mainly Dekker, as critic of the players, no less than in other ways, who carries on the tradition of Greene and Nashe.[1] Himself an active playwright, it is with black looks that he stands by, in thronged term-time or at the coming of ambassadors, and watches the companies battening upon the fruits of divine poetry, like swine on acorns; and when plague arrives, although his own occupation be gone, it is with savage glee that he sees the flag hauled down and the doors closed, and his gloomy paymasters setting out once more on the hard life of 'strowlers'.
One interesting result of the feud between poets and players was that some of the former were led to encourage and even acquire financial interests in a rival type of theatrical organization which for a time at least entered into successful competition with the professional companies. This organization rested upon the use of boy actors. I have elsewhere expounded the important share taken by school plays in the earlier development of the Renaissance drama.[2] The grammar schools of
- [Footnote: R. G. would it not make you blush at the matter?. . . Aske the Queens
Players, if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty Nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same Play to the Lord Admirals men for as much more. Was not this plaine Conny-Catching, Maister R. G.?. . . But I hear, when this was objected, you made this excuse; that there was no more faith to be held with players than with them that valued faith at the price of a feather; for as they were comedians to act, so the actions of their lives were Camelion-like; that they were uncertain, variable, time-pleasers, men that measured honesty by profit, and that regarded their authors not by desert, but by necessity of time.']P[arrot], Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks (1613), Epig. 131, Theatrum Licentia:
Cotta's become a player most men know,
And will no longer take such toyling paines;
For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow
And brings them damnable excessive gaines:
That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs,
Since Greene's Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs.
]
- ↑ Dekker, Jests to Make you Merrie (1607, Works, ii. 303, 352), 'As proud as a player that feedes on the fruité of diuine poetry (as swine on acorns). . . . O you that are the Poets of these sinfull times, ouer whome the Players haue now got the vpper hand, by making fooles of the poore country people, in driuing them like flockes of geese to sit cackling in an old barne: and to swallow downe those playes for new which here euery punck and her squire (like the interpreter and his poppet) can rand out by heart they are so stale, and therefore so stincking; I know the Lady Pecunia and you come very hardly together, & therefore trouble not you'; cf. his references to 'strowlers' in note to p. 332. Another seventeenth-century critic is H[enry
- ↑ Mediaeval Stage, ii. 194, 214. For Elizabethan school-plays at Shrewsbury, cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Ashton. Murray, ii. 204, 216, 243, 324, 364, 382, records plays by schoolboys or other children at Bath (1602), Bristol (1594), Coventry (1601-2), Ludlow (1562, 1575-6), Norwich (1564-5), Plymouth (Totnes boys, 1564-74).
