1122
WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London ..4
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA
KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG
FIRST EDITION 1930
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
FROM SHEETS OF THE FIRST EDITION
1951, 1963
8
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WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE
A STUDY OF FACTS AND PROBLEMS
BY
E. K. CHAMBERS
VOL. I
'O K&apos
M
FRAGU. DEMOCRITI
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
N. C.
PREFACE
IN these pages I return, divers* per aequora vectus> to
the point from which I started in the last century. I
then set out to write of Shakespeare, and of the English
stage as a background for Shakespeare; and this has been
throughout my theme, although I have not found it pos-
sible to use quite that brevity of words which the confident
surmise of youth anticipated. My remaining purpose is
threefold. The present volumes complete the design of
The Elizabethan Stage by a treatment of its central figure,
for which in that book I had no space proportionate to his
significance, .1 collect the scanty biographical data from
records and tradition, and endeavour to submit them to
the tests of a reasonable analysis. And thirdly, I attempt
to evaluate the results of bibliographical and historical
study in relation to the canon of the plays, and to form a
considered opinion upon the nature of the texts in which
Shakespeare's work is preserved to us. In so doing, I am
led to a confirmation of the doubts expressed in my
British Academy lecture of 1924 on The Disintegration of
Shakespeare^ as to the validity of certain drifts of specula-
tion, which tend to minimize at once the originality of
that work and the purity of its transmission. I am not so
much perturbed as some of my critics seem to think that
I ought to be, by finding that my conclusions do not differ
essentially from those which have long formed part of the
critical tradition. That is itself the outcome of study
through many generations by men of diverse tempers,
starting from diverse standpoints. They have no doubt
left something for modern scholarship to contribute,
especially as regards the causes of major textual variations.
But I do not think that revolutionary results really emerge
from the closer examination of contemporary plays, or
viii PREFACE
of theatrical conditions, or of the psychology of misprints.
Shakespeare, as a dramatist, remains something more than
the life-tenant of a literary entail,
I have been on well-trodden paths, and my debt to
others is heavy: among the earlier writers to Malone,
Halliwell-Phillipps, and Dowden beyond the rest; and
among my own contemporaries above all to Dr. W. W.
Greg, whose published studies I cite on page after page,
and upon whose generosity in counsel and information I
have constantly drawn during the progress of this book.
I have learnt much also from those accomplished biblio-
graphers, Professor A. W. Pollard and Dr. R. B. McKer-
row, and from Professor J. Dover Wilson, perhaps most
where he most stimulated me to reaction. I have had help
on various points from many others, to all of whom my
thanks are due: Miss Eleanore Boswell, Miss M. St.
Clare Byrne, Dr. H. H. E. Craster, Mr. F. H. Cripps-
Day, Mr, P. J. Dobell, Mr. F. S. Ferguson, the Rev.
W. G. D. Fletcher, the Rev. E. I. Fripp, Professor E, G.
Gardner, Mr. S. Gibson, Mr. M. S. Giuseppi, Father
W. Godfrey, the Hon. Henry Hannen, Miss M. Dormer
Harris, the late Dr. J. W. Horrocks, Sir Mark Hunter,
the Rev. P. J, Latham, Mr. E. T. Leeds, Dr. J. G.
Milne, Professor G. C Moore Smith, Professor D. Nichol
Smith, Professor Allardyce Nicoll, Mr. A, M. Oliver,
Mr. S. C. Ratcliff, Mr. V. B. Redstone, Miss M. Sellers,
Mr. Percy Simpson, Mr. K. Sisam, Professor C. J. Sisson,
the late Professor E. A. Sonnenschein, Mr. A. E, Stamp,
the Rev. W. Stanhope-Lovell, Mr. A. H. Thomas,
Mr. F. C. Wellstood, Dr. C. T. Hagberg Wright.
To the Pierpont Morgan Library of New York I owe
permission to use the Holgate manuscript of Francis
Beaumont's poem.
At the end of my pilgrimage I have yet older memories
to set down. The unfailing sympathy, encouragement
PREFACE ix
and patience of my wife have been my mainstay through-
out. To her, Artemis of the Ways, these volumes, like
their predecessors, are dedicated.
ov TroAAi] 8* TJ x&pis* &M' oofy*
And I should indeed be an ingrate if I did not now recall
the succession of those who have done so much, one after
another, for the presentation of my work at the Clarendon
Press. They have among them borne with my script and
my divagations for well over a quarter of a century; and
those who survive must share my feeling of relief, if not
its intermingled regret, that the last of many chapters is
now closed.
E. K. C.
EYNSHAM, July 1930.
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
I. SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN .
II. THE STAGE IN 1592
III. SHAKESPEARE AND HIS COMPANY
IV* THE BOOK OF THE PLAY
V. THE QUARTOS AND THE FIRST FOLIO
VI. PLAYS IN THE PRINTING-HOUSE
VI L THE PROBLEM or AUTHENTICITY .
VIII, THE PROBLEM OF CHRONOLOGY
IX. PLAYS OF THE FIRST FOLIO ,
i, ii, iii. Henry the Sixth .
iv. Richard the Third
v. The Comedy of Errors
vi. Titus Andronicus
vii^The Taming of the Shrew .
viii. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
ix. Love's Labour 's Lost .
x. Romeo and Juliet
xi. Richard the Second
xii. A Midsummer-Night's Dream
xiii. King John
xiv. The Merchant of Venice .
xv, xvi. Henry the Fourth
xvii. Much Ado about Nothing
xviii. Henry the Fifth
xix. Julius Caesar .
xx. As You Like It
XXL Twelfth Night .
xxii. Hamlet . .
xxiii. The Merry Wives of Windsor
xxiv. Troilus and Cressida .
xxv. All's Well that Ends Well .
xxvi. Measure for Measure .
xxvii. Othello .
xxviii. King Lear . . *
xxix. Macbeth ....
xii CONTENTS
xxx. Antony and Cleopatra .... 476
xxxi. Coriolanus 478
xxxii. Timon of Athens 480
xxxiii. Cymbeline ...;.. 484
xxxiv. The Winter's Tale .... 487
xxxv. The Tempest 490
xxxvi. Henry the Eighth 495
X. PLAYS OUTSIDE THE FIRST FOLIO . . . 499
i. Sir Thomas More 499
ii. Edward the Third 515
iii. Pericles 518
iv. The Two Noble Kinsmen . . . 528
v. Plays Ascribed in the Third Folio . . 532
vi. Other Ascribed Plays .... 537
XI. THE POEMS AND SONNETS .... 543
i. Venus and Adonis .... 543
ii. The Rape of Lucrece .... 545
iii. The Passionate Pilgrim .... 547
iv. The Phoenix and Turtle . . . 549
v. A Lover's Complaint .... 550
vi. Ascribed Verses 550
vii. The Sonnets 555
VOLUME II
NOTE ON RECORDS xiii
PRINCIPAL DATES xiv
PEDIGREE OF SHAKESPEARE AND ARDEN xvi
APPENDICES
A. RECORDS i
i. Christenings, Marriages, and Burials . . i
ii. The Grants of Arms 1 8
iii. Henley Street 32
igrThe AdblJ^hgjapt^u *_ ... t * ^ *^-~<~**~ **3f
v. Shakespeare's Marriage . . 7" . 41
vi. The Clayton Suit 52
vii. Shakespeare's Interests in the Globe and Black-
friars ....... 52
viii. Shakespeare and his Fellows . . . . 71
ix. Shakespeare's London Residences . . 87
x. The Belott-Mountjoy Suit .... 90
xi. New Place ...... 95
CONTENTS ziH
xii. Shakespeare as Maltster .... 99
xiii. The Quiney Correspondence . . . 101
xiv. The Old Stratford Freehold ... 107
xv. The Chapel Lane Cottage . . . in
xvi. Court of Record Suits . . . .113
xvii. The Stratford Tithes 118
xviit. The Combe Family 127
xix. The Welcombe Enclosure .... 141
xx. The Highways Bill 152
xxi. A Preacher's Thirst 153
xxii. Lord Rutland's Impresa . . . .153
xxiiL The Blackfriars Gate-House . . .154
xxiv. Shakespeare's Will 169
xxv. Shakespeare's Epitaphs . . . .181
B. CONTEMPORARY ALLUSIONS 186
G. THE SHAKESPEARE-MYTHOS .... 238
D. PERFORMANCES OF PLAYS 303
E. THE NAME SHAKESPEARE 354
F. SHAKESPEAREAN FABRICATIONS .... 377
G. TABLE OF QUARTOS 394
H. METRICAL TABLES 397
LIST OF BOOKS 409
SUBJECT-INDEX ....... 426
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME I
I. South Warwickshire and Neighbourhood, from
the tapestry map (Bodleian, Gough collection)
made by the Sheldon weavers of Weston, late in
the 1 6th century . . . Frontispiece
II. Neighbourhood of Stratford-on- A von . facing p. 4
III. Town of Stratford-on- A von . 6
IV. Ferdinando, Earl of Derby, by permission from
the portrait in the possession of the Earl of
Derby, K.G., at Knowsley Hall ... 46
V. Edward Alleyn, from the picture at Dulwich
College, by permission of the Governors . 48
VI. The Lords Chamberlain 64
(a) Henry, Lord Hunsdon, from a print in the
British Museum.
(b) George, Lord Hunsdon, by permission from
a miniature in the possession of the Duke of
Buccleuch and reproduced from a print supplied
by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
VII. Richard Burbadge, from the picture in the
Gallery of Dulwich College, by permission of
the Governors 76
VIII. William Sly, from the picture in the Gallery of
Dulwich College, by permission of the
Governors 78
IX. John Lowin, from the picture in the Ashmolean 80
. X. Nathan Field, from the picture in the Gallery
of Dulwich College, by permission of the
Governors 82
XL Henry Peacham's Illustration of Titus Andromcus^
by permission, from the Harley Papers in the
possession of the Marquis of Bath at Longleat 312
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
XII A. Shakespeare's Signatures, to
(a) The Deposition in Eelott v. Mountjoy^
from the Public Record Office. Photograph,
by Messrs. Monger & Marchant.
(b) The Conveyance of the Blackfriars Gate-
house, from the Guildhall Library of the City
of London.
(c) The Mortgageof the Blackfriars Gate-house,
from the British Museum . . facing p. 504
XII B. Shakespeare's Signatures, to
W> W> (/) The W M (first, second, and third
pages), from the Probate Registry of the Pre-
rogative Court of Canterbury at Somerset
House 504
XIII. Hand D in Sir Thomas More^ from British
Museum Harleian MS. 7368, fol. 9 a . 508
XIV. William Earl of Pembroke, from the brass
statue by Hubert le Soeur in the Bodleian,
based on a picture by Rubens . . . 566
XV. Henry Earl of Southampton, from the picture in
the National Portrait Gallery . . . 568
VOLUME II
XVI. John Davenant's Painted Chamber, at 3 Corn-
market, Oxford, by permission of Mr. E. W.
Attwood ..... Frontispiece
XVII. Richard Quiney's Letter to Shakespeare, from
the Birthplace Museum at Stratford-on-
Avon, by permission of die Trustees . facing 102
XVIII. Memoranda of Thomas Greene, from the
Birthplace Museum at Stratford-on-Avon,
by permission of the Trustees . , . 143
XIX. Shakespeare's Will (First Sheet), from the Pro-
bate Registry of the Prerogative Court of
Canterbury. . . . . .170
XX. Shakespeare's WiU (Second SheetJ, as above . 172
XXI. Shakespeare's Will (Third Sheet;, as above.
Photographs, R. B. Fleming & Co. . . 174
3 142- 1
XVI
XXIII.
XXIV.
between
pages 196-7
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
XXII. Shakespeare's Monument, from Holy
Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon.
Photograph, Frith & Co. . . facing 182.
Shakespeare's Bust, from the monument.
Photograph, Frith & Co. . 184
Cover of the Northumberland MS.
(Reduced Facsimile), from intensified
negative, with the background, and
incidentally the last two letters of Dyr-
month's name, eliminated
XXV. Cover of the Northumberland MS.
(Transcript). The facsimile and the
transcript from F. J. Burgoyne, Collo-
type Facsimile and Type Transcript of
an Elizabethan MS. at Alwwlck Castle
(Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd.), by
permission of His Grace the late
Duke of Northumberland, K.G.
XXVI. Droeshout Engraving (First State),'
from the title-page of the First Folio
(Bodleian Arch. G. c. 8) I between
XXVII. Droeshout Engraving (Second State), \ pages 240-1
from the title-page of the First Folio
(Bodleian Arch. G. c. 7)
XXVIII. Memorandum of John Aubrey, from
Bodleian Aubrey MS. 8, f. 45 V , facing 252
XXIX. Memoranda of William Fulman and
Richard Davies, from C.C.C. (Oxford)
MS. 309, p. 22 . . . 257
XXX. Warwickshire in 1610, from map by
Jodocus Hondius in John Speed, Theatre
of the Empire of Great Britain (i 6 1 1) . 354
CHAPTER I
SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN
\Bibliographical Note. Most of the comprehensive treatises upon Shake-
speare and the editions of the plays (ch. ix) deal with his personal biography
side by side with his career as a dramatist. The Lives by S. Lee (1898,
1925) and J. Q. Adams (1923) are full in this respect. Many documents
collected by Malone and his predecessors are to be found in the revised
Life of the Variorum Shakespeare (1821), ii, and its appendixes. Some
additions were made by Collier and others, but more by Halliwell-Phillipps
in his Liv.es of 1848 and 1853, which are still of value, and in a number
of smaller works, often issued in limited editions and now rare. Most, but
not all, of these were brought together in his Outlines of the Life of Shake-
speare which was often enlarged and took its final form in the seventh
edition of 1887. Since his time the chief new discoveries have been those
of C. W. Wallace, mostly published in Nebraska University Studies, v, x
(1905, 1910). Selections of documents are in D. H. Lambert, Cartae
Shakespeareanae (1904), and T. Brooke, Shakespeare of Stratford (1926).
