Shakespearean Playhouses | Page 9

God grant), the people, specially the meaner and most unruly sort, should with sudden forgetting of His visitation, without fear of God's wrath, and without due respect of the good and politique means that He hath ordained for the preservation of common weals and peoples in health and good order, return to the undue use of such enormities, to the great offense of God....[29]
[Footnote 29: For the complete document see W.C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage, p. 27.]
The restrictions on playing imposed by the ordinance may be briefly summarized:
1. Only such plays should be acted as were free from all unchastity, seditiousness, and "uncomely matter."
2. Before being acted all plays should be "first perused and allowed in such order and form, and by such persons as by the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen for the time being shall be appointed."
3. Inns or other buildings used for acting, and their proprietors, should both be licensed by the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen.
4. The proprietors of such buildings should be "bound to the Chamberlain of London" by a sufficient bond to guarantee "the keeping of good order, and avoiding of" the inconveniences noted in the Preamble.
5. No plays should be given during the time of sickness, or during any inhibition ordered at any time by the city authorities.
6. No plays should be given during "any usual time of divine service," and no persons should be admitted into playing places until after divine services were over.
7. The proprietors of such places should pay towards the support of the poor a sum to be agreed upon by the city authorities.
In order, however, to avoid trouble with the Queen, or those noblemen who were accustomed to have plays given in their homes for the private entertainment of themselves and their guests, the Common Council added, rather grudgingly, the following proviso:
Provided alway that this act (otherwise than touching the publishing of unchaste, seditious, and unmeet matters) shall not extend to any plays, interludes, comedies, tragedies, or shews to be played or shewed in the private house, dwelling, or lodging of any nobleman, citizen, or gentleman, which shall or will then have the same there so played or shewed in his presence for the festivity of any marriage, assembly of friends, or other like cause, without public or common collections of money of the auditory or beholders thereof.
Such regulations if strictly enforced would prove very annoying to the players. But, as the Common Council itself informs us, "these orders were not then observed." The troupes continued to play in the city, protected against any violent action on the part of the municipal authorities by the known favor of the Queen and the frequent interference of the Privy Council. This state of affairs was not, of course, comfortable for the actors; but it was by no means desperate, and for several years after the passage of the ordinance of 1574 they continued without serious interruption to occupy their inn-playhouses.
The long-continued hostility of the city authorities, however, of which the ordinance of 1574 was an ominous expression, led more or less directly to the construction of special buildings devoted to plays and situated beyond the jurisdiction of the Common Council. As the Reverend John Stockwood, in A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, 1578, indignantly puts it:
Have we not houses of purpose, built with great charges for the maintenance of plays, and that without the liberties, as who would say "There, let them say what they will say, we will play!"
Thus came into existence playhouses; and with them dawned a new era in the history of the English drama.
[Illustration: THE SITE OF THE FIRST PLAYHOUSES
Finsbury Field and Holywell. The man walking from the Field towards Shoreditch is just entering Holywell Lane.
(From Agas's Map of London, representing the city as it was about 1560.)]
CHAPTER III
THE THEATRE
The hostility of the city to the drama was unquestionably the main cause of the erection of the first playhouse; yet combined with this were two other important causes, usually overlooked. The first was the need of a building specially designed to meet the requirements of the players and of the public, a need yearly growing more urgent as plays became more complex, acting developed into a finer art, and audiences increased in dignity as well as in size. The second and the more immediate cause was the appearance of a man with business insight enough to see that such a building would pay. The first playhouse, we should remember, was not erected by a troupe of actors, but by a money-seeking individual.[30] Although he was himself an actor, and the manager of a troupe, he did not, it seems, take the troupe into his confidence. In complete independence of any theatrical organization he proceeded with the erection of his building as a private