Note 1059 — XI THE ACTOR'S ECONOMICS
Reading edition
Dekker, Jests to Make you Merrie (1607, Works, ii. 303, 352), 'As proud as a player that feedes on the fruité of diuine poetry (as swine on acorns).... O you that are the Poets of these sinfull times, ouer whome the Players haue now got the vpper hand, by making fooles of the poore country people, in driuing them like flockes of geese to sit cackling in an old barne: and to swallow downe those playes for new which here euery punck and her squire (like the interpreter and his poppet) can rand out by heart they are so stale, and therefore so stincking; I know the Lady Pecunia and you come very hardly together, & therefore trouble not you'; cf. his references to 'strowlers' in note to p. 332. Another seventeenth-century critic is H[enry] P[arrot], Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks (1613), Epig. 131, Theatrum Licentia:
Cotta's become a player most men know, And will no longer take such toyling paines; For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow And brings them damnable excessive gaines: That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs, Since Greene's Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs.