Note 253 — BOOK III THE COMPANIES (continued 2)

Eight players of interludes at £3 6s. 8d. each are in the fee-lists (cf. vol. i, p. 29), Stowe MS. 571, f. 148 (c. 1575–80), Sloane MS. 3194, f. 38 (1585), Stowe MS. 571, f. 168 (c. 1587–90), Lansd. MS. 171, f. 250 (c. 1587–91), S. P. D. Eliz. ccxxi, f. 16 (c. 1588–93), H. O. 256 (c. 1598), and with the error of £3 6s. in Hargreave MS. 215, f. 21v (c. 1592–5), Lord Chamberlain’s Records, v. 33, f. 19v (1593), Stowe MS. 572, f. 35v (c. 1592–6), Harl. MS. 2078, f. 18v (c. 1592–6). The inaccurate Cott. MS. Titus, B. iii, f. 176 (c. 1585–93) gives two ‘Plaiers on Interludes’ at £3 6s. The normal entry recurs in the Jacobean Lansd. MS. 272, f. 27 (1614) and Stowe MS. 575, f. 24 (1616), but a group of the early part of the reign (Addl. MS. 35848, f. 19; Addl. MS. 38008, f. 58v; Soc. Antiq. MSS. 74, 75) have ‘Plaiers on the In lute’ or ‘on in Lutes’, at £3 6s. 8d. or £3 6s., which looks like an attempt to rationalize the Cotton MS. entry. And Stowe MS. 574, f. 16v, has ‘Players on Lute’ at £3 6s. 8d., which some one has corrected by inserting the normal entry. All this suggests that many copyists of fee-lists in the seventeenth century confused the post of interlude player with that of a lute player, and the former was therefore probably obsolete, and its fee no longer paid to the royal players of the day (cf. ch. x). I cannot agree with E. Law, Shakespeare a Groom, of the Chamber, 26, 64, that the interlude players survived under James as ‘mummers, who, perhaps, sang in a sort of recitative at masques and anti-masques’.