from those extreme champions of reformation principles, whose zeal against abuses, and in particular against abuses countenanced by official churchmanship, won them the name of Puritans. The rise of Puritanism was coincident with the beginnings of the agitation against the stage, and the growth of Puritanism in London was the chief feature in a process which stirred the local magistracy, as represented by the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City, to try its strength, with the stage as a bone of contention, against the central authority of the Privy Council. The controversy is so important a one, from the point of view of the history of the stage and of civilization, that even at the risk of retraversing ground already trod, it is desirable to consider at some length the forces that were at work.[759]

The general relation of Reformation sentiment to the drama is a matter of rather complicated cross-currents. In the first place, there was the humanist rediscovery of the classics, fanning into flame the enthusiasm for Terence which had smouldered throughout the Middle Ages themselves, and making full use in its theory of education of the school-play as a means of inculcating pure Latinity, sound moral precepts, and gentlemanly self-possession in the conduct of affairs. In some at least of its manifestations this tendency is comprehensive enough to include the professional, as well as the academic, player. An example may be found in the treatise De recta reipublicae administratione of the German jurist, John Ferrarius. This was written in 1556 and translated into English by William Bavande of the Middle Temple in 1559. It was probably not without its influence upon the line of apologetic adopted by those gentlemen of the Inns of Court to whom the London stage came to look as its warmest supporters. For Ferrarius players are no longer the proscribed folk of the Middle Ages. They have become one of the seven handicrafts of the commonweal; and, provided[238] that care is taken that their performances shall stand with honesty, they have a function, not merely to delight in times of recreation, but also to further morals by ministering ensamples of virtue and goodness to be embraced, and of vice and filthy living to be eschewed. In his short chapter, Ferrarius makes use of two notions, which became commonplaces of Elizabethan dramatic criticism. Both are derived from classical sources. One is Horace's statement in the De Arte Poetica of the double object of comedy in the mingling of delight with profit;[760] the other the Plutarchan image of the bee sucking its honey even from noxious herbs, the honey of ethical precept from the herbs of wanton or foolish writings.[761] Even more famous, from its glorification in Hamlet, is a third passage which Ferrarius does not cite, and that is the definition of comedy, attributed by the fourth-century grammarian Donatus to Cicero but not discoverable in his extant works, as imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis.[762]

There were, however, other humanists who may have shared the abstract ideal of Ferrarius, but who at any rate were sufficiently conscious of the extent to which the popular stage of their own day fell short of that ideal, and were in consequence led to condemn, or perhaps more often to ignore, it. Of such was Ludovicus Vives, who devoted to dramatic poetry a section of his work on the corruption of the arts, in which, while accepting the Horatian account of the end of comedy, he points out that, with the notable exception of the author of Celestina, the playwrights, having been driven by the resentment of the great against satire to find their material in love-intrigues and similar themes, had lamentably failed to justify themselves by a proper determination of their plots to the ends of salutary morals. Even for Vives, Plautus and Terence are necessary to education; but he would use his blue pencil, and is by no means so warm a champion of the Latin drama on its ethical side as his older and more famous contemporary Erasmus. In his formal writings on education[239] Erasmus gives Terence the first place amongst Latin writers, adding Plautus with more hesitation and with a stipulation for carefully selected plays. And in a letter written about 1489 to an anonymous friend he tilts with vehemence against the doctrine of certain homunciones imperituli, imo lividuli, who maintain that Terence is no fit reading for Christians, and explains to their ignorance that the end of dramatic writing lies precisely in the refutation of vice. Erasmus is closely followed by his English disciple, Sir Thomas Elyot, whose defence of comedies in The Governour (1531), as no 'doctrinall of rybaudrie' but 'a mirrour of man's life, wherin iuell is not taught but discouered', served as a standard authority to be quoted in support of much later apologetic. Nor is the point of view confined to what may be called the secular wing of humanism. The Terentian school-play is an essential feature in the pedagogy of such convinced reformers as Philip Melanchthon at Wittenberg and John Sturm at Strasburg,[763] and from Sturm the tradition passes direct to one of the most scholarly and by no means one of the least austere of early English Protestants, Roger Ascham. It is to be observed, however, that Ascham's concern for Terence is wholly on the side of letters and Latinity. Both Vives and Erasmus had had their moments of uneasiness as to how far, after all, the ethics of pagan Rome were quite meet to be assimilated by Christian youth. Vives would expurgate both Plautus and Terence, and Erasmus Plautus at least. Ascham, very much impressed with the demoralizing influence of Italian books and Italian manners on English civilization, has no doubt at all that, necessary as both Plautus and Terence are to the schoolmaster, their matter is but 'base stuff' for the contemplation of the budding divine or civil servant. Views similar to Ascham's had already established themselves amongst both Catholic and Protestant teachers, and the attempt to combine Roman impeccability of phrase with Christian impeccability of theme and incident had produced the remarkable dramatic type known as the 'Christian Terence'.[764] This had had its vernacular, as well as its Latin, developments in many lands. Its acceptability in the eyes of the earlier reformers in England may be illustrated from the chapter De honestis ludis, which forms part of the treatise De regno Christi written by Martin Bucer as a New Year's gift[240] for Edward VI in 1551.[765] Bucer allows of plays, both for the exercise of youth, and for the honest and not unprofitable delectation of the public. They must be written by learned and pious men, and may be either comedies or tragedies, which deal respectively with mean and exalted actions. For comic themes he instances the dissension between the shepherds of Abraham and Lot, the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob's service amongst the flocks of Laban; and he expounds no less than six moral lessons which the first of these plots may serviceably inculcate. As for tragedy, the histories of patriarchs, kings, prophets, and apostles, from Adam onwards, are full of those [Greek: peripeteiai] upon which Aristotle lays such stress. It is from such sources that Christians should draw their poetry, rather than from the impious fables and histories of the Gentiles. And care must be taken to let vice awaken a horror of sin and well-doing a sense of the divine grace; for edification is to be the end of the action, even if, in order to attain it, some sacrifice of literary decorum is necessitated. Bucer holds that plays conceived in this spirit may with advantage be performed by youth in the vernacular, as well as in Greek and Latin; and declares that some have already been written which, although men of secular learning may miss in them the literary graces to be found in the comedies of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence and the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, are yet to be preferred for their religious character to pieces whose effect upon morality can only be deplorable. It is to be noticed that Bucer proposes to submit all plays before production to the judgement of persons at once expert in the dramatic art and of sound divinity, one of whose functions it shall be to let nothing which is leve aut histrionicum be shown. This is interesting not only because it anticipates the actual Tudor experiments in a dramatic censorship, but also because it indicates that the idea of a censorship arose out of ethical, as well as out of merely political, considerations. It is possible that Bucer may have been familiar with the actual working of the system at Geneva, to which further reference will presently be made.

In actual practice the Protestant religious drama, whether it was imitating Latin comedy or advancing on the lines of the popular morality, used the Scriptures with some discrimination. It drew freely upon the historical books and upon the parables. The parable of the prodigal son, in[241] particular, perhaps because it was so obviously cognate to beloved Terentian themes, became the parent of a copious dramatic literature, both in Christian Latin and in all the vernaculars. The central topics, the mysteries of the faith in creation, fall, and incarnation, and the life of Christ himself, were much more charily touched. This may have been due to a reprobation of the methods of the miracle-plays, which is itself traceable to more than one cause. Protestant reverence could hardly fail to reinforce the criticism of the leve aut histrionicum in the popular representations, which often made itself heard even amongst orthodox Churchmen. Luther is at one with Ludovicus Vives on the point.[766] And Protestantism had its own particular ground of quarrel with the miracle-plays, in that they were hardly dissociable from the Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and the like, which their great feast-day of Corpus Christi had been specially invented to glorify. Certainly the decadence of the Corpus Christi play sets in pretty quickly after the middle of the sixteenth century, and in more than one instance the hand of the Protestant reformer is to be traced in the process.[767] It is of the Corpus Christi plays, as well as of the Hock-play at Coventry, that Robert Laneham is thinking when he regrets 'the zeal of certain theyr Preacherz: men very commendabl for their behauiour and learning, & sweet in their sermons, but sumwhat too sour in preaching awey theyr pastime'.[768] An exception to the normal temper of Protestantism in this respect is to be found in that fiery protagonist of the earlier English reformation, John Bale, amongst whose few extant plays are a Prophetae, a John Baptist, and a Temptation, while a list of his various dramatic experiments, which he has himself left upon record, indicates that they included a continuous New Testament cycle from the Presentation in the Temple to the Resurrection.[769]

It is, of course, in form only and not in spirit that Bale touched the ecclesiastical compilers of the Corpus Christi plays. The author of Kinge Johan and the translator of Pammachius is the typical English figure of that characteristic sixteenth-century movement whereby the drama, like every other form of literary expression, bound itself for a time to[242] the service of heretical controversy. Both the Christian Terence and the vernacular morality contained elements which could be readily adapted to the purposes of polemic, no less than to those of edification; and Bale appears to have been the principal agent of Cromwell's statecraft in what was probably a deliberate attempt to capture so powerful an engine as the stage in the interests of Protestantism. And it is to be observed that this movement was not confined to those academic branches of the drama in which it may be supposed to have had its origin. For once the theologian and the histrio laid aside their ancient antagonism, and not in school and college refectories only, but in every inn-yard and on every village green, the praises of the pure Gospel were sung, and Pope and priests were derided in play, at the bidding of the wily Privy Seal. Of this there is sufficient evidence in the passionate protest of Bale after Cromwell had fallen, and the players' mouths had been shut by the Act for the Advancement of true Religion in 1543.[770]

No doubt many things were changed in English Protestantism after the days of the Marian exile; and a ready explanation of the active Puritan hostility to the stage is afforded by the substitution of a Calvinist for a Lutheran bias in the conduct of the Reformation. But the antithesis must not be pressed too far. Assuredly the returning preachers brought with them a new seriousness in their view of life and a haunting mistrust of the moral evils lurking even in innocent modes of recreation. The 'merry England' of tradition formed no part of their ideal. Moreover, they were less in bondage than their predecessors of Henry's reign to the prestige of secular learning, and less likely to be impressed, therefore, by the[243] literary and educational significance of the drama. But so far as the popular stage is concerned, there is no reason to suppose that they would have failed to see eye to eye with John Bale himself, for it is pretty clear from the passage quoted above that Bale's tolerance of the interlude-players was entirely conditioned by the polemical use he had been enabled to make of them, and that, apart from what he chose to regard as their conversion, they would have had short shrift at his hands. Now by the time of the Puritans this break in the normal relations of the stage to the pulpit had come to an end. The drama of Protestant controversy survived its original manipulator, Cromwell. It flourished greatly under Edward VI. It won the imitation of the Catholics under Mary. And when Elizabeth came, its exponents made haste to re-enter a field which was probably by now capable of yielding profit in a worldly as well as a spiritual sense. It is clear that at the beginning of the reign Elizabeth and her ministers deliberately continued Cromwell's policy of encouraging stage-polemic. During the Christmas of 1558 the court and the streets were full of masks, in which cardinals, bishops, and abbots were held up to derision as crows, asses, and wolves.[771] During the debates on the Act of Uniformity in the following spring, Abbot Feckenham protested against the way in which 'by the onely preachers and scaffold players of this newe religion, all thinges are turned up-side downe'.[772] Almost simultaneously the dispatches of Venetian agents mention the prevalence of anti-Catholic plays in hostels and taverns, and dwell particularly upon one performance in which Philip and Mary and Cardinal Pole were represented in exposition of their religious views.[773] The inwardness of the movement is made clear by a letter of the Duke of Féria to Philip himself, in which he reports Elizabeth's diplomatic repudiation of the insolent pieces, and adds that he knew for a fact[244] that the arguments were given to the players by none other than Sir William Cecil.[774] The Elizabethan methods of government were tortuous, and it is a little difficult to say how long the licence of the stage to deal with matters of religion lasted. Ostensibly the proclamation of 16 May 1559, presumably issued in deference to De Feria's complaints, brought it to a very definite stop. But it was one thing to issue a proclamation and another to see that it was enforced; and as late as the June of 1562 we find De Feria's successor, the Bishop of Aquila, still protesting against Elizabeth's failure to carry out her perpetual promises, by suppressing the books, farces, and songs which were written in dishonour of his royal master.[775] The burden of these, however, may have been political rather than strictly religious. Certainly, when Elizabeth considered that she had 'settled' the affairs of the Church, it in no way remained part of her intention that they should continue to be matter for public debate. Nor is it likely that the extreme vulgarities of Protestant controversy were altogether to her private taste. Already during the Christmas of 1559 a play at court had been broken off for some unknown offence, and when some Cambridge students pursued the queen to Hinchinbrook in the autumn of 1564 with a scandalous dramatic parody of Catholic ritual, the royal displeasure was unmistakable.[776] Meanwhile the pulpit attacks upon the 'fleshly and filthy' sayings and doings of players begin with Bishop Alley's St. Paul's sermon delivered in 1561, and it is natural to suppose that the temporary alliance between Church and Stage was already dissolved and the normal hostility restored, before Bishop Grindal came to pen his vehement outburst to Cecil on 23 February 1564 in favour of the permanent inhibition of the 'histriones, common playours', that 'idle sorte off people, which have ben infamouse in all goode common weales'. The theory that the first controversial phase of the[245] Elizabethan popular drama was but of short duration need not be regarded as invalidated by the fact that plays of distinctly Protestant type continued to be published until at least the third decade of the reign. There is no very obvious proof that these plays were performed at all, and certainly none that they belonged to the popular rather than the academic stage. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the dates of composition fell anywhere near the dates of publication, and in some cases such evidence as is available points to a period very shortly after Elizabeth's accession. Several Protestant plays of Edwardian or earlier origin were apparently revived by publishers at about the same time.[777] In some of these the closing prayers have been altered so as to apply to Elizabeth, and a similar revision has taken place in the text, extant only in manuscript, of Bale's Kinge Johan. This seems to be evidence, perhaps more certainly as regards the manuscript than as regards the prints, of actual performance during the new reign.

If, then, what might have been the natural attitude of the earlier English Protestantism to the popular stage was deflected by something of an accident, it is also not quite true to suppose that Calvinism was always and everywhere uncompromisingly opposed to the drama in its more respectable forms. Calvin himself was not unaffected by humanist influences, and more than one of his near associates, notably Theodore Beza, his successor at Geneva, are to be reckoned amongst academic playwrights. The annals of stage-history at Geneva throw a valuable light upon the order of ideas from which the Puritans started. During the later Middle Ages the city had taken its full delight in spectacula of many kinds. The abuses connected with these had formed the subject of constant ecclesiastical prohibitions, the tradition of which had only been continued by the reformers.[778] Calvin's principal forerunner, William Farel, had published theses at Bâle in 1524, in which he laid down abstinence from disguisings as a counsel of perfection.[779] But he did not succeed[246] in making his principles wholly operative at Geneva, and even when, after an abortive attempt in 1537, the so-called 'theocracy' was finally established by Calvin's constitutions of 1541, there was no absolute condemnation, except for the clergy, of plays.[780] Dances were prohibited and such heathen ceremonies as the Roi-boit at Twelfth Night and the Mardigras[781]; but it seems to have been thought sufficient to leave plays under the close inspection and control of the body of ministers, whose functions included the maintenance of Church discipline with the aid of a consistory of elders, and the advising of the secular town council on all matters appertaining to faith and morals. It was not long, however, before more radical views began to commend themselves to a certain section of the ministers, and the question came to a serious issue in some stormy episodes of the year 1546. On 2 May, being Quasimodo Sunday, the council had permitted the performance of a morality by one Roux Monet and others. They had before them a certificate from the ministers that it was of an edifying character, although some grumbling persons declared that its object was to ridicule and satirize the tradesmen.[782] About a month later, two fresh applications came before them. One was apparently from a troupe of travelling players and acrobats, and this was summarily refused as likely to cause scandal.[783] The other was more plausible. Some local joueurs des ystoires desired to represent for the edification of the people a dramatization of The Acts of the Apostles. The council ordered the book of the piece to be submitted[247] to Calvin, and agreed that it might be performed, should his report be favourable. Calvin and the other ministers did not much like the proposal, more particularly as the players declined to give alms to the poor out of the profits of the enterprise. It so happened, however, that one of the ministers, Abel Poupin, was himself the author of the play, and partly because of this, and partly because he was not sure that an attempt to prevent the performance would be successful, Calvin seems to have persuaded his colleagues to offer no objection. The formal sanction of the council was therefore given, and Abel Poupin was ordered to make himself responsible for the conduct of the play. Reading between the lines, we may perhaps discern some resentment amongst the ministers, not only at the performance itself, which they considered a waste of money that might have gone in charity, but also at the domineering attitude adopted by Calvin and Poupin. Even while the matter was still under discussion, one of them, Philibert de Beauxlieux, was haled before the consistory for saying that Calvin was taking the part of the Pope and Poupin that of the cardinal. And when the decision was arrived at there was an outbreak. A preacher of fiery temper, Michel Cop, got into the pulpit and denounced the play, accusing the women performers of a shameless desire to display themselves in public and thereby ensnare the eyes of men. For this he was summoned before the council; but Calvin took his part, and although they had differed as to the toleration of the play, claimed that Cop had only exercised the preacher's proper liberty in saying freely what he thought on a question of morals.[784] The documents concerning this incident include, in addition to numerous entries in official registers, two private letters from Calvin to Farel,[785] in which he describes what had taken place, and makes it clear that his own willingness to allow the play arose from motives of expediency and from a feeling that there were limits to the pressure which could be put upon the public to abstain from[248] recreation. In reply the aged reformer anticipated the probable future destiny of the frequenters of plays in terms which recall the worst ferocities of Tertullian on this subject.[786] Something more may be gathered as to Calvin's personal attitude towards plays from a sermon preached in 1556, in which he expounds the prohibition of the change of sex-costume in Deuteronomy xxii. 5 as an absolute one, and as applying particularly to the wearing of men's dresses by women and of women's dresses by men in masks and mummeries.[787] This is an exegesis which counted for a good deal in the Puritan criticism of a stage in which boys habitually took the female parts.

Abel Poupin's much-discussed Acts of the Apostles was duly given, and the council ordered themselves loges at the public expense to see the show, and decreed a four days' suspension of arrest for debt in honour of the occasion. Shortly afterwards the ministers approached the council as a body in order to urge that the money devoted to plays might be better bestowed on the poor, and it was thereupon resolved that no more ystoyres should be given 'jusque lon voye le temps plus propre'.[788] This determination must, I think, have been motived by some temporary conditions of special economic distress, for it was far from being the end of plays in Geneva. In the following year, 1547, Richard Chaultemps and his wife and children were refused permission for a jeu de passe-temps, which was thought contrary to Christianity, and were given a teston to go on their way. On the other hand, the council attended officially in the same year at a performance of a Latin dialogue 'du livre de Joseph' by the scholars of the college. In 1548 a wandering tragechieur[249] was allowed to perform on condition of avoiding any 'chose contre Dieu'. In 1549 the scholars played a comedy of Terence in a meadow, and received a gift of two crowns for a banquet. In 1551 the council forbade the recitation of a ballade by Abel Poupin at a banquet, but sanctioned a 'petite farce de joyeuseté' for recreation's sake. In 1558 the seigneurs of Berne paid a visit to Geneva and one Maître Enoch proposed a play on a subject taken from the Berne armoiries of Jupiter and Europa, and another on the execution of five Berne scholars at Lyons. This application was referred to Calvin for a report. In 1560 the reprinting of Beza's tragedy of Abraham's Sacrifice was approved by the consistory. In 1561 Conrad Badius's comedy of Le Pape Malade was performed in the college hall and afterwards printed, and permission was also given for a comedy by Jerome Wyart, 'si M. Calvin est de cet avis'. An interval of some years without plays followed, until in 1568 the series was resumed with Jacques Bienvenu's comedy of Le Monde Malade et Mal Pansé.[789] It is hardly necessary to carry the record further, since the proof is sufficient that, whatever the private opinions of some of the ministers may have been, the actual working of the theocracy was not inconsistent with the production, under a careful censorship, of academic or bourgeois plays, or even, although more rarely, of entertainments of the type afforded by a professional tragechieur. It was not until 1572 that the Synod of Nîmes passed a constitution for the whole of the French reformed churches, by which all plays, other than those of a strictly educational character, were forbidden.[790]

It must be doubtful whether even this decree would have fully met the views of Michel Cop and his supporters. At any rate, it is possible to trace the growth of a sentiment amongst English theologians of the Calvinistic persuasion,[250] which was not prepared to exclude the academic play from the general condemnation of things theatrical. Naturally this tendency shows itself mainly at the Universities, where tragedies and comedies, both in Latin and in English, continued to be part of the ordinary exercise of youth, especially when Christmas was kept or entertainment had to be found for a royal visit, and where men of high ecclesiastical standing, such as James Calfhill, Penitentiary of St. Paul's and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, did not disdain to furnish dramas for the use of their scholars.[791] So far as Cambridge is concerned, we find Vice-Chancellor Beaumont reporting to Archbishop Parker in 1565 that 'two or three in Trinity College think it very unseeming that Christians should play or be present at any profane comedies or tragedies'.[792] We find Sir John Harington, who was an undergraduate from 1576 to 1578, noting his recollection about 1597 that 'in Cambridge, howsoever the presyser sort have banisht them, the wyser sort did, and still doe mayntayn them'. And we find John Smith of Christ's haled before the University for an unguarded attack upon the less strict practice of his fellows in a Lenten sermon of 1586.[793] It was at Oxford, however, that the divergence of opinion became most articulate. The protagonist was John Rainolds, afterwards President of Corpus Christi College, and a man of great influence in the Puritan party, whom he represented at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. Rainolds first touched the question, to which his attention was probably called by the dispute then raging in London, with a passing allusion to the 'pestes scenicorum, theatralia spectacula' as one of the great interruptions to Oxford studies, in his preface to some disputations published in 1581. There is no reason to suppose that he voiced the general view of the University, and in particular of those of its members who were still under the influence of the humanist spirit. Probably these were better represented by the commentaries on the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle published by John Case, Fellow of St. John's College, in his Speculum moralium quaestionum (1585) and Sphaera civitatis (1588). Case commends plays, provided that they are an expression of comitas, the Aristotelian [Greek: eutrapelia], and not of its excess scurrilitas. They are sanctioned by the use of[251] antiquity, and they give a lively picture of antiquity itself. They teach experience of things and of the human heart, and afford training—it is the scenae trigemina corona—in the management of the voice, the features, the gestures. All this is, of course, in the traditional humanist vein. Some of the current criticisms of the drama are quoted, only to be refuted. It is not necessarily indecorum for a man to wear the dress of a harlot on the stage, if his object is to expose the vices of harlotry, 'non est enim monstrum vestes sed mores meretricis induere'. It is true that the Fathers condemned plays, but they had in mind the abuses of plays and in particular the devotion of plays to the service of idols. It is ridiculous to hold that the dignity of kingship is offended if it is impersonated by an actor. The offence is no more than when the outlines of a king are represented in a picture. No doubt Case has the academic drama almost wholly in his mind, and would have been inclined to dismiss the professional stage contemptuously enough as scurrilitas.[794] He is certainly careful to make it clear that the plays of which he approves are not 'inanes et histrionicae fabulae, Veneris illecebrae', but witty comedies and magnificent tragedies 'in quibus expressa imago vitae morumque cernitur'. He did not convince John Rainolds; it is just possible that the ninepin arguments, which in true scholastic fashion he set up and knocked down again, were hardly to be accepted as an adequate statement of the Puritan position. Rainolds evidently acquired a reputation in the University for 'preciseness' as regards the drama; and the time came when the academic playwrights thought it well to challenge him in public. Their champion was Dr. William Gager of Christ Church, two of whose plays, Ulysses Redux and Rivales, were down for performance by the Christ Church students during the Christmas of 1591-2. Rainolds was invited by one Thomas Thornton to see the Ulysses Redux. He refused and being pressed gave his reasons. It was not therefore unnatural that when Gager appended to the Hippolytus, which was also given, a new apologetical epilogue in which arguments against the stage, very similar to those of Rainolds, were put into the mouth of one Momus, our theologian should infer that by Momus none other was intended than himself. He must have cried 'Touché', and thereby gave Gager an opportunity of sending him a printed[252] copy of Ulysses, with an enlarged epilogue and a repudiation of any personal intention in the character of Momus. This led to a letter from Rainolds, in which he set out his views upon the stage at great length and with considerable learning, to a reply from Gager, who was or professed to be stung by some of the reflections cast by Rainolds upon the Christ Church men, and to a rejoinder from Rainolds, in which he reiterated his original arguments with even greater elaboration. His main contentions were four in number. Firstly, he laid stress upon the infamia with which the Roman praetors had 'noted' histriones, and refused to accept Gager's pleas that this only applied to those who played for gain, or that gentlemen who only appeared upon the stage rarely and at long intervals could not properly be called histriones at all. Secondly, he adopted Calvin's interpretation of the Deuteronomic prohibition of the change of sex-costume as an absolute one, belonging to the moral and not merely the ceremonial law. Gager had taken the view, which later on had the support of the learned Selden, and which to a folklorist hardly needs demonstration, that what Moses had in mind was a change of costume forming part of an idolatrous ritual; and had also committed himself to the weaker argument that a man might justifiably, as Achilles did, put on a woman's clothing to save his life. The latter Rainolds denied, and pointed out that, even if it held good, it would hardly cover a change designed for a purely histrionic purpose. His third argument was based on the moral deterioration entailed by counterfeiting wanton behaviour in a play; and his fourth on the waste both of time and money involved. He does not wish to be thought an enemy either of poetry or of reasonable recreation, but he expresses a doubt whether some hours were not spent over Gager's plays that ought to have been spent at sermons. The theory of humanistic educators that acting teaches lads self-confidence he is not prepared to admit as a sufficient justification of their practice. The debate is, of course, a good deal complicated by topics of mere erudition and by disputes as to whether Momus was really meant as a caricature of Rainolds, or as to whether Rainolds's abstract argument about infamia bore the concrete implication that such honest youths as the Christ Church students or so well-voiced a musician as the Master of the Choristers, who had played with them, were in fact infames, or as to the extent of approval implied by the presence of University dignitaries and of the queen herself at performances of Gager's pieces. Anyway, said Rainolds, the queen's laws set down players as vagabonds. Given their common premises,[253] it must be acknowledged that both in learning and in logic the Puritan had the advantage over his opponent, although common sense was on the side of the latter, and it is with some scepticism that one reads the statement of the printer who gave Rainolds's share of the controversy to the world in 1599, that ultimately Gager 'let goe his hold, and in a Christian modestie and humilitie yeelded to the truth, and quite altered his judgement'. My own conviction is that Gager would have subscribed to anything, in order to have done with receiving argumentative letters from Rainolds. But when Rainolds had disposed of Gager, he had to meet a fresh adversary in Alberico Gentili, an Italian who held the professorship of civil law at Oxford and had committed himself to a different view as to the force of the praetorian infamia. Between these two pundits the discussion continued for some time without contributing much to the elucidation of the main issue. Rainolds's book, the first line of the title of which was Th' overthrow of Stage-Playes, furnished many weapons later on for the armoury of Prynne, and material for ridicule in the play of Fucus, sive Histriomastix, produced at Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1623.

