No More Learning

'
In his prologue, Brome notes that his title promises mirth,
Which were a new
And forc'd thing in these sad and tragic days;
but, since he finds that plays are now liked which tediously and
tearfully relate lovers' distresses, up to the point at which
some impossibility
Concludes all strife and makes a comedy,
he, therefore, composes a kind of parody on this popular style, in
which he hopes the sadness will not make any woman weep. This
interesting account of the genesis of the play would hardly have
been surmised by the critic without the author's help. The finest
thing in the play, and, indeed, in all Brome's writings, is the
description of the steward Springlove's annual hunger for the
green grass and the careless content of the wandering beggar.
You kept a swallow in a cage that while.
I cannot, Sir, endure another summer
In that restraint with life: 'twas then my torment
But now my death.
We have to wait till the days of George Borrow and R. L. Steven-
son for a repetition of Brome's conception of the joy and glory of
vagabondage. The sketch of the beggars' content is combined
with a very natural picture of the kind and compassionate master
and squire. There is a touch of religious feeling in the picture of
Oldrents's kindness of heart, and his compassion for the poor and
unfortunate; the only drawback to the charm of the play is the
occasional coarseness of the realism in the description of the
jovial crew of beggars. The first act of this play is work of high
and rare merit. Brome's English is admirably plain, unaffected
and direct; his blank verse is unadorned, but clear and natural,
and he reaps the reward of his simplicity. To the student of
decadent romanticism, this play has the perfection of a cup of
cold water in a dry and thirsty land.
A Jovialt Crew is classed among Brome's romantic dramas
of intriguel; and two plays, The Queen and Concubine and The
Queenes Exchange, have been reckoned as pure romantic dramas.
This division, of course, is merely intended to meet the require-
ment of convenience. Of the six romantic plays, the last two
mentioned and The Love-sick Court best illustrate Brome's ideas
of romance and poetry, and thus call for some notice. Brome's
modest conception of himself as a playwright and not an author
1 With three others, The Love-sick Court, The Novella and The English Moor.


## p. 231 (#249) ############################################

Brome's Romantic Dramas
231
or poet—his disinclination to indulge in imaginative effort-stamps
him as out of sympathy with the fashionable taste for lengthy
imaginative sentiment. He had a real sense of artistic form, and
recoiled not only from the sentimentality, but from the incoherence,
both in plan and metre, of the later Caroline drama. We have
already quoted his account of the composition of A Joviall Crew.
In the prologue to The Antipodes, he complains that 'opinion
cares only for plays that
carry state,
In scene magnificent and language high,
And cloathes worth all the rest, except the action.
The taste of the journeyman playwright, on this head, was certainly
far sounder than that of the king and his court. Yet Brome did
essay romantic drama, and with very interesting results. The
Love-sick Court was, probably, the earliest of the batch; The
Queenes Exchange dates from about 1632, and The Queen and
Concubine from after 1635. In these plays we see Brome manfully
striving to write as a poet and to achieve a good romantic play.
In the first two, he is often at a loss; his art fails him, and only
fumbling work is produced; but The Queen and Concubine marks
a very definite advance, and shows that Brome might have pro-
duced excellent romantic work if his public had asked for it
Shakespeare, rather than Fletcher, is the master from whom
Brome takes his suggestions, and the good queen Eulalia, whose
trials and virtues are touchingly described, is a blend of the
patient Grissill of Dekker and queen Katharine in Henry VIII,
There are two fine songs in the play; one of them—What if a
day, or a month, or a year’-possessing the true Elizabethan
charm of Campion or Dekker. The shining merit of Brome in
these plays, for all their feeble workmanship, is his capacity for
the unsophisticated and direct expression of emotion. We escape
from inflated sentiment and return to a simplicity of moral feeling
which belongs to the earlier days of the drama. Brome's humility
was described above as almost servile; and the suggestion was
made that his unaffected modesty is reflected in the restraint and
the naturalness of his art. Like Day, Brome proves his manliness
when he falls on evil days. He wrote his dedication of A Joviall
Crew, when it was printed in 1652, a few months before his death,
' in these anti-ingenious Times,' when the theatres had been closed
for ten years. Since the Times conspire to make us all Beggars,'
he says, 'let us make ourselves merry. That is what his play
drives at. ' He does not Ainch in his extremity: 'I am poor and


## p. 232 (#250) ############################################

232 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
proud,' he tells us; ‘you know, Sir, I am old and cannot cringe. '
This is his last word.
Among Jonson's most eager admirers was Thomas Randolph;
but he was not, like Field and Brome, a pupil of the old poet.
He was a king's scholar of Westminster school, who became a
fellow of Trinity college, Cambridge. At the end of 1629, a year
of plague broke up the schools at Cambridge, and Randolph made
Jonson's acquaintance during his stay in London; he was probably
adopted as a 'son' before he returned to Cambridge. He had written
by this time his two earliest ‘shews-Aristippus and The Conceited
Pedler, which were printed in 1630. These lively sketches recall
that early type of dramatic performance, the clown's jig, in which
a famous comedian, such as Tarlton, poured forth an improvisation
of his own, which was a mixture of prose, verse and antics. But
it is Randolph's command of racy English, his high spirits and his
exuberant wit that suggest this comparison. His pieces belong to
that large body of 'college drama' which is described in another
chapter? Aristippus, or, The Joviall Philosopher is a dispute on
the rival merits of ale and sack. All the technical terms of Aris-
totle's logic are crowded into a hilarious laudation of sack and a
decrying of malt liquor, which never flags. Randolph's classical
and scholastical learning supplies matter for a cataract of ingenious
puns and word play, and, therefore, his transference of Aristotelian
metaphysic into English farce is to be contrasted with, rather than
compared to, Robert Browning's profuse employment of the details
of Attic drama in his Aristophanes' Apology. Both poets, while
crammed with learning, have no pedantry in their nature. The
marvellous agility of some of the riming in Aristippus is another
point of contact with Browning's poetry.
In March 1632, king Charles visited Cambridge, and the
Trinity men acted before him The Jealous Lovers, written for
the occasion. It is Randolph's only failure. Its dramatic character
is so bad that the ability of the writing cannot redeem it. After
the king's visit, Randolph left Cambridge for London, 'called thence
to keep the flock of Corydon. ' In An Eglogue to Mr Johnson, he
describes how he had relished his Aristotelian studies—those deep
and learned layes' which 'the shepherd of Stagira used to sing';
but now he has to keep another's flock,' and not he but 'the Master
shears the sheep. ' Fleay's interpretation of this passage is that
Randolph was manager of prince Charles's men acting at Salisbury
? See post, chap. XII, where more is said about The Jealous Lovers.
· I. . . Ben Jonson.


