APILEUTTER, CHRISTOPHER. Germany, 1615.
ARCHER, RICHARD. Vide Arkinstall.
ARCHER? (ARZSCHAR, ERTZER), ROBERT. Germany, 1608–16.
ARKINSTALL, JOHN. A common player of interludes under licence, with Richard Archer, Barker, and Anthony Ward as his fellows. He was at Hastings on 25 March 1603, and on 30 March laid an information of the proclamation of Lord Beauchamp as king by Lord Southampton (Hist. MSS. xii. 4. 126).
ARMIN, ROBERT, is said to have been apprentice to a goldsmith in Lombard Street, and to have been encouraged as a ‘wag’ by Tarlton (ob. 1588), who prophesied that he should ‘enjoy my clownes sute after me’. He ‘used to’ Tarlton’s plays, and in time became himself a player ‘and at this houre performes the same, where, at the Globe on the Banks side men may see him’.[931] But his earliest reputation was as a writer. He wrote a preface to A Brief Resolution of the Right Religion (1590) and probably other things now unknown, for he is referred to as a son of Elderton in Nashe’s Foure Letters Confuted of 1592 (Works, i. 280). R. A. wrote verses to Robert Tofte’s Alba (1598), and R. A. compiled England’s Parnassus (1600); the latter is generally taken to be Robert Allot. The first dramatic company in which Armin can be traced is Lord Chandos’s men. In an epistle to Mary, widow of William Lord Chandos (1594–1602) prefixed to his kinsman Gilbert Dugdale’s True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, &c. (1604), he says, ‘Your good honor knowes Pinck’s poor heart, who in all my services to your late deceased kind lord, never savoured of flatterie or fixion.’ In his Foole upon Foole, or Six Sortes of Sottes (1600) he tells an incident which took place at Pershore in Worcestershire, during a tour of ‘the Lord Shandoyes players’, at which he was himself present, not improbably playing the clown ‘Grumball’.[932] By 1599, however, he had probably joined the Chamberlain’s men, for in the first edition of Foole upon Foole he describes himself as ‘Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe’. In a later edition of 1605 this becomes ‘Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe’. Both issues are anonymous, but Armin put his name to an enlargement entitled A Nest of Ninnies (1608).[933] ‘Clunnyco de Curtanio Snuffe’ is also on the title-page of Quips upon Questions (1600), which must therefore be by Armin and not by J. Singer, whose autograph Collier (Bibl. Cat. ii. 203) said that he found on a copy. This is a book of quatrains on stage ‘themes’ (cf. ch. xviii). It was written, as a reference to 28 December as on a Friday shows, in 1599. The author serves a master at Hackney (A ij). Later editions of 1601 and 1602 are said to have been in the Harley collection, and there is a reprint by F. Ouvry (1875). His name is in the 1603 licence for the King’s men and in the Coronation list of 1604. In 1605 Augustine Phillips left him 20s. as his ‘fellow’. Collier’s statement that in the same year he and Kempe (q.v.) were in trouble for libelling aldermen cannot be verified. He is a King’s man on the title-page of his Two Maids of Moreclacke (1609), produced by the King’s Revels, and on the title-page and in the S. R. entry on 6 February 1609 of his Phantasma, the Italian Tailor and his Boy. This is a translation from Straparola and is dedicated to Lord and Lady Haddington. In it he claims to have been ‘writ down an ass in his time’ and refers to ‘his constableship’, from which it is inferred that he played Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing. Fleay, L. of S. 300, finds a pun on ‘armine’ (= wretch) in London Prodigal (c. 1603), v. i. 179, and suggests that Armin played Matthew Flowerdale. There is a clown Robin in Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), and a clown Grumball in If it be not Good (1610–12), but this was a play of Anne’s men. He is in the actor-list of Jonson’s Alchemist (1610). An epigram on ‘honest gamesome Robert Armin’ is in John Davies of Hereford’s Scourge of Folly (S.R. 8 October 1610). He is not in the actor-list of Jonson’s Catiline (1611), nor has any later notice of him been found. That Armin is the R. A. whose play The Valiant Welshman was published in 1615 is only a conjecture. He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays. It is possible that a woodcut on the title-page of the Two Maids (q.v.) gives his portrait.
ARTHUR, THOMAS. Interluders, 1528.
ATTEWELL (OTTEWELL, OTWELL), GEORGE. Strange’s, 1591; Queen’s, (?) 1595. ‘Mr Otwell’ lived in St. Saviour’s Close in 1599. He is perhaps more likely than the following to be the author or singer of ‘Mr Attowel’s Jigge: betweene Francis, a Gentleman; Richard, a farmer; and their wives’, printed in A. Clark, Shirburn Ballads, lxi (H. ii. 240; B. 147).
ATTWELL (OTTEWELL), HUGH. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613; Charles’s, 1616–21; ob. 25 September 1621.
AUGUSTEN (AGUSTEN), WILLIAM. A ‘player’, from whom Henslowe bought his ‘boy’ Bristow in 1597 (H. ii. 240).
AYNSWORTH, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried at St. Leonard’s 28 September 1581 (B. 153).