The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 2

by E. K. Chambers

I am afraid that Beeston’s character does not come altogether unstained out of another suit brought by one John Smith in the Court of Requests during 1619 for a sum of £46 5s. 8d. in respect of ‘tinsell stuffes and other stuffe’ delivered on Beeston’s order to Worth, Perkins, Cumber, and others at the Red Bull between 27 June 1612 and 23 February 1617, since when they had ‘fallen at variance and strife amongst themselves and separated and devided themselves into other companies.’ He accuses these four men of conspiring to keep him out of payment. Worth, Perkins, and Cumber asserted that the liability was Beeston’s. The company had ‘required divers officers and that every of the said actors should take vpon them some place & charge’. Beeston was charged with the provision of furniture and apparel, which needed ‘a thriueing man & one that was of abilitie & meanes’. He was to ‘defaulke outt of the colleccions and gatheringes which were made continually when-soeuer any playe was acted a certen some of money as a comon stock.’ to pay for purchases out of this, and to account to the company for the balance. No one else was privy to his transactions. The arrangement lasted for seven or eight years, and they believe that he ‘much enritched himself and rendered a false account for expenditure of £400. He is now conspiring with Smith and hoping for a chance to ‘exclayme on’ them. If he incurred debt, he had certainly taken funds to meet it. From the beginning he had ‘a greater care for his owne privatt gaine’. Now he has ‘of late given over his coate & condicion & separated and devided himself’ from the company, carrying away all the furniture and apparel. Beeston says that he has long been ill. On Queen Anne’s death he left the company and joined Prince Charles’s men. The Queen’s had ten sharers, and sometimes one, sometimes another, provided the clothes. He denies liability. Several witnesses, including William Freshwater, merchant tailor and ‘a workman to the said company’, spoke to Beeston’s liability.[671] One John King says that the company allowed Beeston ‘one half of the profitt that came of the gallyryes’, and that they began to break up about three years ago. At a hearing on 16 June 1620 Beeston got the case deferred on the ground that Emanuel Read, a material witness, was in Ireland until Michaelmas. Elizabeth, the wife of Richard Perkins, said that Read had been there for two or three years, was over at Easter, and was not expected again. Smith got in a blow at Beeston’s credit with an affidavit that he had said ‘it was nothing for him to put in a false answere into the Court of Requestes, for that it was not punishable’. The result of the suit is unknown.

We may perhaps reach the following conclusions as to the composition of the London company after the deaths in 1612 of Pulham, presumably a recent comer since 1609, and Greene. Their nucleus consisted of two of the patented men, Christopher Beeston and Heywood, who probably remained with them throughout. Of the other patentees, Swinnerton kept to the provinces. Lee had rejoined them from the provinces by 1613 or 1614, and went back to the provinces about May 1616. Perkins was apparently not of their number in June 1616, but was in June 1617. Holt is not traceable; perhaps he also went to the provinces. Pallant joined the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1614 and had passed to Prince Charles’s by 1616. All these five men, however, appear with Beeston and Heywood as Anne’s servants at her funeral. Here too are Slater and Edmonds, then of the Bristol, and apparently never of the London company; also Worth, Cumber, Blaney, Drewe, and Robinson, presumably identical with Robins, all of whom had joined the London company by June 1616, Basse, formerly of the Lady Elizabeth’s, who joined it between June 1616 and June 1617, and Gregory Sanderson and John Garret, who, if they belonged to the London company at all, must have joined it after June 1617.[672] The list does not contain the names of two men who belonged to the company in 1616 and 1617. One was Emanuel Read, who joined it from the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1613 or later; the other, Robert Reynolds, whose attachment to the company must have been rather loose, as he was travelling in Germany in July 1616 and again in 1618. Evidently, as the lawsuits suggest, the organization of the Queen’s men during its later years was rather unstable. Into its attempts to hold together after Anne’s death and the after-careers of its members, it is not necessary to go.

In June 1617 the Queen’s were come, or shortly to come, from the Red Bull to the Cockpit. In fact they were at the Cockpit, then a new house, on 4 March 1617, when it was sacked by prentices in a Shrovetide riot.[673] But they may have returned to the Red Bull for a time, while the Cockpit was being repaired, as they did again after they lost it on the separation from Christopher Beeston, who seems to have been its owner, in 1619.

xxii. THE DUKE OF LENNOX’S MEN

Ludovic Stuart, s. of Esmé, 1st Duke of Lennox; cousin and until 1594 heir presumptive of James; nat. 29 Sept. 1574; succ. as 2nd Duke, 26 May 1583; Gentleman of Bedchamber, 1603; Earl of Richmond, 6 Oct. 1613; Lord Steward, Nov. 1615; Duke of Richmond, 17 Aug. 1623; o.s.p. 16 Feb. 1624.

The first notice of Lennox’s men is on 13 October 1604, when he gave an open warrant of assistance in their behalf addressed to mayors, justices, and other local officers, some of whom had apparently refused the company permission to play (App. D, no. cxxxvii). On 16 March 1605 Francis Henslowe gave his uncle Philip a bond of £60 to observe articles of an agreement he had entered into with John Garland and Abraham Savere ‘his ffellowes, servantes to the most noble Prince the duke of Lennox’; and on 1 March 1605 Savere had given Francis Henslowe a power of attorney to recover £40 on a forfeited bond from John Garland of ‘the ould forde’, securing delivery of a warrant made to Savere by Lennox (Henslowe Papers, 62). Some other traces point to a connexion between Savere and Francis Henslowe, which was ended by the latter’s death in the middle of 1606 (Henslowe, ii. 277), and an undated loan of £7 by Philip Henslowe to his nephew ‘to goyne with owld Garlland and Symcockes and Saverey when they played in the duckes nam at ther laste goinge owt’ (Henslowe, i. 160) makes it possible to add one more to the list of the company. It does not seem to have played in London, but is traceable at Canterbury in 1603–4, Barnstaple, Coventry, and Norwich in 1604–5, and Coventry again in 1607–8. Both Garland and Henslowe had been Queen Elizabeth’s men, and it is possible that, when these men were left stranded by her death in 1603, they found a new patron in Lennox. John Garland had joined the Duke of York’s men by 1610, and it has been suggested that this company may have been a continuation of Lennox’s.

xxiii. THE DUKE OF YORK’S (PRINCE CHARLES’S) MEN
The Duke of York’s Men (1608–12); The Prince’s Men (1612–16)

Charles, 2nd s. of James I; nat. 19 Nov. 1600; Duke of Albany, 23 Dec. 1600; Duke of York, 16 Jan. 1605; Prince of Wales, 3 Nov. 1616; afterwards (27 Mar. 1625) Charles I.

[Bibliographical Note.—The documents bearing on the relations of the Duke of York’s men with Alleyn are printed by W. W. Greg in Henslowe Papers (1907); the Bill and Answers in the equity suit of Taylor v. Hemynges (1612) by C. W. Wallace in Globe Theatre Apparel (p.p., 1909).]

A company under the patronage of Prince Charles, then Duke of York, first makes its appearance during 1608, and in the provinces. A visit of ‘the younger princes’ men to Ipswich is recorded on 20 October. During 1608–9 the company was also at Bath, and it is at least possible that it was ‘the Princes players of the White Chapple London’ rewarded at Leicester in 1608. The Boar’s Head (q.v.) may have been roughly spoken of as in Whitechapel, and although there is no proof that the Duke of York’s men occupied it after the Queen’s moved to the Red Bull, there is nothing to connect them during the earlier years of their career with any of the better-known London houses. On 30 March 1610 they received, like other London companies, a patent, of which the following are the terms:[674]