nobler name than that of Shakespeare's predecessors. The predecessors of Shakespeare. The lives of all of these are, of course, in part contemporary with the life of Shakespeare himself; nor was there any substantial difference in the circumstances under which most of them, and he, led their lives as dramatic authors. A distinction was manifestly kept up between poets and playwrights. Of the contempt entertained for the actor's profession some fell to the share of the dramatist; "even Lodge," says C. M. Ingleby, "who had indeed never trod the stage, but had written several plays, and had no reason to be ashamed of his antecedents, speaks of the vocation of the play-maker as sharing the odium attaching to the actor." Among the dramatists themselves good fellowship and literary partnership only at times asserted themselves as stronger than the tendency to mutual jealousy and abuse; of all chapters of dramatic history, the annals of the early Elizabethan stage perhaps least resemble those of Arcadia. History of the Elizabethan stage. Moreover, the theatre had hardly found its strength as a powerful element in the national life, when it was involved in a bitter controversy, with which it had originally no connexion, on behalf of an ally whose sympathy with it can only have been of a very limited kind. The Marprelate controversy, into which, among leading playwrights, Lyly and Nashe were drawn, in 1589 led to a stoppage of stage-plays which proved only temporary; but the general result of the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of political abuse and invective was beyond a doubt to coarsen and degrade both plays and players. Scurrilous attempts and rough repression continued during the years 1590-1593; and the true remedy was at last applied, when from about 1594, the chief London actors became divided into two great rival companies--the lord chamberlain's and the lord admiral's--which alone received licences. Instead of half a dozen or more companies whose jealousies communicated themselves to the playwrights belonging to them, there were now, besides the Children of the Chapel, two established bodies of actors, directed by steady and, in the full sense of the word, respectable men. To the lord chamberlain's company, which, after being settled at "the Theater" (opened as early as 1576 or 1577), moved to Blackfriars, purchased by James Burbage, in 1596, and to the Globe on the Bankside in 1599, Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, the greatest of the Elizabethan actors, belonged; the lord admiral's was managed by Philip Henslowe, the author of the _Diary_, and Edward Alleyn, the founder of Dulwich College, and was ultimately, in 1600, settled at the Fortune. In these and other houses were performed the plays of the Elizabethan dramatists, with few adventitious aids, the performance being crowded into a brief afternoon, when it is obvious that only the idler sections of the population could attend.