## p. 233 (#251) ############################################

Thomas Randolph
233
court in 1632 and 1633. At Salisbury court theatre, Fleay thinks.
The Muses Looking-Glasse was presented towards the end of 1632.
(It was not printed till 1638, when the writer was dead. ) This
theory accords very well with the character of Randolph's master-
piece, and explains the genesis of this new and distinct type of
dramatic art. It is just such a work as the writer of Aristippus
might be expected to produce if he were called upon to expand
his short shew' into something that could compete in length,
interest and dignity with the plays of a better class. Randolph's
creative capacity had been stimulated to this effort by close con-
tact with the drama of the London stage; but the Aristotelian
student is still in evidence. The main part of the piece consists
of a series of fifteen scenes, in which the vices of Aristotle's Ethics
appear in couples or singly and, in accordance with the theory
of comedy put forward in the first act of the piece, hold up a
mirror in which spectators may note their own defects; this is
how comedies ‘laugh' people 'into wit and virtue. ' These scenes,
therefore, are planned like the colloquies' of Day's Parliament of
Bees; but the contrast is great between Day's delicate rimes and
Randolph's masculine and emphatic blank verse, which only
occasionally uses the heroic couplet. Kolax, the flatterer, remains
on all the time because 'Any vice yields work for flattery. In
these strongly written scenes, the influence of Jonson's satiric
plays is very obvious. In act I, there is an excellent scene in
which Comedy, Tragedy, Mime and Satire dispute together and
expound their functions according to classic theory. Before the
vices come in, we have a masque,
a rude dance,
Presented by the seven deadly sing.
In act v, after Mediocrity, the mother of virtues, has expounded
in a bundred lines Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, she presents a
masque of her daughters, 'wherein all the Vertues dance together. '
The invention of all this is both copious and happy. The author
describes his work as containing
No plot at all, but a meer Olla Podrida,
A medley of ill plac'd and worse penned Humours,
borrowed from the man
to whom he owes
All the poor skill he has, great Aristotle.
Randolph is pleasantly unconscious that the creative and artistic
faculty is too often, as in Jonson's case, smothered, rather than
nourished, by theory, however sound. But we have still to mention


## p. 234 (#252) ############################################

234 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
6
the most delightful feature of the play. The 'moralising 'scenes
are presented before Bird, a feather-man, and Mistress Flowerdew,
wife to a Haberdasher of Small Wares. ' These worthies bring
feathers and pins and looking glasses to sell to the players; but
they belong to the Sanctified Fraternity of Black-Fryers': that is
to say, they are puritans. This device is not new. Beaumont used
it admirably in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But Randolph
employs it to lighten the didactic tendency of his main scenes;
moreover, his two puritans are to be converted to the theory of
comedy put forward in the play; they are, therefore, described
with more good humour, with more restraint and naturalness,
than is usual in Elizabethan comedy. When the virtues are to be
presented, Bird hopes there are no 'cardinal vertues'-
I hate a vertue
That will be made a Cardinal,
-he adds that even ‘Bishop vertues are unwarrantable,' and,
generally,
Vertnes in Orders are unsanctified.
He is disturbed when the virtues dance:
O vile, absurd, Maypole-Maid-Marian Vertue!
Yet, as the play goes on, Mistress Flowerdew begins to relent:
I have picked
Out of the garden of this play a good
And wholesome salad of instruction.
And, finally, both are mollified Bird says
.
I'll teach devotion now a milder temper,
while Mistress Flowerdew admits,
I might have gone to hell the narrow way.
We have called The Muses Looking-Glasse Randolph's masterpiece,
though this title might be claimed for his fine pastoral Amyntas.
But the later production has to compete with even finer work
by Jonson and Fletcher, while the former is unique of its kind.
Randolph died in 1635, at the age of twenty-nine; and he is to be
counted among those poets whose achievement, considerable as it is,
is an earnest only of what his matured powers might have given us.
It remains to attempt a hurried survey of the lesser dramatists
of the end of the age, who were writing from the later years of
James until the closing of the theatres. They exhibit very clearly
the exhaustion of the great dramatic impulse which begins with
Marlowe and ends with Shirley and Brome. A tasteless and
featureless mediocrity or a pretentious extravagance are the


