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 Obviously the privileges given to players were not intended to exempt them from the ordinary duties and responsibilities of citizenship. In the first place, they were called upon to make their contributions to local burdens in the districts in which they set up their play-houses. To this they had probably no objection; on the contrary, they more than once found that a readiness to pay their tithes for the use of the poor was an effective method of smoothing away difficulties with local officials. Nor had they less to gain than others from a reasonable expenditure of money on the repair of the highways.

And secondly, they had to exercise a constant watchfulness against the danger of allowing their play-houses to become the centres of riot and sedition, and the cognate danger of allowing matter to creep into their plays which was contrary to public morals as conceived by those who were not Puritans, or displeasing to persons of importance, or inconsistent with the views of Tudor and Stuart governments upon religious and political questions. The disturbances which form a count in the sixteenth-century indictments of theatres are not particularly conspicuous in the seventeenth. There were bad characters enough, both male and female, amongst the audience. Pockets might be picked and even modesty endangered; and occasionally brawls and bloodshed were the result. But in the more important theatres, such as the Globe and the Fortune, which made their appeal to the well-to-do and the fashionable, no less than to the groundlings,

from vs which by course was ours'.]
 * [Footnote: complaining to Alleyn that 'intemperate Mr. Meade' had taken 'the day