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 year4 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 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."

Elizabeth's face shone upon the actors, and rehearsals went actively on before the Master of the Revels. The numbers of the players, however, so increased and spread over the kingdom, that the government, when Shakspeare was eight years of age, enacted that startling statute which is supposed to have branded dramatic art and artists with infamy. But the celebrated statute of 1572 does not declare players to be "rogues and vagabonds." It simply threatens to treat as such all acting companies who presume to set up their stage without the license of "two justices of the peace at least." This was rather to protect the art than to insult the artist; and a few years subsequent to the publication of this statute, Elizabeth granted the first royal patent conceded in England to actors – that of 1576.6 By this authority Lord Leicester's servants were empowered to produce such plays as seemed good to them, "as well," says the Queen, "for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall think good to see them." Sovereign could scarcely pay a more graceful compliment to poet or to actor.

This royal patent sanctioned the acting of plays within the liberties of the city; but against this the city magistrates commenced an active agitation. Their brethren of Middlesex followed a like course throughout the county. The players were treated as the devil's missionaries; and such unsavoury terms were flung at them and at playwrights, by the city aldermen and the county justices, that thereon was founded that animosity which led dramatic authors to represent citizens and justices as the most egregious of fools, the most arrant of knaves, and the most deluded of husbands.

Driven from the city, Burbage and his gay brotherhood were safe in the shelter of Blackfriars, adjacent to the city walls. Safe, but neither welcome nor unmolested. The devout and noble ladies who had long resided near the once sacred building, clamoured at the audacity of the actors. Divine worship and sermon, so they averred, would be grievously disturbed by the music and rant of the comedians, and by the debauched companions resorting to witness those abominable plays and interludes.

This cry was shrill and incessant, but it was unsuccessful. The Blackfriars' was patronised by a public whose favours were also solicited by those "sumptuous houses" the "Theatre" and the "Curtain" in Shoreditch. Pulpit logicians reasoned, more heedless of connection between premises and conclusion than Grindal or Gosson. "The cause of plagues is sin," argues one, "and the cause of sin are plays; therefore, the cause of plagues are plays." Again: "If these be not suppressed," exclaims a Paul's Cross preacher, "it will make such a tragedy that all London may well mourn while it is London."7 But for the sympathy of the Earl of Leicester it would have gone ill with these players. He has been as ill-requited by authors and actors as their earlier friend, Richard of Gloucester. To this day the stage exhibits the great earl, according to the legend contrived by his foes, as the murderer of his wife.

Sanctioned by the court, befriended by the noble, and followed by the general public, the players stood their ground, but they lacked the discretion which should have distinguished them. They bearded authority, played in despite of legal prohibitions, and introduced forbidden subjects of state and religion upon their stage. Thence ensued suspensions for indefinite periods, severe supervision when the suspension was rescinded, and renewed transgression on the part of the reckless companies, even to the playing on a Sunday, in any locality where they conjectured there was small likelihood of their being followed by a warrant.

But the most costly of the theatrical revels of King James took place at Whitehall, at Greenwich, or at Hampton Court, on Sunday evenings – an unseemly practice, which embittered the hatred of the Puritans against the stage, all belonging to it, and all who patronised it. James was wiser when he licensed Kirkham, Hawkins, Kendall, and Payne to train the Queen's children of the revels, and to exercise them in playing within the Blackfriars' or elsewhere all plays which had the sanction of old Samuel Danyell. His queen, Anne, was both actress and manager in the masques performed at court, the expenses of which often exceeded, indeed were ordered not to be limited to, £1000. "Excellent comedies" were played before Prince Charles and the Prince Palsgrave8 at Cambridge; and the members of St. John's, Clare, and Trinity, acted before the King and court in 1615, when the illustrious guests were scattered among the colleges, and twenty-six tuns of wine consumed within five days!

The lawyers alone were offended at the visits of the court to the amateurs at Cambridge, especially when James went thither to see the comedy of Ignoramus, in which law and lawyers are treated with small measure of respect. When James was prevented from going to Cambridge, he was accustomed to send for the whole scholastic company to appear before him, in one of the choicest of their pieces, at Royston. Roving troops were licensed by this play-loving king to follow their vocation in stated places in the country, under certain restrictions for their tarrying and wending – a fortnight's residence in one town being the time limited, with injunction not to play "during church hours."