## p. 235 (#253) ############################################

May. Davenport
235
characteristics of work which was ceasing to conform to type
and losing all sense of true dramatic form. On a first casual
inspection, the more meritorious of these plays seem better written
and more judiciously planned than much of the Elizabethan work
which has survived; but a closer study reveals the essential
insipidity of the later work, due, in the first place, to exhaustion
of the dramatic impulse, and, in the second, to the deterioration
of the audiences and the practical cessation of a demand for good
plays
Thomas May, the historian of the Long parliament, whose
character Clarendon and Marvell? unite in decrying, began his
literary career with two comedies, The Heir and The Old Couple,
written about 1620. The Heir is a Fletcherian tragicomedy; The
Old Couple, which Fleay thinks the earlier of the pair, a play of
Jonsonian intrigue and manners. After producing these plays, May
turned to the work by which he is best known-his translations of
the Georgics and of Lucan's Pharsalia. Jonson wrote lines 'to my
chosen friend the learned translator of Lucan, Thomas May, Esq. ,'
and May was a contributor to Jonsonus Virbius. Jonson's influence
and that of the classics would seem to have turned May to classical
drama, and he produced three tragedies, of which the first, Antigone,
the Theban Princess is dedicated to Endymion Porter, and may
have been written before 1626. Fleay has suggested that May
is the author of the anonymous Nero, printed 1624. We are to
suppose that the fire and energy of this fine play were the result
of May's first study of Tacitus, perhaps before he had been too
much obsessed by Jonson's influence and method. But May's
study of Tacitus would seem to have been later than 1624. His
Cleopatra is dated 1626, and Julia Agrippina 1628. May's
imagination is pedestrian; his style is regular and painstaking.
Nero is the work of a scholar whose imagination is fiery and
strong, and who contrives to crowd into his play a great deal
of the excitement, the incident and the underlying unity of the
Roman historian's picture of the tyrant. May's first two plays
are meritorious; there is care and correctness in the blank verse,
and much careful invention in the plot and the conception of the
characters; but his classical plays are no better and no worse
than his continuation of Pharsalia. They are pale reflections of
Jonson's work in Sejanus and Catiline. May is nothing more than
a 'son' of Ben, who copied his adoptive father's least inspired work.
Meritorious, like May's, was the work of Robert Davenport,
1 Most servile wit and mercenary pen. '


## p. 236 (#254) ############################################

236 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
whose activity begins in 1624. Three of his plays survive, two
comedies and a tragedy. The tragedy is a careful rewriting of
Munday and Chettle's Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington!
Chettle's drama is stripped of its crudities and banalities ; so
far as may be, the horrible is replaced by the pathetic, and a
considerable adornment of poetic diction and imagery is added.
The versification, of course, is brought up to date and irregularities
disappear. The old play has a deeper significance than that which
it expresses: we read it with impatience; but we remember it with
interest, because of its suggestion of horror and gloom. Davenport,
on the other hand, we read with respect for his industry, and we
forget him at once. It is a plausible conjecture that his comedies
were remodellings of older material; so that all his work looks
backward. But The City-Night-Cap and A New Tricke to Cheat
the Divell are, both of them, interesting and able comedies, like
the two plays of May which we have just considered. The former
dates from 1624. As this play takes its main story from “The
Curious Impertinent' in Don Quixote, there can be nothing sur-
prising in the fact that, in some respects, it is unpleasant; indeed,
its comic part is intolerable; but, on the romantic side, it has merit
It contains echoes of Measure for Measure, of Cymbeline and of
A Winter's Tale; it is highminded, with some grace of diction
and force of eloquence, but dramatically unreasonable and wrong.
The other play is slighter and more humorous, and, on the whole,
more agreeable. Two of Davenport's friends were players; of his
circumstances nothing is known.
Thomas Nabbes seems to have belonged to the same social
level as Davenport, and, like him, to have produced his tragedy,
Hannibal and Scipio, by revising an older play; he was a friend
of Richard Brome. His Microcosmus is a morality play which he
calls a masque. His best work is to be found in his three comedies,
Covent-Garden, 1632, Totenham-Court, 1633, and The Bride, 1638.
Nabbes breaks away from the prevailing coarse type of comedy,
intended to hit the taste of the man about town, and takes pains
and pleasure in representing people of virtuous life and con-
versation. With just a little more distinction and force, both in
his writing and in his characterisation, Nabbes would have risen
above the ranks of third-rate dramatists. The Bride is a comedy
of considerable effectiveness, distinguished among the plays of its
time by the goodness and purity to be found in its men and women.
His heroes and heroines are amiable and sincere; somewhat colour-
1 Cf. ante, vol. V, chap. XIII,


## p. 237 (#255) ############################################

>
coarse.
Cartwright. Mayne 237
less when compared with stronger dramatic work; but without the
two diseases of the time, the convention of coarseness, and the
convention of fantastic sentiment
Two writers who were among the sons' of Ben and of great
repute in their day need not detain us long. William Cartwright
was the son of an innkeeper at Cirencester. He was educated at
Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, and rose to be the most
noted man in his university as a strenuous scholar, an admired
dramatist and a 'seraphical' preacher. His first play, probably, was
his comedy The Ordinary, produced about 1635. This was followed
by three tragicomedies, The Lady Errant, The Royall Slave and
The Siedge or Love's Convert. After taking holy orders in 1638, he
did not write any more plays. He died in 1642. His plays, therefore,
were probably composed hurriedly. They are essentially the work
of a man of parts, who writes for reputation without any true
respect either for his art or for himself. His comedy is a flashy
and vulgar imitation of Jonsonian 'humours,' as tedious as it is
His tragicomedies belong to the school of enervated
romance which pleased king Charles and was suited to the
French tastes of the queen. The Royall Slave was presented
before the king and queen at Oxford on 30 August 1636, by
the students of Christ Church, and, again, six months later, at
Hampton court, by the king's players. The students are said to
have acted best. Very probably, professionals found it difficult
to adapt themselves to the extravagant sentiment and preciosity
of Cartwright's style. Jonson's saying, 'my son Cartwright writes
all like a man,' suggests a directness of style and truth of inspira-
tion which are not found in Cartwright's plays.
Jasper Mayne, dramatist, translator and archdeacon, was a
Devonshire man, educated at Westminster school an Christ
Church, Oxford. Like his friend Cartwright, he was an admired
preacher. He produced a tragicomedy, The Amorous Warre,
and a comedy, The Citye Match, which was acted at Whitehall by
the king's command in 1639. It is a much better comedy than
Cartwright's, with plenty of life and movement in it, and, although
it has no moral elevation, it is without Cartwright's obscenity.
Mayne's most useful contribution to the literature of his country
was his translation of Lucian.
The tragicomedies of Cartwright and Mayne belong to the
group of romantic plays specially characteristic of the closing
years of the drama, written to please the court and the current
liking for inflated sentiment and fantastic emotion. But, before
1 Both Cartwright and Mayne contributed to Jonsonus Virbius.


