William Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor. Malone recorded in 1780 a stage tradition ‘that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter’s attendant’ or call-boy. His intellectual capacity and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers were probably soon recognised, and thenceforth his promotion was assured.
The acting companies.
Shakespeare’s earliest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his histrionic fame, he remained a prominent member of the actor’s profession till near the end of his life. By an Act of Parliament of 1571 (14 Eliz. cap. 2), which was re-enacted in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4), players were under the necessity of procuring a license to pursue their calling from a peer of the realm or ‘personage of higher degree;’ otherwise they were adjudged to be of the status of rogues and vagabonds. The Queen herself and many Elizabethan peers were liberal in the exercise of their licensing powers, and few actors failed to secure a statutory license, which gave them a rank of respectability, and relieved them of all risk of identification with vagrants or ‘sturdy beggars.’ From an early period in Elizabeth’s reign licensed actors were organised into permanent companies. In 1587 and following years, besides three companies of duly licensed boy-actors that were formed from the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Chapel
Royal and from Westminster scholars, there were in London at least six companies of fully licensed adult actors; five of these were called after the noblemen to whom their members respectively owed their licenses (viz. the Earls of Leicester, Oxford, Sussex, and Worcester, and the Lord Admiral, Charles, lord Howard of Effingham), and one of them whose actors derived their license from the Queen was called the Queen’s Company.
The Lord Chamberlain’s company.
The patron’s functions in relation to the companies seem to have been mainly confined to the grant or renewal of the actors’ licenses. Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each company’s history. But there seems no doubt that the most influential of the companies named—that under the nominal patronage of the Earl of Leicester—passed on his death in September 1588 to the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on September 25, 1592. When the Earl of Derby died on April 16, 1594, his place as patron and licenser was successively filled by Henry Carey, first lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain (d. July 23, 1596), and by his son and heir, George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became Lord Chamberlain in March 1597. After King James’s succession in May 1603 the company was promoted to be the King’s players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it fully maintained the supremacy
which, under its successive titles, it had already long enjoyed.
A member of the Lord Chamberlain’s.
It is fair to infer that this was the company that Shakespeare originally joined and adhered to through life. Documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it in December 1594; in May, 1603 he was one of its leaders. Four of its chief members—Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic actor of the day, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips were among Shakespeare’s lifelong friends. Under this company’s auspices, moreover, Shakespeare’s plays first saw the light. Only two of the plays claimed for him—‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘3 Henry VI’—seem to have been performed by other companies (the Earl of Sussex’s men in the one case, and the Earl of Pembroke’s in the other).