An interval of four or five years renders improbable any continuity between this company and the famous Lord Chamberlain’s company, which first emerged on the resorting of the plague-stricken mimes in 1594, passed under royal patronage in 1603, and prolonged an existence illumined by the genius of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Shirley, until the closing of the theatres in 1642. The first notice of the new organization is in June 1594, when ‘my Lord Admeralle men and my Lorde Chamberlen men’ played from the 3rd to the 13th of the month, either in combination or separately on allotted days, for Henslowe at Newington Butts.[557] Some of the plays given during this period can be traced to the subsequent repertory of the Admiral’s men; others, which cannot, may be assigned to the Chamberlain’s. They are Hester and Ahasuerus, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Taming of A Shrew, which, although so described, may of course have been really the Taming of The Shrew, Shakespeare’s adaptation of the older play entered in the Stationers’ Register on the previous 2 May. It is ingeniously, and I think rightly, inferred from a line drawn in Henslowe’s account after 13 June, that from that date all the performances recorded are by the Admiral’s men, probably at the Rose, and that his relations with the Chamberlain’s men had ceased. The company is found at Marlborough about September, and on 8 October Lord Hunsdon wrote to the Lord Mayor, asking permission for ‘my nowe companie’ to continue an occupation of the Cross Keys,[558] on which it seems to have already entered. Henceforward the company was regularly established in London, took the lead annually at Court, and except for brief periods of inhibition in 1596, 1597, and possibly 1601, does not appear to have travelled during the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign. Whether Hunsdon’s men got the Cross Keys for the winter or not, they probably had from the beginning the use of the Theatre for the summer seasons, for Richard Burbage, the son of the owner, was one of their leading members, and on 15 March 1595 appears as joint payee with William Kempe and William Shakespeare for two plays given at Court on 26 and 28 December 1594. These plays cannot be identified, but Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and Romeo and Juliet may well have been produced this winter.[559] Most likely the date 28 December was entered in the payment warrant by mistake for 27 December, for the Admiral’s men are also recorded as playing at Court on 28 December, and on the same night ‘a company of base and common fellows’, with whom one is bound to identify the Chamberlain’s men, played ‘a Comedy of Errors’ as part of the Christmas revels of the Prince of Purpoole at Gray’s Inn.[560] There seems to be some echo of Romeo and Juliet in the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, which may very well have been given at Greenwich or Burghley House for the wedding of William Stanley, Earl of Derby, and Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, on 26 January 1595. Another possible occasion for the production, however, is the wedding of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir George Carey and grand-daughter of Lord Hunsdon, to Thomas, son of Henry Lord Berkeley on 19 February 1596. This took place at Blackfriars, presumably in Sir George Carey’s house there.[561]

To 1595 or thereabouts I also assign Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona and King John and Richard II.[562] The company played at Court on 26, 27, and 28 December 1595 and 6 January and 22 February 1596. In the warrant for their fees, dated on 21 December 1596, and made payable to John Heminges and George Bryan, they are described as ‘servauntes to the late Lord Chamberlayne and now servauntes to the Lorde Hunsdon’. It is clear that, when the first Lord Hunsdon died on 22 July 1596, the players had been retained by his son and heir, Sir George Carey. The Lord Chamberlainship passed to Lord Cobham; but he died on 5 March 1597, and on 17 March the post was given to the second Lord Hunsdon. The company, then, was properly known as Lord Hunsdon’s men from 22 July 1596 to 17 March 1597; before and after that period it was the Lord Chamberlain’s men.

To 1596 I assign Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Evidence of the occupation of the Theatre about this time by the company is to be found in Lodge’s allusion to a revival of Hamlet there, for this play is not likely to have been in other hands.[563] It is not an unreasonable conjecture that James Burbadge destined to their use the play-house in the Blackfriars, which he purchased in February, and had converted for ‘publique’ use by November of this year. If so, he and they were disappointed, for a petition of the inhabitants, amongst the signatories to an alleged copy of which Lord Hunsdon himself is somewhat oddly found, led to an intervention of the Privy Council, who forbade plays to be given within the liberty.[564] At this time also the Corporation seem to have succeeded in finally and permanently expelling the players from the City inns which had long been their head-quarters, and Nashe connects this persecution with the loss of ‘their old Lord’, by whom he doubtless means Henry Lord Hunsdon. It is possible that plays were inhibited altogether during the summer of 1596, although no formal order to that effect is preserved, for Hunsdon’s went to Faversham, and Nashe himself was disappointed of ‘an after harvest I expected by writing for the stage and for the presse’.[565]

