Note 586 — BOOK V PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

There are prayers in All for Money, Apius and Virginia, Common Conditions, Damon and Pythias, Disobedient Child (headed ‘The Players ... kneele downe’), King Darius, Like Will to Like, Longer Thou Livest, New Custom, Trial of Treasure (epilogue headed ‘Praie for all estates’). Mary Magdalen and Tide Tarrieth for No Man substitute a mere expression of piety. I do not agree with Fleay, 57, that such prayers are evidence of Court performance. The reverence and epilogue to the Queen in the belated moral of Liberality and Prodigality (1602), 1314, is different in tone. The Pedlar’s Prophecy, also belated as regards date of print, adds to the usual prayer for Queen and council ‘And that honorable T. N. &c. of N. chiefly: Whom as our good Lord and maister, found we haue’. No doubt any strolling company purchasing the play would fill up the blanks to meet their own case. Probably both the Queen and estates and the ‘lord’ of a company were prayed for, whether present or absent, so long as the custom lasted; cf. ch. x, p. 311; ch. xviii, p. 550.