The papers at Stratford are calendared in F. C. Wellstood, Catalogue of
the Books, Manuscripts, etc. in Shakespeare's Birthplace (1925). I give
the most important documents and extracts from others, as far as possible
from originals or facsimiles, with references to some minor dissertations, in
Appendix A. These are supplemented by the contemporary allusions in
Appendix B and the traditions in Appendix C.
Books of primarily biographical interest are J, Hunter, New Illustrations
ofSh. (1845); G. R. French, Shakespeareana Genealogica (1869); J. P.
Yeatman, The Gentle Sh. (1896; 1904, with additions); C. C. Stopes,
SJt's Family (1901), Sh.'s Warwickshire Contemporaries (1907), Sh.'s
Environment (1914, 1918), SA.'s Industry (1916); C. I. Elton, William
Sh. His Family and Friends (1904); J. W. Gray, SA.'s Marriage and
Departure from Stratford (1905); A. Gray, A Chapter in the Early Life
ofSh. (1926); J. S. Smart, Sh. Truth and Tradition (1928).
There is no adequate history of Stratford-on-Avon. Dugdale's Anti-
quities of Warwickshire (1656; ed. W. Thomas, 1718) is valuable on the
origins. The Victoria History covers the college, gild, and school, but has
not yet reached the parochial volumes. The Corporation archives are
voluminous. H.P. provided a Descriptive Calendar (1863) and printed
Extracts from the Council Books (1864), Extracts from the Subsidy Rolls
(1864), Extracts from the Festry Book (1865), The Chamberlain? Accounts,
i59-97 (1866), Extracts from the Chamberlain? Accounts (1866-7),
Extracts from the Registry of the Court of Record (1867). These are being
largely replaced by R. Savage and E. I. Fripp, Minutes and Accounts of the
Corporation and other Records (1921-9, Dugdale Society, 4 vols. to 1592
issued). R. Savage has printed tie Parish Registers (1897-1905, Parish
Register Soc.) and G. Arbuthnot the Festry Minute Book (1899), J. H.
3I42-I B
2 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
Bloom's Shakespeare's Church (1902) is unsatisfactory. He has also edited
the Register of the Gild of Holy Cross (1907). Other special studies are
R. B. Wheler, Historical Account of the Birthplace (1824, 1863); G.
Arbuthnot, Guide to the Collegiate Church (c. 1895); H. E. Forrest, The
Old Houses of S. A. (1925). Early summary accounts are R. B. Wheler,
History and Antiquities of S. A. (1806), and J. R. Wise, Sh.'s Birthplace
and its Neighbourhood (1861); more recent S. Lee, S. A. from the Earliest
Times to the Death of Sh. (1885, 1907), and E. I. Fripp, Sh.'s Stratford
(1928). The surrounding neighbourhood is described in E. I. Fripp,
Sh.'s Haunts near Stratford (1929); earlier guide-books are C. J, Ribton-
Turner, Sh.'s Land(i%<)$)\ B. C. A. Windle, 8k. 9 s Country (1899); W. S.
Brassington, Sh.'s Homeland (1903).
Practically all the available information about John Sh. is collected in
H.P.'s Outlines. Traditions of the poet's Stratford life are discussed in
C. F. Green, The Legend of Sh.'s Crab-Tree (1857, 1862); C. H. Brace-
bridge, 8A. no Deer-Stealer (1862); his grammar school in a Tercentenary
Volume (1853); by A. F. Leach in 7.H. ii. 329, English Schools at the
Reformation (1896), Educational Charters and Documents (1911); and by
A. R. Bayley, Sh.'s Schoolmasters (10 N.Q. viii. 323; 12 N.Q. i. 321);
J. H. Pollen, A Sh. Discovery: His School-master afterwards a Jesuit (1917,
The Month, cxxx. 317); W. H. Stgrenson, 8k! s Schoolmaster and Hand-
writing (1920, Jan. 8, T.L.S.)-> and'rts curriculum by T. S. Baynes, What
Sh. Learnt at School (1894, 8k. Studies, 147); F. Watson, The Curriculum
and Text-Books of English Schools in the Seventeenth Century (1902, Bibl.
Soc. Trans, vi. 159); S. Blach, Sks Lattingrammatik (1908-9, J. xliv. 65;
xlv. 51); J. E. Sandys, Education (Sh.'s England, i. 224). More general
works on Sh.'s literary acquirements are H. R. D. Anders, Sk!s Books
(1904); H. B. Wheatley, Sh. as a Man of Letters (1919, Bill. Soc. Trans.
xiv. 109); R. Farmer, Essay on the Learning of Sh. (1767; Far. i. 300);
A. H. Cruickshank, The Classical Attainments ofSh. (1887, Noctes Shake-
spearianae 9 45); P. Stapfer, 8k. and Classical Antiquity (1880); J. C.
Collins, Essays and Studies (i 895) ; R. K. Root, Classical Mythology in Sh.
(1903); M. W. M c Callum, Sh.'s Roman Plays and their Background
(1910); L. Rick, Sh. and Ovid (1919, J. lv. 35); E. R. Hooker, The
Relation ofSA. to Montaigne (1902, P.M.L.A. xvii. 3 1 2) ; J. M. Robertson,
Montaigne and Sh. (1909); G. C.Taylor, Sh.'s Debt to Monta igne(i<)2 5);
C. Wordsworth, Sh.'s Knowledge and Use of the Bible (4th ed., 1892);
T. Carter, 8k. and Holy Scripture (1905); J. A. R. Marriott, English
History in Sk. (1918); H. Green, Sh. and the Emblem- Writers (1870); R.
Jente, Proverbs ofSh. (1926 Washington Univ. Studies xiii. 391). On the
specificsources of the plays are: J. Nichols, Six Old Plays (1779) ; K. Simrock
and others, Quellen des Sh. (1831); J. P. Collier, Sh.'s Library (1844; <*.
W. C. Hazlitt, 1875); I. Gollancz and others, 8k. Classics (1903-13);
F, A. Leo, Four Chapters of North's Plutarch (1878); A. Vollmer, 8k. and
Plutarch (1887, Archiv, Ixxvii. 353; Ixxviii. 75, 215); W. W. Skeat,
Sh.'s Plutarch (1892); R. H. Carr, Plutarch's Lives (1906); W. G.
BosweU-Stone, 8k.'s Holinshed (1896); A. and J, Nicoll, Holinshed's
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 3
Chronicles as Used in Si.'s Plays (1927). On Shakespeare's knowledge of
country life are H. Loewe, Si. unddie Waidmannskunst (1904, J. xl. 51);
D. H. Madden, The Diary of Master William Silence (1897); C. Brown,
Sh. and the Horse (1912, j Library, iii. 1 52); H. N. Ellacombe, Si. as an
Angler (1883), Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Sh. (3rded. 1896);?. G.
Savage, Flora and folk-Lore of Sh. (1923); A. Geikie, The Birds of Sh.
(1916). On his medical knowledge are J. C. Bucknill, Medical Knowledge
of Si. (1860), Mad Folk of Sh. (1867); J. Moyes, Medicine and Kindred
Arts in the Plays of Sh. (1896). On his legal knowledge and conjectured
training as a lawyer are J. Lord Campbell, Si. 9 s Legal Acquirements (1859);
W. L. Rushton, Si. a Lawyer (1858), Si's Legal Maxims (1859, 1907),
Si.'* Testamentary Language (1869), Si. Illustrated by the Lex Scrip fa
(1870); J. Kohler, Si. vor dem Forum der Jurisprudenz (1883, 1919);
W. C. Devecmon, In re Si.'s Legal Acquirements (1899); C. Allen, Notes
on the Sh.-Bacon Question (1900) ; G. G. Greenwood, Si. 9 s Law and Latin
(1916), Si.'s Law (1920); A. Underhill, ^(1917, 1926, Si.'s England,
i. 381); D. P. Barton, Si.'s Links with the Law (1929). On other occupa-
tions ascribed to Shakespeare are W. J. Thorns, Was Si. ever a Soldier?
(1865, Three Notelets on Si.)i W. Blades, Si. and Typography (1872);
W. L. Rushton, Si. an Archer (1897).]
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE was born of burgess folk, not un-
like those whom he depicts in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Stratford-on-Avon, however, had not grown up in the
shadow of a royal castle. It was a provincial market
town, and counted with Henley-in-Arden after the city of
Coventry and the borough of Warwick among the business
centres of Warwickshire. It stood on the north bank of
the Avon, where a ford had once been traversed -by a
minor Roman thoroughfare. A medieval wooden bridge
had been replaced at the end of the fifteenth century by
the stone one which still survives. The great western
highway, following the line of Watling Street to Shrews-
bury and Chester, passed well to the north through
Coventry. But at Stratford bridge met two lesser roads
from London, one by Oxford and under the Cotswolds,
the other by Banbury and Edgehill; and beyond it ways
radiated through Stratford itself to Warwick, Birming-
ham, Alcester, and Evesham. 'Emporiolum non in-
elegans' is the description of the place in Camden's
Britannia , and Leland, who visited it about 1540, records
that it was 'reasonably well buyldyd of tymbar', with
B 2
4 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
'two or three very lardge stretes, besyde bake lanes'. Topo-
graphers give the name of Arden to Warwickshire north
of the Avon and distinguish it as the Woodland from the
cultivated champaign of the Feldon to the south. But even
on the north bank of the river there were open corn-
fields, as well as many enclosed pastures, and frequent
hamlets tell of early clearings on the fringe of Arden. The
lord had his boscus at Stratford in the thirteenth century
and later a park, but Leland says that little woodland was
visible there in his time.
The town of Stratford only occupied a small part of
a large parish which bore the same name. This ^ was ten
miles in circuit and had i,5oohouseling people in 1546.
Mercian kings had made wide grants to the bishops of
Worcester, with a 'hundredal' jurisdiction independent of
the sheriff over the liberty of Pathlow, for which they held
wayside courts at Pathlow itself and at Gilleputs in Strat-
ford. There was a monastery, afterwards discontinued,
for the bishop and his household. Much of the dominion,
even in Saxon times, had passed from the bishops by
devolution to thanes and in other ways, and in the six-
teenth-century parish there were several manors. The
hamlet of Clopton was held by the family of that name;
Luddington by the Convays of Arrow; Drayton by the
Petos of Chesterton; Bishopston by the Catesbys of
Lapworth and afterwards by the Archers of Tan worth;
part of Shottery by the Smiths of Wootton Wawen. But
the principal manor still remained with the bishop up to
1549. In this lay the borough itself, the 'Old Town*
which divided it from the parish church of Holy Trinity
on the southern outskirts, and a considerable stretch of
agricultural land in the fields of Old Stratford, Welcombe,
and Shottery. 1 The bishop had also the distinct township
of Bishop's Hampton, to the east of Stratford. On the
south side of the river were the Lucy manor of Charlecote,
the Greville manor of Milcote, and the Rainsford manor
of Clifford Chambers in Gloucestershire. The hamlet of
Bridgetown beyond the bridge was partly in the borough
1 Cf. plan (Plate III).
PLATE II
Office
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 5
and partly in Alveston. To the north-east and north-west
of Stratford were the villages of Snitterfield and Aston
Cantlow. They had been 'Warwickslands', lordships of
the dominant families of Beauchamp and Neville, and had
reverted to the crown on attainder. For all these places
Stratford was the natural urban centre, 1
The borough had come into existence under Bishop
John de Coutances (i 195-8), who had laid out part of his
demesne in quarter-acre plots of uniform frontage and
depth. These were held as burgages, practically on a free-
hold tenure, subject to shilling chief rents, and with rights
of division and disposition by sale or will. A separate
manor court was presided over by the bishop's steward,
but the burgesses probably chose their own bailiff and
sub-bailiffs as executive officers. The court sat twice in
the year, for 'leets' or 'law days' near Easter and Michael-
mas. At these officers were appointed, transfers of
burgages were recorded, small civil actions for debt
and the like were heard, by-laws for good order were
made, and breaches of these, with frays and infringements
of the 'assizes' of food and drink and other standards
for the quality of saleable articles, were punished. Side
by side with the manorial jurisdiction had grown up
the organization of the Gild of Holy Cross, which
ministered in many ways to the well-being of the town.
It dated from the thirteenth century. Early in the fifteenth
it absorbed smaller gilds, and thereafter an almost con-
tinuous register preserves the admissions of brothers and
sisters, and the payments for the souls of the dead, whose
masses were sung by the priests of its chapel. The
members of the gild were bound to fraternal relations and
to attendance at each others funerals in their Augustinian
hoods. Periodical love-feasts encouraged more mundane
intercourse. The gild had accumulated much property, in
and about Stratford, from pious gifts and legacies. It
helped its poorer members and maintained an almshouse.
A school, which had existed in some form as far back as
1295, was one of its activities. This had an endowment
Cf. map (Plate II).
6 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
from Thomas Joliffe for the gratuitous teaching of gram-
mar by one of the priests. The gild buildings, which stood
just within the borough, owed their latest form to Sir
Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London in 1492. He, too,
had built the bridge. The affairs of the gild were in the
hands of a Master and Aldermen, with two Proctors as
financial officers. It was at the height of its reputation in
the middle of the fifteenth century, and attracted members
of distinction from far beyond the limits of Stratford.
Later it suffered a decline, perhaps due in part to the rise
of trade gilds, in which the craftsmen of the town were
linked for business purposes. Probably the gild chapel
counted for more in the religious life of the borough than
the comparatively distant church. This belonged to a
college of priests under a warden, which also had acquired
much landed property, in addition to the ample tithes of
the large parish. Two chapels in the hamlets of Bishopston
and Luddington were under its control.