The problem with which, long before the University disputants handled the matter at all, the London Puritans had to deal, was not one of nice differentiation between the position of the amateur and that of the professional player. Their concern with the academic drama was comparatively small; some at least of them were prepared to subscribe to all the allowances for it that were made by the Synod of Nîmes.[795] What they were face to face with was the rapid growth in London of professional playing as a recognized occupation, using an increasing number of playing-places, almost entirely free from control on its ethical side, and tending more and more to become a permanent element in the life of the community. And the attitude of condemnation which they adopted was in the main one in which Lutheran, Calvinist, and humanist, Case and Gager no less than Rainolds, would in theory at least have concurred. The writings against the stage, especially those of the critical period from 1576 to 1583, are of a very heterogeneous character. The most important are, on the one hand, long passages in two treatises by ministers devoted to the flagellation of social evils generally, the Dicing, Dauncing, Vaine Playes, or Enterludes (1577) of John Northbrooke, and the Anatomie of Abuses (1583) of Phillip Stubbes; and on the other, three special pamphlets[254] by sometime playwrights who had embraced conversion, and had the advantage of speaking from inner knowledge of the profession they were attacking. Of these two, The Schoole of Abuse (1579) and Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582) were by Stephen Gosson, who became the vicar of St. Botolph's in the City, and the third was by Anthony Munday, who, as Gosson put it, returned to his own vomit again, and resumed play-writing. Munday's contribution was the Third Blast of a composite publication issued under the title of A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580). The Second Blast was a translation of the chapter against spectacula from Salvian's fifth-century De Gubernatione Dei.[796] These five books form the main indictment of the stage, as it developed itself at Puritan hands or under Puritan influences. In addition there were many minor onslaughts, in sermons by Thomas White (1577), John Stockwood (1578), and others at the famous City pulpit of Paul's Cross, in works of devotional theology, such as Gervase Babington's Exposition of the Commandements (1583), and in many examples of the miscellaneous literature that stood for modern journalism. The arguments used in support of the attack are naturally various. Some of them coincide with those used later by Rainolds at Oxford. Calvin's objection, based on Deuteronomy, to the wearing of women's clothes by boys makes its appearance.[797] The condemnations of histriones by the Fathers and by the austerer pagans are applied without discrimination to their Elizabethan successors, and there is a deliberate attempt to brand these alike with the Roman note of infamia and with the more recent stigma of vagabondage. The historical disquisitions lay much stress on the origin of pagan plays in idolatry. Gosson, who in his second book affects a methodical treatment of the subject, and draws upon his recollection of Aristotle for analysis of the efficient, material, formal, final causes and effects of plays, justifies himself from Tertullian in finding the efficient cause of plays in none other than the incarnate Devil.[798] He also derives from Aristotle, although he knew less of Aristotle than did John Case, a theory that acting, being essentially the simulation of what is not, is by its very nature 'with in the compasse of a lye, which by Aristotle's judgment is naught of it selfe and to be fledde'.[799] A similar doctrine is readily applied to the imaginations of poets which give actors their opportunity.[800] As Touchstone puts it, poetry is not 'honest in deed and word' nor 'a true thing', for 'the truest poetry is the most feigning'.[801]

[255]

Whatever weight such abstract reasonings may have carried, they were after all but the fringes and trimmings of the controversy. The main burden of the complaints raised by the Puritans rested neither on theology nor on history, but on the character of the London plays as they knew them, and on the actual conditions under which representations were given. In a stage from which Protestant polemic was now banned, they found nothing but scurrilitas. They resented the impurity of speech and gesture. They resented the scoffs at virtue and religion, especially when these were interlaced with themes taken, as dramatic themes were still often taken, from the Scriptures.[802] And their disapproval was hardly less when the plays were wholly secular, for in tragedies they could discern nothing but examples to honest citizens of murders, treacheries, and rebellions, and in comedies nothing but demoralizing pictures of intrigues and wantonness. Plays, they declared, are the snares of the devil set to catch souls. By plays the imagination of youth is corrupted, and matronly chastity first turned to thoughts of sin. With their ready touch upon vituperative rhetoric, they found for the theatre a string of nicknames of which Gosson's 'the school of abuse' was the model, and 'the school of bawdery', 'the nest of the devil', 'the consultorie of Satan', may serve as further samples. And what the plays began, they held that the surroundings of the playhouses were only too well adapted to finish. In them was focused all the sin of the city. Here men came, not merely to waste their time and their money, but to meet wantons, and to whisper dishonourable proposals in the ears of any respectable women with whom they found themselves in company. The constant presence of harlots amongst the audience, the dallying with them in the front of the galleries, the manning of them home afterwards, even if the buildings adjacent to the stage did not themselves afford a convenient shelter for ill-doing, are dwelt upon with a vigour of description which perhaps testifies to the horror wherewith this connexion of the stage with sexual immorality had affected the Puritan mind.[803]

Above all, there was Sabbatarianism to be taken into account. During the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, Sunday was the usual day for plays. The trumpets blew for the performances just as the bells were tolling for afternoon prayer; and writer after writer bears testimony to the fact that too often the yards and galleries were filled with an appreciative crowd, while the preacher's sermon was[256] unfrequented.[804] Thus a touch of professional amour propre gave its sting to the conflict, and there is no one point that is more insisted upon in sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet than the desecration of the Lord's Day which the attendance at theatres directly entailed. The preachers did not disdain an appeal to popular superstitions which they probably themselves shared, and the visitations of plague from which Elizabethan London regularly suffered,[805] no less than such events as earthquakes[806] or the fall of ruinous buildings,[807] were interpreted as tokens of divine wrath at the wickedness of plays and in particular at the breach of the Fourth Commandment. A curious legend was whispered abroad in various forms, to the effect that the devil himself had been known on occasion to take an unrehearsed part in this or that godless piece.[808]

The playwright, no less than the theologian, has a ready pen, and the Puritan attacks naturally provoked a counter-literature of apology. This first took shape in critical prefaces attached to such contemporary plays, mainly of literary rather than stage origin, as reached the honours of print.[809] Gosson's Schoole of Abuse, a treacherous performance from the point of view of his former colleagues, called for a more elaborate reply. More than one pamphlet was written, of which the Honest Excuses (c. 1579) Thomas Lodge has alone come down to us. The serious argument of this, as well as of the prefaces which preceded it, continues the main humanist tradition. Against the denunciations of the Fathers and of certain pagan moralists, the apologists set the antiquity of plays and the honour in which after all they were held in the palmy days of Greece and Rome. The examples of violence and wantonness in tragedy and comedy they justify by the moral end of drama. Decorum—the literary sense of[257] what is psychologically appropriate to a given character—requires that, as George Whetstone puts it, 'grave old men should instruct, yonge men should show the imperfections of youth, strumpets should be lascivious, boyes unhappy, and clownes should be disorderly'. But whether the action be merry or mournful, grave or lascivious, the ultimate object is edification, even as the bee sucks honey from flowers and weeds alike. 'By the rewarde of the good, the good are encowraged in well doinge; and with the scowrge of the lewde, the lewde are feared from evil attempts.' Comedy, no doubt, aims at delight, but it is a delight which, on the Horatian principle, is mingled with the useful. This appears to have been the especial theme of the Play of Plays and Pastimes, in which the actors essayed their own defence on the boards of the Theatre. Unfortunately this piece is only known by Gosson's unfriendly account of its plot in Playes Confuted.[810] It was in the form of an allegorical morality, in which was shown the dependence of Life on Delight and Recreation as a protection from Glut and Tediousness, and how Zeal, in order to govern Life aright, must be reduced to Moderate Zeal and work hand in hand with Delight, using comedies for which it is prescribed 'that the matter be purged, deformities blazed, sinne rebuked, honest mirth intermingled, and fitte time for the hearing of the same appointed'. It is the note of humanism, again, which is prominent in the group of critical writings of which the first and most important is Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry (c. 1583). It is reasonable to suppose that this treatise had its origin in the train of ideas awakened by the Puritan outcries. Gosson had dedicated The Schoole of Abuse to Sidney, and as Gabriel Harvey told Spenser, was 'for hys labor scorned; if at leaste it be in the goodnesse of that nature to scorne'. Certainly the Defence can hardly be regarded as a direct contribution to the controversy. Sidney was not particularly concerned to uphold the contemporary stage, and occupied himself rather with answering a general attack upon poetry contained in The Schoole of Abuse, which had been merely incidental to Gosson's principal argument. But in the course of his discussion he comes to examine tragedy and comedy as branches of imaginative literature, and the definitions which he frames are conceived once more in the full spirit of humanism. He speaks of 'high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors; that with stirring the[258] effects of admiration and commiseration teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded'. So, too, the work of the comic poet is 'an imitation of the common errors of our life which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one'. The Defence was not published until 1595, but it must have been well known in private before that, since, itself founded on such Italian writers as Scaliger, Minturno, and Castelvetro, it in turn furnished inspiration for William Webbe's Discourse of English Poesie (1586), Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), and Sir John Harington's Apologie of Poetrie (1591). All these three writers emphasize the moral lessons of tragedy and comedy on the familiar humanist lines.

It must be admitted that the humanist theory was not altogether conclusive as an answer to the Puritans. These were not prepared to accept the authority of Horace as making delight, even in conjunction with the useful, a legitimate end, when, as they pointed out, the delight was a carnal and not a spiritual one.[811] Nor could the arguments in favour of decorum, which were wholly of a literary and not an ethical nature, be expected to appeal to them. And as to the moral lessons to be learned by witnessing plays, whether tragedies or comedies, they were entirely sceptical. They return again and again, with obvious irritation, to the probably mythical story of a good woman who swore by her troth that she had been as much edified at a play as at any sermon.[812]

And if sometimes notorious evil-doers are held up to reprobation on the stage, it seems to the preachers that such rebuke might more suitably come from the pulpit, since in a theatre the appeal must needs be made to an audience hardly fit to be judges in any man's cause.[814] Gosson and Munday, having[259] been playwrights, and having presumably suffered at the hands of their masters, pay off old scores with another argument. If plays had really a moral influence, would not this be apparent in the lives of those who are most conversant with them, the players themselves. Yet the players are not only extremely insolent and swaggering persons, but notoriously practise in real life the very vices which they represent on the stage. Moreover, they take young boys and bring them up in shamelessness. How can it be expected that good shall be done, where there is no will in the agent to do good?[815] The inconclusiveness of the discussion was of course largely due to the fact that the Puritan and the humanist disputants were not talking about quite the same thing. Obviously the influence of a play, if any, upon conduct must depend on the manner of handling and on the dramatic idea involved; and it may be taken for granted that the ideal comedy and tragedy, which the humanists praised and which some of them tried to realize, were often very imperfectly represented by the actual pieces put before a London audience. This is to some extent admitted on both sides. Sidney is frankly contemptuous of the popular stage. Whetstone speaks of his 'commendable exercise' as 'discredited with the tryfels of yonge, unadvised, and rashe witted wryters'. Lodge and the author of The Play of Plays are fully conscious of abuses, which must be remedied if the drama is to take the place assigned to it in the humanist scheme of things. On the other hand, Gosson is fair-minded enough to admit that certain plays, principally his own, are beyond reproach; and even that, as compared with an earlier period than that of which he wrote, there had been some purging of the language used on the boards.[816] Yet, when all allowance has been made on this score, it would seem that there must still remain some fundamental incompatibility between the views of the Puritans and those of the humanists as regards the psychological effects of the drama upon conduct. Perhaps this is hardly to be wondered at. After all, the psychological effect of a drama, or of any other work of art, is not a simple thing, but depends upon an incalculable relation between what the artist puts into his work and what the spectator brings to the contemplation of it. And it may fairly be assumed that what a Sidney brought and what a limb of Limehouse brought were sufficiently different things. Were this a philosophic work on the drama and not merely a history of the stage, it might be appropriate to dwell upon the fact that, however much the Puritans and the humanists might disagree, they[260] were at one in referring their judgement of the drama to purely ethical standards of value, and that the conception of aesthetic value, which means so much for modern thought, was in the main beyond the scope of Elizabethan criticism.

So far as the character of the particular plays put on the stage was material, the case for the defence grew stronger as these approached more nearly to literature. Thus Thomas Nashe, whose Pierce Penilesse His Supplication (1592) contains by far the most effective of the apologies for the drama from a popular point of view, is in a position, not only to vaunt the respectability of English actors as compared with the 'squirting baudie comedians' of beyond the seas, to repudiate the idea that rowdy apprentices were wanted in the theatres at all, and to claim a distinct superiority for play-going over gaming, whoreing and drinking as a pastime for courtiers and other idle men; but also to give point to his glorification of the moral purpose of tragedy and comedy by a special reference to the chronicle plays then at the height of their success, 'wherein our forefathers valiant acts, that haue line long buried in rustie brasse and worme-eaten bookes, are reuiued, and they themselues raised from the graue of obliuion, and brought to pleade their aged honours in open presence; than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate, effeminate dayes of ours?' Nashe can even illustrate his contention from the Talbot scenes of Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI; and it is indeed the ultimate paradox of the Puritan controversy that a movement, which was undoubtedly designed in the interests of honest and clean living, would have had the result, if it had been successful, of shutting out the world from the possibilities of a Shakespeare.

After the publication of the Anatomie of Abuses in 1583 there was some slackening in the literary warfare carried on by the Puritans. The duty of abstinence from plays becomes a commonplace of treatises on morals and devotion, and the preachers continue to complain, but the only specialist pamphlet during the next quarter of a century is the comparatively unimportant Mirrour of Monsters (1587) by another cast playwright, William Rankins. It must be doubtful whether this was due to any decrease in the strength of the sentiment against the stage. But the trial of forces was over, and for a time there was little further advance to be made. Something, as will be seen in the next chapter, had been won, so far as the observance of Sunday was concerned; on the other hand, the main issue had been pretty definitely lost. Moreover, there were other things to be thought of;[261] firstly the Martin Marprelate controversy, which for a while absorbed much ink and paper, and secondly, the persecution which recusants had to undergo at the hands of the dominant party in Church and State. Aggressive at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, by its close Puritanism had to stand on its defence. A corresponding change in its relations with the stage was inevitable. From an assailant, it became an object of assault. The players had never been disposed to endure criticism without hitting back. Lewis Wager, as early as 1566, has his word against the hypocrites, who slander plays from fear lest their own wickedness should be revealed in public; and one may be sure that the actor's side of the question was as remorselessly pressed from the scaffold as that of the Puritan from the pulpit. This tendency can only have gathered impetus from the official encouragement given for a time to the players to intervene against Martin Marprelate.[817] The tone of the later apologists for the stage has become insolent rather than deprecatory. Nashe, always ready to carry any war into the enemy's quarter, boldly ascribes the attacks upon plays to the envy felt by vintners, alewives, and victuallers for more respectable places of entertainment than their own, and to the indifference to greatness of avaricious citizens, who 'know when they are dead they shall not be brought upon the stage for any goodness, but in a merriment of the Usurer and the Diuel, or buying Armes of the Herald'. So, too, Henry Chettle, in his Kind-Harts Dreame (1592), puts into the mouth of the ghost of Tarleton, not only the usual serious defence of the moral value of plays and an appeal to the youth of the city not to disturb the peace of the theatres, but also a mock protest from the keepers of bowling-alleys, dicing-houses, and brothels against the competition of actors with their trades, and the discovery in jig and jest of 'our crosse-biting, our conny-catching, our traines, our traps, our gins, our snares, our subtilties'. Nashe and Chettle are perhaps tilting rather at some of the civic allies of the Puritans, than at the Puritans themselves. But the latter had to bear their full share of the stage's revengeful triumph. The printer of Th' Overthrow of Stage Playes in 1599 notes in his preface how some 'haue not bene afraied of late dayes to bring vpon the stage the very sober countenances, graue attire, modest and matronelike gestures & speaches of men & women to be laughed at as a scorne and reproch to the world'. A detailed analysis of the satire of Puritanism in later Elizabethan and in Jacobean comedy would pass beyond the limits of this study. For a sample[262] may be taken the figure of Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614). Busy has a scruple against eating pig at the fair, 'for the very calling it a Bartholmew-pigge, and to eat it so, is a spice of Idolatry, and you make the Fayre, no better than one of the high Places'. But the lust of the flesh overcomes him, and he eats 'two and a half to his share' and drinks 'a pailefull'. This, however, does not dispose him to be lenient to the pride of the eyes at the fair. He condemns a doll with 'See you not Goldylocks, the purple strumpet, there? in her yellow gowne, and greene sleeues?' and pulls down a pile of gingerbread cakes as 'this idolatrous groue of images, this flasket of idols'. Naturally, his extreme wrath is against the puppet, which he calls Dagon, and 'a beame in the eye of the brethren; a very great beame, an exceeding great beame; such as are your Stage-players, Rimers, and Morrise-dancers, who have walked hand in hand, in contempt of the Brethren, and the Cause'. He disputes with the puppet, and produces the 'old stale argument' of the male putting on the apparel of the female and the female of the male, and is finally refuted when the puppet 'takes up his garment', and reveals that it has no sex.[818]

When Puritanism gathered head again under James, it was the sting of caricature which directly led to the renewal of the old controversy. Two hypocrites in The Puritan (c. 1606) had been christened after the churches of St. Antholin and St. Mary Overies, which were known to be the principal centres in London of Puritan faith and practice. William Crashaw, the father of the poet, protested in a sermon at Paul's Cross. Two years later, he again rebuked the players for their opposition to the Virginian expedition, which he declared to be due to pique at the godly determination of the adventurers to take no company to their plantation. There were other 'seditious sectists' at work, and a leading actor of the Queen's men, who was also a prolific dramatist, Thomas Heywood, took up the cudgels for his 'quality' against these 'over-curious heads' in an elaborate Apology for Actors, which must have been written about 1608, but was not published until 1612. This resumes, effectively enough, most of the arguments both of the humanists and of popular disputants such as Nashe, but does not contribute anything very novel upon a subject as to which, indeed, little novel remained to be said, with the exception of a[263] reminder to the preachers that, whatever the Fathers may have thought about the Roman ludi, nothing had been said against them by either Christ or his Apostles.[819] Heywood dwells, of course, upon the established position to which by his time actors had attained in the favour both of English and of foreign sovereigns. But he is not blind to the abuses of his profession, and while lauding many of his fellows as men 'of substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-keepers, and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', regrets the licentiousness of others, as well as a growing tendency to inveigh upon the stage both against 'the state, the court, the law, the citty', and against 'private men's humors'.[820] Heywood was answered by one I. G. in A Refutation of the Apologie for Actors (1615), which in its turn covered much ground already trod; and a year later another actor, Nathan Field, was moved to a Remonstrance by some personal attacks levelled at himself and the rest of the King's men by Thomas Sutton, minister of St. Mary Overies. This brings us to the limit of the Shakespearian period, and in the distance still lie the final and portentous presentation of the whole Puritan case in Prynne's Histriomastix (1633), the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament, and the reaction of the Restoration under which men looked back to the stage of James and Charles as a model of decency and order.[821]

There is one clear heritage of English Puritanism from the Genevan theocracy, and that is the claim of the ministers, not only to direct the consciences of their flocks, but also to call upon the municipal authorities to put down with the might of the secular arm whatever in the life of the community did not conform to the religious and ethical standards which they preached. Most of the sermons and pamphlets of 1576-83 are quite deliberately addressed to the 'magistrate', with a view to the exercise of the regulative powers conferred by the proclamation of 1559 and the statute of 1572 for the remedy of the abuses of playhouses, and if possible to the complete suppression of playing. The City fathers, although Gosson railed against their 'sleepiness', were by no means deaf to these appeals.[822] Many of them had themselves adopted Puritanic principles. And apart from strictly religious considerations, they had their own reasons for looking with disfavour upon plays. They were husbands and employers, and their wives and apprentices wasted both time and money in gadding abroad to theatres, at a risk to their virtue and[264] even their honesty. They were dignitaries, and were not invariably treated with respect upon the boards. They were the health authority, and even if plays did not stir the divine wrath to send a plague or an earthquake, the crowded assemblies certainly helped to spread infection, and the rickety structures brought hazard to life and limb.[823] They were responsible for the maintenance of law and order, and plays were not only the occasions for frays and riots, but also brought bad characters together, and were suspected of affording secret opportunities for the hatching of sedition. It must be borne in mind that, so far as the external abuses of theatres go, the complaints of their bitterest enemies are fairly well supported by independent evidence. The presence of improper persons in the theatres is amply testified to by the satirists, and by references in the plays themselves.[824] Intrigues and other nefarious transactions were carried on there[825]; and careful mothers, such as Lady Bacon, anxiously entreated their sons to choose more salutary neighbourhoods for their lodgings.[826] Some serious disturbances of the peace of which theatres were the centres will require attention in the next chapter, while law-court and other records preserve the memory of both grave crimes and minor misdemeanours of which they were the scenes.[827] Like the bawdy-houses, they[265] appear to have been at the mercy of the traditional rowdiness of the prentices on Shrove Tuesday.[828]

