III. THE COMPANIES (part 2 of 2)

III. THE COMPANIES (part 2 of 2)

The England of Elizabeth and James was a lender rather than a borrower of players. No records have been disinterred of French actors in this country between 1495 and 1629;[715] and although there are a few of Italian actors, their visits seem to have been confined to a single brief period.[716] The head-quarters of Italian comedy during the middle of the sixteenth century was at the Court of Mantua, and when Lord Buckhurst went as ambassador to congratulate Charles IX of France on his wedding, it was by Louis Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers and brother of the Duke of Mantua, that he was entertained on 4 March 1571 ‘with a comedie of Italians that for the good mirth and handling thereof deserved singular comendacion’.[717] In the following year the Earl of Lincoln was at Paris from 8 to 22 June in order to conclude a treaty, and letters relate how he saw at the Louvre ‘an Italian playe, and dyvers vauters and leapers of dyvers sortes verie excellent’, and how later, when he visited the King at the Chateau de Madrid, ‘he had some pastyme showed him by Italian players, which I was at with hym’.[718] It may perhaps have been encouragement from one or both of these nobles, which led an Italian company not long afterwards to make its way across the Channel. The first notice of it is at Nottingham in September 1573, when a reward was ‘gevin to the Italyans for serteyne pastymes that they shewed before Maister Meare and his brethren’.[719] In 1574 the Revels Accounts include expenditure ‘for the Italyan players that ffollowed the progresse and made pastyme fyrst at Wynsor and afterwardes at Reading’. Elizabeth was at Windsor on 11 and 12 July; on 15 July she removed to Reading and remained there to 22 July. At Windsor the Italians used ‘iij devells cotes and heades & one olde mannes fries cote’; at Reading, where they performed on 15 July, the provisions included staves, hooks, and lambskins for shepherds, arrows for nymphs, a scythe for Saturn, and ‘horstayles for the wylde mannes garment’. Professor Feuillerat appears to suggest that they may have been playing Tasso’s Aminta, produced at Ferrara on 31 July 1573. But there were other pastorals.[720] The Italians are probably the comedians commended to the Lord Mayor on 22 July, and in November Thomas Norton calls special attention to ‘the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tomblinge of the Italian weomen’. How long this company remained in England is unknown. There was an Italian acrobat at the Kenilworth festivities on 14 July 1575, but the description suggests that he was a solitary performer.[721] The Treasurer of the Chamber paid ‘Alfruso Ferrabolle and the rest of the Italian players’ for a play at Court on 27 February 1576, to the consideration of which I shall return. In April 1577 there was an Italian play before the Council at Durham Place.[722] Finally, on 13 January 1578, the Privy Council addressed a letter to the Lord Mayor, requiring him to permit ‘one Drousiano, an Italian, a commediante and his companye’, to play until the first week of the coming Lent. I take it that the company was also at Court, since the Chamber Accounts for 1577–8 include an item ‘for a mattres hoopes and boardes with tressells for the Italian Tumblers’. The company to which the visit of 1573–4 was due cannot be identified with any certainty. Presumably it came through France, and ought to have left signs there. There seem to have been three Italian companies in France during 1571. The first, in February, was that of Giovanni Tabarin. The second, that seen by Lord Buckhurst in Paris, was the famous Compagnia de’ Gelosi, of which one Signora Vittoria, of Ferrara, known on the stage as Fioretta, was the prima donna. This, however, had returned to Milan by the spring of 1572 and its subsequent movements hardly render a visit to England in 1573 plausible. A third company, that of Alberto Ganassa, a Zanni or clown from Bergamo, reached Paris in the autumn of 1571.[723] It was sent away by the Parlement on account of its high charges for admission, but returned in 1572 and played at the wedding of Henri of Navarre and Marguerite of Valois on 18 August. Nothing is heard of Ganassa in France after October 1572, but during the summer of 1574 he seems to have been in Madrid; so he also is not available for the English visit. It may very likely have been his company which the Earl of Lincoln saw. But it may also have been that led by Soldino of Florence and Anton Maria of Venice, which was performing ‘commedies et saults’ before Charles IX at Blois on 25 March 1572, and subsequently made its way to Paris. My authorities say nothing further about Soldino and Anton Maria, so we are at liberty to believe that Lincoln invited them to try their fortune across the sea.[724]

The ‘Drousiano’ of 1578 offers less difficulty. He must have been Drusiano, son of Francisco Martinelli, of Mantua, who in after years won a considerable reputation, although less than that of his brother Tristano Martinelli, as Arlecchino in the commedia dell’ arte.[725] There is no other notice of him before 1580, when he subscribes himself as ‘marito di M^a Angelica’, who appears to have been one Angelica Alberghini, and the company with which he was associated in 1578 is not known.[726] But it may very well have been the Gelosi. This company paid in 1577 their second visit to France, upon the invitation of Henri III, and remained there at least until July. They seem to have been in Florence fairly early in 1578, but some or all of them may have found time for an English trip in the interval. Direct proof that Drusiano Martinelli ever belonged to the Gelosi is lacking. But they are the only Italian company known to have been in France in the summer of 1577, and players are not likely to have passed from Italy to England without leaving some traces of their presence in France.[727]

The professional Italian actors of the second half of the sixteenth century played both the popular commedia dell’ arte and the literary commedia erudita, or commedia sostenuta. The former, with its more or less improvised dialogue upon scenarii, which revolved around the amorous and ridiculous adventures of the zanni, the arlecchino, the dottore, and other standing types, was probably best adapted to the methods of wandering mimes in an alien land.[728] The latter was common to professionals and amateurs. And I suspect that the Court play of 27 February 1576, although it earned its reward from the Treasurer of the Chamber, was an amateur performance. The ‘Alfruso Ferrabolle’ of the account-book can hardly be other than a clerical perversion of the name of Alfonso Ferrabosco, the first of three generations of that name, father, son, and grandson, who contributed in turn to the gaiety of the English Court. The eldest Ferrabosco was certainly in this country by 1562 when he was granted an annuity of 100 marks. His service terminated after various interruptions in 1578.[729] He is doubtless the ‘Mr. Alphonse’ who took part in the preparation of a mask in June 1572.[730] In connexion with the same mask, a reward was paid to one ‘Petrucio’, while for a later mask of 11 January 1579 ‘Patruchius Ubaldinas’ was employed to translate speeches into Italian and write them out fair in tables.[731] This was Petruccio Ubaldini, another of Elizabeth’s Italian pensioners, who was both a literary man and an illuminator, and made his residence in England from 1562 to 1586.[732] It is quite possible that the performance of 1576 may be referred to in the following undated letter from Ubaldini to the Queen, in which he makes mention of Ferrabosco.[733] If so, it came off after all.

Sacra Serenissima Maiesta,

Perché à i giorni passati io haveva promesso à M. Claudio Cavallerizzo, et à M. Alfonso Ferrabosco, d’esser contento di recitare ad una piacevol Comedia Italiana; per compiacere alla Maiesta Vostra; et non si trovando di poi altri, che tre ò quattro, che fusser contenti d’accettar tal carico; ho voluto che l’Altezza Vostra conosca da me stesso il pronto animo, ch’ io ho per la mia parté di servirla, et di compiacerla in ogni attioné, che me sia comandata ò da lei, ò in suo nomé, non solamente comé servitore giurato, ch’io gli sono; ma comé desiderosissimo di far conoscere, che la divotioné, ch’io porto allé sue Reali qualità, supera ogn’ altro rispetto; desiderandogli io contentezza, et felicità non meno, che qualunqué altro suo servitore gli desideri: la cui bontà Dio ci prosperi.

Di Vostra Sacra Serenissima Maiesta.

Of Claudio Cavallerizzo I regret to say that I know nothing.

A statement that Venetian actors were in England in 1608 rests upon a misreading of a record.[734]

ii. ENGLISH PLAYERS IN SCOTLAND

The interlude players of Henry VII, under John English, accompanied the Princess Margaret to Scotland for her wedding with James IV in 1503, and ‘did their devoir’ before the Court at Edinburgh.[735] It is the best part of a century before any similar adventure is recorded. In the interval came the Scottish reformation, which was no friend to courtly pageantry. Yet in Scotland, as elsewhere, Kirk discipline had to make some compromise with the drama. In 1574 the General Assembly, while utterly forbidding, not for the first time, ‘clerk playes, comedies or tragedies maid of ye cannonicall Scriptures’, went on to ordain ‘an article to be given in to sick as sitts upon ye policie yat for uther playes comedies tragedies and utheris profaine playes, as are not maid upon authentick pairtes of ye Scriptures, may be considerit before they be exponit publictlie and yat they be not played uppon ye Sabboth dayes’.[736] It was once more a royal wedding that led to a histrionic courtesy between England and Scotland. In the autumn of 1589 James VI was expecting the arrival of his bride Anne of Denmark, a sensuous and spectacle-loving lady, who had already had experience of English actors at her father’s Court in 1586.[737] And being then, two years after his mother’s execution, actively engaged in promoting friendly relations with Elizabeth, he sent a request through one Roger Ashton to Lord Scrope, the Warden of the English West Marches, ‘for to have her Majesties players for to repayer into Scotland to his grace’. In reply Scrope wrote from Carlisle on 20 September to William Ashby, the English ambassador at Edinburgh, begging him to notify the King, that he had sent a servant to them, ‘wheir they were in the furthest parte of Langkeshire, whervpon they made their returne heather to Carliell, wher they are, and have stayed for the space of ten dayes’.[738] After all, the Lapland witches and their winds delayed Anne’s crossing for some months, and James had himself to join her in Denmark. It is, I think, only a conjecture that the players whose ‘book’ was submitted on 3 June 1589 for the licence of the Kirk Session at Perth, in accordance with the order of 1574, were Englishmen.[739] But certainly ‘Inglis comedianis’ were in Scotland in 1594, probably for the baptism of Henry Frederick on 30 August, and received from James the generous gift of £333 6_s._ 8_d._ out of ‘the composicioun of the escheit of ye laird of Kilcrewch and his complices’.[740] Probably Laurence Fletcher was at the head of this expedition, for on 22 March 1595 George Nicolson, the English agent at Edinburgh, wrote to Robert Bowes, treasurer of Berwick, that, ‘The King heard that Fletcher, the player, was hanged, and told him and Roger Aston so, in merry words, not believing it, saying very pleasantly that if it were true he would hang them also’.[741] In any case, Fletcher appears to have been the leader of a company whose peregrinations in Scotland a few years later, much favoured by James, were also much embarrassed by the critical relations which then existed between the Sovereign and the Kirk. It is only a conjecture that this was the company which was refused leave to play at St. Andrews on 1 October 1598.[742] But of greater troubles, which took place at Edinburgh a year later, we are very well informed. They are detailed from the Kirk point of view in the more or less contemporary chronicle of David Calderwood.[743]

The King Chargeth the Kirk of Edinburgh to Rescind an Act.

Some English comedians came to this countrie in the moneth of October. After they had acted sindrie comedeis in presence of the King, they purchassed at last a warrant or precept to the bailliffes of Edinburgh, to gett them an hous within the toun. Upon Moonday, the 12^{th} of November, they gave warning by trumpets and drummes through the streets of Edinburgh, to all that pleased, to come to the Blacke Friers’ Wynd to see the acting of their comedeis. The ministers of Edinburgh, fearing the profanitie that was to ensue, speciallie the profanatioun of the Sabbath day, convocated the foure sessiouns of the Kirk. An act was made by commoun consent, that none resort to these profane comedeis, for eshewing offence of God, and of evill exemple to others; and an ordinance was made, that everie minister sould intimat this act in their owne severall pulpits. They had indeid committed manie abusses, speciallie upon the Sabboth, at night before. The King taketh the act in evill part, as made purposelie to crosse his warrant, and caused summoun the ministers and foure sessiouns, super inquirendis, before the Secreit Counsell, They sent doun some in commissioun to the King, and desired the mater might be tryed privatlie, and offered, if they had offended, to repair the offence at his owne sight; and alledged they had the warrant of the synod presentlie sitting in the toun. The King would have the mater to come in publict. When they went doun, none was called upon but M^r. Peter Hewat and Henrie Nisbit. After that they were heard, the sentence was givin out against all the rest unheard, and charge givin to the ministers and foure sessiouns to conveene, within three houres after, to rescind their former ordinance, and to the ministers, to intimat the contrarie of that which they intimated before. They craved to be heard. Loath was the King, yitt the counsell moved him to heare them. M^r. Johne Hall was appointed to be their mouth. ‘We are summouned, Sir,’ said M^r. Johne, ‘and crave to understand to what end.’ ‘It is true’, said the King, ‘yee are summouned, and I have decerned alreadie.’ M^r. Johne made no reply. M^r. Robert Bruce said, ‘If it might stand with your good pleasure, we would know wherefore this hard sentence is past against us.’ ‘For contraveening of my warrant,’ said the King. ‘We have fulfilled your warrant,’ said M^r. Robert, ‘for your warrant craved no more but an hous to them, which they have gottin.’ ‘To what end, I pray you, sought I an hous,’ said the King, ‘but onlie that the people might resort to their comedeis?’ ‘Your warrant beareth not that end,’ said M^r. Robert, ‘and we have good reasoun to stay them from their playes, even by your owne acts of parliament.’ The King answered, ‘Yee are not the interpreters of my lawes.’ ‘And farther, the warrant was intimated but to one or two,’ said M^r. Robert, and, therefore, desired the King to retreate the sentence. The King would alter nothing. ‘At the least, then,’ said M^r. Robert, ‘lett the paine strike upon us, and exeeme our people.’ The King bade him make away. So, in departing, M^r. Robert turned, and said, ‘Sir, please you, nixt the regard we ow to God, we had a reverent respect to your Maiestie’s royall person, and person of your queene; for we heard that the comedians, in their playes, checked your royall person with secreit and indirect taunts and checkes; and there is not a man of honour in England would give such fellowes so much as their countenance’. So they departed.

They were charged, at two houres, by sound of trumpet, the day following, at the publict Croce, about ten houres, to conveene themselves, and rescind the acts, or ellis to passe to the horne immediatly after. The foure sessiouns conveene in the East Kirk. They asked the ministers’ advice. The ministers willed them to advise with some advocats, seing the mater tuiched their estate so neere. M^r. William Oliphant and M^r. Johne Schairp, advocats, came to the foure sessiouns. The charge was read. The advocats gave their counsell to rescind the act, by reasoun the King’s charge did not allow slanderous and undecent comedeis; and farther, shewed unto them, that the sessiouns could doe nothing without their ministers, seing they were charged as weill as the sessiouns, and the mater could not passe in voting, but the moderator and they being present. They were called in, and after reasouning they came to voting. M^r. Robert Bruce being first asked, answered ‘His Majestie is not minded to allow anie slanderous or offensive comedeis; but so it is that their comedeis are slanderous and offensive; therefore, the king, in effect, ratifieth our act. The rest of the ministers voted after the same maner. The elders, partlie for feare of their estats, partlie upon informatioun of the advocats, voted to the rescinding of the act. It was voted nixt, whether the ministers sould intimat the rescinding of the act? The most part voted they sould. The ministers assured them they would not. Henrie Nisbit, Archibald Johnstoun, Alexander Lindsey, and some others, tooke upon them to purchasse an exemptioun to the ministers. They returned with this answere, that his Majestie was content the mater sould be passed over lightlie, but he would have some mentioun made of the annulling of the act. They refuse. Their commissioners went the second tyme to the king, and returned with this answere, ‘Lett them nather speeke good nor evill in that mater, but leave it as dead.’ The ministers conveened apart to consult. M^r. Robert Bruce said it behoved them ather to justifie the thing they had done, or ellis they could not goe to a pulpit. Some others said the like. Others said, Leave it to God, to doe as God would direct their hearts. So they dissolved. M^r. Robert, and others that were of his minde, justified it the day following, in some small measure, and yitt were not querrelled.

Several other documents confirm this narrative. The Privy Council register contains an order of 8 November for an officer at arms to call upon the sessions by proclamation to rescind their resolution and a further proclamation of 10 November reciting the submission made by the sessions.[744] The Lord High Treasurer’s accounts contain payments to Walter Forsyth, the officer employed, as well as gifts to ‘ye Inglis comedianis’ of £43 6_s._ 8_d._ in October, of £40 in November ‘to by tymber for ye preparatioun of ane house to thair pastyme’, and of a further £333 6_s._ 8_d._ in December.[745] It is George Nicolson, in a letter of 12 November forwarding the proclamation of 8 November to Sir Robert Cecil, who identifies the players for us as ‘Fletcher and Mertyn with their company’.[746] The bounty of James, although it must be borne in mind that the sums were reckoned in pounds Scots, probably left them disinclined to quit Edinburgh in a hurry. Another gift of £400 reached them through Roger Ashton in 1601;[747] and on 9 October in the same year they visited Aberdeen with a letter of recommendation from the King, and with the style of his majesty’s servants, and the town council gave them £22 and spent £3 on their supper ‘that nicht thaye plaid to the towne’. Nay, more, another entry in the burgh register tells us that the players came in the train of ‘Sir Francis Hospital of Haulszie, Knycht, Frenschman’, and one of those ‘admittit burgesses’ with the foreign visitor was ‘Laurence Fletcher, comediane to his Majesty’.[748]

Laurence Fletcher’s name stands first in the English patent of 1603 to the King’s men, and the inferences have been drawn that the company at Aberdeen was the Chamberlain’s men, that their visit was due to a proscription from London on account of their participation in the Essex ‘innovation’, that Shakespeare was with them, and that he picked up local colour, to the extent of ‘a blasted heath’ for Macbeth.[749] To this it may be briefly replied that, as the Chamberlain’s men were at Court as usual in the winter of 1602, any absence from London, which their unlucky performance of Richard II may have rendered discreet, can only have been of short duration; that the most plausible reading of the Scottish evidence is that Fletcher’s company were in the service of James as Court comedians from 1599 to 1601; and that there is nothing whatever to indicate that Fletcher ever belonged to the Chamberlain’s company at all. In fact, very little is known of him outside Scotland, although it is just possible that he may have been the object of two advances made by Henslowe to the Admiral’s men about October 1596, and described respectively as ‘lent vnto Martyne to feache Fleatcher’ and ‘lent the company to geue Fleatcher’.[750] If Fletcher was the King’s man in Scotland, it was not unnatural that he should retain that status when James came to England; and it is very doubtful whether the insertion of his name in the patent in any way entailed his being taken into business relations with his ‘fellows’. I strongly suspect that his companion at Edinburgh, Martin, was put into a precisely similar position amongst Queen Anne’s men, for who can Martin be but Martin Slater, who is often, as in the passage quoted above, called Martin tout court in Henslowe’s Diary, and who certainly left the Admiral’s men in 1597?

iii. ENGLISH PLAYERS ON THE CONTINENT

[Bibliographical Note.--The earliest comprehensive study of the foreign travels of English actors is that of A. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1865). Much material has been collected, mostly since Cohn wrote, in a number of local histories and special studies, of which the most important are: C. M. Plümicke, Entwurf einer Theatergeschichte von Berlin (1781); D. C. von Rommel, Geschichte von Hessen (1820–38); J. E. Schlager, Über das alte Wiener Hoftheater in Sitzungsberichte der phil.-hist. Classe der Kaiserlichen Akad. der Wissenschaften, vi (1851), 147; M. Fürstenau, Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am Hofe der Kurfürsten von Sachsen (1861); E. Mentzel, Geschichte der Schauspielkunst in Frankfurt am Main (1882); O. Teuber, Geschichte des Prager Theaters (1883); J. Meissner, in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xix. 113 (Austria), and Die englischen Comoedianten zur Zeit Shakespeares in Oesterreich (1884); K. Trautmann in Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte, xii. 319 (Munich, Augsburg); xiii. 34 (Suabia), 315 (Ulm); xiv. 113 (Nuremberg), 225 (Suabia); xv. 209 (Ulm, Stuttgart, Tübingen); in Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, vii (Rothenburg); and in Jahrbuch für Münchener Geschichte, iii. 259; J. Crüger in Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte, xv. 113 (Strassburg); Duncker, Landgraf Moritz von Hessen und die englischen Komödianten in Deutsche Rundschau, xlviii (1886), 260; A. Cohn in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xxi. 245 (Cologne); J. Bolte in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xxiii. 99 (Denmark and Sweden), and Das Danziger Theater im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (1893); J. Wolter in Zeitschrift des Bergischen Geschichtsvereins, xxxii. 90 (Cologne); A. Wormstall in Zeitschrift für vaterländische Geschichte und Altertumskunde Westfalens, lvi (1898), 75 (Münster); G. Witkowzski in Euphorion, xv. 441 (Leipzig). A collection of records from the earlier of these and from more scattered sources is in K. Goedeke, Grundriss der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen^2 (1886), ii. 524, and valuable summaries are given in W. Creizenach, Schauspiele der englischen Komödianten (1889), and E. Herz, Englische Schauspieler und englisches Schauspiel zur Zeit Shakespeares in Deutschland (1903). The excursus of F. G. Fleay in Life and Work of Shakespeare (1886), 307, is misleading. Additional material, which has become available since Herz wrote, is recorded by C. F. Meyer in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xxxviii. 196 (Wolgast), and C. Grabau in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xlv. 311 (Leipzig). Useful special studies are by C. Harris, The English Comedians in Germany before the Thirty Years’ War: the Financial Side (Publ. of Modern Language Association, xxii. 446), A. Dessoff, Über englische, italienische und spanische Dramen in den Spielverzeichnissen deutscher Wandertruppen (1901, Studien für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, i), and on the problem of staging (cf. ch. xx) C. H. Kaulfuss-Diesch, Die Inszenierung des deutschen Dramas an der Wende des sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (1905). A collection of plays and jigs, in German, but belonging to the repertory of an English company, appeared as Engelische Comedien und Tragedien (1620); some of the plays have been edited by J. Tittmann, Die Schauspiele der englischen Komödianten in Deutschland (1880), and the jigs by J. Bolte, Die Singspiele der englischen Komödianten und ihrer Nachfolger in Deutschland, Holland und Scandinavien (1893). German plays written under English influences are to be found in J. Tittmann, Die Schauspiele des Herzogs Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig (1880), and A. von Keller, Jacob Ayrers Dramen (1865). Cohn prints, with translations, Ayrer’s Sidea and Phaenicia, Julio and Hyppolita and Titus Andronicus from the 1620 volume, and early German versions of Hamlet (Der bestrafte Brudermord) and Romeo and Juliet from manuscripts. The literary records and remains of the English players are fully discussed by Creizenach and Herz, and their relation to Ayrer by W. Wodick, J. Ayrers Dramen in ihrem Verhältniss zur einheimischen Literatur und zum Schauspiel der englischen Komödianten (1912).

The material for the Netherlands, some of which was gathered by Cohn, may be studied in J. A. Worp, Geschiedenis van het Drama en van het Tooneel in Nederland (1904–8), who also deals with the Dutch versions of English dramas. The contemporary stage conditions in France are best treated by E. Rigal, Le Théâtre français avant la période classique (1901), and those in Spain by H. A. Rennert, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (1909), who uses the results of recent researches by C. Pérez Pastor, which have added much to the information furnished by C. Pellicer, Tratado histórico sobre el origen y progresos de la Comedia y del Histrionismo en España (1804).]

Thomas Heywood records, about 1608, that ‘the King of Denmarke, father to him that now reigneth, entertained into his service a company of English comedians, commended unto him by the honourable the Earl of Leicester’.[751] This King of Denmark was Frederick II (1559–88), father of Christian IV (1588–1648), and of Queen Anne of England. English ‘instrumentister’, Johann Krafftt, Johann Personn, Johann Kirck or Kirckmann, and Thomas Bull, were at the Danish Court as early as 1579–80, and in 1585 certain unnamed English played (lechte) in the courtyard of the town-hall at Elsinore, when the press of folk was such that the wall broke down. These may be the same men who played and vaulted at Leipzig on 19 July 1585, and are the earliest English players yet traced in Germany.[752] But the particular comedians referred to by Heywood were probably another company who had accompanied Leicester to Holland, when he took the command of the English forces in 1585, and had given a show, half dramatic, half acrobatic, of The Forces of Hercules at Utrecht on 23 April 1586. Certainly Leicester had in his train one Will, a ‘jesting plaier’, who is now usually identified with William Kempe, and in August and September 1586 the Household Accounts of the Danish Court record the presence of ‘Wilhelm Kempe instrumentist’, and of his boy Daniell Jonns. It is not clear what were the precise relations between Kempe and five other ‘instrumentister och springere’, Thomas Stiwens, Jurgenn Brienn, Thomas Koning, Thomas Pape, and Robert Persj, who were at Court from 17 June to 18 September 1586, and for whom the same accounts record a payment to Thomas Stiuens of six thalers a month apiece, at the end of that period. If he had, as is probable, been their fellow up to that point, he did not accompany them in their further peregrinations.[753] These took them to the Court of Frederick’s nephew, Christian I, Elector of Saxony (1586–91), as a result of correspondence, still extant, between the sovereigns, in which the offer of salaries at the annual rate of 100 thalers overcame the reluctance of the Englishmen to face the perils of an unknown tongue. They started with an interpreter on 25 September, and shortly after their arrival at Waidenhain on 16 October received instructions from Christian to follow him with mourning clothes to Berlin, where he was then sojourning. Christian’s own capital was Dresden, and here they held a formal appointment in his service, under which they were bound to follow him in his travels, and to entertain him with performances after his banquets, and with music and ‘Springkunst’, and were entitled, beyond their pay, to board, livery, and travelling expenses, and a lodging allowance of forty thalers each. The Dresden archives give their names as Tomas Konigk, Tomas Stephan or Stephans, George Beyzandt, Tomas Papst, and Rupert Persten. Their departure from Court is recorded on 17 July 1587.[754] In all these notices music and acrobatic feats are to the fore, but that the men were actors there can be no doubt, for two of them, Thomas Pope and George Bryan, reappear amongst Strange’s men, and thereafter as fellows of Shakespeare in the Chamberlain’s company. Of Stevens, King, and Percy no more is known. Kempe was abroad again, in Italy and Germany, during 1601, and returned to England on 2 September. It is not certain whether he took a company with him, or went as a solitary morris dancer. But it is noteworthy that on the following 26 November an English company, under one Johann Kemp, reached Münster, after a tour which had taken them to Amsterdam, Cologne, Redberg, and Steinfurt. They played in English, and had a clown who pattered in German between the acts.[755]

The man, however, who did most to acclimatize the English actors in Germany was Robert Browne, who paid several visits to the country, and spent considerable periods there between 1590 and 1620. With him he took relays of actors, some of whom split off into independent associations, and account for most, although not all, of the groups of ‘Engländer’ who became familiar figures at the Frankfort spring and autumn fairs and even in out-of-the-way corners of northern Europe. Of some of these groups the wanderings can be traced in outline, although the frequent failure of the archives to record individual names is responsible for many lacunae, which the conjectural ingenuity of literary historians has done its best to fill. Many of these anonymous performances I must pass over in silence.