The reign of Edward VI was a period of considerable
change for Stratford. The gild and the college were both
dissolved under the Chantries Act of 1547, and their
revenues went to the crown. Provisional direction was
given for the continuance of the school. In 1 549 Bishop
Nicholas Heath was driven, apparently for inadequate
compensation, to transfer his manor, with that of Bishop's
Hampton, to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and after-
wards Duke of Northumberland, who aspired to restore
the old domination of the Beauchamps and Nevilles in the
county. It passed from him in the same year and back to
him in 1553 by exchanges with the crown. On his at-
tainder in 1553 Mary granted it to the duchess, and after
her death in 1555 to the hospital of the Savoy. But this
grant was almost immediately vacated, and the manor
remained with the crown until 1 562, when Elizabeth gave
it to Northumberland's son Ambrose Dudley, now in his
turn created Earl of Warwick. On his death in 1590 it
again reverted to the crown, but was sold and acquired by
Sir Edward Greville of Milcote. 1 Another event of 1 553
1 Cf. App. Ay no. xix.
Scok qf yonts
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Oxford University Press
TOWN OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 7
had, however, reduced the importance of the manor and
its court in local affairs. The inhabitants, perturbed by
the^loss of valuable elements in their civic life, petitioned
for incorporation as a royal borough; and this, presumably
through the influence of Northumberland, then in power,
was accorded by a charter of 28 June 1 553. The govern-
ment of the borough was entrusted to a Bailiff and
a Council of fourteen Aldermen and fourteen Capital
Burgesses, with powers to provide for good order and the
management of corporate property, to fill vacancies in
their number, and to make annual election of the bailiff,
Serjeants at the mace, constables, and such other officers
as might prove .necessary. The Council was to have the
return to royal writs within the borough, to the exclusion of
the sheriff, and the bailiff to hold crown office as escheator,
coroner, almoner, and clerk of the market. With a chosen
alderman, he was to act as justice of peace. Authority was
given for a weekly market and for two annual fairs, with
a court of pie-powder. There was also to be a court of
record under the bailiff, with jurisdiction in civil causes,
where the amount in dispute was not more than 30. To
meet the municipal expenses, the charter granted the
property of the late gild, worth about ^46, and the rever-
sion of a lease of the parish tithes granted by the college,
with the reserved rent of $+. 1 The rest of the college
property remained with the Crown. The funds granted
were charged with the maintenance of the almshouse,
and with salaries for the schoolmaster, the vicar, and his
curate. A general reservation, which afterwards led to
trouble, was made for the rights of the lord of the manor,
and in particular the election of the bailiff was to be sub-
ject to his approval, and he was to have the appointment
of the schoolmaster and vicar. For some years from 1 553
the records leave it rather difficult to disentangle the
activities of the bailiff and his brethren from those of
the court leet. But soon after a recognition of the charter
by Elizabeth in 1560, the Council was regularly at work,
holding its meetings at 'halls' every month or so in the
1 Cf. App. A, no. xvii.
8 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
buildings of the old gild, making its by-laws, surveying its
property, approving leases, ordering the market, the fairs,
and the almshouse, and raising small levies for public or
charitable purposes to supplement its regular funds.
It had at first a town clerk and afterwards a steward, who
assisted the bailiff at the court of record. 1 This, in addi-
tion to its jurisdiction between civil litigants, chiefly in
cases of debt, took over the imposition of penalties for
breaches of by-laws or of the assize. Frays may be assumed
to have fallen to the justices of peace. The leet, although
shorn of many of its functions, continued to be held. It
presumably dealt with matters peculiar to the manor, such
as the transfer of burgages. The constables, although
chosen by the Council with other officers at Michaelmas,
were sworn in at a leet. Disputes arose with the lords of
the manor, about toll-corn, about commoners' rights,
about the approval of bailiffs. Internal discipline also
gave trouble. The aldermen and principal burgesses did
not always attend halls regularly, and some of them were
inclined to shun the responsibilities of office when their
turns came. Towards the end of the century the Council
was much occupied with affairs in London. 2 The in-
dustries of Stratford were decaying and there had been
disastrous fires. Suits were made to the Crown for ex-
emption from subsidies, and for an enlarged charter. One
was in fact granted by James in 1 6 10, which extended the
boundary of the borough to include the Old Town. The
minutes of council meetings are not very full. Rather
more illuminating are the accounts of the Chamberlains,
who had succeeded the proctors of the gild as financial
officers. These were made up annually after each year of
office and presented to the Council for audit about
Christmas. The chamberlains collected the rents and
dues, and kept a detailed record of their expenditure upon
salaries, repairs to property, gifts, generally in wine and
sugar, to distinguished strangers, and rewards to players.
The accounts throw many sidelights on town history and
on local personalities. Religious changes for example are
x Cf. App. A, no. xvL Cf. App. A, nos. xii, xiii.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 9
traceable in payments of 1562-3 for defacing images in
the chapel, and of 1563-4 for taking down the rood-loft,
and in a council order of 1571 for the sale of copes and
vestments. 1
Stratford has been represented as a dirty and ignorant
town, an unmeet cradle for poetry. There is some want
of historical perspective here. No doubt sanitary science
was in its infancy. But, after all, penalties for the breach of
by-laws, if they are evidence that the by-laws were some-
times broken, are also evidence that they were enforced.
Nor was contemporary London, with the puppy dogs in
its Fleet and its unsecured Moorditch, in much better
case. Stratford had its paved streets and much garden
ground about its houses. It was embosomed in elms, of
which a survey of 1582 records a vast number in .closes
and on the backsides of the burgages. 2 And all around was
fair and open land with parks and dingles and a shining
river. There was much give and take between town and
country-side. The urban industries, weaving, dyeing,
tanning, shoe-making, glove-making, smithing, rope-
making, carpentry, were such as subserve or are fed by
agriculture. Many of the burgesses were also landholders
in the parish or in neighbouring villages. There was much
buying of barley, for the making and sale of malt, which
was a subsidiary occupation of many households. 3 Sheep,
cattle, ducks, and ringed swine ran on the common pasture
called the Bank Croft. Although remote, the town was
not out of touch with a larger civilization. Access to Oxford
was easy, and to London itself, by roads on which carriers
came and went regularly, and the burgesses journeyed on
their public and private business. Nor was it entirely
bookless. Leading townsmen could quote Latin and write
a Latin letter if need be. Critical eyes may have watched
the Whitsun pastoral which David Jones produced in
1 5 8 3 .4 The Grammar School was probably of good stand-
ing. The schoolmaster's salary, which Joliffe fixed at I o,
1 M.A. i. 128, 1385 ii. 54. 4 M.A. w. 137 : Tayd to Davi Jones
* M.A. lii. 10$. and his companye for his pastyme at
3 Cf. App. A) no. xii. Whitsontyde xiij 8 iiij a .'
io SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
was increased to 20 by the charter. This was much more
than the 12 $s. paid at Warwick or than the amounts
usual in Elizabethan grammar schools, outside West-
minster, Eton, Winchester, and Shrewsbury. It was
better than the emoluments of an Oxford or Cambridge
fellowship. And from Oxford or Cambridge came William
Smart (1554-65), Fellow of Christ's, John Browns word
(1565-7), a Latin poet of repute, John Acton (1567-9),
Walter Roche (1569-71), Fellow of Corpus, Oxford,
Simon Hunt (1571-5), afterwards a Jesuit at Douai and
English penitentiary at Rome, Thomas Jenkins (i 575-9),
Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, who came from Warwick,
John Cottam (1579-81), and Alexander Aspinall (1581-
1624). The actual curriculum of the school is unknown;
it was probably based on those planned by Colet for St.
Paul's in 1518 and Wolsey for Ipswich in 1529, and not
unlike that in force at St. Bees in 1583. Colet required
an entrant to be able to 'rede and write Latyn and Eng-
lisshe sufficiently, soo that he be able to rede and wryte
his owne lessons'. 1 But London had its sufficiency of
elementary schools, and the easier standard of Stratford
was content if a child was 'fet for the gramer scoll or at
the least wyez entred or reddy to enter into ther accydence
& princypalles of gramer'. 2 Even the preparation seems at
first to have been given by an usher attached to the gram-
mar school, whom the chamberlains paid 'for techyng ye
chylder'. But by 1604 an independent teacher had for
some time taught reading and his wife needlework,
'whereby our young youth is well furthered in reading and
the Free School greatly eased of that tedious trouble'^
In the grammar school itself there would be little but
Latin; the grammar of Colet himself and William Lilly,
revised and appointed for use in schools under successive
sovereigns; some easy book of phrases, such as the Sen-
tentiae Pueriles of Leonhard Culmann or the Pueriles
Confabulatiunculae of Evaldus Callus; Aesop's Fables and
the Moral Distichs of Cato; Cicero, Sallust, or Caesar, Ovid
in abundance, Virgil, perhaps Horace or Terence; pro-
1 J. xUv. 66. * M.A. i. 34. a M.A. i. 128$ iii. .
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN n
bably some Renaissance writing, the Bucolica of Baptista
Spagnolo Mantuanus or the Zodiacus Vitae of Marcellus
Palingenius. There is not likely to have been any Greek.
About sixteen a boy was ripe for the University. Sir Hugh
Clopton had left six exhibitions to Oxford and Cambridge;
it is not known whether the Corporation continued them. 1
Such was the environment of the youthful Shakespeare.
His father, John Shakespeare, was not of native Stratford
stock; there are no Shakespeares in the gild register.
John makes his first appearance in Stratford at a leet
of 29 April 1552, when he was fined one shilling for
having an unauthorized dunghill in Henley St. He may
reasonably be identified with a John Shakespeare of
Snitterfield, who administered the estate of his father
Richard in 1 561.2 Richard had held land on two manors
at Snitterfield, in part as tenant to Robert Arden of Wilm-
cote in Aston Cantlow. He is traceable there from 1 528-
9, and may possibly have come from Hampton Corley in
Budbrooke. But his ultimate origin has eluded research.
When grants of arms to John Shakespeare were applied
for, the heralds recited ancestral service to Henry VII
and a reward of lands in Warwickshire. No confirm-
ing record has been found. Shakespeares were thick
on the ground in sixteenth-century Warwickshire, par-
ticularly in the Woodland about Wroxall and Rowington
to the north of Stratford.^ A Richard Shakespeare was
in fact bailiff of Wroxall manor in 1534, but his after-
history is known, and excludes a suggested identity with
Richard of Snitterfield. Other affiliations have been tried
in vain. There was some cousinship between the poet and
a family of Greene in Warwick, which may one day yield
a clue. John Shakespeare, as administrator to his father, is
called agrlcola or husbandman. Later his brother Henry
is found holding land at Snitterfield, where he died, much
indebted, in 1596. Other documents call John a yeoman.
Technically a yeoman was a freeholder of land to the
annual value of fifty shillings, but the description was
often applied to any well-to-do man short of a gentleman.
1 Leach 243. a Cf. App. A, no. ii. * C App. E.
iz SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
A more precise designation is that of 'glover 1 or *whit-
tawer'. A whittawer cured and whitened the soft skins
which were the material of the glover's craft. There can
be little doubt that John Shakespeare combined these oc-
cupations, and was a freeman of the Mystery of the
Glovers, Whittawers and Collarmakers, which was one of
the Stratford trade gilds. It does not weigh for much
against the contemporary use of these terms that John
Aubrey called him a butcher in 1681, and that Nicholas
Rowe, who made the first attempt at a systematic bio-
graphy of the poet in 1709, called him a wool-dealer. 1
Likely enough, he had subordinate activities; he is men-
tioned as selling both barley and timber. It is possible
that he is the John Shakespeare who was tenant of Ingon
meadow in Bishop's Hampton about 1570. He is clearly
distinct from a John Shakespeare of Clifford Chambers,
traceable there from 1560 to his death in 1610, and from
a second John Shakespeare of Stratford, a corvizer who
dwelt in the town from 1586 to about 1595, and whose
progeny early biographers confused with his, 2 The poet's
father married Mary Arden, daughter of that Robert from
whom the grandfather had held land. He was of the
ancient house of the Ardens of Park Hall, although the
precise degree of relationship is uncertain. 3 Mary was a
co-heiress in a small way. Robert left her some land in
Wilmcote called Asbies by his will of 1556, and had
probably already settled other property there upon her.
She was also entitled to a share in a reversionary interest
of his Snitterfield estate,-* The marriage must have taken
place between the date of the will and i$ September
1558, when a daughter Joan was christened at Stratford.
She must have died early. There followed Margaret
(c. 1562, b. 1563), William (c. 26 April 1564), Gilbert
(c. 1566), a second Joan (c. 1569), Anne (c. 1571, b,
1579), Richard (c. 1574), and Edmund (c. 1580). The
' App. C, nos. xiii, xxv. The wool- > Cf. App. A, no. i (a), fc).
dealer tradition established itself at ' Cf. App. A, no. ii.
Stratfordj cf. App. A, no. iiij App. Q 4 Cf. App. A, no. iv.
nos. xlvi, liv.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 13
actual day of William's birth is unknown. A belief that
it was April 23, on which day he died in 1616, seems to
rest on an eighteenth-century blunder. 1 In 1556 John
Shakespeare bought two houses, one in Henley St. and
one in Greenhill St. In 1575 he bought two other houses,
the locality of which is not specified. In 1590 he owned
two contiguous houses in Henley St. Of these the
westernmost is now called the 'Birthplace' and the eastern-
most the ' Woolshop'. But this tradition does not go back
beyond the middle of the eighteenth century. Certainly
the 'Woolshop 1 was the purchase of 1556. But whether
John was living in the 'Birthplace* in 1552, or whether
he was then living as a tenant in the 'Woolshop 1 , and
bought the 'Birthplace' in 1575, has not been established. 2
However this may be, the purchases suggest that John
Shakespeare prospered in business. And he became
prominent in municipal life.a Between 1557 and 1561 he
appears as juror, constable, and 'affeeror' or assessor of
fines at the court leet, and was himself again fined for
leaving his gutter dirty and for not making presentments
as ale-taster before the court of record. In 1561 and
1562 he was chosen as one of the chamberlains, and it is
perhaps evidence of his financial capacity that he acted,
quite exceptionally, as deputy to the chamberlains of
the next two years. Probably he was already a capital
burgess by 1561, although his name first appears in a list
of 1 564. His subscriptions to the relief of the poor during
that year of plague-time are liberal. In 1565 he was
chosen an alderman, and in 1568 reached the top of
civic ambition as bailiff. In view of contemporary
habits, it is no proof of inability to write that he was
accustomed to authenticate documents by a mark, which
was sometimes a cross and sometimes a pair of glover's
dividers. 4 But it is unfortunate, because it leaves us igno-
rant as to how he spelt his name. The town-clerk, a
constant scribe, makes it 'Shakspeyr' with great regularity;
1 Cf. App. A, no. i(a). 4 C. Sisson, Marks as Signatures
* Cf, App. A y no. iii. ( Z 9 2 8> 4 Library, ix. 22), is sceptical.
