Note 557 — Chapter XXIV · PLAYERS OF INTERLUDES

At Rayleigh, Essex (1550), 20s. from the produce of church goods was paid to stage-players on Trinity Sunday (Archaeologia, xlii. 287). An Answer to a Certain Libel (1572, quoted Collier, ii. 72) accuses the clergy of hurrying the service, because there is ‘an enterlude to be played, and if no place else can be gotten, it must be doone in the church’; cf. S. Gosson, Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters, 1580 (Hazlitt, E. D. S. 134) ‘Such like men, vnder the title of their maisters or as reteiners, are priuiledged to roaue abroad, and permitted to publish their mametree in euerie Temple of God, and that through England, vnto the horrible contempt of praier. So that now the Sanctuarie is become a plaiers stage, and a den of theeues and adulterers.’ Possibly only the publication of the banns of plays in church is here complained of. Cf. also Fuller, Church History (1655), 391.