popularity of the
stage increased, the functions of playwright and actor, whether combined
or not, began to hold out a reasonable promise of personal gain. Nor,
above all, was that higher impulse which leads men of talent and genius
to attempt forms of art in harmony with the tastes and tendencies of
their times wanting to the group of writers who can be remembered by no
nobler name than that of Shakespeare's predecessors.

The predecessors of Shakespeare.

The lives of all of these are, of course, in part contemporary with the
life of Shakespeare himself; nor was there any substantial difference in
the circumstances under which most of them, and he, led their lives as
dramatic authors. A distinction was manifestly kept up between poets and
playwrights. Of the contempt entertained for the actor's profession some
fell to the share of the dramatist; "even Lodge," says C. M. Ingleby,
"who had indeed never trod the stage, but had written several plays, and
had no reason to be ashamed of his antecedents, speaks of the vocation
of the play-maker as sharing the odium attaching to the actor." Among
the dramatists themselves good fellowship and literary partnership only
at times asserted themselves as stronger than the tendency to mutual
jealousy and abuse; of all chapters of dramatic history, the annals of
the early Elizabethan stage perhaps least resemble those of Arcadia.

History of the Elizabethan stage.

Moreover, the theatre had hardly found its strength as a powerful
element in the national life, when it was involved in a bitter
controversy, with which it had originally no connexion, on behalf of an
ally whose sympathy with it can only have been of a very limited kind.
The Marprelate controversy, into which, among leading playwrights, Lyly
and Nashe were drawn, in 1589 led to a stoppage of stage-plays which
proved only temporary; but the general result of the attempt to make the
stage a vehicle of political abuse and invective was beyond a doubt to
coarsen and degrade both plays and players. Scurrilous attempts and
rough repression continued during the years 1590-1593; and the true
remedy was at last applied, when from about 1594, the chief London
actors became divided into two great rival companies--the lord
chamberlain's and the lord admiral's--which alone received licences.
Instead of half a dozen or more companies whose jealousies communicated
themselves to the playwrights belonging to them, there were now