Volume 2 / Book 3 — BOOK III THE COMPANIES (continued 2)

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 6d. to 10d. 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:

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 Q₁ of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608) assigns it to Paul’s; the Q₂ 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 6s. 8d. 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 6s. 8d. 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]

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 ‘xvid. 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 vjd.’, ‘For a lynke to bring thapparell from the reuells iiijd.’, ‘At the playing of Miles Glor: in M^r. Deanes howse for pinnes half a thousand vjd.’, ‘Geuen to M^r. Holte yeoman of the reuells xs.’, ‘To M^r. Taylor his man’, ‘For one Plautus geven to ye Queenes maiestie and fowre other vnto the nobilitie xjs.’ 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 6s. 8d. 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 6s. 8d. 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 13s. 4d. Others got £3 6s. 8d. as before, and others again only two-thirds of this amount, £2 4s. 5d. 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 13s. 4d. 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 4d. 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 3s. 4d. 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 13s. 4d., in the Chamber Accounts.[242] Each now got £3 6s. 8d. 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 3s. 4d. 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 6s. 8d. 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 6s. 8d. and livery allowances of £1 3s. 4d. 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.

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]

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.