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Shakespeare on the Record and the Stages of 1594: Newington Butts, the Theatre, Greenwich Palace, and Gray’s Inn

Plague

The plague of 1593/4 brought turmoil to the theatre industry. It closed off many venues for playing, and not only in London. All the major companies either went out of business or were reduced to shadows of their former selves, clearly not fit to perform at court. We have already marked the fates of the Queen’s Men and Strange’s/Derby’s Men (pp. 49–50; 65). The fates of others seem to be traced in Titus Andronicus’s 1594 claim that “it was played by the Right Honourable the Earl of Derby, Earl of Pembroke and Earl of Sussex their servants.” There has been debate over whether this means that the survivors of these three companies collaborated to present it or whether the play was passed from one to the next as they successively failed. But either scenario speaks of some desperation.

The Privy Council and the London authorities were generally in agreement about the danger of the plague and the need to close playhouses there when deaths rose above a certain number. In the 1590s the agreed figure seems to have been thirty deaths a week reported from the combined parishes of London. The draft of a licence for Queen Anne’s Men, from around 1604, speaks of them being allowed to play only “when the infection of the plague shall decrease to the number of thirty weekly within our city of London and the liberties thereof” (ES, 2: 230). In later documents, such as the King’s Men’s patent of 1619, the figure is raised to forty. In years like 1593/4 (1603, 1610, and 1625 were similar) the numbers far exceeded that: in a single week in August 1625 3,659 deaths of the plague were registered (Bentley, 1984, 182).

The first hint of final remission of the plague in 1594 is to be found in Henslowe’s Diary, in a section which begins “In the name of God, Amen. Beginning at Newington my Lord Admiral’s Men & my Lord Chamberlain’s Men. As followeth” (see Figure 3.1) He then records ten performances between June 3 and 13 (Henslowe, 21–2). It is uncertain whether the two companies combined for these performances, or whether they played alternately. But they certainly put on plays which would later be identified with the separate companies – Marlowe’s Jew of Malta with the Admiral’s Men and Titus Andronicus with the Chamberlain’s. Two other titles – Hamlet and The Taming of A Shrew – are also intriguing, in view of plays subsequently associated with Shakespeare.

Figure 3.1 Digital reproduction of a page in Philip Henslowe’s Diary.

Source: Dulwich College, MS VII f9r, © David Cooper.

Newington Butts is one of the more obscure playhouses of the era. It was first built by Jerome Savage, a leading player with the Earl of Warwick’s Men, about the same time that James Burbage was building the Theatre (Ingram, 1992, 163–81). As Burbage was, at least in part, providing a London base to Leicester’s Men, Savage was presumably aiming to do the same for Warwick’s. But they failed to flourish after the defection of the Dutton brothers (see p. 34); and the playhouse similarly did poor trade “by reason of the tediousness of the way,” it was said in 1591/2, “and that of long time plays have not there been used on working days” (ES, 2: 405).

The village of Newington was indeed one mile south of London Bridge, which was itself a similar distance from the main residential areas of the city. And it could hardly have been very profitable if it normally only opened on holidays. The work‐week was six days, but playing was (after 1579) at least notionally forbidden on Sundays – the one day when most working people would otherwise have been free to go.¹ Festival holidays included the Twelve Days of Christmas, Plough Monday, Candlemas, Shrove Tuesday, the four quarter days, May Day, and Halloween –about three a month in the Anglican Church calendar, averaged over the year. Henslowe’s records make it quite plain that the Rose (and doubtless all the other successful theatres) operated on most days of the working week, doubtless attracting those who did not have to work, such as students at the Inns of Court, but also some workers and apprentices on afternoons when they really should have been at their trade.² The likeliest reason for the choice of Newington Butts as the first venue for what were in fact two new companies is that it was the furthest playhouse from the city – a prudent first step as the plague at long last receded.

Duopoly

But it lasted only briefly and by the middle of June the Admiral’s Men moved to the Rose and the Chamberlain’s Men to the Theatre. This was the beginning of what has come to be called the duopoly of these two companies in London playing. How exactly it came about is a matter for some debate. Andrew Gurr has argued most vigorously that it was engineered by the Privy Council – most specifically Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon and his son‐in‐law, Lord Admiral Howard – to continue the policy first evident in the creation of the Queen’s Men:

In effect, the Lord Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain worked together to set up a pair of new companies to replace the now divided Queen’s Men. Setting up two companies was a better guarantee for the supply of the Queen’s plays each Christmas than one had been. They drew the player membership from some of the major companies which had recently lost their patrons. They based the new groupings on the two chief impresarios who owned playhouses in the suburbs, James Burbage and Philip Henslowe, and their heirs, Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn. They resolved the chronic problem of relations with the city by banning all playing from city inns, and instead specified as the only authorized playing places Henslowe’s Rose and Burbage’s Theatre. Henceforth the companies were denied any access to playing within the Lord Mayor’s bailiwick.

(Gurr 2002, 236–7; see also Gurr, 1996, chapter 4)

But we do not have the documentation for such Privy Council action as we do for the creation of the Queen’s Men, and there have been several objections to the scenario Gurr outlines. Roslyn Knutson, for example, has argued that the two companies emerged this way by a process of friendly commercial rivalry rather than political fiat (2001, 8–9). And Holger Schott Syme has objected that Gurr builds inferences (such as that popularity at court equates with popularity in the public playhouses, or that it was specific policy to restrict the number of settled London companies to two) for which there is simply no evidence (2010). Gurr in effect argues from outcomes. It is certainly the case that these were the only two companies invited to perform at court in the seasons from 1594/5 to 1598/9 and they remained by some margin the dominant figures there until the end of the reign. It is less certain that the Rose and the Theatre were explicitly the only playing places to be allowed; the Curtain remained available and in 1595 Francis Langley, a goldsmith, built the Swan some distance downriver from the Rose and with others converted the Boar’s Head Inn in Whitechapel into a true theatre in 1598/9 (see Figure 3.2). He presumably would not have done this if there was no question of their use by actors. On the other hand, the Swan project went seriously awry in 1597 and the Boar’s Head was only successful for a short time. Other companies clearly did play in London from time to time, but it took serious patronage to allow them to settle there for prolonged periods or to gain access to court. On the question of playing in the city inns (the Boar’s Head was outside the city): if there was an agreement with the city authorities to end this in 1594 Hunsdon himself broke it as early as that October with a request for his Lord Chamberlain’s Men to be allowed to use the Cross Keys that winter (p. 114). Most scholars agree that the practice had indeed ceased by 1596, but even that has been disputed (Menzer, 2006b).

Figure 3.2 A map showing the London theatres of Shakespeare’s day.

Source: First published in Shakespeare’s Playhouses, J. Q. Adams (1917).

I will add this one observation to the controversy, which I have not seen voiced elsewhere. At some point in the 1590s, it became normal for plays in public playhouses to start at 2 p.m. Thomas Platter confirms this in 1599: “And thus every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in … London two and sometimes three comedies are performed at separate places wherewith folk make merry together” (EPF, 413). It is not clear if this included those festival holy‐days which we noticed in respect of Newington Butts.³ They had for years been a source of friction in negotiations between the Privy Council and the City of London authorities. On these days (and perhaps others) evensong was observed, between 2 p.m. and perhaps 4 p.m., and the Privy Council had respected a condition that playing should not clash with it. In the 1574 royal patent that Leicester’s Men received, for example, it was an express condition that they should not play “in the time of common prayer” (ES, 2: 88).

In 1582 the Privy Council tried to argue with the Lord Mayor that playing should be allowed “after evening prayer, as long as the season of the year may permit” (ES, 4: 288; my emphasis). The Lord Mayor, however, replied that this could “very hardly be done. For though they begin not their plays till after evening prayer, yet all the time of the afternoon before they take in hearers and fill the place with such as be thereby absent from serving God at Church … if for remedy hereof I should also restrain the letting in of the people till after service in the Church, it would drive the action of their plays into very inconvenient time of night …” (ibid.). In 1584 the Queen’s Men petitioned the Common Council of London for greater freedom to perform in the City, citing in turn the inconvenience of playing into the night. This drew sarcasm when the Council explained their response to the Privy Council:

If in winter the dark do carry inconvenience, and the short time of day after evening prayer do leave them no leisure, and foulness of season do hinder the passage into the fields to plays, the remedy is ill‐conceived to bring them into London, but the true remedy is to leave of that unnecessary expense of time, whereunto God himself giveth so many impediments. (ES, 4: 301)

We hear no more of this quarrel in the 1590s. And the first we hear of 2 p.m. as a regular start time for playing is that 1594 letter, mentioned above, in which Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon asked permission for his new company of players to perform at the Cross Keys, which stipulated that “where heretofore they began not their plays till towards four o’clock, they will now begin at two and have done between four and five” (ES, 4: 316). It is not clear if the previous start time of 4 p.m. applied only to holy‐days, in order to avoid evensong, but Hunsdon makes no discrimination at all – as if the 2 p.m. start will apply in all cases, in which case performances would be in direct conflict with evensong. But they would end in time to avoid what all parties recognized as a major inconvenience, for players, audiences, and authorities alike – performances that ran on into darkness. Might this speak to some kind of negotiated settlement between the Privy Council and the City fathers?⁴

Shakespeare in the Records

On March 15,1595 William Shakespeare finally entered the written record as the member of an acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The Treasurer of the Chamber’s Accounts record: “To William Kemp, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain, upon the Council’s warrant … for two several comedies or interludes showed by them before her Majesty in Christmas time last past, viz. upon St. Stephen’s Day [26 December] and Innocents” Day [28 December] £13 6s. 8d. and by way of her Majesty’s reward £6 13s. and 4d.” (ES, 4: 164–5). Other than the inclusion of Shakespeare’s name this is a very typical entry. It was normal that a senior member or members of the company, trusted by their colleagues, would be paid for performances at court. In later years the most regular payee was John Heminge, who emerged over time as a kind of company manager. But in this first year they sent Kemp, the most famous living clown; Burbage was not yet the great tragedian he was to become, but was presumably there because he represented the company’s association with its now‐normal London home, the Theatre; and Shakespeare’s presence suggests that he had acquired some stature in his earlier company associations, even though we cannot trace them in the records.

The amounts they received add up to £10 per performance, the normal court payment throughout the period. The division of the sums into a fee and the Queen’s “reward” was a formality, but a reminder that performance at court was not simply a commercial activity. The players were “servants” of a leading aristocrat (and indeed Elizabeth’s first cousin) and they came to court – very much as they would come to another great house or a city guildhall – in the spirit of a gift‐offering from their patron to their sovereign. So the Queen not only paid them for their pains, but awarded them a gratuity – a gift‐offering of her own – in addition. In many ways this sums up the midway status of Elizabethan players between being lowly figures in a traditional, deferential, hierarchical class system (and “vagabonds” if they strayed outside it) and commercial entrepreneurs, a lucky few of whom made very substantial wealth by skill and shrewd investment.

It was clearly the case that those lucky enough to be allowed to play regularly in London made most of their money out of playing in their theatres; the court payments could never have been more than a fraction of their total income (Dutton, 2016, 13–14). On the other hand, they were well aware that regular London playing was a privilege only made possible by the court’s authority. They needed each other. Besides, court performances took place at night, after supper, starting usually around 9 p.m.; in most cases the company would have given one of their usual performances at the Theatre in the afternoon and then made their way to court (another virtue of being “done between four and five”). This was an opportunity to make extra money that would not otherwise be available.

These Chamber Accounts tell us the dates of performances but not what was played. Between 1594 and the Queen’s death in 1603 the only plays we know with certainty that Shakespeare’s company put on at court (because title pages of early editions tell us) are Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor. But even there we do not know on which dates. We can make shrewd guesses about other titles and particular dates, but this is another of those glasses in which we see darkly. In the 1595 record we may not even be able to trust the Chamber accounts about one of the dates. On the evening of December 28, 1594, as we shall see, the Chamberlain’s Men gave a performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn, one of the Inns of Court or law schools in London; it is unlikely that they played twice in the same evening in venues so far apart (the court was then resident in Greenwich, some five miles south of the city). Besides, the Admiral’s Men are also credited in the accounts with appearing at court on that date, and while it was not unknown for two companies to appear on the same evening it was not common. So the Chamberlain’s Men probably appeared on the 27th. The St. Stephen’s Day date, however, is almost certainly correct. In the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign that was invariably the first day of the Revels season (which extended intermittently through Candlemas to Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday), and from 1595 the Chamberlain’s Men occupied that opening slot until the end of her reign. That first year the Admiral’s Men received payment for three appearances (one of their payees was Edward Alleyn), the Chamberlain’s only two. But the proportions of court performances thereafter almost always favored Shakespeare’s company.

Four Playing Places

After finding no trace of Shakespeare in earlier records we suddenly can place him with some precision in five distinct playing‐places in 1594, assuming that he was part of the Chamberlain’s Men from the company’s inception: Newington Butts; the Theatre; the Cross Keys inn; the court at Greenwich; and Gray’s Inn. I have already covered all that we usefully know about Newington Butts (p. 77) and will turn to the other four in order.

But first, a word of caution. I want to remind you that my Introduction devoted many words telling you how much we do not know about Elizabethan playing spaces. This is where that rubber touches the road. We think of a typical playhouse as having, like “Shakespeare’s Globe” in Southwark, a “heavens” and supporting pillars, a “hell” beneath the stage, trapdoors, a discovery space, lords’ rooms, descent machinery, and other familiar furniture. But we can only know whether any particular playhouse had any or all of these features – or had them from when it was first built – if evidence fortuitously survives: in building contracts, in records left by visitors (usually foreigners), in the texts of plays performed there (remembering always that if a play was printed long after its earliest performances, it might reflect staging in another place).

In the search for the historical truth about such matters we are in fact often forced to fall back on “best‐guesses,” hoping that something we can identify in one playhouse was common to them all or that something true in 1594 was still true in 1609. As I make my way through the public playhouses which Shakespeare is known to have used (after his presumed early experience at the Rose) – the Theatre, the Curtain and the Globe – and the one private playhouse for which he wrote, the Blackfriars, I shall address all of these issues as and when the evidence accumulates to a credible pitch, relying as much as I can on the plays likely to have been played in those venues. I can, however, immediately address the distinction between “public” and “private” playhouses, lest these terms give rise to misconceptions.

They were all in fact “public,” in the sense that anyone who had the money could pay to see a play there. But the “private” playhouses charged considerably more for entrance – the minimum for the Blackfriars was 6d., against 1d. for the Globe – so some of the key distinctions were social and economic. But there were also very distinct differences in the designs of their theatrical spaces. The “public” playhouses were what we commonly think of as the Elizabethan theatres, amphitheaters largely open to the elements, whose design seems to have owed something both to animal‐baiting houses and galleried inn‐yards, such as that in Norwich where we observed the Queen’s Men. The “private” playhouses were enclosed auditoria, perhaps more appropriately known as hall theatres, “built in large rooms on the model of the banqueting halls in royal palaces and great houses where plays were provided for banqueting guests” – the kinds of great houses Shakespeare would have visited with any major troupe touring the country in the 1580s (Gurr, 2004b, 14). The Blackfriars theatre in Staunton, Virginia, and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse erected close to “Shakespeare’s Globe” both approximate such a theatre, while the Prescot theatre planned by Shakespeare North on Merseyside is to be based on one, specifically the 1629 design by Inigo Jones for the Cockpit‐in‐Court theatre in Whitehall palace (1629). It was around the time the boy companies were revived in 1599/1600 – Paul’s boys and the Children of the Chapel – that a kind of snobbish antagonism grew up in the use of “public” and “private” designations. The adult companies exclusively used “public” playhouses at this time, while the boys always performed in their “private” halls. But that distinction disappeared within a decade. The boy companies virtually went out of business, and Shakespeare’s company found itself using both a public and a private playhouse. But their first resident base in London was the Theatre.

The Theatre

Why did Burbage and Brayne choose to locate the Theatre where they did in 1576? They built it in part of the dissolved priory of Holywell in Shoreditch, five hundred yards beyond the north‐east wall of the City, across Finsbury Fields – largely open land at that time.⁵ We have already seen that when Philip Henslowe first built a playhouse, some eleven years later, he did so in the Liberty of Clink on the Bankside – diametrically the opposite side of London (p. 12). The key common feature of the two locations – and those of every new playhouse down to the Civil War of the 1640s – is that they fell outside the jurisdiction of the City of London authorities: the Lord Mayor, the Court of Aldermen, and the Common Council.

It seems very likely that what settled the minds of Burbage, Brayne, Henslowe, and all other builders of playhouses against sites within the City was an Act of the Common Council of December 6, 1574; this in turn was clearly a response to the royal patent issued to Leicester’s Men earlier that year. That patent gave certain players royal authority to perform “as well within our City of London and liberties of the same, as also within the liberties and freedoms of any our cities, towns, boroughs etc. … without any your lets, hindrance or molestation” (EPF, 206). It also required that their plays should be “seen and allowed” by the Master of the Revels.

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Box 3.1 Masters of the Revels

The Masters of the Revels were the most important officials with whom the actors of Shakespeare’s day had to conduct business on a regular basis. They had two functions: one was to ensure that entertainment of suitable quality was available to the royal court, especially during the midwinter Revels season that ran from Christmas (or, under James I, often as early as November 1, All Saints) until Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and Lent; his other function was to censor and licence all plays that were to be performed in public.

There had been Masters of the Revels under all the Tudor monarchs, who were mainly concerned with helping the court to entertain itself, aided by an office staff which provided costumes and stage shows, supplying any necessary scenery, properties and lighting (Streitberger, 2016). The emphasis changed somewhat in 1579 when Edmund Tilney was appointed to the position. Expenses in the Revels Office had been running out of control and it was key to his remit that they be reined in. His main strategy for achieving this was to rely far less on expensive masques and shows staged by the courtiers themselves and to hire in the most successful professional players on a much more regular basis than hitherto. This was doubtless aided by the fact that leading troupes like the Earl of Leicester’s and Earl of Warwick’s Men now had London bases (the Theatre, Newington Butts), where they could build up their own stock of costumes and properties, relieving the Revels Office of the need to supply them.

