When the companies settled down again to a London life after the conclusion of the long plague in 1594, the Admiral’s men reconstituted themselves as an independent company with Alleyn at its head, leaving the greater number of their recent comrades of the road to pass, as the Lord Chamberlain’s men, under the patronage of Lord Hunsdon. The personal alliance between Alleyn and Henslowe, whose step-daughter, Joan Woodward, he had married on 22 October 1592, led to the institution of close business relations between the company and the pawnbroker, and the record of these in the famous diary enables us to follow with a singular minuteness the almost daily fortunes of the Admiral’s men during the course of some nine or ten years, broken into two periods by a reconstruction of the company in 1597 and finally closing about the time of their conversion into Prince Henry’s men in 1604. The precise nature of the position occupied by Henslowe has been carefully investigated by Dr. Greg,[369] and has already been briefly considered in these pages (ch. xi). He was not a member of the company, but its landlord, and, probably to an increasing extent, its financier. In the former capacity he received, after every day’s performance, a fluctuating sum, which seems to have represented half the amount received for admission to the galleries of the house; the other half, with the payments for entrance to the standing room in the yard, being divided amongst such of the players as had a share in the profits. Out of this, of course, they had to meet all expenditure other than by way of rent, such as the wages of hired men, payments for apparel and play-books, fees to the Master of the Revels for the licensing of plays, and the like. In practice it became convenient for Henslowe, who was a capitalist, while many of the players lived from hand to mouth, to advance sums to meet such expenditure as it fell due, and to recoup himself from time to time out of the company’s profits. It seems likely that, when the system was in full working, the moiety of the gallery money, which remained after the deduction of the rent, was assigned for the purpose of these repayments. During the period 1597–1604 Henslowe’s entries in his diary are mainly in the nature of a running account of these advances and of the receipts set off against them; for 1594–7 similar entries occur irregularly, but the principal record is a daily list, such as Henslowe had already kept during his shorter associations with Strange’s, the Queen’s, and Sussex’s companies in the course of 1592–4, of each performance given, with the name of the play and of the amount accruing to Henslowe himself in the form of rent. This list renders possible a very interesting analysis, both of the repertory of the company and of some at least of the financial conditions of their enterprise.

The entries start with the heading, ‘In the name of God Amen begininge the 14 of Maye 1594 by my lord Admeralls men’. After three days, during which The Jew of Malta, Cutlack, and The Ranger’s Comedy, all of which are found in the later repertory of the company, were given, they stop abruptly.[370] To about the same date may be assigned a fragmentary account, headed ‘Layd owt for my Lorde Admeralle seruantes as ffoloweth 1594’, and recording expenditure for coming and going to Court and to Somerset House, the residence of the Lord Chamberlain, ‘for mackinge of our leater twise’, and ‘for drinckinge with the jentellmen’, all evidently concerned with the initial business of forming and licensing the company.[371] On 5 June the account of performances is resumed with a fresh heading, ‘In the name of God Amen begininge at Newington my Lord Admeralle men and my Lorde Chamberlen men as ffolowethe 1594’.[372] Henslowe’s takings only averaged 9s. for the first ten days, probably on account of the distance of Newington Butts from London.[373] The takings for the three days in May averaged 41s., and it may perhaps be inferred that these May performances were at the Rose, and that some fear of renewed plague on the part of the authorities led to their being relegated to a safer quarter. The tentative character of these early performances is shown by the fact that the Admiral’s were still sharing a theatre with the Chamberlain’s. To the repertory of the latter it seems safe to assign three of the seven plays produced, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and The Taming of A Shrew, and probably also a fourth, Hester and Ahasuerus, as there is no later sign of this amongst the Admiral’s plays. This leaves three others to be regarded as the Admiral’s contribution, The Jew of Malta and Cutlack, which they had played in May and were often to play again, and Belin Dun, to which are attached the letters ‘ne’, Henslowe’s normal indication of a new play.[374] There is nothing in the order in which the plays were taken to indicate an alternation of the two companies, and it is likely enough that neither was yet fully constituted, and that they actually joined forces in the same performances.

