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Title: The Elizabethan Stage (Vol 2 of 4)
Author: Chambers, E. K. (Edmund Kerchever)
Language: English
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THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE
VOL. II
Oxford University Press
_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_
_New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_
_Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_
Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY
[Illustration: FROM THE ENGRAVING BY WENCESLAUS HOLLAR IN DUGDALE’S
_St. Paul’s_ 1658]
THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE
BY E. K. CHAMBERS. VOL. II
OXFORD: AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
M.CMXXIII
Printed in England
CONTENTS
VOLUME II
BOOK III. THE COMPANIES
PAGE
XII. INTRODUCTION. THE BOY COMPANIES 1
A. Introduction 3
B. The Boy Companies--
i. Children of Paul’s 8
ii. Children of the Chapel and Queen’s Revels 23
iii. Children of Windsor 61
iv. Children of the King’s Revels 64
v. Children of Bristol 68
vi. Westminster School 69
vii. Eton College 73
viii. Merchant Taylors School 75
ix. The Earl of Leicester’s Boys 76
x. The Earl of Oxford’s Boys 76
xi. Mr. Stanley’s Boys 76
XIII. THE ADULT COMPANIES 77
i. The Court Interluders 77
ii. The Earl of Leicester’s Men 85
iii. Lord Rich’s Men 91
iv. Lord Abergavenny’s Men 92
v. The Earl of Sussex’s Men 92
vi. Sir Robert Lane’s Men 96
vii. The Earl of Lincoln’s (Lord Clinton’s) Men 96
viii. The Earl of Warwick’s Men 97
ix. The Earl of Oxford’s Men 99
x. The Earl of Essex’s Men 102
xi. Lord Vaux’s Men 103
xii. Lord Berkeley’s Men 103
xiii. Queen Elizabeth’s Men 104
xiv. The Earl of Arundel’s Men 116
xv. The Earl of Hertford’s Men 116
xvi. Mr. Evelyn’s Men 117
xvii. The Earl of Derby’s (Lord Strange’s) Men 118
xviii. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men 128
xix. The Lord Admiral’s (Lord Howard’s, Earl of
Nottingham’s), Prince Henry’s, and
Elector Palatine’s Men 134
xx. The Lord Chamberlain’s (Lord Hunsdon’s)
and King’s Men 192
xxi. The Earl of Worcester’s and Queen Anne’s
Men 220
xxii. The Duke of Lennox’s Men 241
xxiii. The Duke of York’s (Prince Charles’s) Men 241
xxiv. The Lady Elizabeth’s Men 246
XIV. INTERNATIONAL COMPANIES 261
i. Italian Players in England 261
ii. English Players in Scotland 265
iii. English Players on the Continent 270
XV. ACTORS 295
BOOK IV. THE PLAY-HOUSES
XVI. INTRODUCTION. THE PUBLIC THEATRES 353
A. Introduction 355
B. The Public Theatres--
i. The Red Lion Inn 379
ii. The Bull Inn 380
iii. The Bell Inn 381
iv. The Bel Savage Inn 382
v. The Cross Keys Inn 383
vi. The Theatre 383
vii. The Curtain 400
viii. Newington Butts 404
ix. The Rose 405
x. The Swan 411
xi. The Globe 414
xii. The Fortune 435
xiii. The Boar’s Head 443
xiv. The Red Bull 445
xv. The Hope 448
xvi. Porter’s Hall 472
XVII. THE PRIVATE THEATRES 475
i. The Blackfriars 475
ii. The Whitefriars 515
XVIII. THE STRUCTURE AND CONDUCT OF THEATRES 518
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Domus Capitularis S^{ti} Pauli a Meridie Prospectus.
By Wenceslaus Hollar. From Sir William Dugdale,
_History of St. Paul’s Cathedral_ (1658) _Frontispiece_
Diagrams of the Blackfriars Theatres p. 504
Interior of the Swan Theatre. From the drawing
after Johannes de Witt in Arend van Buchell’s
commonplace book p. 521
NOTE ON SYMBOLS
I have found it convenient, especially in Appendix A, to use the symbol
< following a date, to indicate an uncertain date not earlier than that
named, and the symbol > followed by a date, to indicate an uncertain
date not later than that named. Thus 1903 < > 23 would indicate the
composition date of any part of this book. I have sometimes placed the
date of a play in italics, where it was desirable to indicate the date
of production rather than publication.
BOOK III
THE COMPANIES
‘Has led the drum before the English tragedians.’
_All’s Well that Ends Well._
XII
INTRODUCTION. THE BOY COMPANIES
[_Bibliographical Note._--The first systematic investigation
into the history of the companies was that of F. G. Fleay,
which, after tentative sketches in his _Shakespeare Manual_
(1876) and _Life and Work of Shakespeare_ (1886), took shape in
his _Chronicle History of the Stage_ (1890). Little is added by
the compilations of A. Albrecht, _Das Englische Kindertheater_
(1883), H. Maas, _Die Kindertruppen_ (1901) and _Äussere
Geschichte der Englischen Theatertruppen_ (1907), and J. A.
Nairn, _Boy-Actors under the Tudors and Stewarts_ (_Trans. of
Royal Soc. of Lit._ xxxii). W. W. Greg, _Henslowe’s Diary_
(1904–8), made a careful study of all the companies which had
relations with Philip Henslowe, and modified or corrected many
of Fleay’s results. An account of the chief London companies
is in A. H. Thorndike, _Shakespeare’s Theater_ (1916), and
utilizes some new material collected in recent years. W.
Creizenach, _Schauspiele der Englischen Komödianten_ (1889),
and E. Herz, _Englische Schauspieler und Englisches Schauspiel_
(1903), have summarized the records of the travels of English
actors in Germany. C. W. Wallace, besides his special work on
the Chapel, has published the records of several theatrical
lawsuits in _Advance Sheets from Shakespeare, the Globe, and
Blackfriars_ (1909), in _Nebraska University Studies_, ix
(1909), 287; x (1910), 261; xiii (1913), 1, and in _The Swan
Theatre and the Earl of Pembroke’s Servants_ (1911, _Englische
Studien_, xliii. 340); the present writer has completed the
information drawn from the _Chamber Accounts_ in P. Cunningham’s
_Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court_ (1842) by
articles in _M. L. R._ ii (1906), 1; iv (1909), 153 (cf. App.
B); and a number of documents, new and old, including the texts
of all the patents issued to companies, have been carefully
edited in vol. i of the _Collections of the Malone Society_
(1907–11). Finally, J. T. Murray, _English Dramatic Companies_
(1910), has collected the published notices of performances
in the provinces, added others from the municipal archives
of Barnstaple, Bristol, Coventry, Dover, Exeter, Gloucester,
Marlborough, Norwich, Plymouth, Shrewsbury, Southampton,
Winchester, and York, and on the basis of these constructed
valuable accounts of all the London and provincial companies
between 1558 and 1642. Most of the present chapter was written
before Murray’s book appeared, but it has been carefully
revised with the aid of his new material. I have not thought
it necessary to refer to my original provincial sources, where
they are included in his convenient Appendix G, but in using
his book it should be borne in mind that he has made a good
many omissions in carrying data from this Appendix to the
tables of provincial visits, which he gives for each company.
For a few places I have had the advantage of sources not drawn
upon by Murray, and these should be treated as the references
for any facts as regards such places not discoverable in
Murray’s Appendix. They are:--for Belvoir and other houses
of the Earls of Rutland, _Rutland MSS._ (_Hist. MSS._), iv.
260; for the house of Richard Bertie and his wife the Duchess
of Suffolk at Grimsthorpe, _Ancaster MSS._ (_Hist. MSS._),
459; for Wollaton, the house of Francis Willoughby, _Middleton
MSS._ (_Hist. MSS._), 446; for Maldon and Saffron Walden in
Essex, A. Clark’s extracts in _10 Notes and Queries_, vii.
181, 342, 422; viii. 43; xii. 41; for Newcastle-on-Tyne, G. B.
Richardson, _Reprints of Rare Tracts_, vol. iii, and _10 N.
Q._ xii. 222; for Reading, _Hist. MSS._ xi. 177; for Oxford,
F. S. Boas in _Fortnightly Review_ (Aug. 1913; Aug. 1918; May
1920); for Stratford, J. O. Halliwell, _Stratford-upon-Avon in
the Time of the Shakespeares, illustrated by Extracts from the
Council-Books_ (1864); for Weymouth, H. J. Moule, _Weymouth and
Melcombe Regis Documents_ (1883), 136; for Dunwich, _Various
Collections_ (_Hist. MSS._), vii. 82; for Aldeburgh, Suffolk,
C. C. Stopes, _William Hunnis_, 314. References for a few other
scattered items are in the foot-notes. The warning should
be given that the dates assigned to some of the provincial
performances are approximate, and may be in error within a
year or so either way. For this there are more reasons than
one. The zealous antiquaries who have made extracts from local
records have not realized that precise dates might be of
value, and have often named a year without indicating whether
it represents the calendar year (Circumcision style) or the
calendar year (Annunciation style) in which a performance fell,
or the calendar year in which a regnal, mayoral, or accounting
year, in which the performance fell, began or ended. When they
are clearly dealing with accounting years, they do not always
indicate whether these ended at Michaelmas or at some other
date. They sometimes give only the year of a performance, when
they might have given, precisely or approximately, the month
and day of the month as well. But it is fair to add that the
accounts of City Chamberlains and similar officers, from which
the notices of plays are generally derived, are not always so
kept as to render precise dating feasible. Some accountants
specify the days, others the weeks to which their entries
relate; others put their entries in chronological order and
date some of them, so that it is possible to fix the dates of
the rest within limits; others again render accounts analysed
under heads, grouping all payments to players perhaps under a
head of ‘Gifts and Rewards’, and in such cases you cannot be
sure that the companies are even entered in the order of their
visits, and if months and days are not specified, cannot learn
more than the year to which a visit belongs. Where, for whatever
reason, I can only assign a performance to its accounting year,
I generally give it under the calendar year in which the account
ends. This, in the case of a London company and of a Michaelmas
year (much the commonest year for municipal accounts), is pretty
safe, as the touring season was roughly July to September. Some
accounting years (Coventry, Marlborough, Stratford-on-Avon) end
later still, but if, as at Bath, the year ends about Midsummer,
it is often quite a toss-up to which of two years an entry
belongs. In the case of Leicester performances before 1603, I
have combined the indications of Michaelmas years in M. Bateson,
_Leicester Records_, vol. iii, with those of calendar years in
W. Kelly, _Notices Illustrative of the Drama_ (1865), 185, and
distinguished between performances before and after Michaelmas.
I hope Kelly has not misled me, and that he found evidence in
the entries for his dating. After 1603 he is the only source. I
do not think that the amount of error which has crept into the
following chapter from the various causes described is likely to
be at all considerable. I have been as careful as possible and
most of Murray’s own extracting is excellently done. I should,
however, add that the Ipswich dates, as given both here and by
Murray, ii. 287. from _Hist. MSS._ ix. i, 248, are unreliable,
because some of the rolls from which they are taken contain
membranes properly belonging to those for other years; cf. my
notes on Leicester’s (pp. 89, 91), Queen’s (p. 106), Warwick’s
(p. 99), Derby’s (p. 120), King’s (p. 209).]
A. INTRODUCTION
The present chapter contains detailed chronicles--too often, I
fear, lapsing into arid annals of performances at Court or in the
provinces--of all the companies traceable in London during any year
between 1558 and 1616. The household and other establishments to which
the companies were attached are taken as the basis of classification.
This principle is open to criticism. Certainly it has not always the
advantage of presenting economic units. It is improbable that there
was any continuity as regards membership between the bodies of actors
successively appearing, often after long intervals, under the names of
Sussex or Hunsdon or Derby. On the other hand, particular associations
of actors can sometimes be discerned as holding together under a change
of patrons. Thus between 1571 and 1583 Laurence and John Dutton seem to
have led a single company, which earned the nickname of the Chameleons,
first in the service of Sir Robert Lane and then, turn by turn, in that
of the Earls of Lincoln, Warwick, and Oxford. The real successors,
again, of the Derby’s men of 1593 are less the Derby’s men of 1595–1618
than the Hunsdon’s men of 1594–1603, who in course of time became the
King’s men without any breach of their unity as a trading association.
Nevertheless, an arrangement under patrons is a practicable one, since
companies nearly always appear under the names of their patrons in
official documents, while an arrangement under trading associations
is not. Actors are a restless folk, and the history of the Admiral’s
men, or the Queen’s Revels, or the Lady Elizabeth’s men, will show how
constantly their business organizations were disturbed by the coming
and going of individuals, and by the breaking and reconstruction of the
agreements on which they were based. It is but rarely that we have any
clue to these intricacies; and I have therefore followed the households
as the best available guides, indicating breaches of continuity and
affiliations, where these appear to exist, and adopting as far as
possible an order which, without pretence of being scientific, will
bring each household under consideration roughly at the point at
which its servants become of the greatest significance to the general
history of the stage. The method may perhaps be described as that of a
λαμπαδηφορία.
A study of the succession of the companies gives rise to a few general
considerations. During the earlier years of Elizabeth’s reign the drama
is under the domination of the boy companies. This may be in part due
to the long-standing humanistic tradition of the Renaissance, although
the lead is in fact taken not so much by schoolboys in the stricter
sense, as by the trained musical establishments of the royal chapels
and still more that of the St. Paul’s choir under Sebastian Westcott.
More important points perhaps are, that the Gentlemen of the Chapel,
who had been prominent under Henry VIII, had ceased to perform, that
the royal Interluders had been allowed to decay, and that the other
professional companies had not yet found a permanent economic basis in
London, while their literary accomplishment was still upon a popular
rather than a courtly level. Whatever the cause or causes, the fact is
undeniable. Out of seventy-eight rewards for Court performances between
1558 and 1576, twenty-one went to the Paul’s boys, fifteen to the royal
chapels, and ten to schoolboys, making a total of forty-six, as against
only thirty-two paid to adult companies. And if the first half of this
period only be taken, the disproportion is still greater, for by 1567
the Paul’s boys had received eleven rewards, other boys two, and the
adult companies six. A complete reversal of this position coincides
rather markedly with the building of the first permanent theatres in
1576. Between 1576 and 1583 the adult companies had thirty-nine rewards
and the boys only seventeen. There is also a rapid growth in the number
of companies. Before 1576 the Earl of Leicester’s men and the Duttons
were alone conspicuous. After 1576 the entertainment of a London
company seems to become a regular practice with those great officers
the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral, as well as with special
favourites of the Queen, such as the Earl of Leicester himself or the
Earl of Oxford. Stockwood in 1578 speaks of ‘eighte ordinarie places’
in the City as occupied by the players. A Privy Council order of the
same year limits the right to perform to six companies selected to take
part in the Court festivities at Christmas, namely Leicester’s men,
Warwick’s, Sussex’s, Essex’s, and the Children of the Chapel and St.
Paul’s. Gabriel Harvey, writing to Edmund Spenser of the publication of
his virelays in the following summer, says:
‘Ye have preiudished my good name for ever in thrustinge me
thus on the stage to make tryall of my extemporall faculty,
and to play Wylsons or Tarletons parte. I suppose thou wilt
go nighe hande shortelye to sende my lorde of Lycesters or my
lorde of Warwickes, Vawsis, or my lord Ritches players, or sum
other freshe starteupp comedanties unto me for sum newe devised
interlude, or sum maltconceivid comedye fitt for the Theater, or
sum other paintid stage whereat thou and thy lively copesmates
in London maye lawghe ther mouthes and bellyes full for pence or
twoepence apeece.’[1]
Doubtless many of this mushroom brood of ‘freshe starteupp comedanties’
never succeeded in making good their permanent footing in the
metropolis. Lord Vaux’s men, whom Harvey mentions, were never fortunate
enough to be summoned to Court; and the same may be said of Lord
Arundel’s men, Lord Berkeley’s, and Lord Abergavenny’s. Such men, after
their cast for fortune, had to drift away into the provinces, and pad
the hoof on the hard roads once more.
The next septennial period, 1583–90, witnessed the extinction, for
a decade or so, of the boy companies, in spite of the new impulse
given to the latter by the activity as a playwright of John Lyly. Of
forty-five Court payments made during these years, thirty apparently
went to men and only fifteen to boys. This ultimate success of
the professional organizations may largely have been due to their
employment of such university wits as Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lodge,
and Nashe in the writing of plays, with which Lyly could be challenged
on his own ground before the Court, while a sufficient supply of
chronicle histories and other popular stuff could still be kept on
the boards to tickle the ears of the groundlings. The undisputed
pre-eminence lay during this period with the Queen’s men, who made
within it no less than twenty-one appearances at Court. This company
enjoyed the prestige of the royal livery, transferred to it from the
now defunct Interluders, which had a ready effect in the unloosing of
municipal pockets. And at its foundation in 1583 it incorporated, in
addition to Tarlton, whose origin is unknown, the leading members of
the pre-existing companies: Wilson and Laneham from Leicester’s, Adams
from Sussex’s, and John Dutton from Oxford’s. The former fellows of
these lucky ones were naturally hardly able to maintain their standing.
In January 1587 Leicester’s, Oxford’s, and the Admiral’s were still
setting up their bills side by side with those of the Queen’s.[2] But
the first two are not heard of at Court again, and even the Admiral’s
were hardly able to make a show except by coalition with other
companies. Thus we find the Admiral’s combining with Hunsdon’s in
1585, and with Strange’s perhaps from 1589 onwards, and it became the
destiny of this last alliance, under the leadership of Edward Alleyn,
to dispossess the Queen’s men, after the death of Tarlton in 1588, from
their pride of place. The fall of the Queen’s men was sudden. In 1590–1
they gave four Court plays to two by their rivals; in 1591–2 they gave
one, and their rivals six. In their turn they appear to have been
reduced to forming a coalition with Lord Sussex’s men.
The plague-years of 1592–4 brought disaster, chaos, and change
into the theatrical world. Only the briefest London seasons were
possible. The necessities of travelling led to further combinations
and recombinations of groups, one of which may have given rise to
the ephemeral existence of Lord Pembroke’s men. And, by the time the
public health was restored, the Queen’s had reconciled themselves
to a provincial existence, and continued until 1603 to make their
harvest of the royal name, as their predecessors in title had done,
without returning to London at all. The combination of which Alleyn
had been the centre broke up, and its component elements reconstituted
themselves as the two great companies of the Chamberlain’s and the
Admiral’s men. Between these there was a vigorous rivalry, which
sometimes showed itself in lawsuits, sometimes in the more legitimate
form of competing plays on similar themes. Thus a popular sentiment
offended by the Chamberlain’s men in _1 Henry IV_ was at once appealed
to by the Admiral’s with _Sir John Oldcastle_. And when the Admiral’s
scored a success by their representation of forest life in _Robin
Hood_, the Chamberlain’s were quickly ready to counter with _As You
Like It_. I think the Chamberlain’s secured the better position of the
two. They had their Burbadge to pit against the reputation of Alleyn;
they had their honey-tongued Shakespeare; and they had a business
organization which gave them a greater stability of membership than
any company in the hands of Henslowe was likely to secure. If one may
once more use the statistics of Court performances as a criterion,
they are found to have appeared thirty-two times and their rivals only
twenty times from 1594 to 1603. Between them the Chamberlain’s and the
Admiral’s enjoyed for some years a practical monopoly of the London
stage, which received an official recognition by the action of the
Privy Council in 1597. But this state of things did not long continue.
Ambitious companies, such as Pembroke’s, disregarded the directions of
the Council. Derby’s men, Worcester’s, Hertford’s, one by one obtained
at least a temporary footing at Court, and in 1602 the influence of
the Earl of Oxford was strong enough to bring about the admission to
a permanent home in London of a third company made up of his own and
Worcester’s servants. Even more dangerous, perhaps, to the monopoly
was the revival of the boy companies, Paul’s in 1599 and the Chapel in
1600. The imps not only took by their novelty in the eyes of a younger
generation of play-goers. They began a warfare of satire, in which they
‘berattled the common stages’ with a vigour and dexterity that betray
the malice of the poets against the players which had been a motive in
their rehabilitation.[3]
No material change took place at the coming of James. The three adult
companies, the Chamberlain’s, the Admiral’s, Worcester’s, passed
respectively under the patronage of James, Prince Henry, and Queen
Anne.[4] On the death of Prince Henry in 1612 his place was taken
by the Elector Palatine. The Children of the Chapel also received
the patronage of Queen Anne, as Children of the Queen’s Revels. The
competition for popular favour continued severe. Dekker refers to it in
1608 and the preacher Crashaw in 1610.[5] It is to be noticed, however,
that Dekker speaks only of ‘a deadly war’ between ‘three houses’,
presumably regarding the boy companies as negligible. And in fact
these companies were on the wane. By 1609 the Queen’s Revels, though
still in existence, had suffered from the wearing off of novelty,
from the tendency of boys to grow older, from the plague-seasons of
1603–4 and 1608–9, which they were less well equipped than the better
financed adults to withstand, from the indiscretions and quarrels of
their managers, and from the loss of the Blackfriars, of which the
King’s men had secured possession.[6] The Paul’s boys had been bought
off by the payment of a ‘dead rent’ or blackmail to the Master. A
third company, the King’s Revels, had been started, but had failed to
establish itself.[7] The three houses were not, indeed, left with
an undisputed field. Advantage was taken of the predilection of the
younger members of the royal family for the drama, and patents were
obtained, in 1610 for a Duke of York’s company, and in 1611 for a Lady
Elizabeth’s company. These also had but a frail life. In 1613 the
Lady Elizabeth’s and the Queen’s Revels coalesced under the dangerous
wardenship of Henslowe. In 1615 the Duke of York’s, now Prince
Charles’s, men joined the combination. And finally in 1616 the Prince’s
men were left alone to make up the tale of four London companies,
and the Lady Elizabeth’s and the Queen’s Revels disappeared into the
provinces. The list of men summoned before the Privy Council in March
1615 to account for playing in Lent contains the names of the leaders
of the four companies, the King’s, the Queen’s, the Palsgrave’s, and
the Prince’s. The King’s played at the Globe and Blackfriars, the
Queen’s at the Red Bull, whence they moved in 1617 to the Cockpit, the
Palsgrave’s at the Fortune, and the Prince’s at the Hope. The supremacy
of the King’s men during 1603–16 was undisputed. Of two hundred and
ninety-nine plays rewarded at Court for that period, they gave one
hundred and seventy-seven, the Prince’s men forty-seven, the Queen’s
men twenty-eight, the Duke of York’s men twenty, the Lady Elizabeth’s
men nine, the Queen’s Revels boys fifteen, and the Paul’s boys three.
Their plays, moreover, were those usually selected for performance
before James himself. It is possible, however, that the Red Bull and
the Fortune were better able to hold their own against the Globe when
it came to attracting a popular audience.
B. THE BOY COMPANIES
i. Children of Paul’s.
ii. Children of the Chapel and Queen’s Revels.
iii. Children of Windsor.
iv. Children of the King’s Revels.
v. Children of Bristol.
vi. Westminster School.
vii. Eton College.
viii. Merchant Taylors School.
ix. Earl of Leicester’s Boys.
x. Earl of Oxford’s Boys.
xi. Mr. Stanley’s Boys.
i. THE CHILDREN OF PAUL’S
_High Masters of Grammar School_:--William Lily (1509–22); John Ritwise
(1522–32); Richard Jones (1532–49); Thomas Freeman (1549–59); John Cook
(1559–73); William Malim (1573–81); John Harrison (1581–96); Richard
Mulcaster (1596–1608).
_Masters of Choir School_:--? Thomas Hikeman (_c._ 1521); John Redford
(_c._ 1540);? Thomas Mulliner (?); Sebastian Westcott (> 1557–1582);
Thomas Giles (1584–1590 <); Edward Pearce (> 1600–1606 <).
[_Bibliographical Note._--The documents bearing upon the early
history of the two cathedral schools, often confused, are
printed and discussed by A. F. Leach in _St. Paul’s School
before Colet_ (_Archaeologia_, lxii. 1. 191) and in _Journal of
Education_ (1909), 503. M. F. J. McDonnell, _A History of St.
Paul’s School_ (1909), carries on the narrative of the grammar
school. The official chroniclers of the cathedral, perhaps
owing to the loss of archives in the Great Fire, have given
no connected account of the choir school; with the material
available on the dramatic side they appear to be unfamiliar.
Valuable contributions are W. H. G. Flood, _Master Sebastian_,
in _Musical Antiquary_, iii. 149; iv. 187; and H. N. Hillebrand,
_Sebastian Westcote, Dramatist and Master of the Children of
Paul’s_ (1915, _J. G. P._ xiv. 568). Little is added to the
papers on _Plays Acted by the Children of Paul’s and Music in
St. Paul’s Cathedral_ in W. S. Simpson, _Gleanings from Old St.
Paul’s_ (1889), 101, 155, by J. S. Bumpus, _The Organists and
Composers of St. Paul’s Cathedral_ (1891), and W. M. Sinclair,
_Memorials of St. Paul’s Cathedral_ (1909).]
Mr. Leach has succeeded in tracing the grammar school, as part of
the establishment of St. Paul’s Cathedral, to the beginning of the
twelfth century. It was then located in the south-east corner of the
churchyard, near the bell-tower, and here it remained to 1512, when it
was rebuilt, endowed, and reorganized on humanist lines by Dean Colet,
and thereafter to 1876, when it was transferred to Horsham in Sussex.
Originally the master was one of the canons; but by the beginning
of the thirteenth century this officer had taken on the name of
chancellor, and the general supervision of the actual schoolmaster, a
vicar choral, was only one of his functions. Distinct from the grammar
school was the choir school, for which the responsible dignitary was
not the chancellor, but the precentor, in whose hands the appointment
of a master of the song school rested.[8] There was, however, a third
branch of the cathedral organization also concerned with the training
of boys. The almonry or hospital, maintained by the chapter for the
relief of the poor, seems to have been established at the end of the
twelfth century, and statutes of about the same date make it the duty
of a canon residentiary to assist in the maintenance of its _pueri
elemosinarii_, and prescribe the special services to be rendered them
at their great annual ceremony of the Boy Bishop on Innocents’ Day.[9]
In the thirteenth century the supervision of these boys was in the
hands of another subordinate official, appointed by the chapter and
known as the almoner. The number of the boys was then eight; it was
afterwards increased, apparently in 1358, to ten.[10] The almoner is
required to provide for their literary and moral education, and their
liturgical duties are defined as consisting of standing in pairs at
the corners of the choir and carrying candles.[11] A later version of
the statutes provides for their musical education, and it is clear
that these _pueri elemosinarii_ were in fact identical with or formed
the nucleus of the boys of the song school.[12] During the sixteenth
century the posts of almoner and master of the song school, although
technically distinct, were in practice held together, and the holder
was ordinarily a member of the supplementary cathedral establishment
known as the College of Minor Canons.[13] To this college had been
appropriated the parish church of St. Gregory, on the south side of St.
Paul’s, just west of the Chapter or Convocation House, and here the
song school was already housed by the twelfth century.[14] The college
had also a common hall on the north of the cathedral, near the Pardon
churchyard; and hard by was the almonry in Paternoster Row.[15] The
statutes left the almoner the option of either giving the boys their
literary education himself, or sending them elsewhere. It naturally
proved convenient to send them to the grammar school, and the almoners
claimed that they had a right to admission without fees.[16] On the
other side we find the grammar school boys directed by Colet to attend
the Boy Bishop ceremony and make their offerings.[17] Evidently there
was much give and take between song school and grammar school.
As early as 1378 the scholars of Paul’s are said to have prepared a
play of the History of the Old Testament for public representation
at Christmas.[18] Whether they took a share in the other miracles
recorded in mediaeval London, it is impossible to say. A century and
a half later the boys of the grammar school, during the mastership
of John Ritwise, are found contributing interludes, in the humanist
fashion, to the entertainment of the Court. On 10 November 1527 they
gave an anti-Lutheran play in Latin and French before the King and
the ambassadors of Francis I, and in the following year the _Phormio_
before Wolsey, who also saw them, if Anthony Wood can be trusted, in
a _Dido_ written by Ritwise himself.[19] There is no evidence that
Ritwise’s successors followed his example by bringing their pupils
to Court; and the next performances by Paul’s boys, which can be
definitely traced, began a quarter of a century later, and were under
the control of Sebastian Westcott, master of the song school, and were
therefore presumably given by boys of that school. Westcott in 1545 was
a Yeoman of the Chamber at Court.[20] He was ‘scolemaister of Powles’
by New Year’s Day 1557, when he presented a manuscript book of ditties
to Queen Mary.[21] Five years earlier, he had brought children to
Hatfield, to give a play before the Princess Elizabeth; and the chances
are that these were the Paul’s boys.[22] With him came one Heywood,
who may fairly be identified with John Heywood the dramatist; and this
enables us, more conjecturally, to reduce a little further the gap
in the dramatic history of the Paul’s choir, for some years before,
in March 1538, Heywood had already received a reward for playing an
interlude with ‘his children’ before the Lady Mary.[23] There is
nothing beyond this phrase to suggest that Heywood had a company of
his own, and it is not probable that he was ever himself master of
the choir school.[24] But he may very well have supplied them with
plays, both in Westcott’s time and also in that of his predecessor John
Redford. Several of Heywood’s verses are preserved in a manuscript,
which also contains Redford’s _Wyt and Science_ and fragments of other
interludes, not improbably intended for performance by the boys under
his charge.[25] A play ‘of childerne sett owte by Mr. Haywood’ at Court
during the spring of 1553 may also belong to the Paul’s boys.[26]
Certain performances ascribed to them at Hatfield, during the Princess
Elizabeth’s residence there in her sister’s reign, have of late fallen
under suspicion of being apocryphal.[27]
From the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign Westcott’s theatrical
enterprise stands out clearly enough. On 7 August 1559 the Queen was
entertained by the Earl of Arundel at Nonsuch with ‘a play of the
chylderyn of Powlles and ther Master Se[bastian], Master Phelypes,
and Master Haywod’.[28] If ‘Master Phelypes’ was the John Philip or
Phillips who wrote _Patient Grissell_ (_c._ 1566), this play may also
belong to the Paul’s repertory. Heywood could not adapt himself again
to a Protestant England, and soon left the country. Sebastian Westcott
was more fortunate. In 1560 he was appointed as Head of the College
of Minor Canons or Sub-dean.[29] Shortly afterwards, being unable to
accept the religious settlement, he was sentenced to deprivation of
his offices, which included that of organist, but escaped through the
personal influence of Elizabeth, in spite of some searchings of the
heart of Bishop Grindal as to his suitability to be an instructor of
youth.[30] In fact he succeeded in remaining songmaster of Paul’s for
the next twenty-three years, and during that period brought his boys to
Court no less than twenty-seven times, furnishing a far larger share of
the royal Christmas entertainment, especially during the first decade
of the reign, than any other single company. The chronicle of his
plays must now be given. There was one at each of the Christmases of
1560–1 and 1561–2, one between 6 January and 9 March 1562, and one at
the Christmas of 1562–3.[31] During the next winter the plague stopped
London plays. At the Christmas of 1564–5 there were two by the Paul’s
boys, of which the second fell on 2 January, and at that of 1565–6
three, two at Court and one at the Lady Cecilia’s lodging in the Savoy.
There were two again at each of the Christmases of 1566–7 and 1567–8,
and one on 1 January 1569. During the winter of 1569–70 the company
was, exceptionally, absent from Court. They reappeared on 28 December
1570, and again at Shrovetide (25–7 February) 1571. On 28 December
1571 they gave the ‘tragedy’ of _Iphigenia_, which Professor Wallace
identifies with the comedy called _The Bugbears_, but which might, for
the matter of that, be Lady Lumley’s translation from the Greek of
Euripides. At the Christmas of 1572–3 they played before 7 January. On
27 December 1573 they gave _Alcmaeon_. They played on 2 February 1575,
and a misfortune which befell them in the same year is recorded in a
letter of 3 December from the Privy Council, which sets out that ‘one
of Sebastianes boyes, being one of his principall plaiers, is lately
stolen and conveyed from him’, and instructs no less personages than
the Master of the Rolls and Dr. Wilson, one of the Masters of Requests,
to examine the persons whom he suspected and proceed according to law
with them.[32] Five days later the Court of Aldermen drew up a protest
against Westcott’s continued Romish tendencies.[33] The next Court
performance by the boys was on 6 January 1576. On 1 January 1577 they
gave _Error_, and on 19 February _Titus and Gisippus_. They played on
29 December 1577, and one wonders whether it was anything amiss with
that performance which led to an entry in the Acts of the Privy Council
for the same day that ‘Sebastian was committid to the Marshalsea’.[34]
Whether this was so or not, the Paul’s boys were included in the
list of companies authorized to practise publicly in the City for
the following Christmas. On 1 January 1579 they gave _The Marriage
of Mind and Measure_, on 3 January 1580 _Scipio Africanus_, and on 6
January 1581 _Pompey_. A play on 26 December 1581 is anonymous, but may
possibly be the _Cupid and Psyche_ mentioned as ‘plaid at Paules’ in
Gosson’s _Playes Confuted_ of 1582.[35]
In the course of 1582 Sebastian Westcott died, and this event led to
an important development in the dramatic activities of the boys.[36]
Hitherto their performances, when not at Court, had been in their own
quarters ‘at Paules’, although the notice of 1578, as well as Gosson’s
reference, suggests that the public were not altogether excluded from
their rehearsals. Probably they used their singing school, which may
have been still, as in the twelfth century, the church of St. Gregory
itself.[37] This privacy, even if something of a convention, had
perhaps enabled them to utilize the services of the grammar school
when they had occasion to make a display of erudition.[38] After
Westcott’s death, however, they appear to have followed the example
of the Chapel, who had already in 1576 taken a step in the direction
of professionalism, by transferring their performances to Farrant’s
newly opened theatre at the Blackfriars. Here, if the rather difficult
evidence can be trusted, the Paul’s boys appear to have joined them,
and to have formed part of a composite company, to which Lord Oxford’s
boys also contributed, and which produced the _Campaspe_ and _Sapho and
Phao_ of the earl’s follower John Lyly. Lyly took these plays to Court
on 1 January and 3 March 1584, and Henry Evans, who was also associated
with the enterprise, took a play called _Agamemnon and Ulysses_ on 27
December. On all three occasions the official patron of the company
was the Earl of Oxford. In _Agamemnon and Ulysses_ it must be doubtful
whether the Paul’s boys had any share, for in the spring of 1584
the Blackfriars theatre ceased to be available, and the combination
probably broke up.[39] This, however, was far from being the end of
Lyly’s connexion with the boys, for the title-pages of no less than
five of his later plays acknowledge them as the presenters. They had,
indeed, a four years’ period of renewed activity at Court, under the
mastership of Thomas Giles, who, being already almoner, became Master
of the Song School on 22 May 1584, and in the following year received
a royal commission to ‘take up’ boys for the choir, analogous to that
ordinarily granted to masters of the Chapel Children.[40] There is
no specific mention of plays in the document, but its whole basis
is in the service which the boys may be called upon to do the Queen
in music and singing. Under Giles the company appeared at Court nine
times during four winter seasons; on 26 February 1587, on 1 January
and 2 February 1588, on 27 December 1588, 1 January and 12 January
1589, and on 28 December 1589, 1 January and 6 January 1590. The
title-pages of Lyly’s _Endymion_, _Galathea_, and _Midas_ assign the
representation of these plays at Court to a 2 February, a 1 January,
and a 6 January respectively. _Endymion_ must therefore belong to 1588
and _Midas_ to 1590; for _Galathea_ the most probable of the three
years is 1588. _Mother Bombie_ and _Love’s Metamorphosis_ can be less
precisely dated, but doubtless belong to the period 1587–90. At some
time or other, and probably before 1590, the Paul’s boys performed a
play of _Meleager_, of which an abstract only, without author’s name,
is preserved. It is not, I think, to be supposed that Lyly, although
he happened to be a grandson of the first High Master of Colet’s
school, had any official connexion either with that establishment or
with the choir school. It is true that Gabriel Harvey says of him in
1589, ‘He hath not played the Vicemaster of Poules and the Foolemaster
of the Theatre for naughtes’.[41] But this is merely Harvey’s jesting
on the old dramatic sense of the term ‘vice’, and the probabilities
are that Lyly’s relation as dramatist to Giles as responsible manager
of the company was much that which had formerly existed between John
Heywood and Sebastian Westcott. Nevertheless, it was this connexion
which ultimately brought the Paul’s plays to a standstill. Lyly was
one of the literary men employed about 1589 to answer the Martin
Marprelate pamphleteers in their own vein, and to this end he availed
himself of the Paul’s stage, apparently with the result that, when
it suited the government to disavow its instruments, that stage was
incontinently suppressed.[42] The reason may be conjectural, but the
fact is undoubted. The Paul’s boys disappear from the Court records
after 1590. In 1591 the printer of _Endymion_ writes in his preface
that ‘Since the Plaies in Paules were dissolved, there are certaine
Commedies come to my handes by chaunce’, and the prolongation of this
dissolution is witnessed to in 1596 by Thomas Nashe, who in his chaff
of Gabriel Harvey’s anticipated practice in the Arches says, ‘Then we
neede neuer wish the Playes at Powles vp againe, but if we were wearie
with walking, and loth to goe too farre to seeke sport, into the Arches
we might step, and heare him plead; which would bee a merrier Comedie
than euer was old Mother _Bomby_’.[43]
A last theatrical period opened for the boys with the appointment about
1600 of a new master. This was one Edward Pearce or Piers, who had
become a Gentleman of the Chapel on 16 March 1589, and by 15 August
1600, when his successor was sworn in, had ‘yealded up his place for
the Mastership of the children of Poules’.[44] I am tempted to believe
that in reviving the plays Pearce had the encouragement of Richard
Mulcaster, who had become High Master of the grammar school in 1596,
and during his earlier mastership of Merchant Taylors had on several
occasions brought his boys to Court. Pearce is first found in the
Treasurer of the Chamber’s Accounts as payee for a performance on 1
January 1601, but several of the extant plays produced during this
section of the company’s career are of earlier date, and one of them,
Marston’s _I Antonio and Mellida_, can hardly be later than 1599. A
stage direction of this play apparently records the names of two of the
performers as Cole and Norwood.[45] The Paul’s boys, therefore, were
‘up again’ before their rivals of the Chapel, who cannot be shown to
have begun in the Blackfriars under Henry Evans until 1600.[46] This
being so, they were probably also responsible for Marston’s revision
in 1599 of _Histriomastix,_ which by giving offence to Ben Jonson, led
him to satire Marston’s style in _Every Man Out of His Humour_, and so
introduced the ‘war of the theatres’.[47] Before the end of 1600 they
had probably added to their repertory Chapman’s _Bussy d’Ambois_, and
certainly _The Maid’s Metamorphosis_, _The Wisdom of Dr. Dodipoll_,
and _Jack Drum’s Entertainment_, all three of which were entered on
the Stationers’ Register, and the first two printed, during that year.
_Jack Drum’s Entertainment_ followed in 1601 and contains the following
interesting passage of autobiography:[48]
_Sir Edward Fortune._ I saw the Children of _Powles_ last night,
And troth they pleas’d me prettie, prettie well:
The Apes in time will doe it handsomely.
_Planet._ I faith, I like the audience that frequenteth there
With much applause: A man shall not be chokte
With the stench of Garlick; nor be pasted
To the barmie Iacket of a Beer-brewer.
_Brabant Junior._ ’Tis a good, gentle audience, and I hope the boies
Will come one day into the Court of requests.
_Brabant Senior._ I, and they had good Plaies. But they produce
Such mustie fopperies of antiquitie,
And do not sute the humorous ages backs,
With clothes in fashion.
The criticism, being a self-criticism, must not be taken too seriously.
So far as published plays are concerned, _Histriomastix_ is the only
one to which it applies. In Marston, Chapman, and Middleton the company
had enlisted vigorous young playwrights, who were probably not sorry to
be free from the yoke of the professional actors, and appear to have
followed the exceptional policy of printing some at least of their new
plays as soon as they were produced.
On 11 March 1601, two months after the boys made their first bow at
Court, the Lord Mayor was ordered by the Privy Council to suppress
plays ‘at Powles’ during Lent. It is to be inferred that they were,
as of old, acting in their singing school. Confirmation is provided
by a curious note appended by William Percy to his manuscript volume
of plays, presumably in sending them to be considered with a view to
production by the boys. The plays bear dates in 1601–3, but it can
hardly be taken for granted that they were in fact produced by the
Paul’s or any other company. The note runs:
A note to the Master of Children of Powles.
Memorandum, that if any of the fine and formost of these
Pastorals and Comoedyes conteyned in this volume shall but
overeach in length (the children not to begin before foure,
after prayers, and the gates of Powles shutting at six) the
tyme of supper, that then in tyme and place convenient, you do
let passe some of the songs, and make the consort the shorter;
for I suppose these plaies be somewhat too long for that place.
Howsoever, on your own experience, and at your best direction,
be it. Farewell to you all.[49]
Both parts of Marston’s _Antonio and Mellida_ were entered on the
Stationers’ Register in the autumn of 1601 and printed in 1602. The
second part may have been on the stage during 1601, and in the same
year the boys probably produced John Marston’s _What You Will_, and
certainly played ‘privately’, as the Chamberlain’s men did ‘publicly’,
_Satiromastix_ in which Dekker, with a hand from Marston, brought his
swashing blow against the redoubtable Jonson. This also was registered
in 1601 and printed in 1602. There is no sign of the boys at Court
in the winter of 1601–2. In the course of 1602 their play of _Blurt
Master Constable_, by Middleton, was registered and printed. They
were at Court on 1 January 1603, for the last time before Elizabeth,
and on 20 February 1604, for the first time before James. Either the
choir school or the grammar school boys took part in the pageant
speeches at the coronation triumph on 15 March 1604.[50] To the year
1604 probably belongs _Westward Ho!_ which introduced to the company,
in collaboration with Dekker, a new writer, John Webster. _Northward
Ho!_ by the same authors, followed in 1605. The company was not at
Court for the winter of 1604–5, but during that of 1605–6 they gave two
plays before the Princes Henry and Charles. For these the payee was not
Pearce, but Edward Kirkham, who is described in the Treasurer of the
Chamber’s account as ‘one of the Mr^{es} of the Childeren of Pawles’.
Kirkham, who was Yeoman of the Revels, had until recently been a
manager of the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars. It may have
been the disgrace brought upon these by _Eastward Ho!_ in the course
of 1605 that led him to transfer his activities elsewhere.[51] With
him he seems to have brought Marston’s _The Fawn_, probably written
in 1604 and ascribed in the first of the two editions of 1606 to the
Queen’s Revels alone, in the second to them ‘and since at Poules’. The
charms of partnership with Kirkham were not, however, sufficient to
induce Pearce to continue his enterprise. The last traceable appearance
of the Paul’s boys was on 30 July 1606, when they gave _The Abuses_
before James and King Christian of Denmark.[52] Probably the plays were
discontinued not long afterwards. This would account for the large
number of play-books belonging to the company which reached the hands
of the publishers in 1607 and 1608. The earlier policy of giving plays
to the press immediately after production does not seem to have endured
beyond 1602. Those now printed, in addition to _Bussy D’Ambois_, _What
You Will_, _Westward Ho!_ and _Northward Ho!_ already mentioned,
included Middleton’s _Michaelmas Term_, _The Phoenix_, _A Mad World,
my Masters_, and _A Trick to Catch the Old One_, together with _The
Puritan_, very likely also by Middleton, and _The Woman Hater_, the
first work of Francis Beaumont. _The Puritan_ can be dated, from a
chronological allusion, in 1606. The title-pages of _The Woman Hater_,
_A Mad World, my Masters_, and _A Trick to Catch the Old One_ specify
them to have been ‘lately’ acted. It is apparent from the second quarto
of _A Trick to Catch the Old One_ that the Children of the Blackfriars
took it over and presented it at Court on 1 January 1609. This was
probably part of a bargain as to which we have another record. Pearce
may have had at the back of his mind a notion of reopening his theatre
some day. But it is given in evidence in the lawsuit of _Keysar v.
Burbadge_ in 1610 that, while it was still closed, he was approached
on behalf of the other ‘private’ houses in London, those of the
Blackfriars and the Whitefriars, and offered a ‘dead rent’ of £20 a
year, ‘that there might be a cessation of playeinge and playes to be
acted in the said howse neere S^t. Paules Church’.[53] This must have
been in the winter of 1608–9, just as the Revels company was migrating
from the Blackfriars to the Whitefriars. The agent was Philip Rosseter
who, with Robert Keysar, was financially interested in the Revels
company. When the King’s men began to occupy the Blackfriars in the
autumn of 1609, they took on responsibility for half the dead rent, but
whether the arrangement survived the lawsuit of 1610 is unknown.
ii. THE CHILDREN OF THE CHAPEL AND OF THE QUEEN’S REVELS
The Children of the Chapel (1501–1603).
_Masters of the Children_: William Newark (1493–1509),
William Cornish (1509–23), William Crane (1523–45), Richard
Bower (1545–61), Richard Edwardes (1561–6), William Hunnis
(1566–97), Richard Farrant (acting, 1577–80), Nathaniel Giles
(1597–1634).
The Children of the Queen’s Revels (1603–5).
The Children of the Revels (1605–6).
_Masters_: Henry Evans, Edward Kirkham, and others.
The Children of the Blackfriars (1606–9).
The Children of the Whitefriars (1609–10).
_Masters_: Robert Keysar and others.
The Children of the Queen’s Revels (1610–16).
_Masters_: Philip Rosseter and others.
[_Bibliographical Note._--Official records of the Chapel are
to be found in E. F. Rimbault, _The Old Cheque Book of the
Chapel Royal_ (1872, _Camden Soc._). Most of the material for
the sixteenth-century part of the present section was collected
before the publication of C. W. Wallace, _The Evolution of the
English Drama up to Shakespeare_ (1912, cited as Wallace, i),
which has, however, been valuable for purposes of revision.
J. M. Manly, _The Children of the Chapel Royal and their
Masters_ (1910, _C. H._ vi. 279), W. H. Flood, _Queen Mary’s
Chapel Royal_ (_E. H. R._ xxxiii. 83), H. M. Hildebrand, _The
Early History of the Chapel Royal_ (1920, _M. P._ xviii. 233),
are useful contributions. The chief published sources for
the seventeenth century are three lawsuits discovered by J.
Greenstreet and printed in full by F. G. Fleay, _A Chronicle
History of the London Stage_ (1890), 127, 210, 223. These are
(a) _Clifton v. Robinson and Others_ (Star Chamber, 1601), (b)
_Evans v. Kirkham_ (Chancery, May–June 1612), cited as _E. v.
K._, with Fleay’s pages, and (c) _Kirkham v. Painton and Others_
(Chancery, July–Nov. 1612), cited as _K. v. P._ Not much beyond
dubious hypothesis is added by C. W. Wallace, _The Children of
the Chapel at Blackfriars_ (1908, cited as Wallace, ii). But
Professor Wallace published an additional suit of importance,
(d) _Keysar v. Burbadge and Others_ (Court of Requests,
Feb.–June 1610), in _Nebraska University Studies_ (1910), x.
336, cited as _K. v. B._ This is apparently one of twelve suits
other than Greenstreet’s, which he claims (ii. 36) to have
found, with other material, which may alter the story. In the
meantime, I see no reason to depart from the main outlines
sketched in my article on _Court Performances under James the
First_ (1909, _M. L. R._ iv. 153).]
The Chapel was an ancient part of the establishment of the Household,
traceable far back into the twelfth century.[54] Up to the end of
the fourteenth, we hear only of chaplains and clerks. These were
respectively priests and laymen, and the principal chaplain came to
bear the title of Dean.[55] Children of the Chapel first appear under
Henry IV, who appointed a chaplain to act as Master of Grammar for them
in 1401.[56] In 1420 comes the first of a series of royal commissions
authorizing the impressment of boys for the Chapel service, and in
1444 the first appointment of a Master of the Children, John Plummer,
by patent.[57] It is probably to the known tastes of Henry VI that the
high level of musical accomplishment, which had been reached by the
singers of the Chapel during the next reign was due.[58] The status
and duties of the Chapel are set out with full detail in the _Liber
Niger_ about 1478, at which date the establishment consisted of a Dean,
six Chaplains, twenty Clerks, two Yeomen or Epistolers, and eight
Children. These were instructed by a Master of Song, chosen by the Dean
from ‘the seyd felyshipp of Chapell’, and a Master of Grammar, whose
services were also available for the royal Henchmen.[59] There is no
further record of the Master of Grammar; but with this exception the
establishment continued to exist on much the same footing, apart from
some increase of numbers, up to the seventeenth century.[60] Although
subject to some general supervision from the Lord Chamberlain and
to that extent part of the Chamber, it was largely a self-contained
organization under its own Dean. Elizabeth, however, left the post of
Dean vacant, and the responsibility of the Lord Chamberlain then became
more direct.[61] It probably did not follow, at any rate in its full
numbers, a progress, but moved with the Court to the larger ‘standing
houses’, except possibly to Windsor where there was a separate musical
establishment in St. George’s Chapel.[62] It does not seem, at any
rate in Tudor times, to have had any relation to the collegiate chapel
of St. Stephen in the old palace of Westminster.[63] The number of
Children varied between eight and ten up to 1526, when it was finally
fixed by Henry VIII at twelve.[64] The chaplains and clerks were
collectively known in the sixteenth century as the Gentlemen of the
Chapel, and the most important of them, next to one who acted as
subdean, was the Master of the Children, who trained them in music
and, as time went on, also formed them into a dramatic company. The
Master generally held office under a patent during pleasure, and was
entitled in addition to his fee of 7½_d._ a day or £91 8_s._ 1½_d._
a year as Gentleman and his share in the general ‘rewards’ of the
Chapel, to a special Exchequer annuity of 40 marks (£26 13_s._ 4_d._),
raised in 1526 to £40, ‘pro exhibicione puerorum’, which is further
defined in 1510 as ‘pro exhibicione vesturarum et lectorum’ and in
1523 as ‘pro sustencione et diettes’.[65] To this, moreover, several
other payments came to be added in the course of Henry VIII’s reign.
Originally the Chapel dined and supped in the royal hall; but this
proved inconvenient, and a money allowance from the Cofferer of the
Household was substituted, which was fixed in 1544 at 1_s._ a day for
each Gentleman and 2_s._ a week for each Child.[66] The allowance for
the Children was afterwards raised to 6_d._ a day.[67] Long before
this, however, the Masters had succeeded in obtaining an exceptional
allowance of 8_d._ a week for the breakfast of each Child, which was
reckoned as making £16 a year and paid them in monthly instalments of
26_s._ 8_d._ by the Treasurer of the Chamber. The costs of the Masters
in their journeys for the impressment of Children were also recouped
by the Treasurer of the Chamber. And from him they also received
rewards of 20_s._ when _Audivi vocem_ was sung on All Saints’ Day, £6
13_s._ 4_d._ for the Children’s feast of St. Nicholas on 6 December,
and 40_s._ when _Gloria in Excelsis_ was sung on Christmas and St.
John’s Days. These were, of course, over and above any special rewards
received for dramatic performances.[68] In the provision of _vesturae_
the Masters were helped by the issue from the Great Wardrobe of black
and tawny camlet gowns, yellow satin coats, and Milan bonnets, which
presumably constituted the festal and penitential arrays of the
choir.[69] The boys themselves do not appear to have received any
wages but, when their voices had broken, the King made provision for
them at the University or otherwise, and until this could be done, the
Treasurer of the Chamber sometimes paid allowances to the Master or
some other Gentleman for their maintenance and instruction.[70]
The earlier Masters were John Plummer (1444–55), Henry Abyngdon
(1455–78), Gilbert Banaster (1478–83?), probably John Melyonek
(1483–5), Lawrence Squier (1486–93), and William Newark
(1493–1509).[71] Some of these have left a musical or literary
reputation, and Banaster is said to have written an interlude in
1482.[72] But until the end of this period only occasional traces of
dramatic performances by the Chapel can be discerned. An alleged play
by the Gentlemen at the Christmas of 1485 cannot be verified.[73] The
first recorded performance, therefore, is one of the disguisings at the
wedding of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Spain in 1501, in which two
of the children were concealed in mermaids ‘singing right sweetly and
with quaint hermony’.[74]
Towards the end of Henry VII’s reign begins a short series of plays
given at the rate of one or two a year by the Gentlemen, which lasted
through 1506–12.[75] Thereafter there is no other play by the Gentlemen
as such upon record until the Christmas of 1553, when they performed
a morality of which the principal character was Genus Humanum.[76]
This had been originally planned for the coronation on the previous 1
October, and as a warrant then issued states that a coronation play
had customarily been given ‘by the gentlemen of the chappell of our
progenitoures’, it may perhaps be inferred that Edward VI’s coronation
play of ‘the story of Orpheus’ on 22 February 1547 was also by the
Gentlemen.[77] In the meantime the regular series of Chapel plays at
Court had been broken after 1512, and when it was taken up again in
1517 it was not by the Gentlemen, but by the Children.[78] This is,
of course, characteristic of the Renaissance.[79] But an immediate
cause is probably to be found in the personality of William Cornish, a
talented and energetic Master of the Children, who succeeded William
Newark in the autumn of 1509, and held office until his death in
1523.[80] Cornish appears to have come of a musical family.[81] He took
part in a play given by the Gentlemen of the Chapel shortly before
his appointment as Master. And although it was some years before he
organized the Children into a definite company, he was the ruling
spirit and chief organizer of the elaborate disguisings which glorified
the youthful court of Henry VIII from the Shrovetide of 1511 to the
visit of the Emperor Charles V in 1522, and hold an important place in
the story, elsewhere dealt with, of the Court mask.[82] In these revels
both the Gentlemen and the Children of the Chapel, as well as the King
and his lords and ladies took a part, and they were often designed so
as to frame an interlude, which would call for the services of skilled
performers.[83]
In view of Cornish’s importance in the history of the stage at Court,
it is matter for regret that none of his dramatic writing has been
preserved, for it is impossible to attach any value to the fantastic
attributions of Professor Wallace, who credits him not only with the
anonymous _Calisto and Meliboea_, _Of Gentleness and Nobility_, _The
Pardoner and the Frere_, and _Johan Johan_, but also with _The Four
Elements_ and _The Four P. P._, for the authorship of which by John
Rastell and John Heywood respectively there is good contemporary
evidence.[84] Cornish was succeeded as Master of the Children by
William Crane (1523–45) and Crane by Richard Bower, whose patent was
successively renewed by Edward VI, presumably by Mary, and finally
by Elizabeth on 30 April 1559.[85] His service was almost certainly
continuous, and it is therefore rather puzzling to be told that a
commission to take up singing children for the Chapel, similar to that
of John Melyonek in 1484, was issued in February 1550 to Philip van
Wilder, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.[86] Neither the full text nor
a reference to the source for the warrant is given, and I suspect the
explanation to be that it was not for the Chapel at all. Philip van
Wilder was a lutenist, one of a family of musicians of whom others were
in the royal service, and he may not improbably have had a commission
to recruit a body of young minstrels with whom other notices suggest
that he may have been connected.[87] Bower himself had a commission
for the Chapel on 6 June 1552.[88] Although the Children continued to
give performances at Court both under Crane and under Bower, it may
be doubted whether they were quite so prominent as they had been in
Cornish’s time. Certainly they had to contend with the competition of
the Paul’s boys. Crane himself is not known to have been a dramatist.
It has been suggested that Bower’s authorship is indicated by the
initials R. B. on the title-page of _Apius and Virginia_ (1575), but,
in view of the date of the publication, this must be regarded as very
doubtful. The chief Marian producer of plays was Nicholas Udall, but it
remains uncertain whether he wrote for the Chapel Children. Professor
Wallace has no justification whatever for his confident assertions
that John Heywood ‘not only could but did’ write plays for the Chapel,
that he ‘had grown up in the Chapel under Cornish’, and that ‘as
dramatist and Court-entertainer’ he ‘was naturally associated with
the performances of the Chapel’.[89] There is no proof whatever that
Heywood began as a Chapel boy, and although he certainly wrote plays
for boys, they are nowhere said or implied to have been of the Chapel
company. There are scraps of evidence which indicate that they may have
been the Paul’s boys.[90] It is also conceivable that they may have
been Philip van Wilder’s young minstrels.
When Elizabeth came to the throne, then, the Chapel had already a
considerable dramatic tradition behind it. But for a decade its share
in the Court revels remains somewhat obscure. The Treasurer of the
Chamber records no payments for performances to its Masters before
1568.[91] A note in a Revels inventory of 1560 of the employment of
some white sarcenet ‘in ffurnishinge of a pley by the children of
the Chapple’ may apparently refer to any year from 1555 to 1560, and
it is therefore hazardous to identify the Chapel with the anonymous
players of the interlude of 31 December 1559 which contained ‘suche
matter that they wher commondyd to leyff off’.[92] Bower may of course
have retained Catholic sympathies, but he died on 26 July 1561, and
it is difficult to suppose that the high dramatic reputation of his
successor Richard Edwardes was not based upon a greater number of Court
productions than actually stand to his name.[93] Edwardes had been a
Gentleman of the Chapel from 1556 or earlier. His patent as Master is
dated on 27 October 1561, and on the following 10 December he received
a commission the terms of which served as a model for those of the next
two Masterships:[94]
Memorandum quod x^o die Januarii anno infra scripto istud
breve deliberatum fuit domino custodi magni Sigilli apud
Westmonasterium exequendum.
Elizabeth by the grace of God Quene of England Fraunce & Ireland
defender of the faythe &c. To our right welbeloved & faythfull
counsaylour Sir Nicholas Bacon knight Keper of our great Seale of
Englande, commaundinge you that vnder our great Seale aforsayd
ye cause to be made our lettres patentes in forme followinge. To
all mayours sherifs bayliefes constables & all other our officers
gretinge. For that it is mete that our chappell royall should be
furnysshed with well singing children from tyme to tyme we have & by
these presentes do authorise our welbeloved servaunt Richard Edwardes
master of our children of our sayd chappell or his deputie beinge
by his bill subscribed & sealed so authorised, & havinge this our
presente comyssion with hym, to take as manye well singinge children
as he or his sufficient deputie shall thinke mete in all chathedrall
& collegiate churches as well within libertie[s] as without within
this our realme of England whatsoever they be, And also at tymes
necessarie, horses, boates, barges, cartes, & carres, as he for the
conveyaunce of the sayd children from any place to our sayd chappell
royall [shall thinke mete] with all maner of necessaries apperteynyng
to the sayd children as well by lande as water at our prices ordynarye
to be redely payed when they for our service shall remove to any place
or places, Provided also that if our sayd servaunt or his deputie or
deputies bearers hereof in his name cannot forthwith remove the chyld
or children when he by vertue of this our commyssyon hathe taken hym or
them that then the sayd child or children shall remayne there vntill
suche tyme as our sayd servaunt Rychard Edwardes shall send for him
or them. Wherfore we will & commaunde you & everie of you to whom
this our comyssion shall come to be helpinge aydinge & assistinge to
the vttermost of your powers as ye will answer at your vttermoste
perylles. In wytnes wherof &c. Geven vnder our privie seale at our
Manor of St James the fourth daye of Decembre in the fourth yere of our
Raigne.
R. Jones.
At Christmas 1564–5 the boys appeared at Court in a tragedy by
Edwardes, which may have been his extant _Damon and Pythias_.[95] On
2 February 1565 and 2 February 1566 they gave performances before the
lawyers at the Candlemas feasts of Lincoln’s Inn.[96] There is nothing
to show that the Chapel had any concern with the successful play of
_Palamon and Arcite_, written and produced by Edwardes for Elizabeth’s
visit to Oxford in September 1566. Edwardes died on the following 31
October, and on 15 November William Hunnis was appointed Master of
the Children.[97] His formal patent of appointment is dated 22 April
1567, and the bill for his commission, which only differs from that of
Edwardes in minor points of detail, on 18 April.[98] Hunnis had been a
Gentleman at least since about 1553, with an interval of disgrace under
Mary, owing to his participation in Protestant plots. He was certainly
himself a dramatist, but none of his plays are known to be extant,
and a contemporary eulogy speaks of his ‘enterludes’ as if they dated
from an earlier period than that of his Mastership. It is, however,
natural to suppose that he may have had a hand in some at least of the
pieces which his Children produced at Court. The first of these was a
tragedy at Shrovetide 1568. In the following year is said to have been
published a pamphlet entitled _The Children of the Chapel Stript and
Whipt_, which apparently originated in some gross offence given by the
dramatic activities of the Chapel to the growing Puritan sentiment.
‘Plaies’, said the writer, ‘will never be supprest, while her maiesties
unfledged minions flaunt it in silkes and sattens. They had as well
be at their Popish service, in the deuils garments.’ And again, ‘Even
in her maiesties chappel do these pretty upstart youthes profane
the Lordes Day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs,
and gorgeous decking of their apparell, in feigning bawdie fables
gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets’. I should feel more easy in
drawing inferences from this, were the book extant.[99] But it seems
to indicate either that the controversialist of 1569 was less careful
than his successors to avoid attacks upon Elizabeth’s private ‘solace’,
or that the idea had already occurred to the Master of turning his
rehearsals of Court plays to profit by giving open performances in
the Chapel. That the Court performances themselves took place in the
Chapel is possible, but not very likely; the usual places for them seem
to have been the Hall or the Great Chamber.[100] But no doubt they
sometimes fell on a Sunday.
The boys played at Court on 6 January 1570 and during Shrovetide 1571.
On 6 January 1572 they gave _Narcissus_, and on 13 February 1575 a
play with a hunt in it.[101] On all these occasions Hunnis was payee.
An obvious error of the clerk of the Privy Council in entering him as
‘John’ Hunnis in connexion with the issue of a warrant for the payment
of 1572 led Chalmers to infer the existence of two Masters of the name
of Hunnis.[102] During the progress of 1575 Hunnis contributed shows to
the ‘Princely Pleasures’ of Kenilworth, and very likely utilized the
services of the boys in these.[103] And herewith his active conduct
of the Chapel performances appears to have been suspended for some
years. A play of _Mutius Scaevola_, given jointly at Court by the
Children of the Chapel and the Children of Windsor on 6 January 1577,
is the first of a series for which the place of Hunnis as payee is
taken by Richard Farrant. To this series belong unnamed plays on 27
December 1577 and 27 December 1578, _Loyalty and Beauty_ on 2 March
1579, and _Alucius_ on 27 December 1579.[104] Farrant, who is known
as a musician, had been a Gentleman of the Chapel in 1553, and had
left on 24 April 1564, doubtless to take up the post of Master of the
Children of Windsor, in which capacity he annually presented a play
at Court from 1566–7 to 1575–6.[105] But evidently the two offices
were not regarded as incompatible, for on 5 November 1570, while still
holding his Mastership, he was again sworn in as Gentleman of the
Chapel ‘from Winsore’.[106] A recent discovery by M. Feuillerat enables
us to see that his taking over of the Chapel Children from Hunnis
in 1576 was part of a somewhat considerable theatrical enterprise.
Stimulated perhaps by the example of Burbadge’s new-built Theatre, he
took a lease of some of the old Priory buildings in the Blackfriars;
and here, either for the first time, or in continuation of a similar
use of the Chapel itself, which had provoked criticism, the Children
appeared under his direction in performances open to the public.[107]
The ambiguous relation of the Blackfriars precinct to the jurisdiction
of the City Corporation probably explains the inclusion of the Chapel
in the list of companies whose exercises the Privy Council instructed
the City to tolerate on 24 December 1578. It is, I think, pretty clear
that, although Farrant is described as Master of the Chapel Children by
the Treasurer of the Chamber from 1577 to 1580, and by Hunnis himself
in his petition of 1583,[108] he was never technically Master, but
merely acted as deputy to Hunnis, probably even to the extent of taking
all the financial risks off his hands. Farrant was paid for a comedy
at Lincoln’s Inn at Candlemas 1580 and is described in the entry as
‘one of the Queen’s chaplains’.[109] On 30 November 1580 he died and
Hunnis then resumed his normal functions.[110] The Chapel played at
Court on 5 February 1581, 31 December 1581, 27 February 1582, and 26
December 1582. One of these plays may have been Peele’s _Arraignment
of Paris_; that of 26 December 1582 was _A Game of Cards_, possibly the
piece which, according to Sir John Harington, was thought ‘somewhat
too plaine’, and was championed at rehearsal by ‘a notable wise
counseller’.[111] On the first three of these occasions the Treasurer
merely entered a payment to the Master of the Children, without giving
a name, but in the entry for the last play Hunnis is specified. It
is known, moreover, that Hunnis, together with one John Newman, took
a sub-lease of the Blackfriars from Farrant’s widow on 20 December
1581. They do not seem to have been very successful financially, for
they were irregular in their rent, and neglected their repairs. It
was perhaps trepidation at the competition likely to arise from the
establishment of the Queen’s men in 1583, which led them to transfer
their interest to one Henry Evans, a scrivener of London, from whom,
when Sir William More took steps to protect himself against the breach
of covenant involved in an alienation without his consent, it was
handed on to the Earl of Oxford and ultimately to John Lyly.[112] In
November 1583, therefore, Hunnis found himself much dissatisfied with
his financial position, and drew up the following memorial, probably
for submission to the Board of Green Cloth of the royal household:[113]
‘Maye it please your honores, William Hunnys, M^r of the
Children of hir highnes Chappell, most humble beseecheth to
consider of these fewe lynes. First, hir Maiestie alloweth for
the dyett of xij children of hir sayd Chappell daylie vi^d a
peece by the daye, and xl^{li} by the yeare for theyre aparrell
and all other furneture.
‘Agayne there is no ffee allowed neyther for the m^r of the
sayd children nor for his ussher, and yet neuertheless is he
constrayned, over and besydes the ussher still to kepe bothe a
man servant to attend upon them and lykewyse a woman seruant to
wash and kepe them cleane.
‘Also there is no allowance for the lodginge of the sayd
chilldren, such tyme as they attend vppon the Courte, but the
m^r to his greate charge is dryuen to hyer chambers both for
himself, his usher chilldren and servantes.
‘Also theare is no allowaunce for ryding jornies when occasion
serueth the m^r to trauell or send into sundrie partes within
this realme, to take vpp and bring such children as be thought
meete to be trayned for the service of hir Maiestie.
‘Also there is no allowance ne other consideracion for those
children whose voyces be chaunged, whoe onelye do depend vpon
the charge of the sayd m^r vntill such tyme as he may preferr
the same with cloathing and other furniture, vnto his no smalle
charge.
‘And although it may be obiected that hir Maiesties allowaunce
is no whitt less then hir Maiesties ffather of famous memorie
therefore allowed: yet considering the pryces of thinges present
to the tyme past and what annuities the m^r then hadd out of
sundrie abbies within this realme, besydes sondrie giftes from
the Kinge, and dyuers perticuler ffees besydes, for the better
mayntenaunce of the sayd children and office: and besides also
there hath ben withdrawne from the sayd chilldren synce hir
Maiesties comming to the crowne xij^d by the daye which was
allowed for theyr breakefastes as may apeare by the Treasorer
of the Chamber his acompt for the tyme beinge, with other
allowaunces incident to the office as appeareth by the auntyent
acomptes in the sayd office which I heere omytt.
‘The burden heerof hath from tyme to tyme so hindred the M^{rs}
of the Children viz. M^r Bower, M^r Edwardes, my sellf and M^r
Farrant: that notwithstanding some good helpes otherwyse some of
them dyed in so poore case, and so deepelie indebted that they
haue not left scarcelye wherewith to burye them.
‘In tender consideracion whereof, might it please your honores
that the sayde allowaunce of vj^d a daye apeece for the
childrens dyet might be reserued in hir Maiesties coffers during
the tyme of theyre attendaunce. And in liew thereof they to be
allowed meate and drinke within this honorable householde for
that I am not able vppon so small allowaunce eny longer to beare
so heauie a burden. Or otherwyse to be consydred as shall seeme
best vnto your honorable wysdomes.
‘[_Endorsed_] 1583 November. The humble peticion of the M^r of
the Children of hir highnes Chappell [_and in another hand_]
To have further allowances for the finding of the children for
causes within mentioned.’
The actual request made by Hunnis seems a modest one. He seems to
have thought that for his boys to have the run of their teeth at the
tables of Whitehall would be a better bargain than the board-wages
of 6_d._ a day. Doubtless he knew their appetites. I do not think
that the Green Cloth met his views, for in the next reign the 6_d._
was still being paid and was raised to 10_d._ for the benefit of
Nathaniel Giles.[114] Possibly Hunnis did get back the £16 a year for
breakfasts, which seems to be the fee described by him as 1_s._ a day,
although that in fact works out to £18 5_s._ a year, and the £9 13_s._
4_d._ for largess, if that also had been withdrawn, since these are
included in fee lists for 1593 and 1598.[115] The ‘perticuler ffees’
to which he refers are presumably the allowances occasionally paid by
Henry for the maintenance of boys whose voices had changed. In any
case Hunnis’s personal grievance must have been fully met by liberal
grants of Crown lands which were made him in 1585.[116] It will be
observed that he says nothing of any profits derived by him from the
dramatic activities of the Children; whether in the form of rewards
at Court or in that of admission fees to public performances. Plays
were no part of the official functions of the Chapel, although it is
consistent with the general policy of the reign towards the London
stage to suppose that Elizabeth and her economical ministers were
well enough content that the deficiencies of her Chapel maintenance
should be eked out, and her Christmas ‘solace’ rendered possible, out
of the profits of public exercise. So far, however, as the Chapel was
concerned, this convenient arrangement was, for the time, nearly at
an end. The facts with regard to the boy companies during 1584 are
somewhat complicated. The Treasurer of the Chamber paid the Master
of the Chapel Children, without specifying his name, for plays on 6
January and 2 February 1584. He also paid John Lyly for plays by the
Earl of Oxford’s ‘servants’ on 1 January and 3 March 1584, and Henry
Evans for a play by the Earl of Oxford’s ‘children’ on 27 December
1584. Were this all, one would naturally assume that Oxford had brought
to Court the ‘lads’ who appeared under his name at Norwich in 1580,
and that these formed a company, quite distinct from the Chapel, of
which the Earl entrusted the management either jointly or successively
to Lyly and Evans. Lyly, of course, is known to have been at one time
in the Earl’s service.[117] One would then be left to speculate as
to which company played at the Blackfriars during 1584 and where the
other played. But the real puzzle begins when it is realized that in
the same year 1584 two of Lyly’s plays, _Campaspe_ and _Sapho and
Phao_, were for the first time printed, that these have prologues ‘at
the Blackfriars’, that their title-pages indicate their performance at
Court, not by Oxford’s company, but by the Chapel and the Paul’s boys,
of which latter the Treasurer of the Chamber makes no mention, and
that the title-pages of the two issues of _Campaspe_ further specify,
in the one case Twelfth Night, and in the other, which is apparently
corrected, New Year’s Day, as the precise date of performance, while
that of _Sapho and Phao_ similarly specifies Shrove Tuesday. But New
Year’s Day and Shrove Tuesday of 1584 are the days which the Treasurer
of the Chamber assigns not to the Chapel, but to Oxford’s company; and
even if you accept Professor Feuillerat’s rather far-fetched assumption
that the days referred to in the title-pages were not necessarily
those falling in the year of issue, you will not find a New Year’s Day,
or for the matter of that a Twelfth Night, since the opening of the
Blackfriars, which, if a play-day at all, is not occupied either by
some Chapel or Paul’s play of which the name is known, or by some other
company altogether.[118] The conjecture seems inevitable that, when he
found himself in financial straits and with the rivalry of the Queen’s
men to face in 1583, Hunnis came to an arrangement with the Paul’s
boys, who had recently lost Sebastian Westcott, on the one hand, and
with the Earl of Oxford and his agents Lyly and Evans on the other, and
put the Blackfriars at the disposal of a combination of boys from all
three companies, who appeared indifferently at Court under the name of
the Master or that of the Earl. In the course of 1584 Sir William More
resumed possession of the Blackfriars. Henry Evans must have made some
temporary arrangement to enable the company to appear at Court during
the winter of 1584–5.[119] But for a year or two thereafter there were
no boys acting in London until in 1586 an arrangement with Thomas
Giles, Westcott’s successor at St. Paul’s, afforded a new opportunity
for Lyly’s pen.[120]
The Chapel had contributed pretty continuously to Court drama for
nearly a century. They now drop out of its story for about seventeen
years.[121] In addition to the two plays of Lyly, one other of their
recent pieces, Peele’s _Arraignment of Paris_, was printed in 1584.
Two former Children, Henry Eveseed and John Bull, afterwards well
known as a musician, became Gentlemen on 30 November 1585 and in
January 1586 respectively.[122] Absence from Court did not entail
an absolute cessation of dramatic activities. Performances by the
Children are recorded at Ipswich and Norwich in 1586–7 and at Leicester
before Michaelmas in 1591. There is, however, little to bear out the
suggestion that the Chapel furnished the boys who played at Croydon,
probably in the archbishop’s palace, during the summers of 1592 and
1593, other than the fact that the author of the play produced in 1593,
_Summer’s Last Will and Testament_, was Thomas Nashe, who was also part
author with Marlowe of _Dido_, one of two plays printed as Chapel plays
in 1594. The extant text of the other play, _The Wars of Cyrus_, seems
to be datable between 1587 and 1594. Hunnis died on 6 June 1597, and on
9 June 1597 Nathaniel Giles, ‘being before extraordinary’, was sworn as
a regular Gentleman of the Chapel and Master of the Children. Giles,
like Farrant, came ‘from Winsore’. Born about 1559, he was educated
at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was appointed Clerk in St. George’s
Chapel, Windsor, and Master of the Children on 1 October 1595. He
earned a considerable reputation as a musician, and died in possession
of both Masterships at the age of seventy-five on 24 January 1634.[123]
His patent of appointment to the Chapel Royal is dated 14 July and
his commission 15 July 1597.[124] They closely follow in terms those
granted to Hunnis.[125]
Three years later the theatrical enterprise which had been dropped in
1584 was renewed by Giles, in co-operation with Henry Evans, who had
been associated with its final stages. The locality chosen was again
the Blackfriars, in the building reconstructed by James Burbadge in
1596, and then inhibited, on a petition of the inhabitants, from use
as a public play-house. Of this, being ‘then or late in the tenure or
occupacion of’ Henry Evans, Richard Burbadge gave him on 2 September
1600 a lease for twenty-one years from the following Michaelmas at a
rent of £40.[126] According to Burbadge’s own account of the matter,
Evans ‘intended then presentlye to erect or sett vp a companye of boyes
... in the same’, and knowing that the payment of the rent depended
upon the possibility of maintaining a company ‘to playe playes and
interludes in the said Playhowse in such sort as before tyme had bene
there vsed’, he thought it desirable to take collateral security in
the form of a bond for £400 from Evans and his son-in-law Alexander
Hawkins.[127] Long after, the Blackfriars _Sharers Papers_ of 1635
describe the lease as being to ‘one Evans that first sett vp the boyes
commonly called the Queenes Majesties Children of the Chapell’.[128] I
find nothing in this language to bear out the contention of Professor
Wallace that Evans’s occupation of the Blackfriars extended back long
before the date of his lease, and that, as already suggested by Mr.
Fleay, the Chapel plays began again, not in 1600, but in 1597.[129]
Burbadge speaks clearly of the setting up of the company as still an
intention when the lease was drawn, and the reference to earlier plays
in the house may either be to some use of it unknown to us between
1596 and 1600, or perhaps more probably to the performances by Evans
and others before the time of James Burbadge’s reconstruction. Mr.
Fleay’s suggestion rested, so far as I can judge, upon the evidence for
the existence of Jonson’s _Case is Altered_ as early as January 1599
and its publication as ‘acted by the children of the Blacke-friers’.
But this publication was not until 1609 and represents a revision
made not long before that date; and as will be seen the company
did not use the name Children of the Blackfriars until about 1606.
There is no reason to suppose that they were the original producers
of the play. A confirmatory indication for 1600 as the date of the
revival may be found in the appearance of the Chapel at Court, for
the first time since 1584, on 6 January and 22 February 1601. On both
occasions Nathaniel Giles was payee. The performance of 6 January,
described by the Treasurer of the Chamber as ‘a showe with musycke
and speciall songes’ was probably Jonson’s _Cynthia’s Revels_, which
that description well fits; that of 22 February may have been the
anonymous _Contention between Liberality and Prodigality_. Both of
these were published in 1601. Jonson has preserved for us in his Folio
of 1616 the list of the principal actors of _Cynthia’s Revels_, who
were ‘Nat. Field, Sal. Pavy, Tho. Day, Ioh. Underwood, Rob. Baxter
and Ioh. Frost’. The induction of the play is spoken by ‘Iacke’ and
two other of the Children, of whom one, impersonating a spectator,
complains that ‘the vmbrae, or ghosts of some three or foure playes,
departed a dozen yeeres since, haue bin seene walking on your stage
heere’. _Liberality and Prodigality_ may be one of the old-fashioned
plays here scoffed at, but it is probable that Jonson also had in
mind Lyly’s _Love’s Metamorphosis_, which was published in 1601 as
‘first playd by the Children of Paules, and now by the Children of
the Chappell’, and there may have been other revivals of the same
kind. The company was included in the Lenten prohibition of 11 March
1601. Later in the year they produced Jonson’s _Poetaster_, containing
raillery of the common stages, which stimulated a reply in Dekker’s
_Satiromastix_, and which, together with their growing popularity,
sufficiently explains the reference to the ‘aerie of children, little
eyases’ in _Hamlet_.[130] The _Poetaster_ was published in 1602 and
the actor-list of the Folio of 1616 contains the names of ‘Nat. Field,
Sal Pavy, Tho. Day, Ioh. Underwood, Wil. Ostler and Tho. Marton’. The
full name of Pavy, who died after acting for three years, is given as
Salathiel in the epigram written to his memory by Jonson; it appears
as Salmon in a document which adds considerably to our knowledge both
of the original constitution of the company and of the lines on which
it was managed. This is a complaint to the Star Chamber by one Henry
Clifton, Esq., of Toftrees, Norfolk, against a serious abuse of the
powers of impressment entrusted under the royal commission to Nathaniel
Giles.[131] Clifton alleged that Giles, in confederacy with Evans,
one James Robinson and others, had set up a play-house for their own
profit in the Blackfriars, and under colour of the commission had taken
boys, not for the royal service in the Chapel Royal, but employment in
acting interludes. He specified as so taken, ‘John Chappell, a gramer
schole scholler of one Mr. Spykes schole neere Criplegate, London;
John Motteram, a gramer scholler in the free schole at Westmi[n]ster;
Nathan ffield, a scholler of a gramer schole in London, kepte by one
Mr. Monkaster; Alvery Trussell, an apprentice to one Thomas Gyles;
one Phillipp Pykman and Thomas Grymes, apprentices to Richard and
Georg Chambers; Salmon Pavey, apprentice to one Peerce’. These were
all children ‘noe way able or fitt for singing, nor by anie the sayd
confederates endevoured to be taught to singe’. Finally they had
made an attempt upon Clifton’s own son Thomas, a boy of thirteen,
who had been seized by Robinson in Christ Church cloister on or
about 13 December 1600, as he went from Clifton’s house in Great St.
Bartholomew’s to the grammar school at Christ Church, and carried off
to the play-house ‘to exercyse the base trade of a mercynary enterlude
player, to his vtter losse of tyme, ruyne and disparagment’. Clifton
went to the Blackfriars, where his son was ‘amongste a companie of
lewde and dissolute mercenary players’, and made a protest; but Giles,
Robinson, and Evans replied that ‘yf the Queene would not beare them
furth in that accion, she should gett another to execute her comission
for them’, that ‘they had aucthoritie sufficient soe to take any noble
mans sonne in this land’, and that ‘were yt not for the benefitt they
made by the sayd play howse, whoe would, should serve the Chappell
with children for them’. Then they committed Thomas Clifton to the
charge of Evans in his father’s presence, with a threat of a whipping
if he was not obedient, and ‘did then and there deliuer vnto his sayd
sonne, in moste scornefull disdaynfull and dispightfull manner, a
scrolle of paper, conteyning parte of one of theire sayd playes or
enterludes, and him, the sayd Thomas Clifton, comaunded to learne
the same by harte’. Clifton appealed to Sir John Fortescue and got
a warrant from him for the boy’s release after a day and a night’s
durance. It was not, however, until a year later, on 15 December 1601,
that he made his complaint.[132] During the following Christmas Giles
brought the boys to Court on 6 and 10 January and 14 February 1602,
and then with the hearing of the case in the Star Chamber during
Hilary Term troubles began for the syndicate. Evans was censured ‘for
his vnorderlie carriage and behauiour in takinge vp of gentlemens
childeren against theire wills and to ymploy them for players and
for other misdemeanors’, and it was decreed that all assurances made
to him concerning the play-house or plays should be void and should
be delivered up to be cancelled.[133] Evans, however, had apparently
prepared himself against this contingency by assigning his lease to
his son-in-law Alexander Hawkins on 21 October 1601. This at least
is one explanation of a somewhat obscure transaction. According to
Evans himself, the assignment was to protect Hawkins from any risk
upon the bond given to Burbadge. On the other hand, there had already
been negotiations for the sale of a half interest in the undertaking
to three new partners, Edward Kirkham, William Rastall, and Thomas
Kendall, and it was claimed later by Kirkham that the assignment to
Hawkins had been in trust to reassign a moiety to these three, in
return for a contribution of capital variously stated at from £300 to
£600. No such reassignment was, however, carried out.[134] But although
the lease from Burbadge was certainly not cancelled as a result of the
Star Chamber decree, it probably did seem prudent that the original
managers of the theatre should remain in the background for a time.
Nothing more is heard of James Robinson, while the partnership between
Evans and Hawkins on the one side and Kirkham, Rastall, and Kendall on
the other was brought into operation under articles dated on 20 April
1602. For the observance of these Evans and Hawkins gave a bond of
£200.[135] Kirkham, Rastall, and Kendall in turn gave Evans a bond of
£50 as security for a weekly payment of 8s., ‘because after the said
agreements made, the complainant [Kirkham] and his said parteners would
at their directions haue the dieting and ordering of the boyes vsed
about the plaies there, which before the said complainant had, and for
the which he had weekely before that disbursed and allowed great sommes
of monie’.[136]
Of the new managers, Rastall was a merchant and Kendall a haberdasher,
both of London.[137] Kirkham has generally been assumed to be the
Yeoman of the Revels, but of this there is not, so far as I know,
any definite proof. The association did not prove an harmonious one.
According to Evans, Kirkham and his fellows made false information
against him to the Lord Chamberlain, as a result of which he was
‘comaunded by his Lordship to avoyd and leave the same’, had to quit
the country, and lost nearly £300 by the charge he was put to and the
negligence of Hawkins in looking after his profits.[138] This seems
to have been in May 1602. Meanwhile the performances continued. The
company did not appear at Court during the winter of 1602–3, but _Sir
Giles Goosecap_ and possibly Chapman’s _Gentleman Usher_ were produced
by them before the end of Elizabeth’s reign; and on 18 September
1602 a visit was paid to the theatre by Philipp Julius, Duke of
Stettin-Pomerania, of which the following account is preserved in the
journal of Frederic Gerschow, a member of his suite:[139]
‘Von dannen sind wir auf die Kinder-comoediam gangen, welche
im Argument iudiciret eine castam viduam, war eine historia
einer königlichen Wittwe aus Engellandt. Es hat aber mit dieser
Kinder-comoedia die Gelegenheit: die Königin hält viel junger
Knaben, die sich der Singekunst mit Ernst befleissigen müssen
und auf allen Instrumenten lernen, auch dabenebenst studieren.
Diese Knaben haben ihre besondere praeceptores in allen
Künsten, insonderheit sehr gute musicos.’
‘Damit sie nun höfliche Sitten anwenden, ist ihnen aufgelegt,
wöchentlich eine comoedia zu agiren, wozu ihnen denn die Königin
ein sonderlich theatrum erbauet und mit köstlichen Kleidern zum
Ueberfluss versorget hat. Wer solcher Action zusehen will, muss
so gut als unserer Münze acht sundische Schillinge geben, und
findet sich doch stets viel Volks auch viele ehrbare Frauens,
weil nutze argumenta und viele schöne Lehren, als von andern
berichtet, sollen tractiret werden; alle bey Lichte agiret,
welches ein gross Ansehen macht. Eine ganze Stunde vorher höret
man eine köstliche musicam instrumentalem von Orgeln, Lauten,
Pandoren, Mandoren, Geigen und Pfeiffen, wie denn damahlen ein
Knabe cum voce tremula in einer Basgeigen so lieblich gesungen,
dass wo es die Nonnen zu Mailand ihnen nicht vorgethan, wir
seines Gleichen auf der Reise nicht gehöret hatten.’
This report of a foreigner must not be pressed as if it were precise
evidence upon the business organization of the Blackfriars. Yet it
forms the main basis of the theory propounded by Professor Wallace
that Elizabeth personally financed the Chapel plays and personally
directed the limitation of the number of adult companies allowed to
perform in London, as part of a deliberate scheme of reform, which
her ‘definite notion of what the theatre should be’ had led her to
plan--a theory which, I fear, makes his _Children of the Chapel at
Blackfriars_ misleading, in spite of its value as a review of the
available evidence, old and new, about the company.[140] Professor
Wallace supposes that Edward Kirkham, acting officially as Yeoman of
the Revels, was Elizabeth’s agent, and that, even before he became a
partner in the syndicate, he dieted the boys and supplied them with the
‘köstlichen Kleidern zum Ueberfluss’ mentioned by Gerschow, accounting
for the expenditure either through the Revels Accounts or through some
other unspecified accounts ‘yet to be discovered’.[141] Certainly no
such expenditure appeared in the Revels Accounts, and no other official
account with which Kirkham was concerned is known. It may be pointed
out that, if we took Gerschow’s account as authoritative, we should
have to suppose that Elizabeth provided the theatre building, which
we know she did not, and I think it may be taken for granted that her
payments for the Chapel were no more than those with which we are
already quite familiar, namely the Master’s fee of £40 ‘pro exhibicione
puerorum’, the board-wages of 6_d._ a day for each of twelve children,
possibly the breakfast allowance of £16 a year and the largess of £9
13_s._ 4_d._ for high feasts, and the occasional rewards for actual
performances. None of these, of course, passed through the Revels
Office, and although this office may, as in the past, have helped to
furnish the actual plays at Court, the cost of exercising in public
remained a speculation of the Master and his backers, who had to look
for recoupment and any possible profits to the sums received from
spectators. If it is true, as Gerschow seems to say, that performances
were only given on Saturdays, the high entrance charge of 1_s._ is
fully explained. The lawsuits, of course, bear full evidence to the
expenditure by the members of the syndicate upon the ‘setting forward’
of plays.[142] Nor is there any ground for asserting, as Professor
Wallace does, that there were two distinct sets of children, one lodged
in or near the palace for chapel purposes proper, and the other kept
at the Blackfriars for plays.[143] It is true that Clifton charged
Giles with impressing boys who could not sing, but Gerschow’s account
proves that there were others at the Blackfriars who could sing well
enough, and it would be absurd to suppose that there was one trained
choir for the stage and another for divine service. Doubtless, however,
the needs of the theatre made it necessary to employ, by agreement
or impressment, a larger number of boys than the twelve borne on the
official establishment.[144] And that boys whose voices had broken were
retained in the theatrical company may be inferred from the report
about 1602 that the Dowager Countess of Leicester had married ‘one
of the playing boyes of the chappell’.[145] I cannot, finally, agree
with Professor Wallace in assuming that the play attended by Elizabeth
at the Blackfriars on 29 December 1601 was necessarily a public one
at the theatre; much less that it was ‘only one in a series of such
attendances’. She had dined with Lord Hunsdon at his house in the
Blackfriars. The play may have been in his great chamber, or he may
have borrowed the theatre next door for private use on an off-day. And
the actors may even more probably have been his own company than the
Chapel boys.[146]
The appointment of a new Lord Chamberlain by James I seems to have
enabled Evans to return to England. He found theatrical affairs in a
bad way, owing to the plague of 1603, and ‘speach and treatie’ arose
between him and Burbadge about a possible surrender of his lease.[147]
By December, however, things looked brighter. Evans did some repairs
to the Blackfriars, and the enterprise continued.[148] Like the adult
companies, the partners secured direct royal protection under the
following patent of 4 February 1604:[149]
[Sidenote: De licencia speciali pro Eduardo Kirkham et aliis pro le
Revell domine Regine.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Mayors Shiriffes Justices
of Peace Baliffes Constables and to all other our officers
mynisters and lovinge Subiectes to whome theis presentes shall
come, greeting. Whereas the Queene our deerest wief hath for her
pleasure and recrea[~c]on when she shall thinke it fit to have
any playes or shewes appoynted her servauntes Edward Kirkham
Alexander Hawkyns Thomas Kendall and Robert Payne to provyde and
bring vppe a convenient nomber of Children, whoe shalbe called
children of her Revelles, knowe ye that we have appointed and
authorized and by theis presentes doe authorize and appoynte
the said Edward Kirkham Alexander Hawkins Thomas Kendall and
Robert Payne from tyme to tyme to provide keepe and bring vppe a
convenient nomber of Children, and them to practize and exercise
in the quality of playinge by the name of Children of the
Revells to the Queene within the Black-fryers in our Cytie of
London, or in any other convenient place where they shall thinke
fit for that purpose. Wherefore we will and commaunde [you] and
everie of you to whome it shall appertayne to permytt her said
Servauntes to keepe a convenient nomber of Children by the name
of Children of her Revells and them to exercise in the quality
of playing according to her pleasure. Provided allwaies that noe
such Playes or Shewes shalbee presented before the said Queene
our wief by the said Children or by them any where publiquelie
acted but by the approbacion and allowaunce of Samuell Danyell,
whome her pleasure is to appoynt for that purpose. And theis
our lettres Patentes shalbe your sufficient warraunte in this
behalfe. In witnes whereof &c., witnes our self at Westminster
the fourth day of February.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
Apparently it was still thought better to keep the name of Evans out of
the patent, and he was represented by Hawkins; of the nature of Payne’s
connexion with the company I know nothing. The adoption of the name of
Children of the Queen’s Revels should perhaps be taken as indicating
that, as the boy-actors grew older, the original connexion with the
Chapel became looser. The use of Giles’s commission as a method of
obtaining recruits was probably abandoned, and there is no evidence
that he had any further personal association with the theatre.[150]
The commission itself was, however, renewed on 13 September 1604,
with a new provision for the further education of boys whose voices
had changed;[151] and in December Giles was successful in getting the
board-wages allowed for his charges raised from 6_d._ to 10_d._ a
day.[152]
The Revels children started gaily on the new phase of their career, and
the _Hamlet_ allusion is echoed in Middleton’s advice to a gallant,
‘if his humour so serve him, to call in at the Blackfriars, where he
should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man’.[153] They were at
Court on 21 February 1604 and on 1 and 3 January 1605. Their payees
were Kirkham for the first year and Evans and Daniel for the second.
Evidently Daniel was taking a more active part in the management than
that of a mere licenser. Their play of 1 January 1605 was Chapman’s
_All Fools_ (1605), and to 1603–5 may also be assigned his _Monsieur
d’Olive_ (1606), and possibly his _Bussy d’Ambois_ (1607), and _Day’s
Law Tricks_ (1608). I venture to conjecture that the boys’ companies
were much more under the influence of their poets than were their
adult rivals; it is noteworthy that plays written for them got
published much more rapidly than the King’s or Prince’s men ever
permitted.[154] And it is known that one poet, who now began for the
first time to work for the Blackfriars, acquired a financial interest
in the undertaking. This was John Marston, to whom Evans parted, at
an unspecified date, with a third of the moiety which the arrangement
of 1602 had left on his hands.[155] Marston’s earliest contributions
were probably _The Malcontent_ (1604) and _The Dutch Courtesan_
(1605). From the induction to the _Malcontent_ we learn that it
was appropriated by the King’s men, in return for the performance
by the boys of a play on Jeronimo, perhaps the extant _I Jeronimo_,
in which the King’s claimed rights. Marston’s satirical temper did
not, however, prove altogether an asset to the company; and I fear
that the deference of its directors to literary suggestions was not
compatible with that practical political sense, which as a rule enabled
the professional players to escape conflicts with authority. The
history of the next few years is one of a series of indiscretions,
which render it rather surprising that the company should throughout
have succeeded in maintaining its vitality, even with the help of
constant reconstructions of management and changes of name. The first
trouble, the nature of which is unknown, appears to have been caused
by Marston’s _Dutch Courtesan_. Then came, ironically enough, the
_Philotas_ of the company’s official censor, Samuel Daniel. Then, in
1605, the serious affair of _Eastward Ho!_ for which Marston appears
to have been mainly responsible, although he saved himself by flight,
whereas his fellow authors, Jonson and Chapman, found themselves in
prison and in imminent danger of losing their ears.[156] I do not
think that the scandal arose on the performance of the play, but on
its publication in the late autumn.[157] The company did not appear
at Court during the winter of 1605–6, but the ingenious Kirkham seems
to have succeeded in transferring one of its new plays, Marston’s
_Fawn_, and possibly also _Bussy D’Ambois_, to Paul’s, and appeared
triumphantly before the Treasurer of the Chamber’s paymaster the
following spring as ‘one of the Masters of the Children of Pawles’.
Meanwhile the Blackfriars company went on acting, but it is to be
inferred from the title-pages of its next group of plays, Marston’s
_Sophonisba_ (1606), Sharpham’s _The Fleir_ (1607), and Day’s _Isle of
Gulls_ (1606), that its misdemeanour had cost it the direct patronage
of the Queen, and that it was now only entitled to call itself, not
Children of the Queen’s Revels, but Children of the Revels.[158]
Possibly the change of name also indicates that thereafter, not
Daniel, but the Master of the Revels, acted as its censor. Anne
herself, by the way, must have felt the snub, for it was probably at
the Blackfriars that, if the French ambassador may be trusted, she had
attended representations ‘to enjoy the laugh against her husband’.[159]
The alias, whatever it connoted, proved but an ephemeral one. By
February 1606 one of the plays just named, the _Isle of Gulls_, had
given a new offence. Some of those responsible for it were thrown into
Bridewell, and a fresh reconstruction became imperative.[160] It was
probably at this date that one Robert Keysar, a London goldsmith, came
into the business. Kirkham, like Evans before him, discreetly retired
from active management, and the Children, with Keysar as ‘interest
with them’, became ‘Masters themselves’, taking the risks and paying
the syndicate for the use of the hall.[161] Kirkham claims that under
this arrangement the moiety of profits in which he had rights amounted
to £150 a year, as against £100 a year previously earned.[162] Shortly
afterwards the dissociation of the Chapel from the Blackfriars was
completed by a new commission issued to Giles on 7 November 1606, to
which was added the following clause:
‘Prouided alwayes and wee doe straightlie charge and commaunde
that none of the saide Choristers or Children of the Chappell
so to be taken by force of this commission shalbe vsed or
imployed as Comedians or Stage players, or to exercise or acte
any Stage playes Interludes Comedies or tragedies, for that it
is not fitt or decent that such as shoulde singe the praises
of God Allmightie shoulde be trayned vpp or imployed in suche
lascivious and prophane exercises.’[163]
It is presumably to this pronouncement that Flecknoe refers in 1664,
when he speaks of the Chapel theatre being converted to the use of the
Children of the Revels, on account of the growing precision of the
people and the growing licentiousness of plays.[164] It is, however,
curious to observe that the abandoned titles of the company tended to
linger on in actual use. Evans in 1612 speaks of the syndicate as ‘the
coparteners sharers, and Masters of the Queenes Maiesties Children
of the Revells (for so yt was often called)’ in 1608;[165] while the
name Children of the Chapel is used in the Stationers’ Register entry
of _Your Five Gallants_ in 1608, at Maidstone in 1610, and even
in such official documents as the Revels Accounts for 1604–5 and the
Chamber Accounts for 1612–13.
Under Keysar the name was Children of the Blackfriars. For a couple
of years the company succeeded in keeping clear of further disaster.
But on 29 March 1608 the French ambassador, M. de la Boderie, reported
that all the London theatres had been closed, and were now threatened
by the King with a permanent inhibition on account of two plays which
had given the greatest offence.[166] Against one of these, which
dealt with the domestic affairs of the French king, he had himself
lodged a protest, and his description leaves no doubt that this was
one of the parts of Chapman’s _Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron_,
which was published, without the offending scene, later in the year,
as ‘acted at the Black-Friars’. The other play was a personal attack
upon James himself. ‘Un jour ou deux devant’, says La Boderie, ‘ilz
avoient dépêché leur Roi, sa mine d’Escosse, et tous ses favorits
d’une estrange sorte; car aprés luy avoir fait dépiter le ciel sur
le vol d’un oyseau, et faict battre un gentilhomme pour avoir rompu
ses chiens, ils le dépeignoient ivre pour le moins une fois le jour.’
This piece is not extant, but I have recently come across another
allusion to it in a letter of 11 March 1608 to Lord Salisbury from
Sir Thomas Lake, a clerk of the signet in attendance upon the King at
Thetford.[167]
‘His ma^{tie} was well pleased with that which your lo.
advertiseth concerning the committing of the players y^{t}
have offended in y^{e} matters of France, and commanded me to
signifye to your lo. that for y^{e} others who have offended in
y^{e} matter of y^{e} Mynes and other lewd words, which is y^{e}
children of y^{e} blackfriars, That though he had signified
his mynde to your lo. by my lo. of Mountgommery yet I should
repeate it again, That his G. had vowed they should never play
more, but should first begg their bred and he wold have his vow
performed, And therefore my lo. chamberlain by himselfe or your
ll. at the table should take order to dissolve them, and to
punish the maker besides.’
Sir Thomas Lake appears to have been under the impression that two
companies were concerned, and that the ‘matters of France’ were not
played by the Children of Blackfriars. If so, we must suppose that
_Byron_ was originally produced elsewhere, perhaps by the King’s
Revels, and transferred to the Blackfriars after ‘reformation’ by the
Council. M. de la Boderie, however, writes as if the same company
were responsible for both plays, and perhaps it is on the whole more
probable that Sir Thomas Lake misunderstood the situation. I feel
very little doubt that the maker of the play on the mines was once
more Marston, who was certainly summoned before the Privy Council and
committed to Newgate, on some offence not specified in the extant
record, on 8 June 1608.[168] And this was probably the end of his
stormy connexion with the stage. He disappeared from the Blackfriars
and from literary life, leaving _The Insatiate Countess_ unfinished,
and selling the share in the syndicate which he had acquired from Evans
about 1603 to Robert Keysar for £100. Before making his purchase,
Keysar, who tells us that he put a value of £600 on the whole of the
enterprise, got an assurance, as he thought, from the King’s men
that they would not come to any arrangement with Henry Evans which
would prejudice his interests.[169] This the King’s men afterwards
denied, and as a matter of fact the negotiations, tentatively opened
as far back as 1603, between Evans and Burbadge for a surrender of
the lease were now coming to a head, and its actual surrender took
place about August 1608.[170] On the ninth of that month Burbadge
executed fresh leases of the theatre to a new syndicate representing
the King’s men.[171] The circumstances leading up to Evans’s part in
this transaction became subsequently the subject of hostile criticism
by Kirkham, who asserted that the lease, which Alexander Hawkins
held in trust, had been stolen from his custody by Mrs. Evans, and
that the surrender was effected with the fraudulent intention of
excluding Kirkham from the profits to which he was entitled under the
settlement of 1602.[172] According to Evans, however, Kirkham was at
least implicitly a consenting party, for it was he who, after the
King’s inhibition had brought the profits to an end, grew weary of
the undertaking and initiated measures for winding it up. On or about
26 July 1608 he had had the ‘apparells, properties and goods’ of the
syndicate appraised and an equitable division made. When some of the
boys were committed to prison he had ‘said he would deale no more with
yt, “for”, quoth he, “yt is a base thing”, or vsed wordes to such, or
very like effect’. And he had ‘delivered up their commission, which he
had vnder the greate seale aucthorising them to plaie, and discharged
divers of the partners and poetts’. In view of this, Evans claimed that
he was fully justified in coming to terms with Burbadge.[173]
After all, the King’s anger proved only a flash in the pan. Perhaps
the company travelled during the summer of 1608, if they, and not
the King’s Revels, were ‘the Children of the Revells’ rewarded at
Leicester on 21 August.[174] But by the following Christmas they were
in London, and with Keysar as their payee gave three plays at Court,
where they had not put in an appearance since 1604–5. Two of these were
on 1 and 4 January 1609. As they still bore the name of Children of
Blackfriars, they had presumably remained on sufferance in their old
theatre, which the King’s men may not have been in a hurry to occupy
during a plague-stricken period.[175] But when a new season opened in
the autumn of 1609, new quarters became necessary. These they found at
Whitefriars, which had been vacated by the failure of the short-lived
King’s Revels company, and it was as the Children of Whitefriars that
Keysar brought them to Court for no less than five plays during the
winter of 1609–10. He had now enlisted a partner in Philip Rosseter,
one of the lutenists of the royal household, who carried out a scheme,
with the co-operation of the King’s men, for buying off with a ‘dead
rent’ the possible competition of the Paul’s boys, who had closed their
doors about 1606, but might at any moment open them again.[176] More
than this, through the influence of Sir Thomas Monson, Rosseter was
successful in obtaining a new patent, dated on 4 January 1610, by which
the Children once more became entitled to call themselves Children of
the Queen’s Revels.[177] It ran as follows:
[Sidenote: De concessione Roberto Daborne & aliis.]
Iames by the grace of God &c., To all Maiors Sheriffes Iustices
of peace Bayliffes Constables and to all other our Officers
Ministers and loving Subiects to whome theis presentes shall
come Greeting. Whereas the Quene our deerest wyfe hathe for
hir pleasure, and recreacion, when shee shall thinke it fitt
to have any Playes or Shewes, appoynted hir servantes Robert
Daborne, Phillippe Rosseter, Iohn Tarbock, Richard Iones, and
Robert Browne to prouide and bring vpp a convenient nomber of
Children whoe shalbe called Children of hir Revelles, knowe ye
that wee haue appoynted and authorised, and by theis presentes
do authorize and appoynte the said Robert Daborne, Phillipp
Rosseter, Iohn Tarbock, Richard Iones, and Robert Browne from
tyme to tyme to provide keepe and bring vpp a convenient nomber
of children, and them to practice and exercise in the quality of
playing, by the name of Children of the Revells to the Queene,
within the white ffryers in the Suburbs of our Citty of London,
or in any other convenyent place where they shall thinke fitt
for that purpose. Wherfore wee will and commaund you and euery
of you to whome it shall appertayne to permitt her said seruants
to keepe a conuenient nomber of Children by the name of the
Children of hir Revells, and them to exercise in the qualitye
of playing according to hir pleasure, And theis our lettres
patentes shalbe your sufficient warrant in this behaulfe.
Wittnes our self at Westminster, the ffourth daye of Ianuary.
per breve de priuato sigillo.
Of the new syndicate Browne and Jones were old professional actors
who had belonged to the Admiral’s men a quarter of a century before,
and had since been prominent, Browne in particular, as organizers
of English companies for travel in Germany. Daborne was or became a
playwright. Of Tarbock I know nothing; he may have been a nominee of
Keysar, whose own name, perhaps for reasons of diplomacy, does not
appear in the patent. He may, of course, have retired, but a lawsuit
which he brought in 1610 suggests that his connexion with the company
was not altogether broken. The Whitefriars had not the tradition of
the Blackfriars, and Keysar was aggrieved at the surrender of the
Blackfriars lease by Evans over his head. On 8 February 1610 he laid a
bill in the Court of Requests against the housekeepers of the King’s
men, claiming a share in their profits since the date of surrender,
which he estimated at £1,500, on the strength of the one-sixth interest
in the lease assigned by Evans to Marston and by Marston to him.[178]
He asserted that he had kept boys two years in the hope of playing
‘vpon the ceasing of the generall sicknes’, and had spent £500 on
that and on making provision in the house, and had now, at a loss of
£1,000, had to disperse ‘a companye of the moste exparte and skilful
actors within the realme of England to the number of eighteane or
twentye persons all or moste of them trayned vp in that service, in
the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth for ten yeares togeather and
afterwardes preferred into her Maiesties service to be the Chilldren
of her Revells’.[179] Burbadge and his fellows denied that they had
made £1,500, or that they had attempted to defraud Keysar either about
the surrender of the lease or, as he also alleged, the ‘dead rent’ to
Paul’s, and they pointed out that his losses were really due to the
plague. He could recover his share of the theatrical stock from Evans.
Evans had had no legal right to assign his interest under the lease.
As only the pleadings in the case and not the depositions or the order
of the court are extant, we do not know what Evans, who was to be a
witness, had to say.[180] The fact that one of the new Blackfriars
leases of 1608 was to a Thomas Evans leaves the transaction between
Henry Evans and Burbadge not altogether free from a suspicion of bad
faith. Kirkham also found that he had been either hasty or outwitted in
1608, and as the deaths of Rastall and Kendall in that year had left
him the sole claimant to any interest under the arrangement of 1602, he
had recourse to litigation. In the course of 1611 and 1612 he brought
a ‘multiplicitie of suites’ against Evans and Hawkins, and was finally
non-suited in the King’s Bench.[181] Then, in May 1612, Evans in his
turn brought a Chancery action against Kirkham, in the hope of getting
his bond of 1602 cancelled, and thus securing himself against any
further persecution for petty breaches of the articles of agreement.
The result of this is unknown, but in the course of it many of the
incidents of 1600–8 were brought into question, and Kirkham claimed
that not merely had Evans shut him out in 1604 from certain rooms in
the Blackfriars which he was entitled to use, but that by the surrender
of the lease in 1608 he had lost profits which he estimated at £60
a year.[182] Finally in July 1612 Kirkham brought a Chancery action
against Evans, Burbadge, and John Heminges, and also against the widow
of Alexander Hawkins and Edward Painton, to whom she was now married,
for reinstatement in his moiety of the lease. In this suit much of the
same ground was again traversed, but the Court refused to grant him any
relief.
It is not altogether easy to disentangle the plays produced at the
Blackfriars under Keysar from those produced immediately afterwards
at the Whitefriars. The only title-page which definitely names the
Children of the Blackfriars is that of Jonson’s _The Case is Altered_
(1609). But Chapman’s _Byron_ (1608) and _May Day_ (1611) and
Middleton’s _Your Five Gallants_ (n.d.?1608) also claim to have been
acted at the Blackfriars. The Q_{1} of Middleton’s _A Trick to Catch
the Old One_ (1608) assigns it to Paul’s; the Q_{2} both to Paul’s and
Blackfriars, with an indication of a Court performance on New Year’s
Day, which can only be that of 1 January 1609. This play, therefore,
must have been taken over from Paul’s, when that house closed in 1606
or 1607. As Middleton is not generally found writing for Blackfriars,
_Your Five Gallants_ may have been acquired in the same way. It is also
extremely likely that Chapman’s _Bussy d’Ambois_ passed from Paul’s
to Blackfriars on its way to the King’s men. No name of company or
theatre is attached to Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Knight of the Burning
Pestle_ (1613) or to _The Faithful Shepherdess_ (_c._ 1609). But the
_K. B. P._ was published with an epistle to Keysar as its preserver
and can be securely dated in 1607–8; it refers to the house in which
it was played as having been open for seven years, which just fits
the Blackfriars. _The Faithful Shepherdess_ is of 1608–9 and a boys’
play; the commendatory verses by Field, Jonson, and Chapman justify
an attribution to the company with which they had to do. Chapman’s
_The Widow’s Tears_ (1612) had been staged both at Blackfriars and at
Whitefriars before publication, and was probably therefore produced
shortly before the company moved house. The greatest difficulty is
Jonson’s _Epicoene_ (S. R. 20 September 1610). No edition is known to
be extant earlier than the Folio of 1616, in which Jonson ascribed the
production to ‘1609’ and to the Children of the Revels. According to
the system of dating ordinarily adopted by Jonson in this Folio, ‘1609’
should mean 1609 and not 1609–10. Yet the Children were not entitled
to call themselves ‘of the Revels’ during 1609. Either Jonson’s
chronology or his memory of the shifting nomenclature of the company
has slipped. The actor-list of _Epicoene_ names ‘Nat. Field, Gil.
Carie, Hug. Attawel, Ioh. Smith, Will. Barksted, Will. Pen, Ric. Allin,
Ioh. Blaney’. Amongst these Field is the sole direct connecting link
with the Chapel actor-lists of 1600 and 1601. Keysar’s pleading shows
us that from 1600 to 1610 the company had maintained a substantial
identity throughout all its phases, as successively Children of the
Chapel, Children of the Queen’s Revels, Children of the Blackfriars,
Children of the Whitefriars; but part of his grievance is its
dispersal, and possibly the continuity with the second Children of the
Revels may not have been quite so marked. ‘In processe of time’, say
the Burbadges in the _Blackfriars Sharers Papers_ of 1635, ‘the boyes
growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, and were
taken to strengthen the King’s service’.[183] This, which is written in
relation to the acquisition of the Blackfriars, is doubtless accurate
as regards Ostler and Underwood, and their transfer may reasonably be
placed in the winter of 1609–10. But it was not until some years later
that Field joined the King’s men.
The career of the second Queen’s Revels, but for the temporary
suppression of _Epicoene_ owing to a misconstruction placed on it by
Arabella Stuart, was comparatively uneventful. They are recorded at
Maidstone as the Children of the Chapel about March 1610. They made
no appearance at Court during the following winter, and were again
travelling in the following autumn, when they came to Norwich under
the leadership of one Ralph Reeve, who showed the patent of 4 January
1610, and at first claimed to be Rosseter, but afterwards admitted
that he was not. As he could show no letters of deputation, he was not
allowed to play, although he received a reward on the following day,
which was recorded, not quite correctly, as paid to ‘the master of the
children of the King’s Revells’. By 29 August Barksted and Carey had
left the company to join the newly formed Lady Elizabeth’s men. We may
therefore place at some time before this date Barksted’s completion of
Marston’s _Insatiate Countess_, which was published in 1613 as ‘acted
at Whitefriars’. The entry in the Stationer’s Register of Field’s
_A Woman is a Weathercock_ (1612) on 23 November 1611 shows that he
also had begun to experiment in authorship. As this had been acted at
Court, as well as by the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars, it probably
dates back to the winter of 1609–10. The company returned to court on
5 January 1612 with Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Cupid’s Revenge_, and the
Clerk of the Revels entered them as the Children of Whitefriars.[184]
The travels of 1612 were under the leadership of Nicholas Long, and on
20 May another _contretemps_ occurred at Norwich. The instrument of
deputation was forthcoming on this occasion, but the mayor chose to
interpret the patent as giving authority only to teach and instruct
children, and not to perform with them; and so once again ‘the Master
of the Kings Revells’ got his reward of 20s., but was not allowed to
play. Between Michaelmas and Christmas ‘the queens maiesties revellers’
were at Bristol, and at some time during 1612–13 ‘two of the company of
the childeren of Revells’ received a reward at Coventry. Conceivably
the provincial company of Reeve and Long was a distinct organization
from that in London. Rosseter was payee for four performances at Court
during the winter of 1612–13. On the first occasion, in the course of
November, the play was Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Coxcomb_; on 1 January
and again on 9 January it was _Cupid’s Revenge_; and on 27 February it
was _The Widow’s Tears_. In one version of the _Chamber Accounts_ the
company appears this year as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, but
in another under the obsolete designation of Children of the Chapel.
In addition to the plays already named, Chapman’s _Revenge of Bussy_
had been on the Whitefriars stage before it was published in 1613; and
it is conceivable that Chapman’s _Chabot_ and Beaumont and Fletcher’s
_Monsieur Thomas_ and _The Nightwalker_ may be Queen’s Revels plays of
1610–13. They may also, indeed, be Lady Elizabeth’s plays of 1613–16,
but during this period the Lady Elizabeth and the Queen’s Revels appear
to have been practically amalgamated, under an arrangement made between
Henslowe and Rosseter in March 1613 and then modified, first in 1614,
and again on the addition of Prince Charles’s men to the ‘combine’
in 1615. Yet in some way the Children of the Revels maintained a
separate individuality, at least in theory, during these years, as
may be seen from the patent of 3 June 1615, which licensed Rosseter
and Reeve, together with Robert Jones and Philip Kingman, to build a
new Blackfriars theatre in the house known as Porter’s Hall.[185] The
main purpose of this undertaking was expressed to be the provision
of a new house for the Children of the Queen’s Revels instead of the
Whitefriars, where Rosseter’s lease was now expired, although it was
also contemplated that use might be made of it by the Prince’s and the
Lady Elizabeth’s players. Porter’s Hall only stood for a short time
before civic hostility procured its demolition, and the single play,
which we can be fairly confident that the Children of the Revels gave
in it, is Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Scornful Lady_. This presumably
fell after the amalgamation under Henslowe broke up about the time
of his death early in 1616. Field appears to have joined the King’s
men about 1615. The Queen’s Revels dropped out of London theatrical
life. Their provincial travels under Nicholas Long had apparently
terminated in 1612, as in 1614 he is found using the patent of the
Lady Elizabeth’s men (q. v.) in the provinces. But some members of the
company seem to have gone travelling during the period of troubled
relations with Henslowe, and are traceable at Coventry on 7 October
1615, and at Nottingham in February 1616 and again later in 1616–17. On
31 October 1617 a new Queen’s Revel’s company was formed by Rosseter,
in association with Nicholas Long, Robert Lee of the Queen’s men, and
William Perry of the King’s Revels.[186]
iii. THE CHILDREN OF WINDSOR
_Masters of the Children_:--Richard Farrant (1564–80),
Nathaniel Giles (1595–1634).
The Chapel Royal at Windsor was served by an ecclesiastical college,
which had been in existence as far back as the reign of Henry I, and
had subsequently been resettled as St. George’s Chapel in connexion
with the establishment of the Order of the Garter by Edward III,
finally incorporated under Edward IV, and exempted from dissolution at
the Reformation. Edward III had provided for a warden, who afterwards
came to be called dean, 12 canons, 13 priest vicars, 4 clerks, 6
boy choristers, and 26 ‘poor knights’. The boys were to be ‘endued
with clear and tuneable voices’, and to succeed the clerks as their
voices changed. Their number was altered from time to time; during
the greater part of Elizabeth’s reign it stood at 10. Each had an
annual fee of £3 6_s._ 8_d._ They were lodged within the Castle, in a
chamber north of the chapel, and next to a building founded by James
Denton in 1520, known as the ‘New Commons’. This is now merged in the
canons’ houses, but a doorway is inscribed ‘Edes pro Sacellaenorum
et Choristarum conviviis extructae A. D. 1519’. There were also an
epistoler and a gospeller.[187] The music was ‘useyd after ye order and
maner of ye quenes chappell’.[188] One of the clerks, whose position
corresponded to that of the Gentlemen of the household Chapel Royal,
was appointed by the Chapter of the College to act as Organist and
Master of the Children. The College was privileged, like the Chapel
Royal itself, to recruit its choir by impressment. A commission for
this purpose, issued on 8 March 1560, merely repeats the terms of one
granted by Mary, which itself had confirmed earlier grants by Henry
VIII and Edward VI.[189]
The Master at Elizabeth’s accession was one Preston.[190] But he was
deprived, as unwilling to accept the new ecclesiastical settlement;
and the first Master under whom the choristers appear to have acted at
Court was Richard Farrant. He had been a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal
from about 1553, but was replaced on 24 April 1564, doubtless on his
appointment as Master at Windsor.[191] On the following 30 September
the Chapter assigned a chantry to the teacher of the choristers for
an increase of his maintenance.[192] On 5 November 1570, Farrant was
reappointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, but evidently did not
resign his Mastership.[193] On 11 February 1567 he began a series of
plays with the ‘Children of Windsor’ at Court, which was continued at
Shrovetide 1568, on 22 February and 27 December 1569, at Shrovetide
1571, on 1 January 1572, when he gave _Ajax and Ulysses_, on 1 January
1573, on 6 January 1574, when he gave _Quintus Fabius_, on 6 January
1575, when he gave _King Xerxes_, and on 27 December 1575. With the
winter of 1576–7 the entries of his name in the accounts of the
Treasurer take a new form; he is no longer ‘M^r of the children of
the Chappell at Wyndsore’ but ‘M^r of the children of the Chappell’.
The Revels Accounts for the same season record that on 6 January 1577
_Mutius Scaevola_ was played at Court by ‘the Children of Windsore and
the Chappell’, and it is a fair inference that Farrant, in addition to
exercising his own office, was now also acting as deputy to William
Hunnis, the Master by patent of the Children of the Chapel Royal, and
had made up a combined company from both choirs for the Christmas
delectation of the Queen.[194] This interpretation of the facts was
confirmed when Professor Feuillerat was able to show from the Loseley
archives that in 1576 Farrant had taken a lease of rooms in the
Blackfriars from Sir William More and had converted them into the first
Blackfriars theatre.[195] Whether boys from Windsor continued to take
a share in the performances by the Chapel during 1577–8, 1578–9, and
1579–80, for all of which Farrant was payee, we do not know; there is
no further mention of them as actors in the Court accounts, although
they accompanied the singing men from Windsor to Reading during the
progress of 1576.[196] Farrant died on 30 November 1580, leaving a
widow Anne, who in 1582 obtained the reversion of a small lease from
the Crown, and was involved in controversies with Sir William More over
the Blackfriars tenement at least up to 1587.[197] He had acquired some
reputation as a musician, and amongst his surviving compositions are
a few which may have been intended for use in plays.[198] Farrant was
succeeded at Windsor by Nathaniel Giles, but only after an interval
of either five or fifteen years. Ashmole reports Giles’s monument as
crediting him with forty-nine years’ service as Master of St. George’s
before his death in 1634.[199] There must be an inaccuracy, either
here or in the date of 1 October ’37 Eliz.’ (1595) upon a copy of his
indenture of appointment by the Windsor chapter, which is amongst
Ashmole’s papers.[200] This recites that the chapter ‘are now destitute
of an experte and cunnynge man’, and that Giles ‘is well contented to
come and serve’ them. He is granted from the previous Michaelmas to the
end of his life ‘the Roome and place of a Clerk within the said ffree
Chappell and to be one of the Players on the Organes there, and also
the office of Instructor and Master of the ten Children or Choristers
of the same ffree Chappell, And the office of tutor, creansor, or
governor of the same tenn Children or Coristers’. He is to have an
annuity of £81 6s. 8d. and ‘tholde comons howse’, wherein John Mundie
lately dwelt, which he is to hold on the same terms as ‘one Richarde
ffarrante enjoyed the same’ at a rent of £1 6_s._ 8_d._ His fee is
to be ‘over and besides all such giftes, rewardes or benevolences as
from time to time during the naturall lief of him the said Nathanaell
Gyles shall be given bestowed or ymployed to or upon the Choristers
for singinge of Balattes, playes or for the like respects whatsoever’.
He is to maintain the children and to supply vacancies, ‘her Maiesties
comission for the taking of Children which her highnes hath alredie
graunted to the said Dean and Canons being allowed vnto him the said
Nathanaell Gyles for that purpose’. Evidently the door was left open
for a resumption of theatrical activities, such as was afterwards
brought about at the London Chapel Royal during the Mastership of Giles
there; but there is no proof that such a resumption ever took place at
Windsor. It is perhaps a fanciful conjecture that the boys may have
helped with _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ about 1600.[201]
iv. CHILDREN OF THE KING’S REVELS
_Masters_:--Martin Slater and others.
[_Bibliographical Note._--The chief source of information
is J. Greenstreet, _The Whitefriars Theatre in the Time of
Shakspere_ (_N. S. S. Trans. 1887–92_, 269), which gives
the text of the bill and answer in _Androwes v. Slater_
(1609, Chancery).]
The accident of litigation brings into light a company of boys, who
appear to have acted for a brief and troubled period, which probably
ended in 1608 or early in 1609. The story is told by one George
Androwes a silk-weaver of London, and begins in February 1608. At
that date a part of the dissolved Whitefriars monastery was held, in
contemplation of a lease from Lord Buckhurst, by Michael Drayton and
Thomas Woodford. The lease was actually executed about the following
March, and was for six years, eight months, and twenty days, at a rent
of £50. Woodford had assigned his interest to one Lording Barry; and
Barry in turn persuaded Androwes to take over a third of it, and to
join a syndicate, of which the active manager was Martin Slater, who
is described as a citizen and ironmonger of London, but is, of course,
well known as an actor in the Admiral’s and other companies. The bill
incorporates the terms of Articles of Agreement entered into on 10
March 1608 by Slater on the one hand and Barry, Androwes, and Drayton,
together with William Trevell, William Cooke, Edward Sibthorpe, and
John Mason, all of London, gentlemen, on the other. They throw a
good deal of light upon the business organization of a theatrical
enterprise. Slater is to have a sixth part of the net profits of ‘any
playes, showes, interludes, musique, or such like exercises’ in the
Whitefriars play-house or elsewhere, together with lodging for himself
and his family on the premises, and any profits that can be made in the
house ‘either by wine, beere, ale, tobacco, wood, coales, or any such
commoditie’. When the ‘pattent for playinge’ shall be renewed, Slater’s
name is to be joined in it with Drayton’s, because ‘if any restrainte
of their playinge shall happen by reason of the plague or other
wise, it shalbe for more creditt of the whole company that the said
Martyn shall travel with the children, and acquainte the magistrates
with their busines’. During any such travel his allowance is to be
increased to a share and a half, no apparel, books, or other property
of the company is to be removed without the consent of the sharers,
and none of them is to print any of the play-books, ‘except the booke
of Torrismount, and that playe not to be printed by any before twelve
monthes be fully expired’. In order to avoid debt, a sixth part is
to be taken up each day of the ‘chardges of the howse’ for the week,
including ‘the gatherers, the wages, the childrens bourd, musique,
booke keeper, tyreman, tyrewoman, lights, the Maister of the revells’
duties, and all other things needefull and necessary’. The children are
to be ‘bound’ for three years to Slater, who undertakes not to part
with ‘the said younge men or ladds’ during their apprenticeship except
on the consent of his fellow sharers.
The theatrical experience of the syndicate presumably rested with
Slater and Drayton. Of Trevell, Cooke, and Sibthorpe I know nothing,
except that Trevell, like Woodford, seems still to have had an interest
in the lease of the Whitefriars (cf. ch. xvii) in 1621. But Mason
and Barry were the authors respectively of _The Turk_ (1610, S. R.
10 March 1609), and _Ram Alley_ (1611, S. R. 9 November 1610), the
title-pages of which ascribe them to the children of the King’s Revels,
and thereby enable us to give a more definite title to the boys, who
are only described in the Chancery pleadings as ‘the Children of the
revells there beinge’, that is to say, at the Whitefriars. And we
can trace the King’s Revels a little farther back than February 1608
with the aid of the earliest of similar entries on the title-pages of
other plays, which are, in the chronological order of publication,
Sharpham’s _Cupid’s Whirligig_ (1607, S. R. 29 June 1607), Middleton’s
_Family of Love_ (1608, S. R. 12 October 1607), Day’s _Humour Out Of
Breath_ (1608, S. R. 12 April 1608), Markham’s (and Machin’s) _The
Dumb Knight_ (1608, S. R. 6 October 1608), and Armin’s _Two Maids of
Moreclack_ (1609). If Lewis Machin was the author of the anonymous
_Every Woman In Her Humour_ (1609), it is possible that this ought to
be added to the list. Clearly the boys were playing at least as early
as the first half of 1607 and the agreement of 1608 must represent a
reconstruction of the original business organization. I do not find
anything in the plays to prove an earlier date than 1607, but it is
quite conceivable that the King’s Revels may have come into existence
as early as 1606, perhaps with the idea of replacing the Queen’s Revels
after their disgrace over _The Isle of Gulls_. But if so, the Queen’s
Revels managed to hold together under another name, and in fact proved
more enduring than their rivals. Mr. Fleay, however, suggests that the
King’s Revels were a continuation of the Paul’s boys, and played at the
singing-school, and apparently also that they were themselves continued
as the Duke of York’s men (_H. of S._ 152, 188, 202, 206). He did not,
I think, know of _Androwes v. Slater_, but _Androwes v. Slater_ does
not indicate that the King’s Revels were at Whitefriars before 1608;
rather the contrary.[202] The dates render Mr. Fleay’s conjectures
tempting, although it must be admitted that there is not much evidence.
But _The Family of Love_ was played in a round theatre and the Paul’s
house was round. The curious description of the Duke of York’s men at
Leicester in 1608 as ‘of the White Chapple, London’, might conceivably
be a mistake for ‘of the Whitefriars’, but more probably indicates that
they came from the Boar’s Head (cf. ch. xvi). ‘The Children of the
Revells’ followed them at Leicester on 21 August 1608, but these may
have been the Blackfriars children under a not quite official name. A
complete search through the Patent Rolls for 1606–8 might disinter the
patent for the King’s Revels, which is referred to in the Articles of
Agreements; I find no obvious clue to it in the printed index of signet
bills. It seems possible that William Barksted (cf. ch. xv) may have
belonged to the King’s Revels.
The syndicate did not hold together long. It will be noticed that, in
spite of the attempt in the articles to bar the printing of plays,
these had begun to reach the stationers again as early as April 1608.
The inhibition of 1608 hardly gave the company a chance, and then came
the plague. They were probably broken before the end of 1608, and
although Mason and Barry had at least the consolation that they had
got their own plays staged, other members of the syndicate could only
reflect that they had lost their money. And when dissensions broke
out, and Slater sued Androwes on a bond of £200 given by the sharers
for observance of the articles, and this for defaults which Androwes
himself had not committed, it is not surprising that Androwes drew the
conclusion that he had been a gull. He took Slater to Chancery, and
alleged that he had been asked £90 and paid £70 for his share in the
expectation of a profit of £100 a year, and on the understanding that
the apparel was worth £400 when it was not worth £5, that he had been
led into building and other expenses to the tune of £300, that the
lease had been forfeited for non-payment of rent before any assignation
had been made to him, and that he had been clearly told by Slater
that his obligation was not to extend beyond any breaches of covenant
that he might himself commit. Slater denied any responsibility for
Androwes’s misunderstandings, and pointed out that he had himself been
the principal sufferer by the breakdown of the enterprise, since he and
his family of ten had been illegally turned out of the rooms to which
they were entitled under the articles of agreement, and were now driven
to beg their bread. The view taken by the court is not upon record.
The company which was described as the King’s Revels at Norwich in 1611
and 1612 was travelling under the Queen’s Revels patent of 1610, and
was therefore clearly misnamed. But a second King’s Revels company did
in fact come into existence through a licence given to William Hovell,
William Perry, and Nathan May under the royal signet on 27 February
1615. It performed only in the provinces, and is traceable at Norwich,
Coventry, and Leicester. Its warrant was condemned and withdrawn by an
order of the Lord Chamberlain on 16 July 1616 (Murray, ii. 343), and
in the following year the company seems to have amalgamated with the
provincial relics of the Queen’s Revels.
v. CHILDREN OF BRISTOL
_Masters_:--John Daniel (1615–17); Martin Slater, John
Edmonds, Nathaniel Clay (1618).
A signet bill for a patent for a company of Children of Bristol under
the patronage of Queen Anne was passed in June 1615, perhaps as a
result of her visit to that city in 1613.[203] On 10 July Sir George
Buck wrote to John Packer, the Earl of Somerset’s secretary, to say
that the grant had been made through the Queen’s influence on behalf
of Samuel Daniel, and that he was prepared to assent to it, without
prejudice to his rights as Master of the Revels.[204] The actual
patent, dated 13 July, is made out to Daniel’s brother John.[205]
[Sidenote: De concessione regardante Iohannem Daniell.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Iustices of peace, Mayors,
Sheriffes, Bayliffes, Constables, headboroughes and other our
lovinge subjectes and Officers greetinge. Knowe yee that wee at
the mocion of our most deerelie loved consort the Queene have
licenced and authorised, And by theise presentes do licence
and authorise, our welbeloved subjectes Iohn Daniell and his
Assignes to entertaine and bringe vp a company of children
and youthes vunder the name and title of the children of her
Maiesties royall Chamber of Bristoll, to vse and exercise the
arte and qualitie of playinge Comedies, histories, Enterludes,
Moralles, Pastoralles, Stageplayes, and such other like, as they
have alreadie studied or hereafter shall studie or vse, aswell
for the solace and delight of our most derely loved Consort the
Queene whensoever they shalbe called, as for the recreacion
of our loving Subiectes, And the said Enterludes or other to
shewe and exercise publiquely to their best commoditie, aswell
in and about our said Citie of Bristoll in such vsuall houses
as themselves shall provide, as other convenient places within
the liberties and freedomes of any other Cittie, vniversitie,
Towne, or Burrowe whatsoever within our Realmes and Dominions,
willing and commaundinge you and every of you, as you tender our
pleasures, not onelie to permitt and suffer them herein without
any your lettes, hinderances, molestacions, and disturbances
during our said pleasure, but alsoe to be aydinge and assistinge
vnto them, yf any wronge be done vnto them or to them offred,
and to allowe them such further curtesies as have bene given
to other of the like qualitie, And alsoe what further grace
and favour you shall show vnto them for our sakes wee shall
take kindly at your handes. Provided alwaies and our will and
pleasure is, all authoritie, power, priviledge, and profitt
whatsoever belonginge and properlie apperteyninge to the Maister
of the Revelles in respect of his office shall remayne and abide
entire and in full force, effect, and vertue, and in as ample
sort as if this our Commission had never byn made. In witnes
whereof &c., witnes our selfe at Westminster the seaventeenth day
of Iuly.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
The company is not traceable in London, but Daniel brought it to
Norwich in 1616–17. By April 1618 he had assigned his privilege
to Martin Slater, John Edmonds and Nathaniel Clay, who obtained,
presumably from the Privy Council, supplementary letters of assistance
in which they are described as ‘her Maiesties servants’, and are
authorized to play as ‘her Maiesties servants of her Royall Chamber
of Bristoll’.[206] From a complaint sent in the following June by
the Mayor of Exeter to Sir Thomas Lake, it emerges that, although
the patent was for children, the company consisted of five youths
and several grown men.[207] Slater and Edmonds still held their
_status_ as Queen’s men (q.v.) in 1619.
vi. WESTMINSTER SCHOOL
_Head Masters_:--John Adams (1540); Alexander Nowell
(1543–53); Nicholas Udall (1555–6); John Passey (1557–8, with
Richard Spencer as usher); John Randall (1563); Thomas Browne
(1564–9); Francis Howlyn (1570–1); Edward Graunte (1572–92);
William Camden (1593–8, Undermaster 1575–93); Richard Ireland
(1599–1610); John Wilson (1610–22).
_Choir Masters_ (?):--William Cornish (1480); John Taylor
(1561–7); John Billingsley (1572); William Elderton (1574).
[_Bibliographical Note._--The best sources of information are: R.
Widmore, _History of Westminster Abbey_ (1751); J. Welch [--C. B.
Phillimore], _Alumni Westmonasterienses_, ed. 2 (1852); _Appendix to
First Report of the Cathedral Commissioners_ (1854); F. H. Forshall,
_Westminster School, Past and Present_ (1884); J. Sargeaunt, _Annals
of Westminster School_ (1898); A. F. Leach, _The Origin of Westminster
School in Journal of Education_, n. s. xxvii (1905), 79. Some valuable
records have been printed by E. J. L. Scott in the _Athenaeum_, and
extracts from others are given in the _Observer_ for 7 Dec. 1919. A. F.
Leach has fixed the dates of Udall’s life in _Encycl. Brit._ s.v.]
There is no trace of any grammar school in the abbey of Westminster
until the fourteenth century. The _Customary_ of 1259–83 (ed. E. M.
Thompson for _Henry Bradshaw Soc._) only contemplates education for the
novices, and in the earliest almoner’s accounts, which begin with 1282,
entries of 1317 ‘in maintaining Nigel at school for the love of God’
(Leach, 80) and 1339–40, ‘pro scholaribus inueniendis ad scolas’ (E. H.
Pearce, _The Monks of Westminster Abbey_, 79), need only refer to the
support of scholars at a University. But from 1354–5 there were almonry
boys (_pueri Elemosinariae_) under the charge of the Sub-Almoner, and
these are traceable up to the dissolution. To them we may assign the
_ludus_ of the Boy Bishop on St. Nicholas’ day, mentions of which have
been noted in 1369, 1388, 1413, and 1540 (_Mediaeval Stage_, i. 360;
Leach, 80). They had a school house near ‘le Millebank’, and from 1367
the Almoner paid a _Magister Puerorum_. From 1387 he is often called
_Magister Scolarum_ and in the fifteenth century _Magister Scolarium_.
From 1510 the boys under the _Magister_ become _pueri grammatici_,
and may be distinct from certain _pueri cantantes_ for whom since
1479–80 the Almoner had paid a separate teacher of singing. The first
of these song-masters was William Cornish, doubtless of the family so
closely connected with the Chapel Royal (q.v.). In 1540 the _pueri
grammatici_ were reorganized as the still existing College of St.
Peter, Westminster, which is therefore generally regarded as owing its
origin to Henry VIII, who on the surrender of the abbey in 1540 turned
it into a college of secular canons, and provided for a school of forty
scholars. This endured in some form through the reactionary reign of
Mary, whose favourite dramatist Nicholas Udall became its Head Master,
although the date of his appointment on 16 December 1555 (A. F. Leach
in _Encycl. Brit._, s.v. Udall) makes it probable that, if he wrote his
_Ralph Roister Doister_ for a school at all, it was for Eton (q.v.)
rather than Westminster. His predecessor Alexander Nowell is said
by Strype to have ‘brought in the reading of Terence for the better
learning the pure Roman style’, and, as the Sub-Almoner paid ‘xvi_d._
for wryting of a play for the chyldren’ as early as 1521 (_Observer_),
the performance of Latin comedies by the boys may have been
pre-Elizabethan. It is provided for in the statutes drafted by Dean
Bill (_c._ 1560) after the restoration of her father’s foundation by
Elizabeth. These statutes also contemplate a good deal of interrelation
between the choir school and the grammar school. They are printed in
the _Report of the Cathedral Commission_ (App. I, 80). The personnel
of the foundation was to include (a) ‘_clerici duodecim_’, of whom
‘_unus sit choristarum doctor_’, (b) ‘_decem pueri symphoniaci sive
choristae_’, presumably in continuation of the former singing boys,
(c) ‘_praeceptores duo ad erudiendam iuventutem_’, (d) ‘_discipuli
grammatici quadraginta_’. The ‘_praeceptores_’ are distinguished later
in the document as ‘_archididascalus_’ and ‘_hypodidascalus_’, and the
former is also called ‘_ludimagister_’. By c. 5 the choristers are to
have a preference in elections to the grammar school. The following
section ‘_De Choristis et Choristarum Magistro_’ forms part of c. 9:
‘Statuimus et ordinamus ut in ecclesia nostra praedicta sint
decem choristae, pueri tenerae aetatis et vocibus sonoris ad
cantandum, et ad artem musicam discendam, et etiam ad musica
instrumenta pulsanda apti, qui choro inserviant, ministrent,
et cantent. Ad hos praeclare instituendos, unus eligatur qui
sit honestae famae, vitae probae, religionis sincerae, artis
musicae peritus, et ad cantandum et musica instrumenta pulsanda
exercitatus, qui pueris in praedictis scientiis et exercitiis
docendis aliisque muniis [? muneribus] in choro obeundis
studiose vacabit. Hunc magistrum choristarum appellari volumus.
Cui muneri doctores et baccalaureos musices aliis praeferendos
censemus. Volumus etiam quoties eum ab ecclesia nostra
abesse contingat, alterum substituat a decano vel eo absente
prodecano approbandum. Prospiciat item puerorum saluti, quorum
et in literis (donec ut in scholam nostram admittantur apti
censebuntur) et in morum modestia et in convictu educationem
et liberalem institutionem illius fidei et industriae
committimus. Quod si negligens et in docendo desidiosus, aut in
salute puerorum et recta eorum educatione minime providus et
circumspectus, et ideo non tolerandus inveniatur, post trinam
admonitionem (si se non emendaverit) ab officio deponatur. Qui
quidem choristarum magister ad officium suum per se fideliter
obeundum iuramento etiam adigetur. Choristae postquam octo
orationis partes memoriter didicerint et scribere mediocriter
noverint, ad scholam nostram ut melius in grammatica proficiant
singulis diebus profestis accedant, ibique duabus minimum horis
maneant, et a praeceptoribus instituantur.’
The following section ‘_De Comoediis et Ludis in Natali Domini
exhibendis_’ comes in c. 10:
‘Quo iuventus maiore cum fructu tempus Natalis Christi terat,
et tum actioni tum pronunciationi decenti melius se assuescat:
statuimus ut singulis annis intra 12^m post festum Natalis
Christi dies [? diem], vel postea arbitrio decani, ludimagister
et praeceptor simul Latine unam, magister choristarum Anglice
alteram comoediam aut tragoediam a discipulis et choristis suis
in aula privatim vel publice agendam, curent. Quod si non
prestiterint singuli quorum negligentia omittuntur decem solidis
mulctentur.’
The statutes appear never to have been confirmed by the Crown, and
their practical adoption was subject to certain exceptions. Thus, it
is stated in the report of the Public Schools Commission in 1864 (i.
159) that there is no reason to believe that the provision giving a
preference to choristers in elections for the grammar school was ever
attended to.
Of plays and the like, however, there are various records. The first
since 1521 is at the Lord Mayor’s Day of 1561, when the Merchant
Taylors’ expenses for their pageant included items ‘to John Tayllour,
master of the Children of the late monastere of Westminster, for his
children that sung and played in the pageant’, and ‘to John Holt
momer in reward for attendance given of the children in the pageant’.
Similar payments were made to Taylor as ‘M^r of the quirysters’ for
the services of the children on the Ironmongers’ pageant of 1566.[208]
In 1562 the choristers of Westminster Abbey performed a goodly play
before the Society of Parish Clerks after their annual dinner.[209]
In 1564–5 comes the first of a series of Court performances, which
received assistance from the Revels office. To this occasion belongs
a memorandum of ‘Thexpenses of twoo playes viz. Heautontimoroumenos
Terentii and Miles Gloriosus Plauti plaied by the children of the
grammer schoole in the colledge of Westminster and before the Quenes
maiestie anno 1564’.[210] The items include, ‘At ye rehersing before
Sir Thomas Benger for pinnes and suger candee vj_d._’, ‘For a lynke
to bring thapparell from the reuells iiij_d._’, ‘At the playing of
Miles Glor: in M^r. Deanes howse for pinnes half a thousand vj_d._’,
‘Geuen to M^r. Holte yeoman of the reuells x_s._’, ‘To M^r. Taylor
his man’, ‘For one Plautus geven to ye Queenes maiestie and fowre
other vnto the nobilitie xj_s._’ It is not quite clear whether the
_Heautontimorumenus_, as well as the _Miles Gloriosus_, was given
before the Queen, but I think not. In 1565–6 Elizabeth was again
present at the play of _Sapientia Solomonis_, and there were payments
‘For drawing the city and temple of Jerusalem and paynting towers’,
‘To a woman that brawght her childe to the stadge and there attended
uppon it’, and for a copy of the play bound ‘in vellum with the Queenes
Ma^{tie} hir armes and sylke ribben strings’, almost certainly that
still extant as _Addl. MS._ 20061 (cf. App. K), which shows that
Elizabeth was accompanied by Cecilia of Sweden.[211] Whether these
plays were at the school or at Court is not quite clear. I should,
on the whole, infer the latter, but no rewards were paid for them
by the Treasurer of the Chamber. John Taylor was, however, paid for
plays by the Children of Westminster during the Shrovetide of 1566–7
and the Christmas of 1567–8; John Billingesley for their _Paris and
Vienna_ on 19 February 1572; and William Elderton for their _Truth,
Faithfulness, and Mercy_ on 1 January 1574. In 1567 also the boys are
recorded (_Observer_) to have played at Putney before Bishop Grindal.
I suppose that Billingesley and Elderton succeeded Taylor as _Magistri
Choristarum_. Taylor himself is probably the same who on 8 September
1557 was Master of the singing children at the hospital of St. Mary
Woolnoth. Elderton is presumably the same who brought the Eton boys
to Court in 1573. Whether he is also the bibulous balladist of the
pamphleteers (cf. ch. xv) is more doubtful. The absence of a payment
for _Miles Gloriosus_ may suggest that this was given by the grammar
school who, like the Inns of Court, did not expect a reward, and that
the English plays were given by the choristers, who were on the same
footing as the choristers of Paul’s. I am not sure, however, that the
wording of the statutes quite implies such a sharp distinction between
the two sets of boys, and it will be noticed that Taylor, or his man,
was in some way concerned with the Latin play. Very possibly grammar
boys and choristers acted together. With 1574 the Court performances
end, but expenses of plays are traceable in the college accounts in
1604–5, 1605–6, 1606–7, and 1609–10, and up to about 1640, when they
stop for sixty-four years.[212]
vii. ETON COLLEGE
_Head Masters_:--William Malim (c. 1555–73); William Smyth (c.
1563); Reuben Sherwood (c. 1571); Thomas Ridley (1579); John
Hammond (1583); Richard Langley (1594); Richard Wright (1611);
Matthew Bust (1611–30).
[_Bibliographical Note._--The best sources of information are J.
Heywood and T. Wright, _Ancient Laws of King’s College and Eton
College_ (1850); _Report of Public Schools Commission_ (1864);
W. L. Collins, _Etoniana_ 1865); H. Maxwell-Lyte, _History of
Eton_ (1875, 4th ed. 1911); W. Sterry, _Annals of Eton College_
(1898).]
The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton beside Windsor was founded
by Henry VI in 1441. The Statutes of 1444 provide for a Boy Bishop
(_Mediaeval Stage_, i. 365), but the custom was discontinued before
1559–61, when William Malim prepared a _Consuetudinarium_ for a Royal
Commission appointed to visit the college. By this time, however,
Christmas plays by the boys had become the practice, and Malim
writes:[213]
‘Circiter festum D. Andreae [Nov. 30] ludimagister eligere
solet pro suo arbitrio scaenicas fabulas optimas et quam
accommodatissimas, quas pueri feriis natalitiis subsequentibus
non sine ludorum elegantia, populo spectante, publice aliquando
peragant. Histrionum levis ars est, ad actionem tamen oratorum,
et gestum motumque corporis decentem tantopere facit, ut nihil
magis. Interdum etiam exhibet Anglico sermone contextas fabulas,
quae habeant acumen et leporem.’
There are ‘numerous’ entries of expenditure on these plays in the
Audit Books from 1525–6 to 1572–3, of which a few only have been
printed.[214] There is also an inventory, apparently undated, of
articles in ‘M^r. Scholemasters chamber’, which includes ‘a great
cheste bound about with yron to keepe the players coats in’, and a list
of the apparel, beards, and properties. The Eton boys played under
Udall before Cromwell in 1538 (_Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 196, 451), and
it is possible that _Ralph Roister Doister_ may belong to his Eton
mastership.[215] The only Court performance by Eton boys on record was
one on 6 January 1573, for which the payee was Elderton, presumably
the William Elderton who was payee for the Westminster boys in the
following year.
viii. MERCHANT TAYLORS SCHOOL
_Head Masters_:--Richard Mulcaster (1561–86); Henry Wilkinson
(1586–92); Edmund Smith (1592–9); William Hayne (1599–1625).
The London school of the Merchant Taylors was founded in 1561, and
its first master was Richard Mulcaster, or Moncaster, as his name
is spelt in some of the earlier records.[216] He was a student of
King’s, Cambridge and Christ Church, Oxford, who had been teaching
in London since 1559. The first performances by his boys, of which
record remains, were in 1572–3. In that and the following year they
played before the Merchant Taylors Company at the Common Hall.[217]
Unfortunately the audience, who had paid for their seats, and very
likely Mulcaster himself, paid more attention to the plays than to the
dignitaries in whose hall they were given. The plays were therefore
stopped, and the following pleasing example of civic pomposity inserted
in the archives of the Company on 16 March 1574:[218]
‘Whereas at our comon playes and suche lyke exercises whiche
be comonly exposed to be seene for money, everye lewd persone
thinketh himself (for his penny) worthye of the chiefe and most
comodious place withoute respecte of any other either for age
or estimacion in the comon weale, whiche bringeth the youthe to
such an impudente famyliaritie with theire betters that often
tymes greite contempte of maisters, parents, and magistrats
foloweth thereof, as experience of late in this our comon hall
hath sufficyently declared, where by reasone of the tumultuous
disordered persones repayringe hither to see suche playes as
by our schollers were here lately played, the Maisters of this
Worshipful Companie and their deare ffrends could not have
entertaynmente and convenyente place as they ought to have had,
by no provision beinge made, notwithstandinge the spoyle of this
howse, the charges of this Mystery, and theire juste authoritie
which did reasonably require the contrary. Therefore and ffor
the causes ffirst above saide, yt is ordeyned and decreed by
the authoritie of this presente Courte, with the assente and
consente of all the worshipfull persones aforesaide, that
henceforthe theire shall be no more plays suffered to be played
in this our Comon Hall, any use or custome heretofore to the
contrary in anywise notwithstandinge.’
Mulcaster, however, found more tolerant critics than his own employers.
His first appearance at Court was on 3 February 1573.[219] On 2
February 1574 he presented _Timoclia at the Siege of Thebes_ and
on 23 February _Percius and Anthomiris_; at Shrovetide 1575 and on
6 March 1576 plays unnamed; and on 12 February 1583 _Ariodante and
Geneuora_. A reminiscence of these performances has been left us by the
seventeenth-century judge, Sir James Whitelocke, who entered the school
in 1575 and left for St. John’s, Oxford, in 1588:
‘I was brought up at school under M^r Mulcaster, in the famous
school of the Merchantaylors in London.... Yeerly he presented
sum playes to the court, in which his scholers wear only actors,
and I on among them, and by that meanes taughte them good
behaviour and audacitye.’[220]
In 1586 Mulcaster quarrelled with the Merchant Taylors and resigned.
In 1596 he became High Master of St. Paul’s grammar school, but it is
only conjecture that his influence counted for anything in the revival
of plays by the choir master, Edward Pearce. Regular plays at Merchant
Taylors probably ceased on his withdrawal. When Sir Robert Lee, one
of the Company, became Lord Mayor in 1602, a payment was made to Mr.
Haines, the Schoolmaster, for a wagon and the apparel of ten scholars,
who represented Apollo and the Muses in Cheapside. But when James came
to dine at the hall on 16 July 1607, it was thought best to apply for
help to Heminges of the King’s men and Nathaniel Giles of the Chapel,
on the ground that the Schoolmaster and children were not familiar with
such entertainments.[221]
ix. THE EARL OF LEICESTER’S BOYS
Vide ch. xiii (Earl of Leicester’s men).
x. THE EARL OF OXFORD’S BOYS
Vide ch. xiii (Earl of Oxford’s men).
xi. MR. STANLEY’S BOYS
Vide ch. xiii (Earl of Derby’s men).
XIII
THE ADULT COMPANIES
i. The Court Interluders.
ii. The Earl of Leicester’s men.
iii. Lord Rich’s men.
iv. Lord Abergavenny’s men.
v. The Earl of Sussex’s men.
vi. Sir Robert Lane’s men.
vii. The Earl of Lincoln’s (Lord Clinton’s) men.
viii. The Earl of Warwick’s men.
ix. The Earl of Oxford’s men.
x. The Earl of Essex’s men.
xi. Lord Vaux’s men.
xii. Lord Berkeley’s men.
xiii. Queen Elizabeth’s men.
xiv. The Earl of Arundel’s men.
xv. The Earl of Hertford’s men.
xvi. Mr. Evelyn’s men.
xvii. The Earl of Derby’s (Lord Strange’s) men.
xviii. The Earl of Pembroke’s men.
xix. The Lord Admiral’s (Lord Howard’s, Earl of Nottingham’s),
Prince Henry’s, and Elector Palatine’s men.
xx. The Lord Chamberlain’s (Lord Hunsdon’s) and King’s men.
xxi. The Earl of Worcester’s and Queen Anne’s men.
xxii. The Duke of Lennox’s men.
xxiii. The Duke of York’s (Prince Charles’s) men.
xxiv. The Lady Elizabeth’s men.
i. THE COURT INTERLUDERS
Henry VII (22 Aug. 1485--21 Apr. 1509); Henry VIII (22 Apr.
1509--28 Jan. 1547); Edward VI (28 Jan. 1547--6 July 1553); Mary
(19 July 1553--24 July 1554); Philip and Mary (25 July 1554--17
Nov. 1558); Elizabeth (17 Nov. 1558--24 Mar. 1603).
The _doyen_ of the Court companies, when Elizabeth came to the throne,
was the royal company of Players of Interludes. This had already half a
century of history behind it. Its beginnings are probably traceable in
the reign of Henry VII. Richard III had entertained a company, as Duke
of Gloucester, in 1482; but nothing is known of it during his short
reign from 1583 to 1585.[222] Nor is a royal company discoverable
amongst the earlier records of Henry VII himself.[223] But from 1493
onwards Exchequer documents testify to the continuous existence of
a body of men under the style of _Lusores Regis_, or in the vulgar
tongue, Players of the King’s Interludes. In 1494 there were four of
them, John English, Edward May, Richard Gibson, and John Hammond, and
each had an annual fee, payable out of the Exchequer, of £3 6_s._
8_d._ In 1503 there were five, William Rutter and John Scott taking
the place of Hammond, but the total Exchequer payment to the company
of £13 6_s._ 8_d._ a year, seems to have remained unaltered to the
end of the reign.[224] They received, however, additional sums from
time to time, as ‘rewards’ for performances, which were charged to the
separate account of the Chamber.[225] In 1503, under the leadership of
John English, they attended the Princess Margaret to Edinburgh, for
her wedding with James IV of Scotland. Here they ‘did their devoir’,
both on the day of the wedding, 8 August, and on the following days.
On 11 August they played after supper, and on 13 August they played ‘a
Moralite’ after dinner.[226]
The royal company continued under Henry VIII, who appears to have
increased its numbers, and doubled the charge upon the Exchequer.[227]
The financial records are, however, a little complicated. The
Exchequer officials presumably continued to regard the establishment
as consisting of four members drawing fees of ten instead of five
marks each.[228] But the individual members were in fact paid on
different scales. John English, the leader, got £6 13_s._ 4_d._
Others got £3 6_s._ 8_d._ as before, and others again only two-thirds
of this amount, £2 4_s._ 5_d._ By this arrangement, it was possible
to maintain an actual establishment of from eight to ten within the
limits of the Exchequer allowance. It seems also to have been found
convenient to transfer the responsibility for some at least of the
payments from the Exchequer to the Treasurer of the Chamber.[229]
The same distinction between players of different grades is also
reflected in the annual rewards paid by the Treasurer of the Chamber
for Christmas performances. These were increased in amount, and for a
time the general reward to the players as a whole was supplemented by
an additional sum to the ‘old’ players. Ultimately an amalgamated sum
of £6 13_s._ 4_d._ became the customary reward for the company.[230]
Details of a performance of Henry Medwall’s _Finding of Truth_ on 6
January 1514 are related by Collier from a document which cannot be
regarded as free from suspicion.[231] The name of Richard Gibson now
disappears from the notices of the company. He may, likely enough,
have given up playing on his appointment to be Porter and Yeoman
Tailor of the Great Wardrobe.[232] But in his capacity of officer in
charge of the Revels he must have maintained close relations with his
former fellows, and his Account for 1510 records the delivery to John
English of a ‘red satin ladies garment, powdered, with tassels of
silver of Kolen’.[233] English remained at the head of the company,
and is traceable in the _Chamber Accounts_ up to 1531. John Scott
died in 1528–9, in singular circumstances which are detailed by a
contemporary chronicler.[234] Other names which come in succession
before us are those of Richard Hole, George Maylor, George Birch, John
Roll or Roo (_d._ 1539), Thomas Sudbury or Sudborough (_d._ 1546),
Robert Hinstock, Richard Parrowe, John Slye, and John Young.[235]
Some interesting information is disclosed by two lawsuits, in both of
which George Maylor figured. The first of these was a dispute between
John Rastell and Henry Walton as to the dilapidations of certain
playing garments, during which George Mayler, merchant tailor, aged
40, and George Birch, coriar, aged 32, were called to give evidence
as to the value of the garments and their use for a royal banquet at
Greenwich in 1527.[236] In the second Mayler was himself a party. He
is here described as a glazier, and an agreement of November 1528 is
recited between him and one Thomas Arthur, tailor, whom he took as an
apprentice for a year, promising to teach him to play and to obtain
him admission into the King’s company and the right to the privileges
(_libertatem_) thereof and ‘the Kinges bage’. According to Mayler, he
found Arthur meat and drink and 4_d._ a day, but after seven weeks
Arthur left him, beguiling away three of his covenant servants upon a
playing tour in the provinces, out of which they made a profit of £30.
He was, adds Mayler, ‘right harde and dull too taike any lernynge,
whereby he was nothinge meate or apte too bee in service with the
Kinges grace too maike any plaiez or interludes before his highnes’.
Arthur, on the other hand, alleged that it was Mayler who had broken
the indentures, and sued him before the sheriffs of London for £26
damages. Owing to the accident of Mayler’s being in Ludgate prison
and unable to defend himself, the jury found against him for £4, and
he appealed to Chancery to remove the action to that court.[237] The
King’s men, even apart from their other occupations as Household
servants or tradesmen, were not wholly dependent on the royal bounty.
The reward at Christmas was supplemented by minor gifts from the
Princess Mary, or from lords and ladies of the Court, such as the
Duke of Rutland and the Countess of Devon;[238] and the glamour of
the King’s badge doubtless added to the liberality of the company’s
reception in many a monastery, country mansion, and town hall. They are
found during the reign at the priories of Thetford, Dunmow (1531–2),
and Durham (1532–3), at the house of the Lestranges at Hunstanton (23
October 1530), at New Romney (1526–7), Shrewsbury (1527, 1533, 1540),
Leicester (1531), Norwich (1533), Bristol (1535, 1536, 1537, 1541),
Cambridge (1537–8), Beverley (1540–1), and Maldon (1546–7).[239]
A private performance by the King’s men forms an episode in the
Elizabethan play of _Sir Thomas More_, although the Mason there named
cannot be traced amongst their number.
No important change in the status of the company is to be observed
under Edward VI. Some of the existing members seem to have retired,
and four new ones, Richard Coke, John Birch, Henry Heryot, and John
Smyth, were appointed.[240] The first three of these, together with
two others, Richard Skinner and Thomas Southey, received a warrant to
the Master of the Great Wardrobe on 15 February 1548, for the usual
livery assigned to yeomen officers of the household, which consisted
of three yards of red cloth, with an allowance of 3_s._ 4_d._ for the
embroidering thereon of the royal initials.[241] The fees of these
five, and of George Birch and Robert Hinstock, who were survivors
from Henry VIII’s time, are traceable, as well as the annual reward
of £6 13_s._ 4_d._, in the Chamber Accounts.[242] Each now got £3
6_s._ 8_d._ a year, under a warrant of 24 December 1548. The same
names appear in a list of 30 September 1552, with the exception of
Robert Hinstock, whose place had probably been taken by John Browne,
appointed as from the previous Christmas by a warrant of 9 June 1552,
which introduced the innovation of granting him a livery allowance of
£1 3_s._ 4_d._ a year instead of the actual livery.[243] If we suppose
that John Smith and John Young continued to be borne on the Exchequer
pay-roll, the total number of eight interlude-players provided for in
fee-lists of Edward’s reign is made up.[244] John Smith is probably to
be identified with the ‘disard’ or jester of that name who took part
in George Ferrers’s Christmas gambols of 1552–3.[245] John Young may
be the ‘right worshipful esquire John Yung’ to whom William Baldwin
dedicated his _Beware the Cat_ in 1553. He certainly survived into
Elizabeth’s reign and was still drawing an annuity of £3 6_s._ 8_d._
as ‘agitator comediarum’ in 1569–70.[246] I have not noticed any
provincial performances by the company during 1547–53, except at
Maldon in 1549–50, but they are referred to more than once in the
archives of the Revels. The Revels Office made them an oven and weapons
of wood at Shrovetide 1548 and a seven-headed dragon at Shrovetide
1549. At Christmas 1551–2 the Privy Council gave them a warrant to
borrow ‘apparell and other fornyture’ from the Master, and Lord Darcy
gave John Birch and John Browne another for garments to serve in an
interlude before the King on 6 January 1552.[247] William Baldwin, in
his _Beware the Cat_, relates that during the Christmas of 1552–3,
they were learning ‘a play of Esop’s Crowe, wherin the moste part of
the actors were birds’.[248] Their only other play of which the name is
known is that of _Self Love_, for which Sir Thomas Chaloner gave them
20s. on a Shrove Monday in 1551–3.[249]
The company no doubt took their share in Court revels during the
earlier part of Mary’s reign. But when the eclipse of gaiety came upon
her later years they travelled. They are noted as the King and Queen’s
men in 1555–6 at Ipswich and Gloucester, in 1557 at Bristol, and in
1558 at Barnstaple, and as the Queen’s men in 1555 at Leicester, in
1555–6 at Beverley, in 1556–7 at Beverley, Oxford, Norwich and Exeter,
and in 1557–8 at Beverley, Leicester, Maldon, Dover, Lyme Regis, and
Barnstaple. The nominal establishment continued to be eight.[250] But
Heriot disappears after 1552 and John Birch, Coke, and Southey after
1556, and their vacancies do not seem to have been filled.[251]
Under Elizabeth the interlude players were certainly a moribund folk.
They were reappointed ‘during pleasure’ under a warrant of 25 December
1559, and apparently Edmund Strowdewike and William Reading took the
place of George Birch and Skinner.[252] They drew their fees of £3
6_s._ 8_d._ and livery allowances of £1 3_s._ 4_d._ from the Treasurer
of the Chamber. The eight posts figure on the fee-lists long after
there were no holders left.[253] The last ‘reward’ to the company, not
improbably for the anti-papal farce of 6 January 1559, is to be found
in the Chamber Account for 1558–60. It may be inferred that they never
again played at Court. They were allowed to dwindle away. Browne and
Reading died in 1563, Strowdewike on 3 June 1568, and Smith survived
in solitary dignity until 1580.[254] Up to about 1573 he kept up some
sort of provincial organization, doubtless with the aid of unofficial
associates, and the Queen’s players are therefore traceable in many
municipal Account-books. In October 1559 they were at Bristol and
before Christmas at Leicester, in 1559–60 at Gloucester, in 1560–1 at
Barnstaple, in 1561 at Faversham,[255] in October–December 1561 at
Leicester, in 1561–2 at Gloucester, Maldon, and Beverley, in July 1562
at Grimsthorpe, and on 4 October at Ipswich, in August 1563 at Bristol,
in 1563–4 at Maldon, on 12 and 20 March 1564 at Ipswich again, and on
2 August at Leicester, in 1564–5 at Abingdon, Maldon, and Gloucester,
in 1565–6 at Maldon, Oxford, and Shrewsbury, in July 1566 at Bristol,
before 29 September at Leicester, and on 9 October at Ipswich, in July
1567 at Bristol, in 1567–8 at Oxford and Gloucester, in 1568–9 at
Abingdon, Ipswich, and Stratford-upon-Avon, in August 1569 at Bristol,
and on 7 December at Oxford, in 1569–70 at Gloucester and Maldon,
before 29 September 1570 at Leicester, in 1570–1 at Winchester, and
during October-December 1571 at Leicester, in 1571–2 at Oxford, on 23
May 1572 at Nottingham, and on 20 November at Maldon, in 1572–3 at
Ipswich, on 7 January 1573 at Beverley, and in 1573 at Winchester. This
list is not exhaustive.[256] A reward to ‘the Queens Majesty’s men’
in the Doncaster accounts for 1575 can hardly be assumed to refer to
actors.
ii. THE EARL OF LEICESTER’S MEN
Robert Dudley; 5th s. of John, 1st Duke of Northumberland,
_nat._ 24 June 1532 or 1533; m. (1) Amy, d. of Sir John
Robsart, 4 June 1550, (2) Douglas Lady Sheffield, d. of William,
1st Lord Howard of Effingham, May 1573, (3) Lettice Countess of
Essex, d. of Sir Francis Knollys, 1578; Master of the Horse, 11
Jan. 1559; High Steward of Cambridge, 1562; Earl of Leicester,
29 Sept. 1564; Chancellor of Oxford, 31 Dec. 1564; Lord Steward,
1584–8; Absolute Governor of United Provinces, 25 Jan. 1586–12
Apr. 1588; _ob._ 4 Sept. 1588.
The earliest mention of Lord Robert Dudley’s players is in a letter
which he wrote in June 1559 to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord President
of the North, as Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, asking licence for them
to perform in that county, in accordance with the proclamation of 16
May 1559.[257] The terms of the letter suggest that the company may
already have played in London, but it is probable, as nothing is said
of a hearing by the Queen, that they had not been at Court. They were
there at each Christmas from 1560–1 to 1562–3, and then not for a
decade. They were in 1558–9 at Norwich, in 1559–60 at Oxford, Saffron
Walden, and Plymouth, in July 1560 at Bristol, in October 1561 at
Grimsthorpe, in 1561–2 at Oxford, Maldon, and Ipswich, in September
1562 at Bristol, where they are called ‘Lord Dudley’s’ players, on 12
November 1563 at Leicester, and on 17 November at Ipswich, in 1563–4 at
Maldon, on 2 January 1564 at Ipswich, and on 1 July at Leicester. They
are also found, as the Earl of Leicester’s, in 1564–5 at Maldon, on 6
April 1565 at York, on 11 August 1569 at Nottingham, in January 1570 at
Bristol, on 4 May 1570 at Oxford, and in October-December at Leicester,
in 1570–1 at Abingdon, Barnstaple, and Gloucester, on 9 August 1571
at Saffron Walden,[258] in October–December at Leicester, in the
same year at Beverley, on 15 July 1572 at Ipswich, and on 20 August
at Nottingham. The gap in my records between 1565 and 1569 is bridged
in the fuller list covering other towns given by Mr. Murray.[259]
Information as to the company in 1572 is derived from the signatures to
a letter asking for appointment by Leicester, not merely as liveried
retainers but as household servants, in order to meet the terms of the
proclamation of 3 January in that year.[260]
To the right honorable Earle of Lecester, their good lord and
master.
Maye yt please your honour to understande that forasmuche as
there is a certayne Procalmation out for the revivinge of a
Statute as touchinge retayners, as youre Lordshippe knoweth
better than we can enforme you thereof: We therfore, your humble
Servaunts and daylye Oratours your players, for avoydinge all
inconvenients that maye growe by reason of the saide Statute,
are bold to trouble your Lordshippe with this our Suite, humblie
desiringe your honor that (as you have bene alwayes our good
Lord and Master) you will now vouchsaffe to reteyne us at this
present as your houshold Servaunts and daylie wayters, not
that we meane to crave any further stipend or benefite at your
Lordshippes hands but our lyveries as we have had, and also your
honors License to certifye that we are your houshold Servaunts
when we shall have occasion to travayle amongst our frendes as
we do usuallye once a yere, and as other noble-mens Players do
and have done in tyme past, Wherebie we maye enjoye our facultie
in your Lordshippes name as we have done hertofore. Thus beyinge
bound and readie to be alwayes at your Lordshippes commandmente
we committ your honor to the tuition of the Almightie.
Long may your Lordshippe live in peace,
A pere of noblest peres:
In helth welth and prosperitie
Redoubling Nestor’s yeres.
Your Lordshippes Servaunts most bounden
Iames Burbage.
Iohn Perkinne.
Iohn Laneham.
William Iohnson.
Roberte Wilson.
Thomas Clarke.
Several of these men were to achieve distinction in their ‘quality’;
of none of them is there any earlier record, unless John Perkin is to
be identified with the Parkins who had been in 1552–3 one of the train
of the Lord of Misrule.[261] By 6 December 1571 the company were in
London.[262] Three years later they obtained a very singular favour in
the patent of 10 May 1574, the general bearings of which have already
been discussed.[263]
[Sidenote: pro Iacobo Burbage & aliis de licencia speciali]
Elizabeth by the grace of God quene of England, &c. To all
Iustices, Mayors, Sheriffes, Baylyffes, head Constables, vnder
Constables, and all other our officers and mynisters gretinge.
Knowe ye that we of oure especiall grace, certen knowledge,
and mere mocion haue licenced and auctorised, and by these
presentes do licence and auctorise, oure lovinge Subiectes,
Iames Burbage, Iohn Perkyn, Iohn Lanham, William Iohnson, and
Roberte Wilson, seruauntes to oure trustie and welbeloued Cosen
and Counseyllor the Earle of Leycester, to vse, exercise, and
occupie the arte and facultye of playenge Commedies, Tragedies,
Enterludes, stage playes, and such other like as they haue
alredie vsed and studied, or hereafter shall vse and studie,
aswell for the recreacion of oure loving subiectes, as for oure
solace and pleasure when we shall thincke good to see them,
as also to vse and occupie all such Instrumentes as they haue
alredie practised, or hereafter shall practise, for and during
our pleasure. And the said Commedies, Tragedies, Enterludes,
and stage playes, to gether with their musicke, to shewe,
publishe, exercise, and occupie to their best commoditie during
all the terme aforesaide, aswell within oure Citie of London
and liberties of the same, as also within the liberties and
fredomes of anye oure Cities, townes, Bouroughes &c. whatsoeuer
as without the same, thoroughte oure Realme of England.
Willynge and commaundinge yow and everie of yowe, as ye tender
our pleasure, to permytte and suffer them herein withoute anye
yowre lettes, hynderaunce, or molestacion duringe the terme
aforesaid, anye acte, statute, proclamacion, or commaundement
heretofore made, or hereafter to be made, to the contrarie
notwithstandinge. Prouyded that the said Commedies, Tragedies,
enterludes, and stage playes be by the master of oure Revells
for the tyme beynge before sene & allowed, and that the same be
not published or shewen in the tyme of common prayer, or in the
tyme of greate and common plague in oure said Citye of London.
In wytnes whereof &c. wytnes oure selfe at Westminster the
x^{th} daye of Maye.
per breve de priuato sigillo
The names in this patent only differ from those in the letter of 1572
by the omission of Thomas Clarke. By the time of its issue Leicester’s
men were again a Court company. They had made their reappearance
at the Christmas of 1572–3 with three plays, all given before the
end of December. They continued to appear in every subsequent year
until the formation of the Queen’s men in 1583. The building of the
Theatre by James Burbadge in 1576 gave them a valuable head-quarters
in London[264]; but they are still found from time to time about the
provinces. Their detailed adventures are as follows. In 1572–3 they
were at Stratford-on-Avon, on 8 August 1573 at Beverley, on 1 September
at Nottingham, and in October at Bristol. On 26 December they played
_Predor and Lucia_ at Court, on 28 December _Mamillia_, and on 21
February 1574 _Philemon and Philecia_. In 1573–4 they were at Oxford
and Leicester, on 13 June 1574 at Maldon, on 3 December at Canterbury.
In 1574 they were also at Doncaster, where they played in the church.
For the Court they rehearsed _Panecia_, and this was probably either
their play of 26 December in which ‘my Lord of Lesters boyes’ appeared,
or that of 1 January 1575, in which there were chimney-sweepers. From
9 to 27 July 1575 Elizabeth paid her historic visit to Kenilworth, and
there is no proof, but much probability, that the company were called
upon to take their part in her entertainment. Its chronicler, Robert
Laneham, may well have been a kinsman of the player. I have not come
across them elsewhere this year, except at Southampton. They played
at Court on 28 December 1575 and 4 March 1576, and are described in
the account for their payment as ‘Burbag and his company’. A record
of them at Ipswich in 1575–6 as ‘my Lorde Robertes’ men is probably
misdated. On 30 December 1576 they acted _The Collier_ at Court. In
1576–7 they were at Stratford-on-Avon, in September 1577 at Newcastle,
and between 13 and 19 October at Bristol, where they gave _Myngo_.[265]
In 1577–8 they were also at Bath. They were at Court on 26 December
1577 and were to have performed again on 11 February 1578, but were
displaced for Lady Essex’s men. They may have been at Wanstead in May
1578 when Leicester entertained Elizabeth with Sidney’s _The May Lady_.
On 1 September they were at Maldon, on 9 September at Ipswich, and on
3 November at Lord North’s at Kirtling. They played _A Greek Maid_
at Court on 4 January 1579.[266] Their play on 28 December 1579 fell
through because Elizabeth could not be present, but they played on 6
January 1580. In 1579–80 they were at Ipswich and Durham, and from 15
to 17 May 1580 at Kirtling. Vice-Chancellor Hatcher’s letter of 21
January 1580 to Burghley about Oxford’s men (_vide infra_) shows that
Leicester’s had then recently been refused leave to play at Cambridge.
They played _Delight_ at Court on 26 December and appeared again on 7
February 1581. That Wilson was still a member of the company in 1581 is
shown by the reference to him in the curious Latin letter written by
one of Lord Shrewsbury’s players on 25 April of that year.[267] In the
following winter they did not come to Court, but on 10 February 1583
they returned with _Telomo_.[268]
The best of Leicester’s men, including Laneham, Wilson, and Johnson,
appear to have joined the Queen’s company on its formation in
March 1583. Probably the Queen’s also took over the Theatre. James
Burbadge himself may have given up acting. Nothing more is heard of
Leicester’s men until 1584–5, when players under his name visited
Coventry, Leicester, Gloucester, and Norwich. They were at Dover in
June 1585, and at Bath as late as August. These may have been either
the relics of the old company, or a new one formed to attend the Earl
in his expedition to aid the States-General in the Low Countries.
He was appointed to the command of the English forces on 28 August,
and reached Flushing on 10 December. The pageants in his honour
at Utrecht, Leyden, and the Hague were remarkable. Stowe records
festivities at Utrecht on St. George’s Day, 23 April 1586. These
included an after-dinner show of ‘dauncing, vauting, and tumbling, with
the forces of Hercules, which gave great delight to the strangers, for
they had not seene it before’.[269] It is a reasonable inference that
the performers in _The Forces of Hercules_ were English.[270] And on 24
March 1586 Sir Philip Sidney, writing to Walsingham from Utrecht, says:
‘I wrote to yow a letter by Will, my lord of Lester’s jesting
plaier, enclosed in a letter to my wife, and I never had answer
thereof ... I since find that the knave deliverd the letters to
my ladi of Lester.’[271]
That the ‘jesting plaier’ was William Shakespeare is on the whole less
likely than that he was the famous comic actor, William Kempe; and this
theory is confirmed by a mention in an earlier letter of 12 November
1585 from Thomas Doyley at Calais to Leicester himself of ‘Mr. Kemp,
called Don Gulihelmo’, as amongst those remaining at Dunkirk.[272]
Leicester returned to England in November 1586. ‘Wilhelm Kempe,
instrumentist’ and his lad ‘Daniell Jonns’ were at the Danish Court at
Helsingör in August and September of the same year; and so, from 17
July to 18 September, were five ‘instrumentister och springere’ whose
names may evidently be anglicized as Thomas Stevens, George Bryan,
Thomas King, Thomas Pope, and Robert Percy (cf. ch. xiv). Some or all
of these men are evidently the company of English comedians referred to
by Thomas Heywood as commended by the Earl of Leicester to Frederick II
of Denmark. Stevens and his fellows, but not apparently Kempe, went on
to Dresden. Some of them ultimately became Lord Strange’s men. But it
seems to me very doubtful whether, as is usually suggested, they passed
direct into his service from that of Leicester.[273] They did not leave
Dresden until 17 July 1587. But Leicester’s were at Exeter on 23 March
1586. They played at Court on 27 December 1586, and were in London
about 25 January 1587. They were at Abingdon, Bath, Lathom, Coventry,
Leicester, Oxford, Stratford-on-Avon, Dover, Canterbury, Marlborough,
Southampton, Exeter, Gloucester, and Norwich during 1586–7. Kempe may,
of course, have been with them on these occasions; but if Stevens and
the rest passed as Leicester’s in the Low Countries, it is likely that
they ceased to do so when they went to Denmark.
Finally, Leicester’s men were at Coventry, Reading, Bath, Maidstone,
Dover, Plymouth, Gloucester, York, Saffron Walden, and probably Exeter
in 1587–8.[274] On 4 September they were at Norwich, and here William
Stonage, a cobbler, was committed to prison at their suit, ‘for lewd
words uttered against the ragged staff’.[275] As late as 14 September
they did not yet know that the lord in whose name they wore this badge
was dead, for on that day, unless the records are again in error, they
were still playing at Ipswich.[276]
iii. LORD RICH’S MEN
Richard Rich; _nat._ _c._ 1496; cr. 1st Baron Rich, 26 Feb.
1548; Lord Chancellor, 23 Oct. 1548–21 Dec. 1551; m. Elizabeth
Jenks; _ob._ 12 June 1567.
Robert, s. of 1st Baron; _nat._ _c._ 1537; succ. as 2nd Baron,
1567; _ob._ 1581.
The company was at Ipswich on 3 May 1564, Saffron Walden in 1563–4,
Maldon in 1564–5, York on 6 April 1565, and Ipswich on 31 July 1567.
Then it secured a footing in London, and appeared at Court during the
Christmas of 1567–8, on 26 December 1568, and on 5 February 1570.
On 2 February 1570 it played at the Lincoln’s Inn Candlemas ‘Post
Revels’.[277] It was also at Canterbury in 1569, Saffron Walden in
1569–70, and Maldon in 1570. Presumably it was a later company to which
Gabriel Harvey referred in 1579 (cf. p. 4), and the death of Lord
Rich in 1581 might naturally have led to its disbandment or change of
service.
iv. LORD ABERGAVENNY’S MEN
Henry Neville, s. of George, 3rd Lord Abergavenny; succ. as 4th
Lord, 1535; _ob._ 1586.
The only London record of this company is a civic licence for it of 29
January 1572 (App. D, No. xxi), but it is found in provincial records
at Dover, Canterbury, Leicester, Bristol, and Faversham in 1571 and
1572, and at Ludlow in 1575–6.
v. THE EARL OF SUSSEX’S MEN
Thomas Radcliffe, s. of Henry, 2nd Earl; _nat._ _c._ 1526; m.
(1) Elizabeth, d. of Thomas Earl of Southampton, (2) Frances, d.
of Sir William Sidney, 26 Apr. 1555; succ. as 3rd Earl, 17 Feb.
1557; Lord Chamberlain, 13 July 1572; _ob._ 9 June 1583.
Henry Radcliffe, s. of Henry, 2nd Earl; _nat._ _c._ 1530; m.
Honora, d. of Anthony Pound, before 24 Feb. 1561; succ. as 4th
Earl, 1583; _ob._ 14 Dec. 1593.
Robert Radcliffe, s. of 4th Earl; _nat._ _c._ 1569; m. (1)
Bridget, d. of Sir Charles Morison, who _ob._ Dec. 1623, (2)
Frances Shute; succ. as 5th Earl, 1593; acting Earl Marshal,
1597, 1601; _ob._ 22 Sept. 1629.
The third Earl of Sussex had a company, which proved one of the most
long-lived of the theatrical organizations of Elizabeth’s time and held
together, now in London and now in the provinces, under no less than
three earls. It first makes its appearance at Nottingham on 16 March
1569, at Maldon in 1570, on 28 January 1571, and on 20 August 1572, at
Ipswich in 1571–2, at Canterbury and Dover in 1569 and 1570, and in
1569–70 at Bristol, Gloucester, and Ludlow, where it was of six men.
Sussex became Chamberlain in July 1572 and in the following winter
his company came to the Court, whose Christmases it helped to enliven
pretty regularly until the death of its first patron in 1583. As I have
shown elsewhere (ch. vi), Sussex seems to have had occasional deputies
in Lord Howard of Effingham and Lord Hunsdon during his term of office,
but it is probably justifiable to assume that, when the Chamberlain’s
men are referred to at any time during 1572–83, Sussex’s men are meant,
and in 1577 and 1581 there is clear evidence that the names are used
synonymously. Oddly enough, Howard’s men are also referred to in one
record of 1577 (cf. p. 134) as the Chamberlain’s, but that is probably
a slip. The detailed history of the company during this period is as
follows. In 1572–3 they were at Bath, in July 1573 at Leicester, on 14
September at Nottingham, in 1573–4 at Coventry, in 1574, on some date
before 29 September, at Leicester again, on 13 July at Maldon, and
in September at Wollaton (Francis Willoughby’s). They rehearsed two
Court plays for Christmas on 14 December, _Phedrastus_ and _Phigon and
Lucia_, but in the end did not give a performance. In 1574–5 they were
at Gloucester, in 1575 at Maldon, and before 29 September at Leicester.
They played at Court on 2 February 1576. Their payee was John Adams,
the only actor whose name is recorded in connexion with the company. In
1575–6 they were at Ipswich, on 27 July 1576 at Cambridge, and between
29 July and 5 August at Bristol, where they played _The Red Knight_. On
2 February 1577 they played _The Cynocephali_ at Court. In 1576–7 they
were at Coventry and Bath, on 30 May 1577 at Ipswich, and on 31 August
at Nottingham. On 2 February 1578 they played at Court. In 1577–8 they
were at Bath, on 15 July 1578 at Maldon, in the same year at Bristol,
and in 1578–9 at Bath. Thereafter their activities seem to have been
mainly confined to London. They were named by the Privy Council to the
Lord Mayor among the Court companies for the Christmas of 1578–9 (App.
D, No. xl), and played _The Cruelty of a Stepmother_ on 28 December
1578, _The Rape of the Second Helen_ on 6 January, and _Murderous
Michael_ on 3 March 1579. In the following winter their pieces were
_The Duke of Milan and the Marquess of Mantua_ on 26 December, _Portio
and Demorantes_ on 2 February, and _Sarpedon_ on 16 February 1580.[278]
The names of their Court plays on 27 December 1580 and 2 February 1581
are unfortunately not recorded. On 14 September they recur in the
provinces, at Nottingham.[279] They missed the next winter at Court,
and made their last appearance there for a decade in _Ferrar_ on 6
January 1583.
Either the death of their patron in June 1583, or possibly the
formation of the Queen’s men in the previous March, eclipsed them, but
in 1585 they reappear as a provincial company, visiting Dover on 15
May, Bath on 22 July and in May 1586, Coventry twice in 1585–6, Ipswich
in 1586–7, York in 1587, Leicester before Michaelmas of the same year,
and Coventry in September. Here they were playing under the name of the
Countess of Sussex. In 1587–8 they were at Coventry and Bath, on 18
April 1588 at Ipswich, on 17 February 1589 at Leicester, on 1 March at
Ipswich, on 19 November at Leicester again, in the course of 1589 at
Faversham, and in 1588–9 at Aldeburgh. On 17 February 1590 they were
at Ipswich. In the spring of 1591 they appear to have made a temporary
amalgamation with a group of the Queen’s men (q.v.) and appeared with
them on 14 February at Southampton, on 24 March at Coventry, and during
1590–1 at Gloucester. This arrangement probably terminated in May, and
on 11 August Sussex’s were alone at Leicester.[280]
They enter the charmed London circle again with a Court performance
on 2 January 1592.[281] It is possible that they had attracted the
services of Marlowe, for Kyd in a letter, probably to be dated in 1593,
speaks of himself as having been in the service of a lord for whose
players Marlowe was writing, and there are some traces of connexion
between Kyd and the house of Radcliffe. During the plague of 1593 the
company were obliged to travel again, and on 29 April the Privy Council
Register records the issue of
‘an open warrant for the plaiers, servantes to the Erle of
Sussex, authorysinge them to exercyse theire qualitie of
playinge comedies and tragedies in any county, cittie, towne or
corporacion not being within vij^{en} miles of London, where the
infection is not, and in places convenient and tymes fitt.’[282]
The company were at Ipswich, Newcastle, and York in 1592–3. They
were at Winchester on 7 December 1593; then came to London under the
patronage of the fifth Earl, and, although not at Court, had a season
of about six weeks, beginning on 26 December and ending on 6 February,
with Henslowe, probably at the Rose. The names and dates of their
plays and sums received at each, probably by himself as owner of the
theatre, are noted by Henslowe in his diary. The company performed
on thirty nights, in twelve plays. Henslowe’s receipts averaged £1
13_s._, amounting to £3 1_s._ on the first night and £3 10_s._ on each
of the next two, and thereafter fluctuating greatly, from a minimum of
5_s._ to a maximum of £3 8_s._ This last was at the production of the
one ‘new’ play of the season, _Titus Andronicus_, on 24 January. The
enterprise was brought to an abrupt termination by a renewed alarm of
plague, and a consequent inhibition of plays by the Privy Council on
3 February. _Titus Andronicus_ was played for the third and last time
on 6 February, and on the same day the book was entered for copyright
purposes in the Stationers’ Register. The edition published in the
same year professes to give the play as it was played by ‘the Earle
of Darbie, Earle of Pembrooke, and Earle of Sussex their Servants’. I
suppose it to have passed, probably in a pre-Shakespearian version,
from Pembroke’s to Sussex’s, when the former were bankrupt in the
summer of 1593 (cf. _infra_), and to have been revised for Sussex’s
by the hand of Shakespeare. If so, it is a plausible conjecture that
certain other plays, which were once Pembroke’s and ultimately came to
the Chamberlain’s men, also passed through the hands of Sussex’s. Such
were _The Taming of A Shrew_, _The Contention of York and Lancaster_,
and perhaps the _Ur-Hamlet_, _1 Henry VI_, and _Richard III_. There
is no basis for determining whether any of Shakespeare’s work on the
York tetralogy was done for Sussex’s; but it is worth noting that one
of their productions was _Buckingham_, a title which might fit either
_Richard III_ or that early version of _Henry VIII_, the existence of
which, on internal grounds, I suspect. Of Sussex’s other plays in this
season, one, _George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield_, was published
as theirs in 1599; another, Marlowe’s _Jew of Malta_, probably belonged
to Henslowe, as it was acted in turn by nearly every company which he
financed; and of the rest, _God Speed the Plough_, _Huon of Bordeaux_,
_Richard the Confessor_, _William the Conqueror_, _Friar Francis_,
_Abraham and Lot_, _The Fair Maid of Italy_, and _King Lud_, nothing is
known, except for the entry of _God Speed the Plough_ in 1601 and an
edifying tale related about 1608 by Thomas Heywood in connexion with
an undated performance of _Friar Francis_ by the company at King’s
Lynn.[283]
At Easter 1594 Henslowe records another very brief season of eight
nights between 1 and 9 April, during which the Queen’s and Sussex’s
men played ‘together’. This suggests to Dr. Greg that the companies
appeared on different nights, but to me rather that they combined
their forces, as they seem to have already done at Coventry in 1591.
Henslowe’s receipts averaged £1 17_s._ The repertory included,
besides _The Fair Maid of Italy_ and _The Jew of Malta_, _King Leare_,
doubtless to be identified with _King Leire and his Three Daughters_
(1605), _The Ranger’s Comedy_, and _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_.
The latter was published in 1594 as a Queen’s play. Both it and _The
Ranger’s Comedy_ were played at a later date by the Admiral’s, and may
have belonged to Henslowe. Strange’s had played _Friar Bacon_ in 1592–3.
Thereafter Sussex’s men vanish from the annals; they may have been
absorbed in the Queen’s men for travelling purposes. Later players
under the same name are recorded at Coventry in 1602–3, Dover in
1606–7, Canterbury in 1607–8, Bristol, Norwich, and Dunwich in 1608–9,
Leicester on 31 August 1615, and Leominster in 1618, and it may be
these to whom Heywood alludes as visiting King’s Lynn. If so, their
possession of _Friar Francis_ suggests some affiliation to the earlier
company.
vi. SIR ROBERT LANE’S MEN
Robert Lane, of Horton, Northants; _nat._ _c._ 1528; Kt. 2 Oct.
1553; m. (1) Catherine, d. of Sir Roger Copley, (2) Mary, d. of
John Heneage.
I have not come across Sir Robert Lane’s men except at Bristol in
August 1570, and at Court during the Christmas of 1571–2. On 27
December 1571 they played _Lady Barbara_ and on 17 February 1572
_Cloridon and Radiamanta_. The first performance was paid for by a
warrant of 5 January to Laurence Dutton; the second by a warrant of
26 February, in which, according to the entry in the Privy Council
Register, Dutton was again named.[284] But the Treasurer of the Chamber
records the payment as made to John Greaves and Thomas Goughe. Probably
this company is identical with that found next year in the service of
the Earl of Lincoln.
vii. THE EARL OF LINCOLN’S (LORD CLINTON’S) MEN
Edward Fiennes de Clinton; s. of Thomas, 8th Lord Clinton and
Saye, _nat._ 1512; m. (1) Elizabeth Lady Talboys, d. of Sir
John Blount, 1534, (2) Ursula, d. of William Lord Stourton,
_c._ 1540, (3) Elizabeth Lady Browne, ‘the fair Geraldine,’ d.
of Gerald, 9th Earl of Kildare, _c._ 1552; succ. as 9th Baron,
1517; Lord High Admiral, 1550–3, and again 13 Feb. 1558; 1st
Earl of Lincoln, 4 May 1572; ambassador to France, 1572; Lord
Steward, 1581–5; _ob._ 16 Jan. 1585.
Henry Fiennes de Clinton, s. of Edward and Ursula; _nat._ _c._
1541; m. (1) Catharine, d. of Francis, 2nd Earl of Huntingdon,
Feb. 1557, (2) Elizabeth, d. of Sir Richard Morison and wid.
of William Norreys, after 1579; Kt. 29 Sept. 1553; succ. as 2nd
Earl, 16 Jan. 1585; _ob._ 29 Sept. 1616.
Players serving the Lord Admiral were at Winchester in 1566–7. A
company under the name of the Earl of Lincoln and led by Laurence
Dutton played at Court during the Christmas of 1572–3, and a company
under that of Lord Clinton, and also led by Dutton, in _Herpetulus
the Blue Knight and Perobia_ on 3 January 1574, and on 27 December
1574 and 2 January 1575. For 1574–5 they rehearsed three plays, one of
which was _Pretestus_. Probably these are the same company transferred
by the Lord Admiral to his son. Dutton was with Sir Robert Lane’s men
in 1571–2 and with the Earl of Warwick’s in 1575–6. The whole company
may have taken service with Lincoln instead of Lane as a result of the
statute of 1572 (App. D, No. xxiv), but it does not seem to have been
altogether absorbed in Warwick’s, as Lord Clinton’s men are found at
Southampton on 24 June 1577, when they were six in number, at Bristol
in July, and at Coventry in 1576–7. A later company under the name of
the Earl of Lincoln has a purely provincial record in 1599–1604. There
is an isolated notice at Norwich in 1608–9.
viii. THE EARL OF WARWICK’S MEN
Ambrose Dudley, 3rd s. of John, 1st Duke of Northumberland;
_nat._ _c._ 1528; m. (1) Anne Whorwood, (2) Elizabeth Talboys,
_c._ 1553, (3) Anne, d. of Francis, Earl of Bedford, 11 Nov.
1565; Master of Ordnance, 12 Apr. 1560; Earl of Warwick, 26 Dec.
1561; Chief Butler of England, 4 May 1571; Privy Councillor, 5
Sept. 1573; _ob._ 20 Feb. 1590.
Dudley seems to have had players in London in January 1562, when they
were rewarded by the Duchess of Suffolk.[285] They are also found in
1559–64 at Oxford, Gloucester, Bristol, Plymouth, Winchester, Dover,
Canterbury, and Norwich. Their only Court performances upon record were
two during the Christmas of 1564–5. In 1564–5 they were apparently at
Canterbury.[286]
After an interval of ten years there are Warwick’s men at Court on
14 February 1575 and also at Stratford in the course of 1574–5, at
Lichfield between 27 July and 3 August during the progress,[287] and
at Leicester before 29 September 1575. At the following Christmas they
gave three plays at Court, on 26 December 1575 and 1 January and on
5 March 1576. John and Laurence Dutton and Jerome Savage were their
payees. Laurence Dutton and possibly others of the company had been, a
year before, in Lord Clinton’s service. During the next four winters
they appeared regularly at Court, and are recorded at Leicester in
1576 and Nottingham on 1 September 1577. On 26 December 1576 they
played _The Painter’s Daughter_, and on 18 February 1577 _The Irish
Knight_. The names of their plays on 28 December 1577 and 6 January
and 9 February 1578 are not preserved. They were notified by the
Privy Council to the Lord Mayor as one of the Court companies for the
Christmas of 1578–9 (App. D, No. xl), and played _The Three Sisters of
Mantua_ on 26 December and _The Knight in the Burning Rock_ on 1 March.
A play intended for 2 February was not performed, but payment was made
to Jerome Savage. Gabriel Harvey (cf. p. 4) mentions them as a London
company in the summer of 1579. On 1 January 1580 they played _The Four
Sons of Fabius_. A Winchester record of ‘Lord Ambrose Dudley’s’ men in
1581–2 must be an error.
