The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 1

by E. K. Chambers

An old 'book' could be bought for £2, but the value to the company might be much more. A good stock piece was a perpetual 'get-penny' and could, of course, be furbished up from time to time.[1047] In Downton v. Slater (1598) the Admiral's men valued a misappropriated book at £13 6s. 8d. and claimed £30 damages for withholding it. The court awarded £10 10s. New plays cost more, and entailed fees of 7s. each to the Master of the Revels for licensing.[1048] A play by Greene would fetch £6 13s. 4d. about 1592. The prices paid by the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's men between 1597 and 1603 ranged from £4 to £10 10s.; a fee of £6 may be taken as about normal. 'An they'll give me twenty pounds a play, I'll not raise my vein', says Antonio Balladino, who is Anthony Munday, in The Case is Altered, a play of about 1598.[1049] In 1613 Robert Daborne was bargaining for plays with Henslowe at rates of from £10 to £20, and boasting that he could get £25 elsewhere. It seems likely that Henslowe charged a commission on these prices to the company. There are some traces of the system, used at a later date, by which the author was entitled to a 'benefit' night shortly after the production of a new play.[1050] He was also entitled to free admission to the house.[1051] The poets received their fees from Henslowe in instalments, drawing £1 or so in 'earnest' when the commission was given, and as each batch of sheets was handed in, and the balance when the play was finished. This plan proved disastrous to them. The instalments often found them in a debtor's prison, and some of them became mere bond-slaves.[1052] Thus both Henry Porter and Henry Chettle were reduced to making agreements which pledged them to write for no other company than the Admiral's. The device is familiar to the modern publisher. Robert Daborne's correspondence with Henslowe is eloquent of the straits to which a hack playwright might be brought. Daborne was a man of good family, and had lawsuits about his 'estate', which added to his embarrassments. He had been interested in the management of the Queen's Revels, and it may have been the absorption of this company by the Lady Elizabeth's men that brought him into contact with Henslowe. His letters preserved at Dulwich run from April 1613 to July 1614.[1053] During this period he was engaged upon at least four plays. The history of one of them, the tragedy of Machiavel and the Devil, may be taken as typical. On 17 April 1613 he signed an agreement to complete it by the end of May for an 'earnest' of £6 down, £4 on completion of three acts, and £10 'vpon delivery in of yᵉ last scean perfited'; and for the observance of the agreement he gave a bond of £20. On 25 April he wrote to borrow £1 from Henslowe, explaining that he was 'vpon yᵉ sodeyn put to a great extremity in bayling my man committed to Newgate vpon taking a possession for me', and had unfortunately taken 'less money of my kinsman a lawier that was with me then servd my turn'. On 3 May he got another £1, although the three acts were not yet finished; another on 8 May; and another on 16 May, making £11 in all. 'Sir,' he wrote, 'my occations of expenc have bin soe great & soe many I am ashamed to think how much I am forct to press you.' On 19 May he had probably handed in his three acts, as he then signed an acquittance for £16 received up to date, noting at the foot 'This play to be delivered in to Mr. Hinchlaw with all speed'. It was not, however, ready by 31 May, and on 5 June came a piteous appeal for an advance of £2 'which stands me vpon to send over to my counsell in a matter concerns my whole estate'. Henslowe shall not be the loser by his kindness: 'wher I deale otherways then to your content may I & myne want ffryndship in distress'. By 10 June, 'yᵉ necessity of term busines exacts me beyond my custom to be trublesome vnto you', to the tune of yet another £1. By this time Henslowe was evidently calling out for the play; and Daborne protests, 'I perceav you misdoubt my readynes. Sir, I would not be hyred to break my ffayth with you; before God they shall not stay one hour for me.' He was still protesting on 25 June; but soon after must have brought Machiavel and the Devil to an end and drawn the £1 still due to him on balance, since on 18 June he was already beginning to negotiate for his next play, The Arraignment of London. And so the correspondence goes on; the instalments always anticipated, the applications always larded with declarations of his own honesty and with mingled flattery and complaint of a patron who, generous as he was, showed an inexplicable tendency to 'meat' Daborne 'by yᵉ common measuer of poets'. The result was inevitable. Daborne's terms came down from £20 to £12 and even £10 a play; and in addition to reselling to the company at a profit, Henslowe seems on one occasion at least to have squeezed out of Daborne 'half my earnings in the play', by which, I take it, the proceeds of his benefit are meant. By the end of 1613 Daborne was in considerable distress; 'if you doe not help me to tenn shillings by this bearer, by the living God I am vtterly disgract'. There is not much more of the correspondence. It is clear from another source that Daborne did not for some time get free, for when Henslowe lay on his death-bed, Mrs. Daborne called for some papers belonging to her husband, and Henslowe gave her a bond for £20 of which she was ignorant, possibly the very bond signed for Machiavel and the Devil, saying, 'I knowe you and with all my hart doe freely forgive you all that you owe me'.[1054] By 1618 Daborne had taken orders. He became Chancellor of Waterford and Prebendary and Dean of Lismore, and thus, as a contemporary poem has it, 'died amphibious by the ministry'.

