• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 20604 0

of Lord Hunsdon; between that date and 1582 there is no record of any company acting under this nobleman's licence. In July 1582 there is record that Lord Hunsdon's company acted at Ludlow, and upon 27th December 1582 we have record that Lord Hunsdon's players acted before the Court, presenting A Comedy of Beauty and Housewifery. The provincial records show a few performances by this company in the provinces in every year, except one, between 1582 and 1589; while 1587 shows no provincial performance, a payment of five shillings is recorded in Coventry "to the Lord Chamberlain's Musicians that came with the Judge at the assizes"; these were, no doubt, a portion of Burbage's company, Lord Hunsdon then being Lord Chamberlain. This entry, however, is immediately preceded by the entry of a payment of twenty shillings to the Lord Admiral's players. It shall be shown that the Admiral's company was affiliated with Burbage at this time.

The Lord Hunsdon who patronised this company from the time of its inception, in 1582, until we hear no more about it in 1589, was the same Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, who, in 1594, still holding the office of Lord Chamberlain, again took Burbage and his theatrical associates under his protection.

In imagining James Burbage as a member of the Queen's company of players for several years following 1583, and ending in about 1591, it has been customary also to assume that the Queen's company played regularly, when in London, at Burbage's Theatre during these years; and that the Lord Admiral's company, between 1585 and 1591, played principally at the Curtain. There is very slight foundation for the former, and not the slightest for the latter, assumption, both of which were first mooted by Halliwell-Phillipps, and in which he has since been followed blindly by the compilers. The supposition that the Queen's company made their London centre at the Theatre from 1583 onwards, is based upon the disproved assumption that Burbage was the manager of this company. This supposition has been supported by the argument that Tarleton, who was a member of the Queen's company after 1583, is mentioned in 1592, in Nashe's Pierce Penniless, as having "made jests" "at the Theatre," and again in Harrington's Metamorphosis of Ajax in 1596, as follows: "Which word was after admitted into the Theatre by the mouth of Mayster Tarleton, the excellent comedian." As Tarleton died in 1588 these references cannot apply to the "Theatre" later than this date, and if they apply at all to Burbage's Theatre and the term is not used generically, they apply to it in the years preceding 1583, when Tarleton played at the Theatre as a member of Lord Leicester's company. The author of Martin's Month's Mind, in 1587, refers to "twittle twattle that I learned in ale-houses and at the Theatre of Lanam and his fellowes." This also probably refers to the period preceding 1583, when Laneham was a member and evidently the leader of Leicester's company and after Burbage had retired from its leadership. In News out of Purgatory, published in 1587, in which the ghost of Tarleton appears, "the Curtaine of his Countenance" is mentioned, which apparently alludes to his recent connection with that house. While it is possible, however, that the Queen's company may have performed occasionally at the Theatre after their formation in 1582-83 and before the Rose was built in 1587, all evidence and logical assumption regarding the regular playing-places of the Queen's and the Admiral's companies when in London, between 1586 and 1589, infer that the Queen's company played at the Curtain, and after 1587, at the Rose, and the Lord Admiral's company, in conjunction with the Lord Chamberlain's, at the Theatre in summer and the Crosskeys in winter.

Towards the end of this period a rivalry existed between the Queen's company and the combined companies playing under Burbage at the Theatre, which ended in 1591 in the supersession for Court performances of the Queen's company by Lord Strange's players—a new company of which Richard Burbage was a member, which had been