xx. The Lord Chamberlain’s (Lord Hunsdon’s) and King’s Men

Henry Carey, s. of William Carey and Mary, sister of Anne Boleyn; nat. c. 1524; cr. 1st Lord Hunsdon, 13 Jan. 1559; m. Anne, d. of Sir Thomas Morgan; Warden of East Marches and Governor of Berwick, Aug. 1568; Lord Chamberlain, 4 July 1585; lived at Hunsdon House, Herts., and Somerset House, London; ob. 22 July 1596.

George Carey, s. of Henry, 1st Lord Hunsdon; nat. 1547; Kt. 18 May 1570; m. Elizabeth, d. of Sir John Spencer of Althorp; Captain-General of Isle of Wight, 1582; succ. as 2nd Baron, 22 July 1596; Lord Chamberlain, 17 Mar. 1597; lived at Carisbrooke Castle, Hunsdon House, Drayton, and Blackfriars; ob. 9 Sept. 1603.

A company of Lord Hunsdon’s men was at Leicester in the last three months of 1564, at Norwich and Maldon in 1564–5, at Plymouth before Michaelmas in 1565, at Canterbury in the autumn of 1565, at Gloucester and Maldon in 1565–6, at Bristol in July 1566, and at Canterbury in the spring of 1567. Another makes its appearance at Ludlow on 13 July 1581, and at Doncaster in 1582. In the winter Lord Hunsdon was apparently deputy for the Earl of Sussex as Lord Chamberlain, and took occasion to bring his men to Court, where they acted Beauty and Housewifery on 27 December 1582. They did not again appear at Court, but when plays were temporarily suppressed on 14 June 1584 the owner of the Theatre, presumably James Burbadge, made a claim to be Lord Hunsdon’s man. Meanwhile ‘my L. Hunsdouns and my Lords Morleis players being bothe of one companye’ are recorded at Bristol in March 1583, and Lord Hunsdon’s alone at Norwich in 1582–3, Bath in June 1583, and Exeter in July 1583. Hunsdon became Lord Chamberlain on 4 July 1585. Between October and December of that year, a visit was paid to Leicester by ‘the Lord Chamberlens and the Lord Admiralls players’, and on 6 January 1586 ‘the servants of the lo: Admirall and the lo: Chamberlaine’ gave a play at Court. These entries suggest an amalgamation of Hunsdon’s men with those of Lord Admiral Howard, both of whom had perhaps been weakened by the formation of the Queen’s men in 1583. But if so, it was only a partial or temporary one, for while the Admiral’s men established themselves in London, the Chamberlain’s are traceable in the provinces, at Coventry in 1585–6, at Saffron Walden in 1587–8, and at Maidstone in 1589–90.

An interval of four or five years renders improbable any continuity between this company and the famous Lord Chamberlain’s company, which first emerged on the resorting of the plague-stricken mimes in 1594, passed under royal patronage in 1603, and prolonged an existence illumined by the genius of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley, until the closing of the theatres in 1642. The first notice of the new organization is in June 1594, when ‘my Lord Admeralle men and my Lorde Chamberlen men’ played from the 3rd to the 13th of the month, either in combination or separately on allotted days, for Henslowe at Newington Butts. Some of the plays given during this period can be traced to the subsequent repertory of the Admiral’s men; others, which cannot, may be assigned to the Chamberlain’s. They are Hester and Ahasuerus, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Taming of A Shrew, which, although so described, may of course have been really the Taming of The Shrew, Shakespeare’s adaptation of the older play entered in the Stationers’ Register on the previous 2 May. It is ingeniously, and I think rightly, inferred from a line drawn in Henslowe’s account after 13 June, that from that date all the performances recorded are by the Admiral’s men, probably at the Rose, and that his relations with the Chamberlain’s men had ceased. The company is found at Marlborough about September, and on 8 October Lord Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor, asking permission for ‘my nowe companie’ to continue an occupation of the Cross Keys, on which it seems to have already entered. Henceforward the company was regularly established in London, took the lead annually at Court, and except for brief periods of inhibition in 1596, 1597, and possibly 1601, does not appear to have travelled during the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign. Whether Hunsdon’s men got the Cross Keys for the winter or not, they probably had from the beginning the use of the Theatre for the summer seasons, for Richard Burbage, the son of the owner, was one of their leading members, and on 15 March 1595 appears as joint payee with William Kempe and William Shakespeare for two plays given at Court on 26 and 28 December 1594. These plays cannot be identified, but Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet may well have been produced this winter. Most likely the date 28 December was entered in the payment warrant by mistake for 27 December, for the Admiral’s men are also recorded as playing at Court on 28 December, and on the same night ‘a company of base and common fellows’, with whom one is bound to identify the Chamberlain’s men, played ‘a Comedy of Errors’ as part of the Christmas revels of the Prince of Purpoole at Gray’s Inn. There seems to be some echo of Romeo and Juliet in the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, which may very well have been given at Greenwich or Burghley House for the wedding of William Stanley, Earl of Derby, and Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, on 26 January 1595. Another possible occasion for the production, however, is the wedding of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir George Carey and grand-daughter of Lord Hunsdon, to Thomas, son of Henry Lord Berkeley on 19 February 1596. This took place at Blackfriars, presumably in Sir George Carey’s house there.

To 1595 or thereabouts I also assign Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona and King John and Richard II. The company played at Court on 26, 27, and 28 December 1595 and 6 January and 22 February 1596. In the warrant for their fees, dated on 21 December 1596, and made payable to John Heminges and George Bryan, they are described as ‘servauntes to the late Lord Chamberlayne and now servauntes to the Lorde Hunsdon’. It is clear that, when the first Lord Hunsdon died on 22 July 1596, the players had been retained by his son and heir, Sir George Carey. The Lord Chamberlainship passed to Lord Cobham; but he died on 5 March 1597, and on 17 March the post was given to the second Lord Hunsdon. The company, then, was properly known as Lord Hunsdon’s men from 22 July 1596 to 17 March 1597; before and after that period it was the Lord Chamberlain’s men.

To 1596 I assign Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Evidence of the occupation of the Theatre about this time by the company is to be found in Lodge’s allusion to a revival of Hamlet there, for this play is not likely to have been in other hands. It is not an unreasonable conjecture that James Burbadge destined to their use the play-house in the Blackfriars, which he purchased in February, and had converted for ‘publique’ use by November of this year. If so, he and they were disappointed, for a petition of the inhabitants, amongst the signatories to an alleged copy of which Lord Hunsdon himself is somewhat oddly found, led to an intervention of the Privy Council, who forbade plays to be given within the liberty. At this time also the Corporation seem to have succeeded in finally and permanently expelling the players from the City inns which had long been their head-quarters, and Nashe connects this persecution with the loss of ‘their old Lord’, by whom he doubtless means Henry Lord Hunsdon. It is possible that plays were inhibited altogether during the summer of 1596, although no formal order to that effect is preserved, for Hunsdon’s went to Faversham, and Nashe himself was disappointed of ‘an after harvest I expected by writing for the stage and for the presse’.