' CLM.A. passim.
14 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
but some twenty variants are found in Stratford docu-
ments. 1 After a customary interval John, like other ex-
bailiffs, was again justice of the peace as chief alderman
in 1571. A few years later there are indications of a
decline in his fortunes. Throughout his career there had
been suits by and against him for small sums in the court
of record. These, however, appear to have been part of
the ordinary routine of business transactions as conducted
in Stratford. An occasional appearance in the High Courts
involved larger sums. In 1571 John proceeded against
Richard Quiney, the son of an old colleague Adrian
Quiney, for ^50. In 1573 he had himself to meet the
claim of Henry Higford, a former steward of Stratford,
for j3- He failed to appear and a warrant for his arrest,
and if not found, outlawry, was issued. He was still in
a position to spend 40 on house property in 1575. But
at the beginning of 1577 he suddenly discontinued at-
tendance at the 'halls' of the Corporation, and never again
appeared, except on one or two special occasions. In the
following year he was excused from a levy for the relief
of the poor, and rated at an exceptionally low amount for
the expenses of the musters, which still remained unpaid
in 1 579. His wife's inheritance was disposed of. The small
reversion in Snitterfield was sold for ^4. Asbies was let
at a nominal rent, probably in consideration of a sum down.
The other Wilmcote holding was mortgaged to Mary's
brother-in-law Edmund Lambert for ^40, to be repaid at
Michaelmas 1580. It was not repaid. John Shakespeare
afterwards claimed that he had tendered payment, and
that it was refused because he still owed other sums to
Lambert. This he does not seem to have established. He
also maintained that Lambert's son John, to whom posses-
sion passed in 1587, agreed to buy the property outright
from the Shakespeares and their son William, and failed
to keep his agreement. This John Lambert denied.
There was litigation in 1589 and again in 1597, but the
property proved irrecoverable. 2 A singular incident of
1 580 still lacks an explanation. John Shakespeare and one
1 Cf. App. E, no. iii. a App. A, no. iv.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 15
John Audley, a hat-maker of Nottingham, were bound
over in the Court of Queen's Bench to give security against
a breach of the peace. They failed to answer to their
recognizances and incurred substantial fines. That of
Shakespeare amounted to 20 for his own default and 20
more as surety for Audley. 1 In 1587 an entanglement
with the affairs of his brother Henry seems to have added
to his embarrassment. And in the same year the patience
of the Corporation was exhausted, and a new alderman
was appointed in his place, 'for that M r Shaxspere dothe
not come to the halles when they be warned nor hathe not
done of longe tyme'. 2 Further court of record suits
suggest that he was still engaged in business. On 25
September 1592 he was included in a list of persons at
Stratford 'hearetofore presented for not comminge moneth-
lie to the churche according^ to hir Majesties lawes' ; and
to his name and those or eight others is appended the
note, 'It is sayd that these laste nine coom not to churche
for feare of process for debtte'. 3 As arrest for debt could
be made on Sundays in the sixteenth century, the explana-
tion seems, in the light of John Shakespeare's career since
1577, extremely probable. But the notion of a religious
romance in the drab life of a town councillor has proved
too much for his biographers, and much ingenuity has
been spent in interpreting what little is known of John's
personal and official life on the theory that he was in fact
a recusant. The theorists differ, however, as to whether
he was a Catholic or a nonconforming Puritan, and I do
not think that there is much to support either contention.
So far as the recusancy returns of 1592 are concerned, the
positron is clear. They had nothing to do, as has been
suggested by a confusion of dates, with the anti-Puritan
legislation of 1593. In 1591 England was expecting a
renewed Spanish attempt at invasion, and county com-
missions were issued and announced by proclamations of
1 M.A. iii. 6Z, from CoramRege Roll, M.A. iv. 148, 159. S topes, Cont. 31,
AngUa 2o b , 2i a , Trin. 22 Eliz. suggests that this was the corvizer (cf.
* M.A. lii. 170. vol. ii, p. 3) of whose religion, as of his
3 S.P.D. Ettz. ccxliii. 76; Grevttie debts, we know nothing.
Papers (Warwick Castle) 26625 texts in
16 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
October 18,* The instructions to the commissioners are
known. They were to collect the names of those who did
not attend church, not to 'press any persons to answer to any
questions of their conscience for matters of religion', but
if they found wilful recusants, to examine them as to their
allegiance to the Queen, their devotion to the Pope or the
King of Spain, and any maintenance of Jesuits or seminary
priests. Clearly Catholics alone, and not Puritans, were in
danger. Beyond the return itself, the only document
which may bear upon John Shakespeare's religion is the
devotional will or mtamentum animae found in the roof of
one of his Henley St. houses in the eighteenth century. 2
I do not think that this is a forgery, but if the John
Shakespeare who made it was the poet's father, it pro-
bably dates from his early life, and carries little evidence
as to his religious position under Elizabeth. Of his per-
sonality there may be some genuine reminiscence in a
seventeenth-century report of how a visitor, as to whose
identity there must be some blunder, found in his shop
'a merry cheeked old man that said "Will was a good
honest fellow, but he durst have cracked a jest with him
at any time'". 3 Although no longer a member of the
Corporation, John was called upon to advise them on
some difficulties with the lord of the manor in 1601. And
on September 8 of that year he was buried. No will or
administration is known, but of all the property which
passed through his hands, only the Henley St. houses are
found in those of the poet.
Of William Shakespeare's own early days there is but
little on record; and it is no part of my object to compete
with those gifted writers who have drawn upon their
acquaintance with Stratford and with the plays for the
material of an imaginative reconstruction. We are told
by Rowe, presumably on the authority of inquiries made
by 'Thomas Betterton at Stratford, that his father bred
1 Proctl. 837, 839; Dasent, xxii. 138, nals (i824),iv. 78; St. G. K. Hyland, A
174, 1 8 1, 205, 21 1, 227, 245, 3 16, 324, Century of Persecution (1920), 196, 407.
3*5> 33*> 34> 34*> 3 6 5> 3*9? >*> 47> * Cf. App. F, no. vi.
5435 xxiii. 163, 188, 1915 Strype, An- 3 App. C, no. vii.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 17
him at a free school, but withdrew him owing to 'the
narrowness of his circumstances, and the want of his
assistance at home', 1 There is no reason to reject this,
which agrees with what we know of John's financial
history, or to look for a free school other than that of
Stratford itself. It is unfortunate that no early lists of
pupils are preserved there. Rowe's words suggest a some-
what premature withdrawal. From Stratford also comes
the earlier report of one Dowdall (1693) that the poet had
run away from apprenticeship to a butcher.* He does not
say that his master was also his father. But the story
shows that Aubrey was not alone in his belief as to John
Shakespeare's occupation, which he confirms by saying
that William followed his father's trade and 'when he
killM a calfe, he would doe it in a high style, and make a
speech*. 3 Perhaps this really points to some early exercise
of mimic talent. 'Killing a calf seems to have been an
item in the repertory of wandering entertainers. 4 Rowe
also learnt of Shakespeare's early marriage and departure
from Stratford as a result of deer-stealing. The docu-
ments concerning the marriage involve a puzzle. 5 It took
place towards the end of 1582, not in the parish church
of Stratford, or in any of the numerous likely churches
whose registers have been searched; possibly in the chapel
at Luddington, where an entry is said to have been seen
before the register was destroyed. A licence for it was
issued from the episcopal registry at Worcester on Novem-
ber 27, and a bond to hold the bishop harmless was, given
by two sureties on the following day. The procedure was
regular enough, and carries no suggestion of family dis-
approval. But the register of licences gives the bride's
name as Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton and the bond
as Anne Hathwey of Stratford. Once more, romantic
1 App. C, no. xxv. grace behynde a clothe'. J. Raine,
3 App, C, no. xviii. Priory of Tinchde (Surtees Soc.)
3 App. C, no. xiii. ccccxli, cites a 'droll performance*
4 Collier, i. 90, from Account of called 'killing the calf* by an eigh-
Pracess Mary for Christmas 1521, teenth-century entertainer.
*Itm pd, to a man at Wyndesore, for * App. A, no. v.
kylling of a calffe before my ladys
18 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
biography has scented a mystery. The probable solution
is that the bond, as an original document, is correct, and
that the clerk who made up the register blundered. Rowe,
who certainly never heard of the bond, knew the name as
Hathaway. There were several Hathaways in the parish
of Stratford, and Anne's parentage is not quite clear. She
may have been of Luddington, but more likely of Shottery,
where one Richard Hathaway, of a family which bore the
alias of Gardner, occupied the tenement of Hewland,
now known as Anne Hathaway's cottage, and in 1581
left money to a daughter Agnes, then unmarried. That
Agnes and Anne, in common usage although not in strict
law, were regarded as forms of the same name is unques-
tionable. If there was any element of haste or secrecy in
the affair, it may have been due to the fact that Anne was
already with child. A kindly sentiment has pleaded the
possible existence of a pre-contract amounting to a civil
marriage. A daughter Susanna was baptized on 26 May
1583, and followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, on
2 February 1585. Guesses at godparents are idle where
common names, such as Shakespeare's own, are con-
cerned. But those of the twins, which are unusual, point
to Hamnet or Hamlet Sadler, a baker of Stratford, and
his wife Judith.
The story of deer-stealing has been the subject of much
controversy. Rowe's account has the independent con-
firmation of some earlier jottings by Richard Davies who
became rector of Sapperton in Gloucestershire in 1695.*
Probably, like Rowe, he drew upon local gossip. Rowe
says that the exploit was in the park of Sir Thomas Lucy
of Charlecote, that in revenge for prosecution by Lucy
Shakespeare made a ballad upon him, and that as a result
of further prosecution he was obliged to leave Stratford.
Davies says that he was whipped and imprisoned by Lucy,
and that in revenge he depicted Lucy as a justice with
'three lowses rampant for his arms'. There is an obvious
reference here to Merry Wives of Windsor, i, i, in which
Justice Shallow complains that Falstaff has beaten his
1 App. C, nos. OT, xjnr.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 19
men, killed his deer, and broken open his lodge, and
threatens to make a Star Chamber matter of it as a riot.
He is said to bear a 'dozen white luces' in his coat, and
Sir Hugh Evans makes the jest on louses. The Lucy
family had held Charlecote since the twelfth century, and
bore the arms Vair> three luces hauriant argent. 1 The Sir
Thomas of Shakespeare's day was a prominent justice of
peace, and represented Warwickshire in the parliaments
of 1571 and 1 584-5 . 2 It has been held that the whole
story is nothing but a myth which has grown up about
the passage in the Merry Wives of Windsor itself. But I do
not think that, so far as the essential feature is concerned,
we are called upon to reject it. Deer-stealing was a common
practice enough, and was regarded as a venial frolic, even
for young men of higher standing than Shakespeare's,
Details are another matter. Lucy cannot have whipped
Shakespeare, if he proceeded under the ruling game law
of 1563, in which the only penalty prescribed was im-
prisonment. Possibly, if the affair could be regarded as a
riot, it might bear a more serious complexion. Nor does
Lucy appear to have had a 'park', in the legal sense, at
Charlecote. At his death in 1600 he had only a free-
warren. It is true that the learned lawyer Sir Edward
Coke included roe-deer, but not fallow deer, among beasts
of warren, and although other authorities appear to dis-
sent, it was certainly so decided in 1339.3 It is also true
that the Act of 1563 appears to give protection to deer in
any enclosure then existing, whether it was a legally en-
closed park or not, and the free-warren at Charlecote may
well have come under this provision. If the deer was not in
1 The coat is repeated in four quar- indeed, seems to have been concerned
tarings, making a dozen luces, on a with pheasants and partridges, not
Lucy tomb at Warwick (Dugdale, deer (S. D'Ewes, Journals of Partia-
. 348). mcnts, 321, 327, 363, 366, 369, 373,
* He led a Committee (4 Mar. 374).
