Obviously the privileges given to players were not intended to exempt them from the ordinary duties and responsibilities of citizenship. In the first place, they were called upon to make their contributions to local burdens in the districts in which they set up their play-houses. To this they had probably no objection; on the contrary, they more than once found that a readiness to pay their tithes for the use of the poor was an effective method of smoothing away difficulties with local officials.[1] Nor had they less to gain than others from a reasonable expenditure of money on the repair of the highways.[2]
And secondly, they had to exercise a constant watchfulness against the danger of allowing their play-houses to become the centres of riot and sedition, and the cognate danger of allowing matter to creep into their plays which was contrary to public morals as conceived by those who were not Puritans, or displeasing to persons of importance, or inconsistent with the views of Tudor and Stuart governments upon religious and political questions. The disturbances which form a count in the sixteenth-century indictments of theatres are not particularly conspicuous in the seventeenth. There were bad characters enough, both male and female, amongst the audience. Pockets might be picked and even modesty endangered; and occasionally brawls and bloodshed were the result.[3] But in the more important theatres, such as the Globe and the Fortune, which made their appeal to the well-to-do and the fashionable, no less than to the groundlings,
- [Footnote: complaining to Alleyn that 'intemperate Mr. Meade' had taken 'the day
from vs which by course was ours'.]
- ↑ By 1574 the City had offers to farm their licensing rights 'to the relefe of the poore in the hospitalles'; but their regulations of Dec. 1574 provide for direct contributions to the poor and sick by holders of licences for playing-places. A weekly subsidy to the poor from every stage is suggested by Walsingham's correspondent of 1587. Hunsdon, in asking for the use of the Cross Keys in 1594, promised that his men would 'be contributories to the poore of the parishe where they plaie accordinge to their habilities'. In 1600 the Southwark Vestry were negotiating with the players for tithes and contributions for the poor on the basis of an 'order taken before my lords of Canterbury and London and the Master of the Revels. In the same year the inhabitants of Finsbury recite the 'very liberall porcion' of money promised weekly for the relief of the poor as one of their grounds for assenting to the building of the Fortune. The accounts of the overseers of Paris Garden between 1611 and 1621 show varying sums, amounting to about £4 or £5 a year, as received during several years from the players at the Swan.
- ↑ The Middlesex records for 1616 show the Queen's men at the Red Bull as in arrear for their contribution, 'being taxed by the bench 40s. the yeare by theire own consentes'.
- ↑ Cf. ch. viii.
