Some of them to the end, perhaps the majority, remained threadbare companions enough; in and out of debt, spongers upon their fellows, frequenters of pawnshops, acquainted with prison. Partly it was a matter of character. Those who had to do with the stage were not all such riff-raff as a hasty reading of the Puritan literature might suggest. Gosson, indeed, admits as much, allowing that some among those professing 'the qualitie' are 'sober, discreete, properly learned honest housholders and citizens well thought on amonge their neighbours at home'; while on his side Thomas Heywood is quick to maintain the harm wrought by the licentious to a calling in which many are 'of substance, of government, of sober lives and temperate carriages, house-*keepers and contributory to all duties enjoyned them', and to plead that if there be a few of degenerate demeanour, his readers will not 'censure hardly of all for the misdeeds of some'.[1] Doubtless there is a certain instability of temperament, which the life of the theatre, with its ups and downs of fortune, its unreal sentiments and its artificially stimulated emotions, is well calculated to encourage; and we may perhaps find the victims of such a temperament in certain actors who, although clearly of standing in their profession, seem to have been constantly shifting from company to company, without attaining any secure position or, as one may conjecture, reaping any substantial harvest from their labour and their skill. One of these was Richard Jones, originally a fellow of Alleyn with Lord Worcester's men, presently selling to Alleyn his share of clothes and books, at one time reduced to 1s. a day or nothing, at another setting out to tour the Continent with Robert Browne, then back again with Alleyn amongst the Admiral's men, then transferring himself to the Swan and returning a few months later to the Rose, and finally allowing himself to be bought out for £50 and passing into obscurity. Another was Martin Slater, also at one time one of the Admiral's men, whom he left and went to law with, then a wanderer with Laurence Fletcher in Scotland, and afterwards successively traceable with Lord Hertford's men, with Queen Anne's, as a member of the King's Revels syndicate, and with Queen Anne's again as manager of one of the provincial companies travelling under the Queen's warrant. Perhaps it is merely another way of stating the same issue to say that the financial success of a player depended on his obtaining an interest, not merely in the day-to-day profits of a company, but also in the
- ↑ App. C, Nos. xxii, lvii; cf. Wright (App. I, ii) on the 'grave and sober behaviour' of the later King's men.