In 1581 Tilney was given a Special Commission which empowered him to compel workmen to help with court theatricals at fixed wages and to require any players he saw fit to come and rehearse their repertory before him. So in his annual claim for attendance fees at court (this is for 1587/88) Tilney would claim for “attending, making choice, perusing, reforming & altering of such plays, comedies, masques and inventions as were prepared, set forth & presented before her Majesty” (Feuillerat, 1908, 379). And in his Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood recalled how the players used to visit the old Palace of St John in Clerkenwell where Tilney lodged and kept “the office of the Revels, where our court plays have been in late days yearly rehearsed, perfected, and corrected before they come to the public view of the prince and the nobility” (E1v; 1607/8; printed 1612).⁶

By 1594 Tilney had been in office for fifteen years and knew more about London theatre than anyone else alive. He had been the one who enacted the Privy Council’s order for the creation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 and he had overseen a whole generation of playwrights – notably John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Kyd – who were either dead or had given up playwrighting by this date. He may well have had a hand in the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, as he had the Queen’s Men, but no record of this survives. He was certainly responsible, however, for ensuring that they performed at court every year for the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, never less than twice and once (1596/7) as often six times. We see that Love’s Labour’s Lost was published in 1598, proclaiming itself on the title‐page to be “A pleasant conceited comedy … As it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.” Since no earlier version of the play exists we cannot know what was “corrected and augmented,” but there is a good chance that the work was done in preparation for the mentioned performance at court and under Tilney’s active supervision. King Lear was published in 1608 “As it was played before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall upon S. Stephen’s night in Christmas Holidays. By his Majesty’s servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside.” As Andrew Gurr argues, that play clearly glances at James I’s wish to unite his two kingdoms: “It is difficult not to assume from this that the Master of the Revls could only have approved King Lear for a performance at court because he had thought the play supported the king’s position over the question of uniting the kingdoms” (1996, 33). The wording on the title‐page also opens up the possible inference that the version offered at court was not that audiences might see when the company was “playing usually at the Globe” (Dutton, 2016).

In such contexts we must see Tilney as an active collaborator with Shakespeare and others whose plays were being prepared for court performance. Contrary to the impression given by the film, Shakespeare in Love (1999; dir. John Madden), he was a man of some sophistication.⁷ A distant cousin of the Queen, he had dedicated to her A brief and pleasant discourse of the duties in Marriage, called the Flower of Friendship (1568; Tilney, 1992), a dialogue in the manner of Baldasare Castiglione’s influential Book of the Courtier: it went through at least five editions in his lifetime. He also prepared a substantial document called Topographical Descriptions, Regiments, and Policies; focusing on eight key European countries, it demonstrates his wide knowledge of international history, customs, diplomacy, and genealogy. Tilney intended to present it (handsomely decorated with the coats of arms of many of Europe’s leading families) to the Queen, but she died before he completed it; he started work on a version dedicated to King James, but again never presented the manuscript to him (Streitberger, 1986a).

So Tilney might have been a congenial and knowledgeable colleague in preparing plays for the court. But he could also be a strict overseer when it came to censoring and licensing plays for public performance. In 1589, at the height of the Martin Marprelate scandal (a series of puritan satirical pamphlets, attacking the Church of England) order was given “for the stay of all plays within the City, in that Mr. Tilney did utterly mislike the same,” apparently because “the players take upon themselves to handle in their plays certain matters of divinity and of state unfit to be suffered.”⁸ The wording of this suggests that Tilney was not disturbed that the players might support “Martin” but that he felt they should not involve themselves in matters of state at all, presumably defying his authority in presenting plays that he had refused to licence. We also have the evidence of one play manuscript which has survived, bearing the evidence of his censorship. This is Sir Thomas More, the main body of which is in the hand of the playwright Anthony Munday (see p. 42). At the head of the document Tilney has written: “Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof, & begin with Sir Thomas More at the Mayor’s sessions [i.e. scene 2], with a report afterwards of his service done being Sheriff of London upon a mutiny against the Lombards. Only by a short report & not otherwise. At your own perils. E. Tilney” (Dutton 1991, Plate 7).

This refers to the play’s graphic depiction of the notorious “Ill May Day” riots of 1517, which More was instrumental in suppressing. Those riots had been aimed at foreign workers in London, resented for edging out English jobs. There were similar disturbances in the early 1590s, particularly directed at Dutch, Flemish, and French Huguenot immigrants. It seems reasonable to infer that these were Tilney’s principal concerns in respect of the play; he did not want it to further inflame public disorder. He does not want any live‐action rioting on stage; he wants the report of the riots to specify the Lombards from Italy as targets (a less prominent group); and he wants the report short. Just as interesting as this peremptory intervention, however, is the relative lack of marking by Tilney elsewhere. This is striking in a play about a man who was executed for refusing to accept Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, which made him something of a Roman Catholic martyr. We might have expected that this alone would have made it unacceptable. The play itself is careful about the most sensitive issues: Henry himself (the Queen’s father) does not appear, while the text is studiously unspecific about the “Articles” to which More refuses to subscribe. There is to be sure one passage where More and the Bishop of Rochester refuse to subscribe while the Earls of Surrey and Shrewsbury do so all too avidly, to which Tilney evidently objected (his comment is now illegible). But this still demonstrates significant restraint in the face of what might be seen as serious provocation. Tilney did not reject the play out of hand and indeed seems to have wanted to work with the players and their author(s) to make it performable. Several passages not in Munday’s hand have survived alongside the main manuscript, and these are perhaps evidence that there was indeed an attempt to rewrite the play in acceptable form, though there are debates about when exactly this might have happened (see p. 72 and note 3). One of the new passages is commonly thought to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting (it is traditionally dubbed “Hand D”). None of the new passages shows Tilney’s attentions and it is not known if the play was ever actually staged.

Another instance of a Master of the Revels doing his best to make a play acceptable is found in the manuscript of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger in 1619. The Bishop of London initially ordered that the play be “stayed” until it was shown to be acceptable. This play was also on a sensitive subject, since the executed Barnavelt had been an influential statesman in the Protestant Netherlands, which had for many years been England’s closest ally. He had fallen out with Prince Maurice of Nassau (latterly Prince of Orange), who carried a degree of inherited status in what was otherwise a republic. Among their differences was religion, since Barnavelt had sided with the Arminians, a Christian sect at odds with the state’s dominant Calvinists. This would resonate in England, where there were similar divisions and this is probably why, even after Sir George Buc, Tilney’s successor, had licensed the play and the King’s Men had spent money acquiring properties, the Bishop of London briefly prohibited its performance (Dutton, 1991, 207).

When we review the manuscript we can see the care Buc had taken. As T. H. Howard‐Hill describes it:

Buc read the manuscript pencil in hand, marking passages for scrutiny at another time in a variety of ways. Once the drift of the play was clear in his mind he went back to the manuscript again, paying particular attention to the passages he had previously marked in pencil. Some pencil markings he did not pursue; others elicited more emphatic ink crosses, marginal deletions, crossing out, and interlineations and … [a] well‐known marginal note … I like not this. The second reading need not have been achieved at a single sitting, nor need Buc’s markings have been inserted without consultation with the scribe, acting for the authors.

(Fletcher and Massinger, 1980, ix–x)

All of this shows Buc’s careful attention to numerous issues, including references to persons of note in both England and the Netherlands during Barnavelt’s career (including both Queen Elizabeth and King James), to religious affairs, and various other matters. A good example is a passage during Barnavelt’s trial (lines 2343–55 in Howard‐Hill’s cited edition) in which he draws analogies between what was happening in the Netherlands and Augustus Caesar’s transformation of the Roman republic into a monarchy, warning (with a blunt “you can apply this”) against a time “when too late you see this government / Chained to a monarchy” (2349, 2353–4). It is a clear reference to Prince Maurice’s supposed ambitions. Buc tried to make it acceptable. He crossed out the provocative “you can apply this” and “monarchy,” but made several suggestions of his own. Only latterly did he mark the whole passage for deletion, apparently having decided that it could not be redeemed, something that rarely happens in the text. But he had worked hard to save it and evidently satisfied even the Bishop of London, since the play was shortly allowed to be performed.

The “well‐known marginal note” to which Howard‐Hill refers relates to the play’s marked antipathy to Prince Maurice, which Buc monitored closely, finally snapping at lines 385–403, where he wrote in the margin “I like not this: neither do I think that the prince was thus disgracefully used. Besides, he is too much presented” (Dutton, 1991, Plate 9). This shows sensitivity to the status of a man who was virtually ruler of a friendly foreign state, something Masters of the Revels evidently kept their eyes on – they were not supposed to allow depictions of “living Christian monarchs” at all. But it also reflects Buc’s personal knowledge of the people and circumstances of the play, since in 1601 he had been sent on a diplomatic mission to the Netherlands, carrying personal instructions from Queen Elizabeth and Sir Robert Cecil to Prince Maurice and other principals who appear in the play. Like Tilney, he was no faceless bureaucrat. Like Tilney too he owed his appointment as Master of the Revels (against strong competition from the dramatist John Lyly) to the patronage of Lord Admiral Howard (see p. 129). And he was a historian of some note. His account of the 1596 Cadiz expedition under Howard appeared in John Stow’s Annals (1601). The first work under his own name was Daphnis Polystephanos: an Eclog Treating of Crowns, and of Garlands, a poem honoring James I’s coronation and celebrating the king’s ancestors. Later published work included his “Third University of England,” printed as an appendix to the 1615 continuation of the Annals, and surveying the subjects – the arts, sciences, and professions (law, divinity, medicine) – which can be studied in London, even though the city boasted no university.

Buc’s most important works, however, were not published in his lifetime and some have not survived at all. Most important of these is a revisionist History of King Richard the Third, a much more sympathetic account than the one we know from Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare (Buck, 1982). The Baron was a massive historical review of English titles and offices, but only some notes towards it have survived. We also know he wrote an “art of revels,” but none of that survives. It suggests, however, that he saw his position as Master of the Revels as something that involved far more than simply importing the best commercial fare available.

Tilney continued in office until he died in 1610 and so would have licensed the great majority of Shakespeare’s plays; Buc probably only licensed The Tempest, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio. Tilney probably therefore had some involvement in what is usually regarded as the clearest case of censorship among Shakespeare’s own works. When his Richard II was published in 1597 it did not include what is usually called the Parliament Scene, some 163 lines of Act 4 Sc.1 (from Northumberland’s “May it please you, lords, to grant the Commons’suit?” to Richard’s “Conveyors are you all, / That rise thus nimbly by a true king’s fall,” including the sequence where the fallen king examines his face in a mirror, which he then breaks). This passage did not appear until the fourth printing of the play, in 1608, when some copies carried a title‐page which announced “With new additions of the Parliament Scene, and the deposing of King Richard.”

Why the passage did not appear earlier is less clear than often assumed. It may have been part of Shakespeare’s original manuscript but censored by Tilney. It may have been cut at the time of the 1597 printing. It did not go to one of the clerical censors who usually licensed printed books at this date – plays were often treated as ephemera like ballads, and the Master and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company vouched for them without a formal licence. So it may have been they who called for the cut, or the players might prudentially have cut it themselves. Conversely, the passage may not have existed at all in 1597 and been written around the time of the 1608 printing (“With new additions”).

One striking feature is that the “cut” is virtually invisible if you didn’t know it existed. In 1597 the text jumps from the arrest of the Bishop of Carlisle for high treason to Bolingbroke announcing the date of his coronation and the Abbot of Westminster lamenting “A woeful pageant have we here beheld” – the “pageant” logically being Carlisle’s arrest and Bolingbroke’s assumption of royal power. The 1608 text inserts a long display of Richard’s narcissistic self‐pity in which he sidesteps admitting to any crimes, but ceremonially abdicates and ponders on the new identity – or lack of identity – this confers on him. In a play where Richard is clearly deposed, and later murdered, why should this apparently innocuous passage have been singled out for censorship? By far the most convincing explanation is one advanced by Cyndia Susan Clegg, who notes that the “new additions” are indeed clearly a “Parliament Scene,” led off by Northumberland’s introduction of a “the Commons’ suit” – a motion from the House of Commons to the House of Lords – which seeks to confer legitimacy on the transfer of power (1997). In 1597, with Elizabeth’s long reign drawing to an inevitable end, there was neither an acknowledged successor nor an agreed mechanism for finding one. The suggestion that Parliament alone might have the authority of do this was one that Elizabeth was unlikely to find welcome. By 1608, when James I had three healthy children and the succession was secure, the issue was far less loaded and someone may have felt it was safe to reinsert the passage. Conversely, however, there is also the possibility that the play was old and needed an injection of new material, which would take the form of a virtuoso passage for the lead role, presumably played by Richard Burbage. Tilney would certainly have had to be consulted (and paid) either way – to allow censored material to be restored or new material added for the revival.

Although it is difficult to discern exactly what happened here, it is a salutary reminder that the Master of the Revels was a constant presence in the working lives of the players and their authors. A later Master, Sir Henry Herbert, certainly had a reserved box in each playhouse and it is likely that Tilney and Buc had them before him (Herbert, 214). And, in the way of early modern monopolies, they made a handsome profit from their royal authority. In the 1590s they charged 7 shillings (about a third of a pound) to licence a play for performance; by the 1620s this had become one pound. They also charged the owners of the playhouses for a licence to stage their shows – 5 shillings a week in the early 1590s rising steeply to three pounds a month by 1600 (Henslowe, 32–7 [“mr pd”]; 162. Herbert, passim). These were heavy taxes to carry, but they were the cost of doing business. The Masters of the Revels, and the royal authority which they represented, were what allowed the leading companies, like Shakespeare’s, to operate and flourish in the growing London market.

It was a symbiotic relationship, from which they both profited. As far as we can tell Shakespeare and his fellows recognized this fact and respected it. This impression may simply be down to the fact that the office‐books of Tilney and Buc have not survived, as that of Sir Henry Herbert has, at least in part (E. Collins, 2013). Had they survived, the situation might have looked very different. Herbert, for example, records the King’s Men performing an unlicensed play, The Spanish Viceroy in 1624 and resenting his peremptory order not to revive Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, a play that had acquired topical overtones by the 1630s (Herbert, 183, 182–3). But there is no record of any such behavior in Shakespeare’s time. They occasionally staged plays which caused some controversy, but in instances where Tilney’s own judgment seems to have been at fault. Jonson’s Sejanus, for example, incurred the wrath of the Earl of Northampton, and a lost play of Gowrie – about a well‐known plot against James when he was King of Scotland – displeased some members of the Privy Council:

the tragedy of Gowrie with all the action and actors hath been twice represented by the King’s players, with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people. But whether the matter or manner be not well handled, or that it be thought unfit that princes should be played on the stage in their life time, I hear that some great councilors are much displeased with it: and so is thought shall be forbidden.

(Chamberlain, 1939, 1.199)

But in neither case is there any suggestion that the plays did not carry Tilney’s licence, an offense which might have had serious repercussions, as indeed unlicensed performance of Eastward Ho! by the Children of the Queen’s Revels (Hamlet’s “little eyases”) had for Jonson and Chapman in 1605. That company had its own separate licencer (see p. 281). All of these instances probably reflect the tensions in the early years of James’s reign, where there was jockeying for power under the new regime, some of it by the Scots he had brought down with him. The licensing system operated by Tilney seems normally to have been effective in minimizing the overflow of these tensions on to the stage. In 1599 his regime had probably helped the Chamberlain’s Men to represent their performance of a play of Richard II (very possibly Shakespeare’s) on the eve of the Essex rebellion as a normal commercial transaction rather than an act of subversion (see p. 135).

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In other words, it directly challenged the authority of the City to police playing, either in relation to playing places or in respect of censoring and licensing what was played. The 1574 Act of the Common Council robustly reasserted that authority (EPF, 73–7). It fulminated against “sundry great disorders and inconveniences [that] have been found to ensue to this City by the inordinate hauntings of great multitudes of people, specially youths, to plays, interludes and shows,” “talking of frays,” “evil practices of incontinency,” “inveighing and alluring of maids” and more; it speaks as if playhouses were the only sites for the transmission of the plague, if not indeed its cause. It then imposes the City’s own controls over what can be played and in what buildings, applying stiff fines for transgressions. And latterly it raises the issue of taxation: “every person so to be licensed or permitted shall … pay or cause to be paid to the use of the poor in hospitals of the City, or of the poor of the City visited with sickness, by the discretion of the said Lord Mayor and Aldermen, such sums and payments and in such form as … shall be agreed.”

Rather than submit himself to such constraints, Burbage probably felt he had no real option but to build outside the City. It was not that Shoreditch was lawless; like the rest of the Middlesex it was subject to the authority of the county’s Lord Lieutenant and Justices of the Peace. Since these were all crown appointments, however, they tended to view the regulation of theatre very much as the royal court saw it rather than as the City did. Nor would Burbage entirely avoid taxation by retreating to the suburbs; contributions to the upkeep or the poor (and sometimes the upkeep of local amenities, like roads) were a necessary cost of running a business like this. But it is likely that the rates of taxation could be negotiated lower in the suburbs, where the pressures of poor relief were much less, than they would have been in the City proper. Henslowe doubtless made similar calculations when building the Rose in the Liberty of Clink, which was also outside of the City’s jusrisdiction. By asserting itself so aggressively the City may well have denied itself a source of real revenue. The Act also imposed stringent conditions, bonds, and potential financial penalties on the innkeepers who already operated within the City. Strikingly, this does not seem to have affected their business as much as we might have anticipated. As we have already noted, they remained in business for more than twenty years after this date (see p. 117).

Though John Brayne’s first theatrical project, the Red Lion, antedated the Theatre by almost ten years (see p. 30), it has left very little trace, and the claim of the Theatre to be the first successful, purpose‐built commercial playhouse in England since Roman times can hardly be doubted. It stayed in business for over twenty years, despite crippling financial difficulties on the parts of Burbage and Brayne, who went into the scheme expecting to pay about £200 and finished up spending £700, most of it coming out of Brayne’s pocket. They went to law with each other (and on at least one occasion violence) over the money.⁹ Brayne died bankrupt in 1586 but his wife Margaret continued the fight (see p. 31–2). There was a separate running battle with the ground landlord of the playhouse site, Giles Allen (see p. 193, 223), both about the maintenance of other properties on the site and about extending the original twenty‐one year lease. There were also several riots and affrays associated with the Theatre over the years, in connection with which the City was not slow to try to exert some authority (EPF, 341, 342, 345–6; see p. 31). There was even an earthquake in 1580, though no damage seems to have been done.

