enterprises and benefactions
to charity. Sir Thomas Gresham built the Exchange, Sir Hugh Middleton
paid for the New River water supply, and there were many gifts to
hospitals. With all this increase in wealth, the various professions
prospered, especially that of law. The inns of court were crowded with
students, not a few of whom forsook the courts for the drama. The age of
chivalry was over, that of commerce begun. No one gained much glory by a
military career in the days of Elizabeth. The church, the law, banking,
commerce, even politics and literature, offered better roads to wealth
or fame.

The importance of the court in Elizabethan London is not easy to realize
to-day. It dominated the life of the small city. Its nobles and their
retainers, its courtiers and hangers-on, made up a considerable portion
of the population; its shows supplied the entertainment, its gossip the
politics of the hour. It was the seat of pageantry, the mirror of
manners, the patron or the oppressor of every one. No one could be so
humble as to escape coming somehow within its sway, and some of the
greatest wrecked their lives in efforts to secure its approval. It is no
wonder that the plays of Shakespeare deal so largely with kings,
queens, and their courts. Under the Tudors, and still more under the
Stuarts, the court aimed at increasing the central authority so as to
bring every affair of its subjects under its direct control. In London,
however, this effort at centralization met with strong opposition. The
government was in the hands of the guilds representative of the wealth
of the city, and was coming face to face with many of the problems of
modern municipalities. The corporation was in constant clash with the
court; and in the end the city, which had supported Henry VIII and
Elizabeth against powerful nobles, became the Puritan London that aided
in ousting the Stuarts.

[Page Heading: The City and the Court]

This conflict between city and court is illustrated in the regulation of
the theaters and companies of actors. The actors had a legal status only
as the license of some nobleman enrolled them as his servants, and they
relied on the protection of their patron and the court against the
opposition of the city authorities. The fact that they were employed to
give plays before the Queen was, indeed, about the only argument that
won any consideration from the corporation. This opposition was based in
part on moral or puritan groun