My intention here is to give a sense of the organization of Shakespeare’s company and the personnel they would have employed at their various venues. As ever in the theatrical world it took many more people to stage a performance than just the actors, though the Chamberlain’s Men were distinctive, both in their own day and by later standards, for the level of control exercised by the principal actors.
The core of any major acting company were its sharers, the leading actors who would contract an agreement among themselves – with rules they were expected to follow in the business, and agreed penalties if they failed. We do not have a formal list of the sharers of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men when the company was first formed. Clearly Kemp, Burbage, and Shakespeare were among them, as payees at court. There is strong evidence, moreover, that four other former members of Strange’s Men (along with Kemp) were among them; John Heminge and George Bryan were the company’s payees at court the following year; and Heminge was accompanied by Thomas Pope in each of the three succeeding years. Augustine Phillips too was almost certainly an early sharer, because when the company fell under suspicion for having staged a play about Richard II on the eve of the Essex Rebellion in 1601, he was the man the authorities interrogated – that would not have been entrusted to a junior member (see p. 153). In Ben Jonson’s 1616 folio of his Works he lists the “principal comedians” in the company who performed his Every Man In His Humour in 1598; these include six of the seven I have already mentioned (Bryan is the one missing: see p. 157), plus Henry Condell, William Sly, Christopher Beeston, and John Duke.
These were not necessarily sharers at the outset, but Condell and Sly certainly acquired shares eventually. Beeston, who was later to be one of the most powerful theatrical impresarios, left the company not much later, as did Duke. An intriguing absence in all this – and something of a cipher throughout – is Richard Cowley. He had been with Strange’s Men when they toured in 1593, though not one of their sharers (see p. 63, 67). The first we hear of him with the Chamberlain’s Men is when he is identified with the role of Verges in Much Ado About Nothing in its 1600 quarto; the following year he was a payee at court and in 1603 was definitely a sharer in the King’s Men. But he appears in none of the actor lists that Jonson left with his plays for the company – Every Man In, Every Man Out, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline. Some assume that he was a sharer from 1594 but we cannot be sure; see below (p. 206).
The Chamberlain’s Men, like most of the other major companies, were in essence a joint stock company. The sharers, or “fellows” as they were often known, each contributed an agreed sum to the capital of the company, to buy essential equipment (such as costumes and playbooks) and cover necessary expenses. The value of a share would vary with the fortunes of the company and the number of sharers, but it was recognized as owing to the sharer if he left the company or died. In 1613 Charles Massey, a long‐time member of the Admiral’s Men (Prince Henry’s Men after 1603) had cause to remind Philip Henslowe: “for sir I know you understand that there is the composition between our company that if any one give over with consent of his fellows, he is to receive three score and ten pounds (Anthony Jeffes hath had so much); if any one die his widow or friends whom he appoints is to receive fifty pounds (Mrs. Pavy and Mrs. Towne hath had the like)” (Greg, 1907, 64).1 In his 1635 will, John Shank, a leading sharer in what was by then the King’s Men exhorted his fellows: “do not abridge my said wife and executrix in the receiving of what is due unto me and my estate amongst them, as namely fifty pounds for my share in the stocks, books [i.e. play scripts], apparel, and other things according to the old custom and agreement amongst us” (Honigmann and Brock, 1995, 188).
These are quite substantial sums, even allowing for inflation – between four and seven times the £10 that William Ingram designated as a comfortable annual income around 1600 (see p. 16). It presumably explains why some players only achieved a half or even a quarter share. We know, for example, that in June 1595 Henslowe lent his improvident nephew, Francis, £9 “in ready money to lay down for his half share with the company which he doth play with” (Henslowe, 9). For legal purposes, however, the sharers were the company. Whenever a company was issued with a new patent or licence, it is the sharers who are mentioned by name; other employees are usually designated as “associates.” It is reasonable to suppose that the sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men drew up mutually binding contracts, specifying what was expected of them and probably prescribing penalties for failure to comply.
