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The Queen's Men, 1583–1592
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
The Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, entered a traveling charge of one pound in the Revels Accounts when he was called to court “to choose out a companie of players for her majestie. Stow recorded this event in his Abridgement of the English Chronicle:
This yeare 1583, the Queene being at Barne Elmes, at the earnest suite of sir Francis Walsingham, shee entertained twelve Players into her service, and allowed them wages and liveries as Groomes of the Chamber, and untill then she had none of her owne, but divers Lords had Players.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1970
References
NOTES
1. Chambers, E. K., Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1951), II, 104.Google Scholar
2. Stow, John, The Abridgement of the English Chronicle, First Collected by M. John Stow, and after him augmented … By E. H. Gentleman (London, 1618), pp. 347–48.Google Scholar Despite Stow's remark that this was done “at the earnest suite” of Walsingham, , Read, Conyers in Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the policy of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1925), II, 436–37Google Scholar, thinks it “is highly probable that Sidney was responsible for drawing Walsingham and incidentally his purse into touch with a large group of literateurs who gathered about the gentle Astrophel at Bame Elms.” But, Read continues, “with the Elizabethan dramatists Walsingham apparently had little or nothing to do. [Although] there is plenty of reason for believing that Walsingham was very far from sharing the dour Puritan attitude towards pleasures of a similar character he was in any event clearly no patron of the drama.”
3. Bradbrook, M. C., The Rise of the Common Player (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 52.Google Scholar
4. See “Records of Plays and Players in Kent 1450–1642,” Malone Society Collections VII (Oxford, 1965), and “Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber 1558–1642,” Malone Society Collections VI (Oxford, 1961).
5. Wallace, C. W., The First London Theatre (Lincoln, 1913), p. 242.Google Scholar
6. Chambers, IV, 280.
7. See Field, John, A godly exhortation, by occasion of the late judgment of God, etc. (London, 1583)Google Scholar; Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1836)Google Scholar; the letter of William Fleetwood, Recorder of London to Lord Burghley in Malone Society Collections I, p. 160.
8. Stow, John, The Annales of England (London, 1615), p. 697.Google Scholar
9. See below, note 22. M. C. Bradbrook in Rise of the Common Player suggests Tarlton was with Sussex's Men between 1577–83.
10. Murray, J. T., English Dramatic Companies 1558–1642 (London, 1910), II, 197.Google Scholar
11. Malone Society Collections VII, p. 16.
12. Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., Contemporary Depositions Respecting an Affray at Norwich in the year 1583 (London, 1864).Google Scholar
13. For a summary of the evidence that the Queen's Men acted at the Theatre see Adams, J. Q., Shakespearean Phyhouses (Boston, 1917), p. 68 ff.Google Scholar
14. Malone Society Cottections I, p. 67.
15. Steele, Mary, Plays and Masques at Court During the Reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles (New Haven, 1926), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar
16. Malone Society Collections VII, p. 46.
17. Malone Society Coltections I, p. 168.
18. Malone Society Collections VII, p. 47.
19. Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958), I, 188.
20. Lawrence, W. J., Speeding Up Shakespeare (London, 1937), p. 18.Google Scholar
21. Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., Tarlton's Jests and News Out of Purgatory (London, 1844), pp. xi–xii.Google Scholar The four lands of weapons were longsword, backsword, sword and dagger, and rapier and dagger.
22. Tarlton's Toys (1576); Tarlton's Tragicall Treaties (1578); Tarlton's devise upon this unlocked for great snow (1579), etc.
23. Halliwell-Phillipps, J. O., Papers Respecting Disputes which arose from incidents at the Death-bed of Richard Tarlton (London, 1866), p. 17.Google Scholar Perhaps one of the sincerest eulogies was written by Tarlton's colleague Robert Wilson in The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London.
24. Malone Society Collections I, p. 355.
25. Halliwell-Phillips, , Tarlton's Jests, p. 137.Google Scholar
26. Murray, II, 375.
27. London, 1841, p. 43.
28. Chambers, IV, 303–304.
29. London, 1587, Bii-Biiv
30. The Marprelate Tracts, ed. William Pierce (London, 1911), pp. 45–46. Don John is John Aylmer, the Bishop of London, whose palace cellar was a prison.
31. London, 1589, D3–Dv
32. The Returne of the renowned Cavaliero Pasquill of England and Pappe with An Hatchet. See also A Countercuffe given to Martin Junior and Theses Martiniane for further references to stage involvement in the quarrel.
33. Martins Months mind (London, 1589), F2.
34. The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford, 1902), III, 421. For Nashe's comment see McKerrow's edition, I, 100.
35. Chambers, II, 111.
36. Calendar of State Papers (Scotland), X, 178–9.
37. Read, Conyers, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (New York, 1960), pp. 453–54.Google Scholar
38. Murray, I, 16–17, note 10, also suggests the company split, one becoming a provincial and the other a London troupe, since he finds a Queen's Men company in Maidstone on 2 January and the Chamber Accounts report a performance by Her Majesty's Players on 1 and 3 January 1590–91. Accepting the dating of provincial accounts is, however, a hazardous procedure. Often these entries are recording reimbursements to citizens who originally paid town expenses. “Since such reimbursements were sometimes deferred for weeks or months, it follows as a rule that we may never assume that the date of an entry provides more than a terminus ad quern unless the wording or some circumstances clearly show it to be that of performance itself.” (Malone Society Collections VII, ed. Giles Dawson, p. xxiii.)
39. Chambers, IV, 310–11.
40. Malone Society Collections I, p. 190.
41. Chambers, II, 128. Chambers later modified his views somewhat in William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), I, 50.
42. Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), p. 280.
43. Elizabethan Stage, II, 131.
44. Ibid., p. 129; also Baldwin, T. W., On the Literary Genetics of Shakespere's Plays, 1592–1594 (Urbana, 1959), p. 330.Google Scholar
45. The Second Part of King Henry VI, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1952), p. xi ff.
46. See also Wenterdorf's, Karl “Shakespeares Erste Truppe,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 84/86 (1950), pp. 114–130.Google Scholar Wenterdorf also notes: “wenn es schon sehr unwahrscheinlich ist, Alleyn's-Truppe habe im Sommer 1592 so viele Schauspieler entlassen mussen, dass diese eine neue Truppe bilden konnten, so ist es noch unwahrscheinlicher, dass Alleyn's ihnen besten Stücke gegeben hätte; und wenn die Pembroke's-Truppe aus mit veralteten Bühnentexten ausgerüsteten ‘hired men’ bestanden hätte, so wäre es ausgeschlossen, dass sie vor die Konigin hatte spielen kônnen.” (p. 120)
47. Diary, p. 7.
48. Murray, II, 377.
49. Shortly after Elizabeth's death the remnants of the Queen's Men enlisted the protection of the Duke of Lennox. He wrote regarding the company's right to play in October, 1604. Francis Henslowe and John Garland are in Lennox's troupe in March, 1605. (See Greg, W. W., Henslowe Papers [London, 1907], pp. 62–3Google Scholar; Dulwich College manuscripts, Vol. I, Articles 40, 42.) Garland's is the last name of the original company to survive; he is listed in 1610 in the Patent of Prince Charles's Company, possibly a continuation of the Lennox organization, and he was performing with the Prince's Men at Norwich on 18 May 1615 or thereabouts.
50. Chambers, IV, 164.