Robert Browne first appears as one of Worcester’s men, with Edward Alleyn, in 1583, and in 1589 these two, probably as Admiral’s men, still held a common stock of apparel with John Alleyn and Richard Jones.[756] His career abroad begins with a visit to Leyden in October 1590.[757] This was perhaps only tentative, for in February 1592 he was preparing to cross the seas again, and to this end obtained for himself, John Bradstreet, Thomas Sackville, and Richard Jones, the following passport to the States-General of the Netherlands from the Lord Admiral:

Messieurs, comme les présents porteurs, Robert Browne, Jehan Bradstriet, Thomas Saxfield, Richard Jones, ont deliberé de faire ung voyage en Allemagne, avec intention de passer par le païs de Zelande, Hollande et Frise, et allantz en leur dict voyage d’exercer leurs qualitez en faict de musique, agilitez et joeux de commedies, tragedies et histoires, pour s’entretenir et fournir à leurs despenses en leur dict voyage. Cestes sont partant vous requerir monstrer et prester toute faveur en voz païs et jurisdictions, et leur octroyer en ma faveur vostre ample passeport soubz le seel des Estatz, afin que les Bourgmestres des villes estantz soubs voz jurisdictions ne les empeschent en passant d’exercer leurs dictes qualitez par tout. Enquoy faisant, je vous demeureray à tous obligé, et me treuverez très appareillé à me revencher de vostre courtoisie en plus grand cas. De ma chambre à la court d’Angleterre ce x^{me} jour de Febvrier 1591.

Vostre tres affecsionné à vous fayre plaisir et sarvis, C. Howard.[758]

Presumably the Lord Admiral gave this passport in his official capacity, as responsible for the high seas, and it is not necessary to infer that the travellers were in 1592 his servants.[759]

There are not many clear notices of Browne and his company during this tour. They were at Arnhem, with a licence from Prince Maurice of Orange-Nassau, in 1592.[760] Thereafter they may have gone into residence at some Court, Wolfenbüttel or another. They can hardly have been the English ‘comoedianten und springer’ who came to Nyköping in Sweden for the wedding of Duke Karl of Sweden and Princess Christina of Holstein on 28 August 1592[761]; for it was only two days later that Browne approached the Frankfort magistrates for leave to play at the autumn fair, where they gave Gammer Gurton’s Needle and some of Marlowe’s plays.[762] It was on this occasion that Fynes Moryson, the traveller, visited the fair and noted the great vogue of the English actors amongst the merchants.[763] Englishmen played at Cologne in October and November 1592,[764] and at Nuremberg in August 1593;[765] but in view of the Nyköping company it can hardly be assumed that these were Browne and his fellows, and indeed the leader at Nuremberg is called ‘Ruberto Gruen’, which may, but on the other hand may not, be a blunder for Browne’s name. The Cologne players are anonymous. At any rate ‘Robert Braun, Thomas Sachsweil, Johan Bradenstreit und consorten’ were all at Frankfort in August 1593,[766] where they played scriptural dramas, including Abraham and Lot and The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha. Thereafter the company seems to have broken up. Richard Jones certainly went home before 2 September 1594, when he bought a gown ‘of pechecoler in grayne’ from Henslowe.[767] He had doubtless already joined the Admiral’s men.

Thomas Sackville and John Bradstreet probably went to Wolfenbüttel. This was the capital of Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1589–1613), himself the author of plays, mostly printed during 1593 and 1594, in which an English influence is perceptible. The Duke married Elisabeth, daughter of Frederick II of Denmark, and his wedding at Copenhagen in February 1590 was attended by his brother-in-law, afterwards James I of England. It is possible that his earliest play, Susanna, was written either for this occasion or for the repetition of his wedding ceremony at Wolfenbüttel. In this piece the jester, a conventional personage, bears the name ‘Johan Clant’, in the later plays ‘Johan Bouset’; and in the Ehebrecherin (1594) Bouset says, quite irrelevantly to his dramatic character, ‘Ich bin ein Englisch Mann’. Both names are in fact of English origin, from the words ‘clown’ and ‘posset’ respectively. Evidently the Duke must in some way have been in touch with the English stage at a date even earlier than Browne’s second German visit in 1592. It is not, therefore, necessary to conjecture, as has been conjectured, that Wolfenbüttel was the first objective of this visit.[768] Unfortunately the Brunswick household accounts for 1590–1601 are missing, and with them all direct evidence of the first formation of his English company by the Duke has probably gone. The company existed by 1596, when the ‘furstelige comoedianten och springers’ of the Duke paid a month’s visit to Copenhagen for the coronation of his brother-in-law, Christian IV of Denmark, on 29 August.[769] In the following year we find ‘Jan Bosett und seine Gesellen’ at Nuremberg, ‘Thomas Sackfeil und Consorten’ at Augsburg in June, ‘Johann Busset’ and Jakob Behel at Strassburg in July and August, and ‘Thomas Sackville, John Bouset genannt’, Johann Breitenstrasse and Jacob Biel at the Frankfort autumn fair.[770] The identity of this company with the Wolfenbüttel court comedians may perhaps be inferred from Sackville’s use of John Bouset as a stage name, and from a reference, in this same year 1597, to ‘Thomas Sackefiel, princely servant at Wolfenbüttel’. Another member of the company may have been Edward Wakefiel, with whom Sackville, also in 1597, had a brawl in a Brunswick tavern.[771] No more is heard of them until 1601, when John Bouset was expected to join his old friend Robert Browne for the Frankfort Easter fair.[772] The Brunswick household accounts are extant for 1602 and 1608, and from 1614 onwards. Thomas Sackville appears frequently. On 30 August 1602 he took a payment for the English comedians. Later references to him from 1 October 1602 to 1617 are mainly in connexion with purchases for the ducal wardrobe. It seems clear that, while remaining a ducal servant, and possibly even an actor, he went into business and prospered therein.[773] He is said to have been selling silk at Frankfort in 1604, and in 1608 Thomas Coryat, the Odcombian traveller and oddity, records:

‘The wealth that I sawe here was incredible. The goodliest shew of ware that I sawe in all Franckford, saving that of the Goldsmithes, was made by an Englishman one Thomas Sackfield a Dorsetshire man, once a servant of my father, who went out of England but in a meane estate, but after he had spent a few yeares at the Duke of Brunswicks Court, hee so inriched himselfe of late that his glittering shewe of ware in Franckford dit farre excell all the Dutchmen, French, Italians, or whomsoever else.’[774]

John Bradstreet’s name appears in 1604 with that of Sackville in the album of Johannes Cellarius of Nuremberg. He died in 1618 and Sackville in 1628, leaving a library of theology and English literature. Edward Wakefield reappears in the Brunswick accounts for 1602, not specifically as a player. But certainly the playing company continued to exist. The accounts mention it in 1608, and Thomas Heywood notes its existence about the same date. There were English players at Wolfenbüttel in May 1615 and at Brunswick in 1611 and 1617, but no names are recorded, and it can hardly be assumed that these were the original ducal company. Henry Julius himself died in 1613.[775]

Robert Browne’s own movements are uncertain after the break-up of his company in 1593. He is not traceable for a year or so either in Germany or in England, where his wife and all her children and household died of plague in Shoreditch about August 1593.[776] But sooner or later he found his way to Cassel. This was another of the literary courts of Germany, the capital of Maurice the Learned, Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel (1592–1627). Maurice himself wrote an ‘Anglia Comoedia’ and other plays in Terentian Latin, which were performed by the pupils of the Collegium Mauritianum, but are unfortunately not preserved. He also composed music and, like the Duke of Brunswick, gave a welcome to John Dowland on one of his several foreign tours.[777] Possibly Dowland was one of the two lutenists who are recorded to have spent fifteen weeks at Cassel in 1594.[778] In the following year there were performances by players and acrobats at Maurice’s castle of Wilhelmsburg at Schmalkalden, and in the same year Maurice wrote to his agent at Prague to give assistance to his comedians in the event of their visiting that city.[779] To 1594 or 1595 may, therefore, be plausibly ascribed undated warrants by which Robert Browne and Philip Kiningsmann receive appointments from the Landgrave, undertaking to do him service with their company in vocal and instrumental music and in plays to be supplied either by Maurice or by themselves, and not to leave Cassel without his permission.[780] Certainly Browne was the Landgrave’s man by 16 April 1595, when a warrant was issued allowing the export of a consignment of bows and arrows which he had been sent over to bring from England to Cassel.[781] The ‘fürstlich hessische Diener und Comoetianten’ were at Nuremberg on 5 July 1596, and a company under Philip Konigsman were at Strassburg in the following August.[782] Festivities were now in preparation at Cassel for the christening of Maurice’s daughter, one of whose godmothers was Queen Elizabeth, on 24 August 1596. Brown and one John Webster were on duty at Cassel during the visit of the Earl of Lincoln, who came from England to stand proxy for Elizabeth.[783] Payments to the English comedians and performances by them at Melsungen, Weissenstein, and Rothenburg, in the Landgrave’s territory, are recorded in the Cassel archives during 1597 and 1598. A proposed loan of them in 1597 to Landgrave Louis of Marburg seems to have fallen through, but in 1598 they left Cassel for the Court of the Palsgrave Frederic IV at Heidelberg, with a liberal Abfertigung or vail of 300 thalers and a travelling allowance of 20 thalers, which was entrusted to George Webster.[784] From Heidelberg they went to Frankfort towards the end of 1599, but were refused leave to play, owing to the prevalence of plague.[785] Robert Browne, Robert Kingman, and Robert Ledbetter were then of the company. Ledbetter must have recently joined them, as he is in the cast of Frederick and Basilea as played by the Admiral’s men in 1597. Frankfort having failed them, they fell back upon Strassburg, and here they seem to have remained until the spring of 1601.[786] Browne was their leader at their arrival, but he then seems to have left them and returned to England, where he came to Court as manager of the Earl of Derby’s men during the winters of 1599–1600 and 1600–1.[787] By Easter 1601, however, he had started on his fourth tour, and appeared once more at Frankfort, possibly in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. With him were Robert Kingmann and Robert Ledbetter, and they were expecting to be joined by ‘Johannen Buscheten und noch andere in unsere Companie gehörige Comödianten’. The old association of 1592 between Robert Browne and Thomas Sackville was, therefore, still in some sense alive.[788]

Meanwhile, Maurice of Hesse had not been wholly without English actors, since Browne and his fellows left Cassel in 1598. It would seem that George Webster returned from Heidelberg, or perhaps from Strassburg, to his service. The ‘fürstlich-hessischen Komödianten und Musikanten’ were at Frankfort in March, at Nuremberg in April 1600, and at Frankfort again at Easter 1601. The names recorded are those of George Webster, John Hill or Hüll, Richard Machin, and at Nuremberg Bernhardt Sandt.[789] Upon his second visit to Frankfort Webster would have met his old leader, now become his rival, Robert Browne. The Hessian company were for a third time at Frankfort in the autumn of 1601.[790] In the following year they left the Landgrave’s service, not altogether to the regret of some of his subjects, who resented a patronage of foreign arts at the cost of their pockets.[791] Webster and Machin, with whom was then one Ralph Reeve, were still using their former master’s name when they visited Frankfort at Easter 1603.[792] Thereafter they dropped it. Of Webster no more is heard. Machin is conjectured to have joined for a short time an English company in the service of Margrave Christian William, a younger son of the Elector Joachim Frederick of Brandenburg, which came to Frankfort for the Easter and autumn fairs of 1604.[793] The Margrave was administrator of the diocese of Magdeburg, and kept his Court at Halle. His company is traceable from 1604 to 1605, but I do not find any evidence of Machin’s connexion with it. In May 1605 he appeared at Strassburg, and there claimed as his credentials only his four years’ service with Maurice of Hesse.[794] Shortly before, he had been at the Frankfort Easter fair with Reeve, and the two returned to Frankfort in the autumn, and again at Easter 1606.[795]

Robert Browne, for some years after the opening of his fourth tour at Frankfort in the spring of 1601, does not appear to have attached himself to any particular Court. He is found at Frankfort, with Robert Jones, in September 1602, at Augsburg in the following November and December, at Nuremberg in February 1603, and at Frankfort for the Easter fair of the same year.[796] With him were then, but it would seem only temporarily, Thomas Blackwood and John Thare, late of Worcester’s men, who had doubtless just come out from England, when Elizabeth’s illness and death closed the London theatres.[797] He is probably the ‘alte Komödiant’, whose identity seems to have been thought sufficiently described by that term at Frankfort in the autumn of 1604.[798] He returned to Frankfort on 26 May 1606, and was at Strassburg in the following June and July.[799] Here he was accompanied by John Green. On this or some other visit to Strassburg, the company probably lost Robert Kingman, who, like Thomas Sackville, found business more profitable than strolling. He became a freeman of Strassburg in 1618, and in that year was able to befriend his old ‘fellow’ Browne, and in 1626 other actors on their visits to the city.[800] In the course of 1606 Browne seems to have entered the service of Maurice of Hesse, who in the previous year had built a permanent theatre, the Ottonium, at Cassel, and had now again an English company for the first time since 1602. This is to be inferred from an application for leave to play submitted to the Frankfort town council on 26 August 1606, and signed by ‘Robert Braun’, ‘Johann Grün’, and ‘Robert Ledbetter’ as ‘Fürstlich Hessische Comödianten’. Earlier in August the same men had been at Ulm.[801] They visited Nuremberg with a letter of recommendation from their lord in November, and then settled down at Cassel for the winter.[802] But their service did not last long. On 1 March 1607 a household officer wrote to the Landgrave that the English found their salaries inadequate, and after performing the comedy of The King of England and Scotland had declared, either in jest or earnest, that it was their last play in Cassel.[803] Probably they were in earnest. Browne and Green went to Frankfort, for the last time as the Hessian comedians, on 17 March.[804] Browne’s name now disappears from German records for a decade. In 1610 he was a member of the Queen’s Revels syndicate in London, and on 11 April 1612 he wrote a letter to Edward Alleyn from Clerkenwell.[805] But whether Browne left them or not, the company held together for a while longer. Green was at Danzig and Elbing in the course of 1607.[806] Thereafter it seems probable that he tried a bold flight, and penetrated to the heart of Catholic Germany in Austria. In November 1607 an English company was with the archducal court of Ferdinand and Maria Anna at Gräz in Styria. A performance by them of The King of England and the Goldsmith’s Wife is recorded.[807] They followed Ferdinand to Passau, where they gave The Prodigal Son and The Jew, and possibly also to the Reichstag held in January 1608 at Regensburg. By 6 February they were back at Gräz, and a letter from Ferdinand’s sister, the Archduchess Maria Magdalena, then just betrothed to the Grand Duke Cosimo II of Florence, gives a lively account of their performances and of the assistance which they rendered in the revels danced at Court.[808] Their repertory included The Prodigal Son, A Proud Woman of Antwerp, Dr. Faustus, A Duke of Florence and a Nobleman’s Daughter, Nobody and Somebody, Fortunatus, The Jew, King Louis and King Frederick of Hungary, A King of Cyprus and a Duke of Venice, Dives and Lazarus.[809] It is not absolutely certain that the company referred to in these notices was Green’s. No name is in fact mentioned. But the probability suggested by the resemblance of the above play-list to those of 1620 and 1626, with which Green was certainly connected, is confirmed by the existence of a German manuscript of Nobody and Somebody with a dedication by Green to Ferdinand’s brother the Archduke Maximilian, who was certainly present at the Gräz performances, and by a letter which tells us that a company visiting Austria in 1617 was the same as that which had played at Gräz in the lifetime of the Archduchess Maria, who died in 1608. Unfortunately the identification of this company of 1617 with Green’s is itself a matter of high probability, rather than of absolute certainty.[810] The end of the visit to Gräz was marked by a duel in which one of the English actors, ‘the man with long red hair, who always played a little fiddle’, killed a Frenchman.[811] Green now, like Browne, drops for some years out of the German records.

The Court functions at Cassel surrendered by Browne in 1607 were resumed by his predecessors, in whose leadership Reeve had now succeeded Machin; and the appearance of the Hessian company is recorded at Frankfort during both the fairs of 1608 and 1609, the Easter fair of 1610, the autumn fair of 1612, and the Easter fair of 1613. A proposed appearance for the coronation of the Emperor Mathias in June 1612 was prohibited, because the mourning for his predecessor Rudolph II was not yet over.[812] It is perhaps something of an assumption that the company was the same one throughout all these years. Reeve was in charge up to the autumn of 1609; after that no individual name is mentioned. The intervals between the fairs were presumably spent in the main at Cassel. In the summer of 1609 the company visited Stuttgart and Nuremberg and possibly other places, with a letter of recommendation from their lord.[813] In the autumn of the same year John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg (1608–19), who often entertained a company of his own, but appears to have been temporarily without one, wrote to Maurice to borrow them for the wedding of his brother at Berlin.[814] In April 1610 they may not improbably, though there is no evidence of the fact, have followed Maurice to the Diet at Prague.[815] In 1611 they are said to have been at Darmstadt.[816] They certainly played at the wedding of the Margrave Joachim Ernest, uncle of the Elector of Brandenburg, at Anspach in October 1612, and later in the same month paid a visit to Nuremberg.[817] No more is heard of them, or of any other English actors in the service of Maurice of Hesse-Cassel, after 1613.[818] Reeve was a member of Rosseter’s syndicate for the building of the Porter’s Hall theatre at Blackfriars in 1615, and with him were associated Philip Kingman and Robert Jones, the last notices of whom in Germany are as ‘fellows’ of Robert Browne in 1596 and 1602 respectively.

The appearance of Blackwood and Thare, late of Worcester’s men, in company with Browne at the Frankfort Easter fair of 1603, has already been noted. The only further record of either of them is of Thare at Ulm and Augsburg in the following December.[819] But by a series of conjectures, to which I hesitate to subscribe, they have been identified with a company which came to Stuttgart in September 1603 in the train of Lord Spencer and Sir William Dethick, ambassadors from England carrying the insignia of the Garter to Frederick Duke of Württemberg, and there gave a play of Susanna[820]; with a company which visited Nördlingen and other places in January 1604 under the leadership of one Eichelin, apparently a German, but with a repertory which included a Romeo and Juliet and a Pyramus and Thisbe[821]; with a company which held letters of recommendation from the Duke of Würtemberg at Nuremberg in February 1604;[822] and with a company which took a repertory closely resembling the Nördlingen one to Rothenburg in 1604 and 1606.[823] This is all very ingenious guesswork.[824]

All trace of John Green is lost for several years after 1608. An isolated notice at Utrecht in November 1613 suggests that he may have spent part of this interval in the Netherlands.[825] A year or two later he returned to Germany. He was at Danzig in July 1615 and again, with Robert Reinolds, late of Queen Anne’s men, in July 1616, having paid an intermediate visit to Copenhagen.[826] In 1617 he was at Prague for the coronation of the Archduke Ferdinand as King of Bohemia, and in July of the same year at Vienna.[827] The comparative infrequency with which English actors visited Austrian territory perhaps justifies the assumption that his is the company mentioned in a letter of recommendation sent by Ferdinand’s brother, the Archduke Charles, at Neiss to the Bishop of Olmütz on 18 March 1617, as having played at Gräz before his mother the Archduchess Maria, who died in 1608, and having recently spent some months at the Court of Poland in Warsaw.[828] In 1618 Green’s old leader, the indefatigable veteran Robert Browne, came out with a new company on his fifth and last visit to the Continent. He is first noted at Nuremberg on 28 May.[829] My impression is that the two men joined forces. Green’s name does not appear in the records for a couple of years. But Reinolds, who had been with him at Danzig in 1616, was with Browne at Strassburg in June and July 1618.[830] Later in the year Browne was at the autumn fair at Frankfort.[831] There is no definite mention of him during the next twelve months, but it is not improbable that the combined company was that which visited Rostock in May and Danzig in July 1619.[832] At any rate Browne appeared at Cologne in October;[833] and then went for the winter to Prague, where the Elector Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth of England, now King and Queen of Bohemia, had set up their Court.[834] They were but a winter King and Queen. In 1620 the Thirty Years’ War broke out, and Germany had other things to think of than English mumming. Browne was at Nuremberg in February and at Frankfort for the Easter fair.[835] That is the last we hear of him. But Green reached Cologne and Utrecht later in April, and was probably discreetly taking the company home.[836] In 1626 he came out again with Robert Reinolds, who made a reputation as a clown under the name of Pickleherring.[837] The details of this later tour lie beyond the scope of the present inquiry. Pickleherring is the clown-name also in a volume of Engelische Comedien und Tragedien, printed in 1620, which probably represents an attempt of Browne and Green to turn to profit with the printers their repertory of 1618–20, now rendered useless by their return to England.[838] The plays contained in this volume, in addition to two farces and five jigs, in most of which Pickleherring appears, are Esther and Haman, The Prodigal Son, Fortunatus, A King’s Son of England and a King’s Daughter of Scotland, Nobody and Somebody, Sidonia and Theagenes, Julio and Hyppolita, and Titus Andronicus.[839] The first five of these reappear in a list of plays forming the repertory of Green at Dresden during the visit of 1626 referred to above. If the titles can be trusted, two of the plays in this list had already been played by Browne at Frankfort and Cassel in 1601 and 1607, three by an unknown company, possibly that of Blackwood and Thare, at Nördlingen and Rothenburg in 1604 and 1606, and eight by Green himself at Passau and Gräz in the winter of 1607–8.[840] They number thirty in all, as follows: Christabella, Romeo and Juliet,[841] Amphitryo,[842] The Duke of Florence,[843] The King of Spain and the Portuguese Viceroy,[844] Julius Caesar, Crysella,[845] The Duke of Ferrara,[846] Nobody and Somebody,[847] The Kings of Denmark and Sweden,[848] Hamlet,[849] Orlando Furioso,[850] The Kings of England and Scotland,[851] Hieronymo the Spanish Marshal,[852] Haman and Esther,[853] The Martyr Dorothea,[854] Doctor Faustus,[855] The King of Arragon,[856] Fortunatus,[857] Joseph the Jew of Venice,[858] The Clever Thief,[859] The Duke of Venice,[860] Barabbas Jew of Malta, The Dukes of Mantua and Verona, Old Proculus, Lear King of England, The Godfather, The Prodigal Son,[861] The Count of Angiers, The Rich Man.[862]

The lists of 1620 and 1626 do not bear out Fleay’s assumption that the repertories they represent were wholly made up of plays taken out by Browne in 1592.[863]

Another member of Browne’s last expedition can perhaps be identified. With him in 1592 had been Richard Jones, who afterwards became one of the Admiral’s men in 1594 and left that company in 1602. He was again associated with Browne in Rosseter’s Queen’s Revels syndicate of 1610. The following undated letter to Edward Alleyn is preserved at Dulwich:[864]

M^r Allen, I commend my love and humble duty to you, geving you thankes for your great bounty bestoed vpon me in my sicknes, when I was in great want, God blese you for it, Sir, this it is, I am to go over beyond the seeas with M^r Browne and the company, but not by his meanes, for he is put to half a shaer, and to stay hear, for they ar all against his goinge. Now good Sir, as you have ever byne my worthie frend, so healp me nowe. I have a sut of clothes and a cloke at pane for three pound, and if it shall pleas you to lend me so much to release them I shalbe bound to pray for you so longe as I leve, for if I go over and have no clothes, I shall not be esteemed of, and by godes help the first mony that I gett I will send it over vnto you, for hear I get nothinge, some tymes I have a shillinge a day, and some tymes nothinge, so that I leve in great poverty hear, and so I humbly take my leave, prainge to god I and my wiffe for your health and mistris Allenes, which god continew, Your poor frend to command Richard Jones.

[Endorsed] Receved of master Allen the [ extra spaces ] of February the somme of [ extra spaces ] [and by Alleyn] M^r Jones his letter wher on I lent hym 3^l.

This has generally been dated 1592. But Alleyn’s first recorded marriage was in October of that year, and the reference to Browne as not going with the company has always been a puzzle. I suspect that it was written in or near 1615, and that Jones was one of the actors who started in advance of Browne under John Green. That he did travel about this time is shown by two other letters to Alleyn about a lease of the Leopard’s Head in Shoreditch held by his wife.[865] The first, from Jones himself, is not dated, but a mention of Henslowe shows that it was written before the latter’s death on 6 January 1616, or at least before Jones had heard of that event. The writer and his wife were then out of England. The second, from Harris Jones, was written from Danzig on 1 April 1620. Mrs. Jones was then expecting to join her husband, who was with ‘the prince’, whoever this may have been. If Jones had travelled with Browne’s men, he cut himself adrift from them on their return, for in 1622 he entered as a musician the service of Philip Julius, Duke of Wolgast in Pomerania (1592–1625), who had twice visited England, and whose presence at more than one London theatre is recorded in 1602.[866] Two petitions from Jones are in the Stettin archives.[867] On 30 August 1623 he asked permission, with his fellows Johan Kostrassen and Robert Dulandt (Dowland?), to return from Wolgast to England. Behind them they appear to have left Richard Farnaby, son of the better-known composer Giles Farnaby.[868] On 10 July 1624 Jones wrote to the Duke that his hopes of profitable employment under the Prince in England had been disappointed, and asked to be taken back into his service.

All the groups of actors hitherto dealt with seem to have had their origin, more or less directly, in the untiring initiative of Robert Browne. There is, however, another tradition, almost as closely associated with the houses of Brandenburg and Saxony, as the former with those of Hesse-Cassel and Brunswick. Some give and take between Cassel and the Courts of some of the Brandenburg princes has from time to time been noted.[869] But Berlin, where the successive Electors of Brandenburg, Joachim Frederick (1598–1608) and John Sigismund (1608–9), had their capital, was during a long period of years the head-quarters from which an Englishman, John Spencer, undertook extensive travels, both in Protestant and in Catholic Germany. Of Spencer’s stage-career in London, if he ever had one, nothing is known. Possibly he betook himself to the Brandenburg Court during the English plague-year of 1603. At any rate, comedians holding a recommendation given by the Elector on 10 August 1604 and confirmed by the Stadtholder of the Netherlands, Maurice Prince of Orange Nassau, in the following December, were at Leyden in January and The Hague in May 1605.[870] It is reasonable to identify them with the company under John Spencer, who received a recommendation from the Electress Eleonora of Brandenburg to the Elector Christian II of Saxony (1591–1611) in the same year.[871] At Dresden they possibly remained for some time, for although there are several anonymous appearances, including the famous ones at Gräz in the winter of 1607–8, which can be conjecturally assigned to them,[872] they do not clearly emerge until April 1608, when a visit of the Electoral players of Saxony is recorded at Cologne.[873] Subsequently they waited upon Francis, Duke of Stettin and by him were recommended to the new Elector of Brandenburg, John Sigismund, who passed them on once more to the Elector of Saxony on 14 July 1609.[874] Being in need of comedians for his brother’s wedding in the same year, he applied, as has been noted, for a loan of those of Maurice of Hesse.[875] Dresden remained the head-quarters of Spencer’s men again during the next two years, but in 1611 they were back in John Sigismund’s service. Christian II of Saxony died in this year. In July and August they visited Danzig and Königsberg, and in October and November they attended the Elector to Ortelsburg and Königsberg for the ceremonies in connexion with the acknowledgement of him as heir to his father-in-law, Duke Albert Frederick of Prussia. On this occasion Spencer was at the head of not less than nineteen actors and sixteen musicians, and produced an elaborate Turkish ‘Triumph-comedy’.[876] In April 1613 Spencer left Berlin on a tour which was to take him to Dresden once more.[877] The company were at Nuremberg in June, still using the name of the Elector of Brandenburg and playing Philole and Mariana, Celinde and Sedea, The Fall of Troy, The Fall of Constantinople, and The Turk.[878] In July and August they were at Augsburg, and in September they returned to Nuremberg, now describing themselves as the Elector of Saxony’s company.[879] This Elector was John George I (1611–56), the third of his house to entertain an English company. In October they played The Fall of Constantinople at the Reichstag held by the Emperor Mathias at Regensburg. Spencer was their leader, but they no longer claimed any courtly status.[880] After an unsuccessful attempt to pay a third visit for the year to Nuremberg, they went to Rothenburg, and so to Heidelberg, whither the Elector Palatine Frederick V had just brought his English bride. Here they spent the winter, and left to attend the Frankfort fair of Easter 1614.[881] In May their service with the Elector of Brandenburg, although now none of the most recent, helped them to get a footing in Strassburg, where they stayed until July and again played The Fall of Constantinople, as well as a play of Government.[882] In August they were at Augsburg and possibly Ulm.[883] In October they projected a return visit to Strassburg, but were rejected, ‘so dies Jar hie lang genug super multorum opinionem gewessen’.[884] Possibly they fell back upon Stuttgart.[885] In February 1615 they were in Cologne, and here a queer thing happened. The whole company, with Spencer’s wife and children, was converted to Catholicism by the eloquence of a Franciscan friar. The event is recorded in the town archives and also in a manuscript Franciscan chronicle preserved in the British Museum:[886]

‘Twentie fowre stage players arrive out of Ingland at Collen: all Inglish except one Germanian and one Dutchman. All Protestants. Betwixt those and father Francis Nugent disputation was begunne and protracted for the space of 7 or eight dayes consecutively; all of them meeting at one place together. The chiefe among them was one N. Spencer, a proper sufficient man. In fine, all and each of them beeing clearlie convinced, they yielded to the truth; but felt themselves so drie and roughharted that they knew not how to pass from the bewitching Babylonian harlot to their true mother the Catholic church, that always pure and virginal spouse of the lamb.’