We have evidence of such contracts in other companies, though since the precise situations of the different companies varied, the contracts must have varied similarly. Some, for example, were heavily dominated by a manager/impresario, like Christopher Beeston with Queen Anne’s Men in the 1610s and Queen Henrietta’s Men in the 1630s; such men would have been in a position to impose something of their own will. This is obviously the case in respect of the one full player’s contract that has survived, that for Robert Dawes, who in 1614 contracted to play for Philip Henslowe and Jacob Meade with Lady Elizabeth’s Men at their new theatre/bear‐baiting house, the Hope:
7 April 1614
[Articles of Agreement,] made, concluded, and agreed upon, and which are to be kept and performed by Robert Dawes of London, gentleman, unto and with Philip Henslowe, esquire, and Jacob [Meade, waterman] in manner and form following, that is to say
Imprimis. The said Robert Dawes … doth covenant, promise, and grant to and with the said PH and JM … that he … shall and will play with such company as the said PH and JM shall appoint, for and during the space of three years from the date hereof and at the rate of one whole share, according to the custom of players; and that he … shall and will at all times during the said time duly attend all such rehearsal, which shall the night before the rehearsal be given publicly out; and if that he … shall at any time fail to come at the hour appointed, then he shall and will pay to the said PH and JM … 12d; and if he come not before the said rehearsal is ended, then the said Robert Dawes is contented to pay 2s; and further that if the said Robert Dawes shall not every day, whereon any play is or ought to be played, be ready appareled and … to begin the play at the hour of three of the clock in the afternoon, unless by six of the same company he shall be licensed to the contrary, that then he … shall and will pay to the said Philip and Jacob or their assigns 3s; and if that he … happen to be overcome with drink at the time when he [ought to] play, by the judgment of four of the said company, he shall and will pay 10s; and if he … shall [fail to come] during any play, having no licence or just excuse of sickness, he is contented to pay 20s; and further [he] … doth covenant and grant to and with the said PH and JM … that it shall and may be lawful unto and for the said PH and JM … during the term aforesaid, to receive and take back to their own proper use the part of him, the said Robert Dawes, of and in one moiety or half part of all such moneys as shall be received at the galleries and tiring house of such house or houses wherein he … shall play, for and in consideration of the use of the same house and houses; and likewise shall and may take and receive his other moiety [of] the moneys received at the galleries and tiring house dues, towards the paying to them, the said PH and JM, of the sum of £124, being the value of the stock of apparel furnished [to*] the said company by the said PH and JM of the one part of him … or any other sums [owed] to them for any apparel hereafter newly to be bought by the [said PH and JM, until the said PH and JM] shall thereby be fully satisfied, contended, and paid.
And further the said Robert Dawes doth covenant, [promise and grant to and with the said PH and JM, that if he …] shall at any time after the play is ended depart or go out of the [house] with any [of their] apparel on his body, of if the said Robert Dawes [shall carry away any property] belonging to the said company, or shall be consenting [or privy to any other of the said company going out of the house with any of the apparel on his or their bodies, he …] … shall and will forfeit and pay unto the said Philip and Jacob, or their administrators or assigns, the sum of £40 of lawful [money of England].2
The document clearly demonstrates the power that owners of authorized theatres had once the system that tentatively emerged in 1594 bedded in. Access to such a theatre became a prerequisite of London playing, and Henslowe over the years had clearly accumulated costumes, properties, and playbooks in his own name that he expected companies using his playhouses to lease from him. So Dawes’s contract is with Henslowe and Meade much more than it is with the company. James Burbage had no such leverage in 1594. But Shakespeare and his fellows probably had a contract which made each of them accountable to the company for precisely the same kind of things: attending rehearsals and performances in a timely fashion, and not being drunk when they were due to perform. Henslowe and Meade further spelled out that they had the right to make two deductions from the sharers’ take in the galleries and the tiring house (where the lords’ rooms would be situated: see p. 234), before the sharers saw that money: one to repay the £124 value of the costumes which Henslowe and Meade had supplied for the company, the other the house‐rent for use of the playhouse. James Burbage would similarly have expected a house‐rent for the use of the Theatre, though we do not know if this would have been based (as it was for Henslowe at both the Rose and the Hope) on a fixed proportion of the take from the highest‐paying customers, in the galleries and the lords’ rooms (see p. 63).