In the following winter the company played at Court on 26 and 27 December 1596 and on 1 and 6 January and 6 and 8 February 1597. Their payees, for this and for the next two years, were Thomas Pope and John Heminge. In 1597 began the printing of plays written by Shakespeare for this company, with a ‘bad’ quarto of Romeo and Juliet, bearing on its title-page the name of Lord Hunsdon’s men and ‘good’ quartos of Richard II and Richard III, bearing that of the Lord Chamberlain’s. From the text of Richard II was omitted the deposition scene, which did not appear in print until after the death of Elizabeth. The only Shakespearian productions that can be plausibly ascribed to this year are those of the two parts of Henry IV. The presentation of Sir John Oldcastle in the original versions of these seems to have led to a protest, and the character was renamed Sir John Falstaff. It is not improbable that the offence taken was by Lord Chamberlain Cobham, whose ancestress, Joan Lady Cobham, Oldcastle had married. It is impossible to say whether either this scandal or any possible interpretation of disloyalty put upon Richard II contributed to the inhibition of plays on 28 July, of which the main exciting cause was certainly the performance of The Isle of Dogs at the Swan on the Bankside. For the second time since their formation in 1594 the company had to travel. They are traceable at Rye in August, at Dover between 3 and 20 September, at Marlborough, Faversham, and Bath during 1596–7, and at Bristol about 29 September. This inhibition was removed early in October. There is some reason to believe that, when the Chamberlain’s men resumed playing, it was not at the Theatre, as to the renewal of the lease of which the Burbadges were disputing with their ground landlord, but at the Curtain. Marston, in one and the same passage of his Scourge of Villainy, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 September 1598, alludes to the acting of Romeo and Juliet and to ‘Curtaine plaudeties’, while almost simultaneously Edward Guilpin in his Skialetheia, entered on 15 September, speaks of ‘the unfrequented Theater’. The transfer may, however, not have taken place until 1598.

The company played at Court on 26 December 1597 and on 1 and 6 January and 26 February 1598. It is conceivable that one of these plays may have been a revised version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which was printed as ‘newly corrected and augmented’ and ‘as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas’ in 1598. On the other hand, it is also possible that this print may have been intended to replace an earlier ‘bad’ quarto, not now preserved, and if so, the reference to the representation may have been carried on from the earlier title-page. In 1598 were also printed 1 Henry IV, and the anonymous Mucedorus, which may have already belonged to the Chamberlain’s repertory, as it was certainly revised for them about 1610. The Merchant of Venice was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 July, but with a proviso that it must not be printed ‘without lycence first had from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen’. On 7 September 1598 was entered in the Stationers’ Register the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, with its list of Shakespeare’s plays up to date, including the mysterious Love’s Labours Won, which I incline to identify with the Taming of the Shrew. The earliest play not mentioned by Meres is probably Much Ado about Nothing, which may belong to 1598 itself. Another production of this year was Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour, which was still a new play about 20 September, when an Almain in the audience lost 300 crowns. Possibly John Aubrey has this period in mind when he says that Jonson ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure play-house, somewhere in the suburbes, I thinke towardes Shoreditch or Clarkenwell’. Jonson, however, was in prison soon after the production of the play for the manslaughter of Gabriel Spencer on 22 September in Hoxton Fields, and there is no other evidence that he ever acted with the Chamberlain’s men. His own name is not in the list of the original ‘principall Comoedians’ affixed to the text of Every Man In his Humour in the folio of 1616. This is of great value, as being the earliest extant list of the company. The ten names given are:

• Will. Shakespeare.
• Aug. Philips.
• Hen. Condel.
• Will. Slye.
• Will. Kempe.
• Ric. Burbage.
• Joh. Flemings.
• Tho. Pope.
• Chr. Beeston.
• Joh. Duke.

It must not, of course, be assumed, either that the list is in itself quite complete, or that there had been no changes amongst the Chamberlain’s men between 1594 and 1598; but as those named include five out of the six payees for that period, they may perhaps be taken, with the sixth payee, George Bryan, who does not reappear after 1596, and was by 1603 an ordinary groom of the Chamber of the royal Household, as fairly representing the original constitution of the company. And an inference to its origin at once becomes possible, for of these eleven men five (Kempe, Pope, Heminges, Phillips, and Bryan) formed, with Edward Alleyn, the company of Lord Strange’s men to whom Privy Council letters of assistance were granted in 1593, and at least six (Pope, Phillips, Bryan, Burbadge, Duke, and Sly) are to be found in the cast of 2 Seven Deadly Sins as performed by Strange’s or the Admiral’s or the two together about 1590–1. It will be remembered that the Strange’s company of 1593, known as the Earl of Derby’s after 25 September 1593, was apparently formed by a combination of the earlier Strange’s and Admiral’s men somewhere near the time of this performance, if not earlier, and that its composite character never wholly disappeared, Alleyn in particular, who was its leading member, retaining his personal status as an Admiral’s man. It seems clear that in 1594 the combination broke up, that Alleyn became the nucleus of a new Admiral’s company at the Rose, and that the group with whom he had been travelling took fresh service with the Lord Chamberlain. It is not, I think, quite accurate to treat this transaction as a mere continuance of Lord Derby’s men under the style of Lord Chamberlain’s, entailing no reconstruction other than a change of patron following upon Lord Derby’s death on 16 April 1594. On the one hand a Derby’s company continued in existence, and is traceable under the sixth earl from 1594 to 1617. On the other hand, while we do not know what business reconstruction there may have been, a very fundamental change is involved in the replacement of Alleyn as principal actor by Richard Burbadge, who is not at all likely to have played with Strange’s men after the break between the Admiral’s and his father at the Theatre in 1591. Except for Alleyn, all the more important members of the company, as it existed in 1593, seem to have been included in the transfer to Lord Hunsdon. It is, however, little more than conjecture that finds Henry Condell and Christopher Beeston in the ‘Harry’ and ‘Kitt’, or Alexander Cooke, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Gough, who were numbered amongst the King’s men at a later date, in the ‘Saunder’, ‘Nick’, and ‘R. Go.’ of the 2 Seven Deadly Sins plot. Alleyn’s correspondence of 1593 adds Richard Cowley to the list of Lord Strange’s men, and, as we shall find him acting as a payee for the Chamberlain’s men in 1601, he may have been one of them from the beginning. In any case he had joined them by 1598, as the stage-directions of Much Ado about Nothing show that he played Verges to Kempe’s Dogberry.