It need hardly be said that in so Catholic a city as Cologne this singular act of grace gave the performances of the English comedians an extraordinary vogue. In June and July 1615 Spencer was at Strassburg, in company with one Christopher Apileutter, who may have been the Germanian or the Dutchman of the Cologne notice.[887] He attended the autumn fair at Frankfort, using an imperial patent, perhaps given him at Regensburg in 1613.[888] During the winter of 1615–16 he was again in Cologne, still profiting by his conversion.[889] This, however, had not made of him such a bigot, as to be unable to render acceptable duty in the Protestant courts where his earliest successes had been won. For a year his movements became obscure. But in August 1617 he was playing before the Elector of Saxony and the Emperor Matthias at Dresden.[890] And in the following year he once more entered the Brandenburg service. During the interval which had elapsed since 1613, John Sigismund had entertained another company. Early in 1614 he engaged William, Abraham, and Jacob Pedel, Robert Arzschar, Behrendt Holzhew, and August Pflugbeil.[891] The names hardly sound English; but Jacob Pedel is probably the Jacob Behel or Biel who was travelling with Sackville in 1597, William Pedel appeared as an English pantomimist at Leyden in November 1608, and Arzschar, whose correct name was doubtless Archer, is also described as an Englishman at Frankfort in the autumn of 1608.[892] He was then in company with Heinrich Greum and Rudolph Beart. A Burchart Bierdt appeared as ‘Englischer Musicant’ at Cologne in December 1612.[893] Archer perhaps came from Nuremberg. He was at Frankfort again in the autumn of 1610, and at the Reichstag held by the Emperor Matthias at Regensburg in September 1613.[894] It must have been this new company under Archer which visited Wolfenbüttel in September 1614 and Danzig in 1615, styling themselves the Brandenburg comedians.[895] The only names given at Danzig are Johann Friedrich Virnius and Bartholomeus Freyerbott, and in fact the Pedels, Holzhew, and Pflugbeil left Berlin at Easter 1615. Archer himself remained with the Elector until May 1616. The field, then, was clear at Berlin for the enterprise of Spencer. On 17 March 1618 John Sigismund made a payment ‘to one Stockfisch’ for bringing the English comedians from Elbing. Further payments to the English are recorded in the following November, and in June 1619 for plays at Königsberg and Balge in Prussia, of which the Elector had become Duke on the death of his father-in-law Albert Frederick in the preceding August.[896] In July 1619 the Elector of Brandenburg’s comedians are heard of at Danzig.[897] On 23 December 1619 John Sigismund himself died, and in 1620 Hans Stockfisch addressed an appeal for certain arrears of salary to Count Adam von Schwartzenberg, an officer at the court of the new Elector George William (1619–40), in which he claimed to have enjoyed the Count’s protection for more than fifteen years. In reply George William describes the petitioner as ‘den Englischen Junkher Hans Stockfisch, wie er sich nennet’.[898] There can be little doubt that Hans Stockfisch was none other than John Spencer, for the period of fifteen years precisely takes us back to his first appearance as a Brandenburg comedian in 1605. His fish name corresponds to, and was perhaps motived by, that of Pickleherring adopted by Robert Reinolds of the chief rival English company about the same date. Both had their prototype in Sackville’s John Bouset.[899] The Elector George William was no friend to actors, and to Spencer, as to others, the Thirty Years’ War closed many doors. In February 1623 he came to Nuremberg with Sebastian Schadleutner, but was not allowed to play.[900] And that is the last that is heard of him.

A few isolated records indicate the presence from time to time in northern Europe of players not yet mentioned, and not obviously connected either with the Browne or with the Spencer tradition. An English company under Peter de Prun of Brussels visited Nuremberg in April 1594. The name of the leader does not sound very English, and a company, not improbably the same, is described as ‘niederländische’ at Ulm in the following August. Heywood, however, speaks of an English company as in the pay of the Cardinal and Archduke Albert, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, about 1608.[901] Maurice of Orange-Nassau, Stadtholder of the Dutch Netherlands (1584–1625), who gave a recommendation to Spencer in 1605, had also an English company of his own, which visited Frankfort at Easter 1611, and then claimed to be strange in Germany.[902] To Augsburg in June 1602 came Fabian Penton and his company;[903] to Leyden in September 1604 John Woods and his company,[904] and to Leipzig in April 1613 Hans Leberwurst with his boys.[905] Of none of these is anything further known, nor of William Alexander Blank, a Scottish dancer, who performed at Cologne in April 1605.[906]

Traces of English players in southern Europe are few and far between. That Kempe’s travels of 1601 took him to Italy has already been noted.[907] There were some English acrobats at Madrid in January 1583.[908] On 25 May 1598 the Confrères de la Passion leased their theatre in Paris, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, to ‘Jehan Sehais comédien Anglois’, and on 4 June obtained judgement in the court of the Châtelet, ‘tant pour raison du susdit bail que pour le droit d’un écu par jour, jouant lesdits Anglais ailleurs qu’audit Hôtel’.[909] I do not know whether I am justified in finding under the French disguise of ‘Jehan Sehais’ the name of one John Shaa or Shaw, conceivably related to Robert Shaw of the Admiral’s men, who witnessed an advance by Henslowe to Dekker on 24 November 1599.[910] In 1604 another English company was in France, and gave a performance on 18 September in the great hall at Fontainebleau, the effect of which upon the imagination of the future Louis XIV, then a child of four, is minutely described in the singular diary of his tutor and physician, Jean Héroard.[911]

‘Mené en la grande salle neuve ouïr une tragédie représentée par des Anglois; il les écoute avec froideur, gravité et patience jusques à ce qu’il fallut couper la tête à un des personnages.’

On 28 September, Louis was playing at being an actor, and on 29 September, says Héroard:

‘Il dit qu’il veut jouer la comédie; “Monsieur,” dis-je, “comment direz-vous?” Il repond, “Tiph, toph,” en grossissant sa voix. À six heures et demie, soupé; il va en sa chambre, se fait habiller pour masquer, et dit: “Allons voir maman, nous sommes des comédiens.”’

Finally, on 3 October:

‘Il dit, “Habillons-nous en comédiens,” on lui met son tablier coiffé sur la tête; il se prend à parler, disant: “Tiph, toph, milord” et marchant à grands pas.’

It has been suggested on rather inadequate grounds that the play seen by Louis may have been 2 Henry IV. Possibly the princely imagination had merely been smitten by some comic rough and tumble.[912] But it is also conceivable that the theme may have been the execution of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, at the restoration of Henry VI in 1470.[913]

It would be rash to assume that these records of 1598 and 1604 represent all the visits of English actors to France during the Elizabethan period; and it is not improbable that a search in the municipal archives of Picardy and Normandy, as thorough as that which has been carried out for Germany, might yield notable results. Some general evidence that tours in France did take place can be cited. John Green, dedicating his version of Nobody and Somebody to the Archduke Maximilian about 1608, says that he had been in that country.[914] His, indeed, so far as dates go, might have been the company of 1604. And France, no less than Germany, is referred to as scoured by the English comedians about 1613.[915]

XV

ACTORS

[Bibliographical Note.--I include a few managers who were not necessarily themselves actors. The earlier studies of stage biography were mainly concerned with the Chamberlain’s and King’s men in the list of ‘The Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes’, prefixed to the Shakespearian F_{1} of 1623. The statements about them in [J. Roberts] Answer to Mr. Pope’s Preface to Shakespeare (1729) are conjectural and not, as sometimes supposed, traditional. A good deal was collected from wills and registers by E. Malone (Variorum, iii. 182), G. Chalmers (ibid. iii. 464), and J. P. Collier, Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare (1846, Sh. Soc. revised edition in H. E. D. P. iii. 255), and is summarized by K. Elze, William Shakespeare (tr. 1888), 246. New ground was broken by F. G. Fleay, On the Actor Lists, 1578–1642 (R. Hist. Soc. Trans. ix. 44), and in the list in Chronicle History of the London Stage (1890), 370. Here he criticizes Collier’s claim to have a list of 500 actors, as he cannot find ‘that any list at all was found among his papers’, and suggests that a forgery was planned. I am glad to have an opportunity for once of defending Collier, even if it is only against Fleay. The fifth report (1846) of the Sh. Soc. shows that ‘a volume of the original actors in plays by writers other than Shakespeare was in preparation, and Bodl. MS. 29445 contains a number of rough extracts made by Collier and P. Cunningham from London parochial registers, with a digest of these and other material, entitled ‘Old Actors. Collections for the Biography of, derived from Old Books & MSS. Alphabetically arranged’. I have used this manuscript and cite it as ‘Bodl.’ or ‘B.’. The information is mainly from the registers of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, St. Andrew’s Wardrobe, St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, St. Giles’, Cripplegate, and other churches. It appears to be reliable, except perhaps in one or two points. One would, of course, prefer to have the registers themselves in print, but with the exception of those of St. James’s, Clerkenwell (Harl. Soc.), and A. W. C. Hallen’s Registers of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, the published London Registers, as shown by A. M. Burke, Key to the Ancient Parish Registers of England and Wales (1908), are precisely those of least theatrical interest. The Southwark registers in particular, and the other records of that parish, including the ‘token-books’ or annual lists, street by street, of communicants, ought to be made available. Some notes from them are in W. Rendle, Bankside (1877, Harrison, Part ii). Southwark marriages (1605–25) are in Genealogist (n. s. vi-ix). In these records ‘man’ clearly means ‘player’. Extracts from other registers may be found in parochial histories and elsewhere. Some from St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, are in J. P. Malcolm, Londinium Redivivum (1802–7), iii. 303, J. J. Baddeley, St. Giles, Cripplegate (1888), and W. Hunter’s Addl. MS. 24589. C. C. Stopes, Burbage, 139, gives a full collection from St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch. An interesting list of actors and their addresses c. 1623 is in C. W. Wallace, Gervase Markham, Dramatist (1910, Sh.-Jahrbuch, xlvi. 345), cited as ‘J’. The citations ‘H’ and ‘H. P’ are from Greg’s editions of Henslowe’s Diary and Henslowe Papers.]

ABYNGDON, HENRY. Master of Chapel, 1455–78.

ADAMS, JOHN. Sussex’s, 1576; Queen’s, 1583, 1588. He possibly played the clown Adam in A Looking Glass and Oberon in James IV.. It would hardly be justifiable to conjecture that he lived to join Hunsdon’s and play Adam in A. Y. L.

ALDERSON, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1509–13.

ALLEYN, EDWARD, was born on 1 September 1566 in the parish of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate.[916] His father was Edward Alleyn of Willen, Bucks, Innholder and porter to the Queen, who died in 1570; his mother, Margaret Townley, for whom he claimed a descent from the Townleys of Lancashire which modern genealogists hesitate to credit, re-married with one John Browne, a haberdasher, between whom and other Brownes who appear in theatrical annals no connexion can be proved. Edward Alleyn is said by Fuller in his Worthies to have been ‘bred a stage player’. In formal deeds he is generally described as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’, and once, in 1595, as ‘musician’.[917] In January 1583 he was one of Worcester’s players; at some later date he joined the Admiral’s men, and had as ‘fellow’ his brother John, with whom during 1589–91 he was associated in purchases of apparel. On 22 October 1592 he married Joan Woodward, step-daughter of Philip Henslowe, with whom he appears ever after in the closest business relations. A Dulwich tradition that he was already a widower probably rests on a mention of ‘Mistris Allene’ in an undated letter about a German tour by Richard Jones, which is commonly assigned to February 1592, but is more probably of later date.[918] Alleyn is specifically described as the Admiral’s servant in the Privy Council letter of assistance to Strange’s men (q.v.), with whom he travelled during the plague of 1593. Some of the letters passing between him and his wife and father-in-law during this tour are preserved at Dulwich, and are full of interesting domestic details about his white waistcoat and his orange tawny woollen stockings, the pasturing of his horse, his spinach bed, and the furnishing of his house.[919] His ‘tenants’ are mentioned and his ‘sister Phillipes & her husband’. He had by this time a high reputation as an actor, as witnessed by Nashe in his Pierce Penilesse of 1592, where he classes him with Tarlton, Knell, and Bentley, and says, ‘Not Roscius nor Aesope, those admyred tragedians that haue liued euer since before Christ was borne, could euer performe more in action than famous Ned Allen’; and in his Strange Newes of the same year, where he says of Edmund Spenser that ‘his very name (as that of Ned Allen on the common stage) was able to make an ill matter good’.[920] An undated letter at Dulwich, written to him by an admirer who signs himself W. P., offers a wager in which ‘Peele’s credit’ was also in some way concerned, and in which Alleyn was to have the choice of any one of Bentley’s or Knell’s plays, and promises that, even if he loses, ‘we must and will saie Ned Allen still’.[921] In 1594 The Knack to know a Knave is ascribed, quite exceptionally, on its title-page, not to the servants of a particular lord, but to ‘Ed. Allen and his Companie’. From 1594 to 1597 Alleyn was one of the Admiral’s men (q.v.) at the Rose. He then ‘leafte playnge’, but resumed at the request of the Queen, although apparently without becoming a full sharer of the company, when the Fortune (q.v.), which he had built for them, was opened in the autumn of 1600. He became a servant of Prince Henry with the rest of his fellows in 1604, and at the coronation procession on 15 March appeared as the Genius of the City and delivered a ‘gratulatory speech’ to James ‘with excellent action and a well-tun’de, audible voyce’.[922] Further testimonies to his talent are rendered by John Weever;[923] by Ben Jonson, Epigram lxxxix (1616), who equals him to Aesop and Roscius, and himself to Cicero, who praised them; by Heywood, who says, ‘Among so many dead let me not forget one yet alive, in his time the most worthy, famous Maister Edward Allen’;[924] and by Fuller, who says, ‘He was the Roscius of our age, so acting to the life that he made any part (especially a majestic one) to become him.’[925] Of his parts are recorded Faustus,[926] Tamburlaine, Barabas in The Jew of Malta,[927] and Cutlack in a play of that name revived by the Admiral’s men in 1594 and now lost,[928] while that of Orlando in Greene’s Orlando Furioso is amongst the papers at Dulwich.[929] Heywood, writing about 1608, speaks of Alleyn’s playing in the past. He probably retired finally soon after the beginning of the new reign. In 1605 he valued his ‘share of aparell’ at £100; but his name is not in the patent to the Prince’s men of 30 April 1606, although as late as 1611 he still retained his personal rank as servant to the prince. It is difficult to give much credit to the legend that his withdrawal was due to remorse, or, as one version has it, to an apparition of the devil when he was playing Faustus.[930] Certainly he continued to hold an interest in the Fortune, and conceivably in the Red Bull (q.v.) also. And certainly remorse did not prevent him from continuing to exercise the functions of Master of the Game of Paris Garden, a post which he acquired jointly with Henslowe in 1604, having already been interested in the Bear-garden itself since 1594. At this after it became the Hope (q.v.) he was still about 1617 entertaining players. But the time of his retirement synchronizes with the first beginnings of his foundation of a school and hospital by the name of the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich. By 1605 he was a wealthy man, with income from substantial investments in leasehold property as well as the profits from his enterprises, and on 25 October he took the first step in the purchase of the manor of Dulwich, which was completed by 1614 at a total cost of nearly £10,000. Here about 1613 he made his residence, moving from Southwark, where he had been churchwarden of St. Saviour’s in 1610. In 1613 also he began the building of the college, which was opened in 1617. Alleyn himself acted as manager and was in a position to spend upon the college and his own household some £1,700 a year. The endowment of the college included, besides house property in London, the freehold of the Fortune. Henslowe had died in January 1616 and his widow in the following year, and his papers passed to Alleyn and remain at Dulwich. Here, too, is Alleyn’s own diary for 1617–22, and this and his correspondence show him as a friend of persons of honour, and the patron of writers and the members of his own former profession. Alleyn’s wife Joan died on 28 June 1623 and on the following 3 December he married Constance, daughter of John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, settling on her £1,500. A letter of 23 July 1624 indicates that he was then desirous of obtaining ‘sum further dignetie’. He died on 25 November 1626.

ALLEYN, JOHN. Admiral’s, 1589–91. Edward Alleyn had an elder brother John, who was born in 1556–7, and is described as servant to Lord Sheffield and an Innholder in 1580, and as servant to the Lord Admiral in 1589. He died about May 1596, being then of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and left a widow Margaret and son John. Presumably he was the Admiral’s player. But there was also an Allen family of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, one of whom, John, was a player. Here a John was baptized on 17 October 1570, a Lowin, son of John, baptized on 15 December 1588, a Joan buried on 13 May 1593, and a John on 18 May 1593. On 26 July 1596 is this curious baptismal entry: ‘Bennett, reputed daughter of J^{no} Allen, which J^{no} went with S^r Fr. Drake to the Indians in which time the child was got by a stage-player.’ Finally, on 18 October 1597, ‘Jone uxor Joh^{is} Allen player was buried with a still born child’ (H. ii. 239; Bodl.)

ALLEYN, RICHARD. Queen’s, (?) 1594; Admiral’s, 1597–1600. His daughters Anna and Elizabeth were baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 13 May 1599 and 17 May 1601 respectively. Here he is traceable in the token-books during 1583–1601, and was buried on 18 November 1601, leaving a widow (Rendle, Bankside, xxvi; H. ii. 239; Bodl.).

ALLEYN (ALLEN), RICHARD. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613.

ANDREWE, HENRY. Chapel, 1509.

ANDREWES, RICHARD. Worcester’s, 1583.

ANDROWES, GEORGE. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.

APILEUTTER, CHRISTOPHER. Germany, 1615.

ARCHER, RICHARD. Vide ARKINSTALL.

ARCHER? (ARZSCHAR, ERTZER), ROBERT. Germany, 1608–16.

ARKINSTALL, JOHN. A common player of interludes under licence, with Richard Archer, Barker, and Anthony Ward as his fellows. He was at Hastings on 25 March 1603, and on 30 March laid an information of the proclamation of Lord Beauchamp as king by Lord Southampton (Hist. MSS. xii. 4. 126).

ARMIN, ROBERT, is said to have been apprentice to a goldsmith in Lombard Street, and to have been encouraged as a ‘wag’ by Tarlton (ob. 1588), who prophesied that he should ‘enjoy my clownes sute after me’. He ‘used to’ Tarlton’s plays, and in time became himself a player ‘and at this houre performes the same, where, at the Globe on the Banks side men may see him’.[931] But his earliest reputation was as a writer. He wrote a preface to A Brief Resolution of the Right Religion (1590) and probably other things now unknown, for he is referred to as a son of Elderton in Nashe’s Foure Letters Confuted of 1592 (Works, i. 280). R. A. wrote verses to Robert Tofte’s Alba (1598), and R. A. compiled England’s Parnassus (1600); the latter is generally taken to be Robert Allot. The first dramatic company in which Armin can be traced is Lord Chandos’s men. In an epistle to Mary, widow of William Lord Chandos (1594–1602) prefixed to his kinsman Gilbert Dugdale’s True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, &c. (1604), he says, ‘Your good honor knowes Pinck’s poor heart, who in all my services to your late deceased kind lord, never savoured of flatterie or fixion.’ In his Foole upon Foole, or Six Sortes of Sottes (1600) he tells an incident which took place at Pershore in Worcestershire, during a tour of ‘the Lord Shandoyes players’, at which he was himself present, not improbably playing the clown ‘Grumball’.[932] By 1599, however, he had probably joined the Chamberlain’s men, for in the first edition of Foole upon Foole he describes himself as ‘Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe’. In a later edition of 1605 this becomes ‘Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe’. Both issues are anonymous, but Armin put his name to an enlargement entitled A Nest of Ninnies (1608).[933] ‘Clunnyco de Curtanio Snuffe’ is also on the title-page of Quips upon Questions (1600), which must therefore be by Armin and not by J. Singer, whose autograph Collier (Bibl. Cat. ii. 203) said that he found on a copy. This is a book of quatrains on stage ‘themes’ (cf. ch. xviii). It was written, as a reference to 28 December as on a Friday shows, in 1599. The author serves a master at Hackney (A ij). Later editions of 1601 and 1602 are said to have been in the Harley collection, and there is a reprint by F. Ouvry (1875). His name is in the 1603 licence for the King’s men and in the Coronation list of 1604. In 1605 Augustine Phillips left him 20_s._ as his ‘fellow’. Collier’s statement that in the same year he and Kempe (q.v.) were in trouble for libelling aldermen cannot be verified. He is a King’s man on the title-page of his Two Maids of Moreclacke (1609), produced by the King’s Revels, and on the title-page and in the S. R. entry on 6 February 1609 of his Phantasma, the Italian Tailor and his Boy. This is a translation from Straparola and is dedicated to Lord and Lady Haddington. In it he claims to have been ‘writ down an ass in his time’ and refers to ‘his constableship’, from which it is inferred that he played Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing. Fleay, L. of S. 300, finds a pun on ‘armine’ (= wretch) in London Prodigal (c. 1603), v. i. 179, and suggests that Armin played Matthew Flowerdale. There is a clown Robin in Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), and a clown Grumball in If it be not Good (1610–12), but this was a play of Anne’s men. He is in the actor-list of Jonson’s Alchemist (1610). An epigram on ‘honest gamesome Robert Armin’ is in John Davies of Hereford’s Scourge of Folly (S.R. 8 October 1610). He is not in the actor-list of Jonson’s Catiline (1611), nor has any later notice of him been found. That Armin is the R. A. whose play The Valiant Welshman was published in 1615 is only a conjecture. He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays. It is possible that a woodcut on the title-page of the Two Maids (q.v.) gives his portrait.

ARTHUR, THOMAS. Interluders, 1528.

ATTEWELL (OTTEWELL, OTWELL), GEORGE. Strange’s, 1591; Queen’s, (?) 1595. ‘M^r Otwell’ lived in St. Saviour’s Close in 1599. He is perhaps more likely than the following to be the author or singer of ‘M^r Attowel’s Jigge: betweene Francis, a Gentleman; Richard, a farmer; and their wives’, printed in A. Clark, Shirburn Ballads, lxi (H. ii. 240; B. 147).

ATTWELL (OTTEWELL), HUGH. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613; Charles’s, 1616–21; ob. 25 September 1621.

AUGUSTEN (AGUSTEN), WILLIAM. A ‘player’, from whom Henslowe bought his ‘boy’ Bristow in 1597 (H. ii. 240).

AYNSWORTH, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried at St. Leonard’s 28 September 1581 (B. 153).

BAKER, HARRY. Performer of Vertumnus in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1567.

BANASTER, GILBERT. Master of Chapel, 1478–83 (?).

BARFIELD, ROGER. Anne’s, 1606. His d. Isabell was baptized at St. Giles’s on 2 January 1611, and his d. Susan buried there on 3 July 1614 (B. 157).

BARKER. Vide ARKINSTALL.

BARKSTED (BACKSTEAD), WILLIAM. King’s Revels (?), 1607; Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613; Charles’s, 1616; also a dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii) and a poet. His Poems, edited by A. B. Grosart as Part II of Choice Rarities of Ancient English Poetry (1876), were Myrrha (1607), which has commendatory verses by his kinsman Robert Glover and I. W., Lewes Machin, and William Bagnall, and Hiren (1611), which has sonnets to Henry Earl of Oxford, and Elizabeth Countess of Derby. On the title-page he describes himself as ‘one of the servants of his Maiesties Revels’. The surmise of Fleay, i. 29, that this was repeated from an earlier edition of c. 1607 now lost may receive some confirmation from the connexion of Machin with the King’s Revels; but it must also be remembered that the Whitefriars Revels’ company appears to be occasionally described as the King’s Revels in provincial records of c. 1611. A trivial anecdote of him is in J. Taylor, Wit and Mirth (1629).

BARNE, WILLIAM. Admiral’s, 1602.

BARRY, DAVID (LORD). Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.

BARTLE (?). Alexander Bartle, son of ‘---- a player’, was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 27 February 1603 (B. 165).

BARTON, ONESIPHORUS. A ‘player’, buried at St. Giles’s on 9 March 1608 (B. 167).

BASSE, THOMAS. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613; Anne’s, 1617–19.

BAXTER, ROBERT. Chapel, 1601; Lady Elizabeth’s (?), 1613. Greg, H. P. 58, 87, however, thinks that the ‘Baxter’ of 1613, whose Christian name is not given, may be Barksted. Neither man is likely to have written the ‘Baxsters tragedy’ of 1602 (H. P. 58).

BAYLYE, THOMAS. Shrewsbury’s (provincial), 1581. J. Hunter, Hallamshire 80, and Murray, ii. 388, print from College of Arms, Talbot MS. G. f. 74, a Latin letter written by him to Thomas Bawdewin from Sheffield on 25 April 1581, in which he mentions a brother William, thanks him for a tragedy played by the company on St. George’s day, and begs him to procure ‘librum aliquem brevem, novum, iucundum, venustum, lepidum, hilarem, scurrosum, nebulosum, rabulosum, et omnimodis camificiis, latrociniis et lenociniis refertum ... qua in re dicunt quod Wilsonus quidam Leycestrii comitis servus (fidibus pollens) multum vult et potest facere’.

BAYLYE. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

BEART, RUDOLF. Germany, 1608.