Fines for the earlier infringements are fairly stiff – but become a swingeing £40 for leaving the theatre with any of the costumes kept there for company use. Possibly this was inflated because Henslowe and Meade wanted to protect their own investment. But it is not unlikely that a company like the Chamberlain’s Men would have felt similarly protective about their costumes, which must have been their biggest single investment. (We shall see examples of what the Admiral’s Men paid out: p. 170ff.) A parallel example of contractual restrictions lies in the Articles of Agreement entered into by the sharers in a short‐lived boy company, the Children of the King’s Revels, circa 1608. The shareholders were those who bankrolled the operation, rather than the boy players, but here too it was stipulated that “no apparel, books, or other property of the company is to be removed without the consent of the sharers” (ES, 2: 65). And control of company clothing was one of many issues that caused friction between Martin Slater and his fellow sharers (see Box Item, “Martin Slater and the Children of the King’s Revels”).
We do not know how the Chamberlain’s Men initially acquired their stock of costumes. Possibly the former members of Strange’s Men had been able to salvage some from that enterprise. Possibly they were able to acquire some from other companies that had folded during the plague. Or possibly James Burbage had built up a store of them at the Theatre, which the company might have leased or bought; or they simply had to buy them on the general market. Either way, the sharers would pay – upfront in purchasing their share, or over time in deductions from the household take.
Everyone else who worked in the theatre, other than the sharers, was a paid associate. The great majority of the income from performances was divided, one way or another, between the theatre owners and the sharers who rented the theatres from them. But it fell to the sharers (i.e. the actors rather than the housekeepers) to pay the associates from their profits. (On the term “housekeepers” for part‐owners of certain playhouses, see p. 224.) When some of the sharers in the King’s Men in the 1630s sued to be allowed to become housekeepers by acquiring shares in the Globe and the Blackfriars, they pointed out the inequity of their situation – since the shares of the housekeepers were evidently far more profitable than those of mere players: “their shares fall shorter and are a great deal less than the housekeepers,” they complained. “And yet notwithstanding out of those lesser shares the said actors defray all charges of the house whatsoever (viz.) wages to hired men and boys, music, lights etc., amounting to 900 or £1000 per annum or thereabouts, being £3 a day, one day with another, besides the extraordinary charge the said actors are wholly at for apparel and poets etc” (Gurr, 2004, 274). These, of course, were 1630s prices. And during Shakespeare’s time these tensions between sharers and housekeepers were far less marked. Nevertheless the costs associated with hired men were not inconsiderable, even then.
It was a very different operation from that of the adult companies, but the arrangement for the Children of the King’s Revels gives us a better idea of where the hired men figured in the economics of the theatre and who they were. One sixth of each day’s take was to be set aside to cover “charges of the house,” which included “the gatherers, the wages, the children’s board, music, book‐keeper, tireman, tirewoman, lights, the Master of the Revels’s duties [i.e. fees], and all other things needful and necessary” (ES, 2: 65). The main differences for an adult company would be that this obviously makes no provision for paying any actors at all, sharers or hired men. But it does include a provision for lighting, which would be a major cost for a boys company playing indoors, though not for adults in the Theatre or Rose who relied almost exclusively on sunlight.6 And board for the much smaller number of boy apprentices whom the adult players employed would not be handled in this way (see p. 182ff). Otherwise it seems a realistic checklist, and it is perhaps surprising that an old hand like Martin Slater felt it could all be done for one sixth of the weekly take (which was also to be his own share – with an extra half‐share whenever the boys were taken on tour).
I examine below each of the categories of hired personnel identified in the King’s Revels list, together with the category of hired (adult) actors which that list naturally omits. In Chapter 8, where I look at the Blackfriars playhouse, we have very detailed information about the (male) personnel employed by the King’s Men in 1624 (p. 301ff).7 From that I deduce that the total number they employed circa 1608, before they took over the Blackfriars – exclusive of women and minors – would have been in the region of sixteen, all of whom needed paying from the daily take.