On divers grounds therefore the Corporation of London seem to have reached the conclusion, about 1582 if not before, that the only way to reform the theatres was to end them. Probably they were influenced by the views of some of their permanent officials, of whom Thomas Norton, Remembrancer from 1571 to 1584, although himself a part-author of the tragedy of Gorboduc, and William Fleetwood, Recorder from 1571 to 1594, are known to have been determined opponents of the stage. The voluminous reports on city affairs, which Fleetwood was in the habit of sending to Lord Burghley, add much to our knowledge of a critical period.[829] Had the matter rested wholly with the Corporation, the policy of prohibition[266] would doubtless have been brought into effective operation. But it did not rest wholly with them. Not only were the most important theatres, from 1576, outside the limits of their jurisdiction, but also account had to be taken of an authority greater even than that of the City of London, the authority, ill-defined but imperative, of the Privy Council. And the Privy Council was, as a rule, swayed by principles and personalities by no means enamoured of prohibition. Of this the anti-stage pamphleteers show themselves fully conscious. Gosson, addressing his Schoole of Abuse to the Lord Mayor for the time being, acknowledges the difficulties which the 'letters of commendations' held by the companies put in the way of reform, and laments that players share the natures of the cuttle-fish and the torpedo, so that 'how many nets so euer ther be layde to take them, or hookes to choke them, they haue ynke in their bowels to darken the water, and sleights in their budgets, to dry up the arme of euery magistrate'. In Playes Confuted, he prayed for 'some noble Scipio in the courte' to drive the 'daunsing chaplines of Bacchus' out of England, and in a prefatory epistle to Sir Francis Walsingham he declared that the cleansing of the Augean stable was only possible for 'some Hercules in the court, whom the roare of the enimy can never daunt'. No doubt he hoped that the combined functions of a Scipio and of a Hercules would be undertaken by Walsingham himself.[830] Anthony Munday is even more explicit. He urges the city not to be daunted by 'particular men of auctoritie', and inveighs against the nobility who 'restraine the magistrates from executing their office', in order to pleasure servants whom they are unwilling to maintain themselves, and therefore license to roam throughout the country, publishing their 'mametree' in every temple of God, and begging alms in their masters' names from house to house.[831] The Council, however, were by no means disposed to give the City a free hand, and with themselves the policy of prohibition made little headway. They had, indeed, to reconcile conflicting considerations. They too, like the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, feared the opportunities for riots and seditions which the theatres afforded;[832] and the danger of the spread of plague was their constant preoccupation. Moreover, they were especially concerned to see that the players did not touch upon matters of state or religion, and to visit with sharp[267] chastisement any offences in these directions. They frequently, therefore, thought it well to intervene with temporary inhibitions of plays, particularly during hot summers when the anticipations of plague were at their greatest. But they were never prepared to assent to the chronic request of the City that these inhibitions should be made permanent. After all, the people must have their recreation, and, what was more, the Queen must have hers.[833] And if her majesty's 'solace' at Christmas was to be provided upon economical terms, it was necessary that the players should be allowed facilities for 'exercise', and incidentally for earning their living, through public performances.[834] In a sense, therefore, it was really the Court play which saved the popular stage, and enabled the companies to establish themselves in a position which neither preachers nor aldermen could shake. One may suppose that the members of the Privy Council did not all quite see eye to eye on the theatrical question; and there were occasional fluctuations of policy which caused alarm in the tiring-rooms. Even in the high quarters where the natural attitude to the drama was that of humanism, Puritan sympathies were sometimes to be found. Leicester, indeed, who frequently curried favour with the Puritans, failed them in this respect, as may be seen from a letter written in 1581 by John Field, minister of the word of God, and author of an Exhortation on the fall of Paris Garden, in which he rebukes Leicester for his patronage of plays 'to the great greife of all the godly'.[835] Burghley may have been personally inclined to the views of his friend and correspondent William Fleetwood, although even at the end of his long life he had not forgotten the services of the stage to his earlier statecraft.[836] It was to Walsingham that Gosson[268] looked as a Scipio and a Hercules in the dedication of his Playes Confuted in 1583, but Gosson was unlucky in his dedications, and in the following year Walsingham was officially concerned in the formation of the company of Queen's players. One would gladly know who was the 'notable wise counseller' dead in 1591, who, according to Sir John Harington, stood up for the play of The Cards, against those who thought that it was 'somewhat too plaine'. I should not be surprised if this were Walsingham.[837] By virtue of their offices, the Lord Chamberlain and Vice-Chamberlain, who were responsible for Court entertainments, were almost bound to take the players' part. But there was a moment of trepidation when Lord Cobham, who was known to be touched with Puritanism, succeeded for a few months in 1596 the 'old lord', Henry Lord Hunsdon, on whom the companies had learnt to rely. There is nothing to show that Elizabeth, beyond holding out for her 'solace', took any personal interest in the controversy. That very irritating document, the Acts of the Privy Council, which is little more than a letter-book, does not record whether she was present or not at the Council meetings at which theatrical affairs were discussed. But it must be assumed that the general attitude of the Council had her concurrence. Certainly she had no Puritan tendencies, and on the rare occasions on which her interference can be traced she was acting in the interests of one or other favoured company.[838]

[269]

IX
THE STRUGGLE OF COURT AND CITY

THE foregoing chapter has endeavoured to define the practical and spiritual forces which underlay the controversy between Puritanism and the stage; it remains to study the working of the constitutional forms through which, as a resultant of those forces, the 'quality' of the player ultimately established itself as a recognized constituent of the polity. And first, for the social status of the players. The wittier Puritans were fond of twitting them, on the ground that, if all men had their rights, they would count as no better than vagabonds. There is little more than a verbal truth in the taunt. No doubt, in certain circumstances, players, like minstrels before them, might fall within the danger of a series of statutes which, in the course of formulating the provisions of a nascent poor-law, attempted also to regulate the wandering elements of society. It was part of the mediaeval conception of things to assign to every individual a definite function in the social organism and to expect from him the regular fulfilment of that function. To such a theory the migratory beggar and the masterless man were naturally repugnant. But it was primarily a shortage of labour towards the end of the fourteenth century which brought about the first serious endeavour to check vagabondage by legislation, and to compel the able-bodied vagrant, through the machinery of local government, to return to the village of his domicile and there take up again the service which he had abandoned. This policy was continued and developed by the Tudors. The principal act which was operative, when Elizabeth came to[270] the throne, had been passed under Henry VIII in 1531. It provided that any able-bodied beggar or idle vagrant, having no land or master, and using no lawful merchandise, craft, or mystery for his living, should be brought before a justice of the peace, or in a corporate town the mayor, who should see him whipped at the cart-tail, and then, if a beggar, returned to his place of birth or residence, there to work as a true man ought to do, or if an idle person but no beggar, either put to labour or set in the stocks until he found surety to go to service. This statute was replaced by one of greater severity in 1547, under which vagabonds were to be branded and put to forced labour as slaves. But it was revived in 1550 and kept in force by frequent renewals, of which the last was under Elizabeth herself in 1563. In these Acts there is no mention by name either of players or of minstrels.[839] It may, however, be assumed that the quality of a player would no more be regarded than that of a tinker or a pedlar as a merchandise, craft or mystery, and the fact that some of the early companies were composed of men for whom playing had originally been subsidiary to a regular craft would hardly serve them, after they had obviously deserted that craft and were travelling abroad to make a living by the arts of migratory entertainment.[840] Their actual safeguard was quite a different one. By definition the vagabond was a masterless man, and with the exception of a few bodies of town players, who probably did not wander far from their settled habitations, the Tudor companies were not masterless. They were all under the protection of some nobleman or gentleman of position, as whose 'servants' they passed, bearing with them, no doubt, at any rate after this was required by a proclamation of 1554, a 'certificate' or letter of recommendation as proof of identity.[841] No doubt the relation in the larger companies[271] of lord and servants was little more than a nominal one. The strict regulations of Henry VII against retainers who were not household servants had become relaxed with the disappearance of the conditions which necessitated them.[842] The players would wear a livery or badge, and would do some courtesy of attendance on festival occasions. The lord might intervene to help them if they got into an undeserved difficulty, and would see to it that they did not bring his name into bad repute. There was no economic dependence; the players lived by their earnings, not by wages. But they were not reckoned as masterless men.

A secure status, however, did not mean complete absence of control. The players had no free hand to play just when and where and what they liked. They were subject to certain conveniences as to times and seasons and localities, to precautions against breaches of the peace and dangers to public health and safety. Above all, in a time of political and ecclesiastical ferment, the sentiments of their plays had to be such as would stand the scrutiny of a government by no means tolerant of criticism. On these matters it was not, except in so far as heresy was constituted by Acts of Uniformity and the like, with statutes that they had to deal, but with the administrative regulations of the local and central executives. All over the country there were bodies charged with a general responsibility for public order, public safety, and public decency, as the Elizabethans conceived it. In the rural districts there were the justices of the peace, with powers more considerable than clearly defined; in the towns there were mayors and corporations, also acting as justices, but armed with a further authority derived both from custom and from charters, and with a very clear intention to use this authority to the full in the government of their communities. The regulation of amusements had always been regarded as falling within the scope of municipal activity, and in the end it proved a fortunate thing for the players, in London at any rate, that the central authority found itself driven by the pressure of circumstances to take over a large measure of the responsibility for stage control from the hands of the corporations.

For it need hardly be said that in the Tudor scheme of[272] things the power of the local authorities was an immediate rather than an ultimate one. Both the justices of the peace and, for all their charters, the corporations had to reckon with a considerable and growing measure of central control, resting upon the royal prerogative, and claiming not merely to further define, but also in some respects to replace, dispense with, or override legislative enactments. This development of regulation from the centre is, of course, an established feature of sixteenth-century history. It arose out of many convergent causes, the strength of the monarchy in face of the great houses weakened by civil contention, the personal qualities of the Tudor sovereigns, the urgent need of fresh machinery to deal with problems created by ecclesiastical changes, by the growth of the press, by the growth of the stage itself, for which the legal and administrative traditions of the Middle Ages provided no solution. And if it was largely unconstitutional and destined ultimately to bring the prerogative to perdition, this did not in the meantime affect the position of the actor, who would certainly be fined and imprisoned if he did not obey, or to any great extent that of the justices or corporations, who might prove recalcitrant or at least argumentative, but in the long run found it profitable to obey also. There were three main avenues through which the royal prerogative found exercise. The first of these was the ancient procedure of Chancery. The will of the sovereign might be expressed in a writ or mandate, directed to the subject, and stamped for greater solemnity with the impression of the Great Seal of England. Such a writ was generally used in granting licences, in conferring offices, or in issuing commissions to execute functions on behalf of the Crown. It took the form of letters patent, so called because they were intended as open communications to all whom they might concern. These were handed to the recipient after an elaborate diplomatic process during which they passed successively under the royal Sign Manual, the Signet, the Privy Seal, and the Great Seal itself, while a copy was enrolled in the Court of Chancery, and thus became matter of public record.[843][273] Secondly, there was the proclamation. This was in theory the formal announcement either of an executive act, or of the royal intention as to the enforcement or interpretation of a statute. In practice it tended more and more, during the Tudor period, itself to take the place of a statutory enactment. Proclamations were made by direction of the sovereign in council, and were enrolled, like the patents, in Chancery. Both proclamations and, at a comparatively late stage, patents were made use of in the process of regulating players. But they were largely supplemented by the third method through which the royal prerogative expressed itself, namely that day-by-day activity of the Privy Council in the general co-ordination and supervision of affairs, which has already been described.[844] The Council Register itself and the local archives, especially those of London, are full of letters from head-quarters to justices and corporations, directing them as to the allowance or inhibition of plays in general, or calling for special action in cases in which a company of players had provoked a breach of the peace or had brought themselves under suspicion of heresy or sedition. No doubt the corporations, in particular, would often have preferred to act upon their own discretion. Sometimes they argued or protested or deferred compliance. But the Council had the powers of the Star Chamber behind them; and if in the end they resorted to more direct ways of control, this was probably rather for the sake of avoiding administrative friction than because they found any ultimate difficulty in imposing their will by means of correspondence upon reluctant magistrates.

It was, of course, until plague and Puritanism became serious preoccupations, with the subject-matter of plays, rather than the details of times and places, that the central government mainly concerned itself; and it was apparently the disturbed ecclesiastical position of the later years of Henry VIII that directed attention to the drama as a subject of state instead of merely local concern. I have dealt elsewhere with the encouragement given to controversial interludes by Cromwell and Cranmer, with the swing of the pendulum when the controversialists began to apply themselves, not merely to points of church government which Henry desired to alter, but with heresies which he was not prepared[274] to adopt, and with the proclamations and counter-proclamations and the interventions by the Privy Council to which the problem gave rise under Edward VI and Mary.[845] Some additional material which has more recently been published throws light upon the regulative functions of the City of London in particular during 1549 and 1550.[846] More than once the prevalence of 'lewd' and 'naughty' plays on this side or that led to the complete inhibition of all performances for a season. There is also some trace of a system of licences for particular companies. It is not clear why Lord Dorset should have thought it necessary to obtain a special authorization from the Council for his men to play in his presence only in 1551.[847] A forged licence taken from some players and sent to Sir William Cecil in 1552 may perhaps have purported to have been nothing more than such a certificate from a lord as was required by the proclamation of 1554.[848] Two general conclusions may be drawn from these early records. One is that, although the local authorities were certainly responsible for the regulation of plays as a matter of public order, they were not always in a position to make their control effective without an appeal to head-quarters. The performances were popular and the players had inherited from the minstrels a prescriptive right to municipal encouragement and reward, rather than interference. And if they bore the badge of some great personage, himself perhaps a privy councillor, one may be sure that Dogberry and Verges would think twice before they ventured on a rebuff. Even in London the Lord Mayor had to appeal to the Privy Council in 1543 to get certain joiners imprisoned and reprimanded for playing on a Sunday.[849] And if this was so in London, where the Lord Mayor had certainly a firm seat in his saddle, it was naturally still more so in the county areas, whose looser methods of government ultimately proved to have a very marked significance for the history of the London theatres. The[275] weak position of the Surrey justices, for example, is illustrated by a letter from Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, to Sir William Paget, Secretary of State, written on 5 February 1547, shortly after the death of Henry VIII. He asks that Paget or the Protector will intervene to prevent Lord Oxford's men, who have threatened 'to try who shall have most resort, they in game or I in earnest', from giving a play in Southwark at the moment when he sings his Dirige for the dead king; and he reports that one Master Acton, a justice of the peace, has attempted to stop the assembly, but the players 'smally regard' him, and 'press him to a peremptory answer, whether he dare lett them play or not; whereunto he answereth neither yea nor nay as to the playing'.[850]

The second point is that, although the Privy Council might intervene to help the magistrates, their own primary interest at this time was in the exclusion of heresy and sedition from plays. This shows itself in two ways. Individual plays are brought before the Council itself, and lead to disciplinary measures. But there is also the germ of a censorship. At first it is exercised through the local authorities. The London aldermen in 1549 appoint two of the Corporation officers, known as the Secondaries of the Compters, who are bound under recognizances to 'peruse' plays and report upon them to the Lord Mayor. But in the following year the London players themselves are bound only to perform plays licensed by the King himself or the Privy Council, and this too is the basis of Edward's proclamation of 1551 and Mary's of 1553.[851] The former requires a licence 'in writing vnder his maiesties signe, or signed by vj of his highnes priuie counsail'; the latter 'her graces speciall licence in writynge for the same'. By 1557, however, another change has taken place, and the duty of licensing is apparently delegated to the ecclesiastical authorities, that is to say the Commissioners for Religion.[852] These licences are of course for individual plays, and distinct from any general licences needed by a company in order to enable it to play at all.

When Elizabeth came to the throne she was perhaps more able than her predecessor to rely upon the municipalities in[276] carrying out her ecclesiastical policy. It is true that the Act of Uniformity, like Edward's before her, forbade any words in the derogation, depraving or despising of the Book of Common Prayer, and committed the enforcement of this prohibition to the ecclesiastical ordinary as well as to the justices of assize and the civic mayors. It is true also that the general powers of jurisdiction in cases of sedition given to the High Commission by the patent of 19 July 1559 are wide enough to cover 'words or showings' as well as 'books'. But the elaborate provisions for a literary censorship under the Commission contained in the ecclesiastical Injunctions of the same year extend to printed matter only, and for the detailed supervision of plays the Government was at first content to look to the magistrates.[853] There seem to have been two proclamations. The first, which is not extant, is said to have been made on 7 April 1559 and to have restrained plays for a stated period. The second, of the following 16 May, was intended as a permanent regulation. After noting that the usual season for interludes was now over until 1 November, and the inconvenience of some recently given, it goes on to forbid any, whether in public or private, which have not been licensed by the Mayor in a town, or in a shire by the Lord Lieutenant or two justices for the immediate locality. The licensing authorities are enjoined to allow no handling of matters of religion or state in plays, and the nobility and gentry are warned to take order that 'their seruantes being players' shall respect the proclamation. It will be observed that only the licensing of plays and not the status of players was covered. Status was left as the Act of 1531, which was still in force and was explicitly confirmed in 1563, had left it. The position was then as follows. Players, at any rate when they performed away from home, must have a licence either from their lord or possibly from the local magistrates. Whether at home or abroad, they were subject to the regulation of the magistrates as to times and places, and the precautions needed to secure public health and order. In addition, the magistrates had a special responsibility under the proclamation for allowing their individual plays, but this, in rural areas where there were many Justice Shallows, might alternatively be exercised by the Lord Lieutenant for the county as a whole. It is, I suppose, a licence for their repertory rather than for their travelling that Lord Robert Dudley asked for his men[277] from the Earl of Shrewsbury, who as President of the North stood in the place of a Lord Lieutenant for Yorkshire, about a month after the issue of the proclamation. He calls it, indeed, a licence to play, but he dwells on the 'tollerable and convenient' character of their pieces, and it is easy to see how one conception of the purpose for which a licence was required would slip into another.

The history of play-licensing in London, which must now be followed in detail, really turns upon an attempt of the Corporation, goaded by the preachers, to convert their power of regulating plays into a power of suppressing plays, as the ultimate result of which even the power of regulation was lost to them, and the central government, acting through the Privy Council and the system of patents, with the Master of the Revels as a licenser, took the supervision of the stage into its own hands. The issue does not define itself very clearly until the 'seventies, perhaps partly because the Puritan sentiment took some time to grow, and partly because the earlier years are much less fully documented than the later ones.

As with all narratives pieced together out of fragmentary records, care must be taken not to lay too much stress on merely negative evidence with regard to any particular point. The two chief sources of information are the Register of the Privy Council, which contains minutes of letters written to the City Corporation or the Justices of Middlesex and Surrey and of other action taken by the Council with regard to plays, and the City Remembrancia, a book containing copies of letters passing between the Corporation and the Council or other persons of importance. But neither record is continuous during the whole controversy, and although the two frequently help each other out, some of the gaps unfortunately synchronize. In particular there is a comparative absence of information upon the first part of the reign, since the Register only begins to help in 1573 and the Remembrancia in 1580. It is possible, therefore, that the Court and the City may have come to grips on the vexed question of stage-control in London somewhat earlier than is now apparent.

It is certain, indeed, that some negotiations had taken place between the two authorities before the period to which the documents mainly relate. These are appealed to in a City letter of 1574, and it is claimed that, in view of the objections of the Corporation, the Council had 'long since' refrained from pressing a proposal that some private person should be nominated to license playing-places within the City.[278] This is the first mention of a new type of 'licence', distinct from those of companies as such, or of plays as such, and presumably owing its origin to the general local regulative powers of the magistrates. The date of the proposal is not given, and as regards the years 1558-71, there is only occasional evidence of any serious interference, other than such as was necessitated by plague, with the activities of the players, although it is clear that the rulers of the City were exercising the powers of supervision with which the proclamation of 1559 invested them. There is an indication that plays were suspended by a precept from the Lord Mayor in the September of the first and greatest of the Elizabethan plague-years, 1563; and in the following February Edmund Grindal, the Bishop of London, wrote to Sir William Cecil, pointing out that the players set up their bills daily, and especially on holidays, and that the excessive resort of young people to their performances could only be a cause of infection. Both on religious and on hygienic grounds, he urged the desirability of inhibiting plays by proclamation, either permanently or at least for a complete year, and not only within the City, but for a circuit of three miles outside its boundaries. Penalties should, he thought, be imposed for disobedience, not only upon the players, but also upon the owners of the houses where they played. The cessation of the plague probably made it unnecessary for Cecil to entertain the suggestion seriously; but it is interesting to observe that the policy of the Puritans, with whom Grindal was in sympathy, was already in 1564 one of complete suppression, and also that the comparative inefficacy of measures limited to the City, in view of the populous suburbs outside the London jurisdiction and subject only to the Middlesex or Surrey Justices and to the Privy Council, had been already realized.

During the next few years there is little to record, although if The Children of the Chapel Stript and Whipt, alleged to have been printed in 1569, were ever recovered, it might throw more light upon the growing flood of Puritan sentiment than is afforded by Warton's scanty quotations. There was some plague in each of the three years 1568, 1569, and 1570, and in the summer of 1569 the City suspended plays, as a precautionary measure, from the last day of May to the last day of September. There was another suspension on 27 November 1571, for which plague is not alleged as a reason, but a few days later the Corporation appear to have changed their minds and licences were issued during this winter for performances by Leicester's and Abergavenny's men.

[279]

The year 1572 is marked by two measures of government, each of which had its reaction on the status of players throughout the country. The first entailed some regularization of the position of noblemen's companies. The fifteenth-century struggle between the power of the Crown and that of the great feudal houses had led to enactments forbidding subjects to attach to themselves, by the giving and taking of a livery or badge, retainers who were not in some bona-fide sense their own household servants or officers. The Acts against retainers had been continued up to the reign of Henry VII, who had confirmed them in 1487; and had then, upon the firm establishment of the royal supremacy by the Tudors, largely fallen into desuetude, in spite of a proclamation of 1545, already noticed, which was intended to call renewed attention to them. They were, however, still technically operative, and a proclamation of 3 January 1572 announced an intention to enforce them from the following 20 February. Their relation to the players is shown by the fact that the company which had been performing under the Earl of Leicester's name immediately wrote to their lord, and, while making it clear that they did not expect any wages beyond the livery to which they had been accustomed, begged for a definite appointment as his household servants and for a licence to certify the same as a security against interference under the revived statutes during their annual travels in the provinces. A second proclamation of the same character was issued on 19 April 1583. More important than the proclamation, but probably representing the same policy, was the repeal by Parliament of the Vagabond Act of 1531 and the substitution of a new statute, which came into force upon 24 August. This included in a definition of vagabonds, not only 'juglers, pedlars, tynkers and petye chapmen', but also 'fencers, bearewardes, comon players in enterludes, and minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realme, or towardes any other honorable personage of greater degree'. Specific power was, however, given for the issue of local travelling licences by mayors and county justices. So far as noblemen's players were concerned, the Act was presumably no more than declaratory of their existing position. But the knight or plain gentleman lost his privilege of protection altogether; and in future, if his servants wished to travel as players, they had to get their licence from the magistrates. As a matter of fact, with the exception of those forming part of the royal household itself, practically all the companies of professional players which appeared in London during Elizabeth's reign were noblemen's servants. A few performances[280] were given at Court in early years by Sir Robert Lane's men, but these disappeared or transferred their services to a more honourable personage upon the legislation of 1572.[854] The most important of the provincial companies which did not come to London also bore the names of noblemen, and although many others were entertained by mere knights and gentlemen, it is probable that, at any rate after 1572, these did not range very widely from their head-quarters.[855] The necessity of procuring a fresh licence for every shire would doubtless, as was its intention, afford an obstacle to free circulation.[856] Apart from its defining clause, the main object of the Act of 1572 was to try once more the experiment, which had failed under Edward VI, of treating vagabondage with an increased severity. The summary whipping by individual magistrates was abolished except for children. An adult offender was to be committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and then, unless he could find a master to take him for a year's service, to be whipped and branded as a rogue by boring through the ear. On a second offence he was to be adjudged a felon, unless he could secure service for two years, and a third offence was to be treated as felony without benefit of clergy. The classification of unlicensed minstrels as rogues led to the insertion of a clause confirming the ancient privilege of the house of Dutton to issue licences within the county of Chester;[857] and another qualifying[281] provision, the importance of which in connexion with players has been overlooked, safeguarded the validity, as overriding the statute, of licences passed under the Great Seal of England. It is in 1572 also that symptoms of a conflict of judgement between the City and the Privy Council first declare themselves. The annalist Harrison records that in this year plays were 'banished' out of London for fear of infection, and on 20 May a minute of the Court of Aldermen records that letters had been received from the Council for renewed allowance under reasonable conditions, and that, in place of immediate compliance, a letter of protest, based on the peril of assemblies during a hot summer, was to be sent to Lord Burghley. A somewhat similar situation seems to have developed in 1573, which made it necessary in July for the Council to write two letters to the Corporation, of which the second had a peremptory note about it, in order to obtain permission for some Italian players to exhibit an 'instrument of strange motions', or puppet-show. The following year was evidently one of considerable friction. On 2 March the Corporation wrote to the Lord Chamberlain with reference to a suggestion that the licensing of playing-places within the City should be put in the hands of one Holmes. They maintained their earlier refusal, already mentioned, to commit such a matter to any private person, and added that they had other offers for the licensing rights on terms that would be profitable 'to the relefe of the poore in the hospitalles'. The terms of the letter make it clear that they regarded the plan as one which, besides being practically inconvenient, would entail a precedent 'farre extending to the hart of our liberties'. In the meantime plays were apparently inhibited, for on 22 March the Council wrote to inquire the causes of the restraint, 'to thintent their Lordships may the better aunswer suche as desyre to have libertye for the same'. It may be conjectured that the reply was unsatisfactory, for in May a remedy for which provision had been made by anticipation in the Vagabond Act of 1572 was resorted to, and a patent under the Great Seal was issued to the Earl of Leicester's men, which over-ruled the proclamation of 1559 and ignored the position of the Corporation altogether. By this the company received permission to play during the royal pleasure either within[282] London itself or within or without any other town throughout the country. The licence was only subject to two provisions. One was that there should be no performance during common prayer or during plague times in London; the other that all plays should be seen and allowed by the Master of the Revels. As the Master of the Revels was an officer of the royal household, subordinate to the Lord Chamberlain, the action taken practically amounted to a transference of control, so far as this particular company was concerned, from the Corporation to the Court itself. Nothing specific was said in the patent about the allowing of playing-places as distinct from the allowing of plays, and it may have left the Corporation with some reasonable discretion on this point. It is not known that a similar licence was issued to any other Elizabethan company besides Leicester's men, although this could hardly be definitely asserted without a complete examination of the Patent Rolls for the reign. My own impression is that the issue of the patent served its purpose by bringing the Corporation to a more reasonable frame of mind, and that it was not found necessary to repeat the experiment, at any rate exactly in the same form. On 22 July the Council issued a passport to 'the comedie plaiers' to go to London, and also wrote to the Corporation requiring their admission and favourable usage. I feel little doubt that the company in question were the Italians who had been at Windsor and Reading during the progress. In any case it may be taken for granted from the events of the following winter that the Corporation were now beaten, and yielded. But it can only have been with reluctance. The enforced toleration of the Italian players, who seem to have brought with them some female acrobats, had added strength to the Puritan criticisms. Thomas Norton, the City Remembrancer, writing a preface to a summary of City customs for the use of the new Lord Mayor, James Hawes, and dwelling on the need for better regulations against the contagion of the plague, lays special stress on the danger of 'the unnecessarie and scarslie honeste resorts to plaies' and of such assemblies as those attracted by 'the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tomblinge of the Italion weomen'. With a characteristic touch of Puritan logic he adds, 'To offend God and honestie, is not to cease a plague'. In fact, the increase of plague gave London a respite from plays during the winter. On 15 November the Privy Council wrote to the Justices of Middlesex, Essex, and Surrey to inhibit assemblies within ten miles of London until Easter; and the City hardly needed the stimulus of an 'admonition' from their lordships to[283] persuade them to adopt a similar course. They used the interval to enact an elaborate code for the regulation of plays, whose continuance in their midst, whether they liked it or not, they now saw to be inevitable. This took the form of an Act of Common Council, which is dated on 6 December 1574. The preamble sets out the various 'disorders and inconvenyences' which from the civic point of view had arisen from plays in the past, the unchaste and seditious speeches, the waste of money and interference with divine service, the accidents due to the fall of wooden structures and to the use of firearms upon the stage, the opportunities afforded by the performances for frays and quarrels, for purse-cutting, for the corruption of youth by 'previe and unmete contractes', for incontinency in the inner chambers of the 'greate innes' to which the stages were adjacent. It then proceeds to recite the recent inhibition for plague, and the need to provide against the renewal of such 'enormyties' upon the expected withdrawal of God's hand of sickness by securing that 'the laweful, honest and comelye use of plaies, pastymes and recreacions' should alone be permitted. The actual regulations are six in number. No unchaste, seditious, or otherwise improper plays were to be performed, upon a penalty of fourteen days' imprisonment and a fine of £5 for each offence. No play was to be shown which had not first been perused and allowed by such persons as the Lord Mayor and Aldermen might appoint. All playing-places and the persons in control of them were to be licensed by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. All licensees were to be bound to the City Chamberlain for the keeping of good order. No licence was to be operative during a restraint for sickness or other good reason, nor were plays to be given or spectators received during the usual times for divine service on Sundays and holidays. Every licensee was to make such contributions to the poor and sick of the City as might be agreed upon with the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. Machinery was provided for the recovery of penalties, which were also to be for the benefit of the poor and sick, and an exception was made for plays in private houses for which no money was taken. The only regulation to which these were to be subject was that against the introduction of unchaste and seditious matters.