There is, of course, one conspicuous Chamberlain’s man who is not discoverable either in the Privy Council letter of 1593 or in the 2 Seven Deadly Sins of 1590–1. Even the audacity of Mr. Fleay has not attempted to identify the ‘Will’ of the plot with Will Shakespeare. Some relations, if only as author, Shakespeare must have had with Lord Strange’s men, when they produced 1 Henry VI on 3 March 1592, and Greene’s satire of him as a ‘Shake-scene’ in the same year must indicate that he was an actor as well as an author. He may have stood aside altogether during the period of the provincial tours, and devoted himself to poetry, and perhaps, although this is very conjectural, to travel abroad. Or he may, as I have already suggested, have joined Lord Pembroke’s men (q.v.), whom I suspect to have been an offshoot for provincial purposes of the Strange’s combination, and have passed from them to Lord Sussex’s, ultimately rejoining his old fellows in 1594. The possibility of identifying certain minor members of the Chamberlain’s company is also affected by this somewhat obscure problem of Pembroke’s men. The most obvious of these is John Sincler or Sincklo, who was in the cast of 2 Seven Deadly Sins as played by the Admiral’s or Strange’s about 1590–1, and must have ultimately joined the Chamberlain’s, as his name occurs in a stage-direction to Q1 of 2 Henry IV (1600), and in the induction to The Malcontent (1604). It also occurs in stage-directions to 3 Henry VI and the Taming of The Shrew in the Folio of 1623. These both happen to be plays which passed through the hands of Pembroke’s, and the inference may be that Sincler had also passed through this company. But this is far from being conclusive. It is the revised and not the unrevised texts that yield the name, and although I think it likely, on stylistic grounds, that the revision of 3 Henry VI was done for Pembroke’s (q.v.), it is probable from the reference in Henry V, epil. 12, to the loss of France and the civil wars, ‘which oft our stage hath shown’, that the play was revived by the Chamberlain’s, and it may have been in such a revival that Sincler took part. As to the Shrew, it is impossible to say whether Shakespeare’s work upon it was before or after its transfer to the Chamberlain’s. In any case the Chamberlain’s were playing it in some form on 13 June 1594, so that here again the appearance of Sincler’s name cannot ear-mark him as Pembroke’s. We can now go a step farther. The stage-directions to 3 Henry VI contain not only Sincler’s name, but those of a certain ‘Gabriel’ and a certain ‘Humfrey’, not common Elizabethan names even separately, and certainly suggesting, when found in combination, the Gabriel Spencer and Humphrey Jeffes, who were fellows of the Admiral’s in 1597. Now Spencer, and very likely also Jeffes, had come from Pembroke’s, the short-lived Pembroke’s of 1597 at the Swan. Had they been Pembroke’s men ever since 1593? If so, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the performance which brought their names into the text of 3 Henry VI, and with theirs John Sincler’s, was one by Pembroke’s about that date. The obstacle is that there is no known evidence, in provincial records or elsewhere, for any continuous existence of Pembroke’s between 1593 and 1597. Pending the discovery of any such evidence, it seems better to assume that Sincler, Spencer, and Jeffes were all Chamberlain’s men before 1597, and that it was from a combination of discontented elements in that company and in the Admiral’s that the Pembroke’s of the Swan arose. If so, the rest of the Pembroke’s men not traceable as coming from the Admiral’s, namely Robert Shaw, William Bird alias Borne, and probably Anthony Jeffes, may also have come from the Chamberlain’s; and such an origin might explain the suit with Thomas Pope in which Bird was entangled in 1598. Two other minor actors in the company about 1597 were probably Harvey and Rossill, whose names appear to have got into the text of 1 Henry IV in place of those of Bardolph and Peto, whom they represented. The list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays given by the editors of the First Folio includes Samuel Crosse, of whom nothing more is known except that he was of an early generation. As the list in the Folio appears to be limited to Chamberlain’s and King’s men, excluding for example Alleyn, who certainly acted in Shakespearian plays, e.g. 1 Henry VI, it may be that Crosse was for a short time a member of the company soon after 1594.

It is hardly possible to carry the analysis of origins any further with profit, or to assume that the groups which segregated themselves from the Strange-Admiral’s combination in 1594 bore any close correspondence to the respective contributions of Strange’s and the Admiral’s to that combination in 1589 or 1590. The only name that can be connected with Strange’s men before 1588 is John Symons and neither he nor George Attewell, their payee in 1591, became a Chamberlain’s man. Hypotheses have been framed, mainly in the hope of affiliating Shakespeare to Lord Leicester’s men, who are supposed to have carried him away from Stratford-on-Avon when they visited it in 1586–7, and ultimately to have become Lord Strange’s men. So far as Shakespeare is concerned, the first record of him on the boards is in 1592, and the interval since his hegira from Stratford may have been quite otherwise spent. The proof of continuity between Leicester’s men and Strange’s altogether fails, since the latter made their appearance a decade before the former came to an end. The only member of the Lord Chamberlain’s company of 1594 who can be traced to Leicester’s service was Kempe, and he had left Leicester’s men by the summer of 1586 and was in Denmark. With him were Bryan and Pope, who afterwards spent a year in Germany, and may have joined either Strange’s or the Admiral’s on their return. The only other Chamberlain’s man, who can be assigned to an earlier company than Strange’s, is Heminges, who was probably at some time a Queen’s man.

The Chamberlain’s men evidently started business in 1594 with something of a repertory derived by inheritance or purchase from antecedent companies. Our knowledge of this is mainly confined to plays with which Shakespeare was concerned as author or reviser. They certainly did not get all the plays produced by Strange’s men at the Rose during 1592 and 1593. Some of these were Henslowe’s property; others passed with Alleyn to the Admiral’s men. But they got The Jealous Comedy, if I am right in identifying this with The Comedy of Errors. They probably got 1 Henry VI, for although the appearance of a Shakespearian play in the 1623 Folio is not perhaps, in view of the composition of the 1647 ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’ Folio, absolute proof that the King’s men possessed the copy, their stage had often shown both the loss of France and the bleeding of England before Henry V was produced in 1599. And they got Titus and Vespasian, as revised, after passing through the hands of Pembroke’s men, for production by Sussex’s under the title of Titus Andronicus. Three other of Pembroke’s men’s plays came to them, The Taming of A Shrew and 2 and 3 Henry VI, and probably Hamlet belongs to the same group. It is of course only a guess of mine that these also went with Shakespeare to Sussex’s men and came thence with him. Titus Andronicus and A Shrew, indeed, became available in print during 1594, but not Hamlet, and not Henry VI, except in the obsolete version called The Contention of York and Lancaster. I think Shakespeare must also have brought Richard III and possibly an early version of Henry VIII, and that one or other of these had already been played by Sussex’s as Buckingham. Of the provenance of Hester and Ahasuerus nothing can be said. It is not necessary to suppose that the Chamberlain’s acquired any plays from the stock of the Queen’s men. It is true that Shakespeare subsequently made some use of The Troublesome Reign of King John, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and King Leire, but these were all in print before he needed them. Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, published in 1654 as a play the King’s men at the Blackfriars is believed by some to be an early play, possibly by Peele, and if so, may belong to the repertory of 1594.