In an analysis of seven cast lists for the King’s Men printed with plays between 1626 and 1632, G. E. Bentley conclude that “the numbers of hired men assigned roles are four, three, four or five, one, one, three and one” (1984, 69). Another way of putting this is to say that they might expect to cast about as many hired men with speaking roles (sometimes dubbed “journeymen players”) as they did boy players, rarely more than three or four. In the first days of the Chamberlain’s Men we can, as I have shown, fairly confidently identify seven sharers (see p. 140). Besides them, the following are also known to have played with the company early: Henry Condell, William Sly, Christopher Beeston, and John Duke. Of these Condell and Beeston had certainly been apprentices and perhaps became hired men when their indentures ended. Condell became a sharer quite quickly, possibly (following an advantageous marriage) buying the slot vacated by George Bryan, who apparently left circa 1597 to take up a position at court as an ordinary Groom of the Chamber. And Will Sly too became a sharer; Augustine Phillips’s will (1605) treats him as a fellow, alongside Heminge and Burbage. Thomas Pope is not named in the 1603 personnel of the King’s Men (he would die by early 1604), so that too may have opened up a slot.
The remuneration for being a hired man varied quite considerably from contract to contract, and there are numerous complaints about being paid late if at all: several depositions in the 1623 Worth v. Baskervile case attest to hired men getting less than they had been promised, when audiences were thin (see p. 158, 165). John King, for example, claimed to have been “a hired servant” with the Red Bull company for “30 years past and upwards,” which is notable in itself – these were by no means necessarily transitory positions. King claimed that “if at any time it should happen the getting of the said company to be but small and to decrease that then he should not have his whole wages agreed to be paid unto him but to have his part of the loss thereof as well as the said company and to have a part proportionally only to their gettings” (Bentley, 1984, 110). King was deferentially ignoring the reality that he could never earn more than his agreed wage, whereas the “company” (i.e. the sharers – or perhaps their manager) would always do well out of large attendances.
But on the face of it hired men could do quite well. Edward Alleyn, for example, signed a contract with William Kendall in 1597, committing “to give him for his said service every week of his playing in London 10 shillings and in the country 5 shillings; for the which he covenanteth for the space of … 2 years to be ready at all times to play in the house of the said Philip [Henslowe] and in no other during the said term.”8 Ten shillings a week is a princely £26 a year, in a context where we are regarding £10 as a comfortable wage; this assumes payment did not cease in Lent when, for the most part, playing was supposed to be suspended. Even the half pay in the country is not draconian; the company probably handled room and board centrally while they were on tour. Other contracts for the Admiral’s Men were somewhat less generous. That same year three of the sharers hired Thomas Hearne “for 2 years in the quality of playing for five shillings a week for one year and 6 shillings 8 pence for the other year.” And in 1599 a blank contract in the name of the sharer, Thomas Downton, specified payment of “8 shillings a week as long as they play and after they lie still one fortnight then to give him half wages” (Henslowe, 238–9; 45). Presumably lying still would most often be the result of the plague, so that even half wages (when the company would not be earning) had its attractions. In each case there was a “covenant,” formally making the hired man a servant of the person issuing the contract for two years, giving some security on both sides.
What we can see of the business affairs of the Chamberlain’s Men suggests that people once hired tended to remain with the company, perhaps in the hope of becoming a sharer. That does seem, however, to have largely been a case of waiting for dead men’s shoes. The existing sharers would have hesitated to expand the pool, since that would diminish their own returns. This may be why Beeston and Duke left, when opportunities opened up elsewhere; by 1602 they are with the newly‐formed Earl of Worcester’s Men, playing at the Boar’s Head, and very probably sharers in it. But those who hung on generally seemed to achieve promotion to the inner circle eventually. John Lowin is one of the most impressive examples. He appears in Henslowe’s Diary as a member – possibly a sharer – of Worcester’s Men, playing at the Rose in 1602–3; he authorized a number of payments for them. But he evidently transferred to the newly‐created King’s Men shortly thereafter. He performed in Sejanus (1603) and The Malcontent (1604) but was not in official lists of the King’s Men in either year, and so was presumably still a hired man with them; nevertheless, in the Induction to The Malcontent, in which three members of the King’s Men played “themselves”, Lowin was one of the three, status not necessarily correlating with audience familiarity. Thereafter Lowin seems quite prominently placed in the cast‐lists for Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline, played Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, and is clearly a sharer by the next official list in 1619, if not long before. In later years he is recorded as playing several prominent roles with success, including Falstaff, Volpone, and Epicure Mammon in The Alchemist (he was evidently on the portly side) and eventually succeeded Heminge in 1630 as a co‐manager of the company.