Yet the Theatre survived. On April 13, 1576 Burbage signed the fateful lease with Allen. It seems likely that he employed his younger brother or half‐brother Robert, who was a fully‐qualified carpenter – trained for large building projects – to erect the playhouse. He himself, as a trained joiner (a less skilled woodworker), might well have been involved with the fixtures and fittings, though doubtless his theatrical experience (and that of Brayne, such as it was) must have informed the grand design. We have already seen something of the long modern debate about what inspired that design, which was to be, with variations, the template for all the public playhouses of the era (Orrell, 1988, 7–29). Some have argued that it was based on the courtyard structures of the inns which the players had long used, both in the City and on their travels. We saw one in use in the Queen’s Men’s affray in Norwich: an open yard where a makeshift stage could be erected, overlooked by galleries (possibly two tiers of them) on two or three sides, which gave access to the inn’s accommodation. Another possible model was the quasi‐circular buildings used for animal‐baiting, which certainly looked like the theatres from the outside, though internal arrangements were very different.

Yet another argument, most vigorously propounded by John Orrell, is that the main structures of the theatres were inspired by classical models, familiar to the Elizabethans through Sebastiano Serlio’s Architettura, published in various parts between 1537 and 1575 (Orrell 1983; and 1988, 150–63). Burbage and Brayne would not have been set on a minute imitation of such models, but might have worked in the general spirit of what Serlio described, as mediated through the carpentry techniques of their day. It is certainly the case that foreign visitors like Johannes De Witt compared the theatres they saw to Roman precedents: “it [the Swan playhouse] seems to represent the general notion of Roman work” (EPF, 441; see p. 97–8). In all probability multiple inspirations guided Burbage and Brayne in their final design.

Limited archeological excavations between 2008 and 2011 have revealed some details that we could previously only guess at (Bowsher, 2012, 55–62). It was a timber‐framed building that seemed round, but which actually had fourteen sides and seems to have been about about 72 feet across (21.95m). These figures are strikingly similar to those of the Rose, whose foundations have been more extensively excavated, which suggests that Henslowe may deliberately have attempted to copy the Burbage/Brayne model (see Bowsher, 2012, 68–80; and Bowsher and Miller, 2009, 32–67. All measurements here come from these two works). The yard at the Rose was about 48 feet (14.63m) across, leaving around 12 feet on all sides for galleries (3.66m), which members of the audience could pay extra to use; these shielded them from the elements and some had seating – unlike the “pit” or “yard” where the lowest‐paying “groundlings” stood. The Theatre excavations have shown that its lowest galleries were actually 12 feet 6 inches deep (3.81m), and we know from other evidence that a total of three tiers of galleries surrounded the yard, one above the other, the top one being covered by a tile roof (see next paragraph). The stage itself, like the 1587 Rose, does not appear to have had a roof, leaving it as open to the elements as the pit and significantly limiting any possibility of spectacular “descent” scenes. But it also meant that there would be no pillars holding up a roof – and obstructing the sight‐lines.

The main timbers of the playhouse were presumably oak, possibly set on foundations of brick; the walls would then be constructed of lath and plaster (made of sand and lime), which we know Burbage and Brayne spent money on. We know little for certain about the stage and its furnishings, but again the evidence from the Rose is suggestive. Its stage was something of an irregular trapezoid, about 26 feet wide (7.92m) at the front and some 38 feet (11.58m) at its widest.¹⁰ We do not know how deep the stage was, but at the Fortune it projected to the middle of the yard, so similar proportions here would make it 24 feet deep (7.32m). If the stage of the Theatre was indeed of such dimensions, it would have left at least 5 feet (1.52m) on either side (and considerably more nearer the front) between it and the galleries, such that the “groundlings” of the pit crowded up to it on three sides. We owe confirmation of the three tiers galleries all around the pit to a German visitor in 1585, Samuel Kiechel, who commented on the “daily comedies” in the city, adding “There are some peculiar houses that are so made as to have about three galleries over one another so that a great number of people always come in to see such entertainments” (EPF, 410) We infer tiles on the roof from the fact that no thatching was paid for in the construction, as it was in the Globe.

The fact that the Red Lion apparently had a trapdoor makes it reasonable to suppose that the Theatre had at least one, though none of the surviving plays that we can safely assume were written for it actually calls for it. One play that has (presumably) not survived, but may well have called for a trap, was the version of Hamlet which Thomas Lodge mentioned in 1596, featuring a pale‐vizarded “ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster‐wife, Hamlet, revenge” (Lodge, 56).¹¹ All three versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet require the Ghost to call from “under the stage” (Scene 1.5 in modern editions) and it is widely assumed that it enters and exits via a trap. Similarly, Titus Andronicus would require a trap for the pit in which Bassianus’s body is thrown and into which Martius and Quintus fall (2.3). That play almost certainly antedates the Chamberlain’s Men’s residence at the Theatre but, given its long popularity, would likely have joined the repertoire there.

All the surviving plays identifiable with the Theatre are by Shakespeare.¹² Their first performances are taken to have fallen between 1594 and April 1597, when his company vacated the playhouse. It seems likely that the following plays – at least in their original forms – had been staged elsewhere by other companies, before the Chamberlain’s Men occupied the Shoreditch playhouse: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, the Henry VI plays, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus. So their new repertory at the Theatre perhaps comprised The Comedy of Errors (though see below, under Gray’s Inn), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, King John, The Merchant of Venice, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and just possibly Much Ado About Nothing. Love’s Labour’s Lost might also first have been performed there, though many date it earlier; and the 1598 text explicitly tells us that the version we have has been revised from the original.

None of these calls for more than two entrances or exits (cf. the two doors on the Swan drawing: p. Frontispiece) or anything resembling descent machinery. One apparent requirement is for an upper acting space. I discuss the most famous instance, that in Romeo and Juliet, elsewhere (see p. 111, 235), but assuming the company had taken over the Henry VI plays, they too needed such a facility.¹³ In Richard II (3.3 folio text) a stage direction reads “Parley without, and answer within: then a flourish. Enter on the walls Richard, Carlisle, Aumerle, Scroop, Salisbury.” The trumpeters earn their keep with a summons to negotiate, an answer, then a combined flourish to announce the king, who is on the walls, aloft. Later he descends, with exaggerated self‐pity: “Down, down I come, like glistering Phaeton” (178). But he disappears for four lines of dialogue before Bolingbroke kneels, saying “My gracious lord” (189). This has presumably been enough for Richard to take a staircase down, linking the upper playing space to the main stage. Similarly in 3.5 Romeo and Juliet, Juliet “goeth down from the window” [Q1], not by the rope‐ladder (fashioned from the nurse’s “cords”) which Romeo had athletically used, but by the staircase.

The upper stage was most likely part of a gallery of sorts in an upper level of the tiring house at the rear of the stage, fit to serve as a window, balcony or castle walls. The “attiring‐house, or place where the players make them ready” was the hub of the stage, from which all action on it flowed (EPF, 362). It was almost invariably the place from which the actors entered, whether through doors on the main stage or “above,” and where they stored costumes, properties and playbooks – though we have very little information about its internal arrangements. As the Richard II example shows, as many as five players could fit on the upper stage, but dialogue never involves more than two of them at once, so there was probably little space in which to move around and stay visible from ground level while doing so. If the Theatre contained a lords’ room or rooms, their use might have limited space on the upper stage, but we have no evidence that it did (see p. 234).

William Lambarde attests that a version of the penny‐by‐penny entrance system was in operation here, with each section of the playhouse handled separately, thus ensuring (by Shakespeare’s day) that James Burbage‘s distinct portion of the take as sole proprietor was accounted for. In the second edition of his Perambulation of Kent (1596) Lambarde explains how pilgrims were not able to avoid paying to see a shrine, “no more than such as go to Paris Garden, the Bell Savage, or Theatre, to behold bear baiting, interludes or fence play, can account of any pleasant spectacle unless they first pay one penny at the gate, another at the entry of the scaffold [i.e. stage] and the third for a quiet standing” (ES, 2: 359). This differs slightly from the system Thomas Platter described in 1599, but the principle is very similar (see p. 159). The most striking difference lies in the phrase “quiet standing,” for which a third penny would be paid. Platter is quite explicit that there was seating in the galleries in the playhouses he described (including the Swan), of progressively higher comfort. Lambarde seems to suggest that what you were paying extra for at the Theatre (and at a city inn like the Bell Savage) was private standing space, rather than a seat; a gallery is, after all “A covered space for walking in” (OED, n. 1), rather than for sitting. Probably this is something that changed over time. The amount of seating available seems to have been a measure of the upmarket development of the playhouses. At the early Theatre, seating seems to have been distinctly the exception.

No description of the Theatre speaks of a “heavens” or canopy covering the stage, and modern excavations seem to confirm that it did not have one. Such features were certainly built into the Globe and the Fortune, and apparently added to the Rose when it was refitted before its use by Strange’s Men (p. 62). Their primary function was to keep the playing area dry from rain during performances, though there was nothing to protect the audiences in the yard. But they had an important secondary function in allowing ascent / descent machinery to be installed, making it possible for deities miraculously to appear and bodies to be winched up and down. Such effects can be found in many Jacobean plays, but none has been identified with a Theatre play.

Q1 Romeo and Juliet seemingly provides evidence of a discovery space at the Theate, though it appears to have been used quite sparingly there. The Elizabethans did not use this term, but their stage directions make clear that some such option was sometimes available to them. By a discovery space I mean a curtained‐off opening in the tiring house wall, probably mid‐way between the doors at either end of that wall, which were themselves towards the edges of the stage. Behind the opening was quite a shallow recess, probably itself hung with curtains or wall‐hangings; it could be accessed from within the tiring house and so possibly used as an alternative door, or as a route through which substantial properties, such as beds, could be taken on to the main stage. As I shall show in all of Shakespeare’s stages where it is relevant, the discovery space was only used occasionally and little action took place within it. It was mainly a “show” space, in which a tableau could be posed or a character shown in an enclosed space.¹⁴

When, in Q1 Romeo and Juliet, Juliet first drinks the Friar’s “distillèd liquor,” “She falls upon her bed within the curtains” (end of 4.3). This suggests that the bed was positioned at the front of the space, so that she could fall directly on it, letting the curtains fall shut to conclude the scene; she is found there two scenes later, when the Nurse opens the curtains. All that is required is that Juliet be seen there; there is no suggestion that other characters enter the space. We may infer – though the text is far less clear – that the discovery space also represents “the tomb” (i.e. vault) in which Juliet is laid to rest. First, “Paris strews the tomb with flowers” but this must be done outside the tomb, since he has neither the “mattock and a crow of iron” (Q1) nor the “crow and spade” (Q2) which Romeo and Friar Laurence respectively bring to open it. Indeed, Q1 makes it explicit that “Romeo opens the tomb,” presumably with a show of difficulty. Paris confronts Romeo before he can enter the tomb and is killed in the fight that follows. His last wish is “lay me with Juliet” (5.3.73), to which Romeo agrees.

The precise deployments here are difficult to determine. Juliet is presumably lying on a dias or sarcophagus; Paris must lie on something similar, and both must be visible. Romeo dies kissing Juliet: “Falls.” Friar Laurence finds Romeo first and Paris second, then “Juliet rises.” She then “stabs herself and falls.” If this does indeed happen within a discovery space (which has been doubted, though alternative stagings pose at least as many problems), it is as much action as Shakespeare ever scripted for one. The Prince commands “seal up the mouth of outrage for awhile” (Q2, 5.3.216) and this is often read as a cue to draw the curtains, effectively removing the bodies from the stage – assuming they have all fallen backwards of that line. Q1, however, casts some doubt on that; here the Prince says “Come, seal your mouths of outrage for a while,” asking people to cease their laments while they establish exactly what has happened. It is not impossible that both senses are operative: the curtains are drawn and people allow the Prince to examine the witnesses. Even by Shakespeare’s standard, this would be a busy double meaning. But it is the best explanation we have.

One thing commentators did leave an unambiguous record of – even its puritan critics – is that the Theatre was an impressive building. The very choice of its name, as we have observed, was intended to evoke the classical Roman playing spaces of that name, and its appearance also did so. The Dutch visitor, Johannes De Witt, accurately described the four playhouses he saw around 1596 as “amphi‐theaters” or double‐theaters; as George Puttenham noted this was the classical usage for playhouses fully in the round: “Their theaters … sumptuously built with marble & square stone in form all round …were called Amphitheaters” (2007, 1.17.29). De Witt was particularly impressed by the newest he saw, the Swan and remarked on its “wooden columns which, on account of the colour of marble painted on them, can deceive even the most acute, whose form, at least … seems to represent the general notion of Roman work” (EPF, 441). A foreign nobleman quoted by E. K. Chambers made the same Roman connection with what was evidently the Globe: “Monday 3 July 1600. We heard an English play. The theatre was built in the manner of the ancient Romans, out of wood, and so formed that from every side the spectators could see the details most suitably” (ES, 2: 366; my translation).

We can readily tell what an educated man of the period might know of Roman theaters, from a section of Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, where he wants to demonstrate the ancient dignity of his profession:

The first public theater was by Dionysius built in Athens; it was fashioned in the manner of a semi‐circle, or half‐moon, whose galleries and degrees were reared from the ground, their stairs high, in the midst of which did arise the stage, beside, such a convenient distance from the earth, that the audience assembled might easily behold the whole project without impediment. From this the Romans had their first pattern, which at the first not being roofed, but lying open to all weathers, Quintus Catulus was the first that caused the outside to be covered with linen cloth, and the inside to be hung round with curtains of silk. But when Marcus Scaurus was aedilis he repaired it and supported it round with pillars of marble.

Caius Curio, at the solemn obsequies of his father, erected a famous Theatre of Timber, in so strange a form, that on two several stages, two sundry plays might be acted at once, and yet the one be no hindrance or impediment to the other; and when he so pleased the whole frame was artificially composed to meet in the midst, which made an amphi‐theater.

Pompey the great … saw in the city Mitylene a theatre of another form, and after his … return to Rome, he raised one after the same pattern, of free stone, of that vastness and receipt [capacity], that within his spaciousness it was able at once to receive fourscore thousand people, everyone to sit, see and hear … Julius Caesar … exceeded him in his famous architecture. He raised an amphi‐theater, Campo Martio, in the field of Mars, which as far excelled Pompey’s as Pompey’s did exceed Caius Curio’s … for the bases, columns, pillars, and pyramids were all of hewed marble, the coverings of the stage, which we call the heavens (where upon any occasion their gods descended) were geometrically supported by a giant‐like Atlas, whom the poets for his astrology feign to bear heaven on his shoulders, in which an artificial sun and moon of extraordinary aspect and brightness had their diurnal and nocturnal motions; so had the stars their true and celestial course; so had the spheres, which in their continual motion made a most sweet and ravishing harmony. Here were the elements and planets in their degrees, the sky of the moon, the sky of Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; the stars, both fixed and wandering: and above all these, the first mover, or primum mobile, there were the 12 signs; the lines equinoctial and zodiacal, the meridian circle, or zenith, the horizon circle or hemisphere, the zones torrid and frozen, the poles arctic and antarctic, with all other tropics, orbs, lines, circles, the solstitium and all other motions of the stars, signs, and planets. In brief, in that little compass were comprehended the perfect model of the firmament, the whole frame of the heavens, with all grounds of astronomical conjecture. From the roof grew a louvre, or turret, of an exceeding altitude, from which an ensign of silk waved continually: Pendebant vela Theatro [sails hung from the theater] … In the principal galleries were special remote, selected & chosen seats for the emperor, patres conscripti [senators], dictators, consuls, praetors, tribunes, triumviri, decemviri, aediles, curules, and other noble officers among the senators; all other rooms were free for the plebe, or multitude. (Apology for Actors, D2r–D3v)

Of course the London playhouses did not seat eighty thousand (3,000 is several times given as the capacity of the Globe), nor were they built in marble; and Heywood omits to mention that Caesar’s “theater” was built as much for sports and games as for acting. But there were correspondences. The English outdoor playhouses all adopted the amphitheater model, the evolution of which Heywood is careful to trace; they thus ensured that “everyone [could] … see and hear” (if not sit), which was not the case with all theatre designs. Some Roman seats were reserved for the aristocracy, while all other rooms were free for the plebe, or multitude – effectively the same division as created by the lords’ rooms and penny‐by‐penny payment. They may not have been built of marble, but parts of them at least were expertly painted to look like it.¹⁵ And, where there was a “heavens,” it was painted with astronomical and astrological signs, doubtless less comprehensive that that in the Field of Mars, but still tending to the same effect; when we remember that the space under the stage was popularly known as “hell” (see p. 137, Note 12), it is evident that the playhouses were meant to comprehend the three principal locations of the Christian universe. And Elizabethan playhouses also hung out signs or flags from a turret above the tiring house, when performances were in progress; the Swan drawing shows a flag, with a picture of a swan, flying from the highest place on the building (p. Frontispiece). All in all, it is hardly surprising that De Witt and others saw similarities with Roman theatres and it seems likely that, within their limited resources, Burbage and his successors deliberately tried to emulate them.

It is sometimes said that the English prefer to imagine their Elizabethan theatres austerely plain, like their medieval cathedrals. But we know that the cathedrals were once painted with vibrant color, which they only lost after the Reformation. This was almost certainly also the case with the playhouses. There is no specific evidence that the Theatre had such marbling paint twenty years earlier than De Witt, but even the puritan preachers saw it as “sumptuous” and “gorgeous” (though these terms were probably meant as reproaches); and it suggests something that a painter is on record as having regularly been paid in the playhouse.

It was presumably a tribute of sorts to the Theatre that within months it was joined by a neighbor, the Curtain, built barely two hundred yards to its south‐east. It is difficult to believe that the demand warranted a second playhouse, especially in such close proximity. We do not even know who built it, only that the site was owned by one Henry Lanman or Laneman; he may or may not have been the builder, but in 1585 he came to an arrangement with Burbage and Brayne whereby the profits of the two properties would be shared 50–50 (EPF, 348–9; Ingram, 1992, 227–36). This presumably made for a modus vivendi and, as we shall see, eventually provided Shakespeare’s company with an essential lifeline at a critical point in its history.

From the start, however, the two playhouses were commented on together. Their puritan detractors decried the uses to which they were put, even as they acknowledged that they were splendid buildings. One T. W. (Thomas White?) preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross in November 1577, crying “Behold the sumptuous Theatre houses …” while the following month John Northbrooke denounced them as “A spectacle and school for all wickedness to be learned in … those places … which are made up and builded for such plays and interludes, as the Theatre and Curtain is” (Treatise wherein Dicing, Dancing, Vain Plays … are reproved by the Authority of the Word of God, quoted in EPF, 337). The following year John Stockwood preached against “The gorgeous playing place erected in [Finsbury] Fields … as they have pleased to have called it, a Theatre” (339).

Little is known of the Theatre’s use in early years, except the financial problems of and litigation between the various parties. But as early as August 1577 we hear that it had been in business some time. It is likely, though Leicester’s Men continued to tour, that they used the Theatre as a London base, especially in summertime; but they did not have exclusive use of it. In 1578 we hear of a sword‐fighting prize contest being staged there; such events were very popular and a theatrical arena was a logical place to hold them. But until 1594 there would be no permanent occupation of the Theatre. Traveling companies would book to use it as it suited their schedules, so it made sense to book alternative fare like the fencing when it was available. At the time of the 1584 brawl at the door of the playhouse which led to a confrontation between Burbage and William Fleetwood (p. 31), it appears that the Queen’s Men were playing at the Theatre, while a somewhat lesser company, the Earl of Arundel’s Men were playing next door at the Curtain. The whole incident was nearly disastrous, since Fleetwood got a majority of the Privy Council to agree to “the suppressing and pulling down of the Theatre and the Curtain. All the lords agreed thereunto, saving my Lord Chamberlain [Lord Howard of Effingham] and Mr Vice‐Chamberlain [Sir Christopher Hatton]” (EPF, 345–6). Presumably Howard and Hatton – the officers who would be most sensitive to the theatrical needs of the Queen – eventually prevailed, since we hear no more of the matter. As we shall see, there would be other moments when playhouses seemed in danger of being suppressed and pulled down, but it did not happen until the Civil War. The link between the players and the court – and specifically those at the court who understood the practicalities of providing entertainment for the Queen – was always their key lifeline.

It must, then, have seemed an ideal arrangement for all parties when, in 1594, the Chamberlain’s Men settled into the Theatre. For James Burbage it gave him secure tenants, who would normally play in his house rather than tour. Moreover, the company included his son, Richard, which would hopefully take the edge off any business frictions between the landlord and his tenants. And it was one of only two companies with court privileges – along with the Admiral’s Men, who were likewise normally resident at the Rose. This did not cut off all competition from traveling companies making occasional visits to London, as before; the Curtain and, from 1596, the Swan were available to such “incomers.” But, for the Chamberlain’s Men, being as it were in possession gave them an advantage over the competition. They had the opportunity to make the higher profits on a more regular basis which we may assume came with London playing at this date; this in turn probably made them a desirable company to join, either for an established player as a sharer, as a hired man, or as an apprentice – issues discussed in the next chapter. Having the Theatre as a permanent base also gave them room in the tiring house to keep costumes, properties, and playbooks, allowing them to build deep resources in ways that companies constantly on the road could hardly ever have done. A potential downside is that they would need those resources, because they would have to stage a steady turnover of plays, old and new, as we saw with Strange’s Men.

So Shakespeare was critical to this new business strategy. He was expected to keep turning out the box‐office successes – the kind of plays that could be recycled time after time – for which he already had a track record. Naturally, he stuck to an extent to tried formulas. He had scored a lasting hit with his early revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and this seems to have been one of the plays that the Chamberlain’s Men acquired. We have already noted the existence of a Hamlet in the company’s repertoire; if this was not indeed Shakespeare’s own work, he was to make the story his own within a few years. The sequence of history plays we now know as the First Tetralogy and which we usually follow the First Folio in calling Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3, and Richard III – about the disintegration of English power in France after the death of Henry V, England’s collapse into civil war in the Wars of the Roses, and its final delivery from chaos by the triumph of Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth Field – had proved extremely popular and here again Shakespeare seems to have carried their performing rights with him into the new company.

The Epilogue to Henry V speaks of how:

Henry the Sixth, in infant bonds crowned King

Of France and England, did this king succeed;

Whose state so many had the managing

That they lost France and made his England bleed,

Which oft our stage hath shown.

(9–13)

In 1594/5 Shakespeare promptly set about writing a prequel to that earlier sequence, of which Henry V was to be the culmination. That Second Tetralogy, however – like the First – was probably never as neatly preplanned as the First Folio sequence of English history plays suggests.

Richard II (circa 1595) was perhaps the first serious drama he wrote for the company’s new base, homing in on the deposition and murder of a king which destabilized the course of English medieval history. This is, in effect, the starting point for all of Shakespeare’s English histories, barring only King John and Henry VIII. But any plan to pursue that history soon seems to have been blown off‐course by Shakespeare’s engagement with a long poem by Arthur Brooke, based on Italian novellas, Romeus and Juliet (1562); this engagement seems to have resulted in the writing of the tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, back‐to‐back with the comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both borrow so much from Brooke’s poem that, as Brian Gibbons puts it “one might see them as a kind of diptych, portraying the attraction and repulsion of opposites – love and hate, light and darkness, wit and folly, action and dream – in opposed modes of tragedy and comedy, written close together about 1595” (Shakespeare, 1980, 31). Only then (circa 1596/7) did he return to the narrative of the man who deposed Richard II, Henry IV, though his real focus falls on Henry’s son, Prince Hal, the future Henry V. It is not clear if he always planned to spread that story over two plays, or whether the possibility only came to him when he was part way through what became 1 Henry IV. In either case he was probably again blown sideways by the enormous popularity that immediately attached to the chief comic character in that play, Sir John Oldcastle – and equally by the scandal which required him to change that character’s name to Falstaff (p. 194). The Merchant of Venice, a different mix of the serious and the comic, was written about the same time.

Burbage

In all of this Shakespeare must have been adjusting to the novel experience of writing for the same theatre and the same group of players over a period of time.¹⁶ We know distressingly little about the specific skills of Shakespeare’s fellow sharers, or for the most part which roles they played. But we can say something about Shakespeare’s two fellow payees for the company’s first court performances, Richard Burbage and Will Kemp. We shall have occasion to revisit both of them again in due course, but it is appropriate to spell out the basics here (see pp. 257ff; 224ff). Burbage was thirty‐five in 1594 and had been playing for about ten years, according to testimony by his brother, Cuthbert (Gurr, 2004a, 222). The earliest Shakespearean role with which he was identified in his own day was that of Richard III, though we cannot be sure whether he created the role or only took it up when the play became part of the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire at the Theatre.¹⁷ He would later almost certainly perform the roles of Hamlet, Othello and Lear (see p. 164 and Van Es, 2013, 232–48). It would be surprising on that basis if he did not create the roles of Macbeth, Antony, and Coriolanus as well. We know that he played Malevole (a variation on the melancholic revenger) in Marston’s The Malcontent (1604) and Ferdinand, the Duchess’s melancholic twin brother, in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (see p. 281; 183, 187).

Such a track record, however, does not always help us to locate him in other plays, especially comedies. It must be likely that he created the role of Richard II and that Shakespeare invested that play with such a rich poetic texture in part because he already appreciated his colleague’s capacity with blank verse. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he must surely have played Theseus. Did he also originate the common practice of doubling that role with Oberon? Doubling of roles was a common feature of Elizabethan theatre, an economic way of handling more speaking roles than the company could otherwise carry – and perhaps at times (like this) a way of drawing attention to parallels between two characters. But it was more common with lesser characters than with the leads. In Romeo and Juliet the obvious question is whether a man in his mid‐thirties was ideal for a teenager (or at most early twenties) like Romeo; but when we consider that he must have been nearly forty when he probably first handled Shakespeare’s “young Hamlet,” and again consider the richly ornate poetry which this role is asked to deliver, the odds must be in his favor. What, however, of The Merchant of Venice? Bassanio? Antonio? Or Shylock? None of the roles seems an automatic fit. And when we come to 1 Henry IV would he have taken the ageing dignity of the king’s role or the vitality of the prince’s? A possible deciding factor might be swordplay. The man who played Hamlet had to be more than proficient (though so too did the man who played Laertes). That also weighs in the role of Romeo – and the climax of 1 Henry IV is the contest between Prince Hal and Hotspur at Shrewsbury. Indeed, it seems that many of Burbage’s roles in histories and tragedies ended in swordplay – which must have asked a lot of him, on top of the already daunting speaking parts beforehand. Consider also the sheer number of those he had to keep at almost instant readiness at any one time, perhaps thirty over a two‐month period, if what Henslowe shows to have been the Admiral’s Men’s practice also applied to the Chamberlain’s Men (see p. 63, 106). It called for supreme fitness.

Kemp

The role of the leading comedian was no less demanding. Will Kemp (see Figure 3.3) had a reputation well before he came to the Chamberlain’s Men, having worked with Leicester’s and Strange’s Men; he had toured on the continent, including the Low Countries and Denmark (Wiles, 1987; Van Es, 2013, 40–1, 85–90). In the dedication to An Almond for a Parrot (1590, probably by Thomas Nashe) he is hailed as “that most comical and conceited cavalieri [knight], Monsieur du Kemp, jester‐monger and vice‐gerent general to the ghost of Dick Tarlton.” There is an example of his “merriment” in Scene 12 of A Knack to Know a Knave (a Strange’s Men’s play). We know specifically that at the Theatre Kemp played Peter, the Nurse’s “man” in Romeo and Juliet and (just possibly within the company’s time there) Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. This is because early texts sometimes call for him by name, rather than by his role. In the 1599 second quarto of Romeo, a stage‐direction for Peter reads “Enter Will Kemp” (4.5); and in 4.2. of the 1600 Much Ado the directions for Dogberry read at one point “Andrew” (= “Merry‐Andrew,” one who publicly plays the clown) and for the most part “Kemp.” These show us very clearly – since both texts seem to derive from manuscripts either in Shakespeare’s own hand, or very close to it – that he was writing with the specific performer in mind. Indeed, they suggest that Kemp’s overall stage persona, “the clown,” was primary, and the specific roles to which he was allocated somewhat secondary. In the 1597 first quarto of Romeo his role is designated “clown” before he is identified as Peter, and even earlier than that it is likely that he played the undistinguished, illiterate “serving‐man” who has to ask Romeo to read the names of the guests to the feast on the list old Capulet has given him.

Figure 3.3 Image of Will Kemp and companion on the title‐page of Kemp’s nine daies wonder.

Source: PN2598.k6, 1839, Folger Shakespeare Library.

Inadequacies with language are part of his stock‐in‐trade, whether it be an inability to read at all, or a constant predisposition to malapropisms in the case of Dogberry. Like Dogberry himself, he is determined it be known “that I am an ass” (5.1.251). The mode of his clowning is very much that of the country fellow, out of his depth in the sophisticated society of the city or the court, despite a high opinion of himself.¹⁸ He must surely have created the roles of Bottom and Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice. Kemp’s role in Romeo is particularly revealing, since his designation as the Nurse’s “man” is anomalous; the Nurse is a servant herself and is unlikely, therefore, to have her own “man” – only possibly a fellow servant who was directed by their masters to help in some particular task. But this designation is an excuse to put two comic roles side‐by‐side and in the end allows Kemp to introduce his distinctive comedy into many corners of the play, including a set‐piece with the musicians at the end of 4.5, a counterpoint to the rising tide of tragedy in the narrative.

Kemp was also noted for bawdy, irreverent, and energetic entertainments called jigs, which were often staged after the performance of a play. We shall have occasion to examine them elsewhere (see p. 218).

Motley

Something should be said about “motley,” the clothing so often associated with Elizabethan comedians. Shakespeare actually seems to reserve it for the roles played by Kemp’s successor in the company, Robert Armin, who specialized in “fool” roles, which were rather different from the clown roles pioneered by Tarlton and Kemp (see p. 264ff). Jaques in As You Like It (circa 1599) particularly identifies motley with Touchstone, which seems to have been Shakespeare’s first major role for Armin: “Oh, that I were a fool! / I am ambitious for a motley coat” he says, having met the character variously described as “the clownsish fool” and “the roynish [scurvy] clown” (2.7. 2.7.42–3; 1.3.128 and 2.2.8). Unfortunately we still do not know what it meant in terms of what a stage comedian actually wore. Leslie Hotson wrote a whole book on Shakespeare’s Motley (1952), arguing that it was a long coat of fairly coarse woolen cloth, made with variegated colors, of which green or yellow was usually predominant: the clothing given to mentally‐challenged people in real life, often called “naturals” or “fools.” But his argument was systematically dismantled by David Wiles (1987, 182–97), who among other things showed the shifting sense of the term. What I think is clear is that Kemp did not regularly wear “motley” or carry the traditional accompaniments of the fool/jester employed in some noble households, a cockscomb and a bauble (cf. Lear’s Fool). It is still likely, however, that he did wear a distinctive dress which singled him out as “the clown,” which would give a kind of continuity to his various servant roles in Romeo and Juliet, keeping him somewhat separate from his fellow servants.

Kemp was not the only comedian in the company. Augustine Phillips is credited with writing a lost jig, Phillips His Slipper, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1595, which might suggest his own comic facility; his stepbrother, Thomas Pope, is once described as a clown.¹⁹ Richard Cowley played Verges to Kemp’s own Dogberry. There may have been something of a comic star‐cluster in the company, which particularly raises the question of who played the most famous comic role of them all, Falstaff, another role first created at the Theatre. The fact is that we do not know. David Wiles has argued cogently that it was Kemp (1987, 116–35). Others, however, have objected that the kind of comedy generated by Falstaff – a knowing, wordsmart, blasphemous rogue – is very different in temper from anything else he is known to have played. Whatever the competition, however, it is clear that Kemp was the preeminent comedian and star draw of the Chamberlain’s Men’s days at the Theatre. But those days were numbered.

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Box 3.2 A Day at the Theatre

Let us try to reconstruct a typical performance day for the company at the Theatre. Of necessity, many of the details derive from Henslowe and the practice of the Admiral’s Men, but there is every reason to suppose that the Chamberlain’s Men operated in broadly the same way. The schedule, in fact, would have begun a couple of days earlier, when some of the hired men would have gone into the City and the suburbs, posting bills advertising this particular performance (however much this may have irritated the City authorities). On the morning of the performance the message would be reinforced by the company’s trumpeters and drummers (see p. 174). In this instance it is to be the first performance of Romeo and Juliet. The earliest text of that play was printed in 1597 and most scholars date it two or three years earlier, at around the same time as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So there is a strong presumption that the 1597 text reflects its staging in the Theatre.

The morning of the performance was almost certainly taken up with something else, very probably associated with future performance(s). In the mid‐late 1590s Henslowe shows the Admiral’s Men introducing a new play about every three weeks, a phenomenal challenge not only in terms of learning the lines but also of making all the other necessary preparations – and most of these the players had to do for themselves (see p. 64, 76). Even working out how long to keep new plays in the schedule and which plays to revive, in what sequence (and then ensuring that costumes and properties were still to hand and in good order), would have been a taxing business. On our hypothetical day, the sharers (core company members) might listen to a proposal for a new play from one of the many playwrights they commission, other than Shakespeare.²⁰ Henslowe, for example, lent Jonson an advance on a proposed new play that the Admiral’s approved of: “Lent unto Benjamin Jonson the 3 of December 1597 upon a book which he was to write for us before Christmas next after the date hereof, which he showed the plot unto the company: 20s” (Henslowe, 73).²¹ Jonson was doubtless already sufficiently a man of the theatre to have produced an outline that provided for characters in numbers the company could handle, and with roles appropriate for their principal players. We assume that John Heminge handled the Chamberlain’s Men’s money – in later years it seems to have become his principal responsibility – and, like Henslowe, would have to keep track of such commitments, loans and outright payments.

The play would very probably be delivered piece by piece. Henslowe’s records usually show payment to the dramatists in stages. This is often taken to show just how hand‐to‐mouth some of them lived: we hear, for example, of both Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker being arrested for debt at various times. But it also shows them being paid by results, as they delivered portions of the play. So, for example, on July 24, 1599 Henslowe “lent” Dekker 10s. “at the request of Samuel Rowley and Thomas Downton [two of the sharers] in earnest of a book called Stepmothers’ Tragedy.” This apparently means that the company had accepted his “plot” scenario, which was perhaps the limit of his involvement with the play; all further references are to Henry Chettle, such as a month later, when Chettle was “lent” £1 “in earnest of his play called The Stepmothers’ Tragedy,” possibly having produced some early scenes or at least convinced members of the company that they were imminent. Only two days later (August 25) Henslowe lent three of the sharers – William Bird, Edward Juby, and Downton – a further £1 “to pay Harry Chettle for his book called The Stepmothers’ Tragedy”: payment now (to the playwright), rather than lending. Finally on October 14 Robert Shaa, yet another sharer, entered an affidavit into Henslowe’s Diary, attesting that he had received £4 “to pay H. Chettle in full payment of a book called The Stepmothers’ Tragedy for the use of the company” (Henslowe, 123, 125). So, over about two months, Chettle produced the play, receiving loans until he delivered something tangible and then payments; overall he received £6 (and Dekker 10s.) for this work.²² The fact that as many as six of the sharers were involved in authorizing these payments at different times may just have been an accident, but it might also suggest that they were being particularly careful about advancing company money when they were not entirely confident that either Dekker or Chettle was going to deliver. The company still, of course, had to repay Henslowe for all the money he had advanced. Such negotiations with the playwrights and with Henslowe (or Heminge, in the case of the Chamberlain’s Men) must have been a constant and sometimes unpredictable process for the sharers and often occupied them on mornings before a performance.

Once the play was delivered in full, the sharers would hear it read together, presumably before making the final payment. This might be something of a social occasion. Henslowe records lending 5s “for to spend at the reading of [The Famous Wars of Henry the First and the Prince of Wales] at the Sun in New Fish Street” and similarly 2s “lent out for the company when they read the play of Jephtha for wine at the tavern” (88, 201). This latter was the middle of May 1602; earlier that month they had paid Anthony Munday and Dekker £5 in earnest of the play. Subsequent payments suggest that they were happy with what they received, and that would have set off a flurry of business. First the Master of the Revels needed to “peruse” the book – either the version delivered by the dramatists or a fair copy, reproduced either by them or by a scrivener – for licensing, which he apparently did in late June, though Henslowe received a gentle reminder on August 4 that he had not yet been paid for it (296). This “allowed copy” became valuable company property, under the watchful care of the book‐keeper.

