Lanterne. What meane you by that, Sir?
Cokes. Your best Actor. Your Field?
He seems to have been suspected by the company of taking bribes from Henslowe to connive at transactions contrary to their interest (Henslowe Papers, 88). Certainly he was in financial straits and on more than one occasion appealed to Henslowe to secure his release from an arrest (Henslowe Papers, 66, 67). Perhaps it was as a result of this friction with his fellows that he abandoned their amalgamation with Prince Charles’s men in 1615. Instead he joined, at or about this date, the King’s men, and appears as one in the actor-lists of The Loyal Subject, The Knight of Malta, The Queen of Corinth, and The Mad Lover. It must, I think, have been by a slip that Cuthbert Burbadge, in the Sharers Papers of 1635, spoke of him as joining the King’s with Ostler and Underwood in 1608 or 1609. It seems probable that Field brought with him to the King’s a share of the plays which had formed the repertory of the joint Lady Elizabeth’s and Queen’s Revels, including Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, in which a King’s prologue vaunts his success as Bussy. He did not stay with the company very long, for though he is in the patent of 27 March and the livery list of 19 May 1619, he is replaced by John Rice in the livery list of 7 April 1621. And as he does not appear and Rice does appear amongst the actors named in the stage-directions to Sir John von Olden Barnevelt in August 1619, it is probable that he had left in the course of the summer (M. L. R. iv. 395). If so, his departure synchronizes with a scandal which attached itself to his name. His moral character was hardly becoming to the son of a preacher. More than one manuscript commonplace book (e. g. Ashm. MS. 47, f. 49, which appears from the spelling of the name to be a late copy) contains an epigram with some such heading as On Nathaniell Feild suspected for too much familiarity with his Mris Lady May. And on 5 June 1619 Sir William Trumbull wrote from Brussels to Lord Hay (E. J. L. Scott in Athenaeum (1882), i. 103) that he was told that the Earl of Argyll had paid for the nursing of a child, ‘which the world sayes is daughter to my lady and N. Feild the Player’. Lady Argyll was Anne, daughter of Sir William Cornwallis of Brome. Field’s later life is obscure. There is an unimportant jest about him in John Taylor’s Wit and Mirth (1629). He was married to a wife Anne, and had children baptized and buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, during 1619–25. If another epigram, printed by Collier, iii. 437, can be trusted, he very properly suffered from jealousy. In relevant register entries the name is given as Nathan. The Blackfriars registers give children both of Nathan and of Nathaniel Field, and on 20 February 1633 occurs the burial of Nathaniel Field, whom, if the entry does not indicate that the confusion of persons had already begun, we are bound to take to be the bookseller. There is no reason why both brothers should not have resided in Blackfriars.
Field was dramatist, as well as actor. In addition to the two plays published under his single name, he collaborated with Massinger in The Fatal Dowry, which was a King’s play and not likely, therefore, to fall outside the dates 1616–19. And as the Henslowe correspondence (Henslowe Papers, 65, 84) show him as collaborating also with Fletcher, Massinger, and Daborne for the Lady Elizabeth’s, he has been conjectured as a possible sharer in the authorship of several of the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher series. He also, about the time of his joining the King’s, wrote a defence of the stage, in the form of a remonstrance to Mr. Sutton, a preacher of St. Mary Overies (App. C, No. lxiii). A portrait of Field is at Dulwich.
FLETCHER, LAWRENCE. Scotland, 1595, 1599, 1601; Admiral’s (?), 1596; King’s, 1603. Although included as a King’s man in the royal patent, there is no reason to suppose that Fletcher ever joined the company acting at the Globe; the absence of his name from the actor-list in the Shakespeare F1 of 1623 is strong evidence that he did not. He lived in St. Saviour’s, where he had a homonym, a victualler, who survived him. One of the two is shown by the token-books as housed in Hunt’s Rents, Maid Lane, during 1605–7; probably this was the actor, who was buried on 12 September 1608. The description ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a man: in the church’ of the register is amplified in a fee-book to ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a player, the King’s servant, buried in the church, with an afternoon’s knell of the great bell, 20s.’ (Collier, Memoirs of the Actors1, x; Rendle, Bankside, xxvii).
FLOWER. Admiral’s (?), c. 1600.
FOSTER, ALEXANDER. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1618; Charles’s, 1616.
FREYERBOTT, BARTHOLOMEUS. Germany, 1615.
FRITH, MOLL. It appears to be suggested in the Epilogue to The Roaring Girl (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker) that this lady was to appear in person on the Fortune stage, c. 1610.
FROST, JOHN. Chapel, 1601.