broken off for some weeks during Lent. In 1595 and 1596 the interval covered all but the first few days; in 1597 it was less than three weeks, and thereafter the company played three days a week up to Easter. A reservation was made for Lent by the Council order of 1600, and in 1601 the Council sent a special instruction to the Lord Mayor to stop plays at St. Paul's and the Blackfriars during the penitential season. Presumably the same practice prevailed under James I, for the permission to resume playing in April 1604 is expressed as motived by 'the time of Lent being now passt', while on 29 March 1615 representatives of the London companies were summoned before the Privy Council, to answer for playing in Lent contrary to an express direction given them by the Lord Chamberlain through the Master of the Revels.[1] Some light is thrown on this proceeding by the fact that two years later each of the companies undertook to pay the Master of the Revels 44s. 'for a Lenten dispensation'.[2]
A Privy Council letter of 1591 imposes one other curious limitation, with which the Puritans at any rate can have had nothing to do, upon the players. They are to lie idle upon Thursdays and leave that day free for bear-baitings and similar pastimes, which were 'allwayes accustomed and practized upon it'. I am not sure whether the claim of the bearwards to Thursday really went back beyond 1583, when it seems to have become desirable, owing to the impulse to Puritan sentiment given by the Paris Garden accident, to substitute some other day for the Sunday upon which baitings had formerly been usual. Nor does it seem that the attempt to give a special protection to the royal 'game' permanently maintained itself. The Admiral's men, in spite of Edward Alleyn's interest in the Bear Garden, certainly did not yield the Thursdays from 1594 to 1597, and when about 1614 Henslowe and Jacob Meade had occasion to combine playing and baiting in the Hope, they had to insert special stipulations in their agreements with the actors, in order to secure one day a fortnight for the bears.[3]*
- ↑ Cf. Middleton, A Mad World, my Masters (1608), I. i. 38, Tis Lent in your cheeks; the flag's down'; T. Earle, Microcosmography, char. 64, of a player, 'Shrove-tuesday hee feares as much as the bawdes, and Lent is more damage to him then the butcher'.
- ↑ Variorum, iii. 65, from Sir Henry Herbert's papers, which also record a similar payment in 1618 'for toleration in the holydays'. Herbert himself sold similar indulgences and in a list of customary Revels fees drawn up in 1662 includes £3 'for Lent fee', together with £3 'for Christmasse fee' (Variorum, iii. 266). Prynne, Histriomastix (1633), 784, notes the custom of suppressing plays 'in Lent, till now of late'.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xiii (Lady Elizabeth's). About 1617 Prince Charles's men were
