Very little can be gleaned of the company’s whereabouts during this year. They appeared at Court during the Christmas holidays, and received their usual reward. As the theatres in London were closed by order of the Privy Council from August to October, we find them touring the provinces: records of their visits are found at Bath, Bristol, Rye, Dover, and Marlborough. On the title page of the first quarto of “Romeo and Juliet, 1597,” it states that the play was acted with great applause by Lord Hunsdon’s men; this was the second Lord Hunsdon, who had not yet become Lord Chamberlain. Marston refers to a performance of “Romeo and Juliet” given at the Curtain in a book of Satires, dated 1598. This is the only reference to the company appearing in London during this year.
1598.
There only remain very scanty materials to help us in tracing the engagements of the company during this year. They played as usual before the Court during the Christmas holidays. Mr. J. T. Murray, in his admirable and exhaustive study of this company, is unable, owing to want of material, to give a list of their provincial engagements after the year 1597 until their visit to London and Scotland in 1601. As Mr. Murray’s work on the history of the London dramatic companies is the only one that gives a systematic account of the company’s touring programme, there is no higher authority or court of appeal. No doubt the company toured the provinces during these blank years, but all records are lost.
According to Halliwell-Phillipps, a very interesting performance was witnessed at the Curtain Theatre, namely, Ben Jonson’s comedy of “Everyman in his Humour,” in which Shakespeare himself acted the part of old Knowle. Ben Jonson, according to Aubrey, acted in his own play, but his name is omitted in the list of actors prefixed to the first quarto edition of the play. Aubrey, in his Lives, has the following paragraph:
“Jonson acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure playhouse somewhere in the suburbs, I think towards Shoreditch or Clerkenwell.” It is surprising that everyone writing about the stage in the seventeenth century should be so densely ignorant concerning the history of one of the chief playhouses during the Shakesperean era.
1599.
This year is an important one in the theatrical history of Shakespeare’s company as during this time the dispute of granting a further licence to the lessees of the Theatre occurred, which ended in the demolition of the Theatre and the erection of the Globe Theatre in Shoreditch.
A
Most pleasaunt and
excellent conceited Comedie,
of Syr Iohn Falstaffe, and the
merrie Wiues of Windsor.