1585) for considering a Bill for the * G. J. Turner, Select Pleas of the
preservation of game and grain, which Forest (1901)9 x, from decision of
did not become law, but he was King's Bench, 'Caprioli sunt bestiac
replaced on a later Committee, and de warenna et non de foresta eo quod
there is no reason to assume that he was fugant alias feras de foresta*.
an active promoter of the Bill, which,
C 2
20 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
an enclosure protected by the game law, any foray upon
it would have been no more than a trespass, to be remedied
by civil action, and neither whipping nor imprisonment
would have been possible. Rowe, however, only speaks
of prosecution, and of a ballad, which may have amounted
to a criminal libel. A single stanza, claimed as the opening
of this ballad and containing the jest on lousiness, came
into the hands both of William Oldys and of Edward
Capell in the eighteenth century, with a history ascribing
it to information derived from inhabitants of Stratford by
a Mr. Jones who died in 1703.* If so, it represents a
third tradition as old as those of Davies and Rowe. A
complete version produced in 1790 by John Jordan, an
out-at-elbows poet and guide for strangers in Stratford,
was probably not beyond his own capacities for fabrica-
tion. 2 There is, however, yet another alleged fragment of
the ballad, in a different metre, said on very poor authority
to have been picked up at Stratford about 1690 by the
Cambridge professor Joshua Barnes. 3 Its jest on deer
horns carries the familiar Elizabethan insinuation of
cuckoldry against Lucy, whose monument to his wife at
Charlecote lauds her domestic virtues. Obviously the
fragments are inconsistent, and neither is likely to be
genuine. But some weight must be attached to the four-
fold testimony through Davies, Rowe, Jones, and Barnes
to a tradition of the deer-stealing as alive at Stratford
about the end of the seventeenth century. There is later
embroidery which need not be taken seriously. 4 A writer
in the Biografhia Eritannica (1763) ascribes Shakespeare's
release from imprisonment to the intervention of Eliza-
beth; another in 1862, professedly on the authority of
records at Charlecote, to the Earl of Leicester, who died in
1588, but to a pique of whom against Lucy the inspiration
of the Merry Wives of Windsor is none the less attributed.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, perhaps owing
to the discovery that there was no park at Charlecote, the
1 App. C, nos. xxxiv, xliv. * App. C, nos. xli, xlvi, xlix, li, liv,
2 App. C, no. xlvi. Ivii, Iviii.
3 App. C, no. xvi.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 21
story was transferred to the neighbouring park of Fulbrook.
This, however, had been disparked by 1557, was not in
the hands of the Lucy family during Shakespeare's boy-
hood, but was bought by them in 1615 and subsequently
re-emparked. Some hit at Sir Thomas is probably involved
in the Merry Wive$ of Windsor passage. But it would not
be a justifiable inference that the presentment of Justice
Shallow as a whole, especially in Henry IF, is in any way
meant to be a portrait' of the worthy justice. Such por-
traiture seems, to me at least, quite alien from the method
of Shakespeare's art. A belief, once established, that a
distinguished citizen of Stratford had enjoyed a wildish
youth, may have encouraged the later tales of Shake-
speare's drinking exploits, for which no origin other than
the inventiveness of innkeepers need be sought. 1
We cannot give any precise date to the Hegira. A story
current at Stratford in 1 8 1 8 that the venison was stolen
to grace the marriage feast is obviously part of the em-
broidery. Children can be baptized but not begotten
without a father, and it is reasonable to suppose that
Shakespeare was still in Stratford during 1584.* We do
not know whether his wife was at any time the companion
of his absence. There is no record of her in London, and
none in Stratford until after the purchase of New Place.
But the boy Hamnet was buried at Stratford-on 1 1 August
1596. On the other hand it is no proof of Shakespeare's
continuance in Stratford that according to his father's
allegation he concurred in the offer to sell the Wilmcote
property to John Lambert about 1587.3 This seems to
have been only an oral transaction, and wherever William
was, there is no reason to suppose that he was beyond
communication with his family. The words of Rowe's
deer-stealing narrative and of Dowdall's parallel story of
an escape from apprenticeship imply a migration direct
1 App. C, nos. xl, xlvi. Dwell at London. W. S. was a Will',
2 James Yates, servingman, in The but the date is too early, and there are
Holds ofHumititie, 17, printed with his indications in the book which suggest
Castell of Courtesie (1582), has colour- a Suffolk author.
less Verses written at the Departure of 3 App. A, no. iv.
his friende W. S. When he went to
22 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
to London. But these can hardly be pressed. We have
no certainty of Shakespeare's presence in London before
1 592, when a scoffing notice by Robert Greene shows that
he was already an actor and had already begun to write
plays. 1 This is no doubt consistent with some earlier
sojourn, which may have been of no long duration. A
supposed earlier allusion to him as 'Willy* in Spenser's
Tears of the Muses (1591) is now, I think, universally
rejected. 2 We have therefore a very considerable hiatus in
his history, extending over a maximum of eight years from
1584 to 1592, to take into account; and it is obvious that
many things may have occupied this interval, of which
we are ignorant. Tradition, apart from some statements
as to his introduction into theatrical life, has done little
to fill the gap. It was the actor William Beeston who told
Aubrey that he had been a schoolmaster in the country. 3
Beeston's memory might well go back to Shakespeare's
own lifetime, and the statement is not in itself incredible.
The course at Stratford, even if not curtailed, would
hardly have qualified him to take charge of a grammar
school; but his post may have been no more than that of
an usher or an abecedarius. Nor need we suppose that
his studies, even in the classics, terminated with his
school-days. The most direct contemporary evidence is
that of Ben Jonson, who ascribed to him but 'small Latin,
and less Greek 7 , writing naturally enough from the stand-
point of his own considerable scholarship. 4 There has
been much argument on this subject from the time of
Richard Farmer's Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare
(1767), and much enumeration of the books, ancient and
modern,- erudite and popular, which may, directly or in-
directly, have contributed material to his plays. The in-
ferences have not always been discreet. The attempt, for
example, of Professor Churton Collins to establish a
familiarity with the Greek tragedians rests largely upon
analogies of thought and expression which may have had
a natural origin out of analogous situations. A saner
1 App. B, no. iiij cf. p. 58. 3 App. C, no. xiii.
8 App. B, no. i. 4 App. B,.no. xxii.
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 23
judgement is that of Professor Henry Jackson, who after
a careful survey of the evidence found no exceptional
learning, but merely an example of a familiarity with
classical themes, more widespread in Elizabethan days
than in our own, and not indicative of anything beyond
a grammar-school education. 1 One may reasonably as-
sume that at all times Shakespeare read whatever books,
original or translated, came in his way. It has been asked
where he found them in the absence of public libraries.
Did he borrow from the Earl of Southampton, or from
Jonson or from Camden, or did he merely turn over their
leaves on the stationers' stalls? These are foolish questions,
to which I proposeno answers. We do not know what library
he had of his own. Many volumes bear his signatures, and
they are mostly forgeries. Some claim has been made for
an Aldine Metamorphoses of 1502, for a translated Mon-
taigne of 1603, and for a translated Plutarch of i6i2. 2
Sceptics point out that he named no books in his will;
there was no reason why he should, unless he wished^to
dispose of them apart from his other chattels. As with
Shakespeare's general learning, so with his law.. His writ-
ing abounds in legal terminology, closely woven into the
structure of his .metaphor. Here, again, the knowledge
is extensive rather than exact. It is shared by other
dramatists. Our litigious ancestors had a familiarity with
legal processes, from which we are happily exempt. But
many have thought that Shakespeare must have had some
professional experience of a lawyer's office, although this
was not the final opinion of the much-quoted Lord Camp-
bell; and there are those who will tell you by which
Stratford attorney he was employed. This is only one
instance of the willingness of conjecture to step in where
no record has trod. On similar grounds Shakespeare has
been represented as an apothecary and a student of medi-
cine. That he was a soldier rests on a confusion with one
of many William Shakespeares at Rowington; and that he
' Was Shakespeare of Stratford the Jackson O.M. (1926).
Author of Shakespeare's Plays and * Cf. p. 506.
Poems? in R. St. J, Parry, Henry
24 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
was a printer on the fact that Richard Field, who issued
his poems, came from Stratford. In a sense, these con-
flicting theories refute each other. However acquired, a
ready touch over a wide space of human experience was
characteristic of Shakespeare. For some of this experience
we need look no farther than Stratford itself; the early
acquaintance with hunting and angling and fowling; the
keenly noted observation of rural life, mingling oddly with
the fabulous natural history which contemporary literature
inherited from the medieval bestiaries. For the rest, we
cannot tell where it was garnered. But we are entitled to
assume a roving and apperceptive mind, conversant in
some way with many men and manners, and gifted with
that felicity in the selection and application of varied
knowledge, which is one of the secrets of genius. What
has perhaps puzzled readers most is the courtesy of Shake-
speare; his easy movement in the give and take of social
intercourse among persons of good breeding. We have
not, indeed, to think of the well-to-do inhabitants of
Stratford as boors; but the courtesy of a provincial town
is not quite the courtesy of a Portia. Probably the true
explanation is that, once more, it is a matter of appercep-
tiveness, of a temper alive, not only to facts, but to human
values. A recent writer has suggested, with no support
either from records or from probability, that Shakespeare
did not grow up at Stratford at all, but was carried off in
childhood to learn both his courtesy and his Latin, like
Drayton, as a page in the household of Sir Henry Goodere
of Polesworth near Coventry. 1 No such guess is needed,
nor can a similar one reasonably be based on a statement
of a not very reliable writer that Fulke Greville, Lord
Brooke, the son of Sir Fulke Greville, of Beauchamp's
Court, Alcester, claimed to have been the 'master' of both
Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Greville was a patron of
poets, but there is nothing to show to what period the
claim, if it was made, related. 2
A sprinkling of Shakespearfcs in the southern Cotswolds
1 A. Gray, A Chapter in the Early * App, C, no. x.
Life of Shakespeare (1926).
Chap. I SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN 25
and a 'tradition* cited in 1848 of a residence by the poet
at Dursley have led to the supposition that he may there
have found a temporary refuge. Justice Shallow is asked
to countenance William Visor of Woncote against
Clement Perkes of the hill; and it is pointed out that a
Vizard was bailiff at Dursley in 1612, and that neighbouring
families of Vizard of Woncot or Woodmancote and Perkes
of Stinchcombe Hill long survived. 1 The conjunction of
names might be more than a coincidence. But Perkes itself
was a common name in Warwickshire and Worcestershire
as well as in Gloucestershire, and in fact a Clement Perkes
was born at Fladbury, Worcestershire, in 1568. Many
Shakespearean names occur in Stratford documents. On
most little stress can be laid. It is intriguing to find a
Fluellen and a Bardolfe in the same list of recusants as
Shakespeare's father, although Shakespeare knew Bar-
dolfe as the title of a nobleman, and a Stephen Sly of
Stratford z to match the Christopher and Stephen Sly of
The Taming of the Shrew> although 'Slie' and 'Don Christo
Vary' were already given by the source-play of A Shrew.
Christopher Sly, however, calls himself of Burton Heath,
presumably Barton-on-the-Heath, where the Lamberts
dwelt; and Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, must
belong to the Wincot which lies partly in Clifford Cham-
bers and partly in Quinton, where a Sara Hacket was
baptized in 1 59 1 . 3 It is perhaps only a fancy that Clement
Swallow, who sued John Shakespeare for debt in 1559,
may have contributed with Sir Thomas Lucy to the
making of Justice Shallow of Clement's Inn. 4 It seems to
have been a Restoration stage-tradition that a ghost scene
in Hamlet was inspired by a charnel-house in Stratford
churchyard; one would have thought the setting more
appropriate to the grave-digger scene. 5 Possibly the
drowning of a Katherine Hamlet at Tiddington on the
Avon in 1579 may have given a hint for Ophelia's end. 6
1 Madden, 86, 372. 4 10 N.Q. x. 286.
2 H.P. ii. 296, says 'Christopher* in s App. C, no. xxi.
error. 6 M.A. iii. 50.
Cf. App. C, no. viii.
26 SHAKESPEARE'S ORIGIN Chap. I
All this amounts to very little. Whatever imprint Shake-
speare's Warwickshire contemporaries may have left upon
his imagination inevitably eludes us. The main fact in his
earlier career is still that unexplored hiatus, and who shall
say what adventures, material and spiritual, six or eight
crowded Elizabethan years may have brought him. It is
no use guessing. As in so many other historical investiga-
tions, after all the careful scrutiny of clues and all the
patient balancing of possibilities, the last word for a self-
respecting, scholarship can only be that of nescience.
4 Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul,
When hot for certainties in this our life!'
CHAPTER II
THE STAGE IN 1592
[Bibliographical Note. The earlier part of this chapter is based on the
discussions in The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and The Elizabethan Stage
(1923). In the latter part I have attempted to track more closely the
downfall of Queen Elizabeth's company from 1588, and to restate my
conjectures as to the relations of the companies of the Lord Admiral, Lord
Strange, the Earl of Pembroke, and the Earl of Sussex during 1589-94
in the light of criticisms of The Elizabethan Stage by W. W. Greg in
R.E.S. i. 97, 257, and of the revival of an older view as to the origin of
Strange's men in T. W. Baldwin, The Organisation and Personnel of the
Shakespearean Company (1927). Most of the records of London and pro-
vincial performances from 1 5 88 are in Appendix D. Those for the Queen's
and Sussex's men must be supplemented from J. T. Murray, English
Dramatic Companies (1910), subject to some corrections and additions
from sources named in Eliz. Stage, ii. i and the Bibl. Note to Appendix D.]
I HAVE elsewhere described, with such elaboration of
detail as the envious wallet of time would allow, the
gradual establishment of a habit of dramatic representa-
tion in this country; tracing its analogies to certain
mimetic elements in the customs of the folk, its remark-
able emergence in the ritual of a church traditionally
hostile to the histrfoneS) its relations to outstanding features
of medieval society, to the communal celebrations of
religious and trade gilds, to the ludi of courtly halls, to
the varied repertory of the wandering minstrels. And
I have endeavoured to show how the medieval passed
into the Tudor stage; how humanism brought a new
interest in the drama as an instrument of literary and moral
education and even of theological and political contro-
versy; how a special class of minstrels, the servants of the
Crown or of noble lords, made acting an economic pro-
fession and built the permanent London theatres; and
how the theatres, buttressed on one hand by a paying pub-
lic and on the other by court patronage, held their own
against puritan opposition, until the Tudor polity itself
went under in the civil and religious dissensions of the
seventeenth century.
Any intelligible study, however, of the life and work of
28 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
the playwright Shakespeare must have its own prelude in
a retrospect of the state of theatrical affairs, as they stood
at the opening of the last Elizabethan decade, when that
playwright made his first appearance. The story may be-
gin with the year 1583, which was something of a turning-
point in the history of the playing companies. In that year
Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, was called
upon by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State,
to select a body of players for the direct service of the
Queen, Probably Walsingham was acting in the illness of
the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Sussex, within whose
department the oversight of court revels properly fell.