The wrongs of authors are not inarticulate, and they have an appeal to posterity from the injustice of their age. The exploitation of poets by the playing companies brought about some cross-currents in the tone of the allusions to the theatre, which are so frequent in occasional literature. On the one hand, the pamphleteers, and in a less degree the satirists, are with the players as against their enemies the Puritans; on the other hand, they have their own grievances to publish and avenge. A note of hostility makes its appearance not long after the first invasion of the province of stage-writing by the university wits; and by the embittered close of Robert Greene's reckless life the relations were acute. Thomas Lodge in 1589 swore to abandon dramas and 'pennie-knaves delight.'[1055] Thomas Nashe canvassed the players in his prefatory epistle to Greene's Menaphon (1589), and Greene himself, with humour in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), and in his autobiographical romances of Never Too Late (1590) and Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592), and with unsparing invective in the warning To those Gentlemen his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their Wits in making Plaies, which he appended to the latter. In these pamphlets the 'vaine glorious tragedians' are twitted with their mouthings on the stage, with their chameleon-like shifting from the service of one lord to that of another,[1056] with the contrast between their rapid rise to wealth and their obscurity when they carried their fardles afootback upon the roads, with the romances and morals—Delphrigus and The King of the Fairies, Man's Wit, and the Dialogue of Dives—that formed their stock-in-trade before the masters of arts came to their rescue. But the real gravamen is that they live on the wits of scholars. They are 'apes', 'buckram gentlemen', 'a company of taffaty fooles' tricked up with poets' feathers, 'puppits that speake from our mouths', 'anticks garnisht in our colours'. They cleave like burrs to their victims. An alleged comparison by Cicero of the Roman actor Roscius to the crow in Aesop is called in aid, and the taunt of 'vpstart crow, beautified with our feathers' is not spared to an actor before whose dramatic genius that of Greene and his fellows was to fade as a rush-light before the sun.[1057] The actors had something on their side to complain of, with Greene no less than with Daborne. In a remorseful moment he tells us of the 'arch-plaimaking poet' Roberto, how 'what euer he fingered aforehand was the certaine meanes to vnbinde a bargaine'; and a detractor accuses him of selling the same play to two companies, and defending himself by maintaining that no faith was to be kept with players.[1058] During the seventeenth century, it is mainly Dekker, as critic of the players, no less than in other ways, who carries on the tradition of Greene and Nashe.[1059] Himself an active playwright, it is with black looks that he stands by, in thronged term-time or at the coming of ambassadors, and watches the companies battening upon the fruits of divine poetry, like swine on acorns; and when plague arrives, although his own occupation be gone, it is with savage glee that he sees the flag hauled down and the doors closed, and his gloomy paymasters setting out once more on the hard life of 'strowlers'.

One interesting result of the feud between poets and players was that some of the former were led to encourage and even acquire financial interests in a rival type of theatrical organization which for a time at least entered into successful competition with the professional companies. This organization rested upon the use of boy actors. I have elsewhere expounded the important share taken by school plays in the earlier development of the Renaissance drama.[1060] The grammar schools of Eton, Westminster, and Merchant Taylors and the song schools of the Chapel Royal, Windsor, St. Paul's and the private chapel of the Earl of Oxford continued, far into Elizabeth's reign, to give their performances at Court side by side with the growing companies of noble and royal servants. It was not until the professionals called upon the university wits and began to mingle literary with popular elements in their productions that the destinies of the drama passed definitely into their hands. The earlier boy companies died out soon after 1590. A decade later the Paul's and Chapel companies were revived, the latter at least under somewhat new economic conditions. Formerly the plays had been managed by schoolmasters and song-masters, as by-activities of institutions primarily established for other objects. For the revived Paul's plays, so far as we know, Edward Pearce, the choirmaster, was similarly responsible. The Chapel children, on the other hand, were placed upon a more regular business footing. The official Master of the Children, Nathaniel Giles, took part in the undertaking; and the royal commission to impress singing boys, which he held, was unscrupulously used to compel the services of boys who could not sing, and were only needed as recruits for the stage. But long before James had come to the decision that on religious grounds the connexion between the Chapel and the plays must be broken, the actual control of the organization had passed from the Master to a financial syndicate, associated much on the principle adopted by the ordinary playing companies, whose members hired a theatre, charged themselves with the maintenance of the boys and of the performances, and divided up the profits as their reward. During the history of the Chapel boys and of the group of Revels companies which succeeded them, several of these syndicates came into existence, and shares in one or other of them were held by Marston, Drayton, Barry, Mason, Daborne, and very possibly also by other dramatists. The articles of association of the King's Revels company in 1608 may perhaps be taken as typical. One of the sharers, Martin Slater the actor, who was evidently a kind of manager, is to have lodgings in the theatre, which was the Whitefriars, and the right to sell refreshments, and is to travel with the children if necessary, in which event he is to enjoy a share and a half in the profits. The children are to be apprenticed to him for three years each, and he is to bind himself in £40 not to transfer the indentures. The 'whole chardges of the howse, the gatherers, the wages, the childrens bourd, musique, booke keeper, tyreman, tyrewoman, lights, the Maister of the revells duties, and all other things needefull and necessary' are to be deducted in due proportions from each day's takings, so that the company may not run into debt. No sharer is to take away any apparel or other common property, or print any play-book, on pain of losing his interest.

The boys played in what were called 'private' houses, and it is not quite clear how far they were amenable to the usual principles of stage regulation; an order by the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor to suppress plays during the Lent of 1601 was obviously intended to be enforced against them. Their performances, especially while they were novel, proved a serious menace to the prosperity of the adult companies. The classical allusions on the subject are that of Jonson in The Poetaster to the winter of 1600-1, which made the players poorer than so many starved snakes,[1061] and the elaborate apology for the travelling of the company in Hamlet, which is so germane to the matter now under discussion that it must, however familiar, be given in full:[1062]

Hamlet. ... What players are they?

Rosin. Euen those you were wont to take delight in the Tragedians of the City.

Ham. How chances it they trauaile? their residence both in reputation and profit was better both wayes.

Rosin. I thinke their Inhibition comes by the meanes of the late Innouation?

Ham. Doe they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the City? Are they so follow'd?

Rosin. No indeed, they are not.