Then there were unlicensed satirical plays in unlicensed houses. Sir John Yorke, his wife and brothers, were fined and imprisoned, because of a scandalous play acted in Sir John's house, in favour of Popery. On another occasion, in 1617, we hear of a play, in some country mansion, in which the King, represented as a huntsman, observed that he had rather hear a dog bark than a cannon roar. Two kinsmen, named Napleton, discussed this matter, whereupon one of them remarked that it was a pity the King, so well represented, ever came to the crown of England at all, for he loved his dogs better than his subjects. Whereupon the listener to this remark went and laid information before the council against the kinsman who had uttered it!

The players could, in James's reign, boast that their profession was at least kindly looked upon by the foremost man in the English Church. "No man," says Hacket, "was more wise or more serious than Archbishop Bancroft, the Atlas of our clergy, in his time; and he that writes this hath seen an interlude well presented before him, at Lambeth, by his own gentlemen, when I was one of the youngest spectators." The actors thus had the sanction of the Archbishop of Canterbury in James's reign, as they had that of Williams, Archbishop of York, in the next. Hacket often alludes to theatrical matters. "The theatres," he says, in one of his discourses made during the reign of Charles II., when the preacher was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, "are not large enough nowadays to receive our loose gallants, male and female, but whole fields and parks are thronged with their concourse, where they make a muster of their gay clothes." Meanwhile, in 1616, the pulpit once more issued anathemas against the stage. The denouncer, on this occasion, was the preacher of St. Mary Overy's, named Sutton, whose undiscriminating censure was boldly, if not logically, answered by the actor, Field. There is a letter from the latter in the State Paper Office, in which he remonstrates against the sweeping condemnation of all players. The comedian admits that what he calls his trade has its corruptions, like other trades; but he adds, that since it is patronised by the King, there is disloyalty in preaching against it, and he hints that the theology of the preacher must be a little out of gear, seeing that he openly denounces a vocation which is not condemned in Scripture!

Field, the champion of his craft in the early part of the seventeenth century, was one of the dozen actors to whom King James, in 1619, granted a licence to act comedy, tragedy, history, &c., for the solace and pleasure of his Majesty and his subjects, at the Globe, and at their private house in the precincts of Blackfriars. This licence was made out to Hemings, Burbage, Condell, Lowen, Tooley, Underwood, Field, Benfield, Gough, Eccleston, Robinson, Shancks, and their associates. Their success rendered them audacious, and, in 1624, they got into trouble, on a complaint of the Spanish ambassador. The actors at the Globe had produced Middleton's "Game at Chess," in which the action is carried on by black and white pieces, representing the Reformed and Romanist parties. The latter, being the rogues of the piece, are foiled, and are "put in the bag." The Spanish envoy's complaint was founded on the fact that living persons were represented by the actors, such persons being the King of Spain, Gondomar, and the famous Antonio de Dominis, who, after being a Romish bishop (of Spalato), professed Protestantism, became Dean of Windsor, and after all died in his earlier faith, at Rome. On the ambassador's complaint, the actors and the author were summoned before the council, but no immediate result followed, for, two days later, Nethercole writes to Carleton, informing him that "the comedy in which the whole Spanish business is taken up, is drawing £100 nightly." At that time, a house with £20 in it was accounted a "good house," at either the Globe or Blackfriars. Receipts amounting to five times that sum, for nine afternoons successively, may be accepted as a proof of the popularity of this play. The Spaniard, however, would not let the matter rest; the play was suppressed, the actors forbidden to represent living personages on the stage, and the author was sent to prison. Middleton was not long detained in durance vile. James set him free, instigated by a quip in a poor epigram, —

"Use but your royal hand, 'twill set me free!'Tis but removing of a man – that's me."

A worse joke never secured for its author a greater boon – that of liberty.

With all this, an incident of the following year proves that the players disregarded peril, and found profit in excitement. For Shrovetide, 1625, they announced a play founded on the Dutch horrors at Amboyna, but the performance was stopped, on the application of the East India Company, "for fear of disturbances this Shrovetide." A watch of 800 men was set to keep all quiet on Shrove Tuesday; and the subject was not again selected for a piece till 1673, when Dryden's "Amboyna" was produced in Drury Lane, and the cruelties of the Dutch condemned in a serio-comic fashion, as those of a people – so the epilogue intimated to the public – "who have no more religion faith – than you."

In James's days, the greater or less prevalence of the plague regulated the licences for playing. Thus, permission was given to the Queen's Servants to act "in their several houses, the Curtain, and the Boar's Head, Middlesex, as soon as the plague decreases to 30 a week, in London." So, in the very first year of Charles I., 1625, the "common players" have leave not only to act where they will, but "to come to court, now the plague is reduced to six." Accordingly, there was a merry Christmas season at Hampton Court, the actors being there; and, writes Rudyard to Nethercole, "the demoiselles" (maids of honour, doubtless), "mean to present a French pastoral, wherein the Queen is a principal actress." Thus, the example set by the late Queen Anne and now adopted by Henrietta Maria, led to the introduction of actresses on the public stage, and it was the manifestation of a taste for acting exhibited by the French princess, that led to the appearance in London of actresses of that nation.