Then the company would need to cast all the parts which had not been settled upon when they accepted the “plot.” They would use their collective professional judgment (probably steered by Jonson, who would have written with it some individuals in mind) about any roles that could be doubled by a single actor, since that would save money. Once the sharers’ own roles were settled there would need to be calculations about hired men who would be required for any remaining parts – weighing in the balance the possibility of using money‐gatherers and stage‐hands for crowd scenes. There would also have to be decisions about any music required. The sennets, flourishes and alarums of ceremonial entries and battlefield maneuvres would pose no problems (see p. 175). But new songs, especially those which did not rely on familiar ballad tunes, might need commissioning.

Parts

Then, for the speaking roles, a scrivener would have to be hired to draw up their “parts.” This entailed copying out just the words to be spoken by each individual actor, with the very briefest of cues from the previous speaker to alert him to when he was to start speaking (Palfrey and Stern, 2007; Menzer 2008). This would be written out on conventional folios of papers, as Tiffany Stern describes in the rare surviving early “role” of Orlando, from Robert Greene’s play, Orlando Furioso: “it was clearly originally kept as a roll … Each sheet was once joined to the other, top to tail, making a strip that was 18 or so feet in length; this appears to have been anchored at the very top and bottom with rods. The part will then have been wound around its two sticks, creating a text that could be ‘scrolled,’ probably with one hand” (Stern 2009b, 503).²³ This constituted the actor’s roll [i.e.”role”], from which he would learn his lines. The lion’s share of preparing for a new production would entail each member of the cast “conning” his roll individually. Although they might be aided in this by an “instructor” it remained largely a solitary process and, as Stern puts it “plays will never have been as familiar to actors in their entirety as they were in parts” (511).

Costumes and Properties

At the same time attention would have to be paid to any new costumes or properties that would be required for the new play. There was a flurry of payments associated with this late in June: 30s. “unto the tailor for making of suit for Jephtha,” 25s. “to pay unto him which made their properties for Jephtha” and 22s. “to pay the cutter for the play of Jephtha” (203).²⁴ Thomas Downton was the sharer who authorized all of the recorded payments for costumes and properties in connection with Jephtha, so this was presumably a delegated responsibility for him; the Diary suggests that it was something he did regularly. It was a serious obligation, because the company evidently spent a small fortune on costumes, probably their largest single commitment (p. 170ff). Presumably all the other senior members of the company took responsibility for particular aspects of the complex business of bringing a new play to the stage.

There does not seem to have been much time for rehearsals (a “general rehearsal”) as we would understand them, and when they did occur it seems that “verbal content of a play [was] not the emphasis of collective rehearsal; that a general rehearsal [was] largely intended to determine action that affect[ed] the group” (Stern 2009b, 509). It would in effect have been a walkthrough, with the actors expected already to be familiar with their cues and written parts, while the readthrough should already have given them a general scene‐by‐scene sense of the business of the play, with a record presumably kept of properties that would be needed, and some possibly newly acquired. These would all have to be assembled at convenient places in the tiring house on the morning of a performance. But all kinds of issues might need to be resolved in a general rehearsal: which doors to use for particular entrances and exits; who would handle larger properties like beds and cauldrons, or remove dead bodies; at least a basic scenario for any fighting and its outcome (any deaths or woundings requiring suitably concealed bladders of animal blood for realistic effect).

Food and Drink

There was presumably a break for dinner, the main meal of the day, around noon. Inns and ordinaries are commonly associated with the playhouses, doubtless springing up to service players and audiences alike. But there may have been no need to leave the playhouse. We recall that James Burbage’s original partner in the Theatre, John Brayne – like Henslowe’s partner in the Rose, John Chomley – was a grocer; and Chomley’s contract certainly gave him exclusive rights to sell food and drink at the Rose, with the use of a small house nearby “to keep victualing in.” The concessions must always have been a profitable element in the whole enterprise, though we do not know who controlled them at the Theatre after Brayne died. We do know that John Heminge, the actor, always apparently shrewd with money, secured the position of tapster at the Globe, cornering the doubtless lucrative drinks market. Thomas Platter tells us that “in the pauses of the comedy food and drink are carried round amongst the people, and one can thus refresh himself at his own cost” (ES, 2: 365). As with modern sports auditoria, which in many respects the public playhouses resembled, it is likely that such refreshment was available an hour or so before the show began.

Performance

A general rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet had perhaps taken place the day before, leaving a final morning to ensure that everything was in perfect readiness. I shall basically follow the 1597 Q1 version that we may assume was used at the Theatre, though glancing at the much longer Q2, which perhaps shows how it was revised (“newly corrected, augmented, and amended” as the title‐page says) for the court or the Curtain.²⁵ I discuss elsewhere the play’s distinctive use of both an upper stage and a discovery space (especially at the end), so I shall not go into detail here (see pp. 111, 235). After three soundings of the trumpet high in the turret above the tiring house, the book‐keeper would be seated in the prompt‐corner, following the “allowed copy” both as prompter and as overseer of preparations backstage (see pp. 201 on soundings). He would be adjacent to the wall‐mounted “plot,” available to himself and anyone who needed to check the essentials of the running order (see p. 267). His job was both to act as a prompter if necessary and to keep the action flowing smoothly offstage, sending boy assistants to alert cast and crew to upcoming cues.

The Prologue would commence the play at 2 p.m. Scene1.1 involves two unnamed servingmen of the Capulets (Samson and Gregory in Q2, which also tells us that they have “swords and bucklers [shields]”), who confront two similarly anonymous servingmen of the Montagues (one named Abraham in Q2). They would be differentiated by distinctive liveries. There is a fight, which would have needed some basic choreographing, before “other citizens” (“three or four … with clubs or partisans” [a type of spear] in Q2) assault both sides and then all are divided by senior members of the Capulets and Montagues – wordlessly in Q1, with dialogue in Q2. The stage already holds at least thirteen players before the Prince enters (“with his train,” Q2) – and this is before Romeo, Juliet, and Kemp in his various roles have appeared (see p. 113), figures who could not be doubled. Shakespeare wanted a show of the company’s extensive personnel early on. It may be an effect of quoting more specific numbers, but the Q2 text does seem to call for a larger ancillary cast of servingmen and attendants – possibly a mark of the company prospering in the years between the two versions.

Kemp first appears in 1.2, designated as “Clown” on entry, a Capulet servant within the plot; he reappears briefly at the end of 1.3, a scene which otherwise involves three female roles – Lady Capulet, the Nurse, and Juliet, all presumably played by “boys” though we might expect the two older roles to be performed by young men near the ends of their apprenticeships (see p. 183).1.4. shows Romeo, Mercutio, and Benvolio (“with five or six other maskers, torchbearers,” Q2), masked and approaching the Capulet’s house. Torches throughout (see also 5.3) flag that it is night‐time, just as the direction in 5.1 that Balthazar enters “booted” flags that he has traveled a long way (see p. 246). 1.5. shows a difference in staging between the two versions: Q1 defies the usual conventions of continuous staging; Romeo and his colleagues, who were only approaching in 1.4 are somehow (like a filmic lap‐dissolve) within the Capulet’s house when the new scene begins – it is very unusual for characters on stage at the end of one scene to be immediately present at the beginning of the next; in Q2 they merge into the action by mingling with some busy servingmen, who are preparing for a banquet. Q2 explicitly directs that “Music play and they dance” (it is implicit in Q1 too) – a crowded stage‐full of at least eight Montagues and as many Capulets, including Juliet.

At the beginning of 2.1 Romeo enters “alone” but is quickly followed by Benvolio and Mercutio, whom he is able to overhear unseen. If there was indeed no “heavens” at the Theatre, and so no supporting posts, we might suppose he hides behind an arras on the tiring house wall. When he reemerges in 2.2 Juliet has appeared; the dialogue makes clear that she is “above,” on the upper stage, as she will be again later. The company would have had to make accommodations in respects of admissions to the lords’ rooms, and the gatherers at the tiring house door informed, given the amount of activity on the upper stage (see p. 235–6). In 2.3 Friar Laurence appears (“with a basket,” Q2), carrying herbs and flowers, possibly freshly acquired for the show. 2.4 again showcases Kemp as “Peter, [the Nurse’s] man.”

3.1 tilts the whole play towards tragedy as Mercutio and Tybalt duel with rapiers. Q1 is explicit about the key choreography: “Tybalt under Romeo’s arm thrusts Mercutio in, and flies [i.e. runs away].” The contest between Romeo and Tybalt is less fully recorded: “Fight. Tybalt falls.” Presumably in a performance where swordplay was so prominent, and where audiences would have been knowledgeable because of the prize contests in the art, some effort would have been made to provide different action for each new fight. In 3.2 a direction reads “Enter Nurse, wringing her hands, with the ladder of cords in her lap” – a careful preparation for a prop which will not actually be needed until 3.5, when Romeo “goeth down” from Juliet’s bedroom, which in that scene (but perhaps not always) is “aloft” (Q2). The only significant new prop in 3.3 is Romeo’s dagger (“He offers to stab himself, and Nurse snatches the dagger away”), but he presumably wore that throughout. The following scenes raise few staging issues, apart from Romeo’s climb down from Juliet’s bedroom in 3.5, using the Nurse’s “ladder of cords.” In 4.4 the Nurse brings “herbs” to make the house fresh for County Paris, and a servingman brings logs and coals to make it warm. (In Q2 the preparations are grander: Lady Capulet calls to “fetch more spices” (4.4.1) rather than herbs, a much more expensive option, and there are now “three or four” servingmen, who between them carry “spits and logs, and baskets” containing “[t]hings for the cook”). As Paris approaches “Play music,” the first call on the musicians since the ball; this would have been stringed instruments and perhaps woodwind, rather than the trumpets – music for a bridegroom.

As noted elsewhere, at the end of 4.3 Juliet “falls upon her bed within the curtains,” as clear a direction for a curtained discovery space at the rear of the stage as one could imagine (see p. 250). In 4.5 she is discovered, apparently dead; eventually “They all but the Nurse go forth, casting rosemary on her and shutting the curtains.” Rosemary, of course, is “for remembrance” (Hamlet, 4.5.179) – so many features of Elizabethan life had symbolic value (different herbs, gems, metals, colors, for instance) and the players often went out of their way to invoke them. The curtains shield off the body and there follows a sequence which some have found in dubious taste, where Will Kemp jokes with the three musicians, at a loose end since “this is no time to play.” (It is here in Q2 that Kemp is here identified by name, rather than by the role he plays: 4.5.99.1: see p. 103). I have assumed that Shakespeare was responsible for this, though the book‐keeper – who most particularly had to keep track of the actors during performance – may have influenced the usage. I discuss elsewhere the complex final scene at Juliet’s tomb, which involves the most extensive use of a discovery space in any Shakespeare play (see p. 201).

We should expect the play to be over by 4.30 pm or 5.00 pm at the latest, which for most of the year would allow audience and players alike to get home in daylight, or at least twilight, if they did not stop at an ordinary or other eating establishment for supper on the way. It was a long day for the players. And it went on like this, usually six days a week (not Sundays) for much of the year, except when plague or other disturbances intervened. They were generally not supposed to perform in the forty days of Lent, but Henslowe makes it clear that they found ways around this – very probably paying the Master of the Revels for a dispensation. Even when there was no playhouse business to be conducted, the players had always to be “conning” new roles or brushing up old ones as they were revived. Moreover, as members of the company moved on or died all their old roles would have to be redistributed: the conveyor belt never stopped. It was a deeply taxing repertory system, but it gave them great resources. When they went on tour they might have as many as the seven plays to hand for a host to choose from that Wolsey’s Men are said to have in Sir Thomas More, or even more (p. 42). In October 1633, Sir Henry Herbert “sent a warrant by a messenger of the chamber to suppress The Tamer Tamed [an old play being revived] for that afternoon … They acted The Scornful Lady instead of it” (Herbert, 182). So, at perhaps four hours’ notice, they were able to stage a completely different play. Never less than entirely professional.

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Box 3.3 “Dramatic” or “Back‐Stage” Plots

When Henslowe recorded a loan to Ben Jonson as an advance against a play he would write, “which he showed the plot unto the company,” he meant something like an outline, enough of a description of the planned work to convince the company sharers that Jonson could produce a satisfactory play (see p. 107). He was not referring to the surviving pasteboard items called “plots” or “plats,” several of which survive among Alleyn’s papers at Dulwich College and which evidently served some practical function within the playhouses (see p. 62). Those other “plots” or “plats” are what concern me here. Baffling if we look to them for information about the story of the play or its authorship, they reveal a good deal about the practical organization of performances.

Tiffany Stern, who has given them the closest recent attention, calls them “back‐stage plots” (2009a, 201–31). She observes that:

plots were, as everything about them broadcasts, made with heavy and repeated use in mind. All surviving plots are made of substantial pulp boards on to which folio‐sized paper (roughly 12 by 16 inches [0.30‐0.41m]) are affixed. The pulp remains perfectly preserved for the plots of The Dead Man’s Fortune and Frederick and Basilea … Written at the top of the folio sheet stuck onto the board is the nature of the document (the word “plat” or “plot”) and the title of the play for which it is the map … Under the title, and using most of the rest of the sheet in every plot … are two vertical columns ruled in ink in a thin nib. The boxes into which these are subdivided are filled with writing that fits exactly into its space … Lastly … they are pierced through by an oblong hole inserted about a third of the way down the central margin … hanging the documents on a square peg was the last in the act of making them, and the first in the act of publicly using them. (208–9)

In summation, she argues: “Plots … define box‐by‐box when the stage is empty and when it is full, but they are interested only in what is happening onstage, not off it; in particular, they carefully list who is to enter first and who is then to enter to them, but they are only sporadically taken with mid‐scene exits” (214). She then develops a convincing argument that these were publicly‐hung call‐sheets, presupposing the situation of “a ‘prompter’ who spent his performance staring at his ‘book,’ and a call‐boy who aided him during production” (219). But “they must have been available to more than one person … such plots as have marginal annotations for property and music calls anticipate use by at least three sets of caller” (226). They constituted, as John Gillies puts it, “a bird’s‐eye view of the whole action – a grid of entrances, exits, and stage‐effects” (1998, 27). They are another mark of the players’ sheer professionalism, the first resource they would draw upon whenever a play was revived, an instant reminder of its workings and challenges. Of the seven surviving “plots” the one of most immediate interest is that for 2 The Seven Deadly Sins, because it is my belief that it relates to performances of that play by Shakespeare’s own company while at the Curtain. See “The ‘plot’ of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins” (p. 205ff).

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The Cross Keys Inn²⁶

The Chamberlain’s Men were barely settled in the Theatre before their patron, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, 8 October 1594:⁸³

Where my now company of players have been accustomed for the better exercise of their quality, and for the service of Her Majesty if need so require, to play this winter time within the City at the Cross Keys in Gracious Street: these are to require and pray your lordship (the time being such as, thanks be to God, there is now no danger of the sickness) to permit and suffer them so to do. The which I pray you the rather to do for that they have undertaken to me that, where heretofore they began not their plays till towards four o’clock, they will now begin at two and have done between four and five and will not use any drums or trumpets at all for the calling of people together and shall be contributors to the poor of the parish, according to their abilities. (ES, 4: 316)

This is among the clearest evidence we have that the players always really preferred playing in the City center, at least in the dark, cold, wet days of winter, when the appeal of the large, open‐air suburban amphitheaters must have been considerably muted for actors and audiences alike. Hunsdon’s letter, with an old soldier’s concision, anticipates the full raft of all the City father’s usual objections to the players: service of the Queen; no plague; start and end times to ensure they will be done before full dark, even in winter; no disruptive drums and trumpets; reasonable taxes for the poor. We have no actual proof that the Lord Mayor agreed to this, but the letter leaves little room for dissent (Gurr, 2005).

One curious feature of it is the way it talks of “my now company of players” as if they have regularly performed at the Cross Keys in this way in the past. Hunsdon had not patronized players since the late 1580s until the new company was created earlier in this year. Possibly there was a recognition that the Chamberlain’s players were, in many respects, essentially the old Strange’s Men (albeit stripped of Alleyn) and this had been their usual winter recourse. They had certainly played there in 1589, in defiance of the Lord Mayor’s attempts to restrain them from playing at all (EPF, 213).

Professional playing in the City inns can be traced back at least as far as the 1540s, but it was around the time that the Theatre was being built in 1576 that four inns emerged as regular playing places and they would be used by the actors until at least 1596. This was despite the 1574 Act of the Common Council which, as we have noted, played its part in driving the purpose‐built amphitheaters into the suburbs, but under whose conditions the inns’ owners were apparently prepared to operate (see p. 117). The inns themselves may have been somewhat adapted for the purposes of playing, but not radically. Unlike, say, the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel and the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, which were later converted into playhouses, the City inns – the Bell Savage on Ludgate Hill, the Bull in Bishopsgate Street, and the Cross Keys and Bell, both on Gracechurch Street – remained in business as inns, putting up travellers, handling cargoes, and purveying food and drink.

“Inn‐playing in London was largely … a winter phenomenon” (Kathman 2009b, 158). The Queen’s Men had been granted permission to play in two of the inns in the winter of 1583/4, and Lord Hunsdon’s letter explicitly ties his company’s occupation of the Cross Keys to winter. Their preference for the City inns seems to have been driven by the realities of securing an audience. In 1584 the Corporation of London ruled “that no playing be in the dark, nor continue any such time but as any of the auditory may return to their dwellings in London before sun set, or at least before it be dark” (ES, 4: 302). One suspects that this was not only what the City authorities required but also what most respectable members of the audience would prefer. Negotiating the minimally policed city after dark, its roads always in a dubious state of repair and cleanliness, would always have been a daunting prospect. Performances in a nearby inn would always be preferable at that time of year to a playhouse in the suburbs.

