I now return to the chronicle of the Chamberlain’s men from 1598 onwards. The restriction of the London companies by the action of the Privy Council to two had left them in direct rivalry with the Admiral’s at the Rose. Disputes broke out. Henslowe made a loan to William Bird of the Admiral’s on 30 August 1598 to follow a ‘sewt agenste Thomas Poope’, and another to Thomas Downton on 30 January 1599, ‘to descarge Thomas Dickers [Dekker] from the areaste of my lord chamberlens men’.[581] The company played at Court on 26 December 1598 and 1 January and 20 February 1599. During this winter they undertook the enterprise of finding a new head-quarters on the Bankside. The disputes between landlord and tenants as to the lease of the Theatre had reached a crisis, and in December or January the Burbadges removed the timber of the house across the Thames, to serve as material for the construction of the Globe. The lease of the new site was signed on 21 February 1599. Under it one moiety of the interest was retained by Richard Burbadge and his brother Cuthbert, who was not himself an actor; the other was assigned to Shakespeare, Pope, Phillips, Heminges, and Kempe.[582] Shortly afterwards Kempe made over his share to the other four. Presumably he now quitted the company, having first, as a stage-direction shows, played Peter in the revised version of Romeo and Juliet printed in 1599. His place was probably taken by Robert Armin, formerly of Lord Chandos’s men, who describes himself in two successive issues of his Fool upon Fool (1600 and 1605), first as ‘clonnico del Curtanio’, and then as ‘clonnico del Mondo’, and who had therefore probably joined the Chamberlain’s men before their actual transfer to the Globe. As the Theatre had to be built, this is not likely to have taken place until the autumn of 1599, and it must therefore remain doubtful which house was the ‘wooden O’ of Henry V, produced during the absence of Essex in Ireland between 27 March and 28 September 1599. It was, however, certainly at the Globe that Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar on 21 September.[583] ‘This fair-filled Globe’, too, is named in the epilogue to Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour, which is ascribed in the Folio of 1606 to 1599, although if this be correct, an apparent allusion to Kempe’s journey to Norwich in the spring of 1600 must, on the assumption that it is a real allusion, be an interpolation. The ‘principall Comoedians’ in this play were Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips, Condell, Sly, and Pope. Four of the 1598 names are missing. Shakespeare evidently stood aside. Kempe had gone. Beeston and Duke may have gone also, although it is only a conjecture of Mr. Fleay’s that they and Kempe now seceded to Pembroke’s men at the Rose, and they are not definitely heard of again until they are found with Worcester’s men in August 1602.[584] Mr. Fleay thinks that another Worcester’s man, Robert Pallant, had accompanied them; but, although Pallant was with Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590, there is no evidence that he was ever a Chamberlain’s man. Conceivably he may have joined the King’s men about 1619, but that is another matter.[585] About November 1599 was published A Warning for Fair Women, which belonged to the company.
The Court plays called for from the Chamberlain’s men during the following winter were on 26 December 1599 and on 6 January and 3 February 1600. Heminges was sole payee, and occupied the same position in every subsequent year, up to and beyond 1616, except in 1600–1, when Richard Cowley was associated with him, and for a special payment made to Burbadge in 1604. On 6 March 1600 the company had an opportunity of rendering direct service to their patron Lord Hunsdon, by playing Henry IV, still oddly called Sir John Oldcastle, after a dinner which he gave to the Flemish ambassador, Ludovic Verreyken, presumably at his house in the Blackfriars.[586] To 1600 I assign Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, not improbably prepared for performance, with the aid of the boys of Windsor Chapel, at the Garter Feast on 23 April, and also As You Like It. This was a year of some activity among the publishers and, as in 1598, the company had to take steps to protect their interests. In May John Roberts was prevented from printing their moral of Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose, until he could bring proper authority, and in August a note was made in the Stationers’ Register to stay the printing of As You Like It, Henry V, and Much Ado about Nothing.[587] The last two of these, but not the first, were in fact printed during the year, and so were A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, 2 Henry IV, Every Man Out of his Humour, and An Alarum for London, all plays belonging to the company.
The Chamberlain’s men played at Court on 26 December 1600 and on 6 January and 24 February 1601. Shortly before this last performance, they had been involved in one of the tragedies of history. This was the abortive coup d’état of 8 February 1601 in which the Earl of Essex, smarting under the disgrace which his failure in Ireland had brought upon him, attempted to secure his position and get rid of Sir Walter Raleigh and other enemies by taking forcible possession of the person of Elizabeth and the palace of Whitehall. Some of his followers seem to have conceived the idea of predisposing the mind of the populace to their cause by a dramatic representation of the dangers of evil counsellors and the possible remedy of a deposition, as illustrated in the case of Elizabeth’s predecessor Richard II, in whom for some obscure reason the political thought of the time was fond of finding an analogue to the Queen. Saturday, 7 February, the day before the outbreak, was chosen for the performance, and the players applied to were the Chamberlain’s. A deposition by Augustine Phillips, taken before Chief Justice Popham and Justice Fenner during the subsequent inquiries, records the transaction.[588]
‘The Examination of Augustine Phillips, servant unto the L. Chamberlain and one of his players, taken the xviijth of February, 1600, upon his oath.
‘He saith that on Friday last was sennight or Thursday Sir Charles Percy Sir Josceline Percy and the Lord Mounteagle with some three more spoke to some of the players in the presence of this Examinate to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next, promising to get them xls. more than their ordinary to play it. Where this Examinate and his fellows were determined to have played some other play, holding that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use that they should have small or no company at it. But at their request this Examinate and his fellows were content to play it the Saturday and had their xls. more than their ordinary for it, and so played it accordingly.’
