The actors were under arrest for four-and-twenty hours, and were then set free, but under certain stipulations to be observed by them "and all other players throughout the city,"--namely: they were to exercise their vocation of acting "between All Saints and Shrovetide" only; and they were bound to act no other plays but such as were approved of by the Ordinary. This was the most stringent censorship to which the stage has ever been subjected. Although Edward had commanded the transfer of the company of actors from Warwick Inn to Blackfriars, that dissolved monastery was not legally converted into a theatre till the year 1576, when Elizabeth was on the throne. In that year[4] the Earl of Leicester's servants were licensed to open their series of seasons in a house, the site of which is occupied by Apothecaries' Hall and some adjacent buildings. At the head of the company was James, father of Richard Burbage, the original representative of Richard III. and of Hamlet, the author of which tragedies, so named, was, at the time of the opening of the Blackfriars' theatre, a lad of twelve years of age, surmounting the elementary difficulties of Latin and Greek in the Free School of Stratford-on-Avon. In Elizabeth the drama possessed a generous patroness and a vindictive censor. Her afternoons at Windsor Castle and Richmond were made pleasant to her by the exertions of her players. The cost to her of occasional performances at the above residences during two years amounted to a fraction over £444. There were incidental expenses also, proving that the actors were well cared for. In the year 1575, among the estimates for plays at Hampton Court, the liberal sum of £8, 14s. is set down "for the boyling of the brawns against Xtmas." [Illustration: (Richard Burbage.)] As at Court, so also did the drama flourish at the Universities, especially at Cambridge. There, in 1566, the coarse dialect comedy, "Gammer Gurton's Needle"--a marvellous production, when considered as the work of a bishop, Still, of Bath and Wells--was represented amid a world of laughter. There, too, was exercised a sharp censorship over both actors and audience. In a letter from Vice-Chancellor Hatcher to Burleigh, the conduct of Punter, a student of St. John's, at stage-plays at Caius and Trinity, is complained of as unsteady. In 1581 the heads of houses again make application to Burleigh, objecting to the players of the Great Chamberlain, the Earl of Oxford, poet and courtier, exhibiting certain plays already "practised" by them before the King. The authorities, when scholastic audiences were noisy, or when players brought no novelty with them to Cambridge, applied to the great statesman in town, and vexed him with dramatic troubles, as if he had been general stage-manager of all the companies strolling over the kingdom.