Although some have rather hastily jumped to the conclusion that performances at inns were indoor, most of the accounts we have of their actual use speak of outdoor playing, such as we observed with the Queen’s Men’s affray in Norwich. Robert Greene describes the trickery of pickpockets at the Bull inn, in his The Third and Last Part of Conny‐Catching (1592), in a context where it is clear that the audience is outside: a thief, having “nipped” a purse “stepped into the stable to take out the money” (D4^r). The story is probably fictional, but Greene certainly knew the Bull, where several of his own plays had been performed. He describes a stage and the audience being free to move about to get the best view. This is consistent with what we know of the Bull, which was a very large, L‐shaped property with three courtyards – which meant that two could cater to the inn’s regular trade while the third was being used for plays. As David Kathman puts it “The Bull’s northernmost yard would seem to be ideal for [playing] … The dimensions of the northern yard, roughly 45 ft by 35 ft [13.72 × 10.69 m], would have made it comparable in size to the original yard of the Rose playhouse” (2009b, 161). If we combine this with the characteristics I have described before – galleries to accommodate higher‐paying members of the audience, as well as accessible doors for stage and tiring house business – we have all the elements necessary for playing. (William Lambarde’s account of penny‐by‐penny payment specifically mentions the Bell‐Savage inn and the Theatre, but doubtless applied also to the Bull: see p. 95).

We know less about the Cross Keys inn than we do some of the others. But what we do know suggests that playing there may not have been outdoors. For one thing it only had one courtyard, so that playing there would seriously have interfered with the regular business of the inn. Another argument against it is that, unlike the Bull and the Bell Savage (especially the former), neither the Bell nor the Cross Keys is known to have hosted fencing prizes, which were probably better suited to outdoor presentation, in larger arenas. So we may cautiously hypothesize that the Cross Keys contained a room large enough for commercial playing, possibly not as big as the Stratford Guildhall, but surely no smaller than the country houses we reviewed earlier, capable of holding a hundred people. Even at that size, it would barely be economic – unless the players were able to charge a significant premium for indoor accommodation, some of it possibly seated. That was the formula pioneered by the management of the boy companies, though on a larger scale, and which the King’s Men were to replicate, when they took over the Blackfriars. It is not impossible that the specific appeal of the Cross Keys over other potential venues among the inns was that it gave the company its first experience of this end of the market. But this is pure speculation.

Virtually everything we do know about the Cross Keys is contained in David Kathman’s article, “Alice Layston and the Cross Keys” (2009c). Like so many of the theatrical properties, it was surrounded by vexatious, spiteful, and deceitful litigation over a number of years. Between 1571 and 1590 it was owned by Alice Layston, a legacy from her late (second) husband. Playing began there “probably by 1576 and certainly by 1579” (Kathman, 154), though renting the property to the actors was more likely a business decision of the leaseholder rather than the owner. From 1564 to 1584 the leaseholder was a Yorkshireman, Richard Ibbotson. By 1588 the lease passed to John Franklin, who “spent considerable money on wainscott, glass, settles (high‐back wooden benches) and ironwork, among other things, to get the inn into presentable shape” (161). He was thus the leaseholder when Strange’s Men defied the Lord Mayor and played there in 1589. Is it possible that Franklin’s outlay on putting “the inn into presentable shape” was associated with a business plan to attract higher‐paying customers?

Physically, we know that the Cross Keys was “located on the west side of Gracechurch Street … immediately north of the parish church and immediately south of the Bell inn … It was about 140 ft [42.67m] long extending west from the street, and was 80 ft [24.38m] wide at the back end but narrower on the Gracechurch Street end, with 32 ft [9.75m] of street frontage. There was a single yard in the middle, roughly 48 ft long (east‐west) by 32 ft wide (north‐south)” (147).²⁷ The proximity to the parish church doubtless explains why Hunsdon was so explicit about no drums and trumpets, and about the timing of shows. One of the striking features of his letter is that the proposed 2 p.m. start time would clash with evensong, whenever that service was being conducted (see p. 114). This might only have been on holy‐days, and Hunsdon does not go into sufficient detail to explain if there would be special arrangements for such eventualities. But if there was tacit acceptance that shows and services would overlap it was certainly important that there be no drums and trumpets in the streets.

The dimensions show that the building was certainly large enough to contain a substantial interior playing space, especially if (as we may suppose) it rose more than one storey. But just as we do not know the size of this room we cannot know how the players adapted their shows to it. There was, presumably, no need to arrange the seating to include places of honor, but in other respects it might have been very like playing in a great house. Securing payment from an audience would have been very straightforward, with a limited number of doors, especially if there was no differentiated pricing.

On Alice Layston’s death in 1590 the inn passed to her late husband’s brother, William Layston, who went to law to dispossess John Franklin of his lease. He installed in his stead James Beare, who was somewhat improbably a sailor and privateer (some would say pirate). He was thus the leaseholder with whom Shakespeare’s company presumably did business in 1594 and for as many years thereafter as they might have been allowed to play there. It is commonly assumed that playing in the City inns came to an end by 1596, when the petition by Blackfriars residents to stop the company using the new theatre which James Burbage had built there contained the passage “now all players being banished by the Lord Mayor from playing within the City … they now think to plant themselves in liberties” (EPF, 508). It is also the case that none of the foreign visitors to London mentions the inns in their surveys of the theatres after this date. Paul Menzer, however, has recently argued that players continued to perform in the City inns almost up to the end of Elizabeth’s reign (2006b). There is, however, no specific record of the Chamberlain’s Men doing so (or even requesting to do so) after 1594/5, and my assumption is that they did not. Their experience of playing at the Cross Keys was brief, but if my speculation about the business model it involved is correct, it was far from unimportant.

Greenwich Palace

On December 26, 1594 the Chamberlain’s Men performed at court for the first time. The Queen had elected that year to spend Christmas at Greenwich, one of the four royal palaces then in use. The previous year she had used Hampton Court, the next year she would use Richmond, and the year after that Whitehall – which James was to make virtually his settled place of residence and entertainment. But Elizabeth followed the old tradition of moving regularly – carrying virtually her entire government and household with her – partly in order to allow these intensely‐occupied buildings to air out after use.

Greenwich itself had been built by her father as a mark of particular royal magnificence. It stood on the site of what is now Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Naval Hospital, overlooking the River Thames, as did all the royal palaces. This was a practical as well as an aesthetic consideration. Access to water was critical, not least for dealing with sewage. And transport by river was much easier and faster than on land, horseback only excepted. One of the attractions of performing at the Cross Keys must have been that it made getting to Greenwich – on the south shore of the Thames, east of the City – much easier than it would have been from Shoreditch and the Theatre. They most likely took boats to the palace, carrying their costumes and properties; the land journey, having to cross over London Bridge, would have been much more arduous. Using the river also made it quite practical to perform at the inn that afternoon, concluding before five, and to be at the palace well before their performance was to begin, which would be after supper, around 9 p.m.

In each of the palaces dramatic performances were normally staged in one of two rooms, the Hall or the (usually smaller) Great Chamber. Whitehall additionally had structures known as Banqueting Houses. The decisions about which to use would be driven by considerations of the whole festive calendar, planned attendance, and the practicalities of mounting and demounting everything required. In 1594/5 the Great Chamber at Greenwich seems to have been used for all the plays performed by the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s Men (see p. 182–3). But the Hall was used after the Revels season, in March, when the Gentlemen of Gray’s Inn presented the Queen with a masque, Proteus and the Adamantine Rock.

The Great Chamber at Greenwich, as in all the palaces, was the antechamber to the Queen’s private quarters in the royal suite; it was constantly busy and always guarded (it was also known as the Guard Chamber). The fact that it could be set up at this time to use for plays was a mark that this was truly a holiday season. It would also have been decorated to impress, especially since this was the room where visitors were first brought. As John Astington explains: “The royal department of the Wardrobe looked after the preparation of rooms in this fashion [hanging the vertical surfaces with arras or woven cloth], and their responsibilities could easily have been extended to the stage facilities. The chamber was ‘made ready’ with hangings covering the walls, and following a particular event the yeomen and grooms busied themselves ‘taking down stuff and laying it up’ – returning the valuable fabrics to the rooms or cupboards where they were stored” (Astington, 1999, 151). Sometimes we have details of the designs. For the wedding of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon in 1501 the Hall of Richmond Palace was splendidly decorated: “The walls of this pleasant hall are hanged with rich cloths of Arras, their works representing many noble battle and sieges, as of Jerusalem, Troy, Alba, and many other; that this whole apparement [equipment, outfit] was most glorious and joyful to consider and behold” (60–1, quoting Grose, 1808, 2: 315.) And after the execution of Charles I in 1649 many royal hangings were sold off: “Tapestries to hang in chambers came in matching themes (“Six pieces of Vulcan and Venus,” “Five pieces of hangings of King David,” etc.), but also in landscape designs and with other non‐figurative motifs (“Flower pots and pillars”; “flower Deluces”; “beasts bearing the Arms of England”)” (153, quoting W. G. Thomson, 1930, 314–29). Such hangings adjacent to the stage must always have been in a dialogue of sorts with the narrative of a performance.

John Astington describes what a court playing space would normally look like. The audience were:

mostly seated, and no one would have occupied the space between the Queen’s seat, set on a dias somewhere near the centre of the auditorium, and the actors’ stage, a custom‐built platform set across one end of the space, and possibly as large as their playhouse playing area. The court audience would have sat … in sloping banks of seating set against the side walls and the rear wall behind the Queen’s seat, creating more of the effect of a modern sports arena. The chief difference as one looked out from the stage, Shakespeare’s point of view, would have been the effect of the glow and shimmer of numerous candles, suspended on decorated chandeliers hung from the roof, and burning in candleholders set against the wall and posts all around the room. The aura of this scintillating lighting would have been picked up in the jewels and spangled fabrics of the richly‐dressed and high‐born audience assembled to watch the play. Brilliance was the mark of court performance.

(Astington, 2009, 309)

As was usual the Great Chamber at Greenwich was on the second storey, and seems to have been similar in size to that at Whitehall, about 60 ft (18.28m) by 30 ft (9.14m).²⁸ Somewhat less usual, the Hall was little bigger, some 68 ft (20.73m) by 30 ft, making it not much more than half the size of the equivalent room at Whitehall (approximately 90 ft [27.43m] by 40 ft [12.19m]) or Hampton Court (the only one of the four which still stands, 106 ft [32.31m] long overall and 40 ft wide). Those larger rooms must really have tested the vocal range of the actors, being almost twice as long as any distance they would have to carry over the yards of one of the amphitheaters, though indoors. As a general rule, therefore, the Halls were usually used for larger events, with an expanded attendance; the Great Chamber for somewhat more intimate occasions, though probably still involving up to 500 attendees.

There is a ground‐plan for a banquet in the Great Chamber at Whitehall on Twelfth Night 1601, which we have noted was very similar in size to that at Greenwich. The plan is highly suggestive for the use of that room when theatricals were performed there, as they were later that night – including Shakespeare’s company (see Figure 3.4).²⁹ We see that the Queen’s Presence Chamber lay to the south of the Great Chamber; she would enter from there, requiring that her “state” or ceremonial seat would be at that end of the room. Indeed, it is apparent that there were special fittings to hold the “state” in place, so that protocol required that all the other seating would always be arrayed so as to make it the center of attention. In this ground plan we can see that all tables and cupboards have been pushed back to the walls and the seating is arranged in such away that the Queen and the space below her, where the actors would perform, were always the focus of attention. To a slightly lesser extent so to were her most notable quests, who on this occasion included Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, and ambassadors from Muscovy, seated close by her in positions of honor. For most spectators, they were all backdrops to the theatricals, very much as the hangings on the walls were (Astington, 1991, 6–11).

Figure 3.4 Diagram of seating arrangements in the Great Chamber at Whitehall.

Source: College of Arms, MS Vincent 151, pp. 156–7.

This arrangement afforded the actors no equivalent to their tiring houses in the theatres: no base for entrances and exits, no place to change costumes or conceal properties until they were needed. They were simply too far from the door at the north end of the room, via which they and most of the audience would have entered, and there are no alternative options. As they had been doing for decades, the players would have improvised. That is, a “house” or “houses” would have served as a tiring house. The Revels Accounts for the end of Elizabeth’s reign are lost. But the early Jacobean Accounts bear out this supposition. Those for 1604/5 charge “For 12 ells of canvas for the Office of the Revels for the tiring house” (Streitberger, 1986b, 12). This might conceivably have been augmented by the use of smaller, similarly canvas‐covered but richly painted “houses” or booths as localized points for action, and entry and exit, within the action of the play proper and defining its geography (see p. 2, 21). The Revels Office had regularly provided these for court entertainments in earlier decades; their use seems to have been declining by the 1590s, but as late as 1614 Sir George Buc’s Revels Accounts record expenditure on “canvas for the booths and other necessaries for a play called Bartholomew Fair” (70). (I discuss them further in relation to Gray’s Inn, in the next section). Those same accounts also record “Music houses three at Whitehall,” one requiring “taffeta for a curtain,” presumably similar temporary constructions (ibid.).

We have a brief glimpse of Elizabeth seated on her “state” for the last‐ever performance at court of the Queen’s Men, early in 1594. Thomas Birch recorded that “Mr [Anthony] Standen was at the play and dancing on Twelfth Night, which lasted until one after midnight, more by constraint than by choice, the Earl of Essex having committed him to the placing and entertaining of certain Germans. The Queen appeared there in a high throne, richly adorned, and “as beautiful,” says he, “to my old sight, as ever I saw her; and next to her chair the earl, with whom she often devised in sweet and favourable manner” (Birch, 1754, 1.146). The Queen and the last of her great favorites were of more interest than the Queen’s Men, a salutary reminder of the place of theatricals in the great scheme of things.

As at Oxford in 1566, the focus on the Queen is all‐important. She is as much the center of attention (indeed, more so) than the actors – it is crucial that the audience can see her as well as the stage. She is the courtly equivalent of the hosts in great houses, mayors in towns and cities, senior academics in colleges being placed in seats of honor, where they are as visible as the players (see p. 57–8). This would have been enhanced by the lighting that was a distinctive feature of court shows, which were almost always staged in the dead of night. Shakespeare had encountered something of this in great houses where he played, but the court would be lit to a much higher level.

By this time it fell to the Office of Works to set up the stage and the seating, but the Revels Office still deployed its traditional skills in installing the candle lighting, using twisted copper wire. The 1608/9 Accounts are typical in charging for “Branches 16, viz. 8 at 40s the piece (£16) and 8 at 20s (£8) … wire rods, 8 containing 140 foot the piece being twisted three great wires into one rod … ropes to hang the branches, 8 … pipes of plate to save the ropes from burning, 16 … pulleys for branches, 8 … staples to strain the wires, 4 dozen … pendants … candleplates, 4 dozen … candlesticks, 4 dozen” (Streitberger, 1986b, 32–3). As in other venues, the whole room was lit, not just the stage, and there was presumably some scope to enhance lighting and coloring around the action for particular effects: the 1612–13 Accounts charge for “Looking glasses, 40 dozen to set upon the branches” and “bladders gilt to hang upon the branches, six dozen” (58). There were also the usual practical consequences of the candles, which here more than anywhere needed to be trimmed from time to time to stop wax dripping. The play had thus to be stopped, requiring (as we have noted before) what were in fact, if not in intention, act breaks (p. 58).

We see an instance of this in one of the rare accounts we have of a play by professionals being performed at court. The departure of the French Ambassador, La Trémoille, was marked by feasting and a play at Whitehall in May 1619, hosted by the King’s cousin, the Duke of Lennox. The King’s Men performed Pericles for the event:

The Marquise Trenell on Thursday last took leave of the King: that night was feasted at White Hall, by the Duke of Lennox in the Queen’s great chamber … to the King’s great Chamber they went to see the play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which lasted till 2 o’clock. After two acts, the players ceased till the French all refreshed them with sweetmeats brought on chiney voiders, & wine & ale in bottles, after the players began anew.³⁰

This is the most precisely timed and detailed description of a court play (as distinct from masque) that we have. Assuming they had supper at the usual time, the performance began before 10 p.m. and certainly finished at 2 a.m., taking far longer than any modern performance of Pericles would – the text we have is quite short – even with intermissions. But it was interrupted for a relatively modest dessert after the second act, and we have no way of knowing how much time that took.³¹ The fact that plays at court took breaks for refreshments, and had seating for the majority of those present, must have made the performance of ultra‐long plays like Hamlet or Bartholomew Fair far more acceptable from an audience’s point of view (Astington, 1999, 84, 117, 172–3). The rhythms of playing at court must have been very different, from the actors’ point of view, from those in their regular theatres. Getting back to the Theatre in the dead of night on those winter nights – the Shakesperean era was a mini ice‐age, when the Thames several times froze over – must also have been a daunting task.

We have no idea what plays the Chamberlain’s Men staged at Greenwich late in December 1594, though we do know that they had The Comedy of Errorsprepared for performance at Gray’s Inn on the 28th and Edmund Tilney might well have thought it suitable fare for the court Revels season. Whatever the plays, the opulence must have been impressive. Not only would the Queen and her courtiers have been resplendent in their best dresses and doublets, while sergeants‐at‐arms and other guards would have been in full uniform, and the walls and stage would have been covered with hangings we have described. Like much of the clothing in the room, some would be shot through with gold and silver thread, further enhancing the glittering light from the candles. The tapestries’ depictions of Biblical, classical, or mythological scenes placed the plays in ancient traditions of storytelling. The platform on which the players acted may literally have been pretty much bare, but the whole room in which they performed when at court was a richly embellished meta‐stage in which their playing blended into a larger pageantry of royal majesty, visually very different from the common playhouses.

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Box 3.4 Patronage and its Practices

“Patronage” is a broad term, which encompasses many of the characteristic practices of early modern England. “Patronage, broadly defined, was the central social system of the era. It dominated political life and permeated the structure of the church and universities. Its influence on the economy was enormous, and the assumptions behind it were reflected in religious thought, in cosmological speculation, and in the organization and daily detail of family life” (Evans, 1989, 23). Through it, offices, gifts, employment, rewards, authority, land tenancy, influence, opportunities all flowed from the highest in the land down to the lowest in society, in a rigidly hierarchical structure; it forged bonds of reciprocal beneficence and obligation, binding patron and patronized in quasi‐familial ties.

A writer, like Shakespeare, might seek to exploit the benefits offered by the patronage system in one of various ways. At a very basic level he might seek permission to dedicate a work to someone of stature, ideally a wealthy aristocrat; this honored the patron and spread his fame, and might bring the author a reward of perhaps a few pounds. This is what Shakespeare was after when he dedicated both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to the young Earl of Southampton, though it is not impossible that he hoped for a higher level of patronage beyond that: perhaps employment in a role where his linguistic skills were of value, such as a tutor or a secretary. So, for example, the poet John Donne achieved a significant position as chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Lord Egerton (though he threw it away when he secretly married Egerton’s niece); the poet and dramatist, Samuel Daniel, served as a tutor in the household of the great Countess of Pembroke, and later as tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Cumberland (see Robbins, 2003).

