Note 536 — Chapter XXIV · PLAYERS OF INTERLUDES

I have taken lusores in the computi as always meaning performers of a dramatic ludus. This is often demonstrably correct and never demonstrably incorrect, except that when Colet in his Oratio ad Clerum of 1511 quotes the canon ‘ne sit publicus lusor’ he seems to use the term in its canonical sense of ‘gambler.’ The English version (1661) has ‘common gamer or player.’ A similar ambiguity is, I think, the only one which attaches itself to ‘player’ where it is a technical term after the middle of the fourteenth century. Lydgate in his Interpretacyon of the names of Goddys and Goddesses (quoted by Collier, i. 31) uses it of an actor, although an older sense is preserved by the Promptorium Parvulorum (1440), ‘Bordyoure or pleyere, ioculator.’ The sense of ludentes, I think, is wide. The ludentes ‘de Donyngton’ and ‘de Wakefield’ paid by the York corporation in 1446 (York Plays, xxxviii) are more likely to have been minstrels whom the corporation did provide for the plays than actors whom they did not. On the other hand about interludentes and interlusores, neither of them very common terms, there can be no doubt. Lusiatores occurs as a synonym for lusores at Shrewsbury only. Mimi and histriones I have uniformly treated as merely minstrels. At a late date they might, I suppose, be actors, but it is impossible to differentiate.