The Queen's men were taken from the most important
of the existing companies, those of the Earl of Sussex
himself, of the Earls of Leicester and Oxford, possibly of
the Earl of Derby and Henry Lord Hunsdon. All these
had made recent appearances at court. They received the
rank of Grooms of the Royal Chamber, probably without
fee, and were entitled to wear the royal livery and badge.
The reasons for the appointment must be matter for con-
jecture. An old royal company of interlude players, in-
herited from the Queen's father and grandfather, had been
allowed to die out some years before. In a sense the new
men took their place. But it was not the practice of
the economical Elizabeth to multiply household officers
merely as appanages. And it may be suspected that the
departure of 1583 was an incident in the endeavour of
the government to assert a direct control of the London
stage against the claims of the City corporation. If so, it
was not the only such incident. A power to regulate public
entertainments within their area belonged to the traditional
privileges of the City, as of other incorporated towns.
Moreover, a proclamation issued early in Elizabeth's own
reign, on 16 May 1559, had specifically imposed upon
mayors of towns, as upon justices of peace elsewhere, the
duty of licensing plays, and had instructed them to dis-
allow such as handled 'matters of religion or of the
gouernaunce of the estate of the common weale'. Ob-
viously many of the circumstances of plays were proper
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 29
matter for local control. A local authority was best quali-
fied to fix suitable times and places, and to take precautions
against disorder, structural dangers, and infection. The
plan would work well enough, so long as the authority was
reasonable, and did not, as is sometimes the temptation
of licensing authorities, try to convert a power of regula-
tion into a power of suppression. Whether mayors and
justices were equally well qualified to act as censors of
the subject-matter of plays may be doubted; and even if
qualified, they might not always see eye to eye with the
central government. In any case the City of London had
not, from the point of view of Elizabeth's government,
proved altogether reasonable. The Queen required plays
for her Christmas 'solace' at court; and, in order that these
might be economically provided, it was desirable that the
players should have an opportunity of making their living
through public performances. The Corporation was com-
posed of heads of households and employers of labour,
who found that plays distracted their servants and ap-
prentices from business and occasionally led to disorder.
Moreover they were not uninfluenced by a growing
puritan sentiment, which was hostile to plays in the ab-
stract as contrary to the word of God, and found them in
the concrete, even if they did not touch upon religion and
state, full of ribaldry and wantonness. There had been
friction for some years before 1583. The Privy Council
had made more than one attempt to persuade the City to
delegate the licensing -to independent persons, no doubt
such as would be acceptable to the Privy Council itself.
This had been refused, and a hint of the royal prerogative
had been given in a patent to the Earl of Leicester's men
in 1 574, which gave them authority to perform, in London
and elsewhere, such plays as had been allowed by the
Master of the Revels. The City responded in the same
year with a complete code of play-regulations for their
area. These need not have been oppressive, if not applied
oppressively. But the players probably had their mis-
givings; and they contributed perhaps more than the
Privy Council itself to the defeat of the City, by setting up
30 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
theatres just outside its boundaries, where they came under
the control of county justices, less active and interfering
than the mayor and his brethren. It was not a complete
remedy. In summer the apprentices flocked to the plays
even farther from their masters' doors, but in winter the
comparative inaccessibility of the new houses made re-
course to the City inn-yards still inevitable. Meanwhile
the puritan sentiment gprew, and a spate of controversial
sermons and treatises lifted the City into an attitude of
complete opposition to the stage. Short epidemics of
plague, during which the Privy Council and the City were
agreed that plays must be inhibited, brought a complica-
tion. It proved easier to get restraints established than to
get them withdrawn when the plague was over. In 158 1
the patience of the Privy Council was exhausted, and the
precedent of 1574 was followed and extended in a new
commission to the Master of the Revels, giving him a
general power over the whole country, not merely to
license individual plays, but to 'order and reforme,
auctorise and put down* all plays, players, and playmakers
'together with their i "
ana ma)
ancient
necessary, be overruled. No doubt the Master of the
Revels, while carrying out the wishes of the Privy Council
as to a general toleration for the players and as to censor-
ship, would still normally leave details of times and places
to local control. Perhaps, in exasperation, the City now
committed a tactical blunder. An order was sent to the
gilds, requiring all freemen to forbid the attendance of
their 'sarvants, apprentices, journemen, or children* at
plays, whether within or without London. It was a brutum
fulmen, which could not possibly be made effective, par-
ticularly beyond the liberties. But the City would not
accept defeat, and it was probably during 1582 that, in
defiance of the Master of the Revels and his commission,
an ordinance was passed, replacing the regulations of
1574 by a simple prohibition of plays within the area.
The establishment of a company with the status and dig-
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 31
nity of royal servants may reasonably be regarded as a
counter-move on the side of the government. The City
was overawed to the extent of appointing two inn-yards
for the Queen's men in the winter of 1583. In the follow-
ing year they again proved recalcitrant. The players
brought their case before the Privy Council, and there was
an elaborate exchange of arguments and proposals, as to
which no formal decision is upon record. But it is clear
from events that the City were defeated. They had obtained
a small concession in a standing prohibition of plays on
Sundays. But on the main issue they had to submit to the
power of the royal prerogative, and to content themselves
with showing cause for restraints of plays as often as pos-
sible, and pressing for the extension of such restraints to
the Middlesex and Surrey suburbs.
The Queen's men remained the dominant London com-
pany for several years after 1583. They did regular
service at court during each Christmas season, according
to an old routine, in plays carefully chosen by the Revels
officers and rehearsed before the Master. Seventeen plays
are credited to them for the five winters from 1583-4 to
1587-8. It may have been a subsidiary object of their
formation to reduce the number of companies which the
City was called upon to tolerate. If so, it was partly
counteracted by the fact that the Queen's men proved
strong enough to occupy more than one playhouse. There
was a protest against this in the negotiations of 1584, and
it may explain an arrangement by which the Curtain was
taken for a term of seven years from Michaelmas 1585
as an 'easer' to the Theatre. 1 But the relations between
companies and playhouses during this period are very
obscure. James Burbadge, the owner of the Theatre, who
had been a member of Leicester's company, was not
chosen for the Queen's, and seems to have entered the
service of Lord Hunsdon. Certainly, however, the
Queen's made some use of the Theatre, and some use of
various inn-yards during the winter. And in the hot days
of summer a section of them, or perhaps the whole com-
1 Nebraska Univ. Studies, xiii. 125.
32 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
pany if plague was sporadic, travelled the provinces, where
their livery generally secured them exceptionally liberal
rewards. The older companies, robbed of their best men,
became insignificant. Derby's disappear from the records;
Leicester's, Sussex's, Oxford's, and Hunsdon's survived in
the provinces. There were occasional visits to London.
One play was given at court by Leicester's, one by a new
company under the Lord Admiral, Lord Howard of
Effingham, and one by the same men in combination with
those of Hunsdon, who had become Lord Chamberlain in
1585. There were also several performances of Activities',
vaulting and tumbling, led by one John Symons, whose
patron seems to have been generally Lord Strange, but in
one year the Earl of Oxford. The chief rivals of the
Queen's men at court were, however, the boy players.
They were to some extent a survival. In the earlier Tudor
dramatic annals the great choirs of St. Paul's and the
Chapel Royal had been at least as conspicuous as the
professional companies. In 1576 a playhouse had been
constructed in an old building of the Dominican priory at
Blackfriars, and this seems to have been occupied about
1 583 by boys drawn from both these choirs, together with
others from the private chapel of the Earl of Oxford. The
boys followed the classic and literary tradition which
humanism had brought into the drama, and their Masters
employed academic scholars, such as George Peele and
John Lyly. No doubt this served them better at court,
than with the general London public. Lyly seems to have
been the moving spirit of the Blackfriars combination, and
soon after it broke down in 1585, he began a new series
of plays for Paul's. The Queen's men, on the other hand,
probably contented themselves with pieces of more old-
fashioned and popular types. To this period may belong
the early chronicle histories of The Famous Victories of
Henry the Fifth and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third.
The titles of the lost Phillyda and Choryn and Felix and
Phitiomena carry more suggestion of literary influence.
But evidently the Queen's relied largely on the pens of
their own .members. One of these was Robert Wilson.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1-592 33
He is described in 1581 as capable of writing a 'librum
aliquem brevem, novum, iucundum, venustum, lepidum,
hilarem, scurrosum, nebulosum, rabulosum, et omni-
modis carnificiis, latrociniis et lenociniis refertum*. His
extant plays are of the nature of 'moralities'. Another was
Richard Tarlton, of part of whose Seven Deadly Sins a
*plot' or tiring-house outline is preserved. It shows an
attempt at utilizing classical themes. But Tarlton's con-
siderable reputation was evidently in the main that of a
joyous jester and buffoon.
The death of Tarlton in September 1588 probably
shattered the fortunes of the Queen's men; and with it
begins a very difficult phase of company history. Matters
were complicated through the controversy aroused in 1 589
by the anti-ecclesiastical tracts published under the name
of Martin Marprelate, In this both the Queen's men and
the Paul's boys took part, possibly at the instigation of
Richard Bancroft, afterwards Bishop of London. If so,
Bancroft's action was officially disapproved, and the players
suffered. The Paul's company was suppressed. The
Queen's was not, but was probably required to leave
London for a time. 'Vetus Comedia hath been long in the
country', says a pamphlet of October 20. It will be as well
to track the Queen's men to their end. Wilson had ap-
parently left the company before Tarlton's death, and
among its leaders were now John Laneham and John
Dutton, two of the original members, and John Button's
brother Laurence. Moreover, John Symons had entered
the Queen's service, possibly bringing with him some or
all of Strange's troop of acrobats. This had presumably
taken place before 14 August 1588, when *the Quenes
plaiers' and 'the Quenes men that were tumblers' were
rewarded together at Bath. 1 How far Symons maintained
an organization independent of the older company it is
impossible to say, in view of the habit of dividing forces,
which evidently still continued. The travels of 1 58 8 were
prolonged until the end of the year, and extended as far
x Wardle in, from Account from dale of August xvij.s, more given by
c. Whitsun 1588 to c. Whitsun 1589, M* Mayour to the Quenes men that
'given to the Quenes plaiers the xiiij" 1 were tumblers z.s*.
3142*1 D
34 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
north as Lancashire, where Queen's men were at the Earl
of Derby's house of New Park on October 16. The next
day came 4 M r Button*. He was probably John Button
of Button in Cheshire, but the actor Buttons may have
been kinsmen of that house. On November 6 Queen's
men were at Leicester, on Becember 10 at Norwich, on
Becember 17 at Ipswich, evidently returning London-
wards. There were Queen's plays at court on 26 Becem-
ber 1588 and 9 February 1589, and an entry in the Revels
Accounts of a pair of hose for 'Symmons the Tumbler'
suggests that he contributed 'activities'. 1 The travels of
1589 were long and widespread; the Marprelate episode
was no doubt a factor. The movements of more than one
group seem to be involved. A tour started at Maidstone
in January, and went by a southern circuit through Canter-
bury (c. Feb. 2), Bover, Winchester (Mar. 10), Glouces-
ter (Apr. 17), Leicester (May 20). Here the reward was
to 'others moe of her Mayestyes playars', distinct therefore
from the 'certen of her Maiests playars' whose reward
for 6 November 1588 appears in the same account. It
may have been this or another group who are found
moving northwards on an eastern circuit, at Ipswich
(May 22), Aldeburgh (May 30), and Norwich (June 3).
And either from Leicester or from Norwich Queen's men
made their way into the north. They were at Lathom in
Lancashire, another of Lord Berby's houses, on July 12
and 13. Then track is rather lost of them. But they are
more likely to have stayed in the north than to have
returned to London, since Queen's men were again visit-
ing Lord Berby, this time at Knowsley in Lancashire, on
September n to 13, and on September 22 Lord Scrope
wrote to the English ambassador in Scotland that they had
been for ten days in Carlisle. He had sought them out
from 'the furthest parte of Langkeshire', on hearing that
King James wished them to visit Scotland, and they had
1 I abandon the conjecture (Elix. the Queen's, but it does not follow that
Stage, ii. 119) that Simons was tern- the Queen's gave none, and they already
porarily with the Admiral's. It is true had tumblers at Bath (cf. supra} on
that the Chamber Account ascribes 14 August 1588.
(App.D) 'activities' to them and not to
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 35
returned to Carlisle, where they had evidently already
been. Perhaps they never visited Scotland, as a projected
royal wedding was deferred. These dates show that it must
have been a second or third group who started an autumn
tour, again on the southern circuit, through Maidstone
(Aug. 2), Canterbury, Dover, Winchester (September), and
Bath (November). Less precisely dated visits to Coventry,
Oxford, and Reading may belong to either of these tours,
or even to the winter of 1588, but the Nottingham ac-
counts for 15889 clinch the argument for the duplication
of companies, by recording separate payments to 'Symons
and his companie beinge the Quenes players' and to 'the
Quenes players, the two Buttons and others'. By the
Christmas of 1589 the Queen's must have purged their
summer's offence, since they played at court, under John
Dutton and Laneham, on December 26 and March i.
There is no mention of Symons, or of 'activities' by the
Queen's. The provincial visits of 1 5 90 are mainly undated.
We may conjecture a summer tour, by Ipswich to Norwich
(Apr. 22), then perhaps by Leicester and Nottingham to
Knowsley (June 25-6) where 'M r Dutton' was again a
visitor, thence through Shrewsbury (July 24), Bridgnorth
and Ludlow (July), and home by Coventry and Oxford.
