We are made to see, in our survey of the age of Elizabeth, much that is in striking contrast with the spirit and activities of our time. There is a notable contrast between the public play house of those days, where no respectable woman ever appeared, and with the theatre of our day—the rival of the church as a moral force. In the elder time “the permanent and persistent dishonor attached to the stage,” and the stigma attached to the poets who wrote for the public playhouse, attached in like manner to the regular frequenters of public theatres, the majority of whom could neither read nor write, but belonged chiefly to the vicious and idle class of the population. At all the theatres, according to Malone, it appears that noise and show were what chiefly attracted an audience in spite of the reputed author. There was clamor for a stage reeking with blood and anything ministering to their unchaste appetites. The spectacular actor and clown was relatively advantaged, as he could say much more than was set down for him. Kemp’s extemporizing powers of histrionic buffoonery, gagging, and grimacing, paid the running expenses of the playhouse. “It must be borne in mind that actors then occupied an inferior position in society, and that in many quarters even the vocation of a dramatic writer was considered scarcely respectable.” Ben Jonson’s letter to the Earl of Salisbury, lets us see very clearly that he regarded play writing as a degradation. We transcribe it in part as follows: “I am here, my honored Lord, unexamined and unheard, committed to a vile prison and with me a gentleman (whose name may perhaps have come to your Lordship), one Mr. George Chapman, a learned and honest man. The cause (would I could name some worthier though I wish we had known none worthy our imprisonment) (is the words irk-me that our fortune hath necessitated us to so despise a course) a play, my Lord—.” We see how keenly Jonson felt the disgrace, not on account of the charge of reflecting on some one in a play in which they had federated, for he protested his own and Chapman’s innocence, but he felt that their degradation lay chiefly in writing stage poetry, for drama-making was regarded as a degrading kind of employment, which poets accepted who were struggling for the meanest necessities of life, and were driven by poverty to their production, and to the slave-driving play-brokers, many of whom became very rich by making the flesh and blood of poor play-writers their maw.