## p. 238 (#256) ############################################

238 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
we deal summarily with these plays, a figure of some consequence
calls for a less perfunctory consideration.
In 1642, the year of the closing of the theatres, Sir John Suckling
poisoned himself in Paris. All his plays are not worth his handful
of incomparable lyrics; but they have some salt of genius in them
which entitles them to a place of their own among the work of
lesser dramatists. Aglaura, a tragedy of court intrigue, of which
the scene is supposed to be Persia, was acted in the winter of 1637,
when its literary qualities received less attention than the novelty
and magnificence of the scenery used and the dresses presented
by the author to the actors. King Charles is said to have
requested an alternative final act with a happy ending, which
Suckling afterwards wrote. Flecknoe saw the play when it was
revived at the Restoration, and his criticism, that it was 'full of
flowers, but rather stuck in than growing there,' applies to all
Suckling's dramatic work. He has imagination, fancy and wit,
but these faculties are not usually employed upon his plot and
his characters. The famous lyric, "Why so pale and wan, fond
lover ? ' occurs in the fourth act of Aglaura. The Goblins was
probably written next; it was acted in 1638, and is Suckling's
best play. His goblins are thieves who masquerade as devils, and
their pranks are mixed up with the feuds of two noble families
and a double love story. The so-called goblins administer justice
in the style of Robin Hood and his men in older plays. Suckling's
restless temperament expresses itself in the impossible rapidity
and abruptness of the action ; but the sprightliness of the play is
undeniable and its mixture of song and witty dialogues caught
Sheridan's attention, and, undoubtedly, influenced his style. His
lyric 'Here's to the maiden' is suggested by a catch in The
Goblins. Although The Goblins is Suckling's most satisfactory
performance, the tragedy Brennoralt is a work of more promise
and a more striking evidence of his poetic capacity. It did not
appear till 1846 ; but it had been printed in a shorter form in
1640 as The Discontented Colonell. The interest of Brennoralt
lies mainly in our seeming to detect in the hero something of the
inner self of the author, and to find that self better and sounder
than the shallow prodigal who caught the public eye. The gloomy
colonel, in spite of his strict loyalty, is clearly aware of defects
in his king. The rebel Lithuanians are meant for Scots, of about
the year 1639. The rebels having been informed that the king
cannot be unjust to them where there's so little to be had,' their
leader Almerine replies, “Where there is least, there's liberty. '
Suckling's style perceptibly strengthens in the play. The fine
6


## p. 239 (#257) ############################################

Suckling
Marmion.
Carlell
239
a
things are less obviously 'stuck in. ' Sententious force, by which
his political experience receives apt expression, is added to genuine
poetic vigour, Brennoralt is left alive, his rival and both the
heroines being dead. The false Caroline ideal of tragicomedy
prevents the solution of suicide demanded by the tone of the
play. But the melancholy, disillusioned character of Brennoralt,
who points forward to Byron, rather than backward to Marston,
may help to explain Suckling's own suicide, which seems very incon-
sistent with the rest of his career. The versification is spasmodic
and formless. A blank verse line, here and there, suggests to us
what the metre is supposed to be, and, occasionally, such a line as
‘Oh! it is wisdom and great thrift to die ! ' proves that Suckling
had it in him to write blank verse. In all his plays, he has a
trick of appropriating Shakespearean phrases and lines, and, in
The Goblins, the courtship of Orsabrin and Reginella is copied
unblushingly from the courtship scenes in The Tempest. Although
Shakespeare's work is weakened, Suckling's courtship scenes are
the prettiest scenes in his play, and his hero Orsabrin is a brave
spirit of true heroic strain.
A friend and companion in arms of Suckling, who died before
him in 1639, was Shackerley Marmion, author of the considerable
poem Cupid and Psyche. He produced three comedies before his
poem, not, as we should expect, in the romantic vein, but all of
them rather thin imitations of Jonson. The Antiquary is the
best of these.
Veterano, from whose pursuits the play is named,
is an original conception ; but the author fails to give him life,
lacking the capacity to use the opportunity with which he has
provided himself.
In conclusion, we may rapidly enumerate among later writers
of the Jacobean age those dramatists who are important only
because they initiated the type of play which, in its full develop-
ment in the Restoration period, came to be known as the 'heroic
drama. ' In this connection, the insipid and tedious tragicomedies
of Lodowick Carlell have importance. Carlell is said to have
come from the stock which afterwards produced Thomas Carlyle.
He was a Scot, born in 1602, who came to court to make his for-
tune and rose to the position of keeper of the forest at Richmond.
Of his plays, which began in 1629, four tragicomedies remain, two
of which are in two parts. They are taken from contemporary
romances, Spanish or French. French romance, as written by
.
D'Urfé and Mlle de Scudéry, was characterised by a refinement
of sentiment which cut it off from real life and made it vapid
and extravagant. In our own drama, the romance of Fletcher


