James was about sixty on 16 February 1591 (Wallace, 61) and was therefore born in 1530–1. He was ‘by occupacion a joyner and reaping but a small lyving by the same, gave it over and became a commen player in playes’ (Wallace, 141). He was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1576, and apparently continued a ‘fellow’ of this or some other company for a year or two after he established the Theatre in 1576 (Wallace, 142). In this year he was a poor man, and of small credit, not worth above 100 marks (Wallace, 134, 141, 153), but he had enlisted the capital of John Brayne, whose sister Ellen he had married (Wallace, 40, 139). His business history thereafter is bound up with that of the Theatre (q.v.) and of the Blackfriars, which he planned, but probably never used, during the last years of his life. Cuthbert Burbadge says of him (Blackfriars Sharers Papers, 1635) that he ‘was the first builder of playhowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player’. He was described as ‘joyner’ in the lease of the Theatre site in 1576, but in later years usually as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’. Presumably he went to live in Shoreditch in 1576, as entries for his family then begin in the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139). They testify to the baptism (17 March 1576) of a daughter Alice, mentioned as Alice Walker in the will of Nicholas Tooley (q.v.) in 1623, and the burial (18 August 1582) of a daughter Joan. Another daughter, Helen, was buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 15 December 1595 (Bodl.). Besides Alice and Helen he had in 1588 (Wallace, 39) two sons, Cuthbert and Richard, who would both have been born before 1576. James himself was buried at Shoreditch on 2 February 1597 and his widow on 8 May 1613. The registers generally give the family residence as ‘Halliwell Street’, and the ‘Halliwell’ which appears in 1597 and 1601 is perhaps an accidental variant. But the lawsuits suggest that James had built himself a house in the old inner cloister yard of the priory, which lay a little north of Halliwell Street, if that is the same as Holywell Lane (Wallace, 232, 236). They also represent him as a man of violent temper and not over-honest, while an independent record (App. D, No. lxxiv) refers to him as ‘a stubburne fellow’. Before his death he seems to have made over his interest in the Blackfriars to his son Richard, while that in the Theatre had passed by redemption of a mortgage to Cuthbert (Wallace, 55, 73, 108, 145, 278).
Cuthbert Burbadge, the elder son of James, was not an actor, although as holder of the leases of the Theatre and afterwards of the Globe (q.v.) he was concerned during the greater part of his life with theatrical management. On 16 February 1591 he was servant to Walter Cope, gentleman usher to Lord Burghley. He was then twenty-four, and must have been born in 1566–7. He was then probably living in the Strand (Stopes, 152), but the subsidy rolls for 1597 (Stopes, 195) show him as assessed at 10s. 8d. in Holywell Street, and the registers of St. Leonard’s have the records of his children, Walter (bapt. 22 June 1595), James (bur. 15 July 1597), and Elizabeth (bapt. 30 December 1601). Of these only Elizabeth, the wife first of Amias Maxey and secondly of George Bingley, was alive in 1634 and her son Amias had been adopted by his grandfather. Cuthbert himself was buried at Shoreditch on 17 September 1636, and his widow Elizabeth, daughter of John Cox, on 1 October 1636 (Stopes, 134, 140). His friendship with members of the King’s company is commemorated by notices in the wills of William Sly (1608), Richard Cowley (1618), and Nicholas Tooley, who died in his house in 1623. Collier (iii. 285) identified him with Cuthbert Burby the stationer, but Burby was in fact the son of Edmund Burby of Beds., husbandman (Arber, ii. 127). Possibly, however, the families were related, since Burby’s name is given at least once in the Stationers’ Register (Arber, ii. 612) as ‘Burbidge’.
BURBADGE, RICHARD, makes his first appearance, picturesquely enough, in the brawl at the Theatre which followed upon the Chancery Order of 13 November 1590, restoring a moiety of the profits of the house to the widow Brayne (cf. p. 392). John Alleyn deposed (Wallace, 101) that he ‘found the foresaid Ry. Burbage the yongest sone of the said James Burbage there, wt a broome staff in his hand, of whom when this deponente asked what sturre was there, he answered in laughing phrase hew they come for a moytie. But quod he (holding vppe the said broomes staff) I haue, I think, deliuered him a moytie with this & sent them packing.’ Nicholas Bishop (Wallace, 98, 115), one of Mrs. Brayne’s agents, adds the confirmatory detail that ‘the said Ry. Burbage scornfully & disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose, sayd, that yf he delt in the matter, he wold beate him also, and did chalendge the field of him at that tyme’. Very possibly Richard was then playing with the Admiral’s men at the Theatre. His exact age is unknown, but he was younger than Cuthbert, born in 1566–7, and as Cuthbert, long after, spoke of the ‘35 yeeres paines, cost, and labour’ out of which his brother ‘made meanes to leave his wife and children some estate’ in 1619 (Sharers Papers), it may perhaps be inferred that his histrionic career began as early as 1584. The ‘plot’ of The Dead Man’s Fortune, wherein the doubtful direction (cf. p. 125) ‘Burbage a messenger’ suggests that he played a minor part, may belong to a performance by the Admiral’s c. 1590. It is a little more difficult