Patronage of an acting company was a rather different business. As we have seen, its origins lay in the fact that aristocrats and gentry employed household players and musicians, some of whom toured to neighboring establishments and earned gratuities, a practice which gradually extended and became professionalised. Some notable aristocrats seem to have encouraged their players to carry their livery widely around the country as a testament to their prestige, cementing relationships and alliances. So, for example, in 1559 Lord Robert Dudley (later the great Earl of Leicester) wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, in his role as Lord President of the North, seeking the latter’s permission for his players to travel in Yorkshire, as they already traveled widely elsewhere: “Where my servants … be such as are players of interludes, and for the same have the licence of divers of my lords here under their seals … I have thought among the rest by my letters to beseech your good lordship’s conformity to them likewise, that they may have your hand and seal to their licence for the like liberty in Yorkshire; being honest men, and such as shall play none other matters (I trust) but tolerable and convenient … for whom I shall have good cause to thank your lordship and to remain your lordship’s to the best that shall lie in my little power” (EPF, 205). So Dudley begs a favor of Shrewsbury, while promising to reciprocate (with “my little power”) in the future; in this he financially benefits his players, but they in turn reflect his magnificence across the country, at essentially no cost to himself. Patronage oiled many wheels simultaneously.

We have already observed later provisions in the 1570s, prompted by both court and Parliament, which sought to limit such theatrical patronage to the narrow ranks of the aristocracy (excluding the gentry), so reducing the number of troupes and keeping them more securely within the proper limits of authority (see pp. 29–30). What we know very little about in all of this is the nature of the personal relationship between a lord and his players. To what extent were men like Leicester or Lord Strange, or Shakespeare’s theatrical patrons, the Hunsdons, actually interested in theatre or in the plays they performed? To what extent did the players and their writers feel obliged to reflect their patrons’ interests in their works? The evidence is very thin.

Writing for Patrons?

To return for a moment to the Revels season at Greenwich in the winter of 1594/5 (see p. 22): it is possible that the Chamberlain’s Men made one further appearance in Great Chamber there, though there is no record of it. As John Stow’s Annals record: “The 26 of January [1595], the Earl of Derby married the Earl of Oxford’s daughter at the court then at Greenwich, which marriage feast was most royally kept” (Stow, 1605, 1279). The Queen then accompanied the couple to Burghley House (ES 4: 109, notes 10 and 11). This is one of the occasions on which it is often supposed that the Chamberlain’s Men performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a wedding play with its polite obeisance to the “fair vestal thronèd by the west” (2.1.158), which is certainly an allusion to the Virgin Queen as a votaress of Diana and possibly one to the Earl of Hertford’s entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham in 1591. The bridegroom was the younger brother of the late Lord Strange whom many of the company had served and the bride was the grand‐daughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, so this was a marriage of consequence and one for which it would be fitting for Shakespeare’s company to provide entertainment. The date is, moreover, close to when for other reasons scholars usually place the composition of the play.

If this supposed performance took place while the “marriage feast was most royally kept” at Greenwich, then it took place in the Great Chamber – the only room at that time set up for theatricals. The main problem with this hypothesis is that there is no record of any performance at court at that time; the Chamber Accounts detail costs of the feasting, but no payments for a play. It is not impossible, however, that those responsible for the wedding would have paid from their own pockets. (One Arthur Throgmorton desperately petitioned Sir Robert Cecil to be allowed to contrive a masque for the wedding, as a way to return to Elizabeth’s favor. There is no evidence that he was successful [ES, 1: 168n].) Proponents of the Dream theory have alternatively suggested that there could have been a performance at Burghley House, though there is no record of a performance there either.

Others, however, have favored different weddings at which the play might have been performed.³² One is the February 1596 wedding of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas, son of Henry, Lord Berkeley; it took place in Blackfriars, presumably at the residence of the bride’s father, Sir George Carey. Elizabeth Carey was the grand‐daughter of Henry, Lord Hunsdon, patron of Shakespeare’s company. Yet again, however, there is no recorded performance. Neither of these suggestions is inherently implausible and the absence of records is more the norm than an invalidating objection in chronicling Elizabethan theatre. The more critical issue is whether – as many proponents of these notions suppose – the play was not just performed at such an event but written for one.

As we saw in relation to Strange’s Men, Shakespeare’s early history plays seem to show particular care in their treatment of the Stanley family, Lord Strange’s ancestors. This is most notably the case in Richard III where Ernst Honigmann (one of the key proponents of the “Lancastrian Shakespeare” thesis) argued that “Shakespeare rearranged history so as to make Stanley’s [i.e. Thomas Stanley, first Earl of Derby] services to the incoming Tudor dynasty seem more momentous than they really were.”³³ He also points to the sympathetic treatment of Old and Young Clifford in 2 and 3 Henry VI, noting that “Ferdinando, Lord Strange, was the son of Margaret Clifford and was therefore the direct descendant of the Cliffords represented in Henry VI” (154).

Lawrence Manley and Sally‐Beth MacLean further develop these points in their chapter on “Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men,” arguing also that changes (softening?) to the depiction of the Duchess of Gloucester’s witchcraft between the quarto version (The First Part of the Contention … of York and Lancaster) and that in 2 Henry VI, may have been in deference to striking parallels between what happened to her and to Strange’s mother, Lady Margaret Stanley (Manley and MacLean, 2014, 280–320). Both Honigmann and Manley/MacLean also make much of the possible parallels between Ferdinando Stanley and Ferdinando, King of Navarre, in Love’s Labour’s Lost. All of these arguments assume a deeper and more extended connection between Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men, or Stanley patronage more generally, than the historical record can vouch for. They also require some assumptions about the dating of plays, or of versions of plays, that may be open to question. The only version of Love’s Labour’s Lost that we have, for example, was published in 1598; but that text explicitly tells us that the play has been revised. We neither know when the original was written nor what it looked like. In short, there are a lot of intriguing possibilities here, but no smoking gun.

The same might be said of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ever since Leslie Hotson suggested in 1931 that the play might have been written in connection with the elevation of the second Lord Hunsdon to the Order of the Garter in 1597, most editors of the play have treated this as established fact (Hotson, 1931). There is in fact no record of any theatrical performance connected with the Garter ceremony that year, or with the Garter feast some months later. And 1597 is earlier than other indications might suggest for the play.³⁴ Moreover, the play’s detailed references to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the chapel associated with the Garter Knights, only appear in the 1623 folio version of the play, not in its 1602 quarto. The folio version of the play is certainly associated with the Garter, the senior order of chivalry in England, but whether the play should really be linked with Shakespeare’s patron’s becoming a member of it has to be questionable (Dutton, 2016, 245–58).

In the Jacobean phase of his career, questions about the topicality of his plays hang most pointedly over King Lear and its associations with King James’s known desire to unite the parliaments of his two countries, as he had united their crowns. As Andrew Gurr puts it: “Nobody there for the presentation of the play at court at the opening of the 1606 Christmas season could possibly have missed [the play’s] applications as an inverted image of the still disunited kingdoms of England and Scotland … the court’s spectators might see the King’s Men offering support to their patron through their play’s obvious ‘application’” (1996, 300; Marcus, 1988, 148–59). But in trying to assess the weight of such “applications” in relation to a court performance we must always bear in mind the regulating figure of the Master of the Revels, who insisted that all plays be “rehearsed, corrected and perfected” under his guidance before they were put on at court (see p. 85). The play was printed in 1608 “As it was played before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall upon St. Stephen’s night in Christmas Holidays. By his Majesty’s servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside.” That leaves plenty of scope for assuming that the performance differed in some respects from what would have been staged in public. Any “application” that might have been drawn that St Stephen’s Night was one sanctioned by Edmund Tilney and need not have squared with Shakespeare’s original intentions – though of course Tilney would hardly have chosen the play in the first place, if it had not seemed to him to have proper potential.

These questions ask us to determine where Shakespeare and his fellows precisely were in a spectrum of royal service, company patronage, and commercial operation. There is no proven instance of a playwright for the public theatres being commissioned to write a play for an aristocratic event like a wedding or some mark of royal recognition. Of course one or two (Ben Jonson is the prime example) were commissioned to write masques for the court and entertainments for such as the London livery companies (see p. 12). But that is not the same thing as a play, which is a company undertaking, especially if it is written (as it would be by Shakespeare) by their “ordinary poet.” To return to our original example, Francis Meres mentions A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palladis Tamia (1598), so it was certainly public knowledge by then; and it was published in 1600 “As it hath been sundry times publicly acted.” There is no evidence that it was ever performed anywhere else until a play of “Robin Goodfellow” was staged at court on New Year’s Night, 1604. A betting man would lay strong odds that it had been performed before Elizabeth on one of the thirty‐two occasions when we know the Chamberlain’s Men were at her court, but we do not know what they played (Dutton, 2016, 34–7; Streitberger, 2016, 281–92).

An intriguing example of a patron who clearly did take a real interest in his players and their work is the sixth Earl of Derby, brother of Lord Strange, who was described in 1599 as “busy penning comedies for the common players” – presumably his own Derby’s Men, who that year briefly broke into the privileged ranks of chosen performers at court, though possibly the revived Paul’s boys, in whom he invested (see p. 70). It may also tell us something that Thomas Heywood dedicated all his non‐dramatic works to the Earl of Worcester or his son, long after Worcester ceded patronage of Heywood’s acting company to Queen Anne in 1604; this continued until Worcester died in 1628, suggesting a genuine link between patron and client. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is perhaps safest to conclude that Shakespeare and commercial playwrights like him were not specifically commissioned to write plays for their patrons and their particular occasions. Yet it is difficult to believe that some level of identification with their patrons did not make its mark on the plays written for them, in the manner of those plays apparently associated with Lord Strange.

While we might speculate that Shakespeare may have worked with the Queen’s Men and/or Strange’s Men there is no evidence that he was ever a permanent member of either company. The only companies in which he was a sharer were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594–1603) and its subsequent reincarnation, the King’s Men (1603–circa 1613): see p. 277. So, leaving aside James I (see p. 277), the only theatrical patrons we can be sure Shakespeare served were the father and son, Henry and George Carey, first and second Lords Hunsdon, who both served as Lord Chamberlain – the man who oversaw the running of most aspects of the royal household, and so had particular influence over access to the Queen – for most of the time between 1594 and 1603.

Henry Carey (1526–96) (Figure 3.5) was first cousin to Queen Elizabeth on her mother (Anne Boleyn’s) side. Largely because of this he received early honors when she came to the throne (1558), including being created Lord Hunsdon and made a Knight of the Garter. But he had to work hard in her service to achieve the influence and rewards he sought. Early in the reign this service focused mainly on the Scottish borders, a sensitive region at a time when Mary, Queen of Scots laid claim to the English crown and Scottish politics were in turmoil. In 1568 he was appointed governor of the key border town of Berwick and next year was involved in resistance to the revolt of the northern earls against Elizabeth, making a name for himself in 1570 when he defeated the larger forces of the rebel, Leonard Dacre. He was promoted to warden of the east marches (i.e. the eastern section of the Scottish border).

Figure 3.5 Portrait of Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon.

Source: Berkeley Castle.

In 1577 he achieved a central position in Elizabeth’s administration when he was made a Privy Councilor, one of the body that effectively ruled England in the Queen’s name. He got on well with the key figure, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, but also managed to stay on good terms with the Queen’s great favorite, the Earl of Leicester. He gained a reputation as a blunt, plain‐speaking man of affairs, with little of a courtier’s proverbial guile. In 1585 he was appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household, succeeding his son‐in‐law, Lord Howard of Effingham (husband of his eldest daughter), who in turn became Lord Admiral. As noted earlier, Lord Admiral Howard retained an interest in theatrical affairs, so that father‐ and son‐in‐law potentially represented an important axis within the Privy Council whenever theatrical issues came to their attention – a factor in Andrew Gurr’s assumption that the situation in 1594 was engineered by the Council (pp. 72, Note 11; 77–8).

By the 1570s most Lord Chamberlains had assumed the responsibility of patronizing a leading troupe that might serve the Queen. The office required that he be at court with the Queen even over Christmas, so it made sense that they should perform there rather than at his own country estate. The Earl of Sussex, for example, who was Lord Chamberlain from 1572 until 1583 had one of the leading companies of the day and they performed at court most Christmases. Lord Hunsdon had patronized players intermittently since the 1560s, but by the time he came to office the formation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 had effectively settled the choice of court playing for several years, until Strange’s Men emerged (see pp. 41; 61). His players appear occasionally in provincial records, but he apparently patronized none at all between 1590 and the appearance of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the record from 1594 onwards; they were clearly a new formation, built on what was left of Strange’s Men, though critically without Edward Alleyn. He had left to lead Lord Admiral Howard’s Men, the principal rivals to Hunsdon’s own players for the next decade. Whether this was centrally planned or not, it effected a significant reorganization of London playing that set the pattern for the future. And Hunsdon, as Lord Chamberlain, played an important part.

Hunsdon was not an uncritical supporter of players. When in 1584 James Burbage defied the London authorities on the basis of his status as Hunsdon’s “servant,” he promptly backed the authorities (see p. 29). But, as I relate elsewhere, he was not opposed to James Burbage’s building of a playhouse in the Blackfriars, where he was looking for new quarters himself, or to its use by his own players (see p. 196). Had he lived the scheme might have succeeded. But he died on July 22, 1596. Thomas Nashe’s comments in a letter to William Cotton spell out the consequences: “now the players … are piteously persecuted by the Lord Mayor and the aldermen, and however in their old lord’s time they thought their state settled, it is now so uncertain they cannot build upon it” (Nashe, 1904–10, 5: 194).

Ironically, his eldest son, George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon (1547–1603), signed the petition of Blackfriars residents opposed to Burbage’s plans, an unfortunate first involvement with the players he was to patronize (see p. 196). He dearly wanted to succeed his father in office, but Elizabeth as ever cannily spread her favors and appointed another long‐serving retainer, William Brooke, tenth Lord Cobham. Cobham himself, however, died in March 1597, and the younger Hunsdon finally did succeed his father as Lord Chamberlain, a Privy Councilor and member of the Order of the Garter. The younger Hunsdon was not as prominent a figure as his father, but had a typical track‐record of military, parliamentary, and judicial appointments before achieving real prominence. He assumed patronage of the players as soon as his father died; they were known simply as Lord Hunsdon’s Men until he took on his father’s old role. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign he was a sick man and one of King James’ first decisions in London was to relieve him of his duties as Lord Chamberlain (May 4, 1603). But this represented no threat to the players since only two weeks later they acquired the highest patron of them all, the king himself. The younger Hunsdon died on September 8 that year.

There is nothing in Shakespeare’s works that connects them with the Hunsdons like those features of the early plays that may speak to his association with Lord Strange. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for a particular family wedding, there is no known trace of it in the text. The most teasing case is the figure of Falstaff, who appears in three plays – the two parts of Henry IV as well as Merry Wives – and was promised, in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV, to appear in Henry V, though all we get there is an account of his death. It is just possible that all this was associated with Shakespeare’s Hunsdon patrons. I pursue the case elsewhere (see p. 194ff).

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Gray’s Inn

The last distinctively different staging with which we can associate the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 relates to their performance of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn on the night of December 28 (Innocents’ Day).³⁵ The occasion is recorded in the Gesta Grayorum (“A History of Gray’s Men”), an account evidently written close to the date but not printed until 1688. It tells the story of a much longer charade, within which that performance was almost incidental. The students of the Inn, one of the four London law schools which virtually constituted a university in the capital city, had determined to hold protracted revels over the whole Christmas period (stretching from December to February). It was to be a release of festivity after the prolonged plague. These revels took the time‐honored form in such institutions of electing a topsy‐turvey lord‐of‐misrule, who “reigned” over the Inn during this period; he had a retinue which mirrored that of the Queen’s own court, including a Lord Treasurer, Lord Chamberlain, Lord Chancellor, and many others. The student elected was Henry Helmes, dubbed the Prince of Purpoole after the manor of Portpoole in which the Inn stood. One thread running through these sophomoric revels was the intention to cement a bond of amity between Gray’s and the students of their fellow inn, the Inner Temple. Accordingly an “ambassador” of the Inner Temple was among those invited on the night of the Chamberlain’s Men’s performance.

From the Gesta Grayorum:

The next grand night was intended to be upon Innocents’ Day at night; at which time there was a great presence of lords, ladies, and worshipful personages, that did expect some notable performance at that time; which, indeed, had been effected, if the multitude of beholders had not been so exceeding great, that thereby there was no convenient room for those that were actors; by reason whereof, very good inventions and conceits could not have opportunity to be applauded, which otherwise would have been great contentation to the beholders. Against which time, our friend, the Inner Temple, determined to send their Ambassador to our Prince of State, as sent from Frederick Templarius, their Emperor, who was then busied in his wars against the Turk. The Ambassador came very gallantly appointed, and attended by a great number of brave gentlemen, which arrived at our court about nine of the clock at night. Upon their coming thither, the King at Arms gave notice to the Prince, then sitting in his chair of State in the Hall, that there was come to his court an Ambassador from his ancient friend the State of Templaria which desired to have present access unto His Highness … So he was brought in very solemnly, with sound of trumpets, the King at Arms and Lords of Purpoole making to his company, which marched before him in order. He was received very kindly of the Prince, and placed in a chair beside His Highness, to the end that he might be partaker of the sports intended. But first, he made a speech to the Prince … Our Prince made him this answer, That he did acknowledge that the great kindness of his Lord, whereby he doth invite to further degrees in firm and loyal friendship, did deserve all honourable commendations, and effectual accomplishment, that by any means might be devised … When the Ambassador was placed, as aforesaid, and that there was something to be performed for the delight of the beholders, there arose such a disordered tumult and crowd upon the stage, that there was no opportunity to effect that which was intended. There came so great a number of worshipful personages upon the stage, that might not be displaced; and gentlewomen, whose sex did privilege them from violence, that when the prince and his officers had in vain, a good while, expected and endeavoured a reformation, at length there was no hope of redress for that present. The Lord Ambassador and his train thought that they were not so kindly entertained as was before expected, and thereupon would not stay any longer at that time, but, in a sort, discontented and displeased. After their departure the throngs and tumults did somewhat cease, although so much of them continued, as was able to disorder and confound any good inventions whatsoever. In regard whereof, as also for that the sports intended were especially for the gracing of the Templarians it was thought good not to offer anything of account, saving dancing and revelling with gentlewomen; and after such sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players. So that night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.³⁶

I have quoted at such length to give an impression of the whole occasion and its social resonances for the participants. The following day, continuing the fantasy of misrule, the Prince’s Privy Council launched an enquiry into the “great disorders and misdemeanours,” which finally led to a charge against the “sorcerer or conjurer” deemed to be responsible “that he had foisted a company of base and common fellows, to make up our disorders with a play of errors and confusions; and that night had gained to us discredit, and itself a nickname of Errors” (32–3). This was of course in jest, but in such company there lingered the conviction that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were “a company of base and common fellows,” however grand their lord might be.