## p. 240 (#258) ############################################

240 Lesser Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists
shows a tendency to exaggeration; the dramatic thrill ceases
to represent reality; it begins to have a note of hysteria, and to
enjoy its own deliciousness; emotion is dwelt upon, sentiment is
refined, till love, honour and friendship are taken altogether out of
the world of reality. Queen Henrietta Maria's French tastes and
upbringing added the example of French romance to tendencies
already prevailing in England, and rendered the influence of the
court upon the drama merely enervating. Fleay says that Carlell's
plays ‘show what rubbish was palatable to Charles and Henrietta. '
The peculiar extravagance of romantic sentiment which these plays
exhibit goes along with a looseness and incoherence of blank verse
very accurately described by the same critic as 'a riot of hybrid
iambic. ' Dryden's use of rime was almost needed to bring back some
form into this chaos. The plays of Henry Glapthorne are noticeable
from this point of view. His three comedies, at their worst, sink as
low as Cartwright and, at their best, touch the level of Mayne or
Nabbes; but his more serious work, consisting of The Ladies Privi-
ledge, Argalus and Parthenia and Albertus Wallenstein, approaches
more nearly to literature than any of the parallel efforts of Carlell,
Mayne, Cartwright, or Thomas Killigrew. The first of these plays,
which ends as a comedy, belongs to the type of tragicomedy in
which extravagant sentiment insists upon submitting itself to
absurd tasks in the effort to prove its heroism. The second is
a pastoral, also conforming to the tragicomedy type ; and the third
is history treated on the same lines. The plays, therefore, illustrate
the enervating and disintegrating effect of heroic sentiment on all
the chief forms of English drama. But it is William D'Avenant
whose work best enables us to observe the transition to the heroic
drama of Dryden. His first two plays were tragedies in Fletcher's
grimmest style, dated 1626 and 1627, and these were followed by two
able comedies which enjoyed considerable popularity. After 1630,
illness incapacitated him for several years; and, when he resumes
work as a dramatist, his style has altered, and four plays, Love and
Honour, 1634, The Platonick Lovers, 1635, The Fair Favourite,
1638, and The Unfortunate Lover, 1638, show him under French
influences and as the leading exponent of the cult of platonic love,
of which queen Henrietta herself was the patron. The Platonick
Lovers is a budget of speeches and disputations on this unreal
and undramatic theme; it is curious to the student of manners,
but futile as literature. D'Avenant lived to revive the theatre
shortly before the Restoration, and to contribute to its literature
after that date. He will, therefore, receive some further notice
in a later volume.


## p. 241 (#259) ############################################

CHAPTER X
THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
WHEN Elizabeth came to the throne, she found attached to
the court not only musicians and minstrels, but eight players of
interludes. This body had been a permanent part of the court
establishment for some reigns; and, in the new theatrical activity
of Elizabeth's reign, it was supplanted by other bodies, but
not dissolved. It accompanied her occasionally on her pro-
gresses, and only gradually died out. Companies of such players
had long been attached to the households of men of wealth and
position, whose 'livery' or badge they wore on their sleeves.
A statement in Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612) may be
taken to mean that some kind of royal licence was considered
necessary or advisable by these companies, so far back as the
reign of Henry VIII.
In many cases, these companies supported themselves by
playing before the public in various parts of the country. The
practice seems to have been for players, on coming to a town,
first to attend the mayor, to inform him whose servants they were
and to receive his licence for public playing. If the mayor liked
the company or wished to honour their master, he would pay them
a sum (which the entrance money charged to the public would
supplement') to give a first performance before the corporation, to
which the public were admitted. Several cases are on record
where players received a fee, though they were forbidden by the
town's bylaws or otherwise to give a performance. Travelling
players appeared frequently, also, at private houses, at weddings
and on other festival occasions; and, occasionally, even in
churches. At Exeter, Yarmouth and Worcester, there seem to
have been regular playhouses ; at other times, the actors played
1 Murray, John Tucker, ‘English Dramatic Companies in the towns outside of
London, 1550-1600,' Modern Philology, vol. 11, p. 539.
E. L. VI.
16
6
CH. X.


## p. 242 (#260) ############################################

242
The Elizabethan Theatre
6
at the guildhall, or in an innyard. Such incidents as the remon-
strance issued by the privy council to the lord president of the
north in 1556, touching the seditious plays acted by 'certain lewd
persons naming themselves to be the servants of Sir Frances
Lake,' suggest that some, at least, of the companies attached to
great houses had received no recognition or licence from the
crown; while 'common players of interludes,' orders for whose
regulation or arrest were occasionally issued, did not belong, either
in fact or in name, to any nobleman's establishment. In addition
to companies bearing the names of patrons, there were still in
existence a large number of wandering troupes of jugglers and
players, descendants of the old minstrels, who owned no kind of
patronage. Certain municipal corporations had their band of
players; and, in Cornwall and elsewhere, local associations of
amateurs still met to perform town or village plays and pageants
which the reformation had shorn of their old glory. The com-
petition of travelling companies was, perhaps, as important an
element in the decadence of these local bodies as was the hostility
of the puritans.
A few months after her accession, Elizabeth issued a proclama-
tion providing that no interlude should be played without being
notified beforehand and licensed by the mayor or chief officer of
a town, or, in the country, by lieutenants or two local justices
of the peace. And, in 1572, the question of these unattached
companies was finally settled by a law providing that common
players in interludes not belonging to a baron or honourable
personage of greater degree, or not having a licence from two
justices of the peace, should be deemed rogues and vagabonds.
This, practically, is the close of the history—so far as their influence
on the progress of the drama is concerned- of any theatrical
bodies except those definitely under patronage. The early part of
Elizabeth's reign saw not only the triumph of the professional
actor over the amateur, but the supplanting of the old player of
interludes by the better equipped companies then newly formed
by nobles anxious to please their sovereign.
In the city of London, jurisdiction over public theatricals
rested, under the proclamation of 1559, in the mayor and cor-
poration, steady foes of the drama. The decay of the feudal
system under the Tudors had increased the importance not only of
the immediate neighbourhood of the court, but of the capital ; and
London was now the centre of theatrical activity. Elizabeth's own
love of the play tended to the same result; and the privy council,