BEESTON, CHRISTOPHER, has been conjectured to be the ‘Kit’ who played a Lord and a Captain in 2 Seven Deadly Sins for Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1. The actor-list of Every Man in his Humour shows that he belonged to the Chamberlain’s men in 1598. He is not, however, named as a performer of Shakespeare’s plays in the Folio of 1623. Probably he was at one time the hired man of Augustine Phillips who left him 30_s._ as his ‘servant’ in 1605. By 1602 he had passed to Worcester’s men, and with this company, afterwards Queen Anne’s, he remained until it was reconstituted on the Queen’s death in 1619, taking a prominent part in the management of the company, after the death of Thomas Greene in 1612. He seems to have built or acquired the Cockpit theatre, and to have successively housed there Queen Anne’s men (1617–19), Prince Charles’s men (1619–22), Lady Elizabeth’s men (1622–5), Queen Henrietta’s men (1625–37), and ‘the King’s and Queen’s young company’, also known as ‘Beeston’s boys’ (1637). By 1639 he had been succeeded as ‘Governor’ of this company by his son William Beeston, and was doubtless dead. The Cockpit had passed by June 1639 to ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Beeston, alias Hutcheson’.[934] It appears from the lawsuit of 1623, in which Queen Anne’s men were concerned, that Christopher Beeston also bore the alias of Hutcheson or Hutchinson. But if Elizabeth was his widow, she must have been a second wife, for the records of the Middlesex justices for 1615–17 record several true bills for recusancy as brought against a wife Jane. In these records Beeston, whose alias is also given, is described as a gentleman or yeoman, and as ‘late of St. James-at-Clerkenwell’, or in one case ‘of Turmil streete’. In 1617 his house was burgled by Henry Baldwin and others.[935] The registers of St. James’s, Clerkenwell, record the baptism of a daughter Anne on 15 September 1611, and the burial of a servant on 1 July 1615.[936] But at an earlier date Beeston lived in St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, where his sons Augustine, Christopher, and Robert were baptized, and the first two buried between 16 November 1604 and 15 July 1610. Robert also was buried there on 26 December 1615, but Christopher was then described in the register as of Clerkenwell. Possibly he afterwards returned to Shoreditch, as Collier states that his name is traceable in the register up to 1637.[937] His son William, also a suspected recusant, was living in Bishopsgate Without just before his death in 1682.[938] An earlier William Beeston, with whom Christopher may have had some connexion, is the ‘Maister Apis Lapis’ and ‘Gentle M. William’, to whom Nashe addressed his Strange Newes (1592).[939]

BEESTON, ROBERT. Anne’s, 1604, 1609.

BEESTON. A player at Barnstaple in 1560–1 (Murray, ii. 198).

BELT, T. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

BENFIELD, ROBERT, is first named in the actor-lists of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb and The Honest Man’s Fortune, both of which probably represent performances by the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1613. Subsequently he joined the King’s men, but at what date is uncertain. It may have been upon the death on 16 December 1614 of William Ostler, whom he succeeded in the part of Antonio in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. He is in the actor-list of The Knight of Malta (1616–19) and in the patent of 1619. He seems to have been a member of the company to the end, as he signed the dedication of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio in 1647. He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays. Collier found some late records of his family (B. 181).

BENTLEY, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583. He is named by Heywood as before his time, lauded by Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592) (Works, i. 215) with Tarlton, Alleyn, and Knell, coupled with Knell in the undated challenge to Alleyn (q.v.) to play one of their parts, and placed by Dekker in A Knight’s Conjuring (1607) in the company of the poets, Watson, Kyd, and Achelow, ‘tho he had ben a player molded out of their pennes, yet because he had been their louer and register to the muse, inimitable Bentley’. He may be the John Bentley whose poems are mentioned by Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica (1802), 129.

BIERDT, BURCHARD. Germany, 1612.

BILLINGESLY, JOHN. Payee for Westminster boys, 1572.

BIRCH, GEORGE. Interluders, 1538–59.

BIRCH, JOHN. Interluders, 1547–56.

BIRD, alias BORNE, WILLIAM. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1622. Many personalia of his family and debts are recorded in Dulwich manuscripts and church registers (H. ii. 241; B. 204).

‘BLACK DICK.’ Admiral’s, 1597.

BLACKWOOD, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1602–3; Germany, 1603–6(?). The conjecture of Fleay, i. 290, that an earlier German tour is referred to in How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (1602) is baseless (H. ii. 244).

BLANEY, JOHN. Revels, 1609; Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived near the Red Bull in St. John’s Street in 1623 (J. 347).

BLANK, WILLIAM ALEXANDER. A Scottish dancer in Germany, 1605.

BOONE, WILLIAM. A ‘player’ mentioned in books of St. Saviour’s, c. 1600 (Rendle, Bankside, xxvi). Possibly an error for Borne.

BORNE, WILLIAM. Vide Birde.

BOWER, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1545–61, and possibly author of Apius and Virginia (1575); cf. ch. xxiv.

BOWRINGE, GREGORY. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

BRADSHAW, RICHARD. Edward, Lord Dudley’s (provincial), 1595. He was Gabriel Spencer’s ‘man’ in 1598, and concerned in financial transactions with Henslowe during 1598–1601. He may be the same Richard Bradshaw who had a provincial company, with a licence to which his title was dubious, in 1630–33 (H. ii. 245; Murray, ii. 42, 106, 163).

BRADSTREET, JOHN. Germany, 1592–7, 1604. He ob. in 1618.

BRETTEN, WILLIAM. Chapel, >1546.

BRISTOW, JAMES. Augusten’s boy, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602 (H. ii. 245).

BROMEHAM. Paul’s, >1582.

BROWNE, EDWARD. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s, 1602. He was a witness for Henslowe in 1599 (H. ii. 246).

BROWNE, JOHN. Interluders, 1551–63.

BROWNE, JOHN. Revels (?), 1608.

BROWNE, ROBERT. Worcester’s, 1583; Holland, 1590; Germany, 1592–3, 1594 (?)-9; Derby’s, 1599–1601; Germany, 1601–7; Revels patentee, 1610; Germany, 1618–20. His wife and family died at Shoreditch in the plague of 1593, but a son Robert and daughter Elizabeth were baptized at St. Saviour’s on 19 October 1595 and 2 December 1599. On 11 April 1612 he wrote to Alleyn from Clerkenwell (H. P., 37, 63; B. 229; Rendle, Bankside, xxvi).

BROWNE, WILLIAM. Anne’s, c. 1616.

BROWNE. It is not safe to identify the Browne whom Henslowe paid to ‘feach’ for the Admiral’s in 1596 (H. i. 45), or the ‘old Browne’ who, as well as Edward, played in 1 Tamar Cham for the Admiral’s in 1602 (H. P. 148), or ‘Browne of the Boares head’ who, according to Alleyn’s wife on 21 Oct. 1603, ‘is dead & dyed very pore, he went not into the countrye at all’ (H. P. 59). The last may be the man whose widow married Thomas Greene (q.v.).

BRYAN, GEORGE, was one of the English company which visited Helsingör in Denmark and Dresden in Germany during 1586–7. He is one of the three actors distinguished as ‘Mr.’ in the plot of Tarlton’s The Seven Deadly Sins as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, and is named in the Privy Council warrant for the travelling of Strange’s in 1593. He was payee for the Chamberlain’s men on 21 December 1596, but is not in the Every Man in his Humour actor-list of 1598 or traceable at any later date amongst the Chamberlain’s or King’s men. Probably he left to take up duty as an ordinary Groom of the Chamber, as he is found holding this post at Elizabeth’s funeral in 1603 and still held it (Chamber Accounts) in 1611–13. His son George was baptized at St. Andrew’s Wardrobe on 17 February 1600.[940] He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays.

BUCKE, PAUL. A ‘player’ whose d. Sara was buried on 23 July 1580 and his bastard son Paul buried on 23 July 1599 at St. Anne’s (B. 237). It is apparently his name which, for whatever reason, appears at the end of Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1584). ‘Paule Bucke’s praier for Sir Humfrey Gilberte’ was entered in S. R. on 17 July 1578.

BUGBY, JOHN. Grammar Master of Chapel, 1401.

BULL, JOHN. Chapel, 1572 (?)->1586.

BULL, THOMAS. Denmark, 1579–80.

BURBADGE, JAMES. The Shakespearo-centric tendencies of literary historians have led them to suggest a regional connexion between the dramatist and the family of his most famous interpreter.[941] There was a Warwickshire family of Burbadge, of whom John was bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon in 1555, and Malone was thus led (Var. iii. 187) to ‘suspect’ that James Burbadge was Shakespeare’s countryman. Collier (iii. 258) having learnt that the arms claimed by Cuthbert Burbadge at the London visitation of 1634, ‘crest, a boar’s head; and three boars’ heads on a shield’ (Harleian Soc. xv), were those of a Hertfordshire family, attempted the explanation that the two families ‘were in some way related’. He committed himself deeply by publishing in 1835 (New Facts, 32; cf. Ingleby, 256) a forged letter from H. S. to Sir Thomas Egerton, containing the statement that Shakespeare and Richard Burbadge are ‘both of one countie, and indeede almost of one towne’. Burbadges are traceable in various parts of England, including Somerset, Oxfordshire, and Durham (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 344; Stopes, 134, 243), and the conjecture has about as much value as Malone’s derivation of the name (Var. iii. 182) from ‘Borough-bridge’, or Chalmers’s from ‘Boar’s badge’. Nor is any connexion known between James Burbadge and various other Burbadges--Robert, John, and Edward--who appear in contemporary documents (Collier, iii. 282; Stopes, 152), although A. Wood (Fasti Oxon. i. 303) makes himself responsible for the statement that one John Burbadge, of Lincoln College, was nearly related to the actor. The name is indifferently spelt Burbadge, Burbage, or Burbege by contemporaries, but usually Burbadge in family signatures (Wallace, 61, 63 ‘James Burbage’, 252; Collier, iii. 294; Malone Soc. Coll. ii. 69, 76). James sealed the Blackfriars indentures of 1596 with a griffin.

James was about sixty on 16 February 1591 (Wallace, 61) and was therefore born in 1530–1. He was ‘by occupacion a joyner and reaping but a small lyving by the same, gave it over and became a commen player in playes’ (Wallace, 141). He was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1576, and apparently continued a ‘fellow’ of this or some other company for a year or two after he established the Theatre in 1576 (Wallace, 142). In this year he was a poor man, and of small credit, not worth above 100 marks (Wallace, 134, 141, 153), but he had enlisted the capital of John Brayne, whose sister Ellen he had married (Wallace, 40, 139). His business history thereafter is bound up with that of the Theatre (q.v.) and of the Blackfriars, which he planned, but probably never used, during the last years of his life. Cuthbert Burbadge says of him (Blackfriars Sharers Papers, 1635) that he ‘was the first builder of playhowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player’. He was described as ‘joyner’ in the lease of the Theatre site in 1576, but in later years usually as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’. Presumably he went to live in Shoreditch in 1576, as entries for his family then begin in the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139). They testify to the baptism (17 March 1576) of a daughter Alice, mentioned as Alice Walker in the will of Nicholas Tooley (q.v.) in 1623, and the burial (18 August 1582) of a daughter Joan. Another daughter, Helen, was buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 15 December 1595 (Bodl.). Besides Alice and Helen he had in 1588 (Wallace, 39) two sons, Cuthbert and Richard, who would both have been born before 1576. James himself was buried at Shoreditch on 2 February 1597 and his widow on 8 May 1613. The registers generally give the family residence as ‘Halliwell Street’, and the ‘Halliwell’ which appears in 1597 and 1601 is perhaps an accidental variant. But the lawsuits suggest that James had built himself a house in the old inner cloister yard of the priory, which lay a little north of Halliwell Street, if that is the same as Holywell Lane (Wallace, 232, 236). They also represent him as a man of violent temper and not over-honest, while an independent record (App. D, No. lxxiv) refers to him as ‘a stubburne fellow’. Before his death he seems to have made over his interest in the Blackfriars to his son Richard, while that in the Theatre had passed by redemption of a mortgage to Cuthbert (Wallace, 55, 73, 108, 145, 278).

Cuthbert Burbadge, the elder son of James, was not an actor, although as holder of the leases of the Theatre and afterwards of the Globe (q.v.) he was concerned during the greater part of his life with theatrical management. On 16 February 1591 he was servant to Walter Cope, gentleman usher to Lord Burghley. He was then twenty-four, and must have been born in 1566–7. He was then probably living in the Strand (Stopes, 152), but the subsidy rolls for 1597 (Stopes, 195) show him as assessed at 10_s._ 8_d._ in Holywell Street, and the registers of St. Leonard’s have the records of his children, Walter (bapt. 22 June 1595), James (bur. 15 July 1597), and Elizabeth (bapt. 30 December 1601). Of these only Elizabeth, the wife first of Amias Maxey and secondly of George Bingley, was alive in 1634 and her son Amias had been adopted by his grandfather. Cuthbert himself was buried at Shoreditch on 17 September 1636, and his widow Elizabeth, daughter of John Cox, on 1 October 1636 (Stopes, 134, 140). His friendship with members of the King’s company is commemorated by notices in the wills of William Sly (1608), Richard Cowley (1618), and Nicholas Tooley, who died in his house in 1623. Collier (iii. 285) identified him with Cuthbert Burby the stationer, but Burby was in fact the son of Edmund Burby of Beds., husbandman (Arber, ii. 127). Possibly, however, the families were related, since Burby’s name is given at least once in the Stationers’ Register (Arber, ii. 612) as ‘Burbidge’.

BURBADGE, RICHARD, makes his first appearance, picturesquely enough, in the brawl at the Theatre which followed upon the Chancery Order of 13 November 1590, restoring a moiety of the profits of the house to the widow Brayne (cf. p. 392). John Alleyn deposed (Wallace, 101) that he ‘found the foresaid Ry. Burbage the yongest sone of the said James Burbage there, w^t a broome staff in his hand, of whom when this deponente asked what sturre was there, he answered in laughing phrase hew they come for a moytie. But quod he (holding vppe the said broomes staff) I haue, I think, deliuered him a moytie with this & sent them packing.’ Nicholas Bishop (Wallace, 98, 115), one of Mrs. Brayne’s agents, adds the confirmatory detail that ‘the said Ry. Burbage scornfully & disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose, sayd, that yf he delt in the matter, he wold beate him also, and did chalendge the field of him at that tyme’. Very possibly Richard was then playing with the Admiral’s men at the Theatre. His exact age is unknown, but he was younger than Cuthbert, born in 1566–7, and as Cuthbert, long after, spoke of the ‘35 yeeres paines, cost, and labour’ out of which his brother ‘made meanes to leave his wife and children some estate’ in 1619 (Sharers Papers), it may perhaps be inferred that his histrionic career began as early as 1584. The ‘plot’ of The Dead Man’s Fortune, wherein the doubtful direction (cf. p. 125) ‘Burbage a messenger’ suggests that he played a minor part, may belong to a performance by the Admiral’s c. 1590. It is a little more difficult to suppose that at a date when the Queen’s men were still active the Admiral’s or Strange’s had already acquired Tarlton’s Seven Deadly Sins, in the ‘plot’ of which ‘R. Burbadg’ is cast for the important characters of Gorboduc and Terens. But perhaps it is even less probable that, after the breach of the Admiral’s with his father in 1591, he took part in the performances of the same play by the amalgamated Admiral’s and Strange’s men at the Rose in 1592. His name does not appear amongst those of the Strange’s men who were travelling in 1593. But when the amalgamation broke up, and the Chamberlain’s company was formed, with some of its elements as a nucleus, in 1594, he joined that company, and became a prominent member, often acting as its representative or payee, both before and after its metamorphosis into the King’s men, and to the end of his own life. His name is constant in its lists (cf. ch. xiii), and his personal relations with his fellows are reflected in the wills of Augustine Phillips in 1605, Shakespeare in 1616, and Nicholas Tooley, whose ‘master’ he had been, in 1623. It would appear that in the somewhat irregular disposition of James Burbadge’s theatrical interests the Blackfriars freehold fell primarily to Richard. The leases of 1608 were made by him as lessor to his brother and other members of the King’s men’s syndicate as lessees. This, however, was doubtless a mere family arrangement, for Cuthbert spoke of the Blackfriars in 1635 as ‘our inheritance’, and the two brothers shared in the supplementary transactions which rounded off the original purchase (cf. ch. xvii). At the Globe, on the other hand, Cuthbert and Richard held in common a moiety of the housekeepers’ interest under the lease from Nicholas Brend (cf. ch. xvi). They continued to live as close neighbours in Halliwell Street, Shoreditch, where they shared the misfortune of having their houses burgled in 1615 (Jeaffreson, ii. 108) and where the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139) record Richard’s children: Richard (bur. 16 August 1607), Julia or Juliet (bapt. 2 January 1603, bur. 12 September 1608), Frances (bapt. 16 September and bur. 19 September 1604), Anne (bapt. 8 August 1607), Winifred (bapt. 10 October 1613, bur. 14 October 1616), a second Julia (bapt. 26 December 1614, bur. 15 August 1615), William (bapt. 6 November 1616), and a posthumous Sara (bapt. 5 August 1619, bur. 29 April 1625). ‘Richard Burbadge, player’ was himself buried on 16 March 1619. He had died, not as Camden records in his Annals on 9 March, but on 13 March, after making the day before a nuncupative will (Collier, iii. 293), witnessed by his brother and by Nicholas Tooley and Richard Robinson of the King’s men, in which he left his wife Winifred sole executrix. She subsequently married Richard Robinson, and was still alive, as was Burbadge’s son William, in 1635 (Sharers Papers). According to the gossip of the day he left ‘better than £300 land to his heirs’ (Collier, iii. 297).

Burbadge had a high reputation as a player, both in life and after death. A note of 13 March 1602 by John Manningham (Diary, 39) records how his impersonation of Richard III touched the heart of a citizen’s wife, and how Shakespeare prevented him at a resultant assignation. John Davies of Hereford coupled him with Shakespeare in 1603 (Microcosmos) among players whom he loved ‘for painting, poesie’, and in 1609 (Civile Warres of Death and Fortune) amongst those whom Fortune ‘guerdond not, to their desarts’. He is introduced in propria persona into 2 Return from Parnassus (1602) and into Marston’s induction to The Malcontent (1604). Probably he is the ‘one man’ of the London stage with whom the player in Ratseis Ghost (1605; cf. ch. xviii) is advised ‘to play Hamlet for a wager’. Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair (1614), v. iii, makes Cokes ask the master of the puppets, ‘which is your Burbage now?... your best Actor. Your Field?’ He was apparently the model for the Character of an Actor in the Characters of 1615 (App. C, No. lxi). And other evidences of his fame can be traced down to Restoration days in Richard Corbet’s Iter Boreale, in Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle and Theatrum Redivivum, and in Richard Flecknoe’s Short Discourse of the English Stage and his Euterpe Restored (cf. Collier, iii. 279; Stopes, 121; Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, N.S.S., 128, 250).

Shortly after Burbadge’s death, on 20 May 1619, the Earl of Pembroke wrote to Lord Doncaster in Germany of a great supper given the same night by the Duke of Lennox to the French ambassador, and adds that the company were now at the play, ‘which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg’ (E. J. L. Scott in Athenaeum (1882), i. 103). Several epitaphs and elegies upon Burbadge are preserved. The shortest--‘Exit Burbadge’--was printed in Camden’s Remaines (1674), 541. Another is by Middleton (Collier, iii. 280, 296). A third, which begins

Some skillfull limner helpe mee, yf not soe, Some sad tragedian, to expresse my woe,

has been the subject of much controversy (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 88; C. M. Ingleby, The Elegy on Burbadge, in Shakespeare, the Man and the Book, ii. 169). It exists in two versions, one of 86 lines, the other of 124 lines. Of the shorter version several undoubtedly genuine manuscripts are known, and it is probably only by accident that one of these omits ll. 2–5 of the following passage, which is given completely by all the rest:

Hee’s gone & with him what a world are dead, Which he reuiud, to be reuiued soe. No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe. Kind Leer, the greued Moore, and more beside, That liued in him, haue now for ever dy’de. Oft haue I seene him leap into the graue, Suiting the person which he seem’d to haue Of a sadd louer with soe true an eye, That theer I would haue sworne, he meant to dye. Oft haue I seene him play this part in ieast, Soe liuely, that spectators, and the rest Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed, Amazed, thought euen then hee dyed in deed.

In the longer version ll. 2–5 are not only omitted, but are replaced by an interpolation of many lines, detailing a number of parts, some of which belonged to other companies than the King’s, and are not likely to have been played by Burbadge. No manuscript of this version is forthcoming, and there can be little doubt that the interpolation is due to Collier, who referred to the version in his New Particulars (1836), 27, and published it in his Memoirs of the Actors (1846), 52, professedly from a manuscript in the possession of Richard Heber. Of the shorter version I can add to what has been recorded by others that in Stowe MS. 962, f. 62^v, I have found a copy of it, with the title ‘An Elegie on the death of the famous actor Rich: Burbage, who died 13 Martij A^o. 1618’, and an ascription to ‘Jo ffletcher’. Other copies also give the date of Burbadge’s death, or refer, as do the opening lines themselves, to the fact that he was skilled not only as an actor but as a limner. John Davies testifies to this in the verses of 1603 already cited. The accounts of the Earl of Rutland for the birthday tilt of 1613 contain the entry, ‘31 Martij, To M^r. Shakspeare in gold, about my Lordes impreso, 44^s. To Richard Burbage for paynting and makyng yt, in gold, 44^s’; and those for the tilt of 1616, ‘25 Martij, 1616, paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lordes shelde and for the embleance, 4^{li} 18^s’ (H. M. C. Rutland MSS. iv. 494, 508). The gallery at Dulwich contains a picture presented by William Cartwright, which is described in his catalogue as ‘a womans head on a boord done by M^r. Burbige y^e actor’. The inveterate tendency of mankind to guess has led to suggestions that he may have painted the portrait of himself in the same gallery, the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, or the original of the Droeshout print.

One other record of Burbadge, apart from his company, may be noted. On 31 May 1610 he was employed by the City, with his fellow James Rice, to deliver a speech to Prince Henry at a water-pageant on the Thames (cf. ch. iv). Presumably he represented Amphion, ‘a grave and judicious Prophet-like personage’, and Rice Corinea.

BURGES, ROBERT. A ‘player’ buried at St. Bennet’s, Gracechurch, 14 April 1559 (B. 251).

CANDLER, JAMES. Leader of a company at Ipswich, 1569–70 (Hist. MSS. ix. 1. 248).

CARIE (GARY), GILES. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613.

CARLETON, NICHOLAS. Paul’s, >1582.

CARPENTER, WILLIAM. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611; Charles’s, 1619, 1625. He was apparently porter at the Marshalsea in 1623 (J. 347).

CARTWRIGHT, WILLIAM. Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1598–1622 (H. ii. 247). He lived at the upper end of White Cross Street in 1623 (J. 347).

CASTLE, THOMAS. A ‘player’, whose son Nicholas and daughter Hester were baptized at St. Giles’s on 9 October 1608 and 15 April 1610 (B. 262).

CATTANES. Worcester’s, 1602 (H. ii. 248).

CAVALLERIZZO, CLAUDIO. Italians, 1576 (?).

CHAPPELL, JOHN. Chapel, 1600–1.

CHESSON, THOMAS. Oxford’s (?), 1580.

CLARK, SILL. Prince’s, 1603< >1641.

CLARKE, ROBERT. A ‘player’ whose son Ezekiel was buried at St. Giles’s, 7 November 1617 (B. 268).

CLARKE, THOMAS. Leicester’s, 1572.

CLAY, NATHANIEL. Anne’s, 1618; Chamber of Bristol, 1618.

CLEMENT, WILLIAM. London player, 1550 (App. D, No. v).

CLIFTON, THOMAS. Kidnapped for Chapel, 1600.

COBORNE, EDWARD. A ‘player’ whose son John was baptized at St. Giles’s on 23 Nov. 1616. Of other family entries, 1613–25, some are for Edward Coborne ‘gentleman’ (Bodl.). He may be identical with COLBRAND.

COKE, RICHARD. Interluders, 1547–56.

COLBRAND, EDWARD. Palsgrave’s, 1610–13.

COLE. Paul’s, 1599.

COLMAN, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1509.

CONDELL, HENRY, has been conjectured to be the ‘Harry’ cast for Ferrex and a Lord in the ‘plot’ of The Seven Deadly Sins, as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1. The first definite notice of him is in the cast of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, as played by the Chamberlain’s men in 1598. Thereafter he appears in all formal lists of the Chamberlain’s and King’s men, up to the Caroline patent of 1625, including the list in the First Folio of 1623, of which, with Heminges, he acted as editor. He is also in all the casts up to The Humourous Lieutenant (c. 1619). About this date he presumably ceased to play; his part of the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi had passed to Richard Robinson by 1623. The fact that he took this part somewhat discredits the conjecture of John Roberts (Answer to Pope, 1729) that he was a comedian; nor can the statement of the same writer that he was a printer be verified. He is staged with other members of the company in Marston’s Malcontent (1604), and appears as ‘Henry Condye’ in the verses on the burning of the Globe in 1613. He is assigned 26_s._ 8_d._ to buy a ring as Shakespeare’s ‘fellowe’ in his will of 1616, and appears also as a legatee in the will of Augustine Phillips in 1605, as trustee in that of Alexander Cooke in 1614, as executor and joint residuary legatee in that of Nicholas Tooley in 1623, under which also his wife and his daughter Elizabeth receive legacies, and as executor in that of John Underwood in 1625. By 1599 he was married and apparently settled in St. Mary Aldermanbury, where he held various parochial offices during 1606–21, and the register records his children: Elizabeth (bapt. 27 February 1599, bur. 11 April 1599), Anne (bapt. 4 April 1601, bur. 16 July 1610), Richard (bapt. 18 April 1602), Elizabeth (bapt. 14 April 1603, bur. 22 April 1603), Elizabeth (bapt. 26 October 1606), Mary (bapt. 30 January 1608, bur. from Hoxton at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, 24 March 1608), Henry (bapt. 6 May 1610, bur. 4 March 1630), William (bapt. 26 May 1611), Edward (bapt. 22 August 1614, bur. 23 August 1614).[942] Subsequently he had a ‘country house’ at Fulham, at which on 10 September 1625 a pamphlet written by certain players on their travels during the plague, as a reply to Dekker’s A Rod for Run-awayes, under the title of The Run-awayes Answer, was addressed to him, with an expression of gratitude for a ‘free and noble farewell’ which he had given the writers. At Fulham, too, on 13 December 1627, he made his will, leaving to his widow Elizabeth, his sons Henry and William, and his daughter Elizabeth, wife of Herbert Finch, much household property at Aldermanbury and elsewhere in London, including ‘rents and profits’ by ‘leases and terms of years’ of ‘messuages houses and places’ in Blackfriars and on the Bankside, which were to pass for a time to William and ultimately to the widow.[943] Condell had not been an original sharer in the house of the Globe, but by 1612 had acquired an interest jointly with Heminges; of the Blackfriars house he was an original sharer in 1608. The Sharers Papers of 1635 indicate that Mrs. Condell had held four-sixteenths of the Globe and one-eighth of the Blackfriars, but had transferred two-sixteenths of the Globe when Taylor and Lowin were admitted as sharers. A minor legacy in Condell’s will is to his old servant, Elizabeth Wheaton, of her ‘place or priviledge’ in the Globe and Blackfriars. Heminges and Cuthbert Burbadge are named as overseers. Condell was buried on 29 December 1627, and his widow on 3 October 1635, both at St. Mary Aldermanbury.[944]

COOKE, ALEXANDER, has been conjectured to be the ‘Sander’ who is cast in the ‘plot’ of The Seven Deadly Sins as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, for the parts of Videna in Envy and Progne in Lechery. But, as far as this goes, he might just as well be the ‘San.’ who took the part of a player in Taming of a Shrew (1594), ind. 1, which was a Pembroke’s play. Malone ‘presumes’, with some rashness, that he performed ‘all the principal female characters’ in Shakespeare’s plays.[945] It must be doubtful whether he was on the stage as early as 1592. He is traceable as a member of the King’s men in the casts of Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1605), Alchemist (1610), Catiline (1611), and The Captain (1612–13). The fact that in the first two of these his name occurs at the end of the lists has been somewhat hazardously accepted as an indication that he played women’s parts. He is also in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. Augustine Phillips left him a legacy as his ‘fellow’ in 1605.

