ABSTRACT
Haddit's threat to invoke an apprentice riot is, in a manner, a selfreference by the performers. On the holiday of Shrove Tuesday there was something of a tradition in which gangs of apprentices went on the rampage and attacked brothels, theatres, and other resorts of the leisured class in the suburbs. A pitched battle was fought at the Cockpit with the players in 1617, and much damage done. 1 It is probably to this recurrent event that Edmund Gayton refers in 1654, when he recalls the reactions of an audience at the refusal of the players to humour their fickle tastes, when, as well as throwing missiles such as tiles and laths: 'as there were mechanics of all professions, who fell everyone to his trade', they 'dissolved a house in an instant, and made a ruin of a stately fabric'. 2
However, as well as being associated with the Shrovetide disturbances, there seems to have been a significant minority of apprentices with more genteel pretensions than their rowdy fellows, sufficient to attract a Common Council order in 1582 to curb those apprentices who 'did affect to go in costly Apparel and wear Weapons, and frequent Schools of Dancing, Fencing and Music', and apprentices are regularly mentioned as theatre-goers .3 Although for gentry to enter city trade was still considered by many as demeaning, it had its proponents. John Stowe (Survey, 1598) thought it preferable for impoverished younger sons to go into trade rather than to stay in the country and turn to 'naughty Courses for a Subsistence'.4 The traditional definition of a
gentleman as one who does not work with his hands, and the sixteenthcentury reality that gentry did go into trade, are nicely accommodated in Thomas Fuller's formulation in Holy State: 'Gentry therefore may be suspended perchance, and asleep during the apprenticeship, but it awakens afterwards . 's Apprenticeship as an entry to the powerful and profitable guild system could be more nominal than actual, with a system of patrimony and with the cost of entry to some apprenticeships well out of the reach of the ordinary family .6
