appear to have been at the mercy of the traditional rowdiness of the prentices on Shrove Tuesday.[1]
On divers grounds therefore the Corporation of London seem to have reached the conclusion, about 1582 if not before, that the only way to reform the theatres was to end them. Probably they were influenced by the views of some of their permanent officials, of whom Thomas Norton, Remembrancer from 1571 to 1584, although himself a part-author of the tragedy of Gorboduc, and William Fleetwood, Recorder from 1571 to 1594, are known to have been determined opponents of the stage. The voluminous reports on city affairs, which Fleetwood was in the habit of sending to Lord Burghley, add much to our knowledge of a critical period.[2] Had the matter rested wholly with the Corporation, the policy of prohibition
- ↑ Divers persons were slain and others hurt and wounded in an attempt to pull down the Cockpit in Drury Lane on Shrove Tuesday 1617 (M. S. C. i. 374); cf. Camden, Annales (4 March 1617), 'Theatrum ludionum nuper erectum in Drury-Lane a furente multitudine diruitur, et apparatus dilaceratur'; John Taylor, Jack a Lent (1620, ed. Hindley), 'Put play houses to the sack and bawdy houses to the spoil'; The Owles Almanack (1618), 9, 'Shroue-tuesday falls on that day, on which the prentices plucked downe the cocke-pit, and on which they did alwayes vse to rifle Madam Leakes house, at the vpper end of Shorditch'. This was not Puritanism, but a traditional Saturnalia of apprentices at Shrovetide; cf. Earle, Microcosmography, char. 64 (A Player), 'Shrove-tuesday he feares as much as the bawdes'; Busino, Anglopotrida (1618, V. P. xv. 246), describing the bands of prentices, 3,000 or 4,000 strong, who on Shrove Tuesday and 1 May do outrages in all directions, especially the suburbs, where they destroy houses of correction; E. Gayton, Festivous Notes upon Don Quixote (1654), 271, 'I have known upon one of these festivals, but especially at Shrove-tide, where the players have been appointed, notwithstanding their bills to the contrary, to act what the major part of the company had a mind to. Sometimes Tamerlane, sometimes Jugurtha, sometimes The Jew of Malta, and sometimes parts of all these; and at last, none of the three taking, they were forced to undress and put off their tragick habits, and conclude the day with The Merry Milkmaides. And unless this were done, and the popular humour satisfied (as sometimes it so fortun'd that the players were refractory), the benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts, flew about most liberally; and as there were mechanicks of all professions, who fell every one to his trade, and dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruin of a stately fabric'.
- ↑ Most of these letters are printed in Wright, Eliz.; a few are still unprinted among the Lansdowne and Hatfield MSS.; cf. App. D, Nos. xxxv, xxxvii, lxxiv.
Make you Merrie (1607), gives the private playhouse as the habitat of the 'foist' or pickpocket, and says, 'The times when his skirmishes are hottest, or y^e time when they run attilt, is . . . a new play'. Again (iii. 158), in The Belman of London (1608), he tells us that rogues haunt playhouses, and (iii. 212) in Lanthorne and Candlelight (1609), 'A foyst nor a nip shall not walke into a fayre or a Play-house, but euerie cracke will cry looke to your purses'.
