subject and a citizen. To each of these aspects of his calling some measure of detailed consideration is due.
A company of players was not in form, like a company of merchants, a guild or association of independent men. Its constitution had a mediaeval element, by which the derivation of playing from minstrelsy is strongly recalled. The nature of the licence which it must hold, at any rate if it desired to secure itself from the arbitrary discretion of local justices, was determined by statute. And this licence, whether it took the form of a warrant from a nobleman with the confirmation of the Master of the Revels, or of a royal licence by patent, was always such as to set up a relation of service between the company and a 'lord'. Nor is this relation to be dismissed as a mere empty formality. Probably the players of many country nobles and gentlemen continued to the end to consist of their ordinary household servants, who played only at Christmas and other times of recreation, and mainly at their lord's expense.[1] With the regular travelling companies, and particularly with the London companies, it was different. Financially, at least, they were independent. But even of these the 'service', though largely a legal fiction, was not wholly so. The Statutes of Retainers, kept alive by the proclamations of 1572 and 1583, forbade the maintenance of retainers who were not in some real sense household servants. The consequent application made by his players to the Earl of Leicester in 1572 does not suggest that the distinction was a very vital one. Certainly they guard themselves against being supposed to be asking their lord for a fee. But I think it is clear that the lord was expected to take some responsibility for the conduct of those who used his name, and to exercise some discipline in cases of misdemeanour. It was so in 1559, when the proclamation against unlicensed plays expressly called upon noblemen and gentlemen having players to see that it received attention from their servants. And it must still have been so in 1583, when the ill behaviour of Worcester's men at Norwich was effectively checked by a threat to certify their lord of their contempt. On the other hand there is abundant evidence that the lord might be looked to, in time of need, to intervene for the active furtherance of the interests of his players, over and above the general recommendation to favour for his sake, which is common form in the warrants of
- ↑ Murray, ii. 77, gives records of seventy-nine 'Lesser Men's Companies', many of which appear at one town only, while all have a narrow range. Naturally the names of the great nobles carried weight over a wider area. The players in Ratseis Ghost (Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 326) 'denied their owne Lord and Maister, and used another Noblemans name'.
