ABSTRACT
By March 1603, when Elizabeth died, theatrical life in London had thus been successfully transferred out of the hands of some fifty small groups of nomadic ‘Players of Interludes’ who in 1558 had claimed the right (as household servants of members of the aristocracy and landed gentry) to present their plays to public audiences in whatever performance spaces they could rent from their owners, into those of three companies of professional actors recognised as such by the Privy Council and licensed to present their plays on a regular basis in a custom-built playhouse of its own. Yet, despite the radical nature of all these administrative changes in the regulation of theatrical life in London that had been effected within the first forty years of Elizabeth’s reign, the approaches adopted to play-construction and theatrical representation by the company managers and playhouse owners had remained consistently conservative.