The Duttons were evidently a restless folk, and the disappearance of
Warwick’s men and the appearance of Oxford’s men in 1580 is to be
explained by another transfer of their services. This is referred to in
the following verses:[288]
_The Duttons and theyr fellow-players forsakyng the Erle of
Warwycke theyr mayster, became followers of the Erle of Oxford,
and wrot themselves his_ COMOEDIANS, _which certayne Gentlemen
altered and made_ CAMOELIONS. _The Duttons, angry with that,
compared themselves to any gentleman; therefore these armes were
devised for them._
The fyeld, a fart durty, a gybbet crosse-corded,
A dauncing Dame Flurty of alle men abhorred;
A lyther lad scampant, a roge in his ragges,
A whore that is rampant, astryde wyth her legges,
A woodcocke displayed, a calfe and a sheepe,
A bitch that is splayed, a dormouse asleepe;
A vyper in stynche, _la part de la drut_,
Spell backwarde this Frenche and cracke me that nut.
Parcy per pillery, perced with a rope,
To slythe the more lytherly anoynted with sope;
A coxcombe crospate in token of witte,
Two eares perforate, a nose wythe slytte.
Three nettles resplendent, three owles, three swallowes,
Three mynstrellmen pendent on three payre of gallowes,
Further sufficiently placed in them
A knaves head, for a difference from alle honest men.
The wreathe is a chayne of chaungeable red,
To shew they ar vayne and fickle of head;
The creste is a lastrylle whose feathers ar blew,
In signe that these fydlers will never be trew;
Whereon is placed the horne of a gote,
Because they ar chast, to this is theyr lotte,
For their bravery, indented and parted,
And for their knavery innebulated.
Mantled lowsy, wythe doubled drynke,
Their ancient house is called the Clynke;
Thys Posy they beare over the whole earthe,
Wylt please you to have a fyt of our mirthe?
But reason it is, and heraultes allowe welle,
That fidlers should beare their armes in a towelle.
In 1587–8 tumblers were at Bath under Warwick’s name. I do not
understand the entry of his men in the Ipswich accounts, as playing
on 10 March 1592. Ambrose Dudley died in 1590, and his doubtfully
legitimate nephew, Sir Robert Dudley, does not seem even to have
claimed the title until 1597. The Ipswich records are unreliable, but
possibly Lady Warwick maintained a company for a while. The Corporation
of London were considering some ‘cause’ of hers as to plays in May 1594
(App. D, No. xcviii).
ix. THE EARL OF OXFORD’S MEN
John de Vere, s. of John, 15th Earl of Oxford; _nat._ _c._ 1512;
succ. as 16th Earl and Lord Great Chamberlain, 21 Mar. 1540; m.
Margaret Golding, 1547; _ob._ 3 Aug. 1562.
Edward de Vere, s. of John, 16th Earl of Oxford; _nat._ 2 Apr.
1550; succ. as 17th Earl and Lord Great Chamberlain, 3 Aug.
1562; m. (1) Anne, d. of William Lord Burghley, Dec. 1571,
(2) Elizabeth Trentham, _c._ 1591; _ob._ 24 June 1604. Of his
daughters by (1), Elizabeth m. William Stanley, 6th Earl of
Derby, 26 Jan. 1595; Bridget m. Francis, Lord Norris; Susan m.
Sir Philip Herbert, afterwards Earl of Montgomery, 27 Dec. 1604.
The Earls of Oxford had their players as far back as 1492.[289] A
company belonging to the 16th Earl caused a scandal by playing in
Southwark at the moment when a dirge was being sung for Henry VIII
in St. Saviour’s on 6 February 1547.[290] It is probably the same
company which is traceable in 1555–6 at Dover, in 1557–8 at Ipswich, in
1559–60 and 1560–1 at Maldon, and in 1561–2 at Barnstaple, Maldon, and
Ipswich. Murray (ii. 63) adds a few notices. There is no sign of it at
Court, and it is likely that the 17th Earl discontinued it soon after
his succession. The last notices of it are at Leicester, Plymouth, and
Ipswich in 1562–3.
At a later date, however, this Earl was clearly interested in things
dramatic. He took part in a Shrovetide device at Court in 1579, and
is recorded in Francis Meres’s _Palladis Tamia_ (1598) to have been
himself a playwright and one of ‘the best for comedy amongst us’ (App.
C, No. lii). In 1580 the Duttons and the rest of the Earl of Warwick’s
men transferred themselves to his service, and thereby laid themselves
open to satire upon their fickleness (cf. _supra_). I do not know
whether it was their resentment at this that brought them into trouble,
but on 12 April 1580 the Lord Mayor wrote to Sir Thomas Bromley, the
Lord Chancellor, about a disorder at the Theatre two days before, which
he understood to be already before the Privy Council; and on 13 April
we find the Council committing Robert Leveson and Laurence Dutton,
servants of the Earl of Oxford, to the Marshalsea for a fray with the
Inns of Court. On 26 May the matter was referred to three judges for
examination, and on 18 July Thomas Chesson, sometime servant to the
Earl, was released on bail (App. D, Nos. xliii, xliv). These notices
suggest that the company had arranged, possibly during the absence of
Leicester’s men from town, to occupy the Theatre. In view of their
disgrace, it was no doubt better for them to travel, and on 21 June
John Hatcher, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, wrote to Lord Oxford’s
father-in-law, Lord Burghley, to acknowledge recommendations received
from him, as well as from the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chamberlain
Sussex, that Oxford’s men should be allowed to ‘show their cunning in
several plays already practised by them before the Queen’s majesty’,
and to explain that, in view of pestilence, the need for industry
at commencement, a previous refusal to Leicester’s men, and a Privy
Council order of 1575 against assemblies in Cambridge, he had thought
it better to give them 20_s._, and send them away unheard.[291] They
are traceable provincially in 1580–3.[292] At Norwich (1580–1) the
payment was made to ‘the Earle of Oxenfordes lads’, and at Bristol
(Sept. 1581) there were nine boys and a man. These were probably boys
of the Earl’s domestic chapel, travelling either with the Duttons or as
a separate company.
The Duttons joined the Queen’s company, John on its first establishment
in 1583. It is in the following winter, however, that an Oxford’s
company first appears at Court. Here the Earl’s ‘servauntes’ performed
on 1 January and 3 March 1584. Their payee was John Lyly, who had
probably been for some years in the Earl’s service. Provincial
performances continue during 1583–5, and in the records the company
are always described as ‘players’ or ‘men’.[293] On 27 December 1584
_Agamemnon and Ulysses_ was played at Court by the Earl of Oxford’s
‘boyes’. For this the payee was Henry Evans, probably the same who
in 1600 set up the Chapel plays. I do not feel much doubt that the
companies under Lyly and Evans were the same, or that in 1583–4 they
in fact consisted of a combination of Oxford’s boys, Paul’s and the
Chapel, working under Lyly and Evans at the Blackfriars theatre.[294]
This arrangement had, no doubt, to be modified when Sir William More
recovered possession of the premises in the spring of 1584, and after
the performance of December 1584 Oxford perhaps ceased to maintain boy
players and contented himself with another company of his servants, who
made an appearance at Court on 1 January 1585, under John Symons, in
feats of activity and vaulting. These tumblers had apparently been Lord
Strange’s men in 1583, and by 1586 had returned into the service of the
Stanley family.
An Oxford’s company did not again perform at Court, but his ‘plaiers’
were at Norwich in 1585–6, and Ipswich in 1586–7,[295] and players
under his name were notified to Walsingham amongst others setting up
their bills in London on 25 January 1587 (App. D, No. lxxviii). They
were at York in June 1587 and Maidstone in 1589–90. Finally, at the end
of the reign, comes a letter from the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor
on 31 March 1602, which informs him that at the Earl’s suit the Queen
has tolerated a new company formed by a combination of his servants
and those of the Earl of Worcester, and that they are to play at the
Boar’s Head (App. D, No. cxxx). Oxford’s men had probably then been
established for some little time, as they are indicated as having
played _The Weakest Goeth to the Wall_ (1600, S. R. 23 October 1600) by
the title-page, and _The History of George Scanderbarge_ by the entry
in the Stationers’ Register (3 July 1601). Meres’s reference to Oxford
in 1598 suggests that they may have been in existence still earlier, as
it is natural to suppose that he wrote comedies for his own men. Some
of the writers, however, with whom Meres groups him belong to the early
years of the reign, although others are contemporary. From 1602 the
company was no doubt merged in Worcester’s, which in its turn became
Queen Anne’s.
x. THE EARL OF ESSEX’S MEN
Walter Devereux, s. of Sir Richard Devereux and g.s. of Walter,
Lord Bourchier and 1st Viscount Hereford; _nat._ 1541; succ.
as 2nd Viscount Hereford, 1558; m. Lettice, d. of Sir Francis
Knollys, _c._ 1561; 1st Earl of Essex, 4 May 1572; _ob._ 22
Sept. 1576.
Lettice, Countess of Essex, b. _c._ 1541; m. (2) Robert, Earl of
Leicester, 21 Sept. 1578, (3) Sir Christopher Blount, July 1589;
_ob._ 25 Dec. 1634.
Robert Devereux, s. of 1st Earl of Essex; b. 19 Nov. 1566; succ.
as 2nd Earl, 1576; m. Frances, Lady Sidney, d. of Sir Francis
Walsingham, 1590; Master of the Horse, 23 Dec. 1587; Earl
Marshal, 28 Dec. 1597; Chancellor of Cambridge University, 10
Aug. 1598; rebelled, 8 Feb. 1601; executed, 25 Feb. 1601.
The Bourchiers, Earls of Essex, whom the Devereux succeeded through
an heiress, had their players well back into the fifteenth century.
In fact, the earliest household troop on record is that of Henry
Bourchier, first earl of the senior creation, which is found at Maldon
in 1468–9 and at Stoke-by-Nayland on 9 January 1482.[296]
Walter Devereux had a company, which visited Bath, Bristol, Gloucester,
and Nottingham in 1572–3, Wollaton (Francis Willoughby’s) in July
1574, Coventry on 29 August, and Leicester before 29 September 1574,
Gloucester, Dover, and Coventry in 1574–5, Coventry and Leicester in
1575–6, Nottingham in September 1576, and Bristol in September 1577.
On the Earl’s death the Countess retained the company, and under her
name it appeared at Coventry and Oxford in 1576–7. On 11 February 1578
it gave its only performance at Court, taking the place of Leicester’s
men, to whom that day had originally been assigned. It was included
in the list of Court companies sent to the Lord Mayor in December
1578 (App. D, No. xl), but gave no play that winter. The Privy Council
described it as the Earl of Essex’s men, and it played under that
name at Coventry in 1577–8 and at Ipswich in 1579–80; but at Oxford,
Coventry, and Stratford-on-Avon in 1578–9, and at Oxford in 1579–80,
it is still called the Countess of Essex’s. It could hardly have borne
that name after August 1579, when the Countess’s secret marriage
with Leicester was revealed to Elizabeth, and doubtless her disgrace
debarred it from any further Court favour.
Robert Earl of Essex had a provincial company from 1581 to 1596.
In 1581–2 it was at Exeter, in July 1584 at Ludlow, in 1583–4 at
Leicester, Stratford-on-Avon, and Ipswich, and in 1584–5 at Bath. On
26 June 1585 it played at Thorpe in Norwich, in spite of a prohibition
by the Corporation, and was sentenced to be excluded from civic reward
in future. In 1585–6 it was at Coventry and Ipswich, in 1586 before
29 September at Leicester, and possibly about May at Oxford, on 27
February 1587 at York, on 16 July at Leicester, and in the course of
the year at Stratford-on-Avon. In 1587–8 it was at Coventry, Ipswich,
Saffron Walden, and Leicester, in 1588–9 at Bath, Saffron Walden, and
Reading, on 7 September 1589 at Knowsley, on 31 October at Ipswich, and
in the same year at Faversham. It was also at Coventry and Faversham in
1589–90, at Maldon in 1590, and twice at Faversham in 1590–1, and is
last recorded at Ludlow in April 1596. Murray adds some intermediate
dates. A company of Essex’s men which appeared at Coventry in 1600–1 is
probably distinct. The execution of Essex on 25 February 1601 must have
brought it to a premature end.
xi. LORD VAUX’S MEN
William Vaux, 3rd Lord Vaux; _nat._ _c._ 1542; m. (1) Elizabeth
Beaumont, (2) Mary Tresham; _ob._ 20 Aug. 1595.
Edward Vaux, 4th Lord Vaux; _nat._ 1588; _ob._ 1661.
These companies are extremely obscure. Gabriel Harvey mentions
the first in 1579 (cf. p. 4); the second was at Leicester in
October-December 1601, Coventry in 1603–4 and 1608, and Skipton in 1609.
xii. LORD BERKELEY’S MEN
Henry FitzHardinge Berkeley, Baron Berkeley; succ. 1553; m.
Catherine, d. of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; _ob._ 1613;
father of Thomas Berkeley, _nat._ 11 July 1575; m. Elizabeth,
d. of Sir G. Carey, afterwards 2nd Baron Hunsdon, 19 Feb. 1596;
_ob._ 22 Nov. 1611.
The only London record of this company is in July 1581, when some of
them, including Arthur King and Thomas Goodale, were committed to the
Counter after a brawl with Inns of Court men. Lord Berkeley apologized
to the Lord Mayor on their behalf, and said that they would go to the
country (App. D, Nos. xlix, l). Their other appearances are all in
the country, at Bristol between 6 and 12 July 1578, where they played
_What Mischief Worketh in the Mind of Man_, at Bath on 11 July 1578 and
on another day in 1578–9, at Abingdon in 1579–80, Stratford-on-Avon
in 1580–1, Maldon in 1581, Stratford-on-Avon in 1582–3, Barnstaple in
1583–4, and Bath in 1586–7. Long after they, or a later company under
the same name, reappear at Coventry in 1597–8, at Leicester in 1598
before Michaelmas, at Saffron Walden in 1598–9, and at Coventry and
elsewhere in 1603–10. Lord Berkeley’s name is sometimes misspelt in the
account-books as ‘Bartlett’.[297]
xiii. QUEEN ELIZABETH’S MEN
The origin of this company, the most famous of all the London companies
during the decade of the ’eighties, can be dated with an extreme
minuteness.[298] The Revels Accounts for 1582–3 record an expenditure
of 20s. in travelling charges by
‘Edmond Tylney Esquire Master of the office being sente for
to the Courte by Letter from M^r. Secreatary dated the x^{th}
of Marche 1582. To choose out a companie of players for her
majestie.’[299]
The date then was 10 March 1583, and the business was in the hands
of Sir Francis Walsingham. Lord Chamberlain Sussex, to whom it would
naturally have fallen, was ill in the previous September[300] and died
on the following 9 June. Walsingham’s agency in the matter is confirmed
in the account of the formation of the company inserted by Edmund Howes
in the 1615 and 1631 editions of Stowe’s _Annales_:
‘Comedians and stage-players of former time were very poor
and ignorant in respect of these of this time: but being now
grown very skilful and exquisite actors for all matters, they
were entertained into the service of divers great lords: out
of which companies there were twelve of the best chosen, and,
at the request of Sir Francis Walsingham, they were sworn the
queens servants and were allowed wages and liveries as grooms
of the chamber: and until this yeare 1583, the queene had no
players. Among these twelve players were two rare men, viz.
Thomas Wilson, for a quicke, delicate, refined, extemporall
witt, and Richard Tarleton, for a wondrous plentifull pleasant
extemporall wit, he was the wonder of his time. He lieth buried
in Shoreditch church. [In a note] He was so beloved that men use
his picture for their signs.’[301]
Howes is not altogether accurate. ‘Thomas’ is obviously a mistake
for ‘Robert’ Wilson. Elizabeth had maintained players before, the
Interluders, although they had cut little figure in the dramatic
history of the reign, and the last of them had died in 1580. Dr. Greg
thinks that the players were not appointed as grooms of the Chamber, on
the ground that their names do not appear in a list of these officers
appended to a warrant of 8 November 1586.[302] But Tarlton is described
as ‘ordenary grome off her majestes chamber’ in the record of his
graduation as a master of fence in 1587, and both he and his ‘fellow’,
William Johnson, are described as ‘grooms of her majesties chamber’
in his will of 1588. Their absence from Dr. Greg’s list is probably
due to their treatment as a special class of grooms of the chamber in
ordinary without fee, who were not called upon to perform the ordinary
duties of the office, such as helping to watch the palace.[303]
That they had liveries, which were red coats, is borne out by the
particular mention of the fact that they were not wearing them, in the
depositions concerning a very untoward event which took place in the
first few months of their service. On the afternoon of 15 June 1583
they were playing at the Red Lion in Norwich. A dispute as to payment
arose between a servant of one Mr. Wynsdon and Singer, who, in a black
doublet and with a player’s beard on, was acting as gatekeeper. Tarlton
and Bentley, who was playing the duke, came off the stage, and Bentley
broke the offender’s head with the hilt of his sword. The man fled,
pursued by Singer with an arming-sword which he took off the stage,
and by Henry Browne, a servant of Sir William Paston. Both of them
struck him, and one of the blows, but it was not certain whose, proved
mortal.[304]
Several other places, besides Norwich, received a visit from the
Queen’s men during the first summer of their existence. In April they
were at Bristol, on 9 July at Cambridge, and between 24 July and 29
September at Leicester. Their travels also extended to Gloucester,
Aldeburgh, Nottingham, and Shrewsbury.[305] In the winter they returned
to London, and on 26 November the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor
to bespeak for them permission to play in the City and the liberties
upon week-days until Shrovetide. The City accordingly licensed them to
play at the Bull and the Bell, but with unwelcome limitations, for on
1 December it was necessary for Walsingham to write a personal letter,
explaining that it was not the intention of the Council that the
licence to play should be confined to holidays. The City record gives
the names of the twelve members of the company as Robert Wilson, John
Dutton, Richard Tarlton, John Laneham, John Bentley, Thobye Mylles,
John Towne, John Synger, Leonall Cooke, John Garland, John Adams, and
William Johnson. The company made its initial appearance at Court on 26
December, and played again on 29 December, and on 3 March 1584. Their
public performances probably continued through the spring, but in June
there were disturbances in and around the Middlesex theatres, and the
City obtained leave from the Council to suppress plays. The Queen’s
submitted to an injunction from William Fleetwood, the Recorder; and
their leader advised him to send for the owner of the Theatre, who
was Lord Hunsdon’s man, and bind him. They travelled again, and are
found in 1583–4 at Bath and Marlborough, and in October or November at
Dover. When the winter came on, they once more approached the Council
and requested a renewal of the previous year’s privilege, submitting
articles in which they pointed out that the time of their service was
drawing near, and that the season of the year was past to play at
any of the houses outside the City. They also asked for favourable
letters to the Middlesex justices. The City opposed the concession,
and begged that, if it were granted, the number and names of the
Queen’s men might be set out in the warrant, complaining that in the
previous year, when toleration was granted to this company alone, all
the playing-places were filled with men calling themselves the Queen’s
players. The records do not show whether the Council assented.[306] The
company appeared four times at Court, giving _Phillyda and Corin_ on 26
December, _Felix and Philiomena_ on 3 January 1585, _Five Plays in One_
on 6 January, and an antic play and a comedy on 23 February. They had
prepared a fifth performance, of _Three Plays in One_, for 21 February,
but it was not called for. Mr. Fleay has conjectured that the _Five
Plays in One_ and the _Three Plays in One_ may have been the two parts
of Tarlton’s _Seven Deadly Sins_.[307] The payment for this winter’s
plays was made to Robert Wilson.
There is no evidence that the company were travelling in 1585. They
were at Court again on 26 December and on 1 January and 13 February
1586. During 1586 they were at Maidstone, in July at Bristol, on 22
August and later at Faversham, and before 29 September at Leicester.
In 1585–6 they were also at Coventry. On 26 December 1586 and on 1
and 6 January and 28 February 1587 they were at Court, and in the
same January a correspondent of Walsingham’s names them amongst
other companies then playing regularly in the City (App. D, No.
lxxviii). During 1586–7 they were at Bath, Worcester, Canterbury,
and Stratford-on-Avon, whence Malone thought that they might have
enlisted Shakespeare.[308] They were at Bath again on 13 July 1587,
and at Aldeburgh on 20 May and 19 July. Before 29 September they were
at Leicester, on 9 September at York, where it is recorded that they
‘cam in her Majesties lyvereys’, twice in September at Coventry, and at
Aldeburgh on 16 December. They were at Court on 26 December 1587 and on
6 January and 18 February 1588.
A subsidy list of 30 June 1588 shows that Tarlton, Laneham, Johnson,
Towne, Adams, Garland, John Dutton, Singer, and Cooke were then still
household players.[309] It can, perhaps, hardly be assumed that the
whole of the company is here represented. Mills, Wilson, and Bentley
may have dropped out since 1583. But one would have expected to find
the name of Laurence Dutton beside that of John, as he was certainly
a Queen’s man by 1589. Knell also acted with Tarlton in _The Famous
Victories of Henry the Fifth_, and must have belonged to the company.
He also may have been dead by 1588. And this must certainly be the case
if he is the William Knell whose widow Rebecca John Heminges married on
10 March 1588. There is some reason to suppose that Heminges himself
joined the Queen’s men, perhaps in right of his wife. The composition
of the list of 1583 generally bears out the statement of Howes, that
the Queen’s men were selected as the best out of the companies of
divers great lords, for Wilson, Laneham, and Johnson belonged to
Leicester’s in 1572, Adams to Sussex’s in 1576, and Dutton, after a
chameleon past, to Oxford’s in 1580. Mr. Fleay, who did not know either
the list of 1583 or that of 1588, declares that the original members
of the company included James Burbadge and William Slaughter, and
probably John Perkyn.[310] Of these William Slaughter is merely what
the philologists would call a ‘ghost’-name, for there is no evidence
that any such actor ever existed.[311] Evidently James Burbadge did not
join the Queen’s men. Probably Mr. Fleay was biased by his knowledge
that these men acted at the Theatre, which was Burbadge’s property.
But this could prove nothing, as the relations between particular
companies and particular theatres were much less permanent than Mr.
Fleay is apt to suppose. The Queen’s seem to have been acting at the
Theatre when Fleetwood suppressed them in June 1584, but the owner
of the house, who can hardly be any other than James Burbadge, is
specifically described as Lord Hunsdon’s man, which of course does
not necessarily signify that he was a player at all. Moreover, it is
clear from the official correspondence of the following autumn, not
only that, as we know from other sources, the companies regularly moved
in from the suburban houses to the City inn-yards at the approach of
winter, but also that the Queen’s in particular had in the winter of
1583 dispersed themselves for their public performances over various
play-places. The view that they did not exclusively attach themselves
to Burbadge’s, or to any other one theatre, is further borne out by
the indications in the _Jests_ of Tarlton, which there is no reason
to reject, however apocryphal they may be in detail, as evidence of
the theatrical conditions under which the famous mime appeared. The
_Jests_ frequently speak of Tarlton as a Queen’s man and never mention
any other company in connexion with him.[312] And, as it happens,
they record performances at the Curtain,[313] the Bell,[314] and the
Bull,[315] but none at the Theatre. Nashe, however, tells us that
Tarlton made jests of Richard Harvey and his _Astrological Discourse_
of 1583 there;[316] and an entry in the Stationers’ Register makes it
possible to add that shortly before his death he appeared at the Bel
Savage.[317] The stage-keeper in _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), Ind. 37,
gives us a reminiscence of a scene between Tarlton and John Adams, ‘I
am an Asse! I! and yet I kept the _Stage_ in Master _Tarletons_ time,
I thanke my starres. Ho! and that man had liu’d to haue play’d in
_Bartholmew Fayre_, you should ha’ seene him ha’ come in, and ha’ beene
coozened i’ the Cloath-quarter, so finely! And _Adams_, the Rogue, ha’
leap’d and caper’d vpon him, and ha’ dealt his vermine about, as though
they had cost him nothing. And then a substantiall watch to ha’ stolne
in vpon ’hem, and taken ’hem away, with mistaking words, as the fashion
is, in the _Stage_-practice.’
Tarlton’s own talent probably ran more to ‘jigs’ and ‘themes’ than to
the legitimate drama. But the palmy days of the Queen’s company were
those that intervened between its foundation in 1583 and his death on
3 September 1588. To it belonged the men whom such an actor of the
next generation as Thomas Heywood could remember as the giants of the
past,[318] and whose reputation Edward Alleyn’s friends were ready to
back him to excel.[319] From 1588 the future of the stage lay with
Alleyn and the Admiral’s men and Marlowe, and it may reasonably be
supposed that the Queen’s men were hard put to it to hold their own
against their younger rivals. Adams probably survived Tarlton, and
his name appears to be traceable as that of the clowns in _A Looking
Glass for London and England_ (_c._ 1590) and _James IV_ (_c._ 1591).
In 1587–8 the Queen’s visited Coventry and Exeter, and in 1588 Dover,
and on two occasions Faversham. On 19 July and 14 August they were
at Bath. The Bath accounts for this year also show a payment ‘to the
quenes men that were tumblers’. Owing to Tarlton’s death or to some
other reason, the Queen’s men prolonged their travels far into the
winter. On 31 October they were at the Earl of Derby’s house at New
Park, Lancashire; on 6 November ‘certen of’ them were at Leicester; on
10 December they were at Norwich and on 17 December at Ipswich. But
they reached the Court in time for the performance on 26 December, with
which they seem to have had the prerogative of opening the Christmas
season, and appeared again on 9 February. They must have had some
share in the Martin Marprelate controversy, which raged during 1589.
In the previous year, indeed, Martin was able to claim Tarlton as an
ally who had ‘taken’ Simony ‘in Don John of London’s cellar’, and was
himself accused of borrowing his ‘foolery’ from Laneham. But when the
bishops determined to meet the Puritans with literary weapons like
their own, they naturally turned to the Queen’s men amongst others.
About April 1589 _A Whip for an Ape_ bids Martin’s grave opponents to
‘let old Lanam lash him with his rimes’, and although it cannot be
assumed that, if the _Maygame of Martinism_ was in fact played at the
Theatre, it was the Queen’s men who played it, _Martin’s Month’s Minde_
records in August the chafing of the Puritans at players ‘whom, saving
their liveries (for indeed they are hir Majesty’s men ...) they call
rogues’. Influence was brought to bear to suppress the anti-Martinist
plays. A pamphlet of October notes that _Vetus Comoedia_ has been ‘long
in the country’; and this accords with the fact that the provincial
performances of the Queen’s men began at an unusually early date in
1589. They are found at Gloucester on 19 April, at Leicester on 20
May, at Ipswich on 27 May, at Aldeburgh on 30 May, and at Norwich on
3 June. On 5 July they were at the Earl of Derby’s at Lathom, and
on 6 and 7 September at another house of the Earl’s at Knowsley. On
22 September Lord Scrope wrote from Carlisle to William Asheby, the
English ambassador in Scotland, that they had been for ten days in that
town. He had heard from Roger Asheton of the King’s desire that they
should visit Scotland, and had sought them out from ‘the furthest parte
of Langkeshire’.[320] One would be glad to know whether they did in
fact visit Scotland. In any case they were back in England and at Bath
by November. During 1588–9 they were also at Reading, at Nottingham,
and twice at Coventry. Both the Nottingham records and those of
Leicester furnish evidence that for travelling purposes they divided
themselves into two companies. At Leicester the town account for 1588–9
shows ‘certen of her Maiests playars’ as coming on 6 November, and
‘others moe of her Mayestyes playars’ as coming on 20 May; that of
Nottingham for the same year has an entry of ‘Symons and his companie,
being the Quenes players’ and another of ‘the Quenes players, the two
Duttons and others’. The arrangement was of course natural enough,
seeing that even in London the Queen’s men were sufficiently numerous
to occupy more than one inn-yard. Laurence Dutton was evidently by now
a member of the company with his brother John. It is to be presumed
that Symons is the John Symons who on not less than five occasions
presented ‘activities’ at Court, in 1582–3 with Strange’s (q.v.), in
1585 with Oxford’s, in 1586 with ‘Mr. Standleyes boyes’, in 1587–8 with
a company under his own name, and in 1588–9 either with the Admiral’s
or possibly with the Queen’s itself.
Doubtless the incorporation of Symons into the Queen’s service explains
the appearance of the Queen’s tumblers at Bath in 1589. Performances at
Court, for which John Dutton and John Laneham received payment, took
place on 26 December 1589 and 1 March 1590. During 1589–90 the company
were at Coventry, Ludlow, Nottingham, Bridgnorth, and Faversham, on 22
April 1590 at Norwich, on 24 June under the leadership of ‘Mr. Dutton’
at Knowsley, and on 30 October at Leicester. Acrobatic feats still
formed a part of their repertory, and in these they had the assistance
of a Turkish rope-dancer.[321] There were further Court performances
on 26 December and on 1, 3, and 6 January, and 14 February 1591. It is
to be noted that payment was made for the play of 1 January to ‘John
Laneham and his companye her maiesties players’ and for the rest by a
separate warrant to ‘Lawrence Dutton and John Dutton her maiesties
players and there companye’; and that this distinction indicates some
further development of the tendency to bifurcation already observed may
be gathered from a study of the provincial records for 1590–1. On the
very day of the performance of 14 February Queen’s men were also at
Southampton, and the form of the entry indicates that they were there
playing in conjunction with the Earl of Sussex’s men. This was the case
also at Coventry on 24 March and at Gloucester during 1590–1.[322] At
Ipswich during the same year there are two entries, of ‘the Quenes
players’ on 15 May 1591 and of ‘another company of the Quenes players’
on 18 May. Obviously two groups were travelling this year and one
had strengthened itself by a temporary amalgamation with Sussex’s.
Perhaps the normal combination was restored when the two groups found
themselves on the same road at the end of May, for Queen’s men are
recorded alone at Faversham on 2 June 1591, at Wirkburn on 18 August,
and at Coventry on 24 August and 20 October.
It was probably during this summer that Greene, having sold _Orlando
Furioso_ to the Queen’s men for twenty nobles, resold it ‘when they
were in the country’ to the Admiral’s for as much more. The winter
of 1591–2 marks a clear falling-off in the position of the company
at Court, since they were only called upon to give one performance,
on 26 December, as against six assigned to Lord Strange’s men, with
whom at this date Alleyn and the Admiral’s men appear to have been
in combination. Yet it was still possible for the City, writing to
Archbishop Whitgift on 25 February 1592, to suggest that Elizabeth’s
accustomed recreation might be sufficiently served, without the need
for public plays, ‘by the privat exercise of hir Ma^{ts} own players in
convenient place’.[323] That they were again making use of the Theatre
may perhaps be inferred from a passage in Nashe’s _Summer’s Last Will
and Testament_ of the following autumn, in which a Welshman is said
to ‘goe ae Theater, and heare a Queenes Fice, and he make hur laugh,
and laugh hur belly-full’.[324] During 1591–2 they were at Nottingham,
Coventry, Stratfordon-Avon, twice at Aldeburgh, and twice at Bath. In
1592 they were at Rochester, on 27 May at Norwich, before 29 September
at Leicester, and early in September at Chesterton close to Cambridge.
Here they came into conflict with the authorities of Cambridge
University, who were apprehensive of infection from the crowds
assembled at Sturbridge fair, and forbade them to play. Encouraged by
Lord North and by the constables of Chesterton, they disobeyed, set
up their bills upon the college gates, and gave their performance. It
is interesting to note that ‘one Dutton’ was ‘a principale’, and to
remember that, twelve years before, the Duttons had gone to Cambridge
as Lord Oxford’s men and had been refused permission to play by the
University authorities.[325] The outcome of the present encounter was
a formal protest by the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of Houses to the
Privy Council for which they requested Burghley’s support as Chancellor
of the University. After a further appeal about a year later, they
succeeded in obtaining a confirmation of their privileges.[326] Another
letter from the University to their Chancellor, written on 4 December
1592, is of a different character. Its object is to excuse themselves
from accepting an invitation conveyed through the Vice-Chamberlain to
present an English comedy before Elizabeth at Christmas. Sir Thomas
Heneage appears to have given it as a reason for his request ‘that her
Maiesties owne servantes, in this time of infection, may not disport
her Highnes w^{th} theire wonted and ordinary pastimes’.[327]
On 11 October 1592 the Queen’s men were at Aldeburgh, on the same day
as, and conceivably in association with, Lord Morley’s men, although
the payments are distinct. They did not in fact appear at Court during
the Christmas of 1592–3, although both Lord Pembroke’s and Lord
Strange’s did. They were at Coventry and Stratford-on-Avon in the
course of 1592–3, at Leicester in June 1593 and again after Michaelmas,
at Bath on 22 August, and at York in September. On 6 January 1594 they
returned to Court and gave what proved to be their last performance
there. On 1 April they began to play at one of Henslowe’s theatres ‘to
geather’--that is to say, either alternately or in combination--with
Sussex’s men, who had already performed there for the six weeks
between Christmas and Lent. Possibly this was a renewal of an earlier
alliance of 1591. Only eight performances are recorded, and of the five
plays given only _King Leire_ can very reasonably be assigned to the
repertory of the Queen’s men. The others were _The Jew of Malta_ and
_The Fair Maid of Italy_, which Sussex’s men had been playing in the
winter, Greene’s _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, which was played for
Henslowe by other companies both before and after, and was probably
his property, and _The Ranger’s Comedy_, the performances of which
were being continued by the Admiral’s men in the following autumn,
but which it is possible that they or Henslowe may have acquired from
the Queen’s. For there can be no doubt that the Queen’s men, whether
because they had ceased to be modish, or because their finances had
proved unable to stand the strain of the plague years, were now at the
end of their London career. On 8 May 1594 the significant entry occurs
in Henslowe’s diary of a loan of £15 to his nephew Francis Henslowe ‘to
lay downe for his share to the Quenes players when they broke & went
into the contrey to playe’.[328] This by itself would not perhaps be
conclusive, as there are other years in which the company began its
provincial wanderings as early as May. But from the present journey
there is nothing to show that they ever returned, and it may fairly be
reckoned as another sign of defeat that while _The Troublesome Reign of
King John_ (1591) was the only play certainly theirs which was printed
before 1594, no less than nine found their way into the publishers’
hands during that and the following year. These were, besides _Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay_ (1594, S. R. 14 May 1594), with which they
probably had only a recent connexion, _A Looking Glass for London and,
England_ (1594, S. R. 5 March 1594), _King Leire_ (1594, S. R. 14 May
1594), _James IV_ and _The Famous Victories of Henry V_ (1598, S. R.
14 May 1594), _The True Tragedy of Richard III_ (1594, S. R. 19 June
1594), _Selimus_ (1594), Peele’s _Old Wive’s Tale_ (1595, S. R. 16
April 1595), and _Valentine and Orson_ (S. R. 23 May 1595), of which
no copy is known to be extant. Somewhat later came _Sir Clyomon and
Clamydes_ (1599).
The Queen’s men were at Coventry on 4 July 1594, at Bristol in August,
and at Bath and Barnstaple, where they were unlucky enough to break
down the ceiling in the Guildhall, during 1593–4, and thereafter they
are traceable right up to the end of the reign, at Coventry, Oxford,
and Bath in 1594–5, at Leicester both before and after Michaelmas
1595, twice at Coventry and at Ludlow in 1595–6, at Stratford-on-Avon
on 16 and 17 July 1596, at Bristol in August, at Leicester between
October and December 1596, and at Faversham and Bridgnorth in the
same year, at Coventry, at Dunwich, and twice at Bath in 1596–7, at
Bristol again about Christmas 1597, at Nottingham on 8 July 1597, at
Bristol about 25 July, at Bath in 1597–8, at Leicester on 9 January
1598, at Maldon in 1598, at Ipswich and Reading in 1598–9, at Maldon
in 1599, at Dunwich in 1599–1600, at Ipswich on 2 June 1600, and at
Leicester before 29 September in the same year, at Coventry and Bath
in 1600–1, at York in July 1602, at Leicester on 30 September 1602, at
Belvoir in August or September of the same year, and at Coventry in
1602–3. But little, naturally enough, is known of the _personnel_ of
the company during this period of its decay. On 1 June 1595 Francis
Henslowe borrowed another £9 from his uncle ‘to laye downe for his
hallfe share w^{th} the company w^{ch} he dothe playe w^{th} all’,[329]
and I see no particular reason to suppose that this was another company
than the Queen’s. The loan is witnessed by William Smyght, George
Attewell, and Robert Nycowlles, each of whom is described as ‘player’.
It is likely enough that these were now fellows of Francis Henslowe.
Attewell had been payee for Lord Strange’s men in 1591. The earlier
loan was witnessed by John Towne, Hugh Davis, and Richard Alleyn. Davis
and Alleyn appear elsewhere in connexion with Henslowe, but Towne was
certainly a Queen’s man. He is in the 1588 list and is described as
‘one of her Majesties plears’ when on 8 July 1597 he obtained a release
of debts due to Roger Clarke of Nottingham.[330] The other men of 1588
had nearly all vanished. John Singer had joined the Admiral’s by the
autumn of 1594. I should not be surprised, however, to find that John
Garland was still with the Queen’s. He was an associate of Francis
Henslowe in the Duke of Lennox’s men in 1604, and was then ‘owld’
Garland. Indeed, it seems probable that, when the Queen’s men lost
their last shred of claim to a livery on Elizabeth’s death, they made
an attempt still to hold together under the patronage of Lennox. John
Shank was once a Queen’s man.
xiv. THE EARL OF ARUNDEL’S MEN
Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel; _nat. c._ 1511; m. (1)
Katherine, d. of Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, before 1532,
(2) Mary, Countess of Sussex, d. of Sir John Arundel, after
1542; succ. Jan. 1544; Lord Chamberlain, 1544; Lord Steward,
1553, and again 1558–64; _ob._ 24 Feb. 1580.
Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel, s. of Thomas Howard, 4th
Duke of Norfolk, attainted 1572, and Mary, d. and h. of 12th
Earl; _nat._ 28 June 1557; m. Anne, d. of Thomas, Lord Dacre,
1571; succ. Feb. 1580; sent to Tower, 25 Apr. 1585, and _ob._
there, 19 Oct. 1595.
The Earls of Arundel had players as far back as the fifteenth
century.[331] The 12th Earl entertained Elizabeth with a mask at
Nonsuch on 5 August 1559. He had players, who were rewarded by the
Duchess of Suffolk, apparently during a London visit, in December
1561. The 13th Earl had a company in 1584. It was in London when plays
were suppressed in June, and obediently submitted. It seems to have
been located at the Curtain. It can be traced at Ipswich on 1 July, at
Leicester before 29 September, at Aldeburgh in 1583–4, at Norwich in
1585–6, and thereafter no more.
xv. THE EARL OF HERTFORD’S MEN
Edward Seymour, s. of Edward, Protector and 1st and attainted
Duke of Somerset; _nat._ 25 May 1539; cr. Earl of Hertford, 13
Jan. 1559; m. (1) Lady Catherine Grey, d. of Henry, Duke of
Suffolk, _c._ Nov. 1560, (2) Frances, d. of William, 1st Lord
Howard of Effingham, before 1582, (3) Frances, d. of Thomas,
Lord Howard of Bindon and widow of Henry Pranell, Dec. 1600;
_ob._ 6 Apr. 1621.
These are among the most obscure of the companies. They appeared at
Canterbury in 1582, Faversham in 1586, Newcastle in October 1590,
Leicester on 22 November 1590, and Bath, Marlborough, and Southampton
in 1591–2. During the progress of 1591 Elizabeth was entertained from
20 to 24 September by the Earl at Elvetham in Hampshire ‘beeing none
of the Earles chiefe mansion houses’ (cf. ch. xxiv). This was really
a visit of reconciliation, for much of Hertford’s life had been spent
in disgrace, owing to his first marriage with the heiress, under
Henry VIII’s will, to Elizabeth’s throne. The entertainment was very
elaborate, and at its close Elizabeth protested to the Earl that it was
so honourable ‘as hereafter he should find the rewarde thereof in her
especiall favour’. No doubt Hertford’s players took a part, and shared
the ‘largesse’ which she bestowed upon the ‘actors’ of the pastimes
before she departed. I think it must have also been their success on
this occasion which earned them their only appearance at Court, on the
following 6 January 1592. I have elsewhere tried to show that there
is a special connexion between this Elvetham entertainment and _A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream_,[332] and if any special company is satirized
in Bottom and his fellows, I feel sure that it must have been the Earl
of Hertford’s and not, as Mr. Fleay thinks, the Earl of Sussex’s.[333]
Probably the company went under in the plague of 1592–4, and in 1595
Hertford was again in disgrace for presuming so far upon his favour
as to claim a declaration of the validity of his first marriage. But
there were players under his name at Coventry in 1596–7, at Ipswich in
1600–1, and on 8 May 1602, at Norwich in 1601, and at Bath in 1601–2,
and this company appeared at Court on 6 January 1603. Their payee was
Martin Slater, formerly of the Admiral’s, and since then, possibly, an
associate of Laurence Fletcher in his Scottish tours. In 1604–5 they
were at Norwich. In 1606 they visited Leicester, on 9 July Oxford,
and on 2 December the Earl of Derby wrote to the Mayor of Chester to
bespeak for them the use of the town-hall. In 1606–7 they were at
Coventry.
xvi. MR. EVELYN’S MEN (1588)
George Evelyn, of Wotton, Surrey; _nat._ 1530; _ob._ 1603.
Collier gives no authority for the following rather puzzling
statement:[334]
‘In Feb. 1587, the Earl of Warwick obtained a warrant for the
payment of the claim of George Evelyn of Wotton, for provisions
supplied to the Tower, and for the reward of actors on Shrove
Tuesday for a Play, the title of which is not given nor the name
of the company by which it was performed: the whole sum amounted
to only 12_s._’
The date intended must be 1588, as in 1587 Shrovetide fell in March.
But there is probably some misunderstanding, as no such payment occurs
in the Treasurer of the Chamber’s accounts, and the sum named is too
small for a reward. Moreover, private gentlemen do not seem to have
entertained Court companies at so late a date. The Revels Account for
1587–8 only records seven plays. Of these the Treasurer of the Chamber
paid for six, and the seventh was presented by Gray’s Inn.
xvii. THE EARL OF DERBY’S (LORD STRANGE’S) MEN
Henry Stanley, s. of Edward, 3rd Earl of Derby; _nat._ 1531;
known as Lord Strange; m. Margaret, d. of Henry, 2nd Earl of
Cumberland, 7 Feb. 1555; succ. as 4th Earl, 24 Oct. 1572; Lord
Steward, 1588; _ob._ 25 Sept. 1593.
Ferdinando Stanley, 2nd s. of Henry, 4th Earl of Derby; _nat.
c._ 1559; m. Alice, d. of Sir John Spencer of Althorp, 1579;
summoned to Parliament as Lord Strange, 28 Jan. 1589; succ. as
5th Earl of Derby, 25 Sept. 1593; _ob._ 16 Apr. 1594.
William Stanley, s. of Henry, 4th Earl of Derby; _nat._ 1561;
succ. as 6th Earl of Derby, 16 Apr. 1594; m. Elizabeth, d. of
Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford, 26 Jan. 1595; _ob._ 29 Sept. 1642.
The companies connected with the great northern house of Stanley
present a history perhaps more complicated than that of any other
group, partly because it seems to have been not unusual for the heir
of the house to entertain players during his father’s lifetime. The
3rd Earl had a company in Henry the Eighth’s reign. His successor
had one as Lord Strange, which is only recorded in the provinces, in
1563–70.[335] Four years later he had again a company as Earl of Derby.
The earliest mention of it is at Coventry in 1573–4. It was at Dover
and Coventry in 1577–8, at Ipswich on 28 May 1578, at Nottingham on 31
August 1578, at Bristol in the same year, and at Bath in 1578–9. In the
last three months of 1579 it was at Leicester; and during the following
Christmas it made its first appearance at Court with a performance of
_The Soldan and the Duke of ---- _ on 14 February 1580. In 1579–80
it was at Stratford-on-Avon, Exeter, and Coventry, on 1 January 1581
at Court, in 1580–1 at Bath, Leicester, Nottingham, Exeter, and
Winchester, in 1581–2 at Nottingham, Winchester, and Abingdon, in
October to December 1582 at Leicester, and in 1582–3 at Bath, Norwich,
and Southampton. Its last appearance at Court was in _Love and Fortune_
on 30 December 1582.
I think that the Earl of Derby’s players must be taken to be distinct
from another company, which was performing during much the same period
of years under the name of Lord Strange. These men are found in 1576–7
at Exeter, in 1578–9 at Bath, Ipswich, Rochester, Nottingham, Coventry,
and Stratford-on-Avon. They also made their first appearance at Court
in the winter of 1579–80. Their performance was on 15 January 1580,
and they are spoken of, not as players, but as tumblers. On the other
hand they appear as players at Bath, side by side with Derby’s men,
in 1580–1 and 1582–3, and as players also at Bristol, Canterbury, and
Gloucester in 1580–1, Plymouth in 1581–2, and Barnstaple in 1582–3 and
1583–4. With the tumbling at Court in 1580 begins a rather puzzling
series of records. There are further Court entries of feats of activity
by Lord Strange’s men on 28 December 1581, and of feats of activity and
tumbling on 1 January 1583. For this last occasion the payee of the
company was John Symons. Two years later Symons and his ‘fellows’ were
again at Court with feats of activity and vaulting, but they were then
under the patronage, not of Lord Strange, but of the Earl of Oxford.
There would be nothing extraordinary about such a transference of
service, were it not that during the following Christmas, on 9 January
1586, tumbling and feats of activity are ascribed to John Symons and
‘Mr. Standleyes boyes’, and that by ‘Mr. Standley’ one can hardly help
assuming either Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, or some other member
of his family to be intended. This inference is confirmed by a mention
of Lord Strange’s men at Faversham in 1585–6, and it becomes necessary
to assume that, after attaching himself for a year to the Earl of
Oxford, Symons thought better of it, and returned to his original
master. Symons and his company again showed feats of activity on 28
December 1587. No patron is named on this occasion, but as Strange’s
men are traceable at Coventry during 1587–8, it is natural to assume
that they were still holding together. Now a new complication comes
in. There were activities again at Court in the winter of 1588–9, and
Symons certainly took part in them.[336] But the only men companies
to whom payments were made were the Queen’s and the Admiral’s, who
now reappear at Court after absence during two winters, and it is
only in the case of the Admiral’s that the payment is specified to be
for activities. If the restless Symons had joined the Admiral’s men,
it cannot have been for long, since in the course of 1588–9 he was
leading one section of the Queen’s men to Nottingham. Nor had Strange’s
yet entirely broken up, for on 5 November 1589, both they and the
Admiral’s, evidently playing as distinct companies, were suppressed by
the Lord Mayor in the City.[337] Strange’s, who were then at the Cross
Keys, played contemptuously, and some of them were imprisoned. A year
later, the Admiral’s were with Burbadge at the Theatre, and there I
conceive that the residue of Strange’s, deserted by Symons, had joined
them. If they were too many for the house, we know that the Curtain
was available as an ‘easer’. After the quarrel with Burbadge in May
1591, the two companies probably went together to the Rose. The main
evidence for such a theory is that, while the Privy Council record of
play-warrants include two for the Admiral’s men in respect of plays
and feats of activity on 27 December 1590 and 16 February 1591, the
corresponding Chamber payments are to George Ottewell on behalf of
Strange’s men.
This amalgamation of Strange’s and the Admiral’s, tentative perhaps
in 1588–9, and conclusive, if not in 1589–90, at any rate in 1590–1,
lasted until 1594. So far as Court records are concerned, the company
seems to have been regarded as Strange’s. But the leading actor, Edward
Alleyn, kept his personal status as the Lord Admiral’s servant, and
it is to be observed that, for whatever reason, both the Admiral’s
and Strange’s continue to appear, not only in combination, but also
separately in provincial documents.[338] Of this various explanations
are conceivable. One is that the municipal officials were not very
precise in their methods, and when an amalgamated company came before
them, sometimes entered the name of one lord, sometimes of the other,
sometimes of both. Another is that a few of the Admiral’s men may have
been left out of the amalgamation and have travelled separately under
that name. We know, of course, that Richard Jones and others went
abroad in 1592, but they may have spent some time in the provinces
first. And thirdly, it is possible that, while the combined company
performed as a whole in London, they found it more economical to
take their authorities from both lords with them, when they went to
the country in the summer, and to unite or divide their forces as
convenience prompted. I am the more inclined to this third conjecture,
in that the ‘intollerable’ charge of travelling with a great company
and the danger of ‘division and separacion’ involved were explicitly
put forward by Lord Strange’s men in a petition to the Privy Council
for leave to quit Newington Butts, where they had been commanded to
play during a long vacation, and return to their normal quarters,
doubtless at the Rose, on the Bankside. They particularly wanted to
avoid going to the country, but Newington Butts did not pay, and they
were backed by the Thames watermen, who lost custom when the Rose
was not open. It is not clear whether this petition belongs to 1591
or 1592.[339] The provincial records show that the company probably
travelled during 1592, but not 1591. If the petition belongs to 1592,
it is obvious that the plague intervened, and I strongly suspect that
the company’s fears proved justified, and that the reorganization for
provincial work did in fact lead to a ‘division and separacion’, by the
splitting off of some members of the combine as Pembroke’s men (q.v.).
This, however, anticipates a little. To Alleyn’s talent must be
attributed the remarkable success of the company in the winter of
1591–2, during which they were called upon to give six performances at
Court, on 27 and 28 December, 1 and 9 January, and 6 and 8 February,
as against one each allotted to the Queen’s, Sussex’s, and Hertford’s
men. On 19 February 1592 the company began a season with Philip
Henslowe, probably at the Rose, and played six days a week for a period
of eighteen weeks, during which they only missed Good Friday and two
other days. Henslowe records in his diary the name of the play staged
at each of the hundred and five performances, together with a sum of
money which probably represents his share of the takings.[340] If so,
his average receipts were £1 14_s._ 0_d._; but the daily amounts
fluctuated considerably, sometimes falling to a few shillings and again
rising to twice the average on the production of a new or popular
play or during the Easter or Whitsun holiday. Twenty-three plays in
all were given, for any number of days from one to fifteen; the same
play was rarely repeated in any one week. Five of the plays are marked
in the diary with the letters _ne_, which are reasonably taken to
indicate the production of a new piece. These were ‘Harey the vj’,
probably Shakespeare’s _1 Henry VI_, _Titus and Vespasian_, probably
the play on which was based Shakespeare’s _Titus Andronicus_, the
_Second Part_ of _Tamar Cham_, _The Tanner of Denmark_, and _A Knack
to Know a Knave_. The eighteen old plays included Marlowe’s _Jew of
Malta_, Greene’s _Orlando Furioso_ and _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_,
Greene and Lodge’s _A Looking Glass for London_; also _Muly Mollocco_
which might be Peele’s _Battle of Alcazar_, _Four Plays in One_, which
is conjectured to be a part of Tarlton’s _Seven Deadly Sins_, and
_Jeronimo_, which is almost certainly Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_. There
was also a play, sometimes given on the day before this last, under
the varying titles of _Don Horatio_, the _Comedy of Jeronimo_, or _The
Spanish Comedy_, which does not appear to have been preserved.[341] The
same fate has befallen the other ten plays, of which the names were
_Sir John Mandeville_, _Henry of Cornwall_, _Clorys and Orgasto_, _Pope
Joan_, _Machiavel_, _Bindo and Richardo_, _Zenobia_, _Constantine_,
_Jerusalem_, and _Brandimer_. From the financial point of view, the
greatest successes were _Titus and Vespasian_, _The Jew of Malta_, _2
Tamar Cham_, _1 Henry VI_, and _The Spanish Tragedy_. These averaged
respectively for Henslowe £2 8_s._ 6_d._ for seven days, £2 3_s._ 6_d._
for ten days, £2 1_s._ 6_d._ for five days, £2 0_s._ 6_d._ for fifteen
days, and £1 17_s._ 0_d._ for thirteen days. The _Seven Deadly Sins_
and perhaps also the _Looking Glass_ must have passed in some way into
the hands of Strange’s or the Admiral’s, or into Henslowe’s, from the
Queen’s.
The performances came to an end on 23 June, for on that day the Privy
Council inhibited all plays until Michaelmas. Whether the Newington
Butts episode and the watermen’s petition followed or not, at any rate
plague intervened in the course of the summer, and the company had to
face the disadvantages of travelling. They were afoot by 13 July and
still on 19 December. Ten days later, Henslowe resumed his account,
and the resemblance of the list of plays to that of the previous spring
renders it reasonable to suppose that the actors were the same.[342]
The season lasted to the end of January 1593, and a play was given
on each of the twenty-six week-days of this period. _Muly Mollocco_,
_The Spanish Tragedy_, _A Knack to Know a Knave_, _The Jew of Malta_,
_Sir John Mandeville_, _Titus and Vespasian_, _Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay_, _1 Henry VI_, and _2 Tamar Cham_ all made their appearance
again. In addition, there were a comedy called _Cosmo_, and two new
plays, _The Jealous Comedy_, which may, I think, be _The Comedy of
Errors_, and _The Tragedy of the Guise_, which is usually accepted as
Marlowe’s _Massacre of Paris_. The first representation of the former
yielded Henslowe £2 4_s._ 0_d._, that of the latter £3 14_s._ 0_d._; as
in the spring, his daily takings averaged £1 14_s._ 0_d._ Besides their
public performances, Strange’s men were called upon for three plays at
Court, on the evenings of 27 and 31 December 1592 and 1 January 1593.
The plague made a new inhibition of plays necessary on 28 January, but
it does not seem to have been for some months that Strange’s men made
up their minds to travel. A special licence issued in their favour by
the Privy Council on 6 May is registered in the following terms:
‘Whereas it was thought meet that during the time of the
infection and continewaunce of the sicknes in the citie of
London there shold no plaies or enterludes be usd, for th’
avoiding of th’ assemblies and concourse of people in anie usual
place apointed nere the said cittie, and though the bearers
hereof, Edward Allen, servaunt to the right honorable the
Lord Highe Admiral, William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges,
Augustine Phillipes and Georg Brian, being al one companie,
servauntes to our verie good the Lord the Lord Strainge, ar
restrained their exercize of playing within the said citie and
liberties thereof, yet it is not therby ment but that they
shal and maie in regard of the service by them don and to be
don at the Court exercize their quallitie of playing comodies,
tragedies and such like in anie other cities, townes and
corporacions where the infection is not, so it be not within
seaven miles of London or of the Coort, that they maie be in the
better readines hereafter for her Majesty’s service whensoever
they shalbe therunto called. Theis therfore shalbe to wil and
require you that they maie without their lett or contradiccion
use their said exercize at their most convenient times and
places (the accustomed times of Devine praiers excepted).’[343]
The importance of this document is in the information which it gives
as to the composition of the company. Presumably only the leaders
are named, and of these Alleyn alone is specially designated as an
Admiral’s man. Kempe, at any rate, and probably also Pope and Bryan,
were in Leicester’s service in the Low Countries during 1586, and all
three were together during the same year in Denmark. Whether they had
belonged, as has sometimes been supposed, to Leicester’s long-enduring
company of Court players is less certain. Pope and Bryan passed from
Denmark to Germany, and may have joined the Admiral’s or Strange’s on
their return. They also were acrobats as well as players.[344] Kempe,
however, seems to have parted company from the others in Denmark, and
may have joined Strange’s independently, presumably before 10 June
1592, when _A Knack to Know a Knave_, in which he played ‘merrimentes’,
was produced. Heminges may possibly have been a Queen’s man.
Some details of the 1593 tour and the names of two or three more
members of the company are found in the familiar correspondence of
Alleyn with his wife, whom he had married on 22 October 1592, and with
Philip Henslowe, who was her step-father.[345] On 2 May he writes from
Chelmsford, and on 1 August from Bristol. Here he had received a letter
by Richard Cowley and he sends his reply by a kinsman of Thomas Pope.
At the moment of writing he is ready to play _Harry of Cornwall_.
He asks that further letters may be sent to him by the carriers to
Shrewsbury, West Chester, or York, ‘to be keptt till my Lord Stranges
players com’. He does not expect to be home until All Saints’ Day. A
reply from Henslowe and Mrs. Alleyn on 14 August is in fact addressed
to ‘Mr. Edwarde Allen on of my lorde Stranges players’. This mentions
an illness of Alleyn at Bath during which one of his fellows had had
to play his part. With these letters is one written to Mrs. Allen on
behalf of a ‘servant’ of Alleyn’s, whose name was Pige or Pyk, by the
hand of Mr. Doutone, possibly Edward Dutton, but perhaps more probably
Thomas Dowten or Downton, who was later a sharer among the Admiral’s
men. The provincial records, subject to the confusion of company
nomenclature already noted, appear to confirm the visits to Bath,
Shrewsbury, and York, to indicate others to Southampton, Leicester,
Coventry, Ipswich, and Newcastle, and to show that some temporary
alliance had been entered into with the purely provincial company of
Lord Morley.[346] After 25 September 1593 Strange’s men of course
became Derby’s men.
I now come to a difficult point. There exists amongst the Dulwich
papers a ‘plott’ or prompter’s abstract of a play called _The Second
Part of the Seven Deadly Sins_, which an ingenious conjecture of Mr.
Fleay has identified on internal evidence with the _Four Plays in One_
included in the Strange’s repertory of 1592.[347] In this leading parts
were taken, not only by ‘Mr. Pope’, ‘Mr. Phillipps’, and ‘Mr. Brian’,
but also by ‘Richard Burbadge’; lesser ones by Richard Cowley, John
Duke, Robert Pallant, John Sincler, Thomas Goodale, William Sly, J.
Holland, and three others described only as Harry, Kitt, and Vincent;
and female parts by Saunder, Nick, Robert, Ned, Will, and T. Belt, who
may be presumed to have been boys.[348] Alleyn, Kempe, and Heminges are
not named, but there are several parts to which no actors are assigned.
What, however, is the date of the ‘plott’? Not necessarily 1592, for
the performance of _Four Plays in One_ in that year was only a revival.
The authorship of the _Seven Deadly Sins_ is ascribed to Tarlton, and
therefore the original owners were probably the Queen’s men. They are
not very likely to have parted with it before Tarlton’s death in 1588
brought the first shock to their fortunes, but clearly it may have
come into the possession of Strange’s or the Admiral’s or the combined
company before ever they reached the Rose. And surely the appearance
of Richard Burbadge suggests that the ‘plott’ was brought from the
Theatre, and represents a performance there. He is very unlikely to
have joined at the Rose the company which had just been driven there
by a quarrel with his father. It is true that in the ‘plott’ of _Dead
Man’s Fortune_, which also probably dates from the sojourn of the
Admiral’s (q.v.) at the Theatre, he was apparently not playing leading
parts but only a messenger. But the wording is obscure, and after all
the absence of the prefix ‘Mr.’ from his name in the ‘plott’ of the
_Sins_ may indicate, in accordance with the ordinary usage of the
Dulwich documents, that he was not yet a sharer when it was drawn up.
Apparently, then, at least four of Strange’s men, as we find them in
1593, besides Alleyn, had been playing at the Theatre about 1590–1.
These were Pope, Phillips, Bryan, and Cowley. Obviously we cannot say
whether it was to the original Admiral’s or the original Strange’s that
they belonged. One other point of _personnel_ must not be overlooked.
Shakespeare contributed to the repertory of Strange’s in 1592 and
perhaps also in 1593. Greene calls him a Shake-scene, but neither the
‘plott’ of 1590, nor the licence of 1593, nor the Alleyn correspondence
of the same year, yields his name.[349]
Derby’s men did not appear at Court during the winter of 1593–4. On 16
April 1594 Lord Derby died. On 16 May the company used the Countess’s
name at Winchester. It seems clear that during the summer there was
some reshuffling of the companies, that Alleyn took the leadership of
a new body of Admiral’s men, that several other members of the old
combination, including Pope, Heminges, Kempe, and Phillips, joined
with Burbadge, Shakespeare, and Sly, under the patronage of the Lord
Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, and that, after a short period of
co-operation with each other and Henslowe, the two companies definitely
parted. In the course of 1594 the name of Derby’s men appeared upon
the title-page of _Titus Andronicus_, probably because they had
played it in its earlier form of _Titus and Vespasian_ in 1592–3,
before it passed to Pembroke’s and from them to Sussex’s. In the same
year was published _A Knack to Know a Knave_ (S. R. 7 January 1594)
as played ‘by Ed. Allen and his companie’ and with ‘merrimentes’ by
Kemp. This also belongs to the 1592–3 repertory, of the other plays
in which _1 Henry VI_, like _Titus Andronicus_, passed ultimately to
the Chamberlain’s men, and a considerable number, either as their own
property or that of Henslowe, to the Admiral’s. These included _Tamar
Cham_, _The Battle of Alcazar_, _The Spanish Tragedy_, _The Jew of
Malta_, _The Massacre of Paris_, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, and
probably _Orlando Furioso_, of Orlando’s part in which a transcript,
with alterations in Alleyn’s hand, is preserved at Dulwich.[350] The
only play not named in Henslowe’s diary which can be traced to the
company is _Fair Em_, which bears the name of Lord Strange’s men on its
title-page, but of which the first edition is undated.
It is possible that those of the fifth Earl of Derby’s men who did not
take service with the Lord Chamberlain, passed into a provincial period
of existence under his successor, the sixth Earl. A company bearing
his name was at Norwich on 15 September 1594, at Dunwich in 1594–5
and 1595–6, at Coventry, Bath, and Stratford in 1595–6, at Leicester
between October and December 1596, at Bath in 1596–7, at Maldon in
1597, at Coventry twice in 1597–8, at Leicester in 1597–8, and between
October and December 1598, at Wollaton (Percival Willoughby’s) on 7
October 1599, and at Leicester again on 16 October 1599. Letters of 30
June 1599 relate that the Earl of Derby was then ‘busy penning comedies
for the common players’, and it is perhaps natural to suppose that his
own company were chosen as the exponents of his art.[351] This perhaps
explains its appearance at Court during the winters of 1599–1600 and
1600–1. Four performances were given, on 3 and 5 February 1600 and 1
and 6 January 1601, and for these Robert Browne, who had been both
with Worcester’s men and the Admiral’s, but much of whose dramatic
career had been spent in Germany, was the payee. In an undated letter
to Sir Robert Cecil, Lady Derby writes, ‘Being importuned by my Lord
to intreat your favor that his man Browne, with his companye, may not
be bared from ther accoustomed plaing, in maintenance wherof they have
consumde the better part of ther substance, if so vaine a matter shall
not seame troublesum to you, I could desier that your furderance might
be a meane to uphold them, for that my Lord taking delite in them, it
will kepe him from moer prodigall courses’.[352] To this company are
doubtless to be assigned _Edward IV_, perhaps by Heywood (1600, S. R.
28 August 1599), and the anonymous _Trial of Chivalry_ (1605, S. R.
4 December 1604), both of which are credited to Derby’s men on their
title-pages. It again becomes provincial and is traceable at Norwich on
27 February and 9 June 1602, at Ipswich on 4 June 1602, and thereafter
up to 1618, chiefly at Coventry and at Gawthorpe Hall, the house of
Derby’s neighbours, the Shuttleworths.[353]
John Taylor, the water-poet, returned from his journey to Scotland in
1618 at the Maidenhead Inn, Islington, and here after supper on 14
October ‘we had a play of the Life and Death of Guy of Warwick, played
by the Right Honourable the Earl of Derby his men’. Presumably this
was Day and Dekker’s play entered on the Stationers’ Register in 1619,
which Mr. Bullen declines to identify with the _Guy of Warwick_
published as ‘by B. J.’ in 1661.[354]
xviii. THE EARL OF PEMBROKE’S MEN
Henry Herbert, s. of William, 1st Earl of Pembroke; _nat. c._
1534; succ. as 2nd Earl, 17 Mar. 1570; m. (1) Catherine, d. of
Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, 21 May 1553, (2) Catherine, d. of
George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, 17 Feb. 1563, (3) Mary, d.
of Sir Henry Sidney, _c._ Apr. 1577; President of Wales, 1586;
residences, Baynard’s Castle, London, Wilton House, Wilts.,
Ludlow Castle, &c.; _ob._ 9 Jan. 1601.
[_Bibliographical Note._--Halliwell-Phillipps collected
provincial records and other notes on Pembroke’s men in _A
Budget of Notes and Memoranda_ (1880). The Bill, Answer, and
Replication in Shaw _et al._ v. Langley (1597–8, Court of
Requests) are in C. W. Wallace, _The Swan Theatre and the Earl
of Pembroke’s Servants_ (1911, _E. S._ xliii. 340).]
There is an isolated record of a Pembroke’s company at Canterbury
in 1575–6, hardly to be regarded as continuous with that which
makes its appearance in the last decade of the century. Fleay, 87,
puts the origin of the latter in 1589, and supposes it to be a
continuation of Worcester’s men after the death of their original
patron in 1589, and to be the company ridiculed by Nashe (iii. 324)
for playing _Delphrigus_ and _The King of the Fairies_, in his preface
to Greene’s _Menaphon_ (1589). But this Worcester’s company is not
in fact traceable during 1585–9, and Fleay’s theory is only based
on the allusion to _Hamlet_ in the same preface (iii. 315), and the
assumption that the _Ur-Hamlet_, like some other plays, passed to
the Chamberlain’s from Pembroke’s, whereas it may just as well have
passed to them from Strange’s. As a matter of fact, there is no mention
of Pembroke’s before 1592 and no reason to suppose that it had an
earlier existence. It will be well to detail the few facts of its
history before attempting anything in the nature of conjecture. It
was at Leicester in the last three months of 1592 and made its only
appearances at Court on 26 December 1592 and 6 January 1593. In the
following summer it travelled, and is found at York in June, at Rye in
July, and in 1592–3 at Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Coventry, Bath, and Ipswich.
But it had little success. Henslowe wrote to Alleyn on 28 September,
‘As for my lorde a Penbrockes w^{ch} you desier to knowe wheare they be
they ar all at home and hausse ben this v or sixe weackes for they cane
not saue ther carges w^{th} trauell as I heare & weare fayne to pane
ther parell for ther carge’.[355] About the same time three of their
plays came to the booksellers’ hands. These were Marlowe’s _Edward the
Second_ (1594, S. R. 6 July 1593), _The Taming of A Shrew_ (1594,
S. R. 2 May 1594), and _The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York_
(1595). Probably the play to which this last is a sequel, _1 Contention
of York and Lancaster_ (1594, S. R. 12 March 1594) was also theirs,
although the name of the company is not on the title-page. It is on the
title-page of _Titus Andronicus_ (1594), and its position suggests that
the play passed to them from Strange’s and from them before publication
to Sussex’s. All these plays, with the exception of _Edward II_, seem
to have been worked upon by Shakespeare, and probably they ultimately
became part of the stock of the Chamberlain’s men. These men were
playing _Titus Andronicus_ and _The Taming of The Shrew_ in June 1594,
and that they also owned _The Contention_ in its revised form of _2,
3 Henry VI_ is suggested both by its inclusion in the First Folio and
by the reference in the Epilogue to _Henry V_ not only to the loss of
France but also to the bleeding of England ‘which oft our stage hath
shown’.
I now enter a region of conjecture. It seems to me, on the whole,
likely that the origin of Pembroke’s men is to be explained by the
special conditions of the plague-years 1592–3, and was due to a
division for travelling purposes of the large London company formed
by the amalgamation of Strange’s and the Admiral’s. Such a division
had been foreshadowed as likely to be necessary in the petition sent
by Strange’s men to the Privy Council during the summer of 1592 or
earlier, and may actually have become necessary when, after all, the
plague rendered travelling imperative. If this suggestion is well
founded, it becomes not difficult to explain some of the transferences
of acting rights in certain plays which seem to have taken place. Thus
Strange’s may have handed over _Titus Andronicus_ in its earlier form
of _Titus and Vespasian_ to Pembroke’s for the travels of 1593, and may
also have handed over _The Contention of York and Lancaster_, if that
was originally theirs, as is suggested by their production of _1 Henry
VI_, which belongs to the same closely related series. This opens up a
more important line of speculation. It is usual to assume that one of
the members of Strange’s from 1592 or earlier until its reconstitution
as the Chamberlain’s in 1594 was William Shakespeare, and there is no
reason to doubt his authorship at any rate of the Talbot scenes, which
we know from Nashe to have been staged as part of _1 Henry VI_ in 1592.
At the same time, the names of at least seventeen of Strange’s and
the Admiral’s men in 1590–3 are otherwise known, and his is not one
of them, and in particular his prominence amongst the Chamberlain’s
men from the very beginning renders it extremely unlikely that, if
he had been a member of the company in 1593, he would not have been
mentioned in the Privy Council warrant of 6 May. Further, it seems
to me impossible to resist the inference that the attribution to him
of _Titus Andronicus_ both by Francis Meres in 1598 and in the First
Folio of 1623 can only be explained by his revision under that name of
_Titus and Vespasian_, and that this was for the second production of
the play as ‘ne’ for Henslowe by Sussex’s men on 24 January 1594. There
is, therefore, really some basis for the suggestion made long ago by
Halliwell-Phillipps that he is to be looked for during these years in
Pembroke’s company until its collapse and then in Sussex’s, and that
it was from this rather than directly from Strange’s that he went to
the Chamberlain’s.[356] On the other hand, it may be that for a time he
was not attached as an actor to any company at all. It is possible that
he took advantage of the plague-interval to travel in Italy and only
resumed the regular exercise of his profession when the Chamberlain’s
company was formed. In any event, it must have been he who revised
_The Contention_ as _2, 3 Henry VI_, and the close stylistic relation
of these plays to _1 Henry VI_ makes it probable that the work on all
three belongs to about the same date. The limitations of conjecture on
so intricate a question are obvious, but I can conceive the order of
events as being somewhat as follows. Shakespeare’s first dramatic job,
which earned him the ill will of Greene, was the writing or re-writing
of _1 Henry VI_ for Strange’s, in the early spring of 1592. During
the winter of 1592–3 he revised _The Contention_ for Pembroke’s and
completed the series of his early histories with _Richard III_, and, as
I am inclined to suspect, also an _Ur-Henry VIII_. He also wrote _The
Jealous Comedy_ or _Comedy of Errors_ for Strange’s. In the summer of
1593 Sussex’s took over the plays of the bankrupt Pembroke’s, including
the Shakespearian histories _Titus and Vespasian_ and _The Taming of
A Shrew_. Some at least of these Pembroke’s had themselves derived
in 1592 or 1593 from Strange’s. During the winter of 1593–4 Sussex’s
played either _Richard III_ or _Henry VIII_ as _Buckingham_, and
also _Titus and Vespasian_ revised for them by Shakespeare as _Titus
Andronicus_. Alarmed at the further inhibition of plays in February,
they allowed the revised _Titus_ and unrevised texts of _The Taming of
A Shrew_ and _The Contention_ to get into the hands of the booksellers.
Whether Shakespeare had already revised _A Shrew_ or did so later for
the Chamberlain’s (q.v.) I am uncertain. Finally, by the transfer of
their plays to the Chamberlain’s men, who at once revived _A Shrew_
and _Titus Andronicus_, and by the incorporation of Strange’s men in
the same company, the original stock of Strange’s plays, as distinct
from the Admiral’s, came together in the same hands once more. On the
assumption that Shakespeare never left Strange’s, it is difficult to
explain either the fortunes of _Titus Andronicus_, or the absence from
the lists of Strange’s plays in Henslowe’s diary of _Richard III_,
which must have been written about 1592–4. The silence as regards
Strange’s both of the Court records and of Henslowe’s diary during the
winter of 1593–4 makes it unlikely that they were in London, and they
would surely not produce a new play in the country.
Nothing further is heard of a Pembroke’s company for three or four
years.[357] But in 1597 one appeared in London about which we have
rather full information, recently increased by Mr. Wallace’s discovery
of a Court of Requests suit in which they were concerned. Towards
the end of February in that year Robert Shaw, Richard Jones, Gabriel
Spencer, William Bird _alias_ Borne, and Thomas Downton, who describe
themselves in a suit of the following November as Pembroke’s servants,
together with others their ‘accomplices and associates’, entered into
an agreement with Francis Langley to play for twelve months ending on
20 February 1598 at the Swan. Each man gave a bond of £100, which was
apparently to safeguard Langley against any failure by the company as
a whole or of Robert Shaw or a sufficient substitute in particular
to perform during this period, or against any performance elsewhere,
otherwise than ‘in private places’, within five miles of London.
Langley found £300 for apparel and, as he claimed, making ready of
the play-house, and was to receive a moiety of the takings of the
galleries and to be repaid for the apparel out of the other moiety.
Of the men concerned, Jones and Downton had been Admiral’s men during
1594–7, and their transference coincides with a three weeks’ break in
the performances of the Admiral’s at the Rose from 12 February onwards.
Mr. Wallace (_E. S._ xliii. 357) says that Shaw, Spencer, and Bird were
also of the Admiral’s, but of this there is no evidence. If Pembroke’s
had any continued life during 1594–7, they may have shared it. But this
seems improbable, and on the whole I am inclined to think that they
came from the Chamberlain’s (q.v.). Plays were given at the Swan for
some months, and Langley took £100 from the galleries, and £100 more
for apparel. Then came an inhibition of plays near London on 28 July
1597, caused by the production of _The Isle of Dogs_, as a result of
which one of the authors, Nashe, fled, and the other, Jonson, together
with Shaw and Spencer, was committed to the Marshalsea. The definite
evidence that Shaw and Spencer were Pembroke’s men at the Swan, now
produced by Mr. Wallace, confirms my conjecture (_M. L. R._ iv. 411,
511) that _The Isle of Dogs_ was an adventure of that house and not,
as has sometimes been thought, of the Rose. Either in anticipation of
a prolonged closing of the house or for some other reason, the company
now desired to shake off their relations with Langley. Early in August
Jones returned to Henslowe and made a new covenant with him. His
example was followed by Shaw, Spencer, and Bird, and early in October
by Downton. Their prescience was justified, for when in the course of
October the chief offenders were released, and the inhibition, which
was nominally terminable on 1 November, was in practice relaxed, it
proved that, while Henslowe was able to get a new licence for the
Rose, Langley could get none for the Swan. He urged them to try their
fortunes without a licence, as others of their company were willing to
do, but they not unnaturally refused, and Henslowe (i. 54) records,
‘The xj of October begane my lord Admerals and my lord of Penbrockes
men to playe at my howsse 1597’. He describes the company under the
double name again on 21 and 23 October and 5 November, but on 1
December and thereafter as the Lord Admiral’s (i. 68–70). A study
of the Admiral’s repertory for 1597–8 suggests that some or all of
the plays _Black Joan_, _Hardicanute_, _Bourbon_, _Sturgflattery_,
_Branholt_, _Friar Spendleton_, _Alice Pierce_, and _Dido and Aeneas_
may have been brought in by Pembroke’s men.
The five seceders had not heard the last of Langley. He sued them
at common law on the bonds given not to play in a rival house. They
successfully applied to have the case transferred to the Court of
Requests, and in the course of the pleadings maintained, firstly, that
they were prevented from playing at the Swan by the restraint and
Langley’s failure to get a licence; secondly, that Langley had orally
assented to their transfer to Henslowe; thirdly, that they could not
appear at the Swan as a company, since Langley had ‘procured from
them’ two (or, as they afterwards said, three) of their associates,
to whom he had returned their obligations; and fourthly, that Langley
had suffered no damage, since other men were occupying his house.
They also complained that Langley had never handed over the apparel
for which they had recouped him out of their gallery takings. The
negotiations with Langley which they describe seem to have taken place
during October. About the covenants entered into with Henslowe as far
back as the beginning of August they said nothing, and whether either
Langley or the court ever found out about these, and what the ultimate
decision of the court on the main issue was, must remain uncertain. But
certain loans entered in Henslowe’s diary suggest that in March 1598
Langley was in a position to arrest Bird, and that in September of the
same year some kind of agreement was arrived at, under which Langley
received £35, as well as £19 or more for a rich cloak (i. 63, 72, 73,
95, 96). It is possible that a ‘sewt agenste Thomas Poope’ of the
Chamberlain’s, for which Henslowe (i. 72) made a personal advance of
10_s._ to William Bird on 30 August 1598, may also have been connected
with the shiftings of companies in 1597.
The names of the two or three members of the company to whom Langley
gave back their bonds are not stated in the pleadings. Perhaps one
was Jonson, and the other two might conceivably have been Humphrey
and Anthony Jeffes, since the name of ‘Humfrey’ stands with that of
‘Gabriel’ in stage-directions to _3 Henry VI_, and Henslowe’s list of
the reconstituted Admiral’s company as it stood in October 1597–January
1598 contains ‘the ij Geffes’, who are not traceable in the 1594–7
company and may well have come in with the five Pembroke’s men. Langley
tells us that certain ‘fellows’ of his opponents had taken a more
reasonable line than theirs and returned to the Swan. How long these
men remained there we do not know, but probably they secured Pembroke’s
patronage after the five had been definitely merged in the Admiral’s,
for by the end of 1597 there was clearly a distinct Pembroke’s company
again. Provincial records yield the name, not only at Bath in 1596–7
and at Bristol in September 1597, which may point to a tour of the
undivided Swan company during the period of restraint, but also at Bath
in 1598–9, at Bristol in July 1598, at Leicester between October and
December, at Dover on 7 October, at Coventry on 12 December, and at
Bewdley on 22 December. They were at Norwich in April 1599, at Coventry
on 4 July, and at Bristol in July. They were at York on 21 January
1600, Bristol in April, Marlborough in May, and Leicester before
Michaelmas. In October they were in relationship with Henslowe, who
notes ‘my Lordes of Penbrockes men begane to playe at the Rosse’, and
records performances of _Like Unto Like_ and _Roderick_ on 28 and 29
October respectively.[358] The former brought him 11_s._ 6_d._ and the
latter 5_s._, and there apparently the experiment ended, and with it,
so far as is known, the career of Pembroke’s men. It is just possible
that they were merged in Worcester’s company, which arose shortly
afterwards. Mr. Fleay expands this possibility into a definite theory
that Kempe, Beeston, Duke, and Pallant left the Chamberlain’s men for
Pembroke’s in 1599, and ultimately passed from these to Worcester’s.
This is improbable as regards Kempe, and unproved as regards the
rest.[359]
xix. THE LORD ADMIRAL’S (LORD HOWARD’S, EARL OF NOTTINGHAM’S),
PRINCE HENRY’S, AND ELECTOR PALATINE’S MEN
Charles Howard, s. of William, 1st Baron Howard of Effingham,
g.s. of Thomas, 2nd Duke of Norfolk; _nat._ 1536; m. (1)
Catherine Carey, d. of Henry Lord Hunsdon, Lady of the Privy
Chamber, (2) Margaret Stuart, d. of James Earl of Murray, _c._
1604; succ. as 2nd Baron, 29 Jan. 1573; Deputy Lord Chamberlain,
1574–5; Vice-Admiral, Feb. 1582; Lord Chamberlain, _c._ Dec.
1583; Lord High Admiral, 8 July 1585–1619; Earl of Nottingham,
22 Oct. 1596; Lord Steward, 1597; _ob._ 14 Dec. 1624.
Henry Frederick, s. of James VI of Scotland and I of England;
_nat._ 19 Feb. 1594; cr. Duke of Rothesay, 30 Aug. 1594; succ.
as Duke of Cornwall, 24 Mar. 1603; cr. Earl of Chester and
Prince of Wales, 4 June 1610; _ob._ 6 Nov. 1612.
Frederick, s. of Frederick IV, Count Palatine of the Rhine;
_nat._ 19 Aug. 1596; succ. as Frederick V, 1610; m. Princess
Elizabeth of England, 14 Feb. 1613; elected King of Bohemia,
1619; _ob._ 1632.
[_Bibliographical Note._--The material preserved amongst the
papers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn at Dulwich has
been fully collected and studied by W. W. Greg in _Henslowe’s
Diary_ (1904–8) and _Henslowe Papers_ (1907), which replace the
earlier publications of Malone, Collier, and others from the
same source. I have added a little from Professor Wallace’s
researches and elsewhere, and have attempted to give my own
reading of the evidence, which differs in a few minor points
from Dr. Greg’s.]
It was perhaps his employment as deputy to the Earl of Sussex in the
office of Lord Chamberlain which led Lord Howard to encourage players.
A company, under the name of Lord Howard’s men, appeared at Court for
the first time at the Christmas of 1576–7. On 27 December they played
_Tooley_, and on 17 February _The Solitary Knight_.[360] They came
again for the last time in the following winter, and performed on 5
January 1578. They were also at Kirtling on 3 December 1577, Saffron
Walden in 1577–8, Ipswich on 24 October 1577, in 1578–9, and perhaps
on 8 October 1581, Bristol, where they gave _The Queen of Ethiopia_,
between 31 August and 6 September 1578, Nottingham on 19 December 1578,
and Bath and Coventry in 1578–9.
Howard again had players at Court, after he became Admiral in 1585.
The first record of them is at Dover in June 1585. Later in the year
they were playing in conjunction with the Lord Chamberlain’s (Lord
Hunsdon’s). ‘The Lorde Chamberlens and the Lord Admirall’s players’
were rewarded at Leicester in October-December 1585, and ‘the servants
of the lo: admirall and the lo: Chamberlaine’ for a play at Court on 6
January 1586.[361] During the same Christmas, however, the Admiral’s
played alone on 27 December 1585, and as Hunsdon’s survived in the
provinces, the two organizations may have been amalgamated for one
performance only. The Admiral’s were at Coventry, Faversham, Ipswich,
and Leicester in 1585–6. They were reported to Walsingham amongst other
London companies on 25 January 1587 (App. D, No. lxxviii), although
they did not appear at Court during this winter. In 1586–7 they were at
Cambridge, Coventry, Bath, York, Norwich, Ipswich, Exeter, Southampton,
and Leicester. By November they were back in London, and on the 16th
an accident at their theatre is thus related by Philip Gawdy to his
father:[362]
‘Yow shall vnderstande of some accydentall newes heare in this
towne thoughe my self no wyttnesse thereof, yet I may be bold
to veryfye it for an assured troth. My L. Admyrall his men
and players having a devyse in ther playe to tye one of their
fellowes to a poste and so to shoote him to deathe, having
borrowed their callyvers one of the players handes swerved his
peece being charged with bullett missed the fellowe he aymed
at and killed a chyld, and a woman great with chyld forthwith,
and hurt an other man in the head very soore. How they will
answere it I do not study vnlesse their profession were better,
but in chrystyanity I am very sorry for the chaunce but God his
iudgementes ar not to be searched nor enquired of at mannes
handes. And yet I fynde by this an old proverbe veryfyed ther
never comes more hurte than commes of fooling.’
Possibly the company went into retirement as a result of this disaster;
at any rate nothing more is heard of them until the Christmas of
1588–9. They then came to Court, and were rewarded for two interludes
and ‘for showinge other feates of activitye and tumblinge’ on 29
December 1588 and 11 February 1589.[363] On 6 November 1589 they were
playing in the City, and were suppressed by the Lord Mayor, because
Tilney, the Master of the Revels, misliked their plays. Probably
they had been concerning themselves with the Marprelate controversy.
Strange’s men, who were evidently performing as a separate company,
shared their fate. It may have been this misadventure which led the
Admiral’s to seek house-room with James Burbadge at the Theatre (q.v.),
where some evidence by John Alleyn, who, with James Tunstall, was of
their number, locates them in November 1590 and May 1591. A relic of
this period may be presumed to exist in the ‘plot’ of _Dead Man’s
Fortune_, preserved with other plots belonging to the company at
Dulwich, in which Burbadge, doubtless Richard Burbadge, then still a
boy, appeared. Certainly there is nothing to connect Burbadge with the
company at any other date. Other actors in the piece were one Darlowe,
‘b[oy?] Samme’, and Robert Lee, later of Anne’s men. The Admiral’s
again showed ‘feats of activitie’ at Court on 28 December 1589, and
a play on 3 March 1590. In 1589–90 they were at Coventry, Ipswich,
Maidstone, Marlborough, Winchester, and Gloucester, and in 1590–1 at
Winchester and Gloucester. Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_ was published in
1590 as ‘shewed upon stages in the City of London’ by the Admiral’s
men. The Court records for the following winter present what looks at
first sight like a curious discrepancy. The accounts of the Treasurer
of the Chamber include payments for plays and activities on 27 December
1590 and 16 February 1591 to Lord Strange’s men. The corresponding
warrants, however, were made out, according to the Privy Council
Register, for the Admiral’s. Probably there is no error here, and the
entries are evidence of an amalgamation between the two companies,
which possibly dated from as far back as the winter of 1589, and
which seems to have endured until the summer of 1594. Technically,
it would seem that it was the Admiral’s who were merged in Strange’s
men. It is the latter and not the former who generally appear in
official documents during this period. I have therefore dealt with
its details for both companies, with the question of the precise date
of the amalgamation, and with the possibility that the plot of _The
Seven Deadly Sins_ and its list of actors also belong to a Theatre
performance of about 1590, in my account of Strange’s men, and need
only remark here that the name of the Admiral’s does not altogether
fall into disuse, especially in provincial records, and that the
leading actor, Edward Alleyn, in particular, is shown by an official
document to have retained his personal status as an Admiral’s servant.
It is a question of some interest how early Alleyn’s connexion with
the Admiral’s may be supposed to have begun. Was he, for example,
the original Tamburlaine of 1587, and was it as an Admiral’s man
that Nashe referred to him, if it was he to whom Nashe referred, as
the Roscius of the contemporary players in his _Menaphon_ epistle of
1589? He is known to have been a member of Worcester’s company in
1583. Dr. Greg is disposed to think that he remained with them until
the death of the third Earl of Worcester on 22 February 1589, and
then joined the Admiral’s.[364] It is, however, to be observed that
there is no trace of Worcester’s men between 1584 and 1590, and that
it is in 1585 that the Admiral’s men begin to appear at Court. On the
whole, it commends itself to me as the more probable conjecture that
the first Earl of Worcester’s company passed into Howard’s service,
when he became Admiral in 1585, and that the players of the fourth
Earl of Worcester between 1590 and 1596 were distinct from those of
his father. The issue concerns others besides Edward Alleyn himself.
Amongst the members of Worcester’s company in 1583 were Robert Browne,
James Tunstall, and Richard Jones; and all three of these are found
concerned with Alleyn in matters of theatrical business during 1589–91.
The most important document is a deed of sale by ‘Richarde Jones of
London yoman’ to ‘Edwarde Allen of London gent’ for £37 10s. of ‘all
and singuler suche share parte and porcion of playinge apparrelles,
playe bookes, instrumentes, and other comodities whatsoeuer belonginge
to the same, as I the said Richarde Jones nowe haue or of right ought
to haue joyntlye with the same Edwarde Allen, John Allen citizen and
inholder of London and Roberte Browne yoman’.[365] This is dated 3
January 1589. There are also three deeds of sale to Edward and John
Alleyn of theatrical apparel between 1589 and 1591, and to two of these
James Tunstall was a witness.[366] On Dr. Greg’s theory as to the date
at which Alleyn took service with the Lord Admiral, the organization
in whose properties Richard Jones had an interest would naturally be
Worcester’s men; on mine it would be the Admiral’s, and it would follow
that Jones and Browne, as well as Alleyn, had joined that company.
We have seen that James Tunstall had done so by 1590–1. John Alleyn
was an elder brother of Edward. There is nothing to connect him with
Worcester’s men. He was a servant of Lord Sheffield in November 1580
and of the Lord Admiral in 1589.[367] A letter of one Elizabeth Socklen
to Edward Alleyn refers to a time ‘when your brother, my lovinge cozen
John Allen, dwelt with my very good lord, Charles Heawarde’, and this
rather suggests that his service was in some household capacity, and
not merely as player.[368] If so, it may have been through him that
Edward Alleyn and his fellows became Admiral’s men. The first period of
their activity seems to have lasted from 1585 to 1589, and it was no
doubt Edward Alleyn’s genius, and perhaps also his business capacity,
which enabled them to offer a serious rivalry to the Queen’s company.
I suspect that in 1589 or 1590 they were practically dissolved, and
this view is confirmed by the fact that their most important play was
allowed to get to the hands of the printers. Alleyn, with the help of
his brother, bought up the properties, and allied himself with Lord
Strange’s men, and so far as the Admiral’s continued to exist at all
for the next few years, it was almost entirely in and through him
that it did so. After a financial quarrel with James Burbadge in May
1591, the combined companies moved to the Rose. There is nothing to
show whether the Alleyns bought up Robert Browne’s interest as well as
that of Richard Jones. At any rate Browne began in 1590 that series
of continental tours which occupied most of the rest of his career
(cf. ch. xiv). Jones joined him in one of these adventures in 1592,
and it is possible that John Bradstreet and Thomas Sackville, who went
with them, were also old Admiral’s men. But I do not think that it is
accurate to regard this company, as Dr. Greg seems to be inclined to
do, as being itself under the Admiral’s patronage. It is true that they
obtained a passport from him, but this was probably given rather in his
capacity as warden of the seas than in that of their lord. His name is
not mentioned in any of the foreign records of their peregrinations.
It is not possible to say which, other than Alleyn, of the members
of the 1592–3 Strange’s and Admiral’s company, whose names have been
preserved, came from each of the two contributing sources. They do
not include either John Alleyn or James Tunstall, or Edward Browne,
a Worcester’s man of 1583, who reappears with Tunstall among the
Admiral’s after 1594. Nor is it possible to say how far the repertory
of Strange’s men, as disclosed by the 1592–3 entries in Henslowe’s
diary, included plays drawn from the Admiral’s stock. This may have
been the case with _The Battle of Alcazar_, which was printed as an
Admiral’s play in 1594, and with _Orlando Furioso_, which contemporary
gossip represents Greene as selling first to the Queen’s and then to
the Admiral’s. And it may have been the case with _1 Tamar Cham_, which
passed to the later Admiral’s. Neither _Tamburlaine_ nor _The Wounds of
Civil War_, printed like _The Battle of Alcazar_ as an Admiral’s play
in 1594, is recorded to have been played by Strange’s.
When the companies settled down again to a London life after the
conclusion of the long plague in 1594, the Admiral’s men reconstituted
themselves as an independent company with Alleyn at its head, leaving
the greater number of their recent comrades of the road to pass, as
the Lord Chamberlain’s men, under the patronage of Lord Hunsdon. The
personal alliance between Alleyn and Henslowe, whose step-daughter,
Joan Woodward, he had married on 22 October 1592, led to the
institution of close business relations between the company and the
pawnbroker, and the record of these in the famous diary enables us to
follow with a singular minuteness the almost daily fortunes of the
Admiral’s men during the course of some nine or ten years, broken into
two periods by a reconstruction of the company in 1597 and finally
closing about the time of their conversion into Prince Henry’s men in
1604. The precise nature of the position occupied by Henslowe has been
carefully investigated by Dr. Greg,[369] and has already been briefly
considered in these pages (ch. xi). He was not a member of the company,
but its landlord, and, probably to an increasing extent, its financier.
In the former capacity he received, after every day’s performance,
a fluctuating sum, which seems to have represented half the amount
received for admission to the galleries of the house; the other half,
with the payments for entrance to the standing room in the yard, being
divided amongst such of the players as had a share in the profits.
Out of this, of course, they had to meet all expenditure other than
by way of rent, such as the wages of hired men, payments for apparel
and play-books, fees to the Master of the Revels for the licensing of
plays, and the like. In practice it became convenient for Henslowe, who
was a capitalist, while many of the players lived from hand to mouth,
to advance sums to meet such expenditure as it fell due, and to recoup
himself from time to time out of the company’s profits. It seems likely
that, when the system was in full working, the moiety of the gallery
money, which remained after the deduction of the rent, was assigned for
the purpose of these repayments. During the period 1597–1604 Henslowe’s
entries in his diary are mainly in the nature of a running account of
these advances and of the receipts set off against them; for 1594–7
similar entries occur irregularly, but the principal record is a daily
list, such as Henslowe had already kept during his shorter associations
with Strange’s, the Queen’s, and Sussex’s companies in the course of
1592–4, of each performance given, with the name of the play and of
the amount accruing to Henslowe himself in the form of rent. This list
renders possible a very interesting analysis, both of the repertory of
the company and of some at least of the financial conditions of their
enterprise.
The entries start with the heading, ‘In the name of God Amen begininge
the 14 of Maye 1594 by my lord Admeralls men’. After three days, during
which _The Jew of Malta_, _Cutlack_, and _The Ranger’s Comedy_, all
of which are found in the later repertory of the company, were given,
they stop abruptly.[370] To about the same date may be assigned a
fragmentary account, headed ‘Layd owt for my Lorde Admeralle seruantes
as ffoloweth 1594’, and recording expenditure for coming and going to
Court and to Somerset House, the residence of the Lord Chamberlain,
‘for mackinge of our leater twise’, and ‘for drinckinge with the
jentellmen’, all evidently concerned with the initial business of
forming and licensing the company.[371] On 5 June the account of
performances is resumed with a fresh heading, ‘In the name of God Amen
begininge at Newington my Lord Admeralle men and my Lorde Chamberlen
men as ffolowethe 1594’.[372] Henslowe’s takings only averaged 9_s._
for the first ten days, probably on account of the distance of
Newington Butts from London.[373] The takings for the three days in
May averaged 41_s._, and it may perhaps be inferred that these May
performances were at the Rose, and that some fear of renewed plague
on the part of the authorities led to their being relegated to a
safer quarter. The tentative character of these early performances
is shown by the fact that the Admiral’s were still sharing a theatre
with the Chamberlain’s. To the repertory of the latter it seems safe
to assign three of the seven plays produced, _Titus Andronicus_,
_Hamlet_, and _The Taming of A Shrew_, and probably also a fourth,
_Hester and Ahasuerus_, as there is no later sign of this amongst
the Admiral’s plays. This leaves three others to be regarded as the
Admiral’s contribution, _The Jew of Malta_ and _Cutlack_, which they
had played in May and were often to play again, and _Belin Dun_, to
which are attached the letters ‘ne’, Henslowe’s normal indication of a
new play.[374] There is nothing in the order in which the plays were
taken to indicate an alternation of the two companies, and it is likely
enough that neither was yet fully constituted, and that they actually
joined forces in the same performances.
After the tenth play on 15 June, Henslowe drew a line across the
page, and although the entries continue without any indication of a
change in the conditions under which the performances were given, I
can only concur in the conjecture of Mr. Fleay and Dr. Greg that at
this point the Admiral’s plays were transferred to the Rose, and the
combination with the Chamberlain’s ceased.[375] A sudden rise in the
amount of Henslowe’s takings, and the absence from the rest of the
list of the four plays named above and of any other attributable to
the Chamberlain’s repertory, are alike strongly in favour of this
view, which may be treated as a practical certainty. Henceforward the
fortunes of the company seem to have followed a smooth course for the
space of three years. Their proceedings may be briefly summed up as
follows. They played for thirty-nine consecutive weeks from 15 June
1594 to 14 March 1595, appearing at Court during this season on 28
December, 1 January, and 6 January. After a break of thirty-seven days
during Lent, opportunity of which was taken to repair the Rose, they
played again for ten weeks from Easter Monday, 21 April, to 26 June
1595. Then came a vacation of fifty-nine days, with visits to Bath and
Maidstone. They began again in London on 25 August 1595 and played for
twenty-seven weeks to 28 February 1596, giving Court performances on
1 January, 4 January, and 22 and 24 February. This took them to the
end of the first week in Lent. After forty-three days’ interval, they
played for fifteen weeks, from Easter Monday, 12 April, to 23 July
1596. Their summer vacation lasted for ninety-five days, and they are
noted during 1595–6 at Coventry, Bath, Gloucester, and Dunwich. In the
autumn they started playing on 27 October, but the receipts were low,
and if the record is complete, they suspended performances between
15 and 25 November, and then went on to 12 February 1597, making up
a season of about fourteen weeks in all. They do not seem to have
played at Court at all this winter. This year they rather disregarded
Lent, stopping for eighteen days only, during a reconstruction of the
company, and then playing three days a week until Easter, and then
regularly until the end of July, in all twenty-one weeks. To certain
irregularities at the close of this season it will be necessary to
refer later. During the three years, then, there were three winter
and three summer seasons of London playing, covering about a hundred
and twenty-six weeks. Except in Lent or at the beginning or end of
a season, or occasionally, probably for climatic reasons, at other
times, especially in December, plays were given upon every week-day.
It emerges from Dr. Greg’s re-ordering of Henslowe’s very inaccurate
dates that there were no plays on Sundays.[376] On the other hand, a
summons to play at Court in the evening did not necessarily entail a
blank day in the afternoon. The total number of performances during
the three years was seven hundred and twenty-eight. It is reasonable
to assume that Henslowe’s takings varied roughly with those of the
company, although the reserve must be made that different plays
might prove the most attractive to the galleries and to the yard
respectively. The amounts entered range from a minimum of 3_s._ to a
maximum of 73_s._ Dr. Greg calculates the average over ‘certain typical
periods of 1595’ as 30_s._;[377] during the first half of 1597 it was
24_s._ The fluctuations are determined, partly by the popularity or
novelty of the plays presented, partly by the season of the year, and
doubtless the weather and the competition of other amusements. There
were generally some high receipts during Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun
weeks. Unfortunately there is no means of estimating the proportion
which Henslowe’s share bore to that which fell for division among the
players. Some light is thrown upon the expenses by the subsidiary
accounts of advances, which Henslowe began to keep from time to time
in 1596. In May of that year he lent Alleyn ‘for the company’ a total
amount of £39 in several instalments, and recovered it by small sums of
£1 to £3 at a time during the next three months.[378] A longer account
extending from October 1596 to March 1597 reaches, with the aid of a
miscalculation, a total of £52. Of this £22 was repaid during the same
period, chiefly by deductions from the profits of first nights, and an
acknowledgement given for the balance of £30.[379] The advances were
made through various members of the company, and the purposes specified
include apparel for three new plays, travelling expenses, and fees to
playwrights. A third account, if I am right in the interpretation of
some very disputable figures, shows an expenditure at the average rate
of 31_s._ a day during the six months from 24 January to 28 July 1597,
of which, however, nearly half was in fact incurred during the first
twenty-four days of the period. In this case only the sums and not the
purposes for which they were advanced are entered.[380]
During the three years the Admiral’s men produced new plays to the
total number of fifty-five, and at the average rate of one a fortnight.
The productions were not at regular intervals, and often followed each
other in successive weeks. There is, however, no example of two new
productions in the same week.[381] These are the names and dates of the
new plays:
_Belin Dun_ (10 June 1594).
_Galiaso_ (28 June 1594).
_Philipo and Hippolito_ (9 July 1594).
_2 Godfrey of Bulloigne_ (19 July 1594).
_The Merchant of Emden_ (30 July 1594).
_Tasso’s Melancholy_ (13 Aug. 1594).
_The Venetian Comedy_ (27 Aug. 1594).
_Palamon and Arcite_ (18 Sept. 1594).
_The Love of an English Lady_ (26 Sept. 1594).
_A Knack to Know an Honest Man_ (23 Oct. 1594).
_1 Caesar and Pompey_ (8 Nov. 1594).
_Diocletian_ (16 Nov. 1594).
_The Wise Man of West Chester_ (3 Dec. 1594).
_The Set at Maw_ (15 Dec. 1594).
_The French Comedy_ (11 Feb. 1595).
_The Mack_ (21 Feb. 1595).
_Olympo_ (5 Mar. 1595).[382]
_1 Hercules_ (7 May 1595).
_2 Hercules_ (23 May 1595).
_1 The Seven Days of the Week_ (3 June 1595).
_2 Caesar and Pompey_ (18 June 1595).
_Longshanks_ (29 Aug. 1595).
_Crack me this Nut_ (5 Sept. 1595).
_The New World’s Tragedy_ (17 Sept. 1595).
_The Disguises_ (2 Oct. 1595).
_The Wonder of a Woman_ (16 Oct. 1595).
_Barnardo and Fiammetta_ (30 Oct. 1595).
_A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies_ (14 Nov. 1595).
_Henry V_ (28 Nov. 1595).
_Chinon of England_ (3 Jan. 1596).
_Pythagoras_ (16 Jan. 1596).
_2 The Seven Days of the Week_ (23 Jan. 1596).
_The Blind Beggar of Alexandria_ (12 Feb. 1596).
_Julian the Apostate_ (29 Apr. 1596).
_1 Tamar Cham_ (7 May 1596).
_Phocas_ (20 May 1596).
_2 Tamar Cham_ (11 June 1596).
_Troy_ (25 June 1596).
_The Paradox_ (1 July 1596).
_The Tinker of Totnes_ (23 July 1596).
_Vortigern_, _Valteger_, or _Hengist_ (4 Dec. 1596).
_Stukeley_ (10 Dec. 1596).
_Nebuchadnezzar_ (18 Dec. 1596).
_That Will Be Shall Be_ (30 Dec. 1596).
_Jeronimo_ (7 Jan. 1597).
_Alexander and Lodowick_ (14 Jan. 1597).[383]
_Woman Hard to Please_ (27 Jan. 1597).
_Guido_ (21 Mar. 1597).
_Five Plays in One_ (7 Apr. 1597).
_A French Comedy_ (18 Apr. 1597).
_Uther Pendragon_ (29 Apr. 1597).
_The Comedy of Humours_ (11 May 1597).
_The Life and Death of Henry I_ (26 May 1597).
_Frederick and Basilea_ (3 June 1597).
_The Life and Death of Martin Swart_ (30 June 1597).
Oblivion has overtaken the great majority of these plays. _Longshanks_
is possibly Peele’s _Edward I_, and _Jeronimo_ certainly Kyd’s _Spanish
Tragedy_. The title of _The Wise Man of West Chester_ agrees with the
subject of Munday’s _John a Kent_ and _John a Cumber_, the manuscript
of which is dated December 1595. One would be more willing to identify
_Henry V_ with _The Famous Victories_, if the latter had not been
printed in 1598 with the name of the Queen’s men on its title-page. _A
Knack to Know an Honest Man_ was printed, as acted ‘about the Citie
of London’, but without any company name, in 1596 (S. R. 26 November
1595). _Stukeley_ was also printed without a name, as _The Famous
History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley_, in 1605 (S.
R. 11 August 1600). _1 Tamar Cham_ and _Frederick and Basilea_ are
extant in ‘plots’ alone, and _Belin Dun_, or _Bellendon_, as Henslowe
writes it, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 24 November 1595
as _The true tragicall historie of Kinge Rufus the first with the
life and deathe of Belyn Dun the first thief that ever was hanged in
England_, but is not known to be extant. The list also contains two of
the early works of George Chapman, _The Blind Beggar of Alexandria_
(1598, Admiral’s, S. R. 15 August 1598), and _The Comedy of Humours_,
which can be safely identified with _A Humorous Day’s Mirth_ (1599,
Admiral’s). Ingenious attempts have been made to trace in some of the
remaining titles other plays by Chapman, or by Heywood, Dekker, and
the like, or presumed early drafts of these, or the English originals
of plays or titles preserved in German versions; but in most cases
the material available is so scanty as to render the game a hazardous
one.[384] It appears, however, from Henslowe’s notes of advances during
1596–7 that payment was made to Heywood for a book, from which it
may be inferred that his activity as a dramatist for the company had
already began. Payments to ‘marcum’ and ‘Mr. porter’ perhaps indicate
the same of Gervase Markham and Henry Porter.[385]
It is evident that some of the plays marked ‘ne’ by Henslowe cannot
have been new in the fullest sense. This applies to _Jeronimo_, which
had been played by Strange’s men as an old play during 1592–3, and
to _2 Tamar Cham_, which had been produced by the same company on 28
April 1592, and on that occasion also marked ‘ne’ by Henslowe. It
applies also to _Longshanks_ and _Henry V_, if these are really the
same as _Edward I_ and _The Famous Victories_. And it may, of course,
apply also in other cases, which cannot now be distinguished. Two
explanations are possible. One is that plays were treated as new, for
the purpose of Henslowe’s entries, which were only new to the repertory
of the particular company concerned, having been purchased by them or
by Henslowe from the stock of some other company. There is, however,
no indication that Henslowe received any special financial advantage
from the production of a new play, such as would give point to such an
arrangement. The other, and perhaps the most plausible, is that an old
play was marked ‘ne’ if it had undergone any substantial process of
revision before revival. But it must be admitted that the problem set
is one that we have hardly the means to solve.
In addition to their new and revised plays, the Admiral’s had a
considerable stock of old ones. Some of these they were playing, when
they began their first season in June 1594. Several others were revived
in the course of that season, and a few at later dates. The only new
play of the repertory which reached the stage of revival during the
three years was _Belin Dun_, which was originally produced on 10 June
1594, played to the end of the year, then dropped, and afterwards
revived for a single performance on 11 July 1596, and for a series
in the spring of 1597. But it is not likely that many new plays were
written during the plague years, and probably most of the revived plays
of 1594–5 were a good deal more than two or three years old. A list of
the plays not marked ‘ne’ by Henslowe, nineteen in number, follows.
It is, however, possible that some of them are only plays in the list
already given, masquerading under different names.
_Cutlack._
_The Ranger’s Comedy._
_The Guise_, or, _The Massacre of Paris._
_The Jew of Malta._
_Mahomet._
_1 Tamburlaine._
_Dr. Faustus._
_The Love of a Grecian Lady_, or, _The Grecian Comedy_.[386]
_The French Doctor._
_Warlamchester._
_2 Tamburlaine._
_The Siege of London._
_Antony and Valia._[387]
_1 Long Meg of Westminster._[388]
_The Welshman._[389]
_1 Fortunatus._
_Osric._
_Time’s Triumph and Fortune’s._
_The Witch of Islington._
Five plays of Marlowe’s are conspicuous in the list. _Mahomet_ might
be either Greene’s _Alphonsus_, _King of Arragon_ or Peele’s lost
_Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek_. _Fortunatus_, as revised
by Dekker in 1599, is extant, but it is doubtful whether Dekker was
writing early enough to have been the author of the original play.
Conjectural identifications of some of the other titles have been
attempted.[390] There is, perhaps, a natural inclination to eke out
our meagre knowledge of the repertory of the earlier Admiral’s men,
as it was constituted before 1590, by the assumption that the old and
the revised new plays of 1594–7 belong to that stock. But this can
only be proved to be so in the case of _1 and 2 Tamburlaine_, where
the title-page of the 1590 edition comes to our assistance. There is
no trace between 1594 and 1597 of any of the other three plays, _The
Battle of Alcazar_, _The Wounds of Civil War_, and _Orlando Furioso_,
which there is independent evidence for connecting with the Admiral’s.
And it must be borne in mind that there were several other sources from
which a supply of old plays might be drawn. Alleyn seems to have bought
up the books and properties of the pre-1590 men, and we do not know
how far he also retained rights in some or all of the plays produced
during his alliance with Strange’s. Moreover, there were plenty of
opportunities for either Alleyn, Henslowe, or the Admiral’s men as a
whole, to acquire copies from one or more of the companies, Pembroke’s,
the Queen’s, Sussex’s, which went under in the plague years. _Henry
V_, if identical with _The Famous Victories_, had certainly been a
Queen’s play; _The Ranger’s Comedy_ had been played for Henslowe by the
Queen’s and Sussex’s in April 1594; _Jeronimo_ and _The Guise_ had been
similarly played by Strange’s in 1592–3; and the fact that Strange’s,
the Queen’s, Sussex’s, and the Admiral’s, all in turn played _The Jew
of Malta_ leads to a strong suspicion that it was Henslowe’s property
and placed by him at the disposal of any company that might from time
to time be occupying his theatre.
The Rose was what is now known as a ‘repertory’ house. A very
successful play might be repeated on the night after its first
production or revival, or in the course of the same week. But as a
rule one performance a week was the limit, and after a play had been
on the boards a few weeks, the intervals between its appearances
rapidly became greater. _The Wise Man of West Chester_, which was
presented thirty-two times between December 1594 and July 1597, had a
longer life than any other new play during the three years. Next came
_A Knack to Know an Honest Man_, with twenty-one performances in two
years, _1 Seven Days of the Week_, with twenty-one performances in
fifteen months, and _The Blind Beggar of Alexandria_, with twenty-two
performances in fourteen months. _Belin Dun_, although not continuously
upon the stage for long together, achieved with the aid of its revival
a total of twenty-four performances. The only other new plays, that
outlived a year, were _2 Godfrey of Bulloigne_ and _A Toy to Please
Chaste Ladies_. Even such highly successful plays as _1 and 2 Hercules_
ceased to be heard of after six months. The usual run of a play was
anything from six to seventeen nights, but sixteen plays failed to
obtain even such a run, and several plays, which apparently did well
enough on the first night, were not repeated at all. As a rule the
first night of a play brought Henslowe the highest returns; but this
was by no means invariably the case, and the success of any play, which
held the boards for as many as six nights, can perhaps best be measured
by its average returns. By far the most fortunate was _The Comedy of
Humours_ which averaged 53_s._ for the eleven nights available before
the summer season of 1597 closed. Next came _1 and 2 Hercules_ with
42_s._ and 43_s._ respectively, _1 Seven Days of the Week_ with 35_s._,
and _The Wise Man of West Chester_ with 34_s._ On the other hand the
average of _Henry I_ was no more than 19_s._ and that of the second
_French Comedy_ no more than 16_s._ The highest individual returns
were those from the first nights of _1 and 2 Hercules_, _2 Godfrey
of Bulloigne_, and _1 Seven Days of the Week_, which yielded 73_s._,
70_s._, 71_s._, and 70_s._ respectively, and that from the sixth night
of the _Comedy of Humours_, which was also 70_s._ The booking for this
play shows a curious progress, being 43_s._, 55_s._, 58_s._, 64_s._,
66_s._, 70_s._, for the first six nights. Similarly _The Wise Man of
West Chester_, which began with a bad first night of 33_s._, rose to
a good average, while _2 Godfrey of Bulloigne_, for all its start of
70_s._, ended with an average of only 28_s._ The worst first night
taking was the 22_s._ of _Nebuchadnezzar_, and this affords another
curious example of box-office fluctuations, for, though it achieved
no higher average than 22_s._, it rose on its third night to 68_s._
The worst takings, on other than first nights, were 3_s._ for _Chinon
of England_,[391] 4_s._ for _Vortigern_, and for _Olympo_, and 5_s._
twice over for _A Woman Hard to Please_. Probably these were due to
weather or other accidents, as each play averaged enough to justify a
reasonable run. The success of the old plays followed much the same
lines as that of the new ones. They ran for anything from one night
to twenty-four, this total being reached by _Dr. Faustus_. The best
average returns were the 32_s._ and 38_s._ of _1 and 2 Tamburlaine_,
the 30_s._ of _Mahomet_, the 29_s._ of _1 Long Meg of Westminster_,
the 27_s._ of _The Guise_, and the 26_s._ of _The Jew of Malta_;
the best individual returns the 72_s._ and 71_s._ yielded by the
respective first nights of _Dr. Faustus_ and _1 Tamburlaine_. The
persistent popularity of Marlowe’s work comes out quite clearly from
the statistics; and the success of Chapman’s first attempts is also not
to be overlooked.
The _personnel_ of the Admiral’s men during 1594–7 can be determined
with some approach to certainty. They were Edward Alleyn, John Singer,
Richard Jones, Thomas Towne, Martin Slater, Edward Juby, Thomas
Downton, and James Donstone. Their names are found in a list written in
the diary, without any explanation of its object, amongst memoranda of
1594–6.[392] There can be little doubt that it represents the principal
members of the company, and in most cases corroborative evidence is
available. The books of the Treasurer of the Chamber indicate Alleyn,
Jones, and Singer as payees for the Court money of 1594–5, and Alleyn
and Slater for that of 1595–6. Alleyn, Slater, Donstone, and Juby are
noted in Henslowe’s subsidiary accounts for 1596 as responsible for
advances made by him on behalf of the company.[393] Another advance was
made to Stephen the tireman, and he is doubtless the Stephen Magett
who also appears in personal financial relations with Henslowe during
1596.[394] Transactions by way of loan, sale, or pawn are also noted by
Henslowe during 1594–7 with Slater, Jones, Donstone, Singer, and Towne,
and also with Edward Dutton and Richard Alleyn.[395] These latter were
probably not sharers in the company, but can be traced with others
amongst its subordinate members by means of the ‘plot’ of _Frederick
and Basilea_, which it is reasonable to connect with the performances
of the play in June and July 1597, since it was a new play on 3 June,
and it is recorded in the diary that Martin Slater, who figures in the
‘plot’, left the company on 18 July. It is to be inferred from the
plot that the principal parts in _Frederick and Basilea_ were taken
by Mr. Alleyn, Mr. Thomas Towne, Mr. Martin [Slater], Mr. Juby, Mr.
Donstone, and R. Alleyn; that minor male parts were taken by Edward
Dutton, Thomas Hunt, Robert Ledbetter, Black Dick, Pigge, Sam, Charles,
and the ‘gatherers’ or money-takers and other ‘attendants’; and that
female parts were taken by Edward Dutton’s boy Dick and two other boys
known as Will and Griffen. Apparently the play, although not employing
all the principal actors, made considerable demands on the minor staff.
Dr. Greg may be right in identifying Sam and Charles with the Samuel
Rowley and Charles Massey who became members of the company at a later
date.[396] It will be seen that the only name in Henslowe’s undated
list which cannot be verified as that of a member of the company during
1594–7 is that of Thomas Downton; but it may safely be accepted.
Downton had accompanied Alleyn on the provincial tour with Strange’s
men in 1593. So had Pigge or Pyk. Jones and Donstone, who is the same
as Tunstall, had belonged to Worcester’s men in 1583, and probably to
the Admiral’s men before 1590; Jones had been abroad, as we have seen,
during the plague years. John Singer had been a member of the Queen’s
men in 1588. The other names now come into the story for the first
time. Henslowe’s advances for 1596 included sums ‘to feache Fletcher’
and ‘to feache Browne’.[397] It can only be matter of conjecture
whether there is evidence here of negotiations for the incorporation in
the company of Robert Browne and of Laurence Fletcher, at a later date
a colleague of Slater’s, and if so, whether they led to any fruitful
result.
The departure of Martin Slater on 18 July 1597 was only one of several
changes which profoundly modified the composition of the company in
the course of that year.[398] In February Richard Jones and Thomas
Downton went to the Swan as Pembroke’s men, and the disturbance thereby
caused probably accounts for the three weeks’ cessation of playing
during Lent. The Swan enterprise was brought to a disastrous conclusion
after five months by the production of _The Isle of Dogs_, which not
only brought personal trouble on the chief offenders, but also led to
a restraint of plays at all the theatres. This event synchronizes with
the first appearance in the diary of Nashe’s collaborator in _The Isle
of Dogs_, Ben Jonson. On 28 July Henslowe lent him no less a sum than
£4, and took Alleyn and Singer as witnesses. On the same day he opened
an account headed ‘℞ of Bengemenes Johnsones share as ffoloweth’ with
a first instalment of 3_s._ 9_d._[399] On this very day of 28 July
the Privy Council’s inhibition fell, and Jonson went to prison and
paid no more instalments. It is impossible to say whether his ‘share’
was in the Admiral’s company or in Pembroke’s. In any event, although
he continued to write for the Admiral’s men after 1597, there is no
further sign that he was either a ‘sharer’, or indeed an actor in any
capacity.
One result of the restraint was that Jones and Downton not merely
returned to the Rose, but brought at least three other of Pembroke’s
men, Robert Shaw, Gabriel Spencer, and William Bird, known also by
the _alias_ of Borne, with them. Henslowe was thus enabled, almost
immediately after playing stopped, to set about the reconstitution of
his company, and the memoranda of agreement which he noted in his diary
during the next fourteen months are so interesting for the light which
they throw upon his relations with the actors, that I think it well,
before discussing them, to transcribe them in full. There are in all
eleven of them, as follows:[400]
i. (_Thomas Hearne_)
Memorandom that the 27 of Jeuley 1597 I heayred Thomas Hearne
with ij pence for to searve me ij yeares in the qualetie of
playenge for fyve shellynges a weacke for one yeare & vj^s
viij^d for the other yeare which he hath covenanted hime seallfe
to searue me & not to departe frome my companey tyll this ij
yeares be eanded wittnes to this
John Synger.
Jeames Donston.
Thomas Towne.
ii. (_John Helle_)
Lent John Helle the clowne the 3 of Aguste 1597 in redy money
the some of x^s. At that tyme I bownd hime by ane a sumsett of
ij^d to contenew with me at my howsse in playinge tylle Srafte
tid next after the date a boue written yf not to forfytte vnto
me fortipowndes wittneses to the same
E Alleyn
John Synger
Jeames Donstall.
Edward Jubey
Samewell Rowley.
iii. (_Richard Jones_)
Memorandom that the 6 of Aguste 1597 I bownd Richard Jones by &
a sumsett of ij^d to contenew & playe with the companye of my
lord Admeralles players frome Mihelmase next after the daye a
bowe written vntell the eand & tearme of iij yeares emediatly
followinge & to playe in my howsse only known by the name of the
Rosse & in no other howse a bowt London publicke & yf restraynte
be granted then to go for the tyme into the contrey & after to
retorne agayne to London yf he breacke this a sumsett then to
forfett vnto me for the same a hundreth markes of lafull money
of Ingland wittnes to this E Alleyn & John Midelton.
iv. (_Robert Shaw_)
More over Richard Jones at that tyme [6 Aug. 1597] hath tacken
one other ij^d of me vpon & asumset to forfet vnto me one
hundrethe markes yf one Robart Shaee do not playe with my lordes
Admeralles men as he hath covenanted be fore in euery thinge &
time to the oter moste wittnes E Alleyn John Midellton.
v. (_William Borne_)
Memorandom that the 10 of Aguste 1597 William Borne came &
ofered hime sealfe to come and playe with my lord Admeralles
mean at my howsse called by the name of the Rosse setewate
one the back after this order folowinge he hath receued of me
iij^d vpon & a sumsette to forfette vnto me a hundrethe marckes
of lafull money of Ingland yf he do not performe thes thinges
folowinge that is presentley after libertie being granted for
playinge to come & to playe with my lordes Admeralles men at
my howsse aforsayd & not in any other howsse publicke a bowt
London for the space of iij yeares beginynge imediatly after
this restraynt is recaled by the lordes of the cownsell which
restraynt is by the meanes of playinge the Jeylle of Dooges
yf he do not then he forfettes this asumset afore or ells not
wittnes to this E Alleyn & Robsone.
vi. (_Thomas Downton_)
Memorandom that the 6 of October 1597 Thomas Dowton came & bownd
him seallfe vnto me in xxxx^{ll} in & a somesett by the receuing
of iij^d of me before wittnes the covenant is this that he
shold frome the daye a bove written vntell Sraftid next come
ij yeares to playe in my howsse & in no other a bowte London
publickely yf he do with owt my consent to forfet vnto me this
some of money a bove written wittnes to this
E Alleyn
W^m Borne
Dicke Jonnes
Robarte Shawe
John Synger
vii. (_William Kendall_)
Memorandum that this 8^{th} of December 1597 my father Philyp
Hinshlow hierd as a covenauant servant Willyam Kendall for ij
years after the statute of Winchester with ij single penc a to
geue hym for his sayd servis everi week of his playng in London
x^s & in the cuntrie v^s for the which he covenaunteth for the
space of those ij years to be redye att all tymes to play in the
howse of the sayd Philyp & in no other during the said terme.
Wittnes my self the writer of this E Alleyn.
viii. (_James Bristow_)
Bought my boye Jeames Brystow of William Agusten player the 18
of Desember 1597 for viij^{li}.
ix. (_Richard Alleyn_)
Memorandom that this 25 of Marche 1598 Richard Alleyne came &
bownde hime seallfe vnto me for ij yeares in & asumsette as a
hiered servante with ij syngell pence & to contenew frome the
daye aboue written vnto the eand & tearme of ij yeares yf he do
not performe this covenant then he to forfette for the breache
of yt fortye powndes & wittnes to this
W^m Borne.
Thomas Dowton.
Gabrell Spencer.
Robart Shawe.
Richard Jonnes.
x. (_Thomas Heywood_)
Memorandom that this 25 of Marche 1598 Thomas Hawoode came and
hiered hime seallfe with me as a covenante searvante for ij
yeares by the receuenge of ij syngell pence acordinge to the
statute of Winshester & to begine at the daye a boue written &
not to playe any wher publicke a bowt London not whille these ij
yeares be expired but in my howsse yf he do then he doth forfett
vnto me by the receuinge of these ij^d fortie powndes & wittnes
to this
Antony Monday
Gabrell Spencer
Robart Shawe
Richard Alleyn.
W^m Borne
Thomas Dowton
Richard Jonnes.
xi. (_Charles Massey and Samuel Rowley_)
Memorandom that this 16 of November 1598 I hired as my covenant
servantes Charles Massey & Samewell Rowley for a yeare & as
mvche as to Sraftide begenynge at the daye a bove written after
the statute of Winchester with ij syngell pence & for them they
haue covenanted with me to playe in my howes & in no other
howsse dewringe the thime publeck but in mine yf they dooe with
owt my consent yf they dooe to forfett vnto me xxxx^{li} a pece
wittnes
Thomas Dowton
Robart Shawe
W^m Borne
Jubey
Richard Jonnes.
Evidently the position of James Bristow is distinct from that of the
other players. He was a ‘boy’ or apprentice, whose indentures had been
transferred to Henslowe for a consideration by his former master. In
the rest of the cases, the essence of the agreement appears to be the
undertaking by the player under bond to play only with the Admiral’s
men at Henslowe’s house. It is interesting to notice that in the
agreement with Hearne Henslowe calls the company ‘my company’; and the
fact that its members were constituted Henslowe’s covenant servants
seems to argue a closer personal relation between the organization
and its financier, than might on other grounds have been inferred.
Dr. Greg, indeed, draws a distinction between the agreements with
Jones, Shaw, Borne, and Downton, whom he regards as merely ‘binding
themselves to play at Henslowe’s house like other sharers’, and those
with the rest, whom he regards as ‘placing themselves in the position
of covenant servants to him, which would seem to imply that they
were merely hired men’.[401] But I do not think that there is any
justification for this theory in the terms of the documents, and it
immediately gets Dr. Greg into difficulties about Massey and Rowley,
who, as we shall see, were in fact on the footing of full members of
the company even before the date of their agreement. I do not mean
that I deny the distinction between sharers and hired men, which is of
course important, but that I do not think that it is relevant to the
contractual relations set up by the agreements. I am not quite clear
whether Henslowe’s memoranda, which are written throughout, including
the names of the witnesses, in his own hand or Alleyn’s, constitute
the formal instruments under which the agreements were effected, or
are merely notes for his own information. But in either event their
terminology is loose. They are not always expressed as being agreements
of hiring, or for service, even in the cases of those men whom Dr.
Greg does not suppose to have been sharers, and they are not careful
to specify the considerations, other than the formal 2_d._ or 3_d._,
which the actors were to receive. Wages are, in fact, provided for only
in the agreements with Hearne and Kendall, and it is quite possible
that, if we had the full terms before us, we should find that, while
some of the others were also to receive wages, some were to find their
recompense in a share of such profits as the company might make. It is
probable that, even where Henslowe undertook to pay wages, the general
agreement between him and the company provided for the shifting of that
liability to them. They certainly had to pay him, at the rate of 3_s._
a week, for the services of his boy Bristow.[402] To a slightly later
date belongs an agreement with an unnamed actor, in which the hirer is
not Henslowe but Thomas Downton, and this I add in order to complete
the series.[403]
xii.
Thomas Downton the 25 of Janewary 1599 ded hire as his couenante
servante ---- for ij yers to begyne at Shrofe Tewesday next & he
to geue hime viij^s a wecke as longe as they playe & after they
lye stylle one fortnyght then to geue hime hallfe wages [ extra
spaces ]wittnes P H & Edward Browne & Charlles Masey.
The appearance of Jones as guarantee for Shaw is due to the fact
that, as a result of _The Isle of Dogs_, the latter was languishing
with Gabriel Spencer and Ben Jonson in the Marshalsea. Meanwhile some
at least of the company travelled. Henslowe lent Alleyn 40_s._ for
John Singer and Thomas Towne ‘when they went into the contrey’ and
noted that this was ‘at ther last cominge’. There is another entry
of a small loan to Singer on 9 August, so they cannot have started
before that; and they must have been back by 6 October, when Singer
witnessed the agreement with Thomas Downton. Possibly Edward Dutton
and Richard Alleyn, who also borrowed money from Henslowe, went with
them.[404] The Privy Council warrants for the release of the prisoners
in the Marshalsea were signed on 3 October,[405] and a few days later
Henslowe, more successful than Langley of the Swan in getting the
licence for his house renewed, even before the formal expiration of
the restraint on 1 November, was in a position to resume his play list
with the heading, ‘The xj of Octobe begane my lord Admerals & my lorde
of Penbrockes men to play at my howsse 1597’.[406] The entries of
plays are few and irregular up to 5 November, and then stop. A note
is appended that on 26 November the Master of the Revels was paid for
four weeks. The performances included one new play, _Friar Spendleton_,
and five old ones, _Jeronimo_, _The Comedy of Humours_, _Dr. Faustus_,
_Hardicanute_, and _Bourbon_, of which the last two do not belong to
the 1594–7 repertory, and may have been contributed by Pembroke’s men.
The diary also contains an account of weekly receipts running from 21
October 1597 to 4 March 1598, under the heading, ‘A juste a cownte of
all suche monye as I haue receyed of my lord Admeralles & my lord of
Penbrocke men as foloweth be gynynge the 21 of October 1597’, and some
notes of individual advances and repayments, mainly through Robert Shaw
and Thomas Downton, on behalf of the company, from 23 October to 12
December.[407] In the course of these the company is again described
on 23 October and 5 November as ‘the company of my lord Admeralles
men & my lord Penbrockes’, but on 1 December as ‘the companey of my
lord Admeralles men’; and the substance of the whole of these advances
is set out again, without any reference to Pembroke’s men, at the
beginning of a continuous account from 21 October onwards, which is
headed, ‘A juste a cownt of all suche money as I haue layd owt for my
lord Admeralles players begynyng the xj of October whose names ar as
foloweth Borne Gabrell Shaw Jonnes Dowten Jube Towne Synger & the ij
Geffes’.[408] Nothing very certain is known of the previous career of
Humphrey and Anthony Jeffes, but if the former is the ‘Humfrey’ who
appears with ‘Gabriel’ [Spencer] in the stage-directions to _3 Henry
VI_ it is most likely that these men also came from Pembroke’s.[409]
The responsible members of the Admiral’s company at the beginning
of the third period of their existence were, then, so far as their
relations to Henslowe were concerned, Thomas Downton, Richard Jones,
Edward Juby, Thomas Towne, John Singer, Robert Shaw, William Borne, who
seems to have had the regular _alias_ of William Bird, Gabriel Spencer,
Humphrey Jeffes, and Anthony Jeffes. To these must probably be added
a number of hired men, including Thomas Hearne, John Helle, William
Kendall, Richard Alleyn, Thomas Heywood, and probably Charles Massey,
Samuel Rowley, Thomas Hunt, and Stephen Maget the tireman, and of
apprentices, including James Bristow and Pigge. Of the sharers Downton,
Jones, Juby, Towne, and Singer had alone belonged to the earlier
Admiral’s men. Slater’s departure involved the company in a lawsuit,
the nature of which is not stated in the diary. Professor Wallace,
however, has found an independent record of a Queen’s Bench action by
Thomas Downton to recover £13 6_s._ 8_d._, the value of a playbook
which Downton had lost in the parish of St. Mary le Bow on 1 December
1597, and Slater had ‘found’, refused to surrender, and was alleged to
have disposed of for his own profit. Damages of £10 10_s._ were awarded
on 3 November 1598.[410] Donstone also seems to have dropped out or
may have been dead; he witnessed Helle’s agreement on 3 August 1597,
and thereafter no more is heard of him. But incomparably the greatest
loss was that of Edward Alleyn, who now retired from the stage and did
not return to it for a period of three years.[411] From 29 December
1597 to 8 November 1598 Henslowe made notes of playing goods bought
‘sence my sonne Edward Allen leafte [p]laynge’, and it would appear
that the company acknowledged a debt of £50 in respect of his interest
on retirement.[412] In place of Alleyn, it would seem that the lead was
taken by Robert Shaw and Thomas Downton, perhaps as representing the
two elements of which the company was made up. These two were joint
payees for the Court money of both 1597–8 and 1598–9. For 1599–1600
Shaw was sole payee. It was, moreover, most often, although by no means
always, to one or other of these men that Henslowe’s advances on behalf
of the company were made. It must be added that some of the new-comers
appear to have sought private assistance from Henslowe in order to
enable them to take up their shares. On 14 January 1598, he opened an
account of sums received ‘of Humfreye Jeaffes hallfe share’, entered
seven instalments up to 4 March, amounting to a total of 60_s._ 6_d._,
and then noted, ‘This some was payd backe agayne vnto the companey
of my lord Admeralles players the 8 of Marche 1598, & they shared yt
amonste them’. There is a later account, running from 29 April to 21
July 1598, and amounting by small instalments to 35_s._, of ‘all such
money as I dooe receue for Umfrey Jeaffes and Antoney Jeaffes ... of
the companey’.[413] Possibly the brothers only held a single share
between them. A similar transaction took place with Gabriel Spencer. On
20 April 1598 this actor gave an acknowledgement for £4 and between 6
April and 24 June Henslowe carried to an account headed ‘℞ of Gabrell
Spencer at severall tymes of his share in the gallereyes’ a total of
25_s._ 6_d._, of which 5_s._ 6_d._ was paid over to Downton.[414] In
addition, personal loans were negotiated from time to time by various
members of the company, and the reasons given for these indicate that
in the course of 1598, besides the dispute of the ex-Pembroke’s men
with Langley, Bird and perhaps the company as a whole were engaged in
litigation with Thomas Pope, presumably the actor in the Chamberlain’s
company.[415]
There does not seem to have been much further change in the composition
of the Admiral’s men during 1597–1600. An acknowledgement of the state
of their account with Henslowe between 8 and 13 March 1598 bears the
signatures of ‘J. Singer, Thomas Downton, William Birde, Robt Shaa,
Richard Jones, Gabriell Spenser, Thomas Towne, Humfry Jeffes, Charles
Massye, and Samuell Rowlye’.[416] The last two had evidently become
sharers in the course of the year. Juby and Anthony Jeffes do not sign,
but this is probably due to an accident, as they were certainly sharers
both in 1597 and in 1600.[417] Gabriel Spencer was killed by Ben Jonson
(cf. ch. xxiii) on 22 September 1598. On 26 September Henslowe wrote
to Alleyn at the Brill in Sussex, ‘Now to leat you vnderstand newes I
will teall you some but yt is for me harde & heavey. Sence you weare
with me I haue loste one of my company which hurteth me greatley;
that is Gabrell, for he is slayen in Hogesden fylldes by the handes
of Bengemen Jonson bricklayer’.[418] No doubt Henslowe wrote from the
heart. Probably Spencer’s share was not yet paid for, and in addition
small personal loans to the amount of 66_s._ stand undischarged against
him in the diary, of which the last was on 19 May ‘to bye a plume of
feathers which his mane Bradshawe feched of me’. Richard Bradshaw
was an actor and may have played as a hired man with the company. A
fragmentary ‘plot’ of _Troilus and Cressida_, probably to be dated
in April 1599, yields the names of ‘Mr. Jones’ and his ‘boy’, Thomas
Hunt, Stephen, Proctor, and Pigge. Mr. Jones’s boy is shown by a note
of 17 November 1599 in the diary to have been called James.[419] Of
Proctor no more is known. Stephen is probably Stephen Magett, the
tireman, and Pigge was with Alleyn on the tour of Strange’s men in
1593. He is also mentioned, with Dobe, Whittcombe, and Anderson, who
may have been actors, in some inventories of properties belonging to
Alleyn or to the company in March 1598.[420] Thomas Downton also had
in June 1600 a ‘boye’ who played in _Cupid and Psyche_.[421] Another
acknowledgement of account, dated on 10 July 1600, only differs from
the former one by the omission of Spencer’s name and the inclusion of
those of Juby and Anthony Jeffes.[422] The alleged manuscript notes to
a copy of Dekker’s _Shoemaker’s Holiday_ (q.v.), produced in January
1600, which are discredited by Dr. Greg, give the cast as composed of
‘Jones, H. Jeffes, Rowley, Shawe, Massy, Dowton, Singer, Jewby, Towne,
A. Jeffes, Birde, Wilson, Flower, Price, Day, Dowton’s boy Ned and
Alleine’; the last for a female part. Certainly nothing is known of Day
or Wilson as actors for the Admiral’s, or of Price at any such early
date, or of Flower at all. But if the document is a forgery, it is a
very pointless, and at the same time a very cautious one. And how did
the forger, unless he were Collier or Cunningham, know that Day was an
actor at all?
The records kept by Henslowe for the period 1597–1600 differ
considerably in character from those for 1594–7. The diurnal list of
plays performed and of rent-takings disappears altogether. On the
other hand, the records of advances made, for the books and licensing
of plays, for costumes and properties, and for certain miscellaneous
items of expenditure, become full and systematic. A _per contra_
account is also kept of weekly sums received by Henslowe in repayment
of such advances, and from time to time a balance is struck, and the
hands of the company taken to a settlement or acknowledgement of debt.
Henslowe’s book-keeping, however, if not exactly faulty, is not always
sufficiently lucid to make the whole of the financial transactions
perfectly clear. In the absence of the daily entries of performances,
the weekly records of repayments make it possible to determine roughly
the periods covered by the theatrical seasons.[423] The company played
for twenty continuous weeks from 11 October 1597 to about 4 March 1598,
apparently with some irregularity at the beginning and again about
Christmas time. Their Court plays were on 27 December and 28 February.
In Lent they had a three weeks’ interval, during the course of which
they met to read a book in New Fish Street, and ‘played in Fleatstreet
pryuat’.[424] Playing was resumed about 25 March and lasted for some
fifteen weeks, until about 8 July, making thirty-five weeks in all
for the year 1597–8. The company only took two weeks’ vacation in the
summer and are not likely to have travelled, although on 27 September,
after the new season had begun, Borne is found riding to the Lord
Admiral at Croydon at the time of the Queen’s visit there.[425] They
played for thirty-one weeks from about 22 July to 24 February 1599,
with performances at Court on 27 December, 6 January and 18 February,
and stopped for three weeks in Lent. The summer season lasted for
eleven weeks from about 19 March to 3 June, making forty-four weeks
playing for 1598–9. On Easter Eve Towne and Richard Alleyn went to
Court for some unspecified purpose. About the same time Anthony Jeffes
was making purchases against St. George’s Day.[426] The interval
of this summer was seventeen weeks, but I have no evidence of any
travelling. The next season was one of nineteen weeks from about 29
September 1599 to 10 February 1600, with Court performances on 27
December and 1 January, and was followed by a Lenten interval of
about four weeks. At the beginning of February they bought a drum and
trumpets ‘when to go into the contry’.[427] Whether these were for
use during the short break in Lent or not until the following summer
must remain uncertain; at any rate the purchase confirms the view that
there had been no provincial tour since 1596.[428] Finally they played
for nineteen weeks from about 2 March to 13 July, thus completing
thirty-six weeks for 1599–1600. Apparently the summer season was
diversified by a visit to Windsor for the Garter installation of Henri
IV of France on 27 April.[429] In all they seem to have played for
about 115 weeks or something under 690 days in 1597–1600, as compared
with 728 days in 1594–7.
The entries of sums paid for plays usually give the names of the
authors as well as those of the plays, and therefore furnish a good
deal of material for reconstituting the literary side of the company’s
activity. Henslowe’s terminology is neither precise nor uniform, but
it is clear that, while the payments were always entered as loans to
the company, they were often made direct by him to the playwrights, on
the ‘appointment’ of one or more of its members. Sometimes they are
expressed as being ‘to bye a boocke of’ a play; that is to say, for
the purchase outright of an old or even a new manuscript. But a new
play was generally commissioned, upon the strength of a sample or of an
outline of the plot, and in such cases payment was made by instalments,
of which the earlier ones were ‘lent upon’ or ‘in earneste of’ or
‘in parte paymente of’, and the last ‘in full paymente of’ the book.
Portions of the manuscript were handed over as security for the earlier
payments. Production was very rapid, and a play put together in two or
three weeks often represented the collaboration of as many as four or
even five or six authors. The procedure, which prevailed during the
whole of the period covered by the diary, is illustrated by a small
group of letters preserved amongst the miscellaneous papers found at
Dulwich. Thus on 8 November 1599 Shaw writes with regard to _2 Henry
Richmond_, ‘Mr. Henshlowe, we haue heard their booke and lyke yt. Their
pryce is eight poundes, which I pray pay now to Mr. Wilson, according
to our promysse’; and accordingly Henslowe includes in his account, by
an entry written and signed by Wilson, a sum of £8 ‘by a note vnder the
hand of Mr. Rob: Shaw’.[430] On 14 June 1600 Shaw writes again, ‘I pray
you, Mr. Henshlowe, deliuer vnto the bringer hereof the some of fyue &
fifty shillinges to make the 3^{ll} fyue shillinges which they receaued
before full six poundes in full payment of their booke called the fayre
Constance of Roome, whereof I pray you reserue for me Mr. Willsons
whole share which is xj^s. which I to supply his neede deliuered him
yesternight.’ The diary duly records the payment to Drayton, Hathway,
Munday, and Dekker ‘at the a poyntment of Roberte Shawe’ of 44_s._[431]
Similarly Samuel Rowley writes on 4 April 1601, ‘Mr. Hinchloe, I haue
harde fyue shetes of a playe of the Conqueste of the Indes & I dow
not doute but it wyll be a verye good playe; tharefore I praye ye
delyuer them fortye shyllynges in earneste of it & take the papers into
your one hands & on Easter eue thaye promyse to make an ende of all
the reste’. The earnest and several supplementary earnests were paid
to Day, Haughton, and Smith, but the completion of the play lagged
until the following September.[432] An undated letter of Rowley’s
relates to the withdrawal of a play, ‘Mr. Hynchlo, I praye ye let Mr.
Hathwaye haue his papars agayne of the playe of John a Gante & for the
repayement of the monye back agayne he is contente to gyue ye a byll
of his hande to be payde at some cartayne tyme as in your dyscressyon
yow shall thinke good; which done ye may crose it oute of your boouke
& keepe the byll; or else wele stande so much indetted to you & kepe
the byll our selues’. Henslowe appears to have thought it safer to
adopt the second alternative, as incomplete payments to the amount of
£1 19_s._ 0_d._ for _The Conquest of Spain by John of Gaunt_ still
stand in his ‘boouke’.[433] Other letters of the same kind concern _Six
Yeomen of the West_, and _Too Good to be True_.[434] The normal price
for a new play during 1597–1601 seems to have been £6, but sometimes it
fell to £5 or possibly even £4, and sometimes the playwrights succeeded
in squeezing out a few shillings more. One or two of them, notably
Chapman, were able to secure a higher rate from the beginning; and
about 1599 a general tendency towards a higher scale of prices becomes
discernible. The ‘book’ of an old play could generally be purchased for
about £2.
In attempting to estimate the actual ‘output’ of the company, one
is faced by the difficulty that some of the plays commissioned are
not shown by the diary to have reached the stage of payment in full,
and that it must, therefore, remain doubtful whether they were ever
completed. It is possible that, as Dr. Greg thinks,[435] some of the
payments were made direct by the company, instead of through Henslowe.
But the correspondence just quoted rather suggests that any such
arrangement would be exceptional; and it would not be inconsistent with
human nature, if the extremely out-at-elbows men of letters who hung
about the Rose occasionally found it profitable to take their ‘earnest’
for a play, and then to find plausible reasons for indefinitely
delaying its completion. Probably in the long run they had to account
for the advance, but the example of _The Conquest of Spain_ shows that
such a repayment would not necessarily find its way into Henslowe’s
account. This view is borne out by an examination of the affairs of
one of the most impecunious of them all, Henry Chettle, during 1598–9.
During the first six months of the year, he had a hand in half a dozen
plays, all of which were completed and paid for in full. But on one of
these, _1 Black Bateman of the North_, Henslowe appears, perhaps by
an oversight, to have paid him £1 too much. At the beginning of May
£1 was lent to Chettle upon this play, and the loan does not appear
to have been considered when, on 22 May, a further sum of £6 was laid
out upon ‘a boocke called Blacke Battmane of the North ... which coste
sixe powndes’. On 24 June Chettle borrowed 10_s._, not apparently on
any particular play, and Henslowe seems then to have recalled the
overpayment, and noted against Chettle’s name in the diary, ‘All his
parte of boockes to this place are payde which weare dew unto hime & he
reastes be syddes in my deatte the some of xxx^s.’ Chettle collaborated
in several other plays, which got completed during the year, but no
deduction seems to have been made from his share of the fees in respect
of this debt. In addition he had £5 upon _A Woman’s Tragedy_, upon
condition ‘eather to deliver the playe or els to paye the mony with in
one forthnyght’; he had 5_s._ in earnest upon _Catiline’s Conspiracy_;
and he had £1 14_s._ 0_d._ in earnest upon _Brute_, probably a
continuation of an older _1 Brute_ bought by the company. When the
last payment on _Brute_ was made on 16 September Henslowe noted, ‘Hary
Cheattell vntell this place owes vs viij^{li} ix^s dew al his boockes
& recknynges payd’. This amount is precisely made up of the 30_s._ due
on 24 June and the sums paid on account of these three plays. By 22
October Chettle had completed _2 Brute_ and managed somehow to get £6
for it in full. On the same day he gave Henslowe an acknowledgement of
a debt, not of £8 9_s._ 0_d._, but of £9 9_s._ 0_d._ In November he
got an earnest of £1 for _Tis no Deceit to Deceive the Deceiver_, and
£1 for ‘mending’ _Robin Hood_, and in January 1599 30_s._ ‘to paye his
charges in the Marshallsey’. Small loans of a shilling or two are also
noted in the margin of the book, and appear to be quite distinct from
the company’s account with him, and to indicate private generosities of
Henslowe. In February 1599 Chettle had finished _Polyphemus_, and it is
recorded that in full payment of £6 he got £2 10_s._ down, ‘& strocken
of his deatte which he owes vnto the companey fyftye shelenges more’.
A separate entry in the diary indicates that he paid off yet another
10_s._ out of his fee for _The Spencers_ in March.[436] Material is
not available for the further tracing of this particular chain of
transactions, but the inference that credit obtained for an unfinished
play had sometimes to be redeemed out of the profits of a finished one
is irresistible. Chettle, at least, does not seem to have been hardly
treated, but obviously the unbusinesslike methods of the playwrights
kept down the price of plays, and a familiar device of the modern
Barabbas was anticipated when Henry Porter was obliged, on the receipt
of an earnest, to give Henslowe ‘his faythfulle promysse that I shold
haue alle the boockes which he writte ether him sellfe or with any
other’.[437] Whatever Henslowe’s precise financial relations with the
company may have been, by the way, he seems to have been in a position
to pose as paymaster, so far as the poets were concerned.
On the whole, I think it must be concluded that, if the diary fails
to record payments to the amount of at least £5 for a new play, there
is _prima facie_ evidence that that play never got itself finished.
Occasionally, of course, apparently incomplete payments may be
explained by the fact that the same play is entered under more than
one name. Occasionally, also, a particular play may have been tacitly
debited with payments not specifically expressed in the diary to have
been made in respect of that play. Thus a sum of £2 paid on 4 February
1598 ‘to dise charge Mr. Dicker owt of the cownter in the Powltrey’
was probably treated as an instalment of the price of _Phaethon_ on
which Dekker was then working, and for which otherwise only £4 is
entered. Another sum of £3 10_s._ paid on 30 January 1599 ‘to descarge
Thomas Dickers frome the a reaste of my lord Chamberlens men’ seems
similarly to have gone towards _The First Introduction of the Civil
Wars of France_. And Haughton probably got 10_s._ less than he would
otherwise have done for _Ferrex and Porrex_, because he had required
a loan of that amount on 10 March 1600, ‘to releace him owt of the
Clyncke’.[438] The record, again, for a few plays is most likely
rendered imperfect by the loss of a leaf or two from the manuscript,
which once contained entries for the end of April and beginning of May
1599.[439] When these factors have been taken into consideration, the
resultant total of possibly unfinished plays is not a very large one,
amounting for 1597–1600 on my calculation to not more than twenty as
against fifty-six new plays duly completed and paid for in full. Of
these twenty it is very likely that some were in fact finished, either
for other companies, or for the Admiral’s men themselves, later than
the period covered by the diary. It is, however, consonant with the
literary temperament to suppose that some at least remained within the
category of unrealized projects. The most puzzling problem is that of
Haughton’s _A Woman will have her Will_. For this it is impossible to
trace payments beyond £2 10_s._, and these are not stated to be in
full. Yet the play is not only now extant but was certainly extant in
1598. In this case I see no alternative to Dr. Greg’s theory of direct
payments by the company.
Henslowe’s notes of advances to authors are not the sole material
which is available for drawing up an account of the repertory of the
Admiral’s men. There are also entries of the purchase of costumes
and properties for certain plays, and of fees for the licensing of
plays by the Master of the Revels. And there is a valuable series of
inventories, formerly preserved at Dulwich, and dating from 1598, which
record respectively the stock of apparel and properties in the hands of
the Admiral’s men during the second week of March, their play-books at
the same date, and the additions made out of Henslowe’s purchases up
to about the following August.[440] The theory that some of the plays
recorded in the diary were never finished receives confirmation from
the absence of any corroborative proof of their existence in these
subsidiary entries and documents, whereas such evidence exists in
the case of a very large proportion of the plays for which the diary
records payment in full. It must not, however, be assumed, either that
every play completed necessarily got produced, although it is not
likely that many were withheld, or that a play was necessarily not
produced, because no special apparel or properties were bought for it,
since it may have been quite possible to mount some plays out of the
company’s existing stock. The number of fees paid for licensing is so
small in proportion to the number of plays certainly produced, that
these fees cannot all be supposed to have passed through Henslowe’s
hands.
Subject to the difficulties discussed in the foregoing paragraphs, I
think that the following is a fairly accurate account of the repertory
of the company for the three years now in question.[441] During 1597–8
they purchased seventeen new plays. These, with the names of their
authors, were:
_Mother Redcap_ (Drayton and Munday).
_Phaethon_ (Dekker).
_1 Robin Hood_ (Munday).
_2 Robin Hood_ (Chettle and Munday).
_The Triangle of Cuckolds_ (Dekker).[442]
_The Welshman’s Prize_, or, _The Famous Wars of Henry I and the
Prince of Wales_ (Chettle, Dekker, and Drayton).[443]
_1 Earl Godwin and his Three Sons_ (Chettle, Dekker, Drayton,
and Wilson).
_2 Earl Godwin and his Three Sons_ (Chettle, Dekker, Drayton,
and Wilson).
_King Arthur_ (Hathway).
_Love Prevented_ (Porter).[444]
_A Woman will have her Will_ (Haughton).
_1 Black Bateman of the North_ (Chettle, Dekker, Drayton, and
Wilson).
_2 Black Bateman of the North_ (Chettle and Wilson).
_The Madman’s Morris_ (Dekker, Drayton, and Wilson).
_The Funeral of Richard Cœur de Lion_ (Chettle, Drayton, Munday,
and Wilson).
_Hannibal and Hermes_ (Dekker, Drayton, and Wilson).[445]
_Valentine and Orson_ (Hathway and Munday).
There is evidence of the actual performance of _Mother Redcap_,
_Phaethon_ (January), _1 and 2 Robin Hood_ (March), _1 Earl Godwin_
(April), _King Arthur_ (May), _2 Earl Godwin_ (June), _1 Black Bateman_
(June). Properties were bought for _The Madman’s Morris_ in July, and
the next season probably opened with it. To the new plays must be added
_Friar Spendleton_, produced as ‘ne’ on 31 October, and _Dido and
Aeneas_. A loan of 30_s._ on 8 January ‘when they fyrst played Dido at
nyght’ suggests a supper, not a night performance. Either play may have
been purchased at the end of 1596–7, or may have come from Pembroke’s
stock. The same applies to _Branholt_ and _Alice Pierce_, which were
probably new when properties were purchased for them in November and
December. The company also bought on 12 December two jigs from two
young men, for which they paid 6_s._ 8_d._ Hardly any of the 1597–8
new plays are extant. The two parts of _Robin Hood_ are _The Downfall
of Robert Earl of Huntingdon_, and _The Death of Robert Earl of
Huntingdon_, printed without Munday’s name as Admiral’s plays in 1601.
Haughton’s _A Woman will have her Will_ was entered on the Stationers’
Register on 3 August 1601, and printed with the alternative title of
_Englishmen for my Money_ in 1616. _Phaethon_ probably underlies Dekker
and Ford’s _The Sun’s Darling_, and it is a plausible conjecture of
Mr. Fleay’s that _Love Prevented_ may be _1 The Two Angry Women of
Abingdon_, printed as an Admiral’s play in 1599, and not to be traced
elsewhere in the diary. The payments for four plays during the year,
besides the puzzling _A Woman will have her Will_, were incomplete. I
take it that the £2 paid to Chettle, Dekker, Drayton, and Wilson for
_Pierce of Exton_ was transferred to the account for _2 Earl Godwin_,
which otherwise lacks just that amount of the full £6; that Chettle
failed to deliver _A Woman’s Tragedy_; that Chapman’s _Isle of a
Woman_ was held over until 1598–9; and that a projected tragedy of Ben
Jonson’s was similarly held over, and then indefinitely postponed owing
to the tragedy in real life of Spencer’s death. There are two entries
with regard to this. On 3 December 1597, Henslowe lent Jonson 20_s._
‘vpon a boocke which he showed the plotte vnto the company which he
promysed to deliver vnto the company at Cryssmas next’. On 23 October
1598, a month after the duel, not Jonson, but Chapman, received £3
‘one his playe boocke & ij ectes of a tragedie of Bengemenes plotte’.
I think that Chapman’s own play was _The Four Kings_ and that he
finished it in 1599; but I see no sign that he ever did anything with
‘Bengemenes plotte’.
Of older plays the Admiral’s revived at the beginning of the year
Chapman’s success of the previous spring, _The Comedy of Humours_; also
the perennial _Dr. Faustus_, and two pieces which, as they formed no
part of the 1594–7 repertory, may have been brought in by Pembroke’s
men, _Hardicanute_ and _Bourbon_. They bought for £8 from Martin
Slater _1 and 2 Hercules_, _Phocas_, _Pythagoras_, and _Alexander and
Lodowick_, all of which had been produced between May 1595 and January
1597, and had evidently been retained by Slater when he left the
company. These books presumably do not include that which became the
subject of the lawsuit between Slater and the Admiral’s men, and as
they had afterwards to buy back some of their old books in a precisely
similar way from Alleyn, it is probable that a retiring member of
the company had a right to claim a partition of the repertory. They
also bought _The Cobler of Queenhithe_,[446] and from Robert Lee,
formerly of the Admiral’s men and afterwards of Queen Anne’s, _The
Miller_. But of these seven purchased plays, the only one that they
can be proved to have revived is one of the _Hercules_ plays, for
which they bought properties in July. The book-inventory shows that
they had plays called _Black Joan_ and _Sturgflattery_,[447] also
possibly from Pembroke’s stock; and the property-inventories that
they had properties and clothes, if not in all cases books,[448] for
_The Battle of Alcazar_[449] and for a number of pieces staged during
1594–7, including _Mahomet_,[450] _Tamburlaine_,[451] _The Jew of
Malta_,[452] _1 Fortunatus_,[453] _The Siege of London_,[454] _Belin
Dun_,[455] _Tasso’s Melancholy_,[456] _1 Caesar and Pompey_,[457] _The
Wise Man of West Chester_,[458] _The Set at Maw_,[459] _Olympo_,[460]
_Henry V_,[461] _Longshanks_,[462] _Troy_,[463] _Vortigern_,[464]
_Guido_,[465] _Uther Pendragon_.[466] To these must be added _Pontius
Pilate_,[467] revived in 1601 and perhaps from the Pembroke’s stock,
and others now unidentifiable.[468] As the company revived _The Blind
Beggar of Alexandria_ in 1601 they probably had this also.[469]
The new plays purchased in 1598–9 were twenty-one in number:
_Pierce of Winchester_ (Dekker, Drayton, and Wilson).
_Hot Anger Soon Cold_ (Chettle, Jonson, and Porter).
_Chance Medley_ (Chettle or Dekker, Drayton, Munday, and
Wilson).[470]
_Worse Afeared than Hurt_ (Dekker and Drayton).[471]
_1 Civil Wars of France_ (Dekker and Drayton).
_The Fount of New Fashions_ (Chapman).[472]
_2 The Conquest of Brute_, or, _Brute Greenshield_
(Chettle).[473]
_Connan, Prince of Cornwall_ (Dekker and Drayton).
_2 Civil Wars of France_ (Dekker and Drayton).
_3 Civil Wars of France_ (Dekker and Drayton).
_The Four Kings_ (Chapman).[474]
_War without Blows and Love without Suit_ (Heywood).[475]
_First Introduction of the Civil Wars of France_ (Dekker).
_2 Two Angry Women of Abingdon_ (Porter).
_Joan as Good as my Lady_ (Heywood)
_Friar Fox and Gillian of Brentford_ (Anon.).
_The Spencers_ (Chettle and Porter).
_Troy’s Revenge and the Tragedy of Polyphemus_ (Chettle).
_Troilus and Cressida_ (Chettle and Dekker).
_Agamemnon_, or, _Orestes Furious_ (Chettle and Dekker).[476]
_The World Runs on Wheels_, or, _All Fools but the Fool_
(Chapman).[477]
The property and licence entries only make it possible to trace
the actual performance during the year of _Pierce of Winchester_
(October), _1 and 2 Civil Wars of France_ (October and November),
_The Fount of New Fashions_ (November), _2 Angry Women of Abingdon_
(February), _2 Conquest of Brute_ (March), _The Four Kings_ (March),
_The Spencers_ (April), and _Agamemnon_ (June). Probably, in view of
the extant fragment of a ‘plot’ _Troilus and Cressida_ should be added.
The production of _Troy’s Revenge_ was deferred until the following
October. No one of this year’s new plays is extant, unless, as is
possible, _All Fools but the Fool_ was an early form of Chapman’s _All
Fools_.[478] Earnests were paid in the course of 1598–9 for _Catiline’s
Conspiracy_ (Chettle), _Tis no Deceit to Deceive the Deceiver_
(Chettle), _William Longsword_[479] (Drayton), _Two Merry Women of
Abingdon_ (Porter), and an unnamed pastoral tragedy by Chapman, but
there is no reason to suppose that any one of these was ever finished.
On 9 August 1598 Munday had 10s. in earnest of an unnamed comedy ‘for
the corte’ and Drayton gave his word for the book to be done in a
fortnight, but the project must have been dropped, as the entry was
cancelled. Of old plays the company revived in August _Vayvode_, in
November _The Massacre at Paris_, in which Bird played the Guise,[480]
in December _1 The Conquest of Brute_, bought from John Day, and in
March _Alexander and Lodowick_, bought from Martin Slater in the
preceding year. As to _Vayvode_, the entries are rather puzzling. In
August Chettle received £1 ‘for his playe of Vayvode’, and the purchase
of properties show that the production took place. But in the following
January there was a payment of £2 to Alleyn ‘for the playe of Vayvod
for the company’. Possibly Alleyn had some rights in the manuscript,
which were at first overlooked. On 25 November Chettle had 10_s._
‘for mendinge of Roben Hood for the corte’. Either _1_ or _2_ _Robin
Hood_ was therefore probably the play given on 6 January 1599. At the
beginning of the year the company bought _Mulmutius Dunwallow_ from
William Rankins and another old play called _Tristram of Lyons_, but it
must be uncertain whether they played them. A reference in Guilpin’s
_Skialetheia_ suggests that _The Spanish Tragedy_ may have been on the
boards of the Rose not long before September 1598.[481]
The new plays completed during 1599–1600, twenty in all, were:
_The Gentle Craft_ (Dekker).[482]
_Bear a Brain_ (Dekker).[483]
_Page of Plymouth_ (Dekker and Jonson).
_Robert II_, or, _The Scot’s Tragedy_ (Chettle, Dekker, Jonson,
and Marston).[484]
_The Stepmother’s Tragedy_ (Chettle and Dekker).
_1 Sir John Oldcastle_ (Drayton, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson).
_Cox of Collumpton_ (Day and Haughton).
_2 Henry Richmond_ (Wilson).
_2 Sir John Oldcastle_ (Drayton, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson).
_Patient Grissell_ (Chettle, Dekker, and Haughton).
_The Whole History of Fortunatus_ (Dekker).
_Thomas Merry_, or, _Beech’s Tragedy_ (Day and Haughton).
_Jugurtha_ (Boyle).[485]
_The Seven Wise Masters_ (Chettle, Day, Dekker, and Haughton).
_Ferrex and Porrex_ (Haughton).
_Cupid and Psyche_, or, _The Golden Ass_ (Chettle, Day, and
Dekker).
_Damon and Pythias_ (Chettle).
_Strange News out of Poland_ (Haughton and Pett).
_1 Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ (Chettle and Day).
_1 Fair Constance of Rome_ (Dekker, Drayton, Hathway, Munday,
and Wilson).
It is possible to verify the actual performance of _Page of Plymouth_
(September), _1 Sir John Oldcastle_ (November),[486] Fortunatus
(December), _The Gentle Craft_ (January), _Thomas Merry_ (January),
_Patient Grissell_ (January), _2 Sir John Oldcastle_ (March), _The
Seven Wise Masters_ (March), _Ferrex and Porrex_ (May), _Damon and
Pythias_ (May), _Strange News out of Poland_ (May), _Cupid and
Psyche_ (June). _Sir John Oldcastle_ must of course be regarded as
a counterblast to the _Henry IV_ plays of the Chamberlain’s men,
in which the character of Falstaff originally bore the name of the
Lollard hero. One infers that it had a considerable success, for the
company gave 10s. for ‘Mr. Mundaye and the reste of the poets at the
playnge of Sr John Oldcastell the ferste tyme’, and Henslowe notes
in the margin that this was ‘as a gefte’. It is with some hesitation
that I have included _Fortunatus_ in the list of new plays, because
it is impossible to suppose that it was not based upon the earlier
_Fortunatus_, already an old play in 1596, of the properties of which
the Admiral’s men certainly retained possession. But Dekker was paid on
the scale of a new play, for he got a full £6 in the course of November
for the book, together with an additional £1 ‘for the altrenge of the
boocke’ and £2 a fortnight later ‘for the eande of Fortewnatus for the
corte’. I take it that this was the Court play of 27 December. That of
1 January was another of Dekker’s, _The Gentle Craft_, also called _The
Shoemaker’s Holiday_, which was published in the year ‘1600’ as played
before the Queen ‘on New Year’s Day at night last’ by the Admiral’s
men. _Fortunatus_, _1 Sir John Oldcastle_,[486] _Patient Grissell_,
and _1 Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ have also been preserved, while
the publication, also in the course of the twelve months ending on 24
March 1601, of _Look About You_ as an Admiral’s play must surely render
plausible the hypothesis, rejected by Dr. Greg, of its identity with
_Bear a Brain_. It would seem that _Thomas Merry_ furnishes one of the
two parallel plots of Robert Yarington’s _Two Lamentable Tragedies_,
and a notice by Simon Forman suggests that _Cox of Collumpton_ was
ultimately finished.[487] An outline of the opening scenes of _2 Henry
Richmond_ is among the Dulwich papers.[488] Publication was a form of
popularity which the actors were apt to resent. The Admiral’s men spent
£2 on 18 March 1600 ‘to geue vnto the printer to staye the printing
of Patient Gresell’. This did not prevent the play being entered on
the Stationers’ Register on 28 March, but does perhaps explain why the
earliest known edition is dated 1603. The unfinished plays of 1599–1600
were _The Poor Man’s Paradise_ (Haughton), _The Orphans’ Tragedy_
(Chettle),[489] an unnamed Italian tragedy by Day, _The Arcadian
Virgin_ (Chettle and Haughton), _Owen Tudor_ (Drayton, Hathway, Munday,
and Wilson), _Truth’s Supplication to Candlelight_ (Dekker),[490] _The
Spanish Moor’s Tragedy_ (Day, Dekker, and Haughton),[491] _The English
Fugitives_ (Haughton), _The Devil and his Dame_ (Haughton),[492] _The
Wooing of Death_ (Chettle), _Judas_ (Haughton),[493] _2 Fair Constance
of Rome_ (Hathway), and an unnamed play by Chettle and Day.[494] Except
in so far as _Fortunatus_ was an old play, I find no trace of a revival
during 1599–1600, but it may be assumed that some of the productions of
the last two years still held the boards.
The year 1600 was another turning-point in the history of the company.
Probably at some date between 14 August, when the first entry in a
fresh account was made, and 28 October, when Pembroke’s men were in
occupation of the Rose, they crossed the river, and took up their
quarters at Alleyn’s recently built Fortune, on the north-west boundary
of the City. A more important event still was the return of Alleyn
himself to the stage, from which he had been absent for three years.
It is suggested in the Privy Council letter of 8 April 1600 to the
Middlesex justices in favour of the Fortune project, that this step
was determined by the personal wish of the Queen to see the great
actor at Court with his fellows again.[495] It is not quite clear on
what terms he rejoined the company. There was a ‘composicion’ or
agreement, in connexion with which a payment of £4 was made to him
on 11 November. The next entry, which is undated, runs, ‘P^d vnto my
sonne Alleyn for the firste weckes playe the xj parte of xvij^{ll} ix^s
which came to therti & ij shellinges’. There are no further entries
of the same kind until the date of a reckoning in February 1602, when
Henslowe paid Alleyn 27_s._ 6_d._ ‘dew to my sone out of the gallery
money’. Probably this was a share of some small residue, the origin of
which cannot now be traced. The earlier payment suggests that Alleyn
received one full share of the actors’ takings, for, if I am right in
supposing that the brothers Jeffes only held half a share each, there
would have been just ten sharers besides himself. Or possibly his share
may have been limited to the actors’ moiety of the gallery takings,
and the outgoings may all have been charged to the receipts from the
yard. Certainly Alleyn does not seem to have had any responsibility for
these outgoings. His name is never put with those of other sharers to
Henslowe’s periodical reckonings, and if his play-books were used, they
were bought from him. On the other hand, he sometimes, although not so
often as some of his fellows, ‘appointed’ payments, and he received the
Court money for the company, alike in 1601, 1602, and 1603. That his
share did not pass through Henslowe’s hands after the date of the first
instalment is perhaps explained by the assumption that, as the owner
and joint occupier with Henslowe of the Fortune, the appointment of a
‘gatherer’ for the gallery money may naturally have fallen to him.
Some such change in the financial arrangements may also account for the
fact that, while Henslowe’s record of advances continues on the same
lines as that for 1597–1600, the notes of weekly repayments are now
discontinued. As a result it is no longer possible to determine with
any exactness the length of the theatrical seasons, since, naturally
enough, the outgoings did not altogether stop while the house was
closed. Their course, however, suggests intervals in February and March
1601, February to April 1602, August 1602 and January and February
1603. It is possible, although not very likely, that there was no
cessation of playing during the summer of 1601. I find no evidence of
further provincial travels before the end of the reign. These were, I
think, years of prosperity. The players still required small personal
advances from time to time, and Thomas Towne was reduced to pawning
a pair of stockings on 13 March 1602.[496] But it is noticeable that
about the previous June Henslowe opened an account under the heading,
‘Begininge to receue of thes meane ther privet deates which they owe
vnto me’, and was able to enter in it a series of repayments by Jones,
Downton, Bird, and Shaw.[497] Bird, however, still owed £10 10_s._
on 12 March 1602, and Henslowe noted, ‘He is cleere of all debtes &
demaundes except theis debtes and such stocke & covenentes as I maie
clayme & challendge of him by reason of his coniunction with the
companie’.[498] Whether the playwrights reaped any benefit may be
doubted. The tendency to a rise of prices which showed itself in 1599
was hardly maintained. Some of them were still impecunious enough.
The company had, on more than one occasion to redeem a play which the
unfortunate Chettle had pawned with one Bromfield, a mercer; and in
March 1602 he seems to have followed Porter’s example and put his hand,
for a consideration of £3, to an instrument binding him to write for
them alone.[499] There were some legal troubles in the course of 1601.
A sum of £21 10_s._ had to be paid on a bond to a Mr. Treheren during
March, and in August there were fees to a jury and a clerk of assizes.
The company had also to find 10_s._ in May ‘to geatte the boye into
the ospetalle which was hurt at the Fortewne’.[500] Information as to
the composition of the company at some time between Alleyn’s return
and February 1602 is given by the ‘plot’ of _The Battle of Alcazar_,
although, as this is mutilated, it must not be treated as negative
evidence, and in particular the names of W. Borne and John Singer are
missing.[501] All the other sharers, however, are found in it--‘Mr. Ed.
Allen, Mr. Doughton, Mr. Juby, Mr. Shaa, Mr. Jones, Mr. Towne, Antony
Jeffes, H. Jeffes, Mr. Charles [Massey], and Mr. Sam [Rowley]’. There
are also Mr. Rich. Allen and Mr. Hunt, who were not sharers, but whose
long service had apparently earned them the dignity of the ‘Mr.’, W.
Kendall, Jeames, who was possibly Henslowe’s apprentice James Bristow
and possibly Jones’s boy of the same name, and Dob, who was probably
the Dobe of the 1598 inventory. The remaining names, all of which
are new, are those of W. Cartwright, who, however, had witnessed a
loan for Henslowe as far back as 21 April 1598,[502] Dick Jubie, Ro.
Tailor, George Somerset, Tho. Drum, [Thomas] Parsons, Harry, and the
‘boys’ of Mr. Allen and Mr. Towne. The only important woman’s part,
that of Callipolis, is assigned by the ‘plot’ to Pisano, which does
not look like an actor’s name and may be a mistake. The services of
Bristow were evidently leased out by Henslowe to the company or some
one of its members, at a rate of 3_s._ a week. Antony Jeffes paid two
weeks’ arrears ‘for my boyes Jeames wages’ in August 1600, and Henslowe
charged the company £6 10_s._ on the same account in the following
February.[503] Another boy attached to the company about the same time
must have been ‘Nick’, for whom hose ‘to tumbell in be fore the quen’
were bought on 25 December 1601. Hugh Davis, for the mending of whose
tawny coat ‘which was eatten with the rattes’ 6_s._ 7_d._ was paid
in November 1601, was perhaps a hired man. A list of the responsible
members of the company is attached by Henslowe to a reckoning cast
between 7 and 23 February 1602. They were then ‘John Singer, Thomas
Downton, William Byrd, Edward Juby, Thomas Towne, Humphrey Jeffs,
Anthony Jeffs, Samuel Rowley, and Charles Massy’.[504] A note is added
that £50 had been advanced ‘to geve vnto Mr. Jonnes & Mr. Shaw at
ther goinge a waye’. This departure must have been quite recent. Shaw
had been agent for the company on the previous 21 January, and the
list of continuing members is in fact in his handwriting. The last
instalment of Jones’s private debt had been paid off on 1 November.
His three years’ agreement with Henslowe had expired at Michaelmas
1600. Richard Alleyn must have died in September 1602, for on the
19th of that month his widow borrowed £5 10_s._ to take her mantle
and sheet and face-cloth out of pawn.[505] Neither Shaw nor Jones nor
Richard Alleyn is in the plot of _1 Tamar Cham_, which may reasonably
be assigned to a date in the vicinity of the purchase of the book from
Alleyn on 2 October 1602. This is of interest, partly because it is
complete, and partly because there was a procession in the play, and
the number of supernumeraries required must have tried the resources
of the establishment to their utmost. All the principal members of the
company appeared--‘Mr. Allen, Mr. Denygten, Mr. Boorne, Mr. Towne, Mr.
Singer, Mr. Jubie, H. Jeffs, A. Jeffs, Mr. Charles [Massey], and Mr.
Sam [Rowley]’; and in addition Dick Jubie, W. Cart[wright], George
[Somerset], Tho. Parsons, and Jeames [Bristow], who were in _The Battle
of Alcazar_, and W. Parr, Tho. Marbeck, Jack Grigorie, Gedion, Gibbs,
Tho. Rowley, Rester, ‘old Browne’, Ned Browne, ‘the red fast fellow’
and several boys, described, perhaps in some cases twice over, as
Jack Jones, ‘little Will’, ‘little Will Barne’, who do not seem to be
identical, ‘Gils his boy’, ‘Mr. Denyghtens little boy’, perhaps the
same already recorded in 1600, and ‘the other little boy’. ‘Old Browne’
can hardly be Robert Browne, who seems to have been in Germany; but
Ned Browne may be the Edward Browne who, like Robert, was a member of
Worcester’s company in 1583. Little is added by the only other extant
‘plot’, the fragmentary one of _2 Fortune’s Tennis_. This is difficult
to date, but it must be later than Dekker’s _1 Fortune’s Tennis_ of
September 1600, and may not improbably be Munday’s _Set at Tennis_
of December 1602. The few names which it contains--Mr. Singer, Sam,
Charles, Geo[rge Somerset], R. Tailor, W. Cartwright, Pavy--suggest
proximity to _The Battle of Alcazar_ and _1 Tamar Cham_. The only
fresh one is that of Pavy, who may or may not be connected with the
Salathiel Pavy of Ben Jonson’s epitaph. Both _1 Tamar Cham_ and _2
Fortune’s Tennis_ must be earlier than January 1603, a month which
saw the retirement of the old Queen’s man, John Singer. So at least
may be inferred from the fact that he makes no further appearance in
the diary after 13 January, when he received £5 ‘for his play called
Syngers Vallentarey’. I take ‘vallentarey’ to mean ‘valediction’. His
name is absent from the next list of the company, which belongs to
1604. He probably left to become an ordinary Groom of the Chamber in
the royal household, a post which he is found occupying at the time of
Elizabeth’s funeral.[506]
The succession of new plays was not quite so rapid during 1600–3 as
in previous periods. I can only trace thirty-one in all, as against
fifty-five in 1594–7 and sixty-two in 1599–1600. It may well have
been the case that Alleyn, who had ‘created’ parts in the ’eighties
and early ’nineties, had a tendency towards revivals. For 1600–1 the
company bought only seven new books. These were:
_1 Fortune’s Tennis_ (Dekker).
_Hannibal and Scipio_ (Hathway and Rankins).
_Scogan and Skelton_ (Hathway and Rankins).
_All is not Gold that Glisters_ (Chettle).
_2 Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ (Day and Haughton).
_The Six Yeomen of the West_ (Day and Haughton).
_King Sebastian of Portugal_ (Chettle and Dekker).
None of these plays is extant, but the purchase of properties testifies
to the performance of _2 Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ in April
and _The Six Yeomen of the West_ in July. Moreover, Day received a
bonus of 10_s._ between 27 April and 2 May ‘after the playinge of’
the former piece. Only £1 was paid for _1 Fortune’s Tennis_, but the
existence of a ‘plot’ for _2 Fortune’s Tennis_ suggests that it must
have been completed. Probably it was a short topical overture designed
to celebrate the opening of the Fortune.[507] Unfinished plays were
_Robin Hood’s Pennyworths_ (Haughton)[508] and _The Conquest of
Spain by John of Gaunt_ (Hathway and Rankins). The revivals included
_Phaethon_ (January), _The Blind Beggar of Alexandria_ (May), and _The
Jew of Malta_ (May). Dekker had £2 for ‘alterynge of’ _Phaethon_ for
the Court, and this was therefore the Admiral’s play of 6 January 1601.
They also appeared on 28 December and 2 February. _Dr. Faustus_ was
entered on 7 January; the earliest print (1604) bears their name. The
new books of 1601–2 were fourteen in number, as follows:[509]
_The Conquest of the West Indies_ (Day, Haughton, and Smith).
_3 Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ (Day and Haughton).
_The Life of Cardinal Wolsey_ (Chettle).[510]
_1 The Six Clothiers_ (Hathway, Haughton, and Smith).
_The Rising of Cardinal Wolsey_ (Chettle, Drayton, Munday, and
Smith).
_Friar Rush and the Proud Woman of Antwerp_ (Chettle, Day, and
Haughton).
_Judas_ (Bird and Rowley).[511]
_Too Good to be True_ (Chettle, Hathway, and Smith).
_Malcolm King of Scots_ (Massey).
_Love Parts Friendship_ (Chettle and Smith).
_Jephthah_ (Dekker and Munday).
_Tobias_ (Chettle).
_The Bristol Tragedy_ (Day).
_Caesar’s Fall_, or, _The Two Shapes_ (Dekker, Drayton,
Middleton, Munday, and Webster).
At least ten of these appear to have been played: _2 Cardinal Wolsey_
(August), _3 Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ (September), _Judas_
(January), _The Conquest of the West Indies_ (January), _Malcolm
King of Scots_ (April), _Love Parts Friendship_ (May), _1 Cardinal
Wolsey_ (June), _Jephthah_ (July), and at uncertain dates, _Tobias_
and probably _The Bristol Tragedy_.[512] None is now extant. The
unfinished plays were _The Humorous Earl of Gloucester with his
Conquest of Portugal_ (Wadeson), _2 Tom Dough_[513] (Day and Haughton),
_The Orphan’s Tragedy_ (Chettle),[514] _2 The Six Clothiers_ (Hathway,
Haughton, and Smith),[515] _The Spanish Fig_ (Anon.),[516] _Richard
Crookback_ (Jonson),[517] _A Danish Tragedy_ (Chettle),[518] and _A
Medicine for a Curst Wife_ (Dekker).[519] There was considerable
activity of revival during the year. Six old plays belonging to the
1594–7 repertory, for some of which the company already held the
properties,[520] were bought from Alleyn at £2 each, _Mahomet_ in
August, _The Wise Man of West Chester_ in September, _Vortigern_
in November, and _The French Doctor_, _The Massacre at Paris_, and
_Crack Me this Nut_ in January. The first and the last three of these
certainly were played, and the revival of _The Massacre at Paris_
appears to have caused annoyance to Henri IV.[521] In addition,
properties were bought for one of the _Hercules_ plays in December,
Dekker got 10_s._ for a prologue and epilogue to _Pontius Pilate_[522]
in January, and Jonson wrote additions to _The Spanish Tragedy_,
possibly those now extant, in September, although it may be doubted
whether the further additions contemplated in the following June were
ever made. There is nothing to show what was selected, other than
Nick’s tumbling, for the Admiral’s only Court play of 1601–2, which
took place on 27 December.
The season of 1602–3 was, of course, shortened by the death of
Elizabeth and the outbreak of plague. The new plays numbered nine. They
were:
_Samson_ (Anon.).
_Felmelanco_ (Chettle and Robinson).
_Joshua_ (Rowley).
_Randal Earl of Chester_ (Middleton).
_Merry as May Be_ (Day, Hathway, and Smith).
_The Set at Tennis_ (Munday).
_1 The London Florentine_ (Chettle and Heywood).
_Singer’s Voluntary_ (Singer).
_The Boss of Billingsgate_ (Day, Hathway, and another).[523]
It must be added that in September properties were bought for a ‘new
playe’ called _The Earl of Hertford_, which it seems impossible to
identify with any of the pieces bought. This looks like one of the rare
cases in which payment did not pass through Henslowe’s hands. This and
_Samson_ are the only new plays of the year, the actual performance
of which can be verified; and none of these plays is extant.[524] I
suspect, however, that Munday’s _Set at Tennis_ is the _2 Fortune’s
Tennis_ of which a ‘plot’ survives. The payment, of only £3, was ‘in
full’, and it may, like _1 Fortune’s Tennis_, have been a short piece
of some exceptional character, motived by the name of the theatre in
which it was presented. Unfinished plays at the end of the season were
_The Widow’s Charm_ (Munday or Wadeson),[525] _William Cartwright_
(Haughton), _Hoffman_ (Chettle),[526] _2 London Florentine_ (Chettle
and Heywood), _The Siege of Dunkirk and Alleyn the Pirate_ (Massey).
The revival of old plays continued. Costumes for _Vortigern_, one of
those bought from Alleyn in the previous year, were in preparation
during September, and Alleyn’s stock yielded three more, _Philip of
Spain_ and _Longshanks_ in August and _Tamar Cham_, probably the second
part, as the extant ‘plot’ testifies, in October. The last two of
these belonged to the Admiral’s repertory of 1594–7, but the origin of
_Philip of Spain_ is unknown. A book of _The Four Sons of Aymon_, for
which £2 was paid to Robert Shaw, was probably also old, and was bought
on condition that Shaw should repay the £2, unless the play was used by
the Admiral’s or some other company with his consent by Christmas 1604.
Bird and Rowley had £4 in September for additions to _Dr. Faustus_.
Dekker completed some alterations of _Tasso’s Melancholy_, another
1594–7 play, in December, and in the same month Middleton wrote ‘for
the corte’ a prologue and epilogue to Greene’s _Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay_, which I should suppose to have been Henslowe’s property, as
it was played by Strange’s men in 1592–3 and the Queen’s and Sussex’s
in 1594. This probably served for the first of the three appearances
made by the Admiral’s at Court, on 27 December. The other two were on
6 March and on a date unspecified. For one of these occasions Chettle
was writing a prologue and epilogue at the end of December, but the
play is not named.[527] One of the new plays, _Merry as May Be_, was
intended for Court, when the first payment on account of it was made on
9 November.
On 12 March 1603 Henslowe practically closes the detailed record
which he had kept continuously in his diary since October 1597 of
his financial transactions, otherwise than by way of rent, with the
Admiral’s men. A brief review of these is not without interest.[528]
His advances from 21 October 1597 to 8 March 1598 amounted to £46
7_s._ 3_d._, and to this he took the signatures of the company, with
the note, ‘Thes men dothe aknowlege this deat to be dewe by them by
seatynge of ther handes to yette’. By 28 July a further amount of £120
15_s._ 4_d._ had been incurred, making a total of £166 17_s._ 7_d._ for
1597–8.[529] During the same period he entered weekly receipts from the
company to a total of £125. These must have gone to an old debt, for
he did not balance them with the payments for the year, but carried on
the whole debit of £166 17_s._ 7_d._ to 1598–9. Apparently, however, he
was not satisfied with the way in which expenditure was outstripping
income, for he headed a new receipts account, ‘Here I begyne to receue
the wholle gallereys frome this daye beinge the 29 of July 1598’, and
the weekly entries become about double what they were during 1597–8.
On the other hand, there is also a considerable increase in the rate
of expenditure. It is an ingenious and, I think, sound conjecture of
Dr. Greg’s, that throughout 1594–1603 Henslowe was taking half the
gallery money for rent, and that, at different times, he also took
either the other half, or another quarter only, to recoup himself for
his advances.[530] The outgoings entered during 1598–9 reach £435 7_s._
4_d._, but some items for March and April 1599 are probably missing,
owing to a mutilation of the manuscript.[531] The receipts for the same
period were £358 3_s._ On 13 October 1599, about a fortnight after
the beginning of the 1599–1600 season, a balance was struck. Henslowe
credited the company with the £358 received from the gallery money, and
debited them with £632 advanced by him. This includes £166 17_s._ 7_d._
for 1597–8, £435 7_s._ 4_d._ for 1598–9, and £29 15_s._ 1_d._, which
may reasonably be taken as the sum of the missing entries for March and
April 1599. The balance of £274 remained as a debt from the company.
They did not, however, set their hands to a reckoning until the end of
the next year, on 10 July 1600. During 1599–1600 a fresh account had
been running, on which Henslowe’s receipts were £202 10_s._ and his
payments £222 5_s._ 6_d._ At the reckoning the company’s indebtedness
is calculated at £300, and is admitted by the formula, ‘which some
of three hundred powndes we whose names are here vnder written doe
acknowledge our dewe debt & doe promyse payment’. To this their
signatures are appended. There is, however, an unexplained discrepancy
of £6 4_s._ 6_d._, as the old debt of £274 and the 1599–1600 debit
balance of £19 15_s._ 6_d._ only make up £293 15_s._ 6_d._
From 1600 onwards there are no records of receipts. A continuous
account of payments is kept up to 7 February 1602. The total amounts to
£304 10_s._ 4_d._, but Henslowe sums it in error as £308 6_s._ 4_d._,
and notes, ‘Frome ther handes to this place is 308^{ll}-06^s-04^d dewe
vnto me & with the three hundred of owld is £608-06-04^d’. He then
adds the £50 paid to Jones and Shaw on retirement, ‘which is not in
this recknynge’. Above this summary comes a list of names, said by Dr.
Greg to be in Shaw’s hand, of those sharers who were continuing in the
company, headed by the figures ‘211. 9. 0.’ I think the interpretation
is that £386 17_s._ 4_d._ of the £608 6_s._ 4_d._ was paid out of
gallery money or other sources, leaving £211 9_s._, together with the
£50 for Jones and Shaw, chargeable on the company. This is borne out
by the remnant of the accounts, which is headed, ‘Begininge with a new
recknyng with my lord of Notingames men the 23 daye of Febreary 1601
as foloweth’. The expenditure on this new reckoning up to 12 March
1603 was, as calculated by Henslowe, £188 11_s._ 6_d._, and he adds
to this total a sum of £211 9_s._ ‘vpon band’, being evidently the
residue of the debt as it stood at the close of the old reckoning, and
makes a total of £400 0_s._ 6_d._ This, with the £50 for Jones and
Shaw, was no doubt what the company owed when the detailed account in
the diary closed. There was, however, an unstated amount of gallery
receipts during 1602–3 to set against it; and in fact a retrospect
of the whole series of figures shows that there would have been a
pretty fair equivalence of gallery money and advances throughout, but
for the exceptionally heavy expenditure of 1598–9, £465 2_s._ 5_d._
in all, which left the company saddled with an obligation which they
never quite overtook. This expenditure was more than half the total
expenditure of £854 5_s._ 6_d._ for the _triennium_ 1597–1600, and
nearly as much as the whole expenditure of £493 1_s._ 10_d._ for the
_triennium_ 1600–3, during which it may be suspected that the business
capacities of Alleyn brought about considerable economies.
The accounts may be looked at from another point of view. If the
unanalysable sum of £29 15_s._ 1_d._ for the missing items of March
and April 1599 be neglected, there was a total expenditure for the six
years of £1,317 11_s._ 3_d._ Of this £652 13_s._ 8_d._, being about
half, went in payments in respect of play-books; £561 1_s._ 1_d._
for properties and apparel; and £103 16_s._ 6_d._ in miscellaneous
outgoings, such as licensing fees, legal charges, musical instruments,
travelling expenses, merry-makings and the like. Thus, if the company
supped together at Mr. Mason’s of the Queen’s Head, or met to read a
‘book’ at the Sun in New Fish Street, Henslowe would put his hand into
his pocket to pay the score, and would not forget afterwards to debit
the company with the amount in his diary.[532] It must, of course, be
borne in mind that only part of this miscellaneous expenditure was
incurred through Henslowe. He certainly did not, for example, pay all
the fees for the licensing of new plays by the Master of the Revels.
And of course there were many matters, in particular the wages of hired
actors and servitors, for which the company had regularly to find funds
in other ways. It is probable that only play-books, properties, and
apparel were normally charged to his account, although the convenience
of an occasional extension of his functions can readily be understood.
Dr. Greg may be right in thinking that his position as agent for the
company in its purchases was a natural development of his pawnbroking
business.[533] But during the period under review he did not, as a
rule, supply them with goods himself. A sale of ‘A shorte velluett
clocke wraght with bugell & a gearcken of velluet layd with brade coper
sylver lace’ for £4 on 28 November 1598 was exceptional. Usually the
payments are to tradesmen, to the mercers Stone, Richard Heath, and
Robert Bromfield, to ‘him at the Eagell and Chylld’ for armour, to
Mrs. Gosson for head-tires, and for wigs to one Father Ogle, who is
mentioned also in the Revels Accounts and in the play of _Sir Thomas
More_. Sometimes ready-made garments, new or second-hand, were bought.
A doublet and hose of sea-water green satin cost £3 and a doublet and
‘venesyons’ of cloth of silver wrought with red silk £4 10_s._ But
often stuffs were obtained in piece and made up by tailors, of whom the
company employed two, Dover and Radford, the latter known, for the sake
of distinction, as ‘the little tailor’. These and William White, who
made the crowns, probably worked at the theatre, in the tiring-house.
The company gave 6_s._ a yard for russet broadcloth and the same for
murrey satin, 12_s._ for other satins, 12_s._ 6_d._ for taffeties,
and no less than £1 for ‘ij pylle velluet of carnardyn’. Laces cost
1_d._ each; copper lace anything from 4_s._ a pound to 1_s._ 2_d._ an
ounce. Of this they used quantities, and in the summer of 1601 they
had run up a considerable ‘old debt’ to the copper lace-man, as well
as another to Heath the mercer, which had to be paid off by degrees.
The more expensive garments, such as a rich cloak bought of Langley
for £19, were, of course, an investment on the part of the company,
and were worn in their time by many sharers and hired men in different
parts. But the principal actors had also, as Alleyn’s inventory shows,
their private wardrobes. Henslowe was prepared to furnish these on the
instalment system. Thus Richard Jones bought in 1594 ‘a manes gowne
of pechecoler in grayne’ for £3 payable in weekly sums of 5_s._, and
Thomas Towne in 1598 ‘a blacke clothe clocke layd with sylke lace’ for
26_s._ 8_d._ at 1_s._ weekly. It was as hard to keep these glories
as to procure them. On one occasion the company came to the rescue
and lent Thomas Downton £12 10_s._, to fetch out of pawn two cloaks,
‘which they exsepted into the stock’. The one was ‘ashecolerd velluet
embradered with gowld’, the other ‘a longe black velluet clocke layd
with sylke lace’.[534]
The termination of the record of advances after 12 March 1603 indicates
an interruption of performances, probably due to the increasing illness
of Elizabeth, who died on the following 24 March. Thereafter there
are only a few winding-up entries in the diary. The company must have
immediately begun to travel under the leadership of Thomas Downton, who
in the course of 1602–3 received a gift for them from the Corporation
of Canterbury, ‘because it was thought fitt they should not play at
all, in regard that our late Queene was then very sicke or dead as
they supposed’. London playing, if resumed at all, must have very
soon been stopped again by the plague. There was some further small
expenditure, of which the details are not given, before Henslowe noted
that, in addition to the bond for £211 9_s._, ‘Ther reasteth dew vnto
me to this daye beinge the v daye of Maye 1603 when we leafte of playe
now at the Kynges cominge all recknynges abated the some of a hundred
fowerscore & sevntenepowndes & thirteneshellynges & fowerpence I saye
dew--£197 13_s._ 4_d._ the fyftye powndes which Jonnes & Shawe had at
ther goinge a way not reconed’. The company travelled again during the
plague, being traceable as the Admiral’s men in 1602–3 at Bath and York
and on 18 August 1603 at Leicester, and as the Earl of Nottingham’s in
1602–3 at Coventry. The tour was over by 21 October, on which date Joan
Alleyn wrote to her husband at the house of Mr. Chaloner in Sussex,
telling him amongst other things that ‘all of your owne company ar
well at theyr owne houses’, that all the other companies had returned,
that ‘Nicke and Jeames be well’, and that ‘Browne of the Boares head’
had not gone into the country at all, and was now dead, ‘& dyed very
pore’. This might be either Edward Browne, or the ‘old Browne’ who
appeared with him in _1 Tamar Cham_ in the previous autumn. In any
case, it is clear from the reference to him that he was not a regular
member of Alleyn’s company. ‘Jeames’ is no doubt James Bristow, who, as
Henslowe’s apprentice, would be likely to form part of his household;
and ‘Nicke’, who seems to have been in the same position, may be
supposed to be the Nick who tumbled before the Queen at Christmas 1601.
The Jacobean records of the company seem meagre in the absence of
Henslowe’s detailed register of proceedings. About Christmas 1603 they
were taken into the service of Prince Henry, and are hereafter known
as the Prince’s players.[535] They are entered amongst other ‘Officers
to the Prince’ as receiving four and a half yards of red cloth apiece
as liveries for the coronation procession on 15 March 1604, and
their names are given as ‘Edward Allen, William Bird, Thomas Towne,
Thomas Dowton, Samuell Rowley, Edward Jubie, Humfry Jeffes, Charles
Massey, and Anthony Jeffes’.[536] Alleyn, even if not a ‘sharer’,
was therefore a member of the company in its official capacity. He
is also named as the Prince’s servant, both in the printed account
of the entertainment at which, dressed as a Genius, he delivered a
speech, and in Stowe’s description of a bear-baiting which formed part
of the festivities.[537] It may, however, be inferred that he took an
early opportunity of leaving a profession to which he had only been
recalled by the personal whim of the late Queen.[538] He was joint
payee with Juby in the warrant of 19 February, but Juby’s name stands
alone in another of 17 April and in those of all subsequent years up
to 1615. And when the company received a formal licence by patent on
30 April 1606, Alleyn’s name was omitted, and does not appear in any
further list of its members. It is true that as late as 11 May 1611 he
is still described in a formal document as the Prince’s servant, but
he may have held some other appointment, actual or honorific, in the
household.[539] A note of his resources about 1605, however, includes
‘my share of aparell, £100’.[540] And he certainly remained interested
in the company. They were his tenants at the Fortune, although an
unexecuted draft of a lease to Thomas Downton dated in 1608 suggests
that he may have taken steps to transfer the whole or a share of his
direct interest to them. Under this lease Downton was to receive during
thirteen years a thirty-second part of the daily profits accruing to
Henslowe and Alleyn, and in return to pay £27 10_s._, a rent of 10_s._
annually and his proportionate share of repairs, and to bind himself
to play in the house and not elsewhere without consent.[541] On 11
April 1612 Robert Browne is found writing to Alleyn on behalf of one
Mr. Rose, lately ‘entertayned amongst the princes men’, to request
his interest as one ‘who he knowes can strike a greter stroke amongst
them then this’ to procure him a ‘gathering place’ for his wife.[542]
Another letter from Bird to Alleyn, also about a gatherer, is amusing
enough to quote in full. It is undated.
