Out of Time

The arrival of travelling professional actors in many Imperial cities disrupted festive schedules protected for more than a century. Focusing on two case studies—Nuremberg and Ulm—this chapter examines how the performances of the English Comedians interacted with civic cultures and changed them. It shows how the difficulty in accommodating itinerant theatre and the perception that it inflicted financial losses on urban polities led directly to the establishment of permanent theatre-houses. The travelling players are registered in cultural histories of these cities largely as an absence or negligible detail because those histories have generally subserved accounts of political and constitutional evolution. Yet the players’ introduction of commercial festivity assisted in the suppression of festive traditions and the long-term absorption of local cultures into larger political entities. The English Comedians were therefore important midwives of historical change. Urban governors struggled to recognize and place them: that struggle persisted within later history writing because their activities pose serious challenges to habits of chronologization and localization.