‘Mr. Cooke and his wife’ commend themselves to Alleyn in his wife’s letter of 21 October 1603.[946] The token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, show an Alexander Cooke in Hill’s Rents during 1604, 1607, 1609, and 1610; and the parish register, recording the baptism of Francis Cooke, son of Alexander, ‘a player’, on 27 October 1605, makes an identification possible. There were three more children, Rebecca (bapt. 11 October 1607), Alice (bapt. 3 November 1611), Alexander (bapt. 20 March 1614). This last was posthumous; the register records Alexander Cooke’s burial on 25 February 1614.[947] His will, dated 3 January 1614, leaves £50 each to Francis, Rebecca, and the unborn child, and the residue to his wife.[948] He owned £50 ‘which is in the hand of my fellowes, as my share of the stock’. He appoints ‘my master Hemings’, to whom he had presumably been apprenticed, and Condell trustees for his children, and mentions brothers Ellis and John, of whom the latter is conjectured by Collier to be the author of Greene’s Tu Quoque.

COOKE, EDWARD. Chapel, 1509.

COOKE, LIONEL. Queen’s, 1583, 1588.

COOKE, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1583.

COOKE, WILLIAM. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.

CORNISH, JOHN. Gentleman of Chapel, and pageant-master at wedding of Arthur in 1501.

CORNISH, KIT. A ‘ghost-name’ in Chapel records.

CORNISH, WILLIAM. Master of Song School, Westminster, 1479–80.

CORNISH, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1509–23. Conceivably identical with the last, and in any case probably of the same family.

COWLEY, RICHARD, was of Strange’s men in 1593. He had played minor parts with that company or the Admiral’s in The Seven Deadly Sins of 1590–1, and is mentioned in Alleyn’s correspondence as travelling with the company. He joined the Chamberlain’s men, probably on their formation in 1594, and was payee for the company in 1601. The stage-directions to the Quarto (1600) and Folio texts of Much Ado about Nothing, IV. ii, show that he played Verges. He is in the 1603 and 1604 lists of the King’s men, and received a legacy from Augustine Phillips as his ‘fellow’ in 1605, but does not appear to have been a sharer in the houses of the Globe or Blackfriars. He is in the Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. He dwelt in Holywell, or for a short period in Alleyn’s Rents, both in the parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, whose register records his children, Robert (bapt. 8 March 1596, bur. (?) 20 March 1597), Cuthbert (bapt. 8 May 1597), Richard (bapt. 29 April 1598, bur. 26 February 1603), Elizabeth (bapt. 2 February 1602), as well as the funeral of his wife Elizabeth on 28 September 1616, and his own on 12 March 1619.[949] His will, dated on 13 January 1618, appoints his daughter Elizabeth Birch executrix and is witnessed by Heminges, Cuthbert Burbadge, Shank, and Thomas Ravenscroft, perhaps the madrigalist.[950]

CRANE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).

CRANE, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1523–45.

CROSSE, SAMUEL, is named amongst the performers of Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio, but in no list of the Chamberlain’s or King’s men. Probably, therefore, he belongs to the very beginning of Shakespeare’s career, and is to be identified with the Crosse named by Heywood amongst famous actors of a generation before his time.[951]

CUMBER, JOHN. Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived in Aldermanbury in 1623, and died in that year (J. 347; Fleay, 279).

CURTEYS, JAMES. Chapel, 1509.

CUTLER, JAMES. Chapel, > 1605.

DABORNE, ROBERT. Revels patentee, 1610, and dramatist.

DANIEL, JOHN. Chamber of Bristol patentee, 1615–17.

DANIEL, SAMUEL. Allower of Revels’ plays, 1604, and dramatist.

DARLOWE. Admiral’s, >1590.

DAVIES, HUGH. Admiral’s (?), 1601 (H. ii. 255).

DAWES, ROBERT. Duke of York’s, 1610; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614.

DAY, JOHN. Admiral’s (?), c. 1600. John, son of John Day, ‘player’, was baptized at St. Saviour’s, 3 June 1604 (B. 308; cf. ch. xxiii).

DAY, THOMAS. Chapel, 1601, 1602.

DOB. Admiral’s, 1598–1601.

DOWNTON (DOWTON, DOUTON (?), DOWTEN, DOWGHTON, DENYGTEN, DOUBTON), THOMAS. Strange’s, 1593; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–c. 1618. The St. Saviour’s registers record various family events, including the baptism of Christopher, son of Thomas Dowton ‘musycyon’ on 27 December 1592 and that of Thomas Dowton ‘baseborne, the supposed son of Thomas Dowton, a player’, 25 May 1600. He apparently married a vintner’s widow on 15 February 1618, became a vintner, and was still alive on 18 August 1622 (B. 316; H. ii. 262, 265). Dr. Greg regards him as one of the Dutton family.

DRAKE, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

DRAYTON, MICHAEL. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.

DREWE, BARTHOLOMEW. A ‘player’, whose son George was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 12 November 1614 (B. 314).

DREWE, THOMAS. Anne’s, 1616–19.

DROM, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1601.

DRUSIANO. Vide MARTINELLI.

DUKE, JOHN. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Chamberlain’s, 1598; Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–9. Four children were baptized at St. Leonard’s, where he lived in Holywell Street, from July 1604 to January 1609 (H. ii. 265; Collier, Actors, xxxi).

DULANDT (DOWLAND?), ROBERT. Musician in Germany, 1623.

DUTTON, EDWARD. Admiral’s, 1597, with a boy ‘Dick’. Children of his were baptized at St. Saviour’s during 1600–2 (B. 326).

DUTTON, JOHN. Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1583, 1588–91. Lincoln’s Inn paid him for musicians in 1567–8 (Walker, i. 362). There are family records of a John Dutton at St. Botolph’s, who is called ‘player’ in the entry of a daughter Elizabeth’s baptism of 3 July 1586 (B. 328).

DUTTON, LAURENCE. Lane’s, 1571–2; Clinton’s, 1572–5; Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1589–91. It is curious that a John and a Laurence Dutton also appear as Court Messengers. I find a payment on 23 May 1578 to John for carrying letters to Antwerp (Pipe Office, Chamber Declared Account 541, m. 211^v), and Laurence was paid for ‘sondry jorneys’ in 1561–2 (ibid. m. 39) and was during 1576–82 one of the regular Messengers of the Chamber in attendance on the Privy Council (Dasent, ix. 223, x. 223, 228, xi. 437, xii. 23, xiii. 135, 392, etc.). The ‘Edward’ Dutton of the last entry may be an error. In 1592 the Council (xxii. 493) recommended John the son of Laurence who had ‘of long tyme served her Majestie’ as Messenger, for admission as a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster. But this Laurence can hardly have been the actor, for he was acting as Messenger on 20 May 1580, while the affray for which Laurence the actor had been committed to the Marshalsea on 13 April was still uninquired into. Somewhat earlier a Thomas Dutton was employed as a post between Edward VI’s Council and Thomas Gresham in Antwerp, and was Gresham’s agent in Hamburg, c. 1571 (Burgon, Gresham, i. 109; ii. 421). It is easier again to conjecture than to prove a connexion between the actors and the house of Dutton, which had a hereditary jurisdiction over minstrelsy in Cheshire (cf. ch. ix), although in this the names John and Laurence both appear. It is perhaps an accident that two of the recorded visits of the Queen’s men to Lord Derby’s northern seats in 1588–90 synchronize with visits by a Mr. Dutton (Murray, ii. 296).

ECCLESTONE, WILLIAM, appears as a King’s man in the casts of The Alchemist (1610) and Catiline (1611). Mr. Fleay’s statement that he joined the company from the Queen’s Revels in 1609 rests upon a confusion with Field.[952] In 1611 he became a member of the Lady Elizabeth’s men, but left them in 1613 after playing in The Honest Man’s Fortune during that year. He returned to the King’s, and his name is found in the official lists of the company for 1619 and 1621 and in most of the casts of their plays, from Bonduca in 1613–14 to The Spanish Curate in 1622, as well as in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. Nicholas Tooley forgave him a debt in his will of 3 June 1623. As he is not in the Caroline patent of 1625, he had probably died or retired by that date. He may be the W. E. who writes commendatory verses to The Wild-goose Chase in 1652. If he is also the ‘William Eglestone’ whose marriage to Anne Jacob is recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 20 February 1603, he lived to be an old man.[953]

EDMONDS, JOHN. Globe lessee, 1612; Chamber of Bristol, 1618–19. The St. Saviour’s registers record the marriage of a John Edmonds to Margaret Goodyere on 22 February 1600 and the baptism of children of John Edmonds, ‘player’, from 6 January 1605 to 17 July 1615 (B. 334). Probably the two are not identical and the player is the John Edmans who seems to have married his fellow-legatee, Mary Clarke, of the will of Thomas Pope (q.v.) in 1604.

EDWARDES, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1561–6, and dramatist.

EICHELIN. Germany, 1604.

ELDERTON, WILLIAM. One Elderton, dressed as a fool, played the part of one of the Lord of Misrule’s sons in George Ferrers’s Christmas revel of 1552–3 (Feuillerat, Edw. and Mary, 120; cf. Mediaeval Stage, i. 407). Conjecture may identify him with the Elderton who brought the Eton boys to Court on 6 January 1573 and the William Elderton who brought the Westminster boys on 1 January 1574, and with the rhyming William Elderton, some of whose ballads are preserved and reprinted in Collier, Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies (1842, Percy Soc.), 25, 45; H. Huth, Ancient Ballads and Broadsides (1867, Philobiblon Soc.); and H. L. Collman, Ballads and Broadsides (1912, Roxburghe Club); or recorded, with ballads against him, in the Stationers’ Register (Arber, i. 179, 180, 181, 199, 384, 403, 439; ii. 338, 363, 369, 388, 396, 399; cf. v. lxxvi), while his ‘ale-crammed nose’ and ‘rymes lying a steepe in ale’ are subject for much humour among the pamphleteers (Lyly, iii. 398; Nashe, i. 197, 256, 280; iii. 123, 133, 177, 354). Stowe (Survey, i. 272) makes him an attorney in the sheriff’s courts at the Guildhall about 1568, but he can hardly be the ‘master Elderton’ who sat as a justice at the Guildhall in a coining case of 1562 (Machyn, 290). He appears to have been dead by 1592 (Harvey, i. 163; Nashe, i. 280). A recent paper on Elderton by H. E. Rollins is in S. P. xvii (1920), 199.

ENGLISH, JOHN. Interluders, 1494–1531.

EVANS, HENRY. Blackfriars lessee, 1583, 1600–8; payee for Oxford’s, 1584; manager of Chapel, 1600–3. He was a scrivener, and overseer to the will of Sebastian Westcott, Master of Paul’s, in 1582.

EVANS, THOMAS. Blackfriars lessee, 1608.

EVESEED, HENRY. Chapel, >1585.

FARNABY, RICHARD. Musician in Germany, 1623.

FARRANT, RICHARD. Master of Children of Windsor, 1564–80; Acting Master of Chapel and Blackfriars lessee, 1576–80.

FERRABOSCO, ALFONSO. Italians, 1576, and Court musician (cf. ch. ii).

FETHERSTON, WILLIAM. Of Danby, Yorks., unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

FIDGE, WILLIAM. H. R. Plomer (3 Library, ix. 252) cites from a Canterbury record of 1571, ‘William Fidge and Whetstone owe the said [Robert] Bettes [a painter] for their portions in buying of certen playebookes 35_s._ 4_d._’

FIELD, NATHAN, was the son of John Field, preacher and castigator of the stage (cf. App. C, No. xxxi), and was baptized at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 17 October 1587 (Collier, iii. 425). His name is always spelt Nathan in formal contemporary documents, although he was familiarly known as Nat or Nid. But he appears in many reputable modern works of learning as Nathaniel. This error perhaps originated with the compilers of the 1679 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, who in four out of the six actor-lists in which his name is found used the form Nathan and in two (Loyal Subject and Mad Lover) Nathanael. It was certainly encouraged by a muddle of Collier, who finding in the Cripplegate registers that another son of John Field had been baptized Nathaniel on 13 June 1581, and not realizing that a cranky theological father might quite well use the names as distinct, thought it necessary to assume that this Nathaniel had died before 1587. As a matter of fact, he survived, was apprenticed to a stationer at Michaelmas 1596, took up his freedom on 3 June 1611, and between 1624 and 1627 published some books, including two sermons by a third brother, Theophilus Field, Bishop of Llandaff (McKerrow, Dict. 101). I need hardly linger over the suggestion that Nathan Field lived a double life as actor and bookseller. At this time of the apprenticeship he was not yet nine years old, and he was still a scholar of St. Paul’s Grammar School when, not earlier than 1600, he was impressed by Nathaniel Giles and his deputies to serve as one of the Children of the Chapel (Clifton v. Robinson in Fleay, 128). His education was not entirely interrupted, for he fell into the hands of Ben Jonson, who told Drummond in 1619 that ‘Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the Satyres of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall’ (Laing, 11). Field remained a member of the Chapel and the Queen’s Revels throughout the vicissitudes of the company from 1600 to 1613. He is in the actor-lists of Cynthia’s Revels (1600), The Poetaster (1601), and Epicoene (1609), and presumably played Humfrey in K. B. P. (1607).[954] With his fellows he became absorbed into the Lady Elizabeth’s in March 1613, contracted with Henslowe and Meade on behalf of this company (Henslowe Papers, 23), acted as their payee in 1615, and appears in the actor-lists of The Coxcomb, The Honest Man’s Fortune, and Bartholomew Fair (1614), in the text of which Jonson compliments him (v. 3) as follows:

Cokes. Which is your Burbage now?

Lanterne. What meane you by that, Sir?

Cokes. Your best Actor. Your Field?

He seems to have been suspected by the company of taking bribes from Henslowe to connive at transactions contrary to their interest (Henslowe Papers, 88). Certainly he was in financial straits and on more than one occasion appealed to Henslowe to secure his release from an arrest (Henslowe Papers, 66, 67). Perhaps it was as a result of this friction with his fellows that he abandoned their amalgamation with Prince Charles’s men in 1615. Instead he joined, at or about this date, the King’s men, and appears as one in the actor-lists of The Loyal Subject, The Knight of Malta, The Queen of Corinth, and The Mad Lover. It must, I think, have been by a slip that Cuthbert Burbadge, in the Sharers Papers of 1635, spoke of him as joining the King’s with Ostler and Underwood in 1608 or 1609. It seems probable that Field brought with him to the King’s a share of the plays which had formed the repertory of the joint Lady Elizabeth’s and Queen’s Revels, including Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, in which a King’s prologue vaunts his success as Bussy. He did not stay with the company very long, for though he is in the patent of 27 March and the livery list of 19 May 1619, he is replaced by John Rice in the livery list of 7 April 1621. And as he does not appear and Rice does appear amongst the actors named in the stage-directions to Sir John von Olden Barnevelt in August 1619, it is probable that he had left in the course of the summer (M. L. R. iv. 395). If so, his departure synchronizes with a scandal which attached itself to his name. His moral character was hardly becoming to the son of a preacher. More than one manuscript commonplace book (e. g. Ashm. MS. 47, f. 49, which appears from the spelling of the name to be a late copy) contains an epigram with some such heading as On Nathaniell Feild suspected for too much familiarity with his M^{ris} Lady May. And on 5 June 1619 Sir William Trumbull wrote from Brussels to Lord Hay (E. J. L. Scott in Athenaeum (1882), i. 103) that he was told that the Earl of Argyll had paid for the nursing of a child, ‘which the world sayes is daughter to my lady and N. Feild the Player’. Lady Argyll was Anne, daughter of Sir William Cornwallis of Brome. Field’s later life is obscure. There is an unimportant jest about him in John Taylor’s Wit and Mirth (1629). He was married to a wife Anne, and had children baptized and buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, during 1619–25. If another epigram, printed by Collier, iii. 437, can be trusted, he very properly suffered from jealousy. In relevant register entries the name is given as Nathan. The Blackfriars registers give children both of Nathan and of Nathaniel Field, and on 20 February 1633 occurs the burial of Nathaniel Field, whom, if the entry does not indicate that the confusion of persons had already begun, we are bound to take to be the bookseller. There is no reason why both brothers should not have resided in Blackfriars.

Field was dramatist, as well as actor. In addition to the two plays published under his single name, he collaborated with Massinger in The Fatal Dowry, which was a King’s play and not likely, therefore, to fall outside the dates 1616–19. And as the Henslowe correspondence (Henslowe Papers, 65, 84) show him as collaborating also with Fletcher, Massinger, and Daborne for the Lady Elizabeth’s, he has been conjectured as a possible sharer in the authorship of several of the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher series. He also, about the time of his joining the King’s, wrote a defence of the stage, in the form of a remonstrance to Mr. Sutton, a preacher of St. Mary Overies (App. C, No. lxiii). A portrait of Field is at Dulwich.

FLETCHER, LAWRENCE. Scotland, 1595, 1599, 1601; Admiral’s (?), 1596; King’s, 1603. Although included as a King’s man in the royal patent, there is no reason to suppose that Fletcher ever joined the company acting at the Globe; the absence of his name from the actor-list in the Shakespeare F_{1} of 1623 is strong evidence that he did not. He lived in St. Saviour’s, where he had a homonym, a victualler, who survived him. One of the two is shown by the token-books as housed in Hunt’s Rents, Maid Lane, during 1605–7; probably this was the actor, who was buried on 12 September 1608. The description ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a man: in the church’ of the register is amplified in a fee-book to ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a player, the King’s servant, buried in the church, with an afternoon’s knell of the great bell, 20s.’ (Collier, Memoirs of the Actors^1, x; Rendle, Bankside, xxvii).

FLOWER. Admiral’s (?), c. 1600.

FOSTER, ALEXANDER. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1618; Charles’s, 1616.

FREYERBOTT, BARTHOLOMEUS. Germany, 1615.

FRITH, MOLL. It appears to be suggested in the Epilogue to The Roaring Girl (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker) that this lady was to appear in person on the Fortune stage, c. 1610.

FROST, JOHN. Chapel, 1601.

GARLAND, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588; Lennox’s, 1605; Duke of York’s, 1610. He appears to have dwelt in 1605 at ‘the ould forde’ (H. ii. 267).

GARLICK. In I. H., This World’s Folly (1615), an actor of this name is apparently said to have personated himself on the Fortune stage, ‘behung with chaynes of Garlicke’ (App. C, No. lix); cf. Dekker, If This be not a Good Play (1610–12), sc. x (ed. Pearson, iii. 325), ‘Fortune fauours no body but Garlicke, nor Garlike neither now, yet she has strong reason to loue it; for tho Garlicke made her smell abhominably in the nostrills of the gallants, yet she had smelt and stuncke worse but for garlike’; H. Parrot, Laquei Ridiculosi (1613), Epig. 131, ‘Greene’s Tu Quoque and those Garlicke Jigs’; in Tailor, Hog Hath Lost his Pearl (1614, ed. Dodsley^4, p. 434), a jig will draw more whores ‘than e’er Garlic had’.

GARRET, JOHN. Anne’s, 1619.

GEDION. Admiral’s, 1602.

‘GERRY.’ King’s Revels, 1607.

GEW. A blind player, referred to in 1 Ant. Mellida (1599), ind. 142, ‘’t had been a right part for Proteus or Gew. Ho! blind Gew would ha’ done ’t rarely, rarely’; E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), Sat. v, ‘One that for ape tricks can put Gue to schoole’, and Epig. xi, ‘Gue, hang thy selfe for woe, since gentlemen Are now grown cunning in thy apishness’; Jonson, Epig. cxxix, ‘Thou dost out-zany Cokely, Pod; nay, Gue.’ Pod was a puppet-showman.

GIBBS. Admiral’s, 1602.

GIBSON, RICHARD. Interluders, 1494–1508; afterwards Yeoman of the Revels.

GILBURNE, SAMUEL, is recorded in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. All that is known of him beyond this is that Augustine Phillips left him as his ‘late apprentice’ in his will of 1605 the sum of 40_s._, various garments, and a bass viol. Collier’s inference that he could play on the viol is a fairly harmless example of biographical conjecture.[955] The identification of him with the ‘b[oy?] Sam’ of the ‘plot’ of The Dead Man’s Fortune, a play probably belonging to the Admiral’s, and of a date not later than 1591, is more dangerous.[956]

GILES, NATHANIEL. Master of Windsor Choir, 1595–1634; Master of Chapel, 1597–1634.

GILES, THOMAS. Master of Paul’s, 1585–1590 <; Instructor in Music to Henry, 1606, and Charles, 1613.

GOODALE, BAPTISTE. ‘Ghost-name’ (?) in Queen’s list (1589) forged by Collier, New Facts, ii.

GOODALE, THOMAS. Berkeley’s, 1581; Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Chamberlain’s (?) at date of Sir Thomas More (cf. ch. xxiv). If he is the Thomas Goodale, mercer, who entered with John Alleyn and Robert Lee into a bond to Edward Alleyn on 18 May 1593 (H. ii. 295, from Dulwich MS. iv. 29), he was not improbably connected with the Admiral’s >1590.

GOUGHE or GOFFE, ROBERT, was probably the ‘R. Go.’ entered in the ‘plot’ of The Seven Deadly Sins, as playing Aspasia in Sloth for the Admiral’s or Strange’s men about 1590–1. Probably he belonged at an early date to the King’s men. He is a legatee in Thomas Pope’s will of 22 July 1603, and witnessed that of Augustine Phillips on 4 May 1605, in which Phillips names a sister Elizabeth Goughe, doubtless the Elizabeth ---- recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, as marrying Robert Gough on 13 February 1603. The token-books of St. Saviour’s indicate Gough’s residence in Hill’s Rents during 1604, Samson’s Rents during 1605 and 1606, and Austin’s Rents in 1612–22; and the registers, which generally call him a ‘player’, record his children Elizabeth (bapt. 30 May 1605), Nicholas (bapt. 24 November 1608), Dorothy (bapt. 10 February 1611, bur. 12 January 1613), Alexander (bapt. 7 August 1614), and his own burial on 19 February 1624.[957] His son Alexander became in his turn a player. A stage-direction to l. 1723 of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) shows that he played Memphonius. He also played Leidenberch in Sir John von Olden Barnevelt in 1619, and appears in the official lists of the King’s men for 1619 and 1621 and in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays.

GOUGHE, THOMAS. Lane’s, 1572.

GRACE, FRANCIS. Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1610–22. He lived at George Alley, Golden Lane, in 1623 (J. 347).

GRAUNGER, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.

GREAVES, JOHN. Lane’s, 1572.

GREEN, JOHN. Germany, 1608; France, >1608; Holland, 1613; Germany, 1615–20, 1626. On his verses and portrait, 1608, cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. Nobody and Somebody. He may have been brother of the following.

GREENE, THOMAS. Anne’s, 1604–12. In R. Braithwaite, Remains after Death (1618) are four epigrams on him, one of which says that he ‘new come from sea, made but one face and dide’. A couplet on his death, signed W. R., is in Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque. I. H., World’s Folly (1615), mentions his performance of a baboon (cf. App. C, No. lix). He was of St. James’s, Clerkenwell, in 1612, when he made his will (Fleay, 192), naming his wife Susan, daughter Honor, sons-in-law (i.e. stepsons) Robert and William Browne, daughters-in-law Susanna, Elizabeth, and Anne Browne, brothers John and Jeffery Greene, and sister Elizabeth Barrett. A conjecture that he was of Stratford origin has no foundation (Lee, 54).

GREUM, HENRY. Germany, 1608.

GRIFFEN. Admiral’s, 1597.

GRIGORIE, JACK. Admiral’s, 1602.

GRYMES, THOMAS. Chapel, 1600–1.

GUNNELL, RICHARD. Palsgrave’s, 1613–22. Family notes appear in the registers of St. Giles’s, 1614–30 (B. 409).

GYLLOME, FOKE. Player (?) to Alexander Houghton, 1581 (cf. ch. ix, p. 280).

GYRKE, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).

HALLAWAIE, ‘the younger’. Paul’s, 1580.

HAMLEN (HAMLETT), ROBERT. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611–13; Charles’s, 1616, 1625.

HAMMOND, JOHN. Interluders, 1494.

HAMOND. Worcester’s, 1565.

HARRISON, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose daughter Suzanna by wife Anne was baptized at St. Helen’s on 10 January 1602.

HARRISON, WILLIAM. Worcester’s, 1583.

HARVEY. Chamberlain’s, 1597.

HAWKINS, ALEXANDER. Blackfriars lessee, 1601; Revels patentee, 1604.

HAYNE, WILLIAM. Head Master of Merchant Taylors’, 1599–1625.

HAYSELL, GEORGE. Worcester’s, 1583. For a possible notice of the same man, cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. Misogonus.

HEARNE, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1597.

HELLE, JOHN. Admiral’s, 1597.

HEMINGES, JOHN, whose name is variously spelt, appearing, for example, as ‘Heminge’ in his signature to the dedication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and as ‘Hemmings’ in the actor-list in the same volume, is known to have had a wife Rebecca, and may fairly be identified with the ‘John Hemminge, gent.’ of St. Mary Cornhill, who was married on 10 March 1588 to Rebecca Knell, widow, relict of William Knell, gent., late of St. Mary Aldermanbury. In the same parish William Knell had married Rebecca Edwards on 30 January 1586, and an older William Knell had been buried on 24 September 1578.[958] One of these was not improbably the early actor celebrated by Heywood. Malone found a family of Heming at Shottery, and conjectured that of this family John was born at some date earlier than the opening of the Stratford-on-Avon register in 1558.[959] But this is rendered improbable by a confirmation of arms in 1629 to ‘John Hemings of London Gent. of long tyme Servant to Queen Elizabeth of happie Memory, also to King James hir Royal Successor and to King Charles his Sonne’, in which he is described as ‘Sonne and Heire of George Hemings of Draytwiche in the Countye of Worcester Gent.’[960] There seems little reason to doubt that this John Hemings is the player. He very probably began his theatrical career with the Queen’s company, to which also Knell had belonged. By May 1593, however, he had joined Strange’s men, from whom he passed to the Chamberlain’s men, probably on the original formation in 1594. Of this company, afterwards the King’s men, he remained a member to the end of his career. He appears in all the official lists of the company up to 1629, and regularly acted as their payee for Court performances, generally with a colleague from 1596 to 1601, and thereafter alone. This and his prominence in the negotiations of the company and the lawsuits arising out of them, suggest that he acted as their business manager. As an actor he appears in all the casts up to Catiline in 1611, but not thereafter; possibly he may have resigned acting, and devoted himself to business. The unreliable John Roberts, Answer to Pope (1729), conjectures that he was a ‘tragedian’. Malone had seen a statement in some tract of which he had forgotten the title, that he was the original performer of Falstaff.[961] The lines on the burning of the Globe in 1613 thus describe him:

Then with swolne eyes, like druncken Flemminges, Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.