The fact that Phillips speaks of the play as old and long out of use, which becomes in the narrative of Camden ‘exoleta tragoedia’, hardly justifies the suggestion that it was something earlier than Shakespeare’s Richard II. This, if produced in 1596, may well have been off the boards by 1601.
A good deal of misunderstanding has gathered round the connexion of the Chamberlain’s men with this affair. Mr. Fleay is responsible for the theory that they fell into disgrace, had to travel, and were excluded from the Court festivities of the following Christmas.[589] As a matter of fact they played four times during that winter. This Mr. Fleay did not know, as he only had before him Cunningham’s incomplete extracts from the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber. But he ought to have noticed that their last performance for 1600–1 was itself some days later than the examination of Augustine Phillips. Nor is any evidence that the company travelled in 1601 forthcoming from the provincial archives. Mr. Fleay’s identification of them with Laurence Fletcher’s Scottish company of that year merely rests upon the presence of Fletcher’s name in the patent of 1603, and this will not bear the strain of the argument.[590] Thus remains, however, the possibly autobiographical passage in Hamlet, ii. 2. 346, which assigns an ‘inhibition by the means of the late innovation’ as a cause of the travelling of players to Elsinore. The date of Hamlet may well be 1601, since the same passage refers to the theatrical competition set up by the establishment of boy companies at St. Paul’s in 1599 and at the Chapel Royal in 1600. But it must be borne in mind that this competition is the only reason given for the travelling in the 1603 edition of the play. In the 1604 edition the only reason is the inhibition, while in the text of the 1623 Folio both reasons stand somewhat inconsistently side by side.[591] No doubt the text of 1603 is an imperfect piratical reprint. On the other hand that of 1604 almost certainly represents a revised version of the play, and the ‘inhibition’ cited, if it had an historical existence at all, may be that of 1603, during which certainly the company travelled. I suppose that ‘innovation’ might mean the accession of a new sovereign, although it does not seem a very obvious term. But then it does not seem a very obvious term for a seditious rising either.[592] On the whole, there is no reason to suppose that any serious blame was attached to the Chamberlain’s men for lending themselves to Sir Gilly Meyrick’s intrigue. It is certainly absurd to suggest, as has been suggested, that the ‘adorned creature’, whose ingratitude instigated the comparison between Elizabeth and Richard, was not Essex but Shakespeare.[593] At the same time the company may, of course, have been told to leave London for a few weeks. At some time, as the 1603 title-page tells us, they took Hamlet both to Oxford and to Cambridge, and it is at least tempting to find a reminiscence of the Cambridge visit in the scene from 2 Return from Parnassus cited below. It is possible that Phillips and his fellows, and even their relation to the Essex crisis itself, may be glanced at in the satirical picture of the Roman actors in Jonson’s Poetaster, produced by the Chapel boys in the course of 1601.[594] Certainly the play betrays its author’s knowledge of a counter-attack which the Chamberlain’s men were already preparing for him in Dekker’s Satiromastix. This play, in which Dekker may have had some help from Marston, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 11 November 1601, and had probably been on the stage not long before. It is noteworthy that it was produced by the Paul’s boys, as well as by the Chamberlain’s men. It was actually published in 1602. Another play which may reasonably be assigned to 1601 is Twelfth Night.
In the following winter the company played at Court on 26 and 27 December 1601 and on 1 January and 14 February 1602. They also gave Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple feast on 2 February;[595] and I have very little doubt that it was they who furnished the play at which Elizabeth and her maids of honour were present in the Blackfriars after dining with Lord Hunsdon on 31 December.[596] The alleged production of Othello before the Queen when Sir Thomas Egerton entertained her at Harefield from 31 July to 2 August 1602 rests on a forgery by Collier.[597] It is possible that, as Professor Wallace conjectures, the play was on the capture of Stuhl-Weissenburg, seen by the Duke of Stettin on 13 September 1602, may have been a Globe production.[598] Sir Thomas Cromwell, a play of unknown authorship belonging to the company, was published in the course of 1602, with an ascription on the title-page to W. S., and to this year I assign Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well and Troilus and Cressida. If so, the portrait of Ajax in the latter play cannot very well have been the ‘purge’ administered by Shakespeare to Jonson, to which reference is made in 2 Return from Parnassus. This is a Cambridge Christmas piece, probably of 1601–2, and in it Burbadge and Kempe are introduced as in search of scholars to write for them. Perhaps the Cambridge author did not know that Kempe had ceased to be the ‘fellow’ of Burbadge and Shakespeare in 1599, and was at the time playing with Worcester’s men at the Rose. It is, however, just possible that after returning from his continental tour and before throwing in his lot with Worcester’s, he may have rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while, and may have accompanied them to Cambridge, if they did travel in 1601.[599]
The last performances of the company before Elizabeth took place on 26 December 1602 and 2 February 1603, and on the following 24 March the Queen died. Playing immediately ceased in London. Strictly speaking, the Chamberlain’s men must have again become Lord Hunsdon’s men for a month or so, for the Household appointments naturally lapsed with the death of the sovereign, and Hunsdon, being in failing health, was relieved of his duties on 6 April. On 9 September he died.[600] The company, however, had already passed under royal patronage.
A contemporary panegyrist records the graciousness of James in ‘taking to him the late Lord Chamberlaines servants, now the Kings acters’.[601] The appointment was by letters patent dated 19 May 1603, of which the text follows.[602]