1594, after the long plague closure. The company had a small number of partners or shareholders, who pooled their funds to pay expenses and in turn shared the profits, in what was largely a de facto democratic way (at least for the sharers, if not for the hired men and apprentices they employed). Their main rivals, the Admiral's Men, suffered in contrast under a less ideal version of capitalist organization: Philip Henslowe functioned more like a blend of big-business autocrat, landlord, and loan shark. He managed multiple companies of actors and built and owned several theatres, and controlled players (sharers included) and playwrights by doling out payments and loans. (The silver lining in this cloud is that Henslowe's surviving financial records provide a wealth of detailed knowledge about the theatre conditions in his era that is unparalleled by any other source.) Other companies varied between these extremes of organization. (Francis Langley, builder of the Swan Theatre, operated much as Henslowe did, though less successfully, and for a shorter time.) Drama in the age of Elizabeth was at best an organized disorder; suppression of individual companies, and even the profession as a whole, for political reasons was not unknown. [See: The Isle of Dogs.] Local residents sometimes opposed theatres in their neighborhoods. Individual companies of actors struggled and failed and recombined; tracking the changes has been the obsession of scholars and the bane of students. Yet the drama was also enormously popular, from the Queen and Court down to the commonest of the common people; indeed, the odd polarity of the theatre audience in this period, with the High and the Low favoring the drama, and the middle class generally more hostile with the growth of Puritan sentiments, is a surprising and intriguing phenomenon. Theatres proliferated, especially (though not exclusively) in neighborhoods outside the city's walls and the Corporation's control in Shoreditch to the north, or the Bankside and Paris Garden in Southwark, on the southern bank of the River Thames: the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Fortune, the Globe, the Blackfrairs a famous roster. The Jacobean and Caroline Eras King James, "VI and I", was passionately fond of drama; and theatrical activity at Court accelerated from the start of his reign. Consider the following figures. In roughly the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, 1594–1603, there were 64 theatrical performances at Court, for an average of 6 or 7 a