ABSTRACT
THE IMMENSE popularity of the drama in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth and after naturally created a large demand for actors, and numerous companies sprang into existence. But it often happens that a sudden demand for persons trained to a certain calling will result soon afterwards in a glut. People hear of large openings and opportunities in a particular direction and rush to take advantage of them; the first-comers do well, but the profession soon becomes overcrowded. So it was among professional actors in Elizabethan England; the supply soon exceeded the demand, and many of the less fortunate or less able practitioners of the art found it difficult to make a living. In these circumstances it was natural enough that some of them should turn their attention to foreign fields of enterprise. The dramatic art was far less developed in most of the countries on the Continent than in England at that time, and companies of English actors travelling abroad were received with admiration and generally well remunerated. Among the Alleyn Papers there is a letter, which has often been quoted, from one Richard Jones, an actor, to Edward Alleyn asking for a loan of three pounds. He is about to ‘go over beyond the seeas with Mr. Browne and the company’, and requires the money in order to release ‘a sut of clothes and a cloke’ from pawn. He must have the clothes, ‘for if I go over, and have no clothes, I shall not be esteemed of, and he has no money to pay for them himself; but ‘by God's help’, he continues, ‘the first mony that I gett I will send it over unto you, for hear I get nothinge: some tymes I have a shillinge a day, and some tymes nothinge, so that I leve in great poverty hear.’ The case of Richard Jones is probably typical of most of the English players who took to travelling abroad in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
