Acting and Actors

Before the plays were given over to the Guilds, the Clergy would perform the plays. I would be easy for me to imagine that they would have been better than the average, unskilled person. Once the papal edict of 1210 appeared though, and the Guilds gained control of the plays, the people who became the actors in the plays were just that, the average person, not trained in acting and generally nothing theatrical related. The number of actors was also unimaginable to people of our time, where in The Acts of the Apostles there were 494 different roles, and most likely because there were so many unskilled people as actors, they distributed the roles to 300 actors. It seems to me that if there had been such a thing as the professional actor at the time, the number of actors actually needed would have been considerably less, but this was how it was at the time and nonetheless that is an amazingly large amount of people.
It is also interesting to note from Brockett on page 94, that in 1476 the city council decided that four of "the most cunning, discreet, and able players within this city" were to be the ones who would do the auditioning of the actors. As Brockett notes, it seems to mean that the guilds did not in fact keep the casting to themselves, or even to the people within their guilds, but the entirety of the city was involved.