The prosperity of the actor caused many to adopt the calling. His vocation, we are told, was the most excellent one in the world for money, and therefore players grew as plentifully "as spawn of frogs in March." It was open to the actor to buy shares in his theatre, and he could, by becoming a shareholder, attain the position of owner, and would, in Shakespeare's theatre, as one of the King's players, be provided from the royal wardrobe "with a cloak of bastard-scarlet and crimson velvet for the cape." He could also term himself "gentleman," a rank he was allowed to assume, and which he was very glad to adopt in defiance of the enemies of theatrical performances, who constantly taunted him, in the words of the old statute, with being "a rogue and a vagabond." The popularity of the stage as a profession excited the envy of scholars and lawyers. They taunted the actor with his vanity in believing that his fame would descend to posterity. They blamed the public for affording these "glorious vagabonds" means to ride through the "gazing streets" in satin clothes attended by their pages, and for enabling those who had done no more than "mouth words that better wits had framed" to purchase lands and possess country houses. The actor retaliated by deriding the scholar's poverty and ridiculing the lawyer's use of bad Latin. They contended that it was better "to make a fool of the world than to be fooled of the world as you scholars are." There is an anecdote related of Nathan Field which shows that actors did not underrate their own importance. "Nathan Field, the player, being in company with a certain nobleman who was distantly related to him, the latter asked the reason why they spelt their names differently, the nobleman's family speling it 'Feild,' and the player spelling it 'Field'? 'I cannot tell,' answered the player, 'except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew to spell.'" It would hardly have been agreeable to this tragedian to learn that he and his fellows, Shakespeare and Burbage, were "writ down" by the Master of His Majesty's Revels as "players, jugglers, and such kind of creatures"; nor would Ben Jonson have felt flattered by the candid confession of an admirer who "could not understand how a poet could have so much principle."