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