He is ‘old Master Hemings’ in Jonson’s Masque of Christmas (1616). He lent his ‘boy’ John Rice (q.v.) to the Merchant Taylors for their entertainment of James on 16 July 1607, and another ‘boy’ for Chapman’s mask of 1613. He is named as a legatee and overseer in the will of Augustine Phillips in 1605, and as executor in the event of the widow’s re-marriage; also as a trustee in the will of Alexander Cooke, who calls him his ‘master’, in 1614; as a witness in that of Richard Cowley in 1618; as a legatee in that of Shakespeare in 1616; and as a legatee and overseer in those of Underwood in 1624 and of Condell in 1627. He was appointed a trustee for Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property in 1613,[962] and acted with Condell as editor of the First Folio of the plays in 1623. This fact is probably the origin of the statement of Roberts that he was engaged with Condell in business as a printer. He filled various parochial posts from 1608 to 1619 in St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, and the registers contain records of the following children: Alice (bapt. 10 November 1590, married John Atkins 11 February 1612), Mary (bapt. 26 May 1592, bur. 9 August 1592), Judith (bapt. 29 August 1593), Thomasine (bapt. 15 January 1595), Joan (bapt. 2 May 1596), John (bapt. 12 August 1599), Beavis (bapt. 24 May 1601), William (bapt. 3 October 1602), George (bapt. 12 Feb. 1604), Rebecca (bapt. 4 February 1605), Elizabeth (bapt. 6 March 1608), Mary (bapt. 21 June 1611, bur. 23 July 1611).[963] In the same parish ‘John Heminge, player’ was himself buried on 12 October 1630, beside his wife Rebecca, who preceded him on 2 September 1619. He is registered as a ‘stranger’ and was therefore probably residing elsewhere. In his will, made on 9 October, he describes himself as ‘citizen and grocer of London’, appoints his son William executor and trustee for his unmarried and unadvanced children, and Cuthbert Burbadge and ‘Mr. Rice’, possibly the actor, overseers, and leaves legacies to his daughters Rebecca, wife of Captain William Smith, Margaret, wife of Mr. Thomas Sheppard, who is not mentioned in the register, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Merefield, and to his son-in-law Atkins ‘and his now wife’, and his grandchild Richard Atkins. He also leaves 10_s._ for a ring ‘unto every of my fellows and sharers, his majesties servants.[964] William Heminges went to Westminster and Christ Church, and became a playwright.[965] Unnamed in the will is Thomasine, who may have been dead, but certainly had quarrelled seriously with her father. She had married William Ostler of the King’s men in 1611 and her son Beaumont was baptized at St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, on 18 May 1612. Ostler died intestate on 16 December 1614 in possession of shares in the leases both of the Globe and the Blackfriars. These passed of right to Thomasine as his administratrix, and formed all the provision left for her maintenance and her husband’s debts. The leases, however, passed into the hands of Heminges, who retained them and asserted that Ostler had created a trust, of which Thomasine declared that she knew nothing. On 20 September 1615 she entered a bill in Chancery against her father, and subpœnaed him to appear during the coming Michaelmas term. On 26 September Heminges promised that if she would withdraw her suit, and would also ‘doe her dutie’ to him and to her mother Rebecca, he would satisfy her to the value of the shares. Thomasine states that on the same day kneeling and in tears she made her submission at her father’s house in Aldermanbury. She also stayed her suit, but Heminges, although called upon to fulfil his promise on 5 October, failed to do so, and on 9 October Thomasine brought a common law action against him for damages to the amount of £600, which she estimated to be the value of the shares.[966] The issue of the case is unknown, but it would seem probable from the Sharers Papers of 1635 that Heminges succeeded in retaining the shares, and that at his death they passed to his son William. Professor Wallace states that in 1616 Thomasine Ostler was involved in another lawsuit with Walter Raleigh, son of Sir Walter, and obtained a verdict of £250 against him for insult and slander. One way and another, Heminges seems to have acquired a considerable financial interest in the Globe and Blackfriars. He had an original seventh of a moiety of the Globe lease in 1599, and an original seventh of the Blackfriars lease in 1608. But as executor to Phillips (q.v.) and otherwise he had opportunities of adding to these holdings. The Sharers Papers show that at his death he had four sixteenths of the Globe and probably two eighths of the Blackfriars; and these, or some of them, he had enjoyed ‘thirty yeeres without any molestacion, beeing the most of the sayd yeeres both player and houskeeper, and after hee gave over playing diverse yeeres’. In Witter v. Heminges and Condell he is described as being in 1619 of ‘greate lyveinge wealth and power’.[967] The play-house shares seem to have been the chief part of the property left by his will. They passed to William Heminges as his executor. He seems to have gradually disposed of them, first selling one share in the Globe by arrangement with the company to Taylor and Lowin, and later, by transactions which some of his fellows resented, one share in each house to John Shank during 1633 for £156, and the remaining shares also to John Shank during 1634, for £350. He was then in difficulties, and Shank disbursed additional small sums to him in prison. It was these sales to Shank which brought about the petition to the Lord Chamberlain recorded in the Sharers Papers.

HENSLOWE, FRANCIS. Queen’s, 1594; Lennox’s, 1605. He was son of Richard and nephew of Philip Henslowe, and various entries in the diary and other Dulwich MSS. record his imprisonments, more than once on criminal charges, his employment during 1593–4 in his uncle’s pawnbroking, and his loans, one of which on 1 June 1595 was of £9 ‘to laye downe for his hallfe share with the company which he dothe playe with all’ (H. i. 6), conceivably, as Dr. Greg suggests, some company other than the Queen’s, in which he had already acquired a half share in 1594. He dwelt in the Clink in 1594, took a house called the Upper Ground on Bankside in 1597, and was of St. George’s, Southwark, in 1606, in which year, between 30 March and 6 October, both he and his wife died (H. ii. 277).

HENSLOWE, PHILIP. Owner of Rose, Fortune, Hope, and perhaps lessee of Whitefriars; cf. ch. xi.

HERIOT, HENRY. Interluders, 1547–52.

HEYWOOD, JOHN. For his possible connexion with Paul’s, cf. ch. xii, s.v. Chapel.

HEYWOOD, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1598; Worcester’s Anne’s, 1602–19, and dramatist.

HINSTOCK, ROBERT. Interluders, 1538–51.

HOBBES, THOMAS. Charles’s, 1610, 1616–25. He lived at the upper end of Shoreditch in 1623 (J. 348).

HOLE, RICHARD. Interluders, 1526–30.

HOLLAND, J. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

HOLT, JAMES. Anne’s, 1604–19.

HOLT, JOHN. A ‘momer’, who helped the Westminster boys in 1561, probably identical with the Yeoman of the Revels of that name (cf. ch. iii), who helped them in 1564–5.

HOLZHEW, BEHRENDT. Germany, 1614–15.

HOVELL, WILLIAM. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615.

HOWARD, THOMAS. A ‘player’ named in St. Saviour’s records c. 1600 (Rendle, Bankside, xxvi).

HUDSON, RICHARD. Weaver of Hutton Bushell, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

HÜLL, JOHN. Germany, 1600–1.

HUNNIS, JOHN. A ‘ghost-name’ by an error for the following.

HUNNIS, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1566–97, and dramatist.

HUNT (HONTE), THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1599, 1602; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611 (H. ii. 285).

HUNTLEY, DICK. Actor in Summer’s Last Will and Testament (vide l. 14).

HUSE, RICHARD. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

IVY, NICHOLAS. Chapel, 1509.

JEFFES, ANTHONY. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1597–>1613. Anthony, son of Richard Jeffes, baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 14 December 1578, may be the same who married Faith Jones there on 19 February 1601. Children of Anthony Jeffes ‘player’ are recorded in the registers of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, from 11 June 1602 to 1 May 1609; in later entries from 30 May 1610 to 30 October 1616, Anthony is called ‘brewer’ (H. ii. 286; Bodl.).

JEFFES, HUMPHREY. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1616<. He was buried at St. Giles’s, 21 August 1618. A daughter Mary was baptized at St. Saviour’s, 25 January 1601 (H. ii. 287; Collier, Actors, xxx).

JOHNSON, WILLIAM. Leicester’s, 1572–4; Queen’s, 1583, 1587–8. The baptismal entries at St. Giles’s include on 10 February 1587 ‘Comedia, baseborne daughter of Alice Bowker, and, as she saithe, the father’s name is William Johnson, one of the Queen’s plaiers’, and the burials on 3 March 1593 ‘Comedia, daughter of William Johnson, player’. Is he the William Johnson, vintner, who was trustee of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property 1613–18 (Lee, 459, 493)?

JONES, RICHARD. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s (?), >1589; Germany, 1592–3; Admiral’s, 1594–6; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602; Revels patentee, 1610; Germany (?), 1615; Germany, 1620, 1622–4. His wife Harris inherited a lease of the Leopard’s Head in Shoreditch from her father in 1620. A Richard Jones is traceable in the Southwark token-books from 1588 to 1607 and may or may not be the same who married Anne Jube there on 14 February 1602 (H. ii. 288; H. P. 94; Bodl.).

JONES, ROBERT. Germany, 1602; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615.

JONNS, DANIEL. Denmark, 1586.

JONSON, BENJAMIN. Pembroke’s (?), 1597; Chamberlain’s (?), c. 1598; and dramatist.

JUBY, EDWARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–1618, Fortune lessee, 1618. An Edward Juby is traceable during 1598 to 1619 in the token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark. In the last year he is marked ‘dead’, and his burial was registered on 20 November 1618. In 1610 and 1614 he filled parish offices. He may fairly be identified with the ‘player’ whose children occur in the registers from 3 June 1599 to 15 September 1614. His widow Francis held his share of the Fortune lease in 1622 (H. ii. 290; Rendle, Bankside, xxvi; Bodl.).

JUBY, RICHARD. Admiral’s, 1602. His son Richard was baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 1 May 1602 (Bodl.).

JUBY, WILLIAM (?). Admiral’s, 1599–1602 (H. ii. 290).

JUGLER, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

KEMP, JOHN. Germany, 1601.

KEMPE, WILLIAM, cannot be securely identified or connected with any one of various homonyms who have been traced in D. N. B. and elsewhere.[968] He probably emerges as one of Leicester’s men in the Low Countries during 1585–6 and thence made his way to Denmark. He was in London and had already won a comic reputation by 1590 when the dedication of An Almond for a Parrat (Nashe, iii. 341), ‘To that most Comicall and conceited Caualeire Monsieur du Kempe, Jestmonger and Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton,’ tells how the anonymous author, possibly Nashe, had been asked by ‘that famous Francatrip’ Harlicken’ at Bergamo in the previous summer, whether he knew ‘any such Parabolano here in London as Signior Chiarlatano Kempino’ of whose ‘pleasance’ Harlicken had heard ‘report’. In Four Letters Confuted (1592) Nashe says of an action of Harvey’s, ‘Will Kempe, I mistrust it will fall to thy lot for a merriment, one of these dayes’ (i. 287). An example of Kempe’s merriments is to be found in sc. xii of A Knack to Know a Knave (1594) played by Strange’s men, to whom Kempe belonged by 1593. He was also famous for his jigs. Four of these are entered in the Stationers’ Register during 1591–5 (cf. ch. xviii) but are not preserved, and ‘Kemps jiggs’ is the heading to some music collected by John Dowland and preserved in Camb. Univ. Libr. MS. Dd. ii. 11 (cf. Halliwell, MS. Rarities, 8). Marston (iii. 372), Scourge of Villainy (1598), sat. xi. 30, ‘the orbs celestial Will dance Kempe’s jig,’ and E. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), sat. v, ‘Whores, bedles, bawdes, and sergeants filthily Chaunt Kemps Jigge, or the Burgonians tragedy,’ show his vogue. In 1594–5 he was one of the recently constituted Chamberlain’s men and the intrusion of his name into stage-directions to R. J. iv. 5. 102 (Q_{2}) and M. Ado, iv. 2, shows that he played Peter in the one play and Dogberry in the other. Oddly enough, one of his speeches (iv. 2. 4) in M. Ado is assigned to ‘Andrew’, possibly a generic name for a clown or ‘merry-Andrew’. He is in the actor-list of Every Man in his Humour (1598) but not in that of Every Man out of his Humour (1599), and this fact, together with his sale of his share in the Globe soon after the lease of 21 February 1599 was signed, points to his leaving the company. ‘Would I had one of Kemps shooes to throw after you,’ says a speaker in E. M. O. IV. v (q.v.). This may be an allusion to some clownery by Kempe, perhaps in a performance with some other company at the Curtain in the autumn of 1599 after the Chamberlain’s left that house; or, less probably, to Kempe’s famous morris-dance for a wager from London to Norwich, at the end of which he hung his buskins in the Guildhall, for this began on 11 February 1600 and ended on 11 March, the year being fixed by the mayoralty (1599–1600) of Roger Weld at Norwich. Another allusion to ‘Kemps morice’ is in Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), i. 45. Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain on 13 October 1600 (S. P. D. Eliz. cclxxv. 93) that on his way from Witham to Englefield ‘we met a company of mad wenches, whereof M^{rs}. Mary Wroughton and young Stafford were ringleaders, who travelled from house to house, and to some places where they were little known, attended with a concert of musicians, as if they had undertaken the like adventure as Kemp did from London to Norwich’. Kempe’s own account of his adventure was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘Kemps morris to Norwiche’ on 22 April 1600 (Arber, iii. 160). In the Epistle to Anne Fitton, whom, possibly by confusion with her sister Mary, he describes as maid of honour to Elizabeth, he refers to unentered ballads on the subject, and when he says that ‘I haue daunst my selfe out of the world’ is not improbably jesting on his departure from the Globe. At the end he foreshadows crossing to Calais, which he no doubt did. A John Kemp, who was in charge of a touring company, which had been in Holland and reached Münster by November 1601, may have been a relative. But William Kempe had returned to England, after visiting Italy as well as Germany, on 2 September 1601, as is shown by the following interpolation in a diary of one William Smith of Abingdon, in Sloane MS. 414, f. 56 (wrongly cited by Halliwell, Ludus Coventriae 410, as Sloane MS. 392, f. 401; cf. F. J. Furnivall in N.S.S. Trans. 1880–6, 65):

‘Sep. 2. Kemp, mimus quidam, qui peregrinationem quandam in Germaniam et Italiam instituerat, post multos errores, et infortunia sua, reversus: multa refert de Anthonio Sherley, equite aurato, quem Romae (legatum Persicum agentem) convenerat.’

Possibly Kempe rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while. In 3 Parnassus (? January 1602), iv. 3, he is introduced as a fellow of Burbadge and Shakespeare, and greeted with allusions to his ‘dancing the morrice ouer the Alpes’ and ‘the Emperour of Germany’. But on 10 March 1602 he had a loan from Henslowe, and during the winter of 1602–3 he was certainly one of Worcester’s men. The dates do not lend support to the suggestion of Fleay, ii. 20, that he had already in 1599–1600 been at the Rose with Pembroke’s men. After the end of Elizabeth’s reign he is not traceable, and he is mentioned as dead in Heywood, Apology (c. 1608), and dead or retired in Dekker, Gull’s Hornbook (1609), 11, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fools that now come drawling behind them, never played the clown more naturally.’ A William Kempe is recorded in token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, as living in Samson’s Rents in 1595, 1596, 1598, and 1599, in Langley’s New Rents in 1602, and later near the old play-house (Collier, iii. 351, and Bodl.; Rendle, Bankside, xxvi). Collier, but not Rendle, gives the date ‘1605’ for the last entry, probably with a view to supporting his notice of Kempe, as playing with Armin at the Blackfriars (q.v.) in 1605, which is doubtless a fabrication. On the other hand, though the date is plausible, the notice of ‘Kempe a man’ as buried at St. Saviour’s on 2 November 1603 (Rendle, xxvii) is not so worded as to be absolutely conclusive. The name was a common one, and Collier, Actors, xxxvi, gives notices of it from other parishes. In T. Weelkes, Ayres on Phantasticke Sprites (1608), it is said of Kempe that ‘into France He took pains to skip it’. His visit to Venice and meeting with Sherley are dramatized in Travels of Three English Brothers (1607) and apparently misdated after the Englands Joy of November 1602. Finally, an epitaph upon him is in R. Braithwaite, Remains after Death (1618), sig. F 8^v, which suggests that he died not long after his morris.

KENDALL, THOMAS. Blackfriars manager, 1602; Revels patentee, 1604. He died in 1608.

KENDALL, WILLIAM. Admiral’s, 1597–8; Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, >1614. His son John was baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 5 January 1615 (Bodl.).

KEYSAR, ROBERT. Revels manager, 1606–10 (?); Blackfriars lessee, 1606–8. To him was written the epistle to K. B. P.

KING, ARTHUR. Berkeley’s, 1581.

KING, THOMAS. Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.

KINGMAN (KINGSMAN), PHILIP. Germany, 1596; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615. ‘M^r Kyngman the elder’ was a witness for Henslowe on 16 April 1599 (H. i. 205).

KINGSMAN, ROBERT. Germany, 1599, 1601; afterwards a tradesman in Strassburg, 1606 (?), 1618, 1626.

KIRCK (KIRCKMANN), JOHN. Denmark, 1579–80.

KIRKHAM, EDWARD. Chapel manager, 1602; Revels patentee, 1604–6. He is probably the Yeoman of the Revels (cf. ch. iii).

KITE, JOHN. Gentleman of Chapel, 1508; afterwards Abp. of Armagh.

KNAGGES, RICHARD. Of Moorsham, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

KNELL, WILLIAM (?). Queen’s, >1588. A Rebecca, widow of William Knell, married John Heminges (q.v.), 10 March 1588. Heywood notes Knell as before his time. Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592, Works, i. 215), names him with Tarlton, Alleyn, and Bentley, and he is coupled with Bentley in the undated challenge to Alleyn (q.v.) to play one of their parts.

KNIGHT, ROBERT. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

KOSTRESSEN, JOHAN, musician. Germany, 1623.

KRAFFT, JOHN. Denmark, 1579–80.

LANEHAM, JOHN. Leicester’s, 1572–4; Queen’s, 1583, 1588–91. Heywood notes him as before his time. Was he related to Robert Laneham, Keeper of the Council Chamber door, who described the Kenilworth entertainment (cf. ch. xxiv) in 1575?

LANMAN, HENRY. Owner of Curtain, 1581–92. Adams, 80, suggests, apparently from the similarity of the names, that he was a brother of John Laneham.

LEBERWURST, HANS. Germany, 1613.

LEDBETTER, ROBERT. Admiral’s, 1597; Germany, 1599, 1601, 1606.

LEE, ROBERT. Admiral’s (?), >1591; Anne’s, 1604–19; Revels Company, 1622. He had a business transaction with Edward and John Alleyn and Thomas Goodale (q.v.) in 1593. He lived in Clerkenwell Close in 1623 (H. ii. 294; J. 347; Murray, i. 198).

LEEKE, DAVID. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, c. 1571 (_3 Library_, ix. 253).

LEVESON, ROBERT. Oxford’s, 1580.

LISTER, EDWARD. Weaver of Allerston, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

LONG, NICHOLAS. Revels (provincial) manager, 1612, 1617; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614–15. For his later career, cf. Murray, i. 192, 361; ii. 101. He was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 21 January 1622 (Bodl.).

LOVEKYN, ARTHUR. Chapel, 1509–13.

LOWIN, JOHN, was a member of Worcester’s company during their season of 1602–3 with Henslowe at the Rose. On 12 March 1603 Henslowe lent him money to go into the country with the company, but during the course of the year he must have transferred his services to the King’s men, presumably as a hireling, since, although in the cast of Sejanus (1603) and the Induction to Malcontent (1604) he is not in the official lists of 1603 and 1604. A portrait of him in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, has the inscription ‘1640, Aetat. 64’, and he may therefore be identified with the John, son of Richard Lowen, baptized at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 9 December 1576. If so, his father seems to have been a carpenter, and he had a sister Susan and a brother William.[969] He remained through a long life with the King’s men, appearing in most of the casts, in the actor-list of the First Folio, and in the official lists from 1619 onwards. He played Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi. A pamphlet entitled Conclusions upon Dances (1607) has a dedication to Lord Denny, dated 23 November 1606, and signed ‘I. L. Roscio’. Collier claims to have found in a copy of this the note ‘By Jhon Lowin. Witnesseth Tho. D. 1610’.[970] A John Lowen married Joan Hall, widow, by licence, in St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on 29 October 1607.[971] Shortly afterwards a John Lowin was paying a poor-rate of 2_d._ weekly in the liberty of the Clink. The Southwark token-books attest his residence ‘near the play-house’ and in other parts of the parish at various dates from 1601 to 1642.[972] He was overseer of Paris Garden in 1617–18.[973] But in 1623 he lived in Lambeth (J. 348). He is named as a legatee and overseer in the will of his ‘fellow’ John Underwood in 1624. It appears from the Sharers Papers that he had no interest in the play-houses until after the death of Heminges in 1630, when he was admitted to purchase two sixteenths of the Globe and one eighth of the Blackfriars. From this time onwards he seems to have shared the business responsibilities of the company with Joseph Taylor. He was also prominent as an actor.[974] Wright enumerates amongst his parts Shakespeare’s Falstaff; but when Roberts adds Hamlet and Henry VIII, he is presumably guessing that Lowin was ‘fat and scant of breath’. He may have been the original Henry VIII, for Downes reports that Betterton was instructed in the part by Sir William Davenant, ‘who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had his instructions from Mr. Shakespeare himself’.[975] Wright tells us that at the outbreak of civil war he was ‘superannuated’, and ‘in his latter days kept an inn (the Three Pigeons) at Brentford, where he dyed very old (for he was an actor of eminent note in the reign of King James the First), and his poverty was as great as his age’.[976] He signed with Taylor the dedication to Fletcher’s The Wild-goose Chase in 1652, the publication of which was an attempt to relieve their necessities. A ‘John Lewin’ who left a widow Martha, was buried at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields on 18 March 1659, and a ‘John Lowen’ at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, on 16 March 1669.[977] Probably a G. Lowin who played Barnaveldt’s daughter to Lowin’s Barnaveldt in 1619 was his son.

LYLY, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1583; Oxford’s payee, 1584; and dramatist.

MACHIN, RICHARD. Germany, 1600–3, 1605–6.

MAGETT, STEPHEN. Admiral’s tireman, 1596, 1599 (?) (H. ii. 295).

MARBECK, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1602.

MARSHALL, CHARLES. Palsgrave’s (provincial), 1616.

MARSTON, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1603–8, and dramatist.

MARTINELLI (?), ANGELICA. Italians, >1598.

MARTINELLI, DRUSIANO. Italians, 1578.

MARTON, THOMAS. Chapel, 1602.

MARTYN, WILLIAM. Payee for a company at Ipswich, 20 February 1572 (Murray, ii. 290).

MASON, JOHN. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.

MASSEY (MASSYE), CHARLES. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–>1635 (?); Fortune lessee, 1618–>1635; and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii). He is probably the Charles Marcy or Mercy, variously described as ‘player’, ‘gentleman’, and ‘yeoman’ in the registers of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, from 30 December 1610 to 20 July 1625. He died before 6 December 1635, leaving a widow Elianor, and had a cousin Ned Collins (H. ii. 296; Bodl.).

MAXE, ROBERT. Chapel, 1509–>1513.

MAY, EDWARD. Interluders, 1494–1503.

MAY, NATHAN. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615. Possibly the name, as given in Murray, ii. 340, may be a mistake for Clay (q.v.).

MAYLER, GEORGE. Interluders, 1525–40.

MEADE, JACOB. Keeper of the Bears, by 1599, and partner with Henslowe in the Bear Garden and Hope. He was buried at St. Saviour’s on 9 July 1624 (Bodl.).

MELYONEK, JOHN. Master of Chapel (?), 1483–5.

MERYELL, HENRY. Chapel, 1509.

MILS (MYLLES), TOBIAS. Queen’s, 1583. Heywood notes him as before his time. He was buried as ‘one of the Queenes Maiesties players’ at St. Olave’s, Southwark, on 11 July 1585, and his sons William and Toby were baptized on 3 January 1584 and 5 September 1585 (Bodl.). Probably, therefore, ‘one Myles, one of my lord of Summersettes players’, whose testimony to the value of Bath waters for the gout is cited in a hydropathic treatise of 1557 (Collier, i. 139), was of an older generation. Somerset was beheaded on 22 January 1552. Robert Cecil had a Secretary Milles, whose son Tobias was buried at Chelsea on 9 April 1599 (R. Davies, Chelsea Old Church, 296).

MOON, PETER. Payee for a company of players at Ipswich, 1562 (Murray, ii. 287).

MOORE, JOSEPH. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611; 1616–29. He lived at the Harrow in Barbican in 1623 (Murray, i. 252; J. 347).

MOTTERAM, JOHN. Chapel, 1600–1.

MUFFORD, JOHN. Beauchamp’s, 10 June 1590 (Murray, ii. 337).

MULCASTER (MONCASTER), RICHARD. Head Master of Merchant Taylors, 1561–86; of St. Paul’s Grammar School, 1596–1608.

MUNDAY, ANTONY. A player before 1582, according to a contemporary pamphlet, possibly with Oxford’s, whose ‘servant’ he was in 1580, and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii).

NASION. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

‘NED.’ Musician (?) in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, prol. 7.

‘NED.’ Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

NETHE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

NETHERSALL, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

NEWARK, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1493–1509.

NEWMAN, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1581–3.

NEWTON, JOHN. Charles’s, 1610, 1616, 1619, 1625.

‘NICK.’ Admiral’s, 1601–3. See also TOOLEY.

NILL, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose daughter Alice was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 13 August 1601 (Bodl.).

NORWOOD. Paul’s, 1599.

NYCOWLLES, ROBERT. A ‘player’ who witnessed a loan to Francis Henslowe on 1 June 1595 (H. i. 6).

OFFLEY, THOMAS. Paul’s, c. 1522.

OSTLER, WILLIAM, began his career as a boy actor in the Chapel company. He took a part in Jonson’s Poetaster in 1601. From the Sharers Papers we learn that on growing up he was, like Field and Underwood, ‘taken to strengthen the King’s service’.[978] He first appears amongst the King’s men in the cast of Jonson’s The Alchemist in 1610, and played also in Catiline, The Captain, The Duchess of Malfi, in which he took the part of Antonio, Valentinian, and Bonduca. The following epigram in John Davies, Scourge of Folly (c. 1611), attests his fame and his participation in some forgotten brawl:

To the Roscius of these Times, Mr. W. Ostler.

Ostler, thou took’st a knock thou would’st have giv’n, Neere sent thee to thy latest home: but O! Where was thine action, when thy crown was riv’n, Sole King of Actors! then wast idle? No: Thou hadst it, for thou would’st bee doing? Thus Good actors deeds are oft most dangerous; But if thou plaist thy dying part as well As thy stage parts, thou hast no part in hell.