## p. 243 (#261) ############################################

Grounds of Objection
243
on the whole, supported her in defending the acted drama against
the attacks of the city government. The difference between court
and city was the cause of many disputes and much uncertainty,
as is shown at length in a later chapter of this volume, where
it is also related how an unforeseen result of the city's opposition
was the enormous stimulus given to theatrical art by the building
of playhouses outside the common council's jurisdiction but within
easy reach of the citizens of London.
The quarrel' was due to other causes besides the religious
difference, and the inevitable conflict between the feudal privilege
from which companies drew their origin, on the one hand, and, on
the other, the rights of the corporation, which meant the growing
importance of the middle class. A very reasonable objection was
advanced against the overcrowding of narrow streets by people
riding or, later, driving to the playhouses, and by the concourse of
loafers and beggars; furthermore, apprentices and others were
tempted to play truant and occasional tumults or crimes resulted
from the massing of numbers of people in holiday mood. A
theatrical performance, like the performance of a miracle-play in
earlier times, meant a procession through the streets with drums
and trumpets. It would not be fair, however, to ascribe to plays
alone all the disturbances which are on record. Such incidents as
those which took place outside the Theater in 1584, when 'one
Browne, a serving man in a blew coat, a shifting fellowe,' attacked
an apprentice with a sword, were due rather to the fact that the
neighbourhood of this house was the 'ordinary place for all maister-
les men and vagabond persons. . . to meet together and to recreate
themselfes. ' The gravest cause for the corporation's objection to
plays a cause which the privy council readily supported them in
avoiding—was, however, the recurrence of the plague, to the grievous
and prolonged visitations of which full reference is made in the
chapter discussing the conflicts between puritanism and the stage*.
But, in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, every year
was a plague year, and, besides 1582—3, 1558, 1586, 1593, 1603,
1613, 1625 and 1636 were very bad plague years. It was important
to check the spread of infection by preventing the gathering of
crowds, and plays were forbidden whenever it seemed desirable.
Early in the reign of James I, all performances were prohibited
· See post, chap. xiv.
· For an interesting suggestion as to the influence of the Blackfriars playhouse in
and after the year 1597, see Wallace, C. W. , Children of the Chapel, chap. XII.
* Remembrancia, vol. 11, p. 103.
* See post, chap. XIV.
16_2


## p. 244 (#262) ############################################

244
The Elizabethan Theatre
when the number of deaths a week reached 30; and, in or about
1619, 40 was fixed as the limiting number'. This frequently en-
tailed the closing of places of public performance during the whole
of the summer and autumn, when companies sometimes 'broke,
sometimes went on tour in England and sometimes travelled
abroad. The history of these travels is well worth study, but lies
outside the scope of this work.
In the conflict between the drama and the corporation, the
weight of Elizabeth herself was thrown entirely on the side of the
drama. The list of performances at court shows that, while masques
were frequently performed by amateurs at the beginning of her
reign, their place was almost entirely taken later by the per-
formances of professional actors whom her patronage helped to
bring to efficiency. The stock excuse offered by the privy council
for contravention of the prohibitive regulations of the city authori-
ties is that players must be allowed full opportunities of practising
their art in order that they may exercise it fitly before the queen,
during the Christmas holidays or at Shrovetide—the great seasons
of performances at court. In 1583, the queen, at the suggestion
of Walsingham, and probably as a countermove to a decision of
the common council, had her own company selected from the best
actors of the day; and every attempt was made to regard public
performances as mere rehearsals for those at court. It is easily
possible to make too much of the pretext, which, doubtless, was
convenient at the time. The chance of a play being awarded a
place among the few to be performed at court would scarcely have
sufficed to encourage playwrights to produce work of the quantity
or the character left by Elizabethan dramatists. Occasional state
performances, rewarded with a small fee, could not be prize enough
to keep large numbers of men working hard at acting, and at
nothing else, all the year round; and players grew well-to-do and
respectable, not because they played now and then at court, but
because court favour enabled them to meet the ardent desire for
theatrical performances which had been largely thwarted in pre-
vious troubled reigns, but which, when it could be indulged, to a
great extent supplanted the love of athletic or acrobatic exhibi-
tions that had had to suffice for earlier times. Such exhibitions
still survived; but the drama either swept them into its own
a
i Greg's Henslowe's Diary, vol. 11, p. 145.
? See Cohn, A. , Shakespeare in Germany and. The English Comedians in Germany,'
by Harris, C. , in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, N. S.
Vol. xv, No. 3, and of the opening passages of chap. XI, vol. v, ante.


