The summons, however, which the tragic muse heeded came directly from the public theatres and the professional actors. The university men who at this time were writing for the theatre under the lash and loans of a slave-driving theatrical manager may have been tempted to forget that their sordid and Bohemian existence offered a means for triumphant artistic expression. The London theatres were now well established, patronized by the courtiers, and secured in prosperity by the motley audiences that crowded their performances. They had become important centres in the social life of the time, comparable to the newspaper offices of a twentieth-century city in their close touch with the daily life about them; and in their task of affording amusement and information fulfilling in part the functions of periodicals and novels as well as of the drama at present. The stage, without scenery, was still in a transition state between the medieval and modern, and, to our view, almost unrealizably crude. Places were sometimes indicated by signs; properties, beds, tables, or trees were brought on or off as occasion required; or, a heavier property, like a cave, might remain whether the scene was in cave-land or a counting-room. There was no drop curtain; actors went off, others came on, and the place changed from a seacoast to the palace; or, the actors merely moved across the platform, and it transpired that they had passed from "a fair and pleasant green" to a room in the house of Faustus. At the close of a tragedy all the survivors might be needed to bear off the bodies of the dead. A balcony in the rear of the stage stood in stead of a castle wall or the deck of a ship, while a curtained space below might represent an inner room or a dungeon vault. A curtain extending across the stage seems at times to have been used in managing a change of scene. Spectacular elements were not lacking: fireworks, ascents and descents of gods, armies, coronations, and battles delighted the eye. On costume, anachronistic but elaborate, the manager lavished his money and ingenuity. Cleopatra tightly laced, Tamburlaine in scarlet copper breeches are recorded facts, but Venuses, Apollos, mermaids, devils, satyrs, and nymphs leave something for fancy to conceive, as does the "gown to go invisible in" which perhaps shielded Ariel or Puck. Of the acting we have little information. Female parts were played by boys; clowns with their jigs were great favorites, but a considerable skill in acting must be supposed,--less subtle, less occupied with stage business than to-day, more declamatory possibly, and more attentive to the spoken word. Any superiority in the appreciation possessed by the audiences over those of to-day must be attributed not to their superior intelligence, but to their long training in listening to plays. They probably differed from uneducated audiences in the cheaper theatres of to-day chiefly, if at all, in spontaneity of emotions, a desire for emotional incongruity, and a cultivated delight in verbal fireworks or felicities. It is certain that in the time of Marlowe they were gaping for sensation and joyed in a comedy of beatings, a tragedy of murders, and a mixture of jigging and villany. For such audiences, for such a stage, under stress of immediate demand requiring hasty and collaborative work, Marlowe and his contemporaries wrote. They were hack writers, and so viewed by the literati of their day. Every one of them, Shakespeare included, had in the first place to satisfy the demands of the public theatres. This needs to be remembered no less than the fact that the plays of nearly all, of the meanest hack as well as Shakespeare, seem to have felt the stir and thrill of the effort to express thought in enduring words.