The last transitional stage in England between medieval and modern theater (counting Shakespeare as the start of the modern) was the rise of touring theater companies. There were two types, the sponsored kind that we think was involved in Shakespeare’s productions, and the small town independent company.
Touring companies consisted of no more than six men, often with a boy mixed in so that he could play women’s parts without needing to shave. They carried everything they needed, so they developed minimal props and costumes: a few masks, a few specific props like a sword, axe or cup. They could perform a play with more roles than they had actors, since it was possible to double up roles with quick costume changes.
Records of companies like this go back to the 14th century, with the early traveling players of Exeter College, Oxford. They probably began mostly as musicians, and gradually switched over to acting with the introduction of morality plays that gave more scope to invention. In the 15th and 16th centuries, many of these groups were funded by aristocrats as a base bankroll, but they took in fees as they traveled. They stayed at other aristocratic houses to defray travel costs, or they took in the pennies of the common folk at mid-play collections. We hear of “Leicester’s Men” performing a play for Queen Elizabeth in 1561; there were also the Earl of Arundel’s Players, and Prince Edward’s Players. The theater companies with sponsorship like this could afford to be larger, and probably had more gear.
In East Anglia, the town parishes often set up theater productions during the 1400s and early 1500s. The groups seem to have declined after 1530, that is, after Henry VIII’s Reformation conflicts made the landscape more dangerous. It’s possible that the aristocrat-backed theater companies did better then, since many of the aristocrats who survived were supporters of the Tudor family’s Protestantism. So as the parish players were declining, sponsored companies increased.
In their heyday, though, the parish companies of East Anglia were very active in putting on plays. People from nearby towns would come to see the productions, but they also traveled within a 50 mile range (at most). Men from Wittersham, Kent were paid to put on a play at New Romney in 1426. In Herefordshire, the town of Bishop’s Stortford put on a play every few years, and in off years, contributed to neighboring towns’ plays. In 1503, their play required a dragon “made of hoops and covered with canvas” that we still find in the town’s financial records. The aristocratic-patronage companies also traveled in this area; the Earl of Arundel’s Players were paid at Dover in 1477.
Two questions emerge from these details: why would aristocrats become patrons of traveling theater companies? And why was East Anglia more active in putting on town plays? It’s possible that the first question is tied to the Reformation conflicts; the governmental structure at local levels was tied more closely to the lords than to the Crown. One way to keep the country quiet and loyal was to maintain personal loyalty to the Earl or Duke. So these plays may have been what we’d call goodwill-ambassadors.
Why East Anglia? probably because there was more travel to and from France, where plays had gone in a secular, comic direction. In York, they could settle into their local customs and forget the outside world, but Dover’s main business was acting as the gateway to France. The Thames River was the main highway for all international travel to London. Probably the fishing villages of the entire Channel coast had a frequent interchange with French fishermen and merchants, just as the Channel Islands had a French-speaking population. There would have been many residents who went back and forth, seeing French culture.
East Anglia was also the Puritan stronghold, though I can’t say why the Reformation values were adopted there so much sooner and more strongly than in the north. (In Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer explains New England’s Puritan population by pointing to their common origin: East Anglia.)
The morality play “Mankind” was first played in 1465, and its script was still active in 1470, during the War of the Roses, because one of the Vices cites a legal document dated “anno regni regis nulli,” the year of no king. But we can find clues not only for its time, but also for its geographical place. Various places in East Anglia are mentioned, locating it near Cambridge and King’s Lynn. “Mankind” might have been a good choice for a touring company, since the devil Titivillus wore a full head mask—-allowing the role to be doubled with any other in which the actor’s face showed. Its props are simple, like Mankind’s shovel.
As we move into Tudor times, the patron-sponsored traveling companies may still have played an older work like “Mankind,” but they probably moved toward the secular Interlude plays. And that brings us right up to Shakespeare and the modern age—early modern of course, but modern. Plays have only changed somewhat since Shakespeare’s five-act format. You can see in the pre-Shakespearean plays some of the models and stock characters he used, like the “sot” fool speaking truth to power, or the rural clown who’s trying to cover up for something like stealing a sheep. We see monologues and puns as in Heywood’s Interludes, but more refined and mixed with serious material.
So thus ends the series: how European drama got from the early stages of acting out pagan ritual and reading Latin comedies, to Shakespeare, Johnson and Marlowe.
with thanks to “Touring Players and their Plays before 1570” by Peter Greenfield, in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Medieval Drama and Performance.