It is not strange, perhaps, that it was university men who served to free the drama to the better purposes of art. Themselves trained in the classics, and in the essentials of Italian culture, they were able to bring to bear on drama the force of the influence of Seneca, the pastoral, and the masque, and thereby greatly to increase the range of inspiration and the instruments of effective expression open to the playwrights. The fact is, however, worthy of remark that it is to the university playwrights that we have to credit the transference of the patronage of the drama out of the hands of the court into the hands of the people. Lyly had been the first great university dramatist. His plays, of which _Campaspe_ and _Sapho and Phao_ must have been composed before 1581, were written for court production. But Lyly's own melancholy story shows clearly enough that if dramatists were to flourish at all they needed means of support supplementary to the uncertain pension of a noble. It was for the sake of this further support that the playwrights and the actors proceeded to perform their court plays before the people, first in the inn-yards of the Cross Keys, the Bull and the Bell Savage, and finally in the Theatre and the Curtain, erected in 1576 and 1577 in Finsbury Fields. As an indication of the movement to transfer the support of the drama from the court to the public it is recorded that in 1575 "Her Majesty's poor players" were petitioning the Lord Mayor, through the Privy Council, for permission to play within the city, assigning as reasons the fact that they needed rehearsal properly to prepare for their court appearances, and that they needed to earn their livings. The answer of the city authorities, that plays should be presented by way of recreation by men with other means of subsistence, was manifestly an avoidance of the implications of the situation at hand.