<P> Comedies were common, too . A subgenre developed in this period was the city comedy, which deals satirically with life in London after the fashion of Roman New Comedy . Examples are Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside . </P> <P> Though marginalised, the older genres like pastoral (The Faithful Shepherdess, 1608), and even the morality play (Four Plays in One, ca . 1608 - 13) could exert influences . After about 1610, the new hybrid subgenre of the tragicomedy enjoyed an efflorescence, as did the masque throughout the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I . </P> <P> Only a minority of the plays of English Renaissance theatre were ever printed . Of Heywood's 220 plays, only about 20 were published in book form . A little over 600 plays were published in the period as a whole, most commonly in individual quarto editions . (Larger collected editions, like those of Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, were a late and limited development .) Through much of the modern era, it was thought that play texts were popular items among Renaissance readers that provided healthy profits for the stationers who printed and sold them . By the turn of the 21st century, the climate of scholarly opinion shifted somewhat on this belief: some contemporary researchers argue that publishing plays was a risky and marginal business--though this conclusion has been disputed by others . Some of the most successful publishers of the English Renaissance, like William Ponsonby or Edward Blount, rarely published plays . </P> <P> A small number of plays from the era survived not in printed texts but in manuscript form . </P>

Which of the following statements are true of public playhouses in elizabethan england