It is often stated that the regulations of 1574 were followed in 1575 by a decree of the Corporation banishing players totally and finally from the confines of the City. This is, however, a mistake due to an erroneous endorsement of date upon some documents which belong in reality to about 1584.[284] The regulations remained operative for a considerable number of years. It is true that, reasonable and moderate as they were, they were not accepted as satisfactory either by the players or by their critics. After all, they left a good deal in working to the discretion of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen for the time being; and the players seem to have come to the conclusion that it would be better to be independent, as far as possible, of the risks attaching to this discretion. They turned to the easier conditions afforded by the lax county government of the suburbs. Within two or three years after the issue of the regulations two houses had been built expressly for playing in the liberty of Halliwell, which was within the jurisdiction of Middlesex; the Theatre in 1576 and the Curtain either in the same year or early in 1577. A third house, at Newington Butts on the Surrey side, was already obsolete about 1592, and seems to have been in existence by 1580. Exactly upon what considerations the private house in the Blackfriars was established, also in 1576, is less certain. But at any rate, as a result of the action of the Corporation in 1574, the main locality of the popular drama was shifted from the courtyards of the London inns to the specialized suburban theatres. It must not, of course, be supposed that the inns fell altogether into disuse. The new arrangement was not without its inconveniences for the players. During the summer months it was no hardship for pleasure-seekers to cross the river or the fields in search of a spectacle. But the short evenings and dirty lanes of winter left an advantage to the inns in the heart of the City, which was not lightly to be forgone. It was still, therefore, a matter of importance for the companies to maintain their footing in the City, even if this meant compliance with harassing restrictions, and they were ready to use all their influence with the masters whose liveries they wore, with the Lord Chamberlain, and with the Privy Council, in opposition to any further limitation of their privileges. So far as the summer was concerned, the building of the suburban theatres was a serious check to the policy of the Corporation. It was still the young folk of the City who crowded the audiences; nor could the greater distance diminish the danger of infection, the neglect of divine service, the waste of time and money, or the likelihood of falling into bad company by the way. In future it was not sufficient to make salutary regulations for London; it was necessary to secure, by invoking the goodwill of the county justices, or in default of that even the aid of the Privy Council itself, that similar order should be taken outside[285] the liberties. In this direction the City never met with more than very partial success. The county government was naturally not as closely organized as their own, and it was in the hands of officials and local gentlemen to whom the business considerations and the growing Puritan instincts of the City tradesmen did not appeal. Richard Young, in particular, who was a prominent member of the Middlesex bench for many years, earned an evil reputation as a persecutor of Puritans.[858] On the other hand, the Corporation might look for the co-operation of his colleague William Fleetwood, who was their own Recorder,[859] and machinery had been established between the two areas in the form of a joint committee or court of assistants for dealing with the control of plays and other matters of 'good order'.[860]

And if the players needed a refuge from the regulations of 1574, these must have been far from satisfactory to the Puritans. They fell very far short of the wholesome Genevan model. There was still toleration for the infamous histriones. Plays were not even wholly forbidden on Sundays and holy days, and the crowd flocked to the inn-yard gates, already open in spite of the regulation, while the bells were still ringing for divine service in the empty churches. And although the Corporation certainly did not mean to commit the licensing of plays to the Master of the Revels or to any court nominee, there is nothing to show that they had any intention of leaving it to the ministers. The rise of the 'sumptuous' theatres, monuments of triumphant wickedness, in the fields, could only add fuel to the wrath of the moralists. With Thomas White's Paul's Cross sermon and John Northbrooke's Treatise of 1577 begins a period of active diatribe in pulpit and pamphlet, the deliberate intention of which was to stir the 'magistrate' to a stronger sense of the moral responsibilities of government,[286] so that in London at least the letters of commendation furnished by godlessly-minded nobles for their servants might be disregarded and the accursed thing driven from the gates. And if only, through a Sidney or a Walsingham or a Leicester or a Burghley, the heart of the Council could be touched, it might perhaps even be driven from the suburbs also.

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[287] 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[288] 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[289] 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[290] 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[291] 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[292] 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[293] 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[294] 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[295] 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[296] 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[297] 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[298] 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[299] 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.[300] 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[301] 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[302] 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[303] 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.

If the system of patents did not render the London players independent of the Master of the Revels, still less did it abrogate from the ultimate authority of the King in Council. There is evidence that the theatres were closed in the autumn of 1605, during which plague was prevalent, and in this matter the responsibility for action still rested with the Council.[867] Unfortunately the full Register for the period 1603-13 is missing. A letter of 12 April 1607 from the City asking for a restraint is addressed to the Lord Chamberlain, whose function it would no doubt be to move the Council. In this or some later year the Whitefriars vestry seem also to have made a protest against the dumping of a play-house in their precinct.[868] That plague interfered with plays in 1608-9,[304] and 1609-10 also, is indicated by payments made to the King's men 'for their private practice' during these years. After 1610 London was no more troubled by the plague until 1625. Other reasons for inhibiting plays sometimes presented themselves. Some bad political indiscretions of 1608, which will require consideration in the next chapter, led to a temporary suspension of performances and a royal threat of permanent suppression. The untimely death of Prince Henry on 7 November 1612 threw a shadow upon all mirth, and the Council declared that 'these tymes doe not suite with such playes and idle shewes, as are daily to be seene in and neere the cittie of London, to the scandall of order and good governement at all occasions when they are most tollerable'. On 29 March 1615 the Council summoned representatives of all the London companies before them, to answer for playing in Lent, contrary to the express direction of the Lord Chamberlain given through the Master of the Revels. The records of suburban administration show the Middlesex Justices trying William Claiton, an East Smithfield victualler, on 20 December 1608, for suffering plays to be performed in his house during the night season, and on 1 October 1612 making an Order for Suppressing Jigs at the End of Plays, on the ground that the lewd jigs, songs, and dances so used at the Fortune led to the resort of cutpurses and other ill-disposed persons and to consequent breaches of the peace. Generally speaking, the problem of metropolitan stage-control may be said, during the reign of James I, to have reached a condition of comparative stability.

As regards the provinces there has been some misapprehension. The royal patents of course ran there, and there is one example of a patent issued to a company which actually had its head-quarters in a provincial town, that to the Children of the Queen's Chamber of Bristol, granted through the influence of Queen Anne, who had visited Bristol on her progress in 1613. But in the provinces the patented companies had no monopoly; side by side with them still wandered both unlicensed vagrants and the protected servants of noblemen. It is true that a Vagabond Act of 1604, which in the main and with certain exceptions, such as dropping the experiment of transportation, continued the policy of that of 1597, has been supposed to have withdrawn the privilege of protection.[869] But the provincial records show that in fact the noblemen's[305] companies were still afoot, and the provision of the statute itself, when carefully read, bears quite another interpretation.[870] It professes to be declaratory of that of Elizabeth on which 'divers doubtes and questions' had arisen, and after reciting the catalogue of persons who were to be classed as vagrants, which includes not only players of interludes, but also fencers, bearwards, minstrels, begging scholars and sailors, palmists, fortune-tellers, proctors, and others, it lays down that no authority shall be given by noblemen to 'any other person or persons'; that is surely, to any of the persons named in the catalogue, other than the players of interludes belonging to the noblemen and authorized under their hands and seals, for whom exception is specifically made therein.[871] The system of patents lent itself to certain abuses by travelling companies. Exemplifications were taken out in duplicate, and while the regular company remained in London, a quite distinct one would go on tour with one of the duplicates and, if necessary, an instrument of deputation from the man named in the patent of which it was a copy.[872] This practice was condemned in 1616 by a warrant of the Lord Chamberlain, to whose department the supervision of the issue of playing patents, as well as the general supervision of the Master of the Revels, appears to have been entrusted. The same document also condemns a company which had[306] been travelling under a 'warrant,' by which is apparently meant a licence under the royal sign manual or signet, used instead of an elaborate and doubtless expensive patent.[873] The signet licences were, however, such an obvious convenience that it was not long before they came to be regularly issued to players under the administration of the Lord Chamberlain himself.[874] This is a topic which lies rather beyond my purview. Nor can I dwell at any length on the evidence which shows that the licences given to players, like other assumptions of the royal prerogative, did not pass altogether without criticism from contemporary constitutionalists. I do not know whether it was a weak point that the statutory sanction taken for the patents in 1572 was not re-enacted in 1597. Their wording purported clearly enough to give the holders an authority to play both within and without the liberties and freedoms of any cities, towns, and boroughs. But Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, charging a Norwich jury on 4 August 1606, appears to have told the justices that the remedy of the abuses due to players was entirely in their hands—'they hauing no commission to play in any place without leaue: and therefore, if by your willingnesse they be not entertained, you may soone be rid of them'.[875] Too much stress must not be laid upon this, for Coke vigorously repudiated the accuracy of the printed edition of his charge from which the passage is taken.[876] But Prynne seems to insinuate a very similar argument in his Histriomastix of 1633,[877] and in any event the validity of the patents was terminated by the final ordinance for the suppression of plays passed by the Long Parliament on 9 February 1648, which enacted that 'all stage-players, and players of interludes, and common playes, are hereby declared to be, and are, and shall[307] be taken to be, rogues, ... whether they be wanderers or no, and notwithstanding any license whatsoever from the King or any person or persons to that purpose'.[878] We, however, are now concerned, not with the decadence of the stage, but with its palmy days under Elizabeth and James.

[308]

X
THE ACTOR'S QUALITY

THE history detailed in the foregoing chapter represents, from the point of view of the playing companies, a vexed progress towards that state of regulative security which, in the case of any industry dependent upon a permanent habitation and the outlay of capital, is the first condition of economic stability. More than once in the course of the struggle was an approach made to a settlement before it was actually reached. The rather obscure period of the first attempts of the companies to establish themselves in London was closed by the experimental patent to Leicester's men and the fairly reasonable City regulations of 1574. But the building of the suburban theatres on the one hand and the aggressiveness of the preachers on the other broke down the equilibrium; and there followed a period of acute conflict, of which the commission to the Master of the Revels in 1581, the City prohibition of 1582, the appointment of the Queen's men in 1583, and the controversy before the Privy Council in 1584 formed the final stages. The players were victorious, and the result of their victory was an assured position under the Council and the Master of the Revels, which was not indeed wholly accepted by the City, and was seriously threatened in 1596 and 1597, but only to be the more firmly established in the[309] latter year when the central government assumed direct responsibility for the regulation of the stage throughout the London area. I think that 1597 must be regarded as the critical moment at which complete stability was attained; the substitution under James I of letters patent for Star Chamber orders as the licensing machinery was of comparatively slight importance. From 1597 onwards it was definitely the Crown and not the local authorities which determined the companies to whom, subject to the detailed administrative control of the Privy Council, the Lord Chamberlain, and his subordinate the Master of the Revels, the privilege of playing within the neighbourhood of London should be conceded. And the policy of the Crown, alike under Elizabeth and under the Stuarts, was consistently in favour of such solace and recreation for the Sovereign and the subjects as the players ministered.

And so, tentatively up to 1584, and thereafter with a security which received final confirmation in 1597, the actor's occupation began to take its place as a regular profession, in which money might with reasonable safety be invested, to which a man might look for the career of a lifetime, and in which he might venture to bring up his children. As early as 1574 the patent to Leicester's men refers to playing as an 'arte and facultye'. In 1581 the Privy Council call it a 'trade'; in 1582 a 'profession'; in 1593 a 'qualitie'. The order of 1600 explicitly recognizes that it 'may with a good order and moderacion be suffered in a well gouerned estate'. So that when Fleetwood takes occasion in 1584 to recall that originally interludes were merely the by-work of 'men for their lyvings using other honest and lawfull artes, or reteyned in honest services', his argument has already become anachronistic, not wholly justified even as an antiquarian quibble, and still less as a serious appreciation of the administrative facts with which the writer had to deal. The player of the seventeenth century is in fact as necessary a member of the polity as the minstrel of the twelfth or the fourteenth; with this distinction that, in London at least, he is a householder and not a vagrant, and is therefore able to perform his function on a larger scale and with a fuller use of the methods and advantages of co-operation.

Obviously the player's status, like any other status in a civilized community, depended upon the observance on his side of certain obligations. He had to get his formal authority or licence for the exercise of his art. He had to respect certain prescribed limitations of times and seasons. He had to shoulder certain responsibilities imposed upon him as a[310] subject and a citizen. To each of these aspects of his calling some measure of detailed consideration is due.

A company of players was not in form, like a company of merchants, a guild or association of independent men. Its constitution had a mediaeval element, by which the derivation of playing from minstrelsy is strongly recalled. The nature of the licence which it must hold, at any rate if it desired to secure itself from the arbitrary discretion of local justices, was determined by statute. And this licence, whether it took the form of a warrant from a nobleman with the confirmation of the Master of the Revels, or of a royal licence by patent, was always such as to set up a relation of service between the company and a 'lord'. Nor is this relation to be dismissed as a mere empty formality. Probably the players of many country nobles and gentlemen continued to the end to consist of their ordinary household servants, who played only at Christmas and other times of recreation, and mainly at their lord's expense.[879] With the regular travelling companies, and particularly with the London companies, it was different. Financially, at least, they were independent. But even of these the 'service', though largely a legal fiction, was not wholly so. The Statutes of Retainers, kept alive by the proclamations of 1572 and 1583, forbade the maintenance of retainers who were not in some real sense household servants. The consequent application made by his players to the Earl of Leicester in 1572 does not suggest that the distinction was a very vital one. Certainly they guard themselves against being supposed to be asking their lord for a fee. But I think it is clear that the lord was expected to take some responsibility for the conduct of those who used his name, and to exercise some discipline in cases of misdemeanour. It was so in 1559, when the proclamation against unlicensed plays expressly called upon noblemen and gentlemen having players to see that it received attention from their servants. And it must still have been so in 1583, when the ill behaviour of Worcester's men at Norwich was effectively checked by a threat to certify their lord of their contempt. On the other hand there is abundant evidence that the lord might be looked to, in time of need, to intervene for the active furtherance of the interests of his players, over and above the general recommendation to favour for his sake, which is common form in the warrants of[311] protection and even in the royal patents. Thus Leicester is found writing to the President of the North on behalf of his men in 1559, Berkeley and Hunsdon to the City in 1581 and 1594 respectively, Nottingham to Middlesex in 1600, Lennox for his men in 1604; while the toleration of Oxford's and Worcester's men as a third London company in 1602 is expressly stated by the Privy Council to be due to the suit of the Earl of Oxford to the Queen. On their side the players no doubt had reciprocal courtesies, if no more, to pay. They wore the lord's livery and bore his badge.[880] Leicester's men refer to their livery in their letter of 1572, and in 1588 they had occasion to make their complaint to the Norwich Corporation of a local cobbler 'for lewd woords uttered ageynst the ragged staff'. A practice of offering up a prayer for the lord's well-being at the end of a performance was probably of ancient derivation, although whether it survived in the public theatres may perhaps be doubted.[881] There are instances, moreover, which suggest that, if the lord had need of players for the celebration of a wedding or other festivity, it was to his own servants that he would naturally turn. Thus Leicester had his company with him on his expedition to the Netherlands in 1585, and it was the Chamberlain's men who were called upon to play Henry IV at Hunsdon's house in the Blackfriars when he entertained the Flemish ambassador Verreyken in 1600. Similarly the royal companies, under both Elizabeth and James, formed integral parts of the royal household. They were attached to the Lord Chamberlain's department, and ranked as Grooms of the Chamber. And on one occasion at least, the visit of the Constable of Castile in 1604, the King's and Queen's men were actually assigned, in their capacity as Grooms, to the service of the distinguished strangers. Their exact status is, however, a matter of some difficulty. The old interlude players had held an independent position as such, with fees charged originally on the Exchequer and afterwards on the Chamber, at higher rates than those of[312] Grooms of the Chamber, and the liveries not of Grooms but of Yeomen. When they died out, they were replaced by the Queen's men of 1583. Howes tells us that these 'were sworn the queen's servants and were allowed wages and liveries as grooms of the chamber'. Howes is not quite a contemporary authority, and makes at least a technical mistake when he adds that until 1583 'the queene had no players'. If by 'wages' he means such annual fees as the interlude players had received, his statement is not confirmed by the Chamber Accounts, and it is not very likely that such payments were put back upon the Exchequer. It is true that fee-lists, not only Elizabethan but Jacobean, continue to include eight players of interludes at £3 6s. 8d. each, but I doubt whether this can be safely taken as evidence that the vacancies were filled.[882] No doubt, however, Howes was accurate on the main point, for Tarlton is described in a document of 1587 as an 'ordenary grome off her majestes chamber', and both Tarlton and Johnson as 'groomes of her majesties chamber' in another of 1588. I may add that in a list of the sixteen ordinary grooms who received allowances at Elizabeth's funeral are to be found the names of George Brian and John Singer.[883] These had been respectively a Chamberlain's and an Admiral's man, but both seem to have left playing before the date of the list, and I suspect that they retired on taking up these active Household appointments. For the King's players there is fuller testimony, although most of it is Caroline rather than Jacobean. The players are not called Grooms of the Chamber in their patents of appointment; but this proves nothing, as most of the Household posts were conferred, not by patent, but by swearing-in before the Lord Chamberlain or other high officer. But they received payment as 'his Maiesties Groomes of the Chamber and Players', when they waited upon the Spanish ambassador in 1604, and are entered in the Chamber Accounts for this payment as a distinct group, apart from the seven ordinary and four extraordinary grooms who were also assigned to the ambassador's service. The Queen's men, who waited upon the Flemish commissioners, are similarly described as being 'Groomes of the Chamber and the Queenes Players'. A few months before the King's, Queen's, and Prince's players had all received 4½ yards of red cloth each as a livery at the time of James's coronation procession.[884] Nearly a quarter of a century later we find very[313] similar liveries furnished for both the King's and the Queen's men by a series of Lord Chamberlain's warrants to his Wardrobe, which begin in 1622.[885] These liveries were renewed every two years and consisted at first of three, and afterwards of four, yards of bastard scarlet for a cloak, and a quarter of a yard of crimson velvet for a cap. These were of course state liveries, not the 'watching' liveries of medley-coloured cloth, at 5s. a yard as against the 26s. 8d. paid for the scarlet.[886] The Chamberlain's books of the same period also contain warrants for the swearing-in of new members of the King's and other companies, and in these the players are directed to be sworn as 'grooms of the chamber in ordinary without fee'.[887] These are, as I say, Caroline records, but if we may assume that the procedure which they disclose was no novelty, and that the royal players from 1583 onwards held this intermediate position as 'grooms in ordinary without fee' between the ordinary and the extraordinary Grooms of the Chamber, we get an explanation of their status which, on the assumption that Howes was not quite well informed, is at least consistent with all the few known facts.

The times and seasons at which plays might be given formed, of course, one of the chief battle-grounds in the controversy with the preachers; and it was here that the Puritans, routed on the main issue of the campaign, were able to secure their principal victory. From the beginning it was an understood thing that plays must not be given during the hours of divine service, either on Sundays, or on the Saints' days, which continued long after the Reformation to be observed as public holidays. This, however, did not prevent the audiences from gathering, so that the play-houses were already full, while the bells were still ringing in the empty services.[888] The City regulations of 1574 attempted to remedy this scandal by extending the prohibition to the opening of the doors. The same point is made in the 'Remedies' put forward by the City advocates in 1584. But there was a practical difficulty, which increased when the theatres in the distant fields or over the water came into use. Afternoon prayer did not begin until 2 p.m., and if the theatres waited until 4 p.m., the performances were not[314] over, except in the height of summer, before dark, and the audiences must make their way home as best they could. The City 'Remedy' for this was a shortening of the plays; but in 1594 Lord Hunsdon suggested that to begin at 2 instead of 4 p.m. might after all be the least of two evils, and this seems to have been the solution ultimately adopted.[889] The proviso against playing in time of common prayer, which finds a place in the licence to Leicester's men of 1574, is not repeated in any of the Jacobean licences, with the exception of Queen Anne's personal warrant to her provincial company in 1606.

Obviously the clash with divine service became of minor importance when the Puritans had made good their protest against plays on Sundays, and when, on the other hand, the theatres came to be open on every week-day, instead of principally on holidays. Both of these processes were complete before the final settlement of the status of players was arrived at.[890] It was the failure to exclude Sundays that above all things made the City regulations of 1574 inadequate in the eyes of the preachers, and formed the leading topic of their railings against the lukewarmness of the 'magistrates'. In the City itself they had gained this point at least by 1581, with the assent of the Privy Council, who, while pressing for the toleration of plays both on ordinary week-days and on holidays, was quite prepared to concede the sanctity of the Sabbath. With the potent aid afforded by the ruin of Paris Garden at a Sunday baiting, the City were able about 1583 to get the principle extended to the suburbs, although both in 1587 and[315] in 1591 the Privy Council had to call the attention of the county justices to the neglect of the regulation.[891] In Southwark there is mention of a disturbance at a play on Sunday as late as 11 June 1592, but as the Lord Mayor intervened, this can hardly have been at a regular theatre, for there was only the Rose, which was outside his jurisdiction. On the other hand, the evidence of Henslowe's Diary, as interpreted by Dr. Greg, shows that the prohibition was strictly observed at the theatres under his control between 1592 and 1597, and also that the Sunday abstinence was fully compensated for by continuous playing on every other day of the week.[892] It is probable that the proclamation against Sunday plays, issued by James I as one of the first acts of his reign, did no more, so far as London was concerned, than reaffirm an already accepted practice. More puzzling is the provision in the Council order of 1600, whereby each of the two privileged companies was limited to performances on two days in each week. It must be exceedingly doubtful whether this limitation was ever in fact observed. There is no evidence in Henslowe's Diary of any slackening in the output of new plays by the Admiral's men after 1600. And there is no corresponding limitation in the Jacobean patents. Moreover, an agreement entered into by Queen Anne's men in June 1615 specifically contemplates performances upon six days a week.