Three others to whom Augustine Phillips made bequests very probably rose in the ranks. Richard Cowley, whose indeterminate early status we noted above (see p. 141). Alexander Cooke, who started as a boy apprentice, was with the company until his death in 1613, when his will declared that he owned £50, “which is in the hand of my fellows, as my share of the stock.” Nicholas Tooley was not in the 1603 patent of the King’s Men but was in that of 1619; he died while lodging with “my good friend Mr. Cuthbert Burbage” in 1623.
If any hired men were exclusively actors, they were very much a minority, probably no more than three or four at any one time. The King’s Revels arrangements put gatherers – also known as box‐holders – at the head of their list of necessary employees. As we saw with the Queen’s Men’s affray in Norfolk, it was thought important that reliable people be employed to gather in the take at the doors in the playhouses (see p. 39–40). The Actors’ Remonstrance, a satirical gibe of 1643 (by when Parliament had closed the playhouses) suggests that this did not always happen; the gatherers “cannot now … seem to scratch their heads where they itch not, and drop shillings and half crown‐pieces in at their collars” (ES, 1: 356n). Such dishonesty was obviously undesirable, and the sharers did their best to guard against it, requiring the gatherers to place money they collected in earthenware pots, with just a slot to take the coins: “One of the distinctive features of this form of money box is the fact that it is entirely sealed: there is no opening which would allow for the removal of the money stored within. In order to retrieve the contents, the jar has to be smashed” (Simpson, 2013). Shards of such pots have been found in the excavations of the Rose and the Theatre. But unscrupulous gatherers evidently got around this, and the issue was exacerbated in part because there were multiple entrances and payment points, and also because the income from different parts of the theatre went into different pockets.
The number of doors at which money was taken is indicated in the account of the Swiss visitor, Thomas Platter, who seems to be reflecting on his experience of playgoing at both the Curtain and the Globe in late 1599. He broadly confirms the penny‐by‐penny admission system described by Lambarde (see p. 95), which called for more gatherers than might otherwise have been necessary: “The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive. For whoever cares to stand below [in the pit] only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door, and pays another penny [the twopenny galleries], while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door” (Platter, 1937, 166). The “most comfortable seats” are probably what are sometimes referred to as the “gentlemen’s rooms,” well‐appointed sections of the galleries, very possibly those immediately adjacent to the left and right of the stage – so that the occupants not only had a very good view of the action but were also quite visible to much of the audience. Neither Lambarde nor Platter mentions a fourth option, the lords’ rooms, which were most expensive of all. Their omission is presumably because the elite contingent of the audience which used them gained access by a special entrance through the actors’ tiring house, which would not have been used by the general public. This in itself, however, required at least one extra gatherer. I discuss the lords’ rooms in relation to the Globe (p. 234).
There would thus seem to have been – assuming two general entrances, and one doorway to each category of gallery – at least five gatherers in such a theatre, though it must be likely that several would have been employed at a main external door to handle the crush. (And there is some evidence that there were eventually more than were strictly necessary, because of the patronage system by which many were appointed.) The main reason for this elaborate penny‐entrance tiering must have been the common practice of paying rent to the theatre owner(s) which was not a fixed sum but a proportion of the take from all or some of the galleries. In the Sharers’ Papers of 1635, for example, we learn that the housekeepers of both the Globe and the Blackfriars (those who held shares in the physical structure of the playhouses, rather than in the acting company) were entitled to receive a full moiety (half), “without any defalcation or abatement at all,” of all takings from the galleries and boxes in both houses and from the tiring house door of the Globe.
There were presumably similar divisions elsewhere, though the proportions may have varied. In Henslowe’s Diary, for example, we find the entries: “Here I begin to … receive the whole galleries, from this day being the 29 of July 1598” and “Here I began to receive the galleries again which they received, beginning at Michaelmas week, being the 6 of October 1599,” listing and totaling weekly items thereafter (Henslowe 94, 120). This suggests that the contractual arrangement for the payment of Henslowe’s rent changed at this time; he was henceforth to receive “the whole galleries” (my emphasis). Quite what the change amounts to is obscure to us, but must have been clear to the parties concerned. (There were, of course, no housekeepers for Henslowe to share these takings with.) And in such arrangements it was critical to know what sums were collected at which doors and to keep them separate. Dishonest gatherers might thus be trying to feather their own nests or tilt the balance in the division of the take.