With the reign of Charles I. new hopes came to the poor player, but therewith came new adversaries. Charles I. was a hearty promoter of all sports and pleasures, provided his people would be merry and wise according to his prescription only. Wakes and maypoles were authorised by him, to the infinite disgust of the Puritans, who liked the authorisation no more than they did the suppression of lectures. When Charles repaired to church, where the Book of Sports was read, he was exposed to the chance of hearing the minister, after reading the decree as he was ordered, calmly go through the Ten Commandments, and then tell his hearers, that having listened to the commands of God and those of man, they might now follow which they liked best.

When Bishop Williams, of Lincoln, and subsequently Archbishop of York, held a living, he pleaded in behalf of the right of his Northamptonshire parishioners to dance round the maypole. When ordered to deliver up the Great Seal by the King, he retired to his episcopal palace at Buckden, where, says Hacket, "he was the worse thought of by some strict censurers, because he admitted in his public hall a comedy once or twice to be presented before him, exhibited by his own servants, for an evening recreation." Being then in disgrace, this simple matter was exaggerated by his enemies into a report, that on an Ordination Sunday, this arrogant Welshman had entertained his newly-ordained clergy with a representation of Shakspeare's "Midsummer's Night's Dream," the actors in which had been expressly brought down from London for the purpose!

In the troubled days in which King Charles and Bishop Williams lived, the stage suffered with the throne and church. After this time the names of the old houses cease to be familiar. Let us take a parting glance of these primitive temples of our drama.

The royal theatre, Blackfriars, was the most nobly patronised of all the houses opened previous to the Restoration. The grown-up actors were the most skilled of their craft; and the boys, or apprentices, were the most fair and effeminate that could be procured, and could profit by instruction. On this stage Shakspeare enacted the Ghost in "Hamlet," Old Adam, and a similar line of characters, usually intrusted to the ablest of the performers of the second class. Blackfriars was a winter house. Some idea of its capability and pretension may be formed from the fact, that in 1633 its proprietors, the brothers Burbage,9 let it to the actors for a yearly rent of £50. In 1655 it was pulled down,10 after a successful career of about three-quarters of a century.

Upon the strip of shore, between Fleet Street and the Thames, there have been erected three theatres. In the year 1580, the old monastery of Whitefriars was given up to a company of players; but the Whitefriars' Theatre did not enjoy a very lengthened career. In the year 1616, that in which Shakspeare died, it had already fallen into disrepute and decay, and was never afterwards used for the representation of dramatic pieces. The other theatres, in Dorset Gardens, were built subsequently to the Restoration.

In the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, and in the street now called Playhouse Yard, connecting Whitecross Street with Golding Lane, stood the old Fortune, erected in 1600, for Henslowe (the pawnbroker and money-lender to actors) and Alleyn, the most unselfish of comedians. It was a wooden tenement, which was burned down in 1621, and replaced by a circular brick edifice. In 1649, two years after the suppression of plays by the Puritan Act, when the house was closed, a party of soldiers, "the sectaries of those yeasty times," broke into the edifice, destroyed its interior fittings, and pulled down the building.11 The site and adjacent ground were soon covered by dwelling-houses.

Meanwhile, the inn yards, or great rooms at the inns, were not yet quite superseded. The Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, near which lived Anthony Bacon, to the extreme dislike of his grandmother; and the Red Bull, in St. John Street, Clerkenwell, which last existed as late as the period of the Great Fire, were open, if not for the acting of plays, at least for exhibitions of fencing and wrestling.

The Surrey side of the Thames was a favourite locality for plays, long before the most famous of the regular and royally-sanctioned theatres. The Globe was on that old joyous Bankside; and the Little Rose, in 1584, there succeeded to an elder structure of the same name, whose memory is still preserved in Rose Alley. The Globe, the summer-house of Shakspeare and his fellows, flourished from 1594 to 1613, when it fell a prey to the flames caused by the wadding of a gun, which lodged in and set fire to the thatched roof. The new house, erected by a royal and noble subscription, was of wood, but it was tiled. Its career, however, was not very extended, for in 1654, the owner of the freehold, Sir Matthew Brand, pulled the house down; and the name of Globe Alley is all that is left to point out the whereabouts of the popular summer-house in Southwark.