In Shakespeare's times, the plays were probably well acted. While the fame of Elizabethan actors like Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage has come down to modern times, the success of plays did not depend on single stars. Shakespeare is said to have played in minor rôles. The audience discouraged bad acting. The occupants of the pit would throw apples or worse missiles at an unsatisfactory player, and sometimes the disgusted spectators would suddenly leap on the stage and chase an incompetent actor off the boards. Prior to the Restoration in 1660, the women's parts were taken by boys. While this must have hampered the presentation of characters like Lady Macbeth, it is now known to have been less of a handicap than was formerly thought. The twentieth century has seen feminine parts so well played by carefully trained boys that the most astute women spectators never detected the deception. Boys, especially those of the Chapel Royal, had for a long time acted masculine, as well as feminine, parts. As late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the choir boys were presenting some of the great Elizabethan plays in a private theater connected with St. Paul's Cathedral. Rosencrantz in the second act of _Hamlet_ bears witness to the popularity of these boy actors, when he calls them "little eyases, that cry on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for it." Ben Jonson's touching lyrical epitaph on a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy, who had for "three fill'd zodiacs" been "the stage's jewel," shows how highly the Elizabethans sometimes regarded boy actors. The regular theaters found the companies of boys such strong rivals that, in 1609, Shakespeare and other theatrical managers used modern business methods to suppress competition and agreed to pay the master of the boys of St. Paul's enough to cause him to withdraw them permanently from competing with the other theaters. PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMATISTS The "University Wits" and Thomas Kyd.--Five authors, John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, were sufficiently versatile to be called "university wits." Amid various other activities, all of them were impelled by the spirit of the age to write plays. These intellectual aristocrats hurled the keen shafts of their wit at those dramatists, who, without a university education, were arrogant enough to think that they could write plays. Because Shakespeare had never attended a university, Greene called him "an upstart Crow beautified with our feathers."