Ostler married Thomasine, daughter of John Heminges, in 1611. His son Beaumont was baptized at St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, on 18 May 1612.[979] He acquired shares in the Blackfriars on 20 May 1611, and the Globe on 20 February 1612, and died on 16 December 1614, leaving his shares a subject for litigation between his widow and Heminges (q.v.).

PAGE, OLIVER. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).

PALLANT, ROBERT. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–19; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614; Charles’s, 1616; King’s, 1619, unless, indeed, the R. Pallant who played the female part of Cariola in Duchess of Malfi was of a younger generation. This is not unlikely, for while the St. Saviour’s registers record the burial of Robert Pallant, ‘a man,’ on 4 September 1619, the token-books give the name in 1621 as well as in 1612 and 1616. Ephraim and Hanburye, sons of Robert Pallant ‘player’, were baptized there on 1 January 1611 and 3 July 1614 respectively. There were others earlier. Pallant wrote commendatory verses for Heywood’s Apology (1612), and is noted as visiting Henslowe on his death-bed on 6 January 1616 (H. ii. 20, 300; Bodl.).

PANT, THOMAS. Unlicensed player, 1607–10 (cf. ch. ix, p. 304).

PARR, WILLIAM. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1602–20.

PARROWE (PARLOWE), RICHARD. Interluders, 1538–45.

PARSELEY, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

PARSONS, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1597, 1602 (H. ii. 301).

PATESON, WILLIAM. Worcester’s, 1584.

PAVY. Admiral’s, 1602.

PAVY, SALATHIEL (SALMON). Chapel, 1600–3. An epitaph on him is in Jonson’s Epigrams (1616), cxx, which gives his age at death, after three years of playing, as 13. He was ‘apprentice to one Peerce’, when he was pressed for the Chapel. This is not likely to have been the Master of Paul’s, from whom it would have been rash to take a boy.

PAYNE, ROBERT. Revels patentee, 1604.

PEACOCKE, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

PEARCE (PIERS), EDWARD. Gentleman of Chapel, 1589; Master of Paul’s, 1600.

PEDEL, ABRAHAM. Germany, 1614–15; Palsgrave’s, 1623. He lived at George Alley in Golden Lane in 1623 (J. 348, 350).

PEDEL (BEHEL, BIEL), JACOB. Germany, 1597, 1614–15.

PEDEL, WILLIAM. Holland, 1608; Germany, 1614–15. Children of a William Peadle, variously described as ‘tumbler’ and ‘gentleman’, were baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1610, 1617, and 1629 (Bodl.).

PENN, WILLIAM. Revels, 1609; Charles’s, 1616, 1625. He lived at George Alley, Golden Lane, in 1623 and had children baptized and buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, in 1636 (J. 347; Bodl.).

PENTON, FABIAN. Germany, 1602.

PEPEREL, GILES. Possibly an actor in the Bugbears of John Jeffere (cf. ch. xxiii).

PERKIN, JOHN. Leicester’s, 1572–4. Is he the Parkins who assisted George Ferrers as Lord of Misrule in 1552–3 (Feuillerat, Edw. and Mary, 120)?

PERKINS, RICHARD. Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–19; for his later history, cf. Murray, i. 198, 200, 266. He wrote commendatory verses for Heywood’s Apology (1612), and Webster praises his acting in The White Devil (1612) in a note at the end of the print. His portrait is at Dulwich. He lived at the upper end of St. John’s Street in 1623 (H. ii. 301; J. 347).

PERRY, WILLIAM. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615; Queen’s Revels manager, 1617.

PERSJ (PERSTEN), ROBERT (RUPERT). Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.

PERSONN, JOHANN. Denmark, 1579–80.

PERY, ROBERT. Chapel, 1529–31.

PERY, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1530.

‘PETER’ (?). King’s. At Taming of the Shrew, iv. 4. 68, F_{1} has the s.d. ‘Enter Peter’, apparently a servant of Tranio, who does not speak.

PFLUGBEIL, AUGUST. Germany, 1614–15.

PHILIP, ROBERT. Chapel, 1514.

PHILLIPPE, ROBERT. A ‘momer’, buried at St. Leonard’s, on 9 April 1559 (Collier, Actors, 79). He might be identical with the foregoing.

PHILLIPS, AUGUSTINE, is included in the 1593 list of Strange’s men, and played for them or the Admiral’s in 2 Seven Deadly Sins about 1590–1 as ‘Mr. Phillipps’. Probably he joined the Chamberlain’s men on their formation in 1594. He appears in the actor-lists of 1598 and 1599, was one of the original Globe shareholders of 1599, and on 18 February 1601 gave evidence as to the performance of Richard II by the company before the Essex rising. He is also in the official lists of the King’s men in 1603 and 1604, in the actor-list of Sejanus in 1603, and in that of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. ‘Phillips his gygg of the slyppers’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 26 May 1595 (cf. p. 552). It has been conjectured that Phillips was a brother-in-law of Alleyn, to whom Henslowe wrote on 28 September 1593, ‘Your sister Phillipes & her husband hath leced two or thre owt of ther howsse, yt they in good health & doth hartily comend them unto you.’ If so, his wife was probably Elizabeth Woodward. But it is also possible that the family in question was that of one Edward Phillipes, who was also in relations with Henslowe and Alleyn.[980] An Augustine Phillipps buried at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1592, was probably a relative of the actor, whose children the register of the same parish records as Magdalen (bapt. 29 September 1594), Rebecca (bapt. 11 July 1596), and Austen or Augustine (bapt. 29 November 1601, bur. 1 July 1604). The father is designated histrio, ‘player,’ or ‘player of interludes’. The parish token-books show that he dwelt in Horseshoe Court during 1593 and 1595, thereafter near the Swan in Paris Garden, in Montagu Close during 1601, in ‘Bradshaw’s Rents’ during 1602, and in Horseshoe Court again during 1604.[981] But by 4 May 1605, when he made his will, he was of Mortlake, Surrey, where he had a house and land of which he had lately purchased the lease.[982] Doubtless he had prospered. A note of heraldic irregularities delivered by William Smith, Rouge dragon, to the Earl of Northampton as commissioner for the Earl Marshal states that ‘Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes of S^r W^m Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolph’s cote quartred, which I shewed to M^r. York at a small gravers shopp in Foster Lane’.[983] The will mentions Phillips’s wife, whose name was not Elizabeth but Anne, his daughters Magdalen, Rebecca, Anne, and Elizabeth, his mother Agnes Bennett, his brothers William and James Webb, his sister Margery Borne, and her sons Miles and Philipps, and his sister Elizabeth Gough. Elizabeth had been married at St. Saviour’s in 1603, to Robert Gough (q.v.) of the King’s men, who witnesses the will.[984] Margery Borne may have been the wife of William Borne alias Bird (q.v.) of the Prince’s men. Presumably the Webbs were his brothers-in-law, in which case his wife was obviously not a Woodward. There are legacies of £5 to ‘the hyred men of the company which I am of’, of 30_s._ pieces to his ‘fellows’ William Shakespeare and Henry Condell, and his ‘servant’ Christopher Beeston, of 20_s._ pieces to his ‘fellows’ Laurence Fletcher, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cook and Nicholas Tooley, of silver bowls to John Heminges, Richard Burbadge, and William Sly, and of £20 to Timothy Whithorne. Samuel Gilburne, ‘my late apprentice’ is to have 40_s._ and ‘my mouse colloured velvit hose and a white taffety dublet, a blacke taffety sute, my purple cloke, sword, and dagger, and my base viall’. James Sands ‘my apprentice’ is to have 40_s._ and ‘a citterne, a bandore and a lute’. The widow is appointed executrix, but if she re-marries she is to have ‘no parte or porcion of my goods or chattells’, and is to be replaced by the overseers of the will, Heminges, Richard Burbadge, Sly, and Whithorne. After proving the will on 13 May 1605, the widow did in fact re-marry, with John Witter, and it was proved again by John Heminges on 16 May 1607. His share in the Globe was subsequently the subject of litigation.[985] Heywood (c. 1608) praises his deserts with those of other dead actors.

PICKERING, JAMES. Mason of Bowlby, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

PLUMMER, JOHN. Master of Chapel, 1444–55.

POKELEY, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

POLE. Gate-keeper at Paul’s, 1582.

POPE, THOMAS, was one of the English players, who visited Denmark and Germany in 1586 and 1587. He is in the 1593 list of Strange’s men and played as ‘Mr. Pope’ for them or the Admiral’s in 2 Deadly Sins about 1590–1. He joined the Chamberlain’s men, probably on their foundation in 1594, was joint payee for them with Heminge from 1597–9, and appears in the actor-lists of 1598 and 1599. On 30 August 1598, William Bird borrowed 10_s._ of Henslowe, ‘to folowe the sewt agenst Thomas Poope’.[986] In 1600 he is mentioned, with Singer of the Admiral’s, by Samuel Rowlands in The Letting of Humour’s Blood in the Head-Vein, sat. iv:

What meanes Singer then, And Pope, the clowne, to speak so boorish, when They counterfaite the clownes upon the Stage?

He had an original fifth share of a moiety of the Globe, increased to a fourth on the retirement of Kempe. But he does not appear in the lists of the King’s men, and had therefore probably retired by 1603. On 22 July of that year he made his will, which was proved on 13 February 1604.[987] He leaves his interests in the Globe and Curtain to Mary Clark, alias Wood, and Thomas Bromley, and legacies to Robert Gough and John Edmans. He mentions the house in Southwark, in which he dwelt, held with other tenements of the late Francis Langley; also his brothers John and William Pope, and his mother Agnes Webbe. This hardly justifies Collier in connecting him with the Webbes of Snitterfield, Shakespeare’s kin. Bazell Nicholl, scrivener, and John Wrench, are left executors. As in 1612 a sixth of the Globe was in the hands of Basil Nicoll and John and Mary Edmonds, it is probable that John Edmonds married Mary Clark. It appears from the Southwark token-books that one Pope lived in Blamer’s Rents during 1593, in Wrench’s Rents during 1595, and in Mr. Langley’s New Rents during 1596, 1598, 1600, and 1602.[988] Dr. Greg thinks that Thomas Pope, rather than a Morgan Pope who also had interests in Southwark, was the ‘Mr. Pope’ with whom Henslowe had an interview on 25 June 1603, ‘at the scryveners shope wher he lisse’, concerning the renewal of the lease of the Rose.[989] But Thomas Pope clearly lived in his own house. Collier (Actors, xxxvi) gives a marriage of a Thomas Pope and Elizabeth Baly at St. Botolph’s on 20 December 1584, but the indications of the will do not suggest a married man. William Smith complains that ‘Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of Sir Thomas Pope, Chancelor of y^e Augmentations’.[990] Heywood mentions the ‘deserts’ of Pope in his Apology. He is included in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare.

POWLTON, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1584.

PRICE, JOHN. Musician in Germany, 1609.

PRICE (PRYOR?), RICHARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1600 (?), 1610, 1613, 1622. He lived in White Cross Street in 1623, and records of his children are in the registers of St. Giles, Cripplegate, from 1620 to 1627, where he is variously entered as ‘gentleman’, ‘yeoman’, and ‘player’ (J. 348; Bodl.).

PROCTOR. Admiral’s, 1599.

PRUN, PETER DE. Germany, 1594. He was of Brussels.

PUDSEY, EDWARD. Germany, 1626. He was presumably the owner of the manuscript note-book from which extracts are given in R. Savage, Stratford-upon-Avon Notebooks (1888), i; cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Chapman, Blind Beggar of Alexandria.

PULHAM, GEORGE. Anne’s, 1612.

PYE, JOHN. A ‘momer’, whose son Samuel was baptized at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 28 May 1559 (Bodl.).

PYK (PIK, PYGE, PIGGE), JOHN. Strange’s, 1593; Admiral’s, 1597–9 (H. ii. 303).

PYKMAN, PHILIP. Chapel, 1600–1.

RADSTONE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

RASTALL, WILLIAM. Chapel manager, 1602. He died in 1608.

RAWLYNS, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

READE, EMANUEL. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613; Anne’s, 1613 (?)-17.

READING, WILLIAM. Interluders, 1559–63 (cf. App. D, No. v).

REASON, GILBERT. Charles’s, 1610, 1616, 1625.

REDFORD, JOHN. Master of Paul’s, c. 1540, and dramatist (cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 454).

REEVE, RALPH. Germany, 1603–9; Revels manager (provincial), 1611; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615.

REYNOLDS, ROBERT. Anne’s, 1616–17; Germany, 1616, 1618–20, 1626. He was known in Germany by the clown-name Pickleherring. He and his wife Jane were indicted for non-attendance at church in 1616 and 1617 (Jeaffreson, ii. 120, 127).

RICE, JOHN, was ‘boy’ to Heminges when he delivered a speech in Merchant Taylors’ hall on 16 July 1607, and must have been still with the King’s men when he took part as Corinea with Burbadge in the water-pageant of 31 May 1610. He became one of the original Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1611, and seems to have joined the King’s men again in 1619. The Southwark token-books indicate a John Rice as a resident in 1615, 1619, 1621, and 1623, with an ‘uxor’ in 1621, and another record names John Rice ‘of the Bankside’ amongst players in 1623.[991] He is not in the official list of May of that year, but played in Sir John van Olden Barnavelt about August, and is in the official list of 1621. He is traceable up to the list of 1625, but is not in that of 1629. It is not improbable that he retired, and went into Orders, for Heminges, in his will of 1630, leaves 20_s._ to ‘John Rice, clerk, of St. Saviour’s in Southwark’, and also names ‘Mr. Rice’ as overseer. Rice is in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare.

‘ROBIN.’ Chapel, 1518.

ROBINS (ROBINSON), WILLIAM. Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived on Clerkenwell Hill in 1623 (J. 348).

ROBINSON, JAMES. Chapel manager, 1600.

ROBINSON, RICHARD, first appears in the Catiline actor-list of the King’s men in 1611, and as playing the Lady in a stage direction (l. 1929) to The Second Maiden’s Tragedy of the same year. In The Devil is an Ass (1616), ii. 8. 64, Merecroft describes ‘Dicke Robinson’ as a lad, and as masquerading ‘drest like a lawyer’s wife’. I think it not impossible that he was a son of James Robinson, who was a member of the Children of the Chapel syndicate in 1600. If so, he may have been a Blackfriars boy. He played in Bonduca (c. 1613), is in the 1619 patent to the King’s men, and in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare, and is traceable as a King’s man up to the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647. He may have married Richard Burbadge’s widow, who held shares in the Globe and Blackfriars as Mrs. Robinson in 1635. He owed Tooley £29 13_s._ when the latter made his will in 1623. According to Wright he was a comedian. The same author states that he took up arms for the King, and was killed by Major Harrison at the taking of Basing House, on 14 October 1645. A contemporary report of this event by Hugh Peters confirms the death of ‘Robinson, the player, who, a little before the storm, was known to be mocking and scorning the Parliament’. There were, however, other actors named Robinson, and probably this was one of them. If Richard had been killed in 1645, he could not have signed the dedication of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays in 1647. Moreover, the register of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, records the burial of ‘Richard Robinson, a player’ on 23 March 1648.[992] He seems to have lived at the upper end of Shoreditch in 1623 (J. 347).

ROBINSON, THOMAS. Germany, 1626.

ROLL (ROE), JOHN. Interluders, 1530. He died in 1539.

RONNER, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

ROSE. Henry’s, 1612, where his wife became (?) a gatherer (H. P. 63).

ROSSETER, PHILIP. Whitefriars lessee, 1609–15; Revels patentee, 1610; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615; Revels manager, 1617. He was one of the royal lutenists from Midsummer 1604 to Easter 1623, and published A Booke of Ayres (1601) with Campion, who left him his property in 1620. He died on 5 May 1623 (D. N. B.; Chamber Accounts).

ROSSILL. Chamberlain’s, 1597.

ROWLEY, SAMUEL. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1624 (?), and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii; H. ii. 307).

ROWLEY, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1602.

ROWLEY, WILLIAM. Charles’s, 1610–19; King’s, 1623–5. But he remained technically a Prince’s man until the death of James in 1625 (Murray, i. 162, 172, table).

RUSSELL, JOHN. Gatherer for Palsgrave’s, c. 1617 (H. P. 28, 29, 85).

RUTTER, WILLIAM. Interluders, 1503.

SACKVILLE, THOMAS. Germany, 1592–3, 1597–1602. He used the clown-name Johannes Bouset, was a merchant in Frankfort, 1604–17, and died in 1628.

‘SAM.’ Admiral’s, >1591.

SANDERSON, GREGORY. Anne’s, 1617–19.

SANDS, JAMES. King’s, 1605; Anne’s, c. 1617? He received legacies from Augustine Phillips (q.v.), to whom he was apprentice, in 1605 and from William Sly (q.v.) in 1608. A James Sands appears in the Southwark token-books in 1596, 1598, and 1612 (Bodl.).

SANDT, BERNHARDT. Germany, 1600–1.

SAUNDERS, WILLIAM. Chapel, >1517.

SAUSS, EVERHART. Netherlands, 1592.

SAVAGE, JEROME. Warwick’s, 1575–9.

SAVEREY, ABRAHAM. Lennox’s, 1605.

SCHADLEUTNER, SEBASTIAN. Germany, 1623.

SCARLETT, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose son Richard was baptized at St. Giles’s on 1 September, and buried on 19 September 1605 (Bodl.).

SCARLETT, RICHARD. A ‘player’, buried on 23 April 1609 at St. Giles’s, where his daughter Susan had been baptized on 11 February 1607 and his wife Marie buried on 12 February 1607. Several Scarletts were royal trumpeters--Edward, William, and William the younger in 1483, John in 1509, Arthur in 1559–1603, John in 1677–9 (Bodl.; Chamber Accounts; Lafontaine, 1, 3, 325, 341).

SCOTT, JOHN. Interluders, 1503–28.

SEBECK, HENRY. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1617.

SEHAIS, JEHAN. France, 1598. Possibly the John Shaa, who witnessed an Admiral’s payment to Dekker, 24 November 1599 (H. i. 114). ‘John’ appears for ‘Robert’ Shaw, probably by an error, in a play warrant of 1600 as given in the P. C. Acts (cf. App. B).

SHAKESPEARE, EDMOND. The burials at St. Saviour’s include, on 31 December 1607, ‘Edmond Shakespeare, a player: in the church,’ which is expanded in a fee-book as ‘Edmund Shakespeare, a player, buried in the church, with a forenoone knell of the great bell, 20_s._ (Collier, Actors, xiv). Presumably this is the brother of William.

SHAKESPEARE, EDWARD. The baptisms at St. Giles’s include, on 12 August 1607, ‘Edward, sonne of Edward Schackspeere, Player: base borne’ (Collier, Actors, xv; J. Hunter in Addl. MS. 24589, f. 24).

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Strange’s, 1592; Pembroke’s (?), 1593; Sussex’s (?), 1594; Chamberlain’s-King’s, 1594–1616; and dramatist.

SHAKSHAFTE, WILLIAM. Player (?) to Alexander Houghton, 1581 (cf. ch. ix, p. 280).

SHANBROOKE, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried on 17 Sept. 1618 at St. Giles’s, where his children appear in the registers from 10 June 1610 to 4 June 1618 (Bodl.).

SHANK, JOHN, or SHANKS, for the name is variously spelt, describes himself to Lord Chamberlain Pembroke in the Sharers Papers of 1635 as ‘beeing an old man in this quality, who in his youth first served your noble father, and after that the late Queene Elizabeth, then King James, and now his royall Majestye’.[993] Presumably the Pembroke’s company in question was that of 1597–1600, and the Queen Elizabeth’s men the travelling company of the latter years of the reign. Shank’s account of his own career may be amplified from the records of his name in the 1610 list of Prince Henry’s men and in the patent issued to the same company when they became the Elector Palatine’s men in 1613. He lived in Rochester Yard, Southwark, in 1605, but the register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, shows him later in Golden Lane, and records several baptisms and burials of his children between 1610 and 1629.[994] He had joined the King’s men between 1613 and 1619, as his name is in the patent of the latter year. It recurs in the official lists of the company up to 1629, but occasionally only in actor-lists up to 1631, including that of the First Folio Shakespeare. Amongst his ‘boyes’ or apprentices were Thomas Pollard, John Thompson, John Honiman, and Thomas Holcome. Thompson cost him £40; for other boys he had spent by 1635 as much as £200. After the death of John Heminges, Shank bought from his son William, surreptitiously, as his fellows averred, two shares in the Blackfriars and three in the Globe, for a total sum of £506. It was these transactions, which took place between 1633 and 1635, that led to the petition of Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard to the Lord Chamberlain recorded in the Sharers Papers. As a result Shank was directed to transfer one share in each house to the petitioners. He, however, complained that he could not get satisfactory terms from them, and that they restrained him from the stage. The Cripplegate register records Shank’s burial on 27 January 1636.[995] James Wright calls him a ‘comedian’,[996] and the following verses, signed W. Turner, and quoted by Collier from Turner’s Dish of Stuff, or a Gallimaufry, may perhaps be taken as confirming this[997]:

That’s the fat fool of the Curtain, And the lean fool of the Bull: Since Shancke did leave to sing his rhimes, He is counted but a gull: The players on the Bankside, The round Globe and the Swan, Will teach you idle tricks of love, But the Bull will play the man.

The verses are dated 1662, but the theatres named indicate a much earlier date.

SHAW (SHAA, autograph), ROBERT. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602. John, son of Robert Shaw, ‘player’, was baptized on 10 April 1603, at St. Saviour’s, and Robert Shaw, ‘a man’, buried on 12 September 1603 (H. ii. 309; Bodl.).

SHEALDEN. A ‘player’, who witnessed a loan for Henslowe on 24 August 1594 (H. i. 76).

SHEPARD. Paul’s door-keeper, 1582.

SHEPPARD, WILLIAM. A ‘player’, whose son Robert by his wife Johane was baptized at St. Helen’s, 26 November 1602.

SIBTHORPE, EDWARD. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.

SIMPSON, CHRISTOPHER. Shoemaker of Egton, Yorks, recusant and unlicensed player in 1610–12 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

SIMPSON, CUTHBERT. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (ibid.).

SIMPSON, JOHN. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (ibid.).

SIMPSON, RICHARD. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (ibid.).

SIMPSON, ROBERT. Shoemaker of Staythes, Yorks, recusant and unlicensed player, 1612, 1616 (ibid.).

SINCLER (SINKLO, SINCKLO), JOHN. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Pembroke’s (?), 1592–3; Chamberlain’s, 1594 (?)-1604.

SINGER, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588; Admiral’s, 1594–1603. He became an ordinary Groom of the Chamber in 1603. A John Singer in 1571 owed money to a Canterbury citizen, who had also debts from players (H. R. Plomer in 3 Library, ix. 253). Children of John Singer, ‘player’, appear in the St. Saviour’s register from 1 August 1597 to 5 October 1609, and his name is in the token-books from 1596 to 1602 (Bodl.). The Quips upon Questions (1600) of Armin (q. v.) has been ascribed to Singer in error. Rowlands couples him as a clown with Pope (q. v.) in 1600, and Dekker, Gull’s Horn Book (1609), says, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fooles that now come drawling behind them, never played the clowns more naturally than the arrantest sot of you all shall’. Heywood praised him as dead in the same year (H. ii. 310).

SKINNER, RICHARD. Interluders, 1547–58.

SLATER (SLAUGHTER), MARTIN. Admiral’s, 1594–7; Scotland, 1599; Hertford’s, 1603; Anne’s, 1606; King’s Revels manager, 1608; Chamber of Bristol, 1618–19. He is sometimes recorded by his Christian name only. He had a wife on 22 July 1604, and is described as a citizen and ironmonger in 1608. His name is in the Southwark token-books from 1595 to 1602, and Martin Slawter, ‘a servant’, was buried there on 4 August 1625 (H. ii. 310; Bodl.).

SLAUGHTER, WILLIAM. ‘Ghost-name’ evolved by Mr. Fleay for a supposed Queen’s man.

SLEE (SLYE), JOHN. Queen Jane’s, >1537; Interluders, 1539–40.

SLY, WILLIAM, was doubtless of Strange’s men or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, when he played in 2 Seven Deadly Sins. On 11 October 1594 Henslowe sold him ‘a jewell of gowld seat with a whitte safer’ for 8_s._ to be paid for at the rate of 1_s._ weekly.[998] But apparently he never paid more than 6_s._ 6_d._ An inventory of garments belonging to the Admiral’s men on 13 March 1598 includes ‘Perowes sewt, which W^m Sley were’.[999] Presumably this had come from Strange’s men, as Sly is never traceable as a member of the Admiral’s company. Probably he joined the Chamberlain’s men on their formation in 1594. He is in all the lists of this company from 1598 to 1605, and in the Induction to The Malcontent (1604). He is also in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare. The fact that ‘Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton Heath’ is the name given to the beggar in The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594), led Collier to suggest that he migrated from Warwickshire about the same time as Shakespeare. But the beggar in A Shrew is already Sly, and the name occurs in various parts of London. The Southwark token-books show a William Sly in Norman’s Rents during 1588, in Horseshoe Court during 1593, and in Rose Alley during 1595 and 1596.[1000] In 1605 he was named as one of the overseers and residuary executors, with a legacy, in the will of Augustine Phillips. The register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, records the baptism on 24 September and the burial on 4 October 1606 of John, base-born son of William Sly, player, by Margaret Chambers; and the register of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, records his own burial on 16 August 1608, from Halliwell Street. His nuncupative will was made on 4 August 1608. He left legacies to Cuthbert Burbadge, and James Sandes, and the rest of his property to Robert and Cecily Browne and their daughter Jane. Robert is to have his part of the Globe, and Cecily is appointed executrix. The will was witnessed by several illiterate women, and disputed by a relative named William Sly, but proved on 24 August.[1001] He was not one of the original shareholders in the Globe, but was admitted to a share in 1605 or later. On 9 August 1608, between the date of his will and that of his death, he was granted a lease of a seventh share in the Blackfriars, and this his executrix afterwards surrendered to Richard Burbadge.[1002] Heywood names Sly (c. 1608) amongst other dead players, whose ‘deserts’ he commemorates.

SMITH, ANTONY. Charles’s, 1616, 1625.

SMITH, JOHN. Interluders, c. 1547–80. Is he the John Smith who assisted George Ferrers as Lord of Misrule in 1552–3 (Feuillerat, Edw. and Mary, 120)?

SMITH, JOHN. Revels, 1609.

SMYGHT, WILLIAM. A ‘player’ who witnessed a loan from Philip to Francis Henslowe on 1 June 1595 (H. i. 6; ii. 312).

SOMERSET, GEORGE. Admiral’s, 1601–2. See also JOHN WILSON.

SOUTHEY, THOMAS. Interluders, 1547–56.

SOUTHYN, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

SPENCER, GABRIEL. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1598. He was slain by Ben Jonson (cf. ch. xxiii) on 22 September 1598, and was buried on the next day but one at St. Leonard’s, where the register records him as from Hogge Lane (Collier, Actors, xxii). On 3 December 1596 a coroner’s inquest found that he had himself slain James Feake with a rapier in the house of Richard East, barber, in St. Leonard’s (Jeaffreson, i. xlv, 234). Henslowe sometimes describes him merely as ‘Gabriel’, and under this name Heywood praises him (H. ii. 312).

SPENCER, JOHN. Germany, 1605–23. He was known by the clown-name of Hans Stockfisch.

SQUIRE, LAWRENCE. Master of Chapel, 1486–93.

