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 writes of a play of Gowry, no longer extant, that 'whether the matter or the manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that Princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime, I hear that some great councellors are much displeased with it, and so 'tis thought shall be forbidden'. A somewhat vague allusion to an 'unwilling error' of players and a consequent restraint, contained in the epilogue for a revival of Mucedorus, first published in 1610, may possibly relate to some later episode not otherwise recorded, but possibly only to the Byron episode, with which the King's men had nothing directly to do. Nor do we know who were the 'much-suffering actors' of Daborne's 'oppressed and much-martird Tragedy', A Christian Turned Turk, of about the same date. Conceivably this is itself the play for which Mucedorus apologizes. Even provincial plays sometimes brought their promoters before the Star Chamber. Sir Edward Dymock was imprisoned and fined £1,000 in May 1610 for a scurrilous play against the Earl of Lincoln on a Maypole green. And what seems a curiously belated incident is recorded in 1614, when Sir John Yorke suffered a similar fate for encouraging some vagrant players to perform an interlude in favour of the Popish religion.

And when players had got their warrants and their licences, and signed their recognizances to the Master of the Revels, and paid their tithes, and made up their minds to observe the taboos of Sunday and of Lent, and to purge their plays of all perilous stuff, they had still to encounter the ordinary changesdit q. players de enterludes sont Rogues per le statute et le very bringing de religion sur le stage est libell.' On the career of the Simpsons, cf. ch. ix. The actual offence may have been some years earlier than the Star Chamber sitting of 1614, for Devon, 261, records a payment to the Keeper of the Gatehouse at Westminster for the diet of Lady Julian, wife of Sir John Yorke, as a prisoner from 5 Nov. 1611 to 13 Oct. 1613. The Yorkes were not of those who learn by experience, for in 1628 the Star Chamber sentenced Christopher Malloy for playing the devil in a performance at Sir John Yorke's house in Yorkshire, in which part he carried King James on his back to hell, and alleged that all Protestants were damned (Burn, 119).]