‘Sir there is one Jhon Russell, that by yowr apoyntment was made
a gatherer w^{th} vs, but my fellowes finding often falce to vs,
haue many tymes warnd him ffrom taking the box. And he as often,
with moste damnable othes, hath vowde neuer to touch, yet not
with standing his execrable othes, he hath taken the box, & many
tymes moste vnconsionablye gathered, for which we haue resolued
he shall neuer more come to the doore; yet for your sake, he
shall haue his wages, to be a nessessary atendaunt on the stage,
and if he will pleasure himself and vs, to mend our garmentes,
when he hath leysure, weele pay him for that to. I pray send vs
word if this motion will satisfie you; for him his dishonestye
is such we knowe it will not, Thus yealding our selues in that
& a farr greater matter to be comaunded by you I committ you to
god. Your loving ffrend to comaunde. W Birde.’[543]
With the exception of Alleyn, all the players of the 1604 list and no
others appear in the patent of 1606, the text of which follows:[544]
[Sidenote: De concessione licenciae pro Thoma Downton et aliis.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Iustices, Maiors,
Sheriffes, bailiffes, Constables, headboroughes and other our
officers and loving subiectes greeting. Knowe ye that wee of
our especiall grace, certaine knowledge, and meere mocion haue
licenced and auctorized, and by theis presentes doe licence
and auctorize Thomas Downton, Thomas Towne, William Byrde,
Edwarde Iuby, Samuell Rowle, Humfrey Ieffes, Charles Massey, and
Anthonie Ieffes, Servauntes to our dearest sonne the Prince, and
the rest of theire Associates to vse and exercise the arte and
facultie of playing Commedies, Tragedies, Histories, Enterludes,
Moralls, Pastoralls, Stageplayes, and such other like as they
haue alreadie studied or hereafter shall vse or studie, aswell
for the recreacion of our loving subiectes, as for our solace
and pleasure when wee shall thincke good to see them, during
our pleasure, And the said Commedies, Tragedies, histories,
Enterludes, Moralls, pastoralls, stageplaies, and suche like
to shewe and exercise publiquelie to their best Commoditie,
aswell within theire nowe vsuall house called the Fortune within
our Countie of Middlesex, as alsoe within anie Towne halls or
Moutehalls or other convenient places within the libertie and
ffredome of anie other Cittie, vniversitie, Towne, or Boroughe
whatsoever, within our Realmes and Domynions, willing and
Commaunding you and everie of you, as you tender our pleasure,
not onelie to permitt and suffer them herein without anie your
lettes, hindraunces, or molestacions during our saide pleasure,
but alsoe to be aiding and assisting vnto them yf anie wrong be
to them offered, And to allowe them such former curtesies as
hath been given to men of theire place and quallitie, And alsoe
what further favour you shall shewe vnto them for our sake wee
shall take kindelie at your handes. Prouided alwaies, and our
will and pleasure ys, that all auctoritie, power, priuiledges,
and profittes whatsoever belonging and properlie appertaining
to the Maister of our Revells in respecte of his office, and
everie Clause, article, or graunte conteined within the letteres
patentes or Commission, which haue heretofore been graunted
or directed by the late Queene Elizabeth our deere Sister, or
by our selves, to our welbeloued servantes Edmonde Tilney,
Maister of the office of our said Revells, or to Sir George
Bucke knighte, or to either of them in possession or reversion,
shall be remayne and abide entire, and in full force estate and
vertue, and in as ample sorte as yf this our Commission had
never been made. In witnesse whereof etc. Witnesse our selfe at
Westminster the Thirtith daie of Aprill.
per breve de priuato sigillo.
Between 1606 and 1610 it seems to have been thought desirable to
strengthen the composition of the company by the introduction of
new blood. A list of ‘Comedyanes and Playores’, included in the
establishment book drawn up when Henry formed his own Household as
Prince of Wales in 1610, contains six names in addition to the eight of
the patent.[545] They are ‘Edward Colbrande, Wm. Parre, Rychard Pryore,
William Stratford, Frauncys Grace, and John Shanke’. Of these William
Parr, who is in the plot of _1 Tamar Cham_ in 1602, is alone traceable
in the earlier records of the company. Shank had been of Pembroke’s and
Queen Elizabeth’s men.
Henslowe entered two more advances in his diary, one for ‘facynge
of a blacke grogren clocke with taffytye’, the other to Dekker and
Middleton in earnest of _The Patient Man and the Honest Whore_. This
was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 9 November 1604, and printed
as _The Honest Whore_ during the year. The name of Towne is in a
stage-direction. On 14 March ‘1604’, which may have been either 1604
or 1605, Henslowe had a final reckoning with the company and noted
‘Caste vp all the acowntes frome the begininge of the world vntell this
daye beinge the 14 daye of Marche 1604 by Thomas Dowghton & Edward
Jube for the company of the prynces men & I Phillipe Henslow so ther
reasteth dew vnto me P Henslow the some of xxiiij^{li} all reconynges
consernynge the company in stocke generall descarged & my sealfe
descarged to them of al deates’.[546] With this, so far as the extant
book goes, the record of his transactions with the company practically
ceases. The only exception is a note of receipts at the Fortune during
the three days next after Christmas in 1608, which amounted to 25_s._,
45_s._, and 44_s._ 9_d._ respectively.[547] Something of the career
of the Prince’s men may be gleaned from other sources. They played at
Court before James on 21 January and 20 February 1604, and before Henry
on 4, 15, and 22 January; and during the following Christmas before
Anne on 23 November 1604 and before Henry on 24 November, 14 and 19
December, and on 15 and 22 January and 5 and 19 February 1605. On 8
February 1605 their play of _Richard Whittington_, of which nothing
further is known, was entered on the Stationers’ Register.[548] In the
same year Samuel Rowley’s _When You See Me, You Know Me_, was printed
as played by them. During the Christmas of 1605–6 they gave three
plays before James and three before Henry.[549] In 1604–5 they were at
Maidstone and Winchester, in 1605–6 at Bath, on 17 July 1606 at Oxford,
and on 17 October at Ipswich. During the Christmas of 1606–7 they
gave six plays before James. Dekker’s _Whore of Babylon_ was entered
on the Stationers’ Register on 20 April 1607 and printed as theirs in
the same year. In 1606–7 they were at Bath. During the Christmas of
1607–8 they gave four plays before James and Henry. In 1607–8 they
were at Maidstone and Saffron Walden, and on 1 October 1608 they were
at Leicester; but a visit of the same year from ‘the Princes players
of the White Chapple, London’ is rather to be assigned to the Duke of
York’s men (q.v.). They gave three plays before James and Henry during
the Christmas of 1608–9, four before James during that of 1609–10,
and four before James during that of 1610–11. Middleton and Dekker’s
_The Roaring Girl_ was printed in 1611 as lately played by them at the
Fortune, and Field’s _Amends for Ladies_ (_c._ 1610–11) names ‘Long
Meg and the Ship’ as in their repertory. Presumably their _Long Meg of
Westminster_ of 1595 still held the boards.[550] In 1608–9 they were at
Shrewsbury and Saffron Walden, in 1609–10 at Shrewsbury and Hereford,
in 1610–11 at Shrewsbury and Winchester.
They played at Court before James on 28 and 29 December 1611, giving
on the second night _The Almanac_, and before Henry in February and
Elizabeth in April 1612. On 1 October 1612 the lewd jigs, songs, and
dances at the Fortune are recited in an order of the Middlesex justices
as tending to promote breaches of the peace. One of these may have
been the occasion on which an obscure actor, Garlick by name, made
himself offensive to the more refined part of his audience.[551] On the
following 7 November Henry died and on 7 December his players figured
in his funeral procession.[552]
They found a new patron in the Elector Palatine, then in England,
and on entering his service got a new patent, which bears date 11
January 1613 and closely follows in its terms that of 1606.[553] The
house specified for them was again the Fortune, which they had no
doubt continuously occupied since its opening in 1600. The players
named were ‘Thomas Downton, William Bird, Edward Juby, Samuell Rowle,
Charles Massey, Humfrey Jeffs, Frank Grace, William Cartwright, Edward
Colbrand, William Parr, William Stratford, Richard Gunnell, John
Shanck, and Richard Price’. Possibly Price may be the Pryor of the 1610
list. Cartwright and Gunnell are new since that list, but Cartwright
had been in _The Battle of Alcazar_ and _1 Tamar Cham_ plots of 1601
and 1602. These two must be supposed to have taken the places of Thomas
Towne and Antony Jeffes. Thomas Towne had enjoyed an annuity of £12 out
of Alleyn’s manor of Dulwich from 28 October 1608 to 15 January 1612,
but on 5 November 1612 ‘widow Towne’ is mentioned,[554] and further
evidence of his death is supplied by a letter from Charles Massey to
Alleyn, not dated, but from internal evidence written not very long
after the prince’s death, to which reference is made. Massey is in debt
and wants £50. He offers two things as security. One is ‘that lyttell
moete I have in the play hovsses’; from which it may be inferred that,
like Downton, he had obtained an interest in the Fortune, although what
the second house may have been can hardly be conjectured. The other
is his interest under ‘the composisions betwene ovre compenye that if
any one give over with consent of his fellowes, he is to receve three
score and ten poundes (Antony Jefes hath had so much) if any on dye his
widow or frendes whome he appoyntes it tow reseve fyfte poundes (M^res
Pavie and M^res Tovne hath had the lyke)’. In order to be in a position
to repay the loan at the end of the year he undertakes to get Mr. Jube
to reserve ‘my gallery mony and my quarter of the hovse mony’ for the
purpose, and should it prove at the end of six months that this will be
insufficient, he will be prepared to surrender his whole share, with
the exception of 13_s._ 4_d._ a week for household expenses.[555] From
this letter it may also be gathered that Antony Jeffes had retired, and
apparently that Pavy, whose name is found in the plot of _2 Fortune’s
Tennis_, which I assign to 1602–3, had at some time become a sharer
in the company. One other player, originally in 1597 a hired man, had
evidently reached some prominence between that date and 1614. William
Fennor, in the course of a rhyming controversy with John Taylor, makes
the following boast of his histrionic talent:
And let me tell thee this to calme thy rage,
I chaleng’d Kendall on the Fortune stage;
And he did promise ‘fore an audience,
For to oppose me. Note the accidence:
I set up bills, the people throngd apace,
With full intention to disgrace, or grace;
The house was full, the trumpets twice had sounded,
And though he came not, I was not confounded,
But stept upon the stage, and told them this,
My aduerse would not come: not one did hisse,
But flung me theames: I then _extempore_
Did blot his name from out their memorie,
And pleasd them all, in spight of one to braue me,
Witnesse the ringing plaudits that they gaue me.[556]
As the Elector Palatine’s men the company played at Court during the
winter of 1613–14, twice before James and once before Charles. They
were amongst the companies which performed irregularly in the Lent
of 1615, and Humphrey Jeffes and Thomas Downton were summoned before
the Privy Council to account for their misdoing. One of the irregular
licences condemned by the Lord Chamberlain on 16 July 1616 was an
exemplification of the patent of 1613, taken out by Charles Marshall,
Humphrey Jeffes, and William Parr for provincial purposes.
xx. THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S (LORD HUNSDON’S) AND KING’S MEN
Henry Carey, s. of William Carey and Mary, sister of Anne
Boleyn; _nat. c._ 1524; cr. 1st Lord Hunsdon, 13 Jan. 1559;
m. Anne, d. of Sir Thomas Morgan; Warden of East Marches and
Governor of Berwick, Aug. 1568; Lord Chamberlain, 4 July 1585;
lived at Hunsdon House, Herts., and Somerset House, London;
_ob._ 22 July 1596.
George Carey, s. of Henry, 1st Lord Hunsdon; _nat._ 1547;
Kt. 18 May 1570; m. Elizabeth, d. of Sir John Spencer of
Althorp; Captain-General of Isle of Wight, 1582; succ. as 2nd
Baron, 22 July 1596; Lord Chamberlain, 17 Mar. 1597; lived at
Carisbrooke Castle, Hunsdon House, Drayton, and Blackfriars;
_ob._ 9 Sept. 1603.
A company of Lord Hunsdon’s men was at Leicester in the last three
months of 1564, at Norwich and Maldon in 1564–5, at Plymouth before
Michaelmas in 1565, at Canterbury in the autumn of 1565, at Gloucester
and Maldon in 1565–6, at Bristol in July 1566, and at Canterbury in the
spring of 1567. Another makes its appearance at Ludlow on 13 July 1581,
and at Doncaster in 1582. In the winter Lord Hunsdon was apparently
deputy for the Earl of Sussex as Lord Chamberlain, and took occasion
to bring his men to Court, where they acted _Beauty and Housewifery_
on 27 December 1582. They did not again appear at Court, but when
plays were temporarily suppressed on 14 June 1584 the owner of the
Theatre, presumably James Burbadge, made a claim to be Lord Hunsdon’s
man. Meanwhile ‘my L. Hunsdouns and my Lords Morleis players being
bothe of one companye’ are recorded at Bristol in March 1583, and Lord
Hunsdon’s alone at Norwich in 1582–3, Bath in June 1583, and Exeter
in July 1583. Hunsdon became Lord Chamberlain on 4 July 1585. Between
October and December of that year, a visit was paid to Leicester by
‘the Lord Chamberlens and the Lord Admiralls players’, and on 6 January
1586 ‘the servants of the lo: Admirall and the lo: Chamberlaine’ gave
a play at Court. These entries suggest an amalgamation of Hunsdon’s
men with those of Lord Admiral Howard, both of whom had perhaps been
weakened by the formation of the Queen’s men in 1583. But if so, it
was only a partial or temporary one, for while the Admiral’s men
established themselves in London, the Chamberlain’s are traceable in
the provinces, at Coventry in 1585–6, at Saffron Walden in 1587–8, and
at Maidstone in 1589–90.
An interval of four or five years renders improbable any continuity
between this company and the famous Lord Chamberlain’s company, which
first emerged on the resorting of the plague-stricken mimes in 1594,
passed under royal patronage in 1603, and prolonged an existence
illumined by the genius of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley, until the closing of the theatres in
1642. The first notice of the new organization is in June 1594, when
‘my Lord Admeralle men and my Lorde Chamberlen men’ played from the
3rd to the 13th of the month, either in combination or separately on
allotted days, for Henslowe at Newington Butts.[557] Some of the plays
given during this period can be traced to the subsequent repertory
of the Admiral’s men; others, which cannot, may be assigned to the
Chamberlain’s. They are _Hester and Ahasuerus_, _Titus Andronicus_,
_Hamlet_, and _Taming of A Shrew_, which, although so described, may
of course have been really the _Taming of The Shrew_, Shakespeare’s
adaptation of the older play entered in the Stationers’ Register on the
previous 2 May. It is ingeniously, and I think rightly, inferred from
a line drawn in Henslowe’s account after 13 June, that from that date
all the performances recorded are by the Admiral’s men, probably at the
Rose, and that his relations with the Chamberlain’s men had ceased.
The company is found at Marlborough about September, and on 8 October
Lord Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor, asking permission for ‘my nowe
companie’ to continue an occupation of the Cross Keys,[558] on which it
seems to have already entered. Henceforward the company was regularly
established in London, took the lead annually at Court, and except for
brief periods of inhibition in 1596, 1597, and possibly 1601, does not
appear to have travelled during the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign.
Whether Hunsdon’s men got the Cross Keys for the winter or not, they
probably had from the beginning the use of the Theatre for the summer
seasons, for Richard Burbage, the son of the owner, was one of their
leading members, and on 15 March 1595 appears as joint payee with
William Kempe and William Shakespeare for two plays given at Court
on 26 and 28 December 1594. These plays cannot be identified, but
Shakespeare’s _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ may well
have been produced this winter.[559] Most likely the date 28 December
was entered in the payment warrant by mistake for 27 December, for the
Admiral’s men are also recorded as playing at Court on 28 December, and
on the same night ‘a company of base and common fellows’, with whom
one is bound to identify the Chamberlain’s men, played ‘a Comedy of
Errors’ as part of the Christmas revels of the Prince of Purpoole at
Gray’s Inn.[560] There seems to be some echo of _Romeo and Juliet_ in
the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude of _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, which
may very well have been given at Greenwich or Burghley House for the
wedding of William Stanley, Earl of Derby, and Elizabeth Vere, daughter
of the Earl of Oxford, on 26 January 1595. Another possible occasion
for the production, however, is the wedding of Elizabeth, daughter
of Sir George Carey and grand-daughter of Lord Hunsdon, to Thomas,
son of Henry Lord Berkeley on 19 February 1596. This took place at
Blackfriars, presumably in Sir George Carey’s house there.[561]
To 1595 or thereabouts I also assign Shakespeare’s _Two Gentlemen of
Verona_ and _King John_ and _Richard II_.[562] The company played at
Court on 26, 27, and 28 December 1595 and 6 January and 22 February
1596. In the warrant for their fees, dated on 21 December 1596, and
made payable to John Heminges and George Bryan, they are described as
‘servauntes to the late Lord Chamberlayne and now servauntes to the
Lorde Hunsdon’. It is clear that, when the first Lord Hunsdon died on
22 July 1596, the players had been retained by his son and heir, Sir
George Carey. The Lord Chamberlainship passed to Lord Cobham; but he
died on 5 March 1597, and on 17 March the post was given to the second
Lord Hunsdon. The company, then, was properly known as Lord Hunsdon’s
men from 22 July 1596 to 17 March 1597; before and after that period it
was the Lord Chamberlain’s men.
To 1596 I assign Shakespeare’s _Merchant of Venice_. Evidence of the
occupation of the Theatre about this time by the company is to be
found in Lodge’s allusion to a revival of _Hamlet_ there, for this
play is not likely to have been in other hands.[563] It is not an
unreasonable conjecture that James Burbadge destined to their use the
play-house in the Blackfriars, which he purchased in February, and had
converted for ‘publique’ use by November of this year. If so, he and
they were disappointed, for a petition of the inhabitants, amongst
the signatories to an alleged copy of which Lord Hunsdon himself is
somewhat oddly found, led to an intervention of the Privy Council,
who forbade plays to be given within the liberty.[564] At this time
also the Corporation seem to have succeeded in finally and permanently
expelling the players from the City inns which had long been their
head-quarters, and Nashe connects this persecution with the loss of
‘their old Lord’, by whom he doubtless means Henry Lord Hunsdon. It
is possible that plays were inhibited altogether during the summer
of 1596, although no formal order to that effect is preserved, for
Hunsdon’s went to Faversham, and Nashe himself was disappointed of
‘an after harvest I expected by writing for the stage and for the
presse’.[565]
In the following winter the company played at Court on 26 and 27
December 1596 and on 1 and 6 January and 6 and 8 February 1597.
Their payees, for this and for the next two years, were Thomas Pope
and John Heminge. In 1597 began the printing of plays written by
Shakespeare for this company, with a ‘bad’ quarto of _Romeo and
Juliet_, bearing on its title-page the name of Lord Hunsdon’s men and
‘good’ quartos of _Richard II_ and _Richard III_, bearing that of the
Lord Chamberlain’s.[566] From the text of _Richard II_ was omitted
the deposition scene, which did not appear in print until after the
death of Elizabeth. The only Shakespearian productions that can be
plausibly ascribed to this year are those of the two parts of _Henry
IV_. The presentation of Sir John Oldcastle in the original versions
of these seems to have led to a protest, and the character was renamed
Sir John Falstaff. It is not improbable that the offence taken was by
Lord Chamberlain Cobham, whose ancestress, Joan Lady Cobham, Oldcastle
had married.[567] It is impossible to say whether either this scandal
or any possible interpretation of disloyalty put upon _Richard II_
contributed to the inhibition of plays on 28 July, of which the main
exciting cause was certainly the performance of _The Isle of Dogs_
at the Swan on the Bankside.[568] For the second time since their
formation in 1594 the company had to travel. They are traceable at
Rye in August, at Dover between 3 and 20 September, at Marlborough,
Faversham, and Bath during 1596–7, and at Bristol about 29 September.
This inhibition was removed early in October. There is some reason to
believe that, when the Chamberlain’s men resumed playing, it was not
at the Theatre, as to the renewal of the lease of which the Burbadges
were disputing with their ground landlord, but at the Curtain. Marston,
in one and the same passage of his _Scourge of Villainy_, entered in
the Stationers’ Register on 8 September 1598, alludes to the acting
of _Romeo and Juliet_ and to ‘Curtaine plaudeties’, while almost
simultaneously Edward Guilpin in his _Skialetheia_, entered on 15
September, speaks of ‘the unfrequented Theater’. The transfer may,
however, not have taken place until 1598.[569]
The company played at Court on 26 December 1597 and on 1 and 6 January
and 26 February 1598. It is conceivable that one of these plays may
have been a revised version of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, which was
printed as ‘newly corrected and augmented’ and ‘as it was presented
before her Highnes this last Christmas’ in 1598. On the other hand,
it is also possible that this print may have been intended to replace
an earlier ‘bad’ quarto, not now preserved, and if so, the reference
to the representation may have been carried on from the earlier
title-page. In 1598 were also printed _1 Henry IV_, and the anonymous
_Mucedorus_, which may have already belonged to the Chamberlain’s
repertory, as it was certainly revised for them about 1610. _The
Merchant of Venice_ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 July,
but with a proviso that it must not be printed ‘without lycence first
had from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen’. On 7 September 1598
was entered in the Stationers’ Register the _Palladis Tamia_ of Francis
Meres, with its list of Shakespeare’s plays up to date, including the
mysterious _Love’s Labours Won_, which I incline to identify with the
_Taming of the Shrew_.[570] The earliest play not mentioned by Meres
is probably _Much Ado about Nothing_, which may belong to 1598 itself.
Another production of this year was Jonson’s _Every Man In his Humour_,
which was still a new play about 20 September, when an Almain in the
audience lost 300 crowns. Possibly John Aubrey has this period in mind
when he says that Jonson ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green
Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure play-house, somewhere in the
suburbes, I thinke towardes Shoreditch or Clarkenwell’.[571] Jonson,
however, was in prison soon after the production of the play for the
manslaughter of Gabriel Spencer on 22 September in Hoxton Fields, and
there is no other evidence that he ever acted with the Chamberlain’s
men. His own name is not in the list of the original ‘principall
Comoedians’ affixed to the text of _Every Man In his Humour_ in the
folio of 1616. This is of great value, as being the earliest extant
list of the company. The ten names given are:
Will. Shakespeare.
Aug. Philips.
Hen. Condel.
Will. Slye.
Will. Kempe.
Ric. Burbage.
Joh. Flemings.
Tho. Pope.
Chr. Beeston.
Joh. Duke.
It must not, of course, be assumed, either that the list is in
itself quite complete, or that there had been no changes amongst the
Chamberlain’s men between 1594 and 1598; but as those named include
five out of the six payees for that period, they may perhaps be taken,
with the sixth payee, George Bryan, who does not reappear after
1596, and was by 1603 an ordinary groom of the Chamber of the royal
Household, as fairly representing the original constitution of the
company.[572] And an inference to its origin at once becomes possible,
for of these eleven men five (Kempe, Pope, Heminges, Phillips, and
Bryan) formed, with Edward Alleyn, the company of Lord Strange’s men to
whom Privy Council letters of assistance were granted in 1593, and at
least six (Pope, Phillips, Bryan, Burbadge, Duke, and Sly) are to be
found in the cast of _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ as performed by Strange’s or
the Admiral’s or the two together about 1590–1. It will be remembered
that the Strange’s company of 1593, known as the Earl of Derby’s after
25 September 1593, was apparently formed by a combination of the
earlier Strange’s and Admiral’s men somewhere near the time of this
performance, if not earlier, and that its composite character never
wholly disappeared, Alleyn in particular, who was its leading member,
retaining his personal status as an Admiral’s man. It seems clear that
in 1594 the combination broke up, that Alleyn became the nucleus of
a new Admiral’s company at the Rose, and that the group with whom he
had been travelling took fresh service with the Lord Chamberlain. It
is not, I think, quite accurate to treat this transaction as a mere
continuance of Lord Derby’s men under the style of Lord Chamberlain’s,
entailing no reconstruction other than a change of patron following
upon Lord Derby’s death on 16 April 1594. On the one hand a Derby’s
company continued in existence, and is traceable under the sixth
earl from 1594 to 1617. On the other hand, while we do not know what
business reconstruction there may have been, a very fundamental change
is involved in the replacement of Alleyn as principal actor by Richard
Burbadge, who is not at all likely to have played with Strange’s men
after the break between the Admiral’s and his father at the Theatre in
1591. Except for Alleyn, all the more important members of the company,
as it existed in 1593, seem to have been included in the transfer to
Lord Hunsdon. It is, however, little more than conjecture that finds
Henry Condell and Christopher Beeston in the ‘Harry’ and ‘Kitt’, or
Alexander Cooke, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Gough, who were numbered
amongst the King’s men at a later date, in the ‘Saunder’, ‘Nick’, and
‘R. Go.’ of the _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ plot. Alleyn’s correspondence of
1593 adds Richard Cowley to the list of Lord Strange’s men, and, as we
shall find him acting as a payee for the Chamberlain’s men in 1601, he
may have been one of them from the beginning. In any case he had joined
them by 1598, as the stage-directions of _Much Ado about Nothing_ show
that he played Verges to Kempe’s Dogberry.[573]
There is, of course, one conspicuous Chamberlain’s man who is not
discoverable either in the Privy Council letter of 1593 or in the _2
Seven Deadly Sins_ of 1590–1. Even the audacity of Mr. Fleay has not
attempted to identify the ‘Will’ of the plot with Will Shakespeare.
Some relations, if only as author, Shakespeare must have had with
Lord Strange’s men, when they produced _1 Henry VI_ on 3 March 1592,
and Greene’s satire of him as a ‘Shake-scene’ in the same year must
indicate that he was an actor as well as an author.[574] He may have
stood aside altogether during the period of the provincial tours,
and devoted himself to poetry, and perhaps, although this is very
conjectural, to travel abroad. Or he may, as I have already suggested,
have joined Lord Pembroke’s men (q.v.), whom I suspect to have been
an offshoot for provincial purposes of the Strange’s combination, and
have passed from them to Lord Sussex’s, ultimately rejoining his old
fellows in 1594. The possibility of identifying certain minor members
of the Chamberlain’s company is also affected by this somewhat obscure
problem of Pembroke’s men. The most obvious of these is John Sincler or
Sincklo, who was in the cast of _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ as played by the
Admiral’s or Strange’s about 1590–1, and must have ultimately joined
the Chamberlain’s, as his name occurs in a stage-direction to Q_{1} of
_2 Henry IV_ (1600), and in the induction to _The Malcontent_ (1604).
It also occurs in stage-directions to _3 Henry VI_ and the _Taming of
The Shrew_ in the Folio of 1623.[575] These both happen to be plays
which passed through the hands of Pembroke’s, and the inference may be
that Sincler had also passed through this company. But this is far
from being conclusive. It is the revised and not the unrevised texts
that yield the name, and although I think it likely, on stylistic
grounds, that the revision of _3 Henry VI_ was done for Pembroke’s
(q.v.), it is probable from the reference in _Henry V_, epil. 12,
to the loss of France and the civil wars, ‘which oft our stage hath
shown’, that the play was revived by the Chamberlain’s, and it may have
been in such a revival that Sincler took part. As to the _Shrew_, it
is impossible to say whether Shakespeare’s work upon it was before or
after its transfer to the Chamberlain’s. In any case the Chamberlain’s
were playing it in some form on 13 June 1594, so that here again the
appearance of Sincler’s name cannot ear-mark him as Pembroke’s. We can
now go a step farther. The stage-directions to _3 Henry VI_ contain not
only Sincler’s name, but those of a certain ‘Gabriel’ and a certain
‘Humfrey’, not common Elizabethan names even separately, and certainly
suggesting, when found in combination, the Gabriel Spencer and Humphrey
Jeffes, who were fellows of the Admiral’s in 1597. Now Spencer, and
very likely also Jeffes, had come from Pembroke’s, the short-lived
Pembroke’s of 1597 at the Swan. Had they been Pembroke’s men ever since
1593? If so, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the
performance which brought their names into the text of _3 Henry VI_,
and with theirs John Sincler’s, was one by Pembroke’s about that date.
The obstacle is that there is no known evidence, in provincial records
or elsewhere, for any continuous existence of Pembroke’s between 1593
and 1597. Pending the discovery of any such evidence, it seems better
to assume that Sincler, Spencer, and Jeffes were all Chamberlain’s
men before 1597, and that it was from a combination of discontented
elements in that company and in the Admiral’s that the Pembroke’s of
the Swan arose. If so, the rest of the Pembroke’s men not traceable as
coming from the Admiral’s, namely Robert Shaw, William Bird _alias_
Borne, and probably Anthony Jeffes, may also have come from the
Chamberlain’s; and such an origin might explain the suit with Thomas
Pope in which Bird was entangled in 1598.[576] Two other minor actors
in the company about 1597 were probably Harvey and Rossill, whose names
appear to have got into the text of _1 Henry IV_ in place of those of
Bardolph and Peto, whom they represented.[577] The list of actors in
Shakespeare’s plays given by the editors of the First Folio includes
Samuel Crosse, of whom nothing more is known except that he was of
an early generation. As the list in the Folio appears to be limited
to Chamberlain’s and King’s men, excluding for example Alleyn, who
certainly acted in Shakespearian plays, e.g. _1 Henry VI_, it may be
that Crosse was for a short time a member of the company soon after
1594.
It is hardly possible to carry the analysis of origins any further with
profit, or to assume that the groups which segregated themselves from
the Strange-Admiral’s combination in 1594 bore any close correspondence
to the respective contributions of Strange’s and the Admiral’s to that
combination in 1589 or 1590. The only name that can be connected with
Strange’s men before 1588 is John Symons and neither he nor George
Attewell, their payee in 1591, became a Chamberlain’s man. Hypotheses
have been framed, mainly in the hope of affiliating Shakespeare to
Lord Leicester’s men, who are supposed to have carried him away from
Stratford-on-Avon when they visited it in 1586–7, and ultimately
to have become Lord Strange’s men.[578] So far as Shakespeare is
concerned, the first record of him on the boards is in 1592, and
the interval since his hegira from Stratford may have been quite
otherwise spent. The proof of continuity between Leicester’s men and
Strange’s altogether fails, since the latter made their appearance a
decade before the former came to an end. The only member of the Lord
Chamberlain’s company of 1594 who can be traced to Leicester’s service
was Kempe, and he had left Leicester’s men by the summer of 1586 and
was in Denmark. With him were Bryan and Pope, who afterwards spent a
year in Germany, and may have joined either Strange’s or the Admiral’s
on their return. The only other Chamberlain’s man, who can be assigned
to an earlier company than Strange’s, is Heminges, who was probably at
some time a Queen’s man.
The Chamberlain’s men evidently started business in 1594 with something
of a repertory derived by inheritance or purchase from antecedent
companies. Our knowledge of this is mainly confined to plays with which
Shakespeare was concerned as author or reviser. They certainly did not
get all the plays produced by Strange’s men at the Rose during 1592
and 1593. Some of these were Henslowe’s property; others passed with
Alleyn to the Admiral’s men. But they got _The Jealous Comedy_, if I am
right in identifying this with _The Comedy of Errors_. They probably
got _1 Henry VI_, for although the appearance of a Shakespearian play
in the 1623 Folio is not perhaps, in view of the composition of the
1647 ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’ Folio, absolute proof that the King’s
men possessed the copy, their stage had often shown both the loss
of France and the bleeding of England before _Henry V_ was produced
in 1599.[579] And they got _Titus and Vespasian_, as revised, after
passing through the hands of Pembroke’s men, for production by Sussex’s
under the title of _Titus Andronicus_. Three other of Pembroke’s men’s
plays came to them, _The Taming of A Shrew_ and _2 and 3 Henry VI_,
and probably _Hamlet_ belongs to the same group. It is of course only
a guess of mine that these also went with Shakespeare to Sussex’s men
and came thence with him. _Titus Andronicus_ and _A Shrew_, indeed,
became available in print during 1594, but not _Hamlet_, and not _Henry
VI_, except in the obsolete version called _The Contention of York and
Lancaster_. I think Shakespeare must also have brought _Richard III_
and possibly an early version of _Henry VIII_, and that one or other
of these had already been played by Sussex’s as _Buckingham_. Of the
_provenance_ of _Hester and Ahasuerus_ nothing can be said. It is not
necessary to suppose that the Chamberlain’s acquired any plays from the
stock of the Queen’s men. It is true that Shakespeare subsequently made
some use of _The Troublesome Reign of King John_, _The Famous Victories
of Henry V_, and _King Leire_, but these were all in print before he
needed them.[580] _Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany_, published in 1654 as
a play the King’s men at the Blackfriars is believed by some to be an
early play, possibly by Peele, and if so, may belong to the repertory
of 1594.
I now return to the chronicle of the Chamberlain’s men from 1598
onwards. The restriction of the London companies by the action of
the Privy Council to two had left them in direct rivalry with the
Admiral’s at the Rose. Disputes broke out. Henslowe made a loan to
William Bird of the Admiral’s on 30 August 1598 to follow a ‘sewt
agenste Thomas Poope’, and another to Thomas Downton on 30 January
1599, ‘to descarge Thomas Dickers [Dekker] from the areaste of my lord
chamberlens men’.[581] The company played at Court on 26 December 1598
and 1 January and 20 February 1599. During this winter they undertook
the enterprise of finding a new head-quarters on the Bankside. The
disputes between landlord and tenants as to the lease of the Theatre
had reached a crisis, and in December or January the Burbadges removed
the timber of the house across the Thames, to serve as material for
the construction of the Globe. The lease of the new site was signed
on 21 February 1599. Under it one moiety of the interest was retained
by Richard Burbadge and his brother Cuthbert, who was not himself an
actor; the other was assigned to Shakespeare, Pope, Phillips, Heminges,
and Kempe.[582] Shortly afterwards Kempe made over his share to the
other four. Presumably he now quitted the company, having first, as a
stage-direction shows, played Peter in the revised version of _Romeo
and Juliet_ printed in 1599. His place was probably taken by Robert
Armin, formerly of Lord Chandos’s men, who describes himself in two
successive issues of his _Fool upon Fool_ (1600 and 1605), first as
‘clonnico del Curtanio’, and then as ‘clonnico del Mondo’, and who
had therefore probably joined the Chamberlain’s men before their
actual transfer to the Globe. As the Theatre had to be built, this is
not likely to have taken place until the autumn of 1599, and it must
therefore remain doubtful which house was the ‘wooden O’ of _Henry V_,
produced during the absence of Essex in Ireland between 27 March and
28 September 1599. It was, however, certainly at the Globe that Thomas
Platter saw _Julius Caesar_ on 21 September.[583] ‘This fair-filled
Globe’, too, is named in the epilogue to Jonson’s _Every Man Out of his
Humour_, which is ascribed in the Folio of 1606 to 1599, although if
this be correct, an apparent allusion to Kempe’s journey to Norwich in
the spring of 1600 must, on the assumption that it is a real allusion,
be an interpolation. The ‘principall Comoedians’ in this play were
Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips, Condell, Sly, and Pope. Four of the 1598
names are missing. Shakespeare evidently stood aside. Kempe had gone.
Beeston and Duke may have gone also, although it is only a conjecture
of Mr. Fleay’s that they and Kempe now seceded to Pembroke’s men at the
Rose, and they are not definitely heard of again until they are found
with Worcester’s men in August 1602.[584] Mr. Fleay thinks that another
Worcester’s man, Robert Pallant, had accompanied them; but, although
Pallant was with Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590, there is no
evidence that he was ever a Chamberlain’s man. Conceivably he may have
joined the King’s men about 1619, but that is another matter.[585]
About November 1599 was published _A Warning for Fair Women_, which
belonged to the company.
The Court plays called for from the Chamberlain’s men during the
following winter were on 26 December 1599 and on 6 January and 3
February 1600. Heminges was sole payee, and occupied the same position
in every subsequent year, up to and beyond 1616, except in 1600–1, when
Richard Cowley was associated with him, and for a special payment made
to Burbadge in 1604. On 6 March 1600 the company had an opportunity
of rendering direct service to their patron Lord Hunsdon, by playing
_Henry IV_, still oddly called _Sir John Oldcastle_, after a dinner
which he gave to the Flemish ambassador, Ludovic Verreyken, presumably
at his house in the Blackfriars.[586] To 1600 I assign Shakespeare’s
_Merry Wives of Windsor_, not improbably prepared for performance, with
the aid of the boys of Windsor Chapel, at the Garter Feast on 23 April,
and also _As You Like It_. This was a year of some activity among the
publishers and, as in 1598, the company had to take steps to protect
their interests. In May John Roberts was prevented from printing their
moral of _Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose_, until he could bring proper
authority, and in August a note was made in the Stationers’ Register to
stay the printing of _As You Like It_, _Henry V_, and _Much Ado about
Nothing_.[587] The last two of these, but not the first, were in fact
printed during the year, and so were _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_, _The
Merchant of Venice_, _2 Henry IV_, _Every Man Out of his Humour_, and
_An Alarum for London_, all plays belonging to the company.
The Chamberlain’s men played at Court on 26 December 1600 and on 6
January and 24 February 1601. Shortly before this last performance,
they had been involved in one of the tragedies of history. This was the
abortive _coup d’état_ of 8 February 1601 in which the Earl of Essex,
smarting under the disgrace which his failure in Ireland had brought
upon him, attempted to secure his position and get rid of Sir Walter
Raleigh and other enemies by taking forcible possession of the person
of Elizabeth and the palace of Whitehall. Some of his followers seem
to have conceived the idea of predisposing the mind of the populace
to their cause by a dramatic representation of the dangers of evil
counsellors and the possible remedy of a deposition, as illustrated
in the case of Elizabeth’s predecessor Richard II, in whom for some
obscure reason the political thought of the time was fond of finding
an analogue to the Queen. Saturday, 7 February, the day before the
outbreak, was chosen for the performance, and the players applied to
were the Chamberlain’s. A deposition by Augustine Phillips, taken
before Chief Justice Popham and Justice Fenner during the subsequent
inquiries, records the transaction.[588]
‘The Examination of Augustine Phillips, servant unto the L.
Chamberlain and one of his players, taken the xviij^{th} of
February, 1600, upon his oath.
‘He saith that on Friday last was sennight or Thursday Sir
Charles Percy Sir Josceline Percy and the Lord Mounteagle with
some three more spoke to some of the players in the presence
of this Examinate to have the play of the deposing and killing
of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next,
promising to get them xl_s._ more than their ordinary to play
it. Where this Examinate and his fellows were determined to
have played some other play, holding that play of King Richard
to be so old and so long out of use that they should have small
or no company at it. But at their request this Examinate and
his fellows were content to play it the Saturday and had their
xl^{_s._} more than their ordinary for it, and so played it
accordingly.’
The fact that Phillips speaks of the play as old and long out of
use, which becomes in the narrative of Camden ‘exoleta tragoedia’,
hardly justifies the suggestion that it was something earlier than
Shakespeare’s _Richard II_. This, if produced in 1596, may well
have been off the boards by 1601.
A good deal of misunderstanding has gathered round the connexion of
the Chamberlain’s men with this affair. Mr. Fleay is responsible for
the theory that they fell into disgrace, had to travel, and were
excluded from the Court festivities of the following Christmas.[589] As
a matter of fact they played four times during that winter. This Mr.
Fleay did not know, as he only had before him Cunningham’s incomplete
extracts from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber. But he
ought to have noticed that their last performance for 1600–1 was
itself some days later than the examination of Augustine Phillips.
Nor is any evidence that the company travelled in 1601 forthcoming
from the provincial archives. Mr. Fleay’s identification of them with
Laurence Fletcher’s Scottish company of that year merely rests upon
the presence of Fletcher’s name in the patent of 1603, and this will
not bear the strain of the argument.[590] Thus remains, however, the
possibly autobiographical passage in _Hamlet_, ii. 2. 346, which
assigns an ‘inhibition by the means of the late innovation’ as a
cause of the travelling of players to Elsinore. The date of _Hamlet_
may well be 1601, since the same passage refers to the theatrical
competition set up by the establishment of boy companies at St. Paul’s
in 1599 and at the Chapel Royal in 1600. But it must be borne in mind
that this competition is the only reason given for the travelling in
the 1603 edition of the play. In the 1604 edition the only reason
is the inhibition, while in the text of the 1623 Folio both reasons
stand somewhat inconsistently side by side.[591] No doubt the text
of 1603 is an imperfect piratical reprint. On the other hand that of
1604 almost certainly represents a revised version of the play, and
the ‘inhibition’ cited, if it had an historical existence at all,
may be that of 1603, during which certainly the company travelled. I
suppose that ‘innovation’ might mean the accession of a new sovereign,
although it does not seem a very obvious term. But then it does not
seem a very obvious term for a seditious rising either.[592] On the
whole, there is no reason to suppose that any serious blame was
attached to the Chamberlain’s men for lending themselves to Sir Gilly
Meyrick’s intrigue. It is certainly absurd to suggest, as has been
suggested, that the ‘adorned creature’, whose ingratitude instigated
the comparison between Elizabeth and Richard, was not Essex but
Shakespeare.[593] At the same time the company may, of course, have
been told to leave London for a few weeks. At some time, as the
1603 title-page tells us, they took _Hamlet_ both to Oxford and to
Cambridge, and it is at least tempting to find a reminiscence of the
Cambridge visit in the scene from _2 Return from Parnassus_ cited
below. It is possible that Phillips and his fellows, and even their
relation to the Essex crisis itself, may be glanced at in the satirical
picture of the Roman actors in Jonson’s _Poetaster_, produced by the
Chapel boys in the course of 1601.[594] Certainly the play betrays its
author’s knowledge of a counter-attack which the Chamberlain’s men
were already preparing for him in Dekker’s _Satiromastix_. This play,
in which Dekker may have had some help from Marston, was entered in
the Stationers’ Register on 11 November 1601, and had probably been on
the stage not long before. It is noteworthy that it was produced by
the Paul’s boys, as well as by the Chamberlain’s men. It was actually
published in 1602. Another play which may reasonably be assigned to
1601 is _Twelfth Night_.
In the following winter the company played at Court on 26 and 27
December 1601 and on 1 January and 14 February 1602. They also gave
_Twelfth Night_ at the Middle Temple feast on 2 February;[595] and I
have very little doubt that it was they who furnished the play at which
Elizabeth and her maids of honour were present in the Blackfriars after
dining with Lord Hunsdon on 31 December.[596] The alleged production
of _Othello_ before the Queen when Sir Thomas Egerton entertained
her at Harefield from 31 July to 2 August 1602 rests on a forgery by
Collier.[597] It is possible that, as Professor Wallace conjectures,
the play was on the capture of Stuhl-Weissenburg, seen by the Duke of
Stettin on 13 September 1602, may have been a Globe production.[598]
_Sir Thomas Cromwell_, a play of unknown authorship belonging to the
company, was published in the course of 1602, with an ascription on the
title-page to W. S., and to this year I assign Shakespeare’s _All’s
Well that Ends Well_ and _Troilus and Cressida_. If so, the portrait
of Ajax in the latter play cannot very well have been the ‘purge’
administered by Shakespeare to Jonson, to which reference is made in _2
Return from Parnassus_. This is a Cambridge Christmas piece, probably
of 1601–2, and in it Burbadge and Kempe are introduced as in search of
scholars to write for them. Perhaps the Cambridge author did not know
that Kempe had ceased to be the ‘fellow’ of Burbadge and Shakespeare in
1599, and was at the time playing with Worcester’s men at the Rose. It
is, however, just possible that after returning from his continental
tour and before throwing in his lot with Worcester’s, he may have
rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while, and may have accompanied them
to Cambridge, if they did travel in 1601.[599]
The last performances of the company before Elizabeth took place on 26
December 1602 and 2 February 1603, and on the following 24 March the
Queen died. Playing immediately ceased in London. Strictly speaking,
the Chamberlain’s men must have again become Lord Hunsdon’s men for
a month or so, for the Household appointments naturally lapsed with
the death of the sovereign, and Hunsdon, being in failing health, was
relieved of his duties on 6 April. On 9 September he died.[600] The
company, however, had already passed under royal patronage.
A contemporary panegyrist records the graciousness of James in
‘taking to him the late Lord Chamberlaines servants, now the Kings
acters’.[601] The appointment was by letters patent dated 19 May 1603,
of which the text follows.[602]
[Sidenote: Commissio specialis pro Laurencio Fletcher & Willelmo
Shackespeare et aliis]
Iames by the grace of god &c. To all Iustices, Maiors,
Sheriffes, Constables, hedborowes, and other our Officers and
louinge Subiectes greetinge. Knowe yee that Wee of our speciall
grace, certeine knowledge, & mere motion haue licenced and
aucthorized and by theise presentes doe licence and aucthorize
theise our Servauntes Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare,
Richard Burbage, Augustyne Phillippes, Iohn Heninges, Henrie
Condell, William Sly, Robert Armyn, Richard Cowly, and the rest
of theire Assosiates freely to vse and exercise the Arte and
faculty of playinge Comedies, Tragedies, histories, Enterludes,
moralls, pastoralls, Stage-plaies, and Suche others like as
theie haue alreadie studied or hereafter shall vse or studie,
aswell for the recreation of our lovinge Subjectes, as for
our Solace and pleasure when wee shall thincke good to see
them, duringe our pleasure. And the said Commedies, tragedies,
histories, Enterludes, Morralles, Pastoralls, Stageplayes, and
suche like to shewe and exercise publiquely to theire best
Commoditie, when the infection of the plague shall decrease,
aswell within theire nowe vsual howse called the Globe within
our County of Surrey, as alsoe within anie towne halls or Moute
halls or other conveniente places within the liberties and
freedome of anie other Cittie, vniversitie, towne, or Boroughe
whatsoever within our said Realmes and domynions. Willinge and
Commaundinge you and everie of you, as you tender our pleasure,
not onelie to permitt and suffer them herein without anie your
lettes hindrances or molestacions during our said pleasure, but
alsoe to be aidinge and assistinge to them, yf anie wronge be to
them offered, And to allowe them such former Curtesies as hath
bene given to men of theire place and quallitie, and alsoe what
further favour you shall shewe to theise our Servauntes for our
sake wee shall take kindlie at your handes. In wytnesse whereof
&c. witnesse our selfe at Westminster the nyntenth day of May
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
Of the nine players named, eight are recognizable as the principal
members of the Lord Chamberlain’s company as it stood at the end of
Elizabeth’s reign. Only Thomas Pope is not included. He was near his
end. He made his will on 22 July 1603, and it was proved on 13 February
1604. In it he names none of his fellows, unless Robert Gough, who has
a legacy, was already of the company; his interest in the house of
the Globe passed to legatees and was thus alienated from the company.
Laurence Fletcher, on the other hand, whose name heads the list in
the patent, is not discernible as a Chamberlain’s man. His inclusion
becomes readily intelligible, when it is recalled that he had headed
English actors on tour in Scotland, and had already been marked by the
personal favour of James.[603] Whether he ever joined the company in
the full sense, that is to say, the association of actors as distinct
from the body of royal servants, seems to me very doubtful. His name
is not in the _Sejanus_ list, or in the Folio list of Shakespearian
players, and that he was described as a ‘fellow’ by Phillips in 1605
hardly takes the matter further. He may have held a relation to the
King’s men analogous to that of Martin Slater to Queen Anne’s men.
After 1605 nothing is heard of him.[604]
The terms of the patent imply that it was issued during a suspension
of playing through plague. Probably this had followed hard upon the
suspension at Elizabeth’s death. The company travelled, being found at
Bath, Coventry, and Shrewsbury in the course of 1602–3. A misplaced
Ipswich entry of 30 May 1602 may belong to 1603. The visits to Oxford
and Cambridge referred to on the title-page of the 1603 edition of
_Hamlet_ must also have taken place in this year, if they did not
take place in 1601. On 2 December 1603 the company were summoned
from Mortlake to perform before the King at Lord Pembroke’s house of
Wilton.[605]
During the winter of 1603–4 the company gave eight more plays at
Court, a larger number than Elizabeth had ever called for. They took
place on 26, 27, 28, and 30 December 1603 and on 1 January and 2 and
19 February 1604. On New Year’s Day there were two performances, one
before James, the other before Prince Henry. The plague had not yet
subsided by 8 February, and James gave his men £30 as a ‘free gifte’
for their ‘mayntenaunce and releife’ till it should ‘please God to
settle the cittie in a more perfecte health’. One of the plays of
this winter was _The Fair Maid of Bristow_. Another, produced before
the end of 1603, was probably Ben Jonson’s _Sejanus_. For alleged
popery and treason in this play Jonson was haled before the Privy
Council by the Earl of Northampton, but there is nothing to show that
the players were implicated. The principal actors in _Sejanus_ were
Burbadge, Shakespeare, Phillips, Heminges, Sly, Condell, John Lowin,
and Alexander Cooke. This is Shakespeare’s last appearance in the
cast of any play. He may have ceased to act, while remaining a member
of the company and its poet. The names of Lowin and Cooke are new.
Lowin had been with Worcester’s men in 1602–3. Cooke had probably
begun his connexion with the company as an apprentice to Heminges. The
identification of him with the ‘Sander’ of Strange’s men in 1590 is
more than hazardous. The Induction to Marston’s _Malcontent_, published
in 1604, records the names of Burbadge, who played Malevole, Condell,
Sly, Lowin, Sincler, and a Tire-man. Sincler was probably still only
a hired man. Nothing further is heard of him. This Induction seems to
have been written by John Webster to introduce the presentation by the
King’s men of _The Malcontent_, which was really a Chapel play. The
transaction is thus explained:[606]
_Sly._ I wonder you would play it, another company having
interest in it?
_Condell._ Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo
in decimo-sexto with them? They taught us a name for our play;
we call it _One for Another_.
The play of _Jeronimo_, which the Chapel are here accused of taking,
cannot be _The Spanish Tragedy_, which was an Admiral’s play, and is
not very likely to have been the ‘comedy of Jeronimo’ which Strange’s
men had in 1592, and which was evidently related to _The Spanish
Tragedy_ and may be expected to have remained with it. It might be the
extant _First Part of Jeronimo_, written perhaps for the Chamberlain’s
men about 1601–2, when Jonson was revising _The Spanish Tragedy_ for
the Admiral’s. A reference in T. M.’s _Black Book_ shows that _The
Merry Devil of Edmonton_, which belonged to the company, was already on
the stage by 1604.[607]
The coronation procession of James, deferred on account of the plague,
went through London on 15 March 1604, and the Great Wardrobe furnished
each of the King’s players with four and a half yards of red cloth. The
same nine men are specified in the warrant as in the patent of 1603,
and their names stand next those of various officers of the Chamber.
They did not, however, actually walk in the procession.[608] From 9 to
27 August 1604, they were called upon in their official capacity as
Grooms of the Chamber to form part of the retinue assigned to attend
at Somerset House upon Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Duke of Frias and
Constable of Castile, who was in England as Ambassador Extraordinary
for the negotiation of a peace with Spain. The descriptions of his
visit, which have been preserved, do not show that any plays were given
before him.[609]
The company were at Oxford between 7 May and 16 June 1604. About 18
December they had got into trouble through the production of a tragedy
on _Gowry_, always a delicate subject with James.[610] But this did
not interfere with a long series of no less than eleven performances
which they gave at Court between 1 November 1604 and 12 February 1605,
and of which the Revels Accounts fortunately preserve the names.[611]
The series included one play, _The Spanish Maze_, of which nothing is
known; two by Ben Jonson, _Every Man In his Humour_ and _Every Man Out
of his Humour_; and seven by Shakespeare, _Othello_, _The Merry Wives
of Windsor_, _Measure for Measure_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _Henry V_,
_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, and _The Merchant of Venice_, which was given
twice. _Othello_ and _Measure for Measure_ had probably been produced
for the first time during 1604, but the rest of the list suggests
that opportunity was being taken to revive a number of Elizabethan
plays unknown to the new sovereigns. This is borne out by the terms of
a letter from Sir Walter Cope to Lord Southampton with regard to the
performance of _Love’s Labour ’s Lost_.[612]
Between 4 May 1605, when he made his will, and 13 May, when it was
proved, died Augustine Phillips. Unlike Pope, he was full of kindly
remembrances towards the King’s men. He appointed Heminges, Burbadge,
and Sly overseers of the will. He left legacies to his ‘fellows’
Shakespeare, Condell, Fletcher, Armin, Cowley, Cooke, and Nicholas
Tooley; to the hired men of the company; to his ‘servant’ Christopher
Beeston; to his apprentice James Sands, and to his late apprentice
Samuel Gilburne. We have here practically a full list of the company.
The name of Nicholas Tooley is new, unless indeed he was the ‘Nick’ of
Strange’s men in 1592. He speaks of Richard Burbadge in his will as his
‘master’ and may have been his apprentice. The use of the term ‘fellow’
suggests that Tooley and Cooke were now sharers in the company. On
the other hand Lowin, who is not named among the ‘fellows’, may still
have been only a hired man. Beeston’s legacy is doubtless in memory
of former service as hired man or apprentice; he was in 1605 and for
long after with the Queen’s men. Samuel Gilburne is recorded as a
Shakespearian actor in the 1623 Folio, but practically nothing is known
of him or of James Sands. The exact legal disposal of the interest held
by Phillips in the Globe subsequently became matter of controversy, but
in effect it remained from 1605 to 1613 with his widow and her second
husband, and was thus alienated from the company.
On some date before Michaelmas in 1605 the King’s men visited
Barnstaple, and on 9 October they were at Oxford. This year saw the
publication of _The Fair Maid of Bristow_ and of _The London Prodigal_,
which was assigned on its title-page to Shakespeare. To it I also
assign Shakespeare’s _Macbeth_ and _King Lear_.
Ten Court plays were given in the winter of 1605–6, but the dates are
not recorded. Three more were given in the summer of 1606 during the
visit of the King of Denmark to James, which lasted from 7 July to 11
August, and then the company seem to have gone on tour. They were at
Oxford between 28 and 31 July, at Leicester in August, at Dover between
6 and 24 September, at Saffron Walden and Maidstone during 1605–6, and
at Marlborough in 1606. To this year I assign Shakespeare’s _Antony
and Cleopatra_ and _Coriolanus_, and to the earlier part of it Ben
Jonson’s _Volpone_, in which the principal actors were Burbadge,
Condell, Sly, Heminges, Lowin, and Cooke.
Nine Court plays were given during the winter of 1606–7, on 26 and 29
December 1606, and on 4, 6, and 8 January and 2, 5, 15, and 27 February
1607. The entry in the Stationers’ Register for _King Lear_ and the
title-page of Barnes’ _The Devil’s Charter_, both dated in 1607, show
these to have been the plays selected for 26 December and 2 February
respectively. In the same year were also published Tourneur’s _The
Revenger’s Tragedy_ and Wilkins’ _The Miseries of Enforced Marriage_,
and to it I assign the production of _Timon of Athens_. On 16 July 1607
Heminges lent his boy John Rice to appear as an angel of gladness with
a taper of frankincense, and deliver an eighteen-verse speech by Ben
Jonson as part of the entertainment of James by the Merchant Taylors at
their hall.[613] During the summer the company travelled to Barnstaple,
to Dunwich, to Oxford, where they were on 7 September, and possibly
to Cambridge. _Volpone_ had probably been given in both Universities
before its publication about February 1607 or 1608.
During the winter of 1607–8 the company gave thirteen Court plays, on
26, 27, and 28 December 1606, and on 2, 6, 7, 9, 17, and 26 January,
and 2 and 7 February 1607. On each of the nights of 6 and 17 January
there were two plays. In 1608 was published _A Yorkshire Tragedy_,
with Shakespeare’s name on the title-page, and to it I assign the
production of _Pericles_, in which Shakespeare probably had Wilkins for
a collaborator. About May the company had to find their share of the
heavy fine necessary to buy off the inhibition due to the performance
of Chapman’s _Duke of Byron_ by the Queen’s Revels.[614] The year was
in many ways an eventful one for the King’s men. They had, I suspect,
to face a growing detachment of Shakespeare from London and the
theatre; and the loss was perhaps partly supplied by the establishment
of relations with Beaumont and Fletcher, whose earliest play for the
company, _Philaster_, may be of any date from 1608 to 1610. About 16
August died William Sly, leaving his interest in the Globe to his
son Robert and legacies to Cuthbert Burbadge and James Sands. Both
he and Henry Condell had been admitted to an interest at some date
subsequent to November 1606, the moiety of the lease not retained by
the Burbadges having been redistributed into sixths to allow of this.
The deserts of Pope, Phillips, and Sly are all commemorated in the
_Apology_ of Thomas Heywood, which, though not published until 1612,
was probably written in 1608.[615] Sly’s death complicated an important
transaction in which the King’s men were engaged. This was the
acquisition of the Blackfriars, of which the freehold already belonged
to the Burbadges, but which had been leased since 1600 to Henry Evans
and occupied by the Children of the Revels. About July 1608 Evans was
prepared to surrender his lease, and the Burbadges decided to take the
opportunity of providing the King’s men with a second house on the
north side of the Thames, suitable for a winter head-quarters. As in
the case of the Globe, they shared their interest as housekeepers with
some of the leading members of the company. New leases were executed
on 9 August 1608, by which the house was divided between a syndicate
of seven, of whom five were Richard Burbadge, Shakespeare, Heminges,
Condell, and Sly, while the other two, Cuthbert Burbadge and Thomas
Evans, were not King’s men. When Sly’s death intervened, his executrix
surrendered his interest and the number of the syndicate was reduced
to six. Probably, however, the King’s men did not enter upon the
actual occupation of the Blackfriars until the autumn of the following
year.[616] In fact the plague kept the London theatres closed from July
1608 to December 1609. The King’s men were at Coventry on 29 October
1608 and at Marlborough in the course of 1607–8. The plague did not
prevent them from appearing at Court during the winter of 1608–9, and
they gave twelve plays on unspecified dates. But their difficulties are
testified to by a special reward ‘for their private practise in the
time of infeccion’, which had rendered their Christmas service possible.
The plague led to an early provincial tour. The company were at Ipswich
on 9 May, at Hythe on 16 May, and at New Romney on 17 May 1609. Their
winter season was again interfered with, and a further grant was made
in respect of six weeks of private practice. Amongst the plays so
practised may, I think, have been _Cymbeline_. They gave thirteen plays
at Court on unspecified dates during the holidays of 1609–10.[617]
One of these may have been _Mucedorus_, the edition of which with
the imprint 1610 represents a revised version performed at Court on
the previous Shrove Sunday. This might be either 18 February 1610 or
3 February 1611. The epilogue contains an apology for some recent
indiscretion of the company in a play of which no more is known, but
which might conceivably be Daborne’s _A Christian Turned Turk_, since
this certainly brought its players into some disgrace. By April the
company were at the Globe, playing _Macbeth_ on 20 April, _Cymbeline_
probably shortly before, and _Othello_ on 30 April.[618] To this year
I assign _The Winter’s Tale_ and Beaumont and Fletcher’s _The Maid’s
Tragedy_. It also saw the production of Jonson’s _Alchemist_, with
a cast including Burbadge, Lowin, Condell, Cooke, Armin, Heminges,
William Ostler, John Underwood, Tooley, and William Ecclestone. This is
the last mention of Armin in connexion with the King’s men, but it is
sufficient to show that the production of his _Two Maids of Moreclack_
by the King’s Revels about 1608 did not involve any breach with his
old company. Of Ecclestone’s origin nothing is known.[619] Ostler and
Underwood came from the Queen’s Revels, probably when the Blackfriars
was taken over in 1609. In fact an account of the transaction given by
the Burbadges in 1635 suggests that the desire to acquire these boys
was its fundamental motive. They say:
‘In processe of time, the boyes growing up to bee men, which
were Underwood, Field, Ostler, and were taken to strengthen the
King’s service; and the more to strengthen the service, the
boyes dayly wearing out, it was considered that house would bee
as fitt for ourselves, and soe purchased the lease remaining
from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were
Heminges, Condall, Shakspeare, &c.’
This narrative seems, however, to have antedated matters as regards
Field. Or, if he did come to the King’s men in 1609, he almost
immediately returned to the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars, joining the
King’s again about 1616.[620]
About 8 May 1610 some superfluous apparel of the company was sold
by Heminges on their behalf to the Duke of York’s men (q.v.). On
31 May Burbadge and Rice were employed by the City to make speeches
on fish-back at the civic pageant of welcome to Prince Henry.[621]
The autumn travelling took the company to Dover between 6 July and 4
August 1610, to Oxford in August, and to Shrewsbury and Stafford in
1609–10. During the following winter they gave fifteen Court plays on
unspecified days. They were playing a piece on the story of Richard II,
not now extant, at the Globe on 30 April 1611, and _A Winter’s Tale_ on
15 May.[622] During 1611 Jonson’s _Catiline_ was produced, with a cast
similar to that of _The Alchemist_, except that Armin was replaced by
Richard Robinson, whose earlier history is unknown. Robinson, playing
a female part, and Robert Gough also appear in the stage directions of
_The Second Maiden’s Tragedy_, licensed for the stage by Sir George
Buck on 31 October 1611. Gough was probably one of Strange’s men in
1592. He appears in the wills of Pope in 1603 and of Phillips, who was
his brother-in-law, in 1605, but with no indication that he belonged
to the King’s men. Beaumont and Fletcher’s _A King and No King_ was
also licensed by Buck in 1611, and to this year I assign Shakespeare’s
_Tempest_. On 25 August 1611 the interest in the Blackfriars originally
intended for Sly was assigned to Ostler. Ecclestone, on the other hand,
later in the year than the production of _Catiline_, but before 29
August, left the company for the Lady Elizabeth’s men.
The only provincial visit by the King’s men recorded in 1610–11 was
to Shrewsbury. They gave twenty-two plays at Court during a rather
prolonged winter season extending from 31 October 1611 to 26 April
1612. Two of these, on 12 and 13 January, were joint performances with
the Queen’s men, and the plays used, Heywood’s _Silver Age_ and _Rape
of Lucrece_, were from the repertory of the latter.[623] The King’s men
also gave _The Tempest_ and _A Winter’s Tale_, _A King and No King_,
Tourneur’s _The Nobleman_, and _The Twins’ Tragedy_. On 20 February
1612 the actors’ moiety of the Globe was again redistributed, into
sevenths, so as to allow of the admission as a housekeeper of Ostler,
who had married a daughter of Heminges. From the statement of the
interests held by the parties to this transaction, it is to be inferred
that Heminges and Condell had between them bought out since 1608 the
representatives of Sly. On 21 April 1612 the company was at New Romney
and at some date during 1611–12 at Winchester. Heminges received a
payment for services to the Lord Mayor’s pageant of this year, which
was Dekker’s _Troja Nova Triumphans_.[624]
The actor-list attached to _The Captain_ in the Beaumont and Fletcher
Folio of 1679 probably belongs to the original production of the
play between 1609 and 1612. It names Burbadge, Condell, Cooke, and
Ostler. It was one of the plays selected for the Court season of
1612–13, during which, on 14 February, took place the wedding of the
Elector Palatine Frederick and the Princess Elizabeth, and which was
therefore singularly rich in plays, notwithstanding the interruption
of the festivities due to the death of Prince Henry on 7 November
1612. Heminges lent a boy for Chapman’s mask on 15 February. The
twenty plays given this winter by the King’s men, the exact dates of
which are not upon record, were Shakespeare’s _Much Ado about Nothing_
(performed twice), _The Tempest_, _A Winter’s Tale_, _Julius Caesar_,
_Othello_, and _1 and 2 Henry IV_, Jonson’s _Alchemist_, Beaumont and
Fletcher’s _Philaster_ (also performed twice), _The Maid’s Tragedy_,
_A King and No King_, _The Captain_ and the lost play of _Cardenio_,
Tourneur’s _Nobleman_, and four plays of unknown authorship, _The Merry
Devil of Edmonton_, _The Knot of Fools_, _The Twins’ Tragedy_, and
_A Bad Beginning Makes a Good Ending_. On 8 June there was a special
performance of _Cardenio_ for the Savoyan ambassador. Some unknown
cause seems to have brought Shakespeare back in 1613 to the assistance
of his fellows, and he collaborated with Fletcher in _The Two Noble
Kinsmen_ and in _Henry VIII_ or _All is True_, possibly a revision of
the _Buckingham_ which formed part of the repertory of Sussex’s men in
1594. During a performance of _Henry VIII_, on 29 June 1613, the Globe
was burnt to the ground. Some contemporary verses mention Burbadge,
Heminges, and Condell as present on this occasion. A levy was called
for from the housekeepers to meet the cost of rebuilding, and owing to
the inability of the representatives of Augustine Phillips to meet the
call upon them, Heminges was enabled to recover one of the alienated
interests, which he divided with Condell.
The company was at Oxford before November in 1613, and also visited
Shrewsbury, Stafford, and Folkestone during 1612–13. They played
sixteen times at Court in the winter of 1613–14, on 1, 4, 5, 15, and
16 November and 27 December 1613, and on 1, 4, and 10 January, 2, 4,
8, 10, and 18 February and 6 and 8 March 1614. The rebuilding of the
Globe was complete by 30 June 1614, and in the course of 1613–14 the
company visited Coventry. Cooke died in February 1614, being then a
sharer. Ostler died on 16 December, and his interests in the Globe
and Blackfriars became matter of dispute between his widow and her
father, John Heminges. The ascertained dates of Ostler’s career render
it possible to assign to 1609–14, the period of his connexion with the
King’s men, three plays in which he took part. These are Webster’s
_Duchess of Malfi_, at the first production of which, if the actor-list
of the 1623 edition is rightly interpreted, the parts of Ferdinand, the
Cardinal, and Antonio were played respectively by Burbadge, Condell,
and Ostler, Fletcher’s _Valentinian_, played by Burbadge, Condell,
Lowin, Ostler, and Underwood, and his _Bonduca_, played by Burbadge,
Condell, Lowin, Ostler, Underwood, Tooley, Ecclestone, and Robinson.
_Bonduca_ must be either earlier than Ecclestone’s departure for the
Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1611, or after he quitted that company and
presumably rejoined the King’s in 1613.
The King’s men gave eight plays at Court on unspecified days during the
winter of 1614–15. On 29 March 1615 they were in trouble with other
companies for playing in Lent, and Heminges and Burbadge appeared on
their behalf before the Privy Council. In April 1615 they were at
Nottingham. They gave fourteen plays at Court between 1 November 1615
and 1 April 1616, and again the precise dates are not specified. They
also appeared before Anne at Somerset House on 21 December 1615.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, and with this event I must close my
detailed chronicle of the fortunes of the company. A new patent was
issued to them on 27 March 1619, probably to secure their right to
perform in the Blackfriars, which was being challenged by the action
of the City.[625] Since 1603 Shakespeare, Phillips, Sly, Cowley,
Armin, and Fletcher have dropped out of the list, and are replaced by
Lowin, Underwood, Tooley, Ecclestone, Gough, and Robinson, together
with Nathan Field, Robert Benfield, and John Shank, who now appear
for the first time as members of the company.[626] Benfield and Field
are last traceable with the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1613 and 1615
respectively, Shank with the Palsgrave’s men in 1613. The only names
common to both patents are those of Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell.
But in fact Burbadge died on 13 March 1619, while the patent was going
through its stages, and his place was almost immediately taken by
Joseph Taylor, from Prince Charles’s men. About the same time Field
left the company.[627] Heminges, described as ‘stuttering’ in 1613,
cannot be shown to have acted since the _Catiline_ of 1611. He had
probably devoted himself to the business management of the company, in
which he always appears prominent. Condell also seems to have given up
acting about 1619, and during the rest of the history of the company
up to its extinction in 1642, its mainstays were Lowin and Taylor, who
became depositaries of the tradition of the great Shakespearian parts.
John Downes, who was prompter to the Duke of York’s men after the
Restoration, relates how, when Betterton played Hamlet, ‘Sir _William_
[Davenant] (having seen _Mr. Taylor_ of the _Black-Fryers_ Company Act
it, who being instructed by the Author _Mr. Shakespear_) taught _Mr.
Betterton_ in every Particle of it’; and how Davenant was similarly
able to act as Betterton’s tutor for Henry the Eighth, for he ‘had it
from Old _Mr. Lowen_, that had his Instructions from _Mr. Shakespear_
himself’.[628] When Heminges and Condell came to print Shakespeare’s
plays in 1623, they prefixed ‘the names of the principall Actors in
all these playes’ as follows: ‘William Shakespeare, Richard Burbadge,
John Hemmings, Augustine Phillips, William Kempt, Thomas Poope, George
Bryan, Henry Condell, William Slye, Richard Cowly, John Lowine, Samuell
Crosse, Alexander Cooke, Samuel Gilburne, Robert Armin, William Ostler,
Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone,
Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Robert Goughe, Richard Robinson, John
Shancke, John Rice.’ The order is a little puzzling. The first ten
entries may be those of the original members of the Chamberlain’s
company in 1594; and if so, their order does not matter. But it is
difficult to believe that the other sixteen can represent either the
order in which the men began to play for the company, or the order in
which they became sharers. Of course, there may have been comings and
goings known to Heminges and Condell, but not now traceable. Thus Field
and even Taylor may have come for a short while and gone again before
1611. But it seems impossible that Tooley, who was ‘fellow’ to Phillips
in 1605, could really have been junior to the recruits from the Queen’s
Revels in 1609. On the whole, one must suppose that, if Heminges and
Condell aimed at an exact chronology, their memory occasionally failed
them. The omission from the Folio of Duke, Beeston, Sincler, and Sands
may indicate that the list is confined to sharers. It is probable that
Fletcher, who is also omitted, was not a sharer and did not act in any
Shakespearian play.
xxi. THE EARL OF WORCESTER’S AND QUEEN ANNE’S MEN
William Somerset, _nat._ 1526; succ. as 3rd Earl of Worcester,
1548; m. Christian, d. of Edward, 1st Lord North; _ob._ 22 Feb.
1589.
Edward Somerset, s. of William; _nat._ 1553; Lord Herbert of
Chepstow; succ. as 4th Earl, 1589; m. Elizabeth, d. of Francis,
2nd Earl of Huntingdon; Deputy Master of the Horse, Dec. 1597;
Master of the Horse, 21 Apr. 1601; Earl Marshal, 1603; Lord
Privy Seal, 2 Jan. 1616; _ob._ 3 Mar. 1628.
Henry Somerset, s. of Edward; _nat._ 1577; Lord Herbert of
Chepstow from 1589; m. 16 June 1600, Anne, d. of John, Lord
Russell; succ. as 5th Earl, 1628; cr. 1st Marquis of Worcester,
1642.
Anne, d. of Frederick II, King of Denmark and Norway; _nat._ 12
Dec. 1574; m. James VI, King of Scotland, 20 Aug. 1589; Queen
Consort of England, 24 Mar. 1603; _ob._ 2 Mar. 1619.
[_Bibliographical Note._--The records of Worcester’s men in
1602–3 are printed and discussed by W. W. Greg in _Henslowe’s
Diary_ (1904–8). The will of Thomas Greene (1612) was printed
by J. Greenstreet in the _Athenaeum_ (29 August 1895), and the
Bill, Answer, and Orders in the Chancery suit of _Worth et al.
v. Baskerville et al._ (1623–6) by the same in the _Athenaeum_
(11 July and 29 August 1885) and _N. S. S. Trans._ (_1880–6_),
489. Both are reprinted in Fleay, 192, 271. The Court of
Requests suit of _Smith v. Beeston et al._ (1619–20) is printed
by C. W. Wallace in _Nebraska University Studies_, ix. 315.]
The first company under the patronage of this house had a long and
wholly provincial career.[629] The earliest record of it is at
Barnstaple in 1555. On 10 October 1563 it was at Leicester. On 13 and
14 January 1565 it was at Sir George Vernon’s, Haddon Hall, Derbyshire,
under the leadership of one Hamond.[630] It is further traceable in
December 1565 at Newcastle, before Michaelmas 1566 at Leicester,
in 1567–8 at Gloucester, in 1568–9 at Ipswich, Stratford-on-Avon,
and Bath, on 11 August 1569 at Nottingham, in 1569–70 and 1570–1 at
Gloucester and Barnstaple, in 1571 at Leicester and Beverley, on 9
January 1572 at Nottingham, before Michaelmas at Leicester, on 31
December 1572 at Wollaton, Notts. (Francis Willoughby’s), on 6 January
1573 at Nottingham, in 1572–3 at Bath, in 1573–4 at Abingdon, and in
January 1574 at Wollaton again. As the Earl of Worcester’s eldest
son bore the courtesy title of Lord Herbert, it is probably the same
company which appeared at Leicester, after Michaelmas in 1574, as
‘Lorde Harbards’. But it is named as Worcester’s again in 1574–5 at
Stratford-on-Avon, on 28 April 1575 at Nottingham, and after Michaelmas
in the same year at Leicester, in 1575–6 at Coventry, in 1576–7 at
Stratford-on-Avon and Bath, and on 14 June 1577 at Southampton, where
it consisted of ten men. On 19 January 1578 it was at Nottingham, in
1577–8 at Coventry, in 1580–1 and 1581–2 at Stratford-on-Avon, in
1581–2 at Abingdon, on 15 June 1582 at Ipswich, in the same year at
Doncaster.
Two incidents in successive years suggest that Worcester’s men were not
always quite so amenable, as vagrants should have been, to municipal
discipline. The first was at Norwich on 7 June 1583. Here there was a
fear of plague, and the company were given 26_s._ 8_d._, on a promise
not to play. In spite of this they played in their host’s house. The
Corporation ordered ‘that their lord shall be certified of their
contempt’, and that they should never again receive reward in Norwich,
and should presently depart the town on pain of imprisonment. It was
afterwards agreed, however, on submission and earnest entreaty, not to
report the misdemeanour to the Earl of Worcester. The second occasion
was in the following March in Leicester, and the entries in the
Corporation archives are so interesting as to deserve reproduction in
full.[631]
[Sidenote: M^r Mayor
M^r J. Tatam
M^r Morton.]
Tuesdaie the third daie of Marche, 1583, certen playors whoe
said they were the seruants of the Quenes Maiesties Master
of the Revells, who required lycence to play & for there
aucthorytye showed forth an Indenture of Lycense from one M^r
Edmonde Tylneye esquier M^r of her Maiesties Revells of the one
parte, and George Haysell of Wisbiche in the Ile of Elye in the
Countie of Cambridge, gentleman on the other parte.
The which indenture is dated the vj^{th} daie of Februarye in
the xxv^{th} yere of her Maiesties raign &c.
In which Indenture there ys one article that all Justices,
Maiores, Sherifs, Bayllyfs, Constables, and all other her
officers, ministers & subiects whatsoeuer to be aydinge &
assistinge vnto the said Edmund Tilneye, his Deputies &
Assignes, attendinge & havinge due regard vnto suche parsons
as shall disorderly intrude themselves into any the doings and
actions before mencioned, not beinge reformed, qualifyed & bound
to the orders prescribed by the said Edmund Tyllneye. These
shalbee therefore not only to signifye & geve notice vnto all
& euery her said Justices &c. that none of there owne pretensed
aucthoritye intrude themselves & presume to showe forth any
suche playes, enterludes, tragedies, comodies, or shewes in
any places within this Realm, withoute the orderlye allowance
thereof vnder the hand of the sayd Edmund.
NOTA. No play is to bee played, but suche as is allowed by the
sayd Edmund, & his hand at the latter end of the said booke they
doe play.
The forsed Haysell is nowe the chefe playor &c.
Fridaye the 6 of Marche.
Certen players came before M^r Mayor at the Hall there beinge
present M^r John Tatam, M^r George Tatam, M^r Morton & M^r
Worship: who sayed they were the Earle of Wosters men: who sayd
the forsyd playors were not lawfully aucthorysed, & that they
had taken from them there commyssion, but it is untrue, for they
forgat there box at the Inne in Leicester, & so these men gat yt
& they sed the syd Haysell was not here hymself and they sent
the same to Grantom to the syd Haysell who dwellith there.
William Earle of Worcester &c. hath by his wrytinge dated the 14
of Januarye Anno 25^o Eliz. Reginae licensed his Seruants viz.
Robert Browne, James Tunstall, Edward Allen, William Harryson,
Thomas Cooke, Rychard Johnes, Edward Browne, Rychard Andrewes
to playe & goe abrode, vsinge themselves orderly &c. (in theise
words &c.) These are therefore to require all suche her Highnes
offycers to whom these presents shall come, quietly & frendly
within your severall presincts & corporacions to permytt &
suffer them to passe with your furtherance vsinge & demeanynge
themselves honestly & to geve them (the rather for my sake)
suche intertaynement as other noble mens players haue (In Wytnes
&c.)
M^r Mayor
M^r Jo. Heyrycke
M^r Noryce
M^r Ja. Clarke
M^r George Tatam
M^r Morton
M^r Rob^t Heyrycke
M^r Ellys
M^r Newcome.
Memorandum that M^r Mayor did geve the aforesaid playors an
angell towards there dinner & wild them not to playe at this
present: being Fryday the vj^{th} of Marche, for that the tyme
was not conveynyent.
The foresaid playors mett M^r Mayor in the strete nere M^r
Newcomes housse, after the angell was geven abowte a ij howers,
who then craived lycense ageyne to play at there inn, & he told
them they shold not, then they went away & seyd they wold play,
whether he wold or not, & in dispite of hym, with dyvers other
evyll & contemptyous words: Witness here of M^r Newcome, M^r
Wycam, & William Dethicke.
More, these men, contrary to M^r Mayors comandment, went with
their drum & trumppytts thorowe the Towne, in contempt of M^r
Mayor, neyther wold come at his comandment, by his offycer, viz.
Worship.
William Pateson my lord Harbards man }
Thomas Powlton my lord of Worcesters man } these ij
were they which dyd so much abuse M^r Mayor in the aforesayd
words.
NOTA. These sayd playors have submytted them selves, & are sorye
for there words past, & craved pardon, desyeringe his worship
not to write to there Master agayne them, & so vpon there
submyssyn, they are lycensed to play this night at there inn, &
also they have promysed that vppon the stage, in the begynyng of
there play, to shoe vnto the hearers that they are licensed to
playe by M^r Mayor & with his good will & that they are sory for
the words past.
The latter part of this record is intelligible enough; evidently there
was a repetition of the misrule at Norwich. But the earlier part, which
refers to a different matter altogether, is distinctly puzzling. The
‘theys’ in the first sentence of the Corporation minute of 6 March are
complicated, and it has sometimes been supposed that there was really a
company of Master of the Revels’ men, and that it was Worcester’s men
who questioned the licence of these.[632] On the whole, I think that
a different interpretation of the documents is the more natural one.
No doubt Worcester’s men had found it necessary, as a result of the
powers granted to Tilney as Master of the Revels by the patent of 24
December 1581, to renew the authority under which they travelled. In
addition to a fresh warrant from their lord licensing them to travel
as his household servants, and dated 14 January 1583, they obtained
on the following 6 February a further licence from Tilney, issued
under the clause of his commission which appointed him to ‘order and
reforme, auctorise and put downe’ all players in any part of England,
whether they were ‘belonginge to any noble man’ or otherwise.[633]
This licence, but not the other, they left at their inn in Leicester,
while passing through on some previous occasion; and here it was found
by some unlicensed players, who appropriated it, and either through
misunderstanding or through fraud, imposed it upon the Corporation as
an instrument constituting a Master of the Revels’ company. There are
two difficulties in this theory. One is that George Haysell, to whom
Tilney’s licence was issued, is not one of the actors named in the
Earl of Worcester’s warrant. But there are other cases in which the
constitution of a company in the eyes of its lord was not quite the
same as its constitution from the point of view of business relations,
and I should suppose that Haysell, who was evidently not himself
acting at the time, was the financier of the enterprise, and gave the
bonds which Tilney would probably require for the satisfaction of the
covenants of his indenture of licence. The other difficulty is that
Leicester is not the only place in which the presence of a Master of
the Revels’ company is recorded. Such a company was at Ludlow on 7
December 1583 and at Bath in 1583–4.[634] But, after all, this need
mean no more than that the bogus company kept up their fraud for two or
three months before they were exposed. If Tilney had really started a
company of his own, it might have been expected to have a longer life.
The establishment in 1583 of the Queen’s men makes it the less probable
that he did so.
The list of this provincial company, as it stood in January 1583, is
interesting, because at least four of its members, Robert Browne,
Richard Jones, James Tunstall, and above all Edward Alleyn, then only
a lad of sixteen, were destined to take a considerable share in the
stage history of the future. Edward Browne, too, was afterwards one of
the Admiral’s men. Of the rest, William Harrison, Thomas Cooke, Richard
Andrewes, as well as of George Haysell (cf. ch. xv) and of the two
players who were not named in the warrant, Thomas Powlton and William
Pateson, Lord Herbert’s man, nothing or practically nothing further is
known.[635] It is possible that the escapades of the company at Norwich
and Leicester came, after all, to Worcester’s ears and aroused his
displeasure. Visits are recorded to Coventry and Stratford in 1583–4,
to Maidstone in 1584–5, to York in March 1585, and thereafter no more.
It is also possible that the company passed from Worcester’s service
into that of Lord Howard, when the latter became Lord Admiral in 1585.
If so, a conveyance by Richard Jones to Edward Alleyn on 3 January 1589
of his share in a stock of apparel, play-books, and so forth, held
jointly with Edward and John Alleyn and Robert Browne, must relate, not
to a break up of Worcester’s men shortly before the death of the third
earl, but to some internal change in the organization of the Admiral’s
men.[636] In any case Mr. Fleay’s theory that Worcester’s men, other
than Alleyn, became Pembroke’s in 1589 and only joined the Admiral’s
in 1594 is quite gratuitous, as there is no evidence of the existence
of Pembroke’s men before 1592.[637] Whether there was a Worcester’s
company or not from 1585 to 1589, there was certainly one after the
accession of the fourth earl. It is traceable at Coventry in 1589–90,
at Newcastle in October 1590, at Leicester during the last three months
of the same year, at Coventry and Faversham in 1590–1, at Leicester
on 26 June 1591 and again in the last three months of the year, at
Coventry and Shrewsbury in 1591–2, at Ipswich in 1592–3, twice at
Leicester in 1593, both before and after Michaelmas, twice at Bath in
1593–4, at Leicester before Michaelmas in 1595, at Ludlow on 3 December
1595, at Bath in 1595–6, at Leicester on 1 August 1596, at Bristol in
August 1598, at York in April 1599, and at Coventry on 3 January 1600
and in 1600–1 and 1601–2.[638]
By the end of 1601 the Earl of Worcester was holding the Mastership of
the Horse and other important offices at Court, and may have thought it
consonant with his dignity to have London players under his patronage.
On 3 January 1602 his company was at Court. On 31 March the Privy
Council, after attempting for some years to limit the number of London
companies to two, made an order that Oxford’s and Worcester’s men,
‘beinge ioyned by agrement togeather in on companie’, should be allowed
to play at the Boar’s Head and nowhere else.[639] In the course of 1602
_How a Man may Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_ was published as played
by Worcester’s men. By 17 August the company were in relations, under
the style of ‘my lorde of Worsters players’, with Henslowe, who opened
an account of advances made for their play-books and apparel, on the
same lines as that which he kept during 1597–1603 with the Admiral’s
men.[640] An early entry is of 9_s._ for a supper ‘at the Mermayd when
we weare at owre a grement’. The account was continued until the spring
of 1603, when Henslowe’s famous diary was disused. No theatre is named,
but it is probable that, with or without leave from the Privy Council,
the company moved to the Rose, which had been vacated by the Admiral’s
men on the opening of the Fortune in 1600. Certainly this was so by
May 1603, when an acquittance for an advance entered in the account
refers to a play to be written for ‘the Earle of Worcesters players at
the Rose’.[641] There is no complete list of the company in the diary.
The names of those members incidentally mentioned, as authorizing
payments or otherwise, are John Duke, Thomas Blackwood, William Kempe,
John Thare, John Lowin, Thomas Heywood, Christopher Beeston, Robert
Pallant, and a Cattanes whose first name is not preserved. The payees
for the performance of 1601–2 were Kempe and Heywood. One Underell was
in receipt of wages from the company, together with a tireman, who
made purchases of stuffs for them. It is impossible to say which of
these men had been with Worcester’s and which with Oxford’s before the
amalgamation. Heywood, who was playwright as well as actor, had written
for the Admiral’s from 1596 to 1599, and had bound himself to play in
Henslowe’s house for two years from 25 March 1598. Pallant had been
with Strange’s or the Admiral’s in 1590–1, and Duke, Kempe, and Beeston
with the Chamberlain’s in 1598. Since then Kempe had travelled abroad,
returning in September 1601. It is little more than a guess that some
of these men may have played with Henslowe as Pembroke’s.[642] Several
members of the company borrowed money from Henslowe, in some cases
before their connexion with the Rose began. Duke had a loan as early as
21 September 1600, and Kempe on 10 March 1602.[643] Blackwood and Lowin
borrowed on 12 March 1603 to go into the country with the company.[644]
This was, no doubt, when playing in London was suspended owing to the
illness of Elizabeth. A loan for a similar purpose was made on the same
day to Richard Perkins, and suggests that he too was already one of
Worcester’s men. There is, indeed, an earlier note of 4 September 1602
connecting him with one Dick Syferweste, whose fellows were then in
the country, while Worcester’s were, of course, at the Rose. But this
itself makes it clear that he was interested in a play of Heywood’s,
which can hardly be other than that then in preparation at the Rose,
and perhaps Syferwest was an unfortunate comrade in Oxford’s or
Worcester’s, who had been left out at the reconstruction.[645]
During the seven months of the account Worcester’s men bought twelve
new plays. These were:
_A Medicine for a Curst Wife_ (Dekker).
_Albere Galles_ (Heywood and Smith).
_Marshal Osric_ (Heywood and Smith).
_The Three Brothers_ (Smith).[646]
_1 Lady Jane_, or, _The Overthrow of Rebels_[647] (Chettle,
Dekker, Heywood, Smith, and Webster).
_Christmas Comes but Once a Year_ (Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, and
Webster).
_1 The Black Dog of Newgate_ (Day, Hathaway, Smith, and another).
_The Blind Eats Many a Fly_ (Heywood).
_The Unfortunate General_ (Day, Hathaway, and Smith).
_2 The Black Dog of Newgate_ (Day, Hathaway, Smith, and another).
_A Woman Killed with Kindness_ (Heywood).
_The Italian Tragedy_ (Smith).
As a rule the price was £6 a play; occasionally £1 or £2 more. Dekker
had 10_s._ ‘over & above his price of’ _A Medicine for a Curst Wife_.
This had originally been begun for the Admiral’s and was evidently
transferred to Worcester’s by arrangement. After buying _2 Black Dog
of Newgate_ for £7, the company apparently did not like it, and paid
£2 more for ‘adycyones’. It is possible to verify from the purchase
of properties the performance of nine of the twelve plays. These are
_Albere Galles_ (September), _The Three Brothers_ (October), _Marshal
Osric_ (November), _1 Lady Jane_ (November), _Christmas Comes but
Once a Year_ (December), _1 Black Dog of Newgate_ (January), _The
Unfortunate General_ (January), _2 Black Dog of Newgate_ (February),
and _A Woman Killed with Kindness_ (March). The production of this last
may, however, have been interfered with by Elizabeth’s death. Two plays
of the series are extant, _A Woman Killed with Kindness_, printed in
1607 and described in 1617 as a Queen’s play, and _1 Lady Jane_, which
may be reasonably identified with _Sir Thomas Wyatt_, also printed in
1607 as a Queen’s play, and by Dekker and Webster. Dr. Greg regards Mr.
Fleay’s identification of _Albere Galles_ with _Nobody and Somebody_ as
‘reasonable’; but it appears to rest on little, except the fact that
the latter was also printed as a Queen’s play (S. R. 12 March 1606)
and the conjecture that the title of the former might be a corruption
of _Archigallo_. Payments were made in respect of a few contemplated
plays, which apparently remained incomplete at the end of the season.
These were _2 Lady Jane_ (Dekker), an unnamed tragedy by Chettle, an
unnamed play by Middleton, and another unnamed play by Chettle and
Heywood. The company also produced some plays of earlier date. _Sir
John Oldcastle_ was presumably transferred to them from the Admiral’s
men, for Dekker had £2 10_s._ in respect of new additions to it in
August and September. Heywood also had £1 in September for additions
to a play called _Cutting Dick_, as to the origin of which nothing is
known; and properties were bought in October for _Byron_[648] and for
_Absalom_. Possibly the latter is identical with _The Three Brothers_.
Worcester’s men did not perform at Court in 1602–3, but they must have
expected a summons, as on 1 January they bought head-tires of one
Mrs. Calle ‘for the corte’. Amongst their tradesmen were also Goodman
Freshwater, who supplied ‘a canvas sewt and skenes’, apparently for a
stage dog, and John Willett, mercer, on whose arrest John Duke found
himself in the Clink at the end of the season. Their expenditure was
at a fairly high rate, amounting to a total of £234 11_s._ 6_d._ for
the seven months. Unlike the Admiral’s men, they spent more on apparel
and properties than on play-books. Some of their purchases were costly
enough, ‘a grogren clocke, ij veluet gerkens, ij dubletes and ij hed
tyres’ from Edward Alleyn for £20, ‘a manes gowne of branshed velluet
& a dublett’ from Christopher Beeston for £6, and ‘iiij clothe clockes
layd with coper lace’ from Robert Shaw, formerly of the Admiral’s, for
£16. On this last transaction they had to allow Henslowe £1 as interest
on his money. A ‘flage of sylke’, no doubt for the theatre roof, cost
them £1 6_s._ 8_d._[649] In summing his account, Henslowe made various
errors, whereby he robbed himself of £1 1_s._ 3_d._, and presented a
claim to the company for £140 1_s._ It may be inferred that they had
already repaid him £93 12_s._ 3_d._, but of this there is no record
in the diary. He prepared an acknowledgement to be signed by all the
members of the company, but the only signature actually attached is
Blackwode’s.
On 9 May 1603 Henslowe notes ‘Begininge to playe agayne by the Kynges
licence & layd out sense for my lord of Worsters men as folowethe’;
but the only entry is one of £2 paid in earnest to Chettle and Day for
a play of _Shore’s Wife_. If playing was actually resumed, it was
not long before the plague drove the companies out of London again,
and there is nothing more of Worcester’s men in the diary. Two visits
from them are recorded at Leicester in the course of 1603, and two at
Coventry and one at Barnstaple, whence they departed without playing,
during 1602–3. Early in the new reign the company was taken into the
patronage of Queen Anne.[650] This change was probably effected by
Christmas, and certainly by 19 February 1604, when John Duke obtained
a warrant on account of plays performed before Prince Henry by ‘the
Queenes Majesties players’ on the previous 2 and 13 January. The
Queen’s men are named in the Privy Council letter permitting the
resumption of playing on 9 April 1604, which indicates their house as
the Curtain. A list of players is found amongst other ‘officers to
the Queene’ receiving four and a half yards of red cloth apiece for
the coronation procession of 15 March 1604.[651] The names given are
‘Christopher Beeston, Robert Lee, John Duke, Robert Palante, Richard
Purkins, Thomas Haward, James Houlte, Thomas Swetherton, Thomas Grene,
and Robert Beeston’. Evidently several leading members had left the
company. Kempe was probably dead.[652] Thare and Blackwood were on tour
in Germany; Lowin seems to have joined the King’s men. Of Cattanes and
Underell no more is known. The same ten names are found in a draft
patent for a royal licence to the Queen’s men, of which the text
follows:[653]
Iames, by the grace of God kynge of England, Scotland, Fraunce
and Irelande, defender of the faith &c: To all Iustices _of
peace_, Maiors, Sherryfes, vicechancellours _of any our
vniversities_, _Bailiffes_ [Constables], headboroughes, [and
other our officers] _Constables_, _and to all other our
Officers_, _mynisters_ and lov[e]inge subiectes _to whome it
may appertaine_ Greeting. Knowe yee that wee of our speciall
grace, certaine knowledge, and mere motion haue lycensed and
awthorised, and by these presentes doe lycence and awthorise
Thomas Greene, Christopher Beeston, Thomas Hawood, Richard
Pyrkins, Robert Pallant, Iohn Duke, Thomas Swynerton, I[e]ames
Ho[u]lt, Robert Beeston, & Robert Lee, servauntes vnto our
deare_st_ [and welbeloved] wyfe _the_ Queene Anna, with the
rest of there Associates, freely to vse and exercise the
art and faculty of playinge Comedies, Tragedies, Histories,
Enterludes, Morralls, Pastoralls, Stage plaies, and such other
lyke as they haue already studied, or hereafter shall vse or
stud[d]y, as well for the recreacion of our lovinge subiectes
as for our solace and pleasure, when wee shall thinke good to
see them, during our pleasure; And the said Comedies, Tragedies,
Histories, Enterludes, Morralls, Pastoralls, Stage plaies, and
such like, to shew and exercise publikly, when the infeccion
of the plague shall decrease to the nomber of thirty weekly
within _our Citie_ of London and the liberties _therof_, aswell
within there now vsuall Howsen, called the Curtayne, and the
Bores head, within our County of Middlesex, [or] _as in_ any
other play howse not vsed by others, by the said _Thomas_ Greene
elected, or by him hereafter to be builte, and also within any
Towne Halls, or Mouthalls, or other convenyent places, within
the liberties and freedomes of any Cittie, vniversitie, Towne,
or Boroughe whatsoeuer, within our said Realmes and domynyons:
Willing and Commaundinge yowe and euerie of yowe, as you tender
our pleasure, not only to permytt and suffer them [herein] _to
vse and exercise the said art of playinge_ without any your
Lettes hinderaunces or molestacions, duringe our said pleasure,
but also to be aydinge and assistinge vnto them, yf any wronge
be to them offered, and to allow them such [former] curtesies,
as hath _heretofore_ bene given vnto any men of theire qualitie:
[And also what further favour, any of our subiectes shall shew
to theise our deare and loveinge wyfes servauntes, for our sake,
wee shall take kyndly at your handes. Yeouen at[ extra spaces
]the[ extra spaces ]daye of In the[ extra spaces ]yere of our
Raygne of England: &c:]
_Gyuen &c._
[Endorsed] The Quenes Plaiers.
This draft is undated. But it was prepared during a plague, and located
the Queen’s men at the Boar’s Head; and as they may reasonably be
supposed to have exchanged the Boar’s Head for the Red Bull (q.v.)
before the plague of 1606 began, it may be conjecturally assigned to
that of 1603–4. Probably it never passed the Great Seal, for if it had
there would have been no necessity, so far as one can judge, for a
later patent of 15 April 1609, which is on the rolls, and which closely
follows the earlier draft in its terms, except that it omits the
reference to the plague, names the Red Bull instead of the Boar’s Head
as one of the company’s regular houses, and adds a saving clause for
the rights of the Master of the Revels. Here is the text:[654]
[Sidenote: De concessione licentie Thome Greene et aliis.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Iustices, Mayors,
Sheriffes, Baylieffes, Constables, head-borrowes and other our
Officers and lovinge Subiectes Greetinge. Knowe yee that wee of
our especiall grace certayne knowledge and meere mocion have
lycenced and aucthorised and by these presentes doe lycence and
aucthorize Thomas Greene, Christofer Beeston, Thomas Haywood,
Richard Pirkyns, Richard Pallant, Thomas Swinnerton, Iohn Duke,
Robert Lee, Iames Haulte, and Roberte Beeston, Servantes to
our moste deerely beloved wiefe Queene Anne, and the reste of
theire Associates, to vse and exercise the arte and faculty of
playinge Comedies, Tragedies, historyes, Enterludes, Moralles,
Pastoralles, Stageplayes and suche other like, as they have
already studied or heareafter shall vse or studye, aswell
for the recreacion of our loving Subiectes as for our solace
and pleasure when wee shall thinke good to see them, during
our pleasure. And the said Comedies, Tragedies, histories,
Enterludes, Moralles, Pastoralles, Stageplayes and suche like
to shewe and exercise publiquely and openly to theire beste
commoditye, aswell within theire nowe vsuall houses called the
Redd Bull in Clarkenwell and the Curtayne in Hallowell, as
alsoe within anye Towne halles, Mouthalles and other convenient
places within the libertye and freedome of any other Citty,
vniuersitye, Towne or Boroughe whatsoever within our Realmes and
Domynions. Willing and Commaundinge you and every of you, as you
tender our pleasure, not only to permitt and suffer them herein
without any your lettes hinderances or molestacions during our
said pleasure, but alsoe to be aydinge [and] assistinge vnto
them, yf anye wronge be to them offered, and to allowe them
suche former curtesies as hath byn given to men of theire place
and qualitye, and alsoe what favoure you shall shewe to them
for our sake wee shall take kyndly at your handes. Prouided
alwaies and our will and pleasure is that all aucthoritye,
power, priuiledges, and profyttes whatsoeuer belonginge and
properly appertayninge to Master of Revelles in respecte of his
Office and everye Cause, Article or graunte contayned within
the lettres Patentes or Commission, which have byn heretofore
graunted or directed by the late Queene Elizabeth our deere
Sister or by our selues to our welbeloued Servant Edmond Tylney
Master of the Office of our said Revelles or to Sir George Bucke
knighte or to eyther of them in possession or revercion, shalbe
remayne and abyde entyer and full in effecte, force, estate and
vertue as ample sorte as if this our Commission had never byn
made. In witnes wherof &c. Witnes our selfe at Westminster the
fifteenth daye of Aprill.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
It will be observed that the documents quoted disclose no change in the
composition of the Queen’s official servants between 1604 and 1609.
But the question of _personnel_ is not really quite so simple as this,
since the members of a company under a trade agreement were not always
the same as those named in the authority under which it performed.
Before discussing this complication, it will be simplest first to
set out separately the notices of the Queen’s men, which have been
preserved in London and in provincial records respectively.
Queen’s men played at Court on 30 December 1605, in Heywood’s _How to
Learn of a Woman to Woo_, which is not extant. They played also on 27
December 1606. For both years their payee was, as in 1604, John Duke.
During 1607 Dekker and Webster’s _Sir Thomas Wyatt_ and Day, Wilkins,
and Rowley’s _Travels of Three English Brothers_ were printed with
their name on the title-pages. The latter play, according to the entry
of 29 June 1607 in the Stationers’ Register, was acted at the Curtain.
But it is shown by a passage in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_
to have been also on the stage of the Red Bull. In this house Thomas
Swinnerton, one of the men named in the patents, acquired an interest
between 24 March 1605 and 23 March 1606, and all the evidence is in
favour of a continuous sojourn of Queen’s men there until 1617. The
first quarto of Heywood’s _A Woman Killed with Kindness_, also printed
in 1607, does not bear their name, but it is on that of the ‘third
edition’ of 1617. They are not named as playing at Court during the
winter of 1607–8, but in the course of 1608 Heywood’s _Rape of Lucrece_
was printed, as played by them at the Red Bull. They gave five plays at
Court in the winter of 1608–9, one on 27 December 1609, three on 10 and
one on 27 December 1610. Heywood’s _Golden Age_ was printed, as played
by them at the Red Bull, in 1611. The Court records of 1611–12 are a
little confused.[655] But they appear to have played Cooke’s _City
Gallant_ on 27 December, his _Tu Quoque_, which is in fact the same
play, on 2 February, to have joined with the King’s men in performances
of Heywood’s _Silver Age_ and _Rape of Lucrece_ on 12 and 13 January,
and to have played unnamed pieces on 21 and 23 January. From 1609
to 1612 their payee was Thomas Greene. Webster’s _White Devil_ and
Dekker’s _If It be not Good, the Devil is in It_, were printed as
theirs in 1612, the former with a laudation of the acting of ‘my freind
Maister Perkins’, the latter as played at the Red Bull. They did not
play at Court during the winter of 1612–13, but did on 24 December
1613 and 5 January 1614. _Tu Quoque_ was printed as theirs in 1614.
In the winter of 1614–15 they gave three plays at Court. Heywood’s
_Four Prentices of London_ was printed in 1615 as played by them at the
Red Bull, and their name is also on _The Honest Lawyer_, registered
on 14 August 1615 and printed in 1616. They gave four plays at Court
during the winter of 1615–16. For all their Court plays from 1613–16
Robert Lee was payee, but Ellis Worth replaces him for a Somerset
House performance before Queen Anne on 17 December 1615. When they
were called with other companies before the Privy Council on 29 March
1615 to answer for playing in Lent, they were represented by Lee and
Christopher Beeston. The records of the Middlesex justices contain a
note of 4 October 1616 that Beeston and the rest of the players at the
Red Bull were in arrears to the extent of £5 on an annual rate of £2
agreed to by them for the repair of the highways.
Provincial visits of Queen’s men are recorded in November 1605 at
Dover; in 1605 at Leicester; in 1605–6 at Bath, Coventry, Saffron
Walden, and Weymouth; on 25 July 1606 at Ipswich; on 4 September 1606
at Ludlow; in 1606 at York; in 1606–7 at Bath (twice), Coventry,
Exeter, and Ipswich; on 14 August 1607 at Oxford; on 12 September 1607
at Belvoir (Earl of Rutland’s);[656] in 1607 at Barnstaple, Leicester,
and Reading; in 1607–8 at Coventry, Oxford, Reading, and Shrewsbury;
on 6 June and 26 September 1608 at Leicester;[657] in 1608–9 at
Coventry,[658] Marlborough, and Shrewsbury; between 8 July and 9 August
1609 at Dover; on 15 October 1609 at Norwich; in 1609 at Canterbury; in
1609–10 at Shrewsbury and Stafford; about 23 March 1610 at Maidstone;
on 2 November 1610 at Ipswich; on 31 December 1610 at Leicester; in
1610–11 at Shrewsbury and Southampton; on 27 February 1611 (for a week)
at Norwich; between 11 April and 9 May and between 29 August and 29
September 1612 at Dover; on 14 June and 26 October 1612 at Leicester;
in 1611–12 at Saffron Walden; in 1612–13 at Barnstaple, Coventry
(perhaps twice), and Ipswich; on 18 February 1613 at Marlborough; on
16 March 1613 at Leicester; between 13 April and 15 May 1613 at Dover;
on 2 November 1613 at Marlborough; on 22 December 1613 at Leicester;
in 1613–14 at Saffron Walden, Marlborough, Oxford, and Shrewsbury;
on 27 April 1614 (for three days) at Norwich;[659] between 3 and
29 September 1614 at Dover; in 1614–15 at Barnstaple and Doncaster
(perhaps twice); on 15 April 1615 at Coventry; in April or May 1615 at
Leicester; on 6 May 1615 at Norwich;[660] on 16 October 1615 and again
later in 1615 and on 22 February 1616 at Leicester;[661] on 7 November
1615 at Marlborough; in 1615–16 at Barnstaple, Dunwich (thrice),
Southampton, and Weymouth; in January 1616 at Nottingham; between 20
January and 17 February 1616 and between 11 May and 8 June at Dover; on
17 February 1616 at Coventry; on 22 February 1616 at Leicester; between
1 and 6 April (four days) and on 29 May 1616 at Norwich;[662] on 26
October 1616 at Marlborough; and on 6 February 1617 and again later in
1617 at Leicester.[663]
There were thus tours in each year, which sometimes extended over
periods during which the London theatres must have been open. The
Leicester notices of 1608, 1615, and 1617 suggest that more than
one company was at work, and the explanation certainly is that some
of the players named in the patent, instead of joining the London
organization, had recourse to making up companies of their own for
provincial purposes. Of this there is further evidence. The Southampton
archives contain a copy of the following warrant from Queen Anne
herself, dated on 7 March 1606:[664]
‘Warrant from the Queenes Majestie of her Players. Anna Regina.
Anne by the grace of God Queene of England, Scottland, Fraunce,
and Ireland. To all Justices of the Peace, Maiors, Sheriffs,
Bayliffes, and all other his Majestes Officers and loving
subiectes to whom yt shall or may appertaine greetinge, Know
yee that of our speciall grace and favour, Wee are well pleased
to authorize under our hand and signett the bearers hereof our
sworne servauntes Robert Lee, Martin Statier and Roger Barfield
with theyr fellowes and associates being our Commedians vppon
theyr humble Suite unto us for theyr better mainetenaunce, Yf
att annie time they should have occasion to travell into anie
parte of his Majestes Dominions to playe Tragedyes, historyes,
commedies and pastoralls as well in anie about the Cittye of
London, and in all other cittyes vniversities and townes at all
time anie times (the time of divine seruice onlye excepted)
Theise are therefore to will and requier you uppon the sight
hereofe quiettlye and favourably with your best favours, to
permitt and suffer them, to use theyr sayd qualitye within your
Jurisdiccions without anie of your molestacions or troubles, and
also to affourd them your Townehalls and all other such places
as att anie time have been used by men of theyr qualitye, That
they maye be in the better readiness for our seruise when they
shalbe thereunto commaunded, Nott doubtinge butt that our sayd
servauntes shall find the more favour for our sake in your best
assistaunce, Wherein you shall doe unto us acceptable pleasure.
Given att the Court of Whitehall, the seaventh daye of Marche
1605.’
Of these three men, Lee, and Lee alone, appears in the London lists
of 1603, 1604, and 1609. Of Barfield’s career nothing more is known.
Martin Slater, whose name can be divined under that of Statier, had
left the Admiral’s in 1597. He was probably in Scotland during 1599,
and if so his patronage by Anne may be analogous to the patronage by
James, which brought Laurence Fletcher’s name into the King’s men’s
patent. In 1603 he was payee for Hertford’s men. Presumably the
enterprise of 1606 did not last long, for in the spring of 1608 Slater
became manager for the King’s Revels. His place in the provinces may
have been taken by Thomas Swinnerton, who was leading a company of
Queen’s men at Coventry in 1608–9, and whose departure from the London
company is perhaps indicated by the fact that at about the same time
he sold a share, which he had held in the house of the Red Bull.
Swinnerton was travelling again in 1614–16 and using an exemplification
of the patent of 1609. In 1616 he was accompanied by Robert Lee, who
for two years before had been acting as payee for the London company.
Lee came again with the exemplification to Norwich on 31 May 1617, and
it was then noted to have been taken out on 7 January 1612. A few days
later, on 4 June 1617, a copy was entered in the Norwich court books
of a warrant by the Lord Chamberlain of 16 July 1616, condemning the
use of such exemplifications, and specifying amongst others two taken
out by Thomas Swinnerton and Martin Slater, ‘beinge two of the Queens
Maiesties company of Playors hauing separated themselves from their
said Company’.[665] Slater had, therefore, returned to the provincial
field, and there were now two travelling companies of Queen’s men. I
take it that in 1617 the Lord Chamberlain succeeded in suppressing
them, and that the Queen’s men who continued to appear in the provinces
up to Anne’s death on 2 March 1619 were the London company.[666] Lee
joined the Queen’s Revels as reorganized under a licence of 31 October
1617. Slater, about the same time, joined the Children of Bristol,
for whom, with John Edmonds and Nathaniel Clay, he got letters of
assistance in April 1618. In these all three are described as her
Majesty’s servants. Swinnerton apparently succeeded in keeping on foot
a company of his own, which visited Leicester in 1619.[667] The Bristol
company was in fact under Anne’s patronage, but Lee and Swinnerton,
no less than Slater and Edmonds, remained technically the Queen’s
servants, and are included with the London men in a list of the players
who received mourning at her funeral on 13 May 1619.[668] These were
Robert Lee, Richard Perkins, Christopher Beeston, Robert Pallant,
Thomas Heywood, James Holt, Thomas Swinnerton, Martin Slater, Ellis
Wroth, John Comber, Thomas Basse, John Blaney, William Robinson, John
Edmonds, Thomas Drewe, Gregory Sanderson, and John Garret.
The list of seventeen names includes seven of the ten patentees of
1609. I do not know what had become of John Duke and Robert Beeston.
Thomas Greene had died in August 1612, having made on 25 July a will,
amongst the witnesses to which were Christopher Beeston, Heywood, and
Perkins. The disposal of his property led many years afterwards to a
lawsuit, which gives valuable information as to both the _personnel_
and the organization of the London company. After providing for his
family and making some small legacies, including one to John Cumber,
and 40_s._ to ‘my fellowes of the house of the Redd Bull, to buy gloves
for them’, he left the residue to his widow and executrix, Susanna
Greene, formerly wife of one Browne.[669] In June 1613 she took a
third husband, James Baskervile. The following is her account in 1623
of certain transactions with the company. Shortly before Greene’s
death had died George Pulham, a ‘half sharer’ in the company, which
is described as being in 1612 ‘the companie of the actors or players
of the late queenes majestie Queene Anne, then vsuallie frequentinge
and playinge att the signe of the Redd Bull in St. Johns Street, in
Clerkenwell parishe, in the county of Middlesex’. His representatives
received £40 from the company in respect of his half-share. This was
under an agreement formerly made amongst the company ‘concerninge the
part and share of euerie one of the sharers and half sharers of the
said companie according to the rate and proporcion of their shares
or half shares in that behalfe’. Under the same agreement Susanna
Greene, whose husband was ‘one of the principall and cheif persons of
the said companie, and a full adventurer, storer and sharer of in and
amongst them’, claimed £80, together with £37 laid out by him before
his death in ‘diuers necessarie prouisions’ for the company. In order
to get satisfaction she had to appeal to Viscount Lisle, Chamberlain
of the Queen’s Household, ‘who hadd a kind of gouernment and suruey
ouer the said players’. It was arranged that Mrs. Greene should receive
a half-share in the profits until the debt was paid. By the time,
however, of her marriage with Baskervile, she had only received £6.
In June 1615 negotiations took place between the Baskerviles and the
company, who then included Worth, Perkins, and Christopher Hutchinson,
_alias_ Beeston, by which the Baskerviles agreed to invest £57 10_s._
in the enterprise and to accept in discharge of their claims a pension
for their joint lives of 1_s._ 8_d._ a day ‘for euerye of sixe daies
in the weeke wherin they should play’. The company defaulted, and
in June 1616 a second settlement was made, whereby the Baskerviles
invested another £38, a further pension of 2_s._ a day was established,
and the life of Susan’s son, Francis Browne (or Baskervile), was
substituted for her husband’s. The players were Christopher Beeston,
Thomas Heywood, Ellis Worth, John Cumber, John Blaney, Francis Walpole,
Robert Reynolds, William Robins, Thomas Drewe, and Emanuel Read.[670]
Again they defaulted, and moreover fell into arrear for the wages of
another of Susan Baskervile’s sons, William Browne, who played with
them as a hired man. A third settlement, reassuring the pensions,
and substituting William Browne for Francis, who was now dead, was
made on 3 June 1617, when the company were ‘now comme, or shortlie to
comme from the said Playhowse called the Redd Bull to the Playhowse
in Drurie Lane called the Cockpitt’; and to this the parties, so
far as the company were concerned, were Beeston, Heywood, Worth,
Cumber, Walpole, Blaney, Robins, and Drewe. Apparently Reynolds and
Read, and also Perkins and Thomas Basse, although their names were
recited in the deed, refused to seal. Some further light is thrown
on this by allegations of Worth, Cumber, and Blaney, in opposition
to those of Mrs. Baskervile in 1623. The company of 1617 contained
some members ‘new come into’ it, ‘which were of other companyes at
the tyme of graunting the first annuity’. The terms of the agreement
were carefully looked into, and were found to bind the company to
procure the subscription of any future new members to its terms. This
was inconsistent with a proviso of 1616 that the pensions should only
last so long as four of those then signing should play together; and
therefore, while some of the company signed and gave bonds by way of
security on an oral promise by Mrs. Baskervile that this proviso should
in fact hold good, others refused to do so. These were the wiser, for
in 1623, when Worth, Cumber, and Blaney were the only three of the 1617
signatories who still held together, Mrs. Baskervile sued them on their
bonds, and although they applied to Chancery for equitable enforcement
of the alleged oral promise, Chancery held that the agreement, being
made between players, was ‘vnfitt to be releeued or countenaunced in a
courte of equitie’. In some other respects the players’ account of the
transactions differs from Mrs. Baskervile’s, and in particular they
alleged that the Baskerviles had secured their interest by bribing
Beeston, to whom ‘your oratours and the rest of thier fellowes at
that tyme and long before and since did put the managing of thier
whole businesses and affaires belonging vnto them ioyntly as they were
players in trust’, so that she knew well that whatever he promised
the rest ‘would allowe of the same’. This Mrs. Baskervile repudiates
as regards the bribe, and does not wholly accept as regards Beeston’s
position in the company, although she admits that both before and
after her husband’s death they ‘did putt much affiance in the said
Huttchinson alias Beeston, concerninge the managing of their affaires’.
I am afraid that Beeston’s character does not come altogether
unstained out of another suit brought by one John Smith in the Court
of Requests during 1619 for a sum of £46 5_s._ 8_d._ in respect of
‘tinsell stuffes and other stuffe’ delivered on Beeston’s order to
Worth, Perkins, Cumber, and others at the Red Bull between 27 June
1612 and 23 February 1617, since when they had ‘fallen at variance and
strife amongst themselves and separated and devided themselves into
other companies.’ He accuses these four men of conspiring to keep him
out of payment. Worth, Perkins, and Cumber asserted that the liability
was Beeston’s. The company had ‘required divers officers and that
every of the said actors should take vpon them some place & charge’.
Beeston was charged with the provision of furniture and apparel, which
needed ‘a thriueing man & one that was of abilitie & meanes’. He was
to ‘defaulke outt of the colleccions and gatheringes which were made
continually when-soeuer any playe was acted a certen some of money as a
comon stock.’ to pay for purchases out of this, and to account to the
company for the balance. No one else was privy to his transactions. The
arrangement lasted for seven or eight years, and they believe that he
‘much enritched himself and rendered a false account for expenditure
of £400. He is now conspiring with Smith and hoping for a chance to
‘exclayme on’ them. If he incurred debt, he had certainly taken funds
to meet it. From the beginning he had ‘a greater care for his owne
privatt gaine’. Now he has ‘of late given over his coate & condicion &
separated and devided himself’ from the company, carrying away all the
furniture and apparel. Beeston says that he has long been ill. On Queen
Anne’s death he left the company and joined Prince Charles’s men. The
Queen’s had ten sharers, and sometimes one, sometimes another, provided
the clothes. He denies liability. Several witnesses, including William
Freshwater, merchant tailor and ‘a workman to the said company’, spoke
to Beeston’s liability.[671] One John King says that the company
allowed Beeston ‘one half of the profitt that came of the gallyryes’,
and that they began to break up about three years ago. At a hearing on
16 June 1620 Beeston got the case deferred on the ground that Emanuel
Read, a material witness, was in Ireland until Michaelmas. Elizabeth,
the wife of Richard Perkins, said that Read had been there for two or
three years, was over at Easter, and was not expected again. Smith
got in a blow at Beeston’s credit with an affidavit that he had said
‘it was nothing for him to put in a false answere into the Court of
Requestes, for that it was not punishable’. The result of the suit is
unknown.
We may perhaps reach the following conclusions as to the composition
of the London company after the deaths in 1612 of Pulham, presumably
a recent comer since 1609, and Greene. Their nucleus consisted of two
of the patented men, Christopher Beeston and Heywood, who probably
remained with them throughout. Of the other patentees, Swinnerton kept
to the provinces. Lee had rejoined them from the provinces by 1613
or 1614, and went back to the provinces about May 1616. Perkins was
apparently not of their number in June 1616, but was in June 1617.
Holt is not traceable; perhaps he also went to the provinces. Pallant
joined the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1614 and had passed to Prince Charles’s
by 1616. All these five men, however, appear with Beeston and Heywood
as Anne’s servants at her funeral. Here too are Slater and Edmonds,
then of the Bristol, and apparently never of the London company; also
Worth, Cumber, Blaney, Drewe, and Robinson, presumably identical with
Robins, all of whom had joined the London company by June 1616, Basse,
formerly of the Lady Elizabeth’s, who joined it between June 1616
and June 1617, and Gregory Sanderson and John Garret, who, if they
belonged to the London company at all, must have joined it after June
1617.[672] The list does not contain the names of two men who belonged
to the company in 1616 and 1617. One was Emanuel Read, who joined it
from the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1613 or later; the other, Robert Reynolds,
whose attachment to the company must have been rather loose, as he was
travelling in Germany in July 1616 and again in 1618. Evidently, as the
lawsuits suggest, the organization of the Queen’s men during its later
years was rather unstable. Into its attempts to hold together after
Anne’s death and the after-careers of its members, it is not necessary
to go.
In June 1617 the Queen’s were come, or shortly to come, from the Red
Bull to the Cockpit. In fact they were at the Cockpit, then a new
house, on 4 March 1617, when it was sacked by prentices in a Shrovetide
riot.[673] But they may have returned to the Red Bull for a time, while
the Cockpit was being repaired, as they did again after they lost it
on the separation from Christopher Beeston, who seems to have been its
owner, in 1619.
xxii. THE DUKE OF LENNOX’S MEN
Ludovic Stuart, s. of Esmé, 1st Duke of Lennox; cousin and
until 1594 heir presumptive of James; _nat._ 29 Sept. 1574;
succ. as 2nd Duke, 26 May 1583; Gentleman of Bedchamber, 1603;
Earl of Richmond, 6 Oct. 1613; Lord Steward, Nov. 1615; Duke of
Richmond, 17 Aug. 1623; o.s.p. 16 Feb. 1624.
The first notice of Lennox’s men is on 13 October 1604, when he gave
an open warrant of assistance in their behalf addressed to mayors,
justices, and other local officers, some of whom had apparently refused
the company permission to play (App. D, no. cxxxvii). On 16 March
1605 Francis Henslowe gave his uncle Philip a bond of £60 to observe
articles of an agreement he had entered into with John Garland and
Abraham Savere ‘his ffellowes, servantes to the most noble Prince the
duke of Lennox’; and on 1 March 1605 Savere had given Francis Henslowe
a power of attorney to recover £40 on a forfeited bond from John
Garland of ‘the ould forde’, securing delivery of a warrant made to
Savere by Lennox (_Henslowe Papers_, 62). Some other traces point to
a connexion between Savere and Francis Henslowe, which was ended by
the latter’s death in the middle of 1606 (Henslowe, ii. 277), and an
undated loan of £7 by Philip Henslowe to his nephew ‘to goyne with owld
Garlland and Symcockes and Saverey when they played in the duckes nam
at ther laste goinge owt’ (Henslowe, i. 160) makes it possible to add
one more to the list of the company. It does not seem to have played in
London, but is traceable at Canterbury in 1603–4, Barnstaple, Coventry,
and Norwich in 1604–5, and Coventry again in 1607–8. Both Garland and
Henslowe had been Queen Elizabeth’s men, and it is possible that,
when these men were left stranded by her death in 1603, they found a
new patron in Lennox. John Garland had joined the Duke of York’s men
by 1610, and it has been suggested that this company may have been a
continuation of Lennox’s.
xxiii. THE DUKE OF YORK’S (PRINCE CHARLES’S) MEN
_The Duke of York’s Men (1608–12); The Prince’s Men (1612–16)_
Charles, 2nd s. of James I; _nat._ 19 Nov. 1600; Duke of Albany,
23 Dec. 1600; Duke of York, 16 Jan. 1605; Prince of Wales, 3
Nov. 1616; afterwards (27 Mar. 1625) Charles I.
[_Bibliographical Note._--The documents bearing on the relations
of the Duke of York’s men with Alleyn are printed by W. W. Greg
in _Henslowe Papers_ (1907); the Bill and Answers in the equity
suit of _Taylor v. Hemynges_ (1612) by C. W. Wallace in _Globe
Theatre Apparel_ (p.p., 1909).]
A company under the patronage of Prince Charles, then Duke of York,
first makes its appearance during 1608, and in the provinces. A visit
of ‘the younger princes’ men to Ipswich is recorded on 20 October.
During 1608–9 the company was also at Bath, and it is at least possible
that it was ‘the Princes players of the White Chapple London’ rewarded
at Leicester in 1608. The Boar’s Head (q.v.) may have been roughly
spoken of as in Whitechapel, and although there is no proof that the
Duke of York’s men occupied it after the Queen’s moved to the Red Bull,
there is nothing to connect them during the earlier years of their
career with any of the better-known London houses. On 30 March 1610
they received, like other London companies, a patent, of which the
following are the terms:[674]
[Sidenote: De licentia agendi Tragedias &c. pro Johanne Garland & aliis.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Iustices, Mayors,
Sheriffes, Baylies, Constables, hedboroughes and other our
loveing subiectes and officers greetinge. Knowe ye that wee of
our especyall grace, certen knowledge, and meere mocion haue
lycensed and aucthorized, and by theis presentes doe lycence
and authorise Iohn Garland, Willyam Rowley, Thomas Hobbes,
Robert Dawes, Ioseph Taylor, Iohn Newton, and Gilbert Reason,
alreadye sworne servauntes to our deere sonne the Duke of
York and Rothesay, with the rest of their company, to vse and
exercise the arte and quality of playing Comedyes, Tragedies,
histories, Enterludes, Moralles, Pastoralles, Stagplayes, and
such other like as they haue already studdied or hereafter
shall studye or vse, aswell for the recreacion of our loveing
subiectes, as for our solace and pleasure when wee shall thinke
good to see them, and the said Enterludes or other to shewe
and execise publiquely to their best aduantage and commoditie,
aswell in and about our Cittye of London in such vsuall howses
as themselues shall provide, as alsoe within anye Townehalles,
Mootehalles, Guildhalles, Schoolehowses, or other convenient
places within the lybertye and freedome of any other Cittye,
vniversity, Towne, or Boroughe whatsoever within our Realmes and
Domynions, willing and comaundinge you and everie of you, as
you tender our pleasure, not onlye to permitt and suffer them
herein without any your lettes, hindraunces, molestacions or
disturbances during our said pleasure, but alsoe to be ayding
and assisting vnto them, if any wronge be vnto them offered, and
to allowe them such former curtesies as hath byne given to men
of their place and quality, And alsoe what further favor you
shall shewe them for our sake wee shall take yt kyndlye at your
handes. Prouided alwaies and our will and pleasure is that all
authority, power, priviledg, and proffitt whatsoever belonging
and properly apperteyninge to the Master of our Revelles in
respect of his Office and everie article and graunt contayned
within the lettres patentes or Commission, which haue byne
heretofore graunted or directed by the late Queene Elizabeth our
deere sister or by our selfe to our welbeloved servantes Edmond
Tillney Master of the said Office of the said Revelles, or to
Sir George Bucke knight, or to eyther of them, in possession or
Revercion, shall remayne and abyde entire and in full force,
estate and vertue and in as ample sort as if this our commission
had never bene made. Witnes our selfe att Westminster the
thirtith daye March.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
The only member of the Duke of York’s men, of whose previous history
anything is known, is John Garland. He was of the Duke of Lennox’s men
in 1605. Perhaps the whole company was taken over from the Duke of
Lennox. Mr. Fleay says that the Duke of York’s men arose ‘immediately
after the disappearance of the King’s Revels Children’,[675] and
appears to suggest a continuity between the two companies; but he
must have overlooked the fact that the Duke of York’s were already
performing in the provinces, while the King’s Revels were in all
probability still at Whitefriars.[676]
Some reconstruction doubtless took place about the date of the issue
of the patent, for the pleadings in the equity suit of _Taylor v.
Hemynges_ in 1612 recites an agreement of 15 March 1610, which
provided for the continuance of fellowship during three years and the
forfeiture of the interest in a common stock of ‘apparrell goodes
money and other thinges’ of any member, who left without the consent
of the rest. It was made between Garland on the one side and Taylor,
Rowley, Dawes, and Hobbes on the other, and these four gave Garland a
bond of £200 as security. On 8 May the five bought some ‘olde clothes
or apparrell which formerly weare players clothes or apparrell’ from
John Heminges of the King’s men for £11, and gave a bond of £20 for
payment. Apparently payment had not been made by Easter 1611, when
Taylor ‘by the licence and leave of his said Master the Duke vpon some
speciall reason ... did give over and leave to play in the company’.
Under the agreement the apparel passed to his fellows, and according
to Taylor they paid Heminges the £11 or otherwise satisfied him, and
then ‘havinge conceaued some vndeserued displeasure’ against Taylor
for leaving them, conspired with Heminges to defraud him of £20 on the
bond. According to Heminges no payment was made, and he sued Taylor
as ‘the best able to paye and discharge the same’. Taylor was arrested
and in February 1612 brought his suit in equity to stay the common law
proceedings. The result is unknown.
The company frequently played at Court, but, as it would seem, only
before the younger members of the royal family. Their first appearance
was before Charles and Elizabeth on 9 February 1610. In 1610–11 they
were at Saffron Walden. They came before Charles and Elizabeth on 12
and 20 December 1610 and 15 January 1611, and before Henry, Charles,
and Elizabeth on 12 and 28 January and 13 and 24 February 1612. On
this last occasion they played William Rowley’s _Hymen’s Holiday,
or Cupid’s Vagaries_. After Henry’s death, on 7 November 1612, they
became entitled to the designation of the Prince’s players. In 1612–13
they were at Barnstaple and Ipswich. On 2 and 10 March 1613 they gave
the two parts of _The Knaves_, perhaps by Rowley, before Charles,
Elizabeth, and the Palsgrave. In 1613–14 they were at Barnstaple,
Dover, Saffron Walden, and Coventry. They were not at Court for the
winter of 1613–14. In November 1614 they were at Oxford, Leicester,
and Nottingham. At the Christmas of 1614–15 they gave six plays before
Charles, and on 11 February they were at Youghal in Ireland. Ten days
later R. A.’s _The Valiant Welshman_ was entered and in the course of
the year published as theirs. Their leader seems to have been Rowley.
He both wrote plays for them and acted as payee for all their court
rewards from 1610 to 1614. In 1611 they lost Taylor and in 1614 Dawes
to the Lady Elizabeth’s men; and these transferences seem to have led
to a temporary amalgamation of the two companies, which Mr. Fleay
and Dr. Greg place in 1614, but for which their distinct appearances
at Court in the following winter suggest 1615 as the more likely
date.[677] On 29 March 1615 William Rowley and John Newton were called
with representatives of other companies before the Privy Council to
answer for playing in Lent. No separate representation of the Lady
Elizabeth’s is indicated by the list. In 1614–15 the Prince’s were
at Norwich, Coventry, Winchester, and Barnstaple. In the winter of
1615–16 they gave four plays before Prince Charles, and the payee was
not Rowley, but Alexander Foster, formerly of the Lady Elizabeth’s.
Rosseter’s patent of 3 June 1615 for a second Blackfriars theatre
contemplates its use by the Prince’s men and the Lady Elizabeth’s, as
well as by the Queen’s Revels, and Field’s _Amends for Ladies_ was
actually played in the Blackfriars, probably in this house before it
was suppressed, by the two first-named companies. After Henslowe’s
death on 6 January 1616, the combination, whatever its nature, was
probably broken up, and separate companies of Prince’s men and Lady
Elizabeth’s men were again formed. But both of the original companies
continued to be represented in one which remained at the Hope. This
is shown by an agreement entered into with Alleyn and Meade on 20
March 1616, and signed in the presence of Robert Daborne and others
by William Rowley, Robert Pallant, Joseph Taylor, Robert Hamlen, John
Newton, William Barksted, Thomas Hobbes, Antony Smith, William Penn,
and Hugh Attwell.[678] This recites that the signatories and others had
given bonds to Henslowe and Meade for the repayment of sums lent them
by Henslowe, for a stock of apparel worth £400, and for the fulfilment
of certain Articles of Agreement; and that at their entreaty Alleyn
had agreed to accept £200 in discharge of their full liabilities. They
covenant to pay the £200 by making over to Alleyn one-fourth of the
daily takings of the whole galleries at the Hope or any house in which
they may play, and to carry out the Articles with Alleyn and Meade by
so playing. Alleyn and Meade agree to cancel the bonds when the £200
is paid, except any which may relate to private debts of any of the
men to Henslowe, and also to make over to them any apparel which they
had received from Henslowe, Alleyn, or Meade. The rights of Alleyn and
Meade against any bondsmen not taking part in the new agreement are
to remain unaffected. That the signatories to this document used the
name of Prince Charles’s men seems pretty clear from the reappearance
of several of their names in two later lists of the Prince’s men, one
in Rowley and Middleton’s _Mask of Heroes_ (1619), the other in the
records of King James’s funeral on 20 May 1625.[679] This last contains
also the name of Gilbert Reason, who is not one of the signatories of
1616, but was in that year travelling the provinces with an irregularly
obtained exemplification of the 1610 patent.[680] An undated letter
from Pallant, Rowley, Taylor, Newton, Hamlen, Attwell, and Smith to
Alleyn, which may belong to some time in 1616 or 1617, shows that, in
spite of the easy terms which the company seem to have received by the
agreement, the subsequent relations were not altogether smooth. They
write to excuse their removal from the Bankside, where they had stood
the intemperate weather, until ‘more intemperate Mr. Meade thrust vs
over, taking the day from vs w^{ch} by course was ours’. They ask
Alleyn to find them a house and in the meantime to lend them £40, on
the security that ‘we haue to receiue from the court (w^{ch} after
Shrouetide wee meane to pursue w^{th} best speede) a great summe of
monie’, amounting to more than twice the loan desired.[681] It is to be
presumed that the ‘course’ to which they refer was some distribution of
days between playing and bear-baiting. In 1619 the company was joined
by Christopher Beeston, formerly of the Queen’s, and his house of the
Cockpit became available for their use.
xxiv. THE LADY ELIZABETH’S MEN
Elizabeth, e. d. of James I; _nat. c._ 19 Aug. 1596; m.
Frederick V, Elector Palatine (Palsgrave), 14 Feb. 1613; Queen
of Bohemia, 7 Nov. 1619; known as Queen of Hearts; _ob._ 13 Feb.
1662.
[_Bibliographical Note._--Nearly all the material is to be found
among the extracts from the Dulwich MSS. printed by W. W. Greg
in _Henslowe Papers_ (1907) and summarized in Henslowe, ii. 137.]
This company seems to have come into existence in 1611 under the
following patent of 27 March:[682]
[Sidenote: De licencia speciali pro Iohanne Townsend & Iosepho Moore &
aliis.]
Iames by the grace of god &c. To all Iustices, Maiors,
Sheriffes, Bailiffes, Constables hedborroughes, and other our
lovinge Subiectes and officers greetinge. Knowe ye that wee of
our especiall grace, certayne knowledge, and meere mocon have
licenced and authorised, and by these presente do licence and
authorize Iohn Townsend and Joseph Moore, sworne servantes to
our deere daughter the ladie Elizabeth, with the rest of theire
Companie, to vse and exercise the Arte and qualitie of playinge
Comedies, histories, Enterludes, Morralls, pastoralls, stage
playes, and such other like as they haue alreadie studied or
hereafter shall studie or vse, aswell for the recreacion of
our lovinge Subiectes, as for our solace and pleasure when wee
shall thinke good to see them, And the said enterludes or other
to shewe and exercise publiquelie to their best commoditie
in and about our Cittie of London in such vsuall howses as
themselues shall prouide, And alsoe within anie Towne halles,
mootehalles, Guyld-halles, Schoolehowses or other convenient
places within the libertye and freedome of anie other Cittie,
vniuersitie, Towne or Burroughe whatsoeuer within our Realmes
and Domynions, willinge and comaundinge you and everie of you,
as you tender our pleasure, not onelie to permitt and suffer
them herein without any your lettes, hinderances, molestacions
or disturbances during our said pleasure, but alsoe to be
ayding and assistinge vnto them, if anie wronge be vnto them
offred, And to allowe them such former curtesies as hath byne
given to men of their place and qualitie, And alsoe what
further fauour you shall shewe them for our sake wee shall
take yt kindelie at your handes. Prouided alwayes and our will
and pleasure is that all authoritie, power, priveledge, and
profitt whatsoever belonginge or properlie apperteyning to the
maister of the Revelles in respecte of his office and euerie
Article and graunte conteyned within the letters Pattentes or
Comission, which haue byne heretofore graunted or directed by
the late queene Elizabeth our deere sister or by our selfe to
our welbeloued Servantes Edwarde Tylney Maister of the saide
Revells, or to Sir George Bucke knighte, or to eyther of them,
in possession or reuercon, shall remayne and abide entire and
in full force, effecte and vertue, and in as ample sorte as if
this our Comission had neuer byne made In witnesse wherof &c.
Witnesse our selfe at Westminster the seaven and Twentith daye
of Aprill.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
The company is first traceable in the country, at Bath during 1610–11
and at Ipswich on 28 May 1611. The names of Moore and Townsend render
possible its identification with an unnamed company, which on 29 August
1611 gave duplicate bonds of £500 to Henslowe for the observance of
certain articles of agreement of the same date. Unfortunately the
articles themselves are not preserved, but it is likely that they
contained an arrangement for the housing and financing of the company
by Henslowe.[683] The signatories to both bonds include John Townsend,
Joseph Taylor, William Ecclestone, Thomas Hunt, John Rice, Robert
Hamlen, Joseph Moore, William Carpenter, Thomas Basse, and Alexander
Foster. To these one adds Giles Gary and William Barksted and the
other Francis Waymus. The names recited in the bodies of the documents
agree with the signatures, except that Gary appears in both. Several
of these men now come into London theatrical history for the first
time, but Gary is probably the Giles Cary who with Barksted played in
_Epicoene_ for the Queen’s Revels in 1609, Taylor came from the Duke
of York’s, and Rice from the King’s. One Hunt, whose Christian name is
unknown, was with the Admiral’s in 1601. Alexander Foster received
payment on behalf of the Lady Elizabeth’s men for three plays given
at Court during the Christmas of 1611–12. The first was on 19 January
1612 before Elizabeth and Henry; the second was _The Proud Maid’s
Tragedy_, on 25 February before James; and the third was on 11 March,
again before Elizabeth and Henry. In 1611–12 the company were at Dover
and Coventry, and on 30 July 1612 at Leicester. On 20 October they
played before Elizabeth and the Palsgrave, shortly after the latter’s
arrival in England, in the Cockpit. This was perhaps the play paid for
out of the private funds of Elizabeth, as the result of a wager with
Mr. Edward Sackville.[684] During Christmas they played twice before
Charles, Elizabeth, and the Palsgrave, showing Marston’s _The Dutch
Courtesan_ on 25 February and _Raymond Duke of Lyons_ on 1 March. For
1612–13 Joseph Taylor was payee.
The names of Taylor and Ecclestone are found in another document in
the Dulwich collection, which pretty clearly belongs to the Lady
Elizabeth’s men, and which shows that about the spring of 1613 their
business relations with Henslowe entered upon a somewhat troubled
phase. This is shown by internal evidence to have been written in the
course of 1615. It is here reproduced:[685]
Articles of [ ]uaunce against
M[ ] Hinchlowe
Imprimis in March 1612 vppon M^r. Hynchlowes Joyninge Companes
with M^r. Rosseter the Companie borrowed 80^[ll] of one M^r.
Griffin and the same was put into M^r. Hinchlowes debt which
made itt sixteene score poundes; whoe [a]fter the receipt of the
same or most parte thereof in March 1613 hee broke the saide
Comp[any a]gaine and Ceazed all the stocke, vnder Culler to
satisfie what remayned due to [him]; yet perswaded M^r. Griffyne
afterwardes to arest the Companie for his 80^{ll}, whoe are
still in daunger for the same; Soe nowe there was in equitie due
to the Companie 80^{ll}:
Item M^r. Hinchlowe having lent one Taylor 30^{ll} and 20^{ll}
to one Baxter fellowes of the Companie Cunninglie put theire
said privat debts into the generall accompt by which meanes hee
is in Conscience to allowe them 50^{ll}:
Item havinge the stock of Apparell in his handes to secure his
debt he sould tenn poundes worth of ould apparrell out of the
same without accomptinge or abatinge for the same; heare growes
due to the Companie 10^{ll}:
Also vppon the departure of one Eglestone a ffellowe of the
Companie hee recovered of him 14^{ll} towardes his debt which is
in Conscience likewise to bee allowed to the Companie 14^{ll}:
In March 1613 hee makes vpp a Companie and buies apparrell of
one Rosseter to the value of 63^{ll}, and valued the ould stocke
that remayned in his handes at 63^{ll}, likewise they vppon his
word acceptinge the same at that rate, which being prized by
M^r. Daborne iustlie, betweene his partner Meade and him, Came
but to 40^{ll}: soe heare growes due to the Companie 23^{ll}:
Item hee agrees with the said Companie that they should enter
bond to plaie with him for three yeares att such house and
houses as hee shall appointe and to allowe him halfe galleries
for the said house and houses, and the other halfe galleries
towardes his debt of 126^{ll}, and other such moneys as hee
should laie out for playe apparrell duringe the space of the
said 3 yeares, agreeinge with them in Consideration theareof to
seale each of them a bond of 200^{ll} to find them a Convenient
house and houses, and to laie out such moneies as fower of the
sharers should think fitt for theire vse in apparrell, which att
the 3 yeares, being paid for, to be deliuered to the sharers;
whoe accordinglie entered the said bondes; but M^r. Henchlowe
and M^r. Mead deferred the same, an[d] in Conclusion vtterly
denied to seale att all.
Item M^r. Hinchlowe havinge promised in Consideracion of the
Companies lying still one daie in forteene for his baytinge to
give them 50^s, hee havinge denied to bee bound as aforesaid
gave them onlie 40^s, and for that M^r. Feild would not Consent
therevnto hee gave him soe much as his share out of 50^{ll}
would have Come vnto; by which meanes hee is dulie indebted to
the Companie x^{ll}:
In June followinge the said agreement, hee brought in M^r.
Pallant and short[l]ie after M^r. Dawes into the said Companie,
promisinge one 12^s a weeke out of his part of the galleries,
and the other 6^s a weeke out of his parte of the galleries;
and because M^r. Feild was thought not to bee drawne therevnto,
hee promissed him six shillinges weekelie alsoe; which in
one moneth after vnwilling to beare soe greate a Charge, he
Called the Companie together, and told them that this 24^s was
to bee Charged vppon them, threatninge those which would not
Consent therevnto to breake the Companie and make vpp a newe
without the[m]. Whearevppon knowinge hee was not bound, the
three-quarters sharers advauncinge them selves to whole shares
Consented therevnto, by which meanes they are out of purse
30^{ll}, and his parte of the galleries bettred twise as much
30^{ll}:
Item havinge 9 gatherers more then his due itt Comes to this
yeare from the Companie 10^{ll}:
Item the Companie paid for [Arra]s and other properties 40^{ll},
which Mr. Henchlow deteyneth 40^{ll}:
In Februarie last 1614 perceav[ing]e the Companie drewe out of
his debt and Called vppon him for his accompts hee brooke the
Companie againe, by withdrawinge the hired men from them, and
selles theire stocke (in his hands) for 400^{ll}, givinge vnder
his owne hand that hee had receaved towardes his debt 300^{ll}:
Which with the iuste and Conscionable allowances before named
made to the Companie, which Comes to ... 267^{ll}, makes
567^{ll}:
Articles of oppression against
M^r. Hinchlowe.
Hee Chargeth the stocke with ... 600^{ll}: and odd, towardes
which hee hath receaved as aforesaid ... 567^{ll} of vs; yet
selles the stocke to strangers for fower hundred poundes, and
makes vs no satisfacion.
Hee hath taken all boundes of our hired men in his owne name,
whose wages though wee have truly paid yet att his pleasure hee
hath taken them a waye, and turned them over to others to the
breaking of our Companie.
For lendinge of vj^{ll} to p[ay] them theire wages, hee made vs
enter bond to give him the profitt of a warraunt of tenn poundes
due to vs att Court.
Alsoe hee hath taken right gould and silver lace of divers
garmentes to his owne vse without accompt to vs or abatement.
Vppon everie breach of the Companie hee takes newe bondes for
his stocke and our securitie for playinge with him; Soe that
hee hath in his handes bondes of ours to the value of 5000^{ll}
and his stocke to; which hee denies to deliuer and threatens to
oppresse us with.
Alsoe havinge apointed a man to the seeinge of his accomptes in
byinge of Clothes (hee beinge to have vi^s a weeke) hee takes
the meanes away and turnes the man out.
The reason of his often breakinge with vs hee gave in these
wordes ‘Should these fellowes Come out of my debt, I should have
noe rule with them’.
Alsoe wee have paid him for plaie bookes 200^{ll} or
thereaboutes and yet hee denies to give vs the Coppies of any
one of them.
Also within 3 yeares hee hath broken and dissmembred five
Companies.
It is not quite possible to trace all the five breakings of companies
referred to in the closing sentence; but the statement is sufficient
to give a fairly clear outline of the history of the Lady Elizabeth’s
men during the years which it covers, and, as it happens, there is a
good deal of other evidence from which to supplement it. It appears
that in March 1613 Henslowe joined companies with Rosseter; that is
to say, that an amalgamation took place between the Lady Elizabeth’s
men and the Children of the Queen’s Revels, who had been acting at the
Whitefriars under the patent to Rosseter and others of 4 January 1610.
One of these children was Robert Baxter, if he is the Baxter named
in the Articles of Grievance as a fellow of the company with Taylor
between March 1613 and March 1614.[686] During the same period it
appears that William Ecclestone left the company. He afterwards joined
the King’s men. But, before he went, he took a part in _The Honest
Man’s Fortune_, which is stated in the _Dyce MS._ to have been played
in 1613, while its ‘principal actors’ are named in the 1679 folio of
Beaumont and Fletcher as ‘Nathan Field, Robert Benfield, Emanuel Read,
Joseph Taylor, Will. Eglestone and Thomas Basse’. This particular
combination seems to point clearly to the Lady Elizabeth’s men as the
original producers of the play. A very similar cast is assigned in the
same folio to _The Coxcomb_, namely, ‘Nathan Field, Joseph Taylor,
Giles Gary, Emanuel Read, Richard Allen, Hugh Atawell, Robert Benfeild,
and William Barcksted’; and I think that this also must belong to a
performance by the Lady Elizabeth’s men about 1613. _The Coxcomb_ had
certainly been played at Court by the Queen’s Revels in 1612, but
it seems impossible that Taylor can then have been a member of that
company.[687] The new blood brought in from Rosseter’s company will,
then, have included Field, Attwell, Richard Allen, Benfield, Reade, and
perhaps Robert Baxter, of whom the first three had played in Jonson’s
_Epicoene_ for the Revels in 1609. When it is remembered that Cary and
Barksted had been in the same cast, it will be realized that the Lady
Elizabeth’s men, as constituted in 1613, were very much the Queen’s
Revels over again.
I think there can be no doubt that the Lady Elizabeth’s men was
the company principally referred to in the long series of letters
from Robert Daborne to Henslowe, which runs from 17 April 1613 to
31 July 1614.[688] Daborne had been one of the patentees for the
Queen’s Revels in 1609, and some letters apparently belonging to the
same series show Field as interested, either as writer or actor, in
some of the plays which Henslowe was purchasing from Daborne, with
a view to reselling them to this company. Further confirmation is
to be obtained for this view from the signature of Hugh Attwell as
witness to one of Henslowe’s advances to Daborne,[689] and from the
mention of Benfield,[690] of Pallant who, as will be seen, joined the
company in 1614,[691] and of _Eastward Ho!_ which their repertory
had inherited from that of the Queen’s Revels.[692] That ‘Mr. Allin’
was hearing Daborne’s plays with Henslowe in May 1613 need cause no
difficulty.[693] It is true that Edward Alleyn is not known to have
had any relations with the Lady Elizabeth’s men, but John Alleyn, a
nephew of Edward, is amongst Henslowe’s witnesses about this time,[694]
and Richard Allen, who may not have belonged to the same family, was
himself one of the Lady Elizabeth’s men, and perhaps served as their
literary adviser. The correspondence makes it possible to recover
the names of a series of plays on which Daborne was engaged, either
alone or in collaboration with others, during the period over which it
extends, and all of which seem to have been primarily meant for the
Lady Elizabeth’s men, although he occasionally professes, as an aid to
his chaffering, to have an alternative market with the King’s men.[695]
From April to June 1613 he was writing a tragedy of _Machiavel and the
Devil_, and this is probably the ‘new play’, of which he suggests the
performance on Wednesday in August, to follow one of _Eastward Ho!_ on
the Monday.[696] For this Henslowe covenanted to pay him £20. In June
he was also completing _The Arraignment of London_, of which he had
given an act to Cyril Tourneur to write; and to this _The Bellman of
London_, for which he and a colleague, perhaps again Tourneur, asked
no more than £12 and ‘the overplus of the second day’ in August, was
probably a sequel.[697] This may be the play which he had delivered to
Henslowe about the beginning of December. About July he seems also to
have been occupied upon a play in collaboration with Field, Fletcher,
and Massinger. This is not named, and Mr. Fleay’s identification of it
with _The Honest Man’s Fortune_ is rather hazardous.[698] In December
he began _The Owl_, for which his price fell to £10; and on 11 March
1614 he had finished this, and was beginning _The She Saint_ and asking
‘but 12^l a play till they be playd.’ The correspondence has a gap
between the middle of August and the middle of October 1613. Probably
the company were on tour; they are found at Coventry, Shrewsbury, and
Marlborough in 1612–13, Canterbury on 4 July 1613, Dover between 12
July and 7 August, and Leicester on 13 October. In the spring they had
been at Bristol and Norwich. On 12 December they repeated one of their
plays of the preceding winter, Marston’s _The Dutch Courtesan_, before
Charles, and on 25 January 1614 gave _Eastward Ho!_ which they had been
playing in public during the summer, before James. Taylor was again
their payee for this Christmas.
The statement of grievances indicates another reconstruction of the
company in March 1614. In this transaction, which apparently involved
the buying out of Rosseter’s interest, Meade was in partnership with
Henslowe, and Field was presumably in some position of authority on
behalf of the players, as it is alleged that Henslowe bribed him, in
order to obtain his assent to the modification of a covenant under
which he was to make an allowance for a withdrawal of the theatre once
a fortnight for baiting. The terms recited agree with those of an
undated and mutilated agreement between Henslowe and Jacob Meade on one
side and Field on behalf of an unnamed company of players on the other.
The text of this follows:[699]
Articles of agreement made, concluded, and agreed vppon,
and which are on the parte and behalfe of Phillipp Henslowe
Esquier and Jacob Meade Waterman to be perfourmed, touchinge
& concerninge the Company of players which they haue lately
raised, viz^t.
Imprimis the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade doe for
them, their executours and administratours, Covenante, promise,
and graunt by theis presentes to and with Nathan Feilde gent.,
That they the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade or one
of them shall and will duringe the space of Three yeares at
all tymes (when noe restraynte of playinge shalbe) at their
or some of their owne proper costes and charges fynde and
provide a sufficient howse or howses for the saide Company
to play in, And also shall and will at all tymes duringe the
saide tearme disburse and lay out all suche somme & sommes of
monny, as ffower or ffive Shareres of the saide Company chosen
by the saide Phillipp and Jacob shall thinck fittinge, for
the furnishinge of the said Company with playinge apparrell
towardes the settinge out of their newe playes, And further
that the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade shall and will
at all tymes duringe the saide tearme, when the saide Company
shall play in or neare the Cittie of London, furnish the saide
Company of players, aswell with suche stock of apparrell & other
properties as the said Phillipp Henslowe hath already bought, As
also with suche other stock of apparrell as the saide Phillipp
Henslowe and Jacob Meade shall hereafter provide and buy for
the said Company duringe the saide tearme, And further shall
and will at suche tyme and tymes duringe the saide tearme, as
the saide Company of Players shall by meanes of any restraynte
or sicknes goe into the Contrey, deliuer and furnish the saide
Company with fitting apparrell out of both the saide stockes of
apparrell. And further the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob
Meade doe for them, their executours and administratours,
convenante and graunt to and with the saide Nathan Feilde by
theis presentes in manner and fourme followinge, that is to say,
That they the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade or one of
them shall and will from tyme to tyme duringe the saide tearme
disburse and lay out suche somme or sommes of monny as shalbe
thought fittinge by ffower or ffive of the Shareres of the saide
Company, to be chosen by the saide Phillipp & Jacob or one of
them, to be paide for any play which they shall buy or condicion
or agree for; Soe alwaies as the saide Company doe and shall
truly repaye vnto the saide Phillipp and Jacob, their executores
or assignes, all suche somme & sommes of monny, as they shall
disburse for any play, vppon the second or third daie wheron the
same play shalbe plaide by the saide Company, without fraude
or longer delay; And further that the saide Phillipp Henslowe
and Jacob Meade shall and will at all tymes, vppon request made
by the Maior parte of the Sharers of the saide Company v[nder
their] handes, remove and putt out of the saide Company any of
the saide Company of playeres, if the saide Phillipp Henslowe
and Jacob Meade shall fynde [the s]aide request to be iust and
that ther be noe hope of conformety in the partie complayned
of; And further that they the saide Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob
Mea[de shall] and [will] at all tymes, vppon request made by
the saide Company or the maior parte therof, pay vnto them all
suche somes of monny as shall comme vnto their handes v[ppon [
extra spaces ]of]any forfectures for rehearsalles or suche like
paymentes; And also shall and will, vppon the request of the
said Company or the maior parte of the[m], sue [ extra spaces ]
ar[ extra spaces ] persons by whom any forfecture shalbe made
as aforesaid, and after or vppon the recovery and receipte
th[ero]f (their charges disbursed about the recovery [[ extra
spaces ]b]einge first deducted and allowed) shall and will make
satisfaccion of the remaynder therof vnto the said Company
without fraude or guile.
Mr. Fleay and Dr. Greg think that at the time of this reconstruction
the company was further strengthened by the incorporation of the Duke
of York’s, now the Prince’s, men.[700] This I doubt, as the Prince’s
men continued to play at Court, as a company quite distinct from the
Lady Elizabeth’s, during the winter of 1614–15. It is true that Robert
Dawes, who had been one of the Duke of York’s in 1610, joined the Lady
Elizabeth’s, but it was precisely one of the grievances that this man
and Robert Pallant were introduced by Henslowe, by means of a financial
adjustment unfavourable to the sharers, in June 1614. Pallant had
passed through several companies, and is traceable with Queen Anne’s
men in 1609. He was still technically a servant of the Queen at her
death in 1619.[701] A letter from Daborne on 28 March 1614 shows that
he was then expecting an answer to some proposal made to Henslowe,
which the latter had neglected.[702] Articles between Robert Dawes and
Henslowe and Meade are on record, and bear the date 7 April 1614.[703]
The following is the text:
Articles of Agreement,] made, concluded, and agreed uppon, and
which are to be kept & performed by Robert Dawes of London,
Gent. unto and with Phillipp Henslowe Esq^{re} and Jacob [Meade
Waterman] in manner and forme followinge, that is to say
Imprimis. The said Robert Dawes for him, his executors, and
administrators doth covenante, promise, and graunt to and with
the said Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade, their executors,
administrators, and assynes, in manner and formme followinge,
that is to saie, that he the said Robert Dawes shall and will
plaie with such company, as the said Phillipp Henslowe and
Jacob Meade shall appoynte, for and during the tyme and space
of three yeares from the date hereof for and at the rate of one
whole share, accordinge to the custome of players; and that he
the said Robert Dawes shall and will at all tymes during the
said terme duly attend all suche rehearsall, which shall the
night before the rehearsall be given publickly out; and if that
he the saide Robert Dawes shall at any tyme faile to come at
the hower appoynted, then he shall and will pay to the said
Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade, their executors or assignes,
Twelve pence; and if he come not before the saide rehearsall
is ended, then the said Robert Dawes is contented to pay Twoe
shillings; and further that if the said Robert Dawes shall not
every daie, whereon any play is or ought to be played, be ready
apparrelled and ---- to begyn the play at the hower of three of
the clock in the afternoone, unles by sixe of the same company
he shall be lycenced to the contrary, that then he, the saide
Robert Dawes, shall and will pay unto the said Phillipp and
Jacob or their assignes Three [shillings]; and if that he, the
saide Robert Dawes, happen to be overcome with drinck at the
tyme when he [ought to] play, by the judgment of ffower of the
said company, he shall and will pay Tenne shillings; and if he,
[the said Robert Dawes], shall [faile to come] during any plaie,
having noe lycence or just excuse of sicknes, he is contented
to pay Twenty shillings; and further the said Robert Dawes,
for him, his executors, and administrators, doth covenant and
graunt to and with the said Phillipp Henslowe and Jacob Meade,
their executors, administrators, and asignes, by these presents,
that it shall and may be lawfull unto and for the said Phillipp
Henslowe and Jacob Meade, their executors or assignes, during
the terme aforesaid, to receave and take back to their own
proper use the part of him, the said Robert Dawes, of and in one
moyetie or halfe part of all suche moneyes, as shal be receaved
at the Galleries & tyring howse of such house or howses wherein
he the saide Robert Dawes shall play, for and in consideration
of the use of the same howse and howses; and likewis shall
and may take and receave his other moyetie ...[ extra spaces
] the moneys receaved at the galleries and tiring howse dues,
towards the pa[ying] to them, the saide Phillip Henslowe and
Jacob Meade, of the some of one hundred twenty and fower pounds,
being the value of the stock of apparell furnished by the saide
company by the saide Phillip Henslowe and Jacob Meade ...[ extra
spaces ] the one part of him the saide Robert Dawes or any other
somes ...[ extra spaces ] to them for any apparell hereafter
newly to be bought by the [said Phillip Henslowe and Jacob
Meade, until the saide Phillip Henslowe and Jacob Meade] shall
therby be fully satisfied, contented, and paid. And further
the said Robert Dawes doth covenant, [promise, and graunt to
and with the said Phillip Henslowe and Jacob Meade, that if
he, the said Robert Dawes], shall at any time after the play
is ended depart or goe out of the [howse] with any [of their]
apparell on his body, or if the said Robert Dawes [shall carry
away any propertie] belonging to the said company, or shal be
consentinge [or privy to any other of the said company going
out of the howse with any of their apparell on his or their
bodies, he, the said] Robert Dawes, shall and will forfeit and
pay unto the said Phillip and Jacob, or their administrators
or assignes, the some of ffortie pounds of lawfull [money of
England] ...[ extra spaces ] and the said Robert Dawes, for
him, his executors, and administrators doth [covenant promise
and graunt to with the said] Phillip Henslowe and Jacob Meade,
their executors, and administrators [and assigns] [ extra spaces
] that it shall and may be lawfull to and for the said Phillip
Henslowe and Jacob Meade, their executors, and assignes, to have
and use the playhows so appoynted [for the said company [ extra
spaces ] one day of] every fower daies, the said daie to be
chosen by the said Phillip and [Jacob] [ extra spaces ] Monday
in any week, on which day it shalbe lawful for the said Phillip
[and Jacob, their administrators], and assignes, to bait their
bears and bulls ther, and to use their accustomed sport and
[games] [ extra spaces ] and take to their owne use all suche
somes of money, as thereby shall arise and be receaved
And the saide Robert Dawes, his executors, administrators, and
assignes, [do hereby covenant, promise, and graunt to and with
the saide Phillip and Jacob,] allowing to the saide company
daye the some of ffortie shillings money of England ... [In
testimony] for every such whereof, I the saide Robert Dawes haue
hereunto sett my hand and seal this [sev]enth daie of April 1614
in the twelfth yeare [of the reign of our sovereign lord &c.]
Robert Dawes.
It must be mainly matter of conjecture at what theatres the Lady
Elizabeth’s had played from 1611 to 1614. Possibly they may have begun
at the Swan. Middleton’s _A Chaste Maid in Cheapside_ was published as
‘often acted at the Swan on the Bankeside by the Lady Elizabeth her
Seruants’, and although this publication was not until 1630, it is
rather tempting to identify the play with _The Proud Maid_ of 1611–12.
Probably the association of the company with Henslowe led to a transfer
to the Rose; and after the joining of forces with Rosseter in March
1613, the Whitefriars must have been available for the combination.
That there were alternatives open in 1613 is shown by two passages
in Daborne’s letters.[704] On 5 June he says that the company were
expecting Henslowe to conclude ‘about thear comming over or goinge
to Oxford’, and by ‘comming over’ may most naturally be understood
crossing the Thames. On 9 December he claims that a book he is upon
will ‘make as good a play for your publique howse as ever was playd’,
and the inference is that at the time Henslowe was interested in a
‘private’ as well as in a ‘public’ house. Certainly the Watermen’s
complaint in the spring of 1614 indicates that there were then no plays
on Bankside, and both the Swan and the Rose must therefore have been
deserted. But by the autumn the Lady Elizabeth’s men were in the Clink,
occupying the newly built Hope on the site of the old Bear-garden; and
that the use of this theatre was contemplated in the agreements of the
previous spring is shown both by the presence of Meade, who is not
known to have been interested in any other house, as a party, and by
the reservation of one day in fourteen for the purpose of baiting.[705]
It was at the Hope that William Fennor failed to appear to try his
challenge with John Taylor on 7 October, and the Lady Elizabeth’s men
were presumably the players--
And such a company (I’ll boldly say)
That better (nor the like) ne’er played a play--
who came to the rescue and saved the occasion from fiasco. And it was
at the Hope and by the Lady Elizabeth’s men, as the Induction and the
title-page show, that Jonson’s _Bartholomew Fair_ was produced on 31
October. There is a reference in the text of the play to Taylor’s
adventure,[706] and a compliment to Field, which puts him on a level
with Burbadge of the King’s men.[707] _Bartholomew Fair_ was presented
on the very next day before James at Court. This performance, for which
Field was payee on 11 June, was the only one by the company during the
winter festivities of 1614–15. In February 1615 there was a breach
between Henslowe and the company, as a result of which the Articles of
Grievance were drawn up. According to the Articles Henslowe ‘brooke
the companie’; but it is not quite clear what exactly took place. In
some form the Lady Elizabeth’s men certainly continued to exist. They
visited Nottingham in March 1615, and a letter from Lord Coke to the
Mayor of Coventry shows that they also contemplated a visit to that
town in the same month.[708] My impression is that they subsequently
patched up another reconstruction with Henslowe, and that on this
occasion the process did entail some kind of amalgamation with Prince
Charles’s men. Field, however, probably now joined the King’s men. The
Lady Elizabeth’s do not appear to have been separately represented
when the Privy Council called the London companies before them for a
breach of Lent on 29 March 1615. It is true that they may have been
alone in not offending, but it is more probable that William Rowley
and John Newton, who were summoned, answered for the amalgamation. The
Prince’s men are recorded as playing at Court during the Christmas of
1615–16 and the Lady Elizabeth’s men are not. Yet the payee for their
four plays, of which the dates are not specified, was Alexander Foster,
who had been a Lady Elizabeth’s man and not a Prince’s man. But it
is probable that both this amalgamation and the earlier one between
the Lady Elizabeth’s and the Queen’s Revels, although effective as a
business operation from Henslowe’s point of view, did not amount to a
complete merging of identities, such as would entail a surrender of
one or other of the official patents. Certainly the Lady Elizabeth’s,
the Prince’s and the Revels were in some sense distinct, and yet in
the closest relationship in 1615. So much is clear from Rosseter’s
patent of 3 June to build in the Blackfriars, which contemplated that
all three companies would share in the use of the new house. That
the joint user extended also to plays is suggested by the title-page
of Field’s _Amends for Ladies_ (1618) which declares it to have been
‘acted at the Blacke-Fryers, both by the Princes Seruants and the Lady
Elizabeths’. Perhaps this indicates alternative rather than combined
playing. Whatever the arrangement, it was probably altered again on or
before Henslowe’s death on 6 January 1616.[709] A company containing
many of the former Lady Elizabeth’s men remained at the Hope. But they
went under Prince Charles’s patronage, and it is not until 1622, when
we find them at Christopher Beeston’s house of the Cockpit or Phoenix,
that we can be sure of the presence of Lady Elizabeth’s men in London
once more.[710] But they had held together in the provinces. Possibly
the nucleus of the provincial company had been formed of men left out
by the Henslowe-Rosseter negotiations of 1613–14. They first appear
at Norwich on 2 March 1614 under Nicholas Long, who in 1612 had been
travelling with Queen’s Revels boys. They came again on 27 May 1615
with an exemplification of the 1611 patent dated 31 May 1613, and again
on 5 June 1616 under John Townsend, and again on 7 June 1617 under
Henry Sebeck. In the same year Joseph Moore was acting as an agent of
the Lord Chamberlain and Master of the Revels in clearing the provinces
of irregularly licensed players, not improbably in the interests of
the Lady Elizabeth’s themselves, whose original patent was now set
free, through changes in London, for provincial use in place of a mere
exemplification.[711] The company is also traceable at Leicester,
Coventry, Nottingham, Marlborough, and elsewhere from 1614,[712] and on
11 July 1617 Townsend and Moore received a warrant for £30 in respect
of three plays given before James during his journey to Scotland.[713]
On 20 March 1618 Townsend and Moore, with Alexander Foster and Francis
Waymus, obtained a new licence under the royal signet.[714] This
authorized them to play in London, and their actual return there may
have been earlier than 1622.
XIV
INTERNATIONAL COMPANIES
i. ITALIAN PLAYERS IN ENGLAND
[_Bibliographical Note._--The wanderings of the Italian
companies in Italy itself and in France are recounted in A.
D’Ancona, _Origini del Teatro Italiano_ (ed. 2, 1891), and A.
Baschet, _Les Comédiens italiens à la Cour de France_ (1882),
but without much knowledge of the few English records. W.
Smith, _Italian and Elizabethan Comedy_ (_M. P._ v. 555) and
_The Commedia dell’ Arte_ (1912), deals more fully with these.
The literary influence of Italian comedy is discussed by L. L.
Schücking, _Die stofflichen Beziehungen der englischen Komödie
zur italienischen bis Lilly_ (1901), and R. W. Bond, _Early
Plays from the Italian_ (1911).]
The England of Elizabeth and James was a lender rather than a borrower
of players. No records have been disinterred of French actors in this
country between 1495 and 1629;[715] and although there are a few of
Italian actors, their visits seem to have been confined to a single
brief period.[716] The head-quarters of Italian comedy during the
middle of the sixteenth century was at the Court of Mantua, and when
Lord Buckhurst went as ambassador to congratulate Charles IX of France
on his wedding, it was by Louis Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers and brother
of the Duke of Mantua, that he was entertained on 4 March 1571 ‘with
a comedie of Italians that for the good mirth and handling thereof
deserved singular comendacion’.[717] In the following year the Earl of
Lincoln was at Paris from 8 to 22 June in order to conclude a treaty,
and letters relate how he saw at the Louvre ‘an Italian playe, and
dyvers vauters and leapers of dyvers sortes verie excellent’, and how
later, when he visited the King at the Chateau de Madrid, ‘he had some
pastyme showed him by Italian players, which I was at with hym’.[718]
It may perhaps have been encouragement from one or both of these
nobles, which led an Italian company not long afterwards to make its
way across the Channel. The first notice of it is at Nottingham in
September 1573, when a reward was ‘gevin to the Italyans for serteyne
pastymes that they shewed before Maister Meare and his brethren’.[719]
In 1574 the Revels Accounts include expenditure ‘for the Italyan
players that ffollowed the progresse and made pastyme fyrst at Wynsor
and afterwardes at Reading’. Elizabeth was at Windsor on 11 and 12
July; on 15 July she removed to Reading and remained there to 22 July.
At Windsor the Italians used ‘iij devells cotes and heades & one olde
mannes fries cote’; at Reading, where they performed on 15 July, the
provisions included staves, hooks, and lambskins for shepherds, arrows
for nymphs, a scythe for Saturn, and ‘horstayles for the wylde mannes
garment’. Professor Feuillerat appears to suggest that they may have
been playing Tasso’s _Aminta_, produced at Ferrara on 31 July 1573.
But there were other pastorals.[720] The Italians are probably the
comedians commended to the Lord Mayor on 22 July, and in November
Thomas Norton calls special attention to ‘the unchaste, shamelesse and
unnaturall tomblinge of the Italian weomen’. How long this company
remained in England is unknown. There was an Italian acrobat at the
Kenilworth festivities on 14 July 1575, but the description suggests
that he was a solitary performer.[721] The Treasurer of the Chamber
paid ‘Alfruso Ferrabolle and the rest of the Italian players’ for
a play at Court on 27 February 1576, to the consideration of which
I shall return. In April 1577 there was an Italian play before the
Council at Durham Place.[722] Finally, on 13 January 1578, the Privy
Council addressed a letter to the Lord Mayor, requiring him to permit
‘one Drousiano, an Italian, a commediante and his companye’, to play
until the first week of the coming Lent. I take it that the company
was also at Court, since the Chamber Accounts for 1577–8 include an
item ‘for a mattres hoopes and boardes with tressells for the Italian
Tumblers’. The company to which the visit of 1573–4 was due cannot be
identified with any certainty. Presumably it came through France, and
ought to have left signs there. There seem to have been three Italian
companies in France during 1571. The first, in February, was that of
Giovanni Tabarin. The second, that seen by Lord Buckhurst in Paris,
was the famous Compagnia de’ Gelosi, of which one Signora Vittoria, of
Ferrara, known on the stage as Fioretta, was the prima donna. This,
however, had returned to Milan by the spring of 1572 and its subsequent
movements hardly render a visit to England in 1573 plausible. A third
company, that of Alberto Ganassa, a Zanni or clown from Bergamo,
reached Paris in the autumn of 1571.[723] It was sent away by the
Parlement on account of its high charges for admission, but returned
in 1572 and played at the wedding of Henri of Navarre and Marguerite
of Valois on 18 August. Nothing is heard of Ganassa in France after
October 1572, but during the summer of 1574 he seems to have been in
Madrid; so he also is not available for the English visit. It may
very likely have been his company which the Earl of Lincoln saw. But
it may also have been that led by Soldino of Florence and Anton Maria
of Venice, which was performing ‘commedies et saults’ before Charles
IX at Blois on 25 March 1572, and subsequently made its way to Paris.
My authorities say nothing further about Soldino and Anton Maria, so
we are at liberty to believe that Lincoln invited them to try their
fortune across the sea.[724]
The ‘Drousiano’ of 1578 offers less difficulty. He must have been
Drusiano, son of Francisco Martinelli, of Mantua, who in after years
won a considerable reputation, although less than that of his brother
Tristano Martinelli, as Arlecchino in the _commedia dell’ arte_.[725]
There is no other notice of him before 1580, when he subscribes himself
as ‘marito di M^a Angelica’, who appears to have been one Angelica
Alberghini, and the company with which he was associated in 1578 is not
known.[726] But it may very well have been the Gelosi. This company
paid in 1577 their second visit to France, upon the invitation of Henri
III, and remained there at least until July. They seem to have been in
Florence fairly early in 1578, but some or all of them may have found
time for an English trip in the interval. Direct proof that Drusiano
Martinelli ever belonged to the Gelosi is lacking. But they are the
only Italian company known to have been in France in the summer of
1577, and players are not likely to have passed from Italy to England
without leaving some traces of their presence in France.[727]
The professional Italian actors of the second half of the sixteenth
century played both the popular _commedia dell’ arte_ and the literary
_commedia erudita_, or _commedia sostenuta_. The former, with its more
or less improvised dialogue upon scenarii, which revolved around the
amorous and ridiculous adventures of the _zanni_, the _arlecchino_, the
_dottore_, and other standing types, was probably best adapted to the
methods of wandering mimes in an alien land.[728] The latter was common
to professionals and amateurs. And I suspect that the Court play of 27
February 1576, although it earned its reward from the Treasurer of the
Chamber, was an amateur performance. The ‘Alfruso Ferrabolle’ of the
account-book can hardly be other than a clerical perversion of the name
of Alfonso Ferrabosco, the first of three generations of that name,
father, son, and grandson, who contributed in turn to the gaiety of
the English Court. The eldest Ferrabosco was certainly in this country
by 1562 when he was granted an annuity of 100 marks. His service
terminated after various interruptions in 1578.[729] He is doubtless
the ‘Mr. Alphonse’ who took part in the preparation of a mask in June
1572.[730] In connexion with the same mask, a reward was paid to one
‘Petrucio’, while for a later mask of 11 January 1579 ‘Patruchius
Ubaldinas’ was employed to translate speeches into Italian and write
them out fair in tables.[731] This was Petruccio Ubaldini, another of
Elizabeth’s Italian pensioners, who was both a literary man and an
illuminator, and made his residence in England from 1562 to 1586.[732]
It is quite possible that the performance of 1576 may be referred to in
the following undated letter from Ubaldini to the Queen, in which he
makes mention of Ferrabosco.[733] If so, it came off after all.
Sacra Serenissima Maiesta,
Perché à i giorni passati io haveva promesso à M. Claudio
Cavallerizzo, et à M. Alfonso Ferrabosco, d’esser contento di
recitare ad una piacevol Comedia Italiana; per compiacere alla
Maiesta Vostra; et non si trovando di poi altri, che tre ò
quattro, che fusser contenti d’accettar tal carico; ho voluto
che l’Altezza Vostra conosca da me stesso il pronto animo,
ch’ io ho per la mia parté di servirla, et di compiacerla in
ogni attioné, che me sia comandata ò da lei, ò in suo nomé,
non solamente comé servitore giurato, ch’io gli sono; ma comé
desiderosissimo di far conoscere, che la divotioné, ch’io
porto allé sue Reali qualità, supera ogn’ altro rispetto;
desiderandogli io contentezza, et felicità non meno, che
qualunqué altro suo servitore gli desideri: la cui bontà Dio ci
prosperi.
Di Vostra Sacra Serenissima Maiesta.
Of Claudio Cavallerizzo I regret to say that I know nothing.
A statement that Venetian actors were in England in 1608 rests upon a
misreading of a record.[734]
ii. ENGLISH PLAYERS IN SCOTLAND
The interlude players of Henry VII, under John English, accompanied the
Princess Margaret to Scotland for her wedding with James IV in 1503,
and ‘did their devoir’ before the Court at Edinburgh.[735] It is the
best part of a century before any similar adventure is recorded. In the
interval came the Scottish reformation, which was no friend to courtly
pageantry. Yet in Scotland, as elsewhere, Kirk discipline had to make
some compromise with the drama. In 1574 the General Assembly, while
utterly forbidding, not for the first time, ‘clerk playes, comedies or
tragedies maid of ye cannonicall Scriptures’, went on to ordain ‘an
article to be given in to sick as sitts upon ye policie yat for uther
playes comedies tragedies and utheris profaine playes, as are not maid
upon authentick pairtes of ye Scriptures, may be considerit before
they be exponit publictlie and yat they be not played uppon ye Sabboth
dayes’.[736] It was once more a royal wedding that led to a histrionic
courtesy between England and Scotland. In the autumn of 1589 James VI
was expecting the arrival of his bride Anne of Denmark, a sensuous
and spectacle-loving lady, who had already had experience of English
actors at her father’s Court in 1586.[737] And being then, two years
after his mother’s execution, actively engaged in promoting friendly
relations with Elizabeth, he sent a request through one Roger Ashton
to Lord Scrope, the Warden of the English West Marches, ‘for to have
her Majesties players for to repayer into Scotland to his grace’. In
reply Scrope wrote from Carlisle on 20 September to William Ashby, the
English ambassador at Edinburgh, begging him to notify the King, that
he had sent a servant to them, ‘wheir they were in the furthest parte
of Langkeshire, whervpon they made their returne heather to Carliell,
wher they are, and have stayed for the space of ten dayes’.[738] After
all, the Lapland witches and their winds delayed Anne’s crossing for
some months, and James had himself to join her in Denmark. It is, I
think, only a conjecture that the players whose ‘book’ was submitted on
3 June 1589 for the licence of the Kirk Session at Perth, in accordance
with the order of 1574, were Englishmen.[739] But certainly ‘Inglis
comedianis’ were in Scotland in 1594, probably for the baptism of Henry
Frederick on 30 August, and received from James the generous gift of
£333 6_s._ 8_d._ out of ‘the composicioun of the escheit of ye laird
of Kilcrewch and his complices’.[740] Probably Laurence Fletcher was
at the head of this expedition, for on 22 March 1595 George Nicolson,
the English agent at Edinburgh, wrote to Robert Bowes, treasurer
of Berwick, that, ‘The King heard that Fletcher, the player, was
hanged, and told him and Roger Aston so, in merry words, not believing
it, saying very pleasantly that if it were true he would hang them
also’.[741] In any case, Fletcher appears to have been the leader of
a company whose peregrinations in Scotland a few years later, much
favoured by James, were also much embarrassed by the critical relations
which then existed between the Sovereign and the Kirk. It is only a
conjecture that this was the company which was refused leave to play at
St. Andrews on 1 October 1598.[742] But of greater troubles, which took
place at Edinburgh a year later, we are very well informed. They are
detailed from the Kirk point of view in the more or less contemporary
chronicle of David Calderwood.[743]
_The King Chargeth the Kirk of Edinburgh to Rescind an Act._
Some English comedians came to this countrie in the moneth of
October. After they had acted sindrie comedeis in presence of
the King, they purchassed at last a warrant or precept to the
bailliffes of Edinburgh, to gett them an hous within the toun.
Upon Moonday, the 12^{th} of November, they gave warning by
trumpets and drummes through the streets of Edinburgh, to all
that pleased, to come to the Blacke Friers’ Wynd to see the
acting of their comedeis. The ministers of Edinburgh, fearing
the profanitie that was to ensue, speciallie the profanatioun
of the Sabbath day, convocated the foure sessiouns of the Kirk.
An act was made by commoun consent, that none resort to these
profane comedeis, for eshewing offence of God, and of evill
exemple to others; and an ordinance was made, that everie
minister sould intimat this act in their owne severall pulpits.
They had indeid committed manie abusses, speciallie upon the
Sabboth, at night before. The King taketh the act in evill part,
as made purposelie to crosse his warrant, and caused summoun
the ministers and foure sessiouns, _super inquirendis_, before
the Secreit Counsell, They sent doun some in commissioun to
the King, and desired the mater might be tryed privatlie, and
offered, if they had offended, to repair the offence at his
owne sight; and alledged they had the warrant of the synod
presentlie sitting in the toun. The King would have the mater to
come in publict. When they went doun, none was called upon but
M^r. Peter Hewat and Henrie Nisbit. After that they were heard,
the sentence was givin out against all the rest unheard, and
charge givin to the ministers and foure sessiouns to conveene,
within three houres after, to rescind their former ordinance,
and to the ministers, to intimat the contrarie of that which
they intimated before. They craved to be heard. Loath was the
King, yitt the counsell moved him to heare them. M^r. Johne
Hall was appointed to be their mouth. ‘We are summouned, Sir,’
said M^r. Johne, ‘and crave to understand to what end.’ ‘It is
true’, said the King, ‘yee are summouned, and I have decerned
alreadie.’ M^r. Johne made no reply. M^r. Robert Bruce said, ‘If
it might stand with your good pleasure, we would know wherefore
this hard sentence is past against us.’ ‘For contraveening of
my warrant,’ said the King. ‘We have fulfilled your warrant,’
said M^r. Robert, ‘for your warrant craved no more but an hous
to them, which they have gottin.’ ‘To what end, I pray you,
sought I an hous,’ said the King, ‘but onlie that the people
might resort to their comedeis?’ ‘Your warrant beareth not that
end,’ said M^r. Robert, ‘and we have good reasoun to stay them
from their playes, even by your owne acts of parliament.’ The
King answered, ‘Yee are not the interpreters of my lawes.’ ‘And
farther, the warrant was intimated but to one or two,’ said
M^r. Robert, and, therefore, desired the King to retreate the
sentence. The King would alter nothing. ‘At the least, then,’
said M^r. Robert, ‘lett the paine strike upon us, and exeeme
our people.’ The King bade him make away. So, in departing,
M^r. Robert turned, and said, ‘Sir, please you, nixt the regard
we ow to God, we had a reverent respect to your Maiestie’s
royall person, and person of your queene; for we heard that the
comedians, in their playes, checked your royall person with
secreit and indirect taunts and checkes; and there is not a man
of honour in England would give such fellowes so much as their
countenance’. So they departed.
They were charged, at two houres, by sound of trumpet, the day
following, at the publict Croce, about ten houres, to conveene
themselves, and rescind the acts, or ellis to passe to the horne
immediatly after. The foure sessiouns conveene in the East Kirk.
They asked the ministers’ advice. The ministers willed them
to advise with some advocats, seing the mater tuiched their
estate so neere. M^r. William Oliphant and M^r. Johne Schairp,
advocats, came to the foure sessiouns. The charge was read. The
advocats gave their counsell to rescind the act, by reasoun the
King’s charge did not allow slanderous and undecent comedeis;
and farther, shewed unto them, that the sessiouns could doe
nothing without their ministers, seing they were charged as
weill as the sessiouns, and the mater could not passe in voting,
but the moderator and they being present. They were called in,
and after reasouning they came to voting. M^r. Robert Bruce
being first asked, answered ‘His Majestie is not minded to allow
anie slanderous or offensive comedeis; but so it is that their
comedeis are slanderous and offensive; therefore, the king,
in effect, ratifieth our act. The rest of the ministers voted
after the same maner. The elders, partlie for feare of their
estats, partlie upon informatioun of the advocats, voted to the
rescinding of the act. It was voted nixt, whether the ministers
sould intimat the rescinding of the act? The most part voted
they sould. The ministers assured them they would not. Henrie
Nisbit, Archibald Johnstoun, Alexander Lindsey, and some others,
tooke upon them to purchasse an exemptioun to the ministers.
They returned with this answere, that his Majestie was content
the mater sould be passed over lightlie, but he would have some
mentioun made of the annulling of the act. They refuse. Their
commissioners went the second tyme to the king, and returned
with this answere, ‘Lett them nather speeke good nor evill in
that mater, but leave it as dead.’ The ministers conveened apart
to consult. M^r. Robert Bruce said it behoved them ather to
justifie the thing they had done, or ellis they could not goe to
a pulpit. Some others said the like. Others said, Leave it to
God, to doe as God would direct their hearts. So they dissolved.
M^r. Robert, and others that were of his minde, justified it
the day following, in some small measure, and yitt were not
querrelled.
Several other documents confirm this narrative. The Privy Council
register contains an order of 8 November for an officer at arms to call
upon the sessions by proclamation to rescind their resolution and a
further proclamation of 10 November reciting the submission made by the
sessions.[744] The Lord High Treasurer’s accounts contain payments to
Walter Forsyth, the officer employed, as well as gifts to ‘ye Inglis
comedianis’ of £43 6_s._ 8_d._ in October, of £40 in November ‘to by
tymber for ye preparatioun of ane house to thair pastyme’, and of a
further £333 6_s._ 8_d._ in December.[745] It is George Nicolson, in
a letter of 12 November forwarding the proclamation of 8 November to
Sir Robert Cecil, who identifies the players for us as ‘Fletcher and
Mertyn with their company’.[746] The bounty of James, although it must
be borne in mind that the sums were reckoned in pounds Scots, probably
left them disinclined to quit Edinburgh in a hurry. Another gift of
£400 reached them through Roger Ashton in 1601;[747] and on 9 October
in the same year they visited Aberdeen with a letter of recommendation
from the King, and with the style of his majesty’s servants, and the
town council gave them £22 and spent £3 on their supper ‘that nicht
thaye plaid to the towne’. Nay, more, another entry in the burgh
register tells us that the players came in the train of ‘Sir Francis
Hospital of Haulszie, Knycht, Frenschman’, and one of those ‘admittit
burgesses’ with the foreign visitor was ‘Laurence Fletcher, comediane
to his Majesty’.[748]
Laurence Fletcher’s name stands first in the English patent of 1603 to
the King’s men, and the inferences have been drawn that the company
at Aberdeen was the Chamberlain’s men, that their visit was due to a
proscription from London on account of their participation in the Essex
‘innovation’, that Shakespeare was with them, and that he picked up
local colour, to the extent of ‘a blasted heath’ for _Macbeth_.[749]
To this it may be briefly replied that, as the Chamberlain’s men were
at Court as usual in the winter of 1602, any absence from London,
which their unlucky performance of _Richard II_ may have rendered
discreet, can only have been of short duration; that the most plausible
reading of the Scottish evidence is that Fletcher’s company were in
the service of James as Court comedians from 1599 to 1601; and that
there is nothing whatever to indicate that Fletcher ever belonged to
the Chamberlain’s company at all. In fact, very little is known of
him outside Scotland, although it is just possible that he may have
been the object of two advances made by Henslowe to the Admiral’s men
about October 1596, and described respectively as ‘lent vnto Martyne
to feache Fleatcher’ and ‘lent the company to geue Fleatcher’.[750] If
Fletcher was the King’s man in Scotland, it was not unnatural that he
should retain that status when James came to England; and it is very
doubtful whether the insertion of his name in the patent in any way
entailed his being taken into business relations with his ‘fellows’.
I strongly suspect that his companion at Edinburgh, Martin, was put
into a precisely similar position amongst Queen Anne’s men, for who can
Martin be but Martin Slater, who is often, as in the passage quoted
above, called Martin _tout court_ in Henslowe’s _Diary_, and who
certainly left the Admiral’s men in 1597?
iii. ENGLISH PLAYERS ON THE CONTINENT
[_Bibliographical Note._--The earliest comprehensive study
of the foreign travels of English actors is that of A. Cohn,
_Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries_ (1865). Much material has been collected, mostly
since Cohn wrote, in a number of local histories and special
studies, of which the most important are: C. M. Plümicke,
_Entwurf einer Theatergeschichte von Berlin_ (1781); D. C. von
Rommel, _Geschichte von Hessen_ (1820–38); J. E. Schlager,
_Über das alte Wiener Hoftheater_ in _Sitzungsberichte der
phil.-hist. Classe der Kaiserlichen Akad. der Wissenschaften_,
vi (1851), 147; M. Fürstenau, _Zur Geschichte der Musik und des
Theaters am Hofe der Kurfürsten von Sachsen_ (1861); E. Mentzel,
_Geschichte der Schauspielkunst in Frankfurt am Main_ (1882); O.
Teuber, _Geschichte des Prager Theaters_ (1883); J. Meissner, in
_Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xix. 113 (Austria), and _Die englischen
Comoedianten zur Zeit Shakespeares in Oesterreich_ (1884);
K. Trautmann in _Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte_, xii. 319
(Munich, Augsburg); xiii. 34 (Suabia), 315 (Ulm); xiv. 113
(Nuremberg), 225 (Suabia); xv. 209 (Ulm, Stuttgart, Tübingen);
in _Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte_, vii
(Rothenburg); and in _Jahrbuch für Münchener Geschichte_, iii.
259; J. Crüger in _Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte_, xv. 113
(Strassburg); Duncker, _Landgraf Moritz von Hessen und die
englischen Komödianten in Deutsche Rundschau_, xlviii (1886),
260; A. Cohn in _Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xxi. 245 (Cologne); J.
Bolte in _Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xxiii. 99 (Denmark and Sweden),
and _Das Danziger Theater im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert_ (1893);
J. Wolter in _Zeitschrift des Bergischen Geschichtsvereins_,
xxxii. 90 (Cologne); A. Wormstall in _Zeitschrift für
vaterländische Geschichte und Altertumskunde Westfalens_, lvi
(1898), 75 (Münster); G. Witkowzski in _Euphorion_, xv. 441
(Leipzig). A collection of records from the earlier of these
and from more scattered sources is in K. Goedeke, _Grundriss
der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen_^2 (1886), ii. 524, and
valuable summaries are given in W. Creizenach, _Schauspiele
der englischen Komödianten_ (1889), and E. Herz, _Englische
Schauspieler und englisches Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares
in Deutschland_ (1903). The excursus of F. G. Fleay in _Life
and Work of Shakespeare_ (1886), 307, is misleading. Additional
material, which has become available since Herz wrote, is
recorded by C. F. Meyer in _Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xxxviii. 196
(Wolgast), and C. Grabau in _Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xlv. 311
(Leipzig). Useful special studies are by C. Harris, _The English
Comedians in Germany before the Thirty Years’ War: the Financial
Side_ (_Publ. of Modern Language Association_, xxii. 446), A.
Dessoff, _Über englische, italienische und spanische Dramen
in den Spielverzeichnissen deutscher Wandertruppen_ (1901,
_Studien für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte_, i), and on
the problem of staging (cf. ch. xx) C. H. Kaulfuss-Diesch, _Die
Inszenierung des deutschen Dramas an der Wende des sechzehnten
und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts_ (1905). A collection of plays and
jigs, in German, but belonging to the repertory of an English
company, appeared as _Engelische Comedien und Tragedien_
(1620); some of the plays have been edited by J. Tittmann,
_Die Schauspiele der englischen Komödianten in Deutschland_
(1880), and the jigs by J. Bolte, _Die Singspiele der englischen
Komödianten und ihrer Nachfolger in Deutschland, Holland und
Scandinavien_ (1893). German plays written under English
influences are to be found in J. Tittmann, _Die Schauspiele
des Herzogs Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig_ (1880), and
A. von Keller, _Jacob Ayrers Dramen_ (1865). Cohn prints,
with translations, Ayrer’s _Sidea_ and _Phaenicia, Julio and
Hyppolita_ and _Titus Andronicus_ from the 1620 volume, and
early German versions of _Hamlet_ (_Der bestrafte Brudermord_)
and _Romeo and Juliet_ from manuscripts. The literary records
and remains of the English players are fully discussed by
Creizenach and Herz, and their relation to Ayrer by W. Wodick,
_J. Ayrers Dramen in ihrem Verhältniss zur einheimischen
Literatur und zum Schauspiel der englischen Komödianten_ (1912).
The material for the Netherlands, some of which was gathered by
Cohn, may be studied in J. A. Worp, _Geschiedenis van het Drama
en van het Tooneel in Nederland_ (1904–8), who also deals with
the Dutch versions of English dramas. The contemporary stage
conditions in France are best treated by E. Rigal, _Le Théâtre
français avant la période classique_ (1901), and those in Spain
by H. A. Rennert, _The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de
Vega_ (1909), who uses the results of recent researches by C.
Pérez Pastor, which have added much to the information furnished
by C. Pellicer, _Tratado histórico sobre el origen y progresos
de la Comedia y del Histrionismo en España_ (1804).]
Thomas Heywood records, about 1608, that ‘the King of Denmarke, father
to him that now reigneth, entertained into his service a company of
English comedians, commended unto him by the honourable the Earl of
Leicester’.[751] This King of Denmark was Frederick II (1559–88),
father of Christian IV (1588–1648), and of Queen Anne of England.
English ‘instrumentister’, Johann Krafftt, Johann Personn, Johann
Kirck or Kirckmann, and Thomas Bull, were at the Danish Court as early
as 1579–80, and in 1585 certain unnamed English played (_lechte_) in
the courtyard of the town-hall at Elsinore, when the press of folk
was such that the wall broke down. These may be the same men who
played and vaulted at Leipzig on 19 July 1585, and are the earliest
English players yet traced in Germany.[752] But the particular
comedians referred to by Heywood were probably another company who
had accompanied Leicester to Holland, when he took the command of the
English forces in 1585, and had given a show, half dramatic, half
acrobatic, of _The Forces of Hercules_ at Utrecht on 23 April 1586.
Certainly Leicester had in his train one Will, a ‘jesting plaier’,
who is now usually identified with William Kempe, and in August and
September 1586 the Household Accounts of the Danish Court record the
presence of ‘Wilhelm Kempe instrumentist’, and of his boy Daniell
Jonns. It is not clear what were the precise relations between Kempe
and five other ‘instrumentister och springere’, Thomas Stiwens,
Jurgenn Brienn, Thomas Koning, Thomas Pape, and Robert Persj, who
were at Court from 17 June to 18 September 1586, and for whom the
same accounts record a payment to Thomas Stiuens of six thalers a
month apiece, at the end of that period. If he had, as is probable,
been their fellow up to that point, he did not accompany them in
their further peregrinations.[753] These took them to the Court of
Frederick’s nephew, Christian I, Elector of Saxony (1586–91), as a
result of correspondence, still extant, between the sovereigns, in
which the offer of salaries at the annual rate of 100 thalers overcame
the reluctance of the Englishmen to face the perils of an unknown
tongue. They started with an interpreter on 25 September, and shortly
after their arrival at Waidenhain on 16 October received instructions
from Christian to follow him with mourning clothes to Berlin, where
he was then sojourning. Christian’s own capital was Dresden, and
here they held a formal appointment in his service, under which they
were bound to follow him in his travels, and to entertain him with
performances after his banquets, and with music and ‘Springkunst’, and
were entitled, beyond their pay, to board, livery, and travelling
expenses, and a lodging allowance of forty thalers each. The Dresden
archives give their names as Tomas Konigk, Tomas Stephan or Stephans,
George Beyzandt, Tomas Papst, and Rupert Persten. Their departure from
Court is recorded on 17 July 1587.[754] In all these notices music and
acrobatic feats are to the fore, but that the men were actors there can
be no doubt, for two of them, Thomas Pope and George Bryan, reappear
amongst Strange’s men, and thereafter as fellows of Shakespeare in the
Chamberlain’s company. Of Stevens, King, and Percy no more is known.