After the tenth play on 15 June, Henslowe drew a line across the page, and although the entries continue without any indication of a change in the conditions under which the performances were given, I can only concur in the conjecture of Mr. Fleay and Dr. Greg that at this point the Admiral’s plays were transferred to the Rose, and the combination with the Chamberlain’s ceased.[375] A sudden rise in the amount of Henslowe’s takings, and the absence from the rest of the list of the four plays named above and of any other attributable to the Chamberlain’s repertory, are alike strongly in favour of this view, which may be treated as a practical certainty. Henceforward the fortunes of the company seem to have followed a smooth course for the space of three years. Their proceedings may be briefly summed up as follows. They played for thirty-nine consecutive weeks from 15 June 1594 to 14 March 1595, appearing at Court during this season on 28 December, 1 January, and 6 January. After a break of thirty-seven days during Lent, opportunity of which was taken to repair the Rose, they played again for ten weeks from Easter Monday, 21 April, to 26 June 1595. Then came a vacation of fifty-nine days, with visits to Bath and Maidstone. They began again in London on 25 August 1595 and played for twenty-seven weeks to 28 February 1596, giving Court performances on 1 January, 4 January, and 22 and 24 February. This took them to the end of the first week in Lent. After forty-three days’ interval, they played for fifteen weeks, from Easter Monday, 12 April, to 23 July 1596. Their summer vacation lasted for ninety-five days, and they are noted during 1595–6 at Coventry, Bath, Gloucester, and Dunwich. In the autumn they started playing on 27 October, but the receipts were low, and if the record is complete, they suspended performances between 15 and 25 November, and then went on to 12 February 1597, making up a season of about fourteen weeks in all. They do not seem to have played at Court at all this winter. This year they rather disregarded Lent, stopping for eighteen days only, during a reconstruction of the company, and then playing three days a week until Easter, and then regularly until the end of July, in all twenty-one weeks. To certain irregularities at the close of this season it will be necessary to refer later. During the three years, then, there were three winter and three summer seasons of London playing, covering about a hundred and twenty-six weeks. Except in Lent or at the beginning or end of a season, or occasionally, probably for climatic reasons, at other times, especially in December, plays were given upon every week-day. It emerges from Dr. Greg’s re-ordering of Henslowe’s very inaccurate dates that there were no plays on Sundays.[376] On the other hand, a summons to play at Court in the evening did not necessarily entail a blank day in the afternoon. The total number of performances during the three years was seven hundred and twenty-eight. It is reasonable to assume that Henslowe’s takings varied roughly with those of the company, although the reserve must be made that different plays might prove the most attractive to the galleries and to the yard respectively. The amounts entered range from a minimum of 3s. to a maximum of 73s. Dr. Greg calculates the average over ‘certain typical periods of 1595’ as 30s.;[377] during the first half of 1597 it was 24s. The fluctuations are determined, partly by the popularity or novelty of the plays presented, partly by the season of the year, and doubtless the weather and the competition of other amusements. There were generally some high receipts during Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun weeks. Unfortunately there is no means of estimating the proportion which Henslowe’s share bore to that which fell for division among the players. Some light is thrown upon the expenses by the subsidiary accounts of advances, which Henslowe began to keep from time to time in 1596. In May of that year he lent Alleyn ‘for the company’ a total amount of £39 in several instalments, and recovered it by small sums of £1 to £3 at a time during the next three months.[378] A longer account extending from October 1596 to March 1597 reaches, with the aid of a miscalculation, a total of £52. Of this £22 was repaid during the same period, chiefly by deductions from the profits of first nights, and an acknowledgement given for the balance of £30.[379] The advances were made through various members of the company, and the purposes specified include apparel for three new plays, travelling expenses, and fees to playwrights. A third account, if I am right in the interpretation of some very disputable figures, shows an expenditure at the average rate of 31s. a day during the six months from 24 January to 28 July 1597, of which, however, nearly half was in fact incurred during the first twenty-four days of the period. In this case only the sums and not the purposes for which they were advanced are entered.[380]

During the three years the Admiral’s men produced new plays to the total number of fifty-five, and at the average rate of one a fortnight. The productions were not at regular intervals, and often followed each other in successive weeks. There is, however, no example of two new productions in the same week.[381] These are the names and dates of the new plays:

