Coursers to ride on through the gazing streetes,
Sooping it in their glaring satten sutes,
And pages to attend their maisterships:
With mouthing words that better wits haue framed,
They purchase lands, and now esquiers are namde.
It is the old burden of Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe once more.[1]
The disturbance of theatrical conditions due to the revival of the boy companies became in time less acute. No doubt, the novelty of their performances wore off. Moreover, the companies were not very successful in holding together, partly because of the indiscretions of their managers and the inadequacy of their finance to stand the strain of plague years, but more because the boys, as might perhaps have been expected, grew up and ceased to be boys. Already about 1608 the Blackfriars boys 'were masters themselves' of their own company, and when this arrangement broke down, they began to be drafted into the adult associations. Other boy companies followed, but these were subject to the same difficulties, and the vogue of the original 'little eyases' was never quite recaptured.[2] But, after all, the competition had not disappeared, but had merely taken another form. The younger generation was knocking at the gates; Field and Taylor waiting in eager rivalry for Burbadge's shoes, and meanwhile forming new combinations of their own which, however unstable, at least cut at the profits of their more firmly established rivals. The 'monopoly' offered by Jonson in jest would no doubt have been welcomed by the principal companies in earnest. The policy of the Privy Council from 1597 to 1600 pointed in this direction, but for whatever reason was not brought into effective operation. There are several indications of the pressure of competition during the earlier part of the seventeenth century. In 1609 it was worth the while of the Queen's Revels and the King's men to unite in buying off the Paul's boys at the cost of £20 a year. Dekker in the same year prophesies that the contention of the two houses of York and Lancaster will be as nothing to that of the three houses, by which he means the Globe, the
- ↑ In certain other plays which have actors amongst their dramatis personae (e.g. Midsummer-Night's Dream and Middleton's Mayor of Queenborough) the point is reversed, and it is the regular companies who satirize provincial companies or amateurs.
- ↑ Thus in 1618 the Mayor of Exeter complained of a company travelling under Daniel's patent for the Children of Bristol (q.v.) that, though the patent was for children, the company consisted of men, with only five youths amongst them.