Kempe was abroad again, in Italy and Germany, during 1601, and returned
to England on 2 September. It is not certain whether he took a company
with him, or went as a solitary morris dancer. But it is noteworthy
that on the following 26 November an English company, under one Johann
Kemp, reached Münster, after a tour which had taken them to Amsterdam,
Cologne, Redberg, and Steinfurt. They played in English, and had a
clown who pattered in German between the acts.[755]
The man, however, who did most to acclimatize the English actors in
Germany was Robert Browne, who paid several visits to the country,
and spent considerable periods there between 1590 and 1620. With him
he took relays of actors, some of whom split off into independent
associations, and account for most, although not all, of the groups of
‘Engländer’ who became familiar figures at the Frankfort spring and
autumn fairs and even in out-of-the-way corners of northern Europe. Of
some of these groups the wanderings can be traced in outline, although
the frequent failure of the archives to record individual names is
responsible for many _lacunae_, which the conjectural ingenuity of
literary historians has done its best to fill. Many of these anonymous
performances I must pass over in silence.
Robert Browne first appears as one of Worcester’s men, with Edward
Alleyn, in 1583, and in 1589 these two, probably as Admiral’s men,
still held a common stock of apparel with John Alleyn and Richard
Jones.[756] His career abroad begins with a visit to Leyden in October
1590.[757] This was perhaps only tentative, for in February 1592 he
was preparing to cross the seas again, and to this end obtained for
himself, John Bradstreet, Thomas Sackville, and Richard Jones, the
following passport to the States-General of the Netherlands from the
Lord Admiral:
Messieurs, comme les présents porteurs, Robert Browne, Jehan
Bradstriet, Thomas Saxfield, Richard Jones, ont deliberé de
faire ung voyage en Allemagne, avec intention de passer par le
païs de Zelande, Hollande et Frise, et allantz en leur dict
voyage d’exercer leurs qualitez en faict de musique, agilitez et
joeux de commedies, tragedies et histoires, pour s’entretenir
et fournir à leurs despenses en leur dict voyage. Cestes
sont partant vous requerir monstrer et prester toute faveur
en voz païs et jurisdictions, et leur octroyer en ma faveur
vostre ample passeport soubz le seel des Estatz, afin que les
Bourgmestres des villes estantz soubs voz jurisdictions ne
les empeschent en passant d’exercer leurs dictes qualitez par
tout. Enquoy faisant, je vous demeureray à tous obligé, et me
treuverez très appareillé à me revencher de vostre courtoisie en
plus grand cas. De ma chambre à la court d’Angleterre ce x^{me}
jour de Febvrier 1591.
Vostre tres affecsionné à vous fayre plaisir et sarvis,
C. Howard.[758]
Presumably the Lord Admiral gave this passport in his official
capacity, as responsible for the high seas, and it is not necessary to
infer that the travellers were in 1592 his servants.[759]
There are not many clear notices of Browne and his company during
this tour. They were at Arnhem, with a licence from Prince Maurice
of Orange-Nassau, in 1592.[760] Thereafter they may have gone into
residence at some Court, Wolfenbüttel or another. They can hardly have
been the English ‘comoedianten und springer’ who came to Nyköping in
Sweden for the wedding of Duke Karl of Sweden and Princess Christina
of Holstein on 28 August 1592[761]; for it was only two days later
that Browne approached the Frankfort magistrates for leave to play at
the autumn fair, where they gave _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ and some of
Marlowe’s plays.[762] It was on this occasion that Fynes Moryson, the
traveller, visited the fair and noted the great vogue of the English
actors amongst the merchants.[763] Englishmen played at Cologne in
October and November 1592,[764] and at Nuremberg in August 1593;[765]
but in view of the Nyköping company it can hardly be assumed that these
were Browne and his fellows, and indeed the leader at Nuremberg is
called ‘Ruberto Gruen’, which may, but on the other hand may not, be a
blunder for Browne’s name. The Cologne players are anonymous. At any
rate ‘Robert Braun, Thomas Sachsweil, Johan Bradenstreit und consorten’
were all at Frankfort in August 1593,[766] where they played scriptural
dramas, including _Abraham and Lot_ and _The Destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrha_. Thereafter the company seems to have broken up. Richard
Jones certainly went home before 2 September 1594, when he bought a
gown ‘of pechecoler in grayne’ from Henslowe.[767] He had doubtless
already joined the Admiral’s men.
Thomas Sackville and John Bradstreet probably went to Wolfenbüttel.
This was the capital of Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
(1589–1613), himself the author of plays, mostly printed during 1593
and 1594, in which an English influence is perceptible. The Duke
married Elisabeth, daughter of Frederick II of Denmark, and his wedding
at Copenhagen in February 1590 was attended by his brother-in-law,
afterwards James I of England. It is possible that his earliest play,
_Susanna_, was written either for this occasion or for the repetition
of his wedding ceremony at Wolfenbüttel. In this piece the jester, a
conventional personage, bears the name ‘Johan Clant’, in the later
plays ‘Johan Bouset’; and in the _Ehebrecherin_ (1594) Bouset says,
quite irrelevantly to his dramatic character, ‘Ich bin ein Englisch
Mann’. Both names are in fact of English origin, from the words ‘clown’
and ‘posset’ respectively. Evidently the Duke must in some way have
been in touch with the English stage at a date even earlier than
Browne’s second German visit in 1592. It is not, therefore, necessary
to conjecture, as has been conjectured, that Wolfenbüttel was the first
objective of this visit.[768] Unfortunately the Brunswick household
accounts for 1590–1601 are missing, and with them all direct evidence
of the first formation of his English company by the Duke has probably
gone. The company existed by 1596, when the ‘furstelige comoedianten
och springers’ of the Duke paid a month’s visit to Copenhagen for
the coronation of his brother-in-law, Christian IV of Denmark, on
29 August.[769] In the following year we find ‘Jan Bosett und seine
Gesellen’ at Nuremberg, ‘Thomas Sackfeil und Consorten’ at Augsburg in
June, ‘Johann Busset’ and Jakob Behel at Strassburg in July and August,
and ‘Thomas Sackville, John Bouset genannt’, Johann Breitenstrasse
and Jacob Biel at the Frankfort autumn fair.[770] The identity of
this company with the Wolfenbüttel court comedians may perhaps be
inferred from Sackville’s use of John Bouset as a stage name, and from
a reference, in this same year 1597, to ‘Thomas Sackefiel, princely
servant at Wolfenbüttel’. Another member of the company may have been
Edward Wakefiel, with whom Sackville, also in 1597, had a brawl in
a Brunswick tavern.[771] No more is heard of them until 1601, when
John Bouset was expected to join his old friend Robert Browne for
the Frankfort Easter fair.[772] The Brunswick household accounts are
extant for 1602 and 1608, and from 1614 onwards. Thomas Sackville
appears frequently. On 30 August 1602 he took a payment for the English
comedians. Later references to him from 1 October 1602 to 1617 are
mainly in connexion with purchases for the ducal wardrobe. It seems
clear that, while remaining a ducal servant, and possibly even an
actor, he went into business and prospered therein.[773] He is said to
have been selling silk at Frankfort in 1604, and in 1608 Thomas Coryat,
the Odcombian traveller and oddity, records:
‘The wealth that I sawe here was incredible. The goodliest
shew of ware that I sawe in all Franckford, saving that of the
Goldsmithes, was made by an Englishman one Thomas Sackfield a
Dorsetshire man, once a servant of my father, who went out of
England but in a meane estate, but after he had spent a few
yeares at the Duke of Brunswicks Court, hee so inriched himselfe
of late that his glittering shewe of ware in Franckford dit
farre excell all the Dutchmen, French, Italians, or whomsoever
else.’[774]
John Bradstreet’s name appears in 1604 with that of Sackville in the
album of Johannes Cellarius of Nuremberg. He died in 1618 and Sackville
in 1628, leaving a library of theology and English literature.
Edward Wakefield reappears in the Brunswick accounts for 1602, not
specifically as a player. But certainly the playing company continued
to exist. The accounts mention it in 1608, and Thomas Heywood notes
its existence about the same date. There were English players at
Wolfenbüttel in May 1615 and at Brunswick in 1611 and 1617, but no
names are recorded, and it can hardly be assumed that these were the
original ducal company. Henry Julius himself died in 1613.[775]
Robert Browne’s own movements are uncertain after the break-up of his
company in 1593. He is not traceable for a year or so either in Germany
or in England, where his wife and all her children and household died
of plague in Shoreditch about August 1593.[776] But sooner or later he
found his way to Cassel. This was another of the literary courts of
Germany, the capital of Maurice the Learned, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel
(1592–1627). Maurice himself wrote an ‘_Anglia_ Comoedia’ and other
plays in Terentian Latin, which were performed by the pupils of the
_Collegium Mauritianum_, but are unfortunately not preserved. He also
composed music and, like the Duke of Brunswick, gave a welcome to John
Dowland on one of his several foreign tours.[777] Possibly Dowland was
one of the two lutenists who are recorded to have spent fifteen weeks
at Cassel in 1594.[778] In the following year there were performances
by players and acrobats at Maurice’s castle of Wilhelmsburg at
Schmalkalden, and in the same year Maurice wrote to his agent at Prague
to give assistance to his comedians in the event of their visiting
that city.[779] To 1594 or 1595 may, therefore, be plausibly ascribed
undated warrants by which Robert Browne and Philip Kiningsmann receive
appointments from the Landgrave, undertaking to do him service with
their company in vocal and instrumental music and in plays to be
supplied either by Maurice or by themselves, and not to leave Cassel
without his permission.[780] Certainly Browne was the Landgrave’s man
by 16 April 1595, when a warrant was issued allowing the export of a
consignment of bows and arrows which he had been sent over to bring
from England to Cassel.[781] The ‘fürstlich hessische Diener und
Comoetianten’ were at Nuremberg on 5 July 1596, and a company under
Philip Konigsman were at Strassburg in the following August.[782]
Festivities were now in preparation at Cassel for the christening of
Maurice’s daughter, one of whose godmothers was Queen Elizabeth, on 24
August 1596. Brown and one John Webster were on duty at Cassel during
the visit of the Earl of Lincoln, who came from England to stand proxy
for Elizabeth.[783] Payments to the English comedians and performances
by them at Melsungen, Weissenstein, and Rothenburg, in the Landgrave’s
territory, are recorded in the Cassel archives during 1597 and 1598.
A proposed loan of them in 1597 to Landgrave Louis of Marburg seems
to have fallen through, but in 1598 they left Cassel for the Court of
the Palsgrave Frederic IV at Heidelberg, with a liberal _Abfertigung_
or vail of 300 thalers and a travelling allowance of 20 thalers, which
was entrusted to George Webster.[784] From Heidelberg they went to
Frankfort towards the end of 1599, but were refused leave to play,
owing to the prevalence of plague.[785] Robert Browne, Robert Kingman,
and Robert Ledbetter were then of the company. Ledbetter must have
recently joined them, as he is in the cast of _Frederick and Basilea_
as played by the Admiral’s men in 1597. Frankfort having failed them,
they fell back upon Strassburg, and here they seem to have remained
until the spring of 1601.[786] Browne was their leader at their
arrival, but he then seems to have left them and returned to England,
where he came to Court as manager of the Earl of Derby’s men during
the winters of 1599–1600 and 1600–1.[787] By Easter 1601, however, he
had started on his fourth tour, and appeared once more at Frankfort,
possibly in Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_. With him were Robert Kingmann and
Robert Ledbetter, and they were expecting to be joined by ‘Johannen
Buscheten und noch andere in unsere Companie gehörige Comödianten’. The
old association of 1592 between Robert Browne and Thomas Sackville was,
therefore, still in some sense alive.[788]
Meanwhile, Maurice of Hesse had not been wholly without English
actors, since Browne and his fellows left Cassel in 1598. It would
seem that George Webster returned from Heidelberg, or perhaps from
Strassburg, to his service. The ‘fürstlich-hessischen Komödianten und
Musikanten’ were at Frankfort in March, at Nuremberg in April 1600,
and at Frankfort again at Easter 1601. The names recorded are those of
George Webster, John Hill or Hüll, Richard Machin, and at Nuremberg
Bernhardt Sandt.[789] Upon his second visit to Frankfort Webster would
have met his old leader, now become his rival, Robert Browne. The
Hessian company were for a third time at Frankfort in the autumn of
1601.[790] In the following year they left the Landgrave’s service,
not altogether to the regret of some of his subjects, who resented a
patronage of foreign arts at the cost of their pockets.[791] Webster
and Machin, with whom was then one Ralph Reeve, were still using their
former master’s name when they visited Frankfort at Easter 1603.[792]
Thereafter they dropped it. Of Webster no more is heard. Machin is
conjectured to have joined for a short time an English company in the
service of Margrave Christian William, a younger son of the Elector
Joachim Frederick of Brandenburg, which came to Frankfort for the
Easter and autumn fairs of 1604.[793] The Margrave was administrator of
the diocese of Magdeburg, and kept his Court at Halle. His company is
traceable from 1604 to 1605, but I do not find any evidence of Machin’s
connexion with it. In May 1605 he appeared at Strassburg, and there
claimed as his credentials only his four years’ service with Maurice of
Hesse.[794] Shortly before, he had been at the Frankfort Easter fair
with Reeve, and the two returned to Frankfort in the autumn, and again
at Easter 1606.[795]
Robert Browne, for some years after the opening of his fourth tour at
Frankfort in the spring of 1601, does not appear to have attached
himself to any particular Court. He is found at Frankfort, with Robert
Jones, in September 1602, at Augsburg in the following November and
December, at Nuremberg in February 1603, and at Frankfort for the
Easter fair of the same year.[796] With him were then, but it would
seem only temporarily, Thomas Blackwood and John Thare, late of
Worcester’s men, who had doubtless just come out from England, when
Elizabeth’s illness and death closed the London theatres.[797] He is
probably the ‘alte Komödiant’, whose identity seems to have been
thought sufficiently described by that term at Frankfort in the autumn
of 1604.[798] He returned to Frankfort on 26 May 1606, and was at
Strassburg in the following June and July.[799] Here he was accompanied
by John Green. On this or some other visit to Strassburg, the company
probably lost Robert Kingman, who, like Thomas Sackville, found
business more profitable than strolling. He became a freeman of
Strassburg in 1618, and in that year was able to befriend his old
‘fellow’ Browne, and in 1626 other actors on their visits to the
city.[800] In the course of 1606 Browne seems to have entered the
service of Maurice of Hesse, who in the previous year had built a
permanent theatre, the _Ottonium_, at Cassel, and had now again an
English company for the first time since 1602. This is to be inferred
from an application for leave to play submitted to the Frankfort town
council on 26 August 1606, and signed by ‘Robert Braun’, ‘Johann Grün’,
and ‘Robert Ledbetter’ as ‘Fürstlich Hessische Comödianten’. Earlier
in August the same men had been at Ulm.[801] They visited Nuremberg
with a letter of recommendation from their lord in November, and then
settled down at Cassel for the winter.[802] But their service did not
last long. On 1 March 1607 a household officer wrote to the Landgrave
that the English found their salaries inadequate, and after performing
the comedy of _The King of England and Scotland_ had declared, either
in jest or earnest, that it was their last play in Cassel.[803]
Probably they were in earnest. Browne and Green went to Frankfort, for
the last time as the Hessian comedians, on 17 March.[804] Browne’s
name now disappears from German records for a decade. In 1610 he was a
member of the Queen’s Revels syndicate in London, and on 11 April 1612
he wrote a letter to Edward Alleyn from Clerkenwell.[805] But whether
Browne left them or not, the company held together for a while longer.
Green was at Danzig and Elbing in the course of 1607.[806] Thereafter
it seems probable that he tried a bold flight, and penetrated to the
heart of Catholic Germany in Austria. In November 1607 an English
company was with the archducal court of Ferdinand and Maria Anna at
Gräz in Styria. A performance by them of _The King of England and the
Goldsmith’s Wife_ is recorded.[807] They followed Ferdinand to Passau,
where they gave _The Prodigal Son_ and _The Jew_, and possibly also to
the Reichstag held in January 1608 at Regensburg. By 6 February they
were back at Gräz, and a letter from Ferdinand’s sister, the
Archduchess Maria Magdalena, then just betrothed to the Grand Duke
Cosimo II of Florence, gives a lively account of their performances and
of the assistance which they rendered in the revels danced at
Court.[808] Their repertory included _The Prodigal Son_, _A Proud Woman
of Antwerp_, _Dr. Faustus_, _A Duke of Florence and a Nobleman’s
Daughter_, _Nobody and Somebody_, _Fortunatus_, _The Jew_, _King Louis
and King Frederick of Hungary_, _A King of Cyprus and a Duke of
Venice_, _Dives and Lazarus_.[809] It is not absolutely certain that
the company referred to in these notices was Green’s. No name is in
fact mentioned. But the probability suggested by the resemblance of the
above play-list to those of 1620 and 1626, with which Green was
certainly connected, is confirmed by the existence of a German
manuscript of _Nobody and Somebody_ with a dedication by Green to
Ferdinand’s brother the Archduke Maximilian, who was certainly present
at the Gräz performances, and by a letter which tells us that a company
visiting Austria in 1617 was the same as that which had played at Gräz
in the lifetime of the Archduchess Maria, who died in 1608.
Unfortunately the identification of this company of 1617 with Green’s
is itself a matter of high probability, rather than of absolute
certainty.[810] The end of the visit to Gräz was marked by a duel in
which one of the English actors, ‘the man with long red hair, who
always played a little fiddle’, killed a Frenchman.[811] Green now,
like Browne, drops for some years out of the German records.
The Court functions at Cassel surrendered by Browne in 1607 were
resumed by his predecessors, in whose leadership Reeve had now
succeeded Machin; and the appearance of the Hessian company is recorded
at Frankfort during both the fairs of 1608 and 1609, the Easter fair of
1610, the autumn fair of 1612, and the Easter fair of 1613. A proposed
appearance for the coronation of the Emperor Mathias in June 1612
was prohibited, because the mourning for his predecessor Rudolph II
was not yet over.[812] It is perhaps something of an assumption that
the company was the same one throughout all these years. Reeve was
in charge up to the autumn of 1609; after that no individual name is
mentioned. The intervals between the fairs were presumably spent in the
main at Cassel. In the summer of 1609 the company visited Stuttgart and
Nuremberg and possibly other places, with a letter of recommendation
from their lord.[813] In the autumn of the same year John Sigismund,
Elector of Brandenburg (1608–19), who often entertained a company of
his own, but appears to have been temporarily without one, wrote to
Maurice to borrow them for the wedding of his brother at Berlin.[814]
In April 1610 they may not improbably, though there is no evidence of
the fact, have followed Maurice to the Diet at Prague.[815] In 1611
they are said to have been at Darmstadt.[816] They certainly played at
the wedding of the Margrave Joachim Ernest, uncle of the Elector of
Brandenburg, at Anspach in October 1612, and later in the same month
paid a visit to Nuremberg.[817] No more is heard of them, or of any
other English actors in the service of Maurice of Hesse-Cassel, after
1613.[818] Reeve was a member of Rosseter’s syndicate for the building
of the Porter’s Hall theatre at Blackfriars in 1615, and with him were
associated Philip Kingman and Robert Jones, the last notices of whom in
Germany are as ‘fellows’ of Robert Browne in 1596 and 1602 respectively.
The appearance of Blackwood and Thare, late of Worcester’s men, in
company with Browne at the Frankfort Easter fair of 1603, has already
been noted. The only further record of either of them is of Thare
at Ulm and Augsburg in the following December.[819] But by a series
of conjectures, to which I hesitate to subscribe, they have been
identified with a company which came to Stuttgart in September 1603
in the train of Lord Spencer and Sir William Dethick, ambassadors
from England carrying the insignia of the Garter to Frederick Duke of
Württemberg, and there gave a play of _Susanna_[820]; with a company
which visited Nördlingen and other places in January 1604 under the
leadership of one Eichelin, apparently a German, but with a repertory
which included a _Romeo and Juliet_ and a _Pyramus and Thisbe_[821];
with a company which held letters of recommendation from the Duke of
Würtemberg at Nuremberg in February 1604;[822] and with a company which
took a repertory closely resembling the Nördlingen one to Rothenburg in
1604 and 1606.[823] This is all very ingenious guesswork.[824]
All trace of John Green is lost for several years after 1608. An
isolated notice at Utrecht in November 1613 suggests that he may
have spent part of this interval in the Netherlands.[825] A year or
two later he returned to Germany. He was at Danzig in July 1615 and
again, with Robert Reinolds, late of Queen Anne’s men, in July 1616,
having paid an intermediate visit to Copenhagen.[826] In 1617 he was
at Prague for the coronation of the Archduke Ferdinand as King of
Bohemia, and in July of the same year at Vienna.[827] The comparative
infrequency with which English actors visited Austrian territory
perhaps justifies the assumption that his is the company mentioned in
a letter of recommendation sent by Ferdinand’s brother, the Archduke
Charles, at Neiss to the Bishop of Olmütz on 18 March 1617, as having
played at Gräz before his mother the Archduchess Maria, who died in
1608, and having recently spent some months at the Court of Poland in
Warsaw.[828] In 1618 Green’s old leader, the indefatigable veteran
Robert Browne, came out with a new company on his fifth and last visit
to the Continent. He is first noted at Nuremberg on 28 May.[829] My
impression is that the two men joined forces. Green’s name does not
appear in the records for a couple of years. But Reinolds, who had
been with him at Danzig in 1616, was with Browne at Strassburg in
June and July 1618.[830] Later in the year Browne was at the autumn
fair at Frankfort.[831] There is no definite mention of him during
the next twelve months, but it is not improbable that the combined
company was that which visited Rostock in May and Danzig in July
1619.[832] At any rate Browne appeared at Cologne in October;[833] and
then went for the winter to Prague, where the Elector Palatine and the
Lady Elizabeth of England, now King and Queen of Bohemia, had set up
their Court.[834] They were but a winter King and Queen. In 1620 the
Thirty Years’ War broke out, and Germany had other things to think
of than English mumming. Browne was at Nuremberg in February and at
Frankfort for the Easter fair.[835] That is the last we hear of him.
But Green reached Cologne and Utrecht later in April, and was probably
discreetly taking the company home.[836] In 1626 he came out again
with Robert Reinolds, who made a reputation as a clown under the name
of Pickleherring.[837] The details of this later tour lie beyond the
scope of the present inquiry. Pickleherring is the clown-name also in a
volume of _Engelische Comedien und Tragedien_, printed in 1620, which
probably represents an attempt of Browne and Green to turn to profit
with the printers their repertory of 1618–20, now rendered useless by
their return to England.[838] The plays contained in this volume, in
addition to two farces and five jigs, in most of which Pickleherring
appears, are _Esther and Haman_, _The Prodigal Son_, _Fortunatus_,
_A King’s Son of England and a King’s Daughter of Scotland_, _Nobody
and Somebody_, _Sidonia and Theagenes_, _Julio and Hyppolita_, and
_Titus Andronicus_.[839] The first five of these reappear in a list
of plays forming the repertory of Green at Dresden during the visit
of 1626 referred to above. If the titles can be trusted, two of the
plays in this list had already been played by Browne at Frankfort and
Cassel in 1601 and 1607, three by an unknown company, possibly that
of Blackwood and Thare, at Nördlingen and Rothenburg in 1604 and
1606, and eight by Green himself at Passau and Gräz in the winter of
1607–8.[840] They number thirty in all, as follows: _Christabella_,
_Romeo and Juliet_,[841] _Amphitryo_,[842] _The Duke of Florence_,[843]
_The King of Spain and the Portuguese Viceroy_,[844] _Julius
Caesar_, _Crysella_,[845] _The Duke of Ferrara_,[846] _Nobody and
Somebody_,[847] _The Kings of Denmark and Sweden_,[848] _Hamlet_,[849]
_Orlando Furioso_,[850] _The Kings of England and Scotland_,[851]
_Hieronymo the Spanish Marshal_,[852] _Haman and Esther_,[853]
_The Martyr Dorothea_,[854] _Doctor Faustus_,[855] _The King of
Arragon_,[856] _Fortunatus_,[857] _Joseph the Jew of Venice_,[858]
_The Clever Thief_,[859] _The Duke of Venice_,[860] _Barabbas Jew of
Malta_, _The Dukes of Mantua and Verona_, _Old Proculus_, _Lear King
of England_, _The Godfather_, _The Prodigal Son_,[861] _The Count of
Angiers_, _The Rich Man_.[862]
The lists of 1620 and 1626 do not bear out Fleay’s assumption that the
repertories they represent were wholly made up of plays taken out by
Browne in 1592.[863]
Another member of Browne’s last expedition can perhaps be identified.
With him in 1592 had been Richard Jones, who afterwards became one
of the Admiral’s men in 1594 and left that company in 1602. He was
again associated with Browne in Rosseter’s Queen’s Revels syndicate of
1610. The following undated letter to Edward Alleyn is preserved at
Dulwich:[864]
M^r Allen, I commend my love and humble duty to you, geving you
thankes for your great bounty bestoed vpon me in my sicknes,
when I was in great want, God blese you for it, Sir, this it
is, I am to go over beyond the seeas with M^r Browne and the
company, but not by his meanes, for he is put to half a shaer,
and to stay hear, for they ar all against his goinge. Now good
Sir, as you have ever byne my worthie frend, so healp me nowe.
I have a sut of clothes and a cloke at pane for three pound,
and if it shall pleas you to lend me so much to release them I
shalbe bound to pray for you so longe as I leve, for if I go
over and have no clothes, I shall not be esteemed of, and by
godes help the first mony that I gett I will send it over vnto
you, for hear I get nothinge, some tymes I have a shillinge a
day, and some tymes nothinge, so that I leve in great poverty
hear, and so I humbly take my leave, prainge to god I and my
wiffe for your health and mistris Allenes, which god continew,
Your poor frend to command
Richard Jones.
[_Endorsed_] Receved of master Allen the [ extra spaces ] of
February the somme of [ extra spaces ] [_and by Alleyn_] M^r
Jones his letter wher on I lent hym 3^l.
This has generally been dated 1592. But Alleyn’s first recorded
marriage was in October of that year, and the reference to Browne as
not going with the company has always been a puzzle. I suspect that
it was written in or near 1615, and that Jones was one of the actors
who started in advance of Browne under John Green. That he did travel
about this time is shown by two other letters to Alleyn about a lease
of the Leopard’s Head in Shoreditch held by his wife.[865] The first,
from Jones himself, is not dated, but a mention of Henslowe shows that
it was written before the latter’s death on 6 January 1616, or at
least before Jones had heard of that event. The writer and his wife
were then out of England. The second, from Harris Jones, was written
from Danzig on 1 April 1620. Mrs. Jones was then expecting to join her
husband, who was with ‘the prince’, whoever this may have been. If
Jones had travelled with Browne’s men, he cut himself adrift from them
on their return, for in 1622 he entered as a musician the service of
Philip Julius, Duke of Wolgast in Pomerania (1592–1625), who had twice
visited England, and whose presence at more than one London theatre
is recorded in 1602.[866] Two petitions from Jones are in the Stettin
archives.[867] On 30 August 1623 he asked permission, with his fellows
Johan Kostrassen and Robert Dulandt (Dowland?), to return from Wolgast
to England. Behind them they appear to have left Richard Farnaby, son
of the better-known composer Giles Farnaby.[868] On 10 July 1624 Jones
wrote to the Duke that his hopes of profitable employment under the
Prince in England had been disappointed, and asked to be taken back
into his service.
All the groups of actors hitherto dealt with seem to have had their
origin, more or less directly, in the untiring initiative of Robert
Browne. There is, however, another tradition, almost as closely
associated with the houses of Brandenburg and Saxony, as the former
with those of Hesse-Cassel and Brunswick. Some give and take between
Cassel and the Courts of some of the Brandenburg princes has from time
to time been noted.[869] But Berlin, where the successive Electors of
Brandenburg, Joachim Frederick (1598–1608) and John Sigismund (1608–9),
had their capital, was during a long period of years the head-quarters
from which an Englishman, John Spencer, undertook extensive travels,
both in Protestant and in Catholic Germany. Of Spencer’s stage-career
in London, if he ever had one, nothing is known. Possibly he betook
himself to the Brandenburg Court during the English plague-year
of 1603. At any rate, comedians holding a recommendation given by
the Elector on 10 August 1604 and confirmed by the Stadtholder of
the Netherlands, Maurice Prince of Orange Nassau, in the following
December, were at Leyden in January and The Hague in May 1605.[870] It
is reasonable to identify them with the company under John Spencer, who
received a recommendation from the Electress Eleonora of Brandenburg to
the Elector Christian II of Saxony (1591–1611) in the same year.[871]
At Dresden they possibly remained for some time, for although there are
several anonymous appearances, including the famous ones at Gräz in the
winter of 1607–8, which can be conjecturally assigned to them,[872]
they do not clearly emerge until April 1608, when a visit of the
Electoral players of Saxony is recorded at Cologne.[873] Subsequently
they waited upon Francis, Duke of Stettin and by him were recommended
to the new Elector of Brandenburg, John Sigismund, who passed them on
once more to the Elector of Saxony on 14 July 1609.[874] Being in need
of comedians for his brother’s wedding in the same year, he applied,
as has been noted, for a loan of those of Maurice of Hesse.[875]
Dresden remained the head-quarters of Spencer’s men again during
the next two years, but in 1611 they were back in John Sigismund’s
service. Christian II of Saxony died in this year. In July and August
they visited Danzig and Königsberg, and in October and November they
attended the Elector to Ortelsburg and Königsberg for the ceremonies in
connexion with the acknowledgement of him as heir to his father-in-law,
Duke Albert Frederick of Prussia. On this occasion Spencer was at
the head of not less than nineteen actors and sixteen musicians, and
produced an elaborate Turkish ‘Triumph-comedy’.[876] In April 1613
Spencer left Berlin on a tour which was to take him to Dresden once
more.[877] The company were at Nuremberg in June, still using the
name of the Elector of Brandenburg and playing _Philole and Mariana_,
_Celinde and Sedea_, _The Fall of Troy_, _The Fall of Constantinople_,
and _The Turk_.[878] In July and August they were at Augsburg, and in
September they returned to Nuremberg, now describing themselves as
the Elector of Saxony’s company.[879] This Elector was John George I
(1611–56), the third of his house to entertain an English company. In
October they played The _Fall of Constantinople_ at the Reichstag held
by the Emperor Mathias at Regensburg. Spencer was their leader, but
they no longer claimed any courtly status.[880] After an unsuccessful
attempt to pay a third visit for the year to Nuremberg, they went
to Rothenburg, and so to Heidelberg, whither the Elector Palatine
Frederick V had just brought his English bride. Here they spent the
winter, and left to attend the Frankfort fair of Easter 1614.[881] In
May their service with the Elector of Brandenburg, although now none
of the most recent, helped them to get a footing in Strassburg, where
they stayed until July and again played _The Fall of Constantinople_,
as well as a play of _Government_.[882] In August they were at
Augsburg and possibly Ulm.[883] In October they projected a return
visit to Strassburg, but were rejected, ‘so dies Jar hie lang genug
super multorum opinionem gewessen’.[884] Possibly they fell back upon
Stuttgart.[885] In February 1615 they were in Cologne, and here a queer
thing happened. The whole company, with Spencer’s wife and children,
was converted to Catholicism by the eloquence of a Franciscan friar.
The event is recorded in the town archives and also in a manuscript
Franciscan chronicle preserved in the British Museum:[886]
‘Twentie fowre stage players arrive out of Ingland at Collen:
all Inglish except one Germanian and one Dutchman. All
Protestants. Betwixt those and father Francis Nugent disputation
was begunne and protracted for the space of 7 or eight dayes
consecutively; all of them meeting at one place together. The
chiefe among them was one N. Spencer, a proper sufficient
man. In fine, all and each of them beeing clearlie convinced,
they yielded to the truth; but felt themselves so drie and
roughharted that they knew not how to pass from the bewitching
Babylonian harlot to their true mother the Catholic church, that
always pure and virginal spouse of the lamb.’
It need hardly be said that in so Catholic a city as Cologne this
singular act of grace gave the performances of the English comedians an
extraordinary vogue. In June and July 1615 Spencer was at Strassburg,
in company with one Christopher Apileutter, who may have been the
Germanian or the Dutchman of the Cologne notice.[887] He attended the
autumn fair at Frankfort, using an imperial patent, perhaps given him
at Regensburg in 1613.[888] During the winter of 1615–16 he was again
in Cologne, still profiting by his conversion.[889] This, however, had
not made of him such a bigot, as to be unable to render acceptable
duty in the Protestant courts where his earliest successes had been
won. For a year his movements became obscure. But in August 1617 he
was playing before the Elector of Saxony and the Emperor Matthias
at Dresden.[890] And in the following year he once more entered the
Brandenburg service. During the interval which had elapsed since
1613, John Sigismund had entertained another company. Early in 1614 he
engaged William, Abraham, and Jacob Pedel, Robert Arzschar, Behrendt
Holzhew, and August Pflugbeil.[891] The names hardly sound English; but
Jacob Pedel is probably the Jacob Behel or Biel who was travelling with
Sackville in 1597, William Pedel appeared as an English pantomimist at
Leyden in November 1608, and Arzschar, whose correct name was doubtless
Archer, is also described as an Englishman at Frankfort in the autumn
of 1608.[892] He was then in company with Heinrich Greum and Rudolph
Beart. A Burchart Bierdt appeared as ‘Englischer Musicant’ at Cologne
in December 1612.[893] Archer perhaps came from Nuremberg. He was at
Frankfort again in the autumn of 1610, and at the Reichstag held by
the Emperor Matthias at Regensburg in September 1613.[894] It must
have been this new company under Archer which visited Wolfenbüttel in
September 1614 and Danzig in 1615, styling themselves the Brandenburg
comedians.[895] The only names given at Danzig are Johann Friedrich
Virnius and Bartholomeus Freyerbott, and in fact the Pedels, Holzhew,
and Pflugbeil left Berlin at Easter 1615. Archer himself remained
with the Elector until May 1616. The field, then, was clear at Berlin
for the enterprise of Spencer. On 17 March 1618 John Sigismund made
a payment ‘to one Stockfisch’ for bringing the English comedians
from Elbing. Further payments to the English are recorded in the
following November, and in June 1619 for plays at Königsberg and
Balge in Prussia, of which the Elector had become Duke on the death
of his father-in-law Albert Frederick in the preceding August.[896]
In July 1619 the Elector of Brandenburg’s comedians are heard of at
Danzig.[897] On 23 December 1619 John Sigismund himself died, and
in 1620 Hans Stockfisch addressed an appeal for certain arrears of
salary to Count Adam von Schwartzenberg, an officer at the court of
the new Elector George William (1619–40), in which he claimed to have
enjoyed the Count’s protection for more than fifteen years. In reply
George William describes the petitioner as ‘den Englischen Junkher
Hans Stockfisch, wie er sich nennet’.[898] There can be little doubt
that Hans Stockfisch was none other than John Spencer, for the period
of fifteen years precisely takes us back to his first appearance as a
Brandenburg comedian in 1605. His fish name corresponds to, and was
perhaps motived by, that of Pickleherring adopted by Robert Reinolds
of the chief rival English company about the same date. Both had their
prototype in Sackville’s John Bouset.[899] The Elector George William
was no friend to actors, and to Spencer, as to others, the Thirty
Years’ War closed many doors. In February 1623 he came to Nuremberg
with Sebastian Schadleutner, but was not allowed to play.[900] And that
is the last that is heard of him.
A few isolated records indicate the presence from time to time in
northern Europe of players not yet mentioned, and not obviously
connected either with the Browne or with the Spencer tradition. An
English company under Peter de Prun of Brussels visited Nuremberg in
April 1594. The name of the leader does not sound very English, and a
company, not improbably the same, is described as ‘niederländische’ at
Ulm in the following August. Heywood, however, speaks of an English
company as in the pay of the Cardinal and Archduke Albert, Governor of
the Spanish Netherlands, about 1608.[901] Maurice of Orange-Nassau,
Stadtholder of the Dutch Netherlands (1584–1625), who gave a
recommendation to Spencer in 1605, had also an English company of his
own, which visited Frankfort at Easter 1611, and then claimed to be
strange in Germany.[902] To Augsburg in June 1602 came Fabian Penton
and his company;[903] to Leyden in September 1604 John Woods and his
company,[904] and to Leipzig in April 1613 Hans Leberwurst with his
boys.[905] Of none of these is anything further known, nor of William
Alexander Blank, a Scottish dancer, who performed at Cologne in April
1605.[906]
Traces of English players in southern Europe are few and far between.
That Kempe’s travels of 1601 took him to Italy has already been
noted.[907] There were some English acrobats at Madrid in January
1583.[908] On 25 May 1598 the Confrères de la Passion leased their
theatre in Paris, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, to ‘Jehan Sehais comédien
Anglois’, and on 4 June obtained judgement in the court of the
Châtelet, ‘tant pour raison du susdit bail que pour le droit d’un écu
par jour, jouant lesdits Anglais ailleurs qu’audit Hôtel’.[909] I do
not know whether I am justified in finding under the French disguise of
‘Jehan Sehais’ the name of one John Shaa or Shaw, conceivably related
to Robert Shaw of the Admiral’s men, who witnessed an advance by
Henslowe to Dekker on 24 November 1599.[910] In 1604 another English
company was in France, and gave a performance on 18 September in the
great hall at Fontainebleau, the effect of which upon the imagination
of the future Louis XIV, then a child of four, is minutely described in
the singular diary of his tutor and physician, Jean Héroard.[911]
‘Mené en la grande salle neuve ouïr une tragédie représentée par
des Anglois; il les écoute avec froideur, gravité et patience
jusques à ce qu’il fallut couper la tête à un des personnages.’
On 28 September, Louis was playing at being an actor, and on 29
September, says Héroard:
‘Il dit qu’il veut jouer la comédie; “Monsieur,” dis-je,
“comment direz-vous?” Il repond, “Tiph, toph,” en grossissant sa
voix. À six heures et demie, soupé; il va en sa chambre, se fait
habiller pour masquer, et dit: “Allons voir maman, nous sommes
des comédiens.”’
Finally, on 3 October:
‘Il dit, “Habillons-nous en comédiens,” on lui met son tablier
coiffé sur la tête; il se prend à parler, disant: “Tiph, toph,
milord” et marchant à grands pas.’
It has been suggested on rather inadequate grounds that the play seen
by Louis may have been _2 Henry IV_. Possibly the princely imagination
had merely been smitten by some comic rough and tumble.[912] But it is
also conceivable that the theme may have been the execution of John
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, at the restoration of Henry VI in 1470.[913]
It would be rash to assume that these records of 1598 and 1604
represent all the visits of English actors to France during the
Elizabethan period; and it is not improbable that a search in the
municipal archives of Picardy and Normandy, as thorough as that which
has been carried out for Germany, might yield notable results. Some
general evidence that tours in France did take place can be cited. John
Green, dedicating his version of _Nobody and Somebody_ to the Archduke
Maximilian about 1608, says that he had been in that country.[914] His,
indeed, so far as dates go, might have been the company of 1604. And
France, no less than Germany, is referred to as scoured by the English
comedians about 1613.[915]
XV
ACTORS
[_Bibliographical Note._--I include a few managers who were not
necessarily themselves actors. The earlier studies of stage
biography were mainly concerned with the Chamberlain’s and
King’s men in the list of ‘The Names of the Principall Actors
in all these Playes’, prefixed to the Shakespearian F_{1} of
1623. The statements about them in [J. Roberts] _Answer to Mr.
Pope’s Preface to Shakespeare_ (1729) are conjectural and not,
as sometimes supposed, traditional. A good deal was collected
from wills and registers by E. Malone (_Variorum_, iii. 182), G.
Chalmers (ibid. iii. 464), and J. P. Collier, _Memoirs of the
Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare_ (1846, _Sh. Soc._
revised edition in _H. E. D. P._ iii. 255), and is summarized
by K. Elze, _William Shakespeare_ (tr. 1888), 246. New ground
was broken by F. G. Fleay, _On the Actor Lists, 1578–1642_
(_R. Hist. Soc. Trans._ ix. 44), and in the list in _Chronicle
History of the London Stage_ (1890), 370. Here he criticizes
Collier’s claim to have a list of 500 actors, as he cannot find
‘that any list at all was found among his papers’, and suggests
that a forgery was planned. I am glad to have an opportunity for
once of defending Collier, even if it is only against Fleay. The
fifth report (1846) of the _Sh. Soc._ shows that ‘a volume of
the original actors in plays by writers other than Shakespeare
was in preparation, and _Bodl. MS._ 29445 contains a number of
rough extracts made by Collier and P. Cunningham from London
parochial registers, with a digest of these and other material,
entitled ‘Old Actors. Collections for the Biography of, derived
from Old Books & MSS. Alphabetically arranged’. I have used
this manuscript and cite it as ‘Bodl.’ or ‘B.’. The information
is mainly from the registers of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, St.
Andrew’s Wardrobe, St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, St. Leonard’s,
Shoreditch, St. Giles’, Cripplegate, and other churches. It
appears to be reliable, except perhaps in one or two points.
One would, of course, prefer to have the registers themselves
in print, but with the exception of those of St. James’s,
Clerkenwell (_Harl. Soc._), and A. W. C. Hallen’s _Registers of
St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate_, the published London Registers,
as shown by A. M. Burke, _Key to the Ancient Parish Registers
of England and Wales_ (1908), are precisely those of least
theatrical interest. The Southwark registers in particular, and
the other records of that parish, including the ‘token-books’
or annual lists, street by street, of communicants, ought to
be made available. Some notes from them are in W. Rendle,
_Bankside_ (1877, Harrison, Part ii). Southwark marriages
(1605–25) are in _Genealogist_ (n. s. vi-ix). In these records
‘man’ clearly means ‘player’. Extracts from other registers
may be found in parochial histories and elsewhere. Some from
St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, are in J. P. Malcolm, _Londinium
Redivivum_ (1802–7), iii. 303, J. J. Baddeley, _St. Giles,
Cripplegate_ (1888), and W. Hunter’s _Addl. MS._ 24589. C.
C. Stopes, _Burbage_, 139, gives a full collection from St.
Leonard’s, Shoreditch. An interesting list of actors and their
addresses _c._ 1623 is in C. W. Wallace, _Gervase Markham,
Dramatist_ (1910, _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlvi. 345), cited as ‘J’. The
citations ‘H’ and ‘H. P’ are from Greg’s editions of Henslowe’s
_Diary_ and _Henslowe Papers_.]
ABYNGDON, HENRY. Master of Chapel, 1455–78.
ADAMS, JOHN. Sussex’s, 1576; Queen’s, 1583, 1588. He possibly played
the clown Adam in _A Looking Glass_ and Oberon in _James IV._. It would
hardly be justifiable to conjecture that he lived to join Hunsdon’s and
play Adam in _A. Y. L._
ALDERSON, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1509–13.
ALLEYN, EDWARD, was born on 1 September 1566 in the parish of St.
Botolph, Bishopsgate.[916] His father was Edward Alleyn of Willen,
Bucks, Innholder and porter to the Queen, who died in 1570; his mother,
Margaret Townley, for whom he claimed a descent from the Townleys of
Lancashire which modern genealogists hesitate to credit, re-married
with one John Browne, a haberdasher, between whom and other Brownes who
appear in theatrical annals no connexion can be proved. Edward Alleyn
is said by Fuller in his _Worthies_ to have been ‘bred a stage player’.
In formal deeds he is generally described as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’,
and once, in 1595, as ‘musician’.[917] In January 1583 he was one of
Worcester’s players; at some later date he joined the Admiral’s men,
and had as ‘fellow’ his brother John, with whom during 1589–91 he was
associated in purchases of apparel. On 22 October 1592 he married Joan
Woodward, step-daughter of Philip Henslowe, with whom he appears ever
after in the closest business relations. A Dulwich tradition that he
was already a widower probably rests on a mention of ‘Mistris Allene’
in an undated letter about a German tour by Richard Jones, which is
commonly assigned to February 1592, but is more probably of later
date.[918] Alleyn is specifically described as the Admiral’s servant
in the Privy Council letter of assistance to Strange’s men (q.v.),
with whom he travelled during the plague of 1593. Some of the letters
passing between him and his wife and father-in-law during this tour
are preserved at Dulwich, and are full of interesting domestic details
about his white waistcoat and his orange tawny woollen stockings, the
pasturing of his horse, his spinach bed, and the furnishing of his
house.[919] His ‘tenants’ are mentioned and his ‘sister Phillipes
& her husband’. He had by this time a high reputation as an actor,
as witnessed by Nashe in his _Pierce Penilesse_ of 1592, where he
classes him with Tarlton, Knell, and Bentley, and says, ‘Not Roscius
nor Aesope, those admyred tragedians that haue liued euer since before
Christ was borne, could euer performe more in action than famous Ned
Allen’; and in his _Strange Newes_ of the same year, where he says of
Edmund Spenser that ‘his very name (as that of Ned Allen on the common
stage) was able to make an ill matter good’.[920] An undated letter at
Dulwich, written to him by an admirer who signs himself W. P., offers
a wager in which ‘Peele’s credit’ was also in some way concerned, and
in which Alleyn was to have the choice of any one of Bentley’s or
Knell’s plays, and promises that, even if he loses, ‘we must and will
saie Ned Allen still’.[921] In 1594 _The Knack to know a Knave_ is
ascribed, quite exceptionally, on its title-page, not to the servants
of a particular lord, but to ‘Ed. Allen and his Companie’. From 1594 to
1597 Alleyn was one of the Admiral’s men (q.v.) at the Rose. He then
‘leafte playnge’, but resumed at the request of the Queen, although
apparently without becoming a full sharer of the company, when the
Fortune (q.v.), which he had built for them, was opened in the autumn
of 1600. He became a servant of Prince Henry with the rest of his
fellows in 1604, and at the coronation procession on 15 March appeared
as the Genius of the City and delivered a ‘gratulatory speech’ to
James ‘with excellent action and a well-tun’de, audible voyce’.[922]
Further testimonies to his talent are rendered by John Weever;[923]
by Ben Jonson, _Epigram_ lxxxix (1616), who equals him to Aesop and
Roscius, and himself to Cicero, who praised them; by Heywood, who
says, ‘Among so many dead let me not forget one yet alive, in his time
the most worthy, famous Maister Edward Allen’;[924] and by Fuller,
who says, ‘He was the Roscius of our age, so acting to the life that
he made any part (especially a majestic one) to become him.’[925] Of
his parts are recorded Faustus,[926] Tamburlaine, Barabas in _The
Jew of Malta_,[927] and Cutlack in a play of that name revived by
the Admiral’s men in 1594 and now lost,[928] while that of Orlando
in Greene’s _Orlando Furioso_ is amongst the papers at Dulwich.[929]
Heywood, writing about 1608, speaks of Alleyn’s playing in the past.
He probably retired finally soon after the beginning of the new reign.
In 1605 he valued his ‘share of aparell’ at £100; but his name is not
in the patent to the Prince’s men of 30 April 1606, although as late
as 1611 he still retained his personal rank as servant to the prince.
It is difficult to give much credit to the legend that his withdrawal
was due to remorse, or, as one version has it, to an apparition of
the devil when he was playing Faustus.[930] Certainly he continued
to hold an interest in the Fortune, and conceivably in the Red Bull
(q.v.) also. And certainly remorse did not prevent him from continuing
to exercise the functions of Master of the Game of Paris Garden, a
post which he acquired jointly with Henslowe in 1604, having already
been interested in the Bear-garden itself since 1594. At this after it
became the Hope (q.v.) he was still about 1617 entertaining players.
But the time of his retirement synchronizes with the first beginnings
of his foundation of a school and hospital by the name of the College
of God’s Gift at Dulwich. By 1605 he was a wealthy man, with income
from substantial investments in leasehold property as well as the
profits from his enterprises, and on 25 October he took the first step
in the purchase of the manor of Dulwich, which was completed by 1614 at
a total cost of nearly £10,000. Here about 1613 he made his residence,
moving from Southwark, where he had been churchwarden of St. Saviour’s
in 1610. In 1613 also he began the building of the college, which was
opened in 1617. Alleyn himself acted as manager and was in a position
to spend upon the college and his own household some £1,700 a year. The
endowment of the college included, besides house property in London,
the freehold of the Fortune. Henslowe had died in January 1616 and
his widow in the following year, and his papers passed to Alleyn and
remain at Dulwich. Here, too, is Alleyn’s own diary for 1617–22, and
this and his correspondence show him as a friend of persons of honour,
and the patron of writers and the members of his own former profession.
Alleyn’s wife Joan died on 28 June 1623 and on the following 3 December
he married Constance, daughter of John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s,
settling on her £1,500. A letter of 23 July 1624 indicates that he
was then desirous of obtaining ‘sum further dignetie’. He died on 25
November 1626.
ALLEYN, JOHN. Admiral’s, 1589–91. Edward Alleyn had an elder brother
John, who was born in 1556–7, and is described as servant to Lord
Sheffield and an Innholder in 1580, and as servant to the Lord
Admiral in 1589. He died about May 1596, being then of St. Andrew’s,
Holborn, and left a widow Margaret and son John. Presumably he was the
Admiral’s player. But there was also an Allen family of St. Botolph’s,
Bishopsgate, one of whom, John, was a player. Here a John was baptized
on 17 October 1570, a Lowin, son of John, baptized on 15 December 1588,
a Joan buried on 13 May 1593, and a John on 18 May 1593. On 26 July
1596 is this curious baptismal entry: ‘Bennett, reputed daughter of
J^{no} Allen, which J^{no} went with S^r Fr. Drake to the Indians in
which time the child was got by a stage-player.’ Finally, on 18 October
1597, ‘Jone uxor Joh^{is} Allen player was buried with a still born
child’ (H. ii. 239; Bodl.)
ALLEYN, RICHARD. Queen’s, (?) 1594; Admiral’s, 1597–1600. His daughters
Anna and Elizabeth were baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 13
May 1599 and 17 May 1601 respectively. Here he is traceable in the
token-books during 1583–1601, and was buried on 18 November 1601,
leaving a widow (Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi; H. ii. 239; Bodl.).
ALLEYN (ALLEN), RICHARD. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613.
ANDREWE, HENRY. Chapel, 1509.
ANDREWES, RICHARD. Worcester’s, 1583.
ANDROWES, GEORGE. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.
APILEUTTER, CHRISTOPHER. Germany, 1615.
ARCHER, RICHARD. _Vide_ ARKINSTALL.
ARCHER? (ARZSCHAR, ERTZER), ROBERT. Germany, 1608–16.
ARKINSTALL, JOHN. A common player of interludes under licence, with
Richard Archer, Barker, and Anthony Ward as his fellows. He was at
Hastings on 25 March 1603, and on 30 March laid an information of the
proclamation of Lord Beauchamp as king by Lord Southampton (_Hist.
MSS._ xii. 4. 126).
ARMIN, ROBERT, is said to have been apprentice to a goldsmith in
Lombard Street, and to have been encouraged as a ‘wag’ by Tarlton
(_ob._ 1588), who prophesied that he should ‘enjoy my clownes sute
after me’. He ‘used to’ Tarlton’s plays, and in time became himself a
player ‘and at this houre performes the same, where, at the Globe on
the Banks side men may see him’.[931] But his earliest reputation was
as a writer. He wrote a preface to _A Brief Resolution of the Right
Religion_ (1590) and probably other things now unknown, for he is
referred to as a son of Elderton in Nashe’s _Foure Letters Confuted_
of 1592 (_Works_, i. 280). R. A. wrote verses to Robert Tofte’s _Alba_
(1598), and R. A. compiled _England’s Parnassus_ (1600); the latter
is generally taken to be Robert Allot. The first dramatic company
in which Armin can be traced is Lord Chandos’s men. In an epistle
to Mary, widow of William Lord Chandos (1594–1602) prefixed to his
kinsman Gilbert Dugdale’s _True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth
Caldwell_, &c. (1604), he says, ‘Your good honor knowes Pinck’s poor
heart, who in all my services to your late deceased kind lord, never
savoured of flatterie or fixion.’ In his _Foole upon Foole, or Six
Sortes of Sottes_ (1600) he tells an incident which took place at
Pershore in Worcestershire, during a tour of ‘the Lord Shandoyes
players’, at which he was himself present, not improbably playing the
clown ‘Grumball’.[932] By 1599, however, he had probably joined the
Chamberlain’s men, for in the first edition of _Foole upon Foole_ he
describes himself as ‘Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe’. In a later edition
of 1605 this becomes ‘Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe’. Both issues are
anonymous, but Armin put his name to an enlargement entitled _A Nest
of Ninnies_ (1608).[933] ‘Clunnyco de Curtanio Snuffe’ is also on the
title-page of _Quips upon Questions_ (1600), which must therefore be by
Armin and not by J. Singer, whose autograph Collier (_Bibl. Cat._ ii.
203) said that he found on a copy. This is a book of quatrains on stage
‘themes’ (cf. ch. xviii). It was written, as a reference to 28 December
as on a Friday shows, in 1599. The author serves a master at Hackney
(A ij). Later editions of 1601 and 1602 are said to have been in the
Harley collection, and there is a reprint by F. Ouvry (1875). His name
is in the 1603 licence for the King’s men and in the Coronation list
of 1604. In 1605 Augustine Phillips left him 20_s._ as his ‘fellow’.
Collier’s statement that in the same year he and Kempe (q.v.) were in
trouble for libelling aldermen cannot be verified. He is a King’s man
on the title-page of his _Two Maids of Moreclacke_ (1609), produced
by the King’s Revels, and on the title-page and in the S. R. entry on
6 February 1609 of his _Phantasma, the Italian Tailor and his Boy_.
This is a translation from Straparola and is dedicated to Lord and
Lady Haddington. In it he claims to have been ‘writ down an ass in his
time’ and refers to ‘his constableship’, from which it is inferred
that he played Dogberry in _Much Ado about Nothing_. Fleay, _L. of S._
300, finds a pun on ‘armine’ (= wretch) in _London Prodigal_ (_c._
1603), v. i. 179, and suggests that Armin played Matthew Flowerdale.
There is a clown Robin in _Miseries of Enforced Marriage_ (1607), and
a clown Grumball in _If it be not Good_ (1610–12), but this was a
play of Anne’s men. He is in the actor-list of Jonson’s _Alchemist_
(1610). An epigram on ‘honest gamesome Robert Armin’ is in John Davies
of Hereford’s _Scourge of Folly_ (S.R. 8 October 1610). He is not in
the actor-list of Jonson’s _Catiline_ (1611), nor has any later notice
of him been found. That Armin is the R. A. whose play _The Valiant
Welshman_ was published in 1615 is only a conjecture. He is in the
Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays. It is possible that a
woodcut on the title-page of the _Two Maids_ (q.v.) gives his portrait.
ARTHUR, THOMAS. Interluders, 1528.
ATTEWELL (OTTEWELL, OTWELL), GEORGE. Strange’s, 1591; Queen’s, (?)
1595. ‘M^r Otwell’ lived in St. Saviour’s Close in 1599. He is perhaps
more likely than the following to be the author or singer of ‘M^r
Attowel’s Jigge: betweene Francis, a Gentleman; Richard, a farmer; and
their wives’, printed in A. Clark, _Shirburn Ballads_, lxi (H. ii. 240;
B. 147).
ATTWELL (OTTEWELL), HUGH. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613;
Charles’s, 1616–21; _ob._ 25 September 1621.
AUGUSTEN (AGUSTEN), WILLIAM. A ‘player’, from whom Henslowe bought his
‘boy’ Bristow in 1597 (H. ii. 240).
AYNSWORTH, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried at St. Leonard’s 28 September 1581
(B. 153).
BAKER, HARRY. Performer of Vertumnus in _Summer’s Last Will and
Testament_, 1567.
BANASTER, GILBERT. Master of Chapel, 1478–83 (?).
BARFIELD, ROGER. Anne’s, 1606. His d. Isabell was baptized at St.
Giles’s on 2 January 1611, and his d. Susan buried there on 3 July 1614
(B. 157).
BARKER. _Vide_ ARKINSTALL.
BARKSTED (BACKSTEAD), WILLIAM. King’s Revels (?), 1607; Revels, 1609;
Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613; Charles’s, 1616; also a dramatist (cf.
ch. xxiii) and a poet. His _Poems_, edited by A. B. Grosart as Part II
of _Choice Rarities of Ancient English Poetry_ (1876), were _Myrrha_
(1607), which has commendatory verses by his kinsman Robert Glover
and I. W., Lewes Machin, and William Bagnall, and _Hiren_ (1611),
which has sonnets to Henry Earl of Oxford, and Elizabeth Countess of
Derby. On the title-page he describes himself as ‘one of the servants
of his Maiesties Revels’. The surmise of Fleay, i. 29, that this was
repeated from an earlier edition of _c._ 1607 now lost may receive some
confirmation from the connexion of Machin with the King’s Revels; but
it must also be remembered that the Whitefriars Revels’ company appears
to be occasionally described as the King’s Revels in provincial records
of _c._ 1611. A trivial anecdote of him is in J. Taylor, _Wit and
Mirth_ (1629).
BARNE, WILLIAM. Admiral’s, 1602.
BARRY, DAVID (LORD). Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.
BARTLE (?). Alexander Bartle, son of ‘---- a player’, was baptized at
St. Saviour’s on 27 February 1603 (B. 165).
BARTON, ONESIPHORUS. A ‘player’, buried at St. Giles’s on 9 March 1608
(B. 167).
BASSE, THOMAS. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613; Anne’s, 1617–19.
BAXTER, ROBERT. Chapel, 1601; Lady Elizabeth’s (?), 1613. Greg, _H. P._
58, 87, however, thinks that the ‘Baxter’ of 1613, whose Christian name
is not given, may be Barksted. Neither man is likely to have written
the ‘Baxsters tragedy’ of 1602 (_H. P._ 58).
BAYLYE, THOMAS. Shrewsbury’s (provincial), 1581. J. Hunter,
_Hallamshire_ 80, and Murray, ii. 388, print from _College of Arms,
Talbot MS._ G. f. 74, a Latin letter written by him to Thomas Bawdewin
from Sheffield on 25 April 1581, in which he mentions a brother
William, thanks him for a tragedy played by the company on St. George’s
day, and begs him to procure ‘librum aliquem brevem, novum, iucundum,
venustum, lepidum, hilarem, scurrosum, nebulosum, rabulosum, et
omnimodis camificiis, latrociniis et lenociniis refertum ... qua in re
dicunt quod Wilsonus quidam Leycestrii comitis servus (fidibus pollens)
multum vult et potest facere’.
BAYLYE. Paul’s chorister, >1582.
BEART, RUDOLF. Germany, 1608.
BEESTON, CHRISTOPHER, has been conjectured to be the ‘Kit’ who played
a Lord and a Captain in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ for Strange’s or the
Admiral’s about 1590–1. The actor-list of _Every Man in his Humour_
shows that he belonged to the Chamberlain’s men in 1598. He is not,
however, named as a performer of Shakespeare’s plays in the Folio of
1623. Probably he was at one time the hired man of Augustine Phillips
who left him 30_s._ as his ‘servant’ in 1605. By 1602 he had passed
to Worcester’s men, and with this company, afterwards Queen Anne’s,
he remained until it was reconstituted on the Queen’s death in 1619,
taking a prominent part in the management of the company, after the
death of Thomas Greene in 1612. He seems to have built or acquired the
Cockpit theatre, and to have successively housed there Queen Anne’s
men (1617–19), Prince Charles’s men (1619–22), Lady Elizabeth’s men
(1622–5), Queen Henrietta’s men (1625–37), and ‘the King’s and Queen’s
young company’, also known as ‘Beeston’s boys’ (1637). By 1639 he
had been succeeded as ‘Governor’ of this company by his son William
Beeston, and was doubtless dead. The Cockpit had passed by June 1639
to ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Beeston, alias Hutcheson’.[934] It appears from
the lawsuit of 1623, in which Queen Anne’s men were concerned, that
Christopher Beeston also bore the _alias_ of Hutcheson or Hutchinson.
But if Elizabeth was his widow, she must have been a second wife, for
the records of the Middlesex justices for 1615–17 record several true
bills for recusancy as brought against a wife Jane. In these records
Beeston, whose _alias_ is also given, is described as a gentleman or
yeoman, and as ‘late of St. James-at-Clerkenwell’, or in one case ‘of
Turmil streete’. In 1617 his house was burgled by Henry Baldwin and
others.[935] The registers of St. James’s, Clerkenwell, record the
baptism of a daughter Anne on 15 September 1611, and the burial of a
servant on 1 July 1615.[936] But at an earlier date Beeston lived in
St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, where his sons Augustine, Christopher, and
Robert were baptized, and the first two buried between 16 November 1604
and 15 July 1610. Robert also was buried there on 26 December 1615,
but Christopher was then described in the register as of Clerkenwell.
Possibly he afterwards returned to Shoreditch, as Collier states that
his name is traceable in the register up to 1637.[937] His son William,
also a suspected recusant, was living in Bishopsgate Without just
before his death in 1682.[938] An earlier William Beeston, with whom
Christopher may have had some connexion, is the ‘Maister Apis Lapis’
and ‘Gentle M. William’, to whom Nashe addressed his _Strange Newes_
(1592).[939]
BEESTON, ROBERT. Anne’s, 1604, 1609.
BEESTON. A player at Barnstaple in 1560–1 (Murray, ii. 198).
BELT, T. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.
BENFIELD, ROBERT, is first named in the actor-lists of Beaumont and
Fletcher’s _The Coxcomb_ and _The Honest Man’s Fortune_, both of which
probably represent performances by the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1613.
Subsequently he joined the King’s men, but at what date is uncertain.
It may have been upon the death on 16 December 1614 of William Ostler,
whom he succeeded in the part of Antonio in Webster’s _Duchess of
Malfi_. He is in the actor-list of _The Knight of Malta_ (1616–19) and
in the patent of 1619. He seems to have been a member of the company to
the end, as he signed the dedication of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio
in 1647. He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays.
Collier found some late records of his family (B. 181).
BENTLEY, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583. He is named by Heywood as before his
time, lauded by Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (1592) (_Works_, i. 215) with
Tarlton, Alleyn, and Knell, coupled with Knell in the undated challenge
to Alleyn (q.v.) to play one of their parts, and placed by Dekker in _A
Knight’s Conjuring_ (1607) in the company of the poets, Watson, Kyd,
and Achelow, ‘tho he had ben a player molded out of their pennes, yet
because he had been their louer and register to the muse, inimitable
Bentley’. He may be the John Bentley whose poems are mentioned by
Ritson, _Bibliographia Poetica_ (1802), 129.
BIERDT, BURCHARD. Germany, 1612.
BILLINGESLY, JOHN. Payee for Westminster boys, 1572.
BIRCH, GEORGE. Interluders, 1538–59.
BIRCH, JOHN. Interluders, 1547–56.
BIRD, _alias_ BORNE, WILLIAM. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s,
1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1622. Many personalia of
his family and debts are recorded in Dulwich manuscripts and church
registers (H. ii. 241; B. 204).
‘BLACK DICK.’ Admiral’s, 1597.
BLACKWOOD, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1602–3; Germany, 1603–6(?). The
conjecture of Fleay, i. 290, that an earlier German tour is referred to
in _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_ (1602) is baseless (H. ii.
244).
BLANEY, JOHN. Revels, 1609; Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived near the Red Bull
in St. John’s Street in 1623 (J. 347).
BLANK, WILLIAM ALEXANDER. A Scottish dancer in Germany, 1605.
BOONE, WILLIAM. A ‘player’ mentioned in books of St. Saviour’s, _c._
1600 (Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi). Possibly an error for Borne.
BORNE, WILLIAM. _Vide_ Birde.
BOWER, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1545–61, and possibly author of
_Apius and Virginia_ (1575); cf. ch. xxiv.
BOWRINGE, GREGORY. Paul’s chorister, >1582.
BRADSHAW, RICHARD. Edward, Lord Dudley’s (provincial), 1595. He
was Gabriel Spencer’s ‘man’ in 1598, and concerned in financial
transactions with Henslowe during 1598–1601. He may be the same Richard
Bradshaw who had a provincial company, with a licence to which his
title was dubious, in 1630–33 (H. ii. 245; Murray, ii. 42, 106, 163).
BRADSTREET, JOHN. Germany, 1592–7, 1604. He _ob._ in 1618.
BRETTEN, WILLIAM. Chapel, >1546.
BRISTOW, JAMES. Augusten’s boy, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602 (H. ii. 245).
BROMEHAM. Paul’s, >1582.
BROWNE, EDWARD. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s, 1602. He was a witness
for Henslowe in 1599 (H. ii. 246).
BROWNE, JOHN. Interluders, 1551–63.
BROWNE, JOHN. Revels (?), 1608.
BROWNE, ROBERT. Worcester’s, 1583; Holland, 1590; Germany, 1592–3, 1594
(?)-9; Derby’s, 1599–1601; Germany, 1601–7; Revels patentee, 1610;
Germany, 1618–20. His wife and family died at Shoreditch in the plague
of 1593, but a son Robert and daughter Elizabeth were baptized at St.
Saviour’s on 19 October 1595 and 2 December 1599. On 11 April 1612 he
wrote to Alleyn from Clerkenwell (_H. P._, 37, 63; B. 229; Rendle,
_Bankside_, xxvi).
BROWNE, WILLIAM. Anne’s, _c._ 1616.
BROWNE. It is not safe to identify the Browne whom Henslowe paid to
‘feach’ for the Admiral’s in 1596 (H. i. 45), or the ‘old Browne’
who, as well as Edward, played in _1 Tamar Cham_ for the Admiral’s in
1602 (_H. P._ 148), or ‘Browne of the Boares head’ who, according to
Alleyn’s wife on 21 Oct. 1603, ‘is dead & dyed very pore, he went not
into the countrye at all’ (_H. P._ 59). The last may be the man whose
widow married Thomas Greene (q.v.).
BRYAN, GEORGE, was one of the English company which visited Helsingör
in Denmark and Dresden in Germany during 1586–7. He is one of the three
actors distinguished as ‘Mr.’ in the plot of Tarlton’s _The Seven
Deadly Sins_ as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, and
is named in the Privy Council warrant for the travelling of Strange’s
in 1593. He was payee for the Chamberlain’s men on 21 December 1596,
but is not in the _Every Man in his Humour_ actor-list of 1598 or
traceable at any later date amongst the Chamberlain’s or King’s men.
Probably he left to take up duty as an ordinary Groom of the Chamber,
as he is found holding this post at Elizabeth’s funeral in 1603 and
still held it (_Chamber Accounts_) in 1611–13. His son George was
baptized at St. Andrew’s Wardrobe on 17 February 1600.[940] He is in
the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays.
BUCKE, PAUL. A ‘player’ whose d. Sara was buried on 23 July 1580 and
his bastard son Paul buried on 23 July 1599 at St. Anne’s (B. 237). It
is apparently his name which, for whatever reason, appears at the end
of Wilson’s _Three Ladies of London_ (1584). ‘Paule Bucke’s praier for
Sir Humfrey Gilberte’ was entered in S. R. on 17 July 1578.
BUGBY, JOHN. Grammar Master of Chapel, 1401.
BULL, JOHN. Chapel, 1572 (?)->1586.
BULL, THOMAS. Denmark, 1579–80.
BURBADGE, JAMES. The Shakespearo-centric tendencies of literary
historians have led them to suggest a regional connexion between the
dramatist and the family of his most famous interpreter.[941] There
was a Warwickshire family of Burbadge, of whom John was bailiff of
Stratford-on-Avon in 1555, and Malone was thus led (_Var._ iii. 187)
to ‘suspect’ that James Burbadge was Shakespeare’s countryman. Collier
(iii. 258) having learnt that the arms claimed by Cuthbert Burbadge at
the London visitation of 1634, ‘crest, a boar’s head; and three boars’
heads on a shield’ (_Harleian Soc._ xv), were those of a Hertfordshire
family, attempted the explanation that the two families ‘were in some
way related’. He committed himself deeply by publishing in 1835 (_New
Facts_, 32; cf. Ingleby, 256) a forged letter from H. S. to Sir Thomas
Egerton, containing the statement that Shakespeare and Richard Burbadge
are ‘both of one countie, and indeede almost of one towne’. Burbadges
are traceable in various parts of England, including Somerset,
Oxfordshire, and Durham (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 344; Stopes, 134,
243), and the conjecture has about as much value as Malone’s derivation
of the name (_Var._ iii. 182) from ‘Borough-bridge’, or Chalmers’s
from ‘Boar’s badge’. Nor is any connexion known between James Burbadge
and various other Burbadges--Robert, John, and Edward--who appear in
contemporary documents (Collier, iii. 282; Stopes, 152), although A.
Wood (_Fasti Oxon._ i. 303) makes himself responsible for the statement
that one John Burbadge, of Lincoln College, was nearly related to the
actor. The name is indifferently spelt Burbadge, Burbage, or Burbege by
contemporaries, but usually Burbadge in family signatures (Wallace, 61,
63 ‘James Burbage’, 252; Collier, iii. 294; _Malone Soc. Coll._ ii. 69,
76). James sealed the Blackfriars indentures of 1596 with a griffin.
James was about sixty on 16 February 1591 (Wallace, 61) and was
therefore born in 1530–1. He was ‘by occupacion a joyner and reaping
but a small lyving by the same, gave it over and became a commen
player in playes’ (Wallace, 141). He was one of Leicester’s men in
1572, 1574, and 1576, and apparently continued a ‘fellow’ of this or
some other company for a year or two after he established the Theatre
in 1576 (Wallace, 142). In this year he was a poor man, and of small
credit, not worth above 100 marks (Wallace, 134, 141, 153), but he had
enlisted the capital of John Brayne, whose sister Ellen he had married
(Wallace, 40, 139). His business history thereafter is bound up with
that of the Theatre (q.v.) and of the Blackfriars, which he planned,
but probably never used, during the last years of his life. Cuthbert
Burbadge says of him (_Blackfriars Sharers Papers_, 1635) that he ‘was
the first builder of playhowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres
a player’. He was described as ‘joyner’ in the lease of the Theatre
site in 1576, but in later years usually as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’.
Presumably he went to live in Shoreditch in 1576, as entries for his
family then begin in the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139). They
testify to the baptism (17 March 1576) of a daughter Alice, mentioned
as Alice Walker in the will of Nicholas Tooley (q.v.) in 1623, and the
burial (18 August 1582) of a daughter Joan. Another daughter, Helen,
was buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 15 December 1595 (_Bodl._).
Besides Alice and Helen he had in 1588 (Wallace, 39) two sons, Cuthbert
and Richard, who would both have been born before 1576. James himself
was buried at Shoreditch on 2 February 1597 and his widow on 8 May
1613. The registers generally give the family residence as ‘Halliwell
Street’, and the ‘Halliwell’ which appears in 1597 and 1601 is perhaps
an accidental variant. But the lawsuits suggest that James had built
himself a house in the old inner cloister yard of the priory, which lay
a little north of Halliwell Street, if that is the same as Holywell
Lane (Wallace, 232, 236). They also represent him as a man of violent
temper and not over-honest, while an independent record (App. D, No.
lxxiv) refers to him as ‘a stubburne fellow’. Before his death he seems
to have made over his interest in the Blackfriars to his son Richard,
while that in the Theatre had passed by redemption of a mortgage to
Cuthbert (Wallace, 55, 73, 108, 145, 278).
Cuthbert Burbadge, the elder son of James, was not an actor, although
as holder of the leases of the Theatre and afterwards of the Globe
(q.v.) he was concerned during the greater part of his life with
theatrical management. On 16 February 1591 he was servant to Walter
Cope, gentleman usher to Lord Burghley. He was then twenty-four, and
must have been born in 1566–7. He was then probably living in the
Strand (Stopes, 152), but the subsidy rolls for 1597 (Stopes, 195)
show him as assessed at 10_s._ 8_d._ in Holywell Street, and the
registers of St. Leonard’s have the records of his children, Walter
(bapt. 22 June 1595), James (bur. 15 July 1597), and Elizabeth (bapt.
30 December 1601). Of these only Elizabeth, the wife first of Amias
Maxey and secondly of George Bingley, was alive in 1634 and her son
Amias had been adopted by his grandfather. Cuthbert himself was buried
at Shoreditch on 17 September 1636, and his widow Elizabeth, daughter
of John Cox, on 1 October 1636 (Stopes, 134, 140). His friendship with
members of the King’s company is commemorated by notices in the wills
of William Sly (1608), Richard Cowley (1618), and Nicholas Tooley,
who died in his house in 1623. Collier (iii. 285) identified him with
Cuthbert Burby the stationer, but Burby was in fact the son of Edmund
Burby of Beds., husbandman (Arber, ii. 127). Possibly, however, the
families were related, since Burby’s name is given at least once in the
Stationers’ Register (Arber, ii. 612) as ‘Burbidge’.
BURBADGE, RICHARD, makes his first appearance, picturesquely enough,
in the brawl at the Theatre which followed upon the Chancery Order
of 13 November 1590, restoring a moiety of the profits of the house
to the widow Brayne (cf. p. 392). John Alleyn deposed (Wallace, 101)
that he ‘found the foresaid Ry. Burbage the yongest sone of the said
James Burbage there, w^t a broome staff in his hand, of whom when
this deponente asked what sturre was there, he answered in laughing
phrase hew they come for a moytie. But quod he (holding vppe the said
broomes staff) I haue, I think, deliuered him a moytie with this &
sent them packing.’ Nicholas Bishop (Wallace, 98, 115), one of Mrs.
Brayne’s agents, adds the confirmatory detail that ‘the said Ry.
Burbage scornfully & disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose,
sayd, that yf he delt in the matter, he wold beate him also, and did
chalendge the field of him at that tyme’. Very possibly Richard was
then playing with the Admiral’s men at the Theatre. His exact age
is unknown, but he was younger than Cuthbert, born in 1566–7, and
as Cuthbert, long after, spoke of the ‘35 yeeres paines, cost, and
labour’ out of which his brother ‘made meanes to leave his wife and
children some estate’ in 1619 (_Sharers Papers_), it may perhaps be
inferred that his histrionic career began as early as 1584. The ‘plot’
of _The Dead Man’s Fortune_, wherein the doubtful direction (cf. p.
125) ‘Burbage a messenger’ suggests that he played a minor part, may
belong to a performance by the Admiral’s _c._ 1590. It is a little
more difficult to suppose that at a date when the Queen’s men were
still active the Admiral’s or Strange’s had already acquired Tarlton’s
_Seven Deadly Sins_, in the ‘plot’ of which ‘R. Burbadg’ is cast for
the important characters of Gorboduc and Terens. But perhaps it is even
less probable that, after the breach of the Admiral’s with his father
in 1591, he took part in the performances of the same play by the
amalgamated Admiral’s and Strange’s men at the Rose in 1592. His name
does not appear amongst those of the Strange’s men who were travelling
in 1593. But when the amalgamation broke up, and the Chamberlain’s
company was formed, with some of its elements as a nucleus, in 1594,
he joined that company, and became a prominent member, often acting as
its representative or payee, both before and after its metamorphosis
into the King’s men, and to the end of his own life. His name is
constant in its lists (cf. ch. xiii), and his personal relations with
his fellows are reflected in the wills of Augustine Phillips in 1605,
Shakespeare in 1616, and Nicholas Tooley, whose ‘master’ he had been,
in 1623. It would appear that in the somewhat irregular disposition of
James Burbadge’s theatrical interests the Blackfriars freehold fell
primarily to Richard. The leases of 1608 were made by him as lessor
to his brother and other members of the King’s men’s syndicate as
lessees. This, however, was doubtless a mere family arrangement, for
Cuthbert spoke of the Blackfriars in 1635 as ‘our inheritance’, and the
two brothers shared in the supplementary transactions which rounded
off the original purchase (cf. ch. xvii). At the Globe, on the other
hand, Cuthbert and Richard held in common a moiety of the housekeepers’
interest under the lease from Nicholas Brend (cf. ch. xvi). They
continued to live as close neighbours in Halliwell Street, Shoreditch,
where they shared the misfortune of having their houses burgled in
1615 (Jeaffreson, ii. 108) and where the registers of St. Leonard’s
(Stopes, 139) record Richard’s children: Richard (bur. 16 August
1607), Julia or Juliet (bapt. 2 January 1603, bur. 12 September 1608),
Frances (bapt. 16 September and bur. 19 September 1604), Anne (bapt. 8
August 1607), Winifred (bapt. 10 October 1613, bur. 14 October 1616),
a second Julia (bapt. 26 December 1614, bur. 15 August 1615), William
(bapt. 6 November 1616), and a posthumous Sara (bapt. 5 August 1619,
bur. 29 April 1625). ‘Richard Burbadge, player’ was himself buried on
16 March 1619. He had died, not as Camden records in his _Annals_ on 9
March, but on 13 March, after making the day before a nuncupative will
(Collier, iii. 293), witnessed by his brother and by Nicholas Tooley
and Richard Robinson of the King’s men, in which he left his wife
Winifred sole executrix. She subsequently married Richard Robinson,
and was still alive, as was Burbadge’s son William, in 1635 (_Sharers
Papers_). According to the gossip of the day he left ‘better than £300
land to his heirs’ (Collier, iii. 297).
Burbadge had a high reputation as a player, both in life and after
death. A note of 13 March 1602 by John Manningham (_Diary_, 39)
records how his impersonation of Richard III touched the heart of
a citizen’s wife, and how Shakespeare prevented him at a resultant
assignation. John Davies of Hereford coupled him with Shakespeare
in 1603 (_Microcosmos_) among players whom he loved ‘for painting,
poesie’, and in 1609 (_Civile Warres of Death and Fortune_) amongst
those whom Fortune ‘guerdond not, to their desarts’. He is introduced
_in propria persona_ into _2 Return from Parnassus_ (1602) and into
Marston’s induction to _The Malcontent_ (1604). Probably he is the
‘one man’ of the London stage with whom the player in _Ratseis Ghost_
(1605; cf. ch. xviii) is advised ‘to play Hamlet for a wager’. Jonson,
in _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), v. iii, makes Cokes ask the master of
the puppets, ‘which is your _Burbage_ now?... your best _Actor_. Your
_Field_?’ He was apparently the model for the _Character of an Actor_
in the _Characters_ of 1615 (App. C, No. lxi). And other evidences of
his fame can be traced down to Restoration days in Richard Corbet’s
_Iter Boreale_, in Sir Richard Baker’s _Chronicle_ and _Theatrum
Redivivum_, and in Richard Flecknoe’s _Short Discourse of the English
Stage_ and his _Euterpe Restored_ (cf. Collier, iii. 279; Stopes, 121;
_Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse_, N.S.S., 128, 250).
Shortly after Burbadge’s death, on 20 May 1619, the Earl of Pembroke
wrote to Lord Doncaster in Germany of a great supper given the same
night by the Duke of Lennox to the French ambassador, and adds that the
company were now at the play, ‘which I being tender-harted could not
endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg’
(E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ (1882), i. 103). Several epitaphs and
elegies upon Burbadge are preserved. The shortest--‘Exit Burbadge’--was
printed in Camden’s _Remaines_ (1674), 541. Another is by Middleton
(Collier, iii. 280, 296). A third, which begins
Some skillfull limner helpe mee, yf not soe,
Some sad tragedian, to expresse my woe,
has been the subject of much controversy (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii.
88; C. M. Ingleby, _The Elegy on Burbadge_, in _Shakespeare, the Man
and the Book_, ii. 169). It exists in two versions, one of 86 lines,
the other of 124 lines. Of the shorter version several undoubtedly
genuine manuscripts are known, and it is probably only by accident that
one of these omits ll. 2–5 of the following passage, which is given
completely by all the rest:
Hee’s gone & with him what a world are dead,
Which he reuiud, to be reuiued soe.
No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe.
Kind Leer, the greued Moore, and more beside,
That liued in him, haue now for ever dy’de.
Oft haue I seene him leap into the graue,
Suiting the person which he seem’d to haue
Of a sadd louer with soe true an eye,
That theer I would haue sworne, he meant to dye.
Oft haue I seene him play this part in ieast,
Soe liuely, that spectators, and the rest
Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed,
Amazed, thought euen then hee dyed in deed.
In the longer version ll. 2–5 are not only omitted, but are replaced by
an interpolation of many lines, detailing a number of parts, some of
which belonged to other companies than the King’s, and are not likely
to have been played by Burbadge. No manuscript of this version is
forthcoming, and there can be little doubt that the interpolation is
due to Collier, who referred to the version in his _New Particulars_
(1836), 27, and published it in his _Memoirs of the Actors_ (1846),
52, professedly from a manuscript in the possession of Richard Heber.
Of the shorter version I can add to what has been recorded by others
that in _Stowe MS._ 962, f. 62^v, I have found a copy of it, with the
title ‘An Elegie on the death of the famous actor Rich: Burbage, who
died 13 Martij A^o. 1618’, and an ascription to ‘Jo ffletcher’. Other
copies also give the date of Burbadge’s death, or refer, as do the
opening lines themselves, to the fact that he was skilled not only as
an actor but as a limner. John Davies testifies to this in the verses
of 1603 already cited. The accounts of the Earl of Rutland for the
birthday tilt of 1613 contain the entry, ‘31 Martij, To M^r. Shakspeare
in gold, about my Lordes impreso, 44^s. To Richard Burbage for paynting
and makyng yt, in gold, 44^s’; and those for the tilt of 1616, ‘25
Martij, 1616, paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lordes shelde and for
the embleance, 4^{li} 18^s’ (_H. M. C. Rutland MSS._ iv. 494, 508). The
gallery at Dulwich contains a picture presented by William Cartwright,
which is described in his catalogue as ‘a womans head on a boord done
by M^r. Burbige y^e actor’. The inveterate tendency of mankind to
guess has led to suggestions that he may have painted the portrait of
himself in the same gallery, the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, or
the original of the Droeshout print.
One other record of Burbadge, apart from his company, may be noted. On
31 May 1610 he was employed by the City, with his fellow James Rice,
to deliver a speech to Prince Henry at a water-pageant on the Thames
(cf. ch. iv). Presumably he represented Amphion, ‘a grave and judicious
Prophet-like personage’, and Rice Corinea.
BURGES, ROBERT. A ‘player’ buried at St. Bennet’s, Gracechurch, 14
April 1559 (B. 251).
CANDLER, JAMES. Leader of a company at Ipswich, 1569–70 (_Hist. MSS._
ix. 1. 248).
CARIE (GARY), GILES. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613.
CARLETON, NICHOLAS. Paul’s, >1582.
CARPENTER, WILLIAM. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611; Charles’s, 1619, 1625. He
was apparently porter at the Marshalsea in 1623 (J. 347).
CARTWRIGHT, WILLIAM. Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1598–1622 (H. ii. 247). He
lived at the upper end of White Cross Street in 1623 (J. 347).
CASTLE, THOMAS. A ‘player’, whose son Nicholas and daughter Hester were
baptized at St. Giles’s on 9 October 1608 and 15 April 1610 (B. 262).
CATTANES. Worcester’s, 1602 (H. ii. 248).
CAVALLERIZZO, CLAUDIO. Italians, 1576 (?).
CHAPPELL, JOHN. Chapel, 1600–1.
CHESSON, THOMAS. Oxford’s (?), 1580.
CLARK, SILL. Prince’s, 1603< >1641.
CLARKE, ROBERT. A ‘player’ whose son Ezekiel was buried at St. Giles’s,
7 November 1617 (B. 268).
CLARKE, THOMAS. Leicester’s, 1572.
CLAY, NATHANIEL. Anne’s, 1618; Chamber of Bristol, 1618.
CLEMENT, WILLIAM. London player, 1550 (App. D, No. v).
CLIFTON, THOMAS. Kidnapped for Chapel, 1600.
COBORNE, EDWARD. A ‘player’ whose son John was baptized at St. Giles’s
on 23 Nov. 1616. Of other family entries, 1613–25, some are for Edward
Coborne ‘gentleman’ (_Bodl._). He may be identical with COLBRAND.
COKE, RICHARD. Interluders, 1547–56.
COLBRAND, EDWARD. Palsgrave’s, 1610–13.
COLE. Paul’s, 1599.
COLMAN, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1509.
CONDELL, HENRY, has been conjectured to be the ‘Harry’ cast for Ferrex
and a Lord in the ‘plot’ of _The Seven Deadly Sins_, as played by
Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1. The first definite notice of
him is in the cast of Jonson’s _Every Man in his Humour_, as played
by the Chamberlain’s men in 1598. Thereafter he appears in all formal
lists of the Chamberlain’s and King’s men, up to the Caroline patent
of 1625, including the list in the First Folio of 1623, of which,
with Heminges, he acted as editor. He is also in all the casts up to
_The Humourous Lieutenant_ (_c._ 1619). About this date he presumably
ceased to play; his part of the Cardinal in _The Duchess of Malfi_ had
passed to Richard Robinson by 1623. The fact that he took this part
somewhat discredits the conjecture of John Roberts (_Answer to Pope_,
1729) that he was a comedian; nor can the statement of the same writer
that he was a printer be verified. He is staged with other members of
the company in Marston’s _Malcontent_ (1604), and appears as ‘Henry
Condye’ in the verses on the burning of the Globe in 1613. He is
assigned 26_s._ 8_d._ to buy a ring as Shakespeare’s ‘fellowe’ in his
will of 1616, and appears also as a legatee in the will of Augustine
Phillips in 1605, as trustee in that of Alexander Cooke in 1614, as
executor and joint residuary legatee in that of Nicholas Tooley in
1623, under which also his wife and his daughter Elizabeth receive
legacies, and as executor in that of John Underwood in 1625. By 1599 he
was married and apparently settled in St. Mary Aldermanbury, where he
held various parochial offices during 1606–21, and the register records
his children: Elizabeth (bapt. 27 February 1599, bur. 11 April 1599),
Anne (bapt. 4 April 1601, bur. 16 July 1610), Richard (bapt. 18 April
1602), Elizabeth (bapt. 14 April 1603, bur. 22 April 1603), Elizabeth
(bapt. 26 October 1606), Mary (bapt. 30 January 1608, bur. from Hoxton
at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, 24 March 1608), Henry (bapt. 6 May 1610,
bur. 4 March 1630), William (bapt. 26 May 1611), Edward (bapt. 22
August 1614, bur. 23 August 1614).[942] Subsequently he had a ‘country
house’ at Fulham, at which on 10 September 1625 a pamphlet written
by certain players on their travels during the plague, as a reply to
Dekker’s _A Rod for Run-awayes_, under the title of _The Run-awayes
Answer_, was addressed to him, with an expression of gratitude for a
‘free and noble farewell’ which he had given the writers. At Fulham,
too, on 13 December 1627, he made his will, leaving to his widow
Elizabeth, his sons Henry and William, and his daughter Elizabeth,
wife of Herbert Finch, much household property at Aldermanbury and
elsewhere in London, including ‘rents and profits’ by ‘leases and
terms of years’ of ‘messuages houses and places’ in Blackfriars and on
the Bankside, which were to pass for a time to William and ultimately
to the widow.[943] Condell had not been an original sharer in the
house of the Globe, but by 1612 had acquired an interest jointly with
Heminges; of the Blackfriars house he was an original sharer in 1608.
_The Sharers Papers_ of 1635 indicate that Mrs. Condell had held
four-sixteenths of the Globe and one-eighth of the Blackfriars, but
had transferred two-sixteenths of the Globe when Taylor and Lowin were
admitted as sharers. A minor legacy in Condell’s will is to his old
servant, Elizabeth Wheaton, of her ‘place or priviledge’ in the Globe
and Blackfriars. Heminges and Cuthbert Burbadge are named as overseers.
Condell was buried on 29 December 1627, and his widow on 3 October
1635, both at St. Mary Aldermanbury.[944]
COOKE, ALEXANDER, has been conjectured to be the ‘Sander’ who is cast
in the ‘plot’ of _The Seven Deadly Sins_ as played by Strange’s or the
Admiral’s about 1590–1, for the parts of Videna in _Envy_ and Progne
in _Lechery_. But, as far as this goes, he might just as well be the
‘San.’ who took the part of a player in _Taming of a Shrew_ (1594),
ind. 1, which was a Pembroke’s play. Malone ‘presumes’, with some
rashness, that he performed ‘all the principal female characters’ in
Shakespeare’s plays.[945] It must be doubtful whether he was on the
stage as early as 1592. He is traceable as a member of the King’s
men in the casts of _Sejanus_ (1603), _Volpone_ (1605), _Alchemist_
(1610), _Catiline_ (1611), and _The Captain_ (1612–13). The fact that
in the first two of these his name occurs at the end of the lists has
been somewhat hazardously accepted as an indication that he played
women’s parts. He is also in the First Folio list of performers in
Shakespeare’s plays. Augustine Phillips left him a legacy as his
‘fellow’ in 1605.
‘Mr. Cooke and his wife’ commend themselves to Alleyn in his wife’s
letter of 21 October 1603.[946] The token-books of St. Saviour’s,
Southwark, show an Alexander Cooke in Hill’s Rents during 1604, 1607,
1609, and 1610; and the parish register, recording the baptism of
Francis Cooke, son of Alexander, ‘a player’, on 27 October 1605, makes
an identification possible. There were three more children, Rebecca
(bapt. 11 October 1607), Alice (bapt. 3 November 1611), Alexander
(bapt. 20 March 1614). This last was posthumous; the register records
Alexander Cooke’s burial on 25 February 1614.[947] His will, dated
3 January 1614, leaves £50 each to Francis, Rebecca, and the unborn
child, and the residue to his wife.[948] He owned £50 ‘which is in the
hand of my fellowes, as my share of the stock’. He appoints ‘my master
Hemings’, to whom he had presumably been apprenticed, and Condell
trustees for his children, and mentions brothers Ellis and John, of
whom the latter is conjectured by Collier to be the author of Greene’s
_Tu Quoque_.
COOKE, EDWARD. Chapel, 1509.
COOKE, LIONEL. Queen’s, 1583, 1588.
COOKE, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1583.
COOKE, WILLIAM. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.
CORNISH, JOHN. Gentleman of Chapel, and pageant-master at wedding of
Arthur in 1501.
CORNISH, KIT. A ‘ghost-name’ in Chapel records.
CORNISH, WILLIAM. Master of Song School, Westminster, 1479–80.
CORNISH, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1509–23. Conceivably identical with
the last, and in any case probably of the same family.
COWLEY, RICHARD, was of Strange’s men in 1593. He had played minor
parts with that company or the Admiral’s in _The Seven Deadly Sins_
of 1590–1, and is mentioned in Alleyn’s correspondence as travelling
with the company. He joined the Chamberlain’s men, probably on
their formation in 1594, and was payee for the company in 1601. The
stage-directions to the Quarto (1600) and Folio texts of _Much Ado
about Nothing_, IV. ii, show that he played Verges. He is in the
1603 and 1604 lists of the King’s men, and received a legacy from
Augustine Phillips as his ‘fellow’ in 1605, but does not appear to
have been a sharer in the houses of the Globe or Blackfriars. He is
in the Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. He dwelt in
Holywell, or for a short period in Alleyn’s Rents, both in the parish
of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, whose register records his children,
Robert (bapt. 8 March 1596, bur. (?) 20 March 1597), Cuthbert (bapt.
8 May 1597), Richard (bapt. 29 April 1598, bur. 26 February 1603),
Elizabeth (bapt. 2 February 1602), as well as the funeral of his wife
Elizabeth on 28 September 1616, and his own on 12 March 1619.[949] His
will, dated on 13 January 1618, appoints his daughter Elizabeth Birch
executrix and is witnessed by Heminges, Cuthbert Burbadge, Shank, and
Thomas Ravenscroft, perhaps the madrigalist.[950]
CRANE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).
CRANE, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1523–45.
CROSSE, SAMUEL, is named amongst the performers of Shakespeare’s plays
in the First Folio, but in no list of the Chamberlain’s or King’s men.
Probably, therefore, he belongs to the very beginning of Shakespeare’s
career, and is to be identified with the Crosse named by Heywood
amongst famous actors of a generation before his time.[951]
CUMBER, JOHN. Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived in Aldermanbury in 1623, and
died in that year (J. 347; Fleay, 279).
CURTEYS, JAMES. Chapel, 1509.
CUTLER, JAMES. Chapel, > 1605.
DABORNE, ROBERT. Revels patentee, 1610, and dramatist.
DANIEL, JOHN. Chamber of Bristol patentee, 1615–17.
DANIEL, SAMUEL. Allower of Revels’ plays, 1604, and dramatist.
DARLOWE. Admiral’s, >1590.
DAVIES, HUGH. Admiral’s (?), 1601 (H. ii. 255).
DAWES, ROBERT. Duke of York’s, 1610; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614.
DAY, JOHN. Admiral’s (?), _c._ 1600. John, son of John Day, ‘player’,
was baptized at St. Saviour’s, 3 June 1604 (B. 308; cf. ch. xxiii).
DAY, THOMAS. Chapel, 1601, 1602.
DOB. Admiral’s, 1598–1601.
DOWNTON (DOWTON, DOUTON (?), DOWTEN, DOWGHTON, DENYGTEN, DOUBTON),
THOMAS. Strange’s, 1593; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–_c._
1618. The St. Saviour’s registers record various family events,
including the baptism of Christopher, son of Thomas Dowton ‘musycyon’
on 27 December 1592 and that of Thomas Dowton ‘baseborne, the supposed
son of Thomas Dowton, a player’, 25 May 1600. He apparently married a
vintner’s widow on 15 February 1618, became a vintner, and was still
alive on 18 August 1622 (B. 316; H. ii. 262, 265). Dr. Greg regards him
as one of the Dutton family.
DRAKE, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
DRAYTON, MICHAEL. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.
DREWE, BARTHOLOMEW. A ‘player’, whose son George was baptized at St.
Saviour’s on 12 November 1614 (B. 314).
DREWE, THOMAS. Anne’s, 1616–19.
DROM, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1601.
DRUSIANO. _Vide_ MARTINELLI.
DUKE, JOHN. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Chamberlain’s, 1598;
Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–9. Four children were baptized at St.
Leonard’s, where he lived in Holywell Street, from July 1604 to January
1609 (H. ii. 265; Collier, _Actors_, xxxi).
DULANDT (DOWLAND?), ROBERT. Musician in Germany, 1623.
DUTTON, EDWARD. Admiral’s, 1597, with a boy ‘Dick’. Children of his
were baptized at St. Saviour’s during 1600–2 (B. 326).
DUTTON, JOHN. Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1583,
1588–91. Lincoln’s Inn paid him for musicians in 1567–8 (Walker, i.
362). There are family records of a John Dutton at St. Botolph’s, who
is called ‘player’ in the entry of a daughter Elizabeth’s baptism of 3
July 1586 (B. 328).
DUTTON, LAURENCE. Lane’s, 1571–2; Clinton’s, 1572–5; Warwick’s, 1575–6;
Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1589–91. It is curious that a John and a
Laurence Dutton also appear as Court Messengers. I find a payment on
23 May 1578 to John for carrying letters to Antwerp (_Pipe Office,
Chamber Declared Account_ 541, m. 211^v), and Laurence was paid for
‘sondry jorneys’ in 1561–2 (ibid. m. 39) and was during 1576–82 one
of the regular Messengers of the Chamber in attendance on the Privy
Council (Dasent, ix. 223, x. 223, 228, xi. 437, xii. 23, xiii. 135,
392, etc.). The ‘Edward’ Dutton of the last entry may be an error. In
1592 the Council (xxii. 493) recommended John the son of Laurence who
had ‘of long tyme served her Majestie’ as Messenger, for admission as
a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster. But this Laurence can hardly have
been the actor, for he was acting as Messenger on 20 May 1580, while
the affray for which Laurence the actor had been committed to the
Marshalsea on 13 April was still uninquired into. Somewhat earlier a
Thomas Dutton was employed as a post between Edward VI’s Council and
Thomas Gresham in Antwerp, and was Gresham’s agent in Hamburg, c. 1571
(Burgon, _Gresham_, i. 109; ii. 421). It is easier again to conjecture
than to prove a connexion between the actors and the house of Dutton,
which had a hereditary jurisdiction over minstrelsy in Cheshire (cf.
ch. ix), although in this the names John and Laurence both appear. It
is perhaps an accident that two of the recorded visits of the Queen’s
men to Lord Derby’s northern seats in 1588–90 synchronize with visits
by a Mr. Dutton (Murray, ii. 296).
ECCLESTONE, WILLIAM, appears as a King’s man in the casts of _The
Alchemist_ (1610) and _Catiline_ (1611). Mr. Fleay’s statement that
he joined the company from the Queen’s Revels in 1609 rests upon a
confusion with Field.[952] In 1611 he became a member of the Lady
Elizabeth’s men, but left them in 1613 after playing in _The Honest
Man’s Fortune_ during that year. He returned to the King’s, and his
name is found in the official lists of the company for 1619 and 1621
and in most of the casts of their plays, from _Bonduca_ in 1613–14 to
_The Spanish Curate_ in 1622, as well as in the First Folio list of
performers in Shakespeare’s plays. Nicholas Tooley forgave him a debt
in his will of 3 June 1623. As he is not in the Caroline patent of
1625, he had probably died or retired by that date. He may be the W.
E. who writes commendatory verses to _The Wild-goose Chase_ in 1652.
If he is also the ‘William Eglestone’ whose marriage to Anne Jacob is
recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 20 February
1603, he lived to be an old man.[953]
EDMONDS, JOHN. Globe lessee, 1612; Chamber of Bristol, 1618–19. The
St. Saviour’s registers record the marriage of a John Edmonds to
Margaret Goodyere on 22 February 1600 and the baptism of children of
John Edmonds, ‘player’, from 6 January 1605 to 17 July 1615 (B. 334).
Probably the two are not identical and the player is the John Edmans
who seems to have married his fellow-legatee, Mary Clarke, of the will
of Thomas Pope (q.v.) in 1604.
EDWARDES, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1561–6, and dramatist.
EICHELIN. Germany, 1604.
ELDERTON, WILLIAM. One Elderton, dressed as a fool, played the part of
one of the Lord of Misrule’s sons in George Ferrers’s Christmas revel
of 1552–3 (Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 120; cf. _Mediaeval Stage_,
i. 407). Conjecture may identify him with the Elderton who brought
the Eton boys to Court on 6 January 1573 and the William Elderton who
brought the Westminster boys on 1 January 1574, and with the rhyming
William Elderton, some of whose ballads are preserved and reprinted in
Collier, _Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies_ (1842, _Percy Soc._),
25, 45; H. Huth, _Ancient Ballads and Broadsides_ (1867, _Philobiblon
Soc._); and H. L. Collman, _Ballads and Broadsides_ (1912, _Roxburghe
Club_); or recorded, with ballads against him, in the Stationers’
Register (Arber, i. 179, 180, 181, 199, 384, 403, 439; ii. 338, 363,
369, 388, 396, 399; cf. v. lxxvi), while his ‘ale-crammed nose’ and
‘rymes lying a steepe in ale’ are subject for much humour among the
pamphleteers (Lyly, iii. 398; Nashe, i. 197, 256, 280; iii. 123, 133,
177, 354). Stowe (_Survey_, i. 272) makes him an attorney in the
sheriff’s courts at the Guildhall about 1568, but he can hardly be the
‘master Elderton’ who sat as a justice at the Guildhall in a coining
case of 1562 (Machyn, 290). He appears to have been dead by 1592
(Harvey, i. 163; Nashe, i. 280). A recent paper on Elderton by H. E.
Rollins is in _S. P._ xvii (1920), 199.
ENGLISH, JOHN. Interluders, 1494–1531.
EVANS, HENRY. Blackfriars lessee, 1583, 1600–8; payee for Oxford’s,
1584; manager of Chapel, 1600–3. He was a scrivener, and overseer to
the will of Sebastian Westcott, Master of Paul’s, in 1582.
EVANS, THOMAS. Blackfriars lessee, 1608.
EVESEED, HENRY. Chapel, >1585.
FARNABY, RICHARD. Musician in Germany, 1623.
FARRANT, RICHARD. Master of Children of Windsor, 1564–80; Acting Master
of Chapel and Blackfriars lessee, 1576–80.
FERRABOSCO, ALFONSO. Italians, 1576, and Court musician (cf. ch. ii).
FETHERSTON, WILLIAM. Of Danby, Yorks., unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch.
ix, p. 305).
FIDGE, WILLIAM. H. R. Plomer (3 _Library_, ix. 252) cites from a
Canterbury record of 1571, ‘William Fidge and Whetstone owe the said
[Robert] Bettes [a painter] for their portions in buying of certen
playebookes 35_s._ 4_d._’
FIELD, NATHAN, was the son of John Field, preacher and castigator of
the stage (cf. App. C, No. xxxi), and was baptized at St. Giles’s,
Cripplegate, on 17 October 1587 (Collier, iii. 425). His name is
always spelt Nathan in formal contemporary documents, although he
was familiarly known as Nat or Nid. But he appears in many reputable
modern works of learning as Nathaniel. This error perhaps originated
with the compilers of the 1679 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, who in
four out of the six actor-lists in which his name is found used the
form Nathan and in two (_Loyal Subject_ and _Mad Lover_) Nathanael. It
was certainly encouraged by a muddle of Collier, who finding in the
Cripplegate registers that another son of John Field had been baptized
Nathaniel on 13 June 1581, and not realizing that a cranky theological
father might quite well use the names as distinct, thought it necessary
to assume that this Nathaniel had died before 1587. As a matter of
fact, he survived, was apprenticed to a stationer at Michaelmas 1596,
took up his freedom on 3 June 1611, and between 1624 and 1627 published
some books, including two sermons by a third brother, Theophilus Field,
Bishop of Llandaff (McKerrow, _Dict._ 101). I need hardly linger over
the suggestion that Nathan Field lived a double life as actor and
bookseller. At this time of the apprenticeship he was not yet nine
years old, and he was still a scholar of St. Paul’s Grammar School
when, not earlier than 1600, he was impressed by Nathaniel Giles and
his deputies to serve as one of the Children of the Chapel (_Clifton v.
Robinson_ in Fleay, 128). His education was not entirely interrupted,
for he fell into the hands of Ben Jonson, who told Drummond in
1619 that ‘Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the
Satyres of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall’ (Laing, 11). Field
remained a member of the Chapel and the Queen’s Revels throughout the
vicissitudes of the company from 1600 to 1613. He is in the actor-lists
of _Cynthia’s Revels_ (1600), _The Poetaster_ (1601), and _Epicoene_
(1609), and presumably played Humfrey in _K. B. P._ (1607).[954] With
his fellows he became absorbed into the Lady Elizabeth’s in March
1613, contracted with Henslowe and Meade on behalf of this company
(_Henslowe Papers_, 23), acted as their payee in 1615, and appears
in the actor-lists of _The Coxcomb_, _The Honest Man’s Fortune_, and
_Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), in the text of which Jonson compliments him
(v. 3) as follows:
_Cokes._ Which is your _Burbage_ now?
_Lanterne._ What meane you by that, Sir?
_Cokes._ Your best Actor. Your _Field_?
He seems to have been suspected by the company of taking bribes from
Henslowe to connive at transactions contrary to their interest
(_Henslowe Papers_, 88). Certainly he was in financial straits and on
more than one occasion appealed to Henslowe to secure his release from
an arrest (_Henslowe Papers_, 66, 67). Perhaps it was as a result of
this friction with his fellows that he abandoned their amalgamation
with Prince Charles’s men in 1615. Instead he joined, at or about
this date, the King’s men, and appears as one in the actor-lists of
_The Loyal Subject_, _The Knight of Malta_, _The Queen of Corinth_,
and _The Mad Lover_. It must, I think, have been by a slip that
Cuthbert Burbadge, in the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635, spoke of him as
joining the King’s with Ostler and Underwood in 1608 or 1609. It seems
probable that Field brought with him to the King’s a share of the
plays which had formed the repertory of the joint Lady Elizabeth’s
and Queen’s Revels, including Chapman’s _Bussy D’Ambois_, in which a
King’s prologue vaunts his success as Bussy. He did not stay with the
company very long, for though he is in the patent of 27 March and the
livery list of 19 May 1619, he is replaced by John Rice in the livery
list of 7 April 1621. And as he does not appear and Rice does appear
amongst the actors named in the stage-directions to _Sir John von
Olden Barnevelt_ in August 1619, it is probable that he had left in
the course of the summer (_M. L. R._ iv. 395). If so, his departure
synchronizes with a scandal which attached itself to his name. His
moral character was hardly becoming to the son of a preacher. More than
one manuscript commonplace book (e. g. _Ashm. MS._ 47, f. 49, which
appears from the spelling of the name to be a late copy) contains an
epigram with some such heading as _On Nathaniell Feild suspected for
too much familiarity with his M^{ris} Lady May_. And on 5 June 1619 Sir
William Trumbull wrote from Brussels to Lord Hay (E. J. L. Scott in
_Athenaeum_ (1882), i. 103) that he was told that the Earl of Argyll
had paid for the nursing of a child, ‘which the world sayes is daughter
to my lady and N. Feild the Player’. Lady Argyll was Anne, daughter of
Sir William Cornwallis of Brome. Field’s later life is obscure. There
is an unimportant jest about him in John Taylor’s _Wit and Mirth_
(1629). He was married to a wife Anne, and had children baptized and
buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, during 1619–25. If another epigram,
printed by Collier, iii. 437, can be trusted, he very properly suffered
from jealousy. In relevant register entries the name is given as
Nathan. The Blackfriars registers give children both of Nathan and of
Nathaniel Field, and on 20 February 1633 occurs the burial of Nathaniel
Field, whom, if the entry does not indicate that the confusion of
persons had already begun, we are bound to take to be the bookseller.
There is no reason why both brothers should not have resided in
Blackfriars.
Field was dramatist, as well as actor. In addition to the two plays
published under his single name, he collaborated with Massinger in
_The Fatal Dowry_, which was a King’s play and not likely, therefore,
to fall outside the dates 1616–19. And as the Henslowe correspondence
(_Henslowe Papers_, 65, 84) show him as collaborating also with
Fletcher, Massinger, and Daborne for the Lady Elizabeth’s, he has been
conjectured as a possible sharer in the authorship of several of the
plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher series. He also, about the time of
his joining the King’s, wrote a defence of the stage, in the form of a
remonstrance to Mr. Sutton, a preacher of St. Mary Overies (App. C, No.
lxiii). A portrait of Field is at Dulwich.
FLETCHER, LAWRENCE. Scotland, 1595, 1599, 1601; Admiral’s (?), 1596;
King’s, 1603. Although included as a King’s man in the royal patent,
there is no reason to suppose that Fletcher ever joined the company
acting at the Globe; the absence of his name from the actor-list in the
Shakespeare F_{1} of 1623 is strong evidence that he did not. He lived
in St. Saviour’s, where he had a homonym, a victualler, who survived
him. One of the two is shown by the token-books as housed in Hunt’s
Rents, Maid Lane, during 1605–7; probably this was the actor, who was
buried on 12 September 1608. The description ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a man:
in the church’ of the register is amplified in a fee-book to ‘Lawrence
Fletcher, a player, the King’s servant, buried in the church, with an
afternoon’s knell of the great bell, 20s.’ (Collier, _Memoirs of the
Actors_^1, x; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvii).
FLOWER. Admiral’s (?), _c._ 1600.
FOSTER, ALEXANDER. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1618; Charles’s, 1616.
FREYERBOTT, BARTHOLOMEUS. Germany, 1615.
FRITH, MOLL. It appears to be suggested in the Epilogue to _The
Roaring Girl_ (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker) that this lady was to
appear in person on the Fortune stage, _c._ 1610.
FROST, JOHN. Chapel, 1601.
GARLAND, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588; Lennox’s, 1605; Duke of York’s,
1610. He appears to have dwelt in 1605 at ‘the ould forde’ (H. ii. 267).
GARLICK. In I. H., _This World’s Folly_ (1615), an actor of this name
is apparently said to have personated himself on the Fortune stage,
‘behung with chaynes of Garlicke’ (App. C, No. lix); cf. Dekker, _If
This be not a Good Play_ (1610–12), sc. x (ed. Pearson, iii. 325),
‘Fortune fauours no body but Garlicke, nor Garlike neither now, yet
she has strong reason to loue it; for tho Garlicke made her smell
abhominably in the nostrills of the gallants, yet she had smelt and
stuncke worse but for garlike’; H. Parrot, _Laquei Ridiculosi_ (1613),
Epig. 131, ‘_Greene’s Tu Quoque_ and those Garlicke Jigs’; in Tailor,
_Hog Hath Lost his Pearl_ (1614, ed. Dodsley^4, p. 434), a jig will
draw more whores ‘than e’er Garlic had’.
GARRET, JOHN. Anne’s, 1619.
GEDION. Admiral’s, 1602.
‘GERRY.’ King’s Revels, 1607.
GEW. A blind player, referred to in _1 Ant. Mellida_ (1599), ind. 142,
‘’t had been a right part for Proteus or Gew. Ho! blind Gew would ha’
done ’t rarely, rarely’; E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), _Sat._ v,
‘One that for ape tricks can put Gue to schoole’, and _Epig._ xi, ‘Gue,
hang thy selfe for woe, since gentlemen Are now grown cunning in thy
apishness’; Jonson, _Epig._ cxxix, ‘Thou dost out-zany Cokely, Pod;
nay, Gue.’ Pod was a puppet-showman.
GIBBS. Admiral’s, 1602.
GIBSON, RICHARD. Interluders, 1494–1508; afterwards Yeoman of the
Revels.
GILBURNE, SAMUEL, is recorded in the First Folio list of performers
in Shakespeare’s plays. All that is known of him beyond this is that
Augustine Phillips left him as his ‘late apprentice’ in his will of
1605 the sum of 40_s._, various garments, and a bass viol. Collier’s
inference that he could play on the viol is a fairly harmless example
of biographical conjecture.[955] The identification of him with the
‘b[oy?] Sam’ of the ‘plot’ of _The Dead Man’s Fortune_, a play probably
belonging to the Admiral’s, and of a date not later than 1591, is more
dangerous.[956]
GILES, NATHANIEL. Master of Windsor Choir, 1595–1634; Master of Chapel,
1597–1634.
GILES, THOMAS. Master of Paul’s, 1585–1590 <; Instructor in Music to
Henry, 1606, and Charles, 1613.
GOODALE, BAPTISTE. ‘Ghost-name’ (?) in Queen’s list (1589) forged by
Collier, _New Facts_, ii.
GOODALE, THOMAS. Berkeley’s, 1581; Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Chamberlain’s
(?) at date of _Sir Thomas More_ (cf. ch. xxiv). If he is the Thomas
Goodale, mercer, who entered with John Alleyn and Robert Lee into a
bond to Edward Alleyn on 18 May 1593 (H. ii. 295, from _Dulwich MS._
iv. 29), he was not improbably connected with the Admiral’s >1590.
GOUGHE or GOFFE, ROBERT, was probably the ‘R. Go.’ entered in the
‘plot’ of _The Seven Deadly Sins_, as playing Aspasia in _Sloth_ for
the Admiral’s or Strange’s men about 1590–1. Probably he belonged at
an early date to the King’s men. He is a legatee in Thomas Pope’s will
of 22 July 1603, and witnessed that of Augustine Phillips on 4 May
1605, in which Phillips names a sister Elizabeth Goughe, doubtless the
Elizabeth ---- recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark,
as marrying Robert Gough on 13 February 1603. The token-books of St.
Saviour’s indicate Gough’s residence in Hill’s Rents during 1604,
Samson’s Rents during 1605 and 1606, and Austin’s Rents in 1612–22; and
the registers, which generally call him a ‘player’, record his children
Elizabeth (bapt. 30 May 1605), Nicholas (bapt. 24 November 1608),
Dorothy (bapt. 10 February 1611, bur. 12 January 1613), Alexander
(bapt. 7 August 1614), and his own burial on 19 February 1624.[957]
His son Alexander became in his turn a player. A stage-direction
to l. 1723 of _The Second Maiden’s Tragedy_ (1611) shows that he
played Memphonius. He also played Leidenberch in _Sir John von Olden
Barnevelt_ in 1619, and appears in the official lists of the King’s
men for 1619 and 1621 and in the First Folio list of performers in
Shakespeare’s plays.
GOUGHE, THOMAS. Lane’s, 1572.
GRACE, FRANCIS. Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1610–22. He lived at George Alley,
Golden Lane, in 1623 (J. 347).
GRAUNGER, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.
GREAVES, JOHN. Lane’s, 1572.
GREEN, JOHN. Germany, 1608; France, >1608; Holland, 1613; Germany,
1615–20, 1626. On his verses and portrait, 1608, cf. ch. xxiv, s.v.
_Nobody and Somebody_. He may have been brother of the following.
GREENE, THOMAS. Anne’s, 1604–12. In R. Braithwaite, _Remains after
Death_ (1618) are four epigrams on him, one of which says that he ‘new
come from sea, made but one face and dide’. A couplet on his death,
signed W. R., is in Cooke’s _Greene’s Tu Quoque_. I. H., _World’s
Folly_ (1615), mentions his performance of a baboon (cf. App. C, No.
lix). He was of St. James’s, Clerkenwell, in 1612, when he made his
will (Fleay, 192), naming his wife Susan, daughter Honor, sons-in-law
(i.e. stepsons) Robert and William Browne, daughters-in-law Susanna,
Elizabeth, and Anne Browne, brothers John and Jeffery Greene, and
sister Elizabeth Barrett. A conjecture that he was of Stratford origin
has no foundation (Lee, 54).
GREUM, HENRY. Germany, 1608.
GRIFFEN. Admiral’s, 1597.
GRIGORIE, JACK. Admiral’s, 1602.
GRYMES, THOMAS. Chapel, 1600–1.
GUNNELL, RICHARD. Palsgrave’s, 1613–22. Family notes appear in the
registers of St. Giles’s, 1614–30 (B. 409).
GYLLOME, FOKE. Player (?) to Alexander Houghton, 1581 (cf. ch. ix, p.
280).
GYRKE, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).
HALLAWAIE, ‘the younger’. Paul’s, 1580.
HAMLEN (HAMLETT), ROBERT. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611–13; Charles’s, 1616,
1625.
HAMMOND, JOHN. Interluders, 1494.
HAMOND. Worcester’s, 1565.
HARRISON, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose daughter Suzanna by wife Anne was
baptized at St. Helen’s on 10 January 1602.
HARRISON, WILLIAM. Worcester’s, 1583.
HARVEY. Chamberlain’s, 1597.
HAWKINS, ALEXANDER. Blackfriars lessee, 1601; Revels patentee, 1604.
HAYNE, WILLIAM. Head Master of Merchant Taylors’, 1599–1625.
HAYSELL, GEORGE. Worcester’s, 1583. For a possible notice of the same
man, cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. _Misogonus_.
HEARNE, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1597.
HELLE, JOHN. Admiral’s, 1597.
HEMINGES, JOHN, whose name is variously spelt, appearing, for example,
as ‘Heminge’ in his signature to the dedication of the First Folio
of Shakespeare’s plays, and as ‘Hemmings’ in the actor-list in the
same volume, is known to have had a wife Rebecca, and may fairly be
identified with the ‘John Hemminge, gent.’ of St. Mary Cornhill,
who was married on 10 March 1588 to Rebecca Knell, widow, relict of
William Knell, gent., late of St. Mary Aldermanbury. In the same parish
William Knell had married Rebecca Edwards on 30 January 1586, and an
older William Knell had been buried on 24 September 1578.[958] One
of these was not improbably the early actor celebrated by Heywood.
Malone found a family of Heming at Shottery, and conjectured that of
this family John was born at some date earlier than the opening of
the Stratford-on-Avon register in 1558.[959] But this is rendered
improbable by a confirmation of arms in 1629 to ‘John Hemings of London
Gent. of long tyme Servant to Queen Elizabeth of happie Memory, also to
King James hir Royal Successor and to King Charles his Sonne’, in which
he is described as ‘Sonne and Heire of George Hemings of Draytwiche
in the Countye of Worcester Gent.’[960] There seems little reason to
doubt that this John Hemings is the player. He very probably began his
theatrical career with the Queen’s company, to which also Knell had
belonged. By May 1593, however, he had joined Strange’s men, from whom
he passed to the Chamberlain’s men, probably on the original formation
in 1594. Of this company, afterwards the King’s men, he remained a
member to the end of his career. He appears in all the official lists
of the company up to 1629, and regularly acted as their payee for
Court performances, generally with a colleague from 1596 to 1601, and
thereafter alone. This and his prominence in the negotiations of the
company and the lawsuits arising out of them, suggest that he acted as
their business manager. As an actor he appears in all the casts up to
_Catiline_ in 1611, but not thereafter; possibly he may have resigned
acting, and devoted himself to business. The unreliable John Roberts,
_Answer to Pope_ (1729), conjectures that he was a ‘tragedian’. Malone
had seen a statement in some tract of which he had forgotten the title,
that he was the original performer of Falstaff.[961] The lines on the
burning of the Globe in 1613 thus describe him:
Then with swolne eyes, like druncken Flemminges,
Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.
He is ‘old Master Hemings’ in Jonson’s _Masque of Christmas_ (1616).
He lent his ‘boy’ John Rice (q.v.) to the Merchant Taylors for their
entertainment of James on 16 July 1607, and another ‘boy’ for Chapman’s
mask of 1613. He is named as a legatee and overseer in the will of
Augustine Phillips in 1605, and as executor in the event of the widow’s
re-marriage; also as a trustee in the will of Alexander Cooke, who
calls him his ‘master’, in 1614; as a witness in that of Richard
Cowley in 1618; as a legatee in that of Shakespeare in 1616; and as
a legatee and overseer in those of Underwood in 1624 and of Condell
in 1627. He was appointed a trustee for Shakespeare’s Blackfriars
property in 1613,[962] and acted with Condell as editor of the First
Folio of the plays in 1623. This fact is probably the origin of the
statement of Roberts that he was engaged with Condell in business as
a printer. He filled various parochial posts from 1608 to 1619 in
St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, and the registers contain records of the
following children: Alice (bapt. 10 November 1590, married John Atkins
11 February 1612), Mary (bapt. 26 May 1592, bur. 9 August 1592), Judith
(bapt. 29 August 1593), Thomasine (bapt. 15 January 1595), Joan (bapt.
2 May 1596), John (bapt. 12 August 1599), Beavis (bapt. 24 May 1601),
William (bapt. 3 October 1602), George (bapt. 12 Feb. 1604), Rebecca
(bapt. 4 February 1605), Elizabeth (bapt. 6 March 1608), Mary (bapt. 21
June 1611, bur. 23 July 1611).[963] In the same parish ‘John Heminge,
player’ was himself buried on 12 October 1630, beside his wife Rebecca,
who preceded him on 2 September 1619. He is registered as a ‘stranger’
and was therefore probably residing elsewhere. In his will, made on
9 October, he describes himself as ‘citizen and grocer of London’,
appoints his son William executor and trustee for his unmarried and
unadvanced children, and Cuthbert Burbadge and ‘Mr. Rice’, possibly the
actor, overseers, and leaves legacies to his daughters Rebecca, wife of
Captain William Smith, Margaret, wife of Mr. Thomas Sheppard, who is
not mentioned in the register, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Merefield, and to
his son-in-law Atkins ‘and his now wife’, and his grandchild Richard
Atkins. He also leaves 10_s._ for a ring ‘unto every of my fellows
and sharers, his majesties servants.[964] William Heminges went to
Westminster and Christ Church, and became a playwright.[965] Unnamed
in the will is Thomasine, who may have been dead, but certainly had
quarrelled seriously with her father. She had married William Ostler of
the King’s men in 1611 and her son Beaumont was baptized at St. Mary’s,
Aldermanbury, on 18 May 1612. Ostler died intestate on 16 December
1614 in possession of shares in the leases both of the Globe and the
Blackfriars. These passed of right to Thomasine as his administratrix,
and formed all the provision left for her maintenance and her husband’s
debts. The leases, however, passed into the hands of Heminges, who
retained them and asserted that Ostler had created a trust, of which
Thomasine declared that she knew nothing. On 20 September 1615 she
entered a bill in Chancery against her father, and subpœnaed him to
appear during the coming Michaelmas term. On 26 September Heminges
promised that if she would withdraw her suit, and would also ‘doe her
dutie’ to him and to her mother Rebecca, he would satisfy her to the
value of the shares. Thomasine states that on the same day kneeling and
in tears she made her submission at her father’s house in Aldermanbury.
She also stayed her suit, but Heminges, although called upon to fulfil
his promise on 5 October, failed to do so, and on 9 October Thomasine
brought a common law action against him for damages to the amount of
£600, which she estimated to be the value of the shares.[966] The issue
of the case is unknown, but it would seem probable from the _Sharers
Papers_ of 1635 that Heminges succeeded in retaining the shares, and
that at his death they passed to his son William. Professor Wallace
states that in 1616 Thomasine Ostler was involved in another lawsuit
with Walter Raleigh, son of Sir Walter, and obtained a verdict of £250
against him for insult and slander. One way and another, Heminges seems
to have acquired a considerable financial interest in the Globe and
Blackfriars. He had an original seventh of a moiety of the Globe lease
in 1599, and an original seventh of the Blackfriars lease in 1608. But
as executor to Phillips (q.v.) and otherwise he had opportunities of
adding to these holdings. The _Sharers Papers_ show that at his death
he had four sixteenths of the Globe and probably two eighths of the
Blackfriars; and these, or some of them, he had enjoyed ‘thirty yeeres
without any molestacion, beeing the most of the sayd yeeres both player
and houskeeper, and after hee gave over playing diverse yeeres’. In
_Witter v. Heminges and Condell_ he is described as being in 1619 of
‘greate lyveinge wealth and power’.[967] The play-house shares seem
to have been the chief part of the property left by his will. They
passed to William Heminges as his executor. He seems to have gradually
disposed of them, first selling one share in the Globe by arrangement
with the company to Taylor and Lowin, and later, by transactions which
some of his fellows resented, one share in each house to John Shank
during 1633 for £156, and the remaining shares also to John Shank
during 1634, for £350. He was then in difficulties, and Shank disbursed
additional small sums to him in prison. It was these sales to Shank
which brought about the petition to the Lord Chamberlain recorded in
the _Sharers Papers_.
HENSLOWE, FRANCIS. Queen’s, 1594; Lennox’s, 1605. He was son of Richard
and nephew of Philip Henslowe, and various entries in the diary and
other Dulwich MSS. record his imprisonments, more than once on criminal
charges, his employment during 1593–4 in his uncle’s pawnbroking, and
his loans, one of which on 1 June 1595 was of £9 ‘to laye downe for his
hallfe share with the company which he dothe playe with all’ (H. i. 6),
conceivably, as Dr. Greg suggests, some company other than the Queen’s,
in which he had already acquired a half share in 1594. He dwelt in
the Clink in 1594, took a house called the Upper Ground on Bankside
in 1597, and was of St. George’s, Southwark, in 1606, in which year,
between 30 March and 6 October, both he and his wife died (H. ii. 277).
HENSLOWE, PHILIP. Owner of Rose, Fortune, Hope, and perhaps lessee of
Whitefriars; cf. ch. xi.
HERIOT, HENRY. Interluders, 1547–52.
HEYWOOD, JOHN. For his possible connexion with Paul’s, cf. ch. xii,
s.v. Chapel.
HEYWOOD, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1598; Worcester’s Anne’s, 1602–19, and
dramatist.
HINSTOCK, ROBERT. Interluders, 1538–51.
HOBBES, THOMAS. Charles’s, 1610, 1616–25. He lived at the upper end of
Shoreditch in 1623 (J. 348).
HOLE, RICHARD. Interluders, 1526–30.
HOLLAND, J. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.
HOLT, JAMES. Anne’s, 1604–19.
HOLT, JOHN. A ‘momer’, who helped the Westminster boys in 1561,
probably identical with the Yeoman of the Revels of that name (cf. ch.
iii), who helped them in 1564–5.
HOLZHEW, BEHRENDT. Germany, 1614–15.
HOVELL, WILLIAM. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615.
HOWARD, THOMAS. A ‘player’ named in St. Saviour’s records _c._
1600 (Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi).
HUDSON, RICHARD. Weaver of Hutton Bushell, Yorks, unlicensed player,
1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).
HÜLL, JOHN. Germany, 1600–1.
HUNNIS, JOHN. A ‘ghost-name’ by an error for the following.
HUNNIS, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1566–97, and dramatist.
HUNT (HONTE), THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1599, 1602; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611 (H.
ii. 285).
HUNTLEY, DICK. Actor in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_
(_vide_ l. 14).
HUSE, RICHARD. Paul’s chorister, >1582.
IVY, NICHOLAS. Chapel, 1509.
JEFFES, ANTHONY. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597;
Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1597–>1613. Anthony, son of Richard Jeffes,
baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 14 December 1578, may be the
same who married Faith Jones there on 19 February 1601. Children of
Anthony Jeffes ‘player’ are recorded in the registers of St. Giles’s,
Cripplegate, from 11 June 1602 to 1 May 1609; in later entries from 30
May 1610 to 30 October 1616, Anthony is called ‘brewer’ (H. ii. 286;
_Bodl._).
JEFFES, HUMPHREY. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597;
Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1616<. He was buried at St.
Giles’s, 21 August 1618. A daughter Mary was baptized at St. Saviour’s,
25 January 1601 (H. ii. 287; Collier, _Actors_, xxx).
JOHNSON, WILLIAM. Leicester’s, 1572–4; Queen’s, 1583, 1587–8. The
baptismal entries at St. Giles’s include on 10 February 1587 ‘Comedia,
baseborne daughter of Alice Bowker, and, as she saithe, the father’s
name is William Johnson, one of the Queen’s plaiers’, and the burials
on 3 March 1593 ‘Comedia, daughter of William Johnson, player’. Is
he the William Johnson, vintner, who was trustee of Shakespeare’s
Blackfriars property 1613–18 (Lee, 459, 493)?
JONES, RICHARD. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s (?), >1589; Germany,
1592–3; Admiral’s, 1594–6; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602;
Revels patentee, 1610; Germany (?), 1615; Germany, 1620, 1622–4. His
wife Harris inherited a lease of the Leopard’s Head in Shoreditch from
her father in 1620. A Richard Jones is traceable in the Southwark
token-books from 1588 to 1607 and may or may not be the same who
married Anne Jube there on 14 February 1602 (H. ii. 288; _H. P._
94; _Bodl._).
JONES, ROBERT. Germany, 1602; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615.
JONNS, DANIEL. Denmark, 1586.
JONSON, BENJAMIN. Pembroke’s (?), 1597; Chamberlain’s (?), _c._
1598; and dramatist.
JUBY, EDWARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–1618, Fortune
lessee, 1618. An Edward Juby is traceable during 1598 to 1619 in the
token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark. In the last year he is marked
‘dead’, and his burial was registered on 20 November 1618. In 1610 and
1614 he filled parish offices. He may fairly be identified with the
‘player’ whose children occur in the registers from 3 June 1599 to 15
September 1614. His widow Francis held his share of the Fortune lease
in 1622 (H. ii. 290; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi; _Bodl._).
JUBY, RICHARD. Admiral’s, 1602. His son Richard was baptized at St.
Saviour’s, Southwark, on 1 May 1602 (_Bodl._).
JUBY, WILLIAM (?). Admiral’s, 1599–1602 (H. ii. 290).
JUGLER, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
KEMP, JOHN. Germany, 1601.
KEMPE, WILLIAM, cannot be securely identified or connected with
any one of various homonyms who have been traced in _D. N. B._ and
elsewhere.[968] He probably emerges as one of Leicester’s men in the
Low Countries during 1585–6 and thence made his way to Denmark. He
was in London and had already won a comic reputation by 1590 when the
dedication of _An Almond for a Parrat_ (Nashe, iii. 341), ‘To that
most Comicall and conceited Caualeire Monsieur du Kempe, Jestmonger
and Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton,’ tells how
the anonymous author, possibly Nashe, had been asked by ‘that famous
Francatrip’ Harlicken’ at Bergamo in the previous summer, whether
he knew ‘any such Parabolano here in London as Signior Chiarlatano
Kempino’ of whose ‘pleasance’ Harlicken had heard ‘report’. In _Four
Letters Confuted_ (1592) Nashe says of an action of Harvey’s, ‘Will
Kempe, I mistrust it will fall to thy lot for a merriment, one of these
dayes’ (i. 287). An example of Kempe’s merriments is to be found in
sc. xii of _A Knack to Know a Knave_ (1594) played by Strange’s men,
to whom Kempe belonged by 1593. He was also famous for his jigs. Four
of these are entered in the Stationers’ Register during 1591–5 (cf.
ch. xviii) but are not preserved, and ‘Kemps jiggs’ is the heading to
some music collected by John Dowland and preserved in _Camb. Univ.
Libr. MS._ Dd. ii. 11 (cf. Halliwell, _MS. Rarities_, 8). Marston (iii.
372), _Scourge of Villainy_ (1598), sat. xi. 30, ‘the orbs celestial
Will dance Kempe’s jig,’ and E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), sat. v,
‘Whores, bedles, bawdes, and sergeants filthily Chaunt Kemps Jigge,
or the Burgonians tragedy,’ show his vogue. In 1594–5 he was one
of the recently constituted Chamberlain’s men and the intrusion of
his name into stage-directions to _R. J._ iv. 5. 102 (Q_{2}) and _M.
Ado_, iv. 2, shows that he played Peter in the one play and Dogberry
in the other. Oddly enough, one of his speeches (iv. 2. 4) in _M.
Ado_ is assigned to ‘Andrew’, possibly a generic name for a clown or
‘merry-Andrew’. He is in the actor-list of _Every Man in his Humour_
(1598) but not in that of _Every Man out of his Humour_ (1599), and
this fact, together with his sale of his share in the Globe soon after
the lease of 21 February 1599 was signed, points to his leaving the
company. ‘Would I had one of Kemps shooes to throw after you,’ says a
speaker in _E. M. O._ IV. v (q.v.). This may be an allusion to some
clownery by Kempe, perhaps in a performance with some other company
at the Curtain in the autumn of 1599 after the Chamberlain’s left
that house; or, less probably, to Kempe’s famous morris-dance for a
wager from London to Norwich, at the end of which he hung his buskins
in the Guildhall, for this began on 11 February 1600 and ended on 11
March, the year being fixed by the mayoralty (1599–1600) of Roger Weld
at Norwich. Another allusion to ‘Kemps morice’ is in _Jack Drum’s
Entertainment_ (1600), i. 45. Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain
on 13 October 1600 (_S. P. D. Eliz._ cclxxv. 93) that on his way from
Witham to Englefield ‘we met a company of mad wenches, whereof M^{rs}.
Mary Wroughton and young Stafford were ringleaders, who travelled
from house to house, and to some places where they were little known,
attended with a concert of musicians, as if they had undertaken the
like adventure as Kemp did from London to Norwich’. Kempe’s own account
of his adventure was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘Kemps
morris to Norwiche’ on 22 April 1600 (Arber, iii. 160). In the Epistle
to Anne Fitton, whom, possibly by confusion with her sister Mary,
he describes as maid of honour to Elizabeth, he refers to unentered
ballads on the subject, and when he says that ‘I haue daunst my selfe
out of the world’ is not improbably jesting on his departure from the
Globe. At the end he foreshadows crossing to Calais, which he no doubt
did. A John Kemp, who was in charge of a touring company, which had
been in Holland and reached Münster by November 1601, may have been a
relative. But William Kempe had returned to England, after visiting
Italy as well as Germany, on 2 September 1601, as is shown by the
following interpolation in a diary of one William Smith of Abingdon, in
_Sloane MS._ 414, f. 56 (wrongly cited by Halliwell, _Ludus Coventriae_
410, as _Sloane MS._ 392, f. 401; cf. F. J. Furnivall in _N.S.S. Trans.
1880–6_, 65):
‘Sep. 2. Kemp, mimus quidam, qui peregrinationem quandam in
Germaniam et Italiam instituerat, post multos errores, et
infortunia sua, reversus: multa refert de Anthonio Sherley,
equite aurato, quem Romae (legatum Persicum agentem) convenerat.’
Possibly Kempe rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while. In _3 Parnassus_
(? January 1602), iv. 3, he is introduced as a fellow of Burbadge and
Shakespeare, and greeted with allusions to his ‘dancing the morrice
ouer the Alpes’ and ‘the Emperour of Germany’. But on 10 March 1602
he had a loan from Henslowe, and during the winter of 1602–3 he was
certainly one of Worcester’s men. The dates do not lend support to the
suggestion of Fleay, ii. 20, that he had already in 1599–1600 been at
the Rose with Pembroke’s men. After the end of Elizabeth’s reign he
is not traceable, and he is mentioned as dead in Heywood, _Apology_
(_c._ 1608), and dead or retired in Dekker, _Gull’s Hornbook_ (1609),
11, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fools that now
come drawling behind them, never played the clown more naturally.’ A
William Kempe is recorded in token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark,
as living in Samson’s Rents in 1595, 1596, 1598, and 1599, in Langley’s
New Rents in 1602, and later near the old play-house (Collier,
iii. 351, and _Bodl._; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi). Collier, but not
Rendle, gives the date ‘1605’ for the last entry, probably with a
view to supporting his notice of Kempe, as playing with Armin at the
Blackfriars (q.v.) in 1605, which is doubtless a fabrication. On the
other hand, though the date is plausible, the notice of ‘Kempe a man’
as buried at St. Saviour’s on 2 November 1603 (Rendle, xxvii) is not
so worded as to be absolutely conclusive. The name was a common one,
and Collier, _Actors_, xxxvi, gives notices of it from other parishes.
In T. Weelkes, _Ayres on Phantasticke Sprites_ (1608), it is said of
Kempe that ‘into France He took pains to skip it’. His visit to Venice
and meeting with Sherley are dramatized in _Travels of Three English
Brothers_ (1607) and apparently misdated after the _Englands Joy_ of
November 1602. Finally, an epitaph upon him is in R. Braithwaite,
_Remains after Death_ (1618), sig. F 8^v, which suggests that he died
not long after his morris.
KENDALL, THOMAS. Blackfriars manager, 1602; Revels patentee, 1604. He
died in 1608.
KENDALL, WILLIAM. Admiral’s, 1597–8; Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, >1614. His
son John was baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 5 January 1615
(_Bodl._).
KEYSAR, ROBERT. Revels manager, 1606–10 (?); Blackfriars lessee,
1606–8. To him was written the epistle to _K. B. P._
KING, ARTHUR. Berkeley’s, 1581.
KING, THOMAS. Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.
KINGMAN (KINGSMAN), PHILIP. Germany, 1596; Porter’s Hall patentee,
1615. ‘M^r Kyngman the elder’ was a witness for Henslowe on 16 April
1599 (H. i. 205).
KINGSMAN, ROBERT. Germany, 1599, 1601; afterwards a tradesman in
Strassburg, 1606 (?), 1618, 1626.
KIRCK (KIRCKMANN), JOHN. Denmark, 1579–80.
KIRKHAM, EDWARD. Chapel manager, 1602; Revels patentee, 1604–6. He is
probably the Yeoman of the Revels (cf. ch. iii).
KITE, JOHN. Gentleman of Chapel, 1508; afterwards Abp. of Armagh.
KNAGGES, RICHARD. Of Moorsham, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch.
ix, p. 305).
KNELL, WILLIAM (?). Queen’s, >1588. A Rebecca, widow of William Knell,
married John Heminges (q.v.), 10 March 1588. Heywood notes Knell as
before his time. Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (1592, _Works_, i. 215),
names him with Tarlton, Alleyn, and Bentley, and he is coupled with
Bentley in the undated challenge to Alleyn (q.v.) to play one of their
parts.
KNIGHT, ROBERT. Paul’s chorister, >1582.
KOSTRESSEN, JOHAN, musician. Germany, 1623.
KRAFFT, JOHN. Denmark, 1579–80.
LANEHAM, JOHN. Leicester’s, 1572–4; Queen’s, 1583, 1588–91. Heywood
notes him as before his time. Was he related to Robert Laneham, Keeper
of the Council Chamber door, who described the Kenilworth entertainment
(cf. ch. xxiv) in 1575?
LANMAN, HENRY. Owner of Curtain, 1581–92. Adams, 80, suggests,
apparently from the similarity of the names, that he was a brother of
John Laneham.
LEBERWURST, HANS. Germany, 1613.
LEDBETTER, ROBERT. Admiral’s, 1597; Germany, 1599, 1601, 1606.
LEE, ROBERT. Admiral’s (?), >1591; Anne’s, 1604–19; Revels Company,
1622. He had a business transaction with Edward and John Alleyn and
Thomas Goodale (q.v.) in 1593. He lived in Clerkenwell Close in 1623
(H. ii. 294; J. 347; Murray, i. 198).
LEEKE, DAVID. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, c. 1571 (_3
Library_, ix. 253).
LEVESON, ROBERT. Oxford’s, 1580.
LISTER, EDWARD. Weaver of Allerston, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612
(cf. ch. ix, p. 305).
LONG, NICHOLAS. Revels (provincial) manager, 1612, 1617; Lady
Elizabeth’s, 1614–15. For his later career, cf. Murray, i. 192, 361;
ii. 101. He was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 21 January 1622
(_Bodl._).
LOVEKYN, ARTHUR. Chapel, 1509–13.
LOWIN, JOHN, was a member of Worcester’s company during their season of
1602–3 with Henslowe at the Rose. On 12 March 1603 Henslowe lent him
money to go into the country with the company, but during the course
of the year he must have transferred his services to the King’s men,
presumably as a hireling, since, although in the cast of _Sejanus_
(1603) and the Induction to _Malcontent_ (1604) he is not in the
official lists of 1603 and 1604. A portrait of him in the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford, has the inscription ‘1640, Aetat. 64’, and he may
therefore be identified with the John, son of Richard Lowen, baptized
at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 9 December 1576. If so, his father
seems to have been a carpenter, and he had a sister Susan and a brother
William.[969] He remained through a long life with the King’s men,
appearing in most of the casts, in the actor-list of the First Folio,
and in the official lists from 1619 onwards. He played Bosola in _The
Duchess of Malfi_. A pamphlet entitled _Conclusions upon Dances_ (1607)
has a dedication to Lord Denny, dated 23 November 1606, and signed
‘I. L. _Roscio_’. Collier claims to have found in a copy of this the
note ‘By Jhon Lowin. Witnesseth Tho. D. 1610’.[970] A John Lowen
married Joan Hall, widow, by licence, in St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate,
on 29 October 1607.[971] Shortly afterwards a John Lowin was paying a
poor-rate of 2_d._ weekly in the liberty of the Clink. The Southwark
token-books attest his residence ‘near the play-house’ and in other
parts of the parish at various dates from 1601 to 1642.[972] He was
overseer of Paris Garden in 1617–18.[973] But in 1623 he lived in
Lambeth (J. 348). He is named as a legatee and overseer in the will
of his ‘fellow’ John Underwood in 1624. It appears from the _Sharers
Papers_ that he had no interest in the play-houses until after the
death of Heminges in 1630, when he was admitted to purchase two
sixteenths of the Globe and one eighth of the Blackfriars. From this
time onwards he seems to have shared the business responsibilities of
the company with Joseph Taylor. He was also prominent as an actor.[974]
Wright enumerates amongst his parts Shakespeare’s Falstaff; but when
Roberts adds Hamlet and Henry VIII, he is presumably guessing that
Lowin was ‘fat and scant of breath’. He may have been the original
Henry VIII, for Downes reports that Betterton was instructed in the
part by Sir William Davenant, ‘who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had
his instructions from Mr. Shakespeare himself’.[975] Wright tells us
that at the outbreak of civil war he was ‘superannuated’, and ‘in his
latter days kept an inn (the Three Pigeons) at Brentford, where he dyed
very old (for he was an actor of eminent note in the reign of King
James the First), and his poverty was as great as his age’.[976] He
signed with Taylor the dedication to Fletcher’s _The Wild-goose Chase_
in 1652, the publication of which was an attempt to relieve their
necessities. A ‘John Lewin’ who left a widow Martha, was buried at St.
Martin’s-in-the-Fields on 18 March 1659, and a ‘John Lowen’ at St.
Paul’s, Covent Garden, on 16 March 1669.[977] Probably a G. Lowin who
played Barnaveldt’s daughter to Lowin’s Barnaveldt in 1619 was his son.
LYLY, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1583; Oxford’s payee, 1584; and
dramatist.
MACHIN, RICHARD. Germany, 1600–3, 1605–6.
MAGETT, STEPHEN. Admiral’s tireman, 1596, 1599 (?) (H. ii. 295).
MARBECK, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1602.
MARSHALL, CHARLES. Palsgrave’s (provincial), 1616.
MARSTON, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1603–8, and dramatist.
MARTINELLI (?), ANGELICA. Italians, >1598.
MARTINELLI, DRUSIANO. Italians, 1578.
MARTON, THOMAS. Chapel, 1602.
MARTYN, WILLIAM. Payee for a company at Ipswich, 20 February 1572
(Murray, ii. 290).
MASON, JOHN. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.
MASSEY (MASSYE), CHARLES. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–>1635
(?); Fortune lessee, 1618–>1635; and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii). He is
probably the Charles Marcy or Mercy, variously described as ‘player’,
‘gentleman’, and ‘yeoman’ in the registers of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate,
from 30 December 1610 to 20 July 1625. He died before 6 December 1635,
leaving a widow Elianor, and had a cousin Ned Collins (H. ii. 296;
_Bodl._).
MAXE, ROBERT. Chapel, 1509–>1513.
MAY, EDWARD. Interluders, 1494–1503.
MAY, NATHAN. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615. Possibly the name, as
given in Murray, ii. 340, may be a mistake for Clay (q.v.).
MAYLER, GEORGE. Interluders, 1525–40.
MEADE, JACOB. Keeper of the Bears, by 1599, and partner with Henslowe
in the Bear Garden and Hope. He was buried at St. Saviour’s on 9 July
1624 (_Bodl._).
MELYONEK, JOHN. Master of Chapel (?), 1483–5.
MERYELL, HENRY. Chapel, 1509.
MILS (MYLLES), TOBIAS. Queen’s, 1583. Heywood notes him as before his
time. He was buried as ‘one of the Queenes Maiesties players’ at St.
Olave’s, Southwark, on 11 July 1585, and his sons William and Toby were
baptized on 3 January 1584 and 5 September 1585 (_Bodl._). Probably,
therefore, ‘one Myles, one of my lord of Summersettes players’,
whose testimony to the value of Bath waters for the gout is cited in
a hydropathic treatise of 1557 (Collier, i. 139), was of an older
generation. Somerset was beheaded on 22 January 1552. Robert Cecil had
a Secretary Milles, whose son Tobias was buried at Chelsea on 9 April
1599 (R. Davies, _Chelsea Old Church_, 296).
MOON, PETER. Payee for a company of players at Ipswich, 1562 (Murray,
ii. 287).
MOORE, JOSEPH. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611; 1616–29. He lived at the Harrow
in Barbican in 1623 (Murray, i. 252; J. 347).
MOTTERAM, JOHN. Chapel, 1600–1.
MUFFORD, JOHN. Beauchamp’s, 10 June 1590 (Murray, ii. 337).
MULCASTER (MONCASTER), RICHARD. Head Master of Merchant Taylors,
1561–86; of St. Paul’s Grammar School, 1596–1608.
MUNDAY, ANTONY. A player before 1582, according to a contemporary
pamphlet, possibly with Oxford’s, whose ‘servant’ he was in 1580, and
dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii).
NASION. Paul’s chorister, >1582.
‘NED.’ Musician (?) in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament, prol._ 7.
‘NED.’ Strange’s (?), 1590–1.
NETHE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
NETHERSALL, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
NEWARK, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1493–1509.
NEWMAN, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1581–3.
NEWTON, JOHN. Charles’s, 1610, 1616, 1619, 1625.
‘NICK.’ Admiral’s, 1601–3. See also TOOLEY.
NILL, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose daughter Alice was baptized at St.
Saviour’s on 13 August 1601 (_Bodl._).
NORWOOD. Paul’s, 1599.
NYCOWLLES, ROBERT. A ‘player’ who witnessed a loan to Francis Henslowe
on 1 June 1595 (H. i. 6).
OFFLEY, THOMAS. Paul’s, _c._ 1522.
OSTLER, WILLIAM, began his career as a boy actor in the Chapel company.
He took a part in Jonson’s _Poetaster_ in 1601. From the _Sharers
Papers_ we learn that on growing up he was, like Field and Underwood,
‘taken to strengthen the King’s service’.[978] He first appears amongst
the King’s men in the cast of Jonson’s _The Alchemist_ in 1610, and
played also in _Catiline_, _The Captain_, _The Duchess of Malfi_, in
which he took the part of Antonio, _Valentinian_, and _Bonduca_. The
following epigram in John Davies, _Scourge of Folly_ (_c._ 1611),
attests his fame and his participation in some forgotten brawl:
_To the Roscius of these Times, Mr. W. Ostler._
Ostler, thou took’st a knock thou would’st have giv’n,
Neere sent thee to thy latest home: but O!
Where was thine action, when thy crown was riv’n,
Sole King of Actors! then wast idle? No:
Thou hadst it, for thou would’st bee doing? Thus
Good actors deeds are oft most dangerous;
But if thou plaist thy dying part as well
As thy stage parts, thou hast no part in hell.
Ostler married Thomasine, daughter of John Heminges, in 1611. His son
Beaumont was baptized at St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, on 18 May 1612.[979]
He acquired shares in the Blackfriars on 20 May 1611, and the Globe on
20 February 1612, and died on 16 December 1614, leaving his shares a
subject for litigation between his widow and Heminges (q.v.).
PAGE, OLIVER. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).
PALLANT, ROBERT. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–19;
Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614; Charles’s, 1616; King’s, 1619, unless, indeed,
the R. Pallant who played the female part of Cariola in _Duchess of
Malfi_ was of a younger generation. This is not unlikely, for while
the St. Saviour’s registers record the burial of Robert Pallant, ‘a
man,’ on 4 September 1619, the token-books give the name in 1621 as
well as in 1612 and 1616. Ephraim and Hanburye, sons of Robert Pallant
‘player’, were baptized there on 1 January 1611 and 3 July 1614
respectively. There were others earlier. Pallant wrote commendatory
verses for Heywood’s _Apology_ (1612), and is noted as visiting
Henslowe on his death-bed on 6 January 1616 (H. ii. 20, 300; _Bodl._).
PANT, THOMAS. Unlicensed player, 1607–10 (cf. ch. ix, p. 304).
PARR, WILLIAM. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1602–20.
PARROWE (PARLOWE), RICHARD. Interluders, 1538–45.
PARSELEY, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
PARSONS, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1597, 1602 (H. ii. 301).
PATESON, WILLIAM. Worcester’s, 1584.
PAVY. Admiral’s, 1602.
PAVY, SALATHIEL (SALMON). Chapel, 1600–3. An epitaph on him is in
Jonson’s _Epigrams_ (1616), cxx, which gives his age at death, after
three years of playing, as 13. He was ‘apprentice to one Peerce’, when
he was pressed for the Chapel. This is not likely to have been the
Master of Paul’s, from whom it would have been rash to take a boy.
PAYNE, ROBERT. Revels patentee, 1604.
PEACOCKE, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
PEARCE (PIERS), EDWARD. Gentleman of Chapel, 1589; Master of Paul’s,
1600.
PEDEL, ABRAHAM. Germany, 1614–15; Palsgrave’s, 1623. He lived at George
Alley in Golden Lane in 1623 (J. 348, 350).
PEDEL (BEHEL, BIEL), JACOB. Germany, 1597, 1614–15.
PEDEL, WILLIAM. Holland, 1608; Germany, 1614–15. Children of a William
Peadle, variously described as ‘tumbler’ and ‘gentleman’, were baptized
at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1610, 1617, and 1629 (_Bodl._).
PENN, WILLIAM. Revels, 1609; Charles’s, 1616, 1625. He lived at George
Alley, Golden Lane, in 1623 and had children baptized and buried at St.
Giles’s, Cripplegate, in 1636 (J. 347; _Bodl._).
PENTON, FABIAN. Germany, 1602.
PEPEREL, GILES. Possibly an actor in the _Bugbears_ of John Jeffere
(cf. ch. xxiii).
PERKIN, JOHN. Leicester’s, 1572–4. Is he the Parkins who assisted
George Ferrers as Lord of Misrule in 1552–3 (Feuillerat, _Edw. and
Mary_, 120)?
PERKINS, RICHARD. Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–19; for his later history,
cf. Murray, i. 198, 200, 266. He wrote commendatory verses for
Heywood’s _Apology_ (1612), and Webster praises his acting in
_The White Devil_ (1612) in a note at the end of the print. His
portrait is at Dulwich. He lived at the upper end of St. John’s Street
in 1623 (H. ii. 301; J. 347).
PERRY, WILLIAM. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615; Queen’s Revels
manager, 1617.
PERSJ (PERSTEN), ROBERT (RUPERT). Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.
PERSONN, JOHANN. Denmark, 1579–80.
PERY, ROBERT. Chapel, 1529–31.
PERY, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1530.
‘PETER’ (?). King’s. At _Taming of the Shrew_, iv. 4. 68, F_{1} has the
s.d. ‘Enter Peter’, apparently a servant of Tranio, who does not speak.
PFLUGBEIL, AUGUST. Germany, 1614–15.
PHILIP, ROBERT. Chapel, 1514.
PHILLIPPE, ROBERT. A ‘momer’, buried at St. Leonard’s, on 9 April 1559
(Collier, _Actors_, 79). He might be identical with the foregoing.
PHILLIPS, AUGUSTINE, is included in the 1593 list of Strange’s men,
and played for them or the Admiral’s in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ about
1590–1 as ‘Mr. Phillipps’. Probably he joined the Chamberlain’s men
on their formation in 1594. He appears in the actor-lists of 1598 and
1599, was one of the original Globe shareholders of 1599, and on 18
February 1601 gave evidence as to the performance of _Richard II_ by
the company before the Essex rising. He is also in the official lists
of the King’s men in 1603 and 1604, in the actor-list of _Sejanus_ in
1603, and in that of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. ‘Phillips
his gygg of the slyppers’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on
26 May 1595 (cf. p. 552). It has been conjectured that Phillips was a
brother-in-law of Alleyn, to whom Henslowe wrote on 28 September 1593,
‘Your sister Phillipes & her husband hath leced two or thre owt of ther
howsse, yt they in good health & doth hartily comend them unto you.’ If
so, his wife was probably Elizabeth Woodward. But it is also possible
that the family in question was that of one Edward Phillipes, who was
also in relations with Henslowe and Alleyn.[980] An Augustine Phillipps
buried at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1592, was probably a relative
of the actor, whose children the register of the same parish records
as Magdalen (bapt. 29 September 1594), Rebecca (bapt. 11 July 1596),
and Austen or Augustine (bapt. 29 November 1601, bur. 1 July 1604). The
father is designated _histrio_, ‘player,’ or ‘player of interludes’.
The parish token-books show that he dwelt in Horseshoe Court during
1593 and 1595, thereafter near the Swan in Paris Garden, in Montagu
Close during 1601, in ‘Bradshaw’s Rents’ during 1602, and in Horseshoe
Court again during 1604.[981] But by 4 May 1605, when he made his will,
he was of Mortlake, Surrey, where he had a house and land of which
he had lately purchased the lease.[982] Doubtless he had prospered.
A note of heraldic irregularities delivered by William Smith, Rouge
dragon, to the Earl of Northampton as commissioner for the Earl Marshal
states that ‘Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes
of S^r W^m Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolph’s cote
quartred, which I shewed to M^r. York at a small gravers shopp in
Foster Lane’.[983] The will mentions Phillips’s wife, whose name was
not Elizabeth but Anne, his daughters Magdalen, Rebecca, Anne, and
Elizabeth, his mother Agnes Bennett, his brothers William and James
Webb, his sister Margery Borne, and her sons Miles and Philipps, and
his sister Elizabeth Gough. Elizabeth had been married at St. Saviour’s
in 1603, to Robert Gough (q.v.) of the King’s men, who witnesses the
will.[984] Margery Borne may have been the wife of William Borne
_alias_ Bird (q.v.) of the Prince’s men. Presumably the Webbs were his
brothers-in-law, in which case his wife was obviously not a Woodward.
There are legacies of £5 to ‘the hyred men of the company which I am
of’, of 30_s._ pieces to his ‘fellows’ William Shakespeare and Henry
Condell, and his ‘servant’ Christopher Beeston, of 20_s._ pieces
to his ‘fellows’ Laurence Fletcher, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley,
Alexander Cook and Nicholas Tooley, of silver bowls to John Heminges,
Richard Burbadge, and William Sly, and of £20 to Timothy Whithorne.
Samuel Gilburne, ‘my late apprentice’ is to have 40_s._ and ‘my mouse
colloured velvit hose and a white taffety dublet, a blacke taffety
sute, my purple cloke, sword, and dagger, and my base viall’. James
Sands ‘my apprentice’ is to have 40_s._ and ‘a citterne, a bandore and
a lute’. The widow is appointed executrix, but if she re-marries she
is to have ‘no parte or porcion of my goods or chattells’, and is to
be replaced by the overseers of the will, Heminges, Richard Burbadge,
Sly, and Whithorne. After proving the will on 13 May 1605, the widow
did in fact re-marry, with John Witter, and it was proved again by John
Heminges on 16 May 1607. His share in the Globe was subsequently the
subject of litigation.[985] Heywood (_c._ 1608) praises his deserts
with those of other dead actors.
PICKERING, JAMES. Mason of Bowlby, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf.
ch. ix, p. 305).
PLUMMER, JOHN. Master of Chapel, 1444–55.
POKELEY, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
POLE. Gate-keeper at Paul’s, 1582.
POPE, THOMAS, was one of the English players, who visited Denmark and
Germany in 1586 and 1587. He is in the 1593 list of Strange’s men and
played as ‘Mr. Pope’ for them or the Admiral’s in _2 Deadly Sins_ about
1590–1. He joined the Chamberlain’s men, probably on their foundation
in 1594, was joint payee for them with Heminge from 1597–9, and appears
in the actor-lists of 1598 and 1599. On 30 August 1598, William
Bird borrowed 10_s._ of Henslowe, ‘to folowe the sewt agenst Thomas
Poope’.[986] In 1600 he is mentioned, with Singer of the Admiral’s, by
Samuel Rowlands in _The Letting of Humour’s Blood in the Head-Vein_,
sat. iv:
What meanes Singer then,
And Pope, the clowne, to speak so boorish, when
They counterfaite the clownes upon the Stage?
He had an original fifth share of a moiety of the Globe, increased to a
fourth on the retirement of Kempe. But he does not appear in the lists
of the King’s men, and had therefore probably retired by 1603. On 22
July of that year he made his will, which was proved on 13 February
1604.[987] He leaves his interests in the Globe and Curtain to Mary
Clark, _alias_ Wood, and Thomas Bromley, and legacies to Robert Gough
and John Edmans. He mentions the house in Southwark, in which he
dwelt, held with other tenements of the late Francis Langley; also his
brothers John and William Pope, and his mother Agnes Webbe. This hardly
justifies Collier in connecting him with the Webbes of Snitterfield,
Shakespeare’s kin. Bazell Nicholl, scrivener, and John Wrench, are
left executors. As in 1612 a sixth of the Globe was in the hands of
Basil Nicoll and John and Mary Edmonds, it is probable that John
Edmonds married Mary Clark. It appears from the Southwark token-books
that one Pope lived in Blamer’s Rents during 1593, in Wrench’s Rents
during 1595, and in Mr. Langley’s New Rents during 1596, 1598, 1600,
and 1602.[988] Dr. Greg thinks that Thomas Pope, rather than a Morgan
Pope who also had interests in Southwark, was the ‘Mr. Pope’ with whom
Henslowe had an interview on 25 June 1603, ‘at the scryveners shope
wher he lisse’, concerning the renewal of the lease of the Rose.[989]
But Thomas Pope clearly lived in his own house. Collier (_Actors_,
xxxvi) gives a marriage of a Thomas Pope and Elizabeth Baly at St.
Botolph’s on 20 December 1584, but the indications of the will do not
suggest a married man. William Smith complains that ‘Pope the player
would have no other armes but the armes of Sir Thomas Pope, Chancelor
of y^e Augmentations’.[990] Heywood mentions the ‘deserts’ of Pope in
his _Apology_. He is included in the actor-list of the First Folio
Shakespeare.
POWLTON, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1584.
PRICE, JOHN. Musician in Germany, 1609.
PRICE (PRYOR?), RICHARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1600 (?), 1610,
1613, 1622. He lived in White Cross Street in 1623, and records of his
children are in the registers of St. Giles, Cripplegate, from 1620
to 1627, where he is variously entered as ‘gentleman’, ‘yeoman’, and
‘player’ (J. 348; _Bodl._).
PROCTOR. Admiral’s, 1599.
PRUN, PETER DE. Germany, 1594. He was of Brussels.
PUDSEY, EDWARD. Germany, 1626. He was presumably the owner of the
manuscript note-book from which extracts are given in R. Savage,
_Stratford-upon-Avon Notebooks_ (1888), i; cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Chapman,
_Blind Beggar of Alexandria_.
PULHAM, GEORGE. Anne’s, 1612.
PYE, JOHN. A ‘momer’, whose son Samuel was baptized at St. Leonard’s,
Shoreditch, on 28 May 1559 (_Bodl._).
PYK (PIK, PYGE, PIGGE), JOHN. Strange’s, 1593; Admiral’s, 1597–9 (H.
ii. 303).
PYKMAN, PHILIP. Chapel, 1600–1.
RADSTONE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
RASTALL, WILLIAM. Chapel manager, 1602. He died in 1608.
RAWLYNS, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
READE, EMANUEL. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613; Anne’s, 1613 (?)-17.
READING, WILLIAM. Interluders, 1559–63 (cf. App. D, No. v).
REASON, GILBERT. Charles’s, 1610, 1616, 1625.
REDFORD, JOHN. Master of Paul’s, _c._ 1540, and dramatist (cf.
_Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 454).
REEVE, RALPH. Germany, 1603–9; Revels manager (provincial), 1611;
Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615.
REYNOLDS, ROBERT. Anne’s, 1616–17; Germany, 1616, 1618–20, 1626. He
was known in Germany by the clown-name Pickleherring. He and his wife
Jane were indicted for non-attendance at church in 1616 and 1617
(Jeaffreson, ii. 120, 127).
RICE, JOHN, was ‘boy’ to Heminges when he delivered a speech in
Merchant Taylors’ hall on 16 July 1607, and must have been still
with the King’s men when he took part as Corinea with Burbadge in
the water-pageant of 31 May 1610. He became one of the original Lady
Elizabeth’s men in 1611, and seems to have joined the King’s men again
in 1619. The Southwark token-books indicate a John Rice as a resident
in 1615, 1619, 1621, and 1623, with an ‘uxor’ in 1621, and another
record names John Rice ‘of the Bankside’ amongst players in 1623.[991]
He is not in the official list of May of that year, but played in _Sir
John van Olden Barnavelt_ about August, and is in the official list of
1621. He is traceable up to the list of 1625, but is not in that of
1629. It is not improbable that he retired, and went into Orders, for
Heminges, in his will of 1630, leaves 20_s._ to ‘John Rice, clerk, of
St. Saviour’s in Southwark’, and also names ‘Mr. Rice’ as overseer.
Rice is in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare.
‘ROBIN.’ Chapel, 1518.
ROBINS (ROBINSON), WILLIAM. Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived on Clerkenwell
Hill in 1623 (J. 348).
ROBINSON, JAMES. Chapel manager, 1600.
ROBINSON, RICHARD, first appears in the _Catiline_ actor-list of the
King’s men in 1611, and as playing the Lady in a stage direction (l.
1929) to _The Second Maiden’s Tragedy_ of the same year. In _The Devil
is an Ass_ (1616), ii. 8. 64, Merecroft describes ‘Dicke Robinson’ as
a lad, and as masquerading ‘drest like a lawyer’s wife’. I think it
not impossible that he was a son of James Robinson, who was a member
of the Children of the Chapel syndicate in 1600. If so, he may have
been a Blackfriars boy. He played in _Bonduca_ (_c._ 1613), is in the
1619 patent to the King’s men, and in the actor-list of the First Folio
Shakespeare, and is traceable as a King’s man up to the Beaumont and
Fletcher Folio of 1647. He may have married Richard Burbadge’s widow,
who held shares in the Globe and Blackfriars as Mrs. Robinson in 1635.
He owed Tooley £29 13_s._ when the latter made his will in 1623.
According to Wright he was a comedian. The same author states that he
took up arms for the King, and was killed by Major Harrison at the
taking of Basing House, on 14 October 1645. A contemporary report of
this event by Hugh Peters confirms the death of ‘Robinson, the player,
who, a little before the storm, was known to be mocking and scorning
the Parliament’. There were, however, other actors named Robinson, and
probably this was one of them. If Richard had been killed in 1645, he
could not have signed the dedication of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays
in 1647. Moreover, the register of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, records the
burial of ‘Richard Robinson, a player’ on 23 March 1648.[992] He seems
to have lived at the upper end of Shoreditch in 1623 (J. 347).
ROBINSON, THOMAS. Germany, 1626.
ROLL (ROE), JOHN. Interluders, 1530. He died in 1539.
RONNER, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
ROSE. Henry’s, 1612, where his wife became (?) a gatherer (_H. P._
63).
ROSSETER, PHILIP. Whitefriars lessee, 1609–15; Revels patentee, 1610;
Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615; Revels manager, 1617. He was one of the
royal lutenists from Midsummer 1604 to Easter 1623, and published _A
Booke of Ayres_ (1601) with Campion, who left him his property in 1620.
He died on 5 May 1623 (_D. N. B._; _Chamber Accounts_).
ROSSILL. Chamberlain’s, 1597.
ROWLEY, SAMUEL. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1624 (?), and
dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii; H. ii. 307).
ROWLEY, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1602.
ROWLEY, WILLIAM. Charles’s, 1610–19; King’s, 1623–5. But he remained
technically a Prince’s man until the death of James in 1625 (Murray, i.
162, 172, table).
RUSSELL, JOHN. Gatherer for Palsgrave’s, _c._ 1617 (_H. P._
28, 29, 85).
RUTTER, WILLIAM. Interluders, 1503.
SACKVILLE, THOMAS. Germany, 1592–3, 1597–1602. He used the clown-name
Johannes Bouset, was a merchant in Frankfort, 1604–17, and died in 1628.
‘SAM.’ Admiral’s, >1591.
SANDERSON, GREGORY. Anne’s, 1617–19.
SANDS, JAMES. King’s, 1605; Anne’s, _c._ 1617? He received legacies
from Augustine Phillips (q.v.), to whom he was apprentice, in 1605 and
from William Sly (q.v.) in 1608. A James Sands appears in the Southwark
token-books in 1596, 1598, and 1612 (_Bodl._).
SANDT, BERNHARDT. Germany, 1600–1.
SAUNDERS, WILLIAM. Chapel, >1517.
SAUSS, EVERHART. Netherlands, 1592.
SAVAGE, JEROME. Warwick’s, 1575–9.
SAVEREY, ABRAHAM. Lennox’s, 1605.
SCHADLEUTNER, SEBASTIAN. Germany, 1623.
SCARLETT, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose son Richard was baptized at St.
Giles’s on 1 September, and buried on 19 September 1605 (_Bodl._).
SCARLETT, RICHARD. A ‘player’, buried on 23 April 1609 at St. Giles’s,
where his daughter Susan had been baptized on 11 February 1607 and his
wife Marie buried on 12 February 1607. Several Scarletts were royal
trumpeters--Edward, William, and William the younger in 1483, John in
1509, Arthur in 1559–1603, John in 1677–9 (_Bodl._; _Chamber
Accounts_; Lafontaine, 1, 3, 325, 341).
SCOTT, JOHN. Interluders, 1503–28.
SEBECK, HENRY. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1617.
SEHAIS, JEHAN. France, 1598. Possibly the John Shaa, who witnessed
an Admiral’s payment to Dekker, 24 November 1599 (H. i. 114). ‘John’
appears for ‘Robert’ Shaw, probably by an error, in a play warrant of
1600 as given in the P. C. Acts (cf. App. B).
SHAKESPEARE, EDMOND. The burials at St. Saviour’s include, on 31
December 1607, ‘Edmond Shakespeare, a player: in the church,’ which is
expanded in a fee-book as ‘Edmund Shakespeare, a player, buried in the
church, with a forenoone knell of the great bell, 20_s._ (Collier,
_Actors_, xiv). Presumably this is the brother of William.
SHAKESPEARE, EDWARD. The baptisms at St. Giles’s include, on 12 August
1607, ‘Edward, sonne of Edward Schackspeere, Player: base borne’
(Collier, _Actors_, xv; J. Hunter in _Addl. MS._ 24589, f.
24).
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Strange’s, 1592; Pembroke’s (?), 1593; Sussex’s
(?), 1594; Chamberlain’s-King’s, 1594–1616; and dramatist.
SHAKSHAFTE, WILLIAM. Player (?) to Alexander Houghton, 1581 (cf. ch.
ix, p. 280).
SHANBROOKE, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried on 17 Sept. 1618 at St. Giles’s,
where his children appear in the registers from 10 June 1610 to 4 June
1618 (_Bodl._).
SHANK, JOHN, or SHANKS, for the name is variously spelt, describes
himself to Lord Chamberlain Pembroke in the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635
as ‘beeing an old man in this quality, who in his youth first served
your noble father, and after that the late Queene Elizabeth, then King
James, and now his royall Majestye’.[993] Presumably the Pembroke’s
company in question was that of 1597–1600, and the Queen Elizabeth’s
men the travelling company of the latter years of the reign. Shank’s
account of his own career may be amplified from the records of his
name in the 1610 list of Prince Henry’s men and in the patent issued
to the same company when they became the Elector Palatine’s men in
1613. He lived in Rochester Yard, Southwark, in 1605, but the register
of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, shows him later in Golden Lane, and
records several baptisms and burials of his children between 1610 and
1629.[994] He had joined the King’s men between 1613 and 1619, as his
name is in the patent of the latter year. It recurs in the official
lists of the company up to 1629, but occasionally only in actor-lists
up to 1631, including that of the First Folio Shakespeare. Amongst
his ‘boyes’ or apprentices were Thomas Pollard, John Thompson, John
Honiman, and Thomas Holcome. Thompson cost him £40; for other boys he
had spent by 1635 as much as £200. After the death of John Heminges,
Shank bought from his son William, surreptitiously, as his fellows
averred, two shares in the Blackfriars and three in the Globe, for a
total sum of £506. It was these transactions, which took place between
1633 and 1635, that led to the petition of Benfield, Swanston, and
Pollard to the Lord Chamberlain recorded in the _Sharers Papers_. As
a result Shank was directed to transfer one share in each house to the
petitioners. He, however, complained that he could not get satisfactory
terms from them, and that they restrained him from the stage. The
Cripplegate register records Shank’s burial on 27 January 1636.[995]
James Wright calls him a ‘comedian’,[996] and the following verses,
signed W. Turner, and quoted by Collier from Turner’s _Dish of Stuff,
or a Gallimaufry_, may perhaps be taken as confirming this[997]:
That’s the fat fool of the Curtain,
And the lean fool of the Bull:
Since Shancke did leave to sing his rhimes,
He is counted but a gull:
The players on the Bankside,
The round Globe and the Swan,
Will teach you idle tricks of love,
But the Bull will play the man.
The verses are dated 1662, but the theatres named indicate a much
earlier date.
SHAW (SHAA, autograph), ROBERT. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s,
1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602. John, son of Robert Shaw, ‘player’, was
baptized on 10 April 1603, at St. Saviour’s, and Robert Shaw, ‘a man’,
buried on 12 September 1603 (H. ii. 309; _Bodl._).
SHEALDEN. A ‘player’, who witnessed a loan for Henslowe on 24 August
1594 (H. i. 76).
SHEPARD. Paul’s door-keeper, 1582.
SHEPPARD, WILLIAM. A ‘player’, whose son Robert by his wife Johane was
baptized at St. Helen’s, 26 November 1602.
SIBTHORPE, EDWARD. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.
SIMPSON, CHRISTOPHER. Shoemaker of Egton, Yorks, recusant and
unlicensed player in 1610–12 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).
SIMPSON, CUTHBERT. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616
(_ibid._).
SIMPSON, JOHN. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (_ibid._).
SIMPSON, RICHARD. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616
(_ibid._).
SIMPSON, ROBERT. Shoemaker of Staythes, Yorks, recusant and unlicensed
player, 1612, 1616 (_ibid._).
SINCLER (SINKLO, SINCKLO), JOHN. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Pembroke’s (?),
1592–3; Chamberlain’s, 1594 (?)-1604.
SINGER, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588; Admiral’s, 1594–1603. He became an
ordinary Groom of the Chamber in 1603. A John Singer in 1571 owed money
to a Canterbury citizen, who had also debts from players (H. R. Plomer
in _3 Library_, ix. 253). Children of John Singer, ‘player’, appear in
the St. Saviour’s register from 1 August 1597 to 5 October 1609, and
his name is in the token-books from 1596 to 1602 (_Bodl._). The _Quips
upon Questions_ (1600) of Armin (q. v.) has been ascribed to Singer in
error. Rowlands couples him as a clown with Pope (q. v.) in 1600, and
Dekker, _Gull’s Horn Book_ (1609), says, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer,
nor all the litter of fooles that now come drawling behind them, never
played the clowns more naturally than the arrantest sot of you all
shall’. Heywood praised him as dead in the same year (H. ii. 310).
SKINNER, RICHARD. Interluders, 1547–58.
SLATER (SLAUGHTER), MARTIN. Admiral’s, 1594–7; Scotland, 1599;
Hertford’s, 1603; Anne’s, 1606; King’s Revels manager, 1608; Chamber
of Bristol, 1618–19. He is sometimes recorded by his Christian name
only. He had a wife on 22 July 1604, and is described as a citizen and
ironmonger in 1608. His name is in the Southwark token-books from 1595
to 1602, and Martin Slawter, ‘a servant’, was buried there on 4 August
1625 (H. ii. 310; _Bodl._).
SLAUGHTER, WILLIAM. ‘Ghost-name’ evolved by Mr. Fleay for a supposed
Queen’s man.
SLEE (SLYE), JOHN. Queen Jane’s, >1537; Interluders, 1539–40.
SLY, WILLIAM, was doubtless of Strange’s men or the Admiral’s about
1590–1, when he played in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_. On 11 October 1594
Henslowe sold him ‘a jewell of gowld seat with a whitte safer’ for
8_s._ to be paid for at the rate of 1_s._ weekly.[998] But apparently
he never paid more than 6_s._ 6_d._ An inventory of garments belonging
to the Admiral’s men on 13 March 1598 includes ‘Perowes sewt, which
W^m Sley were’.[999] Presumably this had come from Strange’s men,
as Sly is never traceable as a member of the Admiral’s company.
Probably he joined the Chamberlain’s men on their formation in 1594.
He is in all the lists of this company from 1598 to 1605, and in the
Induction to _The Malcontent_ (1604). He is also in the actor-list
of the First Folio Shakespeare. The fact that ‘Christopher Sly, old
Sly’s son of Burton Heath’ is the name given to the beggar in _The
Taming of the Shrew_ (_c._ 1594), led Collier to suggest that he
migrated from Warwickshire about the same time as Shakespeare. But the
beggar in _A Shrew_ is already Sly, and the name occurs in various
parts of London. The Southwark token-books show a William Sly in
Norman’s Rents during 1588, in Horseshoe Court during 1593, and in
Rose Alley during 1595 and 1596.[1000] In 1605 he was named as one of
the overseers and residuary executors, with a legacy, in the will of
Augustine Phillips. The register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, records
the baptism on 24 September and the burial on 4 October 1606 of John,
base-born son of William Sly, player, by Margaret Chambers; and the
register of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, records his own burial on 16
August 1608, from Halliwell Street. His nuncupative will was made on 4
August 1608. He left legacies to Cuthbert Burbadge, and James Sandes,
and the rest of his property to Robert and Cecily Browne and their
daughter Jane. Robert is to have his part of the Globe, and Cecily
is appointed executrix. The will was witnessed by several illiterate
women, and disputed by a relative named William Sly, but proved on
24 August.[1001] He was not one of the original shareholders in the
Globe, but was admitted to a share in 1605 or later. On 9 August 1608,
between the date of his will and that of his death, he was granted a
lease of a seventh share in the Blackfriars, and this his executrix
afterwards surrendered to Richard Burbadge.[1002] Heywood names Sly
(_c._ 1608) amongst other dead players, whose ‘deserts’ he commemorates.
SMITH, ANTONY. Charles’s, 1616, 1625.
SMITH, JOHN. Interluders, _c._ 1547–80. Is he the John Smith who
assisted George Ferrers as Lord of Misrule in 1552–3 (Feuillerat,
_Edw. and Mary_, 120)?
SMITH, JOHN. Revels, 1609.
SMYGHT, WILLIAM. A ‘player’ who witnessed a loan from Philip to Francis
Henslowe on 1 June 1595 (H. i. 6; ii. 312).
SOMERSET, GEORGE. Admiral’s, 1601–2. See also JOHN WILSON.
SOUTHEY, THOMAS. Interluders, 1547–56.
SOUTHYN, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
SPENCER, GABRIEL. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s,
1598. He was slain by Ben Jonson (cf. ch. xxiii) on 22 September 1598,
and was buried on the next day but one at St. Leonard’s, where the
register records him as from Hogge Lane (Collier, _Actors_, xxii). On
3 December 1596 a coroner’s inquest found that he had himself slain
James Feake with a rapier in the house of Richard East, barber, in St.
Leonard’s (Jeaffreson, i. xlv, 234). Henslowe sometimes describes him
merely as ‘Gabriel’, and under this name Heywood praises him (H. ii.
312).
SPENCER, JOHN. Germany, 1605–23. He was known by the clown-name of Hans
Stockfisch.
SQUIRE, LAWRENCE. Master of Chapel, 1486–93.
STEVENS, THOMAS. Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.
STOKEDALE, EDMUND. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
STRATFORD, WILLIAM. Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1610–23. He lived at the upper
end of White Cross Street in 1623. His children appear in the St.
Giles’s register in that year, and he was buried as a ‘player’ there on
27 August 1625 (J. 348, 350; _Bodl._).
STROWDEWIKE, EDMUND. Interluders, 1559–68.
SUDBURY, THOMAS. Interluders, 1530.
SUTTON, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).
SWANSTON, ELIARD. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1622; King’s, 1624–42 (Murray, i.
172, 255).
SWINNERTON (SWETHERTON), THOMAS. Anne’s, 1604–19; for his later career
cf. Murray, ii. 101, 105.
SYFERWESTE, RICHARD. Worcester’s (?), 1602 (H. ii. 314).
SYMCOCKES. Lennox’s, 1605.
SYMONS, JOHN. A tumbler. Strange’s, 1583; Oxford’s, 1585; Strange’s,
1586–8 (?); Queen’s, 1588 (?)-9.
TAILOR, ROBERT. Admiral’s, 1601–2.
TARBUCK, JOHN. Revels patentee, 1610.
TARLTON, RICHARD, first appears in the ‘Q^d Richard Tarlton’ at the end
of a ballad called _A very lamentable and wofull discours of the fierce
fluds ... the 5. of October, 1570_ (Arber, i. 440).[1003] This is
preserved (Halliwell, 126; Collier, _Old Ballads_, 78; H. L. Collman,
_Ballads and Broadsides_, 265). The Stationers’ Registers also record
in 1576 ‘a newe booke in Englishe verse intituled Tarltons Toyes’
(Arber, ii. 306), in 1578 ‘Tarltons Tragical Treatises conteyninge
sundrie discourses and pretie conceiptes bothe in prose and verse’
(Arber, ii. 323), and in 1579 ‘Tarltons devise upon this unlooked for
great snowe’ (Arber, ii. 346); but these are all lost. _Tarltons Jigge
of a horse loade of Fooles_ (Halliwell, xx) should, if it is genuine,
date from about 1579, as the jest at the Puritan fool ‘Goose son’ is
obviously aimed at Stephen Gosson; but it reads to me like a fake,
and Halliwell took it from a manuscript belonging to Collier, who had
already quoted it in his tainted _New Facts_, 18. It is improbable
that Richard is the ‘one Tarlton’ whose house in Paris Garden is
included in a list of suspected papist resorts sent by Richard Frith
to Alderman Martin at some date not earlier than 1585 (Wright, _Eliz._
ii. 250). The first mention of him is by Gabriel Harvey (cf. p. 4)
in 1579, when he had already acquired some reputation. He became an
original member of the Queen’s men (q. v.) in 1583, and remained
their principal comedian until his death in 1588. For this company he
wrote _The Seven Deadly Sins_ (q. v.) in 1585. Music for some of his
jigs is in existence (Halliwell, _Cambridge Manuscript Rarities_, 8)
and his facility as a jester made him, until he pushed it too far, a
_persona grata_ in Elizabeth’s presence. Bohun, 352, says that the
Queen admitted ‘Tarleton, a famous comedian, and a pleasant talker,
and other such like men, to divert her with stories of the town and
the common jests or accidents, but so that they kept within the bounds
of modesty and chastity’. He adds, ‘Tarleton, who was then the best
comedian in England, had made a pleasant play, and when it was acting
before the Queen, he pointed at Sir Walter Raleigh and said “See, the
Knave commands the Queen”, for which he was corrected by a frown from
the Queen; yet he had the confidence to add that he was of too much
and too intolerable a power; and going on with the same liberty, he
reflected on the overgreat power and riches of the Earl of Leicester,
which was so universally applauded by all that were present, that she
thought best to bear these reflections with a seeming unconcernedness.
But yet she was so offended, that she forbad Tarleton and all her
jesters from coming near her table, being inwardly displeased with this
impudent and unseasonable liberty.’ An anecdote of Tarlton ‘playing
the God Luz with a flitch of bacon at his back’, fighting the Queen’s
little dog Perrico de Faldes with sword and long staff, and exchanging
chaff with the Earl of Sussex (Halliwell, _Death-bed_, 30, from _S.
P. Dom. Eliz._ ccxv, 89) might have some point if Luz was a take-off
of Leicester. On 27 October 1587 Tarlton was allowed as a Master
of Fence, and is described as an ‘ordenary grome off her majestes
chamber’ (_Sloane MS._ 2530, f. 6). The same description recurs in
his will, which was signed on 3 September 1588, the actual day of his
burial at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, from Halliwell Street. He left
his property to his son Philip, as whose guardians he appointed his
mother Katharine, then a widow, his friend Robert Adams, and his fellow
of the Queen’s men, William Johnson. One of the witnesses, Charles
Barnard, was his sister’s husband. This will was disputed by Katharine
Tarlton, who brought a bill in Chancery, alleging that after signing it
and making over property worth £700 to Adams, Tarlton repented, tried
in vain to recall the will, and made another. A rejoinder by Adams
accuses Katharine of acting under the influence of another son-in-law,
Thomas Lee, a butcher, and describes how Adams was called to Tarlton’s
death-bed in the house of one Emma Ball in Shoreditch, ‘of a very
bad reputacion’. Some colour is given to his mother’s complaint by a
death-bed petition from Tarlton to Walsingham, begging his protection
for Philip, who was Sidney’s godson, against ‘a sly fellow, on Addames’
(_S. P. Dom. Eliz._ ccxv. 90). There is no mention of Tarlton’s wife;
the boy was six years old. Robert Adams was apparently a lawyer, and to
be distinguished from John Adams of the Queen’s men, who is referred
to as a fellow of Tarlton’s by the stage keeper in _Bartholomew Fair_
(Induction 38), ‘I kept the Stage in Master _Tarletons_ time, I thanke
my starres. Ho! and that man had liu’d to haue play’d in _Bartholmew
Fayre_, you should ha’ seene him ha’ come in, and ha’ beene coozened i’
the Cloath-quarter, so finely. And _Adams_, the Rogue, ha’ leap’d and
caper’d vpon him, and ha’ dealt his vermine about, as though they had
cost him nothing.’ After Tarlton’s death, several pamphlets, ascribed
to him or otherwise exploiting his popularity, came to the press; in
1588 ‘a ballad intituled Tarltons Farewell’ (Arber, ii. 500); in 1589
‘a sorowfull newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacon uppon this
theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Bel savage without Ludgate
(nowe or ells never) beinge the laste theame he songe’ (Arber, ii.
526); in 1589 ‘Tarltons repentance of his farewell to his frendes in
his sicknes a little before his deathe’ (Arber, ii. 531); in 1590 ‘a
pleasant dyttye dialogue wise betwene Tarltons ghost and Robyn Good
Fellowe’ (Arber, ii. 559). These are lost, unless, indeed, _Tarltons
Farewell_ is identical with ‘A pretie new ballad, entituled Willie
and Peggie, to the tune of Tarlton’s Carroll’, printed in _Archiv._
cxiv. 341, and A. Clark, _Shirburn Ballads_, 351, from _Rawl. Poet.
MS._ 185, f. 10. This ends ‘qd. Richard Tarlton’, but it is in fact
a lament over the death of Tarlton under the name of Willie, as is
clearly shown by lines 23 ‘None would be wery to see him one stage’,
41 ‘A groome of her chamber my Willie was made’, 55 ‘To singe them
their themes he never denied’. These verses support the theory, based
upon a contemporary note in a copy of Spenser (cf. _6 N. Q._ xi. 417;
Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 394), that Tarlton is the ‘pleasant Willy’
mourned as dead in the _Tears of the Muses_ (1591), 208, and if he is
also the Yorick of _Hamlet_, v. 1. 201, he was sufficiently honoured.
Another ballad in the same manuscript on the Armada (_Archiv._ cxiv.
344; _Ballads from MS._ ii. 92) also claims to be to the tune of
Tarlton’s ‘carroll’; the ‘Carroll’ itself is unknown. ‘_Tarltons Newes
out of Purgatorie. Onelye such a jest as his Jigge, fit for Gentlemen
to laugh at an houre, &c. Published by an old companion of his, Robin
Goodfellow_’ (n.d., but entered in S. R. 26 June 1590; Arber, ii.
553) is a volume of _novelle_, put into the mouth of Tarlton’s ghost.
The writer describes him as ‘only superficially seene in learning,
having no more but a bare insight into the Latin tung’, and physically
as ‘one attired in russet, with a buttond cap on his head, a great
bag by his side, and a strong bat in his hand’. Similarly, Henry
Chettle, who put into his mouth a defence of plays forming a section
of _Kind-hartes Dreame_ (1592; cf. App. C, No. xlix), knew him in a
dream ‘by his sute of russet, his buttond cap, his taber, his standing
on the toe, and other tricks’. _The Cobler of Caunterburie or an
Invective against Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie_ (1590) is also a
volume of _novelle_, and has practically nothing about Tarlton. On
the other hand, _Tarltons Jests_ at least claims to be biographical,
although its material, like that of Peele’s _Jests_, largely consists
of the flotsam and jetsam of all the jest-books. The earliest extant
edition is of 1611. But it was transferred from one publisher to
another in 1609 (Arber, iii. 402), the second of its three parts,
which mentions the Globe (Halliwell, 23), was entered in S. R. on 4
August 1600 (Arber, iii. 168), and probably therefore the first part
was already in print in the sixteenth century. It speaks of Tarlton
as a Queen’s man (Halliwell, 13, 27, 29, 30, 33), as playing at the
Bull in Bishopsgate (13, 24), where he did both the clown and the
judge in ‘Henry the Fifth’ (_The Famous Victories_) to Knell’s Harry,
the Curtain (16), and the Bell in Gracechurch Street (24), as singing
themes (16, 27, 28, 40), and as jesting in clown’s apparel in the royal
presence or in the Great Chamber at Court (7, 8). It also tells us,
for what the statements are worth, that his father lived at Ilford
(40), that he had a wife Kate of light character (17, 19), that he
kept the Saba tavern in Gracechurch Street, where he was scavenger of
the ward (15, 21, 22), and an ordinary in Paternoster Row (21, 26),
and that he had a squint (12) and a flat nose (28). A woodcut on the
title-page confirms these peculiarities of feature, and represents a
short, broad-faced, cunning-looking man, with curly hair, an elaborate
moustache and a starved beard, wearing a cap, and a bag or moneybox
slung at his side, and playing on a tabor and a pipe. This appears to
be taken from a drawing by John Scottowe in an initial letter to some
verses on Tarlton’s death in _Harl. MS._ 3885, f. 19. Nashe, _Pierce
Penilesse_ (1592, _Works_, i. 188), gives us a hint of his stage
methods in describing how at a provincial performance, as the Queen’s
men ‘were now entring into their first merriment (as they call it) the
people began exceedingly to laugh, when _Tarlton_ first peeped out his
head’, and how a ‘cholericke wise Iustice’ laid his staff about their
pates, ‘in that they, being but Farmers & poore countrey Hyndes, would
presume to laugh at the Queenes men, and make no more account of her
cloath in his presence’. According to Fuller (_Worthies_, iii. 139)
Tarlton was born at Condover in Shropshire, and kept his father’s
swine there, until a servant of the Earl of Leicester, struck with his
witty replies, brought him to Court. On the other hand, in the _Three
Lords and Three Ladies of London_ (1590), by his fellow Robert Wilson,
Simplicity produces his picture, and says he was ‘a prentice in his
youth of this honorable city: ... when he was yoong he was leaning to
the trade ... waterbearing: I wis he hath tossed a tankard in Cornehil
er now’ (sign. C^v). Halliwell (xxx) has collected a large number of
allusions to Tarleton and his humours, lasting well into the middle
of the seventeenth century. Taverns were named after him, and one is
said to have still stood in Southwark in 1798. Much of the action of W.
Percy’s _Cuck-Queanes and Cuckolds Errants_ (q. v.) takes place at the
Tarlton Inn, Colchester, of which he is said to have been the ‘quondam
controller and induperator’. Tarlton himself speaks the prologue to the
play. George Wilson, _The Commendation of Cockes and Cock-fighting_
(1607), records that on 4 May 1602 there fought at Norwich ‘a cocke
called Tarleton, who was so intituled, because he alwayes came to the
fight like a drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges, which
cocke fought many batels with mighty and fierce adversaries’.
TAWYER, WILLIAM. At _M. N. D._ v. 1. 128, F_{1} has the s. d. ‘Tawyer
with a Trumpet before them’. The St. Saviour’s burials give in June
1625, ‘William Tawier, M^r Heminges man’.
TAYLOR, JOHN. Choir Master at St. Mary’s, Woolnoth, 1557; at
Westminster, 1561–7.
TAYLOR, JOSEPH, is conjectured by Collier to be the Joseph Taylor
who was baptized at St. Andrew’s by the Wardrobe in Blackfriars on 6
February 1586, the Joseph Taylor who married Elizabeth Ingle, widow,
at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 2 May 1610, and the Joseph Taylor who
is shown by the Southwark token-books as dwelling in ‘M^r Langley’s
new rents, near the play-house’ during 1607, in Austen’s Rents during
1612 and 1615, as ‘gone’ in 1617, and as dwelling ‘near the play-house’
in 1623 and 1629, ‘on the Bankside’ in 1631, and in Gravel Lane
during 1633. ‘Joseph Taylor, player,’ is entered in the St. Saviour’s
registers as the father of Elsabeth (bapt. 12 July 1612), Dixsye and
Joseph (bapt. 21 July 1614), Jone (bapt. 11 January 1616), Robert
(bapt. 1 June 1617), and Anne (bapt. 24 August 1623).[1004] On the
other hand, a Joseph Taylor, not improbably a player, was living in
Bishopsgate near the Spittle in 1623 (J. 347). He was a member of the
Duke of York’s company in 1610, but left them without the consent of
his fellows for the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1611, and thereby involved
himself during the same year in a lawsuit with John Heminges.[1005]
He is in the actor-lists of _The Honest Man’s Fortune_ (1613) and of
_The Coxcomb_, as played by the Lady Elizabeth’s men about the same
date, and is also named in the text of their _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614).
There seems to have been some sort of amalgamation between the Duke
of York’s, now Prince Charles’s, and the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1615,
and when this terminated in the following year, Taylor became again
a member of the Prince’s company. He was still with them between
6 January and 2 February 1619, when he appeared as Dr. Almanac in
Middleton and Rowley’s _Mask of Heroes_, but on 19 May 1619 he appears
in a livery warrant issued for the King’s men. As he is not in their
patent of the previous 27 March, it is to be supposed that he joined
them to replace Burbadge, who had died on 13 March.[1006] The rest of
his stage career was spent with the King’s men. He succeeded Burbadge
in several of his characters, including Ferdinand in the _Duchess of
Malfi_ and Hamlet, although the incidence of dates must cast some
doubt upon the statement of Downes that he was instructed in the part
‘by the Author M^r Shakespear’.[1007] Wright says that he played it
‘incomparably well’, and praises him also as Iago in _Othello_, Truewit
in _Epicoene_, and Face in _The Alchemist_.[1008] He is included in
the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. In 1623
Nicholas Tooley left him £10 to pay a debt for which Tooley had become
his surety. With Lowin he seems to have assumed the leadership of the
company in succession to Heminges and Condell, and after Heminges’s
death in 1630 he was admitted to two shares in the ‘house’ of the
Globe and one in that of the Blackfriars, which he still held in
1635. About 1637 he petitioned for a waiter’s place in the Custom
House of London,[1009] and on 11 November 1639 he obtained the post
of Yeoman of the Revels, probably through the influence of Sir Henry
Herbert, with whom he had been in frequent contact as representative
of his company.[1010] After the closing of the theatres he joined his
fellows of the King’s men in publishing the First Folio of Beaumont
and Fletcher’s plays in 1647, and for his benefit and Lowin’s _The
Wild-goose Chase_ was added in 1652. He died at Richmond and was there
buried on 4 November 1652.[1011] The ascription to his brush of the
‘Chandos’ portrait of Shakespeare is now discredited.