In the following winter the company played at Court on 26 and 27 December 1596 and on 1 and 6 January and 6 and 8 February 1597. Their payees, for this and for the next two years, were Thomas Pope and John Heminge. In 1597 began the printing of plays written by Shakespeare for this company, with a ‘bad’ quarto of Romeo and Juliet, bearing on its title-page the name of Lord Hunsdon’s men and ‘good’ quartos of Richard II and Richard III, bearing that of the Lord Chamberlain’s.[566] From the text of Richard II was omitted the deposition scene, which did not appear in print until after the death of Elizabeth. The only Shakespearian productions that can be plausibly ascribed to this year are those of the two parts of Henry IV. The presentation of Sir John Oldcastle in the original versions of these seems to have led to a protest, and the character was renamed Sir John Falstaff. It is not improbable that the offence taken was by Lord Chamberlain Cobham, whose ancestress, Joan Lady Cobham, Oldcastle had married.[567] It is impossible to say whether either this scandal or any possible interpretation of disloyalty put upon Richard II contributed to the inhibition of plays on 28 July, of which the main exciting cause was certainly the performance of The Isle of Dogs at the Swan on the Bankside.[568] For the second time since their formation in 1594 the company had to travel. They are traceable at Rye in August, at Dover between 3 and 20 September, at Marlborough, Faversham, and Bath during 1596–7, and at Bristol about 29 September. This inhibition was removed early in October. There is some reason to believe that, when the Chamberlain’s men resumed playing, it was not at the Theatre, as to the renewal of the lease of which the Burbadges were disputing with their ground landlord, but at the Curtain. Marston, in one and the same passage of his Scourge of Villainy, entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8 September 1598, alludes to the acting of Romeo and Juliet and to ‘Curtaine plaudeties’, while almost simultaneously Edward Guilpin in his Skialetheia, entered on 15 September, speaks of ‘the unfrequented Theater’. The transfer may, however, not have taken place until 1598.[569]

The company played at Court on 26 December 1597 and on 1 and 6 January and 26 February 1598. It is conceivable that one of these plays may have been a revised version of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which was printed as ‘newly corrected and augmented’ and ‘as it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas’ in 1598. On the other hand, it is also possible that this print may have been intended to replace an earlier ‘bad’ quarto, not now preserved, and if so, the reference to the representation may have been carried on from the earlier title-page. In 1598 were also printed 1 Henry IV, and the anonymous Mucedorus, which may have already belonged to the Chamberlain’s repertory, as it was certainly revised for them about 1610. The Merchant of Venice was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 22 July, but with a proviso that it must not be printed ‘without lycence first had from the Right honorable the lord chamberlen’. On 7 September 1598 was entered in the Stationers’ Register the Palladis Tamia of Francis Meres, with its list of Shakespeare’s plays up to date, including the mysterious Love’s Labours Won, which I incline to identify with the Taming of the Shrew.[570] The earliest play not mentioned by Meres is probably Much Ado about Nothing, which may belong to 1598 itself. Another production of this year was Jonson’s Every Man In his Humour, which was still a new play about 20 September, when an Almain in the audience lost 300 crowns. Possibly John Aubrey has this period in mind when he says that Jonson ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure play-house, somewhere in the suburbes, I thinke towardes Shoreditch or Clarkenwell’.[571] Jonson, however, was in prison soon after the production of the play for the manslaughter of Gabriel Spencer on 22 September in Hoxton Fields, and there is no other evidence that he ever acted with the Chamberlain’s men. His own name is not in the list of the original ‘principall Comoedians’ affixed to the text of Every Man In his Humour in the folio of 1616. This is of great value, as being the earliest extant list of the company. The ten names given are:

