The only provincial visit by the King’s men recorded in 1610–11 was to Shrewsbury. They gave twenty-two plays at Court during a rather prolonged winter season extending from 31 October 1611 to 26 April 1612. Two of these, on 12 and 13 January, were joint performances with the Queen’s men, and the plays used, Heywood’s Silver Age and Rape of Lucrece, were from the repertory of the latter.[623] The King’s men also gave The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale, A King and No King, Tourneur’s The Nobleman, and The Twins’ Tragedy. On 20 February 1612 the actors’ moiety of the Globe was again redistributed, into sevenths, so as to allow of the admission as a housekeeper of Ostler, who had married a daughter of Heminges. From the statement of the interests held by the parties to this transaction, it is to be inferred that Heminges and Condell had between them bought out since 1608 the representatives of Sly. On 21 April 1612 the company was at New Romney and at some date during 1611–12 at Winchester. Heminges received a payment for services to the Lord Mayor’s pageant of this year, which was Dekker’s Troja Nova Triumphans.[624]
The actor-list attached to The Captain in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1679 probably belongs to the original production of the play between 1609 and 1612. It names Burbadge, Condell, Cooke, and Ostler. It was one of the plays selected for the Court season of 1612–13, during which, on 14 February, took place the wedding of the Elector Palatine Frederick and the Princess Elizabeth, and which was therefore singularly rich in plays, notwithstanding the interruption of the festivities due to the death of Prince Henry on 7 November 1612. Heminges lent a boy for Chapman’s mask on 15 February. The twenty plays given this winter by the King’s men, the exact dates of which are not upon record, were Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (performed twice), The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar, Othello, and 1 and 2 Henry IV, Jonson’s Alchemist, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (also performed twice), The Maid’s Tragedy, A King and No King, The Captain and the lost play of Cardenio, Tourneur’s Nobleman, and four plays of unknown authorship, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Knot of Fools, The Twins’ Tragedy, and A Bad Beginning Makes a Good Ending. On 8 June there was a special performance of Cardenio for the Savoyan ambassador. Some unknown cause seems to have brought Shakespeare back in 1613 to the assistance of his fellows, and he collaborated with Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen and in Henry VIII or All is True, possibly a revision of the Buckingham which formed part of the repertory of Sussex’s men in 1594. During a performance of Henry VIII, on 29 June 1613, the Globe was burnt to the ground. Some contemporary verses mention Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell as present on this occasion. A levy was called for from the housekeepers to meet the cost of rebuilding, and owing to the inability of the representatives of Augustine Phillips to meet the call upon them, Heminges was enabled to recover one of the alienated interests, which he divided with Condell.
The company was at Oxford before November in 1613, and also visited Shrewsbury, Stafford, and Folkestone during 1612–13. They played sixteen times at Court in the winter of 1613–14, on 1, 4, 5, 15, and 16 November and 27 December 1613, and on 1, 4, and 10 January, 2, 4, 8, 10, and 18 February and 6 and 8 March 1614. The rebuilding of the Globe was complete by 30 June 1614, and in the course of 1613–14 the company visited Coventry. Cooke died in February 1614, being then a sharer. Ostler died on 16 December, and his interests in the Globe and Blackfriars became matter of dispute between his widow and her father, John Heminges. The ascertained dates of Ostler’s career render it possible to assign to 1609–14, the period of his connexion with the King’s men, three plays in which he took part. These are Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, at the first production of which, if the actor-list of the 1623 edition is rightly interpreted, the parts of Ferdinand, the Cardinal, and Antonio were played respectively by Burbadge, Condell, and Ostler, Fletcher’s Valentinian, played by Burbadge, Condell, Lowin, Ostler, and Underwood, and his Bonduca, played by Burbadge, Condell, Lowin, Ostler, Underwood, Tooley, Ecclestone, and Robinson. Bonduca must be either earlier than Ecclestone’s departure for the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1611, or after he quitted that company and presumably rejoined the King’s in 1613.
The King’s men gave eight plays at Court on unspecified days during the winter of 1614–15. On 29 March 1615 they were in trouble with other companies for playing in Lent, and Heminges and Burbadge appeared on their behalf before the Privy Council. In April 1615 they were at Nottingham. They gave fourteen plays at Court between 1 November 1615 and 1 April 1616, and again the precise dates are not specified. They also appeared before Anne at Somerset House on 21 December 1615.
Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, and with this event I must close my detailed chronicle of the fortunes of the company. A new patent was issued to them on 27 March 1619, probably to secure their right to perform in the Blackfriars, which was being challenged by the action of the City.[625] Since 1603 Shakespeare, Phillips, Sly, Cowley, Armin, and Fletcher have dropped out of the list, and are replaced by Lowin, Underwood, Tooley, Ecclestone, Gough, and Robinson, together with Nathan Field, Robert Benfield, and John Shank, who now appear for the first time as members of the company.[626] Benfield and Field are last traceable with the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1613 and 1615 respectively, Shank with the Palsgrave’s men in 1613. The only names common to both patents are those of Burbadge, Heminges, and Condell. But in fact Burbadge died on 13 March 1619, while the patent was going through its stages, and his place was almost immediately taken by Joseph Taylor, from Prince Charles’s men. About the same time Field left the company.[627] Heminges, described as ‘stuttering’ in 1613, cannot be shown to have acted since the Catiline of 1611. He had probably devoted himself to the business management of the company, in which he always appears prominent. Condell also seems to have given up acting about 1619, and during the rest of the history of the company up to its extinction in 1642, its mainstays were Lowin and Taylor, who became depositaries of the tradition of the great Shakespearian parts. John Downes, who was prompter to the Duke of York’s men after the Restoration, relates how, when Betterton played Hamlet, ‘Sir William [Davenant] (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Black-Fryers Company Act it, who being instructed by the Author Mr. Shakespear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it’; and how Davenant was similarly able to act as Betterton’s tutor for Henry the Eighth, for he ‘had it from Old Mr. Lowen, that had his Instructions from Mr. Shakespear himself’.[628] When Heminges and Condell came to print Shakespeare’s plays in 1623, they prefixed ‘the names of the principall Actors in all these playes’ as follows: ‘William Shakespeare, Richard Burbadge, John Hemmings, Augustine Phillips, William Kempt, Thomas Poope, George Bryan, Henry Condell, William Slye, Richard Cowly, John Lowine, Samuell Crosse, Alexander Cooke, Samuel Gilburne, Robert Armin, William Ostler, Nathan Field, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, William Ecclestone, Joseph Taylor, Robert Benfield, Robert Goughe, Richard Robinson, John Shancke, John Rice.’ The order is a little puzzling. The first ten entries may be those of the original members of the Chamberlain’s company in 1594; and if so, their order does not matter. But it is difficult to believe that the other sixteen can represent either the order in which the men began to play for the company, or the order in which they became sharers. Of course, there may have been comings and goings known to Heminges and Condell, but not now traceable. Thus Field and even Taylor may have come for a short while and gone again before 1611. But it seems impossible that Tooley, who was ‘fellow’ to Phillips in 1605, could really have been junior to the recruits from the Queen’s Revels in 1609. On the whole, one must suppose that, if Heminges and Condell aimed at an exact chronology, their memory occasionally failed them. The omission from the Folio of Duke, Beeston, Sincler, and Sands may indicate that the list is confined to sharers. It is probable that Fletcher, who is also omitted, was not a sharer and did not act in any Shakespearian play.
xxi. THE EARL OF WORCESTER’S AND QUEEN ANNE’S MEN
William Somerset, nat. 1526; succ. as 3rd Earl of Worcester, 1548; m. Christian, d. of Edward, 1st Lord North; ob. 22 Feb. 1589.
Edward Somerset, s. of William; nat. 1553; Lord Herbert of Chepstow; succ. as 4th Earl, 1589; m. Elizabeth, d. of Francis, 2nd Earl of Huntingdon; Deputy Master of the Horse, Dec. 1597; Master of the Horse, 21 Apr. 1601; Earl Marshal, 1603; Lord Privy Seal, 2 Jan. 1616; ob. 3 Mar. 1628.
Henry Somerset, s. of Edward; nat. 1577; Lord Herbert of Chepstow from 1589; m. 16 June 1600, Anne, d. of John, Lord Russell; succ. as 5th Earl, 1628; cr. 1st Marquis of Worcester, 1642.
Anne, d. of Frederick II, King of Denmark and Norway; nat. 12 Dec. 1574; m. James VI, King of Scotland, 20 Aug. 1589; Queen Consort of England, 24 Mar. 1603; ob. 2 Mar. 1619.