month on the throne than she issued an ordinance (August 16, 1553)
forbidding such dramas and interludes as were calculated to spread the
principles and doctrines of the Reformation.

Under this sovereign, spectacles furthering the Roman Catholic cause
were of course favoured. On the other hand, it may be assumed that,
during the long and popular reign of Queen Elizabeth, Protestant
tendencies on the stage often passed the censorship, although from
the first years of her government there is an Act prohibiting any
drama in which State and Church affairs were treated, 'being no
meete matters to be written or treated upon but by men of authoritie,
nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreete
persons.'

However, like all previous ordinances, proclamations, and Acts of
Parliament, this one also remained without effect. The dramatists
and the disciples of the mimic art continued busying themselves, in
their customary bold manner, with that which awakened the greatest
interest among the public at large; and one would think that at a
certain time they had become a little power in the State, against which
it was no longer possible to proceed in arbitrary fashion, but which,
on the contrary, had to be reckoned with.

Only such measures, it appears, were afterwards passed which were
calculated to harmonise the religious views uttered on the stage with
the tenets of the Established Church. This follows from a letter of Lord
Burleigh, addressed, in 1589, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which
he requests him to appoint 'some fytt person well learned in divinitie.'
The latter, together with the Master of the Revels and a person chosen
by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, were to form a kind of