It must not, of course, be assumed, either that the list is in itself quite complete, or that there had been no changes amongst the Chamberlain’s men between 1594 and 1598; but as those named include five out of the six payees for that period, they may perhaps be taken, with the sixth payee, George Bryan, who does not reappear after 1596, and was by 1603 an ordinary groom of the Chamber of the royal Household, as fairly representing the original constitution of the company.[572] And an inference to its origin at once becomes possible, for of these eleven men five (Kempe, Pope, Heminges, Phillips, and Bryan) formed, with Edward Alleyn, the company of Lord Strange’s men to whom Privy Council letters of assistance were granted in 1593, and at least six (Pope, Phillips, Bryan, Burbadge, Duke, and Sly) are to be found in the cast of 2 Seven Deadly Sins as performed by Strange’s or the Admiral’s or the two together about 1590–1. It will be remembered that the Strange’s company of 1593, known as the Earl of Derby’s after 25 September 1593, was apparently formed by a combination of the earlier Strange’s and Admiral’s men somewhere near the time of this performance, if not earlier, and that its composite character never wholly disappeared, Alleyn in particular, who was its leading member, retaining his personal status as an Admiral’s man. It seems clear that in 1594 the combination broke up, that Alleyn became the nucleus of a new Admiral’s company at the Rose, and that the group with whom he had been travelling took fresh service with the Lord Chamberlain. It is not, I think, quite accurate to treat this transaction as a mere continuance of Lord Derby’s men under the style of Lord Chamberlain’s, entailing no reconstruction other than a change of patron following upon Lord Derby’s death on 16 April 1594. On the one hand a Derby’s company continued in existence, and is traceable under the sixth earl from 1594 to 1617. On the other hand, while we do not know what business reconstruction there may have been, a very fundamental change is involved in the replacement of Alleyn as principal actor by Richard Burbadge, who is not at all likely to have played with Strange’s men after the break between the Admiral’s and his father at the Theatre in 1591. Except for Alleyn, all the more important members of the company, as it existed in 1593, seem to have been included in the transfer to Lord Hunsdon. It is, however, little more than conjecture that finds Henry Condell and Christopher Beeston in the ‘Harry’ and ‘Kitt’, or Alexander Cooke, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Gough, who were numbered amongst the King’s men at a later date, in the ‘Saunder’, ‘Nick’, and ‘R. Go.’ of the 2 Seven Deadly Sins plot. Alleyn’s correspondence of 1593 adds Richard Cowley to the list of Lord Strange’s men, and, as we shall find him acting as a payee for the Chamberlain’s men in 1601, he may have been one of them from the beginning. In any case he had joined them by 1598, as the stage-directions of Much Ado about Nothing show that he played Verges to Kempe’s Dogberry.[573]

There is, of course, one conspicuous Chamberlain’s man who is not discoverable either in the Privy Council letter of 1593 or in the 2 Seven Deadly Sins of 1590–1. Even the audacity of Mr. Fleay has not attempted to identify the ‘Will’ of the plot with Will Shakespeare. Some relations, if only as author, Shakespeare must have had with Lord Strange’s men, when they produced 1 Henry VI on 3 March 1592, and Greene’s satire of him as a ‘Shake-scene’ in the same year must indicate that he was an actor as well as an author.[574] He may have stood aside altogether during the period of the provincial tours, and devoted himself to poetry, and perhaps, although this is very conjectural, to travel abroad. Or he may, as I have already suggested, have joined Lord Pembroke’s men (q.v.), whom I suspect to have been an offshoot for provincial purposes of the Strange’s combination, and have passed from them to Lord Sussex’s, ultimately rejoining his old fellows in 1594. The possibility of identifying certain minor members of the Chamberlain’s company is also affected by this somewhat obscure problem of Pembroke’s men. The most obvious of these is John Sincler or Sincklo, who was in the cast of 2 Seven Deadly Sins as played by the Admiral’s or Strange’s about 1590–1, and must have ultimately joined the Chamberlain’s, as his name occurs in a stage-direction to Q1 of 2 Henry IV (1600), and in the induction to The Malcontent (1604). It also occurs in stage-directions to 3 Henry VI and the Taming of The Shrew in the Folio of 1623.[575] These both happen to be plays which passed through the hands of Pembroke’s, and the inference may be that Sincler had also passed through this company. But this is far from being conclusive. It is the revised and not the unrevised texts that yield the name, and although I think it likely, on stylistic grounds, that the revision of 3 Henry VI was done for Pembroke’s (q.v.), it is probable from the reference in Henry V, epil. 12, to the loss of France and the civil wars, ‘which oft our stage hath shown’, that the play was revived by the Chamberlain’s, and it may have been in such a revival that Sincler took part. As to the Shrew, it is impossible to say whether Shakespeare’s work upon it was before or after its transfer to the Chamberlain’s. In any case the Chamberlain’s were playing it in some form on 13 June 1594, so that here again the appearance of Sincler’s name cannot ear-mark him as Pembroke’s. We can now go a step farther. The stage-directions to 3 Henry VI contain not only Sincler’s name, but those of a certain ‘Gabriel’ and a certain ‘Humfrey’, not common Elizabethan names even separately, and certainly suggesting, when found in combination, the Gabriel Spencer and Humphrey Jeffes, who were fellows of the Admiral’s in 1597. Now Spencer, and very likely also Jeffes, had come from Pembroke’s, the short-lived Pembroke’s of 1597 at the Swan. Had they been Pembroke’s men ever since 1593? If so, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the performance which brought their names into the text of 3 Henry VI, and with theirs John Sincler’s, was one by Pembroke’s about that date. The obstacle is that there is no known evidence, in provincial records or elsewhere, for any continuous existence of Pembroke’s between 1593 and 1597. Pending the discovery of any such evidence, it seems better to assume that Sincler, Spencer, and Jeffes were all Chamberlain’s men before 1597, and that it was from a combination of discontented elements in that company and in the Admiral’s that the Pembroke’s of the Swan arose. If so, the rest of the Pembroke’s men not traceable as coming from the Admiral’s, namely Robert Shaw, William Bird alias Borne, and probably Anthony Jeffes, may also have come from the Chamberlain’s; and such an origin might explain the suit with Thomas Pope in which Bird was entangled in 1598.[576] Two other minor actors in the company about 1597 were probably Harvey and Rossill, whose names appear to have got into the text of 1 Henry IV in place of those of Bardolph and Peto, whom they represented.[577] The list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays given by the editors of the First Folio includes Samuel Crosse, of whom nothing more is known except that he was of an early generation. As the list in the Folio appears to be limited to Chamberlain’s and King’s men, excluding for example Alleyn, who certainly acted in Shakespearian plays, e.g. 1 Henry VI, it may be that Crosse was for a short time a member of the company soon after 1594.

