playgoers.  A further attack upon the theatre was led by Dr. Reynolds, of Queen’s College, who was greatly troubled by the performance of a play at Christchurch, and who published, in 1593, “The Overthrow of Stage Plays,” described by Disraeli as “a tedious invective, foaming at the mouth of its text with quotations and authorities.”  Reynolds was especially severe upon “the sin of boys wearing the dress and affecting the airs of women;” and thus unconsciously helped on a change he would have regarded as still more deplorable—­the appearance of actresses upon the stage.  But a fiercer far than Reynolds was to arise.  In 1633 Prynne produced his “Histriomastix; or, The Player’s Scourge,” a monstrous work of more than a thousand closely-printed quarto pages, devoted to the most searching indictment of the stage and its votaries.  The author has been described as a man of great learning, but little judgment; of sour and austere principles, but wholly deficient in candour.  His book was judged libellous, for he had unwittingly aspersed the Queen in his attack upon the masques performed at Court.  He was cited in the Star Chamber, and sentenced to stand in the pillory, to lose both ears, to pay a heavy fine, and to undergo imprisonment for life.  This severe punishment probably stimulated the Puritans, when opportunity came to them, to deal mercilessly with the actors by way of avenging Prynne’s wrongs, or of expressing sympathy with his sufferings.

And it is to be noted that early legislation in regard to the players had been far from lenient.  For such actors as had obtained the countenance of “any Baron of this Realme,” or “any other honourable personage of greater degree,” exception was to be made; otherwise, all common players in interludes, all fencers, bearwards, and minstrels, were declared by an Act passed in the 14th year of Elizabeth to be rogues and vagabonds, and, whether male or female, liable on a first conviction “to be grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with an hot iron of the compass of an inch about, manifesting his or her roguish kind of life;” a second offence was adjudged to be felony; a third entailed death without benefit of clergy or privilege of sanctuary.  Meanwhile, the regular companies of players to whom this harsh Act did not apply, were not left unmolested.  The Court might encourage them, but the City would have none of them.  They had long been accustomed to perform in the yards of the City inns, but an order of the Common Council, dated December, 1575, expelled the players from the City.  Thereupon public playhouses were erected outside the “liberties” or boundaries of the City.  The first was probably the theatre in Shoreditch; the second, opened in its immediate neighbourhood, was known as the Curtain; the third, built by John Burbadge and other of the Earl of Leicester’s company of players, was the famous Blackfriars Theatre.  These were all erected about 1576, and other playhouses