The preceding chapters have, through the study of examples of one specific dramatic form, the Interlude, raised a number of important questions, some particular, others with a more general significance. Not all of these questions have proved capable of definite answer. Indeed it has often been the simplest yet most fundamental questions which have proved the most intractable. What, for example, did it actually mean to be a Court playwright in Henrician England? We have looked at a number of examples of the playwright's craft, but how was playwrighting in general organized? Clearly there was no playwrighting profession as such. As Richard F. Green has argued of poets generally, writing had to be conducted as a ‘spare-time’, or at best part-time, occupation, supported by rewards from other sources. But, more generally, what did the process of play-commissioning and playwrighting itself entail, particularly in the specialized context of the Court or a baronial household?

Much work has been done recently on the literature of earlier and later periods, concerning elite literary patronage, its extent and implications. But, although we now know rather more than we did about the mechanics of patronage (who wrote what for whom and with what consequences for the nature of literary production) in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, or in the age of Chaucer, we are still lamentably ignorant concerning the situation in the early sixteenth century.