On the 18th January 1561, an English tragedy in five acts, entitled “Ferrex and Porrex, or Gorbaduc,” was performed before Queen Elizabeth, being the joint composition of her cousins, Sir Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton. In her progress in 1564, Elizabeth was entertained at King’s College, Cambridge, with a play entitled “Ezechias,” and two years afterwards she witnessed a performance in Christ Church Hall, Oxford, of Edwards’s “Palamon and Arcyte.” At this period plays were occasionally exhibited on a Sunday in spite of the denunciations of the Puritans. Elizabeth herself visited a theatrical exhibition on Sunday, and in after years James I. allowed plays to be acted at Court on the same day. It appears that in 1586 a correspondence took place between the Court and the city of London regarding the fitness or unfitness of certain theatrical representations, especially on Sundays. Among the Harleian MSS. is an interesting account of the entertainments given before Elizabeth and her Court in 1568, wherein we find a payment of £634, 9s. 5d. to Sir Thomas Benger, for materials and work “within the Office of the Revels,” between the 14th July 1567 and the 3rd March 1568, during which interval it appears “seven plays” and “one tragedy” were represented before her Majesty.[137] And, it may be added, that it was apparently part of the duty of the Master of the Revels to have the plays rehearsed to him before they were presented at Court. In 1574 the grant of the first “Royal Patent” was conceded in this country to performers of plays, whereby the persons named in it were empowered, during the Queen’s pleasure, to use, exercise, and occupy the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, interludes, and stage plays, as well for the recreation of the Queen’s subjects as for her own solace and pleasure, within the City of London and its liberties, and within any cities, towns, and boroughs throughout England. Associated with the theatrical amusements were the masks and shows, which were conducted on a very expensive and imposing scale, an account of which we have given elsewhere. And, as it has been often pointed out, many of these were specially provided to gratify the vanity of the Queen, to whom some marked and delicate compliment was generally made. In the summer of 1601, the Queen was at an entertainment given by the Lord Keeper, and on her way to the mansion she was entertained by a dialogue “betweene the Bayly and the Dary-mayd,” in which the following was supposed to be spoken by the bailiff of the Lord Keeper: “The Mistress of this fayre companie, though she knowe the way to all men’s hearts, yet she knowes the way to few men’s houses, except she love them very well.”