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466 desire to imitate her noble example. No lady at court can be much costlier than a citizen’s wife when she goes out in state, her hair puckered up with wires and sown with gold, a rich silk gown slashed with open sleeves, gorgeous silk stockings, a cut lawn apron, velvet shoes with high heels, a sparkling feather-fan, and a puff farthingale, in which she swirls through the streets as if she were inflated with air. This is the natural consequence of the splendour of the court. What is done in Westminster, will presently be emulated in Cheap and Dowgate; and it will go hard, too, with the wife of the vintner or the scrivener, if she do not make as grand a figure, to look upon from a distance at least, as the wife of any lord or knight of the shire amongst them.

Love of finery is inseparable from love of display; and love of display seeks gratification in public places and the haunts of pleasure. And this brings me at once to the stage-plays, interludes, and other dramatic entertainments which have been much encouraged in this reign. The favour with which they have been received may be easily explained. The country is rich, and can afford such luxuries, and the age is smitten with a passion for adventure and discovery which takes singular delight in the representation of heroic actions and surprising incidents. But it is necessary to observe that this encouragement has come entirely from the people. Authority has all along set its face against Plays and Interludes as decoys for the idle and thoughtless, and centres of vice and profligacy. Queen Mary was so anxious to repress the evil of these representations — especially when they betrayed any tendency to promote the Reformation — that she prohibited them within the city, except between the feast of All Saints and Shrovetide, and even then no play was allowed to be presented except such as had previously received the sanction of the Ordinary of the parish, who was to look after its theology. On one occasion a licentious play was about to be acted at the Boar’s Head in Aldgate, when her Majesty sent an express messenger to the Lord Mayor, commanding him to seize the players forthwith and put them into prison, and to forward their play -book to the palace that her Majesty might see whether it contained any mischief. The players were afterwards released, but from that day to this the play-book has never been heard of.

Queen Elizabeth, and the worshipful council of the city, have improved upon these processes. Imprisonment was found to be quite useless. There was a vitality in the players that no dungeon could reduce. They came out of gate-houses and compters as brisk and lively as ever. If you put them down in one part of the town, they were sure to rise up again in another. If you chased them out of the Swan, you might confidently expect them to re-appear in the Lamb or the Mitre. In vain they were fined and confined, suspended from their occupation altogether at intervals, and the crowds they collected, when they were allowed to play, put to the rout and dispersed upon the slightest indication of tumult. Under such circumstances, the Lord Mayor came to the conclusion that the only thing he could do with the vagrants was to cast them out of the city by a solemn edict, as in the old times devils were cast out by exorcisms. Such an edict was accordingly drawn up, and duly published; and from this time, a.d. 1575, the players were interdicted from practising their calling within the limits of the Lord Mayor’s jurisdiction, or, in other words, so far as their profession of the stage was concerned they were outlawed from the city.

And now follows the Story of the founding of the First Play-house.

Heretofore the players had performed in innyards, or large empty rooms when they could get them, or sometimes in churchyards by permission of the clergy, for which permission they paid a swingeing fee. Their pursuit was notoriously precarious, both as to opportunity and profits. No man was a player only, for no man could live by playing alone, so oppressive were the restrictions as to time, place, and matter. We shall now see, moving onward out of this year 1575, what re- venges came round for the poor players in the whirligig of time, through the operation of the edict of banishment.

Amongst the outlaws was one James Burbadge, who, fortunately for himself and for us, was by trade a carpenter. To this respectable occupation he added that of an occasional stage-player, picking up some slender gratuities in that way when opportunity served. In what line he acted, or how he acted, are questions to which no answers can now be obtained. But it may be presumed that he held some rank amongst his fellows, as the Earl of Leicester placed him at the head of his little company of actors, for whose performances his lordship obtained a patent — the first ever granted in England — imder the Great Seal in 1574.

The Revels at Kenilworth were to take place in the following July, and Burbadge, while the high festival lasted, would, no doubt, be at the top of his glory; but when that gorgeous assembly broke up, and the guests departed, and the castle relapsed into silence, and the players were dismissed with their largess, where was ho to wander for a subsistence? Dismal thoughts set in upon his brain as he mapped out the dreary future. The city was closed upon him. Stage -playing yielded a thin living before; but it had now reached starvation point. James, too, was a married man, and he had already two sons, Cuthbert and Richard, with a reasonable prospect of a growing family; for his wife Ellen, the daughter of Mr. Brayne, of London, had so fine a constitution that, under favourable circumstances, it was not easy to contemplate a limit to their domestic felicity. What was to be done? Independently of the necessity of getting a living by some means, James Burbadge was not insensible to the fact that his father-in-law, Mr. Brayne, of London, was a man of substance, and would naturally expect him to main- tain his daughter in as much comfort as she hod passed out of from under the paternal roof. These considerations put the worldly wit of poor Motley to a severe test. It was a fine thing to be sure to be one of the Earl of Leicester’s servants, under a royal patent; but what of that? The patent licensed him and his fellows to play interludes, and so forth; but of what avail was it, when they could not play them in London? The open gal-