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And so the actor was, and this is text-book, the outcast and vagabond, except as the professional adjunct to the aristocratic masque. But with the rise of the drama came the attachment of the intellectuals from the universities. The University Wits, proper, were not the only throw-outs of the educational system who drifted into the business of the theatre. It was the bolt-hole for very many of the progressive and enterprising, exactly as the cinema became during the nineteen twenties. Cinema was acclaimed as a medium in the universities, before it was accepted in the salons, and so too, in its generation, was the drama. (A further political parallel, Russia and the cinema, Marlowe and the Walsinghams, it would be professorial to develop). Perhaps it is obvious that a new medium would then, as always, attract the rebels and signposts. But the way they behaved was, similar also. For as the film is a composite production, representative of a group and a machine, rather than of a single director, so was, except in extraordinary instances, the Elizabethan play. The co-operation of the Elizabethan dramatists is a platitude. Less realised is the existance of actual scenario writers who sold skeleton plots for others to work up — like Anthony Munday, whom Meres called " our best plotter." These men developed an organised system, and teams of authors such as Dekker, Day, and Houghton (cp., somehow, Francis, Day, and Hunter) are the equivalents as entertainers to the production units of a modern studio. The Elizabethans, too, would write for stars : Alleyn or Burbage, as Jannings or Lloyd.
There is then a parallel of personnel, and also, to a considerable extent, of objective. Entertainment was the end, and, except in the case of identifiable genius, poetry and dramatic construction were, for the author, by-products. The exclusively intellectual productions remained script, usually scholarly aping of Seneca and the late Romans, and the ordinary writer stuck to pageantry and caricature, the magnificent loud pedal of Marlowe, or the slapstick of the Shakesperean histories. If the spectacle was created by stimulating the imagination of the audience by classical allusions they could aU understand, rather than by lulling that imagination by treatment they all knew by heart, that was the higher standard of the audience rather than the cultural affectation of the dramatists. It is unnecessary to labour how the " effective " film, too, has always been subservient to the box-office, except in the case of a very few outstanding efforts, and the peculiar instance of the U.S.S.R. Unlike the drama, however, which was originally dependent on the institution of patronage, largely as the result of the aristocratic masques, the cinema retained no aristocratic connections. The magic lantern, and the first animated cartoons, were rich men's toys, but pictures sprung essentially from the nickelodeon and the interested diversion of the dregs, rather than from the quainterie which had bored or fascinated upper-class children and the patrons of Mission Halls. But patronage disappeared very early even from the drama, which was for long scorned by the literary-aristocracy (e.g. Sir Philip Sidney) and the play was, as the cinema is, essentially the entertainment of the proletariat.