DULANDT (DOWLAND?), ROBERT. Musician in Germany, 1623.
DUTTON, EDWARD. Admiral’s, 1597, with a boy ‘Dick’. Children of his were baptized at St. Saviour’s during 1600–2 (B. 326).
DUTTON, JOHN. Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1583, 1588–91. Lincoln’s Inn paid him for musicians in 1567–8 (Walker, i. 362). There are family records of a John Dutton at St. Botolph’s, who is called ‘player’ in the entry of a daughter Elizabeth’s baptism of 3 July 1586 (B. 328).
DUTTON, LAURENCE. Lane’s, 1571–2; Clinton’s, 1572–5; Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1589–91. It is curious that a John and a Laurence Dutton also appear as Court Messengers. I find a payment on 23 May 1578 to John for carrying letters to Antwerp (Pipe Office, Chamber Declared Account 541, m. 211v), and Laurence was paid for ‘sondry jorneys’ in 1561–2 (ibid. m. 39) and was during 1576–82 one of the regular Messengers of the Chamber in attendance on the Privy Council (Dasent, ix. 223, x. 223, 228, xi. 437, xii. 23, xiii. 135, 392, etc.). The ‘Edward’ Dutton of the last entry may be an error. In 1592 the Council (xxii. 493) recommended John the son of Laurence who had ‘of long tyme served her Majestie’ as Messenger, for admission as a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster. But this Laurence can hardly have been the actor, for he was acting as Messenger on 20 May 1580, while the affray for which Laurence the actor had been committed to the Marshalsea on 13 April was still uninquired into. Somewhat earlier a Thomas Dutton was employed as a post between Edward VI’s Council and Thomas Gresham in Antwerp, and was Gresham’s agent in Hamburg, c. 1571 (Burgon, Gresham, i. 109; ii. 421). It is easier again to conjecture than to prove a connexion between the actors and the house of Dutton, which had a hereditary jurisdiction over minstrelsy in Cheshire (cf. ch. ix), although in this the names John and Laurence both appear. It is perhaps an accident that two of the recorded visits of the Queen’s men to Lord Derby’s northern seats in 1588–90 synchronize with visits by a Mr. Dutton (Murray, ii. 296).
ECCLESTONE, WILLIAM, appears as a King’s man in the casts of The Alchemist (1610) and Catiline (1611). Mr. Fleay’s statement that he joined the company from the Queen’s Revels in 1609 rests upon a confusion with Field.[952] In 1611 he became a member of the Lady Elizabeth’s men, but left them in 1613 after playing in The Honest Man’s Fortune during that year. He returned to the King’s, and his name is found in the official lists of the company for 1619 and 1621 and in most of the casts of their plays, from Bonduca in 1613–14 to The Spanish Curate in 1622, as well as in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. Nicholas Tooley forgave him a debt in his will of 3 June 1623. As he is not in the Caroline patent of 1625, he had probably died or retired by that date. He may be the W. E. who writes commendatory verses to The Wild-goose Chase in 1652. If he is also the ‘William Eglestone’ whose marriage to Anne Jacob is recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 20 February 1603, he lived to be an old man.[953]
EDMONDS, JOHN. Globe lessee, 1612; Chamber of Bristol, 1618–19. The St. Saviour’s registers record the marriage of a John Edmonds to Margaret Goodyere on 22 February 1600 and the baptism of children of John Edmonds, ‘player’, from 6 January 1605 to 17 July 1615 (B. 334). Probably the two are not identical and the player is the John Edmans who seems to have married his fellow-legatee, Mary Clarke, of the will of Thomas Pope (q.v.) in 1604.
EDWARDES, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1561–6, and dramatist.
EICHELIN. Germany, 1604.
ELDERTON, WILLIAM. One Elderton, dressed as a fool, played the part of one of the Lord of Misrule’s sons in George Ferrers’s Christmas revel of 1552–3 (Feuillerat, Edw. and Mary, 120; cf. Mediaeval Stage, i. 407). Conjecture may identify him with the Elderton who brought the Eton boys to Court on 6 January 1573 and the William Elderton who brought the Westminster boys on 1 January 1574, and with the rhyming William Elderton, some of whose ballads are preserved and reprinted in Collier, Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies (1842, Percy Soc.), 25, 45; H. Huth, Ancient Ballads and Broadsides (1867, Philobiblon Soc.); and H. L. Collman, Ballads and Broadsides (1912, Roxburghe Club); or recorded, with ballads against him, in the Stationers’ Register (Arber, i. 179, 180, 181, 199, 384, 403, 439; ii. 338, 363, 369, 388, 396, 399; cf. v. lxxvi), while his ‘ale-crammed nose’ and ‘rymes lying a steepe in ale’ are subject for much humour among the pamphleteers (Lyly, iii. 398; Nashe, i. 197, 256, 280; iii. 123, 133, 177, 354). Stowe (Survey, i. 272) makes him an attorney in the sheriff’s courts at the Guildhall about 1568, but he can hardly be the ‘master Elderton’ who sat as a justice at the Guildhall in a coining case of 1562 (Machyn, 290). He appears to have been dead by 1592 (Harvey, i. 163; Nashe, i. 280). A recent paper on Elderton by H. E. Rollins is in S. P. xvii (1920), 199.
ENGLISH, JOHN. Interluders, 1494–1531.