An autumn tour may have included Faversham, Can-
terbury (Aug. 10), Winchester, Marlborough, Exeter,
Gloucester, and Leicester (Oct. 30). And that Symons was
a participant in the summer tour may perhaps be inferred
from the numerous records of 'activities'. At Ipswich the
reward was for 'the Torkey Tumblers', at Norwich for
'the Quenes men, when the Turke wente vpon Roppes at
Newhall', at Leicester for 'certen playars, playinge uppon
ropes at the Crosse Keyes', at Bridgnorth for 'the Quenes
players at the dancing on the rop', at Coventry for 'the
Queenes players and the Turk'. From Shrewsbury we have
a fuller account of the rope-dancing by 'the Queen's
Majesty's players and tumblers', and here the Turk be-
comes an 'Hongarian'. 1 The Christmas of 1590 seems to
1 Owen and Blakeway, Hist, of in I Shropshire Arch. Soc. Trans, iii.
Shrewsbury, i. 385; W, A. Leighton 318, from Taylor MS.
D 2
36 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
give new evidence of division. Two separate warrants
were issued on 7 March 1591; one to the Buttons for
four plays from December 26 to February 14; the other
to Laneham for a single play on January i. 1 And on the
day after Laneham's performance a group of Queers men
was already starting at Maidstone for the southern circuit.
It can be tracked through Faversham, Canterbury (Jan.
n), Dover, Southampton (Feb. 14), Winchester, Bath,
Gloucester, perhaps Shrewsbury, Coventry (Mar. 24), and
Oxford. And at Southampton, Gloucester, and Coventry,
probably already at Faversham, it was working in com-
bination with the Earl of Sussex's men. 2 By May it had
crossed to the eastern counties, and here it was possibly
reinforced by a second group, for at Ipswich rewards were
paid to 'the Quenes players' on May 15 and to 'another
company of the Quenes players' on May 28. The two
groups may have gone on together to Norwich (June 23),
where they pass out of sight. Meanwhile, as in 1590, a
fresh tour set out on the familiar round by Maidstone
(May 28), Faversham (June 2), Southampton (June 29),
Winchester, and Bath. At Southampton *M r Button' is
noted as the leader. Then the records fail, but Queen's
men visited the Earl of Rutland at Winkburn in Notts on
August 1 8, and were at Coventry both on August 24 and
October 20, coming and going, maybe, from the marches or
the north. The Shrewsbury visit may belong here. They
were only called upon for one court play, on 26 December
1591, but they are not traceable on the road again until
March 30 at Canterbury. An allusion in Nashe's Sum-
mer's Last Will and Testament suggests that at some time
in 1592 a Queen's 'vice' was to be seen at the Theatre.
Several tours are again probable during this year, but one
can only definitely link dates for Ipswich (May i), Nor-
wich (May 27), and Leicester (June 10); then Southamp-
ton (Aug. 3) and Bath (Aug. 22); then Cambridge (c.
Sept. i) and AldeburgH (Oct. 1 1), where the Queen's were
rewarded 'at the same time' with Lord Morley's men; and
1 Efa. Stage, iv, 163.
* The Faversham entry says Essex's, but I suspect an error.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 37
finally Canterbury (Nov. 17) and Southampton (Nov. 26).
But they were also at some time during 1591-2 at Maid-
stone, Rochester, Winchester, Gloucester, Stratford-on-
Avon, Coventry, Worcester, Nottingham, and again at
Aldeburgh. At Cambridge they got into trouble with the
University authorities, who feared infection from the
plague then raging in London, and 'one Dutton* is again
mentioned as their leader. 1 A letter from the Vice-Cham-
berlain in December indicates that they would be pre-
vented by the plague from, playing at court, and in fact
they did not play, although other companies did. 2 Their
provincial records for 1593 are comparatively few; the
plague had made visitors from London unwelcome in the
country. A tour seems to have started in a new direction
by Oxford (Feb. 25). Queen's men were at Leicester
(June 20), York (September), and Norwich (Oct. 1 8), and
at some time in 15923 at Ipswich, Maidstone, Ply-
mouth, Coventry, and Stratford-on-Avon.* They made
their last appearance at court on 6 January 1594, and an
attempt to maintain a footing in London is indicated by
a season which they began, with their old associates of
1591, the Earl of Sussex's men, at the Rose or perhaps
Newington Butts on April i. It only lasted eight days.
Henslowe's diary records a reconstruction on May 8,
'when they broke and went into the contrey to playe' ; 4 and
for the rest of the reign they are merely a provincial com-
pany. No more is heard of the Buttons, or of Laneham. 5
How long the relations of Symons with the Queen's, what-
ever they were, lasted is uncertain. But there were still
'tumblers that went on the Ropes' at Coventry in 1592-3,
and 'a wagon in the pageant for the Turke* at Gloucester
in 1594-5. These notices do not specifically name the
Queen's.
There is, of course, a strong element of conjecture in
all this mapping of travels, and the disclosure of new
1 M.S.C. i. 190. belongs to August 1594.
2 M.S.C. L 198. 4 Henslowe ii. 277.
3 A Southampton visit ascribed by 5 A forged reference to him is in the
Murray, ii. 399, to August 1593 really MS. of Sir Ttomas More (cf. p. 512).
38 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
records may easily supplement or modify its details. But
I think it is clear that, from the death of Tarlton onwards,
the Queen's men were gradually losing their hold of
London. Their court performances only number eleven
for 1588-94 against the seventeen for 15838. In the
country their livery served them better. But they had to
split their forces, to join up with stray companions of the
road, and to diversify their entertainments with acrobatic
tricks. They were reverting to the hand-to-mouth exis-
tence of the medieval minstrels. It is perhaps signifi-
cant that in 1592 the City took advantage of the situation
to suggest that public plays were no longer necessary, and
that the Queen's service might be adequately provided
for by 'the privat exercise of hir Maiesties own players in
convenient place'. They approached Archbishop Whit-
gift, and the cynical ecclesiastic advised them to bribe the
Master of the Revels. But the money was not forth-
coming, and other players took the place of the Queen's.
The disorganization of the hitherto dominant company
was, indeed, an obvious opportunity for new men. Two
companies come to the front. One is the Lord Admiral's;
the other Lord Strange's. The Lord Admiral's have the
clearer origin. In 1583 a provincial company of the Earl
of Worcester's men included Robert Browne, James Tun-
stall, Edward Alleyn, Richard Jones, and Edward Browne.
The last notice of Worcester's men is in March 1585, the
first of the Admiral's in June 1585; and the connexions in
which some of these names recur later make it a safe con-
jecture that, when Lord Howard became Lord Admiral
in 1585, some or all of Worcester's men entered his
service. The Admiral's played at court, both indepen-
dently and in conjunction with Lord Hunsdon's, in the
winter of 1585-6. They travelled in 158 6, were in London
by January 1587, but not at court, travelled again in 1 58 7,
and returned to London by November. About Novem-
ber 1 6 they were unfortunate enough to kill a woman and a
child during a shooting scene, which must have been the
execution of the Governor of Babylon in 2 Tamburlaine^
v. i. They now disappear from the provincial records
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 39
until 1588-9, when a visit to Cambridge is recorded.
Possibly they found retirement discreet; possibly they
merely gave up travelling. They were at court on 29
December 1588 and n February 1589 with plays, and
also with 'feates of activity and tumblinge'.. Symons had
no monopoly of these. About this time there was probably
some reconstruction of the company, for on 3 January
1589 Edward Alleyn purchased from Richard Jones his
share of a stock of play-books and apparel which the two
had held jointly with John Alleyn and Robert Browne.
John Alleyn was a brother of Edward. He is described as
'servant* to the Admiral in 1589. Other purchases of
theatrical apparel by the Alleyns took place between 1589
and 1591, and to two of these James Tunstall was a wit-
ness. It is possible that Robert Browne was also bought
out, since he was at Leyden in October 1590, and was
accompanied by Jones on a second foreign expedition in
February 1592. Conceivably their companions, John
Bradstreet and Thomas Sackville, may also have been
Admiral's men, but there is no proof of it.
The origin of Strange's men is a more difficult problem.
It is natural, at first sight, to regard them as a development
from their lord's earlier players of Activities' ; and this,
indeed, they may to some extent have been. Symons did
not necessarily take the whole troop with him when he
joined the Queen's. A reward was paid to Strange's at
Coventry during the year ending on All Saints' Day 1588,
but this may have been either before or after Symons's
departure. Something is known of the pre-history of four
men who were ultimately members of or associated with
the later company. John Heminges is stated in his grant
of arms to have been a servant of Queen Elizabeth, pre-
sumably as an actor. He is not, however, in a list, perhaps
not quite complete, of 30 June 1588. William Kempe was
almost certainly the 'Will, my Lord of Lester's jesting
plaier', mentioned in a letter from Utrecht of 24 March
1586. A performance half dramatic, half acrobatic, of
The Forces of Hercules was given before Leicester at
Utrecht on April 23, and in August and September
40 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
'Wilhelm Kempe, instrumentist' was at the Danish
court of HelsingSr. Here too were George Bryan and
Thomas Pope, with three other 'instrumentister och
springere', Thomas Stevens, Thomas King, and Robert
Percy, of whom there is no English record. A sixth,
Thomas Bull, killed one of his fellows in a brawl, and
presumably met his own end as a result. 1 The five, but
not Kempe, went on to Dresden and were there until 1 7
July 1587. This is doubtless the 'company of English
comedians' which Heywood says that Leicester com-
mended to the King of Denmark. 2 Their less dramatic
acquirements were naturally prominent abroad. It does
not of course follow that these comedians, except perhaps
Kempe, had anything to do with Leicester's own long-
lived English company. The Earl may have picked them
up on the Continent itself. Thomas Bull, at least, had
already paid a visit to Denmark in 1579-80.3 Moreover,
Leicester's men were playing at court and elsewhere in
England during the period of the continental travels.
TJiey went on appearing in the provinces up to and after
the Earl's death on 4 September 1 58 8, and if a Faversham
record of 1 58 9-90 can be trusted, they were not even then
disbanded. 4 Possibly they continued for a time in the service
of the Countess, who had in fact similarly retained the com-
pany of her first husband, the Earl of Essex, for some years
after his death. There is not therefore much support for
the theory that Leicester's men passed in a body to Strange,
It has been recently revived by Professor Baldwin, who
thinks that the continental travellers of 1586-7 were not
Leicester's players but his musicians, and that on their
return they amalgamated with his players under the pat-
ronage of Strange. Leicester no doubt had musicians, who
were at Oxford in 1 5 8 5-6, possibly before he went abroad.*
1 J. L. E. Dreyer in T.LS. for Soc. Trans, i. 218) extracted the entry
21 January 1926, citing C. Thranc, (0.1869). I have not been able to con-
Fra Hofuiolemes Tid (1908)5 V. C. suit them.
Ravn, Engehker Instrument r (1870). 5 Boas, St. and the Universities, 19.
* Eltz. Stage, iv. 52. 3 Ibid. ii. 272. Baldwin, 76, confuses them with the
4 The accounts were in a bad con- players and musicians of Edward Lord
dition when J. M. Cowper (j R. Hist. Dudley, who were at Coventry (Mur-
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 41
I do not think that the evidence allows us to say more than
that as early as 10 June 1592 Kempe, who had probably
been a Leicester's man, had joined either Strange's or, as
will be seen, the Admiral's ; l and that, at some time before
1590-1, Bryan and Pope, who had been on the Continent,
had done the same. There are too many possibilities for
confidence. Hunsdon's, who disappear after 158990,
may have contributed an element, as well as the Queen's
and Strange's tumblers. And some or all of the conti-
nental company may have taken service on their return
with Leicester's brother, the Earl of Warwick, or may even
have been his men before they went abroad. Warwick's
tumblers were at Bath in 1587-8, just about the time of
the return, and Warwick's players at Ipswich in 1592.
The real patron must then have been the Countess, since
Warwick died on 20 February 1590, and left no heir.
Strange's were not at court for the 1588-9 season. But
on the following November 5 both they and the Admiral's
were playing in the City. Perhaps one or both companies
had failed to take warning from the fate of the Queen's
and to keep their tongues off Martin Marprelate, for the
Lord Mayor made an attempt to suppress plays, on the
ground that Tilney 'did utterly mislike the same'. The
Admiral's submitted, but Strange's showed contempt and
performed at the Cross Keys, with the result that some of
them found themselves in prison, 'Admiral's' are named
as at court during the following winter, giving a play on
28 December 1589 and 'activities' on 3 March 1590,
'Strange's' are not, nor are any provincial visits ascribed to
them during 1590. 'Admiral's', however, did an autumn
tour, perhaps by Ipswich, Maidstone, Winchester,
Marlborough (July 25), Gloucester (Sept. 17), Coventry,
and Oxford. 2 In the following winter there were plays at
James Burbadge's house, the Theatre, and here events
occurred about which John Alleyn was afterwards called
ray, ii. 238) in 1582-3. There is of six men in 1572 (Ettz. Stage, ii. 86).
course nothing in his point that five z Jfewaaind Knack to Know a Knave.
men were at Dresden and that the same * Possibly some of these visits may
'taUsmanic' number are in the patent to have been late in 1589. There were
Leicester's men of 1574. Leicester had two to Ipswich.