## p. 245 (#263) ############################################

Effect of Royal Patronage 245
net, or tried to make their separate existence dependent on
its pleasure as regards time and place of performance. The
patronage of the queen and the eagerness of nobles to supply
her with a favourite amusement provided the opportunity, rather
than constituted the cause, of the people's new interest in the
play. It is true that the royal favour first enabled the stage to
stand alone, both as an art and as a business ; but, after 1591,
the queen's own company having by that time lost its prestige,
royal patronage as an active force dwindled until the accession
of James I; and, if the honour of playing at court was still
eagerly sought, it was largely for the sake of the immunity from
molestation by the city which the privy council usually extended
to the companies selected. Nevertheless, the hope of playing
before the queen seldom debarred a company from producing a
satirical or seditious play which would attract the public.
The opposition between the city government and the privy
council was, indirectly, a benefit to the art of the theatre, in that
it led at once to control and to encouragement. The somewhat
complicated history of the various moves on both sides shows
the common council determined, with varying success, to keep
players out of the city, the privy council determined to check
sedition and, while fostering dramatic art, to limit the number of
playhouses and companies, and each party inclined to oppose, or
to neglect, the recommendations of the other. The position of
players was uncertain and sometimes dangerous, as is proved by
their petitions and remonstrances, and by the occasional imprison-
ment of offending companies. In such circumstances, only the
strongest could survive with dignity or comfort. The tendency
was always towards consolidation, though the experiment of the
Queen's company, formed in 1583, was not to prove successful
for long. The path of the Chamberlain's and the Admiral's com-
panies was smooth and profitable on the whole, and the steady
influence of royal favour supported them.
That influence became all important on the accession of
James I. The position of the favoured companies, thenceforth,
was assured by the issue of licences which brought them directly
under royal patronage, and by the statute of March 1604, which
abolished private patronage by forbidding nobles to license men
to go wandering abroad. All public theatricals remained directly
under royal patronage during the reigns of James I and Charles I,
until the ordinance of the lords and commons of September 1642
brought them to an end.


## p. 246 (#264) ############################################

246
The Elizabethan Theatre
He was
Playwrights and players were further subject to the control
of the master of the revels. Originally instituted, as it seems,
.
by Henry VII, for the management of the finances and the
material of performances at court, the office grew constantly in
power. It became the duty of the master of the revels to summon
the companies before him and, after seeing them perform, to
select such actors and such plays as he approved and order
such changes to be made in the plays as, in his opinion, should
render them suitable for performance before the sovereign. At
least so early as 1574, we find him empowered to examine every
play that was to be played in any part of England. No play
might be played or printed without his licence, and he had the
power to alter, to forbid and even as the action of Sir Henry
Herbert, master of the revels under Charles I, would seem to
show) to destroy, any play he found objectionable.
entitled to charge a fee for every play he examined, and for
every play which he licensed for printing, besides a fee which rose
from 58. a week in 1592 to £3 a month in 1602, for licensing each
playhouse? ; and, later in the period, we find the two leading
companies paying him, first the results of two performances, and
then a fixed sum in every year. Sedition, no doubt, was the
offence he principally attempted to check; but profanity and
immorality were also the objects of his attention.
Besides the companies of players under royal or noble patron-
age there were, on Elizabeth's accession, two other classes of
dramatic company, both composed of boys or youths. These were
the children’ of St Paul's and of the chapel royal, and the boys of
the public schools, Eton and Westminster and Merchant Taylors'.
The most important of the companies of men was that which
was originally formed by Robert Dudley earl of Leicester, and which,
in 1574, was the first to receive the royal licence. The numbers of
the company mentioned in the document are five: James Burbage,
John Perkyn, John Laneham, William Johnson and Robert Wilson;
but two or more boys and some minor actors must, also, be supposed
to have been attached to the company. When the first playhouse,
the Theater, was built in 1576, it was occupied by Leicester's com-
pany, who remained there, probably, until in 1583, its place was
taken by the new Queen's company, into which Burbage, Laneham
and Wilson were drafted. In 1585, Leicester took his company
6
i Greg's Henslowe's Diary, vol. 11, pp. 114-118.
? Of these boys' companies a separate account is given in the next chapter (31)
of the present volume.


## p. 247 (#265) ############################################

The Chamberlain's Company 247
abroad with him; in 1587, they were touring in England and acted
at Stratford-on-Avon. Of those who believe that Shakespeare
became a member of this company, some hold that he joined it
during, or shortly after, this visit to his native town. In 1588,
Leicester died, and, not long afterwards, the leading actors of the
company that had gone abroad are found as members of the
company of Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange. The new company,
which, through some kind of amalgamation with the remains of
the Admiral's men, during these years included Edward Alleyn
himself, played first at the Cross Keys inn in Gracechurch street,
and later, in February 1592, at Philip Henslowe's playhouse, the
Rose in Southwark? . On 3 March 1592, they produced a new play
entered by Henslowe in his diary as ‘harey the vj,' which is be-
lieved by many to have been Shakespeare's King Henry VI, Part I.
If so, the conditions of the time imply that Shakespeare, by that
date, was a member of the company. In April 1594, lord Strange,
who had become earl of Derby in September 1593, died, and
the company passed under the protection of Henry Carey, lord
Hunsdon, then lord chamberlain, to be thenceforth known as the
Chamberlain's servants. In the June of 1594, they played a short
time with the Admiral's men at the playhouse at Newington Butts ;
but, in the same month, the Admiral's men, with Alleyn at their
head, resumed an independent existence. In March 1595, we have
the first documentary evidence that Shakespeare was a member
of the company: the treasurer's accounts show that ‘Wil. Kempe,'
'Wil. Shakespeare' and 'Rich. Burbage' received payment for two
comedies played at court on 26 and 28 December, 1594. Iu 1595
or 1596, the company was at the Theater. The first lord Hunsdon
died in July 1596, and the company descended to his son George
Carey, second lord, who, in March 1597, himself became lord
chamberlain. In July 1597, the Theater was shut up and the
company possibly played at the Curtain, before moving, in 1599,
into the most famous of all Elizabethan playhouses, the newly
erected Globe on the Surrey bank. In this playhouse, Shakespeare
was a shareholder, and at this playhouse and by this company all
Shakespeare's plays written after that date were produced. In
May 1603, the company received a patent, as the King's men, a
title which they retained till the suppression in 1642. Thence-
forward, they were members of the royal household, holding the
rank, as the Queen's company had before them, of grooms of the
chambers, and being entitled, every two years, to four yards of
1 Greg's Henslowe's Diary, vol. 1, pp. 45, 73.