I now return to the chronicle of the Chamberlain’s men from 1598 onwards. The restriction of the London companies by the action of the Privy Council to two had left them in direct rivalry with the Admiral’s at the Rose. Disputes broke out. Henslowe made a loan to William Bird of the Admiral’s on 30 August 1598 to follow a ‘sewt agenste Thomas Poope’, and another to Thomas Downton on 30 January 1599, ‘to descarge Thomas Dickers [Dekker] from the areaste of my lord chamberlens men’. The company played at Court on 26 December 1598 and 1 January and 20 February 1599. During this winter they undertook the enterprise of finding a new head-quarters on the Bankside. The disputes between landlord and tenants as to the lease of the Theatre had reached a crisis, and in December or January the Burbadges removed the timber of the house across the Thames, to serve as material for the construction of the Globe. The lease of the new site was signed on 21 February 1599. Under it one moiety of the interest was retained by Richard Burbadge and his brother Cuthbert, who was not himself an actor; the other was assigned to Shakespeare, Pope, Phillips, Heminges, and Kempe. Shortly afterwards Kempe made over his share to the other four. Presumably he now quitted the company, having first, as a stage-direction shows, played Peter in the revised version of Romeo and Juliet printed in 1599. His place was probably taken by Robert Armin, formerly of Lord Chandos’s men, who describes himself in two successive issues of his Fool upon Fool (1600 and 1605), first as ‘clonnico del Curtanio’, and then as ‘clonnico del Mondo’, and who had therefore probably joined the Chamberlain’s men before their actual transfer to the Globe. As the Theatre had to be built, this is not likely to have taken place until the autumn of 1599, and it must therefore remain doubtful which house was the ‘wooden O’ of Henry V, produced during the absence of Essex in Ireland between 27 March and 28 September 1599. It was, however, certainly at the Globe that Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar on 21 September. ‘This fair-filled Globe’, too, is named in the epilogue to Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, which is ascribed in the Folio of 1606 to 1599, although if this be correct, an apparent allusion to Kempe’s journey to Norwich in the spring of 1600 must, on the assumption that it is a real allusion, be an interpolation. The ‘principall Comoedians’ in this play were Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips, Condell, Sly, and Pope. Four of the 1598 names are missing. Shakespeare evidently stood aside. Kempe had gone. Beeston and Duke may have gone also, although it is only a conjecture of Mr. Fleay’s that they and Kempe now seceded to Pembroke’s men at the Rose, and they are not definitely heard of again until they are found with Worcester’s men in August 1602. Mr. Fleay thinks that another Worcester’s man, Robert Pallant, had accompanied them; but, although Pallant was with Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590, there is no evidence that he was ever a Chamberlain’s man. Conceivably he may have joined the King’s men about 1619, but that is another matter. About November 1599 was published A Warning for Fair Women, which belonged to the company.

The Court plays called for from the Chamberlain’s men during the following winter were on 26 December 1599 and on 6 January and 3 February 1600. Heminges was sole payee, and occupied the same position in every subsequent year, up to and beyond 1616, except in 1600–1, when Richard Cowley was associated with him, and for a special payment made to Burbadge in 1604. On 6 March 1600 the company had an opportunity of rendering direct service to their patron Lord Hunsdon, by playing Henry IV, still oddly called Sir John Oldcastle, after a dinner which he gave to the Flemish ambassador, Ludovic Verreyken, presumably at his house in the Blackfriars. To 1600 I assign Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, not improbably prepared for performance, with the aid of the boys of Windsor Chapel, at the Garter Feast on 23 April, and also As You Like It. This was a year of some activity among the publishers and, as in 1598, the company had to take steps to protect their interests. In May John Roberts was prevented from printing their moral of Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose, until he could bring proper authority, and in August a note was made in the Stationers’ Register to stay the printing of As You Like It, Henry V, and Much Ado about Nothing. The last two of these, but not the first, were in fact printed during the year, and so were A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 2 Henry IV, Every Man Out of his Humour, and An Alarum for London, all plays belonging to the company.

The Chamberlain’s men played at Court on 26 December 1600 and on 6 January and 24 February 1601. Shortly before this last performance, they had been involved in one of the tragedies of history. This was the abortive coup d’état of 8 February 1601 in which the Earl of Essex, smarting under the disgrace which his failure in Ireland had brought upon him, attempted to secure his position and get rid of Sir Walter Raleigh and other enemies by taking forcible possession of the person of Elizabeth and the palace of Whitehall. Some of his followers seem to have conceived the idea of predisposing the mind of the populace to their cause by a dramatic representation of the dangers of evil counsellors and the possible remedy of a deposition, as illustrated in the case of Elizabeth’s predecessor Richard II, in whom for some obscure reason the political thought of the time was fond of finding an analogue to the Queen. Saturday, 7 February, the day before the outbreak, was chosen for the performance, and the players applied to were the Chamberlain’s. A deposition by Augustine Phillips, taken before Chief Justice Popham and Justice Fenner during the subsequent inquiries, records the transaction.

‘The Examination of Augustine Phillips, servant unto the L. Chamberlain and one of his players, taken the xviijth of February, 1600, upon his oath.

‘He saith that on Friday last was sennight or Thursday Sir Charles Percy Sir Josceline Percy and the Lord Mounteagle with some three more spoke to some of the players in the presence of this Examinate to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next, promising to get them xls. more than their ordinary to play it. Where this Examinate and his fellows were determined to have played some other play, holding that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use that they should have small or no company at it. But at their request this Examinate and his fellows were content to play it the Saturday and had their xls. more than their ordinary for it, and so played it accordingly.’

The fact that Phillips speaks of the play as old and long out of use, which becomes in the narrative of Camden ‘exoleta tragoedia’, hardly justifies the suggestion that it was something earlier than Shakespeare’s Richard II. This, if produced in 1596, may well have been off the boards by 1601.

