Most
fortunately for the actors also, Queen Elizabeth, as well as her
successors, James I and Charles I, was fond of plays and favorably
inclined toward their performers.
Elizabeth rendered a great service to the actors by placing them under
the patronage of the nobility. The municipal authorities, who were
frequently Puritan, considered neither dramatic art nor dramatic poetry
as an acceptable means of livelihood; consequently, those who cultivated
these noble arts easily exposed themselves to being treated as
"masterless men," unless they could give a reference to some
distinguished aristocratic name.
The Queen ordered by law--in a statute which has often been
misunderstood--"that all common players of interludes wandering abroad,
other than players of interludes belonging to any baron of this realme,
or any other honorable personage of greater degree, to be authorized to
play under the hand and seale of arms of such baron or personage, shall
be adjudged and deemed rogues and vagabonds"; in other words, the Queen
urged all actors, for their own sakes, to place themselves under the
patronage of some nobleman, in order to protect them against the
persecution of the Puritan citizens.
But even such mighty protection could not entirely shield them, and it
was this very power of the London corporation to injure the actors that
caused the establishment of the first London theatre.
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