The companies were also expected not to play during Lent. This limitation may have been traditional. It first becomes explicit in the Privy Council's permit of 1578 to the Italian company of Martinelli Drusiano, which is expressed as lasting to the first week in Lent. In the following year a general inhibition for the coming and all subsequent Lents was decreed by the Council. The entries in Henslowe's Diary show some observance of the rule during the last decade of the sixteenth century. Strange's men in 1592 played right through Lent, with the exception of Good Friday. The Admiral's men, on the other hand, during 1595 to 1600, seem regularly to have[316] broken off for some weeks during Lent. In 1595 and 1596 the interval covered all but the first few days; in 1597 it was less than three weeks, and thereafter the company played three days a week up to Easter. A reservation was made for Lent by the Council order of 1600, and in 1601 the Council sent a special instruction to the Lord Mayor to stop plays at St. Paul's and the Blackfriars during the penitential season. Presumably the same practice prevailed under James I, for the permission to resume playing in April 1604 is expressed as motived by 'the time of Lent being now passt', while on 29 March 1615 representatives of the London companies were summoned before the Privy Council, to answer for playing in Lent contrary to an express direction given them by the Lord Chamberlain through the Master of the Revels.[893] Some light is thrown on this proceeding by the fact that two years later each of the companies undertook to pay the Master of the Revels 44s. 'for a Lenten dispensation'.[894]

A Privy Council letter of 1591 imposes one other curious limitation, with which the Puritans at any rate can have had nothing to do, upon the players. They are to lie idle upon Thursdays and leave that day free for bear-baitings and similar pastimes, which were 'allwayes accustomed and practized upon it'. I am not sure whether the claim of the bearwards to Thursday really went back beyond 1583, when it seems to have become desirable, owing to the impulse to Puritan sentiment given by the Paris Garden accident, to substitute some other day for the Sunday upon which baitings had formerly been usual. Nor does it seem that the attempt to give a special protection to the royal 'game' permanently maintained itself. The Admiral's men, in spite of Edward Alleyn's interest in the Bear Garden, certainly did not yield the Thursdays from 1594 to 1597, and when about 1614 Henslowe and Jacob Meade had occasion to combine playing and baiting in the Hope, they had to insert special stipulations in their agreements with the actors, in order to secure one day a fortnight for the bears.[895]

[317]

Obviously the privileges given to players were not intended to exempt them from the ordinary duties and responsibilities of citizenship. In the first place, they were called upon to make their contributions to local burdens in the districts in which they set up their play-houses. To this they had probably no objection; on the contrary, they more than once found that a readiness to pay their tithes for the use of the poor was an effective method of smoothing away difficulties with local officials.[896] Nor had they less to gain than others from a reasonable expenditure of money on the repair of the highways.[897]

And secondly, they had to exercise a constant watchfulness against the danger of allowing their play-houses to become the centres of riot and sedition, and the cognate danger of allowing matter to creep into their plays which was contrary to public morals as conceived by those who were not Puritans, or displeasing to persons of importance, or inconsistent with the views of Tudor and Stuart governments upon religious and political questions. The disturbances which form a count in the sixteenth-century indictments of theatres are not particularly conspicuous in the seventeenth. There were bad characters enough, both male and female, amongst the audience. Pockets might be picked and even modesty endangered; and occasionally brawls and bloodshed were the result.[898] But in the more important theatres, such as the Globe and the Fortune, which made their appeal to the well-to-do and the fashionable, no less than to the groundlings,[318] the maintenance of order was at least as much in the interests of the players themselves as in that of any other section of the community. In avoiding subject-matter of offence, so far as the texts of their plays were concerned, the companies had of course the assistance of the Master of the Revels, upon whom, in view of the unwillingness of the City either to appoint licensing officers themselves or to accept a nominee of the Privy Council, the functions of a stage censor had, as an alternative policy, been conferred.[899] The employment of a royal official for this purpose was in effect a resumption by the central government of a responsibility which it had already attempted to discharge during the earlier Tudor reigns, and had then delegated to the local justices by the proclamation of 1559. The selection of the Master of the Revels explains itself naturally enough as an extension of the duties which already fell to him of scrutinizing and, if need be, 'reforming' the plays proposed for presentation at Court.[900] The actual establishment of his authority appears to have been a gradual process. It is tentative and limited to the plays of one company in the patent for Leicester's men of 1574. It is as wide as possible in the commission issued to the Master in 1581, overriding the proclamation of 1559, and giving him a complete control, not only over individual plays, but over players, playmakers, and playing-places generally. Shortly afterwards, in 1584, the Leicester archives record that the credentials of Worcester's men at that date included, in addition to the warrant from their lord, a licence from the Master of the Revels, from the terms of which it appears that the company were 'bound to the orders prescribed' by him, and in particular that all their plays were to be 'allowed' by him, and to have 'his hand at the latter end of the said booke they doe play'.[901] In London, on the other hand, the correspondence [319] of 1582-4 between the Privy Council and the City makes no mention of the Master, and the Council are still pressing for the appointment of fit persons to consider and allow of plays by the City itself. In 1589, however, the Lord Mayor cited the Master's 'mislike' of the Martin Marprelate plays as a reason for suppressing them, and a step forward was probably taken by the appointment in the same year of a commission to 'allow' plays, consisting of the Master himself and of two assessors nominated by the Lord Mayor and the Archbishop of Canterbury. I find no later reference to these assessors and it may be that before long the Master succeeded in divesting himself of their assistance.[902] In any case, their functions did not go beyond the 'allowing' of the actual plays. The general licensing of companies and of play-houses remained with the Master, and by 1592 we find the City acknowledging their powerlessness to redress the 'inconvenience' of the stage without him and debating the advisability of approaching him with a bribe. Henslowe's Diary discloses the Master between 1592 and 1597 as regularly licensing both theatres and plays, and taking fees, which appear to have amounted to 7s. for each new play produced, and 5s., 6s. 8d., and ultimately 10s. for each week during which a theatre was open.[903] To some extent the assumption of a more direct control by the Privy Council in 1597 must have limited his responsibility. But he continued to act as the agent of the Privy Council or the Lord Chamberlain in transmitting inhibitions and other orders to the companies.[904] Bonds had still to be given to him for the due observance of the regulations.[905] And [320] he still drew fees from the theatres which were in fact again advanced in 1599 from 10s. to 15s. a week. Due reservation is regularly made for his 'aucthoritie power priuiledges and profittes' in the majority of the Jacobean patents issued to the London companies.[906] He continued to license those travelling companies which held no direct royal authority; and in the course of the seventeenth century he succeeded in establishing his jurisdiction over many travelling entertainers who were not strictly players.[907] Above all, it still rested with him to 'allow' the production, even by the patented companies, of individual plays, and about 1607 he undertook also the allowance of plays for the press, which had previously been in the hands of licensers appointed under the High Commission for London.[908] A few manuscripts of plays are extant which have been submitted to the Master of the Revels for purposes of censorship, notably those of Sir Thomas More[321] (c. 1600) and The Second Maiden's Tragedy (1611), and give interesting indications of the manner in which he apprehended his duties.[909] Tilney, in dealing with Sir Thomas More, was perturbed by two features. The play, as submitted to him, began with a dispute between Londoners and certain Lombard aliens, leading up to the riots of 'ill May day' and the reputation won by Sir Thomas More as the restorer of peace. This was still a ticklish subject at the end of the sixteenth century, for there had been comparatively recent disturbances on the alien question, directed against Frenchmen rather than Lombards, and Tilney therefore went carefully through the earlier pages, altering here and there 'Frenchman' or 'straunger' into 'Lombard', and marking for omission or alteration certain passages which might be read as suggestions to the citizens to take matters into their own hands. In the margin of one passage he wrote 'Mend this'. Presumably the effect of these 'reformations' did not satisfy him, for at the beginning of the first scene he has inserted what Dr. Greg calls 'a very conditional licence', but what is in fact a direction for the complete recast of the first part of the play by the omission of the dangerous episodes.[910] Similarly he was pulled up by a later scene in which More's refusal to sign articles sent him by the King seemed to be of bad precedent for subjects, and here he drew a line through a substantial section of the dialogue, and added a note that all must be altered. The Second Maiden's Tragedy is a Jacobean, not an Elizabethan, play, and the censor was Sir George Buck. He, too, is on the look-out for political criticism, and political criticism in 1611 was likely to be criticism of King and Court. The passages, therefore, amended by Buck or at his instigation are a few which speak lightly of courtiers and knights and ladies of high position, and one in particular which seemed to him to dwell with too much point and detail upon the delicate theme of tyrannicide. But this was merely verbal caution. He did not attempt to eliminate tyrannicide[322] from the plot, in which it formed an essential element, and returned the copy duly endorsed with a licence over his signature that it 'may with the reformations bee acted publikely'. One more point shows some development of censorial practice as between Tilney and Buck. The latter, presumably with the Act to Restrain Abuses of Players in his mind, concerns himself not only with politics but with propriety. It is a perfunctory business enough. In half a dozen places such expletives as 'life' and 'heart' are excised; in many more these and others, such as 'mass' and 'faith', which one would have supposed to be as much or as little objectionable, remain unquestioned.[911]

It has been the experience of many governments that the most rigid censorship of the 'books' of plays does not afford a complete guarantee of the inoffensiveness of the performances actually given upon the stage. A few lines of 'gag' are easily inserted; an emphasis, a gesture, a 'make-up' may fill with malicious intention a scene which read harmlessly enough in the privacy of the censor's study. And as nothing draws like topical allusions, it sometimes happened that the activities of the Master of the Revels did not prevent the players from overstepping the boundaries of what the somewhat arbitrary susceptibilities of the government would tolerate. It must not be supposed that the Elizabethan injunction against any intermeddling with politics or religion on the stage was to be taken with absolute literalness. Up to a point the players had a fairly free hand even with contemporary events. They might represent, if they would, such feats of English arms as the siege of Turnhout with all realism.[912] They might mock at foreign potentates, if they did not, as was sometimes the[323] case, embarrass Elizabeth's diplomacy in so doing.[913] It has already been made clear that at the beginning of the reign Cecil made use of interludes, after the manner of his master Cromwell, as a political weapon against Philip of Spain and the Catholics; and many years after both Philip and James of Scotland had their grievances against the freedom with which their names were bandied by the London comedians.[914] Similarly, when it was desired that Puritanism should be unpopular, the players were not debarred from satirizing Puritans.[915] But if the public discussion of religious controversies [324] became a scandal, as in the case of the Marprelate plays, and still more if freedom of speech turned to criticism of the government itself, as probably happened in The Isle of Dogs, it very soon became apparent that the time for toleration was over, and the punishment which fell upon the companies was swift and sharp and undiscriminating. Sometimes it even happened, in spite of the special pains of the Master of Revels, that a play was brought to Court which gave offence. Such a play had to be stopped incontinently during the Christmas of 1559, and another is recorded at a much later date, which drew some displeasing political morals from the suits of a pack of cards, and would have brought the performers into serious disgrace but for the friendly intervention of a councillor with a sense of humour.[916] In addition to the susceptibilities of the government itself, there were also those of powerful individuals to be considered. Cecilia of Sweden, who had outstayed her welcome, complained that her husband was mocked by the players in her presence.[917] Tarlton, although a persona grata at Court, got into trouble for his hits at Leicester and Raleigh, possibly in the very play on the pack of cards already mentioned.[918] A protest from a descendant of Sir John Oldcastle obliged Shakespeare to change the original name of his Falstaff. And on 10 May 1601 the Privy Council sent an order to the Middlesex justices to examine and, if need be, suppress a play at the Curtain, in which were presented 'the persons of some gentlemen of good desert and quality that are yet alive, under obscure manner, but yet in such sort as all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and of the persons that are meant thereby'. A rather inexplicable part was taken by players in the wild scenes that closed the career of Robert Earl of Essex in 1601. Essex was a popular hero, and as the prologue to Henry V shows, a name to conjure with in the theatre. Bacon records how in August 1599, after his return from Ireland, 'did fly about in London streets and theatres seditious libels'.[919] That he should become an object of ridicule rather than of honour on the boards was one of the bitterest stings in his disgrace. 'Shortly', he wailed to Elizabeth on 12 May 1600, 'they will[325] play me in what forms they list upon the stage.'[920] And when the last mad step of rebellion was taken in February 1601 it was a play, none other than Shakespeare's Richard II, to which the plotters looked to stir the temper of London in their favour.[921] The curious thing is that in this case, although Essex and more than one of his followers lost life or liberty, no very serious results seem to have followed to the company involved. The incident has been thought to have inspired the references to an 'innovation' and the consequent travelling of the players in Hamlet. But in fact the Chamberlain's men cannot be traced in the provinces during 1601, and they were admitted to give their full share of Court performances during the following Christmas.[922]

For some years after the coming of James, the freedom of speech adopted by the stage, in a London much inclined to be critical of the alien King and his retinue of hungry Scots, was far beyond anything which could have been tolerated by Elizabeth. The uncouth speech of the Sovereign, his intemperance, his gusts of passion, his inordinate devotion to the chase, were caricatured with what appears incredible audacity, before audiences of his new subjects. 'Consider for pity's sake,' writes Beaumont, the French ambassador, on 14 June 1604, 'what must be the state and condition of a prince, whom the preachers publicly from the pulpit assail, whom the comedians of the metropolis bring upon the stage, whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband.'[923] Beaumont's evidence is confirmed by a letter of 28 March 1605 from Samuel Calvert to Ralph Winwood, in which he writes that 'the play[er]s do not forbear to represent upon their stage the whole course of this present time, not sparing either King, state, or religion, in so great absurdity, and with such liberty, that any would be afraid to hear them'.[924] That in spite of all the companies continued to enjoy a substantial measure of royal favour, while speaking well for the good sense of the government,[326] may perhaps also justify the inference that by the seventeenth century the theatre had so far established itself as an integral part of London life that a vindictive measure of suppression had become impracticable. From time to time, however, the blow fell upon some unusually indiscreet company, or playwright, and at one moment, owing to diplomatic complications, the prospect of suppression became, as will be seen, an imminent danger. Possibly the countenance given by Queen Anne to the comedians may have been in part responsible for the long-suffering with which their insolence was met. It could have been no object for James to underline by any public action the strained relations between King and Consort which already embarrassed the conduct of Court life. One of the companies, indeed, which was most frequently in trouble, was that which had been taken in 1604 under the direct protection of the Queen, with the title of 'Children of the Queen's Revels'. This was a company of boys, in a sense attached to the Court itself and formerly known as the Children of the Chapel, which played at the 'private' house of the Blackfriars under conditions not quite the same as those of the public theatres. The patent under which this company was reconstructed in 1604 had exempted its plays from the jurisdiction of the Master of the Revels, possibly because the Master was an officer of the King's Household from which that of the Queen was distinct, and had committed the licensing of them to the poet Samuel Daniel, who had been nominated by Anne for the purpose. Daniel was extremely unfortunate in the exercise of his functions. Before a year was out, offence had already been given by the play of Philotas, of which he was himself the author. In 1605 followed Eastward Ho! with some audacious satire upon the Scottish nation, which brought Jonson and Chapman into prison, although they maintained that the offending 'clawses' were due not to their pens, but to those of their collaborator Marston, who had apparently made his escape. As a result of the misdemeanour of Eastward Ho! Anne appears to have been induced to withdraw her direct patronage of the company, which for a time was known, not as the Children of the Queen's Revels, but as the Children of the Revels pure and simple. But it was allowed to go on playing at the Blackfriars, and here in February 1606 was produced Day's Isle of Gulls, another satire on the relations of English and Scots, which landed some of those responsible in Bridewell. Further irregularities took place in 1608, of which a lively account is given in a dispatch of the French ambassador, M. de la Boderie. The company produced two offending plays in rapid succession. Of one, now lost, which[327] satirized James in person, the author was probably John Marston. The other, which provoked the ambassador to protest by its allusions to the domestic arrangements of the French king, was Chapman's Byron.[925] A general inhibition of plays was now ordered, but De La Boderie correctly anticipated that James's anger would soon be mollified, especially as the four other London companies had offered an indemnity which he estimates at what seems the incredibly high figure of 100,000 francs. He thought that similar episodes would be prevented in future by refusing allowance to plays whose subjects were taken from contemporary history. This may, in fact, have been the solution adopted, as a standing order against the representation of any 'modern Christian King' on the stage is quoted in 1624.[926] Clearly, however, it left the even more dangerous resources of allegory and of historical parallel still open to the 'seditious' playwright.[927] The Revels boys seem again to have been in trouble in 1610 owing to an offence taken by Lady Arabella Stuart at a passage of Ben Jonson's Epicoene, which she seems to have misunderstood.

The Paul's boys vaunt their abstention from libels in the prologue to their Woman Hater of 1606. But it must not be supposed that the dramatic indiscretions were limited to a single company. Even the King's men themselves, though probably without any intention to offend, sometimes misjudged the limits of what was permissible. The Earl of Northampton haled Ben Jonson before the Privy Council for his Sejanus of 1603. On 18 December 1604 a Court gossip[328] writes of a play of Gowry, no longer extant, that 'whether the matter or the manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that Princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great councellors are much displeased with it, and so 'tis thought shall be forbidden'.[928] A somewhat vague allusion to an 'unwilling error' of players and a consequent restraint, contained in the epilogue for a revival of Mucedorus, first published in 1610, may possibly relate to some later episode not otherwise recorded, but possibly only to the Byron episode, with which the King's men had nothing directly to do. Nor do we know who were the 'much-suffering actors' of Daborne's 'oppressed and much-martird Tragedy', A Christian Turned Turk, of about the same date. Conceivably this is itself the play for which Mucedorus apologizes. Even provincial plays sometimes brought their promoters before the Star Chamber. Sir Edward Dymock was imprisoned and fined £1,000 in May 1610 for a scurrilous play against the Earl of Lincoln on a Maypole green.[929] And what seems a curiously belated incident is recorded in 1614, when Sir John Yorke suffered a similar fate for encouraging some vagrant players to perform an interlude in favour of the Popish religion.[930]

And when players had got their warrants and their licences, and signed their recognizances to the Master of the Revels, and paid their tithes, and made up their minds to observe the taboos of Sunday and of Lent, and to purge their plays of all perilous stuff, they had still to encounter the ordinary changes[329] and chances incident to all mortality. The profits swelled in term time and dwindled in vacation.[931] Easter, Whitsuntide, Bartholomew Fair, were recurring seasons of prosperity.[932] Were the streets full for such an occasion as the entry of an ambassador, the theatres reaped their harvest.[933] A period of public mourning, on the other hand, as at the deaths of Elizabeth and of Prince Henry, meant the cessation of business.[934] Political changes—although, like the other elements of Stuart society, the players probably paid little attention to the forces that were gathering for their ultimate overthrow—might prove more disastrous still. But the dreaded enemy, in whose mysterious workings the Puritans recognized a direct expression of the wrath of God, was undeniably the plague. The menace, and too often the actual reality, of plague, in a city whose growth had far outstripped the advance of sanitary knowledge, was one of the principal domestic preoccupations of Elizabethan administrators. And the precaution, which was always resorted to, of forbidding public assemblies as probable centres of infection, reacted terribly upon theatrical enterprise. A study of the plague calendar which forms an appendix to the present volumes will show that there were three grave visitations of plague during the years which it covers, in 1563, in 1592-4, and in 1603; that in the long period 1564 to 1587 following the first visitation, and in the shorter period 1604 to 1609 following the third visitation, plague had become endemic, generally showing itself from July to November and reaching its maximum in September or October; that during these periods certain years, such as 1579 and 1580 in the one and 1604 in the other were comparatively free; and that probably during 1588-91, and certainly during 1595-1602 and 1610-16, plague was so far absent as to be practically negligible. In fact, after 1609 plague did not again become a serious factor in London[330] life until 1625. The greatest developments of the Elizabethan drama thus coincide with the longest periods of exemption, and perhaps this simple physical fact has something to do with the break-down of the Puritan opposition and the settlement of theatrical conditions in 1597. Certainly the plaguesome years 1564-87 are marked by a series of inhibitions of plays on account of plague, some of which seem to be hardly justified by the actual state of things prevailing, and suggest that the Privy Council occasionally found it convenient to avoid controversy with the City by acquiescing in an inhibition for which the dread of infection was little more than the ostensible reason. This tendency seems to have come very near to bringing about a regular autumnal close season for plays. Ultimately, however, a different principle of regulation was adopted. This was based upon the showings of the plague-bill, a weekly summary of deaths from plague and from other causes respectively, prepared from returns rendered on behalf of each of the 109 parishes within the City area and a few of those in the suburbs.[935] The first indication of an appeal to this criterion is to be found in the documents belonging to the inquiry of 1584, to which the players appear to have contributed the proposal that their activities should continue to be tolerated so long as the deaths from plague in any one week did not exceed fifty. The City questioned the security afforded by this figure, and as an alternative offered toleration whenever the deaths from all causes should have remained below fifty for three weeks together. It is difficult to say whether this reply was intended to be taken seriously. Probably not, in view of the general attitude adopted in the argument of which it forms part. If it had been applied to the years 1578-82, for which plague-bills are extant, there would have been only fifteen weeks of playing during the five years, six weeks in 1580, and nine weeks in 1581.[936] The precise issue of the discussion of 1584 is unknown; but the principle then mooted is found in effective operation during the seventeenth century. Most of the patents do not make any specific reservation for times of plague, but that for the King's men, issued during the plague of 1603, and the unexecuted draft for the Queen's men are expressed as coming into operation 'when the infection of the plague shall decrease', and more precisely in the case of the Queen's men 'when the infeccion of the plague shall decrease to the nomber of thirtie weekly within our Citie of London and the liberties therof'. Similarly the Privy Council letter of 9 April 1604 in allowance[331] of the resumption of plays is guarded by the proviso 'except there shall happen weeklie to die of the plague aboue the number of thirtie within the Cittie of London and the liberties therof; att which time we think it fitt they shall cease and forbeare any further publicklie to playe untill the sicknes be again decreaced to the saide number'. This criterion of thirty deaths was much less favourable to the players than that of fifty which they had themselves suggested in 1584. It appears to have ruled until about 1607 and then to have been replaced by the more liberal allowance of forty, which is the number specified in the later patents of 1619 and 1625 to the King's men.[937]

It is clear that a plague, if at all prolonged, hit the players very hard, partly because it was customary to divide up the profits weekly or even daily, and the companies, as distinct from prudent individuals, seem to have kept no reserve funds. In particular the plague of 1592-4 forms a regular watershed in the history of the companies. Some went under altogether; others, such as the famous Queen's men, failed for ever after to recover a foothold in the metropolis. The reconstructed organizations of 1594 have practically no continuity with those in existence up to 1592. The obvious resource in a time of inhibition was to travel, since a London plague did not necessarily extend far into the provinces.[938] It was a regrettable necessity. In favourable economic conditions, the London companies tended to grow, to effect amalgamations, to occupy more than one theatre.[939] Travelling, for more than a few [332] summer weeks, meant the reduction of establishments to the level of provincial profits, the breaking up of partnerships, the division of books and apparel, the dismissal of hired men.[940] But plague was inexorable. Reluctantly the drums and trumpets were bought, the last stoup was quaffed at the Cardinal's Hat, and the rufflers of London streets resigned themselves to the hard life of country 'strowlers'.[941] On the road, with his wagon, the actor necessarily laid aside the conditions of a householder, and reverted to those of his grandfather, the minstrel.[942] And it is fair to say that, as a rule, although there were Puritans in the provinces as well as in London, he received a minstrel's welcome. His advent, about 1574, to a western borough is thus described by one[333] R. Willis, in a half-autobiographical, half-religious, treatise entitled Mount Tabor, published in 1639:[943]

The account given by Willis receives general confirmation from the numerous entries with regard to players exhumed from the municipal archives not only of Gloucester itself, but of many other towns, and notably Canterbury, Dover, Southampton, Winchester, Exeter, Plymouth, Barnstaple, Oxford, Abingdon, Marlborough, Bath, Bristol, Shrewsbury, Chester, York, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry, Stratford-on-Avon, Maldon, Ipswich, Cambridge, and Norwich.[944] As a rule the information consists of a record in the annual accounts rendered by the Chamberlains or other borough treasurers of the 'rewards' paid to the companies for performing the 'Mayor's play'. These are often stated to have been paid at the 'appointment' of the Mayor, or of the Mayor and the Aldermen or other body who were his 'brethren'. The name of the company is generally given; sometimes the date of the performances, and more rarely the name of the play or some other detail which struck the fancy of the Chamberlains, is added. Sometimes, moreover, there is subsidiary expenditure to record; a stage has to be put up and lit;[945] damage done has to be repaired;[946] the players [334] are entertained with the municipal courtesy of 'wine and sugar', or with a 'drinkinge', 'banket', or 'breakfast' at their inn.[947] At Gloucester the entertainment, of 'wine and chirries', took place in the house of 'Mr. Swordbearer', an official of the corporation. In the main the customs of the different towns seem to have been singularly uniform, but here and there variations of detail present themselves. Thus the mayor's play was not everywhere, as at Gloucester, open to all comers. A 'free' play is noted at Newcastle; at Bath and Canterbury on the other hand there was a 'gathering', supplemented by the town's reward.[948] At Leicester the same arrangement prevailed up to the end of the sixteenth century. The 'gathering' was levied upon the members of the two councils known as the 'Twenty-four' and the 'Forty-eight'; and orders are upon record limiting this liability to performances by the royal companies or the servants of privy councillors.[949] In 1590-1 collections were also taken 'at the hall dore'.

