latter year when the central government assumed direct responsibility for the regulation of the stage throughout the London area. I think that 1597 must be regarded as the critical moment at which complete stability was attained; the substitution under James I of letters patent for Star Chamber orders as the licensing machinery was of comparatively slight importance. From 1597 onwards it was definitely the Crown and not the local authorities which determined the companies to whom, subject to the detailed administrative control of the Privy Council, the Lord Chamberlain, and his subordinate the Master of the Revels, the privilege of playing within the neighbourhood of London should be conceded. And the policy of the Crown, alike under Elizabeth and under the Stuarts, was consistently in favour of such solace and recreation for the Sovereign and the subjects as the players ministered.
And so, tentatively up to 1584, and thereafter with a security which received final confirmation in 1597, the actor's occupation began to take its place as a regular profession, in which money might with reasonable safety be invested, to which a man might look for the career of a lifetime, and in which he might venture to bring up his children. As early as 1574 the patent to Leicester's men refers to playing as an 'arte and facultye'. In 1581 the Privy Council call it a 'trade'; in 1582 a 'profession'; in 1593 a 'qualitie'. The order of 1600 explicitly recognizes that it 'may with a good order and moderacion be suffered in a well gouerned estate'. So that when Fleetwood takes occasion in 1584 to recall that originally interludes were merely the by-work of 'men for their lyvings using other honest and lawfull artes, or reteyned in honest services', his argument has already become anachronistic, not wholly justified even as an antiquarian quibble, and still less as a serious appreciation of the administrative facts with which the writer had to deal. The player of the seventeenth century is in fact as necessary a member of the polity as the minstrel of the twelfth or the fourteenth; with this distinction that, in London at least, he is a householder and not a vagrant, and is therefore able to perform his function on a larger scale and with a fuller use of the methods and advantages of co-operation.
Obviously the player's status, like any other status in a civilized community, depended upon the observance on his side of certain obligations. He had to get his formal authority or licence for the exercise of his art. He had to respect certain prescribed limitations of times and seasons. He had to shoulder certain responsibilities imposed upon him as a