THARE (THAYER), JOHN. Worcester’s, 1602–3; Germany, 1603–6 (?).
TILBERY, JOHN. Chapel, 1405.
TOMSONE, JOHN. A ‘player’ who borrowed 5_s._ from Henslowe on 22
December 1598 (H. i. 40).
TOOLEY, NICHOLAS, appears in the 1619 patent to the King’s men, but
not in that of 1603. He probably joined the company about 1605, as he
received a legacy under the will of Phillips on 4 May as his ‘fellow’.
He is not in the actor-list of _Volpone_ in that year, but is in most
of the later actor-lists from _The Alchemist_ (1610) to _The Spanish
Curate_ (1622), and in that of the First Folio Shakespeare. In 1619 he
witnessed Richard Burbadge’s will. He made his own will as Nicholas
Tooley, Gentleman, on 3 June 1623. After legacies to charity, to the
families of ‘my good friend Mr. Cuthbert Burbadge (in whose house I
do now lodge)’, of ‘my late Mr. Richard Burbadge deceased’, and of ‘my
good friend Mr. Henry Condell’, and to Joseph Taylor, and remissions
of debt to John Underwood and William Ecclestone, but not to Richard
Robinson, he ends by making Burbadge and Condell his executors and
residuary legatees. By a codicil of the same date, signed as Nicholas
Wilkinson _alias_ Tooley, he guards against any danger of invalidity
due to his failure to use the name of Wilkinson.[1012] Presumably,
therefore, Wilkinson, and not Tooley, was his original name. The name
of Tooley was fairly common in London, and more than one Nicholas
Wilkinson has been traced. He may have been the Nicholas, son of
Charles Wilkinson, baptized at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 3 February
1575.[1013] There seems no reason to connect him with a Nicholas Tooley
found on the Warwickshire muster-book in 1569.[1013] His reference to
Richard Burbadge as his ‘master’ suggests that he was his apprentice.
It is tempting, but arbitrary, to identify him with the ‘Nick’ who
played with Strange’s men in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ about 1592, or the
‘Nycke’ who tumbled before Elizabeth for the Admiral’s in 1601 and
is commended by Joan to Edward Alleyn on 21 October 1603.[1014] The
register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, records the burial of ‘Nicholas
Tooley, gentleman, from the house of Cuthbert Burbidge, gentleman’, on
5 June 1623.[1015]
TOTTNELL, HARRY. A ‘player’ whose daughter Joan was baptized at St.
Saviour’s on 20 March 1591 (_Bodl._).
TOWNE, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588, 1594–7. Greg (H. ii. 315) rather
arbitrarily suggests that Henslowe’s note of him as a witness to a loan
to Francis Henslowe of the Queen’s on 8 May 1593 (H. i. 4) is by an
error for Thomas (q. v.).
TOWNE, THOMAS. Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1594–1610. His name is in a s. d. to
_1 Honest Whore_ (1604). Alleyn’s papers record a widow Agnes. Towne’s
name is in the Southwark token-books during 1600–7, and Thomas Towne ‘a
man’ was buried on 9 August 1612. Towne’s will of 4 July 1612 names his
wife, whom he calls Ann, and his brother John, of Dunwich in Suffolk
(‘if he be still living’) and leaves £3 to his fellows Borne, Downton,
Juby, Rowley, Massey, and Humphrey Jeffes, ‘to make them a supper when
it shall please them to call for it’ (H. ii. 316; _Bodl._, citing will
in P. C. C.).
TOWNSEND, JOHN. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1616–32 (?); for his later
career, cf. Murray, i. 252–60; ii. 8.
TOY. The performer of Will Summer in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_.
TREVELL, WILLIAM. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.
TRUSSELL, ALVERY. Chapel, 1600–1.
TUNSTALL (DONSTALL, DONSTONE), JAMES. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s,
1590–1, 1594–7. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), refers to him in
conjunction with Alleyn (q. v.). The variation in his name is made
more, rather than less, puzzling by the baptism at St. Botolph’s of
Dunstone Tunstall on 20 August 1572 (H. ii. 261).
UBALDINI, PETRUCCIO. Italians, 1576 (?).
UNDERELL. Worcester’s, 1602. A Thomas Underell was a royal trumpeter in
1609–24 (_Chamber Accounts_).
UNDERWOOD, JOHN, was a Chapel boy in the year 1601, and continued at
Blackfriars until, as the _Sharers Papers_ state, on growing up to
be a man, he was taken to strengthen the King’s service. This was in
1608 or a little later. He is not in the Queen’s Revels actor-list
of _Epicoene_ (1609), and is in the King’s men’s actor-list of _The
Alchemist_ (1610), and thereafter in the official lists and most of
the actor-lists of the company, including that of the First Folio
Shakespeare, up to 1624. Tooley in his will of 1623 forgave him a debt.
His own will was made on 4 October 1624 and has a codicil appended
on 10 October, doubtless from his oral directions, but after his
death. He describes himself as ‘of the parish of Saint Bartholomew the
Less, in London, gent.’, and leaves his shares in the Blackfriars,
Globe, and Curtain to his executors, of whom Henry Condell is one, in
trust for his five children, all under twenty-one--John, Elizabeth,
Burbage, Thomas, and Isabel. The executors and his ‘fellowes’, Mr. John
Heminges and John Lowin, who are appointed overseers, have 11s. each
for rings.[1016] The baptism of his son John on 27 December 1610 is in
the register of Saint Bartholomew the Less, West Smithfield.[1017] The
trust was still unexpired at Condell’s death in 1627, and was handed on
by him to his wife. The _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 show one share in the
Blackfriars still in the hands of an Underwood; but apparently a third
of it had been parted with about 1632 to Eliart Swanston.[1018]
VINCENT. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.
VIRNIUS, JOHANN FRIEDRICH. Germany, 1615.
WAKEFIELD, EDWARD. Germany, 1597, 1602.
WALPOLE, FRANCIS. Anne’s, 1616–17.
WARD, ANTHONY. Vide ARKINSTALL.
WAYMUS (WAMBUS), FRANCIS. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1617–24.
WEBSTER, GEORGE. Germany, 1598, 1600–3.
WEBSTER, JOHN. Germany, 1596. Is he identical with the dramatist?
WESTCOTT, SEBASTIAN. Master of Paul’s, 1557–82. He is sometimes
described by his Christian name alone.
WHETSTONE, _c._ 1571. Cf. s.v. FIDGE. Plomer suggests that he might be
George Whetstone (cf. ch. xxiii).
WHITELOCKE, JAMES, afterwards Sir James. Merchant Taylors, 1575–86.
WILDER, PHILIP VAN. Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and lutenist,
commissioned to raise a royal company of young minstrels in 1550; cf.
ch. xii, s.v. Chapel.
‘WILL.’ Strange’s, 1590–1.
‘WILL.’ Admiral’s, 1597.
WILLIAMS, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.
WILSON, JOHN. In _Much Ado_, ii. 3. 38, for the ‘Enter Balthaser with
musicke’ of Q_{1}, F_{1} has ‘Enter ... Iacke Wilson’, who therefore,
at some date before 1623, sang ‘Sigh no more, ladies!’ He is probably
the son of Nicholas Wilson, ‘minstrel’, baptized at St. Bartholomew’s
the Less on 24 April 1585. He had an elder brother Adam, and buried
a wife Joan on 17 July 1624, and an unnamed son on 3 September 1624
at St. Giles’s from the house of George Sommerset, musician (Collier,
_Actors_, xviii). He seems to have become a city ‘wait’ about 1622 and
to have still held his post in 1641, and has been confused (Collier in
_Sh. Soc. Papers_, ii. 33; E. F. Rimbault, _Who was Jacke Wilson?_,
1846) with another John Wilson, born in 1595, a royal lutenist and
musician of distinction (cf. _D. N. B._). One or other of them was
concerned with a performance of _M. N. D._ in the house of John
Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on 27 September 1631, which gave offence
to the Puritans (Murray, ii. 148).
WILSON, ROBERT, was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1581. A
reference in Gabriel Harvey’s correspondence of 1579 suggests that he
was conspicuous amongst the actors of the day, and Lodge’s praise about
the same date in the _Defence of Plays_ of his _Shorte and Sweete_,
‘the practice of a good scholler,’ shows that he was also a playwright.
This piece Lodge compares with Gosson’s _Catiline’s Conspiracies_, and
it may have been on the same theme. Further evidence of his reputation
is in the letter of 1581 from T. Baylye (q. v.). In 1583 he joined the
Queen’s men, and is described by Howes in his account of the formation
of that company as a ‘rare’ man ‘for a quicke, delicate, refined,
extemporall witt’. He is not in the Queen’s list of 1588. This may
not be quite complete; on the other hand he may by then have left the
company. I see no solid foundation for the conjectures of Fleay, ii.
279, that he was the player of _Greenes Groatsworth of Wit_ (cf. App.
C, No. xlviii) who penned the _Moral of Man’s Wit_ and the _Dialogue of
Dives_, that he wrote _Fair Em_, that he left the Queen’s for Strange’s
in 1590 and thereby incurred Greene’s hostility, that he is the Roscius
of Nashe’s _Menaphon_ epistle, that he died of the plague in 1593. It
is extremely unlikely that he died in 1593, for in his _Palladis Tamia_
of 1598, after lauding Tarlton as famous for ‘extemporall verse’, Meres
continues, ‘And so is now our wittie Wilson, who for learning and
extemporall witte in this facultie is without compare or compeere, as
to his great and eternall commendations he manifested in his chalenge
at the Swanne on the Banke side.’ The common use by Meres and Howes
of the phrase ‘extemporall witte’ renders it almost impossible to
suppose that they are not speaking of the same man. It is true that,
in the _Apology for Actors_, Heywood, whose knowledge of the stage
must have gone back at least to 1594, classes Wilson with the older
generation of actors, whom he never saw, as being before his time, and
I take it the explanation is that, at or before the virtual break-up
of the Queen’s men in the plague of 1592–3, Wilson gave up acting, and
devoted himself to writing, and occasional extemporizing on themes. He
is generally supposed to be the R. W. of _The Three Ladies of London_
(1584) and _The Three Lords of London_ (1590), and the ‘Robert Wilson,
Gent.’ of _The Cobbler’s Prophecy_ (1594). The ‘Gent.’ is hardly an
insuperable obstacle to identifying him with the ‘Robert Wilson, yoman
(a player)’, who was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 20 November
1600 (Collier, _Actors_, xviii). A Wilson is in the suspected Admiral’s
cast of _c._ January 1600. But now comes the real difficulty. Meres,
also in the _Palladis Tamia_ and without any indication that he has
another man in mind, includes ‘Wilson’ in a group of ‘the best for
comedy amongst vs’, which is composed of the principal writers for the
Admiral’s in 1598, and amongst these writers, as shown by Henslowe’s
papers, was a Robert Wilson, who collaborated in eleven plays during
1598, and in three more during 1599 and 1600. He is last mentioned in
a letter of 14 June 1600. This is generally taken to be a younger man
than the Queen’s player, possibly a Robert Wilson who was baptized at
St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on 22 September 1579, and married Mary
Eaton there on 24 June 1606, possibly the Robert Wilson (not described
as ‘a player and the younger’ as Collier suggests in _Bodl._) whose
son Robert was baptized at St. Leonard’s on 15 January 1601 (Stopes,
_Burbage_, 141), possibly the Robert Wilson whose burial is recorded
at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 21 October 1610. On the whole, I am
inclined to think that, in view of the character of Meres’ references,
of the use of Catiline as a play-theme both about 1580 and in 1598 (cf.
ch. xxiii), and of the sudden disappearance of Wilson from Henslowe’s
diary in the year of the ‘player’s’ death, the balance of evidence is
in favour of one playwright rather than two. The undefined share of
the Admiral’s man in the extant _1 Sir John Oldcastle_ does not really
afford a basis for stylistic comparison with the more old-fashioned
manners of the 1584–94 plays. There is nothing to show that the
Bishopsgate man had any connexion with the stage, still less that he
was a son of the Queen’s player, as has been suggested.
WINTER, RICHARD. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, _c._ 1571 (_3
Library_, ix. 253).
WODERAM, RICHARD. Oxford’s, 1586–7 (?).
WOODFORD, THOMAS. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.
WOODS, JOHN. Holland, 1604.
WORTH, ELLIS. Anne’s, 1615–19; for his later career, cf. Murray, i.
198, 218. He is described as ‘gentleman’ in the register of St. Giles’s
at the baptism of his daughter Jane on 19 July 1613, and as ‘player’ at
that of his son Elizeus on 12 March 1629 (_Bodl._).
WYLKYNSON, JOHN. A London ‘coriour’, who maintained players in his
house in 1549 (cf. App. D, No. ii).
YOUNG, JOHN. Queen Jane’s, >1537; Interluders, 1539–53 (?). He seems to
have been still alive in 1569–70.
BOOK IV
THE PLAY-HOUSES
The world the stage, the prologue tears,
The acts vain hope and varied fears:
The scene shuts up with loss of breath,
And leaves no epilogue but death.
HENRY KING.
XVI
INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC THEATRES
[_Bibliographical Note._--Some notes in the _Gentleman’s
Magazine_ for 1813–16 by Eu. Hood [Joseph Haslewood] are
reprinted in _The Gentleman’s Magazine Library_, xv (1904),
86, and in _Roxburghe Revels_ (ed. J. Maidment, 1837). J. P.
Collier, _History of English Dramatic Poetry_, iii. 79, has
_An Account of the Old Theatres of London_, and chronological
sections on the subject are in F. G. Fleay, _A Chronicle History
of the London Stage_ (1890). T. F. Ordish, _Early London
Theatres_ (1894), covers the Shoreditch and Bankside theatres
‘in the Fields’ other than the Globe; a companion volume on
the urban houses has never appeared. The Bankside houses are
also dealt with by W. Rendle, _The Bankside, Southwark, and the
Globe_ (1877), being Appendix I to F. J. Furnivall, _Harrison’s
Description of England_, Part II (_N. Sh. Soc._), and in _Old
Southwark and its People_ (1878) and _The Play-houses at
Bankside in the Time of Shakespeare_ (_Walford’s Antiquarian_,
1885, vii. 207, 274; viii. 55). J. Q. Adams, _Shakespearean
Play-houses_ (1917), is a comprehensive and valuable work,
which reached me when this chapter was practically complete. I
am glad to find that our results so generally agree. The chief
London maps have been reproduced by the _London Topographical
Society_ and on a smaller scale by G. E. Mitton, _Maps of Old
London_ (1908). Some are also given as illustrations in G. P.
Baker, _The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist_ (1907).
They are classified by W. Martin, _A Study of Early Map-Views
of London_ in _The Antiquary_, xlv (1909), 337, 406, and their
evidence for the Bankside analysed by the same writer, with
partial reproductions, in _The Site of the Globe Play-house of
Shakespeare_ (1910, _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, xxiii.
149).
The evidence of the maps as to the position of the theatres
is obscured, partly by uncertainties as to the dates and
authorships both of the engravings and of the surveys on which
they were based, and partly by the pictorial character of the
topography. They are not strict plans in two dimensions, such
as modern cartographers produce, but either drawings in full
perspective, or bird’s-eye views in diminished perspective.
The imaginary standpoint is always on the south, and the
pictorial aspect is emphasized in the foreground, with the
result that, while the Bankside theatres, but not those north
of the river, are generally indicated, this is rarely with a
precision which renders it possible to locate them in relation
to the thoroughfares amongst which they stand. This is more
particularly the case since, while the general grouping of
buildings, gardens, and trees appears, from a comparison of
one view with another, to be faithfully given, it is probable
that the details are often both conventionally represented and
out of scale. The following classification is mainly borrowed
from Dr. Martin: (_a_) Pre-Reformation representations of
London throwing no light on the theatres; (_b_) _Wyngaerde_, a
pictorial drawing (_c._ 1543–50) by A. Van der Wyngaerde (_L.
T. Soc._ i; Mitton, i); (_c_) _Höfnagel_, a plan with little
perspective by G. Höfnagel, from a survey of _c._ 1554–7 (cf.
A. Marks in _Athenaeum_ for 31 March 1906), published (1572)
with the title _Londinum Feracissimi Angliae Regni Metropolis_
in G. Braun and F. Hohenburg, _Civitates Orbis Terrarum_ (L.
T. Soc. ii; Mitton, iv); (_d_) _Agas_, an engraving with
more perspective, but generally similar to that of Höfnagel
and possibly from the same survey, but drawn after 1561, and
assigned by G. Vertue, who reproduced it (1737), to Ralph Agas
(L. T. Soc. xvii; Mitton, ii); (_e_) _Smith_, a coloured drawing
by William Smith, possibly based on Höfnagel or Agas, in _B. M.
Sloane MS._ 2596, reproduced in H. B. Wheatley and E. W. Ashbee,
_W. Smith_, _The Particular Description of England, 1588_
(1879), and in G. P. Baker, _The Development of Shakespeare
as a Dramatist_ (1907), 18; (_f_) _Bankside Views_, small
representations of the same general character as (_c_), (_d_),
and (_e_), used as backgrounds to pictures and described by W.
Martin in _Antiquary_, xlv. 408; (_g_) _Norden_, engravings
in slight perspective of ‘London’ and ‘Westminster’ by P. Van
den Keere in J. Norden, _Speculum Britanniae_ (1593), from
survey of about the same date (L. T. Soc. vii; Mitton, v, vi;
Furnivall, _Harrison’s Description of England_, Part I, with
notes on p. lxxxix by H. B. Wheatley, reprinted by L. T. Soc.
in _Record_, ii); (_h_) _Delaram Group_, perspective views as
backgrounds to portrait (_c._ 1616) of James I by F. Delaram
(1620), reproduced by W. Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii.
186, and other portraits probably based on some original of
_c._ 1603; (_i_) _Hondius Group_, (i) drawing by P. D. Hondius
(1610) in J. Speed, _Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain_
(1611), as inset to map of Britain (_L. T. Record_, ii, with
notes by T. F. Ordish; Baker, _f. p._), (ii) engraving on
title-page of R. Baker, _Chronicle_ (1643), reproduced by Martin
in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 187, (iii) engraving on title-page
of H. Holland, _Herwologia Anglica_ (1620), (iv) engraving of
triumphal arch at coronation entry of James I by W. Kip in S.
Harrison (cf. ch. xxiv), _The Arches of Triumph_ (1604), all
perhaps based on the same original or survey; (_k_) _Visscher_,
engraving in perspective by Nikolaus Janssen Visscher (1616),
‘Amstelodami, ex officina Judoci Hondii’, with mutilated text
from Camden’s _Britannia_, reproduced from unique copy in Brit.
Mus. (L. T. Soc. iv, with notes by T. F. Ordish in _L. T.
Record_, vi; also W. Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 188,
and in Ordish, _Shakespeare’s London_, _f. p._ and elsewhere);
(_l_) _Merian Group_, (i) engraving in perspective by M. Merian
in J. L. Gottfried, _Neuwe Archontologia Cosmica_ (1638), 290,
reproduced by Martin, 191, and Adams, 256, and copied in (ii)
_f. p._ to James Howell, _Londinopolis_ (1657), reproduced
by Baker, 154, and (iii) R. Wilkinson, _Londina Illustrata_
(1819); (_m_) _‘Ryther’ Group_, (i) engraving in very slight
perspective from drawing unfinished as regards the Bankside in
Crace Collection, No. 32, without date, imprint, or indication
of authorship, reproduced by W. J. Loftie, _History of London_,
ii. 282, C. L. Kingsford, _Chronicles of London_, (1905) _f.
p._, and Baker, 36, 125, 135, and ascribed to Augustine Ryther
in 1604, but probably of about 1636–45 (cf. _4 N. Q._ ix. 95; _6
N. Q._ xii. 361, 393; _7 N. Q._ iii. 110; vi. 297; vii. 498) in
view of (ii) another version in Crace Coll., No. 31, with the
Bankside complete, bearing the imprint of ‘Cornelis Danckerts
grauer of maps’ in Amsterdam (_c._ 1631–56), and possibly by
Hollar, who worked for Danckerts, and was in England 1636–45,
(iii) map by T. Porter (_c._ 1666), based on (i) with later
additions (reproduced L. T. Soc. v); (_n_) _Hollar_, engraving
in perspective by W. Hollar (in London 1635–43), published
by Cornelius Danckerts in 1647 (L. T. Soc. xix; section by
Martin in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 194); (_o_) _Faithorne and
Newcourt_, engraving in conventional perspective by William
Faithorne from drawing by Richard Newcourt, published in
1658 (L. T. Soc. xviii; Mitton, vii). Of the various maps of
post-conflagration London the most useful are that of Leeke and
Hollar (_c._ 1666), of which a section is reproduced by Martin
in _Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 191, and those of John Ogilby and
W. Morgan (1677, Mitton, viii), John Ogilby and W. Morgan (1682,
L. T. Soc. xv), and John Rocque (1746, L. T. Soc. xxxiv, xxxv,
xxxvii; Mitton, ix; section in Martin, _ut supra_, 197). Rendle,
_Bankside_, has attempted to indicate the sites of the Bankside
theatres upon a reconstructed map based on Rocque, and Martin in
_Surrey A. Colls._ xxiii. 155, 202, gives parts of the Bankside
area as it now stands from the Ordnance Survey map (1896) and a
plan of the Anchor Brewery (1909).]
A. INTRODUCTION
The detailed notices, which will form the greater part of this chapter,
may with advantage be prefaced with some general observations upon
the historical sequence of the theatres and their distribution at
different periods over the London area. The earlier Tudor London
knew no theatre, in the sense of a building specially planned and
maintained for public dramatic performances, although Yarmouth had
its ‘game-house’ by 1538, and a _theatrum_ at Exeter was the scene
of satirical farces far back in the fourteenth century. The miracle
plays, not in London processional, were given in the open air, and
probably on temporary scaffolds. Similar stages may sometimes have
been used for the interludes, but these were ordinarily represented
in the winter-time, and sought the kindly shelter of a hall.[1019] In
the provision of specialized buildings, the drama appears to have been
anticipated by the ruder sport of baiting. Höfnagel’s pre-Elizabethan
map already shows on the Southwark side of the river the two rings,
with open centres and roofed seats for spectators, which are repeated
later on by Agas and by Smith. They stand in yards or gardens lined
with dog-kennels. One is lettered ‘The Bowll bayting’, the other
‘The beare bayting’. When the first Elizabethan theatres were built
in 1576, it was the hall on the one hand, and the ring on the other,
which determined the general structure of the two types of auditorium
that came simultaneously into being.[1020] The ‘private’ house, roofed
and lit, and with its seats arranged in tiers along three sides of a
long room, and the ‘public’ house, generally circular, with covered
stage and galleries, and a central yard or ‘pit’ open to the day,
co-existed for more than half a century, and finally merged in the
post-Restoration type of theatre which has come down to our own day.
The distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ is an unessential one,
depending probably upon some difference in the methods of paying for
admission necessitated by the regulations of the City or the Privy
Council.[1021] The performances in all the houses were public in the
ordinary sense. There was, however, another important factor, besides
the baiting ring, which greatly affected the structure of the open-air
theatre. This was the inn-yard. Long before 1576, interludes had been
given in public, as well as in the private halls of the great, and even
the need for some kind of permanent, or quasi-permanent, installation
had been felt. No doubt there were halls in London which could be
hired. The keeper of the Carpenters’ Hall in Shoreditch was prosecuted
towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign for procuring a Protestant
interlude ‘to be openly played’.[1022] Fees for the letting of Trinity
Hall for plays occur among the ‘casuall recepts’ of the churchwardens
of St. Botolph without Aldersgate in 1566–7.[1023] A jest-book of
1567 records a play at Northumberland Place.[1024] But an even more
convenient hospitality was afforded by the great court-yards of the
City inns, where there was sack and bottle-ale to hand, and, as the
Puritans averred, chambers ready for deeds of darkness to be done, when
the play was over.[1025] In these yards, approached by archways under
the inn buildings from one or more streets, and surrounded by galleries
with external staircases giving access to the upper floors, an audience
could quickly gather, behold at their ease, and escape payment with
difficulty. The actors could be accommodated with a tiring-room on the
ground floor, and perform as on a natural stage between the pillars
supporting the galleries. An upper gallery could be used to vary the
scene. The first performances in London inns upon record were at the
Saracen’s Head, Islington, and the Boar’s Head, Aldgate, both in
1557.[1026] By the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign the use of them was
normal. Plays ‘in hostels and taverns’ were specified for prohibition
by the proclamation of April 1559, and the City regulations of 1574 are
clearly aimed at the control of the ‘greate innes, havinge chambers
and secrete places adjoyninge to their open stagies and gallyries’,
and impose obligations for the sake of good order upon innkeepers
and tavern-keepers in the forefront of those regarded as likely to
harbour plays.[1027] It is not reading too much between the lines to
suggest that the owners of particular houses specially laid themselves
out to secure the attraction of public entertainments, entered into
regular contracts with players, and probably even undertook structural
alterations which in fact converted their yards into little less
than permanent theatres.[1028] We have, indeed, the record of a
trade dispute about the workmanship of play-scaffolds at the Red
Lion in Stepney as far back as 1567. The Red Lion stood outside the
jurisdiction of the City. Within it, and so far as we can judge, much
more important in the history of the stage were the Bell and the Cross
Keys, both in Gracechurch Street, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street,
and the Bel Savage on Ludgate Hill. No one of these four is in fact
mentioned by name as a play-house earlier than 1575, and although they
must have been hard hit by the regulations of 1574, it is clear that
they did not go altogether out of use, especially during the winter,
when climatic conditions rendered the suburbs unattractive, for another
twenty years. Stockwood, in 1578, speaks of six or eight ‘ordinarie
places’ where plays were then performed.[1029] Nevertheless the action
of the City, and the enterprise of James Burbadge, whose descendants
claimed for him the honour of being ‘the first builder of playhowses’,
led to a shifting of the dramatic focus. The Theatre and the Curtain,
both built in or about 1576, stood in ‘the fields’ to the north of
London proper, and were perhaps soon followed by Newington Butts on
the south side of the river, beyond St. George’s Fields; while the
Blackfriars, adapted in the same year (1576) by Richard Farrant to
house the performances of children, occupied an old monastic building
in the precinct of a ‘liberty’ which, although within the walls, was
largely exempt from the jurisdiction of the Corporation. This became
the home of the Children of the Chapel, while the Paul’s boys played
in their own ‘song-school’, either the church of St. Gregory or some
other building in the neighbourhood of St. Paul’s. How long this
arrangement had existed, or whether any company of children had played
in public at all before the date of Farrant’s experiment, we do not
know. From 1576 onwards, it is the Theatre and the Curtain which have
to bear the brunt of the Puritan attack, and the luxury of these, as
compared with the primitive accommodation of the inn-yards, arouses
a special indignation. ‘The sumptuous Theatre houses, a continual
monument of Londons prodigalitie and folly’, wails Thomas White in
1577. Stockwood in 1578 discommends ‘the gorgeous playing place erected
in the fieldes’; and William Harrison, perhaps about the same time,
finds it ‘an evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so riche
that they can build such houses’.[1030] Presently the theatres became
notable amongst the sights which foreign travellers must see in London.
Lupold von Wedel in 1584 says nothing of them, although he records the
baiting and its rings.[1031] But they are noticed in the following year
by Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who writes:[1032]
‘Comedies are given daily. It is particularly mirthful to
behold, when the Queen’s comedians act, but annoying to a
foreigner who does not know the language, that he understands
nothing. There are some peculiar houses, which are so made as to
have about three galleries over one another, inasmuch as a great
number of people always enters to see such an entertainment. It
may well be that they take as much as from 50 to 60 dollars [£10
to £12] at once, especially when they act anything new, which
has not been given before, and double prices are charged. This
goes on nearly every day in the week; even though performances
are forbidden on Friday and Saturday, it is not observed.’
The Theatre and the London inns were still the chief playing-places,
when at some date between 1576 and 1596 William Lambarde illustrated
his account of the pilgrimages to Boxley, by explaining that those who
visited the shrine did not get off scot-free--
‘no more than such as goe to Parisgardein, the Bell Sauage, or
Theatre, to beholde Beare baiting, Enterludes, or Fence play,
can account of any pleasant spectacle, unlesse they first pay
one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the Scaffolde,
and the thirde for a quiet standing.’[1033]
Paris Garden was the generic name given to the successive places
for bear-baiting which lay on the Surrey side of the river, not in
Southwark proper, which was in the jurisdiction of the City, but in the
Liberty of the Clink, which stretched in a westerly direction along
the Bankside, or still farther to the west, in the Manor of Paris
Garden itself. In Surrey, no less than in London, plays had established
themselves at an early date. A performance was going on in Southwark,
while the priests of St. Saviour’s sang _Dirige_ for Henry VIII’s
soul in 1547.[1034] The Privy Council ordered the Surrey justices to
suppress plays in the Borough and the adjoining places during 1578; and
it seems probable that a regular play-house had been built south of
the river at a date not much later than that of the Theatre itself. It
stood far back behind Southwark, in the village of Newington, divided
from the river by St. George’s Fields. The distance and the bad roads
were against it; and it was not until the Rose was built in the Clink
about 1587, that the Bankside became a serious rival to the ‘fields’
in the north as the home of theatres. The Swan, in Paris Garden, was
built in 1595. Newington is too far to the south to appear in the maps,
but Norden’s map of 1593 shows two round buildings, standing between
Bankside and an unnamed road, which may safely be identified with that
called Maiden Lane. One is lettered ‘The Beare howse’, the other, more
to the east and the south, ‘The play howse’; and this must clearly be
the Rose.
In 1596 the City appear to have at last obtained the assent of the
Privy Council to the complete exclusion of plays from the area of
their jurisdiction. This is probably the proceeding described, with
no precise indication of date, in the following passage from Richard
Rawlidge’s _A Monster Lately Found out and Discovered, or the
Scourging of Tipplers_ (1628):[1035]
‘_London_ hath within the memory of man lost much of hir
pristine lustre, ... by being ... filled with ... sinnes,
which ... are ... maintained, in Play-houses, Ale-houses,
Bawdy-houses, Dising-houses, ... All which houses, and traps
for Gentlemen, and others, of such Receipt, were formerly taken
notice of by many Citizens, and well disposed graue Gentlemen
... wherevpon some of the pious magistrates made humble suit
to the late Queene Elizabeth of ever-liuing memorie, and her
priuy Counsaile, and obteined leaue from her Majesty to thrust
those Players out of the Citty and to pull downe the Dicing
houses: which accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in
_Gracious street_, _Bishops-gate-street_, nigh _Paules_, that on
_Ludgate_ hill, the _White-Friars_ were put down, and other lewd
houses quite supprest within the Liberties, by the care of those
religious senators, ... and surely had all their successors
followed their worthy stepps, sinne would not at this day haue
beene so powerfull, and raigning as it is.’
The play-houses in Gracious or Gracechurch Street, Bishopsgate Street,
and Ludgate Hill were presumably the Bell and the Cross Keys, the
Bull, and the Bel Savage. By the house ‘nigh Paul’s’ Rawlidge possibly
meant the choir song-school; but in fact there had been no plays by
the Paul’s boys since 1590. If there was really a Whitefriars house
at so early a date, this is the only notice preserved of it. It may
be suspected that Rawlidge confused it with the Blackfriars, which
James Burbadge was apparently prevented, upon representations by the
City, from reopening in 1596. The claim of the City to exercise any
control over the old religious precincts of the Blackfriars and the
Whitefriars was a doubtful one; and although they ultimately secured
jurisdiction, they were not able to prevent the so-called ‘private’
theatres from establishing themselves in these ‘liberties’.[1036] With
these exceptions, however, and possibly that of the Boar’s Head, which
seems to have been used for a few years after 1602, but was more likely
just outside the bars, 1596 probably saw the last of playing within the
actual gates of the City.
Londoners had now to look wholly to the suburbs for their dramatic
entertainment. Prince Lewis of Anhalt-Cöthen found four theatres
in 1596.[1037] These were doubtless the Theatre and the Curtain on
the north and the Rose and the Swan on the south of the river. The
Newington house was still used in 1594, but even before that had long
been out of fashion. It was probably also about 1596 that John de
Witt wrote his _Observations Londinenses_. He too mentioned the
four theatres, together with the baiting house, and was particularly
struck by the newest, and as he avers, the largest and fairest of
them, the Swan, of the interior of which he attached a rough sketch to
his manuscript. This manuscript is lost, but fortunately an extract
survives, copied into a commonplace book by Arend van Buchell of
Utrecht. The following is the complete text:[1038]
EX OBSERVATIONIBUS LONDINENSIBUS JOHANNIS DE WITT.
De phano D. Pauli. Huic Paulino phano adheret locus ab
asservandis sacratioribus vestimentis Sacristi dictus, omnino
observatione dignus, quippe quo DIANAE delubrum fuisse
ferunt. Sacellum est rotundum, hemyphericum, concameratum,
cuius structura Romanam antiquitatem referre videtur. Aiunt
cum fundamenta templi iacerentur effossam ante huius aediculae
fores innumeram cervinorum capitum copiam; inde colligi Dianae
sacrificia (cui cervis litabatur) ibi olim peracta esse eique
hanc aedem sacratam fuisse; in eodem phano sunt epitaphia et
sepulcra varia praeter ea quae alio loco a me notata sunt,
Guilelmi Herberti Penbrochiae comitis Walliae praesidis qui
obijt A^o aetat. lxiii Christi vero 1569.
Ibidem in aede Westmonasteriensi sunt monumenta cum suis
elogiis: Guill. Thynne armigeri ex antiqua Bottevillorum
familia, Joannis Thynne fratris qui obijt 14 Martii 1584, item
Joannis Bourgh Duisburgi gubernatoris A^o 1596.
Amphiteatra Londinij sunt iv visendae pulcritudinis quae a
diversis intersigniis diuersa nomina sortiuntur: in iis varia
quotidie scaena populo exhibetur. Horum duo excellentiora vltra
Tamisim ad meridiam sita sunt, a suspensis signis ROSA et Cygnus
nominata: Alia duo extra vrbem ad septentrionem sunt, viâ quâ
itur per Episcopalem portam vulgariter Biscopgat nuncupatam.
Est etiam quintum, sed dispari [vsu?] et structura, bestiarum
concertationi destinatum, in quo multi vrsi, tauri, et stupendae
magnitudinis canes, discretis caueis & septis aluntur, qui
[_drawing occupies rest of page_] ad pugnam adseruantur,
iocundissimum hominibus spectaculum praebentes. Theatrorum autem
omnium prestantissimum est et amplissimum id cuius intersignium
est cygnus (vulgo te theatre off te cijn [off te swan]),[1039]
quippe quod tres mille homines in sedilibus admittat,
constructum ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide (quorum ingens in
Britannia copia est) ligneis suffultum columnis quae ob illitum
marmoreum colorem, nasutissimos quoque fallere possent. Cuius
quidem formam quod Romani operis vmbram videatur exprimere supra
adpinxi.
Narrabat idem se vidisse in Brittannia apud Abrahamum de
lyndeley [?] mercatorem Alberti Dureri omnia opera cartacea
elegantissima et absolutissima.
The account of Paul Hentzner, who was in London from 31 August to
8 September 1598, lays less stress upon the theatres than upon the
baiting, and is not altogether consistent with that of de Witt as to
the structure of the Swan, which was the nearest house to the moorings
of the royal barge at the west end of Paris Garden.[1040] Hentzner
writes:
‘Sunt porro Londini extra Urbem Theatra aliquot, in quibus
Histriones Angli Comoedias & Tragoedias singulis fere diebus, in
magna hominum frequentia agunt, quas variis etiam saltationibus,
suavissima adhibita musica, magno cum populi applausu finire
solent. Non longe ab uno horum theatrorum, quae omnia lignea
sunt, ad Thamesim navis est regia, quae duo egregia habet
conclavia, fenestris perlucidis, picturis & sculpturis eleganter
exornata, in sicco & quidem sub tecto collocata, propterea, ut a
pluviis & coeli injuria immunis sit.’
Hentzner then describes the baiting.[1041] He concludes:
‘Utuntur in hisce spectaculis sicut & alibi, ubicunque locorum
sint Angli, herba Nicotiana, quam Americano idiomate Tabacam
nuncupant (Paetum alii dicunt) hoc modo frequentissime; Fistulae
in hunc finem ex argilia factae, orificio posteriori, dictam
herbam probe exiccatam, ita ut in pulverem facile redigi possit,
immittunt, & igne admoto accendunt, unde fumus ab anteriori
parte ore attrahitur, qui per nares rursum, tanquam per
infurnibulum exit, & phlegma ac capitis defluxiones magna copia
secum educit. Circumferuntur insuper in hisce theatris varii
fructus venales, ut poma, pyra, nuces & pro ratione temporis,
etiam vinum & cerevisia.’[1042]
It is perhaps natural that foreign visitors should be more struck by
the English theatres at a time when the English stage was serving as a
model to northern Europe, than was the case with a native chronicler of
grave and slightly Puritanic tendencies. John Stowe, when he published
his _Survey of London_ in 1598, had nothing to say of the Bankside
houses, and but little of those in Middlesex. After writing of the
miracle plays, he says:
‘Of late time in place of those Stage playes, hath beene vsed
Comedies, Tragedies, Enterludes, and Histories, both true and
fayned: For the acting whereof certaine publike places as the
Theater, the Curtine, &c., haue been erected’ [_in margin_,
‘Theater and Curten for Comedies & other shewes’].[1043]
In another place, at the end of a description of Holywell, he adds:
‘And neare therevnto are builded two publique houses for the
acting and shewe of Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories, for
recreation. Whereof the one is called the Courtein, the other
the Theatre: both standing on the South-west side towards the
field.’[1044]
Even these scanty references were pruned in the second edition of
1603, after the Theatre had disappeared at the end of 1598 and the
Chamberlain’s men had left the Curtain. And of the Globe, built
during the earlier half of 1599, to which they migrated, Stowe takes
no notice. The Globe, however, appears, although unnamed, together
with two other theatres, of which one must be the Curtain, in the next
foreign account, a very full one by Thomas Platter of Basle, who was
in England from 18 September to 20 October 1599.[1045] I translate the
passage, of which sufficient use has not been made by historians of the
stage:
‘After dinner on the 21st of September, at about two o’clock,
I went with my companions over the water, and in the strewn
roof-house saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with
at least fifteen characters very well acted. At the end of
the comedy they danced according to their custom with extreme
elegance. Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this
performance, in wonderful combination with each other. On
another occasion, I also saw after dinner a comedy, not far from
our inn, in the suburb; if I remember right, in Bishopsgate.
Here they represented various nations, with whom on each
occasion an Englishman fought for his daughter, and overcame
them all except the German, who won the daughter in fight. He
then sat down with him, and gave him and his servant strong
drink, so that they both got drunk, and the servant threw his
shoe at his master’s head and they both fell asleep. Meanwhile
the Englishman went into the tent, robbed the German of his
gains, and thus he outwitted the German also. At the end they
danced very elegantly both in English and in Irish fashion.
And thus every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in the city
of London two and sometimes three comedies are performed,
at separate places, wherewith folk make merry together, and
whichever does best gets the greatest audience. The places are
so built, that they play on a raised platform, and every one
can well see it all. There are, however, separate galleries and
there one stands more comfortably and moreover can sit, but one
pays more for it. Thus anyone who remains on the level standing
pays only one English penny: but if he wants to sit, he is let
in at a further door, and there he gives another penny. If he
desires to sit on a cushion in the most comfortable place of
all, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be
seen, then he gives yet another English penny at another door.
And in the pauses of the comedy food and drink are carried round
amongst the people, and one can thus refresh himself at his own
cost.
‘The comedians are most expensively and elegantly apparelled,
since it is customary in England, when distinguished gentlemen
or knights die, for nearly the finest of their clothes to be
made over and given to their servants, and as it is not proper
for them to wear such clothes but only to imitate them, they
give them to the comedians to purchase for a small sum.
‘What they can thus produce daily by way of mirth in the
comedies, every one knows well, who has happened to see them
acting or playing.’
Platter then describes the Cockpit and the baiting. He concludes:
‘With such and many other pastimes besides the English spend
their time; in the comedies they learn what is going on in other
lands, and this happens without alarm, husband and wife together
in a familiar place, since for the most part the English do not
much use to travel, but are content ever to learn of foreign
matters at home, and ever to take their pastime.’
A year later than Platter, another traveller thus describes a visit to
the Bankside:[1046]
‘1600 die Lunae 3 Julii. Audivimus comoediam Anglicam; theatrum
ad morem antiquorum Romanorum constructum ex lignis, ita
formatum ut omnibus ex partibus spectatores commodatissime
singula videre possint. In reditu transivimus pontem magnificis
aedificiis ornatum e quibus uni adhuc affixa cernuntur capita
quorundam comitum et nobilium, qui laesae Majestatis rei
supplicio affecti sunt.’
When Lewis of Anhalt and de Witt wrote, there were four theatres,
exclusive of the City inn-yards, which were probably already closed.
Platter found two, and sometimes three, performances being given daily.
This agrees with the evidence available from other sources. After the
scandal of _The Isle of Dogs_ in 1597, the Privy Council decreed
a limitation of the London companies to two, the Chamberlain’s men and
the Admiral’s. The former played at the Curtain until 1599, when they
destroyed the Theatre and built the Globe. The latter played at the
Rose until 1600, when they migrated to the newly built Fortune. But
it is clear that the ordinance of the Privy Council was not strictly
observed. An intruding company was playing in February 1598, either
at the Theatre or the Swan. Platter’s three houses in 1599 included
the Curtain, together presumably with the Globe and the Rose. When the
Council sanctioned the opening of the Fortune in 1600, they understood
that the Curtain was to be ‘either ruinated or applied to some other
good use’, but it was still the scene of plays in 1601. Finally, in
the spring of 1602 Elizabeth ordered the Council to tolerate a third
company, that of the Earl of Worcester, Master of the Horse. This
was then playing at the Boar’s Head, a short-lived house of which
practically nothing is known; in the autumn it moved to the Rose. The
Swan possibly went out of use, except for the occasional performances
of acrobats and fencers, or of amateurs. On the other hand, Lord
Hertford’s men were in London during the winter of 1602–3, in addition
to the three privileged companies, and they must have practised
somewhere.
To the above must be added, for the closing years of Elizabeth’s
reign, the ‘private’ houses; Paul’s reopened in the winter of 1599,
the Blackfriars in that of 1600. Of these Platter knows nothing, but
Duke Philip Julius of Stettin-Pomerania, in the autumn of 1602, in
addition to performances at the Fortune and another theatre, saw also,
doubtless at the Blackfriars, the _Kinder-comoedia_. The following
is an extract from the diary of the visit kept by the duke’s secretary,
Frederic Gerschow:[1047]
‘13 [September] On the thirteenth a comedy was played, of
the taking of Stuhl-Weissenberg, firstly by the Turks, and
thereafter back again by the Christians.
14. In the afternoon was played a tragicomedy of Samson and the
half tribe of Benjamin.’[1048]
On 16 September the duke and his retinue saw the baiting. On 18
September they visited the Blackfriars, and Gerschow wrote an account
of the organization of the Children of the Chapel and of the nature of
their performances.[1049]
The Globe and the Fortune continued in regular use, as the houses of
the King’s men, and the Prince’s men respectively, during the new
reign, and endured to the closing of the theatres in 1642. Each was
destroyed by fire and rebuilt; the former in 1613, the latter in 1621.
Queen Anne’s men at first used the Boar’s Head and the Curtain, but
migrated from the Boar’s Head to the Red Bull, which had been built by
1606. This became their principal house, and they cannot be shown to
have used the Curtain after 1609. These were the only companies of men
players in London during 1603–8, and the Globe, the Fortune, and the
Red Bull are obviously the ‘three houses’ whose rivalry is referred to
by Dekker in the following passage from his _Raven’s Almanack_ of
1608:[1050]
‘Another ciuill warre doe I finde wil fal betweene players, who
albeit at the beginning of this fatall yeare, they salute one
another like sworne brothers, yet before the middle of it, shall
they wish one anothers throate cut for two pence. The contention
of the two houses, (the gods bee thanked) was appeased long
agoe, but a deadly warre betweene the three houses will I feare
burst out like thunder and lightning. For it is thought that
Flag will be aduanced (as it were in mortall defiance against
Flag), numbers of people will also bee mustred and fall to one
side or other, the drums and trumpets must be sounded, partes
will then (euen by the chiefest players) bee taken: words will
passe to and fro: speeches cannot so bee put vp, handes will
walke, an alarum be giuen, fortune must fauour some, or els they
are neuer able to stand: the whole world must sticke to others,
or else al the water in the theames wil not serue to carrie
those away that will bee put to flight, and a third faction must
fight like wilde Buls against Lyons, or else it will be in vaine
to march vp into the field.’
There were, however, more than three London companies about 1608. M.
de la Boderie tells us how one fell into disgrace during that year,
and how four others subscribed to buy off the consequent inhibition
of plays.[1051] The reconciliation is simple. Dekker has in mind only
the ‘public’ and not the ‘private’ houses. Of these Paul’s was closed
in 1606; it was made worth its Master’s while not to reopen it. The
Blackfriars was used by the successive boy companies, known generically
as the Queen’s Revels, until 1608 or 1609, when it passed to the King’s
men, who thereafter maintained it as a winter house, to supplement the
Globe. The Queen’s Revels then moved to the Whitefriars, a private
house built at some time before 1608, and occupied in that year by the
ephemeral company of the King’s Revels.
An increase in the number of adult companies now made fresh demands
upon theatrical house-room. It is presumably the Duke of York’s men
who were described at Leicester in 1608 as ‘the Princes players
of the White Chapple, London’. The description suggests that they
used the Boar’s Head, but if so, nothing more is heard of it, and
it is conceivable that they soon succeeded to the Curtain. The Lady
Elizabeth’s, who came into existence in 1611, are traceable at the
Swan, which Henslowe may have taken over to succeed the Rose, disused,
if not pulled down, by 1606. The following lines are in John Heath’s
_Two Centuries of Epigrammes_ (1610), but may of course, especially as
the Red Bull is not named, date back to the period when the Curtain
was still in the hands of the Queen’s men:
Momus would act the fooles part in a play,
And cause he would be exquisite that way,
Hies me to London, where no day can passe
But that some play-house still his presence has;
Now at the Globe with a judicious eye
Into the Vice’s action doth he prie.
Next to the Fortune, where it is a chaunce
But he marks something worth his cognisance.
Then to the Curtaine, where, as at the rest,
He notes that action downe that likes him best.[1052]
A foreign traveller again gives us help. The relation of the visit of
Prince Lewis Frederick of Württemberg in 1610 merely records that he
went to the Globe, and Justus Zingerling, who was in London at about
the same date, has the briefest note of the existence of ‘theatra
comoedorum et in quibus ursi et tauri cum canibus committuntur’.[1053]
But the itinerary of Prince Otto of Hesse-Cassel in the following year
is more expansive. The compiler writes:
‘In London there are seven theatres, where daily, except on
Sundays, comedies are performed, whereof the most important is
the Globe, which lies over the water. The theatre, where the
children play, is on the hither side of the water; they play
at three o’clock, but only from Michaelmas to Easter. Here it
only costs half a shilling to enter, but for the other places
at least half a crown. These play only with lights, and are the
best company in London.’[1054]
In addition to the Globe and the Whitefriars, the tale of seven
theatres is probably made up by the Blackfriars, the Fortune, the Red
Bull, the Curtain, and the Swan.
Henslowe’s correspondence with Daborne shows that he still had a
‘publique howse’, probably the Swan, in December 1613, and also that
in June of that year his company was only just thinking of ‘comming
over’ for a summer season, presumably from the Whitefriars, as he had
recently carried out an amalgamation between the Lady Elizabeth’s
men and the Queen’s Revels.[1055] In the following year occurred an
episode which curiously emphasizes the constant shifting of the focus
of theatrical interest during the whole of the period with which we
are concerned. Originally stageland was in the heart of the City
itself. With the building of the first theatres, it was transferred
to the Fields of the northern suburbs. During the last decade of the
sixteenth century the Fields in their turn gave way to the Bankside.
The Rose, the Swan, and the Globe successively made their appearance,
and the vestry of Southwark began to echo the earlier outcry of the
City against the iniquities of players, until their mouths were stopped
with tithes. But the transpontine period proved a brief one. Hardly was
the Globe up, before Alleyn’s choice of a site for the Fortune set the
fashion veering again, and opened up a new theatrical region in the
western suburbs. This was convenient for the Court and the great houses
along the Strand and for the lawyers in the Temple and at Westminster,
as well as for the City proper, and its tradition has endured until
quite recent years. The Red Bull and the Whitefriars followed in the
same area. On the other hand, the Rose had vanished, and the King’s
men, although they did not desert the Globe, acknowledged the change
of venue by taking up their winter quarters in the Blackfriars hard
by. One result was that men who had ridden to the Fields and been
ferried to the Bankside, now walked or drove in their coaches to the
theatre door. During the spring of 1614 things were probably at their
worst. Both the Globe, after its fire, and the Hope were still in the
builder’s hands, and if the Lady Elizabeth’s lingered again at the
Whitefriars, there can have been no plays across the water at all.
The watermen, who twenty years before had exercised the influence
of their patron, the Lord Admiral, to induce the Privy Council to
revoke an inhibition on the Bankside houses, sent up a bitter cry
of protest. John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’, whom they chose as their
spokesman, tells the story.[1056] A petition to the King was prepared,
to the effect that no play-house might be permitted ‘in London or in
Middlesex, within four miles of the City on that side of the Thames’,
and with this Taylor pursued James to Theobalds, Newmarket, and
Royston. It recited the service done by watermen in the navy during the
Armada invasion of 1588 and in such expeditions as those of Essex in
1596 and 1597. And it proceeded:
‘Afterwards the players began to play on the Bankside and to
leave playing in London and Middlesex (for the most part),
then there went such great concourse of people by water that
the small number of watermen remaining at home were not able
to carry them, by reason of the court, the terms, the players,
and other employments, so that we were enforced and encouraged
(hoping that this golden stirring would have lasted ever) to
take and entertain men and boys.’
It was calculated that the number of watermen and their dependants
between Windsor and Gravesend had now by 1614 reached 40,000:
‘The cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been
the players playing on the Bankside, for I have known three
companies besides the bear-baiting, at once there; to wit, the
Globe, the Rose, and the Swan. And it is an infallible truth
that, had they never played there, it had been better for
watermen by the one half of their living, for the company is
increased more than half by their means of playing there in
former times.’
Foreign employment had now come to an end:
‘And the players have all (except the King’s men) left their
usuall residency on the Bankside, and do play in Middlesex far
remote from the Thames, so that every day in the week they do
draw unto them three or four thousand people, that were used to
spend their monies by water.’
Such, Taylor assures us, was the effect of the petition. It was
referred by James to ‘his commissioners for suits’, that is to say, the
Court of Requests, composed of Sir Julius Caesar, Sir Thomas Parry, Sir
Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Montagu, Sir Walter Cope, George Calvert, and
Baron Sotherton. The King’s men exhibited a counter-petition, and the
case came on for hearing.
‘Sir Francis Bacon very worthily said that so far as the public
weal was to be regarded before pastimes, or a serviceable
decaying multitude before a handful of particular men, or
profit before pleasure, so far was our suit to be preferred
before theirs.’
The players appealed to the Earl of Somerset, who became Lord
Chamberlain and in that capacity their official protector on 10 July
1614, but he proved well affected towards the watermen. The hearing was
adjourned and never resumed, owing to the death of Cope on 31 July,
the promotion of Caesar to the Mastership of the Rolls on 1 October,
and the consequent dissolution of the commission. Ill feeling broke
out between Taylor and his fellows the watermen, who declared that
he met the players at supper at the Cardinal’s Hat on Bankside, and
took bribes of them to let the suit fall. Taylor, therefore, wrote his
pamphlet to vindicate his position.[1057] The completion of the new
Globe and the Hope during the progress of the dispute had probably
eased matters temporarily for the watermen, but the growing tendency
of things theatrical towards Middlesex was not permanently checked.
Some of the minor companies used the Hope until 1617, and then left
it to the bears again. The Globe survived, but will be found to have
occupied during the Caroline period a distinctly secondary position
to the Blackfriars in the economy of the King’s men. For this there
was another reason besides the geographical superiority of Middlesex
over Surrey. The acquisition of the Blackfriars, even though only for
winter purposes, in 1608 was an acknowledgement of the advantages for
adult companies of the ‘private’ or roofed type of theatre, hitherto
used only by boys. Once these advantages were realized, the doom of
the old ‘ring’ type, with its central opening, was written. Probably
the Hope was the only new house constructed on these lines after 1608,
and obviously the Hope required free ventilation to get rid of the
stink of bears and dogs. In 1615 Philip Rosseter and others obtained
sanction for the conversion of Porter’s Hall in the Blackfriars into
a theatre. This was to be used by children as well as adults, and was
probably roofed. It was pulled down again by what seems a somewhat
arbitrary decision in 1617. About the same time, the roofed Cockpit in
Drury Lane was converted into a theatre, under the name of the Phoenix,
for the occupation of the Queen’s men, who migrated to it from the Red
Bull. Whether or not the Fortune was given a roof at the rebuilding
of 1623, or the Red Bull at somewhat the same time, is uncertain; but
at any rate the Salisbury Court theatre, built near the Whitefriars
in 1629, perhaps to replace the old Whitefriars theatre, was a roofed
house.[1058] This was the last new theatre built before the civil
wars. The Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court were the most
important of the Caroline stages, and in the post-Restoration houses,
although these were on a larger scale than the ‘private’ houses of the
past, the roofed model was invariably adopted.
Soon after the completion of Salisbury Court, Edmund Howes, who had
already edited the fourth edition of John Stowe’s _Annales_ in 1615,
was again revising the text for the fifth edition of 1631, and took
occasion to append to his account of the burnings of the Globe and the
Fortune the following summary of theatrical enterprise since 1569:[1059]
‘In the yeere one thousand sixe hundred twenty nine, there was
builded a new faire Play-house, neere the white Fryers. And this
is the seauenteenth Stage, or common Play-house, which hath
beene new made within the space of threescore yeeres within
London and the Suburbs, _viz._
‘Fiue Innes, or common Osteryes turned to Play-houses,
one _Cockpit_, S. _Paules_ singing Schoole, one in the
_Black-fryers_, and one in the _White-fryers_, which was built
last of all, in the yeare one thousand sixe hundred twenty
nine, all the rest not named, were erected only for common
Play-houses, besides the new built Beare garden, which was
built as well for playes, and Fencers prizes, as Bull bayting;
besides, one in former time at _Newington_ Buts; Before the
space of threescore yeares aboue-sayd, I neither knew, heard,
nor read, of any such Theaters, set Stages, or Play-houses, as
haue beene purposely built within mans memory.’
This passage serves as a fair summary of the detailed investigations
set out in this chapter. Howes only allows one house to the Blackfriars
and one to the Whitefriars, and must therefore be leaving out of
account the abortive Porter’s Hall house, and treating Salisbury Court
as a continuation of the earlier Whitefriars. The Hope and Newington
Butts are afterthoughts, and make his seventeen into nineteen. We can
identify his five inns as the Bull, the Bell, the Cross Keys, the
Bel Savage, and probably the Red Lion, although this just antedates
his period of sixty years; while his balance of eight unnamed common
play-houses must be the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the
Globe, the Fortune, the Boar’s Head, and the Red Bull.
Prynne, in his _Histriomastix_ (1633), records six ‘divels chappels’ as
then in use, and these are doubtless the six houses, the Blackfriars,
Globe, Cockpit, Salisbury Court, Fortune, and Red Bull, which are also
noted by the Restoration writers on the stage, John Downes and James
Wright, as surviving up to the cataclysm of the civil wars.[1060]
Somewhat more confused and vague in their datings are the reminiscences
about 1660 of the Marquis of Newcastle in his letter of advice to
Prince Charles, under the head of ‘Devertismentes for your Ma^{tie}
People’:[1061]
‘Firste for London Paris Garden will holde good for the meaner
People.
‘Then for severall Playe Houses as ther weare five att leaste In
my Time,--
‘Black-Friers, the Cock-Pitt, Salsburye Courte, the Fortune,
& the Redd Bull,--Ther weare the Boyes thatt played at
Black-Friers, & Paules, & then the Kinges Players played att the
Globe--which is nowe calde the Phenixe [!]--Some Played, att
the Bores heade, & att the Curtin In the feildes & some att the
Hope whiche Is the Beare Garden, and some at White Friers,--Butt
five or Sixe Playe Houses Is enough for all sortes off Peoples
divertion & pleasure In thatt kinde.’
The marquis is the only one of the chroniclers who definitely records
the Boar’s Head.
A manuscript continuation of Stowe’s _Annales_, found in a copy
of the 1631 edition, narrates the havoc wrought by Puritans and
ground-landlords:[1062]
‘Play Houses. The Globe play house on the Banks side in
Southwarke, was burnt downe to the ground, in the yeare 1612.
And now built vp againe in the yeare 1613, at the great charge
of King Iames, and many Noble men and others. And now pulled
downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, On Munday the 15 of
April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it.
‘The Blacke Friers players play-house in Blacke Friers, London,
which had stood many yeares, was pulled downe to the ground on
Munday the 6 day of August 1655, and tennements built in the
rome.
‘The play house in Salsbury Court, in Fleetstreete, was pulled
downe by a company of souldiers, set on by the sectuaries of
these sad times, on Saturday the 24 day of March 1649.
‘The Phenix in Druery Lane, was pulled downe also this day,
being Saterday the 24 day of March 1649, by the same souldiers.
‘The Fortune Play-house betweene White Crosse streete and
Golding Lane was burnd downe to the ground in the yeare 1618.
And built againe with brick worke on the outside in the yeare
1622. And now pulled downe on the inside by the souldiers this
1649.
‘The Hope, on the Banks side in Southwarke, commonly called
the Beare Garden, a Play House for Stage Playes on Mundayes,
Wedensdayes, Fridayes, and Saterdayes, and for the baiting of
the Beares on Tuesdayes and Thursdayes, the stage being made
to take vp and downe when they please. It was built in the
year 1610, and now pulled downe to make tennementes, by Thomas
Walker, a peticoate maker in Cannon Streete, on Tuesday the 25
day of March 1656. Seuen of M^r. Godfries beares, by the command
of Thomas Pride, then hie Sheriefe of Surry, were then shot to
death, on Saterday the 9 day of February 1655, by a company of
souldiers.’
Downes and Wright do not mention the Hope, as they were not discussing
baiting. On the other hand, the annalist says nothing of the fate of
the Red Bull, which in fact appears to have escaped destruction, to
have been occasionally used for ‘drolls’ during the Commonwealth, and
to have served once more, with the Cockpit and Salisbury Court, the
demolition of which was probably limited to the interior fittings,
for the first entertainments of the Restoration. The building of Vere
Street in 1660, Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1661, and Drury Lane in 1663
made them obsolete.[1063]
These records leave ambiguous the fate of the Curtain and the Swan. The
Curtain is traceable in occasional use up to about 1627, and is figured
as a roundish building in the ‘Ryther’ maps, which are probably of a
decade later.[1064] It cannot, therefore, have vanished long before
the civil wars, and was the most long-lived of all the theatres. It
may, of course, have been rebuilt, later than its original foundation
in 1576, but as to this there is no evidence. The ‘Ryther’ maps also
show the Fortune. No other maps give any of the theatres on the north
of the river. Of the Bankside houses, the Swan is shown by a decagonal
ground-plan, with the inscription ‘Old Play house’, in the Paris Garden
Manor survey of 1627.[1065] And it is described as still existing side
by side with the Globe and the Hope, but clearly also as derelict, in
the following passage from _Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632):
‘Especially, and aboue all the rest, she was most taken with the
report of three famous _Amphytheators_, which stood so neere
scituated, that her eye might take view of them from the lowest
_Turret_, one was the _Continent of the World_, because halfe
the yeere a World of _Beauties_, and braue _Spirits_ resorted
vnto it; the other was a building of excellent _Hope_, and
though _wild beasts_ and _Gladiators_ did most possesse it, yet
the Gallants that came to behold those combats, though they were
of a mixt Society, yet were many Noble worthies amongst them;
the last which stood, and as it were shak’d handes with this
Fortresse, beeing in times past as famous as any of the other,
was now fallen to decay, and like a dying _Swanne_, hanging
downe her head, seemed to sing her owne dierge.’[1066]
I turn now to the maps of the Bankside, which, had they been datable,
and drawn with cartographical precision, ought not only to have
furnished valuable evidence as to the duration of the theatres, but
also to have indicated accurately the position of each amongst the
streets and lanes of the district. Neither condition is, however,
fulfilled. Even where the date of an engraving is known, the date of
the survey on which it was based can, as a rule, be only approximately
determined. And the constant intrusion of pictorial elements, which
gives the maps the character of perspective views rather than of
plans, is naturally emphasized on the Bankside, which has to serve as
a foreground to the design. The main topographical features which have
to be borne in mind are simple, and can easily be related to those
in John Rocque’s map of 1746, as interpreted by Strype’s _Survey_ of
1720, or in a modern Ordnance map. The whole region concerned lies
roughly between the southern approaches to London and Blackfriars
Bridges. It underwent a good deal of development during one period,
especially in the area of the Clink, a liberty lying between Southwark
on the east and another liberty of Paris Garden on the west, and
affording a convenient suburban resort outside the jurisdiction of
the City. Stowe’s account of the neighbourhood in 1598 is perhaps a
little misleading. He describes no more than the Bankside proper, ‘a
continuall building of tenements’ on the riverside, extending about
half a mile west of London Bridge. Here he places, from west to east,
the bear gardens, the former stews, the prison of the Clink, Winchester
House, and the church of St. Mary Overie in Southwark.[1067] This
agrees pretty well with the maps of Agas (_c._ 1561) and Norden
(1593), except that there was already a group of houses falling outside
Stowe’s purview, which stood on the river near Paris Garden Stairs
and practically continued the Bankside westwards. But there was also,
which Stowe does not mention, a marshy _hinterland_ to the Bankside,
of ponds and gardens, among which Agas, and still more Norden, show
a good many scattered houses. By the end of the century there was a
fairly definite north to south street known as Deadman’s Place, which
debouched from the east end of the Bankside, and from which in its turn
struck out one called Maid or Maiden Lane, which went in an irregular
line westwards over the marshes, and was finally joined by two
divergent ways, Love Lane and Gravel (afterwards Holland) Lane, to the
Paris Garden group of houses. Thus was formed a rough parallelogram,
half a mile long, and from 200 to 350 feet deep, within or near which
all the theatrical sites are placed by the maps. In Norden’s map of
1593, both the Bear House and the Play House, which must be the Rose,
stand considerably to the west of Deadman’s Place. The Bear House is
the most westerly of the two, and is about halfway between the Bankside
houses on the north and Maid Lane on the south. The Rose is a good
deal nearer Maid Lane. In the Delaram views (1603–20) there are three
flagged, but unnamed, structures. One which stands well back from
the river and, after allowing for the view-point, appears slightly
the most easterly of the three, is cylindrical; the upper half is
alone windowed, and has a smaller diameter than the lower half. It is
placed amongst trees and meadows. There is nothing which obviously
indicates Maid Lane.[1068] The two other buildings stand much nearer
the river’s edge, amongst houses; they are angled, probably octagonal,
and not cylindrical. The ‘Hondius’ views repeat the cylindrical
building and the most westerly of the two angled buildings much in
the same relative position; the intermediate one has disappeared. It
seems obvious that the cylindrical building must be the Globe, and
the other two the Bear Garden, afterwards the Hope, to the west, and
the Rose, left out of the ‘Hondius’ group, because it disappeared in
1605, in the centre. The Delaram and ‘Hondius’ views do not extend
far enough west to include the Swan. It is shown by Visscher in 1616,
and named. So are the Bear Garden and the Globe, both of which appear
as angled buildings, octagonal or hexagonal, about equidistant from
the Bankside houses, and north of Maid Lane, the angle of which next
Deadman’s Place is shown.[1069] As the change from a cylindrical to an
angled representation of the Globe coincides with the rebuilding of the
house in 1614, we may perhaps infer that the structural form is not
a mere cartographic convention.[1070] It is rather singular that in
the Merian maps (_circa_ 1638) there are four houses again, including
the Swan, well to the west. This, with two of the three houses in the
eastern group, is named by the engraver. A third unnamed house stands
between the Globe on the east and the Bear Garden on the west, which is
approximately where the Rose used to stand. It is distinctly nearer the
river than the other two, but all three are north of Maid Lane, from
which the Bear Garden is slightly more remote than the Globe.[1071]
If the Rose had actually a second term of existence, it was probably
only a brief one.[1072] The fullest of the Ryther maps (_c._ 1636–45)
has two angled buildings, one to the west, rather nearer to Bankside
than to Maid Lane; the other to the east, and south of Maid Lane,
standing in an angle between that and a track running from north-west
to south-east. There are no names, but obviously the eastern house is
the Globe, and the western the Hope, and indeed the dogs can be made
out. The track joining Maid Lane may be Globe Alley. The Hollar view of
1647 shows two cylindrical, not angled, buildings. One lettered ‘The
Globe’ is on the extreme brink of the river; the other, to the east and
south of it, is lettered ‘Beere bayting’. Faithorne and Newcourt, in
1658, give no theatres proper, but only a ring marked ‘Beare garden’.
Finally, Leeke and Hollar about 1666 give a single unnamed roundish
theatre, south of Maid Lane. Presumably it is the Globe, but copied
from a survey of earlier date, as the Globe had been pulled down for
tenements in 1644.
On the whole, the maps are disappointing guides. It seems more
probable than has quite been recognized, that the singular two-storied
structure shown by Hondius and Delaram really represents the earlier,
the Shakespearian, Globe. And the representation of a fourth house by
Merian, even if he did not know its name, gives support to the view
that the Rose may have had some kind of existence at a later date than
the Sewers records indicate. But as regards the alinement, the distance
from the river, and the relation to Maid Lane, of the three houses in
the Clink, it is clear that no consistent story is told. The general
impression one gets is that the Hope stood farthest to the west, then
the Rose, and then the Globe; and that the Rose stood nearest to the
river, then the Hope, and then the Globe. Nor is this inconsistent with
documentary evidence, which in particular indicates that the parcel of
land, on which the latest of the Bear Gardens was built, was contiguous
on the west to that known as ‘the little Rose’.[1073] Bear Garden and
Rose Alley, running side by side from the Bankside into Maid Lane
or Park Street, are traceable in eighteenth-century maps and in the
modern Ordnance map.[1074] Did one judge by the maps alone, one would
probably, in spite of the dissenting testimony of ‘Ryther’ and of Leeke
and Hollar, come to the conclusion that the Globe stood to the north
of Maid Lane. The balance of other evidence points unmistakably in the
other direction.[1075]
B. THE PUBLIC THEATRES
i. The Red Lion Inn.
ii. The Bull Inn.
iii. The Bell Inn.
iv. The Bel Savage Inn.
v. The Cross Keys Inn.
vi. The Theatre.
vii. The Curtain.
viii. Newington Butts.
ix. The Rose.
x. The Swan.
xi. The Globe.
xii. The Fortune.
xiii. The Boar’s Head.
xiv. The Red Bull.
xv. The Hope.
xvi. Porter’s Hall.
i. THE RED LION INN
The following record appears in the court books of the Carpenters’
Company:[1076]
Courte holden the xv^{th} daie of Julie 1567, Annoque Regni
Reginae Eliz. nono by M^r William Ruddoke, M^r Richard More,
Henrye Whreste & Richard Smarte wardeins, & M^r Bradshawe.
Memorandum that at courte holden the daie & yeare abovesayd
that, whear certaine varyaunce, discord & debate was betwene
Wyllyam Sylvester carpenter on thone partie & John Brayne
grocer on thother partie, yt is agreed, concluded & fullie
determyned by the saide parties, by the assent & consent of them
bothe, with the advise of the M^r & wardeins abovesayd that
Willyam Buttermore, John Lyffe, Willyam Snellinge & Richard
Kyrbye, Carpenters, shall with expedicon goe & peruse suche
defaultes as are & by them shalbe found of in & aboute suche
skaffoldes, as he the said Willyam hathe mad at the house called
the Red Lyon in the parishe of Stebinyhuthe, & the said Willyam
Sillvester shall repaire & amend the same with their advize
substancyallie, as they shall thinke good. And that the said
John Brayne, on Satterdaie next ensuenge the date above written,
shall paye to the sayd Willyam Sylvester the some of eight
poundes, tenne shillinges, lawfull money of England, & that
after the playe, which is called the storye of Sampson, be once
plaied at the place aforesaid the said John shall deliver to
the said Willyam such bondes as are now in his custodie for the
performaunce of the bargaine. In witnesse whereof both parties
hereunto hathe sett their handes.
by me John Brayne grocer.
[Sylvester’s mark.]
This is the only notice of the Red Lion playing-inn which has been
preserved, but John Brayne, grocer, is doubtless the same who financed
his brother-in-law, James Burbadge, in the far more important
enterprise of the Theatre in 1576. Stebunheth or Stepney was a parish
in Middlesex, lying to the east of the City, beyond Whitechapel, and,
although near enough to be in a sense a suburb, was outside the civic
jurisdiction.
ii. THE BULL INN
The first notice of the Bull is on 7 June 1575 when the playing of a
‘prize’ there is recorded in the register of the School of Defence.
It appears to have been the most popular of all localities for this
purpose and there are fourteen similar notices of its use in the
register, ending with one on 3 July 1590.[1077] Florio refers to it
as a place for plays in 1578.[1078] Stephen Gosson in his _Schoole of
Abuse_ (1579) exempts from his ordinary condemnation of plays _The Jew_
and _Ptolemy_ ‘shown at the Bull’.[1079] On 1 July 1582 the Earl of
Warwick asked permission from the Lord Mayor for his servant John David
to play his provost prizes at ‘the Bull in Bishopsgatestrete or some
other conuenient place to be assigned within the liberties of London’.
This was refused, much to Warwick’s annoyance, on the ground that an
inn was a place ‘somewhat to close for infection’, and David appointed
to play ‘in an open place of the Leaden hall’.[1080] The Bull, with
the Bell, was assigned by a civic order of 28 November 1583 to the
Queen’s men for their first winter season. Tarlton and the Queen’s men
are said in the _Jests_ to have played ‘oftentimes’ at ‘the Bull in
Bishops-gate-street’, and here their play of _The Famous Victories of
Henry the Fifth_, with Tarlton in the parts of the judge and the clown
and Knell in that of Henry, was given.[1081] This must, of course, have
been between 1583 and Tarlton’s death in 1588. In 1592 the translator
of _The Spaniard’s Monarchie_ disclaims any ‘title fetched from the
Bull within Bishopsgate, as a figge for a Spaniard’. I do not know
whether any old play underlying the Admiral’s (q.v.) _Spanish Fig_ of
1601–2 can be referred to. The house was still in use during 1594, for
in April or May of that year Anthony Bacon settled in Bishopsgate, to
the vexation of his mother, ‘on account of its neighbourhood to the
Bull Inn, where plays and interludes were continually acted, and would,
she imagined, corrupt his servants’.[1082] Richard Flecknoe mentions
the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, with the Cross-Keys, as one of the inns
turned into theatres at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, as
was ‘at this day to be seen’ in 1664.[1083] The site was at No. 91 on
the west of Bishopsgate Street, and is shown in Hatton’s map of 1708,
and the Ordnance Survey maps of 1848–51 and 1875.
iii. THE BELL INN
This inn existed in 1560, for on 12 June of that year ‘the wyff of the
Bell in Gracyous-strett’ was carted as a bawd and whore.[1084] Plays
must have been used there in 1576–7, in the Revels Account for which
year an item of 10_d._ is included ‘ffor the cariadge of the partes
of y^e well counterfeit from the Bell in Gracious strete to St. Iohns
to be performed for the play of Cutwell’.[1085] With the Bull, it was
assigned to the Queen’s men by a civic order of 28 November 1583 for
their first winter season. _Tarlton’s Jests_ also mention Tarlton and
‘his fellowes’, probably the Queen’s men, as performing at the Bell
‘by’ the Cross Keys which was also in Gracious Street, and this must
have been before Tarlton’s death in 1588.[1086] Both houses may be
included in Rawlidge’s reference to play-houses in Gracious street and
elsewhere ‘put down’ by the City in Elizabeth’s time. I suppose that
the site is that of Bell Yard at No. 12 on the west of Gracechurch
Street.[1087]
iv. THE BEL SAVAGE INN
The Bel Savage is named as an early London play-house in the 1596
edition of Lambarde’s _Perambulation of Kent_. This inn, of which the
name is still preserved on Ludgate Hill, where it stood until 1873
(Harben, 63), must be distinguished from another in Gracechurch Street
once kept by Tarlton, which in his time was known as the Saba.[1088]
The origin of the name is obscure; a deed of 1452 refers to an ‘inn
... called Savages Inn, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop, in the
parishe of St. Bride in Fleet Street’ (_L. T. R._ ii. 71). Probably
therefore the notion of the Belle Sauvage is a later perversion.
Gascoigne, in the prologue to his _Glass of Government_ (1575),
repudiates the ‘worthie jests’ and ‘vain delights’ of ‘Bellsavage
fair’.[1089] Gosson, in 1579, excepts from his general condemnation
of plays ‘the two prose books, played at the Belsavage, where you
shall find never a word without wit, never a line without pith, never
a letter placed in vain’.[1090] A play-house ‘on Ludgate Hill’ is
included by Rawlidge in his list of those ‘put down’ in Elizabeth’s
time. Probably the Queen’s men were acting at the Bel Savage in 1588,
for after the death of Tarlton in that year was published ‘a sorowfull
newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacion uppon this theame gyven
him by a gentleman at the Belsavage without Ludgate (nowe or els
never) beinge the laste theame he songe’.[1091] Prynne’s reference
to _Dr. Faustus_ (q.v.) at the Bel Savage suggests that at some time
the Admiral’s also played there. It was also occasionally used for
the playing of ‘prizes’; the earliest recorded date in the Register
of the School of Defence being in 1575–7 and the latest on 31 January
1589.[1092]
v. THE CROSS KEYS INN
This inn may have been the play-house, or one of the play-houses,
‘in Gracious Street’ said by Rawlidge to have been ‘put down’ under
Elizabeth. The first notice of it dates from 23 June 1579, on which
day James Burbadge was arrested at the suit of John Hynde for £5 1_s._
1_d._, ‘as he came down Gracious Street towards the Cross Keys there
to a play’. The house is described as the dwelling-house of Richard
Ibotson, citizen and brewer of London.[1093] It was in use as a place
of popular amusement during the life of Tarlton, who died in 1588,
for one of the Jests relates how he came from the Bell, where he was
playing to ‘the Crosse-Keyes in Gracious streete’ to see Banks’s
performing horse there.[1094] A company can first be definitely
located at it in 1589, on 5 November of which year Lord Strange’s men,
as reported by Lord Mayor Hart to Burghley, disobeyed an admonition
to forbear playing, and ‘went to the Crosse Keys and played that
afternoon’. In 1594 Strange’s men were absorbed in Lord Hunsdon’s, and
on 8 October 1594 Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor to obtain toleration
for ‘my nowe companie of players’ who had been accustomed ‘to plaie
this winter time within the citye at the Crosse Kayes in Gracious
street’.[1095] How long Shakespeare’s fellows continued to use the
Cross Keys as a winter house is unknown; presumably it ceased to be
available in 1596. The adaptation of the inn as a theatre was still
visible at the Restoration, and is assigned by Richard Flecknoe to
‘about the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign’. The site is shown in
Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1677 and the Ordnance Survey map of 1848–51:
it is on the west of Gracechurch Street.
vi. THE THEATRE
[_Bibliographical Note._--Material is available in the records
of four litigations: (a) _Peckham v. Allen_ (Wards and Liveries,
1589) as to the title to the site; (b) _Burbadge v. Ames et al._
(Coram Rege, 1596–9) and _Earl of Rutland v. Allen and Burbadge_
(Exchequer, 1599–1602) as to the title to a neighbouring
plot; (c) _Burbadge v. Brayne_ (Chancery, 1588–95). _Brayne_
(afterwards _Miles_) _v. Burbadge_ (Chancery, 1590–5), and
_Miles v. Burbadge_ (Requests, 1597), as to the profits of the
house; (d) _Allen v. Street_ (Coram Rege, 1600), _Burbadge v.
Allen_ (Requests, 1600), _Allen v. Burbadge_ (Queen’s Bench,
1601–2), and _Allen v. Burbadge et al._ (Star Chamber, 1601–2),
as to the removal of the fabric. A few documents from these,
some of which he supposed to relate to the Blackfriars, were
printed by Collier in _Memoirs of the Actors_ (1846 and _H. E.
D. P._ iii. 257) and in _Original History of the Theatre in
Shoreditch_ (1849, _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 63). A large number
were used by Halliwell-Phillipps for his excursus on _The
Theatre and Curtain_ (_Outlines_, i. 345), and in C. C. Stopes,
_Burbage and Shakespeare’s Stage_ (1913), where abstracts of
(a) and (b) may be consulted. The full texts of (c) and (d) are
printed in C. W. Wallace, _The First London Theatre, Materials
for a History_ (1913, _Nebraska University Studies_, xiii. 1).
The exact locality of the site has been carefully investigated
by W. W. Braines in _Holywell Priory and the Site of the
Theatre, Shoreditch_ (1915, _Indication of Houses of Historical
Interest in London_, xliii), and again in _The Site of the
Theatre, Shoreditch_ (1917, _L. T. R._ xi. 1).]
The following statement as to the beginnings of theatrical enterprise
in London is made by Cuthbert Burbadge and his family in the so-called
_Sharers Papers_ of 1635:[1096]
‘The father of us, Cutbert and Richard Burbage, was the first
builder of playehowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres
a player. The Theater hee built with many hundred poundes taken
up at interest. The players that lived in those first times had
onely the profitts arising from the dores, but now the players
receave all the commings in at the dores to themselves and halfe
the galleries from the houskepers. Hee built this house upon
leased ground, by which meanes the landlord and hee had a great
suite in law, and, by his death, the like troubles fell on us,
his sonnes; wee then bethought us of altering from thence, and
at like expence built the Globe.’
The accuracy of this is fully borne out by the records of the various
legal proceedings in connexion with the Theatre, which a painful
investigation has exhumed, and the topographical indications furnished
by the evidence in some of these have made it possible to locate with
some precision the site of London’s first regular play-house.
The Theatre stood in the Liberty of Halliwell or Holywell, part of the
Middlesex parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, immediately outside
the Bishopsgate entrance to the City.[1097] The name of the Liberty
was derived from an ancient holy well, which has now disappeared, and
its status from the fact that it had been the property of a priory of
Benedictine nuns. The buildings of the priory lay between Shoreditch
High Street, leading north from Bishopsgate, on the east and the open
Finsbury fields on the west. Its southern gate was in a lane leading
from the High Street to the Fields, then and still known as Holywell
Lane or Street, on the south of which lay the Prioress’s pasture
called the Curtain. Part of this south end of the liberty, lying on
both sides of Holywell Lane, had been leased in 1537 and 1538 to the
Earls of Rutland, who continued to hold it from the Crown after the
dissolution in 1539, and obtained a renewed lease in 1584.[1098] The
rest of the property, including the main conventual buildings, was
sold in 1544 to one Henry Webb, whose daughter Susan and her husband
Sir George Peckham sold it in 1555 to Christopher Bumsted, and he in
the same year to Christopher Allen and his son Giles. The alienation
of 1555 was challenged as illegal by Susan Peckham’s heirs in 1582,
and ultimately, but not until about thirty years later, they appear
to have made good their claim.[1099] In the meantime Giles Allen had
leased a part of the property, which became the site of the Theatre,
to James Burbadge on 13 April 1576.[1100] This was bounded to the
north by the wall of Allen’s own garden, probably corresponding to the
main cloister of the convent, on the east or south-east by the Earl
of Rutland’s holding, and on the west by a ditch dividing it from the
open Finsbury fields. Within the ditch and divided from it by a strip
of void ground, was the old brick wall of the precinct. On the extreme
south was a bit of void ground lying between an Oat Barn occupied by
Rutland and another Great Barn included in the lease. The Oat Barn and
the void ground were in fact debatable property claimed both by Allen
and Rutland. North of the Great Barn, and immediately to the east of
the precinct wall was more void and garden ground; farther to the east
the ‘inner court yarde’ of the convent. This held tenements backing
upon Allen’s garden to the north, and others, including a mill-house,
backing on the garden ground to the west. In this yard was a well,
probably the eponymous ‘Holywell’, which fed a horsepond by Rutland’s
stable on the south-east, and then drained away through the debatable
ground to the Finsbury ditch.[1101] Since Burbadge’s barn is known to
have been shored up to the Theatre, it is evident that this must have
been constructed in the void and garden ground between the tenements
and the precinct wall, and as there was no right of way through
Rutland’s holding from Holywell Lane, an entrance was made through
the wall direct from Finsbury fields. The Theatre itself, indeed, was
sometimes loosely spoken of as ‘in the fields’.[1102] Working from
later title-deeds of the locality, Mr. Braines has successfully located
the precise site of the building in the angle now formed by Curtain
Road, which occupies the strip of void ground between the precinct wall
and Finsbury ditch, and New Inn Yard, which occupies a strip of the
‘debateable ground’ and a strip also of the site of the Great Barn.
The site is now part of the premises of the Curtain Road Elementary
School.[1103]
Burbadge’s lease was for a term of twenty-one years from Lady Day 1576.
He was to pay a fine of £20 and an annual rent of £14. He covenanted
to spend £200 within the first ten years in improving the existing
buildings, and in return Allen covenanted to make a new lease for
twenty-one years at any time within the first ten years, and also to
allow the tenant at any time within the term of either lease ‘to take
down such building as should within the sayd tenne yeeres be erected
on the sayd voyde growndes for a theater or playinge place’. It was
also agreed that Allen and his wife and family ‘vpon lawfull request
therfore made’ should be entitled ‘to enter or come into the premisses
and their in some one of the vpper romes to have such convenient place
to sett or stande to se such playes as shalbe ther played freely
without any thinge therefore payeinge soe that the sayd Gyles hys wyfe
and familie doe com and take ther places before they shalbe taken vpp
by any others’. Burbadge, a joiner as well as a player, had probably
the technical qualifications for his enterprise. But he was a man of
small means, not worth above 100 marks, and had no credit.[1104] He
found a partner in his brother-in-law, John Brayne, a well-to-do grocer
of Bucklersbury, who had already been connected with a play-house
speculation at the Red Lion inn. The association proved a calamitous
one, and its history can only be traced through the dubious _ex parte_
statements of later litigation. Burbadge, in an unfortunately mutilated
document, appears to have alleged that Brayne acquired an interest by
means of a promise, which he afterwards evaded, to leave it to his
sister’s children.[1105] Robert Miles, of the George Inn, Whitechapel,
a friend of Brayne, who supported and ultimately inherited the case
of his widow, told a different story.[1106] He had heard Burbadge
‘earnestlie insynuate’ Brayne to join in the transaction, as one which
‘wold grow to ther contynual great profitt and commodytie’. Brayne was
‘verye loth to deale in the matter’, and complained later to Miles
that it was ‘his vtter vndoing’, and that he would never have touched
it, but for the ‘swete and contynuall’ persuasions of Burbadge. His
brother-in-law had assured him that the cost of erecting the play-house
would not exceed £200, and after it had already cost £500, urged that
‘it was no matter’, and that the profits ‘wold shortlie quyte the
cost vnto them bothe’. Obviously Brayne was out for profits, and had
to take his risks. But if the account of Miles is to be trusted, he
had also definite grievances against his partner. Burbadge’s small
contribution to the outlay was partly made in material, for which he
overcharged at the rate of sixpence for a groat’s worth. When funds
ran short, Brayne and his wife worked as labourers on the structure,
while Burbadge, if he set his hand to a job, took the regular rate
of wages for it. And there is some corroboration of a more serious
charge of ‘indyrect dealing’, after the house was opened, about the
‘collecting of the money for the gallories’.[1107] Miles alleged that
during a space of two years Burbadge used a secret key made by one
Braye, a smith in Shoreditch, to filch from ‘the commen box where the
money gathered at the said playes was putt in’, thus cheating ‘his
fellowes the players’ as well as Brayne. He would also ‘thrust some of
the money devident betwene him and his said ffellowes in his bosome
or other where about his bodye’. The Theatre was in use by 1 August
1577, as it is mentioned by name in the Privy Council inhibition of
that date.[1108] But it was opened before the work was completed, and
the last stages were paid for out of the profits.[1109] Moreover,
in addition to what Brayne and Burbadge could find, money had to
be raised on mortgage, with the result that Brayne never got full
security for his interest in the undertaking. He was not a party to
the original lease, thinking that if a joint lease were entered into,
the survivor would take all.[1110] When a draft assurance of a moiety
of the profits to him was prepared on 9 August 1577, it could not be
executed because the lease was at pawn, and ultimately, on 22 May
1578, Burbadge gave him a bond of £400 to assure in due course.[1111]
An assurance was, however, never made. The friction between the
partners led to violent disputes. On one occasion, after high words
in a scrivener’s shop, ‘Burbage did there strike him with his fist
and so they went together by the eares in somuch that this deponent
could herdly part them’.[1112] On 12 July 1578 they submitted their
differences to arbitrators, who decided that, with the exception of
10_s._ weekly for Brayne’s housekeeping and 8s. for Burbadge’s out of
the profits of ‘such playes as should be playd there vpon Sundaies’,
the first charge upon the rents and profits of the property should be
the repayment of debts due upon the theatre. Thereafter Brayne should
take them ‘till he shuld be answered suche somes of money which he had
lade out for and vpon the same Theatre more then the said Burbage had
done’. And when this claim too was discharged, the rents and profits
should ‘go in devydent equallye betwene them’. Should it be necessary
to raise money on mortgage, it should be a joint mortgage, and its
redemption would then come in as the first claim on the rents and
profits. Burbadge gave Brayne a further bond of £200 for the keeping
of this award.[1113] On 26 September 1579 a mortgage was in fact
entered into for a loan of £125 from John Hyde, grocer, to be repaid
in a year. The amount, however, was not forthcoming, and although
Hyde made an arrangement to take £5 a week out of the profits, he
only got it for four or five weeks. In June 1582 he arrested Burbadge
and got £20 out of him. Shortly afterwards he claimed forfeiture of
the lease, and as Burbadge warned him that Brayne ‘wold catch what
he cold’, appointed one of his own servants with Burbadge ‘to gather
vp v^{li} wekely during the tyme of playes’. In this way he got back
another £20 or £30. There was, however, still at least £30 outstanding
when Brayne died in August 1586.[1114] His widow Margaret claimed a
moiety of the interest under the lease as his heir. At first, we hear,
Burbadge allowed her ‘half of the profittes of the gallaries’, but only
so long as she could lay out money ‘to the necessary vse of the said
playe howsse’, and when she had so spent £30, he said that he must
take all the profits until the debts were paid, made her gather as a
servant, and finally thrust her out altogether.[1115] Meanwhile Hyde
was getting impatient for his money. He had promised Mrs. Brayne that,
if he were satisfied, he would reassure the lease to her and Burbadge
jointly, but not to either party separately. But now he said that he
must convey it to whichever would pay him first, and being approached
through Walter Cope, the master of Burbadge’s son Cuthbert, he did in
fact, on some promise that Mrs. Brayne should not be wronged, take his
£30 and make over the lease to Cuthbert Burbadge on 7 June 1589.[1116]
Henceforward Cuthbert, and not his father, was the ostensible tenant
of the property. This transaction stimulated Mrs. Brayne to assert her
claims. About a year before the Burbadges had brought an action against
her in Chancery, apparently in the hope of enforcing the alleged
promise of Brayne to leave his interest to his sister’s children; and
she now retorted with a counteraction against James and Cuthbert, in
which she claimed to have an assignment of a moiety of the lease.[1117]
Her chief witness was the Robert Miles on whose statements this
narrative has already drawn. He was not of unimpeachable reputation.
His long association with Brayne had ended in a quarrel. Brayne had
‘charged Miles with his deathe, by certaine stripes geven him by
Miles’. The widow had accused him before the coroner and procured his
indictment as ‘a comon barreter’. Afterwards they had become friends,
and he was now maintaining Mrs. Brayne in her suit.[1118] Much of his
evidence, however, received corroboration from his son Ralph, from
William Nicoll, a notary who had prepared the deeds connected with
the partnership, and from Edward Collins, who had acquired Brayne’s
grocery business in Bucklersbury. Burbadge, on the other hand, relied
largely on one Henry Bett, who had had an opportunity of perusing Mrs.
Brayne’s papers, and had then transferred his services to the other
side. We cannot perhaps assume that all the evidence in the cross-suits
is preserved. So far as what we have goes, there seems to have been
no attempt on Burbadge’s part to defend himself against the charge of
indirect dealing during the early years of partnership. Nor were the
main facts as to the history of the lease much in dispute. The chief
issue was as to Mrs. Brayne’s equitable claim to an interest in it,
and this of course turned largely on the state of the account between
Brayne and Burbadge at the death of the former. Miles asserted that
the expenditure on the building of the Theatre in cash and credit had
been practically all Brayne’s, that he had started as a rich man, but
had had to sell his lease and stock in Bucklersbury and pawn his own
wardrobe and his wife’s to get the work finished, that he was ruined,
and that Mrs. Brayne was now ‘vtterlye vndone’ by the suit, and owed
500 marks to her friends.[1119] On the other side it was claimed that
Brayne’s wealth, variously reputed at from £500 to £1,000, had been
exaggerated, that he was already involved when he took the Theatre in
hand, and that his downfall was largely due to unfortunate investments
outside the partnership, especially in a soap-making business carried
on with Miles at the George, where in fact Burbadge had incurred losses
in helping him.[1120] Bett, moreover, said that, while Brayne ‘would
never plainlie declare’ what his profits on the Theatre had been, ‘yt
seemed by his taulke, that he had gayned and receyved a grete deale of
monye, more than he had disbursed’.[1121] The actual figures produced
in the course of the case, which are sufficient to enable us to arrive
at a fair estimate of the main position, do not quite bear out this
suggestion. Towards the original outlay Burbadge seems to have found
about £50; Brayne as much and £239 more, which he claimed as due to him
from the partnership. In addition there were outside debts outstanding
at the time of his death to the amount of at least £220. Something,
moreover, had already been spent out of takings before 1586 in payments
on Hyde’s mortgage. So that we may perhaps reasonably accept the total
cost of the building as being somewhere about the 1,000 marks (£666) at
which common repute estimated it.[1122] A certain amount of building
material, worth perhaps 100 marks, was still in hand. All that Brayne
could be shown to have received as against his considerable outlay was
a sum of £135 1_s._, for which his receipt was produced. What Burbadge
had received it is difficult to say. A comparison of various estimates
suggests that after Brayne’s death it may have been between £100 and
£200 a year.[1123] On the other hand, he had paid off the debt of
£220 which Brayne had left outstanding. And throughout he had been
responsible, without aid from Brayne, for certain outgoings independent
of the structure of the Theatre, for which he was entitled to claim
credit. He had paid £230 in rent and laid out at least £220 in putting
the tenements in order, as well as at least £30 early in 1592 on the
repair of the Theatre itself.[1124]
The fortunes of the case in Chancery were various. In 1590 the
Court seemed inclined to grant a sequestration of half the profits;
but instead made an order that the arbitrament of 1578 should be
observed.[1125] On the strength of this Mrs. Brayne and Miles came
to the Theatre on more than one occasion, and claimed to appoint
collectors, including one Nicholas Bishop, who was asked to stand
‘at the door that goeth vppe to the gallaries of the said Theater to
take and receyve for the vse of the said Margarett half the money that
shuld be gyven to come vppe into the said gallaries at that door’. They
were, however, refused access, and on 16 November 1590 there was a row
royal, of which independent witness was borne by John Alleyn, of the
Admiral’s men, who were then playing at the Theatre. James Burbadge,
‘looking out at a wyndoe vpon them’, joined his wife in reviling them
as a murdering knave and whore, and expressed his contempt for the
order of Chancery; Cuthbert, who came home in the middle of the fray,
backed him up; while Richard Burbadge, the youngest son, snatched up a
broom-staff, and as he afterwards boasted, paid Robert Miles his moiety
with a beating. He also threatened Nicholas Bishop, ‘scornfully and
disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose’. James said that at
their next coming his sons should provide pistols charged with powder
and hempseed to shoot them in the legs.[1126] Both Cuthbert and James
were summoned on 28 November for contempt before the court, which
instead of dealing with this charge proceeded to take the whole case
into further consideration.[1127] This was something of a triumph for
Burbadge, who continued to resist the order, and repeated with oaths
that twenty contempts and as many injunctions would not force him to
give up his property. This was heard by John Alleyn in the Theatre yard
about May 1591, and about eight days later ‘in the Attyring housse or
place where the players make them ready’, on the occasion of a dispute
with the Admiral’s men about some of ‘the dyvydent money between him
and them’ which he had detained, Burbadge was equally irreverent before
Alleyn and James Tunstall about the Lord Admiral himself, saying ‘by
a great othe, that he cared not for iij of the best lordes of them
all’.[1128] Margaret Brayne died in 1593, leaving her estate to Miles,
who thus became a principal in the suit.[1129] And on 28 May 1595 the
court came to the decision that it could not entertain the case, until
Miles had endeavoured to obtain relief at common law, by suing on the
two bonds which Burbadge had given to Brayne in 1578.[1130] He does not
seem to have thought it worth while to do this, probably because he
saw very little chance of recovering money from James Burbadge, while
Cuthbert, who now held the lease, was not a party to the bonds.[1131]
It is the personality of Burbadge rather than the conduct of the
Theatre that these details illumine. But we may gather that the
building was constructed mainly of timber with some ironwork, that it
had a tiring-house and galleries, one at least of which was divided
into upper rooms, where spectators could sit as well as stand, and
that money was taken by appointed gatherers, placed in locked boxes,
and subsequently shared out amongst those entitled to it.[1132] From
other sources it appears that 1_d._ was charged for admission to the
building and 1_d._ or 2_d._ more for a place in the galleries.[1133]
Apparently the players took the entrance fee and the owners of the
house the whole or an agreed proportion of the gallery money. In the
winter of 1585 an interesting arrangement was entered into between
Burbadge and Brayne on the one hand and Henry Lanman, owner of the
neighbouring Curtain, on the other, by which during a period of seven
years the Curtain was taken ‘as an Esore’ to the Theatre, and the
profits of both houses pooled and equally divided between the two
parties. This arrangement was still operative in 1592.[1134] Kiechel
tells us that the number of galleries was three, and De Witt that the
shape was that of an ‘amphitheatrum’.[1135] It is impossible to trace
with any certainty the successive occupation of the Theatre by various
companies of players or to reconstruct the list of plays produced upon
the boards. Its occupants were Burbadge’s ‘fellows’ at the time of his
frauds of 1576–8, and may reasonably be identified with Leicester’s,
of whom he was certainly one in 1574.[1136] Stephen Gosson tells us
in 1579 that amongst plays then ‘vsually brought in to the Theater’,
were _The Blacksmith’s Daughter_ and his own _Catiline’s Conspiracies_,
and in 1582 assigns to the same house Lodge’s, if it was Lodge’s,
_Play of Plays and Pastimes_ given on the last 23 February, the play
of _The Fabii_ and possibly the history of _Caesar and Pompey_.[1137]
Presumably _The Fabii_ is _The Four Sons of Fabius_, presented by
Warwick’s men at Court on 1 January 1580. Warwick’s men had therefore
probably replaced Leicester’s at the Theatre, and it was the same men,
then in the service of the Earl of Oxford, who were concerned in a riot
at the Theatre on 10 April 1580.[1138] In 1582 came the controversy
between Edmund Peckham and Giles Allen about the freehold of the
Theatre site, as a result of which Burbadge was ‘disturbed and trobled
in his possession’, and ‘the players for sooke the said Theater to
his great losse’.[1139] So there was probably another change at this
time. And in 1583 there was a complete reshuffling of all the London
companies on the formation of the Queen’s men. Professor Wallace, who
is primarily considering that part of the evidence which he has himself
discovered, says that the Queen’s did not act at the Theatre.[1140] But
most certainly they did. It is true that, when an inhibition against
the Theatre and Curtain was obtained on 14 June 1584, the owner of the
Theatre, ‘a stubburne fellow’, described himself as Lord Hunsdon’s man.
Nevertheless the only companies named as concerned are the Queen’s and
Arundel’s, and Burbadge may not himself have been then acting.[1141]
And as to the presence of the Queen’s in the Theatre at some date there
is no doubt. Tarlton is not traceable in any other company than the
Queen’s, and it was at the Theatre that Tarlton made jests of Richard
Harvey’s _Astrological Discourse upon the Conjunction of Saturn and
Jupiter_, published in 1583.[1142] The Queen’s certainly did not
confine themselves to the Theatre; but that they were there again in
1589 may be inferred from a mock testament of Martin Marprelate in
_Martins Month’s Mind_, in which he is made to admit that he learned
his twittle tattles ... at the Theater of Lanam and his fellows’. A
marginal note in the same pamphlet indicates that it was at the Theatre
that the ‘Maygame’ representing the ‘launcing and worming’ of Martin
was staged, and there is other evidence that Laneham, then one of the
Queen’s men, was one of the players who took a part in the ribald
controversy.[1143] Gabriel Harvey’s scoff at Lyly as ‘the Foolemaster
of the Theatre’ may perhaps indicate his authorship of plays for the
house. In 1590–1 it is clear that the Admiral’s men, probably already
associated with Strange’s, were at the Theatre, and their quarrel with
Burbadge doubtless led them to cross the river and join Henslowe at
the Rose. After the reconstitution of the companies in 1594, James
Burbadge’s son Richard became a leading member of the Chamberlain’s
men, and it is probable that, when this company left the Rose about the
middle of June, it was to the Theatre that they went. Here _Hamlet_,
which certainly belonged to them, was being acted in 1596.[1144] It
must be added that the Theatre was not strictly reserved for the
purposes of the legitimate drama. It was built for ‘activities’,
amongst other things, according to Stowe, and prizes of the School of
Defence were played at it between 1578 and 1585.[1145] On 22 February
1582, there took place at the Theatre ‘a scurvie play set oot al by one
virgin, which there proved a fyemarten without voice, so that we stayed
not the matter’.[1146]
It was a natural consequence of the success of Burbadge’s new departure
that the Theatre and its immediate successor, the Curtain, had to bear
the brunt of the Puritan denunciations of the stage. These incidentally
bore witness to the costly elaborateness of the new accommodation
provided for the players.[1147] Apart from the moral corruption upon
which the Puritans laid most stress, there is some evidence that the
position of the Theatre, with a great space of open ground before it,
made it a natural focus for the disorderly elements of society. As
early as 5 October 1577, just after the resumption of plays for the
autumn, the Mayor and Recorder Fleetwood were listening to ‘a brabell
betwene John Wotton and the Leuetenuntes sonne of the one parte, and
certain ffreholders of Shordyche, for a matter at the Theater’. There
was serious trouble in the course of 1584. Fleetwood wrote to Burghley
how on 8 June, ‘very nere the Theatre or Curten, at the tyme of the
playes, there laye a prentice sleping upon the grasse and one Challes
_alias_ Grostock dyd turne upon the too upon the belly of the same
prentice; whereupon the apprentice start up, and after wordes they
fell to playne bloues’; and how on 10 June, ‘one Browne, a serving man
in a blew coat, a shifting fellowe, having a perrelous witt of his
owne, entending a spoile if he cold have browght it to passe, did at
Theatre doore querell with certen poore boyes, handicraft prentises,
and strooke some of theym; and lastlie he with his sword wondend and
maymed one of the boyes upon the left hand; whereupon there assembled
nere a ml. people’.[1148] Unscrupulous characters might find congenial
companions in the throng. Somewhere in 1594 a diamond, which had gone
astray from the loot of a Spanish vessel, was shown in Finsbury Fields
by a mariner to certain goldsmiths, who said that they had met him
by chance at a play in the Theatre at Shoreditch.[1149] But James
Burbadge had obtained for himself a tactical advantage by building
outside the jurisdiction of the City and within that, less organized
or more easy-going, of the Middlesex magistrates. The Corporation were
powerless, except in so far as, directly by persuasion, or indirectly
by invoking the Privy Council, they could stir the county bench to
action. They lost no opportunity, which brawls or plague afforded, of
attempting this.[1150] An exceptionally troublous year was 1580. It
began with an indictment of John Brayne and James Burbadge ‘yeomen’ of
Shoreditch, at the Middlesex sessions, for bringing unlawful assemblies
together on 21 February and other days ‘_ad audienda et spectanda
quaedam colloquia sive interluda vocata_ playes or interludes’ by them
and others ‘_exercitata et practicata_’ at the Theatre in Holywell,
with the result of affrays and tumults leading to a breach of the
peace.[1151] On 6 April was the great earthquake, which threw down
chimneys in Shoreditch, and according to one account ‘shaked not only
the scenical Theatre, but the great stage and theatre of the whole
land’.[1152] Four days later was the riot between Lord Oxford’s men and
the Inns of Court, and the two events gave the Lord Mayor an excellent
opportunity of pointing out to the Council that the players of plays
which were used at the Theatre were ‘a very superfluous sort of men’
and of securing a suspension of performances until after Michaelmas.
The riot of 8 June 1584 similarly led to the inhibition by the Council
and Fleetwood already noticed, although it is clear that this was not
so permanent as the City probably hoped, when the authority for ‘the
suppressing and pulling downe of the Theatre and Curten’ reached them.
Matters came to a crisis again in 1597 with the production of _The Isle
of Dogs_ on the Bankside, and an appeal of the City on 28 July was
answered on the same day by mandates of the Council, of which one was
addressed to the Middlesex justices, and directed them to send for the
owners of the Theatre and Curtain, and enjoin them to ‘plucke downe
quite the stages, gallories and roomes that are made for people to
stand in, and so to deface the same as they maie not be ymploied agayne
to suche use’.[1153]
It is unlikely that the Theatre was ever opened again. It is certain
that the Chamberlain’s men had moved to the Curtain before the end of
1597, and the abandonment of the old house is referred to unmistakably
enough in a satire published in 1598.[1154] The explanation is to be
found in the relations of the Burbadges to their ground landlord,
Giles Allen. The following account is taken in the main from Cuthbert
Burbadge’s allegations in litigation of 1600. On 1 November 1585,
shortly before the termination of the first ten years of the lease,
James Burbadge, as he was entitled to do, presented Allen with a draft
of a new twenty-one years’ lease. This Allen evaded signing, apparently
alleging that it was not in verbatim agreement with the old lease, and
probably also that some of Burbadge’s covenants under the old lease
had remained unfulfilled.[1155] By way of precaution, Burbadge thought
it desirable to put on record in his account-book some evidence that
he had spent the £200 in improving the tenements, upon which his right
to remove the structure of the Theatre depended. He called in expert
craftsmen, and took two ‘views’, one on 20 November 1585, another,
after some further work had been done, on 18 July 1586. The first
estimate was £220, the second £240. This last was later confirmed by
a third view taken in connexion with the Brayne litigation in July
1591.[1156] The money had been spent, partly on ordinary repairs,
partly on converting the old barn into tenements, partly on putting up
two new houses, one of which was for Burbadge’s own occupation.[1157]
The matter of the new lease now slumbered until the expiration of the
old one on 13 April 1597 drew near. In 1596 negotiations took place
between landlord and tenant, and a compromise was mooted, by which
the new lease was to be granted, but for an increased rent of £24
instead of £14. Allen afterwards asserted and Cuthbert Burbadge denied
that there was a proviso that after five years the building should be
converted to some other use than that of a play-house.[1158] Cuthbert
continued the negotiations after James Burbadge’s death in February
1597, but they finally broke down, and for a year or so the tenancy
was only on sufferance.[1159] Finally, in the autumn of 1598, when
Cuthbert had agreed to demands which he thought extortionate, Allen
refused to accept his brother Richard as security, and all hope of a
settlement disappeared.[1160] Cuthbert now resolved to avail himself of
the covenant of the expired lease, under which the tenant was entitled
to pull down and remove the Theatre. This he began to do, in spite of
a protest from Allen’s representative, on 28 December 1598, with the
concurrence of his mother and brother, and the financial aid of one
William Smith of Waltham Cross.[1161] The work was still in progress
on 20 January 1599, when Burbadge’s agent, Peter Street, carpenter,
entered the close with ten or twelve men, and carried the timber to the
other side of the river for use in the erection of the Globe. For this
act Allen brought an action of trespass against Street in the Queen’s
Bench, alleging that he had trampled down grass in the close to the
value of 40_s._, and claiming damages for £800 in all, of which £700
represented his estimate of the value of the Theatre.[1162] Burbadge
applied to the Court of Requests to stop the common law suit, alleging
in effect that he was equitably entitled to act upon the covenant,
even though the lease had expired, on account of the unreasonable
refusal of Allen to grant the new lease when applied for, under the
terms of the old one, in 1585.[1163] The issue really turned upon
whether this refusal was reasonable. Allen said that James Burbadge had
been a troublesome tenant, that he had converted the barn into eleven
tenements, whose inhabitants became a nuisance to the parish by begging
for their 20_s._ rents, that he had not repaired the building but only
shored it up, that he had not spent the stipulated £200, and that £30
rent was in arrear at the time of the application of 1585 and was
still unpaid.[1164] Probably these last two were the only allegations
to which the court attached importance. Allen claimed that he had no
remedy against James Burbadge’s estate, for he had made deeds of gift
to his sons of his property, and his widow and administratrix was
without funds. Burbadge, however, produced evidence of the estimates
of 1585 and 1586, and suggested that his father had a counter-claim
against the rent in the expense to which he had been put in maintaining
his possession at the time of Peckham’s claim to the freehold. On 18
October 1600 the Court decided in his favour.[1165] Allen brought a
Queen’s Bench action against him in 1601 for breach of agreement, and
in 1601 complained to the Star Chamber of perjury on the part of the
expert witnesses and other wrongs done him in the course of the earlier
proceedings; but, although the conclusions of these suits are not on
record, it is not likely that he succeeded in obtaining a favourable
decision.[1166]
vii. THE CURTAIN
[_Bibliographical Note._--Some rather scanty material is
brought together by T. E. Tomlins, _Origin of the Curtain
Theatre and Mistakes regarding it_ in _Sh. Soc. Papers_,
i. 29, and Halliwell-Phillipps, _The Theatre and Curtain_
(_Outlines_, i. 345).]
The Curtain is included with the Theatre in Stowe’s general description
of Holywell as ‘standing on the South-west side towards the field’.
That it was somewhat south of the Theatre is indicated by a reference
to it in 1601 as in Moorfields, a name given to the open fields lying
south of and adjacent to Finsbury Fields. But, although it stood in
the parish of Shoreditch and the liberty of Holywell, it was not, like
the Theatre, actually within the precinct of the dissolved priory.
_Curtina_ is glossed by Ducange as ‘_minor curtis, seu rustica area,
quae muris cingitur_’, and the description is sufficiently met by the
piece of land lying outside the southern gate of the priory, and on
the other side of Holywell Lane into which that gate opened.[1167]
A priory lease to the Earl of Rutland of his town house in 1538
described it as ‘_infra muros et portas eiusdem monasterii_’, and
part of the holding consisted of stables and a hay-loft ‘_scituata
et existentia extra portas eiusdem monasterii prope pasturam dictae
Priorissae vocatam_ the Curtene’. Post-dissolution conveyances refer
to a ‘house, tenement or lodge’ called the Curtain, and to a parcel of
ground, enclosed with a wall on the west and north, called the Curtain
close, which lay south of the Earl of Rutland’s house, and on which
by 1581 stood various tenements, which were described as ‘sett, lyeng
and being in Halliwell Lane’. The property in question formed part of
the possessions of Sir Thomas Leigh of Hoxton at his death in 1543 and
had formerly been conveyed to him by Lord Wriothesley. Through Leigh’s
daughter Katharine it passed to her husband Lord Mountjoy. On 20
February 1567 it was sold for £40 to Maurice Long and his son William,
being then in the occupation of one Wilkingeson and Robert Manne. On
23 August 1571 Maurice Long conveyed it for £200 to Sir William Allen,
then Lord Mayor, possibly by way of mortgage in connexion with building
speculations, since on 18 March 1581 it was in the hands of William
Long, who then sold it to Thomas Herbert. There had evidently been an
increase in the number of tenements on the site, and Thomas Wilkinson,
Thomas Wilkins, Robert Medley, Richard Hicks, Henry Lanman, and Robert
Manne are named as tenants.[1168] As Henry Lanman or Laneman had the
profits of the theatre in 1585, there can be little doubt that it stood
on part of the land dealt with in the conveyances. Halliwell-Phillipps
thinks that it must have been situated ‘in or near the place which
is marked as Curtain Court in Chassereau’s plan of Shoreditch,
1745’,[1169] and is now known as Gloucester Street. If so, it was very
near the boundary between Holywell and Moorfields, much along the line
of which now runs Curtain Road. But it must be remembered that Curtain
Court may also have taken its name from the ‘house, tenement or lodge’
which already existed in 1567 and is mentioned as the Curtain House in
the Shoreditch registers as late as 1639; and certainly in Ryther’s map
(_c._ 1636–45) the theatre, though still bordering on Moorfields, is
shown a good deal farther, both to the east and the south, than the
point indicated by Halliwell-Phillipps.[1170]
The Burbadges claimed that James was the first builder of play-houses,
but the Curtain must have followed very soon after the Theatre. It is
not mentioned by name with its predecessor in the Privy Council order
of 1 August 1577, but is in Northbrooke’s treatise of the following
December. Up to 1597 its history is little more than a pendant to that
of the Theatre, with which it is generally coupled in the Puritan
attacks and in the occasional interferences of authority. From 1585 to
1592, indeed, it was used as an ‘easer’ to the Theatre, and the profits
of the two houses were pooled under an arrangement between Henry Lanman
and the Burbadges.[1171] The companies who occupied the Curtain can for
the most part only be guessed at.[1172] At the time of the inhibition
of 14 June 1584 it was probably occupied by Lord Arundel’s men. Tarlton
appeared at it, but not necessarily after the formation of the Queen’s
company.[1173] Prizes of the School of Defence were occasionally played
at it from 1579 to 1583.[1174] Unlike the Theatre, the Curtain was
certainly reopened after the inhibition of 1597. It is likely that the
Chamberlain’s men repaired to it in October of that year, and remained
at it until the Globe was ready in 1599. The same satirist, who tells
us that the Theatre was closed in 1598, tells us that the Rose, which
was continuously occupied by the Admiral’s men, and the Curtain were
open;[1175] and a clue to the actors at it is given by Marston’s
reference to ‘Curtain plaudities’ in the closest connexion with _Romeo
and Juliet_.[1176] In 1600 Robert Armin, of the Chamberlain’s men,
published his _Fool upon Fool_, in which he called himself ‘Clonnico de
Curtanio Snuffe’. In the 1605 edition he changed the name to ‘Clonnico
del Mondo Snuffe’. The direct connexion of the Chamberlain’s men with
the Curtain probably ended on the opening of the Globe. But a share in
it belonged to Thomas Pope, when he made his will on 22 July 1603, and
another to John Underwood, when he made his on 4 October 1624. Both
were of the Chamberlain’s men, although Underwood cannot have joined
them until about 1608.
The Curtain did not go entirely out of use when the Chamberlain’s left
it. It must have been the theatre near Bishopsgate at which Thomas
Platter saw a play in September or October 1599.[1177] It is possible
that Kempe (q.v.) was then playing there. In March 1600 one William
Hawkins, barber, of St. Giles’s without Cripplegate was charged at
the Middlesex Sessions with taking a purse and £1 6_s._ 6_d._ at the
Curtain, and Richard Fletcher, pewterer, of Norwich, was bound over to
give evidence.[1178]
On 22 June 1600, when the Privy Council gave authority for the opening
of the Fortune, they were given to understand by the Master of the
Revels that it would replace the Curtain, which was therefore to be
‘ruinated or applied to some other good use’. This arrangement seems to
suggest that the Curtain was in some way under the control of Alleyn
or Henslowe. It was, however, departed from, and apparently with the
tacit consent of the Council, as although they had occasion on 10
May 1601 to instruct the Middlesex justices to suppress a libellous
play produced at ‘the Curtaine in Moorefeilds’, they did not take,
as they might have done, the point that no play ought to have been
produced there at all. On 31 December they were again insisting on
the limitation of the theatres in use to two; and on 31 March 1602
they again departed from their own principles by licensing Oxford’s
and Worcester’s men to play at the Boar’s Head. Henceforward three
companies of men players were regularly tolerated, and when a draft
licence was prepared for Worcester’s, or as they had then become
Queen Anne’s, men early in the following year the Curtain and the
Boar’s Head were named as ‘there now usuall howsen’. The Curtain is
also specified for them in the Council’s warrant for the resumption
of plays on 9 April 1604. About 1606 they also took into use the Red
Bull, and thereafter but little is heard of the Curtain. The Queen’s
men, however, played Day, Wilkins, and Rowley’s _The Travels of Three
English Brothers_ there at some time before its entry on 29 June 1607.
It was still theirs in April 1609, but may perhaps soon have passed to
the Duke of York’s men. It is mentioned, with the Globe and Fortune, in
Heath’s _Epigrams_ of 1610, and plays heard ‘at _Curtaine_, or at Bull’
and ‘a Curtaine Iigge’ are objects of ridicule in Wither’s _Abuses
Stript and Whipt_ of 1613.[1179] It was used by an amateur company for
a performance of Wentworth Smith’s _Hector of Germany_ in 1615, and it
is obscurely referred to in I. H.’s _This World’s Folly_ of the same
year.[1180] Malone gathered from Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book that
it was used by Prince Charles’s men in 1622, and soon thereafter only
by prize-fighters. It was still in use in 1624, and still standing in
1627.[1181]
viii. NEWINGTON BUTTS
A theatre, of which the history is very obscure, but which may have
been built soon after the Theatre and Curtain, stood at Newington, a
village one mile from London Bridge, divided from the Bankside by St.
George’s Fields, and reachable by the road which continued Southwark
High Street.[1182] Here there were butts for the practice of archery.
Plays at Newington Butts, outside the City jurisdiction, are first
mentioned in a Privy Council letter of 13 May 1580 to the Surrey
justices. A similar letter of 11 May 1586 speaks more precisely of
‘the theater or anie other places about Newington’. A third letter,
undated, but probably belonging to 1591 or 1592, recites an order
of the Council restraining Strange’s men from playing at the Rose,
and enjoining them to play three days a week at Newington Butts, and
rescinds it, ‘by reason of the tediousness of the way, and that of long
time plays have not there been used on working days’.[1183] Possibly
the theatre had come into Henslowe’s hands, for his diary records that
it was at Newington that the combined companies of the Admiral’s and
Chamberlain’s men began their first season after the plague of 1592–4,
apparently playing there from 5 to 15 June 1594, and then going their
separate ways to the Rose and the Theatre respectively. The theatre is
mentioned in the list given by Howes in 1631.[1184] It is said to have
been ‘only a memory’ by 1599.[1185] A bad pun is called a ‘Newington
conceit’ in 1612.[1186]
ix. THE ROSE
[_Bibliographical Note._--All the more important documents are
printed or calendared from the _Dulwich MSS._ with a valuable
commentary in Greg, _Henslowe’s Diary_ and _Henslowe Papers_,
and in Collier, _Memoirs of Alleyn_ and _Henslowe’s Diary_.]
The Rose owed its name to the fact that it stood in what had been, as
recently as 1547–8, a rose garden.[1187] On 3 December 1552 Thomasyn,
widow of Ralph Symonds, fishmonger, granted to trustees, for her own
use during life and thereafter to the charitable uses of the parish of
St. Mildred, Bread Street, her ‘messuage or tennement then called the
little rose with twoe gardens’ formerly in St. Margaret’s and then in
St. Saviour’s, Southwark. St. Mildred’s still has a plan of the estate,
which extended to about three roods.[1188] A ‘tenement called the Rose’
is referred to in a recital of a lease of Henry VIII’s reign as the
eastern boundary of other tenements, by name the Barge, the Bell, and
the Cock, which lay ‘vppon the banke called Stewes’ in St. Margaret’s,
afterwards St. Saviour’s, parish, between the highway next the Thames
on the north and Maiden Lane on the south.[1189] It is located by
Mr. Rendle just to the east of the still existing Rose Alley. The
site therefore lay in the Liberty of the Clink midway between those
afterwards occupied by the Globe on the east and the Hope on the
west. On 20 November 1574 the parish let the property for thirty-one
years at £7 annually to William Griffin, vintner. Griffin assigned
it on 11 December 1579 to Robert Withens, vintner, and Withens on 24
March 1585 to Henslowe.[1190] There was as yet no theatre. The first
mention of one as in contemplation is in an agreement of 10 January
1587 between Henslowe and one John Cholmley, citizen and grocer of
London, for partnership during the next eight years and three months,
should both parties live so long, in a garden plot ninety-four feet
square on the Bankside in the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, and
‘a playe howse now in framinge and shortly to be ereckted and sett vppe
vpone the same’. Under this Henslowe undertook to have ‘the saide play
house with all furniture thervnto belonginge’ set up ‘with as muche
expedicion as maye be’ by John Grigges, carpenter, to pay all rents due
on the premisses, and to repair the bridges and wharves belonging to
them before the following Michaelmas. Cholmley undertook to bear his
share of any further cost of maintaining the premises, and also to pay
Henslowe the sum of £816 in quarterly instalments. In consideration of
this, he was to take half of all such profits as ‘shall arysse grow be
colectted gathered or become due for the saide parcell of grounde and
playe howse when and after yt shalbe ereckted and sett vpe by reason of
any playe or playes, that shalbe showen or played there or otherwysse
howsoever’. The partners are jointly to appoint ‘players to vse
exersyse & playe in the saide playe howse’, and collect sums themselves
or by deputy of all persons coming to the performances ‘excepte yt
please any of the saide partyes to suffer theire frendes to go in for
nothinge’. Cholmley is also to have the sole right of selling food or
drink on the premises and a small house already in his tenure on the
south of the plot close to Maiden Lane, ‘to keepe victualinge in’ or
for any other purpose, and with a right of ingress from Thames side by
Rose Alley.[1191] The deed does not name the property, but it cannot
be doubted that it refers to a part of the Little Rose. Presumably the
theatre was to be built on a garden at the back of the holding, and the
existing tenement on Bankside was not to be interfered with. Henslowe
had ‘Rosse rentes’ of a residential character in 1602 or 1603.[1192]
Norden’s map (1593) puts the Rose farther from the river than the Bear
Garden. The Delaram and Merian drawings, on the other hand, put it
very near the river, and these, although of less authority than Norden,
are followed in Mr. Rendle’s plan. Probably Norden’s Bear Garden was
an older one than that which afterwards became the Hope.[1193] The
provision as to the wharfs and bridges seems to indicate an intention
to open the Rose at Michaelmas 1587, and I see no reason to doubt
that it was in fact ready for occupation by about that date. On 29
October the Privy Council called the attention of the Surrey justices
to complaints from Southwark of breaches of the rule against plays on
Sunday, ‘especiallie within the Libertie of the Clincke and in the
parish of St. Saviour’s in Southwarke’. There may, of course, have been
plays at inns in the Clink, but it is more natural to take the protest
as one against the newly opened Rose. No other regular theatre existed
in the Clink at this time. That the Rose was built by 1588 appears from
a record of the Sewer Commission for Surrey.[1194] It is not in Smith’s
plan of 1588, but this may easily not have been quite up to date.
The next that is heard of the Rose is probably in 1592.[1195] In March
and April of that year Henslowe, who had recently taken his famous
‘diary’ into use as a financial memorandum book, noted in it some
building expenditure, and a little later set out ‘a note of suche
carges as I haue layd owt a bowte my playe howsse in the yeare of our
lord 1592’.[1196] Henslowe is not known to have owned Newington Butts,
or any other theatre except the Rose, and it is reasonable to assume
that this is what he meant by ‘my playe howsse’. The work probably
began in or before January, as an entry halfway through the list is
dated on 6 February. It entailed the purchase of a barge and a certain
amount of breaking up and paling and wharfing. Henslowe appears to have
done the work himself and not by contract. He bought a mast, turned
balusters, boards and laths, in part from the carpenter Grigges who is
named in the agreement with Cholmley, and in part from a ‘timber man’
called Lee. He bought bolts, hinges, and nails from the ironmonger at
the Fryingpan in Southwark and from one Brader. He bought lime, sand,
chalk, and bricks. He paid wages to carpenters, workmen, and labourers,
and employed painters and a thatcher. The exact nature and extent of
the work are not specified, but it included the painting of the stage,
the ceiling of ‘my lords rome’, and ‘the rome ouer the tyerhowsse’, and
the ‘makeinge the penthowsse shed at the tyeringe howsse doore’. It has
sometimes been supposed that the Rose never got built in 1587, and that
these are the accounts, or part of them, for the original construction.
This seems to me most unlikely. The total expense, with the exception
of a small number of items lost by the mutilation of a page, only
amounted to about £108. This could not cover more than repairs. On
the other hand, these were clearly substantial repairs, and the fact
that they were needed suggests that the building cannot have been a
very new one. The lapse of five years since 1587 would, however, be
consistent with the necessity for them. Almost simultaneously with the
earliest dated entries in the building account, begins on 19 February
1592 the record of performances by Lord Strange’s men, which continues
to the following 22 June. If these were at the Rose, the paint on the
stage can hardly have been dry in time for them, unless, as Dr. Greg
suggests, the payments made in March and April were for work done a
little earlier. That it was at the Rose that Strange’s men played
seems indicated by the Privy Council order, reciting the restraint of
this company ‘from playinge at the Rose on the Banckside’, which it
is difficult to assign to any year but 1591 or 1592.[1197] It is a
little curious that nothing more is heard of John Cholmley, and I think
the natural inference is that he was dead and that the partnership
had thereby, in accordance with the terms of the agreement, been
automatically dissolved.[1198]
The assumption, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that until
he acquired a share in the Fortune Henslowe had no proprietary interest
in any other theatre must explain the assignment to the Rose of all
the playing recorded in the diary between 1592 and the autumn of 1600,
with the exception of the few performances definitely stated to have
been at Newington Butts. The further conjecture must, I think, be
accepted that the season begun by the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s men
at Newington Butts in the summer of 1594 was transferred, so far as the
Admiral’s men were concerned, to the Rose after 15 June. If so, the
Rose housed Strange’s men again from 29 December 1592 to 1 February
1593, Sussex’s from 26 December 1593 to 6 February 1594, the Queen’s
and Sussex’s together from 1 to 9 April 1594, and the Admiral’s from
14 to 16 May 1594, and then regularly from the following June until
their transference to the Fortune in 1600. The only actual mentions
of the theatre by name in the diary during this period are in the
agreements of 1597 between Henslowe and the players Jones and Borne,
in which Henslowe specifies ‘the Rosse’ as ‘my howsse’ in which they
are to play. It was no doubt in use when Guilpin’s _Skialetheia_ (S.
R. 8 September 1598) was written.[1199] In the Lenten interval of 1595
Henslowe made ‘A nott of what I haue layd owt abowt my playhowsse ffor
payntynge & doinge it abowt with ealme bordes & other repracyones’.
The expenditure reached a total of £108 19_s._, which was much about
the same as that of 1592, and was supplemented in the following June
by a further £7 2_s._ for carpenters’ work, including ‘mackinge the
throne in the heuenes’.[1200] The accounts of 1592 and 1595 suggest
that the building was of wood and plaster on a brick foundation, and
this is consistent with Hentzner’s statement of 1598. Part of it, at
least, was thatched. If the maps can be trusted, it was octagonal. In
1600 Henslowe had to find new occupants for the Rose. He records that
Pembroke’s men began to play there on 28 October, but only enters two
unprofitable performances. Possibly the Privy Council, who had decreed
in the previous July a limitation of houses to one on each side of the
river, interfered. But this limitation was certainly not permanent.
There is a receipt for a play bought for Worcester’s men ‘at the Rose’,
and they probably used the house during the term of their account with
Henslowe between August 1602 and May 1603. Subsequently they moved
to the Curtain and Boar’s Head. Henslowe’s lease of the site was due
to expire at the end of 1605, and this explains to some extent the
following entry in the diary:
‘The 25 of June 1603 I talked with M^r. Pope at the scryveners
shope wher he lisse consernynge the tackynge of the leace a new
of the littell Roosse & he showed me a wrytynge betwext the
pareshe & hime seallfe which was to paye twenty pownd a yeare
rent & to bestowe a hundred marckes vpon billdinge which I sayd
I wold rather pulle downe the playehowse then I wold do so & he
beade me do & sayd he gaue me leaue & wold beare me owt for yt
wasse in him to do yt.’[1201]
It is impossible to say whether ‘Mr. Pope’ was Thomas Pope of the
King’s men at the neighbouring Globe, or Morgan Pope, who was formerly
interested in the Bear House, or some other Pope; nor is it clear how
he was in a position to authorize Henslowe to pull down the theatre.
Dr. Greg draws the natural inference from the wording that he may have
given his consent as a prospective lessee of the property.[1202] In
any case the Rose was not pulled down until two or three years later.
The Sewers records show that in January 1604 not Philip but Francis
Henslowe was amerced 6_s._ 8_d._ for it, which may mean that Lennox’s
men were playing there; that on 4 October 1605 Philip Henslowe was
amerced, but return was made that it was ‘out of his hands’; that on
14 February 1606 Edward Box, of Bread Street, London, was amerced for
it; and that on 25 April 1606 Box was amerced for the site of ‘the late
play-house in Maid lane’.[1203]
There is no record of plays at the Rose after 1603.[1204] It is in
the Delaram engravings, but not in any later views except those of
the Merian group, where it appears, flagged but unnamed, on the river
edge.[1205] Nor is it mentioned with the Hope, Globe, and Swan in
_Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632). The explanation may perhaps be that the
Merian engraver followed some out-of-date authority, such as Delaram,
which had got the house farther north than Norden puts it, and as it
had long ceased to exist, did not know its name. On the other hand,
it is also just conceivable that for a short period the Rose, or some
other building at the north end of the Rose site, had a renewed life
as a place of public entertainment. Alleyn was paying ‘tithe dwe for
the Rose’ in 1622.[1206] And Malone cites Herbert’s ‘office-book’ for a
statement that after 1620 the Swan and the Rose were ‘used occasionally
for the exhibition of prize-fighters’.[1207]
x. THE SWAN
[_Bibliographical Note._--John de Witt’s description and plan
are published in K. T. Gaedertz, _Zur Kenntnis der altenglischen
Bühne_ (1888), and more exactly by H. B. Wheatley in _On a
Contemporary Drawing of the Swan Theatre_, 1596 (_N. S. S.
Trans. 1887–92_, 215). They are discussed by H. Logemann in
_Anglia_, xix. 117, by W. Archer in _The Universal Review_
for June 1888, by W. Rendle in _7 N. Q._ vi. 221, by J. Le G.
Brereton, _De Witt at the Swan_ (1916, _Sh.-Homage_, 204), by
myself in a paper on _The Stage of the Globe_ in _The Stratford
Town Shakespeare_, x. 351, and in most recent treatises on
Elizabethan staging; cf. chh. xviii, xx. Earlier material is
collected by W. Rendle in _The Play-houses at Bankside in the
Time of Shakespeare_ (_Antiquarian Magazine and Bibliographer_,
1885, vii. 207). The facts as to Langley’s purchase and the
pleadings and order in the suit of _Shawe et al. v. Langley_
before the Court of Requests in 1597–8 (cited as _S. v. L._)
are given by C. W. Wallace, _The Swan Theatre and the Earl of
Pembroke’s Servants_ (1911, _E. S._ xliii. 340). T. S. Graves,
_A Note on the Swan Theatre_ (_M. P._ ix. 431), discusses the
light thrown on the internal arrangements of the Swan by the
accounts of _England’s Joy_ in 1602.]
The Swan stood in the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden, at the western
end of the Bankside. This manor, from which the royal ‘game’ of
bear-baiting took its traditional appellation, had come into the hands
of the Crown as part of the possessions of the dissolved monastery of
Bermondsey. It was granted in 1578 to nominees of Henry, Lord Hunsdon,
conveyed by them to the Cure family, and sold for £850 on 24 May 1589
by Thomas Cure the younger to Francis Langley, a citizen and goldsmith
of London. Langley, who was brother-in-law to Sir Anthony Ashley, one
of the clerks to the Privy Council, held the office of Alnager and
Searcher of Cloth, to which he had been appointed by the Corporation
on the recommendation of the Privy Council and Sir Francis Walsingham
in December 1582.[1208] The site of the theatre can be precisely
identified from a plan of the manor dated in 1627, but based on a
survey of 1 November 1624.[1209] It was in the north-east corner of the
demesne, east of the manor-house, twenty-six poles due south of Paris
Garden stairs, and immediately west of a lane leading to a house called
Copt Hall. The outline shown is that of a double circle, or perhaps
dodecahedron, divided into twelve compartments, with a small porch or
tiring-house towards the road. The exact date of building is unknown.
On 3 November 1594 the Lord Mayor wrote to Burghley that Langley
‘intendeth to erect a niew stage or Theater (as they call it) for the
exercising of playes vpon the Banck side’, and detailed the usual civic
objections to the stage as arguments in favour of the suppression of
the project.[1210] It is probable that Burghley refused to intervene
and that Langley proceeded at once with the erection of the Swan, which
may then have been ready for use in 1595. It is impossible, without
the Swan, to make up the tale of four ‘spielhäuser’ seen by the Prince
of Anhalt in 1596 (360). To 1596 again is assigned, although with
probability rather than certainty, the visit of John de Witt, who
not only names but also describes and delineates the Swan.[1211] In
any case the Swan had already been in use by players before February
1597, when Langley entered into an arrangement for its occupation by
Lord Pembroke’s men.[1212] The terms of the lease provided that he
should make the house ready and furnish apparel, which he alleged cost
him £300, and should get his return for this expenditure out of the
company’s moiety of the gallery takings, in addition of course to the
other moiety which in accordance with theatrical custom went to him as
rent.[1213] The enterprise was rudely interrupted by the production of
_The Isle of Dogs_ at the Swan itself, and the restraint of 28 July
1597 which was the result. The leading members of Pembroke’s company
joined or rejoined the Admiral’s at the Rose, and became involved in
litigation with Langley on account of their breach of covenant.[1214]
For a time Langley succeeded in keeping a company together, and the
Swan remained open.[1215] It was perhaps the intention of the Privy
Council order of 19 February 1598, against an intrusive ‘third company’
which was competing with the Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s, to close
it.[1216] If so, Langley may still for a time have found means of
evasion, since on the following 1 May the vestry of St. Saviour’s
were viewing new buildings of his, and at the same time negotiating
with Henslowe and Meade for money for the poor ‘in regarde of theire
playe-houses’.[1217] During the next few years, however, such notices
as we get of the Swan, while showing that it was still in existence
and available for occasional entertainments, carry no evidence of any
use by a regular company. Francis Meres, in his _Palladis Tamia_ of
1598, tells us that it was the scene of a challenge in ‘extemporall’
versifying by Robert Wilson.[1218] It was one of the wooden theatres
which were seen by Hentzner in the same year, and no doubt the one
near which he describes the royal barge as lying.[1219] On 15 May
1600 the Council sanctioned its use for feats of activity by Peter
Bromvill.[1220] On 7 February 1602 it was occupied by fencers, and
while two of these, by names Turner and Dun, were playing their prizes
upon its stage, Dun was unfortunate enough to receive a mortal wound
in the eye.[1221] On 6 November 1602 it was chosen by Richard Vennar
for his impudent mystification of _England’s Joy_. The accounts of this
transaction show that it was fitted with ‘hangings, curtains, chairs,
and stools’, and capable of scenic effects, such as the appearance
of a throne of blessed souls in heaven and of black and damned souls
with fireworks from beneath the stage.[1222] Meanwhile Langley had
died in 1601 and in January 1602 the Paris Garden estate was sold to
Hugh Browker, a protonotary of the Court of Common Pleas, in whose
family it remained to 1655.[1223] About 1611 it was once more taken
into use for plays. _The Roaring Girl_ (1611), itself a Fortune play,
has an allusion to a knight who ‘lost his purse at the last new play
i’ the Swan’,[1224] and the accounts of the overseers of Paris Garden
contain entries of receipts from ‘the play house’ or ‘the Swan’ in
each April from 1611 to 1615.[1225] The last entry is of so small an
amount that it probably only covered a fraction of a year, and I think
the inference is that the Swan was disused on the opening of the Hope
in 1614.[1226] If so, it had probably been taken over by Henslowe for
the use of the Lady Elizabeth’s men, who came into existence in 1611,
and whose _Chaste Maid in Cheapside_ was published in 1630 as ‘often
acted at the Swan on the Bankeside’. The Hope itself was modelled
structurally upon the Swan. Its measurements were the same, and it
had similar partitions between the rooms and external staircases. Its
heavens, however, were to be supported without the help of posts from
the stage, since this had to be removable on days of bear-baiting.
It is obviously illegitimate to infer from this specification that
the stage of the Swan, which was not used for bear-baiting, was also
removable. The accounts of the overseers show one more payment from
the ‘players’ in 1621, which perhaps supports the statement contained
in one of Malone’s notes from Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book, that
after 1620 the Swan was ‘used occasionally for the exhibition of
prize-fighters’.[1227] The theatre is marked ‘Old Play-house’ in the
manor map of 1627. The last notice of it is in _Holland’s Leaguer_
(1632) as a famous amphitheatre, which was ‘now fallen to decay, and
like a dying swanne hanging downe her head seemed to sing her own
dierge’.[1228]
Many of the maps of the Bankside do not extend far enough west to
take in the Swan. It is named and shown as an octagonal or decagonal
building by Visscher (1616) and in maps of the Merian group (1638), but
not by Hollar (1647).
xi. THE GLOBE
[_Bibliographical Note._--The devolution of the Globe shares
can be traced in the documents of three lawsuits: (_a_) _Ostler
v. Heminges_, in the Court of King’s Bench in 1616 (_Coram Rege
Roll_ 1454, 13 Jac. I, Hilary Term, m. 692), described by C.
W. Wallace in _The Times_ of 2 and 4 Oct. 1909, and in part
privately printed by him in _Advance Sheets from Shakespeare,
the Globe, and Blackfriars_ (1909), here cited as _O. v. H._;
(_b_) _Witter v. Heminges and Condell_, in the Court of Requests
(1619–20), described by C. W. Wallace in _The Century_ of Aug.
1910, and printed by him in _Nebraska University Studies_, x
(1910), 261, here cited as _W. v. H._; and (_c_) the proceedings
before the Lord Chamberlain in 1635 known as the _Sharers
Papers_, and printed by Halliwell-Phillipps in _Outlines_, i.
312. Professor Wallace’s descriptive articles require some
corrections from the texts of his documents. Much evidence
bearing upon the site of the theatre was collected by W. Rendle
in _The Bankside, Southwark, and the Globe Play-house_ (1877),
printed by the N. S. S. as an appendix to Harrison, pt. ii
(cited as Rendle, _Bankside_), in _Walford’s Antiquarian_,
viii (1885), 209, and in _The Anchor Brewery_ (1888, _Inns of
Old Southwark_, 56), by G. Hubbard in _Journal of the Royal
Institute of British Architects_, 3rd series, xvii. 26, and
_London and Middlesex Arch. Soc. Trans._ n. s. ii (1912), pt.
iii, and most fully by W. Martin in _Surrey Archaeological
Collections_, xxiii (1910), 149. Some additional facts, from
records of the Sewers Commission for Kent and Surrey in the
possession of the London County Council, and from deeds
concerning the Brend estate, were published by Dr. Wallace in
_The Times_ of 30 April and 1 May 1914, and led to discussion
by Dr. Martin, Mr. Hubbard, and others in _11 N. Q._ x. 209,
290, 335; xi. 447; xii. 10, 50, 70, 121, 143, 161, 201, 224,
264, 289, 347, and by W. W. Braines in _The Site of the Globe
Play-house_ (1921). A paper by the present writer on _The Stage
of the Globe_ is in the _Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 351.]
In the building of the Globe use was made of the materials of the old
Theatre (q.v.) which, according to _Allen v. Burbadge_ (1602), the
Burbadges, with Peter Street and others, pulled down on 28 December
1598, carried ‘all the wood and timber therof unto the Banckside in
the parishe of St. Marye Overyes, and there erected a newe playehowse
with the sayd timber and woode’.[1229] An earlier account gives the
date of the audacious proceeding as 20 January 1599. The formal lease
of the new site from the freeholder, Nicholas Brend of West Molesey,
was executed on 21 February 1599. No doubt Street, who had assisted
in the transfer, was the builder and had finished his job when on 8
January 1600 he contracted with Henslowe and Alleyn to put up the
Fortune (q.v.) on the model, with certain modifications, of ‘the late
erected plaiehowse on the Banck in the saide parishe of St. Saviours
called the Globe’. This contract allowed twenty-eight weeks for the
work. Probably the Globe took about the same time, for it is described
as ‘de novo edificata’ in the inquisition on the property left by the
lessor’s father, Thomas Brend, which is dated on 16 May 1599.[1230] It
may not then have been quite finished, but it was doubtless ready for
the occupation of the Chamberlain’s men by the beginning of the autumn
season of 1599. One of the earliest plays there produced by them was
Shakespeare’s _Julius Caesar_ which on 21 September Thomas Platter
crossed the water to see ‘in dem streüwinen Dachhaus’.[1231] Whether
the Globe or its predecessor the Curtain was the ‘wooden O’ of _Henry
V_, 1, prol. 13, must be more doubtful, as the prologue to Act V of the
same play contemplates the triumphant return of Essex from Ireland, and
in fact Essex left England on 27 March and returned, not triumphant,
on 28 September 1599.[1232] Jonson refers to ‘this faire-fild Globe’
as the scene of his _Every Man Out of his Humour_, produced in the
autumn of 1600.[1233] The Privy Council order of the previous 22 June,
which enacts that there shall be one allowed house only ‘in Surrey in
that place which is commonlie called the Banckside or there aboutes’,
goes on to recite that the Chamberlain’s men had chosen the Globe to be
that one. The allowance of the house ‘in Surrey called the Globe’ is
confirmed by the Privy Council letter of 27 December 1601. The order
of 9 April 1604 authorizes the opening after the plague of ‘the Globe
scituate in Maiden Lane on the Banckside in the Countie of Surrey’.
This order evidently contemplates that the King’s men will use the
house, which was assigned to them by name as ‘theire nowe vsual howse
called the Globe within our County of Surrey’ by the terms of the
patent of 19 May 1603. The precedent is followed in the later patents
of 1619 and 1625, and there is nothing to indicate that any other
company than the Chamberlain’s or King’s men ever performed, even
temporarily, at the theatre.
The Globe was held by a syndicate, composed mainly of members of
the company, on a leasehold tenure. The site, which had been garden
ground, was described in the original lease with some minuteness as
follows:[1234]
‘totam illam parcellam fundi nuper praeantea inclusam & factam
in quatuor separalia gardina nuper in tenuris & occupacionibus
Thomae Burt & Isbrand Morris diers & Lactantii Roper Salter
civis Londoniae continentem in longitudine ab oriente vsque
occidentem ducentos & viginti pedes assisae vel eo circiter
iacentem & adiungentem viae sive venellae ibidem ex vno
latere & abbuttantem super peciam terrae vocatam the Parke
super boream & super gardinum tunc vel nuper in tenura siue
occupacione cuiusdam Johannis Cornishe versus occidentem &
super aliud gardinum tunc vel nuper in tenura sive occupacione
cuiusdam Johannis Knowles versus orientem cum omnibus domibus
aedificiis structuris vijs easiamentis commoditatibus &
pertinentiis adinde spectantibus vel aliquo modo pertinentibus
quae dicta praemissa sunt scituata iacentia & existentia infra
parochiam sancti Salvatoris in Southwarke in Comitatu Surria
aceciam totam illam parcellam terrae nuper praeantea inclusam
& factam in tria separalia gardina vnde duo eorundem nuper in
tenura sive occupacione cuiusdam Johannis Robertes carpenter
ac aliud nuper in occupacione cuiusdam Thomas Ditcher civis &
mercatoris scissoris Londoniae scituatam iacentem & existentem
in parochia praedicta in praedicto comitatu Surria continentem
in longitudine ab oriente ad occidentem per estimacionem centum
quinquaginta & sex pedes assisae vel eo circiter & in latitudine
a borea ad austrum centum pedes assisae per estimacionem vel eo
circiter iacentem & adiungentem super alio latere viae sive
venellae praedictae & abbuttantem super gardinum ibidem tunc vel
nuper praeantea in occupacione Willelmi Sellers versus orientem
& super vnum aliud gardinum ibidem tunc vel nuper praeantea
in tenura Johannis Burgram sadler versus occidentem & super
venellam ibidem vocatam Mayden lane versus austrum cum omnibus
domibus aedificijs structuris vijs easiamentis commoditatibus &
pertinentiis ultimis recitatis praemissis seu alicui parti vel
parcellae inde spectantibus seu aliquo modo pertinentibus simul
cum libero ingressu egressu & regressu & passagio ... per &
trans praedictam viam sive venellam iacentem & existentem inter
praemissa praedicta.’
The lease was granted for a term of thirty-one years from Christmas
1598 to Christmas 1629, and conveyed the property in two equal
moieties, the one to Cuthbert and Richard Burbadge and the other to
William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, John Heminges,
and William Kempe.[1235] With the exception of Cuthbert Burbadge
these were all members of the Chamberlain’s company. Each moiety was
charged with a ground-rent of £7 5_s._ There is nothing to show how
the funds for building were found. ‘Wee’, said the Burbadges in 1635,
‘at like expence built the Globe, with more summes of money taken up
at interest, which lay heavy on us many yeeres; and to ourselves wee
joyned those deserveing men, Shakspere, Hemings, Condall, Philips, and
others, partners in the profittes of that they call the House, but
makeing the leases for twenty-one yeeres hath beene the destruction of
ourselves and others, for they dyeing at the expiration of three or
four yeeres of their lease, the subsequent yeeres became dissolved to
strangers, as by marrying with their widdowes and the like by their
children.’[1236] This is, however, not a strictly accurate account
of what took place in 1599, for Condell was not one of the original
‘housekeepers’, and the original lease was for thirty-one, not
twenty-one, years. In any case, the Burbadges contributed the woodwork
of the Theatre.
Between the execution of the lease and the completion of the
play-house, Shakespeare and his four fellows assigned their moiety to
William Levison and Thomas Savage, who ‘reassigned to euerye of them
seuerally a fift parte of the said moitie’, so that after the building
each of the five had a ‘ioynt tenancie’ with the other four in a moiety
of the ground and galleries, and was also ‘tenant in common’ during the
term of the lease.[1237] Professor Wallace explains that ‘the purpose
of a joint-tenancy was to prevent the breaking up and scattering of an
estate into fractions by keeping the property always in the hands of
the members, or the longest survivors, or survivor, of them all, thus
not allowing it to descend to heirs’. The legal distinction is no doubt
sound, but we shall find that, whatever the intention of the assignment
and reassignment may have been, the Globe shares did in fact descend
to heirs, and that a good deal of trouble and litigation was thereby
caused.[1238]
Shortly after the house was built Kempe, no doubt on his withdrawal
from the company, assigned his interest to Shakespeare, Heminges, and
Phillips, who by further assignments to and from one Thomas Cressey
brought in Pope, with the result that each of the four now held a
fourth part of the moiety.[1239] Pope died before 13 February 1604 and
left his interest to Mary Clark, _alias_ Wood, and Thomas Bromley.
Mary Clark must have married John Edmonds, another legatee under the
will, for in 1612 an interest corresponding to Pope’s was held by
John and Mary Edmonds and Basil Nicoll.[1240] Nicoll, who was Pope’s
executor, was presumably acting as trustee for Thomas Bromley. Edmonds,
though an actor, belonged not to the King’s men, but was a Queen’s
man by 1618. One-eighth of the house, therefore, was alienated from
the company in 1604. A further alienation, which proved particularly
troublesome in its results, took place on the death of Phillips in May
1605. The exact facts became a matter of legal dispute. But it appears
that Phillips’ interest passed first to his widow Anne as executrix,
and, when her marriage in the course of 1606 to the spendthrift John
Witter became known, to Heminges, who succeeded her as executor under
the terms of the will. In this capacity Heminges leased an interest
to the Witters on 14 February 1611 for a term of eighteen years from
Christmas 1610.[1241] This interest was not a fourth, but only a sixth
of the moiety, since at some date between the death of Phillips and
that of Sly on 16 August 1608 the moiety had been redivided to allow of
the introduction of Henry Condell and William Sly into the syndicate
of housekeepers.[1242] A similar transaction took place on 20 February
1612, when Basil Nicoll and John and Mary Edmonds, then holding
one-sixth of the moiety, Shakespeare and Witter, each also holding
one-sixth, and Heminges and Condell, holding three-sixths, joined to
convey one-seventh of the moiety to William Ostler.[1243] It must, I
think, be assumed that Heminges and Condell had together purchased the
share left by Sly to his son Robert.
The acquisition of the Blackfriars by the King’s men in 1608 did not,
at first at least, detract from the importance of the Globe as the
leading London theatre. It is so accepted by foreign visitors in 1610
and again in 1611.[1244]
On 29 June 1613 the house was ‘casually burnt downe and consumed with
fier’.[1245] The event was important enough to find a record in Howes’
continuation of Stowe’s _Annales_:[1246]
‘Upon S. Peters day last, the play-house or Theater, called the
Globe, upon the Banckside near London, by negligent discharging
of a peal of ordinance, close to the south-side thereof, the
thatch took fire, and the wind sodainly disperst the flame round
about, and in a very short space the whole building was quite
consumed, and no man hurt; the house being filled with people to
behold the play, viz. of Henry the Eighth. And the next spring
it was new builded in far fairer manner than before.’
Many other contemporary accounts exist. Thus Thomas Lorkin wrote to Sir
Thomas Puckering on 30 June:[1247]
‘No longer since than yesterday, while Burbage’s company were
acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII, and there shooting
off certain chambers in way of triumph, the fire catched and
fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so
furiously, as it consumed the whole house, all in less than two
hours, the people having enough to do to save themselves.’
On 2 July Sir Henry Wotton wrote to his nephew Sir Edmund Bacon:[1248]
‘Now, to let matters of state sleep, I will entertain you at
the present with what has happened this week at the Bank’s
side. The King’s players had a new play, called _All is True_,
representing some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII,
which was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances
of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the
Knights of the Order with their Georges and garters, the Guards
with their embroidered coats, and the like: sufficient in
truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not
ridiculous. Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal
Wolsey’s house, and certain chambers being shot off at his
entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them
was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at
first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the
show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming
within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds.
This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein
yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken
cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would
perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a
provident wit put it out with bottle ale.’
On 8 July John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood:[1249]
‘The burning of the Globe, or play-house, on the Bankside, on
St. Peter’s day, cannot escape you; which fell out by a peal of
chambers (that I know not upon what occasion were to be used in
the play), the tamplin or stopple of one of them lighting in the
thatch that covered the house, burn’d it down to the ground in
less than two hours, with a dwelling-house adjoining, and it was
a great marvaile and fair grace of God, that the people had so
little harm, having but two narrow doors to get out.’
Nor was poetic chronicles of the disaster lacking. On the day after the
fire took place, two ballads about it were entered in the Stationers’
Register.[1250] Neither is known in print, but the use of the word
‘doleful’ suggests that one of them, of which the author was William
Parrat, is probably identical with the following set of verses,
preserved in manuscript:[1251]
_A Sonnett upon the pittiful burneing of the Globe playhowse
in London._
Now sitt the downe, Melpomene,
Wrapt in a sea-cole robe,
And tell the dolefull tragedie,
That late was playd at Globe;
For noe man that can singe and saye
[But ?] was scard on St. Peters daye.
Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true.
All yow that please to understand,
Come listen to my storye,
To see Death with his rakeing brand
Mongst such an auditorye;
Regarding neither Cardinalls might,
Nor yett the rugged face of Henry the Eight.
Oh sorrow, &c.
This fearfull fire beganne above,
A wonder strange and true,
And to the stage-howse did remove,
As round as taylors clewe;
And burnt downe both beame and snagg,
And did not spare the silken flagg.
Oh sorrow, &c.
Out runne the knightes, out runne the lordes,
And there was great adoe;
Some lost their hattes, and some their swordes;
Then out runne Burbidge too;
The reprobates, though druncke on Munday,
Prayd for the Foole and Henry Condye.
Oh sorrow, &c.
The perrywigges and drumme-heades frye,
Like to a butter firkin;
A wofull burneing did betide
To many a good buffe jerkin.
Then with swolne eyes, like druncken Flemminges,
Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.
Oh sorrow, &c.
No shower his raine did there downe force
In all that Sunn-shine weather,
To save that great renowned howse;
Nor thou, O ale-howse, neither.
Had itt begunne belowe, sans doubte,
Their wives for feare had pissed itt out.
Oh sorrow, &c.
Bee warned, yow stage-strutters all,
Least yow againe be catched,
And such a burneing doe befall,
As to them whose howse was thatched;
Forbeare your whoreing, breeding biles,
And laye up that expence for tiles.
Oh sorrow, &c.
Goe drawe yow a petition,
And doe yow not abhorr itt,
And gett, with low submission,
A licence to begg for itt
In churches, sans churchwardens checkes,
In Surrey and in Midlesex.
Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true.
John Taylor, the water-poet, has his epigram on the theme:[1252]
As gold is better that’s in fier try’d,
So is the Bankside _Globe_, that late was burn’d;
For where before it had a thatched hide,
Now to a stately theator ’tis turn’d:
Which is an emblem, that great things are won
By those that dare through greatest dangers run.
Ben Jonson, in his _Execration upon Vulcan_, writes as if he had been
an eye-witness:[1253]
Well fare the wise men yet, on the Bank side,
My friends the watermen! they could provide
Against thy fury, when to serve their needs,
They made a Vulcan of a sheaf of reeds,
Whom they durst handle in their holiday coats,
And safely trust to dress, not burn their boats.
But O those reeds! thy mere disdain of them
Made thee beget that cruel stratagem,
Which some are pleased to style but thy mad prank,
Against the Globe, the glory of the Bank:
Which, though it were the fort of the whole parish,
Flanked with a ditch, and forced out of a marish,
I saw with two poor chambers taken in,
And razed; ere thought could urge this might have been!
See the World’s ruins! nothing but the piles
Left, and wit since to cover it with tiles.
The Brethren they straight nosed it out for news,
’Twas verily some relict of the Stews;
And this a sparkle of that fire let loose,
That was raked up in the Winchestrian goose,
Bred on the Bank in time of Popery,
When Venus there maintained the mystery.
But others fell with that conceit by the ears,
And cried it was a threatning to the bears,
And that accursed ground, the Paris-garden:
‘Nay,’ sighed a sister, ‘Venus’ nun, Kate Arden,
Kindled the fire!’ But then, did one return,
No fool would his own harvest spoil or burn!
If that were so, thou rather wouldst advance
The place that was thy wife’s inheritance.
‘Oh no,’ cried all, ‘Fortune, for being a whore,
Scaped not his justice any jot the more:
He burnt that idol of the Revels too.
Nay, let Whitehall with revels have to do,
Though but in dances, it shall know his power;
There was a judgement shewn too in an hour.’
The Puritans did in fact draw such morals as Jonson satirized. Prynne,
for example, finds the hand of God in ‘the sudden feareful burning,
even to the ground, both of the Globe and Fortune play-houses, no man
perceiving how these fires came’.[1254]
The Globe was at once rebuilt. It was open again by 30 June 1614,
when John Chamberlain wrote to Alice Carleton that he had called
upon her sister Williams, and found her ‘gone to the new Globe, to a
play. Indeed’, he says, ‘I hear much speech of this new play-house,
which is said to be the fairest that ever was in England, so that if
I live but seven years longer, I may chance to take a journey to see
it’.[1255] The manuscript continuator of Stowe, describing the end
of the theatre, says that the rebuilding was ‘at the great charge
of King Iames, and many Noble men and others’.[1256] The lawsuit
documents contain no indication that any part of the burden fell upon
any one but the ‘housekeepers’, who being bound under their lease to
‘mainteyne and repaire’ the house, resolved to ‘reedifie the same’.
The first estimate of cost seems to have been about £700 to £800, for
a levy of ‘50^{li} or 60^{li}’ was called upon each seventh share
of the moiety.[1257] Witter was unable to meet this demand, and as
he was also behindhand with his share of the ground-rent and other
payments, Heminges resumed possession of the seventh and gave half of
it ‘gratis’ to Henry Condell. By this time it had been ascertained that
the re-edifying would be ‘a verie greate charge’, and Heminges claims
that the re-edifying of Witter’s ‘parte’ had in fact cost himself and
Condell ‘about the somme of cxx^{li}’.[1258] This would mean a total
cost of about £1,680.[1259] Heminges appears to have taken a sub-lease
at 20_s._ a year from his partners of two small parcels of the land
in 1615, and to have built on them a house, probably a taphouse, as a
private enterprise.[1260]
Ostler died in December 1614, and Heminges took possession of his
interest and drew the profits until October 1615, when his daughter
Thomasina, Ostler’s widow, brought an action against him for them, the
result of which is unknown.[1261] Shakespeare died in April 1616, and
his interest, if not previously alienated, would have passed under
his will, with other ‘leases’ to John and Susanna Hall.[1262] At some
time earlier than April 1619, probably when he joined the company
about 1616, Field was admitted to be a housekeeper, and the moiety was
then divided into eighths instead of sevenths.[1263] In April 1619
Witter brought an action against Heminges and Condell in the Court of
Requests, to recover the interest which he had forfeited at the time of
the rebuilding. He estimated the present annual value of the seventh,
which he had held, at £30 to £40, and in the course of the proceedings
expressed his willingness either to pay a rent of £13 6_s._ 8_d._ for
the half of that seventh which Heminges had not passed over to Condell,
or, alternatively, to take the profits of the houses on the site, other
than the theatre, and in return for those to become responsible for the
whole of the ground-rents due under the principal leases. The defence
consisted in a denial of Witter’s claim to benefit under the will of
Augustine Phillips, and an assertion that, after Heminges had allowed
him to draw considerable sums in respect of the share, he had deserted
his wife, at whose death Heminges ‘out of charitie was at the charges
of the buryeing of her’. The depositions of the witnesses, who included
Thomas Woodford and one James Knasborough, are unfortunately missing.
Ultimately Witter failed to proceed with his case, and on 29 November
1620 the Court gave judgement for the defendants.
In October 1624 died John Underwood and left a share in the Globe in
trust for his children to Condell and others as his executors. It must
be supposed that he had succeeded to Field’s eighth, when the latter
left the King’s men in 1619. Condell himself died in December 1627
and left his interest to his son William until he should have made
£300 out of it, and thereafter to his widow. Heminges died in October
1630, and his interest passed to his son William as his executor.
During the last years of their lives Heminges and Condell, following
out the policy of absorption which has already been illustrated,
appear to have acquired in one way or another the whole of the shares
formerly held by Shakespeare, by Basil Nicoll and John Edmonds as
successors of Sly, and by Underwood. This fact emerges from the records
known as the _Sharers Papers_, which start with a petition from
Robert Benfield, Eliard Swanston, and Thomas Pollard, then important
members of the King’s company, to the Lord Chamberlain in 1635, to
be admitted to shares as ‘housekeepers’ in the profits of the Globe
and the Blackfriars.[1264] The allegations show that the Globe had
been ‘formerly’ divided into sixteen shares, of which eight were
held by Cuthbert Burbadge and Richard Burbadge’s widow Winifred, now
Mrs. Robinson, in her own right and that of her son William, four by
Mrs. Condell, and four by William Heminges. Afterwards Joseph Taylor
and John Lowin were allowed to acquire shares, and later still the
remaining Heminges interest was ‘surreptitiously’ purchased by John
Shank. At the date of the petition, therefore, the Burbadges held
seven shares, Mrs. Condell two, Shank three, and Taylor and Lowin two
each. The case furnishes valuable information as to the organization
of the theatre, and as to the division of outgoing and profits between
the housekeepers and the actors as such. It is pretty evident that
by 1635 the Globe took a secondary place to the Blackfriars in the
economy of the King’s men.[1265] Shank admitted that he had bought
a two years’ term of one Globe share in 1633 and a one year’s term
of two more in 1634, together with interests in the Blackfriars, and
seems to have thought that the £506 which he gave was full value for
the purchases.[1266] The Burbadges protested against being called upon
to part with any part of their property to ‘men soe soone shott up’
and not having the ‘antiquity and desert’, which had customarily been
looked for in housekeepers. In support of their plea they recalled
the early services of their father in the building of theatres and
the claims of their family to profit by ‘the great desert of Richard
Burbadge for his quality of playing’. They suggested that ‘makeing
the leases for twenty-one yeeres’ to their fellows, whose widows or
children subsequently alienated the profits from the company, had been
their ‘destruction’. The Lord Chamberlain, however, directed that
the Burbadges should transfer two shares and Shank one to the three
petitioners, ‘at the usual and accustomed rates, and according to the
proportion of the time and benefit they are to injoy’. This the order
states, in the case of the Globe, as five years. Probably there is an
error here. The terms bought by Shank were to expire in 1635, but at
the time of the petition a suit was pending in the Court of Requests
for the confirmation of a ‘lease paroll’ from Sir Matthew Brend for
a further nine years from 25 March 1635. The original lease of 1599
from Nicholas Brend was for thirty-one years and would have expired in
1629. But on 26 October 1613, when the rebuilding of the theatre was
in hand, a fresh lease extending the term to 1635 had been granted by
Sir John Bodley as trustee for Nicholas’s son Matthew, who was then a
minor. Not content with this, the syndicate had procured a promise of
a further extension to 1644 from young Matthew himself, which he now
repudiated.[1267] I think that Bodley must have taken the opportunity
in 1613 to raise the ground-rent from £14 10_s._ to £20. A draft for a
return of new and divided houses, made for the Earl Marshal in 1634,
has the following entry:
‘The Globe play-house nere Maid lane built by the company of
players, with the dwelling-house thereto adjoyninge, built with
timber, about 20 yeares past, upon an old foundation, worth
14^{li} to 20^{li} per ann., and one house there adjoyning
built about the same tyme with timber, in the possession of W^m
Millet, gent., worth per ann. 4^{li} [_In margin_, Play-house &
house, S^r Mathew Brend’s inheritance].’
A corrected return of 1637 runs:
‘The Globe play-house nere Maide lane built by the Company
of Players with timber about 20 yeares past uppon an old
foundacion, worth 20^{li} per ann. beinge the inheritance of S^r
Mathew Brand, K^{nt}.’[1268]
The petitioners in the _Sharers Papers_ declare that up to Lady Day
1635 the rent for the Globe and Blackfriars together was not above
£65. The original rent of the Blackfriars was £40, but this also may
have been put up on the expiration of the first lease in 1629. The
Court of Requests finally confirmed the extension of the lease to
1644, apparently at a still further increased rent of £55, as Shank
states the combined rent of the two houses as £100. The Globe was
‘pulled downe to the ground, by Sir Matthew Brand, on Munday the 15
of April 1644, to make tenements in the room of it’; that is to say,
immediately upon the expiration of the nine years’ term from Lady Day
1635 contemplated in the _Sharers Papers_.[1269]
The precise locality of the Globe has been matter of controversy.
The various contemporary documents already quoted place it beyond
doubt in Surrey, and ‘on the Bankside’, a term which must certainly
be taken to cover, not merely the row of houses looking directly upon
the river, but also the whole of the western part of Southwark lying
behind and south of these. With somewhat greater minuteness, the
parish of St. Mary Overies is specified in the lawsuit of _Allen v.
Burbadge_, and the parish of St. Saviour’s in the Fortune contract.
There is no inconsistency here. The two ancient parishes of St. Mary
Magdalen and St. Margaret on the Hill were amalgamated under the name
of St. Saviour’s at the Reformation.[1270] I do not know that the
ancient boundaries are upon record. The Rose stood in what had been St.
Margaret’s, and one would therefore expect to find the Globe nearer
than the Rose to the old priory church of St. Mary’s. In the Privy
Council order of 1604 the situation is described as ‘in Maiden lane’,
and in the return to the Earl Marshal of 1637 as ‘nere Maide lane’.
But, apart from the difference between ‘in’ and ‘nere’, Maiden Lane
is a fairly long thoroughfare, and so far as these indications are
concerned, the Globe may have been either to the north or the south of
it. Local tradition, as elaborated by Southwark antiquaries, has been
inclined to put it to the south, within the area occupied by what was
formerly Thrale’s and is now Barclay and Perkins’s Anchor Brewery, of
which Maiden Lane, now Park Street, forms the northern boundary. The
main reason for this is the inclusion within the brewery of the course
of a passage known as Globe Alley, which ran west from Deadman’s Place
in a parallel line to Maiden Lane for about 360 feet and then turned
northwards for another 100 feet until it debouched into the Lane. So
far as measurements go, Globe Alley might be the _venella_ of the
1599 lease. The name first appears in the St. Saviour’s token book
for 1614, where it is applied to houses formerly described as Brand’s
Rents, and from 1613 onwards as Sir John Bodley’s Rents.[1271] Land
south of Maiden Lane certainly formed part of the Brend estate, and
a plot of it conveyed by Sir Matthew Brend to one Hilary Memprise in
1626 was bounded on the south by a sewer dividing it from the Bishop
of Winchester’s park, and on the north by ‘the alley or way leading to
the Gloabe Play-house commonly called Gloabe Alley’.[1272] A century
later, property acquired for the brewery in 1732 is similarly described
as ‘fronting a certain alley or passage called Globe Alley, in antient
times leading from Deadman’s Place to the Globe Play-house’.[1273]
It was certainly a belief in the Thrale family that the site of the
theatre itself had passed into their hands. Mrs. Piozzi, Johnson’s
friend, who married Henry Thrale in 1763, left the following
autobiographical note of her residence in Southwark between that date
and her husband’s death in 1781:
‘For a long time, then--or I thought it such--my fate was bound
up with the old Globe Theatre, upon the Bankside, Southwark;
the alley it had occupied having been purchased and thrown down
by M^r Thrale to make an opening before the windows of our
dwelling-house. When it lay desolate in a black heap of rubbish,
my Mother, one day, in a joke, called it the Ruins of Palmyra;
and after that they laid it down in a grass-plot. Palmyra was
the name it went by, I suppose, among the clerks and servants of
the brewhouse.... But there were really curious remains of the
old Globe Play-house, which though hexagonal in form without,
was round within.’[1274]
Dr. Martin seems to think that the lady’s recollection was confused and
that the garden called Palmyra stood on the east of Deadman’s Place
opposite to Globe Alley. But, according to Concanen and Morgan it was
‘on the opposite side of the street’ to the brewery.[1275] However
this may be, there are other notices which show that, however complete
the demolition of 1644, the theatre or part of it was still regarded
by tradition as standing a hundred years later amongst the tenements
by which it was replaced.[1276] In 1787 the brewery was purchased
by Barclay and Perkins, and the conveyance recites amongst other
property a plot of ground between Globe Alley and a common sewer, from
which had been cleared in 1767 some ‘ruinous and decayed’ tenements
formerly occupied in 1715 by John Knowles and others.[1277] This is
probably the clearance referred to by Mrs. Piozzi. Under Acts of 1786
and 1812 Globe Alley was closed, and it is now covered over within the
brewery precinct. Horwood’s map of 1799 shows the eastern end already
obliterated. The western end is called Globe Walk, and to the north of
it is Globe Court, perhaps representing the space cleared in 1767.
On the assumption that the theatre stood in Globe Alley, there has
been divergence of opinion as to the precise part of the Alley in
which it stood. Mr. Rendle fixed on a spot on the north side, about
80 or 100 feet from the Deadman’s Place end.[1278] To this he was
guided, partly by a further local tradition, according to which the
site was occupied successively by a meeting-house and a windmill, and
partly by an argument derived from the entries in the St. Saviour’s
token-book for 1621.[1279] Here, under the heading ‘Sir John Bodley’s
Rentes’ are recorded in succession about ten names. Then comes a new
heading, differently written, ‘Gloab Alley’, then two more names, then
in the margin of the page the word ‘Gloabe’. This Mr. Rendle took
to mean that the Globe was about twelve houses from the east end of
the alley. If this is an indication of the site of the Globe at all,
which is a mere conjecture, I should myself draw the inference that it
stood, not twelve, but two houses from the end of the alley, and that
a part, if not the whole, of Bodley’s Rents was outside the alley. And
why should the enumerator be supposed to have worked from the east,
rather than from the north end of the alley? Dr. Martin, in fact,
turns Mr. Rendle’s argument round in this way, and uses the token-book
to support a theory which places the theatre south of Globe Alley,
just at the angle where it turns to the north, and 360 feet, instead
of Mr. Rendle’s 80 or 100 feet, west of Deadman’s Place.[1280] Here
it appears to be located in a borough history of 1795;[1281] and is
certainly located in more than one early nineteenth-century plan.[1282]
Dr. Martin has attempted to obtain confirmation of this siting from an
investigation of the brewery title-deeds. From 1727 onwards the history
of the angle site is clear. In that year it was transferred, subject
to a mortgage, by Timothy Cason and his wife Elizabeth, heiress of the
Brend estate, to certain parishioners of St. Saviour’s. Upon it was
built the parish workhouse referred to by Concanen and Morgan. This
stood just at the outer south-west angle of Globe Alley, which Dr.
Martin conceives to have been occupied by the theatre. In 1774 a new
workhouse was built, and the site of the old one bought by the Thrales.
It was conveyed with the rest of the brewery to Barclay and Perkins
in 1787, and was then described as the ground ‘on which lately stood
all that great shop or workhouse formerly used for a meeting-house’.
Dr. Martin thinks that this forgotten meeting-house may have been
confused in local tradition with that further to the east along Globe
Alley.[1283] Dr. Martin suggests that the property transferred by
the Casons in 1727 is to be identified with that described in a deed
executed by the same persons in 1706, of which a copy is also to be
found amongst the brewery title-deeds, as consisting of tenements built
‘where the late play-house called the Globe stood and upon the ground
thereunto belonging’. If this were so, he would of course have proved
his point. The deed of 1706 seems to have been a family settlement
covering various fragments of Brend property in Southwark, which had
only just been brought together in the hands of Elizabeth Cason. The
Globe site had been settled by Sir Matthew Brend in 1624 upon his
wife Frances as a jointure. She died in 1673, and it then passed as
a jointure to Judith, wife of Sir Matthew’s son Thomas and mother of
Elizabeth, under a deed of 1655 in which the reference to ‘the late
play-house called the Globe’, repeated in that of 1706, first occurs.
Judith Brend had died in 1706.
As a matter of fact, it is almost impossible to reconcile the Southwark
tradition that the Globe stood on the south of Maiden Lane, either
in Mr. Rendle’s or in Dr. Martin’s interpretation of it, with more
than one bit of evidence which we owe to the research of Professor
Wallace. The first of these is the lease of 1599 itself, as recited
in the pleadings of _Ostler v. Heminges_. This states quite clearly
that the leased plot abutted on a piece of land called the Park ‘super
boream’ and on Maiden Lane ‘versus austrum’, and it is difficult to
take very seriously either the Latinity which makes ‘versus austrum’
mean that the leased plot was on the south, or the suggestion that the
draughtsman was working carelessly from a plan which had the south
instead of the north of the plot at the top of the sheet, and got
the points of his compass wrong.[1284] I daresay that such things do
sometimes happen in conveyancer’s offices, but it is hardly legitimate
to call them in aid as a canon of interpretation. No doubt it is
tempting to identify the piece of land called the Park with the Bishop
of Winchester’s park, which lay at a reasonable distance to the south
and not to the north of Maiden Lane, but after all this must once have
extended nearly up to the Bankside, since Maiden Lane itself is known
to have been cut out of it, and it is not at all improbable that some
little strip of land retained the name.[1285] It can only have been
a very little one. The lease describes the Globe site as consisting
of two plots lying apparently on opposite sides of a way or alley
(_venella_) by which access was obtainable to them. One of these, that
next the Park, had been the gardens of Thomas Burt, Isbrand Morris,
and Lactantius Roper. It was 220 feet in length and lay between the
garden of John Knowles on the east and John Cornish on the west. The
southern plot, bounded by Maiden Lane on the south, had similarly been
the gardens of John Roberts and Thomas Ditcher. This was only 156 feet
long and 100 feet deep, and lay between the gardens of William Sellers
to the east and John Burgram to the west. Now the whole space between
Maiden Lane and the Thames is only from 200 to 350 feet at various
points, so that there could not have been room for much of a ‘park’
between the Globe site and the Bankside houses.
The evidence of the lease is confirmed in various ways by the records
of presentments made by the Commissioners of Sewers for Kent and Surrey
against negligent occupiers in this marshy neighbourhood. The most
important entry is one of 14 February 1606:
‘It is ordered that Burbidge and Heminges and others, the owners
of the Play-house called the Globe in Maid-Lane shall before the
xx^{th} day of Aprill next pull vp and take cleane out of the
Sewar the props or postes which stand vnder their bridge on the
north side of Mayd-lane vpon paine to forfeit xx^s.’
This is endorsed ‘done’, but another order of the same day requiring
the same men to ‘well and sufficientlye pyle boorde and fill vp viij
poles more or lesse of theire wharfe against theire said Play-house’
needed a repetition on 25 April before it received attention.[1286]
Earlier records, before the Globe came into existence, relate to some
of the garden-holders named in the lease. A plot of John Bingham or
Burgram abutted on a Maiden Lane sewer in 1596, and this is probably
identical with the ‘common sewer leading from Sellors gardin to the
beare garden’, which William Sellers and others were ordered to cleanse
on 5 December 1595. Certainly the bear garden was to the north and
not the south of Maiden Lane. There was also a sewer bordering upon
the park, and on this Jasper Morris and Thomas Burt had encroached in
1593.[1287]
The old maps, as usual, do not give much help when it comes to a pinch,
although the balance of their authority, for what it is worth, seems to
me to be in favour of a northern site.[1288] Mr. Hubbard, calculating
from Visscher’s map, would put the Globe on the site of the present
Central Wharf, 15 feet south of the Bankside houses and 136 feet west
of Bank End, and therefore not very near Maiden Lane at all.[1289] I do
not think that he sufficiently recognizes the imperfections of the maps
from a surveyor’s point of view. I doubt whether more is to be got out
of them than that the Globe stood more to the east and probably more to
the south than either the Hope or the Rose.[1290]
The foregoing paragraphs show the state of the controversy when the
body of this chapter was written. Since then Mr. Braines has taken
up the investigation where it was left by Dr. Martin, with the help
of the brewery title-deeds and many other documents bearing on the
distribution of tenements in Maiden Lane and Globe Alley over more than
a century. It now seems clear that, in view of the known history of
properties north of Maiden Lane, there is no room for the Globe plot
there, that this plot did pass from the Casons to the workhouse and
ultimately the brewery, and that it did lie at Dr. Martin’s angle site,
being indeed precisely located on the map by Concanen and Morgan’s
description of 1795. We must therefore assume that the points of the
compass were, as Dr. Martin conjectured, inverted in the lease of
1599, east with west and north with south, and that the Globe company
maintained a bridge over the sewer on the opposite side of Maiden Lane
to the theatre, for the convenience of visitors coming down Horseshoe
Alley from the river. The _venella_ of 1599 must have been a westward
extension of Globe Alley, afterwards disused.
Some notion of the structural character of the Globe may be gleaned
from the builder’s contract for the Fortune in 1600.[1291] The Globe
was then the last new thing in theatres, and in entering into his
agreement for the Fortune with Peter Street, the builder of both
houses, Henslowe was careful to specify that the Globe should be taken
as the model, alike as regards the arrangement of the galleries and
staircases, the contrivances and fashioning of the stage, and all
other minor points not particularly indicated. The only alterations of
design set out in the agreement were that the scantlings or standard
measurements of the timber should be rather stouter than those of the
Globe, and that the main posts of the stage and auditorium should
be shaped square and carved with figures of satyrs. It is probable,
however, that a more important difference is passed without notice.
The Fortune was rectangular; the Globe was almost certainly round. The
reference to a circular house in _Henry V_ and _A Warning for Fair
Women_, both plays of about 1599, may indeed belong to the Curtain
rather than the Globe, but there are similar references in _E. M.
O._ (1599) and in _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_ (1608), which are
certainly Globe plays, and there seems no reason to doubt that the
Globe is represented by the cylindrical buildings, windowless below,
windowed and of narrower diameter above, which are shown in the maps
of the Hondius group and in the background of Delaram’s portrait of
James I.[1292] A few details are furnished by the various narratives
of the fire of 1613. The roof was thatched, whence arose the accident.
The walls were of timber, for nothing was burnt but wood and straw.
The building was ‘flanked with a ditch, and forced out of a marish’.
It had a stage-house ‘round as taylors clewe’, and carried a silken
flag. There were two narrow doors, and hard by stood an alehouse. The
new Globe built after the fire was tiled for greater safety. In other
respects there was probably no great change. The building is described
in 1634 as of timber, upon an old foundation. The maps, if they can be
trusted, figure it as polygonal, rather than strictly round. No doubt
it was round inside; an ‘amphytheator’, it is called in _Holland’s
Leaguer_. The _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 mention the tiring-house door,
at which money was taken. James Wright tells us that it was a summer
house, large and partly open to the weather, and that the acting was
always by daylight. Malone conjectured that the name ‘Globe’ was taken
from the sign, ‘which was a figure of Hercules supporting the Globe,
under which was written _Totus mundus agit histrionem_’.[1293] I do not
know where he got this information.
xii. THE FORTUNE
[_Bibliographical Note._--Most of the documents are at Dulwich,
and are printed in full or in abstract by W. W. Greg in
_Henslowe Papers_, and by J. P. Collier in _Alleyn Memoirs_
and _Alleyn Papers_. The _Register_ of the Privy Council adds
a few of importance. Valuable summaries of the history of the
theatre are given by W. W. Greg, _Henslowe’s Diary_, ii. 56,
and W. Young, _History of Dulwich College_ (1889), ii. 257.
_The Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments at Dulwich_
(1881–1903) by G. F. Warner and F. B. Bickley is also useful.]
The settlement of the Chamberlain’s men in 1599 at the Globe, hard by
the Rose, on Bankside, probably led Henslowe and Alleyn to plan during
the same year a countermove, by the transference of the Admiral’s
men to a new theatrical locality in the rapidly growing districts on
the north-west boundary of the City. The Rose, although not built
fifteen years, was in decay, and the swamps of the Bankside had not,
especially in bad weather, proved attractive to visitors. The new
centre might be expected to serve in summer and winter alike, and,
while in a place ‘remote and exempt’ from the City jurisdiction, would
be convenient for the well-to-do population, which was establishing
itself in the western suburbs, along the main roads of Holborn and the
Strand. The Fortune on the north, and the Blackfriars, opened about
the same time on the south, delimited a region which has remained
almost to our own day the head-quarters of the stage. The actual site
selected lay just outside Cripplegate between Golding or Golden Lane
and Whitecross Street, in the county of Middlesex, the lordship or
liberty of Finsbury, and the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate.
The title-deeds at Dulwich make it possible to trace the history of
the property or part of it back to the reign of Henry VIII, but for
the present purpose it is sufficient to begin with 11 July 1584, the
date of a lease by Daniel Gill, son of William Gill, gardener, to
Patrick Brewe, goldsmith, of five tenements on the east side of Golding
Lane and one on the west side of Whitecross Street at a rent of £12 a
year. This lease Brewe assigned to Alleyn on 22 December 1599, for a
sum of £240. Subsequently, in 1610, Alleyn bought up a reversionary
lease for £100, and also, after troublesome negotiations with the
numerous descendants of Daniel Gill, the freehold of the property for
£340.[1294] This purchase, however, and probably also the original
lease, included a good deal more than the actual plot on which the
theatre was built. The deed of sale recites six tenements on the east
of Golden Lane and six on the west of Whitecross Street. It is pretty
clear, from the boundaries described, as compared with those in a
temporary assignment by Alleyn of the lease, that the property dealt
with in 1584 and in 1610 was the same, and it is natural to conclude
that Alleyn had himself added to the number of tenements.[1295] This
is confirmed by a note of Alleyn’s that, in addition to building the
play-house, he spent £120 ‘for other priuat buildings of myn owne’. One
such building adjoined the south side of the play-house in 1601.[1296]
Alleyn’s note gives the cost of the play-house itself as £520, making
up with the private buildings and the purchase of leasehold, reversion,
and freehold, a total expenditure of £1,320.[1297] The contract for
building the framework was taken by Peter Street, carpenter, at £440,
which presumably left Alleyn £80 for the painting and other decorative
work excluded from the contract. The following is the text of the
contract, which is preserved at Dulwich:[1298]
‘This Indenture made the Eighte daie of Januarye 1599, and in
the Twoe and Fortyth yeare of the Reigne of our sovereigne Ladie
Elizabeth, by the grace of god Queene of Englande, Fraunce
and Irelande, defender of the Faythe, &c. betwene Phillipp
Henslowe and Edwarde Allen of the parishe of S^{te} Saviours
in Southwark in the Countie of Surrey, gentlemen, on thone
parte, and Peeter Streete, Cittizen and Carpenter of London,
on thother parte witnesseth That whereas the saide Phillipp
Henslowe & Edward Allen, the daie of the date hereof, haue
bargayned, compounded & agreed with the saide Peter Streete
ffor the erectinge, buildinge & settinge upp of a new howse
and Stadge for a Plaiehouse in and vppon a certeine plott or
parcell of grounde appoynted oute for that purpose, scytuate
and beinge nere Goldinge lane in the parishe of S^{te} Giles
withoute Cripplegate of London, to be by him the saide Peeter
Streete or somme other sufficyent woorkmen of his provideinge
and appoyntemente and att his propper costes & chardges, for
the consideracion hereafter in theis presentes expressed, made,
erected, builded and sett upp in manner & forme followinge (that
is to saie); The frame of the saide howse to be sett square and
to conteine ffowerscore foote of lawfull assize everye waie
square withoutt and fiftie fiue foote of like assize square
everye waie within, with a good suer and stronge foundacion
of pyles, brick, lyme and sand bothe without & within, to be
wroughte one foote of assize att the leiste aboue the grounde;
And the saide fframe to conteine three Stories in heighth,
the first or lower Storie to conteine Twelue foote of lawfull
assize in heighth, the second Storie Eleaven foote of lawfull
assize in heigth, and the third or vpper Storie to conteine
Nyne foote of lawfull assize in height; All which Stories
shall conteine Twelue foote and a halfe of lawfull assize in
breadth througheoute, besides a juttey forwardes in either
of the saide twoe vpper Stories of Tenne ynches of lawfull
assize, with ffower convenient divisions for gentlemens roomes,
and other sufficient and convenient divisions for Twoe pennie
roomes, with necessarie seates to be placed and sett, aswell
in those roomes as througheoute all the rest of the galleries
of the saide howse, and with suchelike steares, conveyances &
divisions withoute & within, as are made & contryved in and to
the late erected Plaiehowse on the Banck in the saide parishe
of S^{te} Saviours called the Globe; With a Stadge and Tyreinge
howse to be made, erected & settupp within the saide fframe,
with a shadowe or cover over the saide Stadge, which Stadge
shalbe placed & sett, as alsoe the stearecases of the saide
fframe, in suche sorte as is prefigured in a plott thereof
drawen, and which Stadge shall conteine in length Fortie and
Three foote of lawfull assize and in breadth to extende to the
middle of the yarde of the saide howse; The same Stadge to be
paled in belowe with good, stronge and sufficyent newe oken
bourdes, and likewise the lower Storie of the saide fframe
withinside, and the same lower storie to be alsoe laide over
and fenced with stronge yron pykes; And the saide Stadge to
be in all other proporcions contryved and fashioned like vnto
the Stadge of the saide Plaie howse called the Globe; With
convenient windowes and lightes glazed to the saide Tyreinge
howse; And the saide fframe, Stadge and Stearecases to be
covered with Tyle, and to haue a sufficient gutter of lead to
carrie & convey the water frome the coveringe of the saide
Stadge to fall backwardes; And also all the saide fframe and
the Stairecases thereof to be sufficyently enclosed withoute
with lathe, lyme & haire, and the gentlemens roomes and Twoe
pennie roomes to be seeled with lathe, lyme & haire, and all
the fflowers of the saide Galleries, Stories and Stadge to
be bourded with good & sufficyent newe deale bourdes of the
whole thicknes, wheare need shalbe; And the saide howse and
other thinges beforemencioned to be made & doen to be in all
other contrivitions, conveyances, fashions, thinge and thinges
effected, finished and doen accordinge to the manner and
fashion of the saide howse called the Globe, saveinge only that
all the princypall and maine postes of the saide fframe and
Stadge forwarde shalbe square and wroughte palasterwise, with
carved proporcions called Satiers to be placed & sett on the
topp of every of the same postes, and saveinge alsoe that the
said Peeter Streete shall not be chardged with anie manner of
pay[ntin]ge in or aboute the saide fframe howse or Stadge or
anie parte thereof, nor rendringe the walls within, nor seeling
anie more or other roomes then the gentlemens roomes, Twoe
pennie roomes and Stadge before remembred. Nowe theiruppon the
saide Peeter Streete dothe covenant, promise and graunte ffor
himself, his executours and administratours, to and with the
saide Phillipp Henslowe and Edward Allen and either of them,
and thexecutours and administratours of them and either of
them, by theis presentes in manner & forme followeinge (that
is to saie); That he the saide Peeter Streete, his executours
or assignes, shall & will att his or their owne propper costes
& chardges well, woorkmanlike & substancyallie make, erect,
sett upp and fully finishe in and by all thinges, accordinge
to the true meaninge of theis presentes, with good, stronge
and substancyall newe tymber and other necessarie stuff, all
the saide fframe and other woorkes whatsoever in and vppon
the saide plott or parcell of grounde (beinge not by anie
aucthoretie restrayned, and haveinge ingres, egres & regres to
doe the same) before the ffyue & twentith daie of Julie next
commeinge after the date hereof; And shall alsoe at his or
theire like costes and chardges provide and finde all manner
of woorkmen, tymber, joystes, rafters, boordes, dores, boltes,
hinges, brick, tyle, lathe, lyme, haire, sande, nailes, lade,
iron, glasse, woorkmanshipp and other thinges whatsoever, which
shalbe needefull, convenyent & necessarie for the saide fframe
& woorkes & euerie parte thereof; And shall alsoe make all the
saide fframe in every poynte for Scantlinges lardger and bigger
in assize then the Scantlinges of the timber of the saide newe
erected howse called the Globe; And alsoe that he the saide
Peeter Streete shall furthwith, aswell by himself as by suche
other and soemanie woorkmen as shalbe convenient & necessarie,
enter into and vppon the saide buildinges and woorkes, and shall
in reasonable manner proceede therein withoute anie wilfull
detraccion vntill the same shalbe fully effected and finished.
In consideracion of all which buildinges and of all stuff &
woorkemanshipp thereto belonginge, the saide Phillipp Henslowe
& Edward Allen and either of them, ffor themselues, theire, and
either of theire executours & administratours, doe joynctlie
& seuerallie covenante & graunte to & with the saide Peeter
Streete, his executours & administratours by theis presentes,
that they the saide Phillipp Henslowe & Edward Allen or one of
them, or the executours administratours or assignes of them or
one of them, shall & will well & truelie paie or cawse to be
paide vnto the saide Peeter Streete, his executours or assignes,
att the place aforesaid appoynted for the erectinge of the saide
fframe, the full somme of Fower hundred & Fortie Poundes of
lawfull money of Englande in manner & forme followeinge (that
is to saie), att suche tyme and when as the Tymber-woork of
the saide fframe shalbe rayzed & sett upp by the saide Peeter
Streete his executours or assignes, or within seaven daies
then next followeinge, Twoe hundred & Twentie poundes, and
att suche time and when as the saide fframe & woorkes shalbe
fullie effected & ffynished as is aforesaide, or within seaven
daies then next followeinge, thother Twoe hundred and Twentie
poundes, withoute fraude or coven. Prouided allwaies, and it
is agreed betwene the saide parties, that whatsoever somme or
sommes of money the saide Phillipp Henslowe & Edward Allen or
either of them, or the executours or assignes of them or either
of them, shall lend or deliver vnto the saide Peter Streete his
executours or assignes, or anie other by his appoyntemente or
consent, ffor or concerninge the saide woorkes or anie parte
thereof or anie stuff thereto belonginge, before the raizeinge
& settinge upp of the saide fframe, shalbe reputed, accepted,
taken & accoumpted in parte of the firste paymente aforesaid
of the saide some of Fower hundred & Fortie poundes, and all
suche somme & sommes of money, as they or anie of them shall
as aforesaid lend or deliver betwene the razeinge of the
saide fframe & finishinge thereof and of all the rest of the
saide woorkes, shalbe reputed, accepted, taken & accoumpted
in parte of the laste pamente aforesaid of the same somme
of Fower hundred & Fortie poundes, anie thinge abouesaid to
the contrary notwithstandinge. In witnes whereof the parties
abouesaid to theis presente Indentures Interchaungeably haue
sett theire handes and seales. Yeoven the daie and yeare ffirste
abouewritten.
P S
Sealed and deliuered by the saide Peter Streete in the presence
of me William Harris Pub[lic] Scr[ivener] And me Frauncis Smyth
appr[entice] to the said Scr[ivener]
[_Endorsed_:] Peater Streat ffor The Building of the Fortune.
The constant references in the terms of the contract to the model
of the Globe, while bearing testimony to the stimulus which the
building of the Globe had given to theatrical competition, leaves
some uncertainty as to many details of planning, and it is matter
for regret that the ‘plot’ of the stage and staircases furnished to
the builder has not itself been preserved. We learn, however, that
the house was a square one, 80 feet each way by outside and 55 feet
by inside measurement; that the stage was 43 feet wide and projected
into the middle of the yard; that the framework was of wood, on a
foundation of brick and piles, and with an outer coating of plaster;
that the framework and stage were boarded within and strengthened
with iron pikes; that there were three galleries rising to a total
height of 32 feet, and that sections of these were partitioned off and
ceiled as ‘gentlemens rooms’, of which there were four, and ‘two-penny
rooms’; that the tiring-house had glazed windows; that there was a
‘shadowe or cover’ over the stage, and that this, with the galleries
and staircases, were tiled and supplied with lead gutters to carry off
the rain-water. Two divergences from the Globe model are specified:
the timber work is to be stouter, and the principal posts of the frame
work and stage are to be square and carved with satyrs. An ingenious
attempt has been made by Mr. William Archer and Mr. W. H. Godfrey to
reconstruct the plan of the theatre from these and other indications,
with a liberal allowance of conjecture.[1299] It will be observed
that Henslowe, as well as Alleyn, was a party to the contract; but
it is pretty clear from Alleyn’s note already referred to that he
found the money, and although Henslowe did in fact become his partner
in the enterprise, this was under a lease of 4 April 1601, whereby
he took over a moiety of the play-house and its profits for a term
of twenty-four years from the previous 25 March at an annual rent
of £8.[1300] This lease did not include Alleyn’s private tenements,
but it did include some enclosed ‘growndes’ on the north and west of
the house, and a passage 30 feet long by 14 feet wide running east
from the south-west angle of the building ‘from one doore of the said
house to an other’. It is, I think, to be inferred from this that the
main approach to the earlier Fortune theatre was from the Golden Lane
side. The contract with Street is dated on 8 January 1600 and provides
for the completion of the work by the following 25 July, and for the
payment of the price in two instalments, one when the framework was
up and the other upon completion. In fact, however, the acquittances
by Street and others, endorsed upon the Dulwich indenture, show that
Henslowe acted as a kind of banker for the transaction, and made
advances from time to time to Street, or to pay workmen or purchase
materials, all of which were debited against the amounts payable under
the contract. Work seems to have begun before 17 January. By 20 March
Henslowe had paid £180 and by 4 May £240. It is therefore a little
puzzling to find a payment ‘at the eand of the fowndations’ on 8 May.
