[3] It would appear that noblemen's players were prohibited from acting, even before their masters, without leave from the Privy Council. [4] The patent was dated 1574, and does not specify any particular building or locality. [5] 1579 (2d edition). [6] Should be 1574. It is dated 7th May 1574. [7] These quotations are both from the same sermon. [8] Or, Prince Palatine. [9] The owners seem to have been Cuthbert and William Burbage, uncle and nephew. [10] The year of its destruction seems uncertain. [11] It was standing in 1661; in which year it was advertised for sale, with the ground belonging to it. [Illustration: THE SWAN THEATRE.] CHAPTER II. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE PLAYERS. It was in the eventful year 1587,[12] while Roman Catholics were deploring the death of Mary Stuart; while Englishmen were exulting at the destruction dealt by Drake to a hundred Spanish ships in the port of Cadiz; while the Puritan party was at angry issue with Elizabeth; while John Fox was lying dead; and while Walsingham was actively impeding the ways and means of Armada Philip, by getting his bills protested at Genoa,--that the little man, Gosson, in the parish of St. Botolph, of which he was the incumbent, first nibbed his pen,[13] and made it fly furiously over paper, in wordy war against the stage and stage-players. When the Britons ate acorns and drank water, he says, they were giants and heroes; but since plays came in they had dwindled into a puny race, incapable of noble and patriotic achievements! And yet next year, some pretty fellows of that race were sweeping the Invincible Armada from the surface of our seas! When London was talking admiringly of the coronation of Charles I., and Parliament was barely according him one pound in twelve of the money-aids of which he was in need, there was another pamphleteer sending up his testimony from Cheapside to Westminster, against the alleged abomination of plays and players. This writer entitles his work _A short Treatise against Stage Plays_, and he makes it as sharp as it is short. Plays were invented by heathens; they must necessarily be prejudicial to Christians!--_that_ is the style of his assertion and argument. They were invented in order to appease false gods; consequently, the playing of them must excite to wrath a true Deity! They are no recreation, because people come away from them wearied. The argument, in tragedy, he informs us, is murder; in comedy, it is social vice. This he designates as bad instruction; and remembering Field's query to Sutton, he would very much like to know in what page of Holy Writ authority is given for the vocation of an actor. He might as well have asked for the suppression of tailors, on the ground of their never being once named in either the Old Testament or the New!