42 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
upon to give evidence in a Chancery case. 1 The dispute
was between Burbadge and one Mrs. Brayne, who claimed
a share in the profits of the house, and charged Burbadge
with contempt of court in disregarding an order which
she considered to be in her favour. She paid several visits
to the Theatre to demand her rights. One of these was
in November 1590, and a deposition by John Alleyn on
6 February 1592 suggests that it was on this occasion
that James Burbadge spoke words of contempt, and his
youngest son Richard beat one of Mrs. Brayne's supporters
about the legs with a broomstick. Alleyn claims that he 'did
as a servaunt wishe the said James Burbage to have a
conscience in the matter'. Burbadge, however, said that
*yf ther wer xx contempts and as many iniunccions he
wold withstand them all'. And then Alleyn goes on to
relate that 'when this deponent about viij daies after came
to him for certen money which he deteyned from this
deponent and his fellowes, of some of the dyvydent money
betwene him & them, growinge also by the vse of the said
Theater, he denyed to pay the same. He this deponent
told him that belike he ment to deale with them, as he did
with the poor wydowe, meaning the now complainant,
wishing him he wold not do so, for yf he did, they wold
compleyne to ther lorde & M r the lord Admyrall, and
then he in a rage, litle reuerencing his honour & estate,
sayd by a great othe, that he cared not for iij of the best
lordes of them all/ Alleyn was, however, called upon to
make a second deposition in reply to interrogatories on
behalf of Burbadge, in which he was pressed as to the
date of these events, and on 6 May 1592 he said that they
took place 'about a yere past'. The words about the Ad-
miral were spoken in the 'attyring house' in the presence
of James Tunstall. I think that we must take this as
Alleyn's most considered dating, and treat the tenure of
the Theatre by the Admiral's as lasting to at least about
May 1591. The court records for the winter of 1590-1
are on the face of them rather odd. The Privy Council
' Cf. JSltx. Stage, ii. 389. The de- Wallace in Nebraska University
positions cited are printed by C. W. Studies, xiii. i.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 43
Register notes the issue of a warrant for plays and 'ac-
tivities' on December 27 and February 16 by the * Ad-
miral's' ; the Chamber Accounts show payments for these
days to 'George Ottewell and his companye the Lord
Straunge his players'. It is difficult to resist the inference
that the two companies whose names are thus treated in
official documents as equivalent had in fact appeared at
court together. And if so they had probably been 'exer-
cising' their court plays together in public performances,
under an arrangement with James Burbadge which put the
Theatre at their disposal. They may also have had the
Curtain, since the lawsuit already cited tells us that it still
served as an 'easer' for the Theatre. But the relations with
Burbadge indicated by John Alleyn's evidence could
hardly fail to bring any such arrangement to an end. Pro-
vincial notices suggest an autumn tour of 'Admiral's'
men in 1591, closely resembling that of 1590, by South-
ampton, Winchester, Bath, Gloucester, and Oxford.
'Strange's' seem also to have been at Bath. And there is
some reason to suppose that by the summer of 1 59 1 a new
London head-quarters had already been found at Philip
Henslowe's Rose on the Bankside. The Alleyn papers at
Dulwich contain an order by the Privy Council with-
drawing a previous one which had restrained 'Strange's'
men from playing there and had enjoined them to play-
three days a week at Newington Butts. With it are peti-
tions from the company and from Henslowe and the
Thames watermen asking for the concession. Unfor-
tunately neither order is recorded in the Privy Council
Register, and the documents themselves are undated. The
players' petition, however, was written 'nowe in this longe
vacation'. It recites that 'oure companie is greate, and
thearbie our chardge intollerable, in travellinge the coun-
trie, and the contynuance thereof wilbe a meane to bringe
us to division and seperacion'. Henslowe's petition begs
that he may have leave 'to have playinge in his saide howse
duringe such tyme as others have'. It does not look,
therefore, as if there had been any general inhibition of
plays. This seems to point to 1591 rather than to 1592,
44 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
the only other possible year. In 1592 there was such a
general inhibition on June 23, and it was to last to
Michaelmas, and therefore through the 'longe vacation'.
If I am right in supposing that 'Strange's' as well as the
'Admiral's' had broken with James Burbadge in the
spring of 1591, it seems necessary to refer to some earlier
date two tiring-house 'plots' or book-keeper's outlines of
plays, since both of them show Richard Burbadge as a
performer, and he is not likely to have gone with the com-
panies when they left his father. 1 One, now at Dulwich,
is of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins. It gives
an almost complete cast, which includes, as players of male
characters, Mr, Brian, Mr. Phillipps, Mr. Pope, R. Bur-
badg, R. Cowley, John Duke, Ro. Pallant, J. Holland,
John Sincler, Tho. Goodale, W. Sly, Harry, Kitt, and
Vincent; and as players of women, T. Belt, Saunder, Nick,
R. Go., Will, and Ned. Two speakers and some others,
probably mute, have no names assigned; the speakers,
who are presenters, may have already been cast in a plot
for the first part. The other plot, also probably once at
Dulwich, is of The Dead Man's Fortune. Unluckily, it is
not completely cast. The actors named are Robert Lee,
Darlowe, 'b. Samme', and Burbage, who possibly played
a messenger, but more probably a substantial part. To
the inferences to be drawn from these plots I shall return.
No less than six court plays are credited to 'Strange's'
during the winter of 1591-2, on December 27 and 28,
January I and 9, and February 6 and 8 ; none to the 'Ad-
miral's'. The Queen's and Sussex's also appeared, once
each, and a little-known company of the Earl of Hertford's
men. On February 1 9 Henslowe begins a daily record for
'Strange's' which lasts to June 23, Then came the inhibi-
tion provoked by some recent disorders, probably arising
from an agitation (cf. p. 511) against alien artisans
in London; and before its termination at Michaelmas
plague had broken out. 'Strange's' were at Canterbury by
r 3> aad are a ko traceable at Gloucester, Coventry,
1 Dr. Greg is revising the texts of Henslowe Papers, 127, for his Dramatic
Documents.
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 45
Cambridge, and Oxford (Oct. 6). Notices of 'Admiral's*
men during this year are scanty. There is a possible one
at Aldeburgh and a certain one at Ipswich on August 7.
But here the Admiral's were not alone. The payment is
apparently a joint one to the Earl of Derby's and to the
Lord Admiral's players. By Derby's I think we must as-
sume Strange's to be here meant. The Earl does not seem
to have had a company after 1583. Strange's men would
naturally have worn the Stanley badge, and a mistake is
intelligible. 1 Late in the year, on December 19, 'Ad-
miral's' men were at Leicester. The plague, however,
lulled a little about Christmas, and plays at court became
possible. Two were given by a company which at this
juncture makes a rather surprising first appearance in
dramatic annals, that of the Earl of Pembroke, and three
by 'Strange's'. These men also got another month's
season with Henslowe. But fresh plague led to a fresh
inhibition on 28 January 1593, and on January 31 or
February i the season ended. 'Admiral's' men were al-
ready on the road as far afield as Shrewsbury on February
3. Apparently they were weak in numbers, for at York
(April) they were performing with a company described
as Lord Morden's, possibly an error for Lord Morley's;
at Newcastle (May) certainly with Lord Morley's; at Ips-
wich with Lord Stafford's. Their name appears alone at
Norwich and Coventry. 'Strange's 1 seem to have remained
idle for a time, perhaps hoping for the plague to subside.
Edward Alleyn was at Chelmsford with companions on
May 2, and a record of 'Strange's' at Sudbury in 1592-3
may perhaps identify them. On May 6 a special travelling
warrant was issued by the Privy Council in favour of
'the bearers hereof, Edward Allen, servaunt to the right
honorable the Lord Highe Admiral, William Kempe,
Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillipes and
Georg Brian, being al one companie, servauntes to our
verie good Lord the Lord Strainge'. It is a little uncertain
1 A recusant list of 1592 (Bowden, coat with the eagle and child on his
Religion of Shakespeare, 79) includes a sleeve*.
priest, who 'uses to travel in a blue
46 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
whether or not the 'being al one companie' is meant
to cover Alleyn; in any case he was maintaining some
personal relation to the Admiral, For a tour which fol-
lowed, and in which Alleyn took part, his correspondence
enables us to eke out the provincial records; and to learn
that members of the company not named in the warrant
were Richard Cowley, a boy of Alleyn's called John Pyk,
and a 'M r Douton', who is less likely to be one of the
Duttons, than Thomas Downton, who was later an Ad-
miral's man. The route was by Maidstone, Southampton,
Bath, Bristol (Aug. i), Shrewsbury, Leicester, and
Coventry (Dec. 2). Alleyn, writing from Bristol, con-
templated visits to Chester and York, and a return to
London about All Saints' Day. Possibly the prolonged
plague caused a change of purpose. The letters show that
the company was travelling as 'Strange's'. It is Derby's at
Leicester and Coventry, but on September 25 Strange had
succeeded to the earldom. At Shrewsbury the payment
was to 'my 1. Stranges and my 1. Admyralls players'. Prob-
ably the two tours crossed here. The 'Admiral's' appear to
have gone on to Bath and to have found fresh associates in
Lord Norris's men. Again an error for Morley's is possible.
Two other companies of interest to us were also on the
road in 1593. One was Sussex's, who like 'Strange's' ob-
tained on April 29 a special travelling warrant from the
Privy Council. They went far afield, to Sudbury, Ipswich,
York (August), Newcastle (September), and Winchester
(Dec. 7). The other was Pembroke's, the new court as-
pirants of the preceding Christmas. They made for their
Lord's quarters in the Welsh marches, covering Rye, Bath,
Ludlow, Bewdley, Shrewsbury, York (June), Coventry,
Leicester, Ipswich. At Bath the careful chamberlains
record a receipt of two shillings for a bow that
Pembroke's men had broken. It is an allegory, for soon
Pembroke's were themselves broken. There are no precise
dates, and it is possible, although not very likely, that some
of the visits may belong to the end of 1592. But that
Pembroke's were in the provinces during 1593 we learn
from a letter of September 28 in that year from Henslowe
PLATE
FERDINANDO EARL OF DERBY
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 47
to Alleyn. They had by then, he says, been at home for
five or six weeks, because they could not save their charges
with travel, and had been obliged to pawn their apparel.
The only company at court for the Christmas of 1 593-4
was the Queen's. But there was a short cessation of plague,
and Henslowe's book records a short season from Decem-
ber 26 to February 6 by Sussex's men. This had been
purely a provincial company from 1585 up to its appear-
ance at court on 2 January 1 592. But we found it working
with a travelling group of Queen's men in 1591, and after
a fresh outbreak of plague and a consequent inhibition on
February 3, this relation was now renewed in a second
short season with Henslowe from I to 9 April 1594.
Meanwhile 'Derby's' men were at King's Lynn, Ipswich
(May 8), and Southampton (c. May 15) where in their
turn they had combined with Morley's. The Earl had in
fact died in the north on April 1 6, and although this does
not appear to have been known at Southampton, when the
company reached Winchester on May 16 they were
described as the Countess of Derby's. 'Admiral's' men
were with Henslowe from May 14 to 1 6. The plague was
now really over, and a reorganization of the companies
became possible. Already on May 10 and again on June i
the City were considering some 'cause' concerning plays
recommended to them by the Countess of Warwick. 1 It
is just conceivable that she had contemplated maintaining
a London company. If so, nothing^cameofit On June 5
a company of Chamberlain's men is heard of for the first
time since 1588-9. It was playing with Admiral's men,
probably on alternate days, for Henslowe at Newington
Butts. The arrangement seems only to have lasted
until June 1 5. The companies then parted, and to the end
of the reign shared the supremacy of the London stage.
On October 8 Lord Hunsdon was negotiating with the
City for the housing of 'my nowe companie* at the Cross
Keys. 2 Most of the men named as 'Strange's' on 6 May
* The first record is in Elix. Stage, shortly be printed in M.S.C,
iv. 3155 the second has been recently * EKx. Stage, iv. 316.
found by Miss A. J. Mill, and will
48 THE STAGE IN 1592 Chap. II
1593, William Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Heminges,
Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan, became Chamber-
lain's men. So did others of whom we have heard, Richard
Burbadge, Richard Cowley, John Duke, William Sly, John
Sincler. Edward Alleyn, on the other hand, continued or
resumed his service with Charles Howard, the Lord
Admiral, and with him went Richard Jones, now back from
the Continent, James Tunstall, and Thomas Downton.
John Alleyn is not traceable as a player after 1591. There
is some slight evidence connecting George Ottewell or
Attewell with the Queen's in 1595.
This complicated chronicle raises some problems
which are perhaps beyond solution. What was the precise
nature of the association between the Admiral's and
Strange's men, and what period did it cover? My im-
pression is that the court documents of 1590-1 enable us
to put its beginning not later than 1590, and that from
that year to 1594 it amounted to an amalgamation. It
may have begun a little earlier, with the expulsion from
the City in November 1589. It is of course only for
1590-1 that the identity at court of the 'Admiral's' and
'Strange's' is demonstrated, but the reputation of Edward
Alleyn about 1592 renders it almost incr'edible that he was
never .called upon to appear before the Queen between
1590-1 and 1594-5; and if he did so appear, it can only
have been as a 'Strange's' man in 1591-2 and 1592-3.
In these years 'Strange's' are at least as predominant at^
court as the Queen's men had been in their day. In 1593*
there is the clearest evidence that Alleyn, although retain-
ing a personal status as a servant of the Admiral, was
travelling as a 'Strange's' man. I take it that the Ad-
miral's, weakened by the loss of Jones and Browne, and
perhaps later of John Alleyn, were numerically a sub-
ordinate element in the amalgamation. Possibly only
Edward Alleyn and James Tunstall were left of the nucleus
which came from Lord Worcester's service. Obviously
the personal gifts, histrionic and financial, of Edward
made him the effective manager of the company. I think
it best to call it 'the Alleyn company'. Officially, in Lon-
PLATE V
EDWARD ALLEYN
Chap. II THE STAGE IN 1592 49
don at least, it seems to have been known as 'StrangeY.
The provinces are another matter. The records of 1590
and also, but for an isolated visit of 'StrangeY to Bath,
those of 1 59 1 are for the 'Admiral's'. Both names are used
in 1592 and 1593, and during these years probably two
groups were travelling. There are distant records for 'Ad-
miral's' at dates when 'Strange's' cannot have been far
from London, Sometimes the paths of the tours intersect,
and the groups play together. This is not in itself proof
of corporate unity, since both groups also play on occasion
with outside companies, such as Morley's. I interpret the
facts as follows. At the beginning of the amalgamation,
the best of the old Admiral's and Strange's men remained
continuously in London. But at certain seasons a group,
perhaps largely composed of hired men, was sent on tour.
One may guess at either James Tunstall or George Otte-
well as the leader. The arrangement is closely analogous
to that of t