A good deal of misunderstanding has gathered round the connexion of the Chamberlain’s men with this affair. Mr. Fleay is responsible for the theory that they fell into disgrace, had to travel, and were excluded from the Court festivities of the following Christmas. As a matter of fact they played four times during that winter. This Mr. Fleay did not know, as he only had before him Cunningham’s incomplete extracts from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber. But he ought to have noticed that their last performance for 1600–1 was itself some days later than the examination of Augustine Phillips. Nor is any evidence that the company travelled in 1601 forthcoming from the provincial archives. Mr. Fleay’s identification of them with Laurence Fletcher’s Scottish company of that year merely rests upon the presence of Fletcher’s name in the patent of 1603, and this will not bear the strain of the argument. Thus remains, however, the possibly autobiographical passage in Hamlet, ii. 2. 346, which assigns an ‘inhibition by the means of the late innovation’ as a cause of the travelling of players to Elsinore. The date of Hamlet may well be 1601, since the same passage refers to the theatrical competition set up by the establishment of boy companies at St. Paul’s in 1599 and at the Chapel Royal in 1600. But it must be borne in mind that this competition is the only reason given for the travelling in the 1603 edition of the play. In the 1604 edition the only reason is the inhibition, while in the text of the 1623 Folio both reasons stand somewhat inconsistently side by side. No doubt the text of 1603 is an imperfect piratical reprint. On the other hand that of 1604 almost certainly represents a revised version of the play, and the ‘inhibition’ cited, if it had an historical existence at all, may be that of 1603, during which certainly the company travelled. I suppose that ‘innovation’ might mean the accession of a new sovereign, although it does not seem a very obvious term. But then it does not seem a very obvious term for a seditious rising either. On the whole, there is no reason to suppose that any serious blame was attached to the Chamberlain’s men for lending themselves to Sir Gilly Meyrick’s intrigue. It is certainly absurd to suggest, as has been suggested, that the ‘adorned creature’, whose ingratitude instigated the comparison between Elizabeth and Richard, was not Essex but Shakespeare. At the same time the company may, of course, have been told to leave London for a few weeks. At some time, as the 1603 title-page tells us, they took Hamlet both to Oxford and to Cambridge, and it is at least tempting to find a reminiscence of the Cambridge visit in the scene from 2 Return from Parnassus cited below. It is possible that Phillips and his fellows, and even their relation to the Essex crisis itself, may be glanced at in the satirical picture of the Roman actors in Jonson’s Poetaster, produced by the Chapel boys in the course of 1601. Certainly the play betrays its author’s knowledge of a counter-attack which the Chamberlain’s men were already preparing for him in Dekker’s Satiromastix. This play, in which Dekker may have had some help from Marston, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 11 November 1601, and had probably been on the stage not long before. It is noteworthy that it was produced by the Paul’s boys, as well as by the Chamberlain’s men. It was actually published in 1602. Another play which may reasonably be assigned to 1601 is Twelfth Night.

In the following winter the company played at Court on 26 and 27 December 1601 and on 1 January and 14 February 1602. They also gave Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple feast on 2 February; and I have very little doubt that it was they who furnished the play at which Elizabeth and her maids of honour were present in the Blackfriars after dining with Lord Hunsdon on 31 December. The alleged production of Othello before the Queen when Sir Thomas Egerton entertained her at Harefield from 31 July to 2 August 1602 rests on a forgery by Collier. It is possible that, as Professor Wallace conjectures, the play was on the capture of Stuhl-Weissenburg, seen by the Duke of Stettin on 13 September 1602, may have been a Globe production. Sir Thomas Cromwell, a play of unknown authorship belonging to the company, was published in the course of 1602, with an ascription on the title-page to W. S., and to this year I assign Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida. If so, the portrait of Ajax in the latter play cannot very well have been the ‘purge’ administered by Shakespeare to Jonson, to which reference is made in 2 Return from Parnassus. This is a Cambridge Christmas piece, probably of 1601–2, and in it Burbadge and Kempe are introduced as in search of scholars to write for them. Perhaps the Cambridge author did not know that Kempe had ceased to be the ‘fellow’ of Burbadge and Shakespeare in 1599, and was at the time playing with Worcester’s men at the Rose. It is, however, just possible that after returning from his continental tour and before throwing in his lot with Worcester’s, he may have rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while, and may have accompanied them to Cambridge, if they did travel in 1601.

The last performances of the company before Elizabeth took place on 26 December 1602 and 2 February 1603, and on the following 24 March the Queen died. Playing immediately ceased in London. Strictly speaking, the Chamberlain’s men must have again become Lord Hunsdon’s men for a month or so, for the Household appointments naturally lapsed with the death of the sovereign, and Hunsdon, being in failing health, was relieved of his duties on 6 April. On 9 September he died. The company, however, had already passed under royal patronage.

A contemporary panegyrist records the graciousness of James in ‘taking to him the late Lord Chamberlaines servants, now the Kings acters’. The appointment was by letters patent dated 19 May 1603, of which the text follows.

Iames by the grace of god &c. To all Iustices, Maiors, Sheriffes, Constables, hedborowes, and other our Officers and louinge Subiectes greetinge. Knowe yee that Wee of our speciall grace, certeine knowledge, & mere motion haue licenced and aucthorized and by theise presentes doe licence and aucthorize theise our Servauntes Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustyne Phillippes, Iohn Heninges, Henrie Condell, William Sly, Robert Armyn, Richard Cowly, and the rest of theire Assosiates freely to vse and exercise the Arte and faculty of playinge Comedies, Tragedies, histories, Enterludes, moralls, pastoralls, Stage-plaies, and Suche others like as theie haue alreadie studied or hereafter shall vse or studie, aswell for the recreation of our lovinge Subjectes, as for our Solace and pleasure when wee shall thincke good to see them, duringe our pleasure. And the said Commedies, tragedies, histories, Enterludes, Morralles, Pastoralls, Stageplayes, and suche like to shewe and exercise publiquely to theire best Commoditie, when the infection of the plague shall decrease, aswell within theire nowe vsual howse called the Globe within our County of Surrey, as alsoe within anie towne halls or Moute halls or other conveniente places within the liberties and freedome of anie other Cittie, vniversitie, towne, or Boroughe whatsoever within our said Realmes and domynions. Willinge and Commaundinge you and everie of you, as you tender our pleasure, not onelie to permitt and suffer them herein without anie your lettes hindrances or molestacions during our said pleasure, but alsoe to be aidinge and assistinge to them, yf anie wronge be to them offered, And to allowe them such former Curtesies as hath bene given to men of theire place and quallitie, and alsoe what further favour you shall shewe to theise our Servauntes for our sake wee shall take kindlie at your handes. In wytnesse whereof &c. witnesse our selfe at Westminster the nyntenth day of May

per breve de priuato sigillo &c.

Of the nine players named, eight are recognizable as the principal members of the Lord Chamberlain’s company as it stood at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Only Thomas Pope is not included. He was near his end. He made his will on 22 July 1603, and it was proved on 13 February 1604. In it he names none of his fellows, unless Robert Gough, who has a legacy, was already of the company; his interest in the house of the Globe passed to legatees and was thus alienated from the company. Laurence Fletcher, on the other hand, whose name heads the list in the patent, is not discernible as a Chamberlain’s man. His inclusion becomes readily intelligible, when it is recalled that he had headed English actors on tour in Scotland, and had already been marked by the personal favour of James. Whether he ever joined the company in the full sense, that is to say, the association of actors as distinct from the body of royal servants, seems to me very doubtful. His name is not in the Sejanus list, or in the Folio list of Shakespearian players, and that he was described as a ‘fellow’ by Phillips in 1605 hardly takes the matter further. He may have held a relation to the King’s men analogous to that of Martin Slater to Queen Anne’s men. After 1605 nothing is heard of him.