About £53 more was paid before 10 June, making nearly £300 in all by
that date. The last entry is one of 4s. to Street ‘to pasify him’,
which suggests that some dispute had taken place. Here the acquittances
stop, but Henslowe’s _Diary_ indicates that he was frequently dining
in company with Street from 13 June to August 8, and probably the work
was completed about the latter date.[1301] Alleyn had had to face some
opposition in carrying out his project. He began by arming himself with
the authority of his ‘lord’, the Earl of Nottingham, who wrote in his
favour to the Middlesex justices on 12 January 1600, explaining the
reasons for leaving the Bankside and the general convenience of the new
locality, and citing the Queen’s ‘special regarde of fauor’ towards
the company as a reason why the justices should allow his servant to
build ‘w^{th}out anie yo^r lett or molestation’. This action did not
prove sufficient to avert a local protest. Lord Willoughby and others
complained to the Council, who on 9 March wrote to the Middlesex
justices informing them that the erection of a new play-house, ‘wherof
ther are to manie allreadie not farr from that place’, would greatly
displease the Queen, and commanding the project to be ‘staied’. Alleyn,
however, was secure in the royal favour. He also, by offering a weekly
contribution to the relief of the poor, succeeded in obtaining a
certificate from the petty officials and other inhabitants of Finsbury
of their consent to the toleration of the house; and on 8 April the
Council wrote again to the justices, withdrawing their previous
inhibition and laying special stress on Elizabeth’s desire that Alleyn
personally should revive his services as a player, ‘wheareof, of late
he hath made discontynuance’. The letter also referred to the fact
that another house was pulled down instead of the Fortune, and a
formal Privy Council order of 22 June, laying down that there shall
in future be one house in Middlesex for the Admiral’s men, and one on
the Bankside for the Chamberlain’s, makes it clear that the condemned
theatre was the Curtain.[1302] Nevertheless, it is certain that neither
the Curtain nor the Rose was in fact plucked down at this date.
The Fortune was opened in the autumn of 1600 by the Admiral’s men,
probably with Dekker’s _1 Fortune’s Tennis_, and its theatrical history
is closely bound up with that of the same company, who occupied it
continuously, as the Admiral’s to 1603, then as Prince Henry’s men
to his death in 1612, and finally as the Palsgrave’s men. It is
only necessary to deal here with matters that directly concern the
building. That it became something of a centre of disturbance in the
peaceful suburbs of the north-west is shown by various entries in the
records of the Middlesex Bench. On 26 February 1611, two butchers,
Ralph Brewyn and John Lynsey, were charged with abusing gentlemen
there. On 1 October 1612, the justices regarded it as the resort
of cutpurses, and were thereby led to suppress the jigs at the end
of plays, which especially attracted such persons. In 1613 a true
bill was found against Richard Bradley for stabbing Nicholas Bedney
there on 5 June.[1303] The upkeep of the structure was expensive. A
note in Alleyn’s hand of sums laid out upon the play-house during
the seven years 1602–8 shows an average amount of about £120. Only
£4 2_s._ was spent during 1603, for the greater part of which year
the theatres were closed, but £232 1_s._ 8_d._ in 1604.[1304] No
doubt wooden buildings, open to the weather, perished rapidly. It is
not unreasonable to suppose that the relations between the company
and their landlords were much what they had been at the Rose; that
is to say that the latter took half the gallery receipts and bore
repairs, while the former took the rest of the receipts and met all
other outgoings. An unexecuted draft lease to Thomas Downton of 1608
indicates that Alleyn and Henslowe then had it in mind to bind the
company more closely to the theatre, by dividing a quarter of their
interest amongst the eight members of the company.[1305] Possibly the
plan was carried out. In asking a loan from Alleyn on a date apparently
earlier than August 1613, Charles Massye, who was one of the eight, not
only offers repayment out of his ‘gallery mony’ and ‘house mony’, but
also the assignment of ‘that lyttell moete I have in the play housses’
as a security.[1306] Certainly the company took over the house after
Henslowe’s death on 6 January 1616. His share in the building passed
to his widow, who contemplated a sale of it to Gregory Franklyn, Drew
Stapley, and John Hamond.[1307] But the deed remained unexecuted at her
death in 1617, and the whole property was now once more in Alleyn’s
hands. On 31 October 1618 he leased it to the company for £200 a year,
to be reduced to £120 at his death. With it went a taphouse occupied by
Mark Brigham, the rent of a two-room tenement held by John Russell, and
a strip of impaled ground 123 feet by 17 feet, lying next the passage
on the south.[1308] This is perhaps the garden in which, according to
John Chamberlain, the players, ‘not to be overcome with courtesy’,
banqueted the Spanish ambassador when he visited the theatre on 16 July
1621.[1309] John Russell is presumably the same whose appointment by
Alleyn as a ‘gatherer’ lead to a protest from William Bird on behalf
of the company.[1310] A few months after the ambassador’s visit, John
Chamberlain records the destruction of the Fortune on 9 December
1621:[1311]
‘On Sonday night here was a great fire at the Fortune in
Golden-Lane, the fayrest play-house in this towne. It was quite
burnt downe in two howres, & all their apparell & play-bookes
lost, wherby those poore companions are quite undone.’
Alleyn also notes the event in his diary.[1312] On 20 May 1622 he
formed a syndicate, and leased to it the site at a rent of £128 6_s._,
under an obligation to build a new theatre at a cost of £1,000.[1313]
This, ‘a large round brick building’, was erected in the following
year.[1314] The site conveyed covered a space of almost exactly 130
feet square, and on it had stood, besides the buildings named in the
lease of 1618, other tenements, in one of which William Bird himself
lived. Mr. Lawrence has suggested that the new Fortune may have been a
roofed-in house, but his evidence is hardly sufficient to outweigh the
explicit statement of Wright that it ‘lay partly open to the weather,
and there they always acted by daylight’.[1315] This can hardly refer
only to the earlier building. The Fortune was dismantled in 1649 and
‘totally demolished’ by 1662, and the façade still extant in 1819
cannot therefore have belonged to it, although it may have belonged
to a Restoration ‘nursery’ for young actors, possibly upon the same
site.[1316] No acting seems to have taken place at the Fortune after
1649.[1317]
xiii. THE BOAR’S HEAD
There appear to have been at least six city inns under this sign.[1318]
The most famous was that on the south side of Great Eastcheap, in
St. Michael’s, which seems to have been regarded in the middle of
the sixteenth century as the traditional locality of the tavern
scenes in _Henry IV_.[1319] This inn was in the occupation of Joan
Broke, widow, in 1537, and in that of Thomas Wright, vintner, about
1588.[1320] Another Boar’s Head stood ‘without’ Aldgate, in the
extra-mural Portsoken ward, which lay between that gate and the bars
with which the liberties of the City terminated at Hog Lane. Here,
according to Stowe, there were ‘certaine faire Innes for receipt of
trauellers repayring to the Citie’.[1321] At the Aldgate inn had
been produced in 1557 a ‘lewd’ play called _The Sackful of Newes_,
which provoked the interference of Mary’s Privy Council.[1322] But it
seems to me exceedingly improbable that either this or the Eastcheap
inn was converted into the play-house, of which we have brief and
tantalizing records in the seventeenth century. Both were within the
City jurisdiction, where the licensing of play-houses seems to have
definitely terminated in 1596. It is true that a Privy Council letter
of 31 March 1602, which directs that the combined company of Oxford’s
and Worcester’s men shall be allowed to play at the Boar’s Head, is
addressed to the Lord Mayor.[1323] But so are other letters of the
same type, the object of which is to limit plays to a small number of
houses outside the liberties, and to restrain them elsewhere over the
whole area of the City and the suburbs.[1324] And when, a year or two
later, Worcester’s men became Queen Anne’s, and a draft patent was
drawn up to confirm their right to play in the Curtain and the Boar’s
Head, both houses are described, not as in the City, but as ‘within
our County of Middlesex’.[1325] Presumably Anne’s men left the Boar’s
Head when the Red Bull became available for their use in 1606, and Mr.
Adams has explained a mention, which had long puzzled me, of the Duke
of York’s men as ‘the Prince’s Players of Whitechapel’ in 1608 by the
suggestion that they succeeded to the vacant theatre.[1326] If this is
so, I think it affords further evidence for the theory that the Boar’s
Head, although it may have taken its name from the Aldgate inn, was
not itself that inn, and probably not a converted inn at all, but lay
just outside and not just inside the City bars. For, although part of
the street between Aldgate and Whitechapel is sometimes called, as in
Ogilby’s map of 1677 and Rocque’s of 1746, ‘Whitechapel Street’, yet
Whitechapel proper lay outside the liberties, farther to the east
along the Mile End Road.[1327] The only other contemporary record of
the Boar’s Head is a letter to Edward Alleyn from his wife Joan on 21
October 1603, in which she says, ‘All the companyes be come hoame &
well for ought we knowe, but that Browne of the Boares head is dead
& dyed very pore, he went not into the countrye at all’.[1328] This
Browne cannot be identified, and it is perhaps idle to conjecture
that he may have been related to Robert Browne, and that it may have
been at the Boar’s Head that the latter played with Derby’s men in
1599–1601. The Boar’s Head seems to have been generally forgotten by
the Restoration, but is recalled by the Marquis of Newcastle _c._
1660.[1329]
xiv. THE RED BULL
[_Bibliographical Note._--The records of the suit of _Woodford
v. Holland_ (1613) were printed by J. Greenstreet in the
_Athenaeum_ for 28 Nov. 1885 from _Court of Requests Books_,
xxvi, ff. 780, 890, and cxxviii, and therefrom by Fleay, 194;
and more fully with those of the later suit of 1619 (misdated
1620) by C. W. Wallace in _Nebraska University Studies_, ix. 291
(cited as _W. v. H._). Collier, i. 374, mentions evidence on the
same transactions as ‘in the Audit Office’, and misnames the
complainant John Woodward.]
Our chief knowledge of the early history of the Red Bull is derived
from disputes before the Court of Requests in 1613 and 1619 between
Thomas Woodford and Aaron Holland. It appears that Holland held a
lease of the site, which was at the upper end of St. John Street in
the parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, from Anne, widow and executrix
of Christopher Bedingfield, and had there built a play-house. The
indication of a Red Bull Yard in Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1677 to
the west of St. John Street, and just north of the angle which it
forms with Clerkenwell Green, no doubt defines the locality with some
precision.[1330] In _3 Jac. I_, that is, at some date between 24 March
1605 and 23 March 1606, he assigned one-seventh of the house to Thomas
Swynnerton, ‘with a gatherers place thereto belonging’. This Swynnerton
transferred for £50 to Philip Stone.[1331] It was subject to a rent
of £2 10_s._, and Holland gave Stone an indenture in February 1609,
which was alleged not to constitute a proper lease. In 1612–13 Stone
sold his seventh for £50 to Woodford, who took profits for a quarter,
and then entrusted his interest to Holland, instructing his servant
Anthony Payne to pay the rent. He alleged that Holland persuaded Payne
to be behindhand with the rent, and withheld the profits, estimated
at £30 a year. He therefore brought his action a little before May
1613. The Court called upon Holland to show cause why he should not
account for the arrears of profits, and for 1_s._ 6_d._ a week due
to the gatherer’s place.[1332] Holland replied, and the issues were
referred to the arbitration of counsel, including Woodford’s ‘demaund
of the eighteenth penny and the eighteenth part of such moneys & other
comodities as should be collected or receaued ... for the profittes of
the galleries or other places in or belonging to the play howse’.[1333]
Counsel made an arrangement, but did not agree in their reports of its
terms, and the Court ordered Holland to give Woodford an indenture
similar to that given to Stone.[1334] Holland got a writ of prohibition
from the King’s Bench, always jealous of the jurisdiction of the Court
of Requests, on 6 November 1613, and Woodford began a suit against
Holland in Stone’s name for not making a proper indenture in 1609.
This, he says, Stone conspired with Holland to withdraw. In 1619 he
brought another action for his profits before the Court of Requests,
in which Holland describes him as ‘Woodford, _alias_ Simball’, but the
result is unknown.
The Red Bull, then, was built not later and probably not much earlier
than 1606, a little before the first recorded mention of it in the
following passage from _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_, which was
almost certainly produced in the winter of 1607:
_‘Citizen._ Why so sir, go and fetch me him then, and let
the Sophy of Persia come and christen him a childe.
_‘Boy._ Beleeue me sir, that will not doe so well, ’tis
stale, it has beene had before at the red Bull.’[1335]
The allusion is to an incident in the last scene of Day, Rowley, and
Wilkins’ _Travels of the Three Brothers_.[1336] This, according to the
entry in the Stationers’ Register on 29 June 1607, was played at the
Curtain, and according to its title-page of 1607 by the Queen’s men.
But there is no reason why it should not also have been played at the
Red Bull, since both houses are specified as occupied by the Queen’s
men in their patent of 15 April 1609. In their earlier draft patent of
about 1603–4, the Boar’s Head and Curtain are named, and in a Privy
Council letter of 9 April 1604 the Curtain only. Presumably, therefore,
the Red Bull was taken into use by the Queen’s men, of whom Swynnerton
was one, as soon as it was built at some date between 1604 and 1606.
The Red Bull is one of the three houses whose contention is predicted
in Dekker’s _Raven’s Almanack_ of 1608, and Dekker refers to it again
in his _Work for Armourers_, written during the plague of 1609, when
the bear garden was open and the theatres closed. He says, ‘The pide
_Bul_ heere keepes a tossing and a roaring, when the _Red Bull_ dares
not stir’.[1337] Its existence caused trouble from time to time to the
Middlesex justices. At the end of May 1610, William Tedcastle, yeoman,
and John Fryne, Edward Brian, Edward Purfett, and Thomas Williams,
felt-makers, were called upon to give recognisances to answer for a
‘notable outrage at the play-house called the Red Bull’; and on 3
March 1614 Alexander Fulsis was bailed out on a charge of picking
Robert Sweet’s pocket of a purse and £3 at this theatre.[1338] Further
references to it are to be found in Wither’s _Abuses Stript and Whipt_
(1613), in Tomkis’s _Albumazar_ (1615), and in Gayton’s _Pleasant Notes
on Don Quixot_ (1654).[1339]
An entry in Alleyn’s _Diary_ for 1617 has been supposed to indicate
that he had an interest in the Red Bull. To me it only suggests that he
sold the actors there a play.[1340]
The Queen’s men most likely occupied the Red Bull at least until 1617
when, as shown by the lawsuit of 1623, they were on the point of moving
to the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Plays of theirs were printed as acted
there in 1608, 1611, 1612, and 1615. _Swetnam the Woman Hater Arraigned
by Women_, printed in 1620, was also played there, before Anne’s
death in 1619. In 1637 Thomas Heywood, formerly one of the Queen’s
men, included in his _Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas_, a Prologue and
Epilogue, to which he prefixed the note ‘A young witty lad playing the
part of Richard the third: at the Red Bull: the Author because hee
was interessed in the play to incourage him, wrot him this Prologue
and Epilogue’.[1341] This was probably, and certainly if the play
was Shakespeare’s, some quite exceptional performance. Similarly the
‘companie of young men of this citie’, who are stated on the title-page
of Wentworth Smith’s _Hector of Germany_ (1615) to have acted it at the
Red Bull and Curtain, must be supposed to have used these theatres by
some arrangement with the Queen’s men.
The Red Bull afterwards passed to other companies, continued in use up
to, and even occasionally during, the Commonwealth, and had a revived
life after the Restoration to 1663.[1342] Before 1633, and probably
before 1625, it had been re-edified and enlarged.[1343] Mr. Lawrence
suggests that at this time it became a roofed house, which it seems
certainly to have been after the Restoration.[1344] But it is difficult
to get away from Wright’s explicit statement that it ‘lay partly open
to the weather, and there they always acted by daylight’.[1345] Nor
need the quite modern identification of it with the roofed interior
depicted in _The Wits_ rest upon anything but an incidental reference
to the house in the text of the pamphlet.[1346] Nothing is known as to
the shape or galleries of the Red Bull.
xv. THE HOPE
[_Bibliographical Note._--The Dulwich papers relating to the
connexion of Henslowe and Alleyn with the bear-baiting and the
Hope are to be found with a commentary in Greg, _Henslowe’s
Diary_ and _Henslowe Papers_. Valuable material on the Bankside
localities is in W. Rendle, _The Bankside, Southwark, and the
Globe_, 1877 (Appendix I to Furnivall, _Harrison’s Description
of England_, Part II, with a reconstructed map of the Bankside
and a 1627 plan of Paris Garden), _Old Southwark and its
People_ (1878), _The Play-houses at Bankside in the Time of
Shakespeare_ (1885, _Walford’s Antiquarian_, vii. 207, 274;
viii. 55), _Paris Garden and Blackfriars_ (1887, _7 N. Q._ iii.
241, 343, 442). Some notes of Eu. Hood [Joseph Haslewood] in
1813 and A. J. K[empe] in 1833 are reprinted in _The Gentleman’s
Magazine Library_, xv (1904), 74, 117. Other writings on Paris
Garden are by W. H. Overall (1869) in _Proc. Soc. Antiq._ 2nd
series, iv. 195, J. Meymott, _The Manor of Old Paris Garden_
(1881), P. Norman, _The Accounts of the Overseers of the Poor
of Paris Garden, Southwark, 1608–1671_ (1901) in _Surrey Arch.
Colls._ xvi. 55. Since I wrote this chapter, C. L. Kingsford
(1920, _Arch._ lxx. 155) has added valuable material.]
It is convenient, in connexion with the Hope, to deal with the
whole rather troublesome question of the Bankside Bear Gardens. The
_ursarius_ or bearward was a recognized type of mediaeval _mimus_, and
the rewards in which his welcome found expression are a recurring item
in many a series of municipal or domestic accounts. Thus, to take one
example only, the corporation of Shrewsbury entertained between 1483
and 1542 the _ursinarii_, _ursuarii_, or _ursiatores_ of the King, the
Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Marquises of Dorset and Exeter, the
Earl of Derby, and the town of Norwich.[1347] On more than one occasion
the payment is said to be _pro agitacione bestiarum suarum_. The phrase
is perhaps not free from ambiguity. The dancing bear was, until quite
recently, a familiar sight in provincial England, and I have seen one
even on the sophisticated slopes of Notting Hill. And illuminations
dating back as far as the tenth century bear evidence to the antiquity
of his somewhat grotesque _tripudium_.[1348] But in the robust days
of our forefathers there was an even more attractive way of agitating
bears. The traditional victim of an English baiting was no doubt the
bull. A Southwark map of 1542 shows a ‘Bolrynge’ in the middle of the
High Street and a neighbouring alley still bore the name in 1561.[1349]
The maps of Höfnagel (_c._ 1560) and Agas (_c._ 1570) show another
ring, marked ‘The bolle bayting’ and with a very palpable bull inside
it, upon the Bankside, not far from where the Hope must afterwards
have stood.[1350] But the bear was also baited in London, at least
from the twelfth century.[1351] Erasmus is often cited as declaring
that in the reign of Henry VIII ‘herds’ of the animal were kept for
the purpose. This is an error. Erasmus wrote of dancing bears; but I
am afraid it must be assumed that the chief function of the bearward
attached to the Tudor Royal Household was to provide exhibitions of the
more brutal, noisy, and occasionally dangerous sport.[1352] A regular
office is traceable back to 1484, when Richard III in the first year
of his reign appointed his bearward John Browne to be ‘Maister, Guyder
and Ruler of all our Beres and Apes’.[1353] It was still a part of
the establishment of the Royal Household under Elizabeth. A patent
of 2 June 1573 to Ralph Bowes describes it as ‘the room or office of
Cheif Master Overseer and Ruler of all and singular our game pastymes
and sportes, that is to saie of all and everie our beares bulles and
mastyve dogges’, and names as Bowes’s predecessors Cuthbert Vaughan and
Sir Richard Long.[1354] The grant was of the nature of a commission,
authorizing the holder, personally or by deputy, to ‘take up’ or
press animals for the royal service, and giving him the sole right of
baiting the Queen’s bears, to the exclusion of any other officer or
under officer appertaining to the bears, not specially licensed or
appointed by him. The Master was presumably expected to make his profit
out of the privileges granted, for the patent did not assign him any
fee, such as the under officers, known as the Keepers of Bears and
Mastiffs, enjoyed at the hands of the Treasurer of the Chamber.[1355]
But he received a reward, similar to those given to players, of £5
through the Treasurer on the Council’s warrant, when the baiting was
shown before the Queen. These rewards are generally expressed as ‘for
the Game of Paris Garden’ or ‘to the Master of her Majesty’s Game at
Paris Garden’; and Bowes must have joined sons or other relatives
with him as deputies, since Edward Bowes and Thomas Bowes were often
payees instead of Ralph Bowes during his term of office.[1356] Towards
the end of Bowes’s life it would seem that Henslowe and Alleyn, who
had been baiting bears on the Bankside as licensees since 1594,
were in negotiation to obtain the Mastership.[1357] Probably the
first idea was to buy a surrender of the office from Bowes, since
the Dulwich manuscripts contain an unexecuted draft of a patent to
Henslowe, following the terms of that to Bowes himself and reciting
such a surrender.[1358] I should suppose this negotiation to be that
in connexion with which Henslowe spent £2 15_s._ 6_d._ during 1597
upon visits to Sir Julius Caesar, Master of Requests, and other Court
officials, and in a fee to the Clerk of the Signet. The expenditure
is entered in the diary as incurred ‘a bowt the changinge of ower
comysion’.[1359] But before a surrender was effected it would seem that
Henslowe had had to turn his thoughts to a succession. In this he was
disappointed. On 4 June 1598 he wrote to Alleyn that Bowes was very
sick and expected to die, and that he much feared he should lose all.
Neither Caesar nor the Lord Admiral had done anything for him, and
although he had received help from Lady Edmondes and Mr. Langworth, he
now learnt that the reversion of the Mastership was already promised
by the Queen to one Mr. Dorrington, a pensioner.[1360] Bowes did in
effect die very shortly after, and on 11 August 1598 John Dorrington
received his patent for the Mastership.[1361] To this was joined the
office of Keeper of the Bandogs and Mastiffs, with a fee of 10_d._ a
day for exercising this office and keeping twenty mastiff bitches, and
a further fee of 4_d._ for a deputy.[1362] It is not unlikely that John
Dorrington was related to the Richard Darrington who had held this
keepership with the same fees, amounting to £21 5_s._ 10_d._ a year,
in 1571. Another keepership, that of the Bears, was held in 1599 by
Jacob Meade, who was closely associated with Henslowe and Alleyn in the
management of the Bear garden.[1363] Dorrington’s grant was confirmed
by James I on 14 July 1603, and on 23 July he was knighted.[1364] About
this time Henslowe and Alleyn, who were paying Dorrington £40 a year
for licence to bait,[1365] must have contemplated fresh negotiations
for a transfer of the patent, for the draft in the Dulwich manuscripts,
originally drawn up about 1597, has been altered by Henslowe so as
to adapt it to the new reign and to a surrender by Dorrington.[1366]
But once again they were unsuccessful, for Dorrington died, and on 20
July 1604 the Mastership was granted to one of the invading Scots,
Sir William Stuart.[1367] From him, however, Henslowe and Alleyn did
succeed in obtaining an assignment, and a draft patent as joint Masters
and Keepers, with the fees of 10_d._ and 4_d._, is dated 24 November
1604. They had, indeed, been rather in Stuart’s hands, for he had
refused either to give them a licence or to take over their house and
bears, and they had to pay for the surrender at what they considered
the high rate of £450.[1368] This we learn from a petition of about
1607, in which they appealed to the King for an increase in the daily
fee by 2_s._ 8_d._, in view of their losses through restraints and
the deaths of bears, and of their heavy expenses, amounting to £200
a month, whereby their privilege, which was once worth £100 a year,
could now not be let at all.[1369] It is doubtful whether they got any
relief. They had a new patent on 24 November 1608;[1370] but about 1612
they sent up another petition in very similar terms. A grant of £42
10_s._ and 12_d._ a day had, indeed, been made them in March 1611 for
keeping a lion and two white bears. But this was probably menagerie
work and quite apart from the baiting. They continued as joint Masters
until Henslowe’s death in 1616, when the whole office passed to Alleyn
in survivorship.[1371]
When baiting seemed desirable to the soul of the sovereign, the ‘game’
was generally brought to the Court, wherever the Court might happen to
be.[1372] The rewards of the Treasurer of the Chamber were most often
for attendances in the Christmas holidays or at Whitsuntide. But the
game might be called for at any time to add lustre to the entertainment
of an ambassador or other distinguished visitor to Court. Thus on 25
May 1559 French ambassadors dined with Elizabeth, ‘and after dener to
bear and bull baytyng, and the Quens grace and the embassadurs stod in
the galere lokyng of the pastym tyll vj at nyght’.[1373] Later French
embassies of 1561, 1572, 1581, and 1599, and a Danish embassy of 1586
were similarly honoured.[1374] The custom continued during the next
reign. On 19 August 1604 there was a grand banquet at Whitehall for
Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Constable of Castile, on the completion of
peace between England and Spain, and thereafter a ball, and after the
ball ‘all then took their places at the windows of the room which
looked out upon a square, where a platform was raised, and a vast
crowd had assembled to see the King’s bears fight with greyhounds.
This afforded great amusement. Presently a bull, tied to the end of a
rope, was fiercely baited by dogs.’[1375] James had introduced a new
and dangerous element into the sport by using the lions which were
kept in the Tower, and this also became the scene of baitings. On 5
March 1607 the Treasurer of the Chamber paid Henslowe and Alleyn no
less than £30, partly for attendances with the game at Greenwich during
the visit of the King of Denmark and at Whitehall during that of the
Prince de Joinville, and partly for baiting of the lions in the Tower
on three several occasions.[1376] Stowe gives detailed descriptions
of lion-baitings in 1604, 1605, 1609, and 1610, of which the first
is interesting, because it was under the personal superintendence of
Edward Alleyn, ‘now sworne the Princes man and Maister of the Beare
Garden’.[1377]
But the profit of the thing, from the point of view of the Master of
the Game, was not so much in the attendances at Court, as in the public
baitings, which he and those holding licences from him were privileged
to give with the bears and dogs, ‘taken up’ by virtue of the commission
or bought at their own expense, during such times as these were not
required for the royal service. These public spectacles were held at
what was known as the Bear Garden, under conditions much resembling
those of a theatre. They played a considerable part in the life of
London; literature is full of allusions to them; and they are described
with more or less detail in the narratives of many travellers from
abroad. An early account is that from the Spanish of a secretary to
the Duke of Najera, who visited Henry VIII in 1544.[1378] He describes
the bears as baited daily, with three or four dogs to each bear, in an
enclosure where they were tied with ropes, and adds:
‘Into the same place they brought a pony with an ape fastened on
its back, and to see the animal kicking amongst the dogs, with
the screams of the ape, beholding the curs hanging from the ears
and neck of the pony, is very laughable.’
In 1559 the same French ambassadors, who saw the baiting at Whitehall,
were taken on the following day to Paris Garden, and ‘ther was boyth
bare and bull baytyng, and the capten with a c. of the gard to kepe
rowme for them to see the baytyng’.[1379] The next notice of any
value is that of Lupold von Wedel, who was at Southwark on 23 August
1584.[1380]
‘There is a round building three stories high, in which are
kept about a hundred large English dogs, with separate wooden
kennels for each of them. These dogs were made to fight singly
with three bears, the second bear being larger than the first
and the third larger than the second. After this a horse was
brought in and chased by the dogs, and at last a bull, who
defended himself bravely. The next was that a number of men
and women came forward from a separate compartment, dancing,
conversing and fighting with each other: also a man who threw
some white bread among the crowd, that scrambled for it. Right
over the middle of the place a rose was fixed, this rose being
set on fire by a rocket: suddenly lots of apples and pears fell
out of it down upon the people standing below. Whilst the people
were scrambling for the apples, some rockets were made to fall
down upon them out of the rose, which caused a great fright but
amused the spectators. After this, rockets and other fireworks
came flying out of all corners, and that was the end of the
play.’
It is interesting to observe that the baiting proper was supplemented
with fireworks and an entertainment, which must have been of the nature
of a jig.[1381] The visit of Frederick, Duke of Württemberg, on 1
September 1592, is also recorded by his secretary, who says:[1382]
‘His Highness was shown in London the English dogs, of which
there were about 120, all kept in the same enclosure, but each
in a separate kennel. In order to gratify his Highness, and at
his desire, two bears and a bull were baited; at such times you
can perceive the breed and mettle of the dogs, for although they
receive serious injuries from the bears, are caught by the horns
of the bull, and tossed into the air so as frequently to fall
down again upon the horns, they do not give in, so that one is
obliged to pull them back by their tails, and force open their
jaws. Four dogs at once were set on the bull; they, however,
could not gain any advantage over him, for he so artfully
contrived to ward off their attacks that they could not well get
at him; on the contrary, the bull served them very scurvily by
striking and butting at them.’
De Witt briefly notices the ‘amphitheatrum’ of the Bear Garden in 1596.
He says:[1383]
‘Est etiam quintum sed dispari [vsu?] et structura, bestiarum
concertationi destinatum, in quo multi vrsi, tauri, et stupendae
magnitudinis canes discretis caueis et septis aluntur, qui
ad pugnam adseruantur, iocundissimum hominibus spectaculum
praebentes.’
Hentzner, who visited London in the autumn of 1598, says:[1384]
‘Est et alius postea locus Theatri quoque formam habens,
Ursorum & Taurorum venationibus destinatus, qui à postica parte
alligati à magnis illis canibus & molossis Anglicis, quos lingua
vernacula Docken appellant, mire exagitantur, ita tamen, ut
saepe canes isti ab Ursis vel Tauris, dentibus arrepti, vel
cornibus impetiti, de vita periclitari, aliquando etiam animam
exhalare soleant, quibus sic vel sauciis vel lassis statim
substituuntur alii recentes & magis alacres. Accedit aliquando
in fine hujus spectaculi Ursi plane excaecati flagellatio, ubi
quinque, vel sex, in circulo constituti, Ursum flagellis misere
excipiunt, qui licet alligatus auffugere nequeat, alacriter
tamen se defendit, circumstantes, & nimium appropinquantes, nisi
recte & provide sibi caveant, prosternit, ac flagella e manibus
cadentium eripit atque confringit.’
To 1599 belongs the account of Thomas Platter of Basle:[1385]
‘The London bearbaitings usually take place every Sunday and
Wednesday, across the water. The play house is built in circular
form; above are a number of seated galleries; the ground space
under the open sky is unoccupied. In the midst of this a great
bear is fastened to a stake by a long rope. When we came down
the stairs, we went behind the play house, and saw the English
dogs, of which there were about 120 chained up, each in his
separate kennel, in a yard.’
Platter also describes the actual baiting of the bull and bear and
of the blind bear, much as did his predecessors. On 7 September 1601
the Duc de Biron was taken to the Bear Garden, as one of the sights
of London, by no less a cicerone than Sir Walter Raleigh.[1386] A
visit of 16 September 1602 is described in the diary of Philip Julius,
Duke of Stettin in Pomerania.[1387] The vogue of the Bear Garden
amongst foreigners evidently lasted into James’s reign, but the
notices are briefer. Lewis Frederick of Württemberg, saw on 26 April
1610 the baiting both of bears and bulls ‘and monkeys that ride on
horseback’;[1388] and Justus Zingerling of Thuringia, who was in London
about the same year, mentions the ‘_theatra comoedorum_, in which bears
and bulls fight with dogs’.[1389] Even more summary is the reference
in an itinerary of Prince Otto von Hesse-Cassel in 1611.[1390] But
the extracts given sufficiently describe the nature of the sport, and
show that bulls continued to be baited up to a late date, as well as
bears, and that the serious business of the spectacle was diversified
by regular humorous episodes, such as the monkey on horseback and the
whipping of the blind bear. He, by the way, was called Harry Hunks,
and is named by Sir John Davies in his _Epigrams_[1391] of _c._ 1594,
in company with the Sackerson who gave rise to a boast on the part of
Master Slender,[1392] and at a later date by Dekker[1393] and Henry
Peacham.[1394] Two other famous bears were Ned Whiting and George
Stone. Both are alluded to in Ben Jonson’s _Epicoene_ (1609),[1395]
and the latter also in _The Puritan_ (1607).[1396] The death of the
‘goodlye beare’ George Stone at a baiting before the King of Denmark
in 1606 is lamented in the petition of Henslowe and Alleyn to the King
for increased fees already described. One other interesting notice of
the sport may be added from the Dulwich collection, and that is an
advertisement or ‘bill’ of the entertainment, which runs as follows:
‘Tomorrowe beinge Thursdaie shalbe seen at the Beargardin on the
banckside a greate mach plaid by the gamstirs of Essex who hath
chalenged all comers what soeuer to plaie v dogges at the single
beare for v pounds and also to wearie a bull dead at the stake
and for your better content shall haue plasant sport with the
horse and ape and whiping of the blind beare. Viuat Rex.’[1397]
Where then was the Bear Garden? This is a point upon which the foreign
visitors are not very explicit. From them we could infer little more
than that it was transpontine. It has already been pointed out that
in official documents, at any rate those of a less formal character
than a patent under the great seal, the Mastership is described
as the Mastership of the Game of, or at, Paris Garden. With this
common parlance agrees.[1398] In the allusions of the pamphleteers
and poets, from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the
seventeenth century, Paris or Parish Garden is regularly the place of
baiting.[1399] ‘The Beare-garden, commonly called Paris Garden’, says
Stowe, speaking of 1583.[1400] At Paris Garden, or as it is sometimes
corruptly spelt, ‘Pallas Garden’, Henslowe and Alleyn have their office
as Masters[1401] in 1607, and near it Alleyn is living in 1609. Now
the Liberty and Manor of Paris Garden is a quite well defined part of
the Bankside. It lay at the extreme west end, bordering upon Lambeth
Marsh, with the Clink upon its east. In it stood from about 1595 the
most westerly of the theatres, the Swan.[1402] Historians of Southwark
are fond of suggesting that it had been the abode of the bears from
an almost immemorial antiquity, and follow a late edition of Blount’s
seventeenth-century _Glossographia_ in connecting it with the _domus_
of a certain Robert de Parys, near which the butchers of London were
ordered to throw their garbage in 1393.[1403] I think the idea is that
the garbage was found useful for feeding the bears. This theory I
believe to be as much a myth as Taylor the water-poet’s derivation of
the name from Paris, son of Priam. Parish, rather than Paris Garden,
seems, in fact, to be the earlier form, although there is nothing in
the history of the place that very particularly explains it.[1404]
Many residents in London were of course ‘de Parys’ in the fourteenth
century, and the _domus_ of the Robert in question, who lived some
time after the first mention of ‘Parish’ Garden, was pretty clearly on
the City and not the Surrey side of the river.[1405] It is, however,
the case that before the Civil War the Butchers’ Company had been
accustomed to send their offal by a beadle to ‘two barrow houses,
conveniently placed on the river side, for the provision and feeding
of the King’s Game of Bears’, and were directed to resume the practice
after the Restoration; and possibly this is what misled Blount.[1406]
Obviously, however, what the butchers did in the seventeenth century
is no proof of what they did in the fourteenth. And, in fact, the
ordinance of 1393 is explicit in its direction that the offal is
ultimately to be, not devoured by bears, but cast into mid-stream.
There is in fact nothing, so far as I know, to locate the royal Game on
the Bankside at all until the middle of the sixteenth century, when it
was already hard by the stews in the Liberty of the Clink, and still
less, except the persistence of the name, to locate it definitely in
the Liberty of Paris Garden.[1407] The notice which brings Paris Garden
nearest is in Foxe’s _Book of Martyrs_, which contains an account of an
adventure of one Ralph Morice, secretary to Cranmer, who was foolish
enough to take a book of his master’s, containing criticisms of the
Six Articles, in a wherry from Westminster Bridge to Paul’s Wharf. It
chanced that Henry VIII ‘was then in his barge with a great number of
barges and boats about him, then baiting of bears in the water, over
against the Bank’. The waterman stopped to see the fun, and the bear
broke loose, and climbed into the wherry, which upset. The dangerous
book fell into the Thames and was picked up by the bearward, who was
the Lady Elizabeth’s bearward and ‘an arrant Papist’. It was only
through the good offices of Cromwell that Morice escaped serious
trouble. This was about July 1539.[1408] Certainly it was the custom
from an early date to moor the King’s barge off Paris Garden.[1409]
The spot was marked later by the Old Barge Stairs, which stood at
the west end of that part of the Bank lying in front of the Garden,
just as Paris Garden Stairs stood at its east end. But the barge was
not necessarily at its moorings when Henry was baiting from it. Mr.
Ordish suggests that it was the common use of Paris Garden Stairs by
visitors to the baiting, which led to the name being transferred to
the Bear Garden itself, without any one troubling to inquire very
minutely whether it stood a little to the east or a little to the
west of the landing.[1410] On the whole, however, I regard it as
reasonably probable that there was at one time a Bear Garden in the
Liberty, which fixed the traditional name for the sport, even after it
had been transferred farther along the Bank.[1411] It may, perhaps,
be a slight confirmation of this view that the 1627 survey of Paris
Garden shows a space, apparently laid out as a garden and arranged as a
circle within a square, which may represent the site. It stands nearly
opposite Paris Garden Stairs in a triangular bit of ground between
Holland Street and the lane leading to Copt Hall. This seems to have
been rather a desolate region in Elizabeth’s reign, at any rate when
you got beyond the row of houses which lined the bank.[1412] If there
was a Bear Garden there, it had clearly been abandoned some little time
before 1546, as the Stews were then ‘the accustomed place’. Somewhat
later, the maps of Höfnagel (_c._ 1560) and Agas (_c._ 1570) show, in
addition to the Bull ring already mentioned, another ring marked ‘The
Beare bayting’, standing immediately west of it, and like it in the
Clink.[1413] The animals at the stake are discernible in the rings, and
to the south of each stretches a yard with a pond in the middle and
kennelled dogs along the sides. It is in the Clink, too, that Norden
in 1593 shows ‘The Beare howse’, a little west and north of ‘The play
howse’, which is the Rose. This evidence is consistent with what little
is upon written record about the locality of the Bear Gardens. The most
important document is a deposition of John Taylor, not the water-poet,
in a suit of 1620:[1414]
‘He saith that he remembreth that the game of bear-bayting hath
been kept in fower severall places (vizt.) at Mason Steares on
the bankside; neere Maid-lane by the corner of the Pyke Garden;
at the beare garden which was parcell of the possession of
William Payne; and the place where they are now kept.’
Taylor was then an old man of seventy-seven and his memory would easily
go back to the time of the early maps. To his testimony may be added
that of Stowe, who says in his _Survey of London_ (1598):[1415]
‘Now to returne to the West banke, there be two Beare gardens,
the olde and new places, wherein be kept Beares, Buls and other
beastes to be bayted. As also Mastiues in severall kenels,
nourished to baite them. These Beares and other Beasts are there
bayted in plottes of ground, scaffolded about for the Beholders
to stand safe. Next on this banke was sometime the Bordello or
stewes.’
In his _Annales_ Stowe records the fall of ‘the old and under
propped scaffolds round about the Beare-garden, commonly called
Paris garden’, and the consequent death of eight persons, at 4 p.m.
on Sunday, 13 January 1583. It was, he says, ‘a friendly warning to
such as more delight themselves in the cruelty of beasts, than in the
works of mercy, the fruits of a true professed faith, which ought to
be the Sabbath day’s exercise’.[1416] Dr. Dee also noted the accident
in his diary, and it was reported to Burghley on the next day by the
Lord Mayor and on 19 January by Recorder Fleetwood.[1417] Both of
these adopt the view expressed by Stowe that it must be regarded as
divine punishment for the violation of the Sabbath, and Fleetwood
refers to ‘a booke sett downe vpon the same matter’, which may be
John Field’s _Godly Exhortation by Occasion of the late Judgment of
God showed at Paris Garden_. The shrewd irony of Sir Thomas More,
upon a similar event, when it was the church that fell, many years
before at Beverley, found little echo in the mind of the Elizabethan
Puritan.[1418] A further letter from the Lord Mayor to the Privy
Council on 3 July 1583 states that by then the Paris Garden scaffolds
were ‘new builded’.[1419]
I find it very difficult to say which of the numerous bear gardens
mentioned by Taylor and Stowe was in use at any given time. Mr. Rendle
thought that Taylor’s first two, that at Mason Stairs and that at the
corner of the Pike Garden, were the two shown as ‘The bolle bayting’
and ‘The Bearebayting’ by Agas.[1420] If so, they are quite out of
scale. This is likely, since they are drawn large enough to show the
animals. They are shown east and west of each other. Rendle puts the
Pike Garden due south of Mason Stairs, but it clearly extended more to
the east in 1587. In any case both these earlier sites were farther
to the west of the Clink than the Hope. Where then was the place on
William Payne’s ground? Mr. Rendle, after a careful comparison of
Rocque’s map of 1746 and other later maps, puts it at ‘the north
courtelage in the lane known as the Bear Garden’ and the Hope at the
south courtelage in the same lane.[1421] I take him to mean that the
Bear Garden on Payne’s ground was that in use until 1613, and that the
Hope was built a little to the south of it. The terms of the contract
with Katherens, however, suggest that the same or practically the same
site was used. Mr. Rendle adds that ‘William Payne’s place next the
Thames can be traced back into the possession of John Allen, until it
came down to Edward Alleyn, and was sold by him at a large profit to
Henslowe; the same for which Morgan Pope in 1586 paid to the Vestry
of St. Saviour’s “6_s._ 8_d._ by the year for tithes”.’[1422] This I
cannot quite follow. There seem to have been two properties standing
respectively next and next but one on the west to the ‘little Rose’.
Next the Rose stood messuages called The Barge, Bell and Cock. They
were leased by the Bishop of Winchester to William Payne in 1540. His
widow Joan Payne assigned them to John White and John Malthouse on 1
August 1582, and White’s moiety was assigned to Malthouse on 5 February
1589.[1423] From him Henslowe bought the lease in 1593–4.[1424] The
tenements upon it were in his hands as ‘Mr. Malthowes rentes’ in
1603 and Alleyn was living in one of them.[1425] And the lease of
the Barge, Bell and Cock passed to Alleyn and was assigned by his
will towards the settlement of his second or third wife, Constance,
daughter of Dean Donne.’[1426] To the west of this property in 1540
was a tenement once held by the prioress of Stratford. This passed to
the Crown, and then to Thomas and Isabella Keyes under a Crown lease
which was in Henslowe’s hands by 1597. Some notes of deeds--leases,
deputations, bonds--concerning the Bear Garden were left by Alleyn.
Four of the deeds have since been found by Mr. Kingsford in the Record
Office. It appears that, before Henslowe, both Pope and Burnaby had
some of the Keyes land on a sub-lease, and that Burnaby probably had
the Keyes lease itself. Payne carried on baiting in a ring just south
of the Barge. The site was called Orchard Court in 1620, and stood
north of the Hope. This agrees with the relation suggested by Mr.
Rendle between the two courtelages’. The object of the suit of 1620
was to determine whether the Hope also stood upon episcopal, or upon
Crown land. Taylor’s testimony was ambiguous. But it follows that the
transfer southwards must have been due to a tenant who held under
both leases. It was suggested in 1620 that Pope rebuilt the scaffold
standings round the ring as galleries with a larger circuit. This was
doubtless after the ruin of 1583. Nothing is said of a change of site
at this time. Moreover, both Pope and Burnaby seem to have used the
site of the Hope and its bull-house as a dog-yard. Probably, therefore,
the change was made by Henslowe and Alleyn. Alleyn left a record of
‘what the Bear garden cost me for my owne part in December 1594’. He
paid £200 to Burnaby, perhaps only for a joint interest with Henslowe
or Jacob Meade, and £250 for the ‘patten’, that is, I suppose, the
Mastership bought from Sir William Stuart in 1604. He held his interest
for sixteen years and received £60 a year, and then sold it to ‘my
father Hinchloe’ for £580 in February 1611.[1427] There must have been
considerable outgoings on the structure during this period. Another
memorandum in Alleyn’s hand shows an expenditure of £486 4_s._ 10_d._
during 1602–5, and a further expenditure during 1606–8 of £360 ‘p^d.
for ye building of the howses’.[1428] This last doubtless refers in
part, not to the baiting ring itself, but to a tavern and office built
on ‘the foreside of the messuage or tenemente called the Beare garden,
next the river of Thames in the parish of St. Saviors’, for which there
exists a contract of 2 June 1606 between Henslowe and Alleyn and Peter
Street the carpenter.[1429] But this only cost £65, and it seems to
me most likely that the Bear Garden was rebuilt on the southern site
at the same time. Further light is thrown on the profits of the Bear
Garden by a note in Henslowe’s diary that the receipts at it for the
three days next after Christmas 1608 were £4, £6, and £3 14_s._, which
may be compared with the average of £1 18_s._ 3_d._ received from the
Fortune during the same three days.[1430] It may be added that Crowley
notes the ‘bearwardes vaile’ somewhat ambiguously as ½_d._, 1_d._, or
2_d._,[1431] and that Lambarde in 1596 includes Paris Garden with the
Theatre and Bel Savage as a place where you must pay ‘one pennie at
the gate, another at the entrie of the scaffolde, and the thirde for a
quiet standinge’.[1432]
Yet another building enterprise was undertaken in 1613, by which time
an interest in the property had certainly been leased to Jacob Meade.
On 29 August a contract was entered into between Henslowe and Meade and
Gilbert Katherens, carpenter, for the pulling down of the Bear Garden
and the erection before the following 30 November on or near the same
site of a play-house on the model of the Swan, but with a movable
stage, so as to enable the building to be used also for baitings. I
reproduce the document here from Dr. Greg’s text:[1433]
Articles, Covenauntes, grauntes, and agreementes, Concluded and
agreed vppon this Nyne and Twenteithe daie of Auguste, Anno
Domini 1613, Betwene Phillipe Henslowe of the parishe of S^t
Saviour in Sowthworke within the countye of Surrey, Esquire,
and Jacobe Maide of the parishe of S^t Olaves in Sowthworke
aforesaide, waterman, of thone partie, And Gilbert Katherens of
the saide parishe of S^t Saviour in Sowthworke, Carpenter, on
thother partie, As followeth, That is to saie--
Inprimis the saide Gilbert Katherens for him, his executours,
administratours, and assignes, dothe convenaunt, promise, and
graunt to and with the saide Phillipe Henslowe and Jacobe Maide
and either of them, thexecutors, administratours, & assigns of
them and either of them, by theise presentes in manner and forme
following: That he the saied Gilbert Katherens, his executours,
administratours, or assignes shall and will, at his or theire
owne proper costes and charges, vppon or before the last daie of
November next ensuinge the daie of the date of theise presentes
above written, not onlie take downe or pull downe all that same
place or house wherin Beares and Bulls haue been heretofore
vsuallie bayted, and also one other house or staple wherin Bulls
and horsses did vsuallie stande, sett, lyinge, and beinge vppon
or neere the Banksyde in the saide parishe of S^t Saviour in
Sowthworke, comonlie called or knowne by the name of the Beare
garden, but shall also at his or theire owne proper costes and
charges vppon or before the saide laste daie of November newly
erect, builde, and sett vpp one other same place or Plaiehouse
fitt & convenient in all thinges, bothe for players to playe
in, and for the game of Beares and Bulls to be bayted in the
same, and also a fitt and convenient Tyre house and a stage to
be carryed or taken awaie, and to stande vppon tressells good,
substanciall, and sufficient for the carryinge and bearinge of
suche a stage; And shall new builde, erect, and sett vp againe
the saide plaie house or game place neere or vppon the saide
place, where the saide game place did heretofore stande; And to
builde the same of suche large compasse, fforme, widenes, and
height as the Plaie house called the Swan in the libertie of
Parris garden in the saide parishe of S^t Saviour now is; And
shall also builde two stearecasses without and adioyninge to the
saide Playe house in suche convenient places, as shalbe moste
fitt and convenient for the same to stande vppon, and of such
largnes and height as the stearecasses of the saide playehouse
called the Swan nowe are or bee; And shall also builde the
Heavens all over the saide stage, to be borne or carryed without
any postes or supporters to be fixed or sett vppon the saide
stage, and all gutters of leade needfull for the carryage of
all suche raine water as shall fall vppon the same; And shall
also make two Boxes in the lowermost storie fitt and decent for
gentlemen to sitt in; And shall make the particions betwne the
Rommes as they are at the saide Plaie house called the Swan;
And to make turned cullumes vppon and over the stage; And shall
make the principalls and fore fronte of the saide Plaie house of
good and sufficient oken tymber, and no furr tymber to be putt
or vsed in the lower most, or midell stories, except the vpright
postes on the backparte of the saide stories (all the byndinge
joystes to be of oken tymber); The inner principall postes of
the first storie to be twelve footes in height and tenn ynches
square, the inner principall postes in the midell storie to be
eight ynches square, the inner most postes in the vpper storie
to be seaven ynches square; The prick postes in the first storie
to be eight ynches square, in the seconde storie seaven ynches
square, and in the vpper most storie six ynches square; Also
the brest sommers in the lower moste storie to be nyne ynches
depe, and seaven ynches in thicknes, and in the midell storie to
be eight ynches depe and six ynches in thicknes; The byndinge
jostes of the firste storie to be nyne and eight ynches in
depthe and thicknes, and in the midell storie to be viij and
vij ynches in depthe and thicknes. Item to make a good, sure,
and sufficient foundacion of brickes for the saide Play house
or game place, and to make it xiij^{teene} ynches at the leaste
above the grounde. Item to new builde, erect, and sett vpp the
saide Bull house and stable with good and sufficient scantlinge
tymber, plankes, and bordes, and particions of that largnes and
fittnes as shalbe sufficient to kepe and holde six bulls and
three horsses or geldinges, with rackes and mangers to the same,
and also a lofte or storie over the saide house as nowe it is.
And shall also at his & theire owne proper costes and charges
new tyle with Englishe tyles all the vpper rooffe of the saide
Plaie house, game place, and Bull house or stable, and shall
fynde and paie for at his like proper costes and charges for
all the lyme, heare, sande, brickes, tyles, lathes, nayles,
workemanshipe and all other thinges needfull and necessarie for
the full finishinge of the saide Plaie house, Bull house, and
stable; And the saide Plaiehouse or game place to be made in
althinges and in suche forme and fashion, as the saide plaie
house called the Swan (the scantling of the tymbers, tyles,
and foundacion as ys aforesaide without fraude or coven). And
the saide Phillipe Henslow and Jacobe Maide and either of
them for them, thexecutors, administratours, and assignes of
them and either of them, doe covenant and graunt to and with
the saide Gilbert Katherens, his executours, administratours,
and assignes in manner and forme followinge (That is to saie)
That he the saide Gilbert or his assignes shall or maie haue,
and take to his or theire vse and behoofe, not onlie all the
tymber, benches, seates, slates, tyles, brickes, and all other
thinges belonginge to the saide Game place & Bull house or
stable, and also all suche olde tymber whiche the saide Phillipe
Henslow hathe latelie bought, beinge of an old house in Thames
street, London, whereof moste parte is now lyinge in the yarde
or backsyde of the saide Beare-garden; And also to satisfie
and paie vnto the saide Gilbert Katherens, his executors,
administratours, or assignes for the doinge and finishinges of
the workes and buildinges aforesaid the somme of Three Hundered
and three score poundes of good and lawffull monie of England,
in manner and forme followinge (That is to saie) In hande at
thensealinge and delivery hereof, Three score pounds which
the saide Gilbert acknowlegeth him selfe by theise presentes
to haue receaued; And more over to paie every weeke weeklie,
duringe the firste six weekes, vnto the saide Gilbert or his
assignes, when he shall sett workemen to worke vppon or about
the buildinge of the premisses the somme of Tenne poundes of
lawffull monie of Englande to paie them there wages (yf theire
wages dothe amount vnto somuche monie); And when the saide plaie
house, Bull house, and stable are reared, then to make vpp the
saide wages one hundered poundes of lawffull monie of England,
and to be paide to the saide Gilbert or his assignes; And when
the saide Plaie house, Bull house, and stable are Reared,
tyled, walled, then to paie vnto the saide Gilbert Katherens
or his assignes one other hundered poundes of lawffull monie
of England; And when the saide Plaie house, Bull house, and
stable are fullie finished, builded, and done in manner and
forme aforesaide, then to paie vnto the saide Gilbert Katherens
or his assignes one other hundred Poundes of lawffull monie of
England in full satisfacion and payment of the saide somme of
CCClx^{li}. And to all and singuler the covenantes, grauntes,
articles, and agreementes above in theise presentes contayned,
whiche on the parte and behalfe of the saide Gilbert Katherens,
his executours, administratours, or assignes are ought to be
observed, performed, fulfilled, and done, the saide Gilbert
Katherens byndeth himselfe, his executours, administratours, and
assignes vnto the saide Phillipe Henslowe and Jacob Maide and to
either of them, thexecutours, administratours, and assignes of
them or either of them, by theise presentes. In witnes whereof
the saide Gilbert Katherens hath herevnto sett his hande and
seale, the daie and yere firste above written
The mark G K of Gilbert Katherens
Sealed and Delivered in the presence of
witnes Moyses Bowler
Edwarde Griffin
The execution of the contract must have been delayed, for the rebuilt
Bear Garden is fairly to be identified with the Hope, of which no
mention is made in the petition of the spring of 1614 described by
Taylor in _The True Cause of the Watermen’s Suit_, although it had
certainly come into use by the following autumn.[1434] Here was
arranged for 7 October a trial of wit between this same Taylor and the
shifty rhymer William Fennor.[1435] The latter failed to turn up, and
Taylor, who, according to his own account, had advertised ‘this Bear
Garden banquet of dainty conceits’ and collected a great audience, was
left ‘in a greater puzzell then the blinde beare in the midst of all
her whip-broth’. After acting part of what he had intended, he resigned
the stage to the regular company:
Then came the players, and they play’d an act,
Which greatly from my action did detract,
For ’tis not possible for any one
To play against a company alone,
And such a company (I’ll boldly say)
That better (nor the like) e’r played a play.
This company was no doubt the Lady Elizabeth’s, as reconstituted in
the previous March under an agreement with Nathaniel Field on their
behalf, of which a mutilated copy exists. To it Meade was a party, and
there is nothing to establish a connexion between Meade and any other
theatre than the Hope.[1436] Jonson names the Lady Elizabeth’s men as
the actors of _Bartholomew Fair_, and in the Induction thereto, after
a dialogue between the Stage-keeper, who is taunted with ‘gathering
up the broken apples for the beares within’, and the Book-holder,
a Scrivener reads ‘Articles of Agreement, indented, between the
Spectators or Hearers, at the Hope on the Bankeside, in the County of
Surrey on the one party; and the Author of Bartholmew Fayre in the
said place, and County on the other party: the one and thirtieth day
of Octob. 1614’. According to Jonson the locality was suitable for a
play on Bartholomew Fair, for it was ‘as durty as _Smithfield_, and
as stinking euery whit’.[1437] There were disputes between Henslowe
and the company, partly arising out of an arrangement that they should
‘lie still’ one day a fortnight for the baiting, and the combination
broke up. Some of its members, apparently then Prince Charles’s men,
are found after Henslowe’s death signing an agreement with Alleyn and
Meade to play at the Hope, and to set aside a fourth of the gallery
takings towards a sum of £200 to be accepted in discharge of their debt
to Henslowe. Alleyn had of course resumed his part proprietorship of
the house as executor and ultimate heir to Henslowe. Meade probably
took actual charge of the theatre, and there is an undated letter from
Prince Charles’s men to Alleyn, written possibly in 1617, in which
they explain their removal from the Bankside as due to the intemperate
action of his partner in taking from them the day which by course was
theirs. I suppose that this dispute also was due to the competition
of baiting with the plays. In 1619 some disputes between Alleyn and
Meade had to be settled by arbitration, and from Alleyn’s memoranda in
connexion with these it appears that Meade was his deputy under his
patent as Master of the Game, and had also a lease from him of the
house at £100 a year.[1438] The Hope is mentioned from time to time,
chiefly as a place of baiting, up to the civil wars.[1439] It is one of
the three Bankside theatres alluded to in _Holland’s Leaguer_ (1632),
where it is described as ‘a building of excellent hope’ for players,
wild beasts, and gladiators. Bear-baiting was suppressed by the House
of Commons in 1642,[1440] and the house was dismantled in 1656. The
manuscript continuation of Stowe’s _Annales_ describes its end and the
slaughter of the bears, but gives the date of its erection erroneously
as 1610 instead of 1613.[1441]
After the Restoration the Bear Garden was restored, and a lane called
Bear Gardens, running from Bankside to New Park Street, and a sign
therein of The White Bear still mark its name.[1442] Its site is pretty
well defined in the seventeenth-century maps as to the west of the
Globe and, where that is shown, the Rose, and generally as a little
nearer Maid Lane than the latter. This is consistent with a notice in
the Sewers records for 5 December 1595 of a sewer which ran to the Bear
Garden from a garden known to have lain a little farther east along
Maid Lane than the Globe.[1443]
The traditional day for baiting was Sunday. Crowley in 1550 describes
it as taking place on ‘euerye Sondaye’.[1444] Naturally this did not
pass without Puritan comment, to which point was given by the fall
of Paris Garden on a Sunday in 1583.[1445] A general prohibition of
shows on Sunday seems to have followed, from which it is not likely
that bear-baiting was excepted. It may be inferred that Thursday
was substituted, for a Privy Council order of 25 July 1591 called
attention, not only to a neglect of the rule as to Sunday, but also
to the fact that every day ‘the players do use to recite their plays
to the great hurt and destruction of the game of bear-baiting and
like pastimes, which are maintained for Her Majesty’s pleasure if
occasion require’, and forbade plays both on Sunday and on Thursday,
on which day ‘those other games usually have been always accustomed
and practised’.[1446] Henslowe’s diary seems to show that up to 1597
he kept the Sunday prohibition and disregarded the Thursday one,
which is a little odd, as he was interested in the Bear Garden.
But a proclamation of 7 May 1603 on the accession of James repeats
the warning that there was neglect of the Sabbath, and renews the
prohibition both for baiting and for plays.[1447] Henslowe and Alleyn
in their petition of about 1607 for increased fees lay stress on this
restraint as a main factor in their alleged loss.[1448] It seems from
the notes of Stowe’s manuscript _continuator_ that during the first
half of the seventeenth century Tuesday and Thursday became the regular
baiting days.[1449] But the agreements made by Henslowe and Meade with
the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1614 profess only to reserve one day in
fourteen for this purpose, of which apparently notice was to be given
on the previous Monday.[1450]
xvi. PORTER’S HALL
Authority was given for the erection of a new theatre by the following
patent of 3 June 1615:[1451]
[Sidenote: De concessione regard Phillippo Rosseter et aliis.]
Iames by the grace of God &c. To all Maiors, Sheriffes,
Iustices of peace, Bayliffes, Constables, headboroughes, and
to all other our Officers, Ministers, and loving Subiectes,
to whome these presentes shall come, greeting. Whereas wee by
our letteres Patentes sealed with our great seale of England
bearing date the ffourth day of Ianuary in the seaventh yeare
of our Raigne of England Fraunce and Ireland and of Scotland
the three and ffortieth for the consideracions in the same
letteres patentes expressed did appoint and authorise Phillipp
Rosseter and certaine others from tyme to tyme to provide,
keepe, and bring vppe a convenient nomber of children, and them
to practise and exercise in the quallitie of playing by the
name of the children of the Revelles to the Queene, within the
white ffryers in the Suburbs of our Cittie of London, or in any
other convenient place where they the said Phillipp Rosseter
and the rest of his partners should thinke fitting for that
purpose, As in and by the said letteres patentes more at large
appeareth, And whereas the said Phillipp Rosseter and the rest
of his said partners have ever since trayned vppe and practised
a convenient nomber of children of the Revelles for the purpose
aforesaid in a Messuage or mansion house being parcell of
the late dissolved Monastery called the white ffryers neere
Fleetestreete in London, which the said Phillipp Rosseter did
lately hold for terme of certaine yeres expired, And whereas the
said Phillipp Rosseter, together with Phillipp Kingman, Robert
Iones, and Raphe Reeve, to continue the said service for the
keeping and bringing vppe of the children for the solace and
pleasure of our said most deere wife, and the better to practise
and exercise them in the quallitie of playing by the name of
children of the Revelles to the Queene, have latelie taken in
lease and farme divers buildinges, Cellers, sollars, chambers,
and yardes for the building of a Play-house therevpon for the
better practising and exercise of the said children of the
Revelles, All which premisses are scituate and being within the
Precinct of the Blacke ffryers neere Puddlewharfe in the Suburbs
of London, called by the name of the lady Saunders house, or
otherwise Porters hall, and now in the occupation of the said
Robert Iones. Nowe knowe yee that wee of our especiall grace,
certaine knowledge, and meere mocion have given and graunted,
And by theise presentes for vs, our heires, and successors,
doe give and graunte lycense and authoritie vnto the said
Phillipp Rosseter, Phillipp Kingman, Robert Iones, and Raphe
Reeve, at their proper costes and charges to erect, build, and
sett vppe in and vppon the said premisses before mencioned one
convenient Play-house for the said children of the Revelles,
the same Play-house to be vsed by the Children of the Revelles
for the tyme being of the Queenes Maiestie, and for the Princes
Players, and for the ladie Elizabeths Players, soe tollerated or
lawfully lycensed to play exercise and practise them therein,
Any lawe, Statute, Act of Parliament, restraint, or other matter
or thing whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding. Willing and
commaunding you and every of you our said Maiors, Sheriffes,
Iustices of peace, Bayliffes, Constables, headboroughes and
all other our officers and ministers for the tyme being, as
yee tender our pleasure, to permitt and suffer them therein,
without any your lettes, hinderance, molestacion, or disturbance
whatsoever. In witnes whereof, &c. Witnes our selfe at
Westminster the third day of Iune.
per breve de priuato sigillo &c.
The statements made in the patent as to the objects of the promoters
can be confirmed from other sources. We know that the lease of the
Whitefriars expired at the end of 1614, that there had been an
amalgamation of the Queen’s Revels and the Lady Elizabeth’s men in
1613, and that in all probability this arrangement was extended to
bring in Prince Charles’s men during 1615. Unfortunately for Rosseter
and his associates, the patent had hardly been granted before it was
called in question. Presumably the inhabitants of the Blackfriars,
who had already one theatre in their midst, thought that that one was
enough. At any rate the Corporation approached the Privy Council, and
alleged divers inconveniences, in particular the fact that the theatre,
which was described as ‘in Puddle Wharfe’, would ‘adjoine so neere
vnto’ the church of St. Anne’s as to disturb the congregation.[1452]
The Council referred the patent to the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Edward
Coke, no friend of players, or of the royal prerogative which expressed
itself in patents; and when he found a technical flaw, in that the
Blackfriars, having been brought within the City jurisdiction by the
charter of 1608, was not strictly within ‘the suburbs’, ordered on
26 September 1615 that the building, which had already been begun,
should be discontinued. Nevertheless, the work must have gone so
far as to permit of the production of plays, for the title-page of
Field’s _Amends for Ladies_ (1618) testifies that it was acted ‘at the
Blacke-Fryers both by the Princes Servants and the Lady Elizabeths’.
Moreover, on 27 January 1617 the Privy Council wrote again to the Lord
Mayor, enjoining him to see to the suppression of a play-house in the
Blackfriars ‘neere vnto his Majestyes Wardrobe’, which is said to be
‘allmost if not fully finished’.[1453]
It does not appear possible to say exactly where in the Blackfriars’
precinct the Porter’s Hall once occupied by Lady Saunders stood. It
was certainly not the porter’s lodge at the north-west corner of the
great cloister, for this was still in 1615, as it had been since 1554,
part of the Cobham house. One Ninian Sawnders, a vintner, took a lease
of the chancel of the old conventual church from Sir Thomas Cawarden
in 1553, and this would have been close to St. Anne’s, which stood at
the north-east corner of the great cloister. But Ninian died in 1553
and never got knighted. On the other hand, the rooms on the south
side of the great cloister, generally described as Lygon’s lodgings,
had been in the tenure of one Nicholas Saunders shortly before their
sale by Sir George More to John Freeman and others in 1609. Nicholas
Saunders is said to have been knighted in 1603.[1454] These lodgings
adjoined More’s own mansion house, and might at some time have served
as a lodge for his porter.[1455] But I do not feel that they would very
naturally be described either as ‘near’ or ‘in’ Puddle Wharf, or as
‘near’ the Wardrobe. These indications suggest some building approached
either from Puddle Wharf proper or from the hill, afterwards known as
St. Andrew’s Hill, which ran up from it to the Wardrobe, outside the
eastern wall of the Priory precinct. The Cawarden estate did not extend
to this wall, and the Saunders family may quite well, in addition to
Lygon’s lodgings, have had a house, either on the site of the old
convent gardens, or higher up the hill on the Blackwell estate, near
where Shakespeare’s house stood, and near also to St. Anne’s. Perhaps
there had been a porter’s lodge on the east of the old prior’s house.
XVII
THE PRIVATE THEATRES
i. THE BLACKFRIARS
[_Bibliographical Note._--Many documents bearing upon the
history of the theatre are preserved at Loseley, and the most
important are collected by Professor A. Feuillerat in vol. ii
of the _Malone Society’s Collections_ (1913). A few had been
already printed or described by A. J. Kempe in _The Loseley
Manuscripts_ (1835), by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in _Outlines_,
i. 299, by J. C. Jeaffreson in the 7th _Report of the Hist.
MSS. Commission_ (1879), by Professor Feuillerat himself in
_Shakespeare-Jahrbuch_, xlviii (1912), 81, and by C. W. Wallace,
with extracts from others, in _The Evolution of the English
Drama up to Shakespeare_ (1912, cited as Wallace, i). In the
same book and in _The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_
(1908, cited as Wallace, ii), Professor Wallace prints or
extracts documents from other sources, chiefly lawsuits in
the Court of Requests and elsewhere, which supplement those
discovered by J. Greenstreet and printed in F. G. Fleay,
_Chronicle History of the London Stage_ (1890). The references
to the theatre in J. P. Collier, _History of English Dramatic
Poetry_ (1837 and 1879), are seriously contaminated by
forgeries. Some material for the general history of the precinct
is furnished in the various editions of John Stowe, _Survey of
London_ (1598, 1603, ed. Munday, 1618, ed. Strype, 1720, ed.
Kingsford, 1908), in W. Dugdale, _Monasticon_ (1817–30), by M.
Reddan in the _Victoria History of London_, i. 498, and in the
_Athenaeum_ (1886), ii. 91. A. W. Clapham, _On the Topography
of the Dominican Priory of London_ (_Archaeologia_, lxiii.
57), gives a valuable account of the history and church of
the convent, but had not the advantage of knowing the Loseley
documents, and completely distorts the plan of the domestic
buildings and the theatre. An account by J. Q. Adams is in _S.
P._ xiv (1917), 64. The status of the liberty is discussed by
V. C. Gildersleeve, _Government Regulation of the Elizabethan
Drama_, 143.]
The Dominicans, also called the ‘preaching’ or ‘black’ friars, came
to England in 1221. Their first house was in Holborn.[1456] In 1275
they acquired a site on the sloping ground between St. Paul’s and the
river, just to the east of Fleet ditch, and obtained leave to divert
the walls of the City so as to furnish a north and north-west boundary
to their precinct. Here grew up a very famous convent, the motherhouse
of all the Dominican settlements in the country. It received favours
from several sovereigns, notably from Edward I and his Queen Eleanor,
who were regarded as its founders; and in return held its great
buildings available for national purposes. In 1322–3 it furnished a
depository for state records. It housed divers parliaments, at first
in its church and later in a great chamber which will be of singular
interest to us, and from as early as 1311 was often found a convenient
meeting-place for the Privy Council. In 1522 it was the lodging of the
Emperor Charles V, and a wooden bridge and gallery were carried over
the Fleet, to facilitate communications with his train in Bridewell
palace. In 1529 its parliament chamber was the scene of the legatine
sittings which tried the case of divorce between the same Emperor’s
niece Katharine and the conscience-stricken Henry VIII.[1457]
By this time the friars had ceased to be a power in the land. Those
of the convent had numbered seventy in 1315; there were no more than
sixteen or seventeen in 1538.[1458] Parts of the buildings, now
all too spacious, were let out as residences. It was, perhaps, the
neighbourhood of the Wardrobe, whose Master had an official residence
contiguous to the east wall of the precinct, which made the Blackfriars
a favourite locality for those about the Court. A list of ‘them that
hath lodgings within the Blak Freers’, which was drawn up in 1522,
probably in connexion with the imperial visit, contains the names of
Lord Zouch of Harringworth, Lord Cobham, Sir William Kingston, then
carver and afterwards comptroller of the household, Sir Henry Wyatt,
afterwards treasurer of the chamber, Sir William Parr, Sir Thomas
Cheyne, afterwards warden of the Cinque ports and treasurer of the
household, Jane, widow of Sir Richard Guildford, formerly master of
the horse, and Christopher More, a clerk of the exchequer.[1459]
It is to be feared that some of these tenants cast a covetous eye
upon the fee-simple of their dwellings, and that it was not all zeal
for church reform which made Lord Cobham, for example, write to Sir
Thomas Wyatt, the poet and son of Sir Henry, on 7 October 1538, ‘No
news, but I trust there shall not be a friar left in England before
you return’.[1460] Cobham and his friends had not long to wait. The
deed by which the friars surrendered their property into the hands
of the King is dated 12 November 1538. The annual income, derived
from the rented premises, was reckoned as £104 15_s._ 5_d._, but of
course this in no way represents the capital value of the site and
buildings.[1461] The partition of spoils, under the supervision of
the Court of Augmentations, followed in due course. Cobham got his
house, although not immediately, at nine years’ purchase; and between
1540 and 1550 some sixteen other parcels of the estate, many of them
very substantial, were similarly alienated.[1462] Finally, on 12 March
1550, during the liberal distribution of crown lands for which the
authority of Henry VIII was alleged by his executors in the Privy
Council, a comprehensive grant was made of all that still remained
unalienated in the precinct to Sir Thomas Cawarden, the Master of the
Revels, whose office had for some years past been established within
its walls. Apparently Cawarden paid nothing for it, but on the other
hand the King owed him a good deal for moneys spent in the service of
the Revels.[1463]
The Blackfriars long remained an anomaly in the local government of
London. Like all monastic establishments, the friars had maintained
extensive privileges within their own precinct. Nightly their porter
had shut their four gates upon the city. They had done their own
paving. The Lord Mayor had claimed a jurisdiction, but if this was
admitted, it was only in cases of felony. The ordinary functions of
civil magistracy had been exercised, when called for, by Sir William
Kingston and other important tenants.[1464] Naturally there had been
friction from time to time with the Corporation, and on the surrender
the latter, like the tenants, hoped that their opportunity was come.
They addressed a petition to Henry, in which they expressed their
gratification that he had ‘extirped and extinct the orders of Freers
to the great exaltacion of Crystes doctryne and the abolucion of
Antecriste theyr first founder and begynner’, and asked for a grant of
the church and the whole precinct of the Blackfriars, together with
those of the three other London friaries, to be used for the special
benefit of non-parishioners and of those infected by pestilence.[1465]
Henry, however, had not gone to the trouble of obtaining a surrender
merely to inflate the powers and the revenues of a municipality. He
is reported to have replied that ‘he was as well hable to keep the
liberties as the Friers were’, and to have handed the keys to Sir
John Portinari, one of his gentlemen pensioners, who dwelt in the
precinct.[1466] The Blackfriars, therefore, continued to be an exempt
place or ‘liberty’, an enclave within the walls of the City, but not
part of it, and with a somewhat loose and ill-defined organization
of its own. The inhabitants agreed together and appointed a porter
and a scavenger. A constable was appointed for them by the justices
of the verge.[1467] The precinct was constituted an ecclesiastical
parish, known as St. Anne’s after a chapel which had once served its
inhabitants; and was provided with a church.[1468] Petty offences
were tried, and any exceptional affairs managed, as might have been
done in a rural parish, by the justices, and it was to these that
any administrative orders thought necessary by the Privy Council
were ordinarily addressed.[1469] It perhaps goes without saying that
the City were not content with a single rebuff. They attempted to
interfere at the time of a riot in 1551, and were snubbed by the Privy
Council.[1470] Under Mary they promoted legislation with a view to
annexing the liberties, but without success.[1471] In 1562 a sheriff,
who entered the liberty to enforce a proclamation, was shut in by the
prompt action of the constable, and faced with an inhibition which
one of the justices hurried to obtain from a privy councillor.[1472]
The city remained persistent. In 1574 the Council had again to
intervene.[1473] In 1578 a controversy arose as to the right of the
City to dispose of the goods of felons and other escheats. It was
referred to two chief justices, who made a report to the effect that,
while the inhabitants of both the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars
enjoyed certain immunities from civic levies and liabilities,
nevertheless the soil of the precincts lay within the City, and the
City was entitled to exercise jurisdiction therein. It may be doubted
whether effect was given to this opinion.[1474]
In 1587 the Council ordered another inquiry, in order to ascertain
the precise nature of the Queen’s title in the Blackfriars.[1475]
There had been a petition for redress of inconveniences from the
inhabitants.[1476] About the same time the chief landowner, Sir William
More, appears to have suggested that the liberty should be converted
into a manor, and manorial rights conferred upon him.[1477] These are
signs that residence in a liberty hard by a thronging population had
disclosed a seamy side. Undesirable persons were bound to throng to a
district where the Lord Mayor’s writ did not run. An open space, for
example, filled with immemorial trees planted by the friars, had been
ruined to house alleys for bowling and other unlawful games.[1478]
Doubtless there were those who resented the fact that the attempt of
the City to discourage interludes had been met by the establishment of
a Blackfriars theatre in 1576, which lasted until 1584. It appears to
have been a protest from the inhabitants which led the Privy Council
to forbid the public theatre contemplated by James Burbage in 1596,
although some years later they winked at the opening of the building
as a private house. In 1596 the church fell down, and in appointing a
commission to apportion the responsibility for repairs, the council
also instructed them to consider the government of the liberty, ‘which
being grown more populus than heretofore and without any certaine and
knowen officer to keepe good orders there, needeth to be reformed in
that behalfe’.[1479] The nature of the commission’s findings is not
upon record, but that the ultimate solution lay in the incorporation
of the liberty in the City could hardly be doubtful. As far back as
1589 the Council had found it convenient to use the Lord Mayor as
an agent for securing a proper contribution from the Blackfriars
towards a levy. From 1597 onwards they showed an increased tendency to
make similar use of an administrative machinery far more completely
organized than that of the justices of the peace. In that year the Lord
Mayor was instructed to make a collection in aid of the Blackfriars
church repairs. In 1600 it again fell to him to assess the share of
the liberty in a levy of men and money. In 1601 it is he who is called
upon to suppress plays in Blackfriars during Lent.[1480] The final step
was, however, deferred until 20 September 1608, when the new Jacobean
charter formally extended the jurisdiction of the city to various
liberties, including both the Blackfriars and the Whitefriars, with
certain exemptions as regards assessments and the tenure of offices,
but with none as regards responsibility for petty offences and the
keeping of the peace.[1481]
I have anticipated, in order to get the question of jurisdiction out
of the way. I must now return to the topography. Sir Thomas Cawarden
died on 29 August 1559. He had no son, and his executors, Lady Cawarden
and Sir William More, personally took over the Blackfriars estate in
survivorship, as part of the settlement of his affairs.[1482] Lady
Cawarden’s death on 20 February 1560 left More sole owner. He retained
the property until his own death in 1601, and the muniment room of his
house at Loseley near Guildford contains innumerable documents relating
to the business transactions in which it involved him, together with
some of earlier date which he inherited from Cawarden. The researches
of Professor Feuillerat in these archives render it possible to
reconstruct with some minuteness the arrangement of the Blackfriars
and its buildings at the time of the surrender, to trace many of the
changes of the next half-century, and, as part of the process, to
indicate pretty definitely the locality and nature of the structures
which were turned to theatrical uses.
The precinct covered a space of about five acres.[1483] In shape it was
a rough parallelogram, wider at the north than at the south. The great
gate was towards the east end of the north boundary. It was reached
by a short entry on the south of Bowier Row, now Ludgate Hill, just
east of Ludgate. This seems to have been called Gate Street. It is now
the north end of Pilgrim Street.[1484] From here the boundary was the
city wall, westwards for about 450 ft. to the Fleet ditch, and then
southwards for about 800 ft. along the east side of the ditch. There
were towers at intervals. One of these stood about 200 ft. down from
the angle, and immediately south of this was the bridge over the Fleet
towards Bridewell. The south and east boundaries were also walled.
Between the south wall and the river ran Castle Lane, which was not
within the precinct.[1485] A gate in the south wall gave access across
the lane to the Blackfriars ‘bridge’ or ‘stairs’, a common landing
place, originally built by the Prior of St. John’s, from whom, in some
way not clear to me, the Friars held their estate.[1486] The south-east
angle of the precinct was near Puddle Wharf, and from here the boundary
ran up the west side of St. Andrew’s Hill to Carter Lane, bending out
eastwards near the top, where the buildings of the Wardrobe joined it
by an arch over the roadway, was then driven in sharply westwards by
the end of Carter Lane, which was butt up against a turngate in the
friars’ wall, and finally ran in an irregularly diagonal line from the
junction of Creed and Carter Lanes north-west to the great gate again.
Internally the precinct was unequally divided by an irregular highway
which ran north and south, from the great gate to the Blackfriars
stairs. This started out of Gate Street as High Street, and lower down
became Water Lane.[1487] All the conventual buildings lay on the east
of the highway. Here was the larger division of the precinct, measuring
about 450 ft. from east to west. The western division, measuring about
150 ft., contained only a few houses and gardens. Across it ran from
Bridewell Bridge to Water Lane a strip of unoccupied land, containing
nothing but a ruined gallery, probably part of the provision made
for the accommodation of Charles V in 1522. One of Cawarden’s first
acts, when he got his property, was to make a new road, with tenements
and gardens to the south of it, along this strip. It became known as
Bridewell Lane, and is represented by the present Union Street.[1488]
It must have joined Water Lane just south of a little place or
_parvis_ which lay in front of the west porch of the church and the
adjoining entrance to the cloister. The _parvis_ contained one or
two houses and shops, and formed part of the continuous thoroughfare
from north to south, communicating by gateways with High Street and
Water Lane.[1489] The conventual church itself divided the eastern
portion of the precinct from west to east, extending not quite so
far east as the present Friar Street. It was 220 ft. long and 66 ft.
wide, and had two aisles and a chancel, which, as usual in conventual
churches, was as long as the nave. There was a square porch tower over
the west end. Over the junction of nave and chancel stood a belfry,
visible in Wyngaerde’s drawing of _c._ 1543–50, and to the north of
the chancel a chapel, probably the quasi-parochial chapel of St. Anne,
and a vestry.[1490] Beyond these was the churchyard.[1491] This was
300 ft. long by 90 ft. deep, and occupied about two-thirds of the
space between the High Street on the west, the church on the south,
and the north-eastern boundary of the precinct. A group of houses
stood between it and the great gate towards Ludgate, and three others
separated it from the High Street at the south west corner.[1492] One
of these, built up against the church and the High Street gateway, was
a recluse’s cell or Ankerhouse.[1493] Cawarden cut a new road across
the churchyard, 20 ft. north of the site of the chancel and just north
of the Ankerhouse and the High Street gate. This continued Carter Lane,
the turngate at the end of which was converted into a gate practicable
for carts, and with Bridewell Lane provided a thoroughfare across the
Blackfriars from east to west in addition to that from north to south.
That part of the existing Carter Lane, west of Creed Lane, which was
formerly known as Shoemakers’ Row, doubtless represents Cawarden’s new
way.[1494]
On the south of the nave stood the great cloister, entered by a
porter’s lodge in its north-west corner. It was 110 ft. square. Its
eastern alley was probably in a line with a way across the church under
the belfry to a door into the churchyard, and this line, preserved by
Cawarden in order to provide access to the cloister from his new way,
is represented by the existing Church Entry.[1495] The north side of
the cloister was formed by the wall of the nave. Behind the other three
sides were ranged the domestic buildings of the convent. On the east
were the ample Prior’s lodging, which stretched back over the space
south of the chancel, and farther to the south the Convent garden,
covering an acre. Over part of this lodging and over the cloister alley
itself was the east dorter of the friars, communicating direct with
the church by a stairway.[1496] The east side of the cloister also
contained the Chapter-house, which probably stood in the middle, and to
the south of this a school-house.[1497] Behind the south-east corner
were the provincial’s lodging, a store-house, the common jakes, and
another garden, known as the hill garden.[1498] Another dorter stood
over the south cloister alley and over some ground-floor buildings of
uncertain use, which divided this alley from an inner cloister, flanked
on the east by the library, and in part on the west by the infirmary,
behind which were the bakehouse, brewhouse, and stables. The western
end of the south alley of the main cloister formed a lavabo, and was
apparently sunk to a lower level than the rest.[1499] Down the western
side of both cloisters extended a continuous range of buildings, the
details of which will require subsequent examination. These formed two
main blocks. The northern, flanking the main cloister, contained the
buttery and parts of the guest-house and porter’s lodge; the southern,
flanking the inner cloister, was devoted to the refectory, the lower
end of which, owing to the slope of the hill, seems to have stood over
the infirmary. The irregular outline of Water Lane, jutting a good deal
to the west after it emerged from the _parvis_ in front of the church
porch, left a space of some 84 ft. at its widest between this range
of buildings and the lane itself. The guest-house and porter’s lodge
extended back into this space; it also held the convent kitchen and
other subsidiary buildings.[1500]
When Cawarden got his grant in 1550, a great deal of the property had
already been disposed of.[1501] Except for the strip where he laid
out Bridewell Lane and two small garden plots, nothing was left for
him in the western division of the precinct. To the north the group
of houses between the churchyard and the great gate had gone. To
the south, Cobham had taken the rooms over the porter’s lodge, with
a closet window looking into the church, and he and one Sir George
Harper had divided the rest of the guest-house block--‘fayer great
edifices’, says Cawarden--that lay behind.[1502] Sir Francis Bryan had
taken the Prior’s lodging and the convent garden, and from him they
had passed to the Bishop of Ely and then to one William Blackwell.
Lady Kingston had taken the inner cloister, with part of the south
dorter and the rooms beneath it, the library, the infirmary, the
brewhouse, bakehouse, and stables. Others had taken the school-house,
some more of the south dorter, the provincial’s lodging, the jakes,
the store-house, and the hill garden, and these ultimately passed to
Lady Grey. Sir Thomas Cheyne, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, had
taken some of the buildings west of the frater. Everything farther
south, down towards the river, had also been alienated. What was left
for Cawarden consisted mainly of the church itself and the churchyard,
the ankerhouse, the great cloister, the chapter-house, the east dorter,
the porter’s lodge and buttery block, with all the rooms over these
except Cobham’s, the frater, the kitchen, and such buildings standing
between the frater and Water Lane, as did not belong to Cheyne.[1503]
Much trouble was caused to Cawarden’s successors by uncertainty as to
the extent of Cheyne’s claim.[1504] No doubt the grant constituted
Cawarden the chief landowner in the district, but he complained that
hardly any of his property was ‘mansionable’, and even at the time of
his death he had only brought the annual value up to £70.[1505] The
survey taken for the purposes of the grant puts it at no more than
£19. On the other hand, the value of the stone and timber and other
material of the buildings is estimated in the same survey at £879
3_s._ 4_d._, including an item of £709 11_s._ 0_d._ for lead alone.
Evidently it was from the site-value and the judicious erection of new
buildings and conversion of old ones, with the aid of this material,
into ‘mansionable’ property, that Cawarden’s profit was to come. A
convinced Protestant, he looked upon the church as a quarry. He pulled
it down, with the exception of the south wall of the nave, which was
to serve him as a garden wall, and the porch which he turned into a
tenement. Other tenements were built on the site, and the rest of it,
with so much of the churchyard as was not required for the new road,
was let off. One of the tenants appears to have made tennis-courts on
the site of the chancel. The demolition included St. Anne’s Chapel.
This had been closed during Henry’s reign and used as a store-house
for the Offices of Tents and Revels. For a while the inhabitants were
allowed to worship in a room under an old gallery, presumably that
which became the site of Bridewell Lane; but now this passed into
Cawarden’s hands and he evicted them. When they plucked up heart, under
Mary, to protest, he first offered them a site in the churchyard and
a roof if they would be at the expense of building, and ultimately
gave them an upper room, apparently at the north end of the east
dorter. This fell down in 1597, and was rebuilt by the parishioners,
who finally bought it, with a piece of the site of the old conventual
church as a churchyard, from Sir George More in 1607–8.[1506] Cawarden
effected an adjustment of boundaries on the east of the cloister with
the Bishop of Ely.[1507] He then proceeded to build dwelling rooms
along the south and east sides of the cloister.[1508] They must have
been fairly shallow, for they left him a great square garden, but
no doubt the recess of the chapter-house permitted increased depth
towards the east. Under the west wing of the new building, adjoining
the buttery, was a great vaulted room, 57 ft. by 25, which must, I
think, have been the lavabo of the friars.[1509] East of this was a
set of rooms capable of use as a separate dwelling, which came to be
known as Lygon’s lodgings.[1510] The rest formed the capital mansion
of the property, the ‘great house’, and was clearly intended for
Cawarden’s own residence. It seems to have been sometimes let and
sometimes occupied by Sir William More.[1511] The great garden must
have been pleasant enough, with the north and west cloister alleys
left standing, and a tinkling conduit in the west end, filled by a pipe
from Clerkenwell.[1512]
The important part of the Blackfriars, from the point of view of
theatrical topography, is the range of buildings on the western side of
the two cloisters, parallel to Water Lane. The two blocks constituting
this range, or so much of them as passed to Cawarden, are referred to
in the surveys of 1548 and 1550 as the ‘olde butterie’ and the ‘vpper
ffrater’.[1513] From the details given in these surveys and in the
leases and other documents preserved at Loseley, it is possible to form
a very fair notion of their structure and uses. The chief rooms in
both blocks were upon an upper floor. The northern block was 110 ft.
in length from north to south and 36 ft. in width. The upper rooms,
however, were only 26 ft. wide, as 10 ft. was taken up by a high stone
gallery which ran along the west of the building, and was perhaps
connected with the wooden gallery leading to the Fleet.[1514] These
rooms were four in number. That to the north, 21 ft. long, belonged to
Cobham, and had a closet window looking into the church upon the south
wall of which, for 20 ft. of its width, the block abutted.[1515] Then
came two central rooms, a large and a small one, measuring together 52
ft. in length, and then a southern one, which with an entry measured
47 ft.[1516] The surveys treat the three rooms which fell to Cawarden
as a single ‘hall place’. All four rooms had probably formed part of
the guest-house of the convent, and had lodged Charles V. The ground
floor held low rooms pierced at intervals by entries and with cellars
underneath them. The chief entry or gate-house was at the southern
end and served Cawarden’s mansion house when that was built.[1517]
North of this came the buttery proper and a pantry, occupying with a
small entry connecting them 29 ft.;[1518] then another stepped entry
into the cloister serving afterwards as Cawarden’s garden gate;[1519]
then probably more rooms under the two central upper rooms; then a
staircase to Cobham’s upper room;[1520] and finally rooms belonging to
the porter’s lodge, which were 21 ft. in length. This lodge extended
backwards towards Water Lane, and over and around it were other
rooms of Cobham’s and yet others forming the house of Sir George
Harper.[1521] Some or all of these had also probably been part of the
guest-house. Together with a garden of Cobham’s, they occupied rather
less than half the space between the northern block and Water Lane.
South of them, and included in Cawarden’s grant, were the convent
kitchen with a room over it, and the kitchen yard, forming a space 84
ft. wide, and in length 74 ft. at the buttery end and 68 ft. at the
lane end.
The northern block, being 110 ft. long, extended right down to the
southern line of the cloister, which was 110 ft. square. Here it
abutted upon the southern block. This was 52 ft. wide. The length
of the upper frater is given in the surveys as 107 ft., and in two
of More’s leases as 110 ft.[1522] The latter figure is probably the
right one.[1523] The north end of this block contained a ‘great
stair’, which gave access both to the frater and to the guest-house,
and was itself convenient of approach both from the gate-house entry
and from the lavabo at the south-west angle of the cloister. Probably
this end was built in the form of a tower, as there were rooms on
and over the staircase and over the adjoining Duchy Chamber, and
garrets over those.[1524] There was a garret also over the south end
of the northern block.[1525] It is doubtful whether anything stood
over the main portion of the southern block.[1526] This had a flat
leaded roof, whereas the northern block, as its lead is not mentioned
in the survey, probably had a gabled and tiled roof. Apart from the
staircase tower, the upper floor of the southern block consisted of
the ‘upper’ frater or refectory, a spacious apartment, which had been
used for Parliaments and the legatine trial of Henry VIII’s divorce
case, and was sometimes known as ‘the Parliament chamber’.[1527] The
ground floor is a little more difficult. The survey of 1548 assigns to
it a ‘blind’, that is, I suppose, a windowless, or at any rate dark,
parlour, which came next the buttery block, and a hall, to which the
parlour served as an entry.[1528] These are said to be ‘vnder the seide
frater of the same lengethe and breddethe’. This might naturally be
taken to mean that they were, together, of the same size as the frater
above. In fact it must, I think, mean that they were of the same size
as each other, for we know from another source that the south end of
the frater was over a room not belonging to Cawarden at all but to
Lady Kingston, and itself standing over the infirmary, which, owing
to the fall of the ground, formed at that end a lower story of the
block.[1529] The survey does not say what the sizes of the parlour and
hall were, but a later document suggests that together they underlay
over two-thirds of the frater and occupied a space of 74 ft. from north
to south and 52 ft. from east to west.[1530] Under Cawarden’s part of
the southern block were cellars. To the west lay what was known as the
Duchy Chamber, probably from some official use in connexion with the
Duchy of Lancaster. This was a two-story building, 50 ft. long by 16
ft. wide, jutting out at right angles to the extreme north end of the
frater. South of it was a house, apparently belonging to Sir Thomas
Cheyne and occupied by Sir John Portinari, which touched the frater
at one end, and at the other had a parlour, interposed between the
end of the Duchy Chamber and Water Lane, and bounded on the north, as
the Duchy Chamber itself must have been, by the kitchen yard. South
of this again were a little chamber and a kitchen, with an entry from
Water Lane, probably between Portinari’s parlour and another house
belonging to Cheyne.[1531] The little chamber and kitchen were used
in conjunction with the hall under the upper frater. This hall, which
was paved and stood ‘handsome to’ the buttery, had also been a frater,
serving as a breakfast room for the friars, and in the little chamber
had lived their butler.[1532] Now it is noted in the surveys that Sir
Thomas Cheyne had laid claim to the paved hall, the ‘blind’ parlour,
the little chamber, and the kitchen, and it seems very doubtful whether
they were covered by the specifications of Cawarden’s grant.[1533] He
succeeded, however, in occupying them; and the inevitable lawsuit was
left for his successor.
Cawarden had had the buttery, frater, kitchen, and Duchy chamber
on lease since 4 April 1548.[1534] Some of these, as well as other
conventual buildings, he had occupied from a still earlier date in
his capacity as Master of the Tents and Revels. For these offices the
propinquity of the Wardrobe rendered the Blackfriars very convenient.
Already in 1511 temporary use had been made of some room in the
precinct to prepare a pageant in for a joust at Westminster.[1535]
Before Cawarden became Master, the regular store-house of the Revels
office had been at Warwick Inn.[1536] The transfer to Blackfriars
was not completed until February 1547, but it perhaps began earlier,
since the papers of the Court of Augmentations contain receipts by
John Barnard, for sums spent by the King’s surveyor on ‘the reparayng
and amendyng of the Blacke Fryers in London store howse for the seyd
tentes and revelles’ during 1545.[1537] The Chapel of St. Anne had
been requisitioned with other houses ‘to laye in tentes, maskes and
revels’ before the end of Henry VIII’s reign.[1538] As to the exact
location of the Tents there is some interesting, although conflicting,
evidence. An order of the Augmentations in 1550 allowed Sir Thomas
Cheyne £5 a year for the use of his great room by the Tents from
25 March 1545 onwards.[1539] The room intended was undeniably the
paved hall or breakfast room under the frater, but Sir William More
maintained in 1572 that the payment by the Augmentations was an
irregular one, and that the paved hall had never been used for the
Revels and was never in fact Cheyne’s.[1540] Sir John Portinari gave
evidence that for some time after the surrender of the convent it had
remained empty, and that he had himself kept the keys until Cawarden
took possession of it in 1550. Cawarden then invited him to a supper
and a play in the hall.[1541] The Revels seem to have had the use of
the upper frater or parliament chamber during Henry VIII’s reign.[1542]
But the surveys of 1548 and 1550 locate them to the north of this, in
the southernmost of the four halls of the old guest-house. The two
central halls, together with the convent kitchen, had been tenanted as
far back as 1539 by successive Lords Cobham, to whose house they were
adjacent.[1543] In 1554, however, Cawarden sold the two rooms to George
Lord Cobham, together with the porter’s lodge, which underlay his
original holding, and received as part of his consideration a release
from any claim which Cobham may have had to the kitchen yard and to
the property granted to Cawarden on the west side of Water Lane.[1544]
With the upper rooms transferred to Cobham went ‘appurtenances’, which
probably included the corresponding ground-floor rooms, as these are
not traceable in More’s possession and apparently formed part of the
Cobham estate when that was disposed of in the next century.[1545]
The porter’s lodge was all on the ground floor. It had a frontage of
21 ft. on the cloister and ran back for 47 ft. towards Water Lane.
At the time of Cawarden’s grant in 1550 it had been occupied by John
Barnard, clerk comptroller of the Tents and Revels, but he had died in
the same year.[1546] Naturally it was convenient for the officers of
the Revels to live in the Blackfriars. John Holt, the yeoman, had a
house to the north of the churchyard. Thomas Philipps, the clerk, had
the ‘little chamber’ west of the frater. The paved hall served him as
a wood store, and from time to time some of Cawarden’s servants lay
there. About 1552 Cawarden moved Philipps to the Ankerhouse, and put
into the little chamber the deputy clerk, Thomas Blagrave, who found
it too small, and rented an adjoining chamber from Cheyne.[1547] The
paved hall was then let, with other neighbouring rooms on more than
one floor, to one Woodman, who kept an ordinary in the hall and did a
good deal of damage to the property.[1548] Meanwhile, the Revels had
apparently been moved from this first-floor hall where they lay in
1550, for when this hall is recited as the south boundary of Cobham’s
purchase in 1554, it is described as a house in the tenure of Sir John
Cheke or his assigns.[1549] So long as the Tents and Revels continued
to be housed in Crown property, the offices had of course nothing
to pay for rent. But after 1550 Cawarden, as naturally, claimed an
allowance for rent, and in 1555 he was permitted to charge six years’
arrears from Michaelmas 1549 at the rate of £3 6_s._ 8_d._ a year each
for the official residences of the comptroller, clerk, and yeoman, £6
13_s._ 4_d._ for his own, £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for the office of the tents,
and £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for the ‘store and woorke howses of the revelles’.
In the accounts for 1555–9 similar charges recur annually, but the
allowance for Cawarden’s own house is raised to £10 and that for the
houses of the other officers to £5 each; and the £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for
the Revels office is specified as being ‘for the rente of fyve greate
roomes within the Blackefryers for the woorke and store howses of the
Revelles’.[1550] About 1560 the store-house was certainly not the hall
over the buttery, but the great vaulted room in the south-west corner
of the cloister, which had been the lavabo of the friars.[1551] On the
other hand, Sir John Cheke’s tenure of his house had ceased and the
vacated rooms had become available for workhouses. This is evident
from the terms of a lease of the same rooms to Sir Henry Neville,
executed on 10 June 1560, just after the Revels had been removed to
St. John’s.[1552] Cawarden had died on the previous 29 August, and the
lease was one of the first dealings of William More with the property.
The principal rooms leased were precisely four in number. They had
been ‘lately called or knowen by the name of Mr. Chekes lodginge and
sythence vsed by Sir Thomas Cawarden knight deceased for the office
of the Quenes Maiesties Revelles’. They were bounded on the north by
Lord Cobham’s house, on the east by the houses of More and of Sir
Henry Jerningham, who was Lady Kingston’s son and heir, and on the
west by another house of More’s in the occupation of Richard Frith,
and by the way leading to More’s house and garden and a piece of void
ground. Under them and leased with them were the buttery and pantry;
and the lease also covered a cellar and a ‘greate rome in manner of a
grete seller having a chimpney’ which I suppose to have been the late
Revels store-house. The upstairs rooms were approximately 157 ft. long,
27 ft. wide at the north end, and 22 ft. wide at the south end.[1553]
The length agrees approximately with the sum of the lengths of the
upper frater and of the hall over the buttery not included in Cobham’s
purchase of 1554; and it was evidently from these that Neville’s
holding was taken. But the head of the staircase must have interfered
with his width in the middle, and it will be observed that, while he
had the full width of the northern block, he had less than half the
full width (52 ft.) of the frater. Evidently Cawarden had partitioned
the frater to make it ‘mansionable’, and in particular had divided it
into two tenements by a partition from north to south. Neville’s was
the eastern division. The western division and the rooms at the top of
the staircase tower were in the tenure of Richard Frith, who had taken
a twenty-four years’ lease from Cawarden in April 1555 and had obtained
a renewal from More on 24 December 1559. Here, in 1561, Frith kept a
dancing-school.[1554] Neville’s lease also gave him a share in More’s
water-supply, a strip of the void ground, formerly the convent kitchen
yard, between the northern block and Water Lane, and a right of way
to the buttery and pantry through the rest of that ground, which was
reserved to More. Neville’s strip lay just south of Cobham’s garden
wall. That reserved by More was partly taken up by ways to his garden
and gate-house entries. In the space between these was erected in 1561
a public conduit, which received the water-supply after it left More’s
tap, and passed it on to the Earl of Pembroke’s house at Baynard’s
Castle. Here also stood a tennis ground, tenanted with a cellar under
the northern block by Frith.[1555] The gate-house entry, or at least
the way to it, served Frith’s house, as well as More’s own. Near it
were certain rooms, reserved for More’s use or that of his servant John
Horley, which may have been constructed out of the ‘blind’ parlour.
The great stairs in the tower between the two blocks were probably
assigned to Frith. They were not included in Neville’s lease, and he
was specifically debarred from any right of access through More’s
house or garden except by More’s licence. It was probably contemplated
that he would build stairs to the upper floor for himself, and this is
perhaps why More exacted no fine on the execution of the lease.[1556]
At any rate Neville did build stairs on the west of the house, placing
them not in his own strip of yard but in More’s, with his water-cock in
a little room at the stair foot. The pale of Frith’s tennis court was
altered to allow of access between it and Neville’s stairs from More’s
garden entry to his gate-house entry.[1557] In his own strip Neville
built a kitchen and another set of stairs behind it which must have led
into the extreme north end of his house, as the site of the kitchen
underlay, not Neville’s own rooms, but those purchased by Cobham in
1554. The rest of the strip served as a woodyard, and had a privy
in it. Presumably the original convent kitchen acquired by Cawarden
had been pulled down. Within the house Neville put up partitions,
turning his four rooms into six, of which it may be inferred that
two lay in the northern block and four in the southern, and adorning
one of these latter with wainscoting most of the way round, and with
a great round portal.[1558] About Lady Day 1568 More bought back
the lease from Neville for £100, doubtless in consideration of the
improvements.[1559] For a time it seems to have been occupied by the
Silk Dyers Company.[1560] On 6 February 1571 it was let to William Lord
Cobham, the terms of whose lease closely resemble those of Neville’s,
but record the changes made during his predecessor’s tenancy.[1561]
Cobham gave up the house in 1576, and on 27 August of that year Neville
wrote to More to recommend a new applicant for the tenancy, his friend
Richard Farrant. With it came an application from Farrant himself.
Apparently his tenancy entailed the removal of an Italian, who may have
been one of the silk dyers, and he desired to be allowed to take down
one of the partitions. On 17 September he wrote to ask that a small
room, 6 ft. by 4½ ft., occupied by More’s man Bradshaw might be added
to his holding.[1562] His lease was executed on 20 December.[1563] It
gives him all the rooms which Neville had had, with the exception of
the former Revels store-house, which is now described as ‘that great
rome nowe vsed for a wasshynge howse’; and it adds the little room
specially asked for, which had been contrived by throwing together a
privy and a coal-house. Richard Farrant was Master of the Children of
Windsor Chapel, and deputy to William Hunnis as Master of the Children
of the Chapel Royal, and his object in taking the house was to have a
room in which the children could give public representations for profit
of the plays which they were afterwards to perform at Court. He carried
out his plan, and so the old frater of the friars, once the parliament
chamber of the realm, became the first Blackfriars theatre.[1564]
More, according to his own account, was not best pleased at the use
made of his house. He complained that Farrant, after pretending that
he only meant to teach the children in it, had made it a ‘continuall
howse for plays’ to the offence of the precinct, and to fit it for
the purpose had pulled down and defaced Neville’s partitions, spoiled
the windows, and brought the house to great ruin. He had also sublet
certain portions, and, as he was not entitled to do this under his
lease without licence, More claimed the forfeiture of the lease. At
this moment, on 30 November 1580, Farrant died, leaving the house to
his widow Anne. For some months there were no plays in the theatre.
Then Hunnis resolved to carry on Farrant’s enterprise himself, and on
a recommendation from the Earl of Leicester More appears to have given
at least a tacit consent to a sub-letting by Anne to Hunnis and one
John Newman on 20 December 1581. They were to do repairs and pay her
£6 13_s._ 4_d._ in rent more than the £14 due to More. An unfortunate
slip of the scrivener’s pen cut Mrs. Farrant’s profit down to £6 6_s._
8_d._ They also gave bonds of £100 each for the due fulfilment of
their covenants, and according to Newman’s statement to More, paid
£30 down. According to Mrs. Farrant they neglected their repairs and
were extremely irregular with their rent, so that she was put to great
shifts in order to satisfy Sir William More, disposing of a small
reversion given her by the Queen, pawning her plate and jewels, selling
a dozen of gold buttons here and a set of viols there, and borrowing of
powerful friends such as Lord Cobham or Henry Sackford, the Master of
the Tents. Meanwhile Hunnis and Newman disposed of their interest to
one Henry Evans, a scrivener, and More, incensed at this, took definite
steps in the spring of 1583 to recover his house by executing a fresh
lease to one of his men, Thomas Smallpiece, and setting Smallpiece to
sue for the ejectment of Evans. The latter tried to elude him by a
further transfer of the sub-lease to the Earl of Oxford, who passed it
on to John Lyly, the poet; and thus, says More, the title was ‘posted
over from one to another from me’ contrary to the conditions of the
original lease. Doubtless Hunnis, Lyly, and Evans were all working
together under the Earl’s patronage, for a company under Oxford’s name
was taken to Court by Lyly in the winter of 1583–4 and by Evans in the
winter of 1584–5, and it seems pretty clear that in 1583–4, at any
rate, it was in fact made up of boys from the Chapel and Paul’s.[1565]
More, however, pursued his point, and about Easter 1584 recovered legal
possession of his house. Some months before, Anne Farrant, in despair,
had appealed to Sir Francis Walsingham, and had also brought actions at
common law against Hunnis and Newman for the forfeiture of their bonds.
They applied to the Court of Requests to take over the case, and there
is no formal record of the outcome. But in January 1587 Mrs. Farrant
was again complaining to the Privy Council, and Sir John Wolley was
asked to bring about a settlement between her and More, who was his
father-in-law.[1566]
So ends the story of the first Blackfriars theatre. The premises which
it had occupied came into the hands of Henry Lord Hunsdon, who was also
about the same time tenant of More’s mansion house and garden.[1567]
It would seem that Lord Oxford and Lyly had passed on to Hunsdon their
sub-leases from the Farrants and that, even when he recovered legal
possession from the court, More did not care to interfere with this
arrangement. But there was evidently some friction. The sub-leases were
due to expire in 1590 or 1591, and in April 1586 More refused to renew
them. His excuse was that ‘The howses yow had of Lyllye I determyne
that assone as theye bothe shall cum into my handes to kepe them to the
onelye vse of me and mye chylderne’. In acknowledging this decision,
Hunsdon complained that the pipe of water belonging to one of the
houses had been diverted to serve that of Lord Cobham. In 1590 he made
a fresh attempt to secure a renewal. More at first drafted a letter of
consent, but then changed his mind and told Hunsdon that he needed the
houses for his daughter Lady Wolley and for himself on his visits to
London. Hunsdon had suffered annoyance because the tenant of the next
house ‘having the vse of the leades, either by negligence or otherwise,
suffereth the boyes to cutt upp the lead with knifes or to boore yt
through with bodkyns wherby the rayne cometh throwghe’.[1568] This
allusion, together with that to the pipe of water, makes it clear that
Hunsdon’s houses included the rooms covered by Neville’s lease of 1560,
in which the right of dancing-master Frith to use the leads over the
southern block is expressly safeguarded. I think it is probable that
the two houses are merely the southern and northern sections of the
Farrant holding, separately sublet to Hunsdon. It is known that Farrant
himself, while in occupation of the theatre, had let off certain rooms.
More’s wish to retain the property for family reasons did not long
outlast its immediate purpose of decently covering a refusal to the
Lord Chamberlain. Frith’s tenancy also came to an end, and for some
period between 1590 and 1596 the rooms formerly constituting the upper
frater were reunited in the occupation of William de Laune, a doctor
of physic. The rooms to the north of them, after his appointment as
Chamberlain of the Exchequer on 23 November 1591, were used by More for
the purposes of the Pipe Office.[1569] The buttery and pantry beneath
were probably also relet in 1591.[1570]
I must now turn to the history of the ‘paved hall’ and ‘blind parlour’
under the upper frater and the little chamber and kitchen to the west
of these, all of which, when Cawarden obtained possession in 1550,
were under the shadow of a claim by Sir Thomas Cheyne. Blagrave’s
occupation of the little chamber terminated when the Revels Office
moved to St. John’s in 1560, and on 10 December 1564 More drafted a
lease of it to one Laurence Bywater, who had in fact been in occupation
since 1560.[1571] It is described as consisting of a hall, a chamber
above, a little room below, a kitchen, a yard, ‘a long entrie coming
in ouer the yard bourded and railed’, and a vault or cellar. The
paved hall had been let by 1572 to William Joyner, who used it as a
fencing-school. In this year Cheyne’s claim was renewed by one Henry
Pole and his wife Margaret, who was the widow of Cheyne’s eldest son.
The rooms chiefly in dispute were the paved hall and Bywater’s house,
but the Poles seem also to have claimed rooms in the tenures of Richard
Frith and Thomas Hale.[1572] It may be conjectured that these were the
rooms constructed out of the blind parlour. On the other hand More
made a counter-claim, probably not very serious, to Pole tenements in
the occupation of Christopher Fenton, Thomas Austen, and John Lewes.
Incidentally, it appears that Cawarden had not succeeded in removing
all signs of papistry from the Blackfriars, for Bywater’s house is
throughout described in the interrogatories taken as the little house
having chalices and singing cakes painted in the window. The matter
was referred to arbitration.[1573] Pole’s case rested entirely on the
question of fact as to what the holding of Cheyne and his predecessors
actually comprised in 1540, since the grant named no boundaries but
merely gave Cheyne the houses and lands then in his own occupation and
formerly in those of Jasper Fylole and of Thomas Ferebye and William
Lylgrave. Pole produced some witnesses who declared that before the
surrender by the friars one Purpointe had dwelt in Bywater’s house and
kept a tavern in the fencing-school, and that subsequently Ferebye and
Lylgrave had occupied these premises. They could not say that Cheyne
himself had ever had possession of them, but Pole was able to cite the
order of the Court of Augmentation in 1550 allowing Cheyne rent for his
large room as a store-house for the tents. In More’s view this rent
was paid under a misunderstanding, and he seems to have suggested
that the only houses occupied by Cheyne and his predecessors were
that afterwards occupied by Portinari and one ‘new built’ by Cheyne,
in which apparently Lord Henry Seymour was living at the time of the
suit. Moreover, he produced a number of witnesses, including Bywater,
Blagrave, Thomas Hale, groom of the Tents, Portinari himself, and
Elizabeth Baxter, widow of the former porter of the friars, who agreed
in deposing that the friars had never let these rooms, which were
essential as a breakfast room and a butler’s lodging to their daily
life, and gave a perfectly consistent account of the various uses of
them after the surrender by Cawarden, Woodman, Phillips, Blagrave, and
Bywater, which have already been indicated in this narrative. It does
not transpire that More confided to the arbitrators the suspicious
references to Cheyne’s claim in the surveys of 1548 and 1550. However
this may be, their decision was in his favour on the substantial issue.
The Poles were required to acknowledge his right to Bywater’s house and
the paved hall, as well as to the tenements of Frith and Hale. More, on
the other hand, was to abandon his claim to the tenements of Fenton,
Austen, and Lewes, and by way of compromise was to execute a lease of
Bywater’s house to the Poles at a nominal rent for fifty years or the
term of their lives. This he accordingly did. Nothing more is heard
of any of the premises involved until July 1584, just after More had
succeeded in putting an end to Lyly’s theatrical enterprise. By this
date both Bywater and Joyner had gone, and their places had been taken
by another fencing-master, an Italian, Rocco Bonetti by name.[1574]
Bonetti had acquired from Margaret Pole, now a widow, her life-interest
in the butler’s lodging. He had also taken over from Lyly two leases,
one of the fencing-school, the other of a house, the property of
More, immediately west of the butler’s lodging.[1575] The latter he
had repaired at some cost. He had even been rash enough to put up
additional buildings on More’s land. And he had not paid his workmen,
to whom he owed £200. The butler’s lodging is described as being in
great decay. But this also, or its site, he appears to have enlarged,
at the expense of his neighbouring tenement on the west. He feared the
expiration of his interests, and got his friends, of whom were Lord
Willoughby, Sir John North, and Sir Walter Raleigh, to approach More
for an extension of tenure. As regards the western house, More seems to
have consented, after much reluctance in view of Bonetti’s indebted
condition, to a lease for seven years in 1586.[1576] As regards the
butler’s lodging, he was mainly interested in the reversion after Mrs.
Pole’s death, and of this reversion he granted Bonetti a ten years’
term by a lease of 20 March 1585.[1577] The holding is described in
much the same terms as those used in Bywater’s lease of 1564. The
measurements, however, are also given. The length from north to south
was 25 ft. 2 in., and the width from east to west 22 ft. 6 in. But 4
ft. 6 in. of the length and 2 ft. of the width were not covered by Mrs.
Pole’s lease, and were taken, probably by an encroachment which the
lease was intended to regularize, from More’s tenement to the west.
For the sake of greater accuracy, the measurements and boundaries of
this western tenement are given. It was 33 ft. from north to south and
39 ft. 8 in. from east to west. It was bounded on the north by More’s
yard, on the south and west by a house of Mrs. Pole’s, on the south by
the way to Sir George Carey’s house, and on the east by More’s house in
Bonetti’s tenure, that is to say the house which is the subject of the
lease.[1578]
Sir George Carey was the eldest son of Lord Hunsdon, and himself
became Lord Hunsdon on 22 July 1596.[1579] He is not traceable in the
Blackfriars before 1585, but continued to reside there until his death
in 1603. The way to his house corresponds in position with the way to
Lady Kingston’s house of the 1548 survey, and he had pretty clearly
acquired some or all of her property, including the infirmary under
the upper frater.[1580] The way must have followed a line from Water
Lane, much the same as that of the present Printing House Lane. The
fencing-school was accessible from it by a door next to Carey’s.[1581]
Certain other data of the early surveys are a little difficult to
reconcile with those of the later documents. The surveys indicate three
parallel rows of buildings, of a comparatively insignificant character,
extending over a space roughly 80 ft. square between the frater block
and Water Lane. The north row consisted of the two-storied Duchy
Chamber, a narrow building 50 ft. by 17 ft., and the parlour of Sir
John Portinari’s house. These had a frontage on the kitchen yard.
South of them came the rest of Portinari’s house, and south of this
the little chamber, 26 ft. long by 10 ft. wide, the little kitchen, 23
ft. long by 22 ft. wide, and an entry to the latter, 30 ft. long by
17 ft. wide, which I suppose to have debouched upon Water Lane. The
little chamber and kitchen had their frontage on the way leading to
Lady Kingston’s. The house referred to as Cheyne’s in the 1550 survey
is probably that occupied by Portinari. But Cheyne must also have had
other property in the same neighbourhood, which the surveys do not
mention. There was the house, probably that described as ‘new built’ in
1572, which he occupied himself, and which afterwards passed to Lord
Henry Seymour.[1582] And there were the three tenements which More
claimed, but did not secure in 1572. These premises were leased as a
whole by the Poles to Christopher Fenton on 31 May 1571, and appear to
have been gradually cut up into smaller holdings. By 1610 there were
four tenants and by 1614 five. They bounded More’s property, and must
have lain in the angle of Water Lane and the way to Lady Kingston’s,
just south of the entry to the little kitchen.[1583]
The little chamber of 1548 is undoubtedly the butler’s lodging leased
to Bywater in 1564 and to Bonetti in 1585, which was a subject of the
lawsuit in 1572. But whereas it measured 26 ft. by 10 ft. in 1548, it
measured 22 ft. 6 in. by 25 ft. 2 in. in 1585, and the enumeration of
rooms in the two leases show that, although Bonetti may have built a
small additional room upon a bit of land filched from More, there had
been no substantial change since 1564. Further, while in 1548 it was
bounded on the north by Portinari’s holding, it was reached in 1564 by
a railed and boarded entry across its yard, and documents of 1596 and
1601 make it clear that this entry terminated in a small porch opening
on the kitchen yard.[1584] Similarly the little kitchen, 23 ft. by 22
ft., of 1548 had been replaced in 1584 by a house 33 ft. by 39 ft. 8
in., and of this also Portinari’s house had ceased to be the boundary,
and a yard of More’s had been substituted. Finally, More’s successor,
Sir George More, was in a position in 1603 to sell to one John Tice a
strip of land bounded by Tice’s house on the south, Water Lane on the
west, and the kitchen yard on the north and east, which must have been
just about where Portinari’s parlour stood at the time of the 1548
survey.[1585] I am now approaching the region of conjecture, but there
is only one way of accounting for the facts. More must have acquired
and pulled down Portinari’s house, and thus not only let light and
air into the somewhat congested district west of the frater, but also
left room for extensions in the rear of the little houses fronting on
the way to Lady Kingston’s. The extension of the little chamber he had
probably himself undertaken before 1564. It did not interfere with the
chalices and singing cakes in the window, or prevent the house from
being in decay in 1585. In 1572 it could be seen that the house had
been covered with lead, but presumably was so no longer.[1586] The
extension of the little kitchen seems to have been an enterprise of
Bonetti, of which More reaped the profits. The rest of the space gained
was utilized for the fencing-school kitchen, for a staircase behind the
Duchy Chamber, and for certain yards, all of which were in existence in
1596.[1587] It is just possible that More also pulled down the west end
of the Duchy Chamber.
By 1596 both the fencing-school and the butler’s lodging had passed
from the occupation of Bonetti. One Thomas Bruskett had the former and
one John Favour the latter. This is the year of James Burbadge’s great
enterprise of the second Blackfriars theatre. Our first intimation of
it is from Lord Hunsdon, in a letter to More of 9 January 1596.[1588]
He has heard that More has parted with part of his house for a
play-house, and makes an offer for ‘your other howse, which once I had
also’. The deed of sale by More to James Burbadge is dated 4 February
1596.[1589] The purchase money was £600. The rooms transferred are
carefully described, but only a few of the measurements and boundaries
are given. There were seven great upper rooms, ‘sometyme being one
greate and entire room’, enclosed with great stone walls, and reached
by a great pair of winding stairs from the great yard next the Pipe
Office. Other stone stairs reached leads above. These rooms had been
lately in the tenure of William de Laune, doctor of physic. Beneath
them, or beneath an entry between them and the Pipe Office, lay a
vault, of which Burbadge was to have the use only, by a ‘stoole and
tonnell’ contrived in the thickness of his north wall.[1590] Under some
part of De Laune’s seven rooms, and included in the sale, lay also
rooms 52 ft. long and 37 ft. wide, known as the ‘midle romes’ or ‘midle
stories’. These extended south to Sir George Carey’s house, and were
reached from a lane leading thereto, by a door next to Carey’s gate.
They had been in the tenure of Rocco Bonetti and were now in that of
Thomas Bruskett, together with a kitchen adjoining, and two cellars
reached by stairs from the kitchen, and lying under the north end of
the middle rooms. Bruskett had one of these, and the other was occupied
by John Favor, who dwelt in the house held for the term of her life by
Mrs. Pole. This house did not go to Burbadge, but he had one of two
small yards of which Favor had the other, between Mrs. Pole’s house and
the cellars. This yard was occupied by Peter Johnson, and Burbadge also
took four rooms tenanted by Johnson, and surrounded by his yard on the
south, Mrs. Pole’s entry on the west, and the great yard next the Pipe
Office on the north. Two of these were under De Laune’s late rooms. The
other two were under rooms, to the west of the north end of De Laune’s,
which were occupied by Charles Bradshaw, possibly the Bradshaw whose
room was begged by Farrant in 1576. Bradshaw also occupied a little
buttery, an entry and passage from the seven rooms, and a little room
for wood and coals. This lay over the buttery, on the west side of a
staircase leading to two rooms or lofts, one of which was over the east
and north of Bradshaw’s rooms and the other over the entry between the
seven rooms and the Pipe Office. These were in the occupation of Edward
Merry, who also had a room or garret over them reached by a further
staircase. A staircase also led from Peter Johnson’s yard to Bradshaw’s
rooms. Both Bradshaw’s and Merry’s rooms were included in Burbadge’s
purchase, which was completed by a small yard and privy on the north
side of Pipe Office yard, east of Water Lane, south of Cobham’s house,
and west of a house of More’s also occupied by Cobham. Burbadge was
also to have the right of depositing coal and other goods for a
reasonable time in the old kitchen yard, now called ‘the greate yarde
next the Pipe Office’, provided he did not interfere with access to the
Pipe Office itself, or to More’s garden or other parts of his premises.
The description seems complicated, as one reads the deed, but I think
that the disposition of the rooms is fairly intelligible.[1591] The
seven upper rooms, once a single great room, can only represent the
whole of the old parliament chamber or upper frater, formerly divided
into two distinct holdings. This, as we know, abutted across the
staircase upon the hall in the northern block which had formed part of
Farrant’s holding and which More had converted into the Pipe Office
in 1591.[1592] The middle rooms, together with the two easternmost of
Johnson’s rooms, must together represent the space of the paved hall
and blind parlour. There is no reason to suppose that Burbadge bought
from More, or that More ever possessed, anything beyond this space
on the ground floor of the frater block; and if the hall and parlour
were, as I have suggested, of equal size, the total space passing to
Burbadge on this floor was 74 ft. from north to south and 52 ft. from
east to west. The rest of the floor had been Lady Kingston’s and passed
to Sir George Carey.[1593] Johnson’s other two rooms and Bradshaw’s
rooms above them, lying to the west of the north end of the seven great
rooms, must be the two floors of the Duchy Chamber. The yards behind
them were rendered possible by the clearance of Portinari’s house.
Bradshaw’s two smaller rooms were on the staircase tower, and Merry’s
rooms and garret were partly at the top of this staircase and partly
above the Duchy Chamber.
DIAGRAMS OF BLACKFRIARS
1596
[Illustration: A. LOWER STORY]
[Illustration: B. UPPER STORY]
The property purchased by Burbadge was extended at various dates after
his death in February 1597 by his sons Cuthbert and Richard. On 26 June
1601 they bought for £95 from Sir George More the reversion of the
butler’s lodging, subject to the life-interest of Mrs. Pole and to the
ten years’ lease after her death, which had in the interval since 1585
passed from Rocco Bonetti to Thomas Bruskett.[1594] On 30 May 1610 they
purchased two-thirds of the interests of the heirs of Mrs. Pole and of
a mortgagee in the houses formerly held by Christopher Fenton, and on
7 July 1614 also purchased the remaining interest. These houses cost
them in all £170.[1595] If, as is not unlikely, they also purchased
at some time the house which in 1585 stood on the site of the little
kitchen of 1548, and the bit of land sold to John Tice in 1603, the
whole of the plot between the frater on the east, Water Lane on the
west, the kitchen yard on the north, and the way to Lord Hunsdon’s
house on the south, will have passed into their hands. There is no
indication that they ever acquired any part of Lord Hunsdon’s house.
This was apparently occupied by the French ambassador in 1623, when
one of its upper rooms, used as a chapel, fell, and many persons were
killed. Camden in his notes for Jacobean annals confused this room with
the theatre.[1596] About 1629 the King’s printers, Robert Barker and
John Bill, secured Hunsdon House for their press, and it remained the
King’s printing house until the Great Fire.[1597] On 19 December 1612
the Burbadges obtained from the Cobham estate a piece of land for the
enlargement of the yard near the Pipe Office, which was serving twenty
years later to turn coaches in.[1598]
To make an end for the present of topography, the fortunes of the
property to the north of the Burbadge purchases may be briefly traced.
Sir William More died in 1601 and his son and successor, Sir George,
had no need for a Pipe Office. The rooms were therefore leased, with
others, on 23 April 1601 to Sir Jerome Bowes at a rent of £14 6_s._
8_d._ ‘and certein glasses’.[1599] I think that the other rooms
included the old lavatory of the friars, once a Revels store-house and
thereafter a wash-house for More’s mansion, and that it was in this
room that Bowes established the glass-house which became an important
industry of the Blackfriars.[1600] On 19 June 1609 Sir George More sold
this property, subject to Bowes’s lease, together with the mansion
house, the great garden and all that remained to him within the great
cloister, to a syndicate, whose members in 1611 divided the purchase
amongst themselves.[1601] The former Pipe Office, now called the
gate-house, with its yard, part of the glass-house, and a strip of the
garden 23 ft. 10 in. wide passed to William Banister. Banister’s son
Thomas sold them in 1616 to Gideon De Laune and De Laune in 1617 to
Jacob Hardratt. Then Hardratt rebuilt the property and in 1619 sold
back to De Laune a tenement which extended 43 ft. from north to south,
and 24 ft. westwards from ‘the great gate near the play-house’ to the
tenement occupied by a widow Basil. It had a small garden on the east,
lying south of another garden belonging to De Laune.[1602] The length
of 43 ft. exceeds by 6 ft., the width of an entry, that of the Pipe
Office rooms, the site of which De Laune’s tenement no doubt occupied.
The big sale of 1609 did not include the kitchen and kitchen stairs
built by Sir Henry Neville about 1560, or the wood yard which enclosed
them. A bit of this yard had been included in Burbadge’s purchase of
1596. The rest of the property, with the water supply, had been bought
on 11 March 1601, by Henry Lord Cobham, whose house it underlay.[1603]
It had in fact been held by his father as far back as 1596.[1604] In
1603 Cobham was attainted. His Blackfriars property was forfeited to
the Crown, but regranted to his widow, Lady Kildare, and for some
years remained in the hands of trustees for her and her daughter Lady
Howard.[1605] In 1612 an additional bit of the wood yard was sold,
as already stated, to the Burbadges. Finally, in 1632 the estate was
conveyed to the Company of Apothecaries, in whose hands it has since
remained.[1606] They must also have acquired the house of Gideon De
Laune, who was one of their founders, and therefore their present
premises, in their extent of 116 ft. from north to south, exactly
replace the ‘northern block’ of buildings which stood to the west of
the main Blackfriars cloister, when Sir Thomas Cawarden took possession
of it in 1550.
James Burbadge was not destined to see the success of his adventure.
After all, he was prevented from establishing his theatre in 1596.
Play-houses had just been suppressed in the City, and a number of the
more important inhabitants of the Blackfriars disliked the idea of one
being opened in their select residential precinct, where no common
play-house had yet been seen. Farrant’s theatre, nominally intended
for the private practice of the Chapel boys, was presumably regarded
as not falling within the category of common play-houses. A petition
was sent to the Privy Council, amongst the signatories to which were
Burbadge’s neighbour, Sir George Carey, now Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth
Lady Russell, who lived a little farther up Water Lane, and Richard
Field, the printer of Shakespeare’s poems.[1607] The extant copy of
the petition is not dated, but later references assign it to November
1596, and inform us that as a result the Privy Council forbade the use
of the house.[1608] On James Burbadge’s death in February 1597 the
Blackfriars property passed to his son Richard.[1609] It is not known
what use he made of it before 1600, but in that year the resumption
of plays by the Chapel children under Nathaniel Giles gave him an
opportunity of following Farrant’s example, and letting the theatre for
what were practically public performances ‘vnder the name of a private
howse’.[1610] With Giles were associated one James Robinson and Henry
Evans, who had already been concerned in the enterprise of John Lyly
and the Earl of Oxford; and it was to Evans that, on 2 September 1600,
Burbadge leased ‘the great hall or roome, with the roomes over the
same, scituate within the precinct of the black Friours’, for a term
of twenty-one years from Michaelmas 1600, at a rent of £40,[1611] while
Evans and his son-in-law Alexander Hawkins gave a joint bond in £400
as collateral security for due payment. Evans set up a company, which
under various names, and throughout shifting financial managements,
maintained a substantial continuity of existence, and occupied the
Blackfriars for a period of eight years. Its fortunes are dealt with
in detail elsewhere.[1612] Only those points directly bearing upon
the theatre as such need now be noted. In October 1601, when Evans
was negotiating a partnership with Edward Kirkham, William Rastall,
and Thomas Kendall, he apparently undertook to transfer his lease to
Hawkins in trust to reassign a moiety of the interest under it to
these partners.[1613] No reassignment, however, was in fact made.
Evans carried out some repairs in December 1603, and trouble arose
with his partners because he severed the school-house and chamber over
the same from the great hall and used them as private apartments to
dine and sup in.[1614] When the playing companies were hard hit by the
plague of 1603–4, Evans began to treat with Burbadge for a surrender
of the lease.[1615] This came to nothing at the time, but in August
1608, when the Revels company was in disgrace for playing Chapman’s
_Byron_ and Kirkham had declared a desire to make an end of the
speculation, the suggestion was revived, and the surrender, probably
with the assent of Hawkins, actually took place.[1616] As part of his
consideration, Evans, through a nominee, was admitted by Burbadge into
a new syndicate, of which the other members were Burbadge himself and
his brother Cuthbert, and some of the leading players of the King’s
company, by whom it was intended that the Blackfriars should now be
used.[1617] The King’s men probably entered upon their occupation of
the theatre in the autumn of 1609, and thereafter used it alternatively
with the Globe, as their winter house, up to the end of their career
in 1642.[1618] The new syndicate consisted of seven partners, who may
be called ‘housekeepers’, in accordance with the terminology found in
use in 1635, in order to distinguish them from the ‘sharers’ in the
acting profits of the company.[1619] On 9 August 1608 Richard Burbadge
executed six leases, each conveying a seventh part of the play-house
for a term of twenty-one years from the previous midsummer, and
entailing the payment of a seventh part of the rent of £40. The six
lessees were his brother Cuthbert, John Heminges, William Shakespeare,
Henry Condell, William Sly, and Thomas Evans. The remaining interest
he no doubt retained himself. Sly, however, died five days later, and
his share was surrendered by his executrix, and divided amongst the
other partners. On 25 August 1611 it was transferred to William Ostler.
After his death on 16 December 1614 it should have passed to his widow,
Thomasina, but her father John Heminges retained it, and in 1629 she
estimated that he had thus defrauded her of profits at the rate of £20
a year.[1620] At some date later than 1611 John Underwood must have
been admitted to a share, for he owned one at his death in 1624. The
original leases terminated in 1629. Probably new ones were then entered
into, for by 1633 we find that the rent had been increased to £50, and
in 1635 that the interest of the housekeepers had still four years to
run, and that it was divided not into seven, but into eight parts.
Cuthbert Burbadge and the widows of Richard Burbadge and Henry Condell
still represented the original holders. Two parts had been bought in
1633 and 1634 from Heminges’s son by John Shank. One part was still
held in the name of Underwood, but a third of it was apparently in
the hands of Eillart Swanston. John Lowin and Joseph Taylor had each
a part. As a result of the dispute the Lord Chamberlain ordered a new
partition under which Shank resigned one share to be divided between
Swanston, Thomas Pollard, and Robert Benfield.[1621]
The occupation of the Blackfriars by the King’s men was not wholly
peaceful. The beginning of their tenure almost exactly coincided with
the grant of the new charter by which the jurisdiction of the City was
extended to the precinct.[1622] It was not, however, until 1619 that
an attempt was made to invoke this jurisdiction against them. In that
year the officials of the precinct and the church of St. Anne’s, backed
up by a few of the inhabitants, sent a petition to the Corporation,
in which they recited the inconveniences due to a play-house in their
midst, recalled the action taken by the Privy Council in 1596, as well
as the Star Chamber order of 1600 limiting the London play-houses to
two, and begged that conformity to the wishes of the Council might be
enforced. The Corporation made an order for the suppression of the
Blackfriars on 21 January 1619.[1623] It clearly remained inoperative,
but explains why the King’s men thought it desirable to obtain a fresh
patent, dated on 27 March 1619, in which their right to play at ‘their
private house scituate in the precinctes of the Blackfriers’, as well
as at the Globe, was explicitly stated.[1624] They had to face another
attack in 1631. Their opponents on this occasion approached Laud, then
Bishop of London.[1625] After some delay Laud seems to have brought the
matter before the Privy Council. The idea was mooted of buying the
players out and on 9 October 1633 a commission of Middlesex justices
was appointed to report as to the value of their interests.[1626] These
were estimated by the players at £21,990, and by the commissioners at
£2,900. The only offer towards a compensation fund was one of £100 from
the parish of St. Anne’s.[1627] Evidently the proposal was allowed to
drop. On 20 November 1633, the Privy Council made an order forbidding
coaches to stand in Ludgate or St. Paul’s Churchyard while the
performances were going on, but even this regulation was practically
cancelled by an amending order made at a meeting presided over by the
King in person on 29 December.[1628]
It is rather disappointing that the numerous documents bearing upon
the occupation of the Blackfriars between 1600 and 1608 should throw
so little light upon the way in which James Burbadge adapted his
purchase ‘with great charge and troble’ to the purposes of a theatre.
The lease of 1600 did not cover the whole of the property, but only a
‘great hall or roome, with the roomes over the same’. Presumably this
was the case also with the leases of 1608, since the rent was the same
as in 1600. The rest of the premises, with those purchased later by
the younger Burbadges, may be represented by the four tenements valued
at £75 a year in 1633, and the ‘piece of void ground to turn coaches’
valued at £6 was doubtless the fragment of the old kitchen yard north
of the approach. The Kirkham lawsuits tell us that one or two rooms
were reserved for the residence of Evans in 1602 and that during the
early part of 1604 ‘a certen rome, called the Scholehouse, and a certen
chamber over the same’ had been ‘seuered from the said great hall, and
made fitt by’ Evans ‘at his owne proper cost and chardges, to dyne and
supp in’.[1629] Professor Wallace has a number of additional lawsuits,
still unpublished.[1630] But the extracts from these given by him in
1908 add only a few details to those formerly known. They seem to
amount to this. The hall was 66 ft. from north to south and 46 ft. from
east to west. It was paved, and had a stage, galleries, and seats of
which a schedule was attached to the lease. The stage was at one end
of the hall. The school-house was at the north end of the hall.[1631]
At this end also must have been the entrance, as one of the petitions
of 1619 locates it near the way used from part of the precinct in
going to church.[1632] It was doubtless by the gate-house entry to
the cloister, just beyond where the coaches turned. Unfortunately one
is left quite in doubt upon the critical question as to which of the
rooms known to us from earlier records were used for the theatre. It
might have been the upper frater with the partitions removed; it might
have been constructed out of the paved hall and blind parlour beneath,
which appear to be represented by the ‘midle romes’ and two of the
rooms in the occupation of Peter Johnson enumerated in the conveyance
to Burbadge. _A priori_ one would have thought the upper frater the
most likely. It may very well have been paved, like the hall beneath
it, and a chamber which had held parliaments and a legatine trial
could amply suffice to hold a theatre. On this supposition the rooms
‘above’ the hall which were conveyed by the lease of 1600, and one of
which Evans converted into a dining-room can only have been the room
over the staircase and the garret over that. These, indeed, may have
extended over the north end of the frater proper, although in the main
that building appears, down to the time when Burbadge bought it, to
have had nothing over it but leads.[1633] There is a serious difficulty
in the way of the alternative theory, which would identify the theatre
with the ‘midle romes’ on the ground floor. This is that these would
most likely only be low rooms, vaulted to carry the heavy floor of the
parliament chamber above. On the whole, the balance of probability
appears to be strongly in favour of the upper frater.
Professor Wallace’s account of the matter is categorical. ‘The south
section’, he says, ‘underwent a thorough transformation. The two
stories were converted into the auditorium called “the great Hall or
Room”.... The roof was changed, and rooms, probably of the usual dormer
sort, were built above the Great Hall.’[1634] I do not know whether
there is any evidence for this theory, which disregards a good many
structural difficulties, in those parts of his recently discovered
documents which Professor Wallace has not published; there is certainly
none in those which he has. If not, I do not think we must assume
that Burbadge undertook expensive building operations, when he had
all the facilities for planning an admirable auditorium without them.
Professor Wallace seems to have been led into his conjecture by an
assumed necessity for providing space for three tiers of galleries.
There is no such necessity, and in fact no evidence for more than one
tier, although I dare say that the upper frater taken by itself was
high enough for two. Professor Wallace cites a reference to ‘porticibus
_anglice_ galleryes’, and points out that ‘galleryes’ is a plural.
This is so, but the ‘galleryes’ were not necessarily superimposed; if
one ran along the east side of the hall and the other along the west,
they would still constitute a plural. Professor Wallace takes the step
from his plural to three with the aid of Cockledemoy’s address to ‘my
very fine Heliconian gallants, and you, my worshipful friends in the
middle region’.[1635] Obviously the ‘middle region’ is not bound to be
the middle one of three galleries; it may just as well be the space
between the stage and the galleries.
It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to trace the detailed fortunes
of the Blackfriars during its later years. By Caroline times it took
place of the Globe as the principal and most profitable house of
the King’s men.[1636] In 1653, when like the rest of the theatres
it was closed, Richard Flecknoe recalled its origin and wrote its
epitaph.[1637] It was pulled down on 6 August 1655.[1638] This site
was used for tenements, which in course of time were replaced by _The
Times_ office which now occupies the site.[1639]
ii. THE WHITEFRIARS
[_Bibliographical Note._--The relevant dissertations are
P. Cunningham, _The Whitefriars, the Salisbury Court, and
the Duke’s Theatres_ (1849, _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 89), J.
Greenstreet, _The Whitefriars Theatre in the Time of Shakspere_
(1888, _N. S. S. Trans._ 269), with text of the Bill and Answer
in the Chancery suit of _Androwes v. Slater_ (1609), and A. W.
Clapham, _The Topography of the Carmelite Priory of London_
(1910, _Brit. Arch. Assoc. Journal_, n. s. xvi. 15), with
seventeenth-century plan of the precinct, reproduced by Adams,
312.]
The only suggestion of a sixteenth-century play-house in the
Whitefriars is to be found in the statement of Richard Rawlidge in 1628
that one was suppressed there at a date under Elizabeth which he does
not specify, but which may most plausibly be put at 1596 (cf. p. 359).
It is not improbable that Rawlidge wrote ‘Whitefriars’ when he should
have written ‘Blackfriars’, but Malone (_Var._ iii. 46, 52) accepted
the statement and assigned the suppression to 1580. I do not suppose
that Collier had any other basis than this for the ‘more then 30
yeares’ of the following description which he alleged to be an extract
from ‘an original survey of some part of the precinct, made in March
1616’ in his possession, and printed in his _New Facts_ (1835), 44:
‘The Theater is situate near vnto the Bishopps House, and was
in former times a hall or refectorie belonging to the dissolved
Monastery. It hath beene vsed as a place for the presentation
of playes and enterludes for more then 30 yeares, last by the
Children of her Majestie. It hath little or no furniture for a
play-house, saving an old tottered curten, some decayed benches,
and a few worne out properties and peeces of Arras for hangings
to the stage and tire house. The raine hath made its way in and
if it bee not repaired, it must soone be plucked downe or it
will fall.’
The earliest record, therefore, on which reliance can be placed is
the lawsuit of _Androwes v. Slater_ in 1609,[1640] which recites
the lease by Robert Lord Buckhurst to Michael Drayton and Thomas
Woodford for six years eight months and twenty days from March 1608 of
‘a messuage or mansion howse parcell of the late dissolved monastery
called the Whitefriars, in Fleete streete, in the subvrbs of London’,
while the articles of agreement between the sharers of the King’s
Revels syndicate (cf. ch. xii), of the same date, assign lodgings in
the house to Martin Slater, and add
‘The roomes of which howse are thirteene in number, three belowe
and tenne above, that is to saie, the greate hall, the kitchin
by the yard, and a cellar, with all the roomes from the east
ende of the howse to the Master of the revells’ office, as the
same are now severed and devided.’[1641]
The precinct of the former priory of the Carmelites or White Friars lay
between Fleet Street and the river, to the east of Serjeants’ Inn and
to the west of Water Lane, which divided it from Salisbury Court, the
old inn of the bishops of Salisbury, which had passed to the Sackvilles
in the sixteenth century, and ultimately became known as Dorset House
(Stowe, _Survey_, ii. 45). The precinct was a liberty, and its history,
from the point of view of local government, had been closely analogous
to that of the Blackfriars. Like the Blackfriars, it came under
complete civic control in this very year of 1608 (cf. p. 480). The
Whitefriars mansion itself the Sackvilles probably acquired from the
family of Thomas Lord De La Warr, to whom a grant of priory property
was made in 1544 (Dugdale, vi. 1572).
From the King’s Revels the Whitefriars passed to the occupation of
the Queen’s Revels (cf. ch. xii) in 1609, and continued in their use
both before and after their amalgamation with the Lady Elizabeth’s in
March 1613. It is named on the title-pages of _Woman a Weathercock_
(1612) and _The Insatiate Countess_ (1613), and a reference in the
prologue to ‘daughters of Whitefriars’ shows that it was also the
locality of _Epicoene_ (1609). In February 1613 it was ‘taken up’
by some London apprentices for an invitation performance of Robert
Tailor’s _The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl_ (q.v.). From March 1613 the
amalgamated companies had Bankside theatres available, first the Swan
and afterwards the Hope, but it is clear from the Watermen’s petition
(cf. p. 370) that, at any rate before the Hope was built, they mainly
used the Whitefriars. Daborne in a letter to Henslowe of 5 June 1613
speaks of the company ‘comming over’, presumably from the Whitefriars
to Bankside, and on 9 Dec. 1613 suggests that a play of his would be
suitable for Henslowe’s ‘publique howse’, from which it may perhaps be
inferred that Henslowe had also an interest in a ‘private’ house at the
time (_Henslowe Papers_, 72, 79). Apparently conversion into a public
theatre was then contemplated, for on 13 July 1613 the Master of the
Revels received a fee of £20 ‘for a license to erect a new play-house
in the White-friers, &c.’ (_Var._ iii. 52). But this scheme was stopped
by the Privy Council.[1642] On 3 June 1615 Rosseter and others obtained
their patent for the Porter’s Hall theatre in Blackfriars (cf. p.
472), which contemplated its use by the Revels, the Prince’s, and the
Lady Elizabeth’s, and incidentally recited that the Revels Children
had been trained and exercised in the Whitefriars ‘ever since’ 1610.
The amalgamation was dissolved in the spring of 1616, and the Lady
Elizabeth’s and the Revels probably disappeared from London. If,
therefore, the Whitefriars continued in use, it was probably by Prince
Charles’s men, who would have been left homeless by the demolition
of Porter’s Hall early in 1617. That it did continue in use and that
a renewed lease was still held by some of the parties interested in
the house in 1608 is indicated by the suit of _Trevell v. Woodford_
before the Court of Requests in 1642, from which it appears, according
to Peter Cunningham, that Sir Anthony Ashley, the then landlord of
the house, entered the theatre in 1621, and turned out the players,
on the pretence that half a year’s rent was due to him. In 1629 the
Whitefriars was replaced by the Salisbury Court theatre, built on the
site of an old barn just on the other side of Water Lane.
XVIII
THE STRUCTURE AND CONDUCT OF THEATRES
[_Bibliographical Note._--The only Restoration treatises which
throw any light on the pre-Restoration theatre are R. Flecknoe,
_A Short Discourse of the English Stage_ (1664), and J. Wright,
_Historia Histrionica_ (1699), extracts from which are in
Appendix I.
Archaeological material was brought together by E. Malone in
_Variorum_ iii. 51, and J. P. Collier in _H. E. D. P._
iii. 140.
Modern investigation may be said to begin with the discovery of
the Swan drawing in 1888. The principal dissertations up to 1916
are:
K. T. Gaedertz, _Zur Kenntnis der altenglischen Bühne_ (1888);
H. B. Wheatley, _On a contemporary Drawing of the interior of
the Swan Theatre_, 1596 (1888, _N. S. S. Trans. 1887–92_, 215);
W. Archer, _A Sixteenth-Century Play-house_ (1888, _Universal
Review_), _The Stage of Shakespeare_ (10 Aug. 1907, _Tribune_),
_The Fortune Theatre_, 1600 (12 Oct. 1907, _Tribune_, repr.
_Jahrbuch_, xliv. 159), _The Swan Drawing_ (11 Jan. 1908,
_Tribune_), _The Elizabethan Stage_ (1908, _Quarterly Review_,
ccviii. 442), _The Play-house_ (1916, _Shakespeare’s England_,
ii. 283); R. Genée, _Ueber die scenischen Formen Shakespeare’s
in ihrem Verhältnisse zur Bühne seiner Zeit_ (1891, _Jahrbuch_,
xxvi. 131); E. Kilian, _Die scenischen Formen Shakespeares
in ihrer Beziehung zu der Aufführung seiner Dramen auf der
modernen Bühne_ (1893, _Jahrbuch_, xxviii. 90), _Shakespeare
auf der modernen Bühne_ (1900, _Jahrbuch_, xxxvi. 228); H.
Logeman, _Johannes de Witt’s Visit to the Swan Theatre_ (1897,
_Anglia_, xix. 117); C. Grabau, _Zur englischen Bühne um
1600_ (1902, _Jahrbuch_, xxxviii. 232); W. J. Lawrence, _Some
Characteristics of the Elizabethan-Stuart Stage_ (1902, _E.
S._ xxxii. 36), _The Elizabethan Play-house_ (1912, 1913),
_Night Performances in the Elizabethan Theatres_ (1915, _E.
S._ xlviii. 213), _New Light on the Elizabethan Theatre_ (May
1916, _Fortnightly Review_), _A Forgotten Play-house Custom of
Shakespeare’s Day_ (1916, _Book of Homage_, 207), _Horses on
the Elizabethan Stage_ (_T. L. S._ 5 June 1919), _He’s for a
Jig or ---- _ (_T. L. S._ 3 July 1919); K. Mantzius, _History
of Theatrical Art_ (1903–9); E. E. Hale, _The Influence of
Theatrical Conditions on Shakespeare_ (1904, _M. P._ i. 171);
E. Koeppel, _Die unkritische Behandlung dramaturgischer Angaben
in den Shakespeare-Ausgaben_ (1904, _E. S._ xxxiv. 1); W. Bang,
_Zur Bühne Shakespeares_ (1904, _Jahrbuch_, xl. 223); W. Keller,
_Nochmals zur Bühne Shakespeares_ (1904, _Jahrbuch_, xl. 225);
A. H. Tolman, _Shakespeare’s Stage and Modern Adaptations_
(1904, _Views about Hamlet_, 115), _Alternation in the Staging
of Shakespeare’s Plays_ (1909, _M. P._ vi. 517); C. Brodmeier,
_Die Shakespeare-Bühne nach den alten Bühnenanweisungen_ (1904);
R. Prölss, _Von den ältesten Drucken der Dramen Shakespeares_
(1905); P. Monkemeyer, _Prolegomena zu einer Darstellung der
englischen Volksbühne_ (1905); G. P. Baker, _Hamlet on an
Elizabethan Stage_ (1905, _Jahrbuch_, xli. 296), _Elizabethan
Stage Theories_ (3 Nov. 1905, _The Times Literary Supplement_);
C. H. Kaulfuss-Diesch, _Die Inszenierung des deutschen Dramas an
der Wende des 16 und 17 Jahrhunderts_ (1905); G. F. Reynolds,
_Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging_ (1905, _M. P._ i. 581,
ii. 69), _Trees on the Stage of Shakespeare_ (1907, _M. P._ v.
153), _What we know of the Elizabethan Stage_ (1911, _M. P._ ix.
47), _William Percy and his Plays_ (1914, _M. P._ xii. 109);
J. Corbin, _Shakespeare and the Plastic Stage_ (1906, _Atlantic
Monthly_, xcvii. 369), _Shakespeare his Own Stage Manager_
(1911, _Century_, lxxxiii. 260); R. Bridges, _On the Influence
of the Audience_ (1907, _Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 321);
E. K. Chambers, _On the Stage of the Globe_ (1907, _Stratford
Town Shakespeare_, x. 351); C. C. Stopes, _Elizabethan Stage
Scenery_ (June 1907, _Fortnightly Review_); R. Wegener, _Die
Bühneneinrichtung des Shakespeareschen Theaters_ (1907); W.
H. Godfrey, _An Elizabethan Play-house_ (1908, _Architectural
Review_, xxiii. 239; cf. xxxi. 53); C. W. Wallace, _The
Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars_ (1908); F. Schelling,
_The Elizabethan Play-house_ (1908, _Proc. of Philadelphia
Num. and Antiq. Soc._); A. A. Helmholtz-Phelan, _The Staging
of Court Dramas before 1595_ (1909, _M. L. A._ xxiv. 185); V.
E. Albright, _The Shaksperian Stage_ (1909), _Percy’s Plays as
Proof of the Elizabethan Stage_ (1913, _M. P._ xi. 237); A.
R. Skemp, _Some Characteristics of the English Stage before
the Restoration_ (1909, _Jahrbuch_, xlv. 101); W. Creizenach,
_Bühnenwasen und Schauspielkunst_ (1909, _Gesch. des neueren
Dramas_, iv. 401); B. Neuendorff, _Die englische Volksbühne im
Zeitalter Shakespeares nach den Bühnenanweisungen_ (1910); H.
H. Child, _The Elizabethan Theatre_ (1910, _C. H._ vi. 241); H.
Conrad, _Bemerkungen zu Lawrence’ Title and Locality Boards_
(1910, _Jahrbuch_, xlvi. 106); C. R. Baskervill, _The Custom
of Sitting on the Elizabethan Stage_ (1911, _M. P._ viii.
581); J. Q. Adams, _The Four Pictorial Representations of the
Elizabethan Stage_ (April 1911, _J. G. P._); F. A. Foster,
_Dumb Show in Elizabethan Drama before 1620_ (1911, _E. S._
xliv. 8); A. Forestier, _The Fortune Theatre Reconstructed_ (12
Aug. 1911, _Illustrated London News_); M. B. Evans, _An Early
Type of Stage_ (1912, _M. P._ ix. 421); T. S. Graves, _A Note
on the Swan Theatre_ (1912, _M. P._ ix. 431), _Night Scenes in
the Elizabethan Theatres_ (1913, _E. S._ xlvii. 63), _The Court
and the London Theaters during the Reign of Elizabeth_ (1913),
_The Origin of the Custom of Sitting upon the Stage_ (1914, _J.
E. G. P._ xiii. 104), _The Act Time in Elizabethan Theatres_
(1915, _Univ. of Carolina, Studies in Philology_, xii. 3), _The
Ass as Actor_ (1916, _S. Atlantic Quarterly_, xv. 175); G. H.
Cowling, _Music on the Shakespearian Stage_ (1913); H. Bell,
_Contributions to the History of the English Play-house_ (1913,
_Architectural Record_, 262, 359); W. G. Keith, _The Designs
for the first Movable Scenery on the English Stage_ (1914,
_Burlington Magazine_, xxv. 29, 85); W. Poel, _Shakespeare in
the Theatre_ (1915), _Some Notes on Shakespeare’s Stage and
Plays_ (1916); J. Le G. Brereton, _De Witt at the Swan_ (1916,
_Book of Homage_, 204); A. H. Thorndike, _Shakespeare’s Theater_
(1916); T. H. Dickinson, _Some Principles of Shakespeare
Staging_ (1916, _Wisconsin Shakespeare Studies_, 125). More
recent papers are noted in the _Bulletin_ of the English
Association. R. C. Rhodes’ _The Stagery of Shakespeare_ (1922)
deserves consideration.
It remains to give some account of the iconographical material
available. Of four representations of the interiors of
play-houses, the only one of early date (_c._ 1596) is (_a_)
Arend van Buchell’s copy of a drawing by Johannes de Witt of
the Swan, published in 1888 by Gaedertz and in more accurate
facsimile by Wheatley (_vide supra_). The other three are
Caroline. (_b_) A small engraving in a compartment of the
title-page of W. Alabaster, _Roxana_ (1632), may be taken as
representing a type of academic stage, as the play was at
Trinity, Cambridge, _c._ 1592. (_c_) A very similar engraving
in the title-page of N. Richards, _Messallina_ (1640), if it
represents a specific stage at all, is less likely to represent
the second Fortune, as suggested by Skemp in his edition of
the play, or the Red Bull, as suggested by Albright, 45,
than Salisbury Court, where it is clear from Murray, i. 279,
that most of the career of the Revels company, by whom it
was produced, was spent. (_d_) An engraved frontispiece to
Francis Kirkman’s editions (1672, 1673) of _The Wits, or Sport
upon Sport_ (originally published by Marsh, 1662) has been
shown by Albright, 40, to have been erroneously regarded as a
representation of the Red Bull, to which there is an incidental
reference in the preface to Part II, and must be taken to show
the type of stage on which the ‘drolls’ contained in the book
were given ‘when the publique Theatres were shut up’.
A Court interlude, with performers and spectators, might be
supposed to be represented in (_e_) a woodcut prefixed to
Wilson’s _Three Lords and Three Ladies of London_ (1590), but
the subject is not that of the play, and the cut is shown by A.
W. Pollard (_English Miracle Plays_, ed. 6, 1914) to be taken
from S. Batman, _The Travayled Pylgrime_ (1569), and ultimately
from a fifteenth-century illustration to O. de la Marche’s
_Chevalier Délibéré_.
Of the exteriors of theatres there are (_f_) a small engraving
of _Theatrum_ in a compartment of the title-page of Jonson’s
_Works_ (1616), which may be merely a bit of classical
archaeology, but appears to have the characteristic Elizabethan
hut, and (_g_) a series of representations, or perhaps only
cartographical symbols, in the various maps detailed in the
bibliographical note to ch. xvi. Doubtfully authentic is (_h_) a
façade of the Blackfriars, reproduced by Baker, 78, from a print
in the collection of Mr. Henry Gardiner, with a note (44) that
the owner and various antiquarians ‘believe it genuine’; and
almost certainly misnamed (_i_) a façade engraved as a relic of
the second Fortune in R. Wilkinson, _Londina Illustrata_ (1819),
ii. 141, and elsewhere, which is plausibly assigned by W. J.
Lawrence, _Restoration Stage Nurseries_, in _Archiv_ (1914),
301, to a post-Restoration training-school for young actors.
A small ground-plan (_k_) of the Swan appears upon a manor map
of Paris Garden in 1627, reproduced by W. Rendle in Harrison,
ii, App. I.
A rough engraving (_l_) on the title-page of _Cornucopia,
Pasquils Nightcap_ (1612) shows a section of the orchestra of a
classical play-house as seen from the stage, and throws no light
on contemporary conditions; and (_m_) the design by Inigo Jones
described in ch. vii is of uncertain date, and intended for the
private Cockpit theatre at Whitehall.
I know of no representation of an English provincial stage,
and unfortunately E. Mentzel, who describes (_Gesch. der
Schauspielkunst in Frankfurt am Main_, 38) a woodcut of a
play, with signboards, by English actors, probably at Frankfort,
Nuremberg, or Cassel, in 1597, does not reproduce it. Some
notion of the improvised stages used by travelling companies for
out-of-door performances may be obtained from the continental
engravings reproduced by Bapst, 153, by Rigal in _Petit de
Julleville_, iii. 264, 296, and by M. B. Evans, _An Early
Type of Stage_ (_M. P._ ix. 421).
An engraving of the Restoration stage of the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane (built 1663), from _Ariane, ou Le Mariage de
Bacchus_ (1674), and another of the same house as altered in
1696, from _Unhappy Kindness_ (1697), are reproduced by
Lawrence, i. 169; ii. 140. Of the five engravings of the Duke’s
Theatre, Dorset Garden (built 1671), in E. Settle, _Empress
of Morocco_ (1673), one is reproduced by Albright, 47, and
another by Lawrence, ii. 160, and Thorndike, 110.
Graphic attempts to reconstruct the plan and elevation of a
typical Elizabethan stage will be found in the dissertations
cited above of Brodmeier, Wegener, Archer, Godfrey, Albright,
Corbin (1911, by G. Varian and J. Hambridge), and Forestier, and
in the picture reproduced in W. N. Hills, _The Shakespearian
Stage_ (1919).
Various revivals have also been carried out on Elizabethan
stages, with more or less of archaeological purism, notably
in London (W. Poel, _Shakespeare in the Theatre_), Paris
(_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxxv. 383), Harvard (G. P. Baker in
_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xli. 296), and Munich (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlii.
327).]
A history of the theatres would not be complete without some account of
their general structure and economy in the disposition of auditorium
and stage. I propose to begin with the more assured or less important
points, as a clearing of the way for the difficult and controverted
problems of scenic setting, on some of which I am afraid that no very
secure conclusion can be reached.
[Illustration]
It is necessary, in the forefront, to appreciate the distinction
between the ‘common’ or ‘public’ play-houses and the ‘private’ houses,
which, so far as our period is concerned, were Paul’s, the Blackfriars,
and the Whitefriars. This distinction is in its origin somewhat a
technical one, for there is no reason to suppose that in the private
houses the performances were private, in the sense that access to them
could not be obtained, on payment, by members of the general public.
Probably it is to be explained in relation to the Elizabethan system
of State control of theatres, and represents an attempt to evade the
limitations on the location and the number of play-houses which had
been established through the action, first of the civic authorities
and later of the Privy Council itself. This view receives support from
the allegations made during the campaign for the suppression of the
Blackfriars in 1619 that the owner ‘doth vnder the name of a private
howse (respectinge indeed private comoditie only) convert the said
howse to a publique play-house’.[1643]
It can hardly be supposed, however, that Burbadge could have hoodwinked
the Privy Council merely by calling the Blackfriars a ‘private’
house, without finding any other means of differentiating it from
the ‘public’ houses, and it is quite possible that the technical
distinction, for which modern analogies could be found, consisted in
the fact that admission was paid for in advance and no money taken
at the doors.[1644] Mr. Lawrence has very appropriately quoted in
this connexion the Common Council regulations of 1574, in which
an exception is made for performances ‘withowte publique or comen
collection of money of the auditorie, or behoulders theareof’; and
though I do not suggest that the extension of this principle to
Paul’s or the Blackfriars fell within the intention of the order,
the evasion may have been allowed, within the gates of Paul’s or in
a liberty, and for a well-conducted house attended by a well-to-do
audience, to hold.[1645] If so, it is probable that Paul’s from the
beginning and the earlier Blackfriars were in effect private houses.
But the actual terminology does not emerge before the revival of the
boy companies in 1599 and 1600. For some years past the title-pages
of plays had vaunted them as ‘publikely acted’.[1646] A corresponding
‘priuately acted’ appears for Blackfriars in Jonson’s _Cynthia’s
Revels_ (1601) and _Poetaster_ (1602), and for Paul’s in Middleton’s
_Blurt Master Constable_ (1602), while the antithesis is complete in
Dekker’s _Satiromastix_ (1602), which was presented ‘publikely’ by
the Chamberlain’s and ‘priuately’ by Paul’s. Somewhat later we find
Field’s _Woman a Weathercock_ (1612) acted ‘priuately’, and Chapman’s
_Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois_ (1613) ‘at the priuate Play-house’ in the
Whitefriars.[1647] But by this time the distinction may be taken for
granted as well established in general use.[1648]
From the point of view, however, of stage arrangements, the technical
_differentia_ of a private house is less important than certain
subsidiary characteristics.[1649] The private houses were all in
closed buildings, were occupied by boys, and charged higher prices
than the ordinary theatres. These facts entailed variations of
structure and method, which will require attention at more than one
point. They naturally became less fundamental, but did not entirely
disappear, after the transfer of the Blackfriars to the King’s men
in 1609, and probably passed still further into the background after
the introduction of roofed public houses in the Caroline age.[1650]
The title-pages generally describe the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and
Salisbury Court as ‘private’ houses right up to the closing of the
theatres, but the term, in so far as it connotes anything different
from ‘public’, seems to have lost what little meaning it ever had.[1651]
De Witt, about 1596, describes the Theatre, Curtain, Rose, and Swan
as ‘amphiteatra’, and Hentzner in 1598 adds that they were all
‘lignea’.[1652] The Globe and the Hope were built later on the same
structural model. The Fortune was also of wood, but square. Of the
shape and material of the Red Bull we know nothing. Prologues and
epilogues often refer to the internal appearance of the auditorium as
presenting a ‘round’, ‘ring’, ‘circuit’, ‘circumference’, or ‘O’.[1653]
If we can rely upon the draughtsmanship of the London maps, the
external outline was rather that of a polygon. This evidence must not
be pressed too far, for there is probably an element of cartographic
symbolism to be reckoned with. The same house may appear in one map as
a hexagon, in another as an octagon or decagon, and the late Hollar
group differs from its predecessors in using a completely circular
form. But there is confirmation in the Paris Garden manor map of
1627, which shows the ground-plan of the Swan decagonal, and in the
statement of Mrs. Thrale that the ruins of the Globe still visible in
the eighteenth century were hexagonal without and round within. This
was of course the later Globe built in 1613, and there is some reason
for thinking that the earlier Globe may have been of rather different
design. The verses on the fire by which it was destroyed speak of the
stage-house ‘as round as taylers clewe’, and the early Hondius map,
while it shows the Rose as polygonal, shows the Globe as circular,
with the upper half of less diameter than the lower. This construction
reappears in the Delaram drawings, and is so peculiar that the
representation may well be realistic. There was an obvious precedent
for the amphitheatrical form in the bear and bull rings which preceded
the public theatres, and I do not know that we need go back with Ordish
to a tradition of round mediaeval play-places, Cornish or English,
or to the remains of Roman occupation. A ring is the natural form in
which the maximum number of spectators can press about an object of
interest.[1654]
There is nothing to show that, for the main fabric, any material but
timber was used, until the Fortune was rebuilt of brick in 1623. Timber
is provided for in the contracts for the earlier Fortune and the Hope,
and these were modelled on the Globe and Swan. Oak was to be mainly
used for the Hope; no fir in the lower or middle stories. Burbadge’s
lawsuits show that timber was the chief object of his expenditure on
the Theatre, although some ironwork was also employed, presumably to
tie the woodwork together. The dismantled fabric of the Theatre was
used for the Globe. Henslowe used a good deal of timber for the repairs
of the Rose in 1592–3, and did the house ‘about with ealme bordes’ in
1595. There was also some brickwork, and the Fortune and Hope were
to have brick foundations, a foot above the ground. The Fortune was
to be covered with lath, lime, and hair without. Henslowe also used
plaster, and I do not see anything inconsistent with a substantially
wooden structure in De Witt’s statement that the Swan was ‘constructum
ex coaceruato lapide pyrritide ... ligneis suffultum columnis’. This
has been regarded as an error which prejudices the reliability of De
Witt’s observations, but the description is too precise to be disproved
by Hentzner’s generalized ‘lignea’, and after all the strength of the
building was naturally in the columns, and the flints and mortar--a
common form of walling in the chalk districts of England--may well have
filled up the interstices between these. De Witt adds that the columns
might deceive the shrewdest ‘ob illitum marmoreum colorem’.[1655]
De Witt has also been criticized for giving the seating capacity of
the Swan as 3,000. I dare say this is merely the exaggerated round
estimate of a casual visitor, but Wheatley calculates from the drawing
that the galleries might hold 2,000, and it would not be surprising
if our rude forefathers sat a bit closer than we care to do. Moryson
speaks even more largely of theatres ‘more remarkable for the number,
and the capacity, than for the building’, and ‘capable of many
thousands’, while no less than 2,000 got into Trinity College hall for
the academic plays of 1615.[1656] The frame of the Fortune was 80 ft.
square without and 55 ft. square within. This allows a depth of 12½ ft.
for the galleries, and Corbin calculates a seating capacity, allowing
18 in. for a seat and 18 in. square for a standing man, of 2,138 or
2,558 at a pinch.[1657] We do not know that the Swan was not larger
than the Fortune, and have therefore no right to assume that De Witt
was seriously out. Wright tells us that the Globe, Fortune, and Red
Bull were ‘large’ houses; he is comparing them with the private houses
of Caroline days.[1658] The allusion in _Old Fortunatus_ to the ‘small
circumference’ of the Rose perhaps hardly indicates that it was below
the average size.
The Swan drawing is our one contemporary picture of the interior of
a public play-house, and it is a dangerous business to explain away
its evidence by an assumption of inaccurate observation on the part
of De Witt, merely because that evidence conflicts with subjective
interpretations of stage-directions, arrived at in the course of
the pursuit of a ‘typical’ stage. Still less can it be discredited
on the ground that it was merely made by Van Buchell on ‘hearsay
evidence’ from the instructions of De Witt.[1659] It is a copy, like
the accompanying description on the same piece of paper, of De Witt’s
original, which De Witt says he drew (‘adpinxi’) in order to bring
out an analogy which had struck him between the English and the Roman
theatres. It was for this reason also, no doubt, that he marked certain
features of the structure on the drawing with the names of what he
thought to be their classical prototypes. I do not, of course, suggest
that the drawing has the authority of a photographic record. De Witt is
more likely to have made it as an afterthought in his inn than during
the actual performance, and he may well have omitted or misrepresented
features. Certainly he can hardly have seen the trumpeter sounding
when the action had already begun. And the draughtsmanship is bad, and
may have been made worse by the copyist.[1660] The upper part is done,
with an attempt at perspective, as he may have seen it from a point
in the middle, or perhaps the upper, gallery somewhat to the right
of the centre; the lower part as from full face, so that the pillars
stand equidistant from the edges of the stage, as they would not have
appeared to him in perspective. His doors and the compartments of his
stage gallery are of uneven sizes.[1661] But, with all its faults,
the drawing is the inevitable basis of any comprehensive account of
the main structural features of a play-house, and I propose, leaving
aside for the present the question of the possible hangings which it
does not show, to take its parts one by one and illustrate them from
other sources, and in particular from Henslowe’s contracts for the
construction of the Fortune in 1600 and the Hope in 1614.[1662]
The outline of the building is round, or slightly ovoid.[1663] The
floor, which shows no traces of seating, is marked ‘planities siue
arena’. This is the space ordinarily known as the ‘yard’, a name which
it may fairly be taken to have inherited from the inn-yards, surrounded
by galleries and open overhead, in which, in the days before the
building of the Theatre in 1576, more or less permanent play-houses
had grown up.[1664] Spectators in the yard always stood, and the more
unstable psychology of a standing, as compared with a seated, crowd
must always be taken into account in estimating the temperament of an
Elizabethan audience. These are the ‘groundlings’, and the poets take
their revenge for occasional scenes of turbulence in open or covert
sneers at their ‘understanding’.[1665]
Well into the yard, leaving space for the groundlings on three sides of
it, projects a quadrangular stage, which is marked ‘proscaenium’.[1666]
The breadth is perhaps rather greater than the depth.[1667] This was
certainly the case at the Fortune, where the stage was 43 ft. wide,
and extended ‘to the middle of the yarde’, a distance of 27½ ft. The
level of the stage may be some 3 or 4 ft. above the ground. Two solid
trestles forming part of its supports are visible, but at the Fortune
it was paled in with oak, and in view of the common use of the space
below the stage to facilitate apparitions and other episodes requiring
traps, this was probably the normal arrangement.[1668] It has been
thought that the stage of the Swan, like that of the Hope, which was
in many respects modelled upon it, may have been removable. But this
is hardly consistent with the heavy pillars which, in this respect
certainly unlike the Hope, it carries. Moreover, the Hope had to be
available for bear-baiting, which entailed an open arena, and there
is no evidence, and very little likelihood, that baiting ever took
place at the Swan. Like other theatres, it sometimes accommodated
gymnasts and fencers, but these would use the stage.[1669] There are
no rails round the stage, such as we may infer the existence of at
the Globe.[1670] The only scenic apparatus visible is a large bench,
on which a lady sits, while another stands behind her in an attitude
of surprise, at the rapid approach from an outer corner of the stage
of a man in an affected attitude, with a hat on his head and a long
staff in his hand. You might take him for Malvolio cross-gartered, were
there any chance that _Twelfth Night_ could have been written when
the drawing was made, or produced at the Swan.[1671] Probably he is
a returning traveller or a messenger bringing news. The floor of the
stage is apparently bare. Sometimes rushes were laid down, at any rate
for interior scenes.[1672] The Globe produced _Henry VIII_ in 1613
‘with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the
matting of the stage’.
Circling the yard and raised above it are three tiers of galleries,
each containing three rows of seats. Beneath the first gallery De Witt
wrote ‘orchestra’, above its seats ‘sedilia’, and between the middle
and upper galleries ‘porticus’. In the classical theatre ‘porticus’ was
the name for a covered gallery, and the classical analogy also makes
it clear that by ‘orchestra’ De Witt meant to indicate the position
occupied by the spectators of highest rank, corresponding to the seats
of Roman senators, to which the name of the obsolete dancing place
immediately in front of them had been transferred. It was not until the
Restoration that the orchestra was allocated to the music.[1673] The
fronts of the galleries are supported by a number of turned posts. In
the Fortune all the chief supports, presumably both in the auditorium
and on the stage, were to be square and made ‘palasterwise, with carved
proporcions called Satiers’. Internal painting was contemplated, but
was not covered by the contract. Other references to painted theatres
suggest that the Elizabethan builders were not content with bare
scaffolds, but aimed at a decorative effect.[1674] Three seems to have
been the regular number of galleries. Kiechel bears witness to it for
the Theatre and Curtain in 1585; and there were three at the Fortune
and at the Hope. The lowest gallery at the Fortune was 12 ft. high,
the next 11 ft., and the uppermost 9 ft., and each of the two latter
jutted out 10 in. beyond that below. This gives a total height of 32
ft., about three-fifths of the interior width of the house. The maps,
therefore, make the buildings rather disproportionately high. The
uppermost gallery has a roof, marked ‘tectum’. This in the earlier
Globe was of thatch, which caused the fire of 1613, and left the
unlucky King’s men with little but ‘wit to cover it with tiles’. I
think the Rose was also thatched; but the Fortune and Hope were tiled.
In view of the jetties, such a roof would give some protection to those
in the galleries, but the groundlings had none. Both the drawing and
the maps confirm the statement of Wright that the Globe, Fortune, and
Red Bull were ‘partly open to the weather’, and this was doubtless also
the case with their predecessors.[1675]
De Witt does not indicate any internal gallery partitions, but the
Swan had these by 1614, for they were to be the model for ‘two boxes
in the lowermost storie fitt and decent for gentlemen to sitt in’,
which were to be constructed at the Hope. Similarly the Fortune was
to have ‘ffower convenient divisions for gentlemens roomes, and other
sufficient and convenient divisions for twoe pennie roomes, with
necessarie seates’. These were to be ceiled with lath and plaster. An
earlier example of the technical use of the term ‘room’ for a division
of the auditorium occurs in the draft Theatre lease of 1585, which
gave the landlord a right to sit or stand in ‘some one of the upper
romes’, if the places were not already taken up. If the clause, like
the rest of the draft, merely reproduced the covenants of the 1576
lease, the term was of long standing. Probably the divisions were of
varying sizes. There would not have been much point in cutting up the
space available for ‘two-pennie roomes’ into very small sections, but
there were also ‘priuate roomes’, which are perhaps the same as the
‘gentlemens roomes’ of the contracts.[1676] If so, these were probably
to the right and left of the stage in the lowest gallery. But the whole
question of seating and prices is rather difficult, and it is further
complicated by obscurely discerned changes of fashion, which involved
the adoption of the very inconvenient custom of sitting on the stage,
and the consequent abandonment by the gentry of what was called the
lord’s room. Prices also, no doubt, tended to grow, at any rate for
the better seats; the ‘popular’ prices always remained low.[1677] I do
not know whether the professional actors ever contented themselves,
after their establishment in London, with merely sending round the
hat, or, in mediaeval phrase, making a ‘gatheryng’.[1678] Fixed prices
must certainly have been the rule by the time of Kiechel’s visit in
1585, for he tells us that, on the occasion of a new play, double
prices were charged. This practice helps to explain the fluctuating
receipts in Henslowe’s diary, and was still in force in the seventeenth
century.[1679] Spenser and his friends could have their laugh at a
play for 1_d._ or 2_d._ in 1579, and ten years later Martin Marprelate
could be seen for 2_d._ at the Theatre and 4_d._ at Paul’s.[1680]
Higher prices are already characteristic of the private houses. In
1596 Lambarde informs us of a regular scale, apparently applicable to
all public entertainments. None, he says, who ‘goe to Paris Gardein,
the Bell Savage or Theatre, to beholde beare baiting, enterludes or
fence play, can account of any pleasant spectacle unlesse they first
pay one pennie at the gate, another at the entrie of the scaffolde
and the thirde for a quiet standing’. Platter, in 1599, reports the
same scale and adds a distinction, not made by Lambarde, between
standings and seats. You paid 1_d._ to stand on the level, 1_d._ at
an inner door to sit, and 1_d._ at a third door for one of the best
places with a cushion.[1681] The two-penny galleries or rooms long
continued to be the resort of the ordinary playgoer, if he was not
satisfied to stand in the yard for a penny.[1682] He sat close, and
the insolent poets and pamphleteers classed him with the groundlings
as a ‘stinkard’.[1683] His domain certainly included the top gallery,
but about the other galleries I am not sure. There are some puzzling
allusions to penny galleries and rooms, but probably, these are not
distinct from the ‘two-penny’ ones, and the explanation is to be found
in the practice of paying the twopence in two instalments, one on
entrance, the other at the gallery door.[1684] It did not long remain
possible to get one of the best seats for the 3_d._ quoted by Platter,
even if there was not already in his time a higher charge for ‘the
priuate roomes of greater price’.[1685] There were both sixpenny
and twelve-penny rooms by 1604.[1686] These may have been the same
private rooms at varying prices, according as the play was old or
new. I take it that you only got a single seat, even in a ‘private’
room, for your 6_d._ or 12_d._, and not the whole room. Overbury or
another gives 12_d._ as the price of the ‘best room’ as late as about
1614, but in the same year the ordinary scale of charges was greatly
exceeded throughout the house on the production of _Bartholomew Fair_
at the Hope, where a speaker in the induction says, ‘it shall be
lawful to judge his six-penny-worth, his twelve-penny-worth, so to his
eighteen-pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place,
provided always his place get not above his wit’. This must have been
a quite exceptional occasion, not merely a new play, but a new play at
a new house. Similarly, when Richard Vennar brought the gulls to his
swindle of _England’s Joy_ in 1602, ‘the price at cumming in was two
shillings or eighteen-pence at least’.
A special compartment in one of the galleries was not the only
privilege offered to the more fashionable playgoer. He might, at one
time or another, sit ‘over the stage’ and on the stage. De Witt’s
drawing shows, at the back of the stage, a raised gallery divided into
six small boxes, in each of which one or two spectators appear to be
placed.[1687] It is reasonable to suppose that these are sitting ‘over
the stage’.[1688] And some or all of those ‘over the stage’ again,
appear to have sat in ‘the lords room’ or ‘rooms’.[1689] Of such a
room we first hear in 1592, when Henslowe, repairing the Rose, paid
10_s._ ‘for sellynge of the Rome ouer the tyerhowsse’ and 13_s._ ‘for
sellinges my lords Rome’. The entry rather suggests that this was
not so much a room for ‘lords’, as a room primarily reserved for the
particular ‘lord’, under whose patronage the actors played; but however
this may be, it was probably available by courtesy for other persons of
distinction. The practice of sitting on the stage itself first emerges
about 1596.[1690] It was general by the seventeenth century, and was
apparently most encouraged at the Blackfriars, where it perhaps lent
itself best to the structural character of the building.[1691] It was
known at Paul’s, but was inconvenient on so small a stage.[1692] And,
as it certainly originated at the public houses, so it maintained
itself there, in spite of the grumbles of the ordinary spectators,
with whose view of the action the throng of feathered and restless
gallants necessarily interfered.[1693] It may have been profitable to
the actors as sharers, but as actors they resented the restriction
of the space available for their movements which it entailed.[1694]
The prologue to Jonson’s _The Devil is an Ass_ of 1616 contains a
vigorous protest.[1695] But the gallant liked to be seen as well as to
see, and liked to slip in and out of the tiring-house and hob-nob with
the players. It was not until Caroline times that the custom became
intolerable.[1696] On the stage stools were provided for those who
did not care to sit on the rushes, and for these they paid at least
sixpence and sometimes a shilling.[1697] One result of the introduction
of sitting on the stage appears to have been that the lord’s room
lost its attractiveness and consequently its status. It fell into the
background, and became the haunt of a rather disreputable class of
playgoer. The lords were now to be found either on the stage itself,
or in the private rooms of the lower gallery. Presumably the ‘grate’
to which the courtier of Sir John Davies’ epigram relegated himself,
was in the lord’s room, perhaps fitted with a casement for scenic
purposes.[1698] The change is chronicled by Dekker in the passage of
_The Gull’s Horn Book_, in which the gull is instructed how to behave
himself in a play-house. He must by all means advance himself up to the
throne of the stage.
‘I meane not into the Lords roome (which is now but the
Stages Suburbs): no, those boxes, by the iniquity of custome,
conspiracy of waiting-women and Gentlemen-Ushers, that there
sweat together, and the couetousnes of Sharers, are contemptibly
thrust into the reare, and much new Satten is there dambd, by
being smothred to death in darknesse.’
I return to the guidance of De Witt. The boarding between the yard
and the lower gallery, which in the Fortune was overlaid with iron
pikes, presumably to prevent the groundlings from climbing over, shows
two apertures, to right and left of the stage, one of which is marked
‘ingressus’. From these steps lead to the lower gallery itself, and
we may infer the presence of a passage to staircases behind, by which
the upper galleries were reached. The contracts show that the Fortune,
like the Globe, and the Hope, like the Swan, were to have external
staircases.[1699] Perhaps this accounts for the greater diameter of the
lower part of the Globe in the London maps. Of external doors there
were only two at the Globe, which caused trouble at the time of the
fire, and two also at the Fortune, when Alleyn leased a share of it
to Henslowe in 1601. One of these would in each case have been a door
to the tiring-house, giving access to the stage and the lord’s room,
while the other served the body of the theatre.[1700] Those bound for
the galleries paid their pennies at the theatre door, passed through
the yard to the ‘ingressus’, and made additional payments there and
in the ‘rooms’, according to the places selected.[1701] The custom
explains itself by the arrangement between the sharers of companies
and the housekeepers of theatres, which gave the latter a proportion
of gallery takings in lieu of rent. ‘Gatherers’, appointed by the
persons interested, collected the money, and although this was put
into a locked box, whence the modern term ‘box-office’, there were
abundant opportunities for fraud. At need, the gatherers could serve as
supernumeraries on the stage.[1702]
At the back of the stage, and forming a chord to an arc of the circular
structure of the play-house, runs a straight wall, pierced by two
pairs of folding doors, on which De Witt has written ‘mimorum aedes’.
Above it is the gallery or lord’s room already described. This wall
is the ‘scene’, in the primary sense; it is also the front of the
‘tire-house’, or in modern phrase ‘green-room’, a necessary adjunct
of every theatre. The Theatre depositions of 1592 speak of this as
‘the attyring housse or place where the players make them readye’.
The drawing indicates nothing in the way of hangings over either wall
or doors, but in some theatres these certainly existed. Thus Peacham,
in his _Thalia’s Banquet_ (1620) referring to much earlier days,
tells us that
Tarlton when his head was onely seene,
The Tire-house doore and Tapistrie betweene,
Set all the multitude in such a laughter,
They could not hold for scarce an hour after.[1703]
The front of the tiring-house is the ‘scene’ in the Renaissance
sense, and its characteristics will be of great concern in later
chapters.[1704] The Fortune tire-house was to be within the frame of
the theatre, and would not, therefore, unless it projected on to the
stage, have more depth than about 12 ft. Mr. Brereton, in a careful
analysis of the drawing, suggests that the Swan tire-house may not have
extended the full width of the stage, but may have left room to come
and go on either side of its front.[1705] If so, some projection is not
improbable, but one cannot rely much upon the hazardous interpretation
of bad draughtsmanship. The ground-plan of the Swan seems to show an
annexe at one point, and of course additional depth could easily be
obtained in this way. Moreover, there were at least three stories
available. The spectators in the lord’s room would not take up the
whole depth on the level of the middle gallery, and there must have
been a corresponding space on that of the top gallery. Henslowe ceiled
‘the rome ouer the tyerhowsse’ in 1592, and an inventory of the
Admiral’s men in 1598 includes effects ‘leaft above in the tier-house
in the cheast’. No doubt a fair amount of accommodation was needed. The
tire-house was not merely a dressing-room and a store-house. Here came
the author, to rail at the murdering of his lines, and the gallants
to gossip and patronize the players.[1706] Here were the book-holder,
who prompted the speeches, surveyed the entrances and exits, and saw
to the readiness of the properties;[1707] the tireman, who fitted the
dresses and the beards, furnished stools, and in the private theatres
took charge of the lights;[1708] the stage-keeper;[1709] the grooms
and ‘necessary attendants’, waiting to draw curtains, to thrust out
beds, and to carry benches and banquets on and off.[1710] Here, too,
was the head-quarters of the music, although in the public theatres the
music was largely incidental, and was often played on, or above, or
even below the stage, as might seem most appropriate to any particular
action.[1711] Music between the acts was not unknown, but we learn
from the induction to the _Malcontent_ that it was ‘not received’ by
the audience at the Globe in 1604.[1712] There was also, of course, the
final ‘jig’.[1713] For an overture, the public theatres seem to have
employed nothing beyond three soundings of a trumpet, the last of which
was the signal for the prologue to begin.[1714] Probably the musical
element tended to increase. A special music-room perhaps existed
already at the Swan in 1611, and, if so, may have been, as it was in
the later theatres, in the upper part of the tire-house.[1715]
The Fortune tire-house was to have ‘convenient windowes and lightes
glazed’. Some of these may have looked into the auditorium, and have
been used for scenic purposes. But the maps show external windows here
and there in the walls, and these would be necessary to light both the
tire-house and the galleries. We have a picture of Burbadge leaning
out of an upper window to greet with abuse the disturbers of his peace
at the Theatre in 1590. The yard and the stage itself were, of course,
lit, in the absence of a roof, from above. Performances were ordinarily
by daylight; before the end of the sixteenth century the time for
beginning had been fixed at 2 o’clock.[1716] The stage-directions point
to a frequent enough use of lamps and tapers, but always to give the
illusion of scenic darkness. Plays, however, lasted at least two hours,
sometimes half an hour or even an hour longer, and there was the jig to
follow.[1717] It must therefore be doubtful whether, in the depth of
winter, daylight could have served quite to the end. Webster complains
that the ill-success of _The White Devil_ was due to its being
given ‘in so dull a time of winter, and presented in so open and black
a theatre’. Perhaps the shorter plays were chosen for the shorter days,
or the jig was omitted. But it is also possible that some primitive
illumination, in the form of cressets, or baskets of tarred and flaring
rope, was introduced.[1718]
The actors themselves were not wholly without protection from the
elements. De Witt depicts two heavy classical columns, which stand
on square bases rather farther back than the middle of the stage and
a little way from each side of it. These support a pent-house roof,
which starts from the level of the eaves of the ‘tectum’ over the
top gallery, and descends in a steep slope to a level opposite to
the middle of the second gallery, where it slightly projects beyond
the supporting columns. Behind and above it rises a kind of hut,
conspicuous above the ‘tectum’ and forming a superstructure to the
tire-house. Its front has less width than that of the tire-house, and
its side is shown in clumsy perspective, which is apparently followed
round by the pent-house below it. The pent-house is the only thing
in the drawing, that can represent the ‘shadow’ or ‘heavens’, which
several allusions point to as a regular feature in the public theatres,
and which certainly existed at the Rose, the Fortune--and therefore
presumably the Globe--and the Hope.[1719] But it must be admitted that
this sharply sloping roof, coming down low and considerably impeding
the vision of the spectators at any rate in the top gallery, does not
agree very well with the notion of a heavens dominating the stage,
elaborately decorated, and serving for the display of spectacular
effects, which were surely meant to be visible to all. It is possible
that De Witt’s halting draughtsmanship has failed him in the attempt
to tackle the architectural perspective from a difficult angle in an
upper gallery. My impression is that, by giving too much height to the
bottom gallery, he has got the two other galleries out of line with
the stories of the tire-house to which they correspond, and that the
lower gallery should really be on the level of the stage, the middle
gallery on that of the gallery ‘over the stage’, and the top gallery
on that of the rather obscure story above. If so, the front of this
story would have been visible, and may have contained some aperture
of which account has not yet been taken in formulating theories of
staging.[1720] And I think that the columns were really higher and the
roof flatter than De Witt has drawn them. It is perhaps less easy to
suggest that the columns stood farther forward than De Witt has placed
them, but the roof may well have projected farther over them. They are
solid enough to bear a much greater weight than the drawing indicates.
However these things may have been at the Swan--I am not blind to
the dangers of attempting to convert what De Witt has shown into
something which he has not shown--one may, perhaps, infer that more
extensive roofing than the pent-house of the drawing would afford was
contemplated by the Fortune contract, which provides for ‘a shadowe or
cover over the saide stadge’, and the Hope contract, which is even more
precise in its specification of ‘the Heavens all over the saide stage’.
In both cases there were to be gutters to carry away rain-water. The
heavens at the Hope were ‘to be borne or carryed without any postes
or supporters to be fixed or sett uppon the saide stage’, and it has
been thought that other theatres of later date than the Swan may also
have dispensed with posts. But there is little ground for this theory,
other than the obvious obstruction which the posts would offer to
vision.[1721] Howes seems to refer to the arrangement at the Hope as
an innovation, and it can hardly be unrelated to the special need for
a removable stage at that house. On the other hand the posts may very
likely have been slighter than De Witt has shown them. At the Fortune
they were, like other ‘princypall and maine postes’, square and carved
‘palasterwise’ with satyrs. The posts are worked into the action of
several plays, and Kempe tells us that pickpockets were pilloried by
being tied to them.[1722]
The hut has two windows in front, and a door in the visible side. It
has been suggested that it may really have stood rather more forward
than De Witt indicates, jutting out from the tire-house so as to be
directly over a part of the heavens.[1723] An analogous superstructure
is observable in most of the map-representations of theatres. That
of the later Globe in Visscher’s map of 1616 seems to have two bays,
one behind another, instead of the one bay of the Swan drawing, and
would have required more space. The ‘Theatrum’ of Jonson’s 1616 Folio
has an =L=-shaped superstructure. The object of a jut forward would
be to facilitate the descents and ascents from and to the heavens,
which formed popular features in many plays, and which must have been
contrived by some kind of machinery from above.[1724] From the roof of
this hut floats a flag, with the figure of a swan upon it, and at the
door stands a man, apparently blowing a trumpet, from which depends a
smaller flag also bearing a swan. There is abundant evidence that the
play-houses flew flags when they were open for performances, and took
them down when Lent or a plague rendered playing impossible.[1725]
The trumpeter is no doubt giving one of the three ‘soundings’ which
preluded the appearance of the prologue in his traditional long black
velvet cloak.[1726] Nor did the flag and the trumpet exhaust the
resources of the Elizabethan art of advertisement. The _vexillatores_
of the miracle-play would perhaps have been out of keeping with
London conditions.[1727] But it was customary to announce after the
epilogue of each performance what the next was to be.[1728] And public
notification was given by means of play-bills, of which we hear from
as early a date as 1564, and which were set up on posts in conspicuous
places up and down the city and probably also at the play-house
doors.[1729] Copies seem also to have been available for circulation
from hand to hand.[1730] On 30 October 1587 John Charlwood entered in
the Stationers’ Register a licence for ‘the onely ympryntinge of all
manner of billes for players’. This passed from him to James Roberts,
and was transferred by Roberts to William Jaggard on 29 October
1615.[1731] No theatrical bill of the Elizabethan or Jacobean period is
preserved, although a manuscript bill for the Bear Garden is amongst
Alleyn’s papers at Dulwich.[1732] Four late seventeenth-century bills
are at Claydon; they are brief announcements, which give the names of
the plays, but not those of the authors or actors.[1733] There is no
evidence of anything corresponding to the modern programme, with its
cast and synopsis of scenes.[1734] The audience gathered early, as
there were few, if any, reserved seats.[1735] The period of waiting
was spent in consuming fruit or sweatmeats and liquid refreshment, and
in expressing impatience if the actors failed to make an appearance in
good time.[1736] Tobacco was freely used, especially by the gallants
on the stage.[1737] Books were also hawked up and down, and a game
of cards might beguile the tedium of waiting.[1738] The galleries
were full of light women, who found them a profitable haunt, but
whose presence did not altogether prevent that of ladies of position,
probably in the private rooms, and possibly masked.[1739]
If the audience liked a play, the actors expected a _Plaudite_ of
hand-clapping; if otherwise, they took their chance of hissing
and ‘mewing’, or of a pointed withdrawal of spectators from the
stage.[1740] The device of a _claque_ was not unknown.[1741] The
applause was often invited in the closing speech or in a formal
epilogue, on the same lines as the prologue, which it seems to have
replaced in favour about the end of the sixteenth century.[1742]
This might also lead up to or perhaps represent the prayer for the
sovereign, of which there are traces up to a late date, and which
was analogous to the modern use of ‘God Save the King’.[1743] The
accompanying prayer for the ‘lord’ of the players, on the other hand,
cannot be shown to have been adopted into the public theatres.[1744]
Finally, the epilogue might indicate a coming dance.[1745] Of this a
little more needs to be said. The players have amongst other elements
in their ancestry the mediaeval mimes, and they inherit the familiar
mimic tradition of multifarious entertainment. The ‘legitimate’ drama
was not as yet on its pedestal. The companies of the ’eighties and even
the early ’nineties were composed of men ready at need to eke out their
plays by musical performances and even the ‘activities’ of acrobats.
This is perhaps most obvious in the continental companies, which had
to face the obstacles to a complete intelligence between stage and
audience introduced at the tower of Babel. Such a cosmopolitan mingling
of drama and ‘activities’ as we may suppose _The Labours of Hercules_
to have been was a valuable resource.[1746] But at home also we find
Strange’s and the Admiral’s men showing their ‘activities’ at court,
and Symons the acrobat becoming a leader amongst the Queen’s, and
even so late as 1601 Henslowe fitting out the Admiral’s boy Nick to
tumble in the presence of royalty. The country tours of the Queen’s
were for some time accompanied by a Turkish rope dancer.[1747] In
the theatres themselves Italian players made their success and their
scandal, with the help of tumbling women.[1748] Whether English players
did the same we do not know. But we do know that the dance by way of
afterpiece was a regular and enduring custom.[1749] It was known as
the jig.[1750] At first, perhaps, nothing more than such dancing, with
the help of a variety of foreign costumes, as was also an element in
the early masks, it developed into a farcical dialogue, with a musical
and Terpsichorean accompaniment, for which popular tunes, such as
_Fading_, were utilized.[1751] This transformation was perhaps due to
the initiative of Tarlton, to whom several jigs are attributed.[1752]
But he was followed by Kempe and others, and in the last decade of
the sixteenth century the jig may be inferred from the Stationers’
Register to have become almost a literary type.[1753] Nashe in 1596
threatens Gabriel Harvey with an interlude, and ‘a Jigge at the latter
end in English Hexameters of _O neighbour Gabriell, and his wooing of
Kate Cotton_’.[1754] In 1597 Henslowe bought two jigs from two young
men for the Admiral’s at a cost of 6_s._ 8_d._[1755] In 1598 ‘Kemps
Jigge’ was being sung in the streets.[1756] The Middlesex justices
made a special order against the lewd jigs, songs, and dances at the
Fortune in 1612.[1757] Unfortunately few jigs have survived except from
a late date or in German adaptations.[1758] Two or three, however,
appear amongst collections of ballads to which they are cognate in
metrical form, notably one ascribed to ‘M^r Attowel’, whom we should,
I think, identify with the sixteenth-century George, rather than the
seventeenth-century Hugh, of that name.[1759] Another, _Rowland’s
Godson_, seems to be the surviving member of a well-known cycle.[1760]
Nor was the jig the only form of afterpiece which had its savour in
an Elizabethan play-house. Tarlton again, and after Tarlton Wilson,
won reputation in the handling of ‘themes’, which appear to have been
improvisations in verse, strung together on some motive supplied by
a member of the audience.[1761] It has been suggested that complete
plays were also sometimes given by the method of improvised dialogue
on a concerted plot which was followed in the Italian _commedie
dell’ arte_.[1762] This must remain very doubtful. The Italian
practice and the stock characters, pantaloon, zany, and harlequin, of
the _commedie dell’ arte_ were certainly known in England; but we
have the clear evidence of _The Case is Altered_ that by 1597 at
any rate they had not been naturalized.[1763] If improvisation went
beyond the gagging of a clown, it was probably only in some exceptional
experiment or _tour de force_.[1764] As exceptional also we may
regard Vennar’s spectacular _Englands Joy_ of 1602 and the wager
plays, in which actors or even amateurs challenged each other to
compete in rendering some ‘part’ of traditional repute.[1765] One would
like to know more about the play, apparently a monologue, ‘set out al
by one virgin’, at the Theatre in 1583.[1766]
Many of the characteristics of the public theatres naturally repeated
themselves at the Blackfriars, the Whitefriars, and Paul’s. The
distinctive features of these, as already indicated, arose from the
structure of the buildings, from the higher prices charged, and in the
beginning at least from the employment of singing boys as actors. Some
assimilation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ methods was bound to follow
upon the acquisition of the Blackfriars by men actors in 1609, but the
period during which this was the principal house of the King’s company
lies outside the scope of this survey.
