John Doran - Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage (Volume 1 of 3)

Although Edward had commanded the transfer of the company of actors from Warwick Inn to Blackfriars, that dissolved monastery was not legally converted into a theatre till the year 1576, when Elizabeth was on the throne. In that year 4 4 The patent was dated 1574, and does not specify any particular building or locality. the Earl of Leicester's servants were licensed to open their series of seasons in a house, the site of which is occupied by Apothecaries' Hall and some adjacent buildings. At the head of the company was James, father of Richard Burbage, the original representative of Richard III. and of Hamlet, the author of which tragedies, so named, was, at the time of the opening of the Blackfriars' theatre, a lad of twelve years of age, surmounting the elementary difficulties of Latin and Greek in the Free School of Stratford-on-Avon.

In Elizabeth the drama possessed a generous patroness and a vindictive censor. Her afternoons at Windsor Castle and Richmond were made pleasant to her by the exertions of her players. The cost to her of occasional performances at the above residences during two years amounted to a fraction over £444. There were incidental expenses also, proving that the actors were well cared for. In the year 1575, among the estimates for plays at Hampton Court, the liberal sum of £8, 14s. is set down "for the boyling of the brawns against Xtmas."

As at Court, so also did the drama flourish at the Universities, especially at Cambridge. There, in 1566, the coarse dialect comedy, "Gammer Gurton's Needle" – a marvellous production, when considered as the work of a bishop, Still, of Bath and Wells – was represented amid a world of laughter.

There, too, was exercised a sharp censorship over both actors and audience. In a letter from Vice-Chancellor Hatcher to Burleigh, the conduct of Punter, a student of St. John's, at stage-plays at Caius and Trinity, is complained of as unsteady. In 1581 the heads of houses again make application to Burleigh, objecting to the players of the Great Chamberlain, the Earl of Oxford, poet and courtier, exhibiting certain plays already "practised" by them before the King. The authorities, when scholastic audiences were noisy, or when players brought no novelty with them to Cambridge, applied to the great statesman in town, and vexed him with dramatic troubles, as if he had been general stage-manager of all the companies strolling over the kingdom.

On one occasion the stage was employed as a vantage ground whereon to raise a battery against the power of the stage's great patroness, the Queen. In 1599, the indiscreet followers of Essex "filled the pit of the theatre, where Rutland and Southampton are daily seen, and where Shakspeare's company, in the great play of 'Richard II.,' have, for more than a year, been feeding the public eye with pictures of the deposition of kings." In June of the following year, "those scenes of Shakspeare's play disturb Elizabeth's dreams. The play had had a long and splendid run, not less from its glorious agony of dramatic passion than from the open countenance lent to it by the Earl, who, before his voyage, was a constant auditor at the Globe, and by his constant companions, Rutland and Southampton. The great parliamentary scene, the deposition of Richard, not in the printed book, was possibly not in the early play; yet the representation of a royal murder and a successful usurpation on the public stage is an event to be applied by the groundlings, in a pernicious and disloyal sense. Tongues whisper to the Queen that this play is part of a great plot to teach her subjects how to murder kings. They tell her she is Richard; Essex, Bolingbroke. These warnings sink into her mind. When Lambard, Keeper of the Records, waits upon her at the palace, she exclaims to him, 'I am Richard! Know you not that?'"

The performance of this play was, nevertheless, not prohibited. When the final attempt of Essex was about to be made, in February 1601 – "To fan the courage of their crew," says Mr. Hepworth Dixon, from whose Personal History of Lord Bacon I borrow these details, "and prepare the citizens for news of a royal deposition, the chiefs of the insurrection think good to revive, for a night, their favourite play. They send for Augustine Phillips, manager of the Blackfriars Theatre, to Essex House; Monteagle, Percy, and two or three more – among them Cuffe and Meyrick – gentlemen whose names and faces he does not recognise, receive him; and Lord Monteagle, speaking for the rest, tells him that they want to have played the next day Shakspeare's deposition of Richard II. Phillips objects that the play is stale, that a new one is running, and that the company will lose money by a change. Monteagle meets his objections. The theatre shall not lose; a host of gentlemen from Essex House will fill the galleries; if there is fear of loss, here are 40s. to make it up. Phillips takes the money, and King Richard is duly deposed for them, and put to death."

Meanwhile, the profession of player had been assailed by fierce opponents. In 1587, 5 5 1579 (2d edition). when twenty-three summers lightly sat on Shakspeare's brow, Gosson, the "parson" of St. Botolph's, discharged the first shot against stage plays which had yet been fired by any one not in absolute authority. Gosson's book was entitled, A School of Abuse , and it professed to contain "a pleasant invective against poets, players, jesters, and such like caterpillars of a Commonwealth." Gosson's pleasantry consists in his illogical employment of invective. Domitian favoured plays, argal , Domitian's domestic felicity was troubled by a player – Paris. Of Caligula, Gosson remarks, that he made so much of players and dancers, that "he suffered them openly to kiss his lips, when the senators might scarcely have a lick at his feet;" and the good man of St. Botolph's adds, that the murder of Domitian, by Charea, was "a fit catastrophe," for it was done as the Emperor was returning from a play!

As a painter of manners, Gosson thus gaily limns the audiences of his time. "In our Assemblies at plays in London, you shall see such heaving and shouting, such pitching and shouldering to sit by women, such care for their garments that they be not trodden on, such eyes to their laps that no chips light on them, such pillows to their backs that they take no hurt, such masking in their ears, I know not what; such giving them pippins to pass the time; such playing at foot-saunt without cards; such ticking, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home when the sports are ended, that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour." In this picture Gosson paints a good-humoured and a gallant people. When he turns from failings to vices, the old rector of St. Botolph's dwells upon them as Tartuffe does upon the undraped shoulders of Dorinne. He likes the subject, and makes attractive what he denounces as pernicious. The playwrights he assails with the virulence of an author, who, having been unsuccessful himself, has no gladness in the success, nor any generosity for the shortcomings of others. Yet he cannot deny that some plays are moral, such as "Cataline's Conspiracy," – "because," as he elegantly observes, "it is said to be a pig of mine own sow." This, and one or two other plays written by him, he complaisantly designates as "good plays, and sweet plays, and of all plays the best plays, and most to be liked."

Let us now return to the year of Shakspeare's birth. The great poet came into the world when the English portion of it was deafened with the thunder of Archbishop Grindal, who flung his bolts against the profession which the child in his cradle at Stratford was about to ennoble for ever. England had been devastated by the plague of 1563. Grindal illogically traced the rise of the pestilence to the theatres; and to check the evil he counselled Cecil to suppress the vocation of the idle, infamous, youth-infecting players, as the prelate called them, for one whole year, and – "if it were for ever," adds the primate, "it were not amiss."