Actors, or as they were called, players, were all men, both in the medieval and the Renaissance worlds. Women were forbidden to step on the stage, so boys played women's roles, as in Japenese Kabuki and No theater. Henry VIII's break with the Roman Catholic Church soon made mystery and morality plays illegal, though they may still have been performed in country towns by actors on the verge of becoming professional. Some had probably worked as troubadours and jugglers, dancer, singers, and storytellers. Some had been guild performers who preferred acting to their artisan's craft. Then, in 1573, the Queen passed laws that restricted entertainment and required all players to be licensed, which also meant that all players must be sponsored by a member of either the royal or legal court. The best of the traveling men were organized into companies of players sponsored by lords and other prominent men. Many, like Shakespeare, were the sons of merchants drawn to a new trade, a trade that was also an art. Yet despite the rise of professional acting, actors were generally considered to be among the lowest of the low in society, akin to the cutpurses (thieves), vagabonds, and beggars who worked the theater crowds.

As the theater developed, Elizabethan actors became skilled in singing, dancing, swordsmanship, throwing knives and axes, juggling, and performing sleight-of-hand tricks. There were no stunt doubles or stand-ins. If a playwright needed a song, a player would sing it. If he needed a thrilling sword fight, there was no fumbling, clumsy jabbing, and poking at arm's length; the players gave the playwright and the audience the real thing — without anyone getting killed. The only other skill one needed in order to become an actor was the ability to memorize lines.

These lines from Hamlet re-create what acting troupes were like during Shakespeare's time and what was expected of the actors:

Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise…. Pray you, avoid it …. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others…. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.