in an English text. In addition to actual plays, enough lists of performances are upon record to give a fair notion of the range of the travelling repertories. Both recent productions of the London stage and more old-fashioned pieces were drawn upon for adaptation. The choice was doubtless determined by the availability of prompter's copies or printed texts, as the case might be, when a company was collecting a stock-in-trade for its adventure. Sometimes variety was obtained by using the experiments of a German dramatist, or one of those scriptural comedies, Susanna and the Elders, The Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, which had been the delight of the German, even more than the English, Renaissance.
The most obvious thing about the life of the English actor on the road in Germany is that it was uncommonly like his life on the road in England. Perhaps this is hardly surprising when it is borne in mind that, as already pointed out, the player away from his permanent theatre reverted to the status of the minstrel, and that throughout the ages the minstrel had been cosmopolitan. That in a land of alien speech, even more than at home, the strict arts of comedy and tragedy had to be eked out with music and buffoonery and acrobatics goes without saying. Even as late as 1614 and at the court of Berlin the terms on which actors were engaged bound them to render service 'mit Springen, Spielen und anderer Kurzweil', as their lord might require.[1] Away from court, in Germany as in England, they were mainly dependent upon the goodwill of the civic magistrates, to whom on approaching each town they addressed elaborate petitions, of which many are preserved, in which they recited their own merits, and made play with the names of any princes whose servants they were entitled to call themselves, or whose recommendation some successful display had enabled them to gain. There was always the chance that, on the strength of plague or some other pretext, they might be refused admission altogether. At the best, they must expect to have the length of their stay, the days and hours of their performances, the sums they might charge for standing-room and seats, most thoughtfully and minutely regulated for them. And when all the preliminaries were gone through, and the Rathaus or an inn-yard put at their disposal, and the creaking boards set up, and the tattered frippery extracted from the hamper, it might perhaps after all, as at Brunswick in 1614, be a case of 'kein Volk' and the Council might give them a thaler out of charity and send them on their way.[2] In Germany too, as in England, they had to