STEVENS, THOMAS. Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.

STOKEDALE, EDMUND. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

STRATFORD, WILLIAM. Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1610–23. He lived at the upper end of White Cross Street in 1623. His children appear in the St. Giles’s register in that year, and he was buried as a ‘player’ there on 27 August 1625 (J. 348, 350; Bodl.).

STROWDEWIKE, EDMUND. Interluders, 1559–68.

SUDBURY, THOMAS. Interluders, 1530.

SUTTON, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

SWANSTON, ELIARD. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1622; King’s, 1624–42 (Murray, i. 172, 255).

SWINNERTON (SWETHERTON), THOMAS. Anne’s, 1604–19; for his later career cf. Murray, ii. 101, 105.

SYFERWESTE, RICHARD. Worcester’s (?), 1602 (H. ii. 314).

SYMCOCKES. Lennox’s, 1605.

SYMONS, JOHN. A tumbler. Strange’s, 1583; Oxford’s, 1585; Strange’s, 1586–8 (?); Queen’s, 1588 (?)-9.

TAILOR, ROBERT. Admiral’s, 1601–2.

TARBUCK, JOHN. Revels patentee, 1610.

TARLTON, RICHARD, first appears in the ‘Q^d Richard Tarlton’ at the end of a ballad called A very lamentable and wofull discours of the fierce fluds ... the 5. of October, 1570 (Arber, i. 440).[1003] This is preserved (Halliwell, 126; Collier, Old Ballads, 78; H. L. Collman, Ballads and Broadsides, 265). The Stationers’ Registers also record in 1576 ‘a newe booke in Englishe verse intituled Tarltons Toyes’ (Arber, ii. 306), in 1578 ‘Tarltons Tragical Treatises conteyninge sundrie discourses and pretie conceiptes bothe in prose and verse’ (Arber, ii. 323), and in 1579 ‘Tarltons devise upon this unlooked for great snowe’ (Arber, ii. 346); but these are all lost. Tarltons Jigge of a horse loade of Fooles (Halliwell, xx) should, if it is genuine, date from about 1579, as the jest at the Puritan fool ‘Goose son’ is obviously aimed at Stephen Gosson; but it reads to me like a fake, and Halliwell took it from a manuscript belonging to Collier, who had already quoted it in his tainted New Facts, 18. It is improbable that Richard is the ‘one Tarlton’ whose house in Paris Garden is included in a list of suspected papist resorts sent by Richard Frith to Alderman Martin at some date not earlier than 1585 (Wright, Eliz. ii. 250). The first mention of him is by Gabriel Harvey (cf. p. 4) in 1579, when he had already acquired some reputation. He became an original member of the Queen’s men (q. v.) in 1583, and remained their principal comedian until his death in 1588. For this company he wrote The Seven Deadly Sins (q. v.) in 1585. Music for some of his jigs is in existence (Halliwell, Cambridge Manuscript Rarities, 8) and his facility as a jester made him, until he pushed it too far, a persona grata in Elizabeth’s presence. Bohun, 352, says that the Queen admitted ‘Tarleton, a famous comedian, and a pleasant talker, and other such like men, to divert her with stories of the town and the common jests or accidents, but so that they kept within the bounds of modesty and chastity’. He adds, ‘Tarleton, who was then the best comedian in England, had made a pleasant play, and when it was acting before the Queen, he pointed at Sir Walter Raleigh and said “See, the Knave commands the Queen”, for which he was corrected by a frown from the Queen; yet he had the confidence to add that he was of too much and too intolerable a power; and going on with the same liberty, he reflected on the overgreat power and riches of the Earl of Leicester, which was so universally applauded by all that were present, that she thought best to bear these reflections with a seeming unconcernedness. But yet she was so offended, that she forbad Tarleton and all her jesters from coming near her table, being inwardly displeased with this impudent and unseasonable liberty.’ An anecdote of Tarlton ‘playing the God Luz with a flitch of bacon at his back’, fighting the Queen’s little dog Perrico de Faldes with sword and long staff, and exchanging chaff with the Earl of Sussex (Halliwell, Death-bed, 30, from S. P. Dom. Eliz. ccxv, 89) might have some point if Luz was a take-off of Leicester. On 27 October 1587 Tarlton was allowed as a Master of Fence, and is described as an ‘ordenary grome off her majestes chamber’ (Sloane MS. 2530, f. 6). The same description recurs in his will, which was signed on 3 September 1588, the actual day of his burial at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, from Halliwell Street. He left his property to his son Philip, as whose guardians he appointed his mother Katharine, then a widow, his friend Robert Adams, and his fellow of the Queen’s men, William Johnson. One of the witnesses, Charles Barnard, was his sister’s husband. This will was disputed by Katharine Tarlton, who brought a bill in Chancery, alleging that after signing it and making over property worth £700 to Adams, Tarlton repented, tried in vain to recall the will, and made another. A rejoinder by Adams accuses Katharine of acting under the influence of another son-in-law, Thomas Lee, a butcher, and describes how Adams was called to Tarlton’s death-bed in the house of one Emma Ball in Shoreditch, ‘of a very bad reputacion’. Some colour is given to his mother’s complaint by a death-bed petition from Tarlton to Walsingham, begging his protection for Philip, who was Sidney’s godson, against ‘a sly fellow, on Addames’ (S. P. Dom. Eliz. ccxv. 90). There is no mention of Tarlton’s wife; the boy was six years old. Robert Adams was apparently a lawyer, and to be distinguished from John Adams of the Queen’s men, who is referred to as a fellow of Tarlton’s by the stage keeper in Bartholomew Fair (Induction 38), ‘I kept the Stage in Master Tarletons time, I thanke my starres. Ho! and that man had liu’d to haue play’d in Bartholmew Fayre, you should ha’ seene him ha’ come in, and ha’ beene coozened i’ the Cloath-quarter, so finely. And Adams, the Rogue, ha’ leap’d and caper’d vpon him, and ha’ dealt his vermine about, as though they had cost him nothing.’ After Tarlton’s death, several pamphlets, ascribed to him or otherwise exploiting his popularity, came to the press; in 1588 ‘a ballad intituled Tarltons Farewell’ (Arber, ii. 500); in 1589 ‘a sorowfull newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacon uppon this theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Bel savage without Ludgate (nowe or ells never) beinge the laste theame he songe’ (Arber, ii. 526); in 1589 ‘Tarltons repentance of his farewell to his frendes in his sicknes a little before his deathe’ (Arber, ii. 531); in 1590 ‘a pleasant dyttye dialogue wise betwene Tarltons ghost and Robyn Good Fellowe’ (Arber, ii. 559). These are lost, unless, indeed, Tarltons Farewell is identical with ‘A pretie new ballad, entituled Willie and Peggie, to the tune of Tarlton’s Carroll’, printed in Archiv. cxiv. 341, and A. Clark, Shirburn Ballads, 351, from Rawl. Poet. MS. 185, f. 10. This ends ‘qd. Richard Tarlton’, but it is in fact a lament over the death of Tarlton under the name of Willie, as is clearly shown by lines 23 ‘None would be wery to see him one stage’, 41 ‘A groome of her chamber my Willie was made’, 55 ‘To singe them their themes he never denied’. These verses support the theory, based upon a contemporary note in a copy of Spenser (cf. 6 N. Q. xi. 417; Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 394), that Tarlton is the ‘pleasant Willy’ mourned as dead in the Tears of the Muses (1591), 208, and if he is also the Yorick of Hamlet, v. 1. 201, he was sufficiently honoured. Another ballad in the same manuscript on the Armada (Archiv. cxiv. 344; Ballads from MS. ii. 92) also claims to be to the tune of Tarlton’s ‘carroll’; the ‘Carroll’ itself is unknown. ‘Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie. Onelye such a jest as his Jigge, fit for Gentlemen to laugh at an houre, &c. Published by an old companion of his, Robin Goodfellow’ (n.d., but entered in S. R. 26 June 1590; Arber, ii. 553) is a volume of novelle, put into the mouth of Tarlton’s ghost. The writer describes him as ‘only superficially seene in learning, having no more but a bare insight into the Latin tung’, and physically as ‘one attired in russet, with a buttond cap on his head, a great bag by his side, and a strong bat in his hand’. Similarly, Henry Chettle, who put into his mouth a defence of plays forming a section of Kind-hartes Dreame (1592; cf. App. C, No. xlix), knew him in a dream ‘by his sute of russet, his buttond cap, his taber, his standing on the toe, and other tricks’. The Cobler of Caunterburie or an Invective against Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (1590) is also a volume of novelle, and has practically nothing about Tarlton. On the other hand, Tarltons Jests at least claims to be biographical, although its material, like that of Peele’s Jests, largely consists of the flotsam and jetsam of all the jest-books. The earliest extant edition is of 1611. But it was transferred from one publisher to another in 1609 (Arber, iii. 402), the second of its three parts, which mentions the Globe (Halliwell, 23), was entered in S. R. on 4 August 1600 (Arber, iii. 168), and probably therefore the first part was already in print in the sixteenth century. It speaks of Tarlton as a Queen’s man (Halliwell, 13, 27, 29, 30, 33), as playing at the Bull in Bishopsgate (13, 24), where he did both the clown and the judge in ‘Henry the Fifth’ (The Famous Victories) to Knell’s Harry, the Curtain (16), and the Bell in Gracechurch Street (24), as singing themes (16, 27, 28, 40), and as jesting in clown’s apparel in the royal presence or in the Great Chamber at Court (7, 8). It also tells us, for what the statements are worth, that his father lived at Ilford (40), that he had a wife Kate of light character (17, 19), that he kept the Saba tavern in Gracechurch Street, where he was scavenger of the ward (15, 21, 22), and an ordinary in Paternoster Row (21, 26), and that he had a squint (12) and a flat nose (28). A woodcut on the title-page confirms these peculiarities of feature, and represents a short, broad-faced, cunning-looking man, with curly hair, an elaborate moustache and a starved beard, wearing a cap, and a bag or moneybox slung at his side, and playing on a tabor and a pipe. This appears to be taken from a drawing by John Scottowe in an initial letter to some verses on Tarlton’s death in Harl. MS. 3885, f. 19. Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592, Works, i. 188), gives us a hint of his stage methods in describing how at a provincial performance, as the Queen’s men ‘were now entring into their first merriment (as they call it) the people began exceedingly to laugh, when Tarlton first peeped out his head’, and how a ‘cholericke wise Iustice’ laid his staff about their pates, ‘in that they, being but Farmers & poore countrey Hyndes, would presume to laugh at the Queenes men, and make no more account of her cloath in his presence’. According to Fuller (Worthies, iii. 139) Tarlton was born at Condover in Shropshire, and kept his father’s swine there, until a servant of the Earl of Leicester, struck with his witty replies, brought him to Court. On the other hand, in the Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), by his fellow Robert Wilson, Simplicity produces his picture, and says he was ‘a prentice in his youth of this honorable city: ... when he was yoong he was leaning to the trade ... waterbearing: I wis he hath tossed a tankard in Cornehil er now’ (sign. C^v). Halliwell (xxx) has collected a large number of allusions to Tarleton and his humours, lasting well into the middle of the seventeenth century. Taverns were named after him, and one is said to have still stood in Southwark in 1798. Much of the action of W. Percy’s Cuck-Queanes and Cuckolds Errants (q. v.) takes place at the Tarlton Inn, Colchester, of which he is said to have been the ‘quondam controller and induperator’. Tarlton himself speaks the prologue to the play. George Wilson, The Commendation of Cockes and Cock-fighting (1607), records that on 4 May 1602 there fought at Norwich ‘a cocke called Tarleton, who was so intituled, because he alwayes came to the fight like a drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges, which cocke fought many batels with mighty and fierce adversaries’.

TAWYER, WILLIAM. At M. N. D. v. 1. 128, F_{1} has the s. d. ‘Tawyer with a Trumpet before them’. The St. Saviour’s burials give in June 1625, ‘William Tawier, M^r Heminges man’.

TAYLOR, JOHN. Choir Master at St. Mary’s, Woolnoth, 1557; at Westminster, 1561–7.

TAYLOR, JOSEPH, is conjectured by Collier to be the Joseph Taylor who was baptized at St. Andrew’s by the Wardrobe in Blackfriars on 6 February 1586, the Joseph Taylor who married Elizabeth Ingle, widow, at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 2 May 1610, and the Joseph Taylor who is shown by the Southwark token-books as dwelling in ‘M^r Langley’s new rents, near the play-house’ during 1607, in Austen’s Rents during 1612 and 1615, as ‘gone’ in 1617, and as dwelling ‘near the play-house’ in 1623 and 1629, ‘on the Bankside’ in 1631, and in Gravel Lane during 1633. ‘Joseph Taylor, player,’ is entered in the St. Saviour’s registers as the father of Elsabeth (bapt. 12 July 1612), Dixsye and Joseph (bapt. 21 July 1614), Jone (bapt. 11 January 1616), Robert (bapt. 1 June 1617), and Anne (bapt. 24 August 1623).[1004] On the other hand, a Joseph Taylor, not improbably a player, was living in Bishopsgate near the Spittle in 1623 (J. 347). He was a member of the Duke of York’s company in 1610, but left them without the consent of his fellows for the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1611, and thereby involved himself during the same year in a lawsuit with John Heminges.[1005] He is in the actor-lists of The Honest Man’s Fortune (1613) and of The Coxcomb, as played by the Lady Elizabeth’s men about the same date, and is also named in the text of their Bartholomew Fair (1614). There seems to have been some sort of amalgamation between the Duke of York’s, now Prince Charles’s, and the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1615, and when this terminated in the following year, Taylor became again a member of the Prince’s company. He was still with them between 6 January and 2 February 1619, when he appeared as Dr. Almanac in Middleton and Rowley’s Mask of Heroes, but on 19 May 1619 he appears in a livery warrant issued for the King’s men. As he is not in their patent of the previous 27 March, it is to be supposed that he joined them to replace Burbadge, who had died on 13 March.[1006] The rest of his stage career was spent with the King’s men. He succeeded Burbadge in several of his characters, including Ferdinand in the Duchess of Malfi and Hamlet, although the incidence of dates must cast some doubt upon the statement of Downes that he was instructed in the part ‘by the Author M^r Shakespear’.[1007] Wright says that he played it ‘incomparably well’, and praises him also as Iago in Othello, Truewit in Epicoene, and Face in The Alchemist.[1008] He is included in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. In 1623 Nicholas Tooley left him £10 to pay a debt for which Tooley had become his surety. With Lowin he seems to have assumed the leadership of the company in succession to Heminges and Condell, and after Heminges’s death in 1630 he was admitted to two shares in the ‘house’ of the Globe and one in that of the Blackfriars, which he still held in 1635. About 1637 he petitioned for a waiter’s place in the Custom House of London,[1009] and on 11 November 1639 he obtained the post of Yeoman of the Revels, probably through the influence of Sir Henry Herbert, with whom he had been in frequent contact as representative of his company.[1010] After the closing of the theatres he joined his fellows of the King’s men in publishing the First Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays in 1647, and for his benefit and Lowin’s The Wild-goose Chase was added in 1652. He died at Richmond and was there buried on 4 November 1652.[1011] The ascription to his brush of the ‘Chandos’ portrait of Shakespeare is now discredited.

THARE (THAYER), JOHN. Worcester’s, 1602–3; Germany, 1603–6 (?).

TILBERY, JOHN. Chapel, 1405.

TOMSONE, JOHN. A ‘player’ who borrowed 5_s._ from Henslowe on 22 December 1598 (H. i. 40).

TOOLEY, NICHOLAS, appears in the 1619 patent to the King’s men, but not in that of 1603. He probably joined the company about 1605, as he received a legacy under the will of Phillips on 4 May as his ‘fellow’. He is not in the actor-list of Volpone in that year, but is in most of the later actor-lists from The Alchemist (1610) to The Spanish Curate (1622), and in that of the First Folio Shakespeare. In 1619 he witnessed Richard Burbadge’s will. He made his own will as Nicholas Tooley, Gentleman, on 3 June 1623. After legacies to charity, to the families of ‘my good friend Mr. Cuthbert Burbadge (in whose house I do now lodge)’, of ‘my late Mr. Richard Burbadge deceased’, and of ‘my good friend Mr. Henry Condell’, and to Joseph Taylor, and remissions of debt to John Underwood and William Ecclestone, but not to Richard Robinson, he ends by making Burbadge and Condell his executors and residuary legatees. By a codicil of the same date, signed as Nicholas Wilkinson alias Tooley, he guards against any danger of invalidity due to his failure to use the name of Wilkinson.[1012] Presumably, therefore, Wilkinson, and not Tooley, was his original name. The name of Tooley was fairly common in London, and more than one Nicholas Wilkinson has been traced. He may have been the Nicholas, son of Charles Wilkinson, baptized at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 3 February 1575.[1013] There seems no reason to connect him with a Nicholas Tooley found on the Warwickshire muster-book in 1569.[1013] His reference to Richard Burbadge as his ‘master’ suggests that he was his apprentice. It is tempting, but arbitrary, to identify him with the ‘Nick’ who played with Strange’s men in 2 Seven Deadly Sins about 1592, or the ‘Nycke’ who tumbled before Elizabeth for the Admiral’s in 1601 and is commended by Joan to Edward Alleyn on 21 October 1603.[1014] The register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, records the burial of ‘Nicholas Tooley, gentleman, from the house of Cuthbert Burbidge, gentleman’, on 5 June 1623.[1015]

TOTTNELL, HARRY. A ‘player’ whose daughter Joan was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 20 March 1591 (Bodl.).

TOWNE, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588, 1594–7. Greg (H. ii. 315) rather arbitrarily suggests that Henslowe’s note of him as a witness to a loan to Francis Henslowe of the Queen’s on 8 May 1593 (H. i. 4) is by an error for Thomas (q. v.).

TOWNE, THOMAS. Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1594–1610. His name is in a s. d. to 1 Honest Whore (1604). Alleyn’s papers record a widow Agnes. Towne’s name is in the Southwark token-books during 1600–7, and Thomas Towne ‘a man’ was buried on 9 August 1612. Towne’s will of 4 July 1612 names his wife, whom he calls Ann, and his brother John, of Dunwich in Suffolk (‘if he be still living’) and leaves £3 to his fellows Borne, Downton, Juby, Rowley, Massey, and Humphrey Jeffes, ‘to make them a supper when it shall please them to call for it’ (H. ii. 316; Bodl., citing will in P. C. C.).

TOWNSEND, JOHN. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1616–32 (?); for his later career, cf. Murray, i. 252–60; ii. 8.

TOY. The performer of Will Summer in Summer’s Last Will and Testament.

TREVELL, WILLIAM. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.

TRUSSELL, ALVERY. Chapel, 1600–1.

TUNSTALL (DONSTALL, DONSTONE), JAMES. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s, 1590–1, 1594–7. Guilpin, Skialetheia (1598), refers to him in conjunction with Alleyn (q. v.). The variation in his name is made more, rather than less, puzzling by the baptism at St. Botolph’s of Dunstone Tunstall on 20 August 1572 (H. ii. 261).

UBALDINI, PETRUCCIO. Italians, 1576 (?).

UNDERELL. Worcester’s, 1602. A Thomas Underell was a royal trumpeter in 1609–24 (Chamber Accounts).

UNDERWOOD, JOHN, was a Chapel boy in the year 1601, and continued at Blackfriars until, as the Sharers Papers state, on growing up to be a man, he was taken to strengthen the King’s service. This was in 1608 or a little later. He is not in the Queen’s Revels actor-list of Epicoene (1609), and is in the King’s men’s actor-list of The Alchemist (1610), and thereafter in the official lists and most of the actor-lists of the company, including that of the First Folio Shakespeare, up to 1624. Tooley in his will of 1623 forgave him a debt. His own will was made on 4 October 1624 and has a codicil appended on 10 October, doubtless from his oral directions, but after his death. He describes himself as ‘of the parish of Saint Bartholomew the Less, in London, gent.’, and leaves his shares in the Blackfriars, Globe, and Curtain to his executors, of whom Henry Condell is one, in trust for his five children, all under twenty-one--John, Elizabeth, Burbage, Thomas, and Isabel. The executors and his ‘fellowes’, Mr. John Heminges and John Lowin, who are appointed overseers, have 11s. each for rings.[1016] The baptism of his son John on 27 December 1610 is in the register of Saint Bartholomew the Less, West Smithfield.[1017] The trust was still unexpired at Condell’s death in 1627, and was handed on by him to his wife. The Sharers Papers of 1635 show one share in the Blackfriars still in the hands of an Underwood; but apparently a third of it had been parted with about 1632 to Eliart Swanston.[1018]

VINCENT. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

VIRNIUS, JOHANN FRIEDRICH. Germany, 1615.

WAKEFIELD, EDWARD. Germany, 1597, 1602.

WALPOLE, FRANCIS. Anne’s, 1616–17.

WARD, ANTHONY. Vide ARKINSTALL.

WAYMUS (WAMBUS), FRANCIS. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1617–24.

WEBSTER, GEORGE. Germany, 1598, 1600–3.

WEBSTER, JOHN. Germany, 1596. Is he identical with the dramatist?

WESTCOTT, SEBASTIAN. Master of Paul’s, 1557–82. He is sometimes described by his Christian name alone.

WHETSTONE, c. 1571. Cf. s.v. FIDGE. Plomer suggests that he might be George Whetstone (cf. ch. xxiii).

WHITELOCKE, JAMES, afterwards Sir James. Merchant Taylors, 1575–86.

WILDER, PHILIP VAN. Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and lutenist, commissioned to raise a royal company of young minstrels in 1550; cf. ch. xii, s.v. Chapel.

‘WILL.’ Strange’s, 1590–1.

‘WILL.’ Admiral’s, 1597.

WILLIAMS, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.

WILSON, JOHN. In Much Ado, ii. 3. 38, for the ‘Enter Balthaser with musicke’ of Q_{1}, F_{1} has ‘Enter ... Iacke Wilson’, who therefore, at some date before 1623, sang ‘Sigh no more, ladies!’ He is probably the son of Nicholas Wilson, ‘minstrel’, baptized at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 24 April 1585. He had an elder brother Adam, and buried a wife Joan on 17 July 1624, and an unnamed son on 3 September 1624 at St. Giles’s from the house of George Sommerset, musician (Collier, Actors, xviii). He seems to have become a city ‘wait’ about 1622 and to have still held his post in 1641, and has been confused (Collier in Sh. Soc. Papers, ii. 33; E. F. Rimbault, Who was Jacke Wilson?, 1846) with another John Wilson, born in 1595, a royal lutenist and musician of distinction (cf. D. N. B.). One or other of them was concerned with a performance of M. N. D. in the house of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on 27 September 1631, which gave offence to the Puritans (Murray, ii. 148).

WILSON, ROBERT, was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1581. A reference in Gabriel Harvey’s correspondence of 1579 suggests that he was conspicuous amongst the actors of the day, and Lodge’s praise about the same date in the Defence of Plays of his Shorte and Sweete, ‘the practice of a good scholler,’ shows that he was also a playwright. This piece Lodge compares with Gosson’s Catiline’s Conspiracies, and it may have been on the same theme. Further evidence of his reputation is in the letter of 1581 from T. Baylye (q. v.). In 1583 he joined the Queen’s men, and is described by Howes in his account of the formation of that company as a ‘rare’ man ‘for a quicke, delicate, refined, extemporall witt’. He is not in the Queen’s list of 1588. This may not be quite complete; on the other hand he may by then have left the company. I see no solid foundation for the conjectures of Fleay, ii. 279, that he was the player of Greenes Groatsworth of Wit (cf. App. C, No. xlviii) who penned the Moral of Man’s Wit and the Dialogue of Dives, that he wrote Fair Em, that he left the Queen’s for Strange’s in 1590 and thereby incurred Greene’s hostility, that he is the Roscius of Nashe’s Menaphon epistle, that he died of the plague in 1593. It is extremely unlikely that he died in 1593, for in his Palladis Tamia of 1598, after lauding Tarlton as famous for ‘extemporall verse’, Meres continues, ‘And so is now our wittie Wilson, who for learning and extemporall witte in this facultie is without compare or compeere, as to his great and eternall commendations he manifested in his chalenge at the Swanne on the Banke side.’ The common use by Meres and Howes of the phrase ‘extemporall witte’ renders it almost impossible to suppose that they are not speaking of the same man. It is true that, in the Apology for Actors, Heywood, whose knowledge of the stage must have gone back at least to 1594, classes Wilson with the older generation of actors, whom he never saw, as being before his time, and I take it the explanation is that, at or before the virtual break-up of the Queen’s men in the plague of 1592–3, Wilson gave up acting, and devoted himself to writing, and occasional extemporizing on themes. He is generally supposed to be the R. W. of The Three Ladies of London (1584) and The Three Lords of London (1590), and the ‘Robert Wilson, Gent.’ of The Cobbler’s Prophecy (1594). The ‘Gent.’ is hardly an insuperable obstacle to identifying him with the ‘Robert Wilson, yoman (a player)’, who was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 20 November 1600 (Collier, Actors, xviii). A Wilson is in the suspected Admiral’s cast of c. January 1600. But now comes the real difficulty. Meres, also in the Palladis Tamia and without any indication that he has another man in mind, includes ‘Wilson’ in a group of ‘the best for comedy amongst vs’, which is composed of the principal writers for the Admiral’s in 1598, and amongst these writers, as shown by Henslowe’s papers, was a Robert Wilson, who collaborated in eleven plays during 1598, and in three more during 1599 and 1600. He is last mentioned in a letter of 14 June 1600. This is generally taken to be a younger man than the Queen’s player, possibly a Robert Wilson who was baptized at St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on 22 September 1579, and married Mary Eaton there on 24 June 1606, possibly the Robert Wilson (not described as ‘a player and the younger’ as Collier suggests in Bodl.) whose son Robert was baptized at St. Leonard’s on 15 January 1601 (Stopes, Burbage, 141), possibly the Robert Wilson whose burial is recorded at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 21 October 1610. On the whole, I am inclined to think that, in view of the character of Meres’ references, of the use of Catiline as a play-theme both about 1580 and in 1598 (cf. ch. xxiii), and of the sudden disappearance of Wilson from Henslowe’s diary in the year of the ‘player’s’ death, the balance of evidence is in favour of one playwright rather than two. The undefined share of the Admiral’s man in the extant 1 Sir John Oldcastle does not really afford a basis for stylistic comparison with the more old-fashioned manners of the 1584–94 plays. There is nothing to show that the Bishopsgate man had any connexion with the stage, still less that he was a son of the Queen’s player, as has been suggested.

WINTER, RICHARD. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, c. 1571 (3 Library, ix. 253).

WODERAM, RICHARD. Oxford’s, 1586–7 (?).

WOODFORD, THOMAS. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.

WOODS, JOHN. Holland, 1604.

WORTH, ELLIS. Anne’s, 1615–19; for his later career, cf. Murray, i. 198, 218. He is described as ‘gentleman’ in the register of St. Giles’s at the baptism of his daughter Jane on 19 July 1613, and as ‘player’ at that of his son Elizeus on 12 March 1629 (Bodl.).

WYLKYNSON, JOHN. A London ‘coriour’, who maintained players in his house in 1549 (cf. App. D, No. ii).

YOUNG, JOHN. Queen Jane’s, >1537; Interluders, 1539–53 (?). He seems to have been still alive in 1569–70.

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