The exact location of Paul’s is obscure, but we know that its
auditorium was round and its stage small.[1767] Whitefriars and both
the earlier and the later Blackfriars were in rooms which had formed
part of mediaeval conventual buildings, rectangular, roofed, and more
analogous to courtly halls than to popular rings. No room at Farrant’s
disposal would have given him a stage of a greater width than 27 ft.
Burbadge’s theatre was 66 ft. from north to south, and 46 ft. from
east to west. It was on the second story of his purchase that he could
have best constructed it. The stage, which stood on a paved floor, was
probably towards the south end, and as the whole space available was
something like 100 ft. long by 52 wide, we may guess that partitions
had been put up to screen off a tiring-house behind it and a passage
by which the tiring-house could be reached.[1768] The entrance would
be at the north end, where a great flight of stairs led up from a
yard large enough for coaches to turn in. There were galleries, but
not necessarily three distinct tiers of galleries, as in the public
theatres, for which, indeed, there would hardly have been height
enough.[1769] And there was a ‘middle region’ in which the spectators
sat, instead of standing as they did in the public ‘yards’.[1770] This,
which was a feature also of the later private houses, came to be known
as the ‘pit’, but as the derivation of this term is from ‘cockpit’,
it may not be of earlier origin than the building of the Cockpit or
Phoenix theatre in Drury Lane about 1617.[1771] A roofed theatre would
not require a specially constructed ‘heavens’, as descents could
be worked through the ceiling from a room above. There is no clear
evidence for a lord’s room at any of the private houses.[1772] But
there were ‘boxes’, at any rate at the Whitefriars.[1773] Evidence
for seats on the stage has already been furnished. There is much to
suggest that the audience was a more select one than that of the public
theatres.[1774] Elizabeth cannot be shown to have ever attended the
Blackfriars, but Anne certainly did.[1775] And the price of the seats,
which ranged from 6_d._ to 2_s._ 6_d._, was of itself sufficient
to keep out persons of the ‘groundling’ or ‘stinkard’ type.[1776]
Performances did not necessarily take place every day, and they could
begin rather later and go on rather longer than those out of doors,
since they were not dependent on daylight.[1777] Windows were certainly
used, for we hear of them being clapped down to give the illusion of
night scenes.[1778] But candles and torches supplied an artificial
lighting.[1779] As both the Paul’s boys and those of the Chapel
were primarily choristers, it is not surprising that music played a
considerable part in the entertainment provided. Musical interludes
were given between the acts, and Gerschow records a preliminary concert
of an hour in length before the play began at the Blackfriars in
1602.[1780] Sometimes also a boy came forward and danced between the
acts.[1781] At Paul’s there was at the back of the stage a ‘musick
tree’, which apparently rose out of a ‘canopie’ and bore a ‘musick
house’ on either side of it.[1782]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] E. J. L. Scott, _Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey_ (Camden Soc.), 67.
[2] Cf. App. D, No. lxxviii.
[3] Cf. ch. xi.
[4] G. Dugdale, _Time Triumphant_ (1604), sig. B, ‘Nay, see the beauty
of our all kinde soveraigne! not onely to the indifferent of worth,
and the worthy of honor, did he freely deale about thiese causes, but
to the meane gave grace, as taking to him the late Lord Chamberlaines
servants, now the Kings acters; the Queene taking to her the Earle
of Worsters servants, that are now her acters; and the Prince, their
sonne, Henry, Prince of Wales full of hope, tooke to him the Earle of
Nottingham his servants, who are now his acters.’
[5] Cf. ch. xvi, introd., and App. C, No. lviii.
[6] Flecknoe (App. I) perhaps exaggerates the share of moral sentiment
in bringing to an end the formal connexion of the choirs with plays
(cf. p. 52).
[7] De la Boderie, in 1608 (cf. vol. i, p. 327), speaks of five
companies in London. These would be the King’s, Queen’s, Prince’s,
Revels, and King’s Revels.
[8] _Archaeologia_, lxii. 1. 216, from statutes collected in the
decanate of Ralph of Baldock (1294–1304), ‘Cantoris officium est ...
pueros introducendos in chorum et ad cantum intitulatos examinare ...
Magistrum Scolae Cantus in ecclesia Sancti Gregorii, salva Decano et
Capitulo ipsius collacione, preficere’; Dugdale, _St. Paul’s_ (1818),
347, from fifteenth-or early sixteenth-century manuscript of statutes,
‘Magistrum Scholae Cantus constituit Cantor. Ad eum pertinet eos qui
canere nequeunt instruere, pueros diligenter docere, eis non solum
magistrum Cantus, sed etiam bonorum morum esse.’
[9] _Archaeologia_, lxii. 1. 215, from statutes collected in decanate
of Ralph de Diceto (1181–99), ‘Cotidie pascat ... duos pueros
elemosinarios ... et secum ad Ecclesiam media nocte panem et cervisiam
pro iunioribus chorum frequentantibus defer[r]i faciat, et quolibet
quarterio semel vel bis post matutinas iunioribus gentaculum unum in
domo sua faciat’. A thirteenth-century statute required the _pueri
de elemosinaria_ to sit humbly upon the ground when feeding in the
house of a canon. Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 355, for Diceto’s statute
about the Boy Bishop, with its mention of the return of the boys ‘ad
Elemosinariam’, and the reforming statute of 1263.
[10] _Archaeologia_, lxii. 1. 220.
[11] Ibid. 217, 220 (_c._ 1263; _c._ 1310) ‘Elemosinarius ...
habeat insuper continuo secum octo pueros ad Ecclesiae ministerium
ydoneos, quos per seipsum vel alium magistrum in spectantibus ad
ministerium ecclesiae et litteratura ac bonis moribus diligenter faciat
informari.... Quociens vero dicti pueri ad scolas vel spaciatum ire
debent....’; Dugdale, 349 [Elemosinarius] ‘octo pueros bonae indolis et
honestae parentelae habeat; quos alat et educat in morum disciplina;
videat etiam instruantur in cantu et literatura, ut in omnibus apti ad
ministerium Dei in Choro esse possent’.
[12] There was a bequest to the almoner to maintain boys, apparently at
the University, after they had changed their voices, as early as 1315
(_Archaeologia_, lxii. 1. 219–22).
[13] Hennessy, 61; W. S. Simpson, _Charter and Statutes of the College
of Minor Canons in St. Paul’s Cathedral_ (_Archaeologia_, xliii. 165;
cf. _Trans. of London and Midd. Arch. Soc._ (1st series), iv. 231).
The statutes of _c._ 1521 note a dispensation of that year for Thomas
Hikeman ‘peticanon and amner’ and for ‘all and euery peticanon which
shalbe Amneur hear-after’ to bring a stranger to meals.
[14] Stowe, _Survey_, ii. 19; cf. the Hollar engraving in Baker, 95.
[15] Stowe, i. 327; _Archaeologia_, xliii. 171. By c. 14 of the
statutes the college gates were shut at meals.
[16] Leach, _Journal of Education_ (1909), 506, cites the _Registrum
Elemosinariae_ (ed. M. Hacket from _Harl. MS._ 1080), ‘If the almoner
does not keep a clerk to teach the choristers grammar, the schoolmaster
of St. Paul’s claims 5_s._ a year for teaching them, though he ought
to demand nothing for them, because he keeps the school for them, as
the Treasurer of St. Paul’s once alleged before the Dean and Chapter
is to be found in ancient deeds’. Mr. Leach adds, ‘It is to be feared
the Treasurer invented or misrepresented the ancient deed’. William de
Tolleshunt, almoner, appears from his will of 1329 in the same register
to have taught his boys himself (_Archaeologia_, lxii. 1. 220), ‘Item
lego pueris ecclesiae quos ego educavi senioribus in Elemosinaria
existentibus cuilibet xij^d et iunioribus cuilibet vj^d’. He also left
his grammar books ‘et omnes quaternos sermonum de Festo Sanctorum
Innocencium, quos tempore meo solebant Episcopi Puerorum pronuntiare,
ad remanendum in Elemosinaria praedicta imperpetuum, ad usum fructum
puerorum in eadem degencium’. His logic and physic books are to be lent
out ‘pueris aptis ad scolatizandum, cum ab elemosinaria recesserint’.
[17] _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 356. The sermon written by Erasmus is
headed _Concio ... pronunciata ... in nova schola Iohannis Coleti_,
but Erasmus may not have known the exact procedure at St. Paul’s. The
earlier sermon printed by Wynkyn de Worde has ‘whyche often times I
radde whan I was Querester, in the Marteloge of Poulis’.
[18] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 380.
[19] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 196, 215, 219. Wallace, i. 88, points out
that the performers of the _Menaechmi_ before Wolsey in 1527 were not
the Paul’s boys, but the Cardinal’s gentlemen.
[20] _Chamber Accounts_ (1545).
[21] Nichols, _Eliz._ i. xxxv, ‘By Sebastian, scolemaister of Powles, a
boke of ditties, written’.
[22] _Household Accounts of Princess Elizabeth, 1551–2_ (_Camden Misc._
ii), 37, ‘Paid in rewarde to the Kinges Maiesties drommer and phipher,
the xiij^{th} of Februarye, xx^s; M^r. Heywoodde, xxx^s; and to
Sebastian, towardes the charge of the children with the carriage of the
plaiers garmentes iiij^{li}, xix^s. In thole as by warraunte appereth,
vij^{li}, ix^s’.
[23] F. Madden, _Expenses of Lady Mary_, 62 (March 1538), ‘Item geuen
to Heywood playeng an enterlude with his children bifore my lades
grace, xl^s’.
[24] Wallace, i. 77, goes against the evidence when he asserts that
Heywood wrote for the Chapel. Why he asserts that Heywood ‘had grown
up in the Chapel under Cornish’, to whom, by the way, he wantonly
transfers the authorship of _The Four P. P._, _The Pardoner and the
Frere_, and _Johan Johan_, I do not know. There is nothing to show that
Heywood was a Chapel boy, and the absence of his name from the Chapel
list of 1509 (cf. p. 27), when he would have been about twelve, may be
taken as disposing of the notion. He is first discoverable at Court in
December 1514, for which month he received wages at the rate of viij^d
a day in some undefined capacity (_Chamber Account_ in _Addl. MS._
21481, f. 178), which was shared by one John Mason, who was a Yeoman
of the Crown by March 1516 (Brewer, ii. 475). By 1520 Heywood himself
was a Yeoman of the Crown (Brewer, iii. 1. 499), and during 1519–21 the
_Chamber Accounts_ show him as also a ‘singer’ at £5 a quarter. Later
he became player of the virginals, and has 50_s._ a quarter as such
in the _Accounts_ for 1529–31, 1538–41, and 1547–9. He was Sewer of
the Chamber at the funeral of Edward in 1553. It occurs to me as just
possible that Heywood’s ‘children’ may have been neither the Chapel nor
the Paul’s boys, but the boys taken up by Philip Van Wilder for the
musical establishment of the Household; cf. p. 31. But I think it is
more likely that Heywood wrote for the Paul’s boys throughout, as he
almost certainly did in 1559. There is another hint of his connexion
with them in the fact that at the coronation of Mary in 1553 he sat
under a vine against the grammar school and made speeches (Holinshed
(1808), iv. 6). A. W. Reed (1917, _3 Library_, viii. 247) adds facts,
and thinks the Yeoman was distinct.
[25] _Addl. MS._ 15233; cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 454. Thomas Tusser,
in the _Autobiography_ printed with the 1573 edition of his _Points of
Good Husbandry_, is the authority for placing Redford at Paul’s:
But mark the chance, myself to ’vance,
By friendship’s lot, to Paul’s I got.
So found I grace a certain space
Still to remain
With Redford there, the like nowhere
For cunning such and virtue much
By whom some part of musicke art
So did I gain.
From Paul’s Tusser passed to Eton, before he matriculated at Cambridge
in 1543. In other manuscripts compositions by Redford and Thomas
Mulliner are associated, and one of these, _Addl. MS._ 30513, is
inscribed ‘Sum liber Thomae Mullineri, Johanne Heywoode teste’.
Stafford Smith, on what authority is unknown, stated (cf. _D. N. B._)
that Mulliner was Master of St. Paul’s School. If so, he may have
come between Redford and Westcott. On 3 March 1564 he was admitted as
organist in Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Fowler, _Hist. of C.C.C._
426).
[26] Feuillerat, _E. and M._ 145; Wallace, i. 84. The mention of ‘xij
cottes for the boyes in Heywoodes play’ does not justify the assumption
that the players were the Chapel. The ten established boys of the St.
Paul’s choir could be supplemented by probationers or the grammar
school.
[27] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 196.
[28] Machyn, 206. ‘M^r Philip’ was organist of Paul’s in 1557 (Nichols,
_Illustrations_, iii). Fleay, 57, guesses that the play was _Nice
Wanton_, which is not likely, if Heywood had a hand in it.
[29] Hennessy, 61.
[30] Flood cites a Vatican record of 1561 from _Catholic Record Soc._
i. 21, ‘Sebastianus, qui organa pulsabat apud D. Paulum Londini,
cum vellet eiici, tamen tum ita charus Elizabethae fuit, ut nihil
schismatice agens locum suum in ea ecclesia retineat’; also Grindal’s
letter of 1563 to Dudley in Strype, _Grindal_ (ed. 1821), 113.
Hillebrand adds from _Libri Vicarii Generalis_ (_Huick 1561–74_),
iii, f. 77, that in July 1563 Westcott failed to appear before the
Consistory Court and was excommunicated as ‘contumacem’, and from St.
Paul’s records (_A. Box 77_, 2059) that on 8 Nov. 1564 he gave a bond
to conform or resign by the following Easter. Gee, 230, gives a list
of deprived clergy from N. Sanders, _De Visibili Monarchia_ (1571),
688, which includes among _Magistri Musices_ ‘Sebastianus in Cathedrali
ecclesia Londinensi’.
[31] Fleay, 15, 60, has some inaccuracies in these dates, and
conjectures that among the early Paul’s plays were a revival of Udall’s
_Ralph Roister Doister_ and Ulpian Fulwell’s _Like Will to Like_, and
that these contained satire of Richard Edwards and the Chapel.
[32] Dasent, ix. 56.
[33] Hillebrand from _Repertory_, xix, f. 18, ‘For asmoche as this
Court ys enformed that one Sebastian that wyll not communicate with the
Church of England kepe the playes and resorte of the people to great
gaine and peryll of the coruptinge of the Chyldren wyth papistrie And
therefore master Morten ys appoynted to goe to the Deane of Powles and
to gyve him notyce of that dysorder, and to praye him to gyve suche
remeadye therein, within his iurysdyccion, as he shall see meete, for
Christian Relygion and good order’.
[34] Dasent, x. 127. _Cath. Record Soc._ i. 70 gives the date of
Westcott’s committal ‘for papistry’ from _S. P. D. Eliz._ cxl. 40, as
21 Dec. 1577, and that of release as 19 March 1578. According to _S. P.
D. Eliz._ cxviii. 73, Westcott was Master of the Children in 1577 and
valued at £100 in goods.
[35] Gosson, _P. C._ 188.
[36] Flood (_Mus. Ant._ iv. 187) gives an abstract of his will, dated
on 3 April and proved on 14 April 1582. He describes himself as
almoner of St. Paul’s, dwelling in the almonry and born at Chimley in
Devonshire; appoints Henry Evans overseer and Justinian Kyd executor,
and leaves legacies to relatives (apparently he had no children or
wife), to members of the Redford family, to ‘Gyles Clothier’, to
the ten choristers, to ‘sometimes children of the said almenerey’,
by name Bromeham, Richard Huse, Robert Knight, Nicholas Carleton,
Baylye, Nasion, and Gregory Bowringe, to ‘Shepard that keepeth the
door at playes’, and to Pole ‘the keper of the gate’. Wallace, i. 171,
cites the will from _P. C. C._ 14 and 31, Tirwhite, giving the date
of confirmation as 3 July 1582. One name may be added to Westcott’s
list of boys from a Court Minute of Christ’s Hospital on 5 March
1580 (_Musical Times_, 1 Jan. 1907), ‘M^r. Sebastian, of Paulls, is
appointed to have Hallawaie the younger out of this House to be one of
the singing children of the Cathedral Church of Paulls in this Citie’.
[37] Gosson (1582) speaks of the plays as ‘at Paules’; and Rawlidge
(1628) mentions a house ‘nigh Pauls’ as one of those pulled down by
the City, apparently in 1596 (cf. ch. xvi). The Paul’s boys, however,
can hardly have been playing for some years before that date. Howes
(1629) definitely specifies the singing school (cf. ch. xvi). On
the other hand, Flecknoe, a late authority and in a passage dealing
(inaccurately) with Jacobean rather than Elizabethan conditions,
assigns the plays to ‘behinde the Convocation-house in Paul’s’ (App.
I). This is expanded by Malone (_Variorum_, iii. 46) into ‘in S^t.
Paul’s school-room, behind the Convocation-house’, and Baker, 45,
suggests that they used a small yard or cloister before the doors
of the Convocation House and shut off by a high wall from the main
churchyard (cf. Hollar’s prints in Baker, 95, 115). But I doubt if
Flecknoe had anything in mind except St. Gregory’s, which stood just
west of the Convocation House. The hall of the College of Minor Canons
is perhaps also a possibility; but neither this nor the church is
likely to have afforded a circular auditorium (cf. ch. xviii). Can they
have used the Convocation House itself?
[38] McDonnell, 27, argues for the participation of the grammar school
in the plays. Obviously the phrase ‘children of Paul’s’, ordinarily
used of the playing-boys, proves nothing one way or the other. That the
plays were mainly an affair of the choir is a fair inference from the
fact that they were presented at Court by the song-school masters. But
there is no reason to doubt that the mediaeval give and take between
the two schools continued through the sixteenth century. Hunter,
_Chorus Vatum_, v. 542, quotes a manuscript life of Sir Thomas Offley,
‘This Thomas Offley became a good grammarian under Mr. [William]
Lillie and understood the Latin tongue perfectly; and because he had
a sweet voice he was put to learn prick-song among the choristers of
St. Paul’s, for that learned Mr. Lillie knew full well that knowledge
in music was a help and a furtherance to all arts’. On the other hand,
Dean Nowell (Churton, _Life of A. Nowell_, 190) instructed Thomas Giles
in 1584 to teach the choristers catechism, writing, and music, and then
to ‘suffer them to resort to Paul’s School that they may learn the
principles of Grammar’. Some seventeenth-century performances by the
grammar school, after the regular Paul’s plays ceased, are upon record.
[39] Cf. _infra_ (Chapel, Oxford’s); ch. xvii (Blackfriars).
[40] R. Churton, _Life of Alexander Nowell_, 190, from _Reg. Nowell_,
ii, f. 189; Nichols, _Eliz._ ii. 432; Collier, i. 258; Hazlitt, 33;
Wallace, ii. 67, from original warrant under the Signet in _Sloane MS._
2035^b, f. 73:
‘By the Queene,
Elizabeth.
‘Whereas we haue authorysed our servaunte Thomas Gyles M^r. of the
children of the Cathedrall Churche of S^t. Pauls within our Cittie of
London to take vpp suche apte and meete Children as are most fitt to be
instructed and framed in the arte and science of musicke and singinge
as may be had and founde out within anie place of this our Realme of
England or Wales, to be by his education and bringinge vp made meete
and hable to serve vs in that behalf when our pleasure is to call for
them. Wee therefore by the tenour of these presentes will and require
you that ye permitt and suffer from henceforthe our saide servaunte
Thomas Gyles and his deputie or deputies and every of them to take vp
in anye Cathedral or Collegiate Churche or Churches and in everye other
place or places of this our Realme of England and Wales, suche Childe
and Children as he or they or anye of them shall finde and like of and
the same Childe and Children by vertue hereof for the vse and service
afouresaide, with them or anye of them to bringe awaye, withoute anye
your lettes contradiccions staye or interruptions to the contrarie
Charginge and commaundinge you and everie of you to be aydinge helpinge
and assisting vnto the aboue named Thomas Gyles and his deputie and
deputies in and aboute the due execucion of the premisses for the more
spedie effectuall & bettar accomplisshing thereof from tyme to tyme
as you and everie of you doe tendar our will and pleasure and will
aunswere for doinge the contrarye at your perilles. Youen vnder our
Signet at our Manour of Grenewich the 26^{th} Day of Aprill in the
27^{th} yere of our reign.
To all and singuler Deanes, Provostes, Maisters and Wardens of
Collegies and all Ecclesiasticall persons and mynisters and to all
other our officers mynisters and subiectes to whome in this case it
shall apperteyne and to everye of them greetinge.’
No other commission for the Paul’s choir is extant, but their rights
are reserved in the commission for Windsor (q.v.) of 8 March 1560.
[41] Harvey, _Advertisement for Pap-Hatchet_ (_Works_, ii. 212). Lyly
was still Oxford’s man but writing for Paul’s, _c._ Aug. 1585 (_M. L.
R._ xv. 82.).
[42] Cf. ch. ix and App. C, No. xl, especially _Pappe with an Hatchet_
(Oct. 1589).
[43] _Have With You to Saffron Walden_ (_Works_, iii. 46). I do not
think the reference to a twelvemonth’s silence, due to envy, in the
prologue to Nashe’s _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_ (_c._ Oct. 1592)
affords any justification for ascribing that play to the Paul’s boys.
Murray, i. 330; ii. 284, records a payment at Gloucester in 1590–1
‘to the children of powles’. I am sceptical about this, especially as
I observe in the next year a payment for a breakfast to the Queen’s
men ‘at M^r. Powelles’. Murray’s only other municipal record for the
company, at Hedon, Yorkshire, on some quite unknown date, ‘Item, payd
to the ---- pawll plaiers’ (ii. 286), is even less satisfactory. But if
the boys did travel on their suppression, they may well have gone to
Croydon.
[44] Rimbault, 4. Giles must have resigned, if he was the Thomas Giles
who, on 18 April 1606, was paid 100 marks a year as instructor to Henry
in music (Devon, 35). He was instructor to Charles in 1613 (Reyher, 78)
and figures in masks (cf. ch. vi). Fellowes, 184, 190, has two songs
set by Pearce, one from _Blurt Master Constable_.
[45] _1 A. and M._ IV. i. 30, ‘Enter Andrugio, Lucio, Cole, and
Norwood’. Bullen thinks that the two boys played the parts named, but
the action requires at least one page, who sings.
[46] Wallace, ii. 153, says he has evidence of playing at Paul’s in
1598, but he does not give it. It is perhaps rash to assume that Pearce
originated the revival, as there is no proof that he came to Paul’s
before 1600.
[47] Cf. ch. xi.
[48] V. i. 102.
[49] Collier, iii. 181. On the light thrown on the Paul’s stage by
these plays, cf. ch. xxi. It is conceivable that some of them may have
been originally written before 1590 (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Percy).
[50] Cf. ch. xxiv.
[51] Cf. _infra_ (Queen’s Revels).
[52] Nichols, _James_, iv. 1073, from _The King of Denmark’s Welcome_
(1606), ‘the Youthes of Paules, commonlye cald the Children of Paules,
plaide before the two Kings, a playe called _Abuses_: containing both a
Comedie and a Tragedie, at which the Kinges seemed to take delight and
be much pleased’. The play is lost. Fleay, ii. 80, has no justification
for identifying it with _The Insatiate Countess_. _Wily Beguiled_ (ch.
xxiv) might be a Paul’s play.
[53] C. W. Wallace, _Nebraska University Studies_ (1910), x. 355; cf.
_infra_ (Queen’s Revels), ch. xvii (Blackfriars).
[54] _Constitutio Domus Regis_ (_c._ 1135) in Hearne, _Liber Niger
Scaccarii_, i. 342, ‘Capellani, custos capellae et reliquiarum.
Corridium duorum hominum, et quatuor servientes capellae unusquisque
duplicem cibum, et duo summarii capellae unusquisque 1^d in die et
1^d ad ferrandum in mense’; cf. _R. O. Ld. Steward’s Misc._ 298
(1279); Tout, 278, 311 (1318); _H. O._ 3, 10 (1344–8); _Life Records
of Chaucer_ (Chaucer Soc.), iv. 171 (1369); Nicolas, _P. C._ vi. 223
(1454).
[55] _H. O._ 10. In 1318 he was ‘chief chapellain’.
[56] J. H. Wylie, _Henry IV_, iv. 208, from _Household Accounts_, ‘John
Bugby our chaplain retained 3 years ago pur apprendre et enformer
les enfants de notre chapelle en la science de gramaire at 100/-p.
a. nothing yet paid, £15 due’. A grant to John Tilbery, a boy of the
King’s chapel, was made on 12 Nov. 1405 (_C. P. R._, _Hen. IV_, iii.
96).
[57] Wallace, i. 12, 21, from _P. R._ The commission of 1420 was to
John Pyamour ‘uni clericorum Capellae hospicii nostri’; another of 1440
was to John Croucher, Dean. When regular Masters were instituted, the
commissions seem to have been made direct to them.
[58] Wallace, i. 14, quotes laudatory accounts of the singing of the
chapel by two members of the suite of Leo von Ro[vz]mital, a Bohemian
who visited the English Court in 1466.
[59] _H. O._ 49. There is nothing about plays, but ‘Memorandum,
that the King hathe a songe before hym in his hall or chambre uppon
All-hallowen day at the latter graces, by some of these clerkes and
children of chappel in remembrance of Christmasse; and soe of men and
children in Christmasse thorowoute. But after the songe on All-hallowen
day is done, the Steward and Thesaurere of houshold shall be warned
where it liketh the King to kepe his Christmasse’.
[60] At the coronation of James in 1603 (Rimbault, 127) there were
a Sub-dean, 7 Ministers, the Master of the Children, an Organist,
22 ordinary Gentlemen, and a Clerk of the Check; also a Sergeant, 2
Yeomen, and a Groom of the Vestry. This agrees with the Elizabethan fee
lists, which give the total number of Gentlemen as 32. The coronation
list does not name Epistolers; but it is clear from the notices of
appointments in Rimbault, 1, that a Gospeller and Epistoler were
appointed, as next in succession to the Gentlemen’s places, although it
does not appear that they were necessarily ex-Children. There were also
Extraordinary Gentlemen (Rimbault, 31).
[61] Cf. ch. ii.
[62] _H. O._ 160. The hall and chapel are to be kept ‘at all times
when his Highnesse shall lye in his castle of Windsor, his mannors of
Bewlye, Richmond, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Eltham, or Woodstock’; but
‘in rideing journeys and progresses’, only the Master of the Children,
six men, six children, and some officers of the vestry are to attend.
In the seventeenth century ‘all removinge weekes’ were amongst the
‘auntient tymes of lyberty and playinge weekes’ (Rimbault, 73). But the
practice may have varied. Stopes, 252, gives a Stable warrant of 1554
for a wagon ‘for the necessarie conveying and cariage of the Children
of our Chapel and their man from place to place, at such seasons, as
they by our commandment shall remove to serve where wee shall appointe
them’.
[63] A chapel of St. Stephen existed in 1205. It was rebuilt and made
a free collegiate chapel in 1348, and dissolved in 1547, and the
building assigned as a chamber for the House of Commons (J. T. Smith,
_Antiquities of Westminster_, 72; _V. H. London_, i. 566). It may have
originated as a domestic chapel, but seems to be quite distinct from
the Household Chapel by the sixteenth century. Thus its St. Nicholas
Bishop had an old annual reward of £1 from the Exchequer (Devon,
_Issues of Exchequer_, 222; R. Henry, _Hist. of Great Britain_^3, xii.
459; Brewer, iv. 869), while the Household boys got their reward of
£6 12_s._ 4_d._ from the Treasurer of the Chamber. Wallace, i. 22,
notes that the Masters of the Children ‘all lived’ at Greenwich, which
suggests that this was the Tudor head-quarters of the Chapel.
[64] Wallace, i. 22, 23, 26, 61, from patents of Masters; _Fee List_
(_passim_).
[65] R. Henry, _Hist. of Great Britain_^3, xii. 457; Brewer, ii. 873;
iii. 364; iv. 868; _Fee Lists_ (_passim_); Wallace, i. 21, 23, 24, 26,
33, 61, from patents and _Exchequer of Receipt, Auditor’s Privy Seal
Books_. The Elizabethan fee for a Gentleman was only £30 (cf. p. 41, n.
3), but it was increased again to £40 by James in 1604 (Rimbault, 61).
[66] _H. O._ 169, 212. The _Chamber Accounts_ for Aug. 1520 include
a special payment to the Master for the diets of the boys when they
accompanied the King to Calais, at 2_d._ a day each.
[67] The allowance was 6_d._ in 1575 (Collier, i. 175; Nagel, 29; from
_Harl. MS._ 589, f. 220), but Hunnis’s petition of 1583 (cf. p. 37)
implies that this rate was customary before Elizabeth’s reign.
[68] _Chamber Accounts_ (_passim_); cf. p. 24, n. 6. For the feast of
the Boy Bishop on St. Nicholas Day, cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 336, 359,
369.
[69] Stopes, 15, ‘40 surplices for the gentlemen and 16 for the
children of the Chapel’ (Wardrobe warrant of 7 Oct. 1533); ‘for 10
children of the Kings Chapell, for gownes of Tawney Chamblett lined
with black satin of Bruges, and Milan bonnettes for the said children,
as in the same boke of apparel is declared xliii^{li}. iii^s. iiii^d.
For two children of the Kings Chapell, for 2 gownes of Black Chamblett,
lined with black satin of Bruges 2 cotes of yellow saten of Bruges
lined with Coton, and 2 Millan bonnettes, and for making and lining
of said gownes and cotes as in the said boke at large it duly apperes
x^{li} xviii^s ... Item for twenty gentlemen of the King’s chapel, for
20 gownes of Black Damask for the said gentlemen, cxxvii^{li}. x^s.’
(_Queen’s Remembrancia, Wardrobe Expenses_, _Hen. VIII_, 52/10 A).
[70] _Chamber Accounts_ (_passim_). From 1510 to 1513 Robert Fairfax
had 2s. a week for the diet of William Alderson and Arthur Lovekyn,
the King’s scholars, and £2 13_s._ 4_d._ for their teaching. In 1513
William Max, late a Child of the Chapel, had 40_s._ In 1514 Cornish was
finding and apparelling Robert Philip and another Child of the Chapel,
for £1 13_s._ 4_d._ a quarter, and in 1517 finding and teaching William
Saunders, late Child of the Chapel, for the same sum, with 2_d._ a week
for board ‘when the king keepeth no household’. In 1529–30 Crane had
3_d._ a day wages and 20_d._ a week board wages for Robert Pery, and
in 1530 also for William Pery. In 1531 Robert Pery was paid direct.
Cunningham, xx, gives a late seventeenth-century example of a similar
arrangement. In 1546 a royal letter was written for the appointment
of William Bretten, late a Chapel boy, to be singing-man at Lichfield
(Brewer, xxi. 1. 142). Some of the above names appear in a list of
Chapel Children, William Colman, William Maxe, William Alderson, Henry
Meryell, John Williams, John Graunger, Arthur Lovekyn, Henry Andrewe,
Nicholas Ivy, Edward Cooke, and James Curteys, receiving liveries
at the funeral of Henry VII in 1509 (Lafontaine, 3, from _Ld. Ch.
Records_, 550, f. 131). Some amusing correspondence of 1518 relates to
a boy Robin, whom Henry VIII wished to transfer from Wolsey’s chapel
to his own. It was stipulated that Cornish should treat him honestly,
‘otherwise than he doth his own’, and later Cornish wrote praising the
clean singing and descant of the recruit (Brewer, ii. 1246–50).
[71] J. M. Manly in _C. H._ vi. 279; C. Johnson, _John Plummer_ (1921,
_Antiquaries Journal_, i. 52); Wallace, i. 21, from patents and
Exchequer payments. Wallace does not include Melyonek although (ii. 62)
he gives the following commission, already printed by Collier, i. 41,
and Rimbault, vii, from _Harl. MS._ 433, f. 189:
‘Mellenek, Ric. etc. To all and every our subgiettes aswele spirituell
as temporell thise our lettres hering or seeing greeting, We let you
wite that for the confidence & trust that we haue in our trusty and
welbeloued seruant John Melyonek oon of ye gentilmen of our Chapell and
knowing also his expert habilitie and connyng in ye science of Musique
haue licenced him and by thise presentes licence and geue him auctorite
that within all places in this our realme aswele Cathedral churges
coliges chappells houses of relegion and al oyer franchised & exempt
places as elliswhere our colege roial at Wyndesor reserued & except may
take and sease for vs and in our name al suche singing men & childre
being expart in the said science of Musique as he can finde and think
sufficient and able to do vs seruice. Wherfor &c. Yeuen &c. at Nottingham
the xvj^{th} day of September A^o secundo [1484].’
Banaster did not die until 1487, but I think Melyonek must have
replaced him, perhaps without a patent, under Richard III.]
[72] Cf. _D. N. B._ Songs by Banaster and Newark are in _Addl. MS._
5465 (Chambers and Sidgwick, _Early English Lyrics_, 299).
[73] Collier, i. 46; cf. Wallace, i. 12. I am not sure that Collier
meant 1485.
[74] Reyher, 504, from _Harl. MS._ 69, f. 34^v. Wallace, i. 13; ii. 69,
citing the same MS., misdates ‘1490’, and says that eight children took
part. Four singing children who had appeared in another disguising a
day or two before were probably also from the Chapel.
[75] _Chamber Accounts_ in Wallace, i. 28, 38; Bernard Andrew, _Annales
Hen. VII_ (Gairdner, _Memorials of Hen. VII_), 104; Halle, i. 25;
Professor Wallace seems to think that the annual Christmas rewards
paid by the Treasurer of the Chamber to the Gentlemen, which went on
to the end of the reign, were for plays. But these were of £13 6_s._
8_d._, whereas the reward for a play was £6 13_s._ 4_d._ They were
paid on Twelfth Night, and are sometimes said to be for ‘payne taking’
during Christmas. In 1510 they had an extra £6 13_s._ 4_d._ for praying
for the Queen’s good deliverance. The ‘payne taking’ was no doubt as
singers. An order of Henry VII’s time (_H. O._ 121) for the wassail
on Twelfth Night has, ‘Item, the chappell to stand on the one side
of the hall, and when the steward cometh in at the hall doore with
the wassell, he must crie three tymes, Wassell, wassell, wassell; and
then the chappell to answere with a good songe’. The Gentlemen also
had 40_s._ annually from the Treasurer of the Chamber ‘to drink with
their bucks’ given them for a summer feast, which was still held in the
seventeenth century (Rimbault, 122).
[76] Stopes, _Shakespeare’s Environment_, 238; Feuillerat, _Ed. and
Mary_, 149, 289. Professor Feuillerat says that one of the documents
relating to the play refers to the ‘Children of the Chapel’, and doubts
whether there is a real distinction between the ‘Gentlemen’ and the
‘Children’ as actors.
[77] Feuillerat, _Ed. and Mary_, 3, 255. The conjecture is supported by
the fact that garments belonging to the Revels were in possession of
two Gentlemen of the Chapel in April 1547 (ibid., 12, 13).
[78] _Chamber Accounts_ in Wallace, i. 38, 65, 70; Brewer, xiv. 2.
284; Kempe, 69; Collier, i. 78; Feuillerat, _Ed. and Mary_, 266, 288.
The ‘iiij Children y^t played afore y^e king’ on 14 Jan. 1508 were not
necessarily of the Chapel.
[79] Cf. ch. viii and _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 192, 215.
[80] Wallace, i. 33. No patent is cited, but the privy seal for the
payment to Cornish of the Exchequer annuity was dated 1 April 1510, and
he was shortly afterwards paid for the Christmas and Easter quarters.
Newark had died in Nov. 1509. It is therefore a little puzzling to find
in a list of Exchequer fees payable during the year ended Michaelmas
1508 (R. Henry, _Hist. of Great Britain_^3, xii. 457) the item
‘Willelmo Cornysshe magistro puerorum capellae regis pro excubitione
eorundem puerorum 26^{li}. 13^s. 4^d.’ Probably the list was prepared
retrospectively in Henry VIII’s reign (cf. the analogous list in
Brewer, ii. 873), and the name rather than the date is an error.
[81] The data are: (a) _Exchequer Payments_ (Wallace, i. 34), Mich.
1493, ‘Willelmo Cornysshe de Rege’, 100_s._; (b) _T. C. Accounts_,
‘to one Cornysshe for a prophecy in rewarde’, 13_s._ 4_d._ (12 Nov.
1493); ‘to Cornishe of the Kings Chapell’, 26_s._ 8_d._ (1 Sept. 1496);
‘to Cornysshe for 3 pagents’ (26 Oct. 1501); ‘m^r kyte Cornisshe and
other of the Chapell y^t played affore ye king at Richemounte’, £6
13_s._ 4_d._ (25 Dec. 1508); (c) _Household Book of Q. Elizabeth_,
25 Dec. 1502, ‘to Cornisshe for setting of a Carrall vpon Cristmas
Day in reward’, 13_s._ 4_d._; (d) John Cornysh in list of Gent. of
Chapel 23 Feb. 1504, and William Cornysh in similar lists _c._ 1509
and 22 Feb. 1511 (Lafontaine, 2, from _Ld. Ch. Records_); (e) Songs
by ‘W. Cornishe, jun.’ in _Addl. MS._ 5465, by ‘John Cornish’ in
_Addl. MS._ 5665, by ‘W. Cornish’ in _Addl. MS._ 31922 (_Early English
Lyrics_, 299); (f) _A Treatise betweene Trouthe and Enformacon_, by
‘William Cornysshe otherwise called Nyssewhete Chapelman with ...
Henry the VII^{th} his raigne the xix^{th} yere the moneth of July’
[1504], doubtless the satirical ballad on Empson referred to by Stowe,
_Annales_, 816 (_B. M. Royal MS._ 18, D. 11). I think they yield an
older William and a John Cornish, of whom one, probably John, arranged
the three pageants at Arthur’s wedding, and a William ‘jun.’ who
must have joined the Chapel in 1503 or 1504 and became Master of the
Children. The older William may be identical with the Westminster
(q.v.) choir-master of 1479–80. A Christopher or ‘Kit’ Cornish,
referred to by Stopes, 17, and elsewhere, had no existence. This is a
ghost-name, due to the juxtaposition of ‘kyte’, i.e. Sir John Kite,
afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, and ‘Cornisshe’ in the 1508 record
above.
[82] Cf. ch. v and _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 400.
[83] The _T. C. Accounts_ show a reward of £200 to Cornish on 30 Nov.
1516, of which the occasion is not specified, and a payment of £18
2_s._ 11½_d._ for ‘ij pagentes’ on 6 July 1517. With these possible
exceptions, no expenditure on the disguisings or the interludes which
formed part of them as distinct from the independent interludes by
the Children, for which Cornish received £6 13_s._ 4_d._ each, seems
to have passed through these accounts. Any remuneration received by
Cornish or his fellows or children for their personal services probably
passed through the _Revels Accounts_.
[84] Wallace, i. 16, 50. He light-heartedly accuses my friend Mr.
Pollard, me, and others of perpetuating an old mis-ascription on the
strength of Bale, ‘generally without consulting the _Scriptores_’, in
the first edition of which (1548) Bale says that Rastell ‘reliquit’,
and in the second that he ‘edidit’ _The Four Elements_. This Professor
Wallace regards as revision by Bale of an incorrect assertion that
Rastell was the author into an assertion that he was the publisher.
But Bale elsewhere uses ‘edidit’ to indicate authorship, as Professor
Wallace might have learnt from the notice of Heywood which he quotes on
p. 80. As to _The Four P. P._ there are three early editions by three
different publishers, and they all assign it to Heywood.
[85] Wallace, i. 61, 69; ii. 63, from patents and Exchequer payments.
The Elizabethan patent is in Rymer, xv. 517.
[86] Rimbault, viii, quoting only the words ‘in anie churches or
chappells within England to take to the King’s use, such and so many
singing children and choristers, as he or his deputy should think
good’. Stopes, 12, gives _Lansd. MS._ 171, and _Stowe MS._ 371, f.
31^v, as references, but the commission is not in either of them.
[87] Matthew Welder appears as a lute and viol at Court in 1516 and
1517. Peter Welder was appointed in 1519 and is traceable to 1559, as
a lute, viol, or flute. Henry van Wilder was a ‘musician’, 1553–8.
Philip Welder or van Wilder himself is first noted as a ‘minstrel’ in
1526. Later he was a lute up to 1554. In 1547 he was also ‘of the Privy
Chamber’ and keeper of the King’s musical instruments (Nagel, 6, 13,
15, 16, 18, 22, 24, 27; Lafontaine, 8, 9, 12; Brewer, i, cxi). He died
24 Jan. 1554, leaving a son, Henry, probably the one noted above (Fry,
_London Inquisitions_, i. 117). The _Chamber Accounts_ for 1538–41 show
an allowance to him of £70 ‘for six singing children’ (Stopes, 12).
Several references to ‘Philippe and his fellows yong mynstrels’ and
to ‘the children that be in the keeping of Philip and Edmund Harmon’
appear in Green Cloth documents from 30 June 1538 to 1544 (_H. O._ 166,
172, 191, 208; _Genealogist_, xxx. 23). Edmund Harmon was one of the
royal Barbers. Finally, livery lists of 1547 show nine singing men and
children under ‘M^r. Phelips’ (Lafontaine, 7). An earlier company of
‘the King’s young minstrels’ than this of 1538–50 seems to have been
lodged at court _c._ 1526 (Brewer, iv. 1. 865), and there were ‘troyes
autres nos ioesnes ministralx’ as far back as 1369 (_Life Records of
Chaucer_, iv. 174). Elizabethan fee lists continue to make provision
for ‘six children for singing’, but there is no indication that the
posts were filled up.
[88] Wallace, ii. 63, from docquet in _B. M. Royal MS._ 18, C. xxiv, f.
232. By an obvious error, the name is written by the clerk as ‘Gowre’.
[89] Wallace, i. 77.
[90] Cf. p. 12.
[91] It is possible that the Treasurer of the Chamber did not pay all
the rewards for plays during the earlier years of the reign; but the
suggestion of Wallace, i. 108, that, if we had the _Books of Queen’s
Payments_, more information might be available, seems to show a failure
to realize the identity of the Tudor _Books of King’s Payments_ with
the _T. of C. Accounts_. There might, however, be rewards in a book
subsidiary to the _Privy Purse Accounts_. I do not think that much can
be made of the recital of ‘playes’ as well as ‘maskes’ in the preamble
of the _Revels Accounts_ for 1558–9, during which the T. of C. paid no
rewards, since this may be merely ‘common form’.
[92] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 34; cf. Appendix A. Naturally no ‘reward’
would be paid in such circumstances. Fleay, 16, 32, 60, conjectures
that the play was _Misogonus_.
[93] Strype, _Survey of London_ (App. i. 92), gives the date from
Bower’s tombstone at Greenwich, and as his death is recited in
Edwardes’ patent (Stopes, _Hunnis_, 146) and his will of 18 June 1561
was proved on 25 Aug. 1561 (Wallace, i. 106), it is clear that the
entry of Rimbault, 1, ‘1563. Rich. Bower died, M^r of the children, A^o
5^{to}’, must be an error.
[94] Wallace, _Blackfriars_, 65, from Privy Seal in P. R. O. The patent
dated 10 Jan. 1562 is on _Patent Rolls, 4 Eliz._ p. 6, m. 14 _dorso_.
[95] This is recorded in a Revels document, and seems a clear case of a
play given by the Chapel and not paid for by the T. of C.
[96] Cf. ch. vii, p. 223.
[97] Rimbault, 2. On Hunnis, cf. ch. xxiii.
[98] Stopes, 295, translates the patent of appointment from _Auditors
Patent Books_, ix, f. 144^v; the Privy Seal is in _Privy Seals_,
Series iii, 1175. Stopes also prints the patent and Wallace, ii. 66,
the Signet Bill (misdescribing it as a Privy Seal) for the commission;
it is enrolled on _Patent Rolls, 9 Eliz._ p. 10, m. 16 _dorso_. It is
varied from the model of 1562 by the inclusion of power to the Master
to take up lodging for the children in transit, and to fix ‘reasonable
prises’ for carriage and necessaries at his discretion.
[99] Hazlitt-Warton, iv. 217, citing f. xii of the pamphlet. I know
of no copy. One is catalogued among Bishop Tanner’s books in the
Bodleian, but Stopes, 226, ‘went to Oxford on purpose to see it, but
found that it had utterly vanished’. Macray, _Annals of the Bodleian_,
211, thinks that it may have been destroyed when Tanner’s books fell
into a river during their transit from Norwich to Oxford in Dec. 1731.
The pamphlet is also cited for an example of the use of the term ‘spur
money’ (Bumpus, 29, with date ‘1598’). F. T. Hibgame (_10 N. Q._ i.
458) describes a collection of pamphlets seen by him in New York under
the general title of _The Sad Decay of Discipline in our Schools_
(1830), which included _Some Account of the Stripping and Whipping of
the Children of the Chapel_, containing a ‘realistic account of the
treatment of the boys at one of the royal chapels’, of which he thought
the author might be George Colman.
[100] Cf. ch. vii.
[101] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 244, ‘Holly, Ivye, firr poles & Mosse for the
Rock ... Hornes iij, Collers iij, Leashes iij & dogghookes iij with
Bawdrickes for the hornes in Hvnnyes playe’.
[102] _Variorum_, iii. 439.
[103] Cf. ch. xxiii (Gascoigne).
[104] W. Creizenach (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, liv. 73) points out that the
source must have been Livy, xxvi. 50.
[105] Cf. _infra_ (Windsor).
[106] Rimbault, 2.
[107] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars). The bare fact of this early use of
the Blackfriars has, of course, long been known from the reference to
comedies at the Blackfriars in Gosson, _P. C._ 188 (App. C, No. xxx),
and the prologues to Lyly’s _Campaspe_ and _Sapho and Phao_. Fleay,
36, 39, 40, guessed that the early Blackfriars performances were at an
inn, and by the Paul’s boys, and that the euphuistic prose plays at the
Bel Savage mentioned by Gosson, _S. A._ 39 (App. C, No. xxii), in 1579
were early Chapel versions of Lyly’s above-named plays. But there is no
evidence that either of the boy companies ever used an inn.
[108] Cf. p. 38.
[109] Cf. ch. vii, p. 223.
[110] Rimbault, 3. The Blackfriars correspondence shows that the date
1581 given in Rimbault, 56, is wrong. A warrant of 1582 for a lease in
reversion to his widow Anne is in _Hatfield MSS._ ii. 539.
[111] App. C, No. xlv.
[112] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars).
[113] Wallace, i. 156; Stopes, _Hunnis_, 252; from _S. P. D. Eliz._
clxiii. 88.
[114] Cf. p. 50, which suggests that the boys occasionally ate in hall
at festival times.
[115] The _Chamber Accounts_ show no renewal of the payments.
[116] Cf. ch. xxiii (Hunnis).
[117] Cf. ch. xiii (Oxford’s), ch. xxiii (Lyly).
[118] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 470. _Sapho and Phao_ might, however, have
been the unnamed Chapel play of Shrove Tuesday (27 Feb.) 1582.
[119] Perhaps Lyly was still associated with him. F. S. Boas (_M. L.
R._ vi. 92) records payments in connexion with a visit by Leicester to
Christ Church, Oxford, to Mr. Lyly and his man for the loan of apparel,
as well as one of £5 to one Tipslowe ‘for the Revels’ (January 1585).
[120] Cf. _supra_ (Paul’s).
[121] I have no means of dating ‘The order of the show to be done at
the Turret, entring into the parke at Grenewich, the musick being
within the turrett’, which is preserved in _Egerton MS._ 2877, f. 182,
as ‘acted before Q. Elizabeth’. A speech of forty lines beginning ‘He
Jove himselfe, that guides the golden spheare’, was delivered by ‘one
of the biggest children of her Ma^{tes} Chappell’ as Goodwill, and was
followed by a song beginning ‘Ye Helicon muses’.
[122] Rimbault, 4. A note of Anthony Wood’s (cf. _D. N. B._) suggests
that Bull joined the Chapel about 1572.
[123] Ashmole, _Antiquities of Berks_ (ed. 1723), iii. 172, from
tombstone at St. George’s, Windsor. The inscription gives him 49 years
as Master at Windsor, in error for 39. A second stone described as also
his by Ashmole is clearly his wife’s.
[124] Wallace, ii. 59, prints both from the Privy Seals of 2 and 3 July
in the R. O. The appointment is enrolled in _Patent Rolls, 39 Eliz._ p.
12, and the commission in _Patent Rolls, 39 Eliz._ p. 9, m. 7 _dorso_.
The appointment is for life, the commission not so specified, and
therefore during pleasure only.
[125] The operative words of the appointment are ‘pro nobis heredibus
et successoribus nostris damus et concedimus dilecto seruienti nostro
Nathanieli Giles officium Magistri puerorum Capellae nostrae Regiae
... habendum ... durante vita sua naturali Damus etiam ... praefato
Nathanieli Giles vada siue feoda quadraginta librarum sterling
percipienda annuatim ... pro eruditione duodecem puerorum eiusdem
Capellae nostrae ac pro eorum conveniente exhibitione vestiturae et
lectuarii ... vnacum omnibus et omnimodis aliis vadis feodis proficubus
iurisdiccionibus aucthoritate priuilegiis commoditatibus regardis et
aduantagiis quibuscunque eodem officio quoquo modo debitis ... ac ...
praedicto Nathanieli Giles locum siue officium illud vnius generosorum
nostrorum dictae Capellae nostrae Regiae ... vnacum feodo seu annuali
redditu triginta librarum ...’
[126] _E. v. K._ 211; _K. v. P._ 224, 230, 233 (misdated 44 Eliz.
for 42 Eliz.), 239. These are only short recitals in the lawsuits.
Apparently the fragmentary descriptions of the theatre in Wallace, ii.
39, 40, 41, 43, 49, are from a fuller Latin text of the terms of the
lease, possibly recited in a common-law suit, which he has not printed
in full.
[127] _K. v. P._ 230, 234.
[128] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 317.
[129] Fleay, 124, 153; Wallace, ii. 56; cf. _M. L. R._ iv. 156. An
initial date for the enterprise in 1600 fits in exactly with the seven
years during which there had been plays at the house where _K. B. P._
was produced and the ten years’ training of Keysar’s company up to 1610
(cf. p. 57).
[130] Cf. ch. xi.
[131] Fleay, 127. Burn, 152, notes from _Bodl. Tanner MS._ 300 that
among the misdemeanours punished in the Star Chamber was ‘Taking up a
gentleman’s son to be a stage player’.
[132] Wallace, ii. 84, gives the endorsed date omitted by Greenstreet
and Fleay, as ‘Marti decimo quinto Decembris Anno xliiij Elizabeth
Regine’; the date set down for trial is indicated as ‘p Octab Hillar’.
This agrees with the time indication of the offence in the complaint
itself as ‘about one yere last past, and since your maiesties last free
and generall pardon’. The pardon referred to must be that of 1597–8
(_39 Eliz._ c. 28; cf. _R. O. Statutes_, iv. 952). There was another
passed by the Parliament of 1601 (_43 Eliz._ c. 19; cf. _Statutes_,
iv. 1010) for all offences prior to 7 Aug. 1601, but presumably this
was not yet law when the complaint was drawn. The Parliament sat to 19
December. Clifton, however, was only just in time.
[133] _K. v. P._ 248. The date is recited as ‘in or about the three
and ffortieth yeare’ of Elizabeth, i.e. 1600–1, which is not exact.
The reference can hardly be to any other than the Clifton affair. No
Chancery documents in the case, other than the complaint, are known.
It may be presumed that censure fell on Giles and Robinson, as well
as Evans, but they were not concerned in _K. v. P._ Evans, of course,
was technically acting as deputy to Giles under his commission, and
Wallace, ii. 71, is not justified in citing the case as evidence that
‘These powers to Giles were supplemented by official concessions to
Henry Evans that enabled him to rent the Blackfriars theatre and train
the Queen’s Children of the Chapel there, with remunerative privileges’.
[134] _K. v. P._ 224, 230, 236, 242, 244, 248, 250.
[135] _E. v. K._ 211, 216; _K. v. P._ 237, 240, 245. These are
recitals. Wallace, ii. 91, says that he has found two copies of the
original bond, but the text he prints adds nothing to _K. v. P._ 240.
Clearly he is wrong in describing it as ‘containing the Articles
of Agreement’. That was a much more detailed document, which Evans
unfortunately thought so ‘long and tedious’ that he did not insert
it at large in his Answer in _K. v. P._ It was doubtless analogous
to the King’s Revels Articles of 1608 (cf. _infra_). It provided for
the rights of the partners to the use of rooms (_E. v. K._ 211) and
presumably for the division of profits (_K. v. P._ 237).
[136] _K. v. P._ 244. Wallace, ii. 102, adds the actual terms of the
bond. He takes Evans’s explanation to mean that hitherto Evans had
maintained the boys and the plays out of official funds supplied
through Kirkham as Yeoman of the Revels, but that now Evans’s name was
to be kept out of the business, and disbursements made by his partners,
who were to pay him 8_s._ a week as a kind of steward. I cannot
suppose that Kirkham had been the channel of any official subvention,
and, on the whole, think it probable that the second ‘compl^t’ in the
extract from the pleading is an error for ‘def^t’. This leaves it not
wholly clear why Evans should allege his relief from great weekly
disbursements as a reason for receiving 8_s._ a week; but if we had
the Articles of Agreement, the point would probably be clear. Possibly
Evans had in the past made the equivalent of a weekly sum of 8_s._ out
of board-wages passed on to him by Giles.
[137] Wallace, ii. 88.
[138] _E. v. K._ 213, 217, 220.
[139] G. von Bülow and W. Powell in _R. H. S. Trans._ vi. 26; Wallace,
ii. 105; with translations.
[140] Wallace, ii. 126, summarizes his theory; cf. my review in _M. L.
R._ v. 224.
[141] Wallace, ii. 99.
[142] _E. v. K._ 217; _K. v. P._ 224, 227, 229, 231, 236, 248.
[143] Wallace, ii. 73.
[144] Wallace, ii. 75, shows that the Blackfriars repertory would
require twenty or twenty-five actors.
[145] Gawdy, 117.
[146] Wallace, ii. 95. Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain on
29 Dec. 1601 (_S. P. D. Eliz._ cclxxxii. 48), ‘The Q: dined this day
priuatly at my L^d Chamberlains; I came euen now from the blackfriers
where I saw her at the play with all her candidae auditrices’; cf. _M.
L. R._ ii. 12.
[147] _K. v. P._ 235.
[148] Wallace, ii. 89, says that Evans paid £11 0_s._ 2_d._ for repairs
on 8 Dec. 1603.
[149] _M. S. C._ i. 267, from _Patent Roll, 1 Jac. I_, pt. 8. Collier,
i. 340, and Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 40, print the signet bill, the former
dating it 30 Jan. and the latter 31 Jan., and misdescribe it as a privy
seal. Collier, _N. F._ 48, printed a forged letter from Daniel to Sir
T. Egerton (cf. Ingleby, 244, 247) intended to suggest that Drayton,
and perhaps also Shakespeare, had coveted his post.
[150] Wallace, ii. 80, mentions a case of the employment of a boy at
the Blackfriars during James’s reign under a contract with his mother.
[151] _M. S. C._ i. 359. On 7 Oct. 1605 the Wardrobe provided holland
for shirts for the 12 children and ‘for James Cutler, a Chappell boy
gone off’ (Lafontaine, 46, from _L. C._ 804).
[152] Rimbault, 60; Stowe, _Annales_ (ed. Howes), 1037. An order of
17 July 1604 (_H. O._ 301) continued the allowance of an increase of
meat at festival times which the children had presumably enjoyed under
Elizabeth.
[153] Middleton, _Father Hubbard’s Tales_ (_Works_, viii. 64, 77). A
reference in the same book to an ant as ‘this small actor in less than
decimo sexto’ recalls the jest in the Induction to the _Malcontent_ at
the boys who played _Jeronimo_ ‘in decimo sexto’.
[154] Cf. ch. xi.
[155] _K. v. B._ 340.
[156] Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. plays named.
[157] Kirkham and Kendall were still associated in Aug. 1605, when
apparel and properties were obtained from them for the plays at
James’s visit to Oxford (_M. S. C._ i. 247). There was a performance
at the Blackfriars as late as 16 June 1605 (Wallace, ii. 125), a date
connected with a dispute in settlement of which Kirkham’s bond of £50
to Evans was exchanged for a new one to Hawkins (_K. v. P._ 244).
[158] Cf. _M. L. R._ iv. 159. The t.p. of _Sophonisba_ only specifies
performance ‘at the Blackfriars’; those of _The Fleir_ and _The Isle of
Gulls_ ‘by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars’. Probably the
‘Children of the Revels’ of the t.p. of Day’s _Law Tricks_ (1608) is
also the Blackfriars company. No theatre is named, but the play is too
early for the King’s Revels, who, moreover, do not seem to be described
on other t.ps. as ‘Children of the Revels’ pure and simple. I take it
that these t.p. descriptions follow the designations of the companies
in use when the plays were last on the stage before publication, rather
than those in use at the times of first production.
[159] Cf. ch. x.
[160] Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Day.
[161] Keysar was certainly associated with Kendall by the Christmas of
1606–7, when they supplied apparel and properties for the Westminster
plays; cf. Murray, ii. 169.
[162] _K. v. P._ 249.
[163] _M. S. C._ i. 362, from _P. R. O., Patent Roll, 4 James I_, p.
18, _dorso_. Collier, i. 446, long ago noted the existence of a similar
clause in a Caroline commission to Giles of 1626. It was probably the
choristers who assisted in a quasi-dramatic performance on 16 July
1607, when James dined with the Merchant Taylors, and Giles received
the freedom of the company in reward; cf. ch. iv.
[164] Cf. App. I.
[165] _E. v. K._ 221; _K. v. P._ 246. ‘The Children of the Revells’
who appeared at Leicester on 21 Aug. 1608 (Kelly, 248) might have been
these boys, but might also have been the King’s Revels, if the King’s
Revels were still in existence under that name, which is very doubtful.
[166] Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Chapman.
[167] _S. P. D. Jac. I_, xxxi. 73. The mine was no doubt the silver
mine discovered at Hilderston near Linlithgow in 1607, and worked as a
royal enterprise with little success; cf. R. W. Cochran-Patrick, _Early
Records relating to Mining in Scotland_ (1878), xxxvii. 116.
[168] Cf. ch. xxiii.
[169] _K. v. B._ 342.
[170] _E. v. K._ 222; _K. v. P._ 225, 231, 235, 246.
[171] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars).
[172] _K. v. P._ 225, 249.
[173] _E. v. K._ 221; _K. v. P._ 245. In the earlier suit Evans says
that the royal prohibition was ‘vpon some misdemeanors committed in or
about the plaies there, and specially vpon the defendants [Kirkham’s]
acts and doings thereabout’. Unless Kirkham was more directly concerned
in the management during 1608 than appears probable, Evans must be
reflecting upon the whole series of misdemeanours since 1604.
[174] On 9 May John Browne, ‘one of the playe boyes’, was buried at St.
Anne’s.
[175] _K. v. B._ 347, gives the date of surrender in 1610 as ‘about the
tenth of August last past’. Probably a year’s sub-tenancy under the
King’s men explains the discrepancy with the ‘about August in the sixt
year of his Majesties raigne’ of _K. v. P._ 235, and the confirmatory
date of the King’s men’s leases.
[176] Cf. ch. _supra_ (Paul’s). _K. v. B._ 355 tells us that Rosseter
was in partnership with Keysar.
[177] _M. S. C._ i. 271, from _P. R., 7 Jac. I_, p. 13. Ingleby, 254,
gave the material part in discussing a forged draft by Collier (_N. F._
41), in which the names of the patentees are given as ‘Robert Daiborne,
William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Field and Edward Kirkham’. A genuine
note of the patent is in Sir Thomas Egerton’s note-book (_N. F._ 40).
Ingleby adds that the signet office records (cf. Phillimore, 103) show
that the warrant was obtained in Dec. 1609 by the influence of Monson.
He was Anne’s household Chancellor and to him Rosseter and Campion
dedicated their _Book of Airs_ (1601) and Campion his _Third Book of
Airs_ (1617).
[178] _K. v. B._ 343.
[179] _K. v. B._ 343, 350.
[180] Evans, Mrs. Evans, Field, Underwood, Ostler, Baxstead, Rosseter,
Marston, and Mrs. Hawkins were to be examined for the King’s men.
[181] _E. v. K._ 213. I presume that some of these are amongst the
‘twelve additional suits’ which Wallace, ii. 36, claims to have found.
[182] _E. v. K._ 218. In _K. v. P._ 225, he put the total annual
profits during 1608–12 at £160.
[183] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 317; cf. _Hist. Hist._ 416 (App. I),
‘Some of the chapel boys, when they grew men, became actors at the
Blackfriars; such were Nathan Field and John Underwood’.
[184] The _Chamber Accounts_ record no payment to the company (cf. App.
B, introd.).
[185] Cf. ch. xvi.
[186] Murray, i. 361.
[187] E. Ashmole, _Institution of the Garter_ (1672), 127; R. R.
Tighe and J. E. Davis, _Annals of Windsor_, i. 426, 477; _Report of
Cathedrals Commission_ (1854), App. 467; _V. H. Berks_, ii. 106; _H. M.
C. Various MSS._ vii. 10.
[188] Tighe-Davis, ii. 45, from Stowe’s account ‘of the Castell of
Wyndsore’ (_Harl. MS._ 367, f. 13).
[189] Nichols, i. 81, and Collier, i. 170, print a copy in _Ashm. MS._
1113, f. 252, from the Elizabethan commission preserved at Windsor, as
follows:
‘Elizabeth R.
Whereas our castle of Windsor hath of old been well furnished with
singing men and children, We, willing it should not be of less
reputation in our days, but rather augmented and increased, declare,
that no singing men or boys be taken out of the said chapel by virtue
of any commission, not even for our household chapel: and we give power
to the bearer of this to take any singing men and boys from any chapel,
our own household and St. Paul’s only excepted. Given at Westminster,
this 8^{th} of March in the second year of our reign.’
A further copy from _Ashm. MS._ 1113 is in _Addl. MS._ 4847, f. 117.
Copies or notes of the three earlier commissions are in this MS. and in
_Ashm. MS._ 1124. In _Ashm. MS._ 1132, f. 169, is a letter of 18 April
1599 from the Chapter to Sir R. Cecil defending their conduct in taking
a singing man from Westminster.
[190] Gee, 230, in a list of deprived clergy from N. Sanders, _De
Visibili Monarchia_ (1571), 688, ‘_Magistri Musices_ ... Prestonus in
oppido Vindelisoriensi’. Can this Preston be the playwright (cf. ch.
xxiii)?
[191] Rimbault, 1; Stopes, _Shakespeare’s Environment_, 243.
[192] _Ashm. MS._ 1132, f. 165^a.
[193] Rimbault, 2.
[194] _M. L. R._ (1906), ii. 6.
[195] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars).
[196] Cf. App. B.
[197] Rimbault, 3; _H. M. C., Hatfield MSS._ ii. 539.
[198] Rimbault, 182; _Musical Antiquary_, i. 30; _10 N. Q._ v. 341.
A Christ Church, Oxford, MS., dated 1581, assigns to Farrant (cf.
ch. xxiii) a possibly dramatic lament of Panthea for the death of
Abradates, beginning ‘Ah, ah, alas ye salt sea Gods’. This is assigned
to Robert Parsons by _Addl. MSS._ 17786–91, which assign to Farrant a
song which may come from a play in which Altages is a character. The
writer in the _Musical Antiquary_ thinks that a lament for Guichardo
(not from either of the known Gismund texts) in the _Ch. Ch. MS._ is
much in Farrant’s style.
[199] Ashmole, _Antiquities of Berks_ (ed. 1723), iii. 172; cf. p. 41.
[200] _Ashm. MS._ 1125, f. 41^v.
[201] Cf. ch. xiii (Chamberlain’s).
[202] Presumably, however, the ‘Gerry’ buried out of the Whitefriars
play-house (q.v.) on 29 Sept. 1607 was of the company.
[203] Phillimore, 140; cf. App. A.
[204] _S. P. D. Jac. I_, lxxxi. 12.
[205] _M. S. C._ i. 279, from _P. R. 13 Jac. I_, pt. 20.
[206] _Variorum_, iii. 426; Collier, i. 394; Hazlitt,_ E. D. S._ 49;
from _S. P. D. Jac. I_, xcvii. 140.
[207] Collier, i. 396, not, as he says, from the _P. C. Register_, but
from _S. P. D. Jac. I_, xcvii. 140.
[208] Clode, ii. 269; Nicholl, _Ironmongers_, 84; cf. ch. iv.
[209] Warton, iii. 313; Stowe, _Survey_, ed. Strype, v. 231.
[210] E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ (1903), i. 220, from _S. P. D.
Eliz._ xxxvi. 22; Murray, ii. 168.
[211] _Observer._ Other payments in this or another year were for ‘a
haddocke occupied in the plaie’, ‘a thondre barrell’, ‘drawing the
tytle of the comedee’.
[212] E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ (1896), i. 95; (1903) ii. 220;
Murray, ii. 168; _Observer_.
[213] Heywood-Wright, 632; Hazlitt-Warton, iii. 308.
[214] Collins, 215 (1566), ‘M^r Scholemaster towards his charges about
the playes laste Christmas, 20/-’; Maxwell-Lyte,^4 154 (1566–7) ‘To
M^r Scholemaster for his charge setting furthe ij playes 19^o Martii,
iii^l, xiij^s, viij^d’, (1568–9) ‘For ij dossen of links at iij^d the
linke for the childrens showes at Christmass, vj^s’, (1572–3) ‘For vj
poundes of candles at the playes in the Halle, ix^d’.
[215] J. W. Hales in _Englische Studien_, xviii. 408 (cf. _Mediaeval
Stage_, ii. 452), made the date of 1553–4 seem plausible, but his
conjecture that the play was written for the Westminster boys
is disposed of by A. F. Leach, who gives Udall’s appointment to
Westminster from the Chapter Act Book as 16 Dec. 1555 (_Encycl. Brit._
s.v. Udall). It might be a Court play of 1553–4, but the parody of the
_Requiem_ would have been an indiscretion on Udall’s part at that date.
[216] G. C. Moore Smith (_M. L. R._ viii. 368) has an ingenious
identification of him with the Wrenock of Spenser’s _Shepheards
Kalendar_, xii. 41.
[217] Clode, _Hist. of Merchant Taylors Company_, i. 235, from Master’s
_Accounts_. Before they opened their own school the Company had plays
by the Westminster boys (q.v.).
[218] Clode, i. 234.
[219] The subject may have been Perseus and Andromeda, as the Revels
prepared a picture of Andromeda this year. If so, it was probably the
same play as that of 23 Feb. 1574.
[220] Whitelocke, _Liber Famelicus_ (Camden Soc.), 12.
[221] Clode, i. 264, 280, 390.
[222] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 186, 256.
[223] The documents in W. Campbell, _Materials for a History of the
Reign of Henry VII_, are full for the period 1485–90. There is nothing
of King’s players, but certain ‘stuffures’ paid for by a warrant of 25
Nov. 1485 (Campbell, i. 178) included goods delivered to John English,
apparently a royal tailor or valet, ‘servant unto my said sovereign’.
[224] Collier, i. 44, from a book of Exchequer payments, beginning
Michaelmas 1493, in the Chapter-house (probably _Misc. Books of the
Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer_, 131), ‘xvij Die Maij
[1494] John Englissh, Edwardo Maye, Rico Gibbeson, & John Hammond,
Lusoribus Regis, alias, in lingua Anglicana, _les_ pleyars of the
kyngs enterluds, de feodis suis V mrc. ꝓ Ann: le home, per lre Regis
de privato Sigillo dormant de termino Michaelis alt: pte rec: denar:
separatim ꝓ manus proprias, x mrc.’. The payment was continued
half-yearly. Collier adds that Mr. Ouvry owned an original receipt
signed by May and English for the salaries of the same four men. It is
now _Egerton MS._ 2623 (3), f. 1, and appears to be a slip cut from
some Exchequer record. F. Devon, _Issues of the Exchequer_, 516, gives
similar payments for Michaelmas 1494 and Michaelmas 1503; it is in
the latter that the names of William Rutter and John Scott appear. An
Exchequer declaration of 1505–6 in _Lansd. MS._ 156, f. 135, has ‘To
Richard Gibson, and other the kings plaiers, for their annuity for one
yere, £13 6_s._ 8_d._’. Henry, _History of Britain_, xii. 456, gives
from an Exchequer annuity list of 1507–8, ‘Ricardo Gybson et aliis
lusoribus dom. reg. £13 6_s._ 8_d._’.
[225] Collier, i. 49, quotes: (a) _Account_ of Robert Fowler (1501–2),
‘Oct. 26 [1501], Itm to John Englishe for his pagent, £6 13_s._ 4_d._
... Jan. 1 [1502] Itm, to the Kinges players, over 40^s paid by Thomas
Trollop, 20^s’; (b) _Household Book of Henry VII_ (1492–1505, more
correctly from _Addl. MS._ 7099 in Bentley, _Excerpta Historica_, 85),
‘Jan. 6 [1494] To the Kings Pleyers for a rewarde, £2 13_s._ 4_d._ ...
Jan. 7 [1502] To John Englishe the Pleyer, 10_s._’; (c) _The Kings Boke
of Payments_ (1506–9, apparently _Misc. Books of the Treasury of the
Receipt of the Exchequer_, 214), ‘Jan. 7 [1509] To the kings players in
rewarde, £2’. Both (b) and (c) are _Chamber Accounts_.
[226] Leland, _Collectanea_ (ed. Hearne), iv. 265.
[227] _Lansd. MS._ 171, cited by Collier, i. 72, is in fact an
Elizabethan document, but a list of fees and annuities (1516) in
Brewer, ii. 874 has, amongst those granted by Henry VII, ‘John
Englisshe and other players £13 6_s._ 8_d._’, and amongst those
recently granted, ‘John Englisshe and other players, in addition to the
old annuity, £13 6_s._ 8_d._’.
[228] Collier, i. 97, 115, gives an Exchequer payment of 1525–6, ‘Rico
Hole et Georgio Mayler, et aliis lusoribus Dom. Regis, de foedis suis
inter se ad x marcos per ann. sibi debit: pro festo Michaelis, anno
xvij Regis nunc Henrici VIII recept. denar. per manus proprias, per
litt. curr. 66_s._ 8_d._’, and was informed by Mr. Devon of a similar
payment of £3 6_s._ 8_d._ in 1530, in which John Roll, Richard Hole,
and Thomas Sudbury are named. A household list of _c._ 1526 (Brewer,
iv. 869) gives as on yearly wages ‘Ric. Hole and other players, £6
13_s._ 4_d._’. One later than March 1544 (Collier, i. 133) gives 8
players at £3 6_s._ 8_d._ each.
[229] _Chamber Accounts_ (Brewer, v. 303; xiii. 2. 524; xiv. 2. 303;
xvi. 178, 698; xvii. 474; xx. 2. 515; Nicolas, xxviii; Collier, i. 79,
96, 113, 116, 117; _Trevelyan Papers_, i. 149, 157, 170, 177, 195, 203)
give John English (1521–31) at half-yearly ‘fee’ or ‘wages’ of £3 6_s._
8_d._, John Slye or Slee (1539–40) at £1 13_s._ 4_d._ half-yearly,
and Richard Parrowe or Parlowe (1540–5, appointed Christmas 1538),
George Birch (1538–45), Robert Hinstock (1538–45), and George Maylour
(1538–40), at 16_s._ 8_d._ or 11_s._ 1_d._ quarterly.
[230] _Chamber Accounts_ (Brewer, ii. 1441; iii. 1533, &c.; Nicolas,
xxviii; Collier, i. 76, 116). The reward for 1509–10 was £2 13_s._
4_d._; during 1510–13, £3 6_s._ 8_d._; during 1513–21, £3 6_s._ 8_d._
to the ‘players’ and ‘£4’ to the ‘olde players’; and during 1529–41, £6
13_s._ 4_d._
[231] Collier, i. 69, from a ‘paper, folded up in the roll [of the
_Revels Account_ for 1513–14] and in a different handwriting’,
‘Inglyshe, and the oothers of the Kynges pleyers, after pleyed an
Interluyt, whiche was wryten by Mayster Midwell, but yt was so long yt
was not lykyd: yt was of the fyndyng of Troth, who was caryed away by
ygnoraunce and ypocresy. The foolys part was the best, but the kyng
departyd before the end to hys chambre.’ According to Collier, the
paper is signed by William Cornish and also contains a description of a
Chapel interlude. But Brewer, who calendars the _Revels Account_ fully,
does not notice it, and according to A. W. Reed in T. L. S. (3 April
1919) it cannot be traced at the R. O.
[232] Cf. ch. iii; _Tudor Revels_, 6.
[233] Brewer, ii. 1493. In 1546–7 they had 5_s._ for the loan of
garments to the Revels (Kempe, 71).
[234] _Grey Friars Chronicle_ (C. S.), 34, ‘Also this same yere John
Scotte, that was one of the kynges playeres, was put in Newgate for
rebukynge of the shreffes, and was there a sennet, and at the last was
ledde betwene two of the offecers from Newgate thorrow London and soe
to Newgat agayne, and then was delyveryd home to hys howse; but he toke
such a thowte that he dyde, for he went in hys shurte’.
[235] John Slye and John Yonge, mercer, had been players to Queen Jane
before her death in 1537, and were concerned about 1538 in a Chancery
suit about a horse hired ‘to beare there playing garmentes’ (Stopes,
_Shakespeare’s Environment_, 235). Perhaps this explains the annuity of
£1 10_s._ 5_d._ (1_d._ a day) which Young drew from the Chamber during
1540–2. But he obtained a patent as King’s player, with an annual fee
of £3 6_s._ 8_d._, on the death of Roo in 1539 (Brewer, xiv. 1. 423),
and an ‘annuity’ of £3 6_s._ 8_d._ on the death of Sudbury in 1546
(Brewer, xxi. 2. 156). Collier, i. 134, cites a description of him in a
fee list amongst the _Fairfax MSS._ as ‘Maker of Interludes, Comedies,
and Playes’.
[236] Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 183.
[237] G. H. Overend in _N. S. S. Trans._ (1877–9), 425.
[238] Collier, i. 93; Madden, _Privy Purse Expenses of the Princess
Mary_, 104, 140; _Rutland MSS._ iv. 270; Brewer, iv. 340.
[239] Cf. Murray, _passim_, and _Mediaeval Stage_, App. E.
[240] _Royal MS._ 7, C. xvi, f. 97 (cited Collier, i. 137). The names
are in a list of servants ‘nuely in ordinary of the Chamber’, and some
illegible names of players are in an accompanying list of ‘Offycers in
ordynary of the Chamber of the late Kynges Majestie now discharged’.
[241] _Lord Chamberlain’s Records_, _Misc._ v. 127, f. 23 (also with
the error ‘E. and P.’ in Sullivan, 249), ‘three broade yerdes of redd
wollen clothe for a liuery coate of suche prices as the yeomen officers
of oure howseholde are accustomed to haue and iij^s and iiij^d vnto
euery of them for the Enbrauderinge of theire saide coates withe the
lettres E and R on the backe and on the breste’.
[242] _Chamber Accounts_ in _Trevelyan Papers_, i. 195–205; ii. 17–31,
and Collier, i. 136, 138, 148.
[243] _S. P. D. Edw. VI_, xiv.
[244] _Stowe MS._ 571, f. 27^v; _Harl. MS._ 240, f. 13.
[245] Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 89, 90, 97, 98, 119; cf. _Mediaeval
Stage_, i. 406, where I think I was in error in taking John Smith as a
name assumed by Will Somers.
[246] _Hist. MSS._ iii. 230, from book of annuities at Penshurst.
[247] Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 31, 39, 57, 86.
[248] Collier, i. 149. The reference to Ferrers’ ‘divine’ and
‘astronomer’ (cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 407) fixes the date.
[249] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 201, from _Lansd. MS._ 824, f. 24.
[250] Fee-list in collection of Soc. of Antiquaries, cited by Collier,
i. 161.
[251] _Chamber Accounts_ in Collier, i. 161; _Declared Accounts (Pipe
Office)_, 541, m. 2^v.
[252] Reading was a London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v). The Chamber
Accounts for the first few years of Elizabeth show an annuity to a
George Birch under a warrant of 7 Jan. 1560.
[253] Eight players of interludes at £3 6_s._ 8_d._ each are in the
fee-lists (cf. vol. i, p. 29), _Stowe MS._ 571, f. 148 (_c._ 1575–80),
_Sloane MS._ 3194, f. 38 (1585), _Stowe MS._ 571, f. 168 (_c._
1587–90), _Lansd. MS._ 171, f. 250 (_c._ 1587–91), _S. P. D. Eliz._
ccxxi, f. 16 (_c._ 1588–93), _H. O._ 256 (_c._ 1598), and with the
error of £3 6_s._ in _Hargreave MS._ 215, f. 21^v (_c._ 1592–5), _Lord
Chamberlain’s Records_, v. 33, f. 19^v (1593), _Stowe MS._ 572, f. 35^v
(_c._ 1592–6), _Harl. MS._ 2078, f. 18^v (_c._ 1592–6). The inaccurate
_Cott. MS. Titus_, B. iii, f. 176 (_c._ 1585–93) gives two ‘Plaiers
on Interludes’ at £3 6_s._ The normal entry recurs in the Jacobean
_Lansd. MS._ 272, f. 27 (1614) and _Stowe MS._ 575, f. 24 (1616), but
a group of the early part of the reign (_Addl. MS._ 35848, f. 19;
_Addl. MS._ 38008, f. 58^v; _Soc. Antiq. MSS._ 74, 75) have ‘Plaiers
on the In lute’ or ‘on in Lutes’, at £3 6_s._ 8_d._ or £3 6_s._, which
looks like an attempt to rationalize the _Cotton MS._ entry. And
_Stowe MS._ 574, f. 16^v, has ‘Players on Lute’ at £3 6_s._ 8_d._,
which some one has corrected by inserting the normal entry. All this
suggests that many copyists of fee-lists in the seventeenth century
confused the post of interlude player with that of a lute player, and
the former was therefore probably obsolete, and its fee no longer paid
to the royal players of the day (cf. ch. x). I cannot agree with E.
Law, _Shakespeare a Groom, of the Chamber_, 26, 64, that the interlude
players survived under James as ‘mummers, who, perhaps, sang in a sort
of recitative at masques and anti-masques’.
[254] _Chamber Declared Accounts_ (_Pipe Office_), 541, _passim_, 542,
m. 3; Collier, i. 236; Cunningham, xxvii. I do not know how long John
Young continued to draw his Exchequer ‘annuity’, but presumably he had
retired on it.
[255] Fleay, 43, says, ‘There was no specific company called the
Queen’s players till 1583; it was a generic title applied to any
company who prepared plays for the Queen’s amusement. In 1561 the
players probably were the Earl of Leicester’s servants.’ I need
hardly say that I do not accept this, which would not explain the
disappearance of the ‘Queen’s’ from provincial records between 1573 and
1583. For another use of the same improvised theory by Mr. Fleay, cf.
App. D, No. lxxv.
[256] Murray, i. 19, adds records from other towns, and A. Clark (10
_N. Q._ xi. 41) for Saffron Walden.
[257] App. D, No. xi.
[258] Nichols, _Eliz._ i. 280, ‘To my L. of Leyester’s men for a
reward, 2_s._ 6_d._’. Fleay, 18, says that the amount is too small to
favour the supposition that these were players. But Elizabeth was at
Saffron Walden at the time, and a present was made to the Master of the
Revels of a podd of oysters costing no more than 3_s._ 6_d._ Probably
Saffron Walden was an economical place, or the payment was only for
some speech.
[259] Murray, i. 41.
[260] Printed in _M. S. C._ i. 348, from _MS._ F. 10 (213) in the
Marquis of Bath’s collection at Longleat; also in _3 N. Q._ xi. 350.
The letter is undated but followed _Procl._ 663, on which cf. ch. viii
and App. D, No. xix.
[261] _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 406; Kempe, 47. The garments provided for
Ferrers by the Revels included fools’ coats for ‘Children, John Smyth,
Ayer apparent ... Seame 2, Parkins 3, Elderton 4’.
[262] App. D, No. xviii.
[263] Cf. ch. ix. The patent is printed from the Patent Roll in _M. S.
C._ i. 262; also from a copy of the entry on the Patent Roll preserved
amongst Rymer’s papers in _Sloane MS._ 4625 by Steevens, _Shakespeare_
(1773), ii. 156, and therefrom in _Variorum_, iii. 47. This text omits
the words ‘oure Citie of London and liberties of the same as also
within’. Collier, i. 203, and Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 25, printed the
Signet Bill, erroneously describing it as the Privy Seal, from the
State Paper Office. This has the omitted words, and Collier correctly
explains the omission in Steevens’s text as due to an inaccurate
copyist, pointing in proof to the words ‘in oure _said_ Citye of
London’. This did not, however, prevent Fleay, 45, from asserting
that in the Patent ‘an alteration had been made from the Privy Seal’,
on the ground that its terms ‘infringed on the powers of the City
authorities’. Such an alteration not merely did not take place, but
would have been a diplomatic impossibility, as the Patent Roll was made
up, not from the Letters Patent, but from the Privy Seals on which
these were based.
[264] Probably they occupied the Theatre, at any rate in summer, until
1583. A letter of Gabriel Harvey’s in the summer of 1579 mentions
‘Lycesters’, the ‘Theater’, and ‘Wylson’, but in no very definite
connexion with each other (cf. p. 4). The Privy Council letter of 23
Dec. 1579, for their toleration at the Blackfriars, printed by Collier,
_New Facts_, 9, is a forgery (cf. ch. xvii).
[265] I should think the ‘Myngs’ of Murray, ii. 214, and Collier,
_Northbrooke_, viii, more likely to be palaeographically accurate than
the ‘Myngo’ of J. Latimer in _9 N. Q._ xi. 444 and his _Sixteenth
Century Bristol_. But a song of ‘Monsieur Mingo’ exists in a setting by
Orlando de Lassus (cf. _E. H. R._ xxxiii. 83), and is quoted in _2 Hen.
IV_, v. iii. 78, and _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_, 968.
[266] Cf. App. D, No. xl.
[267] Cf. ch. xv, s.v. Baylye.
[268] Murray, i. 41, gives additional provincial records for 1576–82.
[269] Stowe, _Annales_, 717, from a description by William Segar.
[270] The show itself was perhaps of Italian origin, for on 17 June
1572 the Earl of Lincoln was entertained at Paris by the Duke of Anjou
(2 Ellis, iii. 12, from _Cott. MS. Vesp._ F. vi, f. 93) with ‘an
Italian comedie, which eandid, vaulting with notable supersaltes and
through hoopes, and last of all the Antiques, of carying of men one
uppon an other which som men call _labores Herculis_’.
[271] J. Bruce from _Harl. MS._ 287, f. 1, in _Who was Will, my Lord of
Leicester’s jesting player?_ (_Sh. Soc. Papers_, i. 88). Bruce thinks
that ‘Will’ might be Johnson, Kempe, or Sly, but not Shakespeare,
whose ‘earliest works bear upon them the stamp of a mind far too
contemplative and refined’ for Sidney to call him ‘knave’ and ‘jesting
player’. I do not subscribe to the reasoning. W. J. Thoms, _Three
Notelets on Shakespeare_, 120, upholds the Shakespeare theory, and
attempts to support it by evidence of military knowledge in the plays.
[272] Wright, _Eliz._ ii. 268, from _Cott. MS. Galba_ C. viii; cf. _M.
L. R._ iv. 88.
[273] Fleay, 82; but cf. Lee, 36, and pp. 124, 272. The thing is
complicated by the influence of Malone’s suggestion (_Variorum_, ii.
166) that Shakespeare might have left Stratford with Leicester’s men
on a visit to the town. This assumes its most fantastic form in the
suggestion of Lee^1, 33, that Shakespeare was already in London, but
‘Shakespeare’s friends may have called the attention of the strolling
players to the homeless youth, rumours of whose search for employment
about the London theatres had doubtless reached Stratford’.
[274] At Exeter they are called the Lord Steward’s, certainly not the
Marquis of Winchester’s, as Murray, ii. 95, suggests, for he was never
Steward of Elizabeth’s household.
[275] _Norfolk Archaeology_, xiii. 11.
[276] J. M. Cowper, in _1 R. Hist. Soc. Trans._ i. 218, records a
performance by ‘my Lord of Leicester’s men’ at Faversham in 1589–90;
but I think this must be an error.
[277] J. D. Walker, _The Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn_, i. 374, gives
the name as ‘Lord Roche’, but this is probably a mistake. Viscount
Roche of Fermoy in Ireland is not likely to have had players in London.
[278] J. de Perott (_Rev. Germ._ Feb. 1914) suggests that _Portio and
Demorantes_ may be the Lamorat and Porcia of the French version (1548)
of _Amadis de Grecia_ (1542), viii. 56.
[279] Murray, i. 307, and A. Clark (_10 N. Q._ xii. 41) add records for
1573–83.
[280] Murray, i. 307, has additional provincial records for 1585–91.
[281] I do not agree with Fleay, _Sh._ 18, 184, that Sussex’s were
satirized in _A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_; cf. _infra_, s.v. Hertford’s.
[282] Dasent, xxiv. 209.
[283] Cf. App. C, No. lvii.
[284] Dasent, viii. 71, dating the warrant on 29 Feb.
[285] _Ancaster MSS._ (_Hist. MSS._) 466.
[286] _Hist. MSS._ ix. 1. 156. The payment is given as to the Earl of
‘Waffyts’ men.
[287] Nichols, _Eliz._ i. 531.
[288] Wright and Halliwell, _Reliquiae Antiquae_, ii. 122, from _Harl.
MS._ 7392, f. 97; cf. _M. L. R._ ii. 5.
[289] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 222.
[290] Cf. ch. viii.
[291] Ellis, i. 3, 32; Cooper, ii. 379; from _S. P. D. Eliz._ cxxxix.
26. The Privy Council letter of 30 Oct. 1575 (_M. S. C._ i. 195)
forbids ‘open shewes’ and ‘assemblies in open places of multitudes of
people’ within five miles of Cambridge.
[292] Murray, i. 348. I add Maldon (1581).
[293] Murray, i. 348. I add Stratford (1583–4). Dr. Boas kindly informs
me that the Oxford City Accounts for 1584–5 have a payment to Oxford’s
‘musytions’.
[294] Cf. ch. xii (Chapel).
[295] The payment was made to Richard Woderam, but he is more likely to
have been an agent of the Corporation than a member of the company.
[296] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 186, 256. The 1469 entry has been since
published by A. Clark in _10 N. Q._ vii. 181, ‘Et solut. lusoribus
domini comitis Essex ludentibus coram burgensibus infra burgum hoc
anno, v_s_.’
[297] _Variorum_, ii. 150. The ‘lord Cartleyes players’ recorded by B.
S. Penley, _The Bath Stage_, 12, in 1580–1, 1582–3, and 1583–4 were
perhaps Lord Berkeley’s. Murray, ii. 27, adds other provincial notices.
[298] This did not prevent Chalmers from giving the date 1581 and being
set right by Malone (_Variorum_, iii. 442). Collier, i. 247, gives
1583, but misdates Tilney’s commission of 1581, and takes it for the
instrument constituting the company.
[299] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 359.
[300] Nicolas, _Hatton_, 271.
[301] Stowe, _Annales_ (1615), 697, (1631), 698.
[302] Greg, _Henslowe_, ii. 79, citing _Addl. MS._ 5750, f. 113.
[303] Cf. ch. x.
[304] Halliwell, _Affray at Norwich in 1583 in which Queen Elizabeth’s
Players were involved_ (1864), and in _Illustrations of the Life of
Shakespeare_, 118.
[305] Murray, i. 20, and A. Clark in _10 N. Q._ xii. 41 (Saffron
Walden) give other provincial records throughout. An Ipswich one for
1581–2 must be misplaced.
[306] Cf. App. D, No. lxxv.
[307] Fleay, 83.
[308] _Variorum_, ii. 166.
[309] _M. S. C._ i. 354. from _P. R. O. Lay Subsidies, Household_,
69/97.
[310] Fleay, 34.
[311] The illustration of Mr. Fleay’s methods of constructing stage
history is delightful. In _The True Tragedie of Richard the Third_,
a Queen’s play, the murderers of the princes in the Tower are Will
Slawter or Sluter, ‘yet the most part calles him blacke Will’ (Hazlitt,
_Sh. L._ v. 95), and Jack Denten or Douton. On this Mr. Fleay (ii.
316) comments, ‘One of the actors in it, Sc. 11, is called Will
Slaughter, “yet the most part calls him Black Will”, _i.e._ the Black
Will of _Arden of Faversham_, q.v., which had no doubt been acted by
the same man. Another actor is called Jack Donton (Dutton) or Denten,
an accommodation of the Dighton of history to the actor’s real name.’
Obviously there is no need to suppose that the characters in _The True
Tragedie_ bore the names of their actors. John Dutton is not very
likely to have taken a part of four speeches, and Will Slawter is
evidently added to the John Dighton of Holinshed, to give Edward V the
‘irony’ of a pun upon ‘slaughter’. As for _Arden of Faversham_, it is
not known to have been a Queen’s play at all, and its ‘Black Will’ is
taken from Holinshed. Having gone so far, I do not know why Mr. Fleay
stopped short of identifying Black Will’s colleague ‘Shakebag’ with
the name of an actor. Of course, Mr. Fleay’s blundering conjectures
must be distinguished from the deliberate fabrications of Collier,
who published in his _New Facts_, 11, from a forged document amongst
the _Bridgewater MSS._, a certificate to the Privy Council under the
date ‘Nov. 1589’, from ‘her Ma^{ts} poore playeres James Burbidge
Richard Burbidge John Laneham Thomas Greene Robert Wilson John Taylor
Anth. Wadeson Thomas Pope George Peele Augustine Phillippes Nicholas
Towley William Shakespeare William Kempe William Johnson Baptiste
Goodale and Robert Armyn being all of them sharers in the blacke Fryers
playehouse’. On this cf. ch. xvii, and Ingleby, 249.
[312] Tarlton, 12, 13, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, ‘while the queenes
players lay in Worcester’, ‘when the queenes players were restrained
in summer, they travelled downe to S. James his fair at Bristow’, ‘in
the country where the queenes plaiers were accepted into a gentlemans
house’, ‘at Salisbury, Tarlton and his fellowes were to play before the
maior and his brethren’, ‘the queenes players travelling into the west
country to play, and lodging in a little village some ten miles from
Bristow’.
[313] Tarlton, 16, ‘one in mockage threw him in this theame, he playing
then at the Curtaine’.
[314] Tarlton, 24, ‘Tarlton then, with his fellowes, playing at the Bel
by ... the Crosse-keyes in Gracious streete’.
[315] Tarlton, 13, ‘at the Bull in Bishops-gate-street, where the
queenes players oftentimes played’. It was here (Tarlton, 24) that
Tarlton and Knell played _The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth_.
[316] Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (_Works_, i. 197; cf. i. 308).
[317] Arber, ii. 526, ‘A sorowfull newe sonnette intituled Tarltons
Recantacon uppon this theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Bel savage
without Ludgate (nowe or ells never) beinge the laste theame he songe’.
The tract is not extant.
[318] App. C, No. lvii. He names Knell, Bentley, Mills, Wilson, and
Laneham.
[319] Cf. ch. xv, s.v. Alleyn, and ch. xviii.
[320] E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ for 21 Jan. 1882.
[321] Cf. ch. xviii.
[322] Murray, ii. 398 (Southampton), ‘the Queenes maiesties & the
Earle of Sussex players, xxx^s’; 240 (Coventry), ‘the Quenes players
& the Erle of Sussex players, xv^s’; 284 (Gloucester), ‘the Queenes
and the Earle of Sussex players, xxx^s’. At Faversham (Murray, ii.
274) separate payments of 1590–1 for the Queen’s (20_s._) and Essex’s
(10_s._) are followed by ‘to the Queen’s Players and to the Earl of
Essex’s Players’ (20_s._). It is conceivable that in this last entry
‘Essex’s’ may be a slip for ‘Sussex’s’.
[323] App. D, No. lxxxv.
[324] Nashe, _Works_, iii. 244.
[325] _M. S. C._ i. 190, from _Lansd. MSS._ 71, 75. The letters are
both dated 18 Sept. 1592, and that to Burghley contained copies of the
charters of Henry III and Elizabeth, of a Privy Council letter of 30
Oct. 1575 (cf. Dasent, ix. 39) forbidding shows within five miles of
the University, and of the warrant of the Vice-Chancellor and other
justices to the constables of Chesterton, dated 1 Sept. 1592.
[326] University Letter of 17 July 1593 in _M. S. C._ i. 200, from
_Lansd. MS._ 75; Privy Council Act of 29 July 1593 in Dasent, xxiv. 427.
[327] _M. S. C._ i. 198, from _Lansd. MS._ 71.
[328] Henslowe, i. 4. The date in the diary is ‘8 of Maye 1593’, but
I am prepared to accept Dr. Greg’s view (ii. 80) that as Francis was
pawnbroking for his uncle all through 1593, this must be an error of
Henslowe’s for ‘1594’. He seems to have actually left London on 18 May
1594.
[329] Henslowe, i. 6.
[330] W. H. Stevenson, _Nottingham Records_, iv. 244.
[331] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 186, 251.
[332] _Sh. Homage_, 154.
[333] Fleay, _Shakespeare_, 184.
[334] Collier, i. 259.
[335] Murray, i. 294. I add Maldon (1564–5). There is no proof that
‘Beeston and his fellowes’ at Barnstaple in 1560–1 were Strange’s.
[336] The Revels account for 1587–9 (Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 390) includes
‘a paire of fflanell hose for Symmons the Tumbler’, which is not in the
separate account for 1587–8 (Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 380).
[337] App. D, No. lxxxii. The forged list of Queen’s men (q.v.) in 1589
is sometimes, by a further error, whose I do not know, assigned to
Strange’s.
[338] I had better give the complicated and in some cases uncertain
notices in full; the unspecified references are to Murray: Cambridge
(1591–2), ‘my Lord Stranges plaiers’ (Cooper, ii. 518), and so also
(ii. 229, 284) Canterbury (13 July 1592) and Gloucester (1591–2); Bath
(1591–10 June 1592), ‘my Lord Admiralls players’ ... ‘my L. Stranges
plaiers’ (ii. 202); Aldeburgh (1591–2), ‘my Lord Admirals players’
(Stopes, _Hunnis_, 314); Shrewsbury (30 Sept. 1591–29 Sept. 1592), ‘my
L. Admeralls players’ ... ‘my l. Stranges and my l. Admyralls players’
(ii. 392, s. a. 1592–3, but the entries for the two years seem to be
transposed; _vide infra_); Coventry (10 Dec. 1591–29 Nov. 1592), ‘the
Lord Strange players’ (ii. 240); Leicester (19 Dec. 1592), ‘the Lorde
Admiralls Playars’ (ii. 305); Shrewsbury (30 Sept. 1592–29 Sept. 1593),
‘The iii of Feb: 1592. Bestowed vppon the players of my Lorde Admyrall’
... ‘my L. Darbyes men being players’ (ii. 392, s. a. 1591–2, but the
detailed date and the name Derby make an error palpable); Bath (11
June 1592–10 Sept. 1593), ‘my L. Stranges plaiers’ (ii. 203); Coventry
(30 Nov. 1592–26 Nov. 1593), ‘the Lo Admiralls players’ (ii. 240);
York (April 1593), ‘the Lord Admerall & Lord Mordens players’ (ii.
412); Newcastle (May 1593), ‘my Lord Admiralls plaiers, and my Lord
Morleis plaiers being all in one companye’ (G. B. Richardson, _Extracts
from Municipal Accounts of N._); Southampton (1592–3), ‘my L. Morleys
players and the Earle of Darbyes’ (ii. 398, ‘_c._ 18 May’, but Strange
became Derby on 25 Sept.); Leicester (Oct.–Dec. 1593), ‘the Erle of
Darbyes playors’ (ii. 306); Coventry (2 Dec. 1593), ‘the Lo: of Darbyes
players’ (ii. 240); Bath (11 Sept. 1593–1594), ‘the L. Admiralls, the
L. Norris players’ (ii. 203); Ipswich (7 March 1594), ‘vnto therlle of
Darbys players and to the Lorde Admirals players, the ij amongste’ (ii.
293, s. a. 1591–2, but on 7 March 1592 Strange was not yet Derby, and
his men were playing for Henslowe).
[339] App. D, No. xcii.
[340] Henslowe, i. 13. The account is headed, ‘Jn the name of god Amen
1591 beginge the 19 of febreary my lord stranges mene a ffoloweth 1591’.
[341] Cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. _1 Jeronimo_. Some marginal notes of sums of
money are not clearly intelligible, but may represent sums advanced by
Henslowe for the company.
[342] Henslowe, i. 15.
[343] Dasent, xxiv. 212.
[344] Cf. W. W. Greg in Henslowe, ii. 70.
[345] _Dulwich MSS._ i. 9–15 (_Henslowe Papers_, 34); cf. Henslowe, i.
3.
[346] Their patron was Edward Parker, Lord Morley (Murray, ii. 54). I
suspect the Morden of the York entry and the Norris of the Bath entry
of being both transcriber’s errors for Morley. No players of Lord
Norris are on record, and those of Lord Mordaunt (Murray, ii. 90) only
recur in 1585–6 and 1602.
[347] Text in _Henslowe Papers_, 130; on the nature of a ‘plott’, cf.
App. N.
[348] The following rather hazardous identifications have been
attempted by Greg (_loc. cit._) and Fleay, 84: ‘Harry’ = Henry Condell
(Fleay, Greg); ‘Kit’ = Christopher Beeston (Fleay, Greg); ‘Saunder’ =
Alexander Cooke (Fleay, Greg); ‘Nick’ = Nicholas Tooley (Fleay, Greg);
‘Ro.’ or ‘R. Go.’ = Robert Gough (Fleay, Greg); ‘Ned’ = Edward Alleyn
or Edmund Shakespeare (Fleay); ‘Will’ = William Tawyer (Fleay), William
Tawler (Greg). The object is, of course, to establish the connexion
between Strange’s and the Chamberlain’s men. Both writers assign two of
the unallocated parts to Heminges and Shakespeare.
[349] For speculation as to Shakespeare’s early career, cf. s.v.
Pembroke’s.
[350] Text in _Henslowe Papers_, 155.
[351] George Fanner to H. Galdelli and G. Tusinga in _S. P. Dom. Eliz._
cclxxi. 34, 35. I do not accept Mr. James Greenstreet’s theory that W.
Stanley was the real W. Shakespeare.
[352] _Hatfield MSS._ xiii. 609.
[353] Murray, i. 295.
[354] Taylor, _Penniless Pilgrimage_ (ed. Hindley), 67.
[355] _Dulwich MS._ i. 14, in _Henslowe Papers_, 40.
[356] _Outlines_, i. 122; ii. 329.
[357] Fleay, 136, ‘Pembroke’s men continued to act at the Curtain from
1589 to 1597’ is guesswork.
[358] Henslowe, i. 131; cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Fulwell.
[359] Cf. _infra_ (Chamberlain’s). Shank (cf. ch. xv) was once in
Pembroke’s.
[360] The Council Register assigns this performance to the
Chamberlain’s; cf. App. B.
[361] Fleay, _Sh._ 286, supposed Howard to be both Admiral and
Chamberlain at this date, but this view was refuted by
Halliwell-Phillipps in the _Athenaeum_ for 24 April 1886, and resigned
by Fleay, 31; cf. Greg, ii. 81.
[362] I. H. Jeayes, _Letters of Philip Gawdy_ (Roxburghe Club), 23.
[363] Stopes, _Hunnis_, 322, names payees in error.
[364] Henslowe, ii. 83.
[365] _Henslowe Papers_, 31.
[366] _Alleyn Papers_, 11, 12; cf. _Henslowe Papers_, 32.
[367] _Alleyn Papers_, 1, 5.
[368] Ibid. 54.
[369] Henslowe, ii. 127.
[370] Henslowe, i. 17.
[371] Ibid. 198.
[372] Ibid. 17.
[373] Cf. the petitions assigned to 1592 (App. D, No. xcii).
[374] They may represent n[ew] e[nterlude], or merely ne[w].
[375] Fleay, 140; Henslowe, ii. 84.
[376] Henslowe, ii. 324.
[377] Ibid. ii. 133.
[378] Ibid. i. 126.
[379] Ibid. i. 44.
[380] Henslowe, i. 51; cf. Dr. Greg’s explanation in ii. 129 and my
criticism in _M. L. R._ iv. 409. Wallace (_E. S._ xliii. 361) has a
third explanation, that the figures represent the sharers’ takings.
But (_a_) these would not all pass through Henslowe’s hands, (_b_) the
amounts are often less than half the galleries, and (_c_) the columns
are blank for some days of playing.
[381] I include _Belin Dun_, produced just before the separation of
the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s, in the fifty-five; but I do not
follow Dr. Greg in taking the sign ‘j’, which Henslowe attaches to
_Tamburlaine_ (30 Aug. 1594) and _Long Meg of Westminster_ (14 Feb.
1595) as equivalent to ‘ne’. Were it so, these would furnish two, and
the only two, examples of a second new production in a single week.
Probably ‘j’ indicates in both instances the _First Part_ of a two-part
play. This view is confirmed by Henslowe’s note on 10 March 1595, ‘17
p[laies] frome hence lycensed’; cf. my criticism in _M. L. R._ iv. 408.
[382] Variously entered as ‘olimpo’, ‘seleo & olempo’, ‘olempeo &
hengenyo’, &c.; but apparently only one play is meant.
[383] _Alexander and Lodowick_ is actually entered for a second time as
‘ne’ on 11 Feb. 1597, but I have assumed this to be a mistake.
[384] It has been chiefly played by Fleay and Dr. Greg. The relations
suggested are between _1 Caesar and Pompey_ and Chapman’s play of the
same name, _Disguises_ and Chapman’s _May-day_, _Godfrey of Bulloigne_
and Heywood’s _Four Prentices of London_, _Olympo_, _1, 2 Hercules_,
and _Troy_ and Heywood’s _Golden_, _Silver_, _Brazen_, and _Iron Ages_
respectively. _Five Plays in One_ and some of Heywood’s _Dialogues
and Dramas_, _The Wonder of a Woman_ and a supposed early version by
Heywood of W. Rowley’s _A New Wonder, or, A Woman Never Vexed_, _The
Venetian Comedy_ and both the German _Josephus Jude von Venedig_ and
Dekker’s lost _Jew of Venice_, _Diocletian_ and Dekker’s _The Virgin
Martyr_, _A Set at Maw_ and Dekker’s _Match Me in London_, _The Mack_
and Dekker’s _The Wonder of a Kingdom_, _Vortigern_ and Middleton’s
_The Mayor of Quinborough_, _Uther Pendragon_ and W. Rowley’s _Birth of
Merlin_, _Philipo and Hippolito_ and both Massinger’s lost _Philenzo
and Hypollita_ and the German _Julio und Hyppolita_. Full details will
be found in Henslowe, ii. 165 sqq.
[385] Henslowe, i. 44, 128.
[386] Possibly identical with _Mahomet_, if that was Peele’s play. Dr.
Greg’s identification with _The Love of an English Lady_ strikes me as
rather arbitrary.
[387] I assume that ‘valy a for’ entered on 4 Jan. 1595 is the same
play. Conceivably it might be _Vallingford_, i. e. _Fair Em_, an old
Strange’s play.
[388] An allusion in Field’s _Amends for Ladies_, ii. 1, shows that
_Long Meg_ still held the Fortune stage about 1611.
[389] Possibly identical with _Longshanks_.
[390] The relations suggested are between _The Love of a Grecian Lady_
and the German _Tugend-und Liebesstreit_, _The French Doctor_ and both
Dekker’s _Jew of Venice_ and the German _Josephus Jude von Venedig_,
_The Siege of London_ and Heywood’s _1 Edward IV_, _The Welshman_ and
R. A.’s _The Valiant Welshman_, _Time’s Triumph and Fortune’s_ and
Heywood’s _Timon_. For details cf. Henslowe, ii. 165 _sqq._
[391] This was on Whit-Tuesday 1596, and I rather suspect a mis-entry
of _iij_^s for _iij_^{li}, the exact amount taken for the plays of the
Monday and Wednesday in the same week.
[392] Henslowe, i. 5.
[393] Ibid. 44.
[394] Ibid. 31, 45.
[395] Henslowe, i. 29, 31, 43, 44, 199–201.
[396] I see no reason to agree with Dr. Greg in identifying ‘Black
Dick’ with Jones, who would naturally have the ‘Mr.’; and the
suggestions that ‘Dick’ might be Dick Juby and that ‘Will’ might be
Will Barnes or Will Parr are mere guesses based on the occurrence of
these names in other ‘plots’. ‘Will’ might just as well be Will Kendall.
[397] Henslowe, i. 45.
[398] Henslowe’s entry is (i. 54), ‘Martin Slather went for the company
of my lord admeralles men the 18 of July 1597’. I think that ‘for’ must
be meant for ‘from’. Elsewhere (i. 66) Henslowe writes ‘for’ for ‘from’.
[399] Henslowe, i. 47, 200.
[400] Ibid. 201–4; _Egerton MS._ 2623, f. 19 (a fragment from the
Diary).
[401] Henslowe, ii. 89, 101.
[402] Henslowe, i. 105, 131, 134.
[403] Ibid. 40.
[404] Ibid. 199–201.
[405] App. D, No. cxii.
[406] Henslowe, i. 54; _E. S._ xliii. 351.
[407] Henslowe, i. 68–70.
[408] Ibid. 82.
[409] Ibid. ii. 91; cf. p. 200.
[410] Henslowe, i. 69, 73; Wallace in _E. S._ xliii. 382.
[411] Cf. p. 173.
[412] Henslowe, i. 81, 122.
[413] Ibid. 64, 67.
[414] Ibid. 63, 79.
[415] Henslowe, i. 72, ‘Lent W^m Borne to folowe the sewt agenste
Thomas Poope’; cf. i. 26, 38, 47–8, 56, 63–9, 71–8, 80, 201, 205; and
s.v. Pembroke’s.
[416] Henslowe, i. 84.
[417] During 1599–1602 Henslowe sometimes enters advances as made to
the company through ‘W^m’ Juby, and in two cases corrects the entry
by substituting ‘Edward’. As there is no other evidence for a William
Juby as an actor, not to speak of a sharer, either Henslowe must have
persistently mistaken the name, or William must have been a relative of
Edward, acting as his agent (cf. Henslowe, ii. 290).
[418] _Henslowe Papers_, 48.
[419] Henslowe, i. 26.
[420] _Henslowe Papers_, 113.
[421] Henslowe, i. 122.
[422] Ibid. 122.
[423] Ibid. 66, 68, 91, 108.
[424] Ibid. 85.
[425] Henslowe, i. 72.
[426] Ibid. 63, 104.
[427] Ibid. 118.
[428] I find ‘Lorde Haywards’ men at Leicester during Oct.–Dec. 1599,
‘Lord Howardes’ at Bristol in 1599–1600, ‘Lord Heywardes’ at Bath in
the same year, ‘Lord Howards’ at Coventry on 28 Dec. 1599, and ‘Lord
Haywards’ in 1602–3. This must have been another company. The Admiral’s
were playing in London at the time of the Leicester and the earlier
Coventry visits, and Lord Howard of Effingham became Earl of Nottingham
on 22 Oct. 1596. They were at Canterbury in 1599–1600.
[429] Henslowe, i. 120.
[430] _Henslowe Papers_, 49; Henslowe, i. 113.
[431] _Henslowe Papers_, 55; Henslowe, i. 122.
[432] _Henslowe Papers_, 56; Henslowe, i. 135, 147.
[433] _Henslowe Papers_, 56; Henslowe, i. 135.
[434] _Henslowe Papers_, 56–8.
[435] Henslowe, ii. 125.
[436] Henslowe, i. 84–107.
[437] Ibid. 103.
[438] Henslowe, i. 83, 101, 119.
[439] Ibid. ii. 124.
[440] _Henslowe Papers_, 113, from Malone (1790), i. 2. 300; the
manuscript is now lost. The various sections of the document are
headed: (_a_) ‘The booke of the Inventary of the goods of my lord
Admeralles men, tacken the 10 of Marche in the yeare 1598’; (_b_) ‘The
Enventary of the Clownes sewtes and Hermetes Swetes, with dievers
others sewtes, as followeth, 1598, the 10 of March’; (_c_) ‘The
Enventary of all the aparell for my Lord Admiralles men, tacken the 10
of Marche 1598--Leaft above in the tier-house in the cheast’; (_d_)
‘The Enventary tacken of all the properties for my Lord Admeralles men,
the 10 of Marche 1598’; (_e_) ‘The Enventorey of all the aparell of the
Lord Admeralles men, taken the 13^{th} of Marche 1598, as followeth’;
(_f_) ‘A Note of all suche bookes as belong to the Stocke, and such as
I have bought since the 3^d of Marche 1598’; (_g_) ‘A Note of all suche
goodes as I have bought for the Companey of my Lord Admirals men, sence
the 3 of Aprell, 1598, as followeth’. A comparison of the book-list
with the diary payments makes it clear that ‘1598’ is 1597/8 and not
1598/9. The last book entered was bought in Aug. 1598. An undated
inventory of Alleyn’s private theatrical wardrobe is in _Henslowe
Papers_, 52.
[441] It should be borne in mind that these lists are based in part
upon a rather conjectural interpretation of evidence. Full details, for
which I have not space, will be found in Henslowe, ii. 186 _sqq._ I
have annotated a few points of interest.
[442] So called in the book-inventory; in the diary it is _Triplicity
of Cuckolds_.
[443] The first name appears in the inventory, the second in the diary.
[444] Only £4 was paid ‘to by a boocke’, which is low for a new play
and high for an old one. Possibly Porter was in debt to the company.
[445] Once described as ‘other wisse called worsse feared then hurte’,
whence Dr. Greg infers that the 1598–9 play of that name was a second
part of it.
[446] So in the book-inventory; in the account it is only called _The
Cobler_.
[447] Possibly _Strange Flattery_, but the manuscript is lost.
[448] They had to buy _Mahomet_, _The Wise Man of West Chester_,
_Longshanks_, and _Vortigern_ from Alleyn in 1601 and 1602.
[449] ‘the Mores lymes’, ‘iiij Turckes hedes’, ‘j Mores cotte’.
[450] ‘iiij genesareys gownes’, ‘owld Mahemetes head’.
[451] ‘Tamberlyne brydell’, ‘Tamberlynes cotte, with coper lace’,
‘Tamberlanes breches of crymson vellvet’.
[452] ‘j cauderm for the Jewe’.
[453] ‘j tree of gowlden apelles’.
[454] ‘j whell and frame in the Sege of London’.
[455] ‘Belendon stable’.
[456] ‘Tasso picter’, ‘Tasoes robe’.
[457] ‘senetores gowne’ and ‘capes’.
[458] ‘Kents woden leage’.
[459] ‘j mawe gowne of calleco for the quene’.
[460] ‘j sewtte for Nepton’, ‘Nepun forcke & garland’.
[461] ‘Harey the fyftes dublet’ and ‘vellet gowne’, ‘j payer of hosse
for the Dowlfyn’.
[462] ‘j longe-shanckes sewte’.
[463] ‘j great horse with his leages’.
[464] ‘Vartemar sewtte’, ‘Valteger robe of rich tafitie’, ‘j payer of
hosse & a gercken for Valteger’, ‘ij Danes sewtes, and ij payer of
Danes hosse’.
[465] ‘j tome of Guido’, ‘j cloth clocke of russete with coper lace,
called Guydoes clocke’.
[466] ‘Merlen gowne, and cape’.
[467] ‘my lord Caffes gercken & his hoose’.
[468] These include ‘Argosse head’, ‘Andersones sewte’, ‘Will Sommers
sewtte’, ‘ij Orlates sewtes’, ‘Cathemer sewte’, ‘j Whittcomes dublett
poke’, ‘Nabesathe sewte’, ‘j Hell mought’, ‘the cloth of the Sone &
Mone’, ‘Tantelouse tre’, ‘Eves bodeyes’. Probably ‘Perowes sewte which
W^m Sley were’ dated back to the days of Strange’s men. After 3 April
1598 Henslowe bought, _inter alia_, ‘a gown for Nembia’ and ‘a robe for
to goo invisibell’.
[469] It looks as if the book-inventory were not exhaustive; perhaps it
only includes books more or less in current use.
[470] There is a self-contradictory entry, ‘to paye vnto M^r Willson
Monday & Deckers ... iiij^{ll} v^s in this maner Willson xxx^s
Cheattell xxx^s Mondy xxv^s’.
[471] Regarded by Dr. Greg as _2 Hannibal and Hermes_.
[472] I agree with Dr. Greg that this, for which Chapman had £4 in
1598–9, is probably identical with _The Isle of a Woman_, for which he
had had earnests of £4 or £4 10_s._ in 1597–8.
[473] I think the play licensed as _Brute Grenshallde_ in March 1599
was a second part written by Chettle to an old _1 Brute_ by Day, which
would not need re-licensing.
[474] I do not see with what to identify the play licensed under this
name in March 1599 except the unnamed ‘playe boocke’ and ‘tragedie’,
for which Chapman had something under £9 in the previous Oct. and Jan.
[475] The title _War without Blows and Love without Strife_ in one
entry is probably an error.
[476] I agree with Dr. Greg that the entries point to two plays by
Chettle and Dekker rather than one. They are probably incomplete owing
to the hiatus in the manuscript.
[477] Dr. Greg makes two plays of this, but the entry ‘his boocke
called the world rones a whelles & now all foolles but the foolle’
seems unambiguous, and the total payments of £8 10_s._ are not too high
for a play by Chapman.
[478] No importance can be attached to Mr. Fleay’s childish
identifications of _War without Blows and Love without Suit_, _Joan
as Good as my Lady_, and _The Four Kings_ with _The Thracian Wonder_,
Heywood’s _A Maidenhead well Lost_, and _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_
respectively.
[479] So called in Drayton’s autograph receipt, but Henslowe calls it
_William Longbeard_.
[480] Henslowe, i. 72, 78.
[481] Cf. ch. xv, s.v. Alleyn.
[482] The only entry is of 15 July ‘to bye a boocke’, but the hiatus in
the manuscript probably conceals earlier payments.
[483] Here also the hiatus has only left an entry of £2 ‘in full
payment’ on 1 Aug. Dr. Greg, however, would identify _Bear a Brain_ and
_The Gentle Craft_.
[484] The entries are as follows: 2 Sept., ‘Thomas Deckers Bengemen
Johnson Hary Chettell & other Jentellman in earneste of a playe calle
Robart the second kinge of Scottes tragedie’; 15 Sept., ‘in earneste
of a boocke called the Scottes tragedi vnto Thomas Dickers & Harey
Chettell’; 16 Sept., ‘Hary Chettell ... in earneste of a boocke called
the Scottes tragedie’; 27 Sept., ‘Bengemen Johnsone in earneste of a
boocke called the Scottes tragedie’; 28 Sept., ‘vnto M^r Maxton the new
poete in earneste of a boocke called [blank]’. Dr. Greg resists the
fairly reasonable identification of ‘M^r Maxton the new poete’ with the
‘other Jentellman’. All the payments are called earnests, but the total
is £6 10_s._ and therefore the play probably existed.
[485] ‘Lent vnto me W Birde the 9 of Februarye to paye for a new booke
to Will Boyle cald Jugurth xxx^s which if you dislike Ile repaye it
back.’ The price is the lowest ever entered for a ‘new’ book. Mr.
Fleay’s suggestion that Will Bird, who already had one alias in Will
Borne, was also himself Will Boyle, is one of those irresponsible
guesses by which he has done so much to make hay of theatrical history.
[486] Both parts were entered on the Stationers’ Register, but no copy
of _2 Sir John Oldcastle_ is known.
[487] _Bodl. Ashm. MS._ 236, f. 77^v (_c._ 1600), has Forman’s note of
the ‘plai of Cox of Cullinton and his 3 sons, Henry Peter and Jhon’.
[488] _Henslowe Papers_, 49.
[489] This was taken up again in 1601, but still not finished. Dr.
Greg, however, thinks that it is identical with Day’s Italian tragedy,
and forms half of _Two Lamentable Tragedies_ (1601), and that Chettle’s
work in 1601 may have been the effecting of the combination with
_Thomas Merry_.
[490] Dr. Greg, following Mr. Fleay, identifies this with Dekker’s
_Whore of Babylon_, and as Time is a character in this play, cites the
purchase of ‘a Robe for tyme’ in April 1600 as a proof that it was then
performed. Time, however, might also have been a character in _The
Seven Wise Masters_.
[491] Possibly finished later and identical with the pseudo-Marlowesque
_Lust’s Dominion_.
[492] The payment-entry is cancelled. The play may have been finished
for another company, and be identical with the extant _Grim, the
Collier of Croydon_, or, _The Devil and his Dame_.
[493] Possibly the basis of Bird and Rowley’s _Judas_ of 1601.
[494] It seems to me a little arbitrary of Dr. Greg to assume that the
10_s._ entered as an earnest for this was really a bonus on _1 The
Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_.
[495] _Henslowe Papers_, 51. I do not think that Dr. Greg recognizes
the full significance of this when he suggests (Henslowe, ii. 94) that
Alleyn was back on the stage by 1598; cf. my criticism in _M. L. R._
iv. 410. Dr. Greg relies mainly on the appearance of his name in the
plot of _The Battle of Alcazar_, which, he says, ‘almost certainly
belongs to 1598’. But I can find no reason why it should not belong to
1600–2; cf. p. 175.
[496] Henslowe, i. 56.
[497] Ibid. 162.
[498] Ibid. 141.
[499] Ibid. 144, 165, 174.
[500] Ibid. 134, 136, 140, 147.
[501] Dr. Greg puts it in 1598, on the assumption that Alleyn returned
to the stage in that year. It might conceivably belong to 1597, between
18 Dec., when Bristow was bought, and 29 Dec., by which day Alleyn had
left. It cannot be later than Feb. 1602, by which month Jones and Shaw
had left. The prefix ‘M^r’ allotted to Charles and Sam is in favour
of a date after their agreements on 16 Nov. 1598. Dr. Greg’s argument
(_Henslowe Papers_, 138) that Kendall’s agreement expired 7 Dec. 1599
is not convincing, as there was nothing in it to prevent him from
staying on, and the satire of the play in Jonson’s _Poetaster_ of 1601,
to which he refers, obviously tells in favour of a date nearer to 1601
than 1598.
[502] Henslowe, i. 38.
[503] Ibid. 131, 134.
[504] Ibid. 164.
[505] Ibid. 205.
[506] Cf. ch. x.
[507] The entry is ‘Thomas Deckers for his boocke called the fortewn
tenes’. Collier read ‘forteion tenes’ and interpreted _Fortunatus_. Mr.
Fleay furnished the alternatives of _Fortune’s Tennis_ and _Hortenzo’s
Tennis_. I should add that Dr. Greg assigns the ‘plot’ to this play.
[508] Dr. Greg thinks that this may be the same as Haughton’s _The
English Fugitives_ of the previous April. If so, it was probably
finished, as the payments amount to £6.
[509] As the account of advances is continuous, I have drawn the line
between 1600–1 and 1601–2 at the beginning of Aug. 1601.
[510] _The Life_ became _2 Cardinal Wolsey_, as _The Rising_, although
written later, was historically _1 Cardinal Wolsey_. The entries are
complicated. It is just possible that the playwrights were working
on an old play, for the property-inventories of 1598 include an
unexplained ‘Will Sommers sewtte’ (cf. p. 168). A ‘W^m Someres cotte’
was, however, bought for _The Rising_ on 27 May 1602.
[511] Possibly based on Haughton’s unfinished play of 1600.
[512] A note preserved at Dulwich (_Henslowe Papers_, 58) indicates
that licensing fees were in arrear on 4 Aug. 1602 for ‘baxsters
tragedy, Tobias Comedy, Jepha Judg of Israel & the Cardinall, Loue
parts frendshipp’. But of course Warner’s identification of ‘baxsters
tragedy’ with _The Bristol Tragedy_ is conjectural.
[513] There is no _1 Tom Dough_, unless this was an intended sequel to
_The Six Yeomen of the West_.
[514] Already begun by Chettle in 1599.
[515] This may be identical with _1 The Six Clothiers_, which is not
called by Henslowe a ‘first part’, if, as is possible, that was a
sequel to _The Six Yeomen of the West_.
[516] Possibly finished later as Dekker and Rowley’s _The Noble
Spanish Soldier_. But it may have been an old play re-written, for C.
R. Baskervill (_M. P._ xiv. 16) quotes from the preface to H. O.’s
translation of Vasco Figueiro’s _Spaniard’s Monarchie_ (1592), ‘albeit
it hath no title fetched from the Bull within Bishopsgate, as a figge
for a Spaniard’.
[517] I suppose this was unfinished. The only entry is on 22 June 1602,
‘vnto Bengemy Johnsone ... in earneste of a boocke called Richard
Crockbacke & for new adicyons for Jeronymo the some of x^{ll}’. Jonson
had already had £2 on 25 Sept. 1601 ‘vpon his writtinge of his adicians
in Geronymo’. Unless _Richard Crookback_ was nearly complete, his
prices must have risen a good deal.
[518] Possibly finished later as _Hoffman_ (1631).
[519] The £4 paid was cancelled and then reinstated, but the book was
evidently transferred to Worcester’s men (cf. p. 227).
[520] Cf. p. 168.
[521] Cf. vol. i, p. 323. _The Massacre_ was printed (N.D.) as an
Admiral’s play.
[522] The conjectural rendering of Henslowe’s ‘ponesciones pillet’
finds support from the presence of garments for ‘Caffes’ or Caiaphas in
the inventory of 1598; cf. p. 168.
[523] A payment to ‘John Daye & his felowe poetes’ implies at least
three collaborators.
[524] For _Samson_ cf. p. 367.
[525] All four entries merely show the payments as made to ‘Antony the
poyete’.
[526] Finished later and extant; probably identical with the _Danish
Tragedy_ of 1601–2.
[527] I suppose that it was the play which Chettle ‘layd vnto pane’ to
Mr. Bromfield, and which had to be redeemed for £1 (Henslowe, i. 174).
[528] The more so as I do not think that Dr. Greg’s survey in Henslowe.
ii. 135, is accurate.
[529] Henslowe made the total £167 7_s._ 7_d._, but evidently the error
was detected, as only £166 17_s._ 7_d._ was carried forward.
[530] Henslowe, ii. 133. Apparently Henslowe reverted to the plan of
deducting three-quarters only, at the beginning of 1599–1600, but only
for a fortnight, as the receipts from 20 Oct. are headed, ‘Heare I
begane to receue the gallereys agayne which they receued begynynge at
Myhellmas wecke being the 6 of October 1599’.
[531] I have disregarded an error of 15_s._ made by Henslowe.
[532] Henslowe, i. 85, 145.
[533] Ibid. ii. 33.
[534] Henslowe, i. 29, 47, 81, 96, 97, 118, 124, 136, 138, 144, 146,
148, 152, 153, 166, 172, &c.
[535] The exact date is uncertain, as they do not appear to have had a
patent until 1606; but it must lie between their visit to Leicester as
the Admiral’s on 18 Aug. 1603 and the making out of a warrant to them
as the Prince’s men on 19 Feb. 1604 for their Christmas plays.
[536] _N. Sh. Soc. Trans._ (_1877–9_), 17*, from _Lord Chamberlain’s
Books_, 58^a.
[537] Cf. ch. xvi (Hope).
[538] On the legend that he had developed moral scruples about the
stage, cf. s.v. Marlowe, _Dr. Faustus_.
[539] _Henslowe Papers_, 18.
[540] _Dulwich MS._ iii. 15.
[541] _Henslowe Papers_, 13; cf. ch. xvi, s.v. _Fortune_.
[542] _Henslowe Papers_, 63.
[543] Ibid. 85.
[544] _M. S. C._ i. 268, from _P. R. 4 Jac. I_, pt. 19; also printed by
T. E. Tomlins, and dated in error 1607, in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 42.
[545] Birch, _Life of Henry_, 455; Greg, _Gentleman’s Magazine_, ccc.
67, from _Harl. MS._ 252, f. 5, dated 1610.
[546] Henslowe, i. 175.
[547] Ibid. 214.
[548] There may be an allusion to this play in H. Parrot, _Laquei
Ridiculosi, Springes for Woodcocks_ (1613), ii. 162:
’Tis said that _Whittington_ was rais’d of nought,
And by a cat hath divers wonders wrought:
But _Fortune_ (not his cat) makes it appear,
He may dispend a thousand marks a year.
Dr. Greg (_Henslowe_, ii. 65) has dispersed Collier’s myth of one
Whittington ‘perhaps a sleeping partner in the speculation of the
Fortune’.
[549] Most of the play-dates of 1605–12 are in Apps. A and B.
[550] _A. for L._ II. i. In III. iv a drawer says, ‘all the gentlewomen
[from Bess Turnup’s] went to see a play at the Fortune, and are not
come in yet, and she believes they sup with the players’.
[551] Cf. ch. xv, s.v. Garlick.
[552] Nichols, _James_, ii. 495.
[553] _M. S. C._ i. 275, from _P. R. 10 Jac. I_, pt. 25; also from
signet bill in Collier, i. 366, and Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 44. Greg
(_Henslowe_, ii. 263) notes copies in _Addl. MS._ 24502, f. 60^v, and
_Lincoln’s Inn MS._ clviii.
[554] _Henslowe Papers_, 106.
[555] Ibid. 64.
[556] _Fennor’s Defence, or I am Your First Man_ (Taylor’s _Works_,
1630, ed. _Spenser Soc._ 314). The 1659 print of the _Blind Beggar
of Bethnal Green_ has at l. 2177, ‘Enter ... Captain Westford, Sill
Clark’. The title-page professes to give the play as acted by the
Prince’s men, but whether Clark was an actor of 1603–12 or not must
remain doubtful.
[557] Henslowe, i. 17; cf. p. 140.
[558] Cf. App. D, No. ci. It is not ‘my newe companie’, as it is
sometimes misprinted. But I do not think that either term can be
interpreted as showing that the company had or had not a corporate
existence before it came under Hunsdon’s patronage. The use which the
company ‘have byn accustomed’ to make of the inn is only related to
‘this winter time’.
[559] The dates here assigned to Shakespeare’s plays are mainly based
on the conclusions of my article on Shakespeare in the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_.
[560] Cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. _Gesta Grayorum_ and _M. L. R._ ii. 11.
[561] Cf. my paper on _The Occasion of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream_ in
_Shakespeare Homage_, 154, and App. A.
[562] I have recently found confirmation of the date for _Rich. II_ in
a letter from Sir Edward Hoby inviting Sir R. Cecil to his house in
Canon Row on 9 Dec. 1595, ‘where, as late as shall please you, a gate
for your supper shall be open, and K. Richard present himself to your
view’ (_Hatfield MSS._ v. 487).
[563] T. Lodge, _Wits Miserie_ (S. R. 5 May 1596), 56, ‘the Visard of
y^e ghost which cried so miserably at y^e Theator, like an oister wife,
Hamlet, revenge’.
[564] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars). There is a slight doubt as to the
authenticity of the text of the petition, which the inclusion of
Lord Hunsdon’s name can only emphasize. But the fact of the petition
and its result are vouched for by a City document of later date. The
counter-petition of the players published by Collier, i. 288, in which
they are misdescribed as the Lord Chamberlain’s men, is a forgery.
The names given are those of Pope, Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips,
Shakespeare, Kempe, Sly, and Tooley. There is nothing to connect Tooley
with the company before 1605.
[565] Cf. App. D, No. cvi.
[566] For the distinction between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ quartos, cf. ch.
xxii.
[567] R. James (c. 1625), in the dedication to his manuscript _Legend
of Sir John Oldcastle_ (quoted by Ingleby, _Shakespeare’s Centurie
of Praise_, 165), says, ‘offence beinge worthily taken by Personages
descended from his title’.
[568] Raleigh wrote to R. Cecil on 6 July 1597 that Essex was
‘wonderful merry at your conceit of Richard II’ (Edwardes, ii. 169);
for the later history of the play, _vide infra_.
[569] Cf. ch. xvi (Curtain).
[570] App. C, No. lii.
[571] Aubrey, ii. 12. The same writer is obviously confused when he
says, on the authority of Sir Edward Shirburn, that Jonson ‘killed M^r
Marlow the poet, on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-Curtain play-house’.
[572] Cf. ch. x. There is no reason to suppose that the Richard Hoope,
W^m Blackwage, Rafe Raye, and W^m Ferney, to whom Henslowe lent money
as ‘my lord chamberlenes men’ in 1595 (Henslowe, i. 5, 6), were actors.
In fact Raye was a ‘man’ of Hunsdon’s before the company was in
existence at all (Henslowe, ii. 305).
[573] The order of the Shakespearian actors named in the 1623 Folio,
and the omission of the names of Duke and Beeston, rather suggests that
these two were hired men, and that there were ten original sharers,
Shakespeare, Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips, Kempe, Pope, Bryan, Condell,
Sly, and Cowley.
[574] App. C. No. xlviii.
[575] Cf. ch. xxii.
[576] Henslowe, i. 72.
[577] Cf. ch. xxii.
[578] Malone, _Variorum_, ii. 166; Fleay, _L. and W._ 8.
[579] _Hen. V_, epil. 12.
[580] That the _Famous Victories_ was reprinted in 1617 as a King’s
men’s play proves nothing. It was to pass as _Henry V_; obviously the
King’s men never acted it, _Henry V_ being in existence.
[581] Henslowe, i. 72, 101.
[582] For further details, cf. ch. xvi (Globe).
[583] Cf. ch. xvi, introd.
[584] Fleay, 138; cf. Murray, ii. 125; Greg, _Henslowe_, ii. 108. A
loan of 21 Sept. 1600 by Henslowe (i. 132) to Duke is only slight
evidence, and the fact that Anne’s men chose to revive the already
printed _Edward II_, once a Pembroke’s play, even slighter.
[585] Cf. ch. xv.
[586] Cf. ch. vii.
[587] Cf. ch. xxii.
[588] _S. P. D. Eliz._ cclxxviii. 72, 78, 85. Accounts consistent
with this are given in depositions of Sir W. Constable and Sir Gilly
Meyrick (ibid.), Camden, _Annales_, 867, Cobbett, _State Trials_, i.
1445, and Bacon, _A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted
and committed by Robert late Earl of Essex and his Complices_ (1601;
_Works_, ix. 289).
[589] Fleay, 123, 136; cf. _M. L. R._ ii. 12.
[590] Cf. ch. xiv (Scotland).
[591] For the texts cf. ch. xi.
[592] W. H. Griffin in _Academy_ for 25 April 1896, suggests that the
‘innovation’ of 1604 was the same as the ‘noveltie’ of 1603, i.e.
the setting up of child actors. But I am afraid that this leaves
‘inhibition’ without a meaning.
[593] Nichols, _Eliz._ iii. 552, prints, perhaps from a manuscript of
Lord De La Warr’s (_Hist. MSS._ iv. 300), a note by W. Lambarde of a
conversation with the Queen on 4 Aug. 1601, ‘Her Majestie fell upon the
reign of King Richard II, saying, I am Richard II, know ye not that?
_W. L._ Such a wicked imagination was determined and attempted by a
most unkind Gent. the most adorned creature that ever your Majestie
made. _Her Majestie._ He that will forget God, will also forget his
benefactors; this tragedy was played 40^{tie} times in open streets and
houses’. The performances here referred to must have been in 1596–7,
not 1601.
[594] Cf. ch. xi.
[595] J. Manningham, _Diary_, 18.
[596] Cf. App. A.
[597] Collier, _New Particulars_, 57, and _Egerton Papers_, 343, ‘6
August 1602 Rewardes ... x^{li} to Burbidges players for Othello’; cf.
Ingleby, 262.
[598] Wallace, ii, 108; cf. p. 367.
[599] Cf. ch. xv (Kempe).
[600] Cf. ch. ii.
[601] G. Dugdale, _Time Triumphant_ (1604), sig. B.
[602] Printed in _M. S. C._ i. 264, from _P. R. 1 Jac. I_, _pars 2_,
_membr. 4_; also in Rymer, xvi. 505, and Halliwell, _Illustr. 83_.
Halliwell also prints the practically identical texts of the Privy
Signet Bill, dated 17 May, and the Privy Seal, dated 18 May. The former
is also in Collier, i. 334, Hazlitt, 38, and Halliwell-Phillipps, ii.
82.
[603] Cf. ch. xiv (Scotland).
[604] Except in one of Collier’s Blackfriars forgeries; cf. ch. xvi.
[605] W. Cory (_Letters and Journals_, 168) was told on a visit to
Wilton in 1865 that a letter existed there, naming Shakespeare as
present and the play as _As You Like It_; but the letter cannot now be
found.
[606] Marston, _Malcontent_, Ind. 82.
[607] Bullen, _Middleton_, viii. 36, ‘Give him leaue to see the Merry
Deuil of Edmonton or A Woman Killed with Kindness’.
[608] _N. S. S. Trans._ (1877–9), 15*, from _Lord Chamberlain’s
Records_, vol. 58^a, now ix. 4 (5); cf. Law (_ut infra_), 10. Collier,
_Memoirs of Alleyn_, 68, printed a list headed ‘Ks Company’ from the
margin of the copy of the Privy Council order of 9 April 1604 at
Dulwich. This is a forgery. To the nine genuine names Collier added
those of Hostler and Day. The former joined the company some years
later, the latter never; cf. Ingleby, 269.
[609] App. B; cf. E. Law, _Shakespeare as a Groom of the Chamber_
(1910), and the Spanish narrative in _Colección de Documentos inéditos
para la historia de España_, lxxi. 467.
[610] Cf. ch. x.
[611] For the exact dates and the difficult critical questions raised
by the records, cf. App. B.
[612] Cf. App. B.
[613] Clode, _Early Hist. of Merchant Taylors_, i. 290, ‘To M^r
Hemmyngs for his direccion of his boy that made the speech to his
Maiestie 40^s, and 6^s given to John Rise the speaker’; cf. ch. iv.
[614] Cf. ch. x.
[615] App. C, No. lvii.
[616] Cf. ch. xii (Queen’s Revels).
[617] Fleay, 173, and Murray, i. 152, are wrong in saying that there
were no Court plays this year; cf. _M. L. R._ iv. 154.
[618] Rye, 61, from narrative of tour of Lewis Frederick, Duke of
Württemberg, ‘Lundi, 30 [Apr.] S. E. alla au Globe, lieu ordinaire
où l’on joue les Commedies, y fut representé l’histoire du More de
Venise’. Forman’s accounts of _Macbeth_ from _Bodl. Ashm. MS._ 208,
f. 207, and of _Cymbeline_ from the preceding leaf, but undated, are
printed in _N. S. S. Trans._ (1875–6), 417.
[619] Fleay, 190, says that Ecclestone came from the Queen’s Revels. I
think he must have confused him with Field.
[620] Perhaps his place between Ostler and Underwood in the actor-list
of the 1623 Folio gives some confirmation to the statement of the
Burbadges; cf. p. 219.
[621] Cf. ch. iv.
[622] _N. S. S. Trans._ (1875–6), 415, from Simon Forman’s notes in
_Bodl. Ashm. MS._ 208, f. 200.
[623] For the precise dates and their difficulties, cf. App. B.
[624] Clode, _Early Hist. of the Merchant Taylors_, i. 334.
[625] Text in _M. S. C._ i. 280, from Signet Bill in _Exchequer,
Treasury of Receipt, Privy Seals, 17 Jac. I_, Bundle ix, No. 2; also in
Collier, i. 400, and Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 50.
[626] Tawyer, a ‘man’ of Heminges’s, played in some revival of _M. N.
D._ before 1623, but not necessarily before 1619 (cf. ch. xv).
[627] _M. L. R._ iv. 395.
[628] Downes, 21, 24. Nevertheless, Taylor did not join the King’s men
until three years after Shakespeare’s death.
[629] Murray, i. 56, adds 1563–83 records.
[630] G. Le B. Smith, _Haddon Hall_, 121.
[631] Kelly, 211, from _Leicester Hall Papers_, i, ff. 38, 42; _Hist.
MSS._ viii. 1, 431. The latter part of the record, from the Earl’s
licence onwards, was given by Halliwell in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 145,
but with the date 1586, due to a misprint of ‘28^o Eliz.’ for ‘25^o
Eliz.’ in the licence. This has misled Fleay, 86, and other writers.
Maas, 49, and M. Bateson, _Records of Leicester_, iii. 198, introduce
fresh errors of their own.
[632] Gildersleeve, 53.
[633] Cf. ch. ix and App. D, No. lvi.
[634] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Notices of Players Acting at Ludlow_; B. S.
Penley, _The Bath Stage_, 12, from account for year ending 16 June 1584.
[635] Lord Herbert was, of course, Worcester’s son; not, as Dr. Greg
(Henslowe, ii. 104) seems to think, one of the Pembroke family.
[636] _Henslowe Papers_, 31; cf. _supra_ (Admiral’s).
[637] Fleay, 87.
[638] Murray, i. 58, adds 1589–94 records.
[639] App. D, No. cxxx.
[640] Henslowe, i. 179. As Henslowe paid 7_s._ ‘for my Lo^r Worsters
mens warant for playinge at the cort vnto the clarke of the cownselles
for geatynge the cownselles handes to yt’ (_Henslowe Papers_, 108), and
the only warrant to these men was dated 28 Feb. 1602, the connexion
with Henslowe probably began while they were still at the Boar’s Head.
[641] Henslowe, i. 160, 190.
[642] Cf. _supra_ (Chamberlain’s).
[643] Henslowe, i. 132, 163.
[644] Ibid. 177.
[645] Ibid. 178, ‘Lent vnto Richard Perckens the 4 of September 1602 to
buy thinges for Thomas Hewode play & to lend vnto Dick Syferweste to
ride downe to his felowes’. This is, of course, a private loan, and not
in the company’s account.
[646] Called in the earlier entries _The Two Brothers_.
[647] The two names do not occur together, but almost certainly
indicate the same play.
[648] Spelt ‘Burone’ and ‘Berowne’ in the entries.
[649] Henslowe, i. 180, 183, 185, 186, 187, 190.
[650] Cf. p. 7. A further notice of the transfer is given by Thomas
Heywood, Γυναικεῖον _or General History of Women_ (1624), who says that
he was one of Worcester’s men, who at James’s accession ‘bestowed me
upon the excellent princesse Queen Anne’.
[651] _N. S. S. Trans._ (_1877–9_), 16*, from _Lord Chamberlain’s
Books_, 58^a. In August the company served as grooms of the chamber
(App. B).
[652] In assigning Kempe to the Queen’s Revels in 1605, Dr. Greg
(Henslowe, ii. 108) has been tripped up by one of Collier’s forgeries;
cf. my review in _M. L. R._ iv. 408.
[653] Printed in _M. S. C._ i. 265, from _S. P. D. Jac. I_, ii. 100;
also by Collier, i. 336, and Halliwell-Phillipps, _Illustrations_, 106.
It is a rough draft full of deletions, marked by square brackets, and
of additions, printed in italics, in the text. The theory of Fleay,
191, that the document is a forgery is disposed of by Greg, _Henslowe’s
Diary_, ii. 107.
[654] Printed in _M. S. C._ i. 270, from _P. R. 7 Jac. I_, pt. 39; also
from _P. R._, but misdescribed as a Privy Seal, by T. E. Tomlins in
_Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 45. The Signet Bill is indexed under April 1609
in Phillimore, 104.
[655] Cf. App. B.
[656] _Rutland MSS._ iv. 461. They stayed two days, and gave four
performances.
[657] Kelly, 248, ‘Item the vj^{th} of June given to the Queenes
Players xl^s.... Item the xxj^{th} of Auguste given to the Children of
the Revells xx^s. Item the xxvj^{th} of September given to one other
Companye of the Queenes playors xx^s.’
[658] Murray, ii. 245, ‘paid to the Queenes players to Thomas Swinerton
xl^s’.
[659] Murray, ii. 340, from Mayor’s Court Books (18 April 1614),
‘Swynnerton one of the Quenes players in the name of himselfe & the
rest of his company desyred leaue to play in the cytty accordinge to
his Maiesties Lettres patents shewed forth. And M^r Maior & Court moved
them to play onely on Wednesday, Thursday & Fryday in Easter weke.’
[660] Murray, ibid. (6 May 1615), ‘Thomas Swynnerton produced this day
Letters Patents dated the x^{th} [? xv^{th}] of Aprill Anno Septimo
Jacobi whereby hee & others are authorised to play as the Quenes men,
vidz. Thomas Grene, Christofer Breston [? Beeston], Thomas Haywood,
Richard Pyrkyns, Rob^t. Pallant, Tho. Swynnerton, John Duke, Robt. Lee,
James Hoult, & Robt. Breston [? Beeston].’
[661] Kelly, 252, ‘Item given to the Queenes Maiesties Highnes Playors
xl^s.... Item the xvj^{th} daye of October Given to the Queenes Playors
xl^s. Item given to one other Companye of the Queenes Playors xxx^s.’
[662] Murray, ii. 340 (30 March 1616), ‘A Patent was this day brought
into the Court by Thomas Swynerton made to Thomas Grene ... & Robert
Beeston Servants to Quene Anne & the rest of their associats bearing
Teste xv^o Aprilis Anno Septimo Jacobi. But the said Swynerton
confesseth that hee himselfe & Robert Lee only are here to play the
rest are absent....’; (29 May 1616), ‘Thomas Swynerton came this day
into the Court & affirmed himselfe to be one of the players to the
Quenes Maiestie & bringinge with him no patent desyred to haue leaue
to play here ... the same company had liberty to play here at Easter
last....’ Leave was refused on this occasion.
[663] Kelly, 253, ‘Item the sixt of Februarye given to the Queenes
Playors. Item given to one other Companye of the Queenes Playors’.
[664] _Hist. MSS._ xi. 3. 26.
[665] App. D, No. clviii; cf. Murray, ii. 343.
[666] Murray, i. 204.
[667] Kelly, 254.
[668] Collier, i. 397, from a manuscript at Bridgewater House.
[669] Fleay, 192, guesses that her first husband was Robert Browne of
the 1583 Worcester’s company. As Queen Anne’s men played at the Boar’s
Head, he is very likely to have been the ‘Browne of the Boares head’
who ‘dyed very pore’ in the plague of 1603 (_Henslowe Papers_, 59).
[670] Murray, i. 193, appears to date this list _c._ 1612, and the
allegation in the Bill (Fleay, 275) that the pensions were paid for
five years supports this. But it cannot be earlier than 1613 as Read
was still with the Lady Elizabeth’s in that year. Nor does it include
Lee, who was payee for the Queen’s in 1614–16. It clearly belongs to
the 1616 settlement.
[671] ‘Goodman Freshwater’ was furnishing stuffs to Worcester’s men in
1602–3 (Henslowe, i. 179, 187).
[672] Sanderson may be the ‘Sands’ who played with ‘Ellis’ [Worth] in
Daborne’s _Poor Man’s Comfort_ (q.v.), about 1617. Or James Sands,
formerly a boy with the King’s men, may have come to the Queen’s.
[673] Adams, 351.
[674] _M. S. C._ i. 272, from _P. R. 8 Jac. I_, p. 8; also printed by
T. E. Tomlins in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, iv. 47.
[675] Fleay, 188.
[676] Murray, i. 239, confuses the Duke’s with Lord Aubigny’s men.
[677] A letter, probably originally from Dulwich, but now _Egerton
MS._ 2623, f. 25 (printed in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, i. 18, and _Henslowe
Papers_, 126), is signed by William Rowley, as well as by Taylor and
Pallant, and must therefore be later than this amalgamation, and not,
as Dr. Greg suggests, from the Lady Elizabeth’s _c._ 1613. It confirms
a purchase of clothes from Henslowe for £55.
[678] Text in Collier, _Memoirs of Alleyn_, 127; abstract in _Henslowe
Papers_, 90.
[679] _N. S. S. Trans. 1877–9_, 19*; cf. Fleay, 265. Collier, i. 406,
has an elegy by William Rowley on Hugh Attwell, servant to Prince
Charles, who died 25 Sept. 1621.
[680] App. D, No. clviii.
[681] _Henslowe Papers_, 93.
[682] _M. S. C._ i. 274, from _P. R. 9 Jac. I_, p. 20.
[683] _Henslowe Papers_, 18, 111.
[684] Cf. App. B.
[685] _Henslowe Papers_, 86, from _Dulwich MS._ i. 106; also printed in
_Variorum_, xxi. 416, and Collier, _Alleyn Papers_, 78.
[686] Greg, _Henslowe Papers_, 58, 87, thinks that the ‘Baxter’ of the
Grievances was William Barksted or Backstede. It may be so.
[687] Thorndike, 66, thinks that the list belongs to an earlier
production by the Queen’s Revels before 30 March 1610, when Taylor
joined the Duke of York’s. But there is no evidence that he was ever in
the Queen’s Revels.
[688] _Henslowe Papers_, 65, 125; A. E. H. Swaen, _Robert Daborne’s
Plays_ (_Anglia_, xx. 153). The account in Fleay, i. 75, is full of
inaccuracies. The documents now form separate articles of _Dulwich MS._
1. All, unless otherwise specified below, are letters or undertakings
from Daborne to Henslowe. Most of them are dated, and I think that the
following ordering, due to Dr. Greg, is reasonable: (i) Art. 70, 17
Apr. 1613; (ii) Art. 71, 17 Apr. 1613; (iii) Art. 72, 25 Apr. 1613;
(iv) Art. 73, 3 May 1613; (v) Art. 74, 8 May 1613; (vi) Art. 75, 16 May
1613; (vii) Art. 77, 19 May 1613; (viii) Art. 78, 5 June 1613; (ix)
Art. 79, 10 June 1613; (xi) Art. 80, 18 June 1613; (xii) Art. 81, 25
June 1613; (xiii)? Art. 100, Field to Henslowe, N.D.; (xiv)? Art. 69,
Field to Henslowe, N.D.; (xv)? Art. 68, Field, Daborne, and Massinger
to Henslowe, N.D.; (xvi) Art. 82, 16 July 1613; (xvii) Art. 83, 30 July
1613; (xviii)? Art. 76, N.D.; (xix)? Art. 99, Daborne to Edward Griffin
(Henslowe’s scrivener), N.D.; (xx). Art. 84, 23 Aug. 1613; (xxi) Art.
85, 14 Oct. 1613; (xxii) Art. 86, 29 Oct. 1613; (xxiii) Art. 87, 5
Nov. 1613; (xxiv) Art. 88, 13 Nov. 1613; (xxv) Art. 89, 13 Nov. 1613;
(xxvi). Art. 90, 27 Nov. 1613; (xxvii) Art. 91, 9 Dec. 1613; (xxviii)
Art. 92, 10 Dec. 1613; (xxix) Art. 93, 24 Dec. 1613; (xxx)? Art. 95,
N.D.; (xxxi) Art. 94, 31 Dec. 1613; (xxxii) Art. 96, 11 Mar. 1614;
(xxxiii) Art. 97, 28 Mar. 1614; (xxxiv), Art. 98, 31 July 1614.
[689] _Henslowe Papers_, 68.
[690] _Sh. Soc. Papers_, i. 16; _Henslowe Papers_, 125, from _Egerton
MS._ 2623, f. 24. This document cannot be dated, but it has probably
been detached from the Dulwich series.
[691] _Henslowe Papers_, 82.
[692] Ibid. 71. I should suppose this, rather than, with Dr. Greg,
_Bartholomew Fair_, to be the ‘Johnsons play’ contemplated on 13 Nov.
(_Henslowe Papers_, 78), but others of Jonson’s plays may also have
been revived.
[693] Ibid. 69, 70.
[694] Ibid. 71, 103, 111.
[695] Ibid. 76, 77, 78.
[696] Ibid. 71.
[697] Dr. Greg (_Henslowe Papers_, 75) makes them the same play,
founded on Dekker’s tracts, _The Bellman of London_ (1608) and
_Lanthorn and Candlelight, or the Bellman’s Second Night-walk_ (1609),
but _The Arraignment_ seems to have been too nearly finished on 5 June
for this identification (_Henslowe Papers_, 72).
[698] Still more so the ascription (Fleay, i. 81) of _The Faithful
Friends_ to Daborne and the Lady Elizabeth’s men.
[699] _Henslowe Papers_, 23; also in Collier, _Memoirs of Alleyn_, 118.
A few additional lines, much mutilated, appear to have provided for the
allocation of half the daily takings of the galleries to the discharge
of a debt of £124 due to Henslowe and Meade and of any further
disbursements by them. This agrees with the Dawes articles _infra_, but
the Articles of Grievance refer to a debt of £126.
[700] Fleay, 187; Greg, _Henslowe Papers_, 87, _Henslowe’s Diary_, ii.
138.
[701] Cf. p. 240.
[702] _Henslowe Papers_, 82.
[703] Ibid. 123, from _Variorum_, xxi. 413; also in Collier, _Alleyn
Papers_, 75. The original, formerly at Dulwich, is now missing.
[704] _Henslowe Papers_, 72, 79.
[705] I agree with Dr. Greg that the ‘fower’ in Dawes’s articles is
probably a mistake for ‘fourteen’.
[706] _Bartholomew Fair_, v. 3, ‘I thinke, one Taylor, would goe neere
to beat all this company, with a hand bound behinde him’.
[707] Ibid. _Cokes._ Which is your Burbage now?
_Lanterne._ What meane you by that, Sir?
_Cokes._ Your best Actor. Your Field?
[708] Murray, ii. 254. This, however, was probably Long’s company; v.
_infra_.
[709] Robert Pallant, one of the company, is noted (Henslowe, ii. 20)
as visiting Henslowe on his death-bed.
[710] _Variorum_, iii. 59.
[711] App. D, No. clviii.
[712] Murray, i. 263; ii. 4. I add Belvoir on 1 March 1614.
[713] Cunningham, xliv.
[714] Murray, ii. 344.
[715] Lawrence, i. 128 (_Early French Players in England_). One can
hardly, I suppose, assume that the Turkish acrobat of 1589–90 (cf. ch.
xviii) was a real Turk.
[716] J. A. Lester, _Italian Players in Scotland_ (_M. L. N._ xxiii.
240), traces _histriones_, whom he unjustifiably assumes to be actors,
and _tubicines_ in 1514–61.
[717] _S. P. F._ (1569–71), 413.
[718] Nichols, _Eliz._ i. 302.
[719] Murray, ii. 374.
[720] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 225, 227, 458.
[721] Furnivall, _Robert Laneham’s Letter_, 18.
[722] Cf. App. B.
[723] Smith, 148, makes him then head of the Gelosi, but the
authorities she cites do not bear her out.
[724] Baschet, 18, 25, 34, 43; D’Ancona, ii. 455, 457, 459; Rennert,
28, 479.
[725] R. B. M^cKerrow (_Nashe_, iv. 462) suggests that Tristano may
have been ‘that famous Francatrip Harlicken’ represented in the
dedication of _An Almond for a Parrat_ (1590) as asking questions at
Venice about Kempe. But Francatrippa seems to have been the stage name
of Gabriello Panzanini da Bologna of the Gelosi (D’Ancona, ii. 469,
511).
[726] Is this ‘the nimble, tumbling Angelica’ of Marston’s _Scourge
of Villainy_ (1598), xi. 101? If so, a later visit may be suspected.
Drusiano Martinelli was comedian to the Duke of Mantua, to whose son
Angelica had been mistress, in 1595 (D’Ancona, ii. 518).
[727] Baschet, 72, 82, 90, 194, 199; D’Ancona, ii. 464, 479, 504, 518,
523, 526; Smith, 147. The main body of the Gelosi passed about this
time under the leadership of Flaminio Scala, fifty of whose _scenarii_
are printed in _Il Teatro delle Fauole rappresentatiue_ (1611).
[728] Cf. ch. xviii as to traces of improvised comedy in England.
[729] G. E. P. Arkwright, _Notes on the Ferrabosco Family (Musical
Antiquary_, iii. 221; iv. 42); G. Livi, _The Ferrabosco Family_ (ibid.
iv. 121). I may add that he was evidently the Bolognese groom of the
chamber, favoured by the Queen as a musician, who dropped a hint for a
Venetian embassy in 1575 (_V. P._ vii. 524). He left an illegitimate
son, Alfonso, in England, who also was a Court musician by 1603, and
was succeeded in turn by sons, Alfonso and Henry, in 1627 (Lafontaine,
45, 63).
[730] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 159, 160.
[731] Ibid. 160, 301.
[732] Cunningham, 221; cf. _D. N. B._; _M. L. N._ xxii. 2, 129, 201.
[733] _Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys MS._ ii. 663 (cf. _Hist.
MSS. Comm. Report_, 190). The letter is endorsed, ‘To Q. Elizabeth:
Ubaldino an Italian Musitian I suppose’.
[734] Cf. my letter in _T.L.S._ for 12 May 1921.
[735] Cf. ch. xiii (Interluders); _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 187.
[736] _Variorum_, iii. 461; cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 202.
[737] Cf. p. 272.
[738] E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ for 21 Jan. 1882. I am sorry to say
that Mr. Scott suggests that Shakespeare was of the company.
[739] J. Scott, _An Account of Perth_, in Sir J. Sinclair, _Statistical
Account of Scotland_, xviii (1796), 522.
[740] J. C. Dibdin, _Annals of the Edinburgh Stage_ (1888), 20, from
_Accounts_ of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland. _A True Accompt
of the Baptism of Prince Henry Frederick_, printed in 1594 (_Somers
Tracts_, ii. 171), records plays amongst other festivities, but does
not say that English actors took part.
[741] _Scottish Papers_, ii. 676. I suppose that this document is
the authority on which P. F. Tytler, _Hist. of Scotland_, ix. 302,
describing the events of 1599, says of Fletcher, ‘He had been there
before, in 1594; and on his return to England, had suffered some
persecution from his popularity with James’.
[742] D. H. Fleming, _St. Andrews Kirk Session Register_, ii. 870, ‘Ane
Jnglishman haveing desyrit libertie of the session to mak ane publik
play in this citie, it was voted and concludit that he suld nocht be
permitted to do the samin’.
[743] Calderwood, _Historie of the Kirk of Scotland_ (Wodrow Soc.), v.
765.
[744] _Acts of the Privy Council of Scotland_, vi. 39, 41. Calderwood
seems to have put the whole business a week too late.
[745] Dibdin, 22.
[746] Lee, 83, from _S. P. D. Scotland_ (R. O.), lxv. 64; cf. summary
in _Scottish Papers_, ii. 777, ‘Performances of English players,
Fletcher, Martin, and their company, by the King’s permission;
enactment of the [Fower] Sessions, and preaching of the ministers
against them. The bellows blowers say that they are sent by England to
sow dissension between the King and the Kirk’.
[747] Dibdin, 24.
[748] J. Stuart, _Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of
Aberdeen_ (_Spalding Club_), ii. xxi, xxii, 222.
[749] Fleay, 136; cf. Furness, _Macbeth_, 407. Fleay goes so far as to
‘hazard the guess’ that the ‘speciall letter’ of recommendation from
James produced at Aberdeen was ‘the identical letter that James wrote
to Shakespeare with his own hand’, as recorded by Oldys.
[750] Henslowe, i. 45
[751] App. C, No. lvii.
[752] _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlv. 311, ‘5 Thaler den englischen Spielleuten,
so ufm Rathaus ihr Spiel mit Springen und allerlei Kurzweil getrieben’.
[753] The inevitable attempt to show that Shakespeare ‘must’ have been
of the party was made by J. Stefansson, _Shakespeare at Elsinore_,
in _Contemporary Review_, lxix. 20, and disposed of by H. Logeman,
_Shakespeare te Helsingör_ in _Mélanges Paul Fredericy_ (1904); cf.
_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xii. 241.
[754] Fürstenau, 69; Cohn, xxiii; Bolte, _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxiii. 99.
Herz, 5, endeavours to show traces of a visit to Danzig by this company.
[755] M. Röchell, _Chronik_, in J. Janssen, _Gesch. des Bisthums
Münster_ (1852), iii. 174; Cohn, cxxxiv (misdated 1599);
_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxxvi. 274.
[756] _Henslowe Papers_, 31. Greg, _Henslowe_, ii. 8, disposes of the
confusion between Robert Browne and Alleyn’s step-father, John Browne.
[757] Cohn, xxxi. There seems nothing to connect the Andreas Röthsch
who appeared at Leipzig in July 1591 with Browne, or even to justify
the conjecture (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlv. 311) that he was English.
[758] L. Ph. C. van den Bergh, _’s Gravenhaagsche Bijzonderheden_
(1857), 51 from Hague Archives; Cohn, xxviii. A letter from R. Jones to
Alleyn (_Henslowe Papers_, 33), often assigned to this date, seems to
me probably to belong to 1615: cf. p. 287.
[759] Another Admiral’s passport is printed in Rye, 47.
[760] G. van Hasselt, _Arnhemsche Oudheden_, i (1803), 244, naming
Robert Bruyn, Johan Bradsdret, Thomas Saxwiell, Richardus Jonas, and
Everhart Sauss.
[761] Bolte in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxxiii. 104.
[762] Mentzel, 23.
[763] Cf. vol. i, p. 343.
[764] _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxi. 247.
[765] _Archiv_, xiv. 116.
[766] Mentzel, 25.
[767] Henslowe, i. 29.
[768] Cohn, xxxiii, xxxviii; Goedeke, ii. 519; Herz, 8. A conventional
clown, variously called ‘Jahn Clam’, ‘Jahn Posset’, ‘Jahn der
Engelländische Narr’, &c., also appears in plays, from 1596 onwards, by
Jacob Ayrer of Nuremberg, who has other debts, including the ‘jig’, to
the English players (Cohn, lxi; Goedeke, ii. 545).
[769] _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxiii. 103.
[770] _Archiv_, xii. 320; xiii. 316; xiv. 118; xv. 115; Mentzel, 26,
37. Herz, 34, points out that about this date the Duke of Brunswick’s
_Ehebrecherin_ and _Vincentius Ladislaus_ were played in Frankfort,
probably by these men. They are referred to at length by Marx Mangoldt,
_Markschiffs-Nachen_ (1597), in a passage beginning:
Da war nun weiter mein Intent,
Zu sehen das Englische Spiel,
Dauon ich hab gehört so viel.
Wie der Narr drinnen, Jan genennt,
Mit Bossen wer so excellent.
Herz, 34, also assigns to the company anonymous appearances at Ulm,
Munich, and Tübingen in 1597 (_Archiv_, xii. 319; xiii. 316; xv. 212).
[771] Cohn, xxxiv.
[772] Cf. p. 279.
[773] Cohn, xxxiv.
[774] Herz, 37; T. Coryat, _Crudities_, ii. 291. Cf. also _Ein Discurss
von der Frankfurter Messe_ (1615):
Der Narr macht lachen, doch ich weht,
--Da ist keiner so gut wie Jahn begeht--
Vor dieser Zeitt wol hat gethan,
Jetzt ist er ein reicher Handelsmann.
[775] Cohn, xxxiv; _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xl. 342.
[776] _Henslowe Papers_, 37.
[777] Cohn, xviii, lvii; Goedeke, ii. 522; Duncker, _Landgrave Moritz
von Hessen und die Englischen Komödianten_ in _Deutsche Rundschau_,
xlviii. 260.
[778] _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xiv. 361.
[779] Cohn, lviii; Herz, 13.
[780] Könnecke in _Z. f. vergleichende Litteralurgeschichte_, N. F. i.
85.
[781] _Hatfield MSS._ v. 174. Browne was also the agent for a similar
transaction licensed on 11 July 1597 (_S. P. D. Eliz._ cclxiv).
[782] _Archiv_, xiv. 117; xv. 114.
[783] Rommel, vi. 390, from Cassel archives, ‘Robert Brown und John
Wobster begleiteten ihn’. The payment therefore on behalf of the
Admiral’s men about Oct. 1596 ‘to feache Browne’ (Henslowe, i. 45) is
not very likely to refer to Robert.
[784] Cohn, lviii; Duncker, 265.
[785] Mentzel, 41.
[786] _Archiv_, xv. 115. Herz, 17, assigns to them, conjecturally,
performances by ‘Englishmen’ at Memmingen, Cologne, Munich, Ulm, and
Stuttgart during 1600. But the wording of the Strassburg documents
suggests a continuous stay.
[787] On 21 Oct. 1603 Joan Alleyn wrote to Edward Alleyn (_Henslowe
Papers_, 59), ‘All the companyes be come hoame & well for ought we
knowe, but that Browne of the Boares head is dead & dyed very pore,
he went not into the countrye at all’. Obviously this is not Robert
Browne, who lived many years longer. But it may have been a relative,
as Lord Derby’s men are very likely to have preceded Worcester’s at the
Boar’s Head. There was at least one other actor of the name, Edward
Browne, and possibly more (cf. ch. xv).
[788] Mentzel, 46.
[789] Mentzel, 45, 48; _Archiv_, xiv. 119. A performance at Dresden in
Oct. 1600, assigned to them by Herz, 38, is anonymous.
[790] Mentzel, 48.
[791] Duncker, 267, from chronicle of Wilhelm Buch, ‘Anno 1602 hat er
die Engländer alle mit einander von sich gejagt und des springens und
tanzens müde geworden’.
[792] Mentzel, 50.
[793] Mentzel, 51; Bolte, _Das Danziger Theater_, 34.
[794] _Archiv_, xv. 117.
[795] Mentzel, 52.
[796] Mentzel, 50; _Archiv_, xiv. 122.
[797] The Frankfort archives call them ‘Thomas Blackreude’ and
‘Johannes Fheer’, which has prevented their identity with Worcester’s
men from being noticed.
[798] Mentzel, 51.
[799] Mentzel, 53; _Archiv_, xv. 117. Herz, 18, assigns to Browne
anonymous appearances by Englishmen at Strassburg in June 1601, Ulm in
Nov. 1602, Nördlingen in May 1605, and Ulm in May and June 1605. At
Nördlingen a play from the prophet Jonah, possibly Greene and Lodge’s
_Looking Glass for London and England_, was given.
[800] _Archiv_, xv. 120. Coryat, ii. 183, saw him at Strassburg in 1608.
[801] Mentzel, 53; Meissner in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xix. 125; _Archiv_,
xiii. 320; Duncker, 268. The _Ottonium_ was named after Maurice’s son
Otto, the friend of Prince Henry Frederick, who paid a visit to England
in 1611 (Rye, 141).
[802] _Archiv_, xiv. 124.
[803] Cohn, lviii; R. P. Wülcker in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xiv. 360.
[804] Mentzel, 53.
[805] _Henslowe Papers_, 63.
[806] Bolte, 35.
[807] This might be Heywood’s _King Edward IV_.
[808] F. von Hurter, _Gesch. Kaiser Ferdinands II_, v. 395.
[809] _The Proud Woman of Antwerp_ might be the lost piece by Day and
Haughton.
[810] Meissner, 74, and in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xix. 128; cf. pp. 284–6.
The text of _Nobody and Somebody_ is printed from a manuscript at Rein
by F. Bischoff in _Mittheilungen des hist. Vereins für Steiermark_,
xlvii. 127. I think it is just possible that the companies of 1608
and 1617 may have been Spencer’s. There seem to have been _Saxoni_,
as well as _Angli_, playing. These do not seem to have constituted a
distinct company, and are perhaps more likely to have been with Spencer
than with Green. Spencer, as well as Green, was in relations with the
imperial court in 1617; cf. p. 290. But I think that the evidence of
the Rein manuscript is fairly decisive in favour of Green.
[811] This may have been Green himself. A drawing of a red-haired
actor, in the traditional get-up of Nobody, is on the Rein manuscript.
[812] Mentzel, 54, 55, 56, 58.
[813] _Archiv_, xiv. 125; xv. 215. Herz, 41, ascribes to them anonymous
appearances at Ulm, Nördlingen, and Augsburg. John Price, afterwards
well known as a musician at Dresden and Stuttgart, is said to be
recorded at Stuttgart in 1609 (Cohn, cxxxviii), and may have been with
the Hessian company.
[814] Cohn, lix; Duncker, 272.
[815] Meissner, 46; Duncker, 272. Herz, 41, ascribes to them anonymous
appearances at the wedding of the Margrave John George, brother of
the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Princess Christina of Saxony at
Jägerndorf in July, and at Nuremberg and Ulm in November.
[816] Cohn, lix, without reference. Herz, 41, adds an anonymous
performance of _The Merchant of Venice_ at the Court of Margrave
Christian of Brandenburg at Halle.
[817] _Archiv_, xiv. 126.
[818] Duncker, 273.
[819] _Archiv_, xiii. 319. If this is the company which, according
to Alvensleben, _Allgemeine Theaterchronik_ (1832), No. 158, played
_Daniel_, _The Chaste Susanna_, and _The Two Judges in Israel_ at Ulm
in 1602, the identification with the company found at Nördlingen and
Rothenburg is assisted.
[820] Cohn, lxxvii, from Erhard Cellius, _Eques Auratus
Anglo-Wirtembergicus_ (1605); cf. Rye, cvii.
[821] _Archiv_, xi. 625; xiii. 70. They also played _Daniel in the
Lions’ Den_, _Susanna_ (? by Henry Julius of Brunswick or another
version), _The Prodigal Son_, _A Disobedient Merchant’s Son_ (? _The
London Prodigal_), _Charles Duke of Burgundy_, _Annabella a Duke’s
Daughter of Ferrara_ (? Marston’s _Parasitaster_), _Botzarius an
Ancient Roman_, and _Vincentius Ladislaus_ (? by Henry Julius of
Brunswick). Three of these plays (_Romeo and Juliet_, _The Prodigal
Son_, and _Annabella_) are in the repertories of John Green; cf. p. 285.
[822] _Archiv_, xiv. 122.
[823] _Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte_, N. F.
vii. 61. They played in 1604 _Daniel in the Lions’ Den_, _Melone
of Dalmatia_, _Lewis King of Spain_, _Celinde and Sedea_, _Pyramus
and Thisbe_, _Annabella a Duke’s Daughter of Montferrat_; and in
1606 _Charles Duke of Burgundy_, _Susanna_, _The Prodigal Son_,
_A Disobedient Merchant’s Son_, _An Ancient Roman_, _Vincentius
Ladislaus_. The Nördlingen and Rothenburg companies must be the same.
_Celinde and Sedea_, however, is found in a repertory, not of Green,
but of Spencer; cf. p. 289.
[824] Herz, 42, 65.
[825] A. van Sorgen, _De Tooneelspeelkunst in Utrecht_.
[826] Bolte, 41, 47. Herz, 27, conjectures that these may have been the
English players at Wolfenbüttel in May 1615; cf. p. 277.
[827] Schlager, 168; Meissner in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xix. 139.
[828] Cohn, xciii; cf. p. 282 as to the inference that Green was at
Gräz in 1607–8.
[829] _Archiv_, xiv. 129.
[830] _Archiv_, xv. 120.
[831] Mentzel, 60.
[832] Bolte, 51.
[833] Herz, 22, from Wolter, 97.
[834] Mentzel, 61; Meissner, 65.
[835] _Archiv_, xiv. 130; Mentzel, 61.
[836] Herz, 30, from Wolter, 97; A. van Sorgen, _De Tooneelspeelkunst
in Utrecht_.
[837] Herz, 30.
[838] Goedeke, ii. 543, could find no copy of _Musarum Aoniarum tertia
Erato_ (Hamburg, 1611), the title-page of which claims ‘etlichen
Englischen Comedien’ as a source.
[839] The last two plays have some kind of relation to Shakespeare’s
_Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and _Titus Andronicus_. _Sidonia and
Theagenes_ is a prose version of Gabriel Rollenhagen’s _Amantes
Amentes_ (1609). A supplement to the 1620 collection, with six other
plays and two jigs, appeared as _Liebeskampff oder Ander Theil der
Englischen Comödien und Tragödien_ (1630), but none of these are
traceable before the Thirty Years’ War.
[840] Cf. pp. 279, 281, 283. The Dresden list is in Cohn, cxv.
[841] Played at Nördlingen in 1604. Cohn, 309, prints a German version
from a Vienna manuscript.
[842] Possibly Heywood’s _The Silver Age_.
[843] Green played at Gräz in 1608 ‘Von ein Herzog von Florenz der sich
in eines Edelmann’s Tochter verliebt hat’. This seems too early for
Massinger’s _Great Duke of Florence_, but suggests the same story.
[844] Possibly _1 Jeronimo_.
[845] Possibly Dekker’s _Patient Grissel_.
[846] Played at Nördlingen and Rothenburg in 1604. Bolte, 177, prints
from a Danzig manuscript a later German version based on Marston’s
_Parasitaster_.
[847] Played by Green at Gräz in 1608, in a version extant in a Rein
manuscript; a later one is in the 1620 collection. Cf. p. 282.
[848] Possibly _Clyomon and Clamydes_.
[849] Cohn, 236, prints a German version from a late copy.
[850] Possibly Robert Greene’s play.
[851] Played by Browne at Cassel in 1607; a text is in the 1620
collection.
[852] Probably Kyd’s _Spanish Tragedy_, played by Browne at Frankfort
in 1601.
[853] Printed in the 1620 collection.
[854] Probably Dekker’s _Virgin Martyr_.
[855] Played by Green at Gräz in 1608.
[856] Possibly Robert Greene’s _Alphonsus_, _King of Arragon_ or
_Mucedorus_.
[857] Played by Green at Gräz in 1608. A version, related to Dekker’s
_Old Fortunatus_, is in the 1620 collection.
[858] Played by an anonymous company at Halle in 1611; cf. p. 283. _The
Jew_, played by Green at Passau and Gräz in 1607–8, might be either
this play or _The Jew of Malta_. Dekker wrote a _Jew of Venice_, now
lost; but a German version, printed by Meissner, 131, from a Vienna
manuscript, is in part based on _The Merchant of Venice_.
[859] Could this be _The Winter’s Tale_?
[860] Green played _The King of Cyprus and Duke of Venice_ at Gräz in
1608.
[861] Played at Nördlingen in 1604 and Rothenburg in 1606 and by Green
at Passau and Gräz in 1607–8. A version is in the 1620 collection.
[862] Green played _Dives and Lazarus_ at Gräz in 1608.
[863] Fleay, _Sh._ 307.
[864] _Henslowe Papers_, 33.
[865] Ibid. 94.
[866] Cf. ch. xvi, introd.
[867] C. F. Meyer in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxxviii. 208.
[868] _D. N. B._ s.v. Giles Farnaby.
[869] Cf. pp. 279, 283.
[870] Cohn, lxxviii.
[871] Fürstenau, i. 76.
[872] Cf. p. 282. Herz, 44, identifies them with ‘English’ at The
Hague (June 1606), Cologne (Feb. 1607), The Hague (April), Ulm (May),
Nördlingen (June), and Munich (July).
[873] Wolter, 93.
[874] L. Schneider, _Geschichte der Oper in Berlin_, Beilage, lxx. 25;
Fürstenau, i. 77.
[875] Cf. p. 283.
[876] Cohn, lxxxiv.
[877] Ibid. lxxxvii.
[878] _Archiv_, xiv. 128. _Philole and Mariana_ may be Lewis Machin’s
_The Dumb Knight_, and _The Turk_ Mason’s play of that name. _Celinde
and Sedea_ had formed part of a repertory at Rothenburg in 1604
apparently related to those of Green; cf. p. 284. Spencer is not
recorded to have played any other piece found in Green’s repertories.
[879] _Archiv_, xii. 320; xiv. 128.
[880] Schlager, 168; Elze in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xiv. 362; Meissner, 53,
and in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xix. 120.
[881] _Archiv_, xiv. 129; _Zeitschrift für vergl. Litt._ vii. 64;
Mentzel, 58.
[882] _Archiv_, xv. 118.
[883] Ibid. xii. 320; xiii. 322.
[884] Ibid. xv. 119.
[885] Ibid. xv. 215; cf. Herz, 48.
[886] Wolter, 96; Cohn in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxi. 260; Cohn, xci, from
_Harl. MS._ 3888, _The Evangelic Fruict of the Seraphicall Franciscan
Order_.
[887] _Archiv_, xv. 119.
[888] Mentzel, 59.
[889] Cohn in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxi. 261; Wolter, 96.
[890] Meissner, 59, and in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xix. 122.
[891] Cohn, lxxxviii.
[892] Ibid. lxxxiii; Mentzel, 54.
[893] Cohn in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxi. 257; Wolter, 95.
[894] _Archiv_, xiv. 124; Mentzel, 54; Schlager, 168; Herz, 53.
[895] Cohn, xxxv; Bolte, 41.
[896] Cohn, xcii.
[897] Bolte, 51.
[898] Cohn, xcii; Meissner, 38, and in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xix. 122.
[899] Cf. pp. 275, 285.
[900] _Archiv_, xiv. 131.
[901] Ibid., xiii. 316; xiv. 116; Heywood, 60.
[902] Mentzel, 55. H. Chardon, _La Troupe du Roman comique_, 32,
notices Maurice of Nassau’s company at Nantes in 1618 and Paris in
1625, but does not say that they were English.
[903] _Archiv_, xiii. 317; xiv. 121.
[904] Cohn, lxxvii.
[905] _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlv. 311.
[906] Cohn in _Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxi. 253.
[907] Cf. p. 273.
[908] Pellicer, i. 80, citing the records of the Madrid hospital,
‘en 11 de Enero de 1583 voltearon unos ingleses en el Corral de la
Pacheca’. The original record is probably lost, as it is not with
those of 1579–82, 1590, and 1601–2 published from the _Archivo de la
Diputacion provincial de Madrid_ by C. Pérez Pastor in the _Bulletin
Hispanique_ (1906) and reprinted by Rennert, 345.
[909] E. Soulié, _Recherches sur Molière_, 153; cf. Rigal, 46;
Jusserand, _Shakespeare in France_, 51.
[910] Henslowe, i. 114.
[911] Soulié et de Barthélemy, _Journal de Jean Héroard_, i. 88, 91, 92.
[912] H. C. Coote in _Intermédiaire des Chercheurs et Curieux_, ii.
105; cf. _5 N. Q._ ix. 42. The idea was that ‘Tiph, toph’ represented
a reminiscence of _2 Henry IV_, II. i. 205, ‘This is the right fencing
grace, my lord; tap for tap, and so part fair’. The phrase ‘tiff toff’
occurs in brackets in a speech of Crapula while he beats Mendacio in
_Lingua_ (Dodsley,^4 ix. 434). Collier explains it as hiccups; Fleay,
ii. 261, on the authority of P. A. Daniel, as an Italian term for the
thwack of stage blows.
[913] E. Fournier, _Chansons de Gaultier Garguille_, lix, and
_L’Espagne et ses Comédiens en France au xvii^e Siècle_ (_Revue
des Provinces_, iv. 496), cites H. Ternaux in _Revue Françoise et
Étrangère_, i. 78, for statements that the head of the English at
Fontainebleau was Ganassa, who in Spain had had a mixed company of
English, Italians, and Spanish, and on 11 Jan. 1583 had a share in the
receipts of a troupe of English _volteadores_. I have not been able to
see the work of M. Ternaux, who does not inspire confidence by calling
Ganassa Juan instead of Alberto. There seems to be nothing to connect
Ganassa with the _volteadores_ of 1583, except the fact that the Corral
de la Pacheca where they played was leased to him for nine or ten years
in 1574 (Rennert, 29), and they may therefore have paid him rent.
His troupe in 1581–2, as given by Rennert, 479, consisted entirely
of Italians, with two Spanish musicians. He is said to have been in
Spain in 1603 (Pellicer, i. 57, 72; Rennert, 30), but there is nothing
to show that, if so, he went on to France. But Héroard tells us that
there was a Spanish rope-dancer at Fontainebleau in 1604, and a very
obscure passage in his diary suggests that this Spaniard was really
an Irishman. Irish marauders (_voleurs_) were then giving trouble in
Paris, which led Louis to say ‘Ce voleur qui voloit sur la corde étoit
Irlandois?’ and Héroard comments, ‘Il étoit vrai; il accommoda le mot
de voleur à l’autre signification, il l’avoit vu voler à Fontainebleau’
(_Journal_, i. 90, 126).
[914] F. Bischoff in _Mittheilungen des hist. Vereins für Steiermark_,
xlvii. 127; cf. p. 282.
[915] De Bry, _India Orientalis_ (1613), xii. 137, ‘Angli ludiones per
Germaniam et Galliam vagantur’.
[916] Alleyn’s life is more fully dealt with than is here possible
in G. F. Warner and F. Bickley, _Catalogue of Dulwich MSS._ (1881,
1903); G. F. Warner in _D. N. B._ (1885); W. Young, _History of Dulwich
College_ (1889); W. W. Greg, _Henslowe Papers_ (1907), _Henslowe’s
Diary_, vol. ii (1908). An earlier treatment of the material is that
by J. P. Collier, _Memoirs of Edward Alleyn_ (1841), _Alleyn Papers_
(1843). On an account by G. Steevens in _Theatrical Review_ (1763) with
a forged letter from Peele to Marlowe, cf. Lee, 646.
[917] _Dulwich Muniments_, 106.
[918] Cf. ch. xiv.
[919] _Henslowe Papers_, 34, from _Dulwich MSS._, i. 9–15; Edward to
Joan Alleyn, 2 May 1593; Henslowe to Edward Alleyn, 5 July 1593; Edward
to Joan Alleyn, 1 August 1593; Henslowe to Edward Alleyn, _c._ August
1593; Henslowe to Edward Alleyn, 14 August 1593; Henslowe to Edward
Alleyn, 28 September 1593; John Pyk (Alleyn’s ‘boy’) to Joan Alleyn,
_c._ 1593. Later letters of 4 June and 26 September 1598 from Henslowe
to Edward Alleyn and of 21 October 1603 from Joan to Edward Alleyn are
in _Henslowe Papers_, 47, 59, 97.
[920] _Works_, i. 215, 296.
[921] _Henslowe Papers_, 32. The verses on the same theme in Collier,
_Memoirs_, 13, are forged.
[922] Dekker, _Plays_, i. 280.
[923] _Epigrammes_ (1599), iv. 23:
_In Ed: Allen._
_Rome_ had her _Roscius_ and her Theater,
Her _Terence_, _Plautus_,_Ennius_ and _Me_[n]_ander_,
The first to _Allen_, _Phoebus_ did transfer
The next, _Thames_ Swans receiu’d fore he coulde land her,
Of both more worthy we by _Phoebus_ doome,
Then t’ _Allen Roscius_ yeeld, to _London Rome_.
[924] Heywood, _Apology_, 43.
[925] Fuller, _Worthies_ (ed. 1840), ii. 385.
[926] S. Rowland, _Knave of Clubs_ (1609), 29:
The gull gets on a surplis
With a crosse upon his breast,
Like Allen playing Faustus,
In that manner he was drest.
[927] Heywood, _Epistle_ to _The Jew of Malta_ (1633), ‘the part of the
Jew presented by so vnimitable an Actor as M^r Allin’; and _Prologue_,
And He, then by the best of Actors [_in margin_ ‘Allin’] play’d:
... in Tamberlaine,
This Jew, with others many, th’ other wan
The Attribute of peerelesse, being a man
Whom we may ranke with (doing no one wrong)
Proteus for shapes, and Roscius for a tongue,
So could he speake, so vary.
[928] E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), _Epig._ xliii,
_Clodius_ me thinks lookes passing big of late,
With _Dunston’s_ browes, and _Allens Cutlacks_ gate.
[929] _Henslowe Papers_, 155.
[930] For this myth, cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Marlowe.
[931] Tarlton, 22, ‘How Tarlton made Armin his adopted sonne, to
succeed him’. The earliest extant edition of _Tarlton’s Jests_ is that
of 1611, but the Second Part, here quoted, was entered in _S. R._ on 4
Aug. 1600.
[932] Extract in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 321; the unique copy of this
edition is described in his _Calendar of Shakespeare Rarities_ (1887),
145.
[933] Reprinted in the Shakespeare Society’s _Fools and Jesters_ (1842).
[934] _Variorum_, iii. 159, 241, 242; _M. S. C._ i. 345.
[935] Jeaffreson, ii. 107, 110, 114, 120, 128, 220.
[936] Harleian Soc. _Registers_, ix. 62; xvii. 131.
[937] Collier, _Actors_, xxxi.
[938] _M. S. C._ i. 344.
[939] McKerrow, _Nashe_, i. 255.
[940] Collier, iii. 364.
[941] The biographical material collected by C. C. Stopes, _Burbage and
Shakespeare’s Stage_ (1913), is supplemented by the lawsuit records
in C. W. Wallace, _The First London Theatre, Materials for a History_
(1913, _Nebraska University Studies_, xiii. 1).
[942] _Variorum_, iii. 199, 476; Collier, iii. 367; P. C. Carter,
_Hist. of St. Mary Aldermanbury_, 9, 11, 21, 58, 86, 87.
[943] _Variorum_, iii. 200, from P. C. C.; Collier, iii. 376.
[944] Collier, iii. 376, 380.
[945] _Varioram_, iii. 211.
[946] _Henslowe Papers_, 61.
[947] Collier, iii. 406; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi.
[948] _Variorum_, iii. 482, from P. C. C.; Collier, iii. 409.
[949] Collier, iii. 389.
[950] H. R. Plomer in _10 N. Q._ vi. 368, from _London Archdeaconry
Wills_, vi, f. 22.
[951] Heywood, _Apology_, 43.
[952] Fleay, 190; cf. _The Sharers Papers_.
[953] Collier, iii. 457; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi.
[954] _K. B. P._ i. 104, ‘Were you neuer none of Mr. Monkesters
schollars?’
[955] Collier, iii. 411.
[956] Fleay, 85; Greg, _Henslowe Papers_, 133.
[957] Collier, iii. 473; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvii.
[958] _Variorum_, iii. 472; Chester, _London Marriage Licenses_.
[959] _Variorum_, iii. 187.
[960] Ibid. 188.
[961] Ibid. 187.
[962] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 31.
[963] _Variorum_, iii. 198, 475; Collier, iii. 308; P. C. Carter, _St.
Mary, Aldermanbury_, 11, 58, 86, 87. Malone misread Beavis as Beatrice.
An earlier John (1598) and a Swynnerton (1613) died as infants.
[964] _Variorum_, iii. 191.
[965] _D. N. B._ s.v.; Wood, _Athenae_, iii. 277.
[966] _O. v. H._ 16; cf. C. W. Wallace, in _The Times_ for 2 and 4 Oct.
1909.
[967] _N. U. S._ x. 311.
[968] _Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. Performed in a Daunce from London to
Norwich_ (1600) is reprinted with a biography by A. Dyce (1840, _Camden
Soc._) and in Arber, _English Garner_^2, ii (_Social England_), 139,
and E. Goldsmid, _Collectanea Adamantea_, ii (1884). Dissertations are
J. Bruce, _Who was ‘Will, my Lord of Leycester’s Jesting Player’?_
(1844, _Sh. Soc. Papers_, i. 88); B. Nicholson, _Kemp and the Play
of Hamlet_ (_N. S. S. Trans. 1880–6_, 57); _Will Kemp_ (1887,
_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xxii. 255).
[969] Collier, iii. 391.
[970] Ibid. 395.
[971] Ibid. 396.
[972] Ibid. 397; _Bodl._; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi.
[973] Norman, 91.
[974] For further details of his later career, cf. Collier and _D. N.
B._
[975] Downes, 24.
[976] Wright, 10.
[977] _Variorum_, iii. 211; Collier, iii. 403.
[978] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 317.
[979] Collier, iii. 423.
[980] Henslowe, ii. 302; _Henslowe Papers_, 36, 41.
[981] Collier, iii. 322, 325; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxv.
[982] _Variorum_, iii. 470.
[983] S. Lee in _Nineteenth Century_ for May 1906, quoting a manuscript
by Smith in private hands, with the title _A Brief Discourse of y^e
causes of Discord amongst y^e Officers of arms and of the great abuses
and absurdities comitted by painters to the great prejudice and
hindrance of the same office_. Northampton did not get his title until
1604.
[984] Collier, iii. 323.
[985] _N. U. S._ x. 308, 312; cf. ch. xvi (Globe).
[986] Henslowe, i. 72.
[987] _Variorum_, iii. 506; Collier, iii. 363.
[988] Collier, iii. 358; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi.
[989] Henslowe, i. 178; ii. 303.
[990] Cf. s.v. Phillips.
[991] Collier, iii. 488; J. 348; _Bodl._
[992] _Variorum_, iii. 514; P. Cunningham in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, ii. 11;
Collier, iii. 478.
[993] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 314.
[994] Collier, iii. 482; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi.
[995] Collier, iii. 483.
[996] App. I (ii).
[997] Collier, iii. 481.
[998] Henslowe, i. 29.
[999] _Henslowe Papers_, 120.
[1000] Collier, iii. 381.
[1001] _Variorum_, iii. 477; Collier, iii. 385.
[1002] _N. U. S._ x. 317; _O. v. H._ 32.
[1003] J. O. Halliwell, _Tarlton’s Jests ... With ... some Account of
the Life of Tarlton_ (1844, _Sh. Soc._; the Jests are reprinted with a
few additions in Hazlitt, _Jest-Books_, ii. 189) and _Papers respecting
Disputes which arose from Incidents at the Death-bed of Richard
Tarlton, the Actor_ (1866).
[1004] Collier, iii. 460; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi.
[1005] C. W. Wallace, _Globe Theatre Apparel_ (1909).
[1006] _M. L. Review_, iv. 395, from _Hist. MSS._ iv. 299.
[1007] Downes, 21.
[1008] Wright, _Hist. Hist._ 405.
[1009] _S. P. D._ 1637–8, p. 99.
[1010] Cunningham, l.; _Variorum_, iii. 238.
[1011] Cunningham, l.; Wright, _Hist. Hist._ 411.
[1012] _Variorum_, iii. 484, from _P. C. C._
[1013] Collier, iii. 447.
[1014] Henslowe, i. 152; _Henslowe Papers_, 61.
[1015] Collier, iii. 451.
[1016] _Variorum_, iii. 214.
[1017] Collier, iii. 443.
[1018] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 313.
[1019] _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 383; ii. 184, 190, 380. It is, of course,
doubtful whether the ‘theatrum nostrae civitatis’ at Exeter was
permanent.
[1020] Ordish, 12, attempts to affiliate the ring type of baiting-place
and theatre to Roman amphitheatres, Cornish ‘rounds’, and other
circular places used for mediaeval entertainments. But a ring is so
obviously the form in which the maximum number of spectators can see an
object of interest, that too much stress must not be laid upon it as an
evidence of folk ‘tradition’.
[1021] Cf. ch. xviii.
[1022] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 221.
[1023] G. Fothergill in _10 N. Q._ vi. 287, from _Guildhall MS._ 1454,
roll 70, ‘And wyth 22^s 2^d for money by them receyved for the hyer of
Tryntie Halle for playes, the warmanthe [ward-moot] inquest and other
assemblyes within the time of this accompt’.
[1024] Cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Vennar.
[1025] Several galleried inns are illustrated in W. Rendle and P.
Norman, _The Inns of Old Southwark_ (1888), and by Ordish, 119
(Tabard), Baker, 200 (Four Swans), Adams, 4 (White Hart). Probably,
however, none of these are pre-Restoration. The only ones still extant
are the George in Southwark and a much later one in Theobalds Road (_V.
H. Surrey_, iv. 128).
[1026] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 190, 223.