The terms of the patent imply that it was issued during a suspension of playing through plague. Probably this had followed hard upon the suspension at Elizabeth’s death. The company travelled, being found at Bath, Coventry, and Shrewsbury in the course of 1602–3. A misplaced Ipswich entry of 30 May 1602 may belong to 1603. The visits to Oxford and Cambridge referred to on the title-page of the 1603 edition of Hamlet must also have taken place in this year, if they did not take place in 1601. On 2 December 1603 the company were summoned from Mortlake to perform before the King at Lord Pembroke’s house of Wilton.

During the winter of 1603–4 the company gave eight more plays at Court, a larger number than Elizabeth had ever called for. They took place on 26, 27, 28, and 30 December 1603 and on 1 January and 2 and 19 February 1604. On New Year’s Day there were two performances, one before James, the other before Prince Henry. The plague had not yet subsided by 8 February, and James gave his men £30 as a ‘free gifte’ for their ‘mayntenaunce and releife’ till it should ‘please God to settle the cittie in a more perfecte health’. One of the plays of this winter was The Fair Maid of Bristow. Another, produced before the end of 1603, was probably Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. For alleged popery and treason in this play Jonson was haled before the Privy Council by the Earl of Northampton, but there is nothing to show that the players were implicated. The principal actors in Sejanus were Burbadge, Shakespeare, Phillips, Heminges, Sly, Condell, John Lowin, and Alexander Cooke. This is Shakespeare’s last appearance in the cast of any play. He may have ceased to act, while remaining a member of the company and its poet. The names of Lowin and Cooke are new. Lowin had been with Worcester’s men in 1602–3. Cooke had probably begun his connexion with the company as an apprentice to Heminges. The identification of him with the ‘Sander’ of Strange’s men in 1590 is more than hazardous. The Induction to Marston’s Malcontent, published in 1604, records the names of Burbadge, who played Malevole, Condell, Sly, Lowin, Sincler, and a Tire-man. Sincler was probably still only a hired man. Nothing further is heard of him. This Induction seems to have been written by John Webster to introduce the presentation by the King’s men of The Malcontent, which was really a Chapel play. The transaction is thus explained:

Sly. I wonder you would play it, another company having interest in it?

Condell. Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimo-sexto with them? They taught us a name for our play; we call it One for Another.

The play of Jeronimo, which the Chapel are here accused of taking, cannot be The Spanish Tragedy, which was an Admiral’s play, and is not very likely to have been the ‘comedy of Jeronimo’ which Strange’s men had in 1592, and which was evidently related to The Spanish Tragedy and may be expected to have remained with it. It might be the extant First Part of Jeronimo, written perhaps for the Chamberlain’s men about 1601–2, when Jonson was revising The Spanish Tragedy for the Admiral’s. A reference in T. M.’s Black Book shows that The Merry Devil of Edmonton, which belonged to the company, was already on the stage by 1604.

The coronation procession of James, deferred on account of the plague, went through London on 15 March 1604, and the Great Wardrobe furnished each of the King’s players with four and a half yards of red cloth. The same nine men are specified in the warrant as in the patent of 1603, and their names stand next those of various officers of the Chamber. They did not, however, actually walk in the procession. From 9 to 27 August 1604, they were called upon in their official capacity as Grooms of the Chamber to form part of the retinue assigned to attend at Somerset House upon Juan Fernandez de Velasco, Duke of Frias and Constable of Castile, who was in England as Ambassador Extraordinary for the negotiation of a peace with Spain. The descriptions of his visit, which have been preserved, do not show that any plays were given before him.

The company were at Oxford between 7 May and 16 June 1604. About 18 December they had got into trouble through the production of a tragedy on Gowry, always a delicate subject with James. But this did not interfere with a long series of no less than eleven performances which they gave at Court between 1 November 1604 and 12 February 1605, and of which the Revels Accounts fortunately preserve the names. The series included one play, The Spanish Maze, of which nothing is known; two by Ben Jonson, Every Man In his Humour and Every Man Out of his Humour; and seven by Shakespeare, Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice, which was given twice. Othello and Measure for Measure had probably been produced for the first time during 1604, but the rest of the list suggests that opportunity was being taken to revive a number of Elizabethan plays unknown to the new sovereigns. This is borne out by the terms of a letter from Sir Walter Cope to Lord Southampton with regard to the performance of Love’s Labour ’s Lost.

Between 4 May 1605, when he made his will, and 13 May, when it was proved, died Augustine Phillips. Unlike Pope, he was full of kindly remembrances towards the King’s men. He appointed Heminges, Burbadge, and Sly overseers of the will. He left legacies to his ‘fellows’ Shakespeare, Condell, Fletcher, Armin, Cowley, Cooke, and Nicholas Tooley; to the hired men of the company; to his ‘servant’ Christopher Beeston; to his apprentice James Sands, and to his late apprentice Samuel Gilburne. We have here practically a full list of the company. The name of Nicholas Tooley is new, unless indeed he was the ‘Nick’ of Strange’s men in 1592. He speaks of Richard Burbadge in his will as his ‘master’ and may have been his apprentice. The use of the term ‘fellow’ suggests that Tooley and Cooke were now sharers in the company. On the other hand Lowin, who is not named among the ‘fellows’, may still have been only a hired man. Beeston’s legacy is doubtless in memory of former service as hired man or apprentice; he was in 1605 and for long after with the Queen’s men. Samuel Gilburne is recorded as a Shakespearian actor in the 1623 Folio, but practically nothing is known of him or of James Sands. The exact legal disposal of the interest held by Phillips in the Globe subsequently became matter of controversy, but in effect it remained from 1605 to 1613 with his widow and her second husband, and was thus alienated from the company.

On some date before Michaelmas in 1605 the King’s men visited Barnstaple, and on 9 October they were at Oxford. This year saw the publication of The Fair Maid of Bristow and of The London Prodigal, which was assigned on its title-page to Shakespeare. To it I also assign Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear.

Ten Court plays were given in the winter of 1605–6, but the dates are not recorded. Three more were given in the summer of 1606 during the visit of the King of Denmark to James, which lasted from 7 July to 11 August, and then the company seem to have gone on tour. They were at Oxford between 28 and 31 July, at Leicester in August, at Dover between 6 and 24 September, at Saffron Walden and Maidstone during 1605–6, and at Marlborough in 1606. To this year I assign Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, and to the earlier part of it Ben Jonson’s Volpone, in which the principal actors were Burbadge, Condell, Sly, Heminges, Lowin, and Cooke.

