English Actors at the Courts of Wolfenbüttel, Brussels and Graz during the Lifetime of Shakespeare

Summary

Sir Edmund K. Chambers and Walter Wilson Greg devoted their best efforts to disentangling the complicated threads of the theatrical history of the early nineties in Elizabethan England and very few voices have been raised in dissent from the interpretations they proposed. It is nevertheless hoped that new light can be shed on a period of disorganisation in the theatre world around 1590 by examining the careers of certain English actors who seem to have spent the best part of their lives wandering about the continent. As everyone knows, numerous acting companies had sprung into existence at this time and to list and discuss them all is certainly not my aim. As to the actors, those who are of central importance in the following pages are Robert Browne and Thomas Sackville, who are mentioned together with John Bradstreet and Richard Jones in a passport granting permission for a continental journey, issued on 10 February 1592, by the Lord High Admiral. Since this passport is used in many scholarly works in the incomplete and inaccurate version printed in Albert Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1865), pp. xxviii-xxix (no fewer than ten words are missing), we had better begin by giving a fresh transcript of the original.