[1027] Cf. ch. ix.
[1028] Flecknoe tells us _c._ 1664 (App. I) that the actors, ‘about the
beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign ... set up Theaters, first in the
City (as in the Inn-yards of the Cross-Keyes, and Bull in Grace and
Bishops-Gate Street at this day is to be seen)’.
[1029] Cf. App. C, No. xvii.
[1030] App. C, Nos. xv, xvii; App. D, No. xxii.
[1031] Cf. s.v. Hope.
[1032] K. D. Hassler, _Die Reisen des Samuel Kiechel_ (1866) 29,
‘Werden auch täglichen commedien gehalten, sonderlichen ist lustig zu
zusehen, wann der Königen comedianten agiren, aber einem frembden,
der düe sprach nicht kan, verdrüslich, das ers nicht verstöth; es hat
öttliche sonderbare heüser, wölche dozu gemacht sein, das ettwann drey
genng ob ein ander sein, derowegen stöts ein grosse menge volckhs dohin
kompt, solcher kurzweil zuzusehen. Es begibt sich wol, das süe uf
einmal 50 in 60 dalr ufhöben; sonderlichen wann süe was neyes agiren,
so zuvor nicht gehalten worden, mues mann doppelt gelt gebenn, und
wehrt solchs vast alle tag durch düe wochen, onangesehen es freytag wüe
auch samstags zu halten verbotten, würt es doch nicht gehalten.’ Cf.
Rye, 87. Kiechel appears to have been in London from 12 Sept. to about
29 Oct. and from 14 to 17 Nov. 1585.
[1033] Lambarde, _Perambulation of Kent_ (1596), 233. The passage is
not in the first edition of 1576.
[1034] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 222; cf. ch. xiii (Oxford’s).
[1035] P. 2. Malone, in _Variorum_, iii. 46, refers the event to a date
soon after 1580; but there is no justification for this in the text.
[1036] Cf. p. 477.
[1037] Rye, 216, from _Itinerarium_ in Beckmann, _Accessions Historiae
Anhaltinae_ (1716), 165:
‘Hier besieht man vier spielhäuser,
Darinnen man fürstelt die Fürsten, Könge, Keyser,
In rechter lebens gröss, in schöner kleider pracht,
Es wird der thaten auch, wie sie geschehn, gedacht.’
[1038] Text by H. B. Wheatley, _On a Contemporary Drawing of the
Interior of the Swan Theatre, 1596_ (_N. S. S. Trans. 1887–92_, 215),
from _Utrecht Univ. Library MS. Var._ 355, ff. 131^v, 132, with
facsimile reproduction of drawing. The passage was first made known
by K. T. Gaedertz, _Zur Kenntniss der altenglischen Bühne_ (1888).
The reproduction of the drawing published by Gaedertz and further
reproduced from him in many modern books is not an exact facsimile;
the only material difference is that the engraver has made the figure
at the door of the loft rather more obviously a man than it is in the
original. Letters of the early part of the seventeenth century from
de Witt to Buchell, who was his fellow-student at Leyden in 1583, are
also in the Utrecht Library (Gaedertz, 57). The last sentence of the
passage appears from ‘narrabat’ to be a report by Buchell either of
something not directly copied by him or of de Witt’s conversation; but
the rest is pretty clearly from ‘ea quae alio loco a me notata sunt’ a
verbatim extract from a manuscript of de Witt’s own. If so, ‘adpinxi’
further shows that the eye-witness of de Witt and not the imagination
of Buchell is the source of the drawing. Gaedertz, 63, indeed suggests
that the drawing is an original given by de Witt to Buchell, but as
Wheatley, 219, points out, this is impossible, as the paper is the same
as that used in the rest of the volume. There remains the question of
date. De Witt is traceable at Amsterdam in Nov. 1594, at Utrecht in
the winters of 1595 and 1596, and in 1599, and at Amsterdam again in
March 1604 (Gaedertz, 58). His visit to London obviously falls between
Nov. 1594, when the Swan was still only an intention, and Dec. 1598,
when the Theatre was pulled down. Gaedertz, 55, puts it in the summer
of 1596, largely because Shakespeare, whom he thinks de Witt would
certainly have mentioned if he had met him, may have been in Stratford
about that time. This is hopeless. Nor does the further suggestion of
Gaedertz that a lameness from which de Witt was suffering in Dec. 1596
was due to his travels carry much conviction. But he is not likely,
before that year, to have appended the words ‘A^o. 1596’ to his notice
of Sir John Burgh’s tomb. If this is intended to be the date, not of
his visit, but of the tomb, it is an error. Camden, _Reges ... in
Ecclesia ... West-monasterii sepulti_ (1600), gives the final words
of the inscription as ‘G. B. A. M. P. anno Dom. 1595’, and although
the tomb itself has disappeared since 1868 and some modern guides date
it 1594 or 1598, Camden is confirmed by J. C[rull], _Antiquities of
Westminster_ (1711), 198. Burgh’s death, also given on the monument,
was 7 March ‘1594’. On the whole 1596 is the most probable date for
de Witt’s visit. Arend van Buchell was himself a traveller, and his
_Diarium_ has been edited (1907) by G. Brom and L. A. van Langeraad.
But he did not visit England.
[1039] The emendation is due to Wallace (_E. S._ xliii. 356). Adams,
168, suggests that ‘cijn’ is Flemish for ‘swan’, but the dictionary
gives ‘zwaen’, which is perhaps what de Witt wrote.
[1040] Cf. plan of the manor in Rendle, _Bankside_, i.
[1041] Cf. p. 456.
[1042] Hentzner, 196.
[1043] _Survey_ (ed. Kingsford), i. 93. In 1603 the words ‘as the
Theater, the Curtine, &c.’ are omitted from the body of the passage.
[1044] _Survey_, ii. 73. This passage was omitted altogether in 1603.
The early draft in _Harl. MS._ 538 (Kingsford, ii. 369) runs, ‘Neare
adjoyning are builded two houses for the shewe of Activities, Comedies,
tragedies and histories, for recreation. The one of them is named the
Curtayn in Holy Well, the other the Theatre.’
[1045] G. Binz in _Anglia_, xxii. 456 (from Platter’s narrative written
in 1604–5 of his travels in 1595–1600, now in the Basle University
Library): ‘Den 21 Septembris nach dem Imbissessen, etwan umb zwey
vhren, bin ich mitt meiner geselschaft [:v]ber dz wasser gefahren,
haben in dem streüwinen Dachhaus die Tragedy vom ersten Keyser Julio
Caesare mitt ohngefahr 15 personen sehen gar artlich agieren; zu
endt der Comedien dantzeten sie ihrem gebrauch nach gar [:v]berausz
zierlich, ye zwen in mannes vndt 2 in weiber kleideren angethan,
wunderbahrlich mitt einanderen.
Auf ein andere Zeitt hab ich nicht weit von unserem wirdtshaus in
der Vorstadt, meines behaltens an der Bischofsgeet, auch nach essens
ein Comoedien gesehen, da presentierten sie allerhandt nationen, mit
welchen yeder zeit ein Engellender vmb ein tochter kempfete, vndt
vberwandt er sie alle, aussgenommen den teütschen, der gewan die
tochter mitt kempfen, satzet sich neben sie, trank ihme deszwegen
mit seinem diener ein starken rausch, also dasz sie beyde beweinet
wurden, vndt warfe der diener seinem Herren den schu an kopf, vnndt
entschliefen beyde. Hiezwischen stige der engellender in die Zelten,
vnndt entfuhret dem teütschen sein gewin, also [:v]berlistet er
den teütschen auch. Zu endt dantzeten sie auch auf Englisch vnndt
Irlendisch gar zierlich vnndt werden also alle tag vmb 2 vhren nach
mittag in der stadt London zwo biszweilen auch drey Comedien an
vnderscheidenen örteren gehalten, damitt einer den anderen lustig
mache, dann welche sich am besten verhalten, die haben auch zum meisten
Zuhörer. Die örter sindt dergestalt erbauwen, dasz sie auf einer
erhöchten brüge spilen, vnndt yederman alles woll sehen kan. Yedoch
sindt vnderscheidene gäng vnndt ständt da man lustiger vnndt basz
sitzet, bezahlet auch deszwegen mehr. Dann welcher vnden gleich stehn
beleibt, bezahlt nur 1 Englischen pfenning, so er aber sitzen will,
lasset man ihn noch zu einer thür hinein, da gibt er noch 1^d, begeret
er aber am lustigesten ort auf kissen ze sitzen, da er nicht allein
alles woll sihet, sondern auch gesehen kan werden, so gibt er bey einer
anderen thüren noch 1 Englischen pfenning. Vnndt tragt man in wehrender
Comedy zu essen vndt zu trinken vnder den Leüten herumb, mag einer vmb
sein gelt sich also auch erlaben.
Die Comedienspiler sindt beim allerköstlichsten vnndt zierlichsten
bekleidet, dann der brauch in Engellandt, dasz wann fürnemme herren
oder Ritter absterben, sie ihren dieneren vast die schönesten kleider
verehren vndt vergaben, welche, weil es ihnen nicht gezimpt, solche
kleider nicht tragen, sondern nachmahlen, den Comoedienspileren vmb ein
ringen pfenning ze kaufen geben.
Was für zeit sie also in dem Comoedien lustig alle tag können
zubringen, weisset yeglicher woll, der sie etwan hatt sehen agieren
oder spilen....
... Midt solchen vndt viel anderen kurtzweilen mehr vertreiben die
Engellender ihr zeit, erfahren in den Comedien, wasz sich in anderen
Landen zutraget, vndt gehendt ohne scheüchen, mann vndt weibs personen
an gemelte ort, weil mehrtheils Engellender nicht pflegen viel ze
reysen, sondern sich vergnügen zehausz frembde sachen ze erfahren vnndt
ihre kurtzweil ze nemmen.’
[1046] C. A. Mills in _The Times_ (11 April 1914) from the travels of
‘a foreign nobleman, to be published by J. A. F. Orbaan from a _Vatican
MS._’. Mills says that the visit was to the Globe, but the passage
quoted does not exclude the Rose or Swan.
[1047] G. von Bülow in _2 R. Hist. Soc. Trans._ (1892), vi. 6, 10, from
MS. _penes_ Count von der Osten of Plathe, Pomerania; cf. Wallace,
_Blackfriars_, 105, who identifies the _Samson_ play, rightly, with
that of the Admiral’s men at the Fortune (cf. p. 180), and that at
the Blackfriars, wrongly I think, with Chapman’s _The Widow’s Tears_.
He assumes that the theatre visited on 13 Sept, was the Globe, but it
might have been the Rose.
[1048] ‘13. Den 13 ward eine comedia agirt, wie Stuhl-Weissenburg
erstlich von den Türken, hernacher von den Christen wiederum erobert....
14. Auf den Nachmittag ward eine tragica comoedia von Samsone und dem
halben Stamm Benjamin agirt. Als wir zu dem Theatro gingen ...’.
[1049] Cf. ch. xii (Chapel).
[1050] Grosart, _Dekker_, iv. 210 (S. R. July 1608, printed 1609). The
‘two houses’ are, of course, those of York and Lancaster. Note the
final puns.
[1051] Cf. ch. x. Fynes Moryson says in his _Itinerary_, iii. 2. 2
(_c._ 1605–17), ‘The Theaters at London in England for Stage-plaies
are more remarkeable for the number, and for the capacity, than for
the building,’ and in the continuation (_c._ 1609–26, C. Hughes,
_Shakespeare’s Europe_, 476), ‘The Citty of London alone hath foure or
fiue Companyes of players with their peculiar Theaters capable of many
thousands, wherein they all play euery day in the weeke but Sunday....
As there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London than in all the
partes of the worlde I haue seene, so doe these players or Comedians
excell all other in the worlde.’
[1052] _Epigram 39._ Both Curtain and Swan are named by W. Turner in
_Turners Dish of Stuffe, or a Gallimaufry_ (1662), but this cannot be
dated; cf. ch. xv (Shank):
That’s the fat fool of the Curtain,
And the lean fool of the Bull:
Since Shancke did leave to sing his rhimes,
He is counted but a gull:
The players on the Bankside,
The round Globe and the Swan,
Will teach you idle tricks of love,
But the Bull will play the man.
[1053] Jodocus Sincerus, _Itineris Anglici brevissima delineatio_ in
_Itinerarium Galliae_ (1617), 370; cf. Rye, 131, who gives the first
edition as 1616.
[1054] K. Feyerabend in _E. S._ xiv. 440, from manuscript in Cassel
Library (cf. Rye, 143), ‘Zu Londen sind 7 theatra, da tägliche, die
sonntäge ausgenommen, comoedien gehalten werden, unter welchen die
vornehmste der glbs [_sic_, for _globus_], so über dem wasser liegt.
Das theatrum, da die kinder spielen, ist auf diesseit des wassers,
spielen um 3 uhr, aber nur von michaelis bis auf ostern; hier kostet
der eingang einen halben schilling nur, da an andern orten wohl eine
halbe kron. Diese [nämlich der Globus, _Ed._, but surely in error]
spielen nur bei lichtern und is die beste Cumpani in London.’ The
baiting is also mentioned; cf. p. 457.
[1055] _Henslowe Papers_, 72, 79.
[1056] Taylor, _The True Cause of the Watermen’s Suit concerning
Players,_ _and the reasons that their Playing on London side is their
extreame hindrances. With a Relation how farre that suit was proceeded
in, and the occasions that it was not effected_, reprinted by Hindley,
ii, No. 15, from Taylor’s _Works_ (1630), probably originally printed
in 1614.
[1057] It cites Caesar’s promotion and describes the agitation by the
watermen as taking place in ‘January last, 1613’, i. e. 161¾. Probably
it was written in the winter of 1614, and touched up before 1630, since
it refers to Bacon and Somerset as ‘then’ Attorney-General and Lord
Chamberlain respectively. Bacon’s term of office was from 27 Oct. 1613
to 7 March 1617, Somerset’s from 10 July 1614 to 2 Nov. 1615.
[1058] There is, I suppose, no reason why Randolph’s _Muses Looking
Glass_, 1. i. 55, should not have been written before Salisbury Court
was built. Herein a ‘brother’ is said to pray--
That the Globe,
Wherein (quoth he) reigns a whole world of vice,
Had been consum’d: the Phoenix burnt to ashes:
The Fortune whipp’d for a blind whore: Blackfriars,
He wonders how it ’scaped demolishing
I’ th’ time of reformation: lastly, he wish’d
The Bull might cross the Thames to the Bear Garden,
And there be soundly baited.
[1059] Stowe, _Annales_ (1631), 1004. In the extract in Harrison, ii.
49*, the period covered is given in error as 1553–1613.
[1060] Cf. App. I.
[1061] S. A. Strong, _Catalogue of Letters at Welbeck_, 226.
[1062] Harrison, iv. 212, from _Phillipps MS._ 11613, f. 16, _penes_ J.
F. P. Fenwick, of Thirlestane House, Cheltenham, written about 1656–8.
The writer is not quite accurate in some of his earlier dates.
[1063] Ward, iii. 280; Lawrence, ii. 138.
[1064] Baker, 135, gives an enlarged reproduction under the name of the
Theatre; but that is an obvious mistake.
[1065] Rendle, _Bankside_, 1.
[1066] [Nicholas Goodman?] _Hollands Leaguer or an historical Discourse
of the Life and Actions of Dona Britanica Hollandia the Arch-Mistris
of the wicked women of Evtopia_ (1632), sig. F 2; cf. C. W. Wallace in
_Engl. Stud._ xliii. 392.
[1067] Stowe, _Survey_, ii. 52.
[1068] I cannot agree with Dr. Martin (_Surrey Arch. Colls._ xxiii.
186), who sees, both in the Delaram and the ‘Hondius’ engravings, an
east to west highway running north of the cylindrical building, which
he takes for Maid Lane.
[1069] The somewhat wanton suggestion of Dr. Martin (loc. cit. 188)
that the engraver mistook the Rose for the Globe is sufficiently
refuted by the fact that the Rose was extinct or at least long disused.
[1070] I do not know on what ground Adams, 458, says that Visscher’s
view was drawn several years before it was printed, ‘and represents the
city as it was in or before 1613’.
[1071] Martin, loc. cit. 192, again suggests that the houses are
misnamed. He thinks that the Rose has been called the Globe in error
and the Globe the Bear Garden, and that the unnamed house is the Globe.
I cannot follow him in thinking that Merian represents the western
house of the group as south of Maid Lane; all three are clearly to the
north.
[1072] Adams, 458, thinks that Merian worked upon Visscher, ‘with
additions from some other earlier view not yet identified’. If so, this
might perhaps go back to 1605.
[1073] Cf. p. 463.
[1074] Rendle, _Bankside_, xxx.
[1075] Cf. p. 433.
[1076] B. Marsh, _Records of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters_,
iii. 95. I have to thank Mr. Marsh for this reference.
[1077] _Sloane MS._ 2530, f. 11 _et passim_.
[1078] App. C, No. xviii.
[1079] Gosson, _Schoole of Abuse_, 40. The date renders very hazardous
the identifications of _Ptolemy_ with the _Telomo_ shown at Court by
Leicester’s men on 10 Feb. 1583, and of _The Jew_ with R. W.’s _Three
Ladies of London_ (1584), which leads Fleay, 36, 40, to infer that
Leicester’s men played at the Bull from 1560 to 1576.
[1080] App. D, Nos. lx-lxii.
[1081] Tarlton, 13, 24.
[1082] Birch, _Elizabeth_, i. 173, from _Lambeth MS._; Spedding, viii.
314.
[1083] Cf. App. I.
[1084] Machyn, 238.
[1085] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 277. The play may have only been rehearsed,
so that the identification of it by Fleay, 36, with _The Irish Knight_
shown at Court by Warwick’s men on 18 Feb. 1577 is untenable, and with
it vanishes all ground for the assignment of the inn by Fleay, 40, to
Rich’s men in 1568–70, Lane’s in 1571–3, Warwick’s in 1575–80, and
Hunsdon’s in 1582–3.
[1086] Tarlton, 24.
[1087] Harben, 65.
[1088] Tarlton, 21. Apparently the Queen of Sheba, and not Pocahontas,
was the original _Belle Sauvage_.
[1089] App. C, No. xiv.
[1090] App. C, No. xxii. The description reads like a compliment to
Lyly, but does not justify the inference of Fleay, 39, that the Chapel
boys played at the Bel Savage from 1559 to 1582.
[1091] Arber, ii. 526.
[1092] _Sloane MS._ 2530, ff. 7, 10, 11, 14; cf. the quotation from G.
Silver, _Paradoxe of Defence_ (1599), in Adams, 13.
[1093] Wallace, _N. U. S._ xiii. 82, 89.
[1094] Tarlton, 23.
[1095] App. D, No. ci. Fleay, 89, has no other material than these
notices and an unjustifiable assumption of identity between the two
companies for assigning the house to Leicester’s (1586–8) and Strange’s
(1589–91).
[1096] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 317; cf. p. 425.
[1097] Stowe, _Survey_ (ed. Kingsford, ii. 262, 369), ends his account
of Holywell in the 1598 edition, ‘And neare therevnto are builded two
publique houses for the acting and shewe of Comedies, Tragedies, and
Histories, for recreation. Whereof the one is called the Courtein,
the other the Theatre: both standing on the South-west side towards
the field’. This is omitted from the 1603 edition, probably not so
much, as has been suggested, because Stowe shared the Puritan dislike
of the stage, as because in 1603 the Theatre was gone and the Curtain
little used. Stowe’s draft (_c._ 1598) in _Harl. MS._ 538 runs, ‘Neare
adjoyning are builded two houses for the shewe of Activities, Comedies,
tragedies and histories, for recreation. The one of them is named the
Curtayn in Holy Well, the other the Theatre.’ No contemporary map shows
the Theatre, although that of Agas (_c._ 1561) gives a good idea of the
Halliwell district before it was built. The representation from the
seventeenth-century ‘Ryther’ map, given as the Theatre by Baker, 135,
is presumably the Curtain.
[1098] Braines (1915), 4; Stopes, 185.
[1099] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 345; Braines (1915), 5, 21.
[1100] Latin translations of parts of the lease are recited in
pleadings of 1600 and 1602 (Wallace, 166, 268), and the description of
parcels agrees with that in the draft lease of 1585, similarly recited
in 1600 (Wallace, 169); cf. Braines (1915), 8.
[1101] The position of the well in Chassereau’s _Survey of Shoreditch_
(1745) seems to me to bear out this identification, although, as
Braines (1915), 4, points out, we do not know Chassereau’s authority.
Under Burbadge’s lease all Giles Allen’s tenants in Holywell were to
have access to the well. Stowe, _Survey_, i. 15, describes the holy
well as ‘much decayed and marred with filthinesse purposely laide
there, for the heighthening of the ground for garden plots’. It is
clearly distinct from Dame Agnes a Cleere’s well, which was outside
Holywell, towards the north (Stowe, _Survey_, i. 16; ii. 273; Stopes,
192).
[1102] _Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory_ (S. R. 26 June 1590), in
_Tarlton_, 54, 105, ‘I would needs to the Theatre to a play, where
when I came, I founde such concourse of unrulye people, that I thought
it better solitary to walk in the fields, then to intermeddle myselfe
amongst such a great presse. Feeding mine humour with this fancie,
I stept by dame Anne of Cleeres well, and went by the backside of
Hogsdon, where, finding the sun to be hotte, and seeing a faire tree
that had a coole shade, I sat me downe to take the aire, where after I
had rested me a while, I fell asleepe.... And with that I waked, and
saw such concourse of people through the fields that I knew the play
was doon.’
[1103] Braines (1915), 27. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 351, put the site
on the present Deane’s Mews, but this is too far south, and does not
allow for the interposition of Rutland’s holding between Holywell Lane
and Allen’s. The shoring up of the barn to the Theatre is testified to
in Wallace, 227, 231, 243. The exact site therefore cannot have been
far east of the Curtain Road, which apparently occupies the strip of
void land held by Burbadge between the old priory wall and the ditch
bordering Finsbury fields.
[1104] Wallace, 134, 141, 153.
[1105] Ibid. 39.
[1106] Ibid. 139.
[1107] Wallace, 142 (Miles), 152 (Nicoll).
[1108] App. D, No. xxxiv.
[1109] Wallace, 135.
[1110] Ibid. 140.
[1111] Ibid. 151 (Nicoll).
[1112] Ibid. 152 (Nicoll).
[1113] Wallace, 73 (Bett), 102, 119 (Ralph Miles), 137 (Collins), 143
(Robert Miles), 152 (Nicoll), 157.
[1114] Ibid. 53, 107, 111 (Hyde), 73 (Bett), 143 (Robert Miles), 103,
120 (Ralph Miles). Brayne’s will was proved 10 Aug. 1586 (Wallace, 14).
[1115] Ibid. 104 (Ralph Miles), 146 (Robert Miles).
[1116] Ibid. 16, 55, 108 (Hyde), 73 (Bett), 145 (Miles).
[1117] Ibid. 46.
[1118] Wallace, 86 (Bett), 115 (Bishop), 122 (Ralph Miles).
[1119] Ibid. 109 (Hyde), 134 (Griggs), 137 (Collins), 106 (Ralph
Miles), 139, 148 (Robert Miles).
[1120] Ibid. 83 (Bett), 88 (Gascoigne), 90 (James).
[1121] Ibid. 87 (Bett).
[1122] Griggs (Wallace, 134) puts Brayne’s expenditure at 1,000 marks
and Burbadge’s at under £100; Collins (Wallace, 137) agrees as to
Brayne’s and puts Burbadge’s at about £50; Miles (ibid. 141) says
Brayne spent £600 or £700 in cash or credit and Burbadge about £50 in
cash and material; Lanman (ibid. 148) had heard that the building cost
1,000 marks; Giles Allen (ibid. 164) valued it at £700 in 1599.
[1123] Robert Miles put Burbadge’s total profits from tenements and
play-house in eight or nine years before 1592 at 2,000 marks, but in
1600 he only put the aggregate profits of James and Cuthbert from the
play-house by itself at 1,000 marks (Wallace, 147, 263). Giles Allen
(ibid. 198) put them at £2,000. Ralph Miles in 1592 had heard that
Burbadge had received £700 or £800 in rents and profits since Brayne’s
death in 1586 (ibid. 106). John Alleyn, a more disinterested witness,
confirms this estimate, putting the figure at £100 or 200 marks a year
for the five years before 1592 (ibid. 102).
[1124] Wallace, 76 (Ellam), 77 (Hudson).
[1125] Ibid. 47.
[1126] Wallace, 59 (C. Burbadge), 62 (J. Burbadge), 97, 114 (Bishop),
100, 126 (Alleyn), 105, 121 (Ralph Miles).
[1127] Ibid. 49, 66.
[1128] Ibid. 101, 127 (Alleyn). The two depositions are not quite
consistent as to dates. From that of 6 Feb. 1592, one would infer that
the dispute between Burbadge and the Admiral’s was at the time of
the contempt of 16 Nov. 1590. The second, of 6 May 1592, apparently
corrects the first, by giving the date of the insult to the Lord
Admiral as ‘about a yere past’. The point is of importance, as bearing
upon the length of the stay of the Admiral’s and Strange’s (cf. ch.
xiii) at the Theatre. No doubt Mrs. Brayne, who came ‘dyvers tymes’ to
the Theatre, continued her applications after laying her affidavit of
contempt.
[1129] Wallace, 153.
[1130] Wallace, 156.
[1131] Ibid. 161, 263. Miles still held Burbadge’s bonds in 1600.
[1132] Ibid. 137, ‘iron worke which the said Braynes bestowed vppon the
same Theater’.
[1133] Cf. ch. xviii.
[1134] Wallace, 62 (Burbadge), 88 (Bett), 125 (Alleyn), 149 (Lanman).
[1135] Cf. pp. 358, 362. This evidence outweighs the rather slight
grounds on which T. S. Graves, _The Shape of the First London Theatre_
(_South Atlantic Quarterly_, xiii. 280), conjectures that it may have
been rectangular.
[1136] G. Harvey, _Letter Book_, 67, suggests in 1579 that he may be
asked by Leicester’s, Warwick’s, Vaux’s or Rich’s men, or ‘sum other
freshe starteup comedanties’ for ‘sum malt conceivid comedye fitt for
the Theater, or sum other paintid stage’ (cf. p. 4). It is a pity he
was not more precise.
[1137] Cf. App. C, Nos. xxii, xxx. Fleay, 40, 88, 145, identifies _The
Play of Plays_ in which Delight was a character with the _Delight_
shown at Court by Leicester’s on 26 Dec. 1580, and _Caesar and Pompey_,
which Gosson does not quite clearly assign to the Theatre at all,
with the _Pompey_ shown by Paul’s on 6 Jan. 1581; and conjectures
successive occupations by Leicester’s (1576–83), Paul’s (1582), Queen’s
and Hunsdon’s (1584), Queen’s and Oxford’s (1585), Queen’s (1586–93),
Chamberlain’s (1594–7). He was unlucky in omitting the Admiral’s from
his guesses.
[1138] Cf. App. D, Nos. xliii, xliv.
[1139] Wallace, 201 (Cuthbert Burbadge), 239 (Smith), 240 (May), 242
(Tilt).
[1140] Ibid. 11.
[1141] Cf. App. D, No. lxxiv.
[1142] Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (_Works_, i. 197). Harington,
_Metamorphosis of Ajax_ (1596), speaks of a vulgar word ‘admitted
into the Theater with great applause by the mouth of Mayster Tarlton,
the excellent comedian’. It was near the Theatre that the writer of
_Tarltons Newes of Purgatorie_ (Tarlton, 54) had his dream of the dead
actor.
[1143] Cf. App. C, No. xl.
[1144] Lodge, _Wits Miserie_ (1596), ‘pale as the visard of the ghost
which cried so miserably at the Theator, like an oister wife, Hamlet,
revenge’. In T. M., _Black Book_ (1604), is a mention of ‘one of my
divells in D^r Faustus, when the olde Theatre crackt and frighted the
audience’. This was presumably before 1592, as _Dr. Faustus_ seems to
have been continuously in Henslowe’s hands from the beginning of that
year. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 363, quotes an allusion of Barnaby Rich
in 1606 (_Faultes Faults, and Nothing Else but Faultes_, 7) to ‘Gravets
part at the Theatre’, but this must not be pressed as a reference to
the long-destroyed house.
[1145] _Sloane MS._ 2530, ff. 6, 11, 12, 46; cf. App. D, Nos. lxii,
lxviii.
[1146] Cf. ch. xi, p. 371.
[1147] T. W., _Sermon at Paul’s Cross_ (3 Nov. 1577), ‘Beholde the
sumptuous Theatre houses’; Northbrooke (S. R. 2 Dec. 1577), 85,
‘places ... builded for such Playes and Enterludes, as the Theatre and
Curtaine is’; Stockwood, _Sermon at Paul’s Cross_ (24 Aug. 1578), ‘the
Theatre, the Curtayne, and other places of Playes in the Citie ...
the gorgeous Playing place erected in the fieldes ... as they please
to have it called, a Theatre’; _News from the North_ (1579), ‘the
Theaters, Curtines ... and such places where the time is so shamefully
mispent’; T. Twyne, _Physic for Fortune_ (1579), i. xxx, 42, ‘the
Curteine or Theater; which two places are well knowen to be enimies
to good manners: for looke who goeth thyther evyl, returneth worse’;
Stubbes (S. R. 1 March 1583), i. 144, ‘flockyng and runnyng to Theaters
and Curtens ... Venus pallaces’; Field (1583), ‘the distruction bothe
of bodye and soule that many are brought unto by frequenting the
Theater, the Curtin and such like’; Rankins (1587), f. 4, ‘the Theater
and Curtine may aptlie be termed for their abhomination, the chappell
_adulterinum_’; Harrison, _Chronologie_ (1588), i. liv, ‘It is an
evident token of a wicked time when plaiers wexe so riche that they can
build suche houses’.
[1148] App. D, Nos. XXXV, lxxiv. It appears to have been thought a
good example to frequenters of the Theatre that the locality should
occasionally be used for a public execution. Stowe, _Annales_ (1615),
749, 750, records the hanging of W. Gunter, a priest from beyond the
seas, ‘at the Theater’ on 28 Aug. 1588, and of W. Hartley, another
priest, ‘nigh the Theator,’ on 1 Oct. 1588; cf. Halliwell-Phillipps,
i. 351, from _True Report of the Inditement of Weldon, Hartley, and
Sutton, who Suffred for High Treason_ (1588).
[1149] Sir A. Ashley to Sir R. Cecil (_Hatfield MSS._ vii. 504).
[1150] Cf. ch. ix. In addition to the occasions described above,
the Theatre and Curtain are particularly referred to in the City’s
complaint to Walsingham on 3 May 1583, and in the Council’s inhibitions
of 29 Oct. 1587, where the ‘Liberty’ of Holywell is clearly pointed at
in the allusion to ‘places priviledged’, and 23 June 1592 (App. D, Nos.
lxix, lxxx, xc).
[1151] App. D, No. xlii. The County records also contain entries of a
recognisance by ‘James Burbage of Shorditch gent.’, Henry Bett, and
[Cuthbert] Burbage in the Strond, yeoman’, on 6 April 1592, for the
former’s appearance at the next Middlesex sessions, and a similar
recognisance of ‘James Burbage of Hallywell, yeoman’, on 11 Sept. 1593
(Jeaffreson, i. 205, 217); but there is nothing to show the nature of
the proceedings.
[1152] Cf. App. C, No. xxv.
[1153] App. D, No. cx.
[1154] E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_, sat. v:
‘but see yonder,
One, like the unfrequented Theater,
Walkes in darke silence and vast solitude’.
[1155] Wallace, 169, 183, 191, 214, 218.
[1156] Ibid. 72, 76, 226.
[1157] Ibid. 232, 235.
[1158] Wallace, 195, 203, 212, 216, 220, 238. Robert Miles took
occasion of the negotiations to renew his old claim by petitioning
in the Court of Requests for an interest in the new lease. The
proceedings, so far as preserved, are inconclusive (ibid. 158).
Meanwhile Cuthbert Burbadge was co-operating with Giles Allen in
defending a claim made by the Earl of Rutland to the ‘debateable’
ground, and remained a party to the consequent litigation in 1602, long
after the Theatre had disappeared (Stopes, 184).
[1159] Wallace, 184, 196, 204.
[1160] Ibid. 221.
[1161] Ibid. 164, 179, 197, 217, 222, 238, 278. The dates are not
quite certain; possibly the 20 Jan. of _Allen v. Street_ was an error.
Allen’s Answer in the Court of Requests places the whole transaction
‘aboute the feast of the Natiuitie’, and this in his Star Chamber suit
becomes ‘aboute the eight and twentyth day of December’, without any
suggestion that more than one day was occupied.
[1162] Ibid. 163.
[1163] Ibid. 181.
[1164] Wallace, 186, 215, 220.
[1165] Ibid. 285.
[1166] Ibid. 267, 275.
[1167] Aubrey, ii. 12, on the authority of J. Greenhill, says that Ben
Jonson ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind
of nursery or obscure play-house, somewhere in the suburbes’ (I thinke
towards Shoreditch or Clarkenwell), and on that of Sir Edward Shirburn
that Jonson killed Marlowe, ‘on Bunhill, comeing from the Green-Curtain
play-house’. Hoxton, where Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, is of course
not far from Bunhill, and both are in the Holywell neighbourhood.
Probably Aubrey, in giving a name to the theatre, is babbling of green
frieze, rather than green fields. Steevens and Malone (_Variorum_, iii.
54) committed themselves to the view that ‘the original sign hung out
at this play-house was the painting of a curtain striped’.
[1168] Thomas Wilkins was perhaps related to George Wilkins the
dramatist, who was buried at Shoreditch 9 Aug. 1613. Sir William Allen
is not known to have had anything to do either with Edward Alleyn or
with Giles Allen, the ground-landlord of the Theatre. Lanman was 54 on
30 July 1592. We cannot assume that the name is merely an orthographic
variant of that of Laneham.
[1169] Reproduced in Ordish, 40.
[1170] Reproduced in Baker, 36, 135, with a photographic enlargement of
the building, wrongly identified with the _Theatre_. It is shown as a
round or hexagonal structure, with a large flag, standing in the middle
of a square paled plot; but too much stress must not be laid on what is
probably only a cartographic symbol. Immediately south of it is Bedlam.
Kiechel tells us that the house had three galleries, and de Witt that
it was an ‘amphitheatrum’ (cf. pp. 358, 362). In the epilogue to _Three
English Brothers_ (1607) it is a ‘round circumference’.
[1171] Cf. p. 393.
[1172] Fleay, 40, 88, 145, 201, 300, assigns it as follows: Sussex’s
(1576–83), Arundel’s and Oxford’s (1584), Howard’s and Hunsdon’s
(1585), Oxford’s (1586–8), Pembroke’s (1589–97), Chamberlain’s
(1597–9), Derby’s (1599–1600), uncertain company (1601), Queen Anne’s
(1604–9), Duke of York’s (1610–23). But, of course, this _is_ guessing.
[1173] Tarlton, 16. If _Tarlton’s Jig of a Horse Load of Fools_, taken
from a manuscript of Collier’s (Tarlton, xx), is genuine, that also was
given at the Curtain.
[1174] _Sloane MS._ 2530, ff. 4, 12, 43, 44, 46.
[1175] Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (S. R. 8 Sept. 1598), Sat. v:
if my dispose
Perswade me to a play, I’le to the Rose,
Or Curtaine, one of Plautus comedies,
Or the patheticke Spaniards tragedies;
and in the _Preludium_, of a ‘Cittizen ... comming from the Curtaine’.
[1176] _Scourge of Villainy_ (1598), xi. 37 (_Works_, iii. 372):
Luscus, what’s play’d to-day? Faith now I know
I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow
Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo.
Say who acts best? Drusus or Roscio?
Now I have him, that ne’er of ought did speak
But when of plays or players he did treat--
Hath made a commonplace book out of plays,
And speaks in print: at least what e’er he says
Is warranted by Curtain plaudities.
[1177] Cf. p. 365.
[1178] Jeaffreson, i. 259.
[1179] Heath, Epigram 39; Wither, _Abuses_, i. 1; ii. 3.
[1180] Cf. App. C, No. lix.
[1181] _Variorum_, iii. 54, 59; Ordish, 106, from _Vox Graculi_ (1623)
and Jeaffreson, iii. 164.
[1182] A writer in the _Daily News_ for 9 April 1898 identifies the
site of the theatre, without giving any evidence, as ‘between Clock
Passage, Newington Butts, Swan Place, and Hampton Street’; cf. _9 N.
Q._ i. 386.
[1183] App. D, Nos. xlvi, lxxvi, xcii.
[1184] Cf. p. 373.
[1185] C. W. Wallace in _N. U. S._ xiii. 2, ‘as shown by a contemporary
record to be published later’.
[1186] _A Woman is a Weathercock_, III. iii. 25.
[1187] Rendle, _Antiquarian_, viii. 60, ‘Among the early Surveys, 1
Edward VI, we see that this was not merely a name--the place was a
veritable Rose Garden, and paid £1 3_s._ 4_d._ by the year, and the
messuage called the Rose paid £4’.
[1188] _Close Roll 6 Edw. VI_, p. 5, m. 13; cf. Rendle, _Bankside_, xv;
_H. P._ 1.
[1189] _Egerton MS._ 2623, f. 13, quoted in Henslowe, ii. 25. But in
ii. 43 Dr. Greg misdescribes the Rose as on the west of the Barge,
Bell, and Cock.
[1190] _Henslowe Papers_, 1.
[1191] Ibid. 2.
[1192] Henslowe, i. 209.
[1193] Cf. Dekker, _Satiromastix_, 1247, ‘th’ast a breath as sweet as
the Rose, that growes by the Beare-garden’.
[1194] G. L. Gomme, _The Story of London Maps_ (_Geographical Journal_,
xxxi. 628), ‘1588. Henchley.--Item, we present Phillip Henchley to
pull upp all the pylles that stand in the common sewer against the
play-house to the stopping of the water course, the which to be done by
midsomer next uppon paine of x^s yf it be undone. x^s (done)’. Wallace,
in _The Times_ (1914), says that these records mention the theatre
as ‘new’ in April 1588, and show other amercements during the next
eighteen years.
[1195] Dr. Greg, in Henslowe, ii. 46, is, I think, successful in
showing that all the dated building entries belong to 1592 and not to
1591 or 1593. I suppose the scattered entries with the date ‘1591’ to
have been written in first, and the continuous account under the date
‘1592’ added later, probably after Henslowe had changed the year-date
in his play-entries, which seems to have been on 6 May.
[1196] Henslowe, i. 7.
[1197] App. D, No. xcii.
[1198] The words ‘Chomley when’ appear with other scribbles by Henslowe
on the first page of the diary (Henslowe, i. 217).
[1199] Cf. p. 402.
[1200] Henslowe, i. 4.
[1201] Henslowe, i. 178.
[1202] Ibid. ii. 55.
[1203] Wallace, in _The Times_ (1914).
[1204] Rendle, _Bankside_, xv, quotes
In the last great fire
The Rose did expire,
and adds ‘but when that was, I am not clear’. It reads like Collier.
[1205] I cannot endorse the suggestion of Dr. Martin (cf. p. 378)
that the ‘Globe’ of Visscher (1616) was really the Rose. Baker, 165,
reproducing a cut from Hollar (1640), also misnames the Globe as the
Rose.
[1206] Young, ii. 241.
[1207] _Variorum_, iii. 56. I should have been happier if Malone had
quoted _verbatim_, but I do not see that Adams, 160, explains away the
statement by suggesting that a source for Malone’s ‘error’ is a note on
p. 66, where he again cites Herbert for fencing at the Red Bull in 1623.
[1208] _E. S._ xliii. 341; _Index to Remembrancia_, 277. It appears
from _Hatfield MSS._ vi. 182, 184, that in May 1596 Langley was
concerned in some negotiations about a missing diamond claimed by the
Crown; cf. p. 396.
[1209] Printed from a contemporary copy in the Guildhall by W. Rendle
in Appendix to Part II of _Harrison’s Description of England_ (_N. S.
S._, 1878) and Adams, 162. The original is held by the steward of the
manor.
[1210] App. D, No. cii.
[1211] Cf. p. 361, and for the reliability and value of the record as
evidence for the structure and staging of theatres, chh. xviii, xx.
[1212] _S. v. L._ 352, ‘the said howse was then lately afore vsed to
have playes in hit’.
[1213] Ibid., ‘the Defendant should be allowed for the true value
thereof out of the Complainantes moytie of the gains for the seuerall
standinges in the galleries of the said howse which belonged to them’.
As ‘which’ may follow on ‘moytie’, I see no reason for Wallace’s
inference (360) that the galleries were structurally divided between
the two parties, instead of the takings being shared.
[1214] Cf. ch. xiv (Pembroke’s) and ch. xxii (Nashe).
[1215] _S. v. L._ 353 (6 Feb. 1598), ‘the said Defendant hath euer
synce had his said howse contynually from tyme to tyme exercysed with
other players to his great gaines’.
[1216] App. D, No. cxiv.
[1217] App. D, No. cxv.
[1218] App. C, No. lii.
[1219] Cf. p. 362.
[1220] App. D, No. cxxiii.
[1221] Manningham, 130; Gawdy, 93.
[1222] Ch. xxiii (Vennar).
[1223] _E. S._ xliii. 342.
[1224] Act v, sc. i.
[1225] P. Norman, _The Accounts of the Overseers of the Poor of Paris
Garden, 1608–71_ (1901, _Surrey Arch. Colls._ xvi. 55), from _Addl.
MS._ 34, 110, and again by C. W. Wallace as a new discovery in _E. S._
xliii. 390. The amounts are £4 6_s._ 8_d._ in 1611, £5 3_s._ 4_d._ in
1612, £5 5_s._ in 1613, £3 0_s._ 10_d._ in 1614, 19_s._ 2_d._ in 1615,
and £3 19_s._ 4_d._ in 1621.
[1226] It can hardly have been open at the time of the Watermen’s
petition early in 1614 (cf. p. 370).
[1227] Herbert, 63; _Variorum_, iii. 56. Rendle, in _Antiquarian
Magazine_, vii. 211, notes a ‘licence for T. B. and three assistants
to make shows of Italian motion, at the Prince’s Arms, or the Swan’ in
1623; cf. Herbert, 47.
[1228] Cf. p. 376.
[1229] _N. U. S._ xiii. 279; cf. p. 399.
[1230] Wallace, in _The Times_ (1914), ‘Ac de et in vna domo de novo
edificata cum gardino eidem pertinenti in parochia S^{ci} Salvatoris
praedicta in comitatu Surria praedicta in occupacione Willielmi
Shakespeare et aliorum’.
[1231] Cf. p. 364.
[1232] A rather fantastic argument of Ordish, 85, for the Curtain on
the ground of the martial character of the neighbourhood is answered by
Murray, i. 99.
[1233] _E. M. O._ 4368.
[1234] _O. v. H._ l. 110.
[1235] _O. v. H._ l. 99; _W. v. H._ 313.
[1236] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 317.
[1237] _W. v. H._ 314.
[1238] _Century_ (Aug. 1910), 508; cf. p. 424.
[1239] _W. v. H._ 314.
[1240] _O. v. H._ l. 194.
[1241] _W. v. H._ 319.
[1242] Ibid. 317. Wallace dates the admission of Condell in 1610, but
this seems to be an error.
[1243] _O. v. H._ l. 97; _W. v. H._ 321.
[1244] Rye, 61, from _Relation_ of Hans Jacob Wurmsser von Vendenheym,
‘Lundi 30 [April 1610] S. E. [Prince Lewis Frederick of Württemberg]
alla au Globe, lieu ordinaire ou l’on joue les Commedies, y fut
representé l’histoire du More de Venise’; cf. p. 369 on visit of Prince
of Hesse-Cassel in 1611.
[1245] _W. v. H._ 320.
[1246] Stowe, 926. Jonas, 104, cites another record of the date from A.
Hopten, _A Concordancy of Yeares_ (1615).
[1247] Birch, _James_, i. 253.
[1248] L. Pearsall Smith, _Letters of Wotton_, ii. 32.
[1249] Winwood, iii. 469.
[1250] Arber, iii. 528, ‘Simon Stafford ... a ballad called the sodayne
Burninge of the Globe on the Bankside in the Play tyme on Saint Peters
day last 1613’; ‘Edward White ... a doleful ballad of the general
ouerthrowe of the famous theater on the Banksyde called the Globe &c. by
William Parrat’.
[1251] Halliwell-Phillipps, _Outlines_, i. 310, ‘from a manuscript
of the early part of the seventeenth century, of unquestionable
authenticity, preserved in the library of Sir Mathew Wilson, Bart., of
Eshton Hall, co. York’. The Eshton Hall collection, originally formed
by John Hopkinson in 1660, has recently been sold, with the verses, to
Mr. G. D. Smith of New York. The ‘Sonnett’ was first printed [by Joseph
Haslewood] in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_ (1816), lxxxvi. 114, ‘from an
old manuscript volume of poems and therefrom by Collier, i. 371, and
Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 225.
[1252] _Taylors Water-Works_ (1614), reprinted as _The Sculler_ (1630,
_Works_, 515), ep. 22 of 3rd series.
[1253] _Underwoods_, lxii, written later than the Fortune fire of 9
Dec. 1621.
[1254] _Histriomastix_, 556.
[1255] Birch, _James I_, i. 329.
[1256] Cf. p. 374.
[1257] _W. v. H._ 320.
[1258] Ibid. 321.
[1259] A later statement by Shank in the _Sharers Papers_ puts it at
£1,400. Heminges describes Witter’s ‘parte’ by a slip as one-sixth
instead of one-seventh of the moiety. If the £120 was one-twelfth of
the total cost, his figure (£1,440) would agree with that of Shank.
Professor Wallace says in _The Times_ of 2 Oct. 1909, ‘This amount is
in fact excessive.... I have other contemporary documents showing the
cost was far less than £1,400.’
[1260] _W. v. H._ 323; Wallace in _The Times_ (1914).
[1261] _O. v. H._ ll. 245 sqq.
[1262] Lambert, _Shakespeare Documents_, 87.
[1263] _W. v. H._ 323.
[1264] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312.
[1265] Cf. ch. xi. There was a much rougher type of audience at the
Globe; cf. Shirley, _Prologue at the Globe, to his Comedy called ‘The
Doubtful Heir’, which should have been presented at the Blackfriars_,
quoted in _Variorum_, iii. 69.
[1266] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars).
[1267] Wallace in _The Times_ (1914). Bodley seems to have acquired
a dubious title to hold the land in his own right in 1608, raised a
fine of £20 for recognizing the players’ lease in 1609, and a fine of
£2 on Heminges for leave to build his taphouse in 1615. Matthew Brend
recovered the property through the Court of Wards, after the end of his
minority, in 1622.
[1268] Rendle, _Bankside_, xvii, from _Southwark Vestry Papers_. Brend
was knighted in 1622.
[1269] Cf. p. 374. Wallace, in _The Times_ (1914), makes Matthew
Brend’s lease end on 25 Dec. Yet he puts the destruction after the
expiration of the lease.
[1270] Stowe, _Survey_, ii. 58.
[1271] Martin, 158.
[1272] Stopes, _Burbage_, 196; Martin, 169; from _Close Roll, 3 Car.
I_, pt. 23, m. 22.
[1273] Martin, 174.
[1274] A. Hayward, _Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi_, ii. 33.
[1275] _History of St. Saviour’s_ (1795), 231.
[1276] T. Pennant, _London_ (1791), 60, ‘A little west of S. Mary
Overies (in a place still called Globe Alley) stood the Globe.... I
have been told that the door was very lately standing’; Concanen and
Morgan, 224, ‘Several of the neighbouring inhabitants remember these
premises being wholly taken down about fifty years ago, having remained
for many years in a very ruinous state: avoided by the young and
superstitious as a place haunted by those imaginary beings called evil
spirits’.
[1277] Martin, 165, 177. It is probably a mere coincidence that John
Knowles held a garden next the Globe site in 1599.
[1278] Rendle, _Bankside_, xix; _Antiquarian_, viii. 216.
[1279] Chalmers, _Apology_ (1797), 114, ‘I maintain, that the Globe
was situated on the Bank, within eighty paces of the river, which has
since receded from its former limits; that the Globe stood on the site
of John Whatley’s windmill, which is at present used for grinding
colours; as I was assured by an intelligent manager of Barclay’s
brewhouse, which covers, in its ample range, part of Globe Alley;
and that Whatley’s wind mill stands due south from the western side
of Queenhythe by the compass, which I set for the express purpose of
ascertaining the relative bearings of the windmill to the opposite
objects on the Thames’; W. Wilson, _History and Antiquities of
Dissenting Churches_ (1814), iv. 148, 175, ‘In former days there stood
here [in Globe Alley] a theatre called the “Globe”.... Near to this
place stood the meeting-house.... Its dissolution took place about the
year 1752.... It is at present used for warehousing goods. A mill was
also erected over it for the purpose of grinding bones’; R. Wilkinson,
_Londina Illustrata_ (1819), i. 135, ‘Upon the disuse of the theatre,
its site ... was formed into a meeting-house.... Afterwards a mill
was erected here to grind bones; and it is at present appropriated
for the purpose of grinding stones and similar materials’. The plan,
however, which accompanies Wilkinson’s text, assigns the theatre to an
improbable site some way west of the meeting-house. The Globe Alley
meeting-house was built in 1672; it appears in a list of 1683, and is
marked on Rocque’s map of 1746 on Rendle’s favourite site. Wilson only
says the meeting-house was near the Globe; Wilkinson identifies the
sites. Chalmers mentions the windmill, but not the meeting-house. I may
add that a line drawn south from the west of Queenhithe would pass west
of any possible site for the Globe. Malone’s ‘nearly opposite to Friday
Street, Cheapside’ (_Variorum_, iii. 63) can also only be approximate.
[1280] Cf. facsimile from token-book in Martin, 157.
[1281] Concanen and Morgan, _History of St. Saviour’s_ (1795), 224,
‘It was situated in what is now called Maid lane; the north side and
building adjoining, extending from the west side of Counter-alley to
the north side of the passage leading to Mr. Brook’s cooperage; on
the east side beyond the end of Globe-alley, including the ground on
which stood the late parish workhouse, and from thence continuing
to the south end of Mr. Brook’s passage. Under this building was
Fountain-alley, leading from Horseshoe-alley into Castle-lane.’ This
account appears to make the site extend farther north than Dr. Martin
allows for, right up, indeed, to Maid Lane.
[1282] Plan of 1810 in R. Taylor, _Londina Illustrata_, ii. (1825) 136;
plan of 1818 in Taylor, _Annals of St. Mary Overy_ (1833), 140.
[1283] Martin, 171. One cannot lay much stress upon hearsay locations
of the site by employees of the brewery (Martin, 183), or the discovery
of underground staging still farther south than Dr. Martin’s site on a
spot which in 1599 must have been well within Winchester Park (Martin,
201), or of a stone inscribed ‘[T]heayter’, just south of Globe Alley
(Martin, 184).
[1284] Martin, 164.
[1285] A Clink poor relief assessment of 1609 (Collier, _Alleyn
Memoirs_, 91; Warner, 49) shows two names, each assessed for ‘halfe the
parke’; this would hardly be the Bishop’s. The token-books also show
persons resident in the park, but here the order of the entries points
to a locality south of Maiden Lane, near the gate of the Bishop’s Park
(_11 N. Q._ xii. 143).
[1286] Wallace in _The Times_ (1914). Dr. Martin explains (_11 N. Q._
xii. 161) that, in order to conduct their patrons from Bankside to the
play-house south of Maiden Lane, ‘the owners of the Globe had erected a
bridge over the ditches and quagmire of Maid Lane’.
[1287] Dr. Wallace says that all these records were made by the
Commissioners ‘in dealing with the property of Brend and others on the
north side’ of Maiden Lane. But there is no reference to ‘the north
side’ in the actual record. Bingham had, and Sellers may have had, more
than one plot in the neighbourhood.
[1288] Cf. p. 379.
[1289] _R. I. B. A. Journal_, 3rd series, xvii. 26.
[1290] Halliwell-Phillipps (_Calendar of Shakespeare Rarities_, 81)
had a document of 1653 concerning a sewer ‘in Maide Lane nere the
place where the Globe play-house lately stood’, which he considered as
establishing the exact locality of the theatre. It is probably now in
America.
[1291] Cf. p. 436.
[1292] I ought not to have suggested in _The Stage of the Globe_, 356,
that the first Globe might have been rectangular.
[1293] _Variorum_, iii. 67.
[1294] _Henslowe Papers_, 14; Henslowe, ii. 56.
[1295] _Henslowe Papers_, 16.
[1296] Ibid. 25.
[1297] Ibid. 108.
[1298] Printed by W. W. Greg, _Henslowe Papers_, 4, from _Dulwich
Muniments_, 22; also in _Variorum_, iii. 338, and Halliwell-Phillipps,
_Illustrations_, 81; _Outlines_, i. 304.
[1299] _Quarterly Review_, ccviii. 442; _Architectural Review_,
xxiii. 239. Models by Mr. Godfrey are at the Columbia and Illinois
Universities (Adams, 277). M. W. Sampson has pointed out in _M. L. N._
for June 1915 (cited by Adams, 279) that the passage in _The Roaring
Girl_ (1611), i. 1, where Sir Alexander Weargrave displays his house to
his friends, is really a description of the Fortune when ‘Within one
square a thousand heads are laid’.
[1300] _Henslowe Papers_, 25.
[1301] Ibid. 11.
[1302] App. D, Nos. cxvii, cxviii, cxxi, cxxii, cxxiv.
[1303] Cf. ch. viii and App. D, No. cl.
[1304] _Henslowe Papers_, 110.
[1305] Cf. ch. xi.
[1306] _Henslowe Papers_, 64.
[1307] Ibid. 25.
[1308] Ibid. 27.
[1309] Birch, _James I_, ii. 270.
[1310] Cf. ch. xi.
[1311] Birch, _James I_, ii. 280.
[1312] Young, ii. 225.
[1313] _Henslowe Papers_, 28.
[1314] Cf. App. I. It is this second house that is represented as a
small angular flagged building in the ‘Ryther’ maps.
[1315] _Fortnightly Review_ (May 1916).
[1316] W. J. Lawrence in _Archiv_ (1914), 301; cf. p. 520.
[1317] Adams, 284, gives the history of the Fortune during 1621–49.
[1318] A Boar’s Head on the Bankside, which belonged to Henslowe in
1604 and previously to Alleyn (Henslowe, ii. 30), was apparently not an
inn.
[1319] E. Gayton, _Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot_ (1654), 277, ‘Sir
John of famous memory; not he of the Boares Head in Eastcheap’. Neither
the text nor the stage-directions of _Henry IV_ name the Boar’s Head;
but the references to Eastcheap (_1 Hen. IV_, I. ii. 145, 176; II. iv.
16, 485; _2 Hen. IV_, II. i. 76; II. ii. 161) are sufficient, and when
Prince Hal asks (_2 Hen. IV_, II. ii. 159) ‘Doth the old boar feed
in the old frank?’, Bardolph answers, ‘At the old place, my lord, in
Eastcheap’. Doll Tearsheet (II. iv. 250) calls Falstaff a ‘whoreson
little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig’.
[1320] Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 258. Harben, 88, however, suggests that
the name was transferred to this house from another on the north side
of Great Eastcheap in St. Clement’s.
[1321] Stowe, _Survey_, i. 126; ii. 72. I suppose the inn is identical
with the ‘Blue Bore Inne’ marked by Ogilby (1677). The site is at No.
30 on the north of Aldgate High Street (Harben, 87).
[1322] Dasent, vi. 168.
[1323] App. D, No. cxxx. The description of this letter in the _Index
to Remembrancia_, 355, as referring to ‘the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap’
has proved misleading.
[1324] App. D, Nos. cxxv, cxxix, cxxxv.
[1325] Cf. ch. xiii (Anne’s).
[1326] Adams, 17; cf. ch. xiii (Duke of York’s). The further suggestion
of Adams, 8, that Rawlidge in 1628 (cf. p. 360) wrote ‘Whitefriars’
for ‘Whitechapel’ is less plausible. Rawlidge is only dealing with
play-houses within the City.
[1327] Adams, 17, identifies the site with Boar’s Head Yard, between
Middlesex Street and Goulston Street, Whitechapel. But this is the
house of 1557 (v. _supra_) within the liberties. Rocque (1746) shows
an oval site, just east of Church Lane and south of the church of St.
Mary, Whitechapel, which rather suggests an amphitheatre, but may be
merely a churchyard.
[1328] _Henslowe Papers_, 59.
[1329] Cf. p. 374.
[1330] The section is reproduced in Adams, 294.
[1331] Not the mercer Stone who sold stuffs to the Admiral’s in 1601
and 1602 (Henslowe, ii. 313); he was doubtless William Stone (Knt. in
1604).
[1332] _W. v. H._ 296. Professor Wallace has confused this 1_s._ 6_d._
with the profits of Woodford’s seventh, and thinks that a gatherer got
one-eighteenth of the receipts.
[1333] I think the inference is that the gallery profits were divided
in the proportion of seven-eighteenths to the housekeepers and
eleven-eighteenths to the players.
[1334] No order seems to have been made as to the gatherer’s place.
[1335] _Knight of the Burning Pestle_, IV. i. 43.
[1336] _Travels of the Three Brothers_ (ed. Bullen, p. 88).
[1337] Dekker, _Works_, iv. 97; cf. p. 367.
[1338] Jeaffreson, ii. 64, 86.
[1339] Wither, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ (1613), i. 1,
‘His poetry is such as he can cull
From plays he heard at Curtain or at Bull’;
_Albumazar_, II. i. 16, ‘Then will I confound her with
compliments drawn from the plays I see at the Fortune and Red Bull,
where I learn all the words I speak and understand not’; Gayton, 24,
‘I have heard that the poets of the Fortune and Red Bull had always
a mouth-measure for their actors (who were terrible tear-throats)
and made their lines proportionable to their compass, which were
sesquipedales, a foot and a half’.
[1340] Collier, _Memoirs of Alleyn_, 107; _D. N. B._ s.v. Alleyn. The
_Diary_ (Young, ii. 51) runs:
‘Oct. 1, 1617. I came to London in the coach and went to the red Bull.
2^d.
Oct. 3. I went to the red bull and ℞ for the younger brother but 3. 6.
4, water 4^d.’
_The Younger Brother_ was entered in the Stationers’
Register in 1653, but is not extant.
[1341] Heywood, _Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas_, 247.
[1342] Adams, 300.
[1343] Prynne, _Epistle_ to _Histriomastix_ (1633); W. C., _London’s
Lamentation for her Sins_ (1625), ‘Yet even then, Oh Lord, were the
theatres magnified and enlarged’.
[1344] _Fortnightly Review_ (May 1916).
[1345] Cf. App. I.
[1346] Cf. ch. xviii, _Bibl. Note_.
[1347] _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 250; cf. i. 53, 68, 72; ii. 244 (Durham
Priory), 246 (Thetford Priory), 247 (Winchester College), 248
(Magdalen, Oxford).
[1348] Strutt, _Sports and Pastimes_ (ed. Cox), 195.
[1349] Rendle, _Old Southwark_, f. p., 31.
[1350] It is also, although unnamed, in Smith’s drawing of 1588, but
that is probably based on Agas.
[1351] William Fitzstephen (_c._ 1170–82) in J. C. Robertson,
_Materials for the History of Becket_ (R. S.), iii. 11, ‘In hieme
singulis feré festis ante prandium ... pingues tauri cornipetae, seu
ursi immanes, cum objectis depugnant canibus’.
[1352] Erasmus, _Adagia_, 3354, ‘Sed intolerabilius est quod apud
Britannos complures alunt greges ursorum ad saltationem, animal
vorax et maleficum’. I owe the correct reference to Mr. P. S. Allen.
Presumably ‘greges’ is no more than ‘numbers’.
[1353] Collier, i. 42, from _Harl. MS._ 433.
[1354] _Egerton MS._ 2623, f. 11. Collier, who owned this document,
or some other modern, has substituted the name of John Dorrington.
A copy, exemplified for Morgan Pope on 18 Nov. 1585, is at Dulwich;
cf. _Henslowe Papers_, 1. Long became steward of Paris Garden in 1536
(Kingsford, 159).
[1355] Collier, i. 194, from list of fees payable by the Treasurer of
the Chamber in 1571 (_Cotton MS._ Vesp. C. xiv), ‘keapers of Beares and
Mastives, iij. Item to Mathew Becke, Sergeaunte of the beares, for his
wages per ann. 12^l 10^s 7½^d. Item to Symon Powlter, yoman, per ann.
14^l 6^s 3^d. Item to Richard Darryngton M^r and kepar of the bandogges
and mastives, per ann. 21^l 5^s 10^d’. Similarly, the Treasurer’s
_Declared Account_ for 1594–5 (_Pipe Roll_, 542) shows a total payment
to keepers of Bears and Mastiffs of £48 12_s._ 8½_d._ There is an error
in one or other entry of 10_s._
[1356] The Privy Council Acts record warrants _inter alia_ to Ralph in
1574 (Dasent, viii. 257), Thomas in 1576, 1577, 1578, 1579, and 1580
(ix. 121, 153, 335; x. 148; xi. 70, 392), Ralph in 1581 (xii. 321), and
Edward in 1581 and 1582 (xiii. 115, 311). Edward Bowes seems to have
held the Keepership of Dogs, but disclaimed having a fee of £15 17_s._
4_d._ at the subsidy of 1588 (_M. S. C._ i. 355).
[1357] Earlier licensees were William Payne and Simon Powlter (> 1574).
Wistow (_c._ 1575), John Napton, Morgan Pope (_c._ 1585–7), Thomas
Burnaby (_c._ 1590–4), and perhaps others; cf. p. 464; Wallace in _The
Times_ (1914); Kingsford, 171–8.
[1358] _Alleyn Memoirs_, 213; cf. _Henslowe Papers_, 4.
[1359] Henslowe, i. 71. Some payments of June 1597 on account of a
privy seal and a patent for Alleyn (Henslowe, i. 200) may relate to
this.
[1360] _Henslowe Papers_, 98. Possibly an undated letter from Arthur
Langworth to Alleyn (_Henslowe Papers_, 99), in which he refers to
Bowes’s illness and protests against a charge of not giving Alleyn
sufficient help in procuring some ‘place’, relates to this. But it is
allusive and obscure.
[1361] _S. P. D. Eliz._ cclxviii. 18; cf. _Henslowe Papers_, 12.
[1362] Probably Bowes had also held this keepership with his
Mastership, as he was drawing a fee from the Chamber in 1596 (Henslowe,
i. 128).
[1363] Muniment 19 in the _Dulwich MSS._ is a warrant of 24 Nov. 1599
by Meade to a deputy; cf. Henslowe, ii. 38. A list of fees _c._ 1600
in _Henslowe Papers_, 108, shows, under the general heading ‘Parris
garden’, only two keeperships, instead of the three of 1571, that of
Bears at £12 8_s._ 1½_d._, and that of Mastiffs at £21 5_s._ 10½_d._
[1364] _Henslowe Papers_, 12; cf. Henslowe, ii. 37.
[1365] Receipts by or on behalf of Dorrington dated Jan. and April
1602 are in _Henslowe Papers_, 101; Henslowe, i. 212. Each is for a
quarter’s ‘rent’ of £10, and the earlier is specified as ‘for the
commissyon for the Bear-garden’. A letter of May 1600 from Dorrington
to Henslowe asking him and Meade to have the ‘games’ ready for Court
is in _Henslowe Papers_, 100. In 1603 Henslowe spent 16_s._ 4_d._ ‘for
sewinge at the cort’, on petitions to Dorrington, the Lord Chamberlain,
and the Council, the drawing of two licences, and ‘our warent for
baytynge’ (_Henslowe Papers_, 109). I think that from 1603, if not
earlier, he had a regular appointment as deputy to Dorrington. On 18
April 1604 he received the Treasurer of the Chamber’s reward as ‘Deputy
Master of the Game’.
[1366] _Alleyn Memoirs_, 213; cf. _Henslowe Papers_, 4.
[1367] _S. P. D. Jac. I, 1603–10_, p. 134.
[1368] _Henslowe Papers_, 101; _S. P. D. Jac. I_, x, p. 167. It appears
from a memorandum of Alleyn’s in _Henslowe Papers_, 107, that he paid
£250 for his share.
[1369] _Henslowe Papers_, 104.
[1370] This is recited in a warrant to one of their deputies in
_Henslowe Papers_, 18.
[1371] Henslowe, ii. 38. Dr. Greg gives many interesting details of the
business, and of the relations of the Masters with their agents, for
which I have not space. Others, of Bowes’s time, are in Dasent, ix. 9;
xiii. 101.
[1372] _Sydney Papers_, ii. 194 (12 May 1600), ‘This day she appointes
to see a Frenchman doe feates upon a rope, in the Conduit court. To
morrow she hath commanded the beares, the bull and the ape to be baited
in the tiltyard. Upon Wednesday she will have solemn dawncing’; cf.
_Epicoene_, iii. 1, ‘Were you ever so much as look’d upon by a lord or
a lady, before I married you, but on the Easter or Whitsun-holidays?
and then out at the banqueting-house window, when Ned Whiting or George
Stone were at the stake?’ George Stone was killed during the visit of
Christian of Denmark in 1606 (_H. P._ 105). The Court practice was
followed by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. Payments to the bearward of
Paris Garden for pastime showed at the Conduit Heads are in Harrison,
iv. 322.
[1373] Machyn, 198.
[1374] Ibid. 270; Nichols, _Eliz._ i. 305; ii. 469; Walsingham,
_Journal_, 42; Boississe, i. 345. There is a spirited description of a
baiting before Elizabeth at Kenilworth on 14 July 1575 in _Laneham’s
Letter_ (Furnivall, _Captain Cox_, 17); but I do not suppose that these
were the London bears. Leicester, whose cognizance was the bear and
ragged staff, doubtless kept his own ursine establishment.
[1375] Rye, 123.
[1376] _Pipe Office Declared Account_, 543, m. 194.
[1377] Stowe, _Annales_ (1615), 835, 865, 895.
[1378] Translated by F. Madden in _Archaeologia_, xxiii. 354.
[1379] Machyn, 198.
[1380] Translated by G. von Bülow in _2 Transactions of Royal Hist.
Soc._ ix. 230, from a manuscript in the possession of Graf von der
Osten at Plathe, Pomerania. I add for the sake of completeness the
following lines from the _Hodoeporica_ (1568, ed. 2, 1575), 224, of N.
Chytraeus, whose visit was probably _c._ 1565–7:
Opposita in Tamesis ripa, longa area paruis
Distincta aspicitur tectis, vbi magna canum vis
Vrsorumque alitur diuersarumque ferarum,
Quae canibus commissae Anglis spectacula praebent,
Hospitibusque nouis, vincti dum praelia miscent,
Luctantes aut ungue fero, vel dentibus uncis.
[1381] Cf. ch. xviii.
[1382] Translated in Rye, 45.
[1383] Cf. p. 362.
[1384] Hentzner, 196; cf. p. 363.
[1385] G. Binz in _Anglia_, xxii. 460, ‘Man pfleget auch alle Sontag
vnndt mittwochen zu Londen, yenseits desz wassers den Berenhatz zu
halten.... Der Schauplatz ist in die Ründe gebauwen, sind oben herumb
viel geng, darauf man zusicht, vnden am boden vnder dem heiteren
Himmel ist es nicht besetzet. Da bande man in mitten desz platzes
einen grossen Beeren an ein stock am langen seil an.... Wie wir die
stegen hinunter kamen, gungen wir hinder den schauwplatz, besahen die
Englischen docken, deren bey 120 in einem bezirk beysamen, yedoch
yetwederer in einem sonderbahren ställin an einer kettin angeheftet
wahren.’
[1386] _Hatfield MSS._ xi. 382.
[1387] G. von Bülow in _2 Transactions of the Royal Hist. Soc._ vi. 16,
‘16 Sept. Auf den Nachmittag haben wir den Bär u. Stierhetze zugesehen
... wohlmehr as 200 Hünde an selbigem Ort in einem besonderen Häuslein
unterhalten’.
[1388] Rye, 61.
[1389] Rye, 133.
[1390] _Englische Studien_, xiv. 440.
[1391] _Epigram_ xliii:
Publius, student at the common law,
Oft leaves his books, and for his recreation,
To Paris Garden doth himself withdraw,
Where he is ravished with such delectation,
As down among the bears and dogs he goes;
Where, whilst he skipping cries, ‘To head! to head!’
His satin doublet and his velvet hose
Are all with spittle from above bespread:
When he is like his father’s country hall,
Stinking with dogs and muted all with hawks;
And rightly on him too this filth doth fall,
Which for such filthy sports his books forsakes,
Leaving old Ployden, Dyer, Brooke alone,
To see old Harry Hunks, and Sacarson.
[1392] _Merry Wives_, I. i. 306.
[1393] Dekker, _Work for Armourers_ (1609, _Works_, iv. 98), ‘At length
a blind bear was tied to the stake, and instead of baiting him with
dogs, a company of creatures that had the shapes of men and faces of
Christians (being either colliers, carters, or watermen) took the
office of beadles upon them, and whipped Monsieur Hunkes till the blood
ran down his old shoulders’.
[1394] _Coryats Crudities_ (1611), i. 114, ‘Hunks of the Beare-garden
to be feared if he be nigh on’.
[1395] Cf. p. 453. Nashe, _Strange News_ (1592, _Works_, i. 281, also
names ‘great Ned’ and adds ‘Harry of Tame’. In 1590 Burnaby had at the
Bear Garden ‘Tom Hunckes’, ‘Whitinge’, ‘Harry of Tame’, three other
bears, three bulls, a horse, an ape. A ‘great’ bear was worth £8 or
£10, a bull £4 or £5 (Kingsford, 175).
[1396] _Puritan_, iii. 5, ‘How many dogs do you think I had upon me?...
almost as many as George Stone, the bear; three at once’.
[1397] _Henslowe Papers_, 106.
[1398] _Copley Accounts_, s. a. 1575, in _Collectanea Genealogica et
Topographica_, viii. 253, ‘Gyven to the master of Paryshe Garden his
man for goynge with Thos. Sharples into Barmensy Street to see certen
mastyve dogges’.
[1399] R. Crowley, _One and thyrtye Epigrammes_ (1550, ed. E. E. T.
S.), 381:
And yet me thynke those men be mooste foles of all,
Whose store of money is but verye smale,
And yet euerye Sondaye they will surely spende
One peny or two, the bearwardes lyuyng to mende.
At Paryse garden, eche Sundaye, a man shall not fayle
To fynde two or thre hundredes for the bearwardes vaile.
One halpenye a piece they vse for to giue,
When some haue no more in their purse, I belieue;
Jonson, _Execration upon Vulcan_ (_Works_, iii. 322):
a threatning to the bears,
And that accursed ground, the Paris-garden;
Taylor, _Bull, Bear and Horse_ (1638):
And that we have obtained again the game,
Our Paris Garden flag proclaims the same.
Cf. Sir John Davies’ lines already quoted; also Dekker,
ii. 125 (_News from Hell_), iv. 109 (_Work for Armourers_), &c., &c.
[1400] Stowe, _Annales_, 695.
[1401] _Henslowe Papers_, 15, 104. Miss Dormer Harris kindly tells me
that the Coventry Corporation rewarded the ‘Bearward of palace Garden’
in 1576–7.
[1402] Cf. p. 411.
[1403] Malone, _Variorum_, xix. 483; Rendle, _Bankside_, iii;
_Antiquarian_, vii. 277; Ordish, 128.
[1404] _Annales Monasterii de Bermundseia_, s. a. 1113 (Luard,
_Annales Monastici_, iii. 432), ‘Hoc anno Robertus Marmion dedit
hidam de Wideflete cum molendino et aliis pertinentibus suis monachis
de Bermundeseye’; _Register of Hospital of St. John_, s. a. 1420
(_Monasticon Anglicanum_, vi. 819), ‘Haec sunt statuta et ordinationes
concernentia locum privilegiatum vocatum Parishgardyn, alias dictum
Wideflete, sive Wiles, cum pertinentiis, facta per Johannem nuper
Ducem Bedfordiae, firmarium ibidem, anno Domini mccc[c]xx’ [Rules for
a sanctuary, with a dominus, senescallus, ballivus, constabularius,
and societas, follow]; _Liber Fundatorum of St. John_ (ibid. vi. 832),
‘Molendina de Wideflete cum gardino vocato Parish-gardin ... tenentur
de Abbate de Barmondesey’ (1434). Kingsford, 157, traces the manor
through Bermondsey priory, the Templars, and St. John’s Hospital to the
Crown in 1536.
[1405] Blount, _Glossographia_ (ed. 4, 1674), 469, quotes _Close Roll,
16 Rich. II_, dorso ii. Kingsford, 156, translates the writ, which
is abstracted (Sharpe, _Letter Book H_, 392), ‘Writ to the Mayor
and Sheriffs to proclaim ordinances made in the last Parliament at
Winchester to the effect that the laystall or latrine (fimarium sive
sterquilinium) on the bank of the Thames near the house of Robert de
Parys be removed, and a house be built on its site for the use of
butchers, where they may cut up their offal and take it in boats to
mid-stream and cast it into the water at ebb-tide.... Witness the King
at Westminster 21 Feb. 16 Rich. II’. The ordinance is recorded in _Rot.
Parl._ iii. 306.
[1406] _Index to Remembrancia_, 478.
[1407] Brewer, xxi. 2. 88, ‘a licence for Thomas Fluddie, yeoman of
your Majesty’s bears, to bait and make pastime with your Graces bears
at the accustomed place at London, called the Stewes, notwithstanding
the proclamation’ (Sept. 1546); Machyn, 78, ‘The sam day [9 Dec. 1554]
at after-non was a bere-beytyn on the Banke syde, and ther the grett
blynd bere broke losse, and in ronnyng away he chakt a servyng man by
the calff of the lege, and bytt a gret pesse away, and after by the
hokyll-bone, that within iij days after he ded’.
[1408] Foxe, _Acts and Monuments_ (ed. 1846), v. 388. Collier, iii.
94, cites ‘a book of the expenses of the Northumberland family’ to the
effect that the earl went to Paris Garden to behold the bear-baiting in
1525–6. Ordish, 129, criticizes this on the ground that the statement
is not in the _Northumberland Household Book_ printed by Percy. It was
in fact a different book, from which Collier, i. 86, gives entries,
of which one is of boat-hire from and to ‘Parys gardyn’. But there is
nothing about bear-baiting.
[1409] _Account of Treasurer of Chamber_, s. a. 1515 (Brewer, ii.
1466), ‘Hen. Anesley, conveying the King’s barge from Greenwich to
Parys Garden, 16^d’.
[1410] Ordish, 127.
[1411] In _Shaw v. Langley_ (1597) the Swan is described as ‘in the
oulde Parrisgardin’, although there is no specific mention of baiting
(_E. S._ xliii. 345, 355).
[1412] Fleetwood, writing to Burghley on 13 July 1578 (Rendle,
_Antiquarian_, vii. 274, from _S. P. D. Eliz._ cxxv. 21), describes
intrigues of the French ambassador ‘on the Thames side behind Paris
Garden toward Lambeth, in the fields ... I got a skuller to Paris
Garden, but the place was dark and shadowed with trees, that one man
cannot see another unless they have _lynceos oculos_ or els cattes
eys, shewing how admirable a place it was for such doings. The place
is that boowre of conspiracies, it is the college of male cownsell....
There be certain _virgulta_ or eightes of willows set by the Thames
near that place; they grow now exceeding thick, and a notable covert
for confederates to shrowd in; a milkmade lately did see the French
ambassador land in that _virgulta_’.
[1413] The ring, without a name, is also shown in Smith’s drawing
(1588), but this is probably based on one of the maps.
[1414] Rendle, _Antiquarian_, viii. 57, from _Exchequer Depositions, 18
Jac. I_. The depositions also mention a bull-house built in a dog-yard,
a bear-house, a hay-house, a pond for the bears to wash in, and a pond
for dead dogs. Kingsford, 175, gives fuller extracts.
[1415] Stowe, _Survey_, ii. 54. A short passage in i. 95 adds nothing.
[1416] Stowe (1615), 695.
[1417] Halliwell, _Dr. Dee’s Diary_ (C. S.), 18; App. C, No. xxxi; App.
D, No. lxiv. The ballad of which four stanzas are given by Collier, i.
244, is presumably a forgery.
[1418] More, _Works_ (ed. 1557), 208, ‘This is much like as at Beuerlay
late, whan much of the people beyng at a bere baytyng, the church
fell sodeinly down at euensonge tyme, and ouer whelmed some that than
were in it: a good felow, that after herde the tale tolde, “lo”, quod
he, “now maie you see what it is to be at euensong whan ye should be
at the bere baytynge”. How be it, the hurt was not ther in beinge at
euensonge, but in that the churche was falsely wrought’.
[1419] App. D, No. lxx.
[1420] Rendle, _Antiquarian_, viii. 57.
[1421] Rendle, _Antiquarian_, viii. 57; _Bankside_, xxx, with map.
[1422] The tithes were for ‘the bear garden and for the ground
adjoining to the same where the dogs are’ (Rendle, _Bankside_, v).
It was for Morgan Pope that Bowes’s patent as Master of the Game was
exemplified in 1585; cf. p. 450.
[1423] Henslowe, ii. 25, from _Egerton MS._ 2623, f. 13, and _Dulwich
MS._ iv. 21.
[1424] Henslowe, i. 71, ‘Ano do 1595 the xxviij^{th} of Novembere
Reseved of M^r Henslow the day and yeare abov written the som of syx
poundes of curant mony of England and is in part of a mor som [yf he
the sayd] by twyxt the sayd Phillyp Henslow and me consaning a bargen
of the beargarden I say Reseved vj^{ll}. By me John Mavlthouse. Wittnes
I E Alley.’ I take the words in square brackets, which are cancelled
in the diary, to represent ‘if he proceed’. In Henslowe, i. 43, are
further receipts for 40_s._ ‘in part of the bargen for the tenymentes
on the bankes syd’ in Dec. 1595, and sums of £10, £20, and £4 for
unspecified purposes in Jan. and Feb. 1596. Kingsford, 177, gives the
date of Henslowe’s purchase.
[1425] Henslowe, i. 209; cf. _Henslowe Papers_, 109.
[1426] Henslowe, ii. 25.
[1427] _Henslowe Papers_, 107. I agree with Dr. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 30,
39) that it is difficult to see what a lease from Thomas Garland to
Henslowe and Alleyn in 1608 of a close called Long Slip or Long Meadow
in Lambeth can have had to do with the baiting. But Alleyn added the
word ‘Bear-garden’ to the original endorsement ‘M^r Garlands lece’
(_Henslowe Papers_, 12). Perhaps the land was used for some subsidiary
purpose in connexion with the Garden.
[1428] _Henslowe Papers_, 110; _Architectural Review_, xlvii. 152.
[1429] Full text in _Alleyn Memoirs_, 78; abstract in _Henslowe
Papers_, 102.
[1430] Henslowe, i. 214; cf. p. 189 (_supra_).
[1431] Cf. p. 458.
[1432] Cf. ch. xviii.
[1433] _Henslowe Papers_, 19, from Dulwich Muniment 49; also printed in
_Variorum_, iii. 343. Muniment 50 is Katherens’ bond, and Muniment 51
a sub-contract of 8 Sept. 1613 with John Browne, bricklayer, to do the
brickwork for £80.
[1434] Cf. p. 370.
[1435] Taylor, _Works_ (1630), 304, with a reply by Fennor and
rejoinder by Taylor. Incidentally Taylor mentions the arras of the
theatre and the tiles with which it was covered.
[1436] The Southwark vestry order of 1 May 1598 (App. D, No. cxv) seems
to connect him with ‘play-houses’, but I doubt whether anything but the
bear garden is meant.
[1437] Cf. _Satiromastix_, 1247, ‘Th’ast a breath as sweet as the Rose
that growes by the Beare-Garden’.
[1438] _Alleyn Memoirs_, 159.
[1439] Ordish, 235. No date can be assigned to _A North Countrey Song_
in _Wit and Drollery_ (1656):
When I’se come there [to Paris Garden], I was in a rage,
I rayl’d on him that kept the Beares,
Instead of a Stake was suffered a Stage,
And in Hunkes his house a crue of Players.
[1440] Collier, iii. 102.
[1441] Cf. p. 375.
[1442] Ordish, 244. A Bearsfoot Alley shown farther to the east by
Rocque (1746) may derive from one of the earlier baiting-places.
[1443] C. W. Wallace in _The Times_ (30 April 1914), ‘We present John
Wardner William Sellors and all the land holders or their tenantes that
holde anie landes gardeines ground or tenementes abbutting vpon the
common sewer leadinge from Sellors gardin to the beare garden to cast
clense and scoure their and euerie one of their seuerall partes of the
common sewer by Candlemas nexte vpon paine of euerie pole then vndone
... ij^s’.
[1444] Cf. p. 458.
[1445] E. Hake, _Newes out of Poules Churchyarde_ (1579), Sat. v:
What else but gaine and money gote
Maintaines each Saboth day
The bayting of the Beare and Bull?
What brings this brutish play?
Many of the attacks on plays (App. C) also refer to
baiting.
[1446] App. D, No. lxxxiv.
[1447] App. D, No. cxxxii.
[1448] ‘In the late quenes tyme fre libertie was permited with
owt restrainte to bayght them which now is tacken a way frome vs
especiallye one the Sondayes in the after none after devine service
which was the cheffest meanes and benefit to the place’; cf. p. 452.
[1449] Cf. p. 375.
[1450] _Henslowe Papers_, 88, 125.
[1451] Printed in _M. S. C._ i. 277, from _P. R. 13 Jac. I_, pt. 20;
also by Collier, i. 381, and Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 46, from the Signet
Bill, misdescribed as the Privy Seal, of 31 May.
[1452] Cf. App. D, No. clvii.
[1453] Cf. App. D, No. clx. Collier, i. 384, without giving his
authority, says that the Corporation reported the carrying out of this
mandate ‘before three days had elapsed’.
[1454] Shaw. ii. 107. Sir Thomas Saunders had the same lodgings _c._
1551 (cf. p. 478, n. 4; _M. S. C._ ii. 120).
[1455] Cf. ch. xvii (Blackfriars); _M. S. C._ ii. 93, 110, 120.
[1456] W. P. Baildon, _Black Books of Lincoln’s Inn_, iv. 263; C. F. R.
Palmer, _The Friar-Preachers of Holborn, London_ (_Reliquary_, xvii.
33, 75).
[1457] Stowe, _Survey_, i. 9, 27, 40, 64, 339; ii. 14, 44, 89; (1720)
i. 3. 177; Halle, ii. 150; Nicolas, _Acts of Privy Council_, _passim_;
_Rot. Parl._ v. 171; Clapham, 58; _V. H._ i. 498; Brewer, iv. 2483;
Riley, _Memorials of London_, 90; Baldwin, 154, 261, 355, 358, 499;
Gairdner, _Paston Letters_, i. 426, ‘for the ease of resorting of the
Lordys that are withinne the toun’.
[1458] _V. H._ i. 498.
[1459] Brewer, iii. 2. 1053.
[1460] Ibid. xiii. 2. 215.
[1461] Rymer, xiv. 609; Brewer, xiii. 2. 320.
[1462] _M. S. C._ ii. 3.
[1463] Ibid. ii. 4, 6, 8, 109, 114. Cawarden had had a lease of part of
the property on 4 April 1548.
[1464] Stowe (1720), i. 3. 178.
[1465] Printed from _Journal_, 14, f. 129, as appendix to _Memoranda,
References, and Documents relating to the Royal Hospitals of the City
of London_ (1836).
[1466] Stowe (1720), i. 3. 178. Portinari was a pensioner _c._ 1526
(Brewer, iv. 871), and he was aged 64 in 1572 (_M. S. C._ ii. 52). He
was a Florentine by birth and an engineer by profession (_Sp. P._ ii.
399; Winwood, i. 145).
[1467] _B. M. Lansd. MS._ 155, f. 80^v.
[1468] _M. S. C._ ii. 2, 5, 103, 127; Stowe (1598), i. 339; _Athenaeum_
(1886), ii. 91; Dasent, xxvi. 448; xxvii. 13.
[1469] In 1585 the Lord Mayor asked that the Blackfriars might
contribute to the musters (Stowe, ed. Strype, i. 3. 180). In 1588
and 1593 requisitions for a levy were sent to the chief officer, i.
e. the constable, and the inhabitants (Dasent, xv. 428; xxiv. 30).
But in 1589 similar action was taken through the Lord Mayor (Dasent,
xvii. 118). A local dispute was referred to Richard Young and another
Middlesex justice in 1591, with whom the Lord Mayor was joined because
a City company was involved (Dasent, xx. 245, 283). Young and others
again received the Council’s instructions, after they had heard the
inhabitants, on a building matter in 1591 (Dasent, xxi. 337). At a time
of danger in 1592 the keeping of a midsummer watch was committed to
Lord Cobham (Dasent, xxii. 551).
[1470] Stowe (1720), i. 3. 183; Dasent, iii. 235 (Letter of 14 March
1551 ‘to the Maiour of London to suffer the Lorde Cobham, the Lorde
Wardein, and others dwelling within the Blacke Freres t’enjoye their
liberties there’). The riot was put down by Sir Thomas Saunders, Sir
Henry Jerningham, and William More.
[1471] Stowe (1720), i. 3. 183.
[1472] Stowe, ed. Strype (1720), i. 3. 184. The Blackfriars papers
added by A. Munday in 1618 appear to be all notes and examinations
taken by Sir Thomas Saunders, who appealed to the Earl of Arundel for
support.
[1473] Dasent, viii. 240, 257.
[1474] Dasent, x. 429; xii. 19. Pending a decision the Lord Mayor was
directed ‘not to intermeddle in any cawse within the saide liberties,
savinge onlie for the punishment of fellons as heretofore he hath don’.
The report dated 27 Jan. 1580 is printed by Ingleby, 250, from the
Bridgewater MSS. It seems to be genuine. Collier does not print it,
although he mentions it (_New Facts_, 9) in connexion with a forged
Privy Council order which he dates 23 Dec. 1579. Wallace, ii. 22,
describes an unprinted statement of the City’s case, dated 27 Jan.
1579, in _Letter Book_ Z, f. 23^v.
[1475] Dasent, xv. 137; Stowe (1720), i. 3. 177.
[1476] This may be the undated petition relating both to the
Blackfriars and the Whitefriars in _B. M. Lansd. MS._ 155, f. 79^v.
[1477] Wallace, i. 174, from _Loseley MSS._, bundle 425.
[1478] _M. S. C._ ii. 124; cf. Dasent, xiii. 76.
[1479] Dasent, xxvi. 448. Lord Hunsdon and Sir John Fortescue, both
residents in or near the Blackfriars, sat on the commission with the
chief justices. Lady Russell records the want of a steward and bailiff
to keep order in 1597 (_Hatfield MSS._ vii. 298).
[1480] Dasent, xxvii. 13; xxx. 134, 149; cf. App. D, No. cxxvi.
[1481] W. de G. Birch, _Historical Charters and Constitutional
Documents of the City of London_, 142. James is said to have made the
City pay for the rebuilding of the Banqueting House (cf. ch. i) in
return for this extension of jurisdiction (Goodman, ii. 176). Collier,
_N. F._ 20, 22, 32, although ignorant of the charter, quotes documents
relating to the status of the Blackfriars in 1608, of which two at
least, a note of the interest of the players in the theatre and a
letter in their favour signed ‘H. S.’, are forgeries (Ingleby, 244,
246, 256).
[1482] _M. S. C._ ii. 66, 114; cf. Cawarden’s i. p.m. in Fry, _London
Inquisitiones Post Mortem_, i. 191.
[1483] The general lie of Blackfriars can be gathered from Stowe
(1598), i. 313; ii. 11, with the maps described in the _Bibl. Note_ to
ch. xvi, and the modern ordnance maps. The earlier maps are largely
picturesque, and notably place far too much of the precinct on the
east of Water Lane. But they seem to preserve certain details, such as
the arches over the north to south highway. The old lines of the roads
appear to have been preserved at the rebuilding after the great fire of
1666. I have added some details from other sources.
[1484] _M. S. C._ ii. 115.
[1485] The reconstructed map of London by Emery Walker in C. L.
Kingsford’s edition of Stowe gives this name in error to Water Lane.
[1486] The 1586 documents in Stowe (1720), i. 3. 178, state that the
prior held of the lord of St. John’s, ‘who did make the bridge at the
Thames’. Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 454, however, quotes a Declared Account of
1550 for ‘the ereccion and buyldynge ... of two bridges thone at the
Blackfreers and thother at the Temple’. Under Elizabeth the liberty
maintained the bridge as well as that at Bridewell (_Lansd. MS._ 155,
f. 80^v). The tenure from St. John’s is also alleged (1587) in Dasent,
xv. 137. It is rather curious that in an endorsement of the survey of
St. John’s in 1586–7 (Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 47) that house, although in
Clerkenwell, is described, perhaps by a slip, as in the Blackfriars.
[1487] _M. S. C._ ii. 115. For the ‘turngate’ cf. _M. S. C._ ii. 114;
Strype (1720), i. 3. 184. This, with the great gate, and the gates at
the Thames and Fleet bridges, made up the four gates of conventual
times. The gate, over which Shakespeare had a house, where Ireland Yard
debouches into St. Andrew’s Hill, was probably of later date.
[1488] _M. S. C._ ii. 6, 11, 109.
[1489] The upper gate is described in a lease as ‘a gate of the Citie
of London’ (_Loseley MS._ 1396, f. 44). It may have been a relic of the
pre-1276 wall. Its site is shown on the Ordnance map. The lower gate is
visible in the maps of Braun and Agas. It seems to have carried Charles
V’s gallery over the roadway to the guest-house.
[1490] _M. S. C._ ii. 9, 107, 110; Clapham, 64.
[1491] The details for the rest of this paragraph are mainly taken
from Crown surveys of 1548 and 1550 (_M. S. C._ ii. 6, 8), and from a
memorandum by Cawarden on the grants anterior to his own (_M. S. C._
ii. 1, 103), and Professor Feuillerat’s notes of the original patents
which illustrate this.
[1492] _M. S. C._ ii. 9, 107, 114; Clapham, 62; _London Inquisitiones
Post Mortem_, ii. 115.
[1493] Ibid. 9, 10, 112.
[1494] Ibid. 111, 113.
[1495] Ibid. 110; Clapham, 63.
[1496] Ibid. 10, 110, 114.
[1497] Ibid. 3.
[1498] Some vaulted fragments stood until 1900 at a spot which must
have been just east of the school-house. Possibly they formed part of
the provincial’s lodging. They are shown in a plan of _c._ 1670–80
(Clapham, 71), and their condition in 1900 was carefully recorded
(Clapham, 69, 70, 78). Only a fragment of wall is now _in situ_, just
north of what is now the west end of Ireland Yard, but appears on the
seventeenth-century plan as Cloister Court. It must, however, have run
out from the south-east corner of the cloister towards the east. The
name Cloister Court has now passed to a yard farther south.
[1499] Clapham, 68; cf. p. 486.
[1500] Clapham suggests, plausibly enough, that the description (_c._
1394) of a Dominican house in _Pierce the Ploughmans Crede_ (ed. Skeat,
_E. E. T. S._ 153–215) was based upon the London Blackfriars. The
following passages relate to the cloister and refectory.
Þanne kam i to þat cloister . & gaped abouten
Whouȝ it was pilered and peynt . & portred well clene,
All y-hyled wiþ leed . lowe to þe stones,
And y-paued wiþ peynt til . iche poynte after oþer;
With kundites of clene tyn . closed all aboute,
Wiþ lauoures of latun . louelyche y-greithed....
... Þanne was þe chaptire-hous wrouȝt . as a greet chirche,
Coruen and couered . and queyntliche entayled;
Wiþ semlich selure . y-set on lofte;
As a Parlement-hous . y-peynted aboute....
... Þanne ferd y into fraytour . and fond þere an oþer,
An halle for an heyȝ king . an housholde to holden,
Wiþ brode bordes aboute . y-benched wel clene,
Wiþ windowes of glas . wrouȝt as a Chirche....
... Chambers wiþ chymneyes . & Chapells gaie;
And kychens for an hyȝe kinge . in castells to holden,
And her dortour y-diȝte . wiþ dores ful stronge;
Fermery and fraitur . with fele mo houses,
And all strong ston wall . sterne opon heiþe,
Wiþ gaie garites & grete . & iche hole y-glased;
And oþere houses y-nowe . to herberwe þe queene.
[1501] _M. S. C._ ii. 1.
[1502] Ibid. 13, 115.
[1503] Ibid. 6, 8, gives the texts of two surveys (_a_) of the property
leased to Cawarden on 4 April 1548, (_b_) of that included in his grant
of 12 March 1550.
[1504] Ibid. 7, 12, 35; cf. p. 499.
[1505] _London Inquisitiones Post Mortem_, i. 191; cf. _M. S. C._ ii.
4, 12.
[1506] Stowe (1598), i. 341; _Athenaeum_ (1886), ii. 91; _M. S. C._ ii.
2, 127; Hennessy, 88; _Loseley MSS._
[1507] _M. S. C._ ii. 103.
[1508] Ibid. 92, 117.
[1509] Ibid. 21, 31, 92, 126.
[1510] Ibid. 21, 93, 119. They were let to Henry Knowles in 1565 and
had been earlier occupied by Roger Lygon, Lady Parr, and Sir Thomas
Saunders. Later Nicholas Saunders had them.
[1511] Ibid. 117, 124, 125, show Anthony Browne, probably, as tenant in
1560, Henry Lord Hunsdon, probably, in 1584 and 1585, and Ralph Bowes
in 1596.
[1512] Dasent, xxi. 402, gives a Privy Council letter of 18 August
1591 to the Lord Mayor requiring him to repair the supply pipe from
Clerkenwell; cf. p. 494.
[1513] (1548) ‘A Cuchin yarde, an owlde Cuchyn, an entre or passage
Ioyninge to the same, conteyninge in lengethe 84 fote, abuttinge to
the lane aforseide on the weste side, being in breddethe at that ende
68 fote, Abuttinge ageanste an owlde butery on the easte side, being
in breddethe at that ende 74 foote, Abuttinge to M^r Portynarys parler
nexte the lane on the Southe side, And to my lorde Cobhames brick
wall and garden on the Northe syde. An owlde buttery and an entrye or
passage with a greate stayre therin, with Sellers therunder, with a
hall place at the vpper ende of the stayre and an entere there to the
ffrater ouer the same buttery, all which conteyne in lengethe 36 foote
and in breddethe 95 foote, abuttinge to the cloyster on the Este side,
the Cuchin on the weste side, to the lorde Cobhams howse on the Northe
syde, and on the Sowthe side to a blynd parlour that my lorde warden
did clame.
A howse called the vpper frater conteyninge in lengethe 107 foote
and in breddethe 52 foote, abuttinge Sowthe and easte to my ladye
Kingestons howse and garden, Northe to a hall where the kinges revelles
lyes at this presente, and weste towardes the seide Duchie Chamber and
M^r Portynaryes howse.
[Sidenote: Memorandum my lorde warden clamethe the seide hall, parlour,
Cutchin and Chaumber.]
A hall and a parlour vnder the seide frater of the same lengethe
and breddethe, A litle Cuchen conteyning in lengethe 23 foote and
in breddethe 22 foote abuttinge to the aforseide lane on the weste,
towardes the seide parlour on the este, to M^r Portinarys howse on
the northe, and to a waye ledinge to my ladye Kingestons howse on the
southe, A litle Chamber with a voyde rome therunder, conteyning in
lengethe 26 fote, in breddeth 10 foote, abuttinge weste to the cuchin,
este to the parlour, northe to M^r Portinarys howse, and ye seid way to
my ladie Kingestons howse Sowthe, with 4 small Sellers or darke holes
therunder.
A voyde rome, beinge an entre towardes the lytle cytchin and colehowse,
conteyning in lengeth 30 fote and in breddethe 17 fote.
A Chamber called the Duchie Chaumber, with a darke loginge therunder,
conteyninge in lengthe 50 fote and in breddethe 16 foote, abuttinge
este ageanste the north ende of the seide ffrater, abuttinge weste on
M^r Portinaryes parlour ---- 66^s 8^d.’
(1550) ‘One Kitchyn yarde, an olde Kitchyn, an Entrie or passage
ioyneinge to the same, Conteineinge in lengthe 84 fote, abutinge to
the Lane aforesaid on the west side, beinge in bredethe at that ende
three score fowrtene fote, abutinge to M^r Portinareys parler next the
Lane on the southe side and to the Lord Cobham brickewall & gardeine
on the Northe side. One olde Butterie & a Entrie or passage with a
great staier therein, with Cellers therevnder, with a Hawle place at
the vpper ende of the staiers and a entrie there to the ffrater ouer
the same butterie, which all conteinethe in lengthe 95 fote and in
bredethe 36 fote, abuttinge to the Cloyster on thest side, the kitchyn
on the west side, to the Lorde Cobham howse on the northe side, and
on the southe side to a blinde parler that my Lord warden did Clayme.
One howse called the vpper ffrater conteinethe in Lengthe 107 fote and
in bredethe 52 fote, Abuttinge southe and est to the Ladie Kingston
howse and gardein, northe to a hawle where the Kinges Revelles
Liethe at theis presentes, and west towardes the Duchie Chamber and
M^r Portinareyes howse. A voide rome, beinge an Entrie towardes the
Litle Kitchyn & Cole howse, conteininge in Lengthe 30 fote and in
bredethe 17 fote. One Chamber called the Duchie chamber, with a darke
Lodginge there vnder, conteininge in Lengthe 50 fote and in bredethe
16 fote, abuttinge est agaynst the northe ende of the said ffrater,
and abuttinge west apon M^r Portinareys parler. All which premisses be
valued to be worthe by yere ---- iij^{li} vj^s viij^d.’
[1514] _M. S. C._ ii. 14, 24, 116, 117, 119, 120; cf. p. 482. The stone
gallery was removed in 1564.
[1515] Ibid. 13, 16, 115.
[1516] Ibid. 14, 16.
[1517] Ibid. 7, 11, ‘an entrye or passage with a greate stayre therin’
(1548, 1550), 21 ‘one entrye ledinge vnder parcell of the premysses
demysed from that end of the house of William More wherin John Horleye
his servaunt doth lodge’ (1560), 118, ‘the entre in the west ende
of the garden openyng into the same garden’ (1560), 31, ‘an entrye
leadynge from the sayde voyde ground into the sayd dwellynge howse or
tenement of the sayd Sir William More’ (1576), 63, ‘the dore entry way
voide ground and passage leadinge and vsed to and from the saide greate
yard nexte the saide Pipe Office’ (1596), 126, ‘the gate-house with
the appurtenances on the west side of the sayd monastery’ (1611), ‘the
great gate near the play-house’ (1617).
[1518] _M. S. C._ ii. 20.
[1519] Ibid. 14 (cf. 116), ‘vnius paris graduum ducentium a coquina
predicta vsque magnum claustrum’ (1546), 21, ‘the waye ledinge from the
house and garden of William More towards the Water Lane’, ‘one entrye
ledinge vnder parcell of the premysses demysed from the garden of
William More to the voide grounde’ (1560), 119.
[1520] Ibid. 16.
[1521] Ibid. 115.
[1522] Ibid. 27, 29.
[1523] The whole length of the Neville-Farrant holding is given in
1560 (_M. S. C._ ii. 20) as 157½ ft., and in 1576 (_M. S. C._ ii. 29)
as 156½ ft. As this included 37 ft. of the northern block, 119½ ft. or
120½ ft. seems to be left for the staircase and frater. The difference
between inside and outside measurements often causes confusion in old
surveys.
[1524] _M. S. C._ ii. 62, 119; cf. p. 504.
[1525] Ibid. 94.
[1526] Cf. p. 513.
[1527] _M. S. C._ ii. 105.
[1528] The room is described as ‘intrale seu le parlour’ in Cawarden’s
grant of 1550.
[1529] _M. S. C._ ii. 105, 124. There was yet another room under the
infirmary. One Kempe, an assign of Lady Kingston’s heir, tried to claim
the Parliament Chamber from Cawarden, on the strength of her grant of
the infirmary.
[1530] Cf. p. 504.
[1531] On Cheyne’s houses cf. p. 499.
[1532] _M. S. C._ ii. 42–51. This hall is doubtless the ground-floor
frater referred to in a document of _c_. 1562 (_M. S. C._ ii. 105).
[1533] Cf. p. 499. The ‘blinde parler that my Lord warden did clayme’
and ‘the litle kitchyn and cole howse’ are mentioned in the survey of
1550 to define the position of other parcels. But the hall and parlour
might be held to be covered by the grant of the ‘howse called the vpper
frater’, and I do not know what the ‘little tenement’ near that held by
Kirkham from Cheyne was, if it was not the little chamber and kitchen.
It is noteworthy that the disputed rooms, after being included, with
a note of Cheyne’s claim, in the survey of 1548, were left out of
Cawarden’s lease of the same year.
[1534] _M. S. C._ ii. 109.
[1535] Brewer, ii. 2. 1494.
[1536] _Tudor Revels_, 7.
[1537] Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 255; Wallace, i. 140.
[1538] _Athenaeum_ (1886), ii. 91.
[1539] Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 430; cf. _M. S. C._ ii. 120; Wallace, i. 192.
[1540] _M. S. C._ ii. 35. I do not know whether More deliberately
confused the Tents and Revels.
[1541] Ibid. 52.
[1542] Ibid. 105.
[1543] Ibid. 14, 116; _Hist. MSS._ vii. 603.
[1544] Ibid. 15.
[1545] Only an abstract of title at the date of the sale exists
(Barrett, _Apothecaries_, 46), but Apothecaries’ Hall occupies the site
of these rooms.
[1546] _M. S. C._ ii. 4, 9; Feuillerat, _Eliz._ 440. In 1552 Jane
Fremownte had succeeded Barnard (_M. S. C._ ii. 115), but she cannot
have had the whole of the original lodge, as her 4 ft. entry on Water
Lane is too small to have been the main access to the cloister.
Probably part had been granted to her neighbour, Sir George Harper. Nor
did all her holding pass to Cobham in 1554. Some of it was probably
added to the house on the north, which occupied the site of the old
church porch.
[1547] _M. S. C._ ii. 44, 53; cf. p. 502.
[1548] Ibid. 51, 121.
[1549] Ibid. 16.
[1550] Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 210, 230, 242, 301; _Eliz._ 103,
107.
[1551] _M. S. C._ ii. 118, ‘one other grete rome or vawte next the
ground next the entre in the west ende of the garden openyng into the
same garden wherin now the robes of the revelles do lye’ (Lease of 12
Feb. 1560).
[1552] _M. S. C._ ii. 19.
[1553] Cf. p. 489.
[1554] _M. S. C._ ii. 105, 118.
[1555] Ibid. 119, 120.
[1556] Wallace, i. 175.
[1557] _M. S. C._ ii. 119.
[1558] Ibid. 27; Wallace, i. 175.
[1559] Wallace, i. 175.
[1560] _M. S. C._ ii. 120.
[1561] Ibid. 27.
[1562] _Jahrbuch_, xlviii. 92; Wallace, i. 131.
[1563] Ibid. 93; _M. S. C._ ii. 28; Wallace, i. 132.
[1564] On the plays performed there, cf. chh. xii, xiii (Chapel,
Paul’s, Oxford’s). Collier appears to have been aware, probably from
the Lyly prologues and the reference in Gosson, _P. C._ 188, of the
existence of the earlier Blackfriars play-house, and to have dated it,
by a singular coincidence, in 1576. He knew nothing of the real facts,
but inferred (_H. E. D. P._ i. 219) that the undated petition of the
Blackfriars inhabitants, which is really of 1596, was of 1576, on the
strength of a reference in it to a banishment of the players from the
City, which an incorrect endorsement on a _Lansdowne MS._ (cf. App. D,
No. lxxv) had led him to place in 1575. This did not prevent him from
also assigning the petition, with a forged reply from the players, to
1596 (cf. p. 508). He proceeded to forge (_a_) an order dated 23 Dec.
1579 for the toleration of Leicester’s men at the Blackfriars (_New
Facts_, 9), and (_b_) a memorial by Shakespeare and others as Queen’s
men and Blackfriars ‘sharers’ in 1589 (_New Facts_, 11; cf. Ingleby,
244, 249).
[1565] Cf. ch. xii (Chapel).
[1566] _Jahrbuch_, xlviii. 99; Wallace, i. 152 (Will of Farrant, 30
Nov. 1580), 153 (Anne Farrant to More, 25 Dec. 1580), 154 (Leicester to
More, 19 Sept. 1581), 158 (Anne Farrant to Walsingham, _c._ 1583), 159
(Court of Common Pleas, _Farrant v. Hunnis_ and _Farrant v. Newman_,
1583–4), 160 (Court of Requests, _Newman and Hunnis v. Farrant_, 1584),
177 (Wolley to More, 13 Jan. 1587), 174 (Memoranda by More, _c._ 1587;
cf. Dasent, xv. 137).
[1567] _M. S. C._ ii. 123. More’s rental of 1584 includes £50 from
Hunsdon for the mansion house, £20 from Oxford, £8 from Lyly; that of
1585 the same three sums, all from Hunsdon. But the two smaller sums
represent twice Farrant’s rent, which was £14.
[1568] Kempe, 495; _M. S. C._ ii. 123; Wallace, i. 186 (More to
Hunsdon, 8 April 1586; Hunsdon to More, 27 April 1586; Hunsdon to More,
14 April 1590; More to Hunsdon, draft, 17 April 1590; More to Hunsdon,
18 April 1590). Did the Paul’s ‘boyes’ keep up connexion with the
Blackfriars by learning dancing and perhaps playing in Frith’s school?
[1569] _M. S. C._ ii. 61, 93, 94, 98.
[1570] Ibid. 123 (Skinner to More, 11 Oct. 1591).
[1571] Ibid. 50, 54.
[1572] This may have been Thomas Hale, Groom of the Tents, who was a
witness in the case (ibid. 44), or the Thomas Hall, musician, who in
1565 was sub-tenant of Frith’s garrets (ibid. 119).
[1573] Ibid. 35 (memorandum by More), 36 (award by arbitrators), 40
(depositions of More’s witnesses), 122 (notes of evidence by Pole’s
witnesses).
[1574] On Bonetti’s career as a fencer, cf. Wallace, i. 187; _M. S. C._
ii. 122; Reyher, 257; G. Silver, _Paradoxes of Defence_, 64.
[1575] _M. S. C._ ii. 56; Wallace, i. 188 (Willoughby to More, July
1584), 190.
[1576] Wallace, i. 189; _M. S. C._ ii. 122. I do not think the lease
of the fencing-school was in question between More and Bonetti. Both
Raleigh’s letter and the workmen’s petition imply house-building, not
mere internal repairs. Bonetti could have added no building to the
fencing-school except perhaps the kitchen which adjoined in 1596 (ibid.
61). But the western house had been extensively rebuilt by 1584.
[1577] Ibid. 55.
[1578] Ibid. 56. The whole description from ‘All w^{ch} six foote & a
halfe’ (l. 18) to ‘xxxix foote & viij inches’ (l. 29) is parenthetic, a
point which the punctuation obscures.
[1579] Cf. chh. ii, xiii (Chamberlain’s).
[1580] _M. S. C._ ii. 124; cf. p. 490.
[1581] Ibid. 62; cf. p. 504.
[1582] _M. S. C._ ii. 36, 47, 51, 122.
[1583] Ibid. 36, 38, 56 (‘the tenemente of Margrett Poole on the south
and weste’), 70, 77, 81, 85, 125. Here must have been the chamber
which Thomas Blagrave, finding the butler’s lodging too small, hired
of Parson Wythers, Cheyne’s servant, from 1552 to 1560, and which Pole
still had in 1572 (ibid. 53). But if it was strictly ‘adjoininge’ to
his house he must have had the ‘little kitchen’ as well as the ‘little
chamber’.
[1584] Ibid. 63, 71.
[1585] Ibid. 125. An unfortunate hiatus in a document (ibid. 70) leaves
it uncertain whether Tice occupied one of Mrs. Pole’s houses or More’s
enlarged ‘little kitchen’.
[1586] Ibid. 50.
[1587] Cf. p. 504.
[1588] Kempe, 496; Wallace, i. 195; _M. S. C._ ii. 125, misdated 1595.
The ‘other’ house was probably the mansion house, which was let to
Ralph Bowes on 3 March 1596 (cf. p. 497). Hunsdon died on 22 July 1596.
[1589] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 299, from enrolment in R. O.; _M. S. C._
ii. 60, from counterpart executed by Burbadge in _Loseley MS._ 348.
[1590] I suppose that this was the old lavatory. If so, probably
Burbadge’s use terminated when this became a glass-house in 1601; cf.
p. 506.
[1591] The account in Wallace, ii. 37, is not trustworthy; it assumes,
in lieu of the Duchy Chamber and staircase tower, a ‘north section’ of
the building 40 ft. from north to south.
[1592] Cf. p. 498.
[1593] Wallace, i. 196; ii. 38, is misleading here.
[1594] _M. S. C._ ii. 70.
[1595] Ibid. 76 (conveyance by Sir Richard Michelborne, George Pole,
and Charles Pole), 84 (conveyance by Richard and Elizabeth Mansell),
125.
[1596] _Variorum_, iii. 62; Birch, ii. 426.
[1597] H. R. Plomer, _The King’s Printing House under the Stuarts_ (_2
Library_ ii. 353).
[1598] _M. S. C._ ii. 83 (Recital of conveyance by trustees of Lady
Howard); cf. p. 512.
[1599] Ibid. 98 (Recital of lease in deed of sale of 1609).
[1600] Ibid. 93, ‘all that greate Vault or lowe roome adioyneing to
the said greate Garden lyeing and being at the south west end of the
said greate garden nowe vsed and imployed for a glassehowse’ (1609).
By 26 June 1601 (_M. S. C._ ii. 70) the way south of the kitchen yard
has become ‘the yard or way ... which leadeth towardes the glassehouse
nowe in the tenure of Sir Ierom Bowes’. Bowes had obtained a patent
for making drinking-glasses in 1592 and occupied a warehouse under the
church in 1597 (_D. N. B._). Dekker, _Newes from Hell_ (1606, _Works_,
ii. 97), says, ‘Like the Glass-house Furnace in Blacke-friers, the
bonefiers that are kept there neuer goe out’.
[1601] _M. S. C._ ii. 92 (Deed of Sale).
[1602] Ibid. 126. There is some confusion as to the position of Mrs.
Basil’s house. I think it was west of the gate-house.
[1603] Ibid. 88 (Deed of Sale, misdated 1602).
[1604] Ibid. 64.
[1605] Ibid. 83; _S. P. D. Jac. I_, viii. 18 (Grant to trustees for
Lady Kildare). An _inquisitio_ on Cobham’s Blackfriars property (_1
Jac. I_) appears to be amongst the Special Commissions and Returns in
the Exchequer (R. O. _Lists and Indexes_, xxxvii. 61).
[1606] C. R. B. Barrett, _History of the Society of Apothecaries_, 42.
The existing Hall dates from 1669–70. John Downes (cf. App. I, No. iii)
and Pepys, i. 336, record the use of the older building by Davenant for
plays at the Restoration. So Farrant’s tradition survived.
[1607] For text and discussion of bona fides cf. App. D, No. cvii.
Collier, having already assigned the document to 1576 (cf. p. 496),
uses it again for 1596 (_H. E. D. P._ i. 287). With it, in his first
edition (i. 297), he printed a reply, now in _S. P. D. Eliz._ cclx.
117, by Pope, Richard Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips, Shakespeare, Kempe,
Sly, and Tooley, on behalf of the players, which is palaeographically a
forgery (Ingleby, 289) and could not be genuine in substance, since it
refers to the Globe, which did not exist in 1596.
[1608] Cf. p. 511. Wallace, ii. 53, thinks this an error or invention
of the City in 1619, because the Privy Council registers ‘giving all
the official acts of that body, record no such order’. But the Privy
Council registers notoriously do not record all the official acts of
that body (cf. ch. ii). The petitioners of 1619 are not likely to have
invented the ‘petition and indorsemente’ of 1596 to which they appealed.
[1609] In the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 (Halliwell-Phillipps, i.
317) Cuthbert and the other Burbadges then living say ‘now for the
Blackfriers, that is our inheritance; our father purchased it at
extreame rates, and made it into a play-house with great charge and
troble’. Further, Cuthbert was associated with Richard in buying
subsidiary property in 1601, 1610, 1612, and 1614 (cf. p. 505). But the
leases of 1600 and 1608 were by Richard alone, and under one of these
Cuthbert became his tenant.
[1610] Cf. p. 511.
[1611] Fleay, 211, 234, 240.
[1612] Cf. ch. xii.
[1613] Fleay, 224, 230, 245, 250. Evans maintained that the assignment
to Hawkins was absolute, to cover his liability under the bond to
Burbadge. But the court appears to have held that a reassignment was
intended, but that ‘the conveyance was never perfected and sealed’.
[1614] Wallace, ii. 89, from unpublished document; _Evans v. Kirkham_
in Fleay, 214.
[1615] Ibid. 235.
[1616] Ibid. 221, 231, 235, 246.
[1617] The Burbadges say in the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635, ‘the more to
strengthen the service, the boys daily wearing out, it was considered
that house would be as fit for ourselves, and so purchased the lease
remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were
Hemings, Condall, Shakspeare, etc.’. They also say that the players had
their shares ‘of us for nothing’. Very likely they paid no fine, but
they had to pay their quota towards rent. It is reasonable to infer
that Thomas Evans was a relative and nominee of Henry Evans. Kirkham’s
allegation in the 1612 litigation that Henry Evans had shared in the
Blackfriars profits during the past four years (Fleay, 225) was not
seriously contested.
[1618] Cf. ch. xiii. Collier (_New Facts_, 16) printed a document
professing to set out action taken by the City against scurrilities of
Kempe and Armin at Blackfriars in 1605. But this cannot be traced in
the City archives (S. Lee in _D. N. B._ s.v. Kempe), and the City did
not obtain control of the Blackfriars until 1608 (cf. p. 480). It is
probably a forgery.
[1619] Cf. vol. i, p. 357.
[1620] C. W. Wallace, _Advance Sheets from Shakespeare, the Globe, and
Blackfriars_ (p.p. 1909).
[1621] _Sharers Papers_ in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312. Collier,
_Alleyn Memoirs_, 105, conjectures that Alleyn bought Shakespeare’s
interest in April 1612, and it appears from G. F. Warner, _Dulwich
MSS._ 115, 172, 174, that he forged entries in documents relating
to other property of Alleyn’s in Blackfriars, as a support to this
conjecture.
[1622] Cf. p. 480.
[1623] Text in Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 311, and Harrison, iv. 323, from
City _Repertory_, xxxiv, f. 38^v. The two petitions of the officials
and inhabitants are in _M. S. C._ i. 90, from _Remembrancia_, v. 28,
29. They are undated, but can be identified from a recital in the
order. The officials allege ‘that whereas in November 1596 divers
both honorable persons and others then inhabiting the said precinct
made knowne to the Lordes and others of the privie Counsell, what
inconveniencies were likelie to fall vpon them, by a common Play-house
which was then preparinge to bee erected there, wherevpon their Honours
then forbadd the vse of the said howse for playes, as by the peticion
and indorsemente in aunswere thereof may appeare.... Nevertheles ...
the owner of the said play-house doth vnder the name of a private howse
(respectinge indeed private comoditie only) convert the said howse to
a publique play-house.’ They dwell on the inconvenience caused by the
congested streets and the difficulty of getting to church ‘the ordinary
passage for a great part of the precinct aforesaid being close by the
play house dore’.
[1624] Text in _M. S. C._ i. 280.
[1625] Text in Collier, i. 455, from _S. P. D. Car. I_, ccv. 32, where
it is accompanied by copies of the Privy Council order and letter of
22 June 1600 (App. D, No. cxxiv) and the City order of 21 Jan. 1619.
Probably the copy of the petition of Blackfriars inhabitants in 1596
(cf. p. 508), now in _S. P. D. Eliz._ cclx. 116, originally belonged to
this set of documents.
[1626] _M. S. C._ i. 386.
[1627] The report of the commissioners is printed by Collier, _New
Facts_, 27, and _H. E. D. P._ i. 477. It is confirmed by a memorandum
of Secretary Windebank in _S. P. D. Car. I_, ccli. p. 293, and I think
Ingleby, 304, is wrong in suspecting a forgery (cf. _M. S. C._ i. 386).
The commissioners allowed (_a_) £700 to Cuthbert and William Burbadge
for 14 years’ purchase of the rent of £50 reserved to them by lease,
(_b_) £1,134 for 14 years’ purchase of an interest in four tenements
rated at £75 and a piece of void ground to turn coaches at £6, (_c_)
£1,066 13_s._ 4_d._ for 100 marks apiece to 16 players for ‘the
interest that some of them haue by lease in the said Play-house, and in
respect of the shares which others haue in the benefits thereof’, and
for compensation for removal. Collier, _Reply_, 39, mentions but does
not print another document containing a summary of the players’ claim,
with notes by Buck. But Buck was long dead. A third valuation published
by Collier, in which Laz. Fletcher’s name occurs, is certainly a
forgery (Ingleby, 246).
[1628] _M. S. C._ i. 386.
[1629] Fleay, 211, 213. I suppose it was on this that Evans spent £11
0_s._ 2_d._ in Dec. 1603 (Wallace, ii. 89).
[1630] In _The Times_ of 12 Sept. 1906 Professor Wallace gives the
number of new suits as four; in _The Children of the Chapel at
Blackfriars_ (1908), 36, as twelve. Presumably the Court of Requests
suit of _Keysar v. Burbadge et al._, printed in _Nebraska University
Studies_, x. 336, is one of these.
[1631] Wallace, ii. 39, 40, 41, 43, 49.
[1632] Cf. p. 511.
[1633] _M. S. C._ ii. 31, ‘all the Leds couerynge the premysses’
(1576), 61, ‘the stone staires leadinge vpp vnto the Leades or route
over the saide seaven greate vpper romes oute of the saide seaven
greate vpper romes’ (1596).
[1634] Wallace, ii. 40.
[1635] Marston, _The Dutch Courtesan_, v. iii. 162.
[1636] Cf. p. 425.
[1637] R. Flecknoe, _Miscellania_ (1653), 141, ‘From thence passing
on to the Black-fryers, and seeing never a Play-bil on the Gate, no
Coaches on the place, nor Doorkeeper at the Play-house door, with his
Boxe like a Churchwarden, desiring you to remember the poor Players, I
cannot but say for Epilogue to all the Playes were ever acted there:
Poor House that in dayes of our Grand-sires,
Belongst unto the Mendiant Fryers:
And where so oft in our Fathers dayes
We have seen so many of Shakspears Playes,
So many of Johnsons, Beaumonts & Fletchers.’
[1638] I do not know what value to attach to a print in the Gardiner
collection, reproduced by Baker, 44, 78, as representing the theatre.
It shows a Renaissance façade, which can have been no part of the
mediaeval building. Adams, 197, reproduces a painting of mediaeval
fragments found in rebuilding _The Times_ in 1872, small ground-floor
rooms divided by entries. But _The Times_ must cover the site of
Hunsdon House as well as that of the theatre.
[1639] As an epilogue to this narrative and an example of how popular
history is written, I quote D. E. Oliver, _The English Stage_ (1912),
9, ‘Blackfriars House, a deserted monastery on the Thames side, was
granted by Edward VI in 1596 to the Court Players for their use
as a play-house, but it was not until the accession of Elizabeth
that it received official sanction as a recognized place of public
entertainment’.
[1640] Jonas, 132, however, quotes from the register of St. Dunstan’s,
Whitefriars, with the date 29 Sept. 1607, ‘Gerry out of the play-house
in the Friars buried’, which suggests use of the theatre before 1608.
The King’s Revels may well have started by 1607. He also quotes,
without date, ‘We present one play-house in the same precinct, not
fitting these to be now tolerable’.
[1641] I do not know why Adams, 312, identifies the play-house with a
cloister shown in Clapham’s plan. Surely it is more likely to have been
the hall also shown at the north-west corner.
[1642] _P. C. Acts_ (1613–14), 166. One Sturgis had leased a house and
garden from Sir Edward Gorge, and sublet the garden to ‘one Rossetoe
Kynman and others, who goe aboute to erecte a p[l]aye house thereupon’.
[1643] _M. S. C._ i. 91; cf. ch. xvii. The Blackfriars is still the
‘private house’ of the King’s men in the patent of 1619 issued to them
after this controversy.
[1644] It is true that, when the prentices took up Whitefriars for _The
Hog Hath Lost His Pearl_ in 1613, the admission _per bullettini_ is
said to have been ‘for a note of distinction from ordinary comedians’.
But the companies had no need to continue any special system of
admission after they had the protection of their patents; Dekker
(_vide_ p. 523) speaks of gatherers at private houses in 1609. After
the Restoration, ‘ballatine, or tickets sealed for all doors and boxes’
were introduced at the Duke’s Theatre in 1660 (R. W. Lowe, _Thomas
Betterton_, 75).
[1645] Lawrence, i. 230; cf. App. D, No. xxxii.
[1646] The earliest example is _The Troublesome Reign of King John_
(1591).
[1647] But ‘priuately’ is also used of strictly private performances on
the title-pages of _Caesar’s Revenge_ (1607) acted at Trinity College,
Oxford, and, later, W. Montague’s _Shepherd’s Paradise_ (1659) acted by
amateurs at Court.
[1648] T. M., _Black Book_ (1604), in Bullen, _Middleton_, viii.
42, ‘arch tobacco-taker of England ... upon stages both common and
private’; _Malcontent_ (1604), ind., ‘we may sit upon the stage at the
private house’; _Sophonisba_ (1606), _ad fin._, ‘it is printed only
as it was represented by youths, and after the fashion of the private
stage’; Dekker, _Gull’s Horn Book_ (cf. App. H), ‘Whether therefore
the gatherers of the publique or priuate Play-house stand to receiue
the afternoones rent’; Dekker, _Seven Deadly Sins_ (1606, _Works_, ii.
41), ‘All the Citty lookt like a priuate Play-house, when the windowes
are clapt downe’; _Roaring Girl_ (1611), ii. 1, ‘the private stage’s
audience, the twelve-penny stool gentlemen’; _Daborne to Henslowe_
(1613, _Henslowe Papers_, 79), ‘as good a play for your publique howse
as ever was playd’.
[1649] Cf. Wright (App. I).
[1650] Lawrence (_Fortnightly_, May 1916) has shown that the rebuilt
Fortune of 1623 and Red Bull of _c._ 1632 were probably roofed, and
Wright’s description confuses the two phases of these houses.
[1651] Chapman’s _Byron_ (1625) is said to have been acted ‘at the
Blacke-Friers and other publique Stages’, Heywood’s _English Traveller_
(1633), _A Maidenhead Well Lost_ (1634), and _Love’s Mistress_ (1636)
to have been ‘publikely acted’ at the Cockpit, and Shirley’s _Martyred
Soldier_ (1638) to have been acted ‘at the Private House in Drury Lane
and at other publicke Theaters’. This is exceptional terminology, but
shows the obsolescence of the distinction.
[1652] Cf. ch. xvi.
[1653] _Old Fortunatus_ (Rose, 1599), prol. 81, ‘this small
circumference’; _Warning for Fair Women_ (? Curtain, 1599), prol. 83,
88, ‘all this fair circuit ... this round’; _Hen. V_ (Curtain or Globe,
1599), prol. 11, ‘this cockpit ... this wooden O’; _E. M. O._ (Globe,
1599), prol. 199, epil. 4406, ‘this thronged round ... this faire-fild
Globe’; _Sejanus_ (Globe, 1603), comm. v, ‘the Globe’s fair ring’;
_Three English Brothers_ (Curtain or Red Bull, 1607), epil., ‘this
round circumference’; _Merry Devil of Edmonton_ (Globe, 1608), prol. 5,
‘this round’. On the other hand, _Whore of Babylon_ (Fortune, 1607),
prol. 1, ‘The charmes of Silence through this Square be throwne’.
[1654] Ordish, 12.
[1655] Before the Swan was built, Nashe wrote in _The Unfortunate
Traveller_ (1594), ‘I sawe a banketting house belonging to a merchant
that was the meruaile of the world.... It was builte round of green
marble like a Theater without’ (_Works_, ii. 282).
[1656] Cf. chh. iv, xvi (introd.).
[1657] _Atlantic Monthly_ (1906), xcvii. 369.
[1658] Kirkman also says in the preface to _The Wits_ (1672), ‘I
have seen the Red Bull Play-house, which was a large one’; but he is
referring, more certainly than Wright, to the rebuilt house.
[1659] Cf. Albright, 40; Lawrence, i. 12, and _E. S._ xxxii. 44.
[1660] There is a dot in Wheatley’s facsimile over the second
well-marked ‘r’ of the word ‘orchestra’. Is it possible that Van
Buchell misread it ‘orchestia’?
[1661] Cf. Brereton in _Homage_, 204.
[1662] Cf. ch. xvi.
[1663] The _Theatrum_ of Jonson’s 1616 Folio t.p. is oval, rather
than round, but it is safer to take this, in spite of its hut, as
representing Jonson’s notion of a classical theatre.
[1664] Cf. ch. xvi. Graves, 32, tries to minimize the structural
influence of inn-yards on the theatres, and even doubts whether the
actors preferred to act in these ‘rather than in the great halls’. But
I do not think that he makes much of a case. Had the inns, indeed,
‘great halls’ at all?
[1665] Gosson, _P. C._ (1582), ‘it is the fashion of youthes to go
first into the yarde, and to carry theire eye through every gallery’;
_Hamlet_, III. ii. 10, ‘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’; Dekker, _G. H. B._
(1609), ‘your _Groundling_ and _Gallery-Commoner_ buyes his sport by
the penny ... neither are you to be hunted from thence, though the
Scar-crows in the yard hoot at you, hisse at you, spit at you, yea,
throw durt euen in your teeth’; _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), ind. 51,
‘the vnderstanding Gentlemen o’ the ground here, ask’d my iudgement’,
59, 79; _The Hog Has Lost His Pearl_ (1614), prol.:
We may be pelted off for ought we know,
With apples, egges, or stones,
from thence belowe;
W. Fennor, _Descriptions_ (1616):
the understanding, grounded, men for their just reward,
Shall gape and gaze among the fools in the yard.
So later, _Vox Graculi_ (1623), ‘they will sit dryer in
the galleries then those who are the understanding men in the yard’;
Shirley, _The Changes_ (1632):
Many gentlemen
Are not, as in the days of understanding,
Now satisfied with a Jig;
Shirley, _The Doubtful Heir_ (1640), prol.:
No shews, no frisk and, what you most delight in,
Grave understanders, here’s no target-fighting.
[1666] _Proscenium_ is the proper classical word for the space in front
of the _scena_; cf. p. 539.
[1667] Albright has no justification for introducing into his
reconstruction of a typical Shakespearian stage the tapering, instead
of quadrangular, platform which characterizes the late engraving in
_The Wits_, and to a less degree those in _Roxana_ and _Messallina_.
[1668] Wegener, 125, collects examples of the use of traps. They
served, _inter alia_, for the representation of ‘hell-mouth’, which the
Elizabethan stage inherited from the miracle-plays (cf. p. 544), and
the space under the stage was known as ‘hell’; cf. Dekker, _News from
Hell_ (1606, _Works_, ii. 92, 139), ‘Mary the question is, in which of
the _Play-houses_ he [the Devil] would have performed his prize....
Hell being vnder euerie one of their _Stages_, the Players (if they
had owed him a spight) might with a false Trappe doore haue slipt him
downe, and there kept him, as a laughing stocke to al their yawning
spectators.... Tailors ... (as well as Plaiers) haue a hell of their
owne, (vnder their shop-board).’
[1669] Cf. Graves, 41. The register of the association of Masters of
Defence (_Sloane MS._ 2530; cf. extracts in A. Hutton, _The Sword and
the Centuries_, 259) records many ‘prizes’ played at theatres and
theatrical inns during the sixteenth century; cf. App. D, Nos. lx-lxii,
_Case is Altered_, II. vii. 28, ‘First they [maisters of defence] are
brought to the publicke _Theater_’, and for later periods Henslowe,
i. 98 (the Rose, 1598), the fatal contest at the Swan in 1602, and
Herbert, 47, 81. For acrobats cf. App. D, No. cxxiii, on the use of the
Swan by Peter Bromvill in 1600. Henslowe, i. 98, 106, records loans in
connexion with vaulting performances with a horse, perhaps at the Rose,
in 1598 and 1599 by John Haslett or Hassett, who was also paid for
court performances (App. B) in 1603 and 1608.
[1670] T. M. _Black Book_ (1604, Bullen, _Middleton_, viii. 7) opens
with _Lucifer ascending, as Prologue to his own Play_:
Now is hell landed here upon the earth,
When Lucifer, in limbs of burning gold,
Ascends the dusty theatre of the world,...
... my tortured spleen
Melts into mirthful humour at this fate,
That heaven is hung so high, drawn up so far,
And made so fast, nailed up with many a star;
And hell the very shop-board of the earth,...
... And now that I have vaulted up so high
Above the stage-rails of this earthen globe,
I must turn actor and join companies.
Rails are shown in the late _Roxana_ and _Messallina_ engravings of
indoor stages.
[1671] Cf. H. Logeman in _Anglia_, xix. 117.
[1672] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (1609), ‘on the very Rushes where the Commedy
is to daunce ... must our fethered _Estridge_ ... be planted’ ...
‘Salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spred either on the
rushes, or on stooles about you ... take vp a rush, and tickle the
earnest eares of your fellow gallants’; _1 Hen. IV_, III. i. 214, ‘She
bids you on the wanton rushes lay you down’. In _The Gentleman Usher_
(_c. 1604_, Blackfriars), II. i. 72, ‘Enter Bassiolo with Servants,
with rushes and a carpet’, and Bassiolo says,
lay me ’em thus,
In fine smooth threaves; look you, sir, thus, in threaves.
Perhaps some tender lady will squat here,
And if some standing rush should chance to prick her,
She’d squeak, and spoil the songs that must be sung.’
[1673] Lawrence, i. 39, 161.
[1674] G. Harvey (1579, _Letter Book_, 67), ‘sum maltconceivid comedye
fitt for the Theater, or sum other paintid stage whereat thou and thy
liuely copesmates in London may lawghe ther mouthes and bellyes full
for pence or twoepence apeece’; Spenser, _Tears of the Muses_ (1591),
176, ‘That wont with comick sock to beautefie The painted Theaters’;
cf. Graves, 68. Coryat, i. 386, in 1608, found a Venice play-house
‘very beggarly and base in comparison of our stately Play-houses in
England: neyther can their Actors compare with us for apparell, shewes
and musicke’. So in _Case is Altered_, II. vii. 30, the plays in Utopia
(= England) are ‘set foorth with as much state as can be imagined’.
[1675] App. I; but cf. p. 524, n. 1.
[1676] _Malcontent_ (_1604_, Globe), ind., ‘Good sir, will you leave
the stage? I’ll help you to a private room’; cf. Sir J. Davies’
epigram, _infra_.
[1677] Wright, _Hist. Hist._ 407, ‘The prices were small (there being
no scenes)’.
[1678] L. Wager’s _Mary Magdalene_ (1566) has a prologue which says
that the actors will take ‘halfpence or pence’ from the audience,
but this was probably used by strolling actors and continues the
miracle-play tradition. At almost the same date, a jest in _Merry
Tales, Wittie Questions and Quick Answers_ (1567, Hazlitt, _Jest
Books_, i. 145) tells how men stood at the gate of a play at
Northumberland Place, ‘with a boxe (as the facion is) who toke of euery
persone that came in a peny or an half peny at the least’.
[1679] J. Mayne in _Jonsonus Virbius_ (1638):
So when thy Fox had ten times acted been,
Each day was first, but that ’twas cheaper seen;
And so thy Alchemist played o’er and o’er,
Was new o’ the stage, when ’twas not at the door.
[1680] G. Harvey (p. 530, _supra_); Lyly, _Pappe with an Hatchet_
(_Works_, iii. 408); cf. _Martin’s Month’s Mind_ (1589, App. C, No.
xl). Lodge, _Scillaes Metamorphosis_ (1589), will not ‘tie my pen to
Pennie-knaves delight’, and S. Rowlands, _Letting of Humour’s Blood in
the Head Vein_ (1600), bids poets not ‘To teach stage parrots speak for
penny pleasure’; cf. _Case is Altered_, I. i. 104, ‘Tut, giue me the
penny, giue me the peny, I care not for the Gentlemen, I, let me haue a
good ground’.
[1681] Cf. ch. xvi, introd. Field says in 1583 (App. C, No. xxxi),
‘Euery dore hath a payment, & euery gallerie maketh a yearely stipend’.
[1682] _E. M. O._ (1599), ind. 425, ‘Let me neuer liue to looke as
highe as the two-pennie roome, againe’; T. Garzoni, _Hospitall of
Incurable Fooles_ (tr. 1600), epist., ‘a Player that in speaking
an Epilogue makes loue to the two pennie roume for a plaudite’;
_Satiromastix_ (1602), epil. 2690, ‘Are you pleas’d?... if you be not,
by’th Lord Ile see you all--heere for your two pence a peice agen
before Ile loose your company.... Good night, my two-penny Tenants’;
_Mad World, my Masters_ (_c._ 1604–6), v. ii. 36, ‘some ... that ...
took a good conceit of their parts into th’ two-penny room’; _Woman
Hater_ (1607), prol. 5, ‘I do pronounce this, to the utter discomfort
of all two-penny Gallery men, you shall have no bawdery’; _Fleire_
(1607), ii. 30, ‘They (like your common players) let men come in for
twopence a peece’; Dekker, _News from Hell_ (1606, _Works_, ii. 96),
‘You may take him ... in the afternoones, in the twopeny roomes of a
Play-house, like a Puny, seated Cheeke by Iowle with a punke’, _Seven
Deadly Sins_ (1606, ii. 53), ‘_Sloth_ ... will come and sit in the
two-pennie galleries amongst the gentlemen, and see their knaveries
and their pastimes’, _The Dead Term_ (1608, iv. 55), ‘Players ...
prostitute themselues to the pleasures of euery two-penny drunken
Plebeian’, _Lanthorn and Candle-Light_ (1608, iii. 216), ‘Pay thy
twopence to a Player, in his gallerie maist thou sitte by a Harlot’,
_Raven’s Almanac_ (1609, iv. 184), ‘As if you sat in the moste
perspicuous place of the two-penny gallerie in a play-house’; _Roaring
Girl_ (1611), v. 1, ‘One of them is a nip; I took him once i’ the
two-penny gallerie at the Fortune’; &c., &c.
[1683] Dekker, _Seven Deadly Sins_ (1606, _Works_, ii. 53), ‘Their
houses smoakt euery after noone with Stinkards who were so glewed
together in crowdes with the steames of strong breath, that when
they came foorth, their faces lookt as if they had beene per boyld’,
_Raven’s Almanac_ (1609, iv. 194), ‘Hee shall be glad to play three
houres for two pence to the basest stinkard in London, whose breth
is stronger than garlicke, and able to poison all the twelve penny
roomes’, _Work for Armourers_ (1609, iv. 96), ‘tearme times, when
the Twopeny Clients and Peny Stinkards swarme together to heere the
Stagerites’; _vide_ n. 2, _infra_, and p. 534, n. 1.
[1684] _Satiromastix_ (1602), 1669, ‘a Gentleman or an honest Cittizen
shall not sit in your pennie-bench Theaters, with his Squirrell by his
side cracking nuttes ... but he shall be Satyr’d and Epigram’d vpon’;
T. M. _Black Book_ (1604), ‘penny-rooms at theatres’; T. M. _Ant and
Nightingale_ (1604), ‘stinkards sitting in the penny galleries of a
theatre, and yawning upon the players’; Dekker, _Gull’s Horn Book_
(1609, _Works_, ii. 208), ‘thou ... hast vouchsafed to be acquainted
with penny galleries’; _Wit Without Money_ (_c._ 1614), iv. 1, ‘break
in at plays like prentices for three a groat, and crack nuts with the
scholars in peny rooms again’.
[1685] A. Copley, _Wits, Fits and Fancies_ (1595; ed. 1614, p. 124),
tells of a man cast off by his brother, an actor, who sent him sixpence
in a sheet of paper, to show that, ‘though his brother had vowed not
in seven years to see him, yet he for his sixpence could come and see
him upon the stage at his pleasure’. If Platter’s 3_d._ was the highest
normal charge in the sixteenth century, the 6_d._ may represent a first
night’s charge.
[1686] Most of the allusions to 6_d._ charges relate to private houses
(cf. p. 556), but Beaumont’s grammar lecture (cf. ch. xxiii) gives
this price for the Bankside, and T. M. _Black Book_ (1604, Bullen,
_Middleton_, viii. 41) has ‘I give and bequeath to you Benedick
Bottomless, most deep cut-purse, all the benefit of ... the sixpenny
rooms in play-places, to cut, dive and nim’. Later, _The Actors
Remonstrance_ (1643) professes that the players will not admit into
their ‘sixpenny rooms those unwholesome enticing harlots that sit
there merely to be taken up by prentices or lawyers’ clerks’; cf.
Lawrence, i. 36, who thinks that the lord’s rooms became the sixpenny
rooms. For the 1_s._ charge, cf. p. 533, n. 1, and _Malcontent_ (1604),
ind. 63, ‘I say, any man that hath wit may censure, if he sit in the
twelve-penny room’; Dekker, _G. H. B._ (1609), ‘When at a new play you
take up the twelve-penny rome next the stage; (because the Lords and
you may seeme to be haile fellow wel-met) there draw forth this booke,
read alowd, laugh alowd, and play the _Antickes_, that all the garlike
mouthed stinkards may cry out, _Away with the fool_’; _Hen. VIII_
(_1613_), prol., ‘may see away their shilling’; Overbury, _Characters_
(ed. Rimbault, 154, _The Proud Man_), ‘If he have but twelvepence in ’s
purse he will give it for the best room in a play-house’.
[1687] They include women, and certainly look more like spectators than
actors or musicians.
[1688] E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), ep. 53:
See you him yonder, who sits o’re the stage,
With the Tobacco-pipe now at his mouth?
In _E. M. O._ (_1599_), 1390 (Q_{1}), Brisk is said to
speak of lords ‘as familiarlie as if hee had ... ta’ne tabacco with
them ouer the stage i’ the Lords roome’. Dekker-Wilkins, _Jests to
Make you Merry_ (1607, _Works_, ii. 292), has a jest of ‘one that sat
ouer the stage’ on a wench in the two-penny room. _Farmer-Chetham MS._
(seventeenth-century, ed. Grosart, i. 104) has an epigram on Spongus,
who ‘Plays at Primero over the stage’.
[1689] _Satiromastix_ (1602), 2612, ‘You must forsweare to venter
on the stage when your play is ended, and to exchange curtezies and
complements with gallants in the Lordes roomes’. The subject is well
discussed by Lawrence (i. 29), _The Situation of the Lords’ Room_.
[1690] Sir J. Davies, _Epigrams_ (prob. < 1596), ep. 28, _In Sillam_,
‘He that dares take Tobacco on the stage’; ep. 3, _In Rufum_:
Rufus the Courtier at the theatre
Leauing the best and most conspicuous place,
Doth either to the stage himselfe transfer,
Or through a grate doth show his doubtful face,
For that the clamorous frie of Innes of court
Filles vp the priuate roomes of greater prise:
And such a place where all may haue resort
He in his singularitie doth despise.
It is not, I think, sitting on the stage that is
satirized in J. Hall, _Virgedemiarum_ (1597), i. 3, but a performance
by illiterate amateurs on a ‘hired Stage’.
[1691] _C. Revels_ (_1601_), ind. 138:
‘3. Child ... Here I enter.
1. What, vpon the stage too?
2. Yes: and I step forth like one of the children, and ask you, Would
you have a Stool, Sir?
3. A Stoole Boy?
2. I Sir, if you’le giue me sixe Pence, I’le fetch you one.
3. For what I pray thee? what shall I doe with it?
2. O God Sir! will you betraye your Ignorance so much? why, throne your
selfe in state on the stage, as other Gentlemen vse Sir’;
_All Fools_ (_c. 1604_), prol. 30:
if our other audience see
You on the stage depart before we end,
Our wits go with you all and we are fools.
_Isle of Gulls_ (_1606_), ind., ‘But come boy, furnish us with
stools’.... ‘He [the author] is not on the stage amongst gallants
preparing a bespoke Plaudite’.
_K. B. P._ (_1607_), ind. 41:
_Wife below Rafe below._
_Wife._ Husband, shall I come vp husband?
_Citizen._ I cunny. Rafe helpe your mistresse this way: pray gentlemen
make her a little roome, I pray you sir lend me your hand to helpe vp
my wife.... Boy, let my wife and I haue a cupple stooles.... Come vp
Rafe.
It must not be assumed from this burlesque that women usually sat on
the stage, even at the private houses.
[1692] _What You Will_ (1602), ind., ‘Let’s place ourselves within the
curtains, for good faith the stage is so very little, we shall wrong
the general eye else very much’; _Faery Pastoral_ (1603), author’s
note, ‘If so be that the Properties of any of These, that be outward,
will not serue the turne by reason of concourse of the People on the
Stage, Then you may omit the sayd Properties’. In _Wily Beguiled_
(possibly a Paul’s play), 2021, comes the s. d. ‘Stands vpon a stoole’,
in a wood scene.
[1693] _E. M. O._ (_1599_), 585 (Q_{1}), ‘Sit o’ the stage and flout;
prouided, you haue a good suit’; 1784, ‘rich apparell ... takes
possession of your stage at your new play’; _A Mad World, my Masters_
(_c. 1604–6_), v. ii. 38, ‘The actors have been found i’ th’ morning
in a less compass than their stage, though it were ne’er so full of
gentlemen’; _Woman Hater_ (1607), i. 3, ‘All the Gallants on the stage
rise, vail to me, kiss their hand, offer me their places’. It is true
that _Roaring Girl_ (1611), ii. 1, has ‘the private stages audience,
the twelve-penny stool gentlemen’, but this may only point to a
higher price for a stool at the private house, and in any case cannot
outweigh the allusions of Davies and Jonson before the Blackfriars, or
probably Paul’s, were reopened, or T. M. _Black Book_ (1604, Bullen,
_Middleton_, viii. 42), ‘Barnaby Burning-glass, arch tobacco-taker of
England, in ordinaries, upon stages both common and private’; Dekker,
_G. H. B._ (1609), ‘Whether therefore the gatherers of the publique
or priuate Play-house stand to receiue the afternoones rent, let our
Gallant (hauing paid it) presently aduance himselfe vp to the Throne
of the Stage’ (cf. the whole passage on the procedure and advantages
of sitting on the stage, where Dekker clearly mingles traits of both
types of house, in App. H). Wallace, ii. 130, argues that the custom
was started at Blackfriars and was confined to the private houses, but
is hopelessly confuted by C. R. Baskervill in _M. P._ viii. 581.
[1694] _Malcontent_ (1604, Globe), ind.:
‘Enter W. Sly, a Tire-man following him with a stool.
_Tire-man._ Sir, the gentlemen will be angry if you sit here.
_Sly._ Why, we may sit upon the stage at the private house. Thou dost
not take me for a country gentleman, dost? dost think I fear hissing?...
_Lowin._ Good sir, will you leave the stage? I’ll help you to a private
room.
_Sly._ Come, coz, lets take some tobacco’;
_M. D’Olive_ (1606, Blackfriars), IV. ii. 173, ‘I’ll take up some other
fool for the Duke to employ: every ordinary affords fools enow; and
didst not see a pair of gallants sit not far hence like a couple of
bough-pots to make the room smell?’
[1695]
Yet, Grandee’s, would you were not come to grace
Our matter, with allowing vs no place.
Though you presume Satan a subtill thing,
And may haue heard hee’s worne in a thumbe-ring;
Doe not on these presumptions, force vs act,
In compasse of a cheese-trencher. This tract
Will ne’er admit our vice, because of yours.
Anone, who, worse than you, the fault endures
That your selues make? when you will thrust and spurne,
And knocke vs o’ the elbowes, and bid, turne;
As if, when wee had spoke, wee must be gone,
Or, till wee speake, must all runne in, to one,
Like the young adders, at the old ones mouth?
Would wee could stand due North; or had no South,
If that offend: or were Muscouy glasse,
That you might looke our Scenes through as they passe.
We know not how to affect you. If you’ll come
To see new Playes, pray you affoord vs roome.
[1696] Wallace, ii. 142.
[1697] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (1609), ‘You may ... haue a good stoole
for sixpence ... creepe from behind the Arras, with your Tripos or
three-footed stoole in one hand, and a teston mounted betweene a
forefinger and a thumbe in the other’; cf. pp. 535, n. 3, 536, n. 2.
[1698] Cf. ch. xx.
[1699] Godfrey (_Architectural Review_, xxiii. 239) has no authority
for his internal roofed staircases and landings in the narrow spaces
between the galleries and the sides of the stage.
[1700] Henslowe made a ‘penthowsse shed at the tyeringe howsse doore’
of the Rose in 1591. Doubtless the stage could also be reached from in
front; cf. the _K. B. P._ passage on p. 536.
[1701] Gosson, _P. C._ (1582, App. C, No. xxx), tells how youths are
wont ‘to go first into the yarde, and to carry theire eye through euery
gallery’ in search of attractive company; cf. p. 532.
[1702] Cf. p. 541, and ch. xi.
[1703] Peacham, however, may be merely versifying the story of the
choleric justice and the provincial audience which laughed when he
‘first peept out his head’ in Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (_Works_, i.
188), and reading in a feature, in the process, of the stage as known
to himself; and the same applies to Davenant, _The Unfortunate Lovers_
(_c. 1638_), prol., on the play-goers of old times:
For they, he swears, to the theatre would come,
Ere they had din’d, to take up the best room;
There sit on benches, not adorn’d with mats,
And graciously did vail their high-crown’d hats
To every half-dress’d player, as he still
Through the hangings peeped to see how the house did fill.
For Caroline practice, cf. T. Goffe, _Careless
Shepherdess_ ind.:
I never saw Rheade peeping through the curtain,
But ravishing joy entered into my heart;
also Tatham’s prologue for the Fortune players, when they
moved to the Red Bull in 1640:
Forbear
Your wonted custom, banding tile and pear
Against our curtains, to allure us forth;
I pray, take notice, these are of more worth;
Pure Naples silk, not worsted.
I defer a full consideration of stage hangings to the
chapters on staging; cf. vol. iii, p. 78.
[1704] For the classical sense of _Scaena_, cf. the passage from
Vitruvius quoted in vol. iii, p. 3. Florio, _Dictionary_ (1598),
s.v. _Scena_, ‘a skaffold, a pavillion, or forepart of a theatre
where players make them readie, being trimmed with hangings, out of
which they enter upon the stage’, points to the identity of scene and
tire-house front. This structure has therefore precisely the double
function of the ‘domus’ of the court plays; cf. ch. xix. I owe the
quotation to Graves, 15, who adds, _The Englysshe Mancyne upon the
foure Cardynale Vertues_ (_c._ 1520), ‘a disgyser yt goeth into a
secret corner callyd a sene of the pleyinge place to chaunge his
rayment’, and Palsgrave, _Acolastus_ (1540), prol., ‘our scenes, that
is to saye, our places appoynted for our players to come forth of’.
The English ‘Mancyne’ is a translation, earlier than A. Barclay’s, of
Dominic Mancini’s _De Quatuor Virtutibus_ (1516), and the original
has only ‘Histrio, qui in scaenam vadit’. The notion of scena as not
a mere wall, but a shelter for performers, is mediaeval, and appears
to go back to an early definition from σκῆνος, a hut or tent, found,
e. g., side by side with the regular mediaeval misunderstanding of
the classical art of acting in Hugutius, _Liber Derivationum_, ‘Scena
est umbraculum siue locus obumbratus in theatro et cortinis coopertus
similis tabernaculis mercenariorum, quae sunt asseribus vel cortinis
opertae, et secundum hoc scena potest dici a scenos, quod est domus,
quae in modum domus erat constructa. In umbraculo latebant personae
larvatae, quae ad vocem recitatoris exigebantur ad gestus faciendos’;
cf. Herrmann, 280, W. Cloetta, _Komödie und Tragödie im Mittelalter_
(1890), 38; _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 208. It is revised on humanist lines
by Jodocus Badius Ascensius in the _Praenotamenta_ to his Terence of
1502, ‘Intra igitur theatrum ab una parte opposita spectatoribus erant
scenae et proscenia, id est loca lusoria ante scenas facta. Scenae
autem erant quaedam umbracula seu absconsoria, in quibus abscondebantur
lusores, donec exire deberent. Ante autem scenas erant quaedam
tabulata, in quibus personae qui exierant ludebant.’
[1705] The _Roxana_ engraving shows a projecting building at the back
of the stage, but this can hardly be regarded as throwing light upon
sixteenth-century structure.
[1706] _C. Revels_ (1601), ind. 160. The author is not ‘in the
Tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stampe at the Booke-holder, sweare
for our Properties, cursse the poore Tire-man, rayle the Musique out
of tune’; _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), ind. 8, ‘I am looking, lest the
_Poet_ heare me, or his man, Master Broome, behind the Arras....
Hee has (sirreuerence) kick’d me three, or foure times about the
Tyring-house, I thanke him, for but offering to putt in, with my
experience’; v. iii. 57, ‘I would be glad drinke with the young
company; which is the Tiring-house?’
[1707] _Every Woman in her Humour_, p. 354, ‘He would ... stamp and
stare (God blesse us,) like a play-house book-keeper when the actors
misse their entrance’; _R. J._ I. iv. 7,
Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance.
The actor’s signal for entrance was already his ‘cue’;
cf. _M. N. D._ III. i. 77, ‘And so every one according to his cue’;
_Isle of Gulls_, ii. 2, ‘you know your que’; ii. 3, ‘She hath entred
the Dutches iust at her que’.
[1708] _2 Ant. Mellida_, II. i. 30, ‘The tiring man hath not glued on
my beard half fast enough’. A tireman appears in the inductions to
_Malcontent_, ‘Enter W. Sly, a Tire-man following him with a stool’,
and to _What You Will_, ‘Enter Tire-man with lights’. ‘Steven the
tyerman’ of the Admiral’s in 1596 is probably the Steven Magett of
other entries by Henslowe (i. 31, 44, 45).
[1709] Speakers in the induction to _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614) are
the Booke-Holder and the Stage-Keeper, who ‘kept the _Stage_ in
Master _Tarletons_ time’, and whose work is ‘sweeping the _Stage_? or
gathering vp the broken apples for the beares within?’
[1710] The Fortune company, _c._ 1617 (_H. P._ 85), offer to employ a
dismissed ‘gatherer’ as ‘a nessessary atendaunt on the stage’ and to
mend garments. On 27 Dec. 1624 the Master of Revels (_Var._ iii. 112;
Herbert, 74) issued a warrant of protection for Nicholas Underhill,
Robert Pallant, John Rhodes, and eighteen others ‘all imployed by the
kings maiesties servantes in theire quallity of playinge as musitions
and other necessary attendantes’. In _Devil’s Charter_ (1607), 3016,
is the s. d. ‘Alexander vnbraced betwixt two Cardinalls in his study
looking vpon a booke, whilst a groome draweth the curtaine’. Is this
‘groom’ a character or an ‘attendant’? In any case attendants were
naturally, with musicians and even ‘gatherers’ (on whom cf. ch. xi),
used at need for supernumeraries; cf. the gatherers in the _Frederick
and Basilea_ plot (1597, _H. P._ 136) and _2 If You Know Not Me_
(1606), p. 297, ‘Enter ... the waits in sergeants’ gowns’. The long
list of men and boys in the procession at the end of _1 Tamar Cham_
(1602, _H. P._ 148) must have taxed all such resources. For the use
of boys as attendants, cf. _Bartholomew Fair_, V. iii. 65, ‘Ha’ you
none of your pretty impudent boyes, now; to bring stooles, fill
Tabacco, fetch Ale, and beg money, as they haue at other houses?’
Seventeenth-century gossip (_Centurie of Prayse_, 417) made Shakespeare
join the stage as a ‘serviture’.
[1711] Lawrence, i. 75, ii. 159; Wegener, 150; G. H. Cowling, _Music
on the Shakespearian Stage_, 29, 70, 80. I refer to Cowling and to E.
W. Naylor, _Shakespeare and Music_, for discussions of the instruments
used--drums, timbrels, bells (percussion instruments), sackbuts,
trumpets, horns (brass instruments), cornets, hautboys, recorders,
fifes (wood instruments), viols, lutes, citterns, pandores (string
instruments)--of such terms as ‘flourish’, ‘sennet’, ‘tucket’, ‘peal’,
‘alarum’, ‘consort’, and of other technical matters with which I am not
qualified to deal. The Admiral’s inventories of 1598 (_H. P._ 115, 116,
118) include ‘iij trumpettes and a drum, and a trebel viall, a basse
viall, a bandore, a sytteren ... j chyme of bells ... iij tymbrells ...
j sack-bute’.
[1712] _Malcontent_, ind. 89. The additions for the King’s are ‘to
entertain a little more time, and to abridge the not-received custom of
music in our theatre’. But ‘abridge’ only means shorten, and there are
s. ds. for music between the acts of _Sejanus_ (Globe, _1603_) and in
the plot of _Dead Man’s Fortune_ (Admiral’s, _c._ 1590, _H. P._ 133);
cf. Dekker, _Belman of London_ (1608, _Works_, iii. 76), ‘These were
appointed to be my Actes, in this goodly Theater, the musicke betweene,
were the Singers of the Wood’. But such evidence is rare, and Lawrence,
i. 75, and Cowling, 67, do not discriminate sufficiently the practice
of the public theatres from that of the private theatres on the one
hand and the early neo-classic court plays on the other. Here music is
an integral part of the _intermedii_ or dumb-shows, which are little
more than survivals in the full-blown public drama; cf. F. A. Foster in
_E. S._ xliv. 8, and _Hamlet_, III. ii. 13, ‘inexplicable dumb-shows’.
[1713] Cf. p. 551.
[1714] _Alphonsus_, prol., ‘after you haue sounded thrise, let Venus be
let downe from the top of the Stage’; Heywood, _Four Prentices_, prol.,
‘Do you not know that I am the prologue? Do you not see the long black
velvet coat upon my back? Have I not all the signs of the prologue
about me? Have you not sounded thrice?’; Dekker, _Satiromastix_,
epist., ‘In steed of the trumpets sounding thrice, before the play
begin, it shall not be amisse ... first to beholde this short Comedy of
Errors’; _G. H. B._ (cf. App. H), ‘untill the quaking prologue hath (by
rubbing) got cullor into his cheekes, and is ready to give the trumpets
their cue that hee’s upon point to enter’; _E. M. O._ (Q_{1}), 107,
‘Inductio, sono secundo’, 402, ‘Sound the third time. Enter Prologue’.
Jonson has a similar arrangement (F_{1}) in the private house plays
_Cynthia’s Revels_ and _Poetaster_, but probably the trumpets were
here replaced by more elaborate music; cf. _1 Ant. Mellida_, ind. 1,
‘the music will sound straight for entrance’; _What You Will_, ind. 1
(s. d.), ‘Before the music sounds for the Act’; _C. Revels_ (Q_{1}),
1435, ‘Like an unperfect Prologue, at third musique’. Surely this is
the origin of the ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ (or ‘curtain tune’)
music of the Restoration and eighteenth-century overtures, described
by Lawrence, ii. 155. Exceptionally the prologue in Percy’s _C. and C.
Errant_ is between the second and third sounding.
[1715] _Chaste Maid in Cheapside_, V. iv. 1 (s. d.), ‘There is a sad
song in the music-room’; cf. _Thracian Wonder_, IV. i. 182, ‘Pythia
speaks in the musick Room behind the Curtain’, 186, ‘Pythia above,
behind the curtains.’ But these, although early plays, are in late
prints, and the other examples of a music-room ‘above’ given by
Lawrence, i. 91, are Caroline. Jasper Mayne says of Jonson (1638,
_Jonsonus Virbius_), ‘Thou laid’st no sieges to the music-room’. My own
impression is that when the lord’s room over the tire-house was disused
by spectators (cf. p. 537) it became indifferently available for actors
and for music, and that here, rather than, as is possible, higher still
in the scenic wall, was the normal place for the seventeenth-century
music, when it was not needed elsewhere, or the space needed for
other purposes. The introduction of the high proscenium arch at the
Restoration caused difficulties, and various experiments were tried in
placing the music above (Lawrence, i. 91, 161; ii. 160; W. G. Keith,
_The Designs for the First Movable Scenery on the English Public Stage_
in _Burlington Magazine_, xxv. 29, 85), before the modern situation was
adopted.
[1716] Cf. ch. x.
[1717] _R. J._, prol. 12, ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’;
_Alchemist_, prol. 1, ‘these two short hours’; _Hen. VIII_, prol. 13,
‘two short hours’; _T. N. K._, prol. 28, ‘Sceanes ... worth two houres
travell’; Heywood, _Apology_, 11 (Beeston’s c. v.), ‘two houres well
spent’; _Barth. Fair_, ind., ‘the space of two hours and a half and
somewhat more’. Perhaps plays tended to grow shorter. Fenton (1574) and
Northbrooke (1577–8) give ‘two or three houres’, and Whetstone (1578)
three hours (cf. App. C), but Dekker (cf. p. 533, n. 3) seems to regard
three hours as an exceptionally long period.
[1718] Cotgrave, _French-English Dict._ (1611), s.v. Falot, ‘a cresset
light (such as they use in play-houses) made of ropes wreathed, pitched
and put into small and open cages of iron’; cf. Lawrence, ii. 13, who
thinks the cressets were part of the lighting of private houses. But
would they not smoke and smell badly, if used indoors? There is no
particular reason for translating the _lucernae_ of Christ Church hall
in 1566, with Schelling and Lawrence, as ‘cressets’.
[1719] Nashe (iii. 329), epist. to _Astrophel and Stella_ (1591),
‘here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial
heau’n to ouershadow the faire frame’; _Wagnerbook_ (1594, cf. ch.
xx), ‘Now aboue all was there the gay Clowdes vsque quaque adorned
with the heavenly firmament, and often spotted with golden teares
which men callen Stars. There was liuely portrayed the whole Imperiall
Army of the faire heauenly inhabitauntes’; _Birth of Hercules_ (1597
<), i. 1, s. d., ‘Ad comoediae magnificentiam apprime conferet ut
coelum Histrionium sit luna et stellis perspicue distinctum’; Heywood,
_Apology_ (_c. 1608_), 34, of the Roman theatre, ‘the covering of the
stage, which we call the heavens’; Cotgrave, _Dict._ (1611), s.v.
_Volerie_, ‘a place over a stage, which we call the heavens’. The same
word was used for the state over a throne; cf. Cotgrave, s.v. _Dais_,
‘a cloth of estate, canopie, or Heaven, that stands over the heads of
Princes thrones’. Graves, 24, gives examples of heavens used in Tudor
pageants. It is to be noted that the ‘heavens’ and ‘hell’ (cf. p. 528)
of a theatre continue characteristic features of mediaeval staging (cf.
_Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 86, 137, 142); cf. _All Fools_, prol. 1:
The fortune of a stage (like Fortunes selfe)
Amazeth greatest judgments; and none knowes
The hidden causes of those strange effects
That rise from this Hell, or fall from this Heaven.
The theory of J. Corbin in _Century_ (1911), 267, that
the heavens was a mere _velarium_ or cloud of canvas thrown out from
the hut, will not fit the evidence; cf. Lawrence, ii. 6.
[1720] Cf. vol. iii, p. 78. Is this, or the hut, the ‘garret’ of R.
M.’s _A Player_ (cf. p. 546)?
[1721] I do not now regard as tenable my suggestion in _The Stage
of the Globe_ (_Stratford Town Shakespeare_, x. 351) that De Witt
represented as outstanding columns what were really mere pilasters in
the tire-house wall.
[1722] Kempe, _Nine Days Wonder_, 6, ‘I remembred one of them to be
a noted Cut-purse, such a one as we tye to a poast on our stage, for
all people to wonder at, when at a play they are taken pilfring’; cf.
_Nobody and Somebody_, 1893,
_Somebody_
Once pickt a pocket in this Play-house yard,
Was hoysted on the stage, and shamd about it;
also ch. xx, p. 75; ch. xxi, pp. 108, 141.
[1723] For criticism of the drawing of the heavens and hut, cf. Graves,
22, and Brereton in _Homage_, 204.
[1724] Henslowe paid in 1595 for ‘mackinge the throne in the heuenes’
at the Rose; cf. R. M., _Micrologia_ (1629), in Morley, _Character
Writings_, 285, _A Player_, ‘If his action prefigure passion, he raves,
rages, and protests much by his painted heavens, and seems in the
height of this fit ready to pull Jove out of the garret where perchance
he lies leaning on his elbows, or is employed to make squibs and
crackers to grace the play’. Wegener, 133, gives examples of the use of
machines; for the throne, cf. vol. iii, p. 77.
[1725] Field (1583, App. C, No. xxxi), ‘Those flagges of defiance
against God’; Vennar’s apology (1614) for _England’s Joy_ (1602, cf.
ch. xxiii). ‘The report of gentlemen and gentlewomens actions, being
indeed the flagge to our theatre, was not meerely falcification’; _A
Mad World, my Masters_ (1604–6), I. i. 38, III. iii. 143, ‘’Tis Lent in
your cheeks; the flag’s down’.... ‘The hair about the hat is as good as
a flag upo’ th’ pole, at a common play-house, to waft company’; Dekker,
_Raven’s Almanac_ (1609, _Works_, iv. 210), ‘Another ciuill warre doe
I finde will fal betweene players.... For it is thought that Flag will
be aduanced (as it were in mortall defiance against Flag)’; _Work for
Armourers_ (1609, _Works_, iv. 96), ‘Play-houses stand ... the dores
locked vp, the flagges ... taken down’; _Curtain-Drawer of the World_
(1612), ‘Each play-house advanceth his flag in the aire, whither
quickly at the waving thereof are summoned whole troops of men, women,
and children’. The maps regularly show flags on the theatres. The Globe
fire in 1613 ‘did not spare the silken flagg’ (cf. p. 421). Heywood,
_Apology_, 22, mistranslates Ovid’s ‘Tunc neque marmoreo pendebant vela
theatro’ as:
In those days from the marble house did waive
No sail, no silken flag, no ensign brave.
[1726] Cf. p. 542; _Cynthia’s Revels_, ind., where the boys struggle
for the cloak; _Woman Hater_, prol. 1, ‘Gentlemen, Inductions are out
of date, and a Prologue in Verse, is as stale as a black Velvet Cloak,
and a Bay Garland’; _Birth of Hercules_ (1597 <), prol. 5, ‘Thepilogue
is in fashion; prologues no more’; and much later. _Coronation_, prol.
4,
he
That with a little Beard, a long black Cloak,
With a starch’d face, and supple leg hath spoke
Before the plays the twelvemonth.
The prologue appears to be a composite figure, partly
representing the poet, and deriving also in part from the presenter
of dumb-shows, in part from the Chorus of neo-classic tragedy, and in
part from the ‘exposytour in doctorys wede’, developed by miracle-plays
and moralities out of the Augustine of the _Prophetae_; cf. _Mediaeval
Stage_, ii. 52, 72, 153, 417, 423, 426, 429, 448; F. A. Foster in
_E. S._ xliv. 13; F. Lüders, _Prolog und Epilog bei Shakespeare_
(_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, v. 274); Creizenach, 275. The short dramatic
inductions, often introducing actors _in propria persona_, favoured
by Jonson, Marston, and others about the beginning of the seventeenth
century, attempt to give new life to a waning convention.
[1727] Cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 141, 156. Drums and trumpets were
used as advertisements in the city at any rate until 1587 (App. C, Nos.
xvii, xxxi, xxxviii), and were traditional in the provinces up to the
middle of the eighteenth century (Lawrence, ii. 58). Parolles tells
us (_All’s Well_, IV. iii. 298) that Captain Dumain ‘has led the drum
before the English tragedians’. Henslowe (i. 118) bought a drum and two
trumpets for the Admiral’s ‘when to go into the contry’ in Feb. 1600.
In _Histriomastix_, ii. 80, ‘One of them steppes on the Crosse, and
cryes, A Play’.
[1728] H. Moseley, pref. verses to F_{1} of Beaumont and Fletcher
(1647):
As after th’ Epilogue there comes some one
To tell spectators what shall next be shown;
So here am I.
This is, of course, only Caroline evidence; for the
continuance of the practice after the Restoration, cf. Lawrence, ii.
187.
[1729] _Grindal to Cecil_ (1564, App. D, No. xv), ‘these Histriones,
common playours who now daylye, butt speciallye on holydayes, sett vp
bylles’; _Merry Tales, &c._ (1567; cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Vennar), ‘billes
... vpon postes about London’; Northbrooke (1577, App. C, No. xvi),
‘they use to set vp their billes vpon postes certain dayes before’;
Gosson, _S. A._ (1579, App. C, No. xxii), 44, ‘If players can ...
proclame it in their billes, and make it good in theaters’; Rankins
(1587, App. C, No. xxxviii), ‘sticking of their bills in London’;
Marston, _Scourge of Villainy_ (Bullen, iii. 302), ‘Go read each post,
view what is play’d to-day’; _Histriomastix_, v. 69, ‘Text-bills must
now be turned to iron bills’; _Warning for Fair Women_, (> 1599):
’Tis you have kept the Theatres so long,
Painted in play-bills upon every post.
That I am scorned of the multitude.
Wither, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ (1613), ii. 2:
But, by the way, a Bill he doth espy,
Which showes theres acted some new Comedy.
In _Bartholomew Fair_, v. iii. 6, Cokes ‘reads the Bill’
of the motion; cf. Lawrence (ii. 55), _The Origin of the Theatre
Programme_.
[1730] _Devil an Ass_, I. iv. 43, ‘Hee giues him the Play-bill’.
[1731] Arber, ii. 477; iii. 575.
[1732] _Henslowe Papers_, 106.
[1733] Lawrence, ii. 240.
[1734] Jonson, in printing plays, and following him the editors of
the Beaumont and Fletcher F_{1} often give the scene and the actors’
names, and casts appear in _Duchess of Malfi_ (1623). But these are not
necessarily taken from any documents put before the audiences.
[1735] Lawrence, ii. 154; cf. the stipulation in Burbadge’s lease (p.
387), and W. Fennor, _Compter’s Commonwealth_ (1617), 8, ‘he that first
comes in is first seated, like those that come to see playes’.
[1736] Cf. p. 540 (Tatham), and the notices of Hentzner and Platter
(ch. xvi, introd.). In _K. B. P._ the wife comes with her pockets full
of sweetmeats, which she bestows upon the actors, liquorice (i. 77),
green ginger (ii. 279), sugar-candy (ii. 366), and her husband brings
beer (iii. 631). The liquorice would open Ralph’s pipes; cf. ch. xii
(Westminster) and _C. Revels_, ind. 215, ‘I would thou hadst some sugar
candyed, to sweeten thy mouth’; Overbury, _Characters_ (ed. Rimbault,
113, _A Puny-Clarke_), ‘Hee eats ginger-bread at a play-house’.
[1737] Cf. pp. 534, 536 and Hentzner (ch. xvi, introd.); _C. Revels_,
ind. 122, ‘I haue my three sorts of Tabacco, in my Pocket, my light by
me’; _K. B. P._ i. 224, ‘Fie, this stinking Tobacco kils men, would
there were none in _England_, now I pray Gentlemen, what good does this
stinking Tobacco? do you nothing, I warrant you make chimnies a your
faces’; Dekker, _G. H. B._, ‘By sitting on the stage, you may ... get
your match lighted’; _Scornful Lady_, I. ii. 52, ‘They wear swords to
reach fire at a play’; _Sir Giles Goosecap_, IV. ii. 87 (street-scene),
‘By this fire, they do, my lord’. Burn, 84, cites a note by Sir J.
Caesar in _Lansd. MS._ 160, p. 302, of a speech by James in a Star
Chamber case of 1613, in which he advised gentlemen of the Temple not
to frequent plays, whence the smoke of tobacco and the presence of
painted ladies should deter them.
[1738] W. Fennor, _Descriptions_ (1616), ‘I suppose this Pamphlet will
hap into your hands before a Play begin, with the importunate clamour
of “Buy a new Booke!” by some needy companion that will be glad to
furnish you with worke for a turned teaster’. Dekker, _G. H. B._ (cf.
App. H), recommends cards.
[1739] _V. P._ xiv. 593, 599, records a charge against the ambassador
Foscarini (1611–15) of pursuing a woman, and ‘sometimes attending the
public comedies and standing among the people on the chance of seeing
her’. Foscarini said he only went three or four times to the play and
that the archduke’s ambassador and his wife did the same. It was given
in evidence that the ambassador Giustiniani (Dec. 1605–Oct. 1608) went
with the French ambassador and his wife to see _Pericles_ at a cost
of 20 crowns. This must have been at the Globe. For the presence of
harlots, cf. pp. 534, 535; vol. i, p. 255.
[1740] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (1609, _Works_, ii. 201), ‘you can neither
shake our _Comick Theater_ with your stinking breath of hisses, nor
raise it with the thunder-claps of your hands’ (cf. also App. H); _Isle
of Gulls_, ind., ’Tis growne into a custome at playes if anyone rise
(especially of any fashionable sort) about what serious busines soeuer,
the rest thinking it in dislike of the play, tho he neuer thinks it,
cry “Mew! by Jesus, vilde!” and leaue the poore hartlesse children to
speake their Epilogue to the emptie seates’. Later a Gent. says, ‘See
it be baudy, or by the light I and all my friends will hisse’, and the
Prologue replies, ‘You shoulde not deale gentlemanlike with us els’; E.
Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), prol. to Sat., ‘It is the grand hisse to
a filthy play’; _Roaring Girl_, prol., ‘If that he finds not here, he
mews at it’; _T. and C._, epil.:
my fear is this,
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss;
_Downfall of Robin Hood_, _ad fin._:
if I fail in this,
Then let my pains be baffled with a hiss;
_Devil an Ass_, III. v. 41:
If I could but see a piece...
Come but to one act, and I did not care--
But to be seene to rise, and goe away,
To vex the Players, and to punish their _Poet_--
Keepe him in awe!
[1741] _Isle of Gulls_, ind., ‘a prepared company of gallants to
aplaud his iests and grace out his play’; _Histriomastix_, ii. 137,
‘_Belch._’ ‘What’s an Ingle? _Posthaste._ One whose hands are hard as
battle doors with clapping at baldness’. For the special use of ‘ingle’
(= ‘intimate’) in the sense of a patron of players, cf. _Poetaster_,
I. ii. 18, ‘What! shall I have my sonne a stager now? an enghle for
players? a gull? a rooke? a shot-clogge? to make suppers, and bee
laught at?’
[1742] Cf. p. 547, n. 1.
[1743] _K. to K. a Knave_ (1594), _ad fin._; _Looking-Glass_, 2282;
_Locrine_, 2276; _2 Hen. IV_, epil. 35, ‘And so kneele down before
you; but indeed, to pray for the Queene’; _Two Wise Men and All the
Rest Fools_ (1619), epil., ‘It resteth that we render you very humble
and hearty thanks, and that all our hearts pray for the king and his
family’s enduring happiness, and our country’s perpetual welfare. _Si
placet, plaudite_’; cf. ch. xxii.
[1744] Cf. ch. x.
[1745] _M. N. D._ v. i. 360, ‘Will it please you to see the epilogue,
or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company?’; _Much Ado_,
v. i. 130, ‘Strike vp, pipers. _Dance_’; _A. Y. L._ V. iv. 182.
[1746] Cf. ch. xiii (Leicester’s).
[1747] Murray, ii. 206, 293, 304, 367, ‘upon the Q. players at the
dancing on the rop’ (1590, Bridgnorth), ‘vnto the Torkey Tumblers’
(1589–90, Ipswich), ‘to certen playars, playinge uppon ropes at the
Crosse Keyes’ (1590, Leicester), ‘to the Quenes men when the Turke
wente vpon roppes at Newhall’ (22 April 1590, Norwich); _Coventry Corp.
MS._ A 7 (b), ‘the Queens players & the turk’ (1589–90, Coventry);
cf. Nashe, _Epistle to Strange Newes_ (1592, _Works_, i. 262), ‘Say I
am as verie a Turke as hee that three yeeres ago ranne vpon ropes’. A
Gloucester payment of 1594–5 for ‘a wagon in the pageant for the Turke’
(Murray, ii. 285) may or may not refer to the acrobat of 1590.
[1748] Cf. ch. xiv.
[1749] Both Hentzner (1598) and Platter (1599) describe it; cf. ch.
xvi, introd. Platter saw it at both the Globe and the Curtain, where
it was ‘Englisch unndt Irlendisch’. Von Wedel also describes something
very much like a well-developed jig after a baiting on the Bankside in
1584 (cf. ch. xvi, Hope).
[1750] Gosson, _P. C._ (1582; cf. App. C, No. xxx), ‘daunsing of
gigges’; _Much Ado_, II. i. 78, ‘Wooing ... is hot and hasty, like a
Scotch jig, and full as fantastical’; _Hamlet_, III. ii. 132, ‘O God,
your only jig-maker’; _E. M. O._ (Q_{1}), 1147, ‘a thing studied, and
rehearst as ordinarily at his comming from hawking, or hunting, as
a Iigge after a play’; _Jack Drum_, i. 404, ‘as the Iigge is cal’d
for when the play is done’; R. Knolles, _Six Bookes of a Commonweal_
(1606), 645, ‘Now adayes they put at the end of euerie Tragedie (as
poyson into meat) a comedie or jigge’ (translating Bodin’s ‘obscoena
quadam fabula turpissimis ac sordidissimis narrationibus condita’);
Cotgrave (1611), ‘Farce ... also, the Iyg at the end of an Enterlude,
wherein some pretie knauerie is acted’; Dekker, _A Strange Horse Race_
(1613, _Works_, iii. 340), ‘As I haue often seene, after the finishing
of some worthy Tragedy, or Catastrophe in the open Theaters, that the
sceane after the Epilogue hath been more blacke (about a nasty bawdy
jigge) then the most horrid sceane in the play was: The stinkards
speaking all things, yet no man understanding any thing’; cf. the late
Shirley allusion on p. 528. The term is sometimes more loosely used.
In _James IV_, 82, 88, 620, 636, 661, 666, 673, 1116, the speakers of
the Induction call the main action a jig; cf. _1 Tamburlaine_, prol. 1,
‘iygging vaines of riming mother wits’. Swaen (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlvi.
122) points out that a tune known as _The Cobler’s Jig_ would fit the
dialogue song by cobblers in _Locrine_, 569. Naylor, 124, gives some
account of jig tunes and derives the term from _giga_, an instrument of
the fiddle type.
[1751] Cf. the quotation from _K. B. P._ on p. 557, and ch. v.
[1752] Tarlton and Kempe (cf. ch. xv) are spoken of as acting in
‘merriments’. I doubt whether anything more technical is meant than
a farcical episode in a play, perhaps helped out with such ‘gags’ as
_Hamlet_, III. ii. 42, deprecates.
[1753] Arber, ii. 297, 298, 571, 600, 601, 669, 670, 671; iii. 49, 50,
‘a newe Northerne Jigge’ (5 Jan. 1591), ‘the seconde parte of the gigge
betwene Rowland and the Sexton’ (16 Dec. 1591), ‘the thirde and last
parte of Kempes Jigge’ (28 Dec. 1591), ‘a merrie newe Jigge betwene
Jenkin the Collier and Nansie’ (14 Jan. 1592), ‘a plesant newe Jigge
of the broome-man’, ascribed in the margin to Kempe (16 Jan. 1595), ‘a
pleasant Jigge betwene a tincker and a Clowne’ (4 Feb. 1595), ‘a ballad
of Cuttinge George and his hostis beinge a Jigge’ (17 Feb. 1595),
‘Master Kempes Newe Jigge of the kitchen stuffe woman’ (2 May 1595),
‘Phillips his gigg of the slyppers’ (26 May 1595), ‘a pretie newe Jigge
betwene Ffrancis the gentleman Richard the farmer and theire wyves’
(14 Oct. 1595), and ‘Kemps newe Jygge betwixt a Souldiour and a Miser
and Sym the clown’ (21 Oct. 1595); cf. ch. xv (Tarlton). Creizenach,
312, cites a list of jig titles by Hoenig in _Anzeiger für deutsches
Altertum_, xxii. 304.
[1754] _Have With You to Saffron Walden_ (_Works_, iii. 114).
[1755] Henslowe, i. 70, 82.
[1756] E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_, Sat. v.
[1757] App. D, No. cl; cf. the quotation from Dekker, _supra_;
_Hamlet_, II. ii. 522, of Polonius, ‘He ’s for a jig or a tale of
bawdry, or he sleeps’; Wither, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_ (1613), ii.
3, ‘a Curtaine Iigge, a Libell, or a Ballet’. Possibly the Middlesex
order has a bearing on the curious variant in the Epistle to Jonson’s
_Alchemist_ (1612), where some copies lament ‘the concupiscence of
jigges and daunces’, others of ‘daunces and antikes’.
[1758] _The Black Man_ is in Kirkman’s _The Wits_ (1672), and _Singing
Simpkin_ is ascribed in undated texts to the Caroline Robert Cox,
but a tune of this name was known in Basle in 1592, and a German jig
of 1620 seems to be a translation; cf. Herz, 132; F. Bolte, _Die
Singspiele der englischen Komödianten und ihrer Nachfolger_ (1893,
_Theatergeschichtliche Forschungen_, vii); W. J. Lawrence (_T. L. S._ 3
July 1919).
[1759] A. Clark, _Shirburn Ballads_, 244 (cf. S. R. list, _supra_, s.
a. 1595), ‘M^r Attowel’s Jigge: betweene Francis, a Gentleman; Richard,
a farmer; and their wives’. It is in four scenes, sung respectively to
the tunes of ‘Walsingham’, ‘The Jewishe Dance’, ‘Buggle-boe’, and ‘Goe
from my windo’. In _Roxburghe Ballads_, i. 201; ii. 101, are ‘Clod’s
Carroll, a proper new jigg’, and ‘A mery new Jigge’. Collier’s ‘Jigge
of a Horse Loade of Fooles’ (_New Facts_, 18; cf. Halliwell, _Tarlton_,
xx) is probably a fake.
[1760] Clark, 354, from _Bodl. Rawlinson Poet. MS._ 185 (_c._ 1590), ‘A
proper new ballett, intituled Rowland’s god-sonne’. It is to the tune
of ‘Loth to departe’. Nashe, _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_, 76,
mentions this jig. Two parts of a ‘Rowlandes godson moralised’ were
entered in S. R. on 18 and 29 April 1592. Rowland is not a character,
and numerous German allusions to and adaptations of a jig beginning ‘Oh
neighbour Rowland’ (Herz, 134) have probably some other original. A
‘Roland and the Sexton’ is in the S. R. list, _supra_. A verse dialogue
in _Alleyn Papers_, 8, mentions ‘bonny Rowland’ and is probably a jig
of his cycle; another (p. 29) does not read to me like a jig.
[1761] Cf. ch. xv (Tarlton, Wilson) and Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_
(_Works_, i. 244), ‘the queint Comaedians of our time, That when their
Play is doone, do fal to ryme’. Armin’s (q.v.) _Quips Upon Questions_
(1600) are probably themes, or based upon the conception of themes. A
theme is introduced in _Histriomastix_, ii. 293. The Lord sets it:
Your poetts and your pottes
Are knit in true-love knots,
and a sixteen-line ‘song extempore’ by Posthaste follows.
The verses on ‘theames’ in Gascoigne’s _Posies_ (ed. Cunliffe, 62) are
not, I think, improvisations.
[1762] Smith, _Commedia dell’ Arte_, 175; cf. M. J. Wolff, _Shakespeare
und die Commedia dell’ arte_ (_Sh.-Jahrbuch_, xlvi. 1).
[1763] _C. is A._ II. vii. 36, of the players in Utopia (England),
‘_Sebastian._ And how are their plaies? as ours are? extemporall?
_Valentine._ O no! all premeditated things’. The references of
Whetstone, _Heptameron_ (1582), _Sp. Tragedy_, IV. i. 163, Middleton,
_Spanish Gypsy_, IV. ii. 38, are specifically to French and Italian
practice, and so too, presumably, _A. C._ v. ii. 216, ‘The quick
comedians Extemporally will stage us’. The interpretation of Hamlet,
II. ii. 420, ‘For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only
men’, is open, but Falstaff says in _1 Hen. IV_, II. iv. 309, ‘Shall we
have a play extempore?’
[1764] Hamlet, III. ii. 42; cf. _John a Kent and John a Cumber_, iii,
_ad fin._, ‘One of us Johns must play beside the book’.
[1765] In _K. B. P._, ind. 94, where Ralph ‘should have playd
Jeronimo with a Shooemaker for a wager’; _Ratseis Ghost_ (1605,
Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 326), ‘I durst venture all the mony in my
purse on thy head to play Hamlet with him for a wager’; Dekker, _Jests
to Make You Merrie_ (1607, _Works_, ii. 282), ‘A paire of players,
growing into an emulous contention of one anothers worth, refusde to
put themselves to a day of hearing (as any Players would haue done)
but stood onely vpon their good parts’; cf. ch. xvi (Fortune), ch. xv
(Alleyn).
[1766] Cf. ch. xi, p. 371.
[1767] _2 Ant. Mellida_, prol., ‘within this round ... this ring’; cf.
p. 536. _Fawn_ (1604–6), prol., has ‘this fair-filled room’, but the
play was transferred to Paul’s from Blackfriars.
[1768] For the existence of tiring-houses in private theatres, cf.
inductions to _Jack Drum’s Entertainment_ (Paul’s) and _C. Revels_
(Blackfriars).
[1769] Cf. ch. xvii.
[1770] _Dutch Courtesan_ (_c. 1603_, Blackfriars), V. iii. 162, ‘my
very fine Heliconian gallants, and you my worshipful friends in the
middle region’.
[1771] Cf. Wright (App. I). For the origin of the term, cf. the c. v.
of L. Digges to Shakespeare’s _Poems_ (1640):
Let but Beatrice
And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice
The cockpit, galleries, boxes, are all full,
To hear Malvoglio that crosse-garterd gull.
[1772] Dekker, _G. H. B._ (cf. App. H), with its mingling of ‘public’
and ‘private’ features, cannot be relied on. The _Roxana_ and _Wits_
engravings show spectators ‘over the stage’, but cannot be treated as
evidence for the private houses. The _Messallina_ engraving only shows
a window closed by curtains.
[1773] Cf. p. 556, _infra._
[1774] _1 Ant. Mellida_ (Paul’s), prol., ‘select and most respected
auditors’; _What You Will_ (Paul’s), ind., ‘the female presence, the
genteletza, the women’; _Jack Drum’s Entertainment_ (Paul’s), ind.,
‘this choise selected influence’. But it was still mixed enough; cf.
Jonson’s c. v. to _Faithful Shepherdess_ (Revels, _c._ 1608–9):
The wise and many-headed bench that sits
Upon the life and death of plays and wits--
Composed of gamester, captain, knight, knight’s man,
Lady or pusill that wears mask or fan,
Velvet or taffata cap, rank’d in the dark
With the shop’s foreman, or some such brave spark,
That may judge for his sixpence.
[1775] Cf. chh. i, x, and _M. L. R._ ii. 12.
[1776] Jonson, _supra_; _Mich. Term_ (_c._ 1606, Paul’s), ‘sixpenny
fees all the year long’; Otho of Hesse-Cassel (1611, Whitefriars),
‘hier kostet der eingang einen halben schilling nur, da an andern orten
wohl eine halbe kron’; _Scornful Lady_ (1613–16,? Whitefriars), IV. i.
238, ‘I ... can see a play For eighteen-pence again: I can, my lady’;
_Wit Without Money_ (? 1614, Whitefriars), i. 1, ‘And who extoled
you in the halfcrown boxes, where you might sit and muster all the
beauties’. So later, Jonson, _Magnetic Lady_ (_1632_, Blackfriars),
ind., ‘the faeces or grounds of your people, that sit in the oblique
caves and wedges of your house, your sinful sixpenny mechanicks’. I am
rather puzzled by Percy, _C. and C. Errant_, ‘Poules steeple stands in
the place it did before; and twopence is the price for the going into
a newe play there’. Even in 1589 (cf. p. 532) the price at Paul’s was
4_d._ according to a Marprelate tract, and William Darrell in that year
paid 6_d._ (Hall, _Society in Elizabethan Age_, 211).
[1777] In _Isle of Gulls_ (1606, Blackfriars), ind., a Gent. can only
see an act or two out, for ‘I lay in bed till past three a clock, slept
out my dinner and my stomache will toule to supper afore fiue’. Otho of
Hesse-Cassel (1611) says that the Whitefriars plays were at three, and
from Michaelmas to Easter only. Percy, on the other hand (cf. ch. xii),
says that the Paul’s boys were not allowed to begin before four, after
prayers, and the gates of Paul’s shut at six. So, too, _Ram Alley_
(King’s Revels), epil., ‘Thus two hours have brought to end’. Gerschow
in 1602 (cf. ch. xii) says that the Chapel acted once a week; cf.
_Eastward Hoe_ (1605, Blackfriars), epil., ‘May this attract you hither
once a week’.
[1778] Dekker, _Seven Deadly Sins_ (1606, Works, ii. 41), ‘All the
Citty lookt like a priuate Play-house, when the windowes are clapt
downe, as if some _Nocturnall_, or dismal _Tragedy_ were presently to
be acted’.
[1779] _What You Will_ (1601, Paul’s), ‘Enter Atticus, Doricus, and
Philomuse, they sit a good while on the stage before the Candles are
lighted.... Enter Tier-man with lights’; _Mich. Term_ (1607, Paul’s),
‘Ours [terms] haue but sixpenny fees all the year long, yet we dispatch
you in two hours without demur: your suits hang not long here after
candles be lighted’; _Faithful Shepherdess_ (1608–9, Blackfriars),
Beaumont’s c. v., ‘Some like, if the wax lights be new that day’. Otho
of Hesse-Cassel (1611) says that the Whitefriars plays were ‘nur bei
lichtern’. Later we have G. Wither, _Fair Virtue_ (1622), 1781:
those lamps which at a play
Are set up to light the day;
Lenton, _The Young Gallants Whirligig_ (1629):
spangled, rare perfumed attires,
Which once so glister’d at the torchy Friars.
Cf. Lawrence (ii. 1), _Light and Darkness in the Elizabethan Theatre_;
also _E. S._ xlviii. 213.
[1780] Cf. ch. xii; and for evidence of inter-act music, Lawrence, i.
81; Cowling, 68. Papers on _Early Elizabethan Stage Music_ in _Musical
Antiquary_ (Oct. 1909, Jan. 1913) show the origin of the musical
tradition in the earlier boy companies; for its seventeenth-century
development, cf. Wallace, ii. 114.
[1781] _Faithful Shepherdess_ (1608–9, Blackfriars), Beaumont’s c. v.:
Nor wants there those who, as the boy doth dance
Between the acts, will censure the whole play.
In _K. B. P._ (1607, Blackfriars) a boy dances after Acts i and iii,
and the citizens comment, ‘I will haue him dance _Fading_; _Fading_
is a fine Iigge’. After Act ii there are fiddlers. After Act iv Ralph
intervenes with a May Day speech.
[1782] _2 Ant. Mellida_, V. i. 50, ‘Andrugio’s ghost is placed betwixt
the music-houses’; _Faery Pastoral_, s. ds., ‘Highest aloft and on
the Top of the Musick Tree the Title The Faery Pastoral. Beneath him
pind on Post of the Tree The Scene Eluida Forest Lowest of all ouer
the Canopie ΝΑΠΑΙΤΒΟΔΑΙΟΝ or Faery Chappell’.... ‘Here they shutt both
into the Canopie Fane or Trophey’; _Cuck Queenes and Cuckolds Errants_,
prol. by Tarlton, ‘standing at entrance of the doore and right vnder
the Beame I think Graves, 14, rightly explains ‘Trophey’ as ‘arch’,
on the analogy of its use for a triumphal arch in Dekker, _Coronation
Pageant_ (1603). The only other use of ‘canopy’ for a structural part
of a theatre seems to be in _Sophonisba_, iv. 1, ‘Play softly within
the canopy’.... ‘Syphax hasteneth within the canopy, as to Sophonisba’s
bed’. This is a Blackfriars play, but it might conceivably have been
written for Paul’s.
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.
2. Where necessary, original spelling has been retained.
3. Where hyphenation is in doubt, it has been retained as in the
original.
4. Hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been
retained as in the original.
5. Some words seem to have been written as one word, e.g.
thexecutor. These have been retained as in the original.
6. Superscripts are represented using the caret character, e.g.
D^r. or X^{xx}.
7. Italics are shown as _xxx_.
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