Nine Court plays were given during the winter of 1606–7, on 26 and 29 December 1606, and on 4, 6, and 8 January and 2, 5, 15, and 27 February 1607. The entry in the Stationers’ Register for King Lear and the title-page of Barnes’ The Devil’s Charter, both dated in 1607, show these to have been the plays selected for 26 December and 2 February respectively. In the same year were also published Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Wilkins’ The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, and to it I assign the production of Timon of Athens. On 16 July 1607 Heminges lent his boy John Rice to appear as an angel of gladness with a taper of frankincense, and deliver an eighteen-verse speech by Ben Jonson as part of the entertainment of James by the Merchant Taylors at their hall. During the summer the company travelled to Barnstaple, to Dunwich, to Oxford, where they were on 7 September, and possibly to Cambridge. Volpone had probably been given in both Universities before its publication about February 1607 or 1608.

During the winter of 1607–8 the company gave thirteen Court plays, on 26, 27, and 28 December 1606, and on 2, 6, 7, 9, 17, and 26 January, and 2 and 7 February 1607. On each of the nights of 6 and 17 January there were two plays. In 1608 was published A Yorkshire Tragedy, with Shakespeare’s name on the title-page, and to it I assign the production of Pericles, in which Shakespeare probably had Wilkins for a collaborator. About May the company had to find their share of the heavy fine necessary to buy off the inhibition due to the performance of Chapman’s Duke of Byron by the Queen’s Revels. The year was in many ways an eventful one for the King’s men. They had, I suspect, to face a growing detachment of Shakespeare from London and the theatre; and the loss was perhaps partly supplied by the establishment of relations with Beaumont and Fletcher, whose earliest play for the company, Philaster, may be of any date from 1608 to 1610. About 16 August died William Sly, leaving his interest in the Globe to his son Robert and legacies to Cuthbert Burbadge and James Sands. Both he and Henry Condell had been admitted to an interest at some date subsequent to November 1606, the moiety of the lease not retained by the Burbadges having been redistributed into sixths to allow of this. The deserts of Pope, Phillips, and Sly are all commemorated in the Apology of Thomas Heywood, which, though not published until 1612, was probably written in 1608. Sly’s death complicated an important transaction in which the King’s men were engaged. This was the acquisition of the Blackfriars, of which the freehold already belonged to the Burbadges, but which had been leased since 1600 to Henry Evans and occupied by the Children of the Revels. About July 1608 Evans was prepared to surrender his lease, and the Burbadges decided to take the opportunity of providing the King’s men with a second house on the north side of the Thames, suitable for a winter head-quarters. As in the case of the Globe, they shared their interest as housekeepers with some of the leading members of the company. New leases were executed on 9 August 1608, by which the house was divided between a syndicate of seven, of whom five were Richard Burbadge, Shakespeare, Heminges, Condell, and Sly, while the other two, Cuthbert Burbadge and Thomas Evans, were not King’s men. When Sly’s death intervened, his executrix surrendered his interest and the number of the syndicate was reduced to six. Probably, however, the King’s men did not enter upon the actual occupation of the Blackfriars until the autumn of the following year. In fact the plague kept the London theatres closed from July 1608 to December 1609. The King’s men were at Coventry on 29 October 1608 and at Marlborough in the course of 1607–8. The plague did not prevent them from appearing at Court during the winter of 1608–9, and they gave twelve plays on unspecified dates. But their difficulties are testified to by a special reward ‘for their private practise in the time of infeccion’, which had rendered their Christmas service possible.

The plague led to an early provincial tour. The company were at Ipswich on 9 May, at Hythe on 16 May, and at New Romney on 17 May 1609. Their winter season was again interfered with, and a further grant was made in respect of six weeks of private practice. Amongst the plays so practised may, I think, have been Cymbeline. They gave thirteen plays at Court on unspecified dates during the holidays of 1609–10. One of these may have been Mucedorus, the edition of which with the imprint 1610 represents a revised version performed at Court on the previous Shrove Sunday. This might be either 18 February 1610 or 3 February 1611. The epilogue contains an apology for some recent indiscretion of the company in a play of which no more is known, but which might conceivably be Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk, since this certainly brought its players into some disgrace. By April the company were at the Globe, playing Macbeth on 20 April, Cymbeline probably shortly before, and Othello on 30 April. To this year I assign The Winter’s Tale and Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy. It also saw the production of Jonson’s Alchemist, with a cast including Burbadge, Lowin, Condell, Cooke, Armin, Heminges, William Ostler, John Underwood, Tooley, and William Ecclestone. This is the last mention of Armin in connexion with the King’s men, but it is sufficient to show that the production of his Two Maids of Moreclack by the King’s Revels about 1608 did not involve any breach with his old company. Of Ecclestone’s origin nothing is known. Ostler and Underwood came from the Queen’s Revels, probably when the Blackfriars was taken over in 1609. In fact an account of the transaction given by the Burbadges in 1635 suggests that the desire to acquire these boys was its fundamental motive. They say:

‘In processe of time, the boyes growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, and were taken to strengthen the King’s service; and the more to strengthen the service, the boyes dayly wearing out, it was considered that house would bee as fitt for ourselves, and soe purchased the lease remaining from Evans with our money, and placed men players, which were Heminges, Condall, Shakspeare, &c.’

This narrative seems, however, to have antedated matters as regards Field. Or, if he did come to the King’s men in 1609, he almost immediately returned to the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars, joining the King’s again about 1616.

About 8 May 1610 some superfluous apparel of the company was sold by Heminges on their behalf to the Duke of York’s men (q.v.). On 31 May Burbadge and Rice were employed by the City to make speeches on fish-back at the civic pageant of welcome to Prince Henry. The autumn travelling took the company to Dover between 6 July and 4 August 1610, to Oxford in August, and to Shrewsbury and Stafford in 1609–10. During the following winter they gave fifteen Court plays on unspecified days. They were playing a piece on the story of Richard II, not now extant, at the Globe on 30 April 1611, and A Winter’s Tale on 15 May. During 1611 Jonson’s Catiline was produced, with a cast similar to that of The Alchemist, except that Armin was replaced by Richard Robinson, whose earlier history is unknown. Robinson, playing a female part, and Robert Gough also appear in the stage directions of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, licensed for the stage by Sir George Buck on 31 October 1611. Gough was probably one of Strange’s men in 1592. He appears in the wills of Pope in 1603 and of Phillips, who was his brother-in-law, in 1605, but with no indication that he belonged to the King’s men. Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King was also licensed by Buck in 1611, and to this year I assign Shakespeare’s Tempest. On 25 August 1611 the interest in the Blackfriars originally intended for Sly was assigned to Ostler. Ecclestone, on the other hand, later in the year than the production of Catiline, but before 29 August, left the company for the Lady Elizabeth’s men.

