The rise of a professional class of actors brought one step nearer the full growth of drama.  Companies of strolling players formed themselves and passed from town to town, seeking like the industrious amateurs of the guilds, civic patronage, and performing in town-halls, market-place booths, or inn yards, whichever served them best.  The structure of the Elizabethan inn yard (you may see some survivals still, and there are the pictures in Pickwick) was very favourable for their purpose.  The galleries round it made seats like our boxes and circle for the more privileged spectators; in the centre on the floor of the yard stood the crowd or sat, if they had stools with them.  The stage was a platform set on this floor space with its back against one side of the yard, where perhaps one of the inn-rooms served as a dressing room.  So suitable was this “fit-up” as actors call it, that when theatres came to be built in London they were built on the inn-yard pattern.  All the playhouses of the Bankside from the “Curtain” to the “Globe” were square or circular places with galleries rising above one another three parts round, a floor space of beaten earth open to the sky in the middle, and jutting out on to it a platform stage with a tiring room capped by a gallery behind it.

The entertainment given by these companies of players (who usually got the patronage and took the title of some lord) was various.  They played moralities and interludes, they played formless chronicle history plays like the Troublesome Reign of King John, on which Shakespeare worked for his King John; but above and before all they were each a company of specialists, every one of whom had his own talent and performance for which he was admired.  The Elizabethan stage was the ancestor of our music-hall, and to the modern music-hall rather than to the theatre it bears its affinity.  If you wish to realize the aspect of the Globe or the Blackfriars it is to a lower class music-hall you must go.  The quality of the audience is a point of agreement.  The Globe was frequented by young “bloods” and by the more disreputable portions of the community, racing men (or their equivalents of that day) “coney catchers” and the like; commonly the only women present were women of the town.  The similarity extends from the auditorium to the stage.  The Elizabethan playgoer delighted in virtuosity; in exhibitions of strength or skill from his actors; the broad sword combat in Macbeth, and the wrestling in As You Like It, were real trials of skill.  The bear in the Winter’s Tale was no doubt a real bear got from a bear pit, near by in the Bankside.  The comic actors especially were the very grandfathers of our music-hall stars; Tarleton and Kemp and Cowley, the chief of them, were as much popular favourites and esteemed as separate from the plays they played in as is Harry Lauder.  Their songs and tunes were printed and sold in hundreds as broadsheets, just