[335]

A Bridgnorth order of 1570 that no charge should be put upon the town fund appears to be exceptional at this date, and did not prove permanent.[950] The 'rewards' entered in the accounts are generally round sums; where they are broken, they probably went to make up the results of the 'gatherings' to round sums. At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign the amounts often do not exceed a few shillings, but a general tendency to increase is apparent throughout the next half-century, and by 1616 rewards of £2 and even £3 are not uncommon. The establishment of the Queen's men in 1583 led to a rise in the rate of reward for that company, which in course of time brought about increased generosity to others.[951] The highest sums I have noted were £4 to the Queen's men at Ipswich in 1599, and to various companies at Coventry from 1612 onwards. Nottingham distinguished itself by economy, and did not go beyond 20s. at the best. In most places the rates fluctuate considerably to the end; being determined partly by the importance of the 'lord' and his relations to the town, partly in all probability by the opinion of the stage held by the mayor or the town, partly, one may hope, by the merits of individual plays and their interpreters. Commonly enough, the mayor's play took place in the guild-hall, in spite of the criticisms of those who, whatever their real motives, alleged the damage done and the interruption to municipal business.[952] For subsequent [336] performances other quarters had often to be found. These were ordinarily in an inn;[953] occasionally in the church itself or the churchyard.[954] Great Yarmouth had its specially provided 'game house'; a theatre contemplated at York in 1608-9 was to have its own company, as 'a means to restrayne the frequent comminge of other stage players', but the scheme was never actually carried out.[955]

To some extent the evidence of the accounts can be eked out by that of other records throwing a more direct light upon the responsibilities assumed by the civic authorities in regard to plays. Singularly interesting is the register of the Mayor's Court at Norwich, in which are recorded the attendances of players on their arrival in the town to submit their credentials and obtain leave for their performances.[956] The patent companies produced their letters patent in original or in exemplification, in addition to which the Court seems to have expected some instrument of deputation, if none of the men actually[337] named in the document were present.[957] The nature of the evidence forthcoming from other companies is not so clearly specified, but no doubt it consisted of the warrant of appointment by their lord, and after 1581 of the confirmatory licence from the Master of the Revels. Worcester's men were in a difficulty at Leicester in 1583 because, although they could produce the warrant from their lord, their licence from the Master had been purloined by another company.[958] It was probably as a quite special privilege that, when Strange's and Sussex's men travelled in 1593, they carried with them letters of assistance from the Privy Council itself. It may be gathered from the terms of the Norwich entries that the Court regarded its own permission or 'licence' as essential before players were entitled to set up their 'bills' or give their performances within its jurisdiction. The lord's warrant might protect his servants from the penalties of vagabondage; but it was not necessarily accepted, in the provinces any more than in London, as overriding the traditional right of the municipal governments to control the entertainments which might have serious results both upon the morality and the order of their areas. On the other hand, even if the plays had been less popular than they were, the livery of the Queen or of a powerful noble was not a thing to be lightly flouted. Perhaps the difficulty was solved by taking the warrant at its face value as a courteous letter of recommendation, and letting the licence to play and the 'reward' stand as return courtesies from the corporation to their very good lord. This fiction, however, can hardly have been applicable to the terms in which the Master of the Revels may be supposed to have worded his licence, and still less to those of the royal patents, which claimed to give direct authority to play 'within anie town halls or moute halls or other conveniente places within the liberties and freedoms of any cittie, vniversitie, towne or boroughe whatsoever within our realmes and domynions'. The corporations were not very likely to act upon the advice attributed to the Lord Coke in 1606 that such licences from the Crown were ultra vires.[959] No doubt they remained the arbiters as to what places were 'conveniente'. They also prescribed times and seasons, forbidding plays at their[338] discretion on Sunday[960] or at night,[961] or in Lent,[962] or during divine service,[963] and laying down for each company the number of days during which it was at liberty to perform, or the interval which must elapse between one visit and the next. At Norwich the number of days ranged from one to eight, sometimes one performance and sometimes two being allowed on each day. The royal signet warrants which came into use about 1616 authorized the companies holding them to stay fourteen days in any one town. Sometimes Dogberry and Verges found good reason for refusing leave to play. It was a season of plague or of social disturbance in the town.[964] In [339] 1603 when the Admiral's men visited Canterbury, 'it was thought fit they should not play at all in regard that our late Queen was then ether very sick or dead as they supposed'. Or even if the public playing was allowed, the corporation might be too busy for a Mayor's play to be appropriate. In either event the players generally got their fee all the same, and the Chamberlain, if punctilious, entered it not as a 'reward' but as a 'gratuity', and noted in his book that the company 'did not playe'.[965] Certain indications show themselves here and there that the Puritan controversy had spread to the provinces, and even that the desire to have done with plays altogether was not wholly confined to London. As early as 1590 there was a dispute in the corporation of Maldon between an ex-bailiff of the town and certain colleagues whom he abused as 'a sort of precisians and Brownists' because they forbade a performance on a Sunday evening.[966] In 1596 the Chester corporation made an order for the suppression of plays, and fixed a 'gratuity' of 20s. for the Queen's men, and 6s. 8d. for those of any noble. But it does not seem that the resolution was persisted in, and in 1615 the city was still suffering from 'the common brute and scandal' of 'obscene and unlawfull plaies or tragedies', and did no more than bar them out from the Common Hall and confine them to the day-time.[967] At Hull too fines were enacted against citizens resorting to plays and landlords harbouring them in 1598.[968] The players did not always prove conformable to municipal discipline. Several cases are recorded at Norwich, in which companies played contrary to orders, and were punished by committal to prison, or by threats that their lord should be certified of their contempt, and that they should never more[340] have reward of the city.[969] One of the mutinous companies in 1583 was Worcester's, who in the following year repeated their offence at Leicester, going 'with their drum and trumppytts thorowe the towne in contempt of Mr. Mayor' and using 'evyll and contemptyous words' of that dignitary, who had given them an angel (3s. 4d.) towards their dinner. The threat of reporting them to their lord reduced them to submission, and after all they were allowed to play, and made a public apology to Mr. Mayor as a prologue.

The worst of travelling was that, after all the tramping of bad roads, and all the wrangling with jacks-in-office, there was but a scanty living to be made out of it, even with the aid of the few shillings to be picked up in the larger villages, from such a windfall as is described in Ratseis Ghost,[970] or from the generous hospitality of a friendly manor.[971] The competition [341] was considerable, for in the provinces the London companies found rivals in the shape of other companies which rarely or never came to London at all, but were none the less substantial and permanent organizations. Thus Queen Elizabeth's men travelled for years between their last London appearance in 1594 and the end of the reign, and continued all the time to secure the exceptionally high rates of 'reward' which were due to the royal name. Other famous provincial companies, each of which can be traced through a period of years, were those of the Duchess of Suffolk (1548-63), and the Lords Mountjoy (1564-78), Stafford (1574-1604), Sheffield (1577-86), Berkeley (1578-1610), Chandos (1578-1610), Morley (1581-1602), Darcy (1591-1603), Mounteagle (1593-1616), Huntingdon (1597-1606), Evers (1600-13), and Dudley (1600-36). Some of these had a comparatively limited range; others covered the whole country. Their presence in the field, and that of many minor companies, must have made it difficult for the Londoners.[972] The charge of travelling, again, as Strange's men complained to the Privy Council about 1592, was intolerable, and the necessity for dividing the larger companies, so as to cover more ground, led to disorganization. Pembroke's men, when they travelled in 1593, could not save their charges, and had to pawn their apparel and return home. The years of plague and travellings were the lean years which sent the books of plays into the hands of the publishers.[973] And for a company to part with the books and garments that formed its stock in trade was a confession of failure.

The wanderings of English actors were by no means confined to England itself. They crossed the border to Scotland, where towards the end of the sixteenth century they incurred the hostility of the Kirk Sessions, which did not prevent James I from appointing one or more of them as Court comedians, and bringing them back with him in 1603 to figure in the lists of the patented royal companies.[974] Somewhat later they braved the Irish Channel, and are found at Youghal.[975] And on the [342] Continent they ranged far and wide.[976] Notices of them in France, indeed, are rarer than might be expected, perhaps because of the barrier of religion, perhaps because the Italians had already occupied the ground, perhaps only because the archives have not been thoroughly searched. To Italy and to Spain they just penetrated. In northern Europe, on the other hand, in the Netherlands, in Germany, even in Denmark, Sweden, and Poland, they found a constant welcome, until their movements were checked by the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1620. A pioneer company, which made its way from Leicester's head-quarters at Utrecht to the Courts of Copenhagen and Dresden in 1586, included members who afterwards became fellows of Shakespeare as Lord Chamberlain's men. The shifting relations of the numerous bands which followed them are beyond research, but the initiative in organizing the raids seems to have been largely taken by two men. One of these was Robert Browne, who paid not less than five visits abroad between 1590 and 1620, and appears to have had many associates, of whom the most important was John Green. The other was John Spencer, who first appears in 1604, and whose operations were probably quite independent of Browne's. The industry of German scholars has made it possible to trace in outline the stories of Spencer and of a group of companies owing their origin more or less directly to Browne. Their adventures were clearly much facilitated by the existence of numerous petty German courts, under cultivated rulers who were glad to take a troop of actors into their service for a year or two at a time, and then let them go for a while on their travels from one to another of the great towns. Conspicuous amongst such patrons were the Electors Joachim Frederick (1598-1608) and John Sigismund (1608-91) of Brandenburg, the Electors Christian I (1586-91), Christian II (1591-1611), and John George (1611-56) of Saxony, Henry Julius (1589-1613) Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and Maurice (1592-1627) Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel. Naturally, also, the actors made their way to Heidelberg, whither the Elector Palatine Frederick V brought his English bride in 1613. These were Protestant princes, but Catholic Germany, although less often visited, was not closed to the English, who found particular favour with the house of the Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, afterwards the Emperor Ferdinand II. Of the great cities of Germany the most hospitable to actors, so far as our knowledge goes, were Cologne, Strassburg, Ulm, Augsburg, Nuremberg,[343] and above all Frankfort, where the two great marts or fairs held annually at Easter and in the autumn served as a rallying-point for travellers and entertainers of every species. The early successes of the English in Germany are reported by Fynes Moryson, who was at Frankfort for the autumn fair of 1592:

In the Netherlands the English players, according to Moryson, brought themselves into a singular difficulty. Here, too, was no native stage:

Moryson's account finds confirmation in the praise lavished upon English acting by German writers, such as Erhard Cellius in 1605, Joannes Rhenanus about 1610, and Daniel von Wensin in 1613.[978] Undoubtedly the German stage, which had been [344] slow to develop on professional lines, owed a great impetus to the invasions. Germans attached themselves to the English companies, and in course of time imitated the English methods in companies of their own. The English plays served as models for German dramatists, of whom Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick and Jacob Ayrer of Nuremberg were the best known.[979] On the other hand, the invaders themselves became denizened, at any rate to the extent of learning to give their performances in the German tongue. Moryson found Browne's company handicapped by their use of English at Frankfort in 1592. A Münster chronicler tells us that an anonymous company which visited his town in 1601 still played 'in ihrer engelschen Sprache', but that between the acts the clown amused the audience with 'bôtze und geckerie' in German.[980] In 1605 actors who petition for leave to appear at the Frankfort fair advertise their intention to give their comedies and tragedies 'in hochteutscher sprache', and there can be little doubt that, whatever may have been the case in Anglomaniac courts, theirs was the practice which ultimately prevailed in the cities.[981] Such portions of the repertories of the English actors as have been preserved are without exception in German. They are of singularly little literary value, fully bearing out Moryson's description of them as no more than 'peeces and patches' of English plays. But occasionally one of them possesses a critical interest as representing a play now lost or some earlier version of its model than that extant[345] in an English text. In addition to actual plays, enough lists of performances are upon record to give a fair notion of the range of the travelling repertories. Both recent productions of the London stage and more old-fashioned pieces were drawn upon for adaptation. The choice was doubtless determined by the availability of prompter's copies or printed texts, as the case might be, when a company was collecting a stock-in-trade for its adventure. Sometimes variety was obtained by using the experiments of a German dramatist, or one of those scriptural comedies, Susanna and the Elders, The Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, which had been the delight of the German, even more than the English, Renaissance.

The most obvious thing about the life of the English actor on the road in Germany is that it was uncommonly like his life on the road in England. Perhaps this is hardly surprising when it is borne in mind that, as already pointed out, the player away from his permanent theatre reverted to the status of the minstrel, and that throughout the ages the minstrel had been cosmopolitan. That in a land of alien speech, even more than at home, the strict arts of comedy and tragedy had to be eked out with music and buffoonery and acrobatics goes without saying. Even as late as 1614 and at the court of Berlin the terms on which actors were engaged bound them to render service 'mit Springen, Spielen und anderer Kurzweil', as their lord might require.[982] Away from court, in Germany as in England, they were mainly dependent upon the goodwill of the civic magistrates, to whom on approaching each town they addressed elaborate petitions, of which many are preserved, in which they recited their own merits, and made play with the names of any princes whose servants they were entitled to call themselves, or whose recommendation some successful display had enabled them to gain. There was always the chance that, on the strength of plague or some other pretext, they might be refused admission altogether. At the best, they must expect to have the length of their stay, the days and hours of their performances, the sums they might charge for standing-room and seats, most thoughtfully and minutely regulated for them. And when all the preliminaries were gone through, and the Rathaus or an inn-yard put at their disposal, and the creaking boards set up, and the tattered frippery extracted from the hamper, it might perhaps after all, as at Brunswick in 1614, be a case of 'kein Volk' and the Council might give them a thaler out of charity and send them on their way.[983] In Germany too, as in England, they had to [346] make their account with the wise, to whom their performances were folly, and the 'unco' guid', to whom they were an offence.[984] Evidently they were not always discreet in their choice of themes. At Elbing in 1605 a company received a gratification of twenty thalers for a performance before the Council; and the record continues, '... daneben aber auch ihnen zu untersagen, dass sie nunmehr zu agiren aufhören sollen in Anmerkung, dass sie gestern in der Comödie schandbare Sachen fürgebracht'.[985] Even princes sometimes got into trouble by encouraging these foreigners of doubtful respectability. There was glee in Cassel when Landgrave Maurice decided to disband the 'verfluchten' English in 1602. Possibly in this case it was the taxpayer rather than the Puritan who felt relief; but when the Duke of Pommern-Wolgast and his mother allowed the Schlosskirche at Lötz to be used for a performance in 1606 they brought upon themselves a shower of letters from Hofprediger Gregorius Hagius, which precisely re-echo the familiar English diatribes of Stephen Gosson and John Rainolds.[986] Presumably the whole business paid its way, or Browne would not have gone over four or five times or Spencer spent fifteen years in the country. A recent investigator, who has made a far more elaborate analysis of all the financial material than I have room for, calculates that, what with court salaries, and what with admission fees to public performances at the rate of about three kreuzers or less than a penny a head, an actor might hope to make on the average about £60 a year.[987] This was enough to live upon, even if, as was sometimes the case, wife and children accompanied the expedition. It seemed attractive enough to poor Richard Jones, who was making at home 'some tymes a shillinge a day and some tymes nothinge'. But it hardly bears out the statement of Erhard Cellius that the English returned home 'auro et argento onusti'. And in fact those who essayed a career in Germany were the failures of London. 'Some of our cast dispised stage players', Moryson calls them, and many years later, in 1625, the same tale is told by the words put into the mouths of actors in[347] The Run-away's Answer: 'We can be bankrupts on this side and gentlemen of a company beyond the sea: we burst at London, and are pieced up at Rotterdam.'[988] There were, indeed, those who made their fortunes abroad, but they were those who, like Thomas Sackville, forsook the stage and devoted their energies to an honest trade.

[348]

XI
THE ACTOR'S ECONOMICS

WITHAL the actors, or the more discreet of them, prospered. This fact peeps out from the diatribes of their critics, and is indeed part of the case against them. The theatres are thronged, while the churches are empty. The drones suck the honey stored up by London's laborious citizens. Already, in 1578, John Stockwood estimates the aggregate gain of eight play-houses, open but once in the week, at £2,000 by the year. The players began to ruffle it, in garments fit only for their betters. 'The very hyrelings', says Gosson in 1579, 'which stand at reuersion of viˢ by the weeke, iet under gentlemen's noses in sutes of silke, exercising themselues too prating on the stage, and common scoffing when they come abrode, where they looke askance ouer the shoulder at euery man, of whom the Sunday before they begged an almes'; and in like vein Walsingham's correspondent of 1587 bewails to him the 'wofull sight to see two hundred proude players jett in their silkes, wheare five hundred pore people sterve in the streets'. It is, however, possible to lay undue stress upon the public finery as an evidence of prosperity, for this was apt to be borrowed from the tiring-house wardrobe, and in time it was found that the advertisement earned hardly justified the detriment to the common stock of apparel. The articles signed by those joining the Lady Elizabeth's men about 1614 bound them amongst other things not to go out of the theatre with any of the apparel on their bodies. The surest economic sign of a growing industry is the capacity to spend money on building, and it was a true instinct that led Stockwood to discommend the gorgeous playing-places erected at 'great charges' in the fields, and[349] William Harrison to note it as 'an evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so riche that they can build suche houses'. And when Robert Greene wanted to paint a picture of a typical successful actor in 1592, he made him describe himself as one who had once travelled on foot and carried his properties on his back, but now his very share in playing apparel would not be sold for £200, and he was reputed by his neighbours able 'at his proper cost to build a windmill'.[989] James Burbadge was 'the first builder of playhowses', and thereby laid the foundations of the prosperity of his family. He had been a joiner, before he became a player, and perhaps this suggested the enterprise of the Theatre, which he put up in 1576 upon borrowed capital. When his son Richard died in 1619 he was reckoned worth £300 a year in land. Even more fortunate was Edward Alleyn, who was in a position to retire from the stage before he was forty, to purchase the manor of Dulwich for £10,000, to build the College of God's Gift, and thereafter to spend upon the maintenance of his household and his foundation at the rate of some £1,700 a year. Other actors, mainly of the King's company, can be shown to have made their more modest piles. Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, Henry Condell, all appear from their wills to have been substantial men when they died. John Heminge is described in 1614 as 'of greate lyveinge wealth and power'. The Restoration story that Shakespeare spent £1,000 a year at Stratford is probably apocryphal, in view of the fact that his known investments only amount to a little over £1,000; but at least he returned as a moneyed man to the scene of his father's bankruptcy, and enjoyed consideration as the owner of the best house in his native town. Aubrey's statement that he left property worth about £200 or £300 a year, which gives him a fortune about equal to Richard Burbadge's, seems not unreasonable.[990] Like true Englishmen, the successful players sought after less material proof of their worth than was afforded by their lands and houses. Alleyn, having long been lord of a manor, and having connected himself by marriage with the Dean of St. Paul's, was desirous in 1624 of 'sum further dignetie', probably a knighthood. Others were content with acquiring or[350] assuming a claim to armorial bearings, which would entitle them to rank as 'gentlemen'. Shakespeare in 1596 obtained a confirmation of a grant of arms made to his father as bailiff of Stratford nearly thirty years before; and in 1599 sought additional authority to impale the coat of his mother's family, the Ardens.[991] Heminges obtained a confirmation of arms in 1629. Such grants did not go altogether unstrictured by heraldic purists, and the cases of Shakespeare and of his fellow Richard Cowley formed part of the material for a charge of making grants to 'base and ignoble persons' brought by a rival against the responsible king-of-arms. Augustine Phillips and Thomas Pope did not trouble the heralds, but went to an heraldic painter, and bought, the one the arms of Sir William Phillips, Lord Bardolph, and the other those of Sir Thomas Pope, Chancellor of the Augmentations.[992] These ambitions of the players, no less than their investments, yielded stuff both for moralizing and for satire. Henry Crosse, in his Vertues Common-wealth (1603), rebukes the pride of the 'copper-lace gentlemen' who 'purchase lands by adulterous playes'.[993] And in the tract of Ratseis Ghost (1605), already cited, Gamaliel Ratsey speaks of those 'whom Fortune hath so well favored that, what by penny-sparing and long practise of playing, are growne so wealthy that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be conjunct in authority and to sit with men of great worship on the bench of justice'; and he advises the country player, with whom he has fallen in, to get him to London, 'and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place or lordship in the country, that, growing weary of playing, thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation'. The player too heard 'of some that have gone to London very meanly, and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy'. Ratsey then knights him 'Sir Simon Two Shares and a Halfe', and tells him he is 'the first knight that ever was player in England'.[994]

Certainly all players did not grow rich, even in London.[351] Some of them to the end, perhaps the majority, remained threadbare companions enough; in and out of debt, spongers upon their fellows, frequenters of pawnshops, acquainted with prison. Partly it was a matter of character. Those who had to do with the stage were not all such riff-raff as a hasty reading of the Puritan literature might suggest. Gosson, indeed, admits as much, allowing that some among those professing 'the qualitie' are 'sober, discreete, properly learned honest housholders and citizens well thought on amonge their neighbours at home'; while on his side Thomas Heywood is quick to maintain the harm wrought by the licentious to a calling in which many are 'of substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-keepers and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', and to plead that if there be a few of degenerate demeanour, his readers will not 'censure hardly of all for the misdeeds of some'.[995] Doubtless there is a certain instability of temperament, which the life of the theatre, with its ups and downs of fortune, its unreal sentiments and its artificially stimulated emotions, is well calculated to encourage; and we may perhaps find the victims of such a temperament in certain actors who, although clearly of standing in their profession, seem to have been constantly shifting from company to company, without attaining any secure position or, as one may conjecture, reaping any substantial harvest from their labour and their skill. One of these was Richard Jones, originally a fellow of Alleyn with Lord Worcester's men, presently selling to Alleyn his share of clothes and books, at one time reduced to 1s. a day or nothing, at another setting out to tour the Continent with Robert Browne, then back again with Alleyn amongst the Admiral's men, then transferring himself to the Swan and returning a few months later to the Rose, and finally allowing himself to be bought out for £50 and passing into obscurity. Another was Martin Slater, also at one time one of the Admiral's men, whom he left and went to law with, then a wanderer with Laurence Fletcher in Scotland, and afterwards successively traceable with Lord Hertford's men, with Queen Anne's, as a member of the King's Revels syndicate, and with Queen Anne's again as manager of one of the provincial companies travelling under the Queen's warrant. Perhaps it is merely another way of stating the same issue to say that the financial success of a player depended on his obtaining an interest, not merely in the day-to-day profits of a company, but also in the[352] permanent investment represented by a theatre. This becomes readily apparent upon an analysis of the business methods employed in the organization of the dramatic industry. The basis of this organization was the banding together of players into associations or partnerships, the members of which acted together, held a common stock of garments and play-books, incurred joint expenditure, and daily or at other convenient periods divided up the profits of their enterprise. In a legal document an associate of such a company is described as 'a full adventurer, storer and sharer among them';[996] the term in ordinary use was 'sharer'. No doubt the sharing arrangement was in origin traditional; it is described in 1614 as 'accordinge to the custome of players'.[997] But it became convenient to formulate it in a legal agreement or 'composition', which provided for the co-operation of the sharers and defined their relations to each other. Thus the composition of the Duke of York's men in 1610 bound them to play together for three years, and deprived a member who left without the consent of his fellows of any interest in the common stock. Under that of Queen Anne's men about 1612 a retiring sharer was entitled to a payment at the rate of £80 for a full share. Such provisions, which were intended to obviate the breaking up of a stock, and of themselves indicate a substantial investment of capital, seem to have been usual. Alleyn had £50 on leaving the Admiral's men in 1597, Jones and Shaw £50 in 1602; under the composition of the same company, then the Prince's men, in 1613, a sharer retiring with consent was entitled to £70. Both the Queen's and the Prince's men made a similar allowance to the widow of a sharer. Each of the sharers signed a bond for the observance of the composition, which also covered certain disciplinary regulations imposed by the company on its members. Thus the articles signed by Robert Dawes, on joining the Lady Elizabeth's men in 1614, not only made him a partaker in the contractual and financial liabilities of the company, but also exposed him to penalties if he missed plays or rehearsals, or came late or in a state of intoxication, or took apparel or other common property away from the theatre. As the compositions grew more detailed and the enterprises more important, it proved convenient that one of the sharers should be appointed, formally or informally, to act as trustee and manager for the rest, to receive and make payments, to hold the composition, bonds, licences, and other legal papers, and generally to look after the business[353] interests of his fellows. Thus it is pleaded in a lawsuit concerning Queen Anne's men that Thomas Greene was 'one of the principall and cheif persons of the said companie', and did 'laie out or disburse' moneys on their behalf; and that, after his death in 1612, the company 'did put the managing of thier whole businesses and affaires belonging vnto them ioyntly as they were players in trust' unto Christopher Beeston, by whom they were 'altogether ruled'. John Heminge seems to have acted in a similar capacity for the King's men, and to have had the custody of their deeds. He regularly appears as their payee at Court, and it is probable that he gave up acting in order to devote himself to business management. The members of a company did not invariably share and share alike. It is possible that in some cases the manager or a leading actor had a preponderant interest.[998] Tucca, in The Poetaster, at the end of his interview with Histrio, bids him commend him to 'Seven Shares and a Half'. So, too, Gamaliel Ratsey knights his player as 'Sir Simon Two Shares and a Halfe'. Perhaps this is only the chaff of the satirists. In any case one hopes that there is no foundation for the further suggestion of Tucca, when he offers to take the players into his service, and 'ha' two shares for my countenance'.[999] We know what Ratsey's corresponding threat to 'share with thee againe for playing under my warrant' means, for Ratsey was a highwayman, and levied his share not by 'composition', but at the end of a pistol. An actual example of a privileged share is that held by Alleyn in the Admiral's company about 1600, which[354] seems to have been free of any liability to contribute towards the upkeep of the stock or other current expenses.[1000] The shares were often subdivided, so that some members of the company were full sharers, others half sharers or three-quarter sharers.[1001] The number of shares varied; an ordinary London company may be taken to have consisted of about ten or twelve sharers.[1002] For travelling purposes it is probable that separate compositions were entered into, except perhaps for short summer tours, and that the numbers were smaller.[1003] It should be made clear that the companies of players, although based upon the bodies of royal or noble servants constituted under patents or other warrants of appointment, were not precisely identical with these. Each company had to get the authority of such a warrant, before it was licensed to act at all, but the legal bond of association between its members was not the warrant, but the composition. As a rule the terms of the patents give or imply a power to those named in them to associate themselves with others. New members could doubtless be sworn into the service of the lord without any need for a fresh patent. But it cannot be held that every fellow sharer was necessarily a servant of the same lord, and still less that every servant named in a warrant was necessarily a sharer of any particular company acting under that warrant. Thus there is no proof that Laurence Fletcher, who is named first amongst the King's servants of 1603, ever acted with the King's men. Similarly Martin[355] Slater and certain other Queen's servants and Gilbert Reason, a Prince's servant, did not, during long periods, act with the corresponding London companies, but toured the provinces with companies of their own, taking out for this purpose duplicates or exemplifications of the patents, a practice which came to be regarded by the authorities as an abuse.[1004] On the other hand, the servants of two lords sometimes played as a single company.[1005] Thus Lord Oxford's men and Lord Worcester's were 'ioyned by agrement togeather in on companie' at the Boar's Head during 1602. Similarly Lord Hunsdon's men and Lord Howard's came as a single company to Court in 1586; the Queen's men and Lord Sussex's were 'togeather' at the Rose in 1594, while Rosseter's patent for the Porter's Hall theatre in 1615 contemplates its use by no less than three companies, the Lady Elizabeth's, the Prince's, and the Queen's Revels, probably as a united body. Or the servant of one lord might attach himself as an individual to the company passing under the name of another. Thus Alleyn was still an Admiral's man when he toured with Lord Strange's men in 1593, possibly as the last representative of a more complete combination between two companies. Similarly Robert Pallant remained a Queen's man while playing successively with the Lady Elizabeth's and the Duke of York's in 1614-16, and William Rowley appeared in the Prince's livery at King James's funeral in 1625, although he had probably joined the King's men some two years before.[1006]