It is hardly possible to carry the analysis of origins any further with profit, or to assume that the groups which segregated themselves from the Strange-Admiral’s combination in 1594 bore any close correspondence to the respective contributions of Strange’s and the Admiral’s to that combination in 1589 or 1590. The only name that can be connected with Strange’s men before 1588 is John Symons and neither he nor George Attewell, their payee in 1591, became a Chamberlain’s man. Hypotheses have been framed, mainly in the hope of affiliating Shakespeare to Lord Leicester’s men, who are supposed to have carried him away from Stratford-on-Avon when they visited it in 1586–7, and ultimately to have become Lord Strange’s men.[578] So far as Shakespeare is concerned, the first record of him on the boards is in 1592, and the interval since his hegira from Stratford may have been quite otherwise spent. The proof of continuity between Leicester’s men and Strange’s altogether fails, since the latter made their appearance a decade before the former came to an end. The only member of the Lord Chamberlain’s company of 1594 who can be traced to Leicester’s service was Kempe, and he had left Leicester’s men by the summer of 1586 and was in Denmark. With him were Bryan and Pope, who afterwards spent a year in Germany, and may have joined either Strange’s or the Admiral’s on their return. The only other Chamberlain’s man, who can be assigned to an earlier company than Strange’s, is Heminges, who was probably at some time a Queen’s man.

The Chamberlain’s men evidently started business in 1594 with something of a repertory derived by inheritance or purchase from antecedent companies. Our knowledge of this is mainly confined to plays with which Shakespeare was concerned as author or reviser. They certainly did not get all the plays produced by Strange’s men at the Rose during 1592 and 1593. Some of these were Henslowe’s property; others passed with Alleyn to the Admiral’s men. But they got The Jealous Comedy, if I am right in identifying this with The Comedy of Errors. They probably got 1 Henry VI, for although the appearance of a Shakespearian play in the 1623 Folio is not perhaps, in view of the composition of the 1647 ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’ Folio, absolute proof that the King’s men possessed the copy, their stage had often shown both the loss of France and the bleeding of England before Henry V was produced in 1599.[579] And they got Titus and Vespasian, as revised, after passing through the hands of Pembroke’s men, for production by Sussex’s under the title of Titus Andronicus. Three other of Pembroke’s men’s plays came to them, The Taming of A Shrew and 2 and 3 Henry VI, and probably Hamlet belongs to the same group. It is of course only a guess of mine that these also went with Shakespeare to Sussex’s men and came thence with him. Titus Andronicus and A Shrew, indeed, became available in print during 1594, but not Hamlet, and not Henry VI, except in the obsolete version called The Contention of York and Lancaster. I think Shakespeare must also have brought Richard III and possibly an early version of Henry VIII, and that one or other of these had already been played by Sussex’s as Buckingham. Of the provenance of Hester and Ahasuerus nothing can be said. It is not necessary to suppose that the Chamberlain’s acquired any plays from the stock of the Queen’s men. It is true that Shakespeare subsequently made some use of The Troublesome Reign of King John, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and King Leire, but these were all in print before he needed them.[580] Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, published in 1654 as a play the King’s men at the Blackfriars is believed by some to be an early play, possibly by Peele, and if so, may belong to the repertory of 1594.