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company led by Burbage, especially set up for a tour during the winter of 1592/3 (when plague closed the playhouses), which was so unsuccessful that its members had to sell everything, including all the costumes and props, leaving them with only what they stood up in. On another occasion Edward Alleyn, fearing a similar fate, sent home to his wife Joan (Henslowe’s stepdaughter), via a kinsman who had called in to see the show, his best white waistcoat and other garments ‘to be put safely away until his return’. Future correspondence, he told her, should be sent to him in Shrewsbury c/o Lord Strange’s Men, which suggests, given how long it must have taken to send a letter, that the actors must have remained there for some time. Copies of correspondence between Edward and Joan Alleyn, when the former was on tour, are among Henslowe’s papers and give a good idea of what exercised an actor who was away from home for weeks. Alleyn’s pet name for Joan was ‘Mouse’:
    ‘Mouse, you send me no news of anything,’ he complains. ‘You should send of your domestic matters, such things as happen at home, as how your distilled water proves this or that or any other thing you will . . . and, jug, I pray you let my orange tawny stockings of wool be dyed a good black against I come home to wear them in the winter. You send me no word of your garden but next time you will remember this, in any case, that all the bed which was parsley in the month of September, you should sow with spinach for then is the time. I would do so myself but we shall not come home ’til All Hallows tide, so farewell sweet Mouse.’
    The letter was addressed to ‘Mr. Hinslo on the Bankside, right over against the Clink’. 6
    Joan replied that she had seen to the dyeing of his stockings, had bought a good new bedstead and was busy planting out the spinach, but had been unable to buy the cloth he asked for as the plague had shut down the shops and the merchants. Nor had she been successful in selling his horse as he had also asked her to do. The best offer she had received was only £4 ‘so I have sent him into the country until your return’.
    It also seems that English players did not confine themselves to touring in England. There are a number of somewhat scrappy reports of actors performing in Germany and of a company drawn from the Earl of Leicester’s Men, which included Will Kempe, Thomas Pope and George Bryan, appearing in 1586 before the Danish Court in – where else – Elsinore. This writer was stunned to be told, when accompanying a theatre director to work in a theatre at Gdynia in Poland in the early 1990s, that there had long been a tradition in what is now Gdansk that Shakespeare’s plays had been performed there before the end of the sixteenth century; a tradition possibly ‘proved’ a year or so later when the foundations of an Elizabethan-type playhouse were actually discovered there.
    Those who had warned from the start that the building of the playhouses would lead to the end of all common decency, offering nothing but unlimited licence and immorality, soon considered their worst fears had been realised. In 1578, two years after the building of The Theatre, churchman John Stockwood thundered from the pulpit against the ‘flocks of wild youths of both sexes, resorting to interludes, where both by lively gesture and voices there are allurements unto whoredom’. 7 Sour commentator Stephen Gosson, who left Oxford without obtaining his degree, confessed that while up at university he had himself tried his hand at writing plays ‘but I burned one candle to seek another and lost both my time and my travail when I had done’, and thus had learned his lesson. In the
School of Abuse
he writes that those who remain safely within the walls of academe, devoted to their love of learning and seeing ‘but slender offences and small abuses’ within their own walls, will never believe that there are ‘such horrible monsters in playing