The sharers did not, however, take the whole risk of a theatrical enterprise; the owner or owners of the play-house stood in with them. This arrangement certainly goes back to the days of the elder Burbadge, 'the first builder of play-houses'. I do not know whether it had also prevailed in the London inn-yards. Instead of paying a fixed rent for the building placed at their disposal, the sharers assigned to the owner a fixed part of the takings at each performance. Originally Burbadge had the whole of the payments made at[356] the entrances to the galleries; his successors contented themselves with half these payments, together with, at the Globe, half those made at the tiring-house door. The other half, and the full payments at all other outer doors went to the sharers. The owner was apparently allowed to safeguard his interests by appointing the 'gatherers' or money-takers for the galleries.[1007] When the Globe was opened in 1599 the Burbadges of the second generation hit upon the device of binding the interests of some of the leading actors more closely to their own by giving them a share in these profits of the 'house'. To this end the site was conveyed by lease in two distinct moieties. One the Burbadges held; the other was divided amongst five of the actors. Subsequently it was several times redivided into a varying number of fractions, according as one man dropped out, or it was desired to admit another to participate in the benefits. The tenures of the fractions, while such as to secure joint control, did not prevent the alienation of the profits attached to them. This gave rise to some trouble, owing to the remarriage of widows with persons who were not members of the company at all. Incidentally it enabled John Heminge and Henry Condell, who had business capacity, to buy up by degrees the whole moiety. There was a rent payable to the ground landlord, and to this each holder of a fraction made a proportionate contribution. A levy was also called when the Globe had to be rebuilt after a fire in 1613. The Burbadges claimed to have[357] been at the cost of the original building and to have raised a loan for the purpose. We know that they pulled down the Theatre and carried the materials across the water. The lease of the Globe formed a precedent for a somewhat similar transaction when the King's men took over responsibility for the Blackfriars in 1608. In this case the freehold belonged to Richard Burbadge, who leased out the play-house in sevenths, keeping one fraction himself, and allotting the rest to his brother, to the representative of a former tenant, and to four of the players. At some later date the interest was divided into eighths instead of sevenths. It is to be noted that it was only certain selected men who thus acquired rights in the profits of the houses, and one of the effects of the policy adopted was to set up a distinction amongst the members of the association itself, of whom some were both 'housekeepers', as they came to be called, and ordinary sharers, while others were ordinary sharers alone. At the Blackfriars from the beginning, and at the Globe as rights under the leases were alienated, there were also housekeepers who were not sharers at all, and might even be members of rival companies. A dispute arising from these anomalies throws light upon the responsibilities undertaken and the advantages enjoyed by housekeepers and sharers respectively. It is of late date, but there is no reason to think that the conditions revealed were substantially different from those of earlier years. About 1630 all the rights in both houses were held, mainly through deaths and alienations, by persons who were not actors. Shortly afterwards two or three of the leading members of the company were allowed to acquire interests, and in 1635 three other sharers brought the state of things before the notice of the Lord Chamberlain, who exercised some equitable control over the affairs of the company as a part of the royal Household, and petitioned that they too might be admitted to the same privilege of purchasing fractions of the leases 'at the usuall and accustomed rates'. The pleadings and the orders of the Lord Chamberlain form the record known as the Sharers Papers.[1008] From them it emerges that the housekeepers were entitled to receive a full moiety, 'without any defalcation or abatement at all' of all takings from the galleries and boxes in both houses and from the tiring-house door of the Globe. The sharers had the other moiety, together with the takings at the outer doors. If a man was a sharer as well as a housekeeper, he claimed under both heads. The outgoings were also[358] apportioned, and in the view of the sharers, most unfairly. The housekeepers only had to pay the rent and the cost of repairs. The sharers had to find hired men and boys, and to meet all charges for apparel, poets, music, lights, and so forth. The Lord Chamberlain was apparently impressed by the justice of the representation, and made an order for a transfer of interests in both houses.

The method of organization adopted by the Burbadges was subject to abuses, both from alienation and from the agglutinative tendencies of Heminge and Condell. But, at any rate during the earlier years of its working, it seems to have served its purpose of attaching the individual King's men, by means of a capital investment, to the welfare and stability of their company. It was adopted by their principal rivals, by the Queen's men at the Red Bull from the beginning of the reign, by Alleyn and the Prince's men at the Fortune from a somewhat later date. Certainly these companies rested upon a firmer foundation than those which had to look for their theatre to an outside capitalist, especially when that outside capitalist was Philip Henslowe. I have more than once had occasion to mention Henslowe, whose personality stands out, more clearly perhaps than any other, from the stage history of our whole period. It is to the labours of my friend Dr. Greg that we owe an adequate presentment of that personality. He appears to have been a younger son of a good family, originally of Devonshire, but settled in Sussex, where his father was Master of the Game in Ashdown Forest and Brill Park. He had evidently had little formal education, and was a poor man when, probably at some date in the 'seventies, he married Agnes Woodward, a wealthy widow, to whose former husband he had been 'servant'. Agnes had a daughter Joan, who in 1592 married Edward Alleyn, between whom and Henslowe, ever after if not before this event, the closest business and personal relations existed. The occupation which Henslowe thus, in the traditional manner of apprentices, acquired may have been that of a dyer; he is described in documents of about 1584-7 as 'citizen and dyer of London'. But he had a shrewd business capacity, which he turned to many other ways of making money. He was at one time engaged in the manufacture of starch. From at least 1587 onwards he was interested in theatrical property. Between 1593 and 1596 he was carrying on, through agents, a pawnbroking establishment. By 1592 at latest he had obtained an appointment as Groom of the Chamber at Court.[1009] In 1603 he was promoted[359] to be Gentleman Sewer of the Chamber to King James. About 1594 he began to finance the Southwark bear-baiting, under a licence from the Master of the Royal Game of Paris Garden, and by arrangement with Alleyn who held the Bear Garden, and Jacob Meade who was Keeper of the Bears. After more than one unsuccessful attempt, Henslowe and Alleyn secured a transfer to themselves of the joint Mastership of Paris Garden in 1604. Meanwhile Henslowe was steadily amassing house property, most of it in Southwark, and some of it, at least by origin, of a rather questionable character.[1010] His own residence is given in 1577 as in the Liberty of the Clink, more precisely in 1593 as 'on the bank sid right over against the clink', whereby is doubtless meant the prison which gave its name to the Liberty; and in the Clink he continued to dwell to the end. For subsidies he was regularly assessed at £10. He filled parochial offices, becoming[360] vestryman of St. Saviour's, Southwark, in 1607, churchwarden in 1608, and governor of the free grammar school in 1612. His death on 6 January 1616 was followed almost immediately by that of his widow in April 1617, and most of his property passed into the hands of the Alleyns, together with a mass of papers, which are now amalgamated with Alleyn's own at Dulwich. The collection is of the first importance both for dramatic and for social history. It contains title-deeds of theatres, agreements, and bonds entered into by companies of players, private correspondence between the members of Henslowe's family and with the poets and actors dependent upon him, inventories of stage costumes, book-holder's 'plots' or outlines of plays, and many other documents touching in innumerable ways upon the finance and control of the stage. It also contains Henslowe's famous 'Diary'. This is not in fact a diary at all, but a folio memorandum book, which Henslowe used principally during 1592-1603, and in which he entered in picturesque confusion particulars of accounts between himself and the companies occupying his theatres, together with jottings on many personal and business matters, and records of loans, which are often written, signed, or witnessed in the autographs of players and poets.

From the diary and the related documents it is possible to reconstruct in its main outlines the history of Henslowe's theatrical enterprises, and to contrast his policy as a capitalist with that of his rivals, the Burbadges. During the earlier years covered by our information, the theatre with which he was mainly concerned was the Rose, which he had himself built on the Bankside, although he appears also to have had an interest in the distant and practically disused house at Newington Butts. At one or other of these he entertained a succession of companies for the short periods during which playing was possible in the plague-stricken period of 1592-4. In the autumn of 1594 he settled down with Alleyn and the Admiral's men at the Rose, and this combination lasted, with some reorganization of the company in 1597, until 1600, when the Admiral's men moved to the newly built Fortune, and were succeeded a couple of years later at the Rose by Lord Worcester's men. It seems clear from an analysis of the accounts which he kept during 1592-7, that Henslowe, like the housekeepers at the Globe, was in the practice of taking his profits as landlord in the form, not of a fixed rent, but of a share of the daily takings at the theatre, and in his case also the sum allotted seems to have been half the proceeds of the galleries as distinct from the outer doors of the play-house.[361] He was responsible for keeping the building in repair, and for the fees to the Master of the Revels for licensing its use; all other outgoings had presumably to be met by the company. If, as sometimes happened, the theatre was put at the disposal of some fencer or other performer not belonging to the company, the profits of the subletting were apportioned between Henslowe and the actors.[1011] It should be added that, under an agreement entered into when the building of the Rose was being planned in 1587, Henslowe had assigned half his profits for a term of eight years and a quarter to one John Cholmley in return for fixed quarterly payments. The covenants of the agreement entitled the parties jointly to appoint actors to perform in the play-house, and gatherers to collect the entrance fees, and reserved to each of them the right 'to suffer theire frendes to go in for nothinge'. They were to share the cost of repairs and Cholmley, who was a grocer, was to have the monopoly of selling drink on the premises. The agreement was probably terminated by Cholmley's death; if not, it would have served Henslowe for an insurance over the lean years of the long plague.[1012]

The character of Henslowe's entries in the diary changes towards the end of 1597, but the indications do not suggest any alteration in the conditions upon which the Admiral's men remained his tenants. On the other hand, the new series of accounts reveals certain relations between himself and the company for which there is no known analogy in the organization of the King's men. Quite apart from payments for the use of the theatres, the players had to meet divers costs of maintenance, including the purchase of play-books from dramatists and the provision of properties and garments for new productions. These charges were heavy and fluctuating, and proved a difficulty for men who lived from hand to mouth, and had acquired the thriftless habit of sharing their takings weekly or even daily, and keeping no reserve fund. Henslowe, as a capitalist, came to the rescue. Perhaps tentatively at first, but certainly from 1597 as a regular system, he met the claims of poets and tradesmen as they fell due, and debited the sums advanced to a running account with the company, which forms the main subject-matter of the diary. Of course he had to recoup himself from time to time; and Dr. Greg has made it pretty clear that, when the system was in full working, he did this by[362] claiming a lien upon the residue of the gallery takings which, although collected by his own 'gatherers', would otherwise, under the tenancy agreement, have been handed over to the sharers. For a time he seems to have satisfied himself with reserving half of this residue towards his account. In July 1598, however, he notes in the diary 'Here I begyne to receue the wholle gallereys'. Even so the repayments did not keep pace with the expenditure, and from time to time he struck a balance and took an acknowledgement from the company of the amount of their outstanding debt. Most of Henslowe's advances were either for properties and apparel or for the writing of plays, and I see no reason to doubt that substantially the whole expenditure of the company under these two heads passed through his hands. Sometimes, but not always, he paid the fee demanded by the Master of the Revels for the licensing of a new play; and occasionally he put his hand in his pocket for travelling or legal expenses, or for the shot of a corporate jollification at a tavern. On the other hand, there were certain regular outgoings with which he had nothing to do, and for which the company must have had to make provision in other ways; for lighting and cleaning and the rushes which obviated the need for cleaning, for music, for the wages of stage attendants and those actors who were not sharers, the 'hirelings', as they were called from an early date.[1013] Probably the boys who took the female parts were apprenticed to individual sharers; in one case a boy was apprenticed to Henslowe, who charged the company or one of its members a weekly sum for his services.[1014] [363] It is, however, interesting to observe that in the case of the Admiral's men, the legal instruments which secured the continuity of the services of individual actors sometimes at least took the form, for sharers no less than for hirelings, not of bonds given to their fellows, but of contracts of service entered into, under penalties for breach, with Henslowe himself. As it was open to Henslowe to terminate these contracts, the constitution of the company was to a certain extent dependent upon his good will, and in fact he more than once refers to them as 'my company'.[1015] He was not, however, in any strict sense the 'director' or even the 'manager' of the company. Dr. Greg more aptly describes him as their 'banker'.[1016] The entries of his advances on their behalf are so worded as to imply that they were made on specific authorities given by one or more leading members of the company; and some of these authorities in fact exist in the shape of letters asking Henslowe to make payments to poets in respect of plays which the company have heard and approved. That in practice the banker had a considerable say in influencing the policy of the company is probable enough; and also that to the poor devils of poets he, rather than the actors, must have often appeared in the welcome guise of paymaster. Both poets and actors were under frequent personal obligations to him for small loans;[1017] and he sometimes found the capital sum necessary to enable an actor to become a sharer, and took it back by instalments.[1018]

[364]

Henslowe's method of financing the Admiral's men endured for some time after their transference to the Fortune. Here, however, they prospered, and he notes himself in the diary as 'begininge to receue of thes meane ther privet deates which they owe vnto me'. The diary is practically closed in 1603. An exceptional entry in 1604 records that he 'caste vp all the acowntes from the begininge of the world vntell this daye' with the Prince's men, as they had then become, and found 'all reconynges consernynge the company in stocke generall descarged & my sealfe descarged to them of al deates'. It is possible that henceforward the relations of the company were less with Henslowe than with Alleyn, with whom they had entered into some kind of 'composicion' in 1600. Certainly the few remaining documents with regard to the Prince's men now at Dulwich seem to be of Alleyn rather than Henslowe provenance. Henslowe had, however, by agreement with Alleyn, a half interest in the 'house' of the Fortune, an arrangement which may have been modified if, as seems probable, some of the sharers were taken into partnership as housekeepers in 1608. Henslowe had a running account with the Earl of Worcester's men at the Rose from 1602; and these relations had probably also terminated when, as the Queen's men, they set up on an independent basis at the Red Bull in 1604. About 1611-15, however, we again become able to study Henslowe's finances, shortly before his death, in a group of related documents which illustrate and are illustrated by the diary in an extremely interesting way.[1019], The first of these is a bond in £500 given to Henslowe by the Lady Elizabeth's men in 1611 for the observance of certain articles. Unfortunately the articles are not annexed, but it may perhaps be taken for granted that they constituted an agreement under which the company were to play at a house provided by Henslowe. This may in the first instance have been the Swan, but in the spring of 1613 Henslowe probably acquired an interest in the Whitefriars, and in the following autumn he and his partner Jacob Meade entered into a contract with a builder to convert the old Bear Garden into a house capable of being used for plays, as well as for baiting. At this, which was renamed the Hope, the Lady Elizabeth's men certainly performed. The second document,[365] in fact, consists of articles between Henslowe and Meade on the one side and Nathan Field on behalf of the company on the other, whereby the former undertake during a term of three years to house the company, to give them the use of an existing stock of apparel, including a suitable supply for travelling purposes if necessary, and to disburse such sums upon the furnishing of new plays with apparel as four or five sharers, whom Henslowe and Meade are to name for the purpose, may require. They also undertake to make similar disbursements for plays, receiving repayment after the second or third day's performance, to remove non-conforming players at the request of a majority of the company, and to hand over all forfeits for failures to attend rehearsal and the like. The close of the document is mutilated, but it is pretty clear that it provided for a nightly account of gallery takings, out of which Henslowe and Meade were to retain half for rent, and the other half towards the repayment of disbursements on apparel and of an outstanding debt of £124 until this should be extinguished. It is to be noted that, since the days of the Admiral's men, Henslowe had differentiated between the procedure for recovering his advances on account of apparel and of play-books respectively. The articles contemplate that individual players will be under contracts with Henslowe and Meade, and the third document is such a contract, dated 7 April 1614, with one Robert Dawes, who then joined the company. Certain covenants therein with regard to the personal conduct of the actor have already been described. In addition he bound himself to play for three years as a sharer in such company as Henslowe and Meade might appoint, and to consent to the retention by them of a moiety of the gallery and tiring-house takings for the use of the house, and of the other moiety towards the cost of apparel and the debt of £124. Henslowe and Meade also reserve the right to use the house for baiting on one day in each fortnight. The fourth document is the most illuminating of all. It is divided into two sections, one headed Articles of Grieuance against Mr. Hinchlowe, the other Articles of Oppression against Mr. Hinchlowe; and although unsigned was evidently drawn up by the company in the spring of 1615, for reference to some arbitrator, or perhaps to the Lord Chamberlain. The charges against Henslowe are partly of definite acts of dishonesty in the manipulation of his accounts with the company, partly of an oppressive use of his legal position to his own advantage and their detriment. If the allegations are well founded, he had cheated them by failing to bring to account sums due to them and to make[366] a heavy payment with which they were debited, by charging the common stock with loans made to individuals, by putting an inflated value upon apparel taken over from himself, by saddling them with the cost of an excessive number of gatherers and with bonuses which he had promised out of his own pocket, in order to induce particular actors to join the company. Under these heads they claim a heavy rebate against the debt of £600 which he was maintaining to be due from them. They assert that, to gain his ends, he had bribed their own representative Field; that while bonds had been taken from them to an amount far in excess of their real obligations, the articles binding Henslowe and Meade had never been signed; that Henslowe had taken advantage of this to repudiate his liability to hand over the apparel and play-books, for the greater part of which the company had already paid; and that he had similarly taken advantage of the fact that the agreements with the hired men were in his name to withdraw these men, and thus force a reconstruction of the company, whenever it suited his convenience. Thus, they say, 'within three yeares hee hath broken and dissmembred five companies'. It is a little difficult to make up the number of five companies, even if the Children of the Revels, who during the years covered by the statement were absorbed for a time in the Lady Elizabeth's men, are included. But the transactions described serve well to illustrate the distinction between the status of a company as a body of household servants and its status as a legal association, since there is no reason to doubt that, throughout all the shifting phases of its relations to Henslowe, a continuous body of players performed in public and at Court under the title of the Lady Elizabeth's men, and by authority of the patent issued to these men in 1611. One other point, in which Henslowe's earlier practice appears to have undergone modification by the period of his connexion with the Lady Elizabeth's men, emerges from his correspondence with the playwright Robert Daborne. Instead of merely paying for Daborne's plays as agent for the company, as had been his practice for the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's men, he appears to have bought the plays himself, and resold them, probably at a profit, to the company.[1020]

The protesting players represent Henslowe's dealings with them as governed by a desire to be what the modern capitalist calls 'master in his own house'. They declare that he gave the reason of his often breaking with them in his own words,[367] 'Should these fellowes come out of my debt, I should have noe rule with them'. The principle is plausible enough, and is familiar to tradesmen in all poor neighbourhoods. The man burdened with debt must lose the fruits of his labour, because he is not free to revise his contracts on terms more beneficial to himself. Once the players got out of debt and accumulated a reserve fund, they would acquire their own theatre, and Henslowe's might stand empty. If the charges were justified—and as Dr. Greg points out, we have not Henslowe's answer—he certainly resorted to oppressive devices to prevent the Lady Elizabeth's men from achieving independence. It must not be too hastily assumed that he followed a similar policy in his earlier dealings with the Admiral's men. So far as we know, they brought no accusation against him, and the connexion seems to have been advantageous to both parties. The Admiral's men held together, and maintained a standing hardly inferior to that of their principal rivals, the Chamberlain's men. They had Alleyn for a fellow; and it may be that Alleyn, whose 'industrie and care', according to the deposition of a common acquaintance, 'were a great meanes of the bettering of the estate of the said Philip Henslowe', was able to give his partner advice, more equitable and perhaps in the long run not less profitable, even from the capitalist point of view, than was afterwards forthcoming from 'intemperate Mʳ. Meade'.[1021] At any rate there is an agreement which shows that a compromise was arrived at after Henslowe's death with Alleyn and Meade upon the question of the disputed debt.[1022] I am not Henslowe's biographer, and am therefore not concerned either to whitewash or to vilify his character. But it is fair to say that, outside the Articles of Grievance and Oppression, there is not much, in the mass of papers which have descended to us, that necessarily bears an unfavourable interpretation. Henslowe's private loans to players and poets were innumerable. They were generally, but not always, repaid, and it would be difficult to prove that he even exacted interest in such cases, although it is possible that the full sums entered in his accounts did not really change hands. On the other hand, too much stress must not be laid on the expressions of esteem with which his debtors approached him. Thus Daborne dwells on 'your tried curtesy' and 'the great love I have felt from you', and Field, addresses him as 'Father Hinchlow' and signs himself 'your loving son', as if he were Ben[368] Jonson.[1023] An application for money is, however, not even an affidavit. In his will he appears to have stated that he had not used his wife very well and would make amends;[1024] but his private correspondence reveals family affection and a turn for pious sentiment, probably sincere. Neither quality is necessarily inconsistent with unscrupulous methods of business. Whether Henslowe was a good or a bad man seems to me a matter of indifference. He was a capitalist. And my object is to indicate the disadvantages under which a company in the hands of a capitalist lay, in respect of independence and economic stability, as compared with one conducted upon the lines originally laid down by the Burbages for the tenants of the Globe. Not being owners of their own theatre, such a company were liable to eviction, and were drained to a large extent of the profits of their prosperous years. Relying upon their financier to meet in the first instance all extraordinary expenditure, they had no occasion to build up a reserve fund, and constantly tended to drift into debt. Organized upon a legal basis which made an act of association between the members of less importance than individual contracts entered into by sharers and hirelings alike with the capitalist, they were at his mercy if, for purposes of his own, he chose to use his powers under those contracts to bring about their dissolution.[1025]

A few figures bearing on the actual profits of playing can be brought together. And first for the 'house'. Henslowe's takings at the Rose, as disclosed by the diary, seem to have averaged about 30s. a day during 1592-7. A short season at Newington Butts brought him in no more than 9s. a day. As the Rose was normally open for about 240 days in the year, his total annual receipts may be estimated at £360. No doubt the cost of upkeep was substantial. The landlord had to find a site, build a house, maintain it in repair, and take out a licence. The ground-rent of the Rose was £7, of the Globe £14 10s., of the Fortune £16. The total rent of the site and building of the Blackfriars was £40. The building of the Fortune in 1600 cost £520, and its rebuilding in 1622 £1,000; the rebuilding of the Globe in 1613 about £1,400; the conversion[369] of the Bear Garden into the Hope in 1613, £360. There was probably some set-off in all these cases for the profits from taphouses and other tenements attached to the theatres; this was estimated at from £20 to £30 for the Globe and Blackfriars together in 1635. There were also occasional lettings to outsiders.[1026] The housekeepers in 1635 complained of the 'chargeable reparacions'; in earlier years, when theatres were built largely of wood, they must have been more chargeable still. The Rose was not built earlier than 1587, but Henslowe had to spend £108 on it in 1592. The fee charged by the Master of the Revels for licensing a theatre rose during 1592-9 from £1 to £3 a month. The only estimates of net profits are for the King's men and of rather late date. The pleadings in Ostler v. Heminges (1615) give a single housekeeper's profits as £20 from one-fourteenth of the Globe and £20 from one-seventh of the Blackfriars, thus indicating £280 and £140 as the total annual value of the 'houses' at the Globe and Blackfriars respectively; those in Witter v. Heminges and Condell (1619), coming from a less trustworthy witness, allege that the Globe was worth £420 to £560 before the fire and more after the rebuilding.[1027] The bearing of the figures is complicated by our ignorance of the proportions in which the King's men made use of their two theatres. By 1635 the importance of the Blackfriars had outstripped that of the Globe. Its 'house' then yielded £700-£800 a year; that of the Globe about 54s. a day, nearly twice as much as the Rose half a century earlier.