The only provincial visit by the King’s men recorded in 1610–11 was to Shrewsbury. They gave twenty-two plays at Court during a rather prolonged winter season extending from 31 October 1611 to 26 April 1612. Two of these, on 12 and 13 January, were joint performances with the Queen’s men, and the plays used, Heywood’s Silver Age and Rape of Lucrece, were from the repertory of the latter. The King’s men also gave The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale, A King and No King, Tourneur’s The Nobleman, and The Twins’ Tragedy. On 20 February 1612 the actors’ moiety of the Globe was again redistributed, into sevenths, so as to allow of the admission as a housekeeper of Ostler, who had married a daughter of Heminges. From the statement of the interests held by the parties to this transaction, it is to be inferred that Heminges and Condell had between them bought out since 1608 the representatives of Sly. On 21 April 1612 the company was at New Romney and at some date during 1611–12 at Winchester. Heminges received a payment for services to the Lord Mayor’s pageant of this year, which was Dekker’s Troja Nova Triumphans.

The actor-list attached to The Captain in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1679 probably belongs to the original production of the play between 1609 and 1612. It names Burbadge, Condell, Cooke, and Ostler. It was one of the plays selected for the Court season of 1612–13, during which, on 14 February, took place the wedding of the Elector Palatine Frederick and the Princess Elizabeth, and which was therefore singularly rich in plays, notwithstanding the interruption of the festivities due to the death of Prince Henry on 7 November 1612. Heminges lent a boy for Chapman’s mask on 15 February. The twenty plays given this winter by the King’s men, the exact dates of which are not upon record, were Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (performed twice), The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar, Othello, and 1 and 2 Henry IV, Jonson’s Alchemist, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (also performed twice), The Maid’s Tragedy, A King and No King, The Captain and the lost play of Cardenio, Tourneur’s Nobleman, and four plays of unknown authorship, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Knot of Fools, The Twins’ Tragedy, and A Bad Beginning Makes a Good Ending. On 8 June there was a special performance of Cardenio for the Savoyan ambassador. Some unknown cause seems to have brought Shakespeare back in 1613 to the assistance of his fellows, and he collaborated with Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen and in Henry VIII or All is True, possibly a revision of the Buckingham which formed part of the repertory of Sussex’s men in 1594. During a performance of Henry VIII, on 29 June 1613, the Globe was burnt to the ground. Some contemporary verses mention Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell as present on this occasion. A levy was called for from the housekeepers to meet the cost of rebuilding, and owing to the inability of the representatives of Augustine Phillips to meet the call upon them, Heminges was enabled to recover one of the alienated interests, which he divided with Condell.

The company was at Oxford before November in 1613, and also visited Shrewsbury, Stafford, and Folkestone during 1612–13. They played sixteen times at Court in the winter of 1613–14, on 1, 4, 5, 15, and 16 November and 27 December 1613, and on 1, 4, and 10 January, 2, 4, 8, 10, and 18 February and 6 and 8 March 1614. The rebuilding of the Globe was complete by 30 June 1614, and in the course of 1613–14 the company visited Coventry. Cooke died in February 1614, being then a sharer. Ostler died on 16 December, and his interests in the Globe and Blackfriars became matter of dispute between his widow and her father, John Heminges. The ascertained dates of Ostler’s career render it possible to assign to 1609–14, the period of his connexion with the King’s men, three plays in which he took part. These are Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, at the first production of which, if the actor-list of the 1623 edition is rightly interpreted, the parts of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and Antonio were played respectively by Burbadge, Condell, and Ostler, Fletcher’s Valentinian, played by Burbadge, Condell, Lowin, Ostler, and Underwood, and his Bonduca, played by Burbadge, Condell, Lowin, Ostler, Underwood, Tooley, Ecclestone, and Robinson. Bonduca must be either earlier than Ecclestone’s departure for the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1611, or after he quitted that company and presumably rejoined the King’s in 1613.

The King’s men gave eight plays at Court on unspecified days during the winter of 1614–15. On 29 March 1615 they were in trouble with other companies for playing in Lent, and Heminges and Burbadge appeared on their behalf before the Privy Council. In April 1615 they were at Nottingham. They gave fourteen plays at Court between 1 November 1615 and 1 April 1616, and again the precise dates are not specified. They also appeared before Anne at Somerset House on 21 December 1615.

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, and with this event I must close my detailed chronicle of the fortunes of the company. A new patent was issued to them on 27 March 1619, probably to secure their right to perform in the Blackfriars, which was being challenged by the action of the City. Since 1603 Shakespeare, Phillips, Sly, Cowley, Armin, and Fletcher have dropped out of the list, and are replaced by Lowin, Underwood, Tooley, Ecclestone, Gough, and Robinson, together with Nathan Field, Robert Benfield, and John Shank, who now appear for the first time as members of the company. Benfield and Field are last traceable with the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1613 and 1615 respectively, Shank with the Palsgrave’s men in 1613. The only names common to both patents are those of Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell. But in fact Burbadge died on 13 March 1619, while the patent was going through its stages, and his place was almost immediately taken by Joseph Taylor, from Prince Charles’s men. About the same time Field left the company. Heminges, described as ‘stuttering’ in 1613, cannot be shown to have acted since the Catiline of 1611. He had probably devoted himself to the business management of the company, in which he always appears prominent. Condell also seems to have given up acting about 1619, and during the rest of the history of the company up to its extinction in 1642, its mainstays were Lowin and Taylor, who became depositaries of the tradition of the great Shakespearian parts. John Downes, who was prompter to the Duke of York’s men after the Restoration, relates how, when Betterton played Hamlet, ‘Sir William [Davenant] (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryers Company Act it, who being instructed by the Author Mr. Shakespear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it’; and how Davenant was similarly able to act as Betterton’s tutor for Henry the Eighth, for he ‘had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself’. When Heminges and Condell came to print Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, they prefixed ‘the names of the principall Actors in all these playes’ as follows: ‘William Shakespeare, Richard Burbadge, John Hemmings, Augustine Phillips, William Kempt, Thomas Poope, George Bryan, Henry Condell, William Slye, Richard Cowly, John Lowine, Samuell Crosse, Alexander Cooke, Samuel Gilburne, Robert Armin, William Ostler, Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Robert Goughe, Richard Robinson, John Shancke, John Rice.’ The order is a little puzzling. The first ten entries may be those of the original members of the Chamberlain’s company in 1594; and if so, their order does not matter. But it is difficult to believe that the other sixteen can represent either the order in which the men began to play for the company, or the order in which they became sharers. Of course, there may have been comings and goings known to Heminges and Condell, but not now traceable. Thus Field and even Taylor may have come for a short while and gone again before 1611. But it seems impossible that Tooley, who was ‘fellow’ to Phillips in 1605, could really have been junior to the recruits from the Queen’s Revels in 1609. On the whole, one must suppose that, if Heminges and Condell aimed at an exact chronology, their memory occasionally failed them. The omission from the Folio of Duke, Beeston, Sincler, and Sands may indicate that the list is confined to sharers. It is probable that Fletcher, who is also omitted, was not a sharer and did not act in any Shakespearian play.