This is the first mention of a new type of 'licence', distinct from those of companies as such, or of plays as such, and presumably owing its origin to the general local regulative powers of the magistrates. The date of the proposal is not given, and as regards the years 1558-71, there is only occasional evidence of any serious interference, other than such as was necessitated by plague, with the activities of the players, although it is clear that the rulers of the City were exercising the powers of supervision with which the proclamation of 1559 invested them. There is an indication that plays were suspended by a precept from the Lord Mayor in the September of the first and greatest of the Elizabethan plague-years, 1563; and in the following February Edmund Grindal, the Bishop of London, wrote to Sir William Cecil, pointing out that the players set up their bills daily, and especially on holidays, and that the excessive resort of young people to their performances could only be a cause of infection. Both on religious and on hygienic grounds, he urged the desirability of inhibiting plays by proclamation, either permanently or at least for a complete year, and not only within the City, but for a circuit of three miles outside its boundaries. Penalties should, he thought, be imposed for disobedience, not only upon the players, but also upon the owners of the houses where they played. The cessation of the plague probably made it unnecessary for Cecil to entertain the suggestion seriously; but it is interesting to observe that the policy of the Puritans, with whom Grindal was in sympathy, was already in 1564 one of complete suppression, and also that the comparative inefficacy of measures limited to the City, in view of the populous suburbs outside the London jurisdiction and subject only to the Middlesex or Surrey Justices and to the Privy Council, had been already realized.
During the next few years there is little to record, although if The Children of the Chapel Stript and Whipt, alleged to have been printed in 1569, were ever recovered, it might throw more light upon the growing flood of Puritan sentiment than is afforded by Warton's scanty quotations. There was some plague in each of the three years 1568, 1569, and 1570, and in the summer of 1569 the City suspended plays, as a precautionary measure, from the last day of May to the last day of September. There was another suspension on 27 November 1571, for which plague is not alleged as a reason, but a few days later the Corporation appear to have changed their minds and licences were issued during this winter for performances by Leicester's and Abergavenny's men.