As to the earnings of a sharer we have even less information. One of the disputants in 1635 put them at no more than 3s. a day at the Globe; another at £180 a year from all sources. If both were accurate, the Blackfriars must by that date have been doing far better business than the Globe, even after allowing for the inclusion in the £180 of a share of the fees for private performances at Court and elsewhere. The customary Court fee was £10, or £6 13s. 4d. if the King was not present. Private performances were ordinarily at night, and did not interfere with public performances in the afternoon. If the Court was out of London, however, the theatre had to be closed. No special allowance seems to have been made for this until about 1631, when the fee was doubled for a performance in the daytime or away from London.[1028] The King's men got the principal share of the Court work,[370] being called on in 1611-12 for as many as twenty-two plays. Their Court fees during 1603-16 amounted on an average to £125 a year.[1029] The exact number of sharers is not known; it was probably not more than twelve. All things considered, it is not unreasonable to put the earnings of a sharer in the King's men during the first decade of the seventeenth century at about £100 to £150 a year, to which, if he were a 'housekeeper' with an interest in both houses, he might be able to add another £40 or £50. This estimate agrees with Sir Henry Herbert's valuation of the shares which he held before the war in the companies other than the King's at £100 each on an average.[1030] Sir Sidney Lee's figure of £700 for Shakespeare's total professional income, which includes £40 for the books of his plays, seems to me vastly overestimated.[1031] Even the more modest £200 or so was a handsome income for the time, since the purchasing power of money in the seventeenth century is variously reckoned at from five to eight times as much as at present. Of course, in times of inhibition from plague or other cause the income vanished altogether, and was very inadequately replaced by the meagre gains of travelling, together with the allowance made by King James to his men for private practice during the infection.

The gross takings of the sharers were naturally much greater. But they were subject to heavy outgoings. The King's men reckoned these in 1635 at £3 a day or from £900 to £1,000 a year for hired 'journeymen' and boys, music, lights, and so forth, in addition to 'extraordinary' charges for apparel and poets.[1032] The wages of a hireling are given by Gosson [371] in 1579 as 6s. a week; some of Henslowe's agreements of 1597 provide for wages of 5s., 6s. 8d., and 8s.[1033] There was some economy to be secured by doubling small parts.[1034] How far this was facilitated by any use of masks is open to doubt.[1035] Boys were regularly employed to take female parts, and although it would be going rather too far to say that a woman never appeared upon an Elizabethan stage, women were not included in the ordinary companies.[1036] The boys were apprenticed to individuals, and their masters had to pay rather than receive premiums. In return they charged wages to the company. Henslowe gave £8 for a boy in 1597 and got 3s. a week from the Admiral's for his wages. John Shank in 1635 claimed that he had had to give £40 for a single boy, and £200 in all.[1037] Contributions to local rates came to about £5 a year.[1038] The cost of apparel and properties is difficult to estimate. A company bought or accumulated a stock, and might also have at its disposal a stock belonging to the owner of its theatre. Individual actors may have had their private wardrobes.[1039] Fresh purchases were only necessitated by new productions, but these were frequent. The special mounting of Court performances was helped out by the Revels Office.[1040] The actor in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592) boasted that his share of apparel would not be sold for[372] £200, but he was fictitious. Richard Jones, in fact, sold his share in a stock of apparel, play-books, instruments, and other commodities for £37 10s. in 1589. The cost of such things has a tendency to grow. If the sums of from £50 to £80 received by retiring sharers early in the seventeenth century may be taken as representing their interests in the stocks, the total value of the contents of a tiring-house might be anything from £500 to £1,000. Henslowe sold the stock of the Lady Elizabeth's men for £400 in 1615; apparently this did not include their play-books, which they valued at £200. I reckon that in 1597-1603 Henslowe spent in all £1,317 for the Admiral's men, or about £1 for each day of playing; of this play-books accounted for £652, apparel and properties for £561, and miscellaneous expenses for £103. The garments, by Henslowe's time at least, had become costly enough, as much as £19 being given for a single cloak, while a tailor was employed to make up satin at 12s. 6d. and velvet at £1 a yard.[1041] Second-hand finery was sometimes to be obtained from a serving-man or a needy courtier.[1042] It was probably the lavish use of apparel, more than anything else, which led both friends and foes to dwell upon the stately furnishing of the English theatres.[1043] Strictly scenic effects were limited by the structural conditions of the stage, and Henslowe's inventories do not suggest that any vast stock of movable properties was kept.[1044] Animals and monsters were freely introduced.[1045] Living dogs and even horses may have been trained; but your lion or bear or dragon was a creature of skin and brown paper.[1046]

An old 'book' could be bought for £2, but the value to the company might be much more. A good stock piece was[373] a perpetual 'get-penny' and could, of course, be furbished up from time to time.[1047] In Downton v. Slater (1598) the Admiral's men valued a misappropriated book at £13 6s. 8d. and claimed £30 damages for withholding it. The court awarded £10 10s. New plays cost more, and entailed fees of 7s. each to the Master of the Revels for licensing.[1048] A play by Greene would fetch £6 13s. 4d. about 1592. The prices paid by the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's men between 1597 and 1603 ranged from £4 to £10 10s.; a fee of £6 may be taken as about normal. 'An they'll give me twenty pounds a play, I'll not raise my vein', says Antonio Balladino, who is Anthony Munday, in The Case is Altered, a play of about 1598.[1049] In 1613 Robert Daborne was bargaining for plays with Henslowe at rates of from £10 to £20, and boasting that he could get £25 elsewhere. It seems likely that Henslowe charged a commission on these prices to the company. There are some traces of the system, used at a later date, by which the author was entitled to a 'benefit' night shortly after the production of a new play.[1050] He was also [374] entitled to free admission to the house.[1051] The poets received their fees from Henslowe in instalments, drawing £1 or so in 'earnest' when the commission was given, and as each batch of sheets was handed in, and the balance when the play was finished. This plan proved disastrous to them. The instalments often found them in a debtor's prison, and some of them became mere bond-slaves.[1052] Thus both Henry Porter and Henry Chettle were reduced to making agreements which pledged them to write for no other company than the Admiral's. The device is familiar to the modern publisher. Robert Daborne's correspondence with Henslowe is eloquent of the straits to which a hack playwright might be brought. Daborne was a man of good family, and had lawsuits about his 'estate', which added to his embarrassments. He had been interested in the management of the Queen's Revels, and it may have been the absorption of this company by the Lady Elizabeth's men that brought him into contact with Henslowe. His letters preserved at Dulwich run from April 1613 to July 1614.[1053] During this period he was engaged upon at least four plays. The history of one of them, the tragedy of Machiavel and the Devil, may be taken as typical. On 17 April 1613 he signed an agreement to complete it by the end of May for an 'earnest' of £6 down, £4 on completion of three acts, and £10 'vpon delivery in of yᵉ last scean perfited'; and for the observance of the agreement he gave a bond of £20. On 25 April he wrote to borrow £1 from Henslowe, explaining that he was 'vpon yᵉ sodeyn put to a great extremity in bayling my man committed to Newgate vpon taking a possession for me', and had unfortunately taken 'less money of my kinsman a lawier that was with me then servd my turn'. On 3 May he got another £1, although the three acts were not yet finished; another on 8 May;[375] and another on 16 May, making £11 in all. 'Sir,' he wrote, 'my occations of expenc have bin soe great & soe many I am ashamed to think how much I am forct to press you.' On 19 May he had probably handed in his three acts, as he then signed an acquittance for £16 received up to date, noting at the foot 'This play to be delivered in to Mr. Hinchlaw with all speed'. It was not, however, ready by 31 May, and on 5 June came a piteous appeal for an advance of £2 'which stands me vpon to send over to my counsell in a matter concerns my whole estate'. Henslowe shall not be the loser by his kindness: 'wher I deale otherways then to your content may I & myne want ffryndship in distress'. By 10 June, 'yᵉ necessity of term busines exacts me beyond my custom to be trublesome vnto you', to the tune of yet another £1. By this time Henslowe was evidently calling out for the play; and Daborne protests, 'I perceav you misdoubt my readynes. Sir, I would not be hyred to break my ffayth with you; before God they shall not stay one hour for me.' He was still protesting on 25 June; but soon after must have brought Machiavel and the Devil to an end and drawn the £1 still due to him on balance, since on 18 June he was already beginning to negotiate for his next play, The Arraignment of London. And so the correspondence goes on; the instalments always anticipated, the applications always larded with declarations of his own honesty and with mingled flattery and complaint of a patron who, generous as he was, showed an inexplicable tendency to 'meat' Daborne 'by yᵉ common measuer of poets'. The result was inevitable. Daborne's terms came down from £20 to £12 and even £10 a play; and in addition to reselling to the company at a profit, Henslowe seems on one occasion at least to have squeezed out of Daborne 'half my earnings in the play', by which, I take it, the proceeds of his benefit are meant. By the end of 1613 Daborne was in considerable distress; 'if you doe not help me to tenn shillings by this bearer, by the living God I am vtterly disgract'. There is not much more of the correspondence. It is clear from another source that Daborne did not for some time get free, for when Henslowe lay on his death-bed, Mrs. Daborne called for some papers belonging to her husband, and Henslowe gave her a bond for £20 of which she was ignorant, possibly the very bond signed for Machiavel and the Devil, saying, 'I knowe you and with all my hart doe freely forgive you all that you owe me'.[1054] By 1618 Daborne had taken orders. He became Chancellor of Waterford and Prebendary[376] and Dean of Lismore, and thus, as a contemporary poem has it, 'died amphibious by the ministry'.

The wrongs of authors are not inarticulate, and they have an appeal to posterity from the injustice of their age. The exploitation of poets by the playing companies brought about some cross-currents in the tone of the allusions to the theatre, which are so frequent in occasional literature. On the one hand, the pamphleteers, and in a less degree the satirists, are with the players as against their enemies the Puritans; on the other hand, they have their own grievances to publish and avenge. A note of hostility makes its appearance not long after the first invasion of the province of stage-writing by the university wits; and by the embittered close of Robert Greene's reckless life the relations were acute. Thomas Lodge in 1589 swore to abandon dramas and 'pennie-knaves delight.'[1055] Thomas Nashe canvassed the players in his prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon (1589), and Greene himself, with humour in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), and in his autobiographical romances of Never Too Late (1590) and Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592), and with unsparing invective in the warning To those Gentlemen his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their Wits in making Plaies, which he appended to the latter. In these pamphlets the 'vaine glorious tragedians' are twitted with their mouthings on the stage, with their chameleon-like shifting from the service of one lord to that of another,[1056] with the contrast between their rapid rise to wealth and their obscurity when they carried their fardles afootback upon the roads, with the romances and morals—Delphrigus and The King of the Fairies, Man's Wit, and the Dialogue of Dives—that formed their stock-in-trade before the masters of arts came to their rescue. But the real gravamen is that they live on the wits of scholars. They are 'apes', 'buckram gentlemen', 'a company of taffaty fooles' tricked up with poets' feathers, 'puppits that speake from our mouths', 'anticks garnisht in our colours'. They cleave like burrs to their victims. An alleged comparison by Cicero of the Roman actor Roscius to the crow in Aesop is called in aid, and the taunt of 'vpstart crow, beautified with our feathers' is not spared to an actor before whose dramatic[377] genius that of Greene and his fellows was to fade as a rush-light before the sun.[1057] The actors had something on their side to complain of, with Greene no less than with Daborne. In a remorseful moment he tells us of the 'arch-plaimaking poet' Roberto, how 'what euer he fingered aforehand was the certaine meanes to vnbinde a bargaine'; and a detractor accuses him of selling the same play to two companies, and defending himself by maintaining that no faith was to be kept with players.[1058] During the seventeenth century, it is [378] mainly Dekker, as critic of the players, no less than in other ways, who carries on the tradition of Greene and Nashe.[1059] Himself an active playwright, it is with black looks that he stands by, in thronged term-time or at the coming of ambassadors, and watches the companies battening upon the fruits of divine poetry, like swine on acorns; and when plague arrives, although his own occupation be gone, it is with savage glee that he sees the flag hauled down and the doors closed, and his gloomy paymasters setting out once more on the hard life of 'strowlers'.

One interesting result of the feud between poets and players was that some of the former were led to encourage and even acquire financial interests in a rival type of theatrical organization which for a time at least entered into successful competition with the professional companies. This organization rested upon the use of boy actors. I have elsewhere expounded the important share taken by school plays in the earlier development of the Renaissance drama.[1060] The grammar schools of [379] Eton, Westminster, and Merchant Taylors and the song schools of the Chapel Royal, Windsor, St. Paul's and the private chapel of the Earl of Oxford continued, far into Elizabeth's reign, to give their performances at Court side by side with the growing companies of noble and royal servants. It was not until the professionals called upon the university wits and began to mingle literary with popular elements in their productions that the destinies of the drama passed definitely into their hands. The earlier boy companies died out soon after 1590. A decade later the Paul's and Chapel companies were revived, the latter at least under somewhat new economic conditions. Formerly the plays had been managed by schoolmasters and song-masters, as by-activities of institutions primarily established for other objects. For the revived Paul's plays, so far as we know, Edward Pearce, the choirmaster, was similarly responsible. The Chapel children, on the other hand, were placed upon a more regular business footing. The official Master of the Children, Nathaniel Giles, took part in the undertaking; and the royal commission to impress singing boys, which he held, was unscrupulously used to compel the services of boys who could not sing, and were only needed as recruits for the stage. But long before James had come to the decision that on religious grounds the connexion between the Chapel and the plays must be broken, the actual control of the organization had passed from the Master to a financial syndicate, associated much on the principle adopted by the ordinary playing companies, whose members hired a theatre, charged themselves with the maintenance of the boys and of the performances, and divided up the profits as their reward. During the history of the Chapel boys and of the group of Revels companies which succeeded them, several of these syndicates came into existence, and shares in one or other of them were held by Marston, Drayton, Barry, Mason, Daborne, and very possibly also by other dramatists. The articles of association of the King's Revels company in 1608 may perhaps be taken as typical. One of the sharers, Martin Slater the actor, who was evidently a kind of manager, is to have lodgings in the theatre, which was the Whitefriars, and the right to sell refreshments, and is to travel with the children if necessary, in which event he is to enjoy a share and a half in the profits. The children are to be apprenticed to him for three years each, and he is to bind himself in £40 not to transfer the indentures. The 'whole chardges of the howse, the gatherers, the wages, the childrens bourd, musique, booke keeper, tyreman, tyrewoman, lights, the Maister of the revells duties,[380] and all other things needefull and necessary' are to be deducted in due proportions from each day's takings, so that the company may not run into debt. No sharer is to take away any apparel or other common property, or print any play-book, on pain of losing his interest.

The boys played in what were called 'private' houses, and it is not quite clear how far they were amenable to the usual principles of stage regulation; an order by the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor to suppress plays during the Lent of 1601 was obviously intended to be enforced against them. Their performances, especially while they were novel, proved a serious menace to the prosperity of the adult companies. The classical allusions on the subject are that of Jonson in The Poetaster to the winter of 1600-1, which made the players poorer than so many starved snakes,[1061] and the elaborate apology for the travelling of the company in Hamlet, which is so germane to the matter now under discussion that it must, however familiar, be given in full:[1062]

The be-rattling of the common stages and their spirited replies, thought by some to include a 'purge' in Troilus and Cressida, with which Shakespeare 'put down' Ben Jonson, form an element in the literary conflict known as 'the war of the theatres', in which, however, this issue is much complicated with others arising from the personalities of the dramatists engaged, and notably from that of Ben Jonson himself.[1063][382] Thus is explained the apparent paradox by which plays as well as pamphlets become the vehicle of attacks upon players. Three such plays, Histriomastix, The Poetaster, and the second part of The Return from Parnassus, call for special attention. The player-scenes in Histriomastix seem to belong mainly, though not wholly, to the original form of the play, which I regard as an outcome of the campaign of Robert Greene and his fellows about 1590, although the extant text, not printed until 1610, represents a later recension, probably undertaken by Marston, as one of the 'musty fopperies of antiquity' produced by the Paul's boys about 1600.[1064] The piece is of the nature of a political morality, and the scenes in question serve as one illustration of its general theme, which is that of the cyclical rotation of society through the successive stages of Peace, Plenty, Pride, Envy, War, Poverty, and so to Peace again. Many side-lights are thrown upon the methods of company organization which have already been described in these pages. In Act I some idle and drunken artisans, Gulch, Clout, Belch the beard-maker, Gut the fiddle-string-maker, Incle the pedlar, combine to form a company. Their poet is Master Posthaste, whom they call a gentleman scholar, but who is evidently a caricature of Anthony Munday, dramatist and Messenger of the Chamber. A scrivener is called in to 'tye a knott of knaves togither', and Bougie the mercer will furnish them with 'rich stuff' at a price. They call themselves Sir Oliver Owlet's men, and take his badge of an owl in an ivy-bush. In Act II they appear on the steps of a market cross and 'cry' a play to be given in the town-house at three o'clock. Their repertory includes The Lascivious Knight, Lady Nature, Mother Gurton's Needle (a tragedy), The Devil and Dives (a comedy), A Russet Coat and a Knight's Cap (an infernal), A Proud Heart and a Beggar's Purse (a pastoral), The Widow's Apron Strings (a nocturnal).[1065] Posthaste is also working on 'the new plot of the Prodigall Childe', with a prologue 'for lords' and an epilogue. They are invited to play before Lord Mavortius, [383]and thereupon throw over 'the town play', and attend him, singing:

The actual performance, perhaps owing to a Marstonian interpolation, consists of a fragment of The Prodigal Child, together with a fragment of a piece on Troilus and Cressida. At the end Posthaste extemporizes on a 'theame' and the company are rewarded with 3s. 4d. In Act III a Marstonian passage introduces them to a new poet Chrisoganus, who asks ten pounds a play. But 'our companie's hard of hearing of that side', and they will be content with their goose-quillian Posthast'. Chrisoganus rates their pride and the 'windy froth of bottle-ale' which passes muster for poetry on the stage. The 'proud statute rogues' also refuse an offer from Mavortius of 13s. 4d. or even £1 6s. 8d. for another performance, and in view of their 'expense in sumptuous clothes' they must have 'ten pound a play, or no point comedy'. Their insolence is condemned:

In Act IV they are rehearsing, and fine Posthaste 1s. for coming late. And they quarrel amongst themselves. Clout is discontented with his half-share, and will have 'a whole share, or turn camelion'. Acts V and VI bring Nemesis. As they set up their bills, they are pressed for the wars. There is no remedy. They have alienated the town officers by refusing the town's reward. The 'master-sharers' must even provide their equipment out of their own purses. The soldiers loot their apparel. They will be the sharers now, and the players the hired men. They bid one who 'would rend and tear a cat upon a stage' not to 'march like a drowned rat', but 'look up and play the Tamburlaine'. The hostess claims her shot, 'The sharers dinners sixpence a piece. The hirelings —— pence'; and the hamper has to be searched for a cloak to pawn. The constable demands his dues for[384] tax-money to relieve the poor, and the excuse that but fifteen pence was shared last week is not accepted in face of the idle and immoral lives that the rascals have led. In the end they are shipped off remorselessly to serve beyond the seas. It will be obvious that, while most of the points of criticism taken by the dramatist are those familiar to the literary pamphleteers, he is also not unsympathetic to the Puritan view of players as a canker in the state.

Jonson wrote his Poetaster in the spring of 1601. He had already heard of the intention of the Chamberlain's men against him, which afterwards took shape in Dekker and Marston's Satiromastix, and got in the first blows by depicting his assailants as 'a sort of copper-lac't scoundrels' in ancient Rome and their poets as Demetrius 'a dresser of plaies about the town here' and Crispinus 'poetaster and plagiary'. Some of his matter has its reminiscences of Histriomastix; some probably rests on details with regard to individual Chamberlain's men which are now irrecoverable.[1066] His allusions to their poor winter season of 1600-1 and to the accumulation of shares by leading actors have already been quoted. The chief scene devoted to the players is that in which Histrio is bullied by Tucca, the huffing captain, who calls him 'stalker', 'gulch', 'stiffe toe', 'twopenny teare-mouth', and 'penny-biter', bids him turn fiddler again, get a bass violin at his back and march in a tawny coat with one sleeve to Goose Fair, and accuses his company of being usurers and brokers, who prey upon younger sons and citizens, and furnish facilities at their house for immoral practices. Tucca would bring his 'cockatrice' to see a bawdy play, but the players have nothing but humours, revels, and satires; to which Histrio replies that he is confusing them with 'the other side of Tyber', for 'we haue as much ribaldries in our plaies, as can bee, as you would wish, Captaine: all the sinners, i' the suburbs, come, and applaud our action, daily'. Crispinus is introduced as one who will teach the actors to tear and rant. Tucca bids Histrio give him forty shillings in earnest, since 'if hee pen for thee once, thou shalt not need to trauell, with thy pumps full of grauell, any more, after a blinde iade and a hamper: and stalke vpon boords, and barrell heads, to an old crackt trumpet'. Yet inasmuch as some of the players are 'honest gent'men-like scoundrels, and suspected to ha' some wit', Histrio may make Tucca a supper, and bring Frisker 'my zany' and Mango 'your fat fool', so long as he does not laugh too much or beg rapiers or scarfs;[385] but by no means 'your eating plaier' Polyphagus, nor 'the villanous-out-of-tune fiddler' Aenobarbus, nor Aesop, 'your politician'. Later in the play Histrio and Aesop inform against Ovid and Horace, who is Jonson, to the government, and although Tucca promises Aesop 'a monopoly of playing, confirm'd to thee and thy couey, vnder the Empirours broad Seale, for this seruice', his actual reward is to be whipped.[1067] In the Apologetical Dialogue printed with the play Jonson admits his hostility to the players:

The Return from Parnassus is of less significance, as being a Cambridge, not a London, play, and merely an echo of the main controversy. It was acted during the Christmas of 1601-2, and is a satire of things in general from the university point of view. Amongst other topics the relations of scholarship to the stage are touched upon. Burbadge and Kempe come in, boasting of their victory over Ben Jonson, and trying to recruit poets into their service.[1068] The scholars resent such thraldom:

And in the end they decide rather to take the road as fiddlers:

It is the old burden of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe once more.[1069]

The disturbance of theatrical conditions due to the revival of the boy companies became in time less acute. No doubt, the novelty of their performances wore off. Moreover, the companies were not very successful in holding together, partly because of the indiscretions of their managers and the inadequacy of their finance to stand the strain of plague years, but more because the boys, as might perhaps have been expected, grew up and ceased to be boys. Already about 1608 the Blackfriars boys 'were masters themselves' of their own company, and when this arrangement broke down, they began to be drafted into the adult associations. Other boy companies followed, but these were subject to the same difficulties, and the vogue of the original 'little eyases' was never quite recaptured.[1070] But, after all, the competition had not disappeared, but had merely taken another form. The younger generation was knocking at the gates; Field and Taylor waiting in eager rivalry for Burbadge's shoes, and meanwhile forming new combinations of their own which, however unstable, at least cut at the profits of their more firmly established rivals. The 'monopoly' offered by Jonson in jest would no doubt have been welcomed by the principal companies in earnest. The policy of the Privy Council from 1597 to 1600 pointed in this direction, but for whatever reason was not brought into effective operation. There are several indications of the pressure of competition during the earlier part of the seventeenth century. In 1609 it was worth the while of the Queen's Revels and the King's men to unite in buying off the Paul's boys at the cost of £20 a year. Dekker in the same year prophesies that the contention of the two houses of York and Lancaster will be as nothing to that of the three houses, by which he means the Globe, the[387] Fortune, and the Red Bull.[1071] Finally, in 1610, the preacher William Crashaw, commenting upon the hostility shown by the players to the plantation of Virginia, declares explicitly that it was motived by the fact that they were so multiplied in England that one could not live by another, and by the refusal of the promoters of the colony to give any of them a chance of trying their fortunes in the new world.[1072]

The palmy days of playing lasted beyond the formal limits set to this investigation. But they did not last for ever. The coming of the end can here only be adumbrated. It perhaps shows itself first in an increasing unwillingness amongst the provincial corporations to hear the players. It was in 1623, the year of the publication of the First Folio, that the City of Norwich took the step of making a representation to the Privy Council and obtaining leave not to suffer any players within their liberties. It is true that the inhibition was not strictly carried out and that the authority was renewed in 1640. Nevertheless it is a sign of the times. Other cities, Chester in 1615, Southampton in 1623, Worcester in 1627, closed their public buildings to performances.[1073] From this time onwards the entries of payments to players in municipal accounts tend more and more to take the form of 'gratuities' given them 'because they should not play' or 'to dismiss them', or 'to put them off', or in more emphatic terms still 'to rid the town of them'.[1074] Meanwhile the Puritan controversy breaks out again, winding up to that alarming compilation of learning and argument in Prynne's Histriomastix of 1633, which indeed cost its author his ears, but must none the less have hung like a shadow of fate upon the doomed stage for ever after. And in 1642 the shadow moved, and on the outbreak of war came that dignified ordinance of 2 September, which waved frivolity aside, what time the nation girded itself for matters of moment:[1075]

I need not here attempt to trace the faint flutterings of the mimetic instinct which survived this ordinance and even that, final and more detailed, of 9 February 1648, 'for the utter suppression and abolishing of all stage-playes and interludes', whereby players were made amenable to the statutes against vagabonds 'notwithstanding any license whatsoever from the King or any person or persons to that purpose', and the justices were ordered to demolish the houses, and to subject the players, if found, to a whipping.[1076] It is sufficient that from 1642 to 1660 there was substantially no public stage in London. Some of the King's men, we are told, went into the army, 'and, like good men and true, served the King their master, though in a different, yet more honourable capacity'. Under the Commonwealth they were 'reduced to a necessitous condition', and we have one glimpse of the last of Shakespeare's fellows, John Lowin, keeping an inn, the Three Pigeons, at Brentford, where he died very old, 'and his poverty was as great as his age'.[1077]

Printed in England at the Oxford University Press