Oblivion has overtaken the great majority of these plays. Longshanks is possibly Peele’s Edward I, and Jeronimo certainly Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. The title of The Wise Man of West Chester agrees with the subject of Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber, the manuscript of which is dated December 1595. One would be more willing to identify Henry V with The Famous Victories, if the latter had not been printed in 1598 with the name of the Queen’s men on its title-page. A Knack to Know an Honest Man was printed, as acted ‘about the Citie of London’, but without any company name, in 1596 (S. R. 26 November 1595). Stukeley was also printed without a name, as The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, in 1605 (S. R. 11 August 1600). 1 Tamar Cham and Frederick and Basilea are extant in ‘plots’ alone, and Belin Dun, or Bellendon, as Henslowe writes it, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 24 November 1595 as The true tragicall historie of Kinge Rufus the first with the life and deathe of Belyn Dun the first thief that ever was hanged in England, but is not known to be extant. The list also contains two of the early works of George Chapman, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1598, Admiral’s, S. R. 15 August 1598), and The Comedy of Humours, which can be safely identified with A Humorous Day’s Mirth (1599, Admiral’s). Ingenious attempts have been made to trace in some of the remaining titles other plays by Chapman, or by Heywood, Dekker, and the like, or presumed early drafts of these, or the English originals of plays or titles preserved in German versions; but in most cases the material available is so scanty as to render the game a hazardous one.[384] It appears, however, from Henslowe’s notes of advances during 1596–7 that payment was made to Heywood for a book, from which it may be inferred that his activity as a dramatist for the company had already began. Payments to ‘marcum’ and ‘Mr. porter’ perhaps indicate the same of Gervase Markham and Henry Porter.[385]

It is evident that some of the plays marked ‘ne’ by Henslowe cannot have been new in the fullest sense. This applies to Jeronimo, which had been played by Strange’s men as an old play during 1592–3, and to 2 Tamar Cham, which had been produced by the same company on 28 April 1592, and on that occasion also marked ‘ne’ by Henslowe. It applies also to Longshanks and Henry V, if these are really the same as Edward I and The Famous Victories. And it may, of course, apply also in other cases, which cannot now be distinguished. Two explanations are possible. One is that plays were treated as new, for the purpose of Henslowe’s entries, which were only new to the repertory of the particular company concerned, having been purchased by them or by Henslowe from the stock of some other company. There is, however, no indication that Henslowe received any special financial advantage from the production of a new play, such as would give point to such an arrangement. The other, and perhaps the most plausible, is that an old play was marked ‘ne’ if it had undergone any substantial process of revision before revival. But it must be admitted that the problem set is one that we have hardly the means to solve.

In addition to their new and revised plays, the Admiral’s had a considerable stock of old ones. Some of these they were playing, when they began their first season in June 1594. Several others were revived in the course of that season, and a few at later dates. The only new play of the repertory which reached the stage of revival during the three years was Belin Dun, which was originally produced on 10 June 1594, played to the end of the year, then dropped, and afterwards revived for a single performance on 11 July 1596, and for a series in the spring of 1597. But it is not likely that many new plays were written during the plague years, and probably most of the revived plays of 1594–5 were a good deal more than two or three years old. A list of the plays not marked ‘ne’ by Henslowe, nineteen in number, follows. It is, however, possible that some of them are only plays in the list already given, masquerading under different names.

Five plays of Marlowe’s are conspicuous in the list. Mahomet might be either Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Arragon or Peele’s lost Turkish Mahomet and Hiren the Fair Greek. Fortunatus, as revised by Dekker in 1599, is extant, but it is doubtful whether Dekker was writing early enough to have been the author of the original play. Conjectural identifications of some of the other titles have been attempted.[390] There is, perhaps, a natural inclination to eke out our meagre knowledge of the repertory of the earlier Admiral’s men, as it was constituted before 1590, by the assumption that the old and the revised new plays of 1594–7 belong to that stock. But this can only be proved to be so in the case of 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, where the title-page of the 1590 edition comes to our assistance. There is no trace between 1594 and 1597 of any of the other three plays, The Battle of Alcazar, The Wounds of Civil War, and Orlando Furioso, which there is independent evidence for connecting with the Admiral’s. And it must be borne in mind that there were several other sources from which a supply of old plays might be drawn. Alleyn seems to have bought up the books and properties of the pre-1590 men, and we do not know how far he also retained rights in some or all of the plays produced during his alliance with Strange’s. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities for either Alleyn, Henslowe, or the Admiral’s men as a whole, to acquire copies from one or more of the companies, Pembroke’s, the Queen’s, Sussex’s, which went under in the plague years. Henry V, if identical with The Famous Victories, had certainly been a Queen’s play; The Ranger’s Comedy had been played for Henslowe by the Queen’s and Sussex’s in April 1594; Jeronimo and The Guise had been similarly played by Strange’s in 1592–3; and the fact that Strange’s, the Queen’s, Sussex’s, and the Admiral’s, all in turn played The Jew of Malta leads to a strong suspicion that it was Henslowe’s property and placed by him at the disposal of any company that might from time to time be occupying his theatre.