he playhouses at any time were no
better than the "ill-famed stews" in Southwark. It cannot be denied,
however, that under the prevailing circumstances it was quite right that
the playhouses should be temporarily forbidden.

But the sudden and unwarranted expulsion of all dramatic performances
from the precincts of London a few years later, 1575, cannot be
accounted for otherwise than by the increasing popularity which these
plays enjoyed among the non-Puritan public, and the envy with which the
clergy saw the people crowding much more to the places where actors
interpreted the rising poets than to those where the preachers
themselves enunciated their gloomy doctrine.

In the year 1574 the actor James Burbage, with four other actors, all
belonging to the retinue of the Earl of Leicester, had received
permission from the Queen to perform all kinds of plays anywhere in
England, "for the recreation of her beloved subjects as well as for her
own comfort and pleasure, if it should please her to see them."

Perhaps it was a counter-move on the part of the Puritan community when
the lord mayor and the corporation in the following year straightway
forbade all plays within the precincts of the town. If so, it proved a
failure. James Burbage resolutely hired a liberty outside the city, and
here, in 1576, on the premises of an ancient Roman Catholic priory, he
built the first English playhouse, which he named "The Theatre."

In the following year The Theatre gained an ally in "The Curtain," which
was built in the same neighborhood, both, of course, causing great
indignation among the Puritans. In 1577, the year after the first
playhouse had been erected, there appeared a furious pamphlet, by John
Northbrooke, against "dicing, dancing, plays and interludes as well as
other idle pastimes."

No doubt all possible means were taken to have plays forbidden and the
playhouses pulled down, but though the attack of the Black Army never
ceased for a moment, the Puritans did not succeed in getting the better
of the theatres till the year 1642, when they acquired political power
through the civil war; and, fortunately for the part of mankind which
appreciates art, this precious flower of culture, one of the richest and
most remarkable periods in the life of dramatic art, had developed into
full bloom before the outbreak of the war.

In a sermon of 1578 we read the following bitter and deep-drawn sigh by
the clergyman John Stockwood: "Wy