to suppose that at a date when the Queen’s men were still active the Admiral’s or Strange’s had already acquired Tarlton’s Seven Deadly Sins, in the ‘plot’ of which ‘R. Burbadg’ is cast for the important characters of Gorboduc and Terens. But perhaps it is even less probable that, after the breach of the Admiral’s with his father in 1591, he took part in the performances of the same play by the amalgamated Admiral’s and Strange’s men at the Rose in 1592. His name does not appear amongst those of the Strange’s men who were travelling in 1593. But when the amalgamation broke up, and the Chamberlain’s company was formed, with some of its elements as a nucleus, in 1594, he joined that company, and became a prominent member, often acting as its representative or payee, both before and after its metamorphosis into the King’s men, and to the end of his own life. His name is constant in its lists (cf. ch. xiii), and his personal relations with his fellows are reflected in the wills of Augustine Phillips in 1605, Shakespeare in 1616, and Nicholas Tooley, whose ‘master’ he had been, in 1623. It would appear that in the somewhat irregular disposition of James Burbadge’s theatrical interests the Blackfriars freehold fell primarily to Richard. The leases of 1608 were made by him as lessor to his brother and other members of the King’s men’s syndicate as lessees. This, however, was doubtless a mere family arrangement, for Cuthbert spoke of the Blackfriars in 1635 as ‘our inheritance’, and the two brothers shared in the supplementary transactions which rounded off the original purchase (cf. ch. xvii). At the Globe, on the other hand, Cuthbert and Richard held in common a moiety of the housekeepers’ interest under the lease from Nicholas Brend (cf. ch. xvi). They continued to live as close neighbours in Halliwell Street, Shoreditch, where they shared the misfortune of having their houses burgled in 1615 (Jeaffreson, ii. 108) and where the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139) record Richard’s children: Richard (bur. 16 August 1607), Julia or Juliet (bapt. 2 January 1603, bur. 12 September 1608), Frances (bapt. 16 September and bur. 19 September 1604), Anne (bapt. 8 August 1607), Winifred (bapt. 10 October 1613, bur. 14 October 1616), a second Julia (bapt. 26 December 1614, bur. 15 August 1615), William (bapt. 6 November 1616), and a posthumous Sara (bapt. 5 August 1619, bur. 29 April 1625). ‘Richard Burbadge, player’ was himself buried on 16 March 1619. He had died, not as Camden records in his Annals on 9 March, but on 13 March, after making the day before a nuncupative will (Collier, iii. 293), witnessed by his brother and by Nicholas Tooley and Richard Robinson of the King’s men, in which he left his wife Winifred sole executrix. She subsequently married Richard Robinson, and was still alive, as was Burbadge’s son William, in 1635 (Sharers Papers). According to the gossip of the day he left ‘better than £300 land to his heirs’ (Collier, iii. 297).
Burbadge had a high reputation as a player, both in life and after death. A note of 13 March 1602 by John Manningham (Diary, 39) records how his impersonation of Richard III touched the heart of a citizen’s wife, and how Shakespeare prevented him at a resultant assignation. John Davies of Hereford coupled him with Shakespeare in 1603 (Microcosmos) among players whom he loved ‘for painting, poesie’, and in 1609 (Civile Warres of Death and Fortune) amongst those whom Fortune ‘guerdond not, to their desarts’. He is introduced in propria persona into 2 Return from Parnassus (1602) and into Marston’s induction to The Malcontent (1604). Probably he is the ‘one man’ of the London stage with whom the player in Ratseis Ghost (1605; cf. ch. xviii) is advised ‘to play Hamlet for a wager’. Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair (1614), v. iii, makes Cokes ask the master of the puppets, ‘which is your Burbage now?... your best Actor. Your Field?’ He was apparently the model for the Character of an Actor in the Characters of 1615 (App. C, No. lxi). And other evidences of his fame can be traced down to Restoration days in Richard Corbet’s Iter Boreale, in Sir Richard Baker’s Chronicle and Theatrum Redivivum, and in Richard Flecknoe’s Short Discourse of the English Stage and his Euterpe Restored (cf. Collier, iii. 279; Stopes, 121; Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, N.S.S., 128, 250).
Shortly after Burbadge’s death, on 20 May 1619, the Earl of Pembroke wrote to Lord Doncaster in Germany of a great supper given the same night by the Duke of Lennox to the French ambassador, and adds that the company were now at the play, ‘which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg’ (E. J. L. Scott in Athenaeum (1882), i. 103). Several epitaphs and elegies upon Burbadge are preserved. The shortest—‘Exit Burbadge’—was printed in Camden’s Remaines (1674), 541. Another is by Middleton (Collier, iii. 280, 296). A third, which begins
Some skillfull limner helpe mee, yf not soe,
Some sad tragedian, to expresse my woe,
has been the subject of much controversy (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 88; C. M. Ingleby, The Elegy on Burbadge, in Shakespeare, the Man and the Book, ii. 169). It exists in two versions, one of 86 lines, the other of 124 lines. Of the shorter version several undoubtedly genuine manuscripts are known, and it is probably only by accident that one of these omits ll. 2–5 of the following passage, which is given completely by all the rest:
Hee’s gone & with him what a world are dead,
Which he reuiud, to be reuiued soe.