## p. 248 (#266) ############################################

248
The Elizabethan Theatre
scarlet cloth for a cloak, and a quarter of a yard of crimson velvet
for a cape. Their licence permitted them to play at their usual
house, the Globe, and within the liberties and freedom of any other
city, university, town or borough whatsoever. In 1608', the Black-
friars playhouse was occupied by this company, who, thenceforth,
continued to use both houses till all the playhouses were closed
by the ordinance of 1642. The company's career was uneventful
in the sense that it was seldom in trouble; though, in 1601, it was
under suspicion of implication in the Essex conspiracy; in 1615,
it was summoned before the privy council, in the persons of Burbage
and Heminge, then its leaders, for playing in Lent; and, in 1624,
Middleton's Game at Chesse, which attacked the Spaniards, caused
the players, at the instance of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador,
to be inhibited for a fortnight. Many lists of actors are extant to
show the composition of the company, and among its principal
members at various times were Shakespeare, Richard Burbage,
Augustine Phillipps, John Heminge and Henry Condell (afterwards
the editors of the first folio Shakespeare), Slye, Pope, William
Kemp and John Lowin. Richard Burbage died in March 1619;
Shakespeare retired in 1610; Condell in 1619; Pope died in 1604,
and Slye in 1608. Concerning the parts played by the principal
actors, information is scanty. Shakespeare is known to have acted
in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (tradition assigns him
the part of old Nowell) and Sejanus; Rowe, making enquiries
about his acting early in the eighteenth century, 'could never
meet with any further account of him this way than' (what he
heard, possibly, from Betterton) that the top of his performance
was the ghost in his own Hamlet'; Oldys records that 'one of
Shakespeare's younger brothers' had seen him play Adam in As
You Like It; and, in 1610, John Davies of Hereford states that
Shakespeare “plaid some kingly parts in sport,' which is open to
the interpretation that he acted the parts of kings on the stage.
Of Richard Burbage, as an actor, more is known. His name
appears as early as 1592. There is good evidence that he was
the original Richard III, Hamlet, Othello and Lear in Shake-
speare's plays, and it is probable that he also played Romeo. It
is supposed, with reason, that he was the creator of all the leading
parts in the plays which Shakespeare wrote for the company; and
there is evidence that he played, also, the leading parts in all the
most successful of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays produced in his
6
>
1 Wallace, op. cit. pp. 44-45.


## p. 249 (#267) ############################################

The Queen's and Admiral's Companies 249
lifetime, as well as in the plays of Ben Jonson produced by his
company. In fact, he was the leading man, especially in tragedy,
of the company-a position in which Taylor succeeded him. Malone
had read in some tract, of which I have forgot to preserve the
title' that Heminge was the original Falstaff, a part which is soon
found in the hands of Lowin; and Condell is supposed by Collier
to have played Bobadill.
The Queen's company, as we have seen, was formed in 1583 at
the suggestion of Sir Francis Walsingham. Its members were
selected by the master of the revels, then Edmund Tilney, from
the best companies of the day, including Leicester's and the
earl of Warwick's, and it was licensed by the privy council. It
played frequently at court between 1584 and 1591, and its public
house was, probably, the Theater; but in, or about the end of,
1592, it had left London, and it is not heard of after Easter 1594.
The original members included James Burbage, John Laneham,
Robert Wilson and Richard Tarlton from Leicester's company,
and Laurence and John Dutton from Warwick's. James Burbage,
originally a joiner by trade, had been the chief of Leicester's
company. Of Laneham, as an actor, nothing is known, and Wilson
is more famous as a playwright'. Tarlton is a famous figure in the
theatrical history of the time. A clown, who took to the stage, as
it appears, comparatively late in life, he achieved a popularity
that long outlasted his death. His extemporal riming and his
'jiggs' were the delight of the groundlings, and he left some
volumes of verse and jests, besides the play of The Seven Deadly
Sins, the 'platt' or scheme of which survives in manuscript at
Dulwich? Among the authors whose plays this company acted
were the university wits, Greene, Lodge and Peele; and, possibly,
Marlowe's Jew of Malta was in their répertoire.
A company under the patronage of Charles second lord Howard
of Effingham is found acting at court between 1576 and 1578,
and probably continued to exist until 1585. Soon after Howard's
appointment as lord high admiral, a company appears as the
Admirals, playing at court and evidently, also, at some innyard.
The partial dispersal of this company and its loose combination
with that of lord Strange have already been mentioned. In
October 1592, Edward Alleyn, who is first heard of in January
1 That is, supposing him to be the R. W. who wrote The Three Ladies of London,
and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London. On Wilson, see Ward, vol.