rmers--French and Spanish actors, and even French actresses--paid
visits to London. But the national drama held its ground. The art of
acting maintained itself at least on the level to which it had been
brought by Shakespeare's associates and contemporaries, Burbage and
Heminge, Alleyn, Lewin, Taylor, and others "of the older sort." The
profession of actor came to be more generally than of old separated from
that of playwright, though they were still (as in the case of Field)
occasionally combined. But this rather led to an increased appreciation
of the artistic merit of actors who valued the dignity of their own
profession and whose co-operation the authors learnt to esteem as of
independent significance. The stage was purged from the barbarism of the
old school of clowns. Women's parts were still acted by boys, many of
whom attained to considerable celebrity; and a practice was thus
continued which must assuredly have placed the English theatre at a
considerable disadvantage as compared with the Spanish (where it never
obtained), and which may, while it has been held to have facilitated
freedom of fancy, more certainly encouraged the extreme licence of
expression cherished by the dramatists. The arrangement of the stage,
which facilitated a rapid succession of scenes without any necessity for
their being organically connected with one another, remained essentially
what it had been in Shakespeare's days; though the primitive expedients
for indicating locality had begun to be occasionally exchanged for
scenery more or less appropriate to the place of action. Costume was
apparently cultivated with much greater care; and the English stage of
this period had probably gone a not inconsiderable way in a direction to
which it is obviously in the interests of the dramatic art to set some
bounds, if it is to depend for its popular success upon its qualities as
such, and upon the interpretation of its agents upon the stage. At the
same time, the drama had begun largely to avail itself of adventitious
aids to favour. The system of prologues and epilogues, and of
dedications to published plays, was more uniformly employed than it had
been by Shakespeare as the conventional method of recommending authors
and actors to the favour of individual patrons, and to that of their
chief patron, the public.

The drama and Puritanism.

Closing of the theatres.

Up to the outbreak of the Civil War the drama in all its forms continued