Ironically, we learn that the real cause of the disorder was that too many of those in attendance that night felt that their status warranted them a place on the stage, with the Prince. The Gesta tells us that the collegiate form of staging was followed when it describes a “Running Banquet” and specifies “a table set in the midst of the stage, before the Prince’s Seat” – imitating royal seating at court rather than (as long popularly supposed) using the lower end of the hall, with its convenient screen doors and mistrels’ gallery, as the frame of the stage (see p. 24). As Ros King comments: “The stage must have been at the opposite end of the Hall from the screen” (2004, 34). In the chaotic conditions “there arose such a disordered tumult and crowd upon the stage, that there was no opportunity to effect that which was intended. There came so great a number of worshipful personages upon the stage, that might not be displaced ….” There is no way of knowing if these really were “worshipful personages” or only so in the fantasy of Purpool, but the Elizabethan convention of seating the dignitaries “upon the stage” proved in this company to be totally impractical – so much so that the most honored guest of the evening, the “Ambassador” from the Inner Temple, left in disdain.

This same section of the Gesta jokingly lays out how the “sorcerer” “had caused … scaffolds to be reared to the top of the house, to increase expectation. And how he had caused divers ladies and gentlewomen, and others of good condition, to be invited to our sports” (32). This speaks to two points discussed elsewhere. One is that if there was scaffolded seating reaching to the ceiling, there is a good chance that they made proper provision for substantial tiring houses lower down, adjacent to the stage, such as we know were built at Queens’ College, Cambridge (see p. 22). The other is specific acknowledgment of the presence of ladies of quality in the audience. The Inns of Court, like the universities, were all‐male establishments. But theatricals at both were festive occasions when ladies were invited in. Here, as elsewhere, they were a notable factor in the audience (see p. 133, 162).

Only one text of The Comedy of Errors has survived, that in the First Folio, and it has some features that make it unusual by comparison with other Shakespeare works. It is particularly heavily indebted to its Latin source (as the author of the Gesta Grayorum noted, Plautus’s Menaechmi, “The Brothers Menaechmus”) but, more to the point its staging suggests features we do not associate with the public playhouses at this date. The action all takes place in Ephesus, and it repeatedly and pointedly circulates around the house of Antipholus of Ephesus, “the Phoenix,” the house of the Courtesan, “the Porcupine,” and the Priory where the Abbess is found.³⁷ The principal characters are either tied to these sites or in transit between them. They seem to be fixed and known points on the stage, rather than the very provisional designation of locations in most Elizabethan drama. If we compare it with Twelfth Night, for example, another Plautine play of twins and confused identities, we see there a very fluid shifting from Orsino’s court to the seacoast (“This is Illyria, lady”: 1.2.2) to Olivia’s house, then alternating between the court and her house (or garden), or indeterminately to settings in the town or the country, as the action demands. This is what is sometimes called “successive staging,” which takes for granted a change of scene whenever the actors clear the stage. This became the norm for Elizabethan public theatre.

A possible explanation for the relative rigidity of The Comedy of Errors might be that the text reflects a very specific, old‐style staging of the play, possibly even that at Gray’s Inn (for which some scholars think it might have been purposely written) or one at court: we know that it was performed at court on December 28, 1604, but it may well have been staged there earlier.³⁸ Academic institutions and the court are places where “houses” such as those we saw at Oxford in 1566 remained in use (see p. 2, 21; Foakes, 1962, xxxiv–xxxix; Kernodle, 1944, 160–3). Where such “houses” were deployed, the effect was quite different from what we normally expect of the Elizabethan stage, as we see from McMillin and MacLean’s discussion of the George Peele’s Queen’s Men’s play, The Old Wives Tale:

The action moves among four places: a cross, a well, Sacrapant’s study, and a hill with a light hidden behind removable turf. The system of staging uses emblematic props or “houses” to indicate the locations, and because the scenic indicators remain in view throughout the action, this has sometimes been called “simultaneous staging.” The emblematic nature of the scenic properties must be kept in mind. These are not so much acting places as indicators of location … By keeping the locations visible and within easy reach of one another, simultaneous staging implies a containable and organized world. It was perhaps for this reason that simultaneous staging was customary at court and at other institutions of authority, where the monarch might attend and be given her special seat in an auditorium which was also carefully organized. The Queen’s Men were masters of the court schedule in their early years and (help on the settings coming from the Revels office, where new canvas “houses” could be built and old ones pulled from storage) they must have performed many plays on the simultaneous system evident in The Old Wives Tale.

(McMillin and MacLean, 1999, 138–9)³⁹

It is widely assumed that the use of “houses” and simultaneous staging declined at court as the acting conventions developed in the public amphitheaters became more prevalent. But change would not have happened overnight. As we noted, as late as the Revels accounts for 1614 we find a charge for “canvas for the booths” for Bartholomew Fair,” suggesting that those old practices had not been entirely abandoned (p. 121). Jonson may even have been deliberately evoking the old staging, as he evokes so much about old theatre in that play.

The Gray’s Inn Comedy of Errors and an account by John Manningham of a performance of Twelfth Night at the feast of Candlemas (February 2) in the Middle Temple are both well‐established pieces of Shakespearean lore (Schoenbaum, 1987, 213). It is not yet so widely known – a discovery of Alan H. Nelson in tracing the theatrical history of the Inns of Court – that once they became established as the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company took on yearly commissions to perform at the Inner Temple on the feast of All Saints (November 1) and at Candlemas.⁴⁰ They presumably saw this as a lucrative extension of their existing commitment to be available to perform for the court’s Revels season; it was clearly a further inhibition against their touring at that time of the year. These commissions lasted until the Civil War.

As this review of known theatrical venues for Shakespeare and his company in 1594 shows, they were busy and they had to be adaptable. Their plays had to be portable enough to fit a variety of stages; nothing of theirs originating from this time called, for example, for descent machinery or even a trapdoor. In most venues they would play continuously, without interruption, a convention that meant they had (for example) to plan carefully for the removal of dead bodies. Sometimes it is fully scripted, as when Falstaff carries off the dead Hotspur in 1Henry IV or Fortinbras orders “Let four captains / Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage” (5.2.397–8). The dialogue around Desdemona in Othello suggests that she lay where a curtain could be pulled to hide her body, either on the bed itself or at the mouth of the discovery space: “The object poisons sight; / Let it be hid” (5.2.375–6). That was easily arranged in the playhouse, of course, but would have called for special preparations on the road – as, for example, when Othello was performed at Oxford in the summer of 1610 – or in a private household. But in other instances their removal was evidently a charge for minor players, something assigned in rehearsal. In these same plays there is no indication of how Sir Walter Blunt, or Claudius or Laertes, or Roderigo, leaves the stage – but it seems not to have been acceptable to breach the suspension of disbelief by having the actors unaided discreetly withdraw, as often happens today. The players had themselves to be as adaptable as their plays, since these different venues all had different social conventions, histories, and expectations. One wonders what this “company of base and common fellows,” who were now used to conducting a large, successful and profitable business at the Theatre, made of their reveling patrons at Gray’s Inn on that Night of Errors.

The commissions to perform at the Inns of Court should also remind us that the actors did also at times perform plays from their regular repertoire for more private occasions in London. The most notorious example of such a private commission was that by the supporters of the Earl of Essex on the eve of his rebellion in February 1601. They prevailed upon the Chamberlain’s Men to perform “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard” (in all probability Shakespeare’s Richard II) in their usual way at the Globe, despite the players’ protests that it was old and would draw no audience. They were promised “40s more than their ordinary [regular share of the profits] to play it” (ES, 2: 205; see p. 153).

Most special commissions were far less dramatic and usually involved performances in private houses. Rowland White’s regular reports to his master, Sir Robert Sidney, included the information that Sir Walter Ralegh, the Earl of Southampton and others feasted Sir Robert Cecil, with “plays,” before a mission to France (January 30, 1598); that Sir Gelly Meyrick, the Earl of Essex’s steward, laid on “a very great supper” for numerous lords and ladies: “They had 2 plays, which kept them up till 1 o’clock after midnight” (February 15, 1598); and that Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon entertained the Flemish Ambassador, Louis Verreyken, “and there in the afternoon his players acted, before Verreyken, Sir John Oldcastle, to his great contentment” (March 8, 1600: Collins, 1746, 2: 86; 2:90; 2: 175). At the end of December 1601 Hunsdon also called on his players to entertain the Queen at his Blackfriars house. We hear of the letter‐writer, John Chamberlain, going to a play at the house of Sir Robert Cecil’s close associate, Sir Walter Cope (Chamberlain, 1939, 1.457). Earlier in the reign Sir Walter went to great lengths on Cecil’s behalf to find entertainment for Queen Anne, when James was out of town; the King’s Men offered a revival of Love’s Labour’s Lost, but it was already “appointed to be played tomorrow night at my Lord of Southampton’s.” Southampton and Cecil apparently came to some kind of accord over the play; they both entertained the Queen, and her brother the Duke of Holstein, two nights apart in early January 1605, and one or other of them had Love’s Labour’s Lost performed (Kernan, 1995, 69). In 1613 Sir Robert Rich arranged a play for the ambassador from Savoy (ES, 1: 220, n. 3). Clearly only the wealthy could afford to pay for private performances by the players in this way, but it seems likely there was much more of this than we have record of.

Notes

1 There are repeated references at least until 1603 of the ban on Sunday playing not being enforced. See, for example, ES, 1: 314–15; 4: 3045, 307, 310, 335.

2 There is evidence that the boy companies only performed one day a week, Saturdays. The epilogue to Eastward Ho!, for example, performed at the Blackfriars in 1605, concludes with the wish: “May this [pageant] attract you, hither, once a week” (Jonson 2012e, line 8).

3 Henslowe’s Diary contains several entries later than 1594 detailing performances on holy‐days, including May Day in 1596, and Candlemas and Shrove Tuesday in 1597 (Henslowe, 36, 56). But there is no information about the time those performances began.

4 A note in the manuscript plays of the amateur playwright, William Percy, addressed to “the Master of the Children of Paul’s”, explains how they might be trimmed if needs be, “the children not to begin before four, after prayers, and the gates of Paul’s shutting at six” (ES, 2: 21). It is not clear exactly when this was written, but if it was after that playhouse reopened in 1599 it would reflect special circumstances under which it operated. Evensong might well be celebrated every day at St Paul’s and the boy’s company, performing in its precinct, may have been required to respect it even if other companies no longer had to.

5 See Figure 3.2. You can also locate the sites of the Elizabethan theatres in modern London by consulting the Shakespearean London Theatres project site: http://shalt.dmu.ac.uk/locations.html.

6 Tilney was required to vacate the old priory/palace in 1607 and his office later settled in Blackfriars.

7 As played by Simon Callow, Tilney is pompous, self‐important, narrow minded, and uses his position to obtain sexual favors. It makes for good comedy, but it is pure fantasy.

8 This runs together quotations from a letter of the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Harte, and the minute of a Privy Council letter (ES, 4: 305, 306).

9 The key documents relating to the history of the Theatre are conveniently collected in EPF, 330–87; see also Egan, 2009.

10 In the 1592 alterations it was made rather more rectangular, and moved some 6 feet 6 inches further north.

11 It is usually assumed that this refers to an ur‐Hamlet that preceded Shakespeare’s play, though some scholars hold that the Q1 text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet represents that early version. See, for example, Bourus, 2014.

12 Dr Faustus may be an exception. Middleton writes in The Black Book: “He had a head of hair like one of my devils in Dr Faustus when the old Theatre cracked and frighted the audience” (lines 156–7; 2007a). But the play was in the repertoire of the Admiral’s Men at the Rose for nearly a decade before it was first printed in 1604 and probably reflects the staging there. In fact, although it calls for a wide range of properties and effects, including a “chafer of coals”, deer’s horns, fireworks, thunder and lightning, and a detachable leg, it makes minimal demands on a stage. A discovery space was presumably used for Faustus’s study, but there is no call for an upper stage. The ending may or may not call for a trapdoor, depending on how it is played. When Faustus says “Ugly hell, gape not” (5.2.114) it is not clear if there is an actual representation of hell on stage, like an old‐fashioned hell‐mouth, or whether Faustus evokes these horrors for himself. (The 1616 text is much more explicit that “Hell is discovered” (5.2.114), though that is at an earlier point in the rewritten scene.) There is an aptness to making the discovery space the opening to hell, since Faustus’s studies were his road to it. References to all Marlowe’s plays are to Marlowe, 1995.

13 For example, in the witchcraft scene of 2 Henry VI (1.4) “Enter Eleanor aloft”, while 4.5 directs “Enter Lord Scales upon the Tower, and in 4.9 “Enter King, Queen, and Somerset, on the terrace”; there are entrances “on the walls” in both 5.1 and 5.6 of 3Henry VI. See Hosley, 1957.

14 Scholars have long since abandoned the notion of an “inner stage” in Elizabethan theatres, used for indoor scenes. Large parts of the audience would not have been able to see into it at all, and the visibility even for those who could would have been very limited, in the absence of artificial lighting. The use of the discovery space was doubtless conditioned by the need to make what happened there visible to most of the audience.

15 The Fortune contract expressly stipulated that the builder, Peter Street, should not be responsible for any of the painting, presumably because specialist painters would be commissioned for that purpose.

16 Bart Van Es’s Shakespeare in Company (2013) is in part an extended study of this situation.

17 For the mildly salacious tale in John Manningham’s Diary (March 13, 1602) of Shakespeare supposedly getting the better of a sexual assignation Burbage had planned with a lady infatuated with him in the role of Richard III, see Schoenbaum, 1987, 204–5.

18 The best account of Kemp as a clown remains Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, 1987.

19 In Samuel Rowlands’s The Letting of Humour’s Blood in the Head‐Vein, satire 4, Pope is linked with John Singer, a clown in the Admiral’s Men: “What means Singer, then, / And Pope, the clown, to speak so boorish, when / They counterfeit the clowns upon the stage?”

20 There were doubtless many, but the number of plays and playwrights we can associate with the early Chamberlain’s/King’s Men is painfully small: see Appendix.

21 This is clearly “plot” in a different sense from the pasted boards which offered a running schedule of the play as staged (see p. 113). Here it seems to mean something like “outline.”

22 In the period when Chettle was writing The Stepmother’s Tragedy Dekker also received payment for his involvement with plays called Better Late Than Never (August 1), Page of Plymouth (August 10 and September 2, co‐authored with Jonson), and Robert 2, King of Scots (aka The Scots Tragedy; September 3, 15, 16, 27, co‐authored with Jonson and Chettle). Their writing schedules and commitments must have been chaotic.

23 See the entry on the part at the Henslowe–Alleyn Digitization Project website: http://www.henslowe‐alleyn.org.uk/essays/orlando.html.

24 This is Henslowe’s only use of “cutter”, which could relate to /one of several trades. Tailor is most likely, though it could refer to a carver or sculptor.

25 The differences between Q1 and Q2 can be accounted for in many ways. The dominant view used to be that Q1 is a clumsy, cut‐down version of Q2. My own view is that Q2 is an expansion of the text behind the Q1, possibly created for performance at court. See Dutton, 2016, 211–25.

26 This section is particularly indebted to Kathman, 2009b and c; also EPF, 295‐305.

27 The metric equivalents of these measurements are, respectively, 42.67m, 24.38m, 9.75m, and 14.63 × 9.75 m.

28 Astington, 1999, 38. This section is heavily indebted to John Astington’s work.

29 The illustration shows pp. 156–7 from a volume known as Vincents Presidents, preserved by the College of Arms (Vincent 151). Reproduced by courtesy of the College of Arms. Leslie Hotson famously argued that Shakespeare’s company performed Twelfth Night on January 6, 1601, largely because of the presence in the audience of Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, whose name echoes that of the duke in the play. But the records show that multiple companies were paid for performing that night: the Chamberlain’s, Admiral’s and Derby’s Men, together with the Children of the Chapel, in some kind of “show” (ES, 4: 113; Streitberger, 2016, 188, 287). They either collaborated in something spectacular or each offered entertaining scenes rather than a whole play.

30 Sir Gerrard Herbert, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, quoted in Chambers, 1930, 2.346. I am grateful to John Astington for drawing this account to my attention. Voiders were baskets or trays for serving or removing food; “chiney” presumably means these were of (expensive) china, perhaps platters.

31 f. OED “banquet”, n. 3a. “A course of sweetmeats, fruit, and wine, served either as a separate entertainment, or as a continuation of the principal meal … a dessert.”

32 Other marriages suggested for A Midsummer Night’s Dream include that of the Earl of Essex to Sir Philip Sidney’s widow, Frances; and that of Sir Thomas Heneage, Treasurer of the Chamber, to Mary, Countess of Southampton and mother of the man to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. None can produce a certified performance.

33 Honigmann, 1985, 63–4. The whole chapter, “Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men”, 59–76, is relevant to this paragraph.

34 Barbara Freedman (1994) did everything necessary to kill off the 1597 hypothesis. Unfortunately, like so many Shakespearean myths, it refuses to die – especially with editors, the people with the greatest power to perpetuate it.

35 On the dating, see p. 82.

36 Based on Gesta Grayorum, 1968, 29–32.

37 The inn where Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse are supposed to be staying, “the Centaur”, appears to be offstage – no one is seen to enter or exit it.

38 See Andrews, 1987, 324, which reproduces the court record of “Shaxberd Errors” being performed that night.

39 Alan H. Nelson suggests an alternative staging model: “the localized setting of an academic theatre, in which the stage platform represents a street in the city of Ephesus, with the stage houses (not necessarily limited to three) ranged on either side” (1997, 66).

40 Nelson, 2009, 286. The Middle Temple also established a similar pattern of commissions, but with various companies over time.