It may not have helped matters that some of the gatherers’ positions were contractually in the gift of people with a significant stake in the enterprise. When Aaron Holland built the Red Bull playhouse, around 1606, he assigned one‐seventh of the house to the player, Thomas Swinnerton, “with a gatherer’s place thereto belonging” (Bentley, 1984, 98). Such arrangements had much potential for embarrassment, since it fell to the actor‐sharers to pay those appointed. It was so in a case where William Bird (or Borne), a sharer with Prince Henry’s Men, had to write to Edward Alleyn to complain about the dishonesty of one John Russell, “that by your appointment was made a gatherer with us,” accusing him of being “often false.” He explains that the company will no longer let him “take the box,” but will pay his wages as “a necessary attendant on the stage” and if he likes also employ him as a tailor (Greg, 1907, 85). Was Russell stealing for himself or falsifying the take on Alleyn’s behalf? It would always be in the interests of individual gatherers to maximize the take of whoever controlled the shares by which their positions were allocated. Given the authority Alleyn had with Prince Henry’s Men this must have been a difficult negotiation. Although they believe Russell to be dishonest they will continue to find paid employment for him (as Alleyn has the right to insist), but not in this most delicate of positions.
That case probably casts light on another general feature of the position of gatherers. They were only required in that specific role for a couple of hours during the afternoons; it was responsible work, but hardly a full‐time job. Possibly it was normally the only work in the theatre for those appointed by patronage. But for other hired men it was probably one function among many, including working as “necessary attendant[s] on the stage,” tailors or some such, when they were not actually collecting entrance money. In the “plot” for Frederick and Basilea (first performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1597) various unnamed “gatherers” and other attendants are assigned to perform minor roles in the play (Bentley, 1984, 213). It suggests that there were more gatherers than were strictly necessary, if some of them could be called away to perform on stage as needed.
We may hazard a guess – since no one mentions the issue – that none of the gatherers who played minor roles were women. But this is one theatrical job that we know women performed. We know of a Joan Hewes (Hughes) who was a gatherer for the twopenny galleries at the Red Bull in 1607 and was still employed there in 1618; Mary Phillips was also a gatherer at that playhouse in 1607. The Actors’ Remonstrance (1643) satirically describes the straits of those employed in the theatres, since their closing: “Nay, our very doorkeepers, men and women, most grievously complain that by this cessation they are robbed of the privilege of stealing from us with licence” (ES, 1: 356n; my emphasis). On April 11, 1612, a Robert Browne wrote to Edward Alleyn on behalf of his fellow player, Mr Rose, who was already with the Prince’s Men; Rose wanted Alleyn’s help to get a gatherer’s position for his wife: “he hath requested me to be solicitous for him to you (who he knows can strike a greater stroke amongst them than this) as to procure him but a gathering place for his wife, for he hath had many crosses and it will be some comfort and help to them both, and he makes no doubt but she shall so carry herself in that place as they shall think it well bestowed by reason of her upright dealing in that nature” (Greg 1907, 63).10
We do not know if Rose was successful in his petition. But we do know that Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s veteran colleague, exercised his patronage as a housekeeper at both the Globe and the Blackfriars to the benefit of his old servant, Elizabeth Wheaton. In his 1627 will he left her a mourning gown, 40s. and “that place of privilege which she now exerciseth and enjoyeth in the houses of the Blackfriars, London, and the Globe on the Bankside [for life] if my estate shall so long continue in the premises.” Condell’s widow, also Elizabeth, renewed the bequest in her own will, leaving her £20 and “the gathering place at the Globe during my lease” (Bentley, 1984, 94).
The King’s Revels agreement also specified a “tirewoman.” It may be questionable whether tirewomen were ever on the weekly payroll of any of the adult companies, but it is certain that they used their services from time to time. The term broadly denotes a dressmaker, but would extend to someone who helped ladies (and boys dressing as ladies) to dress, and also more specifically to someone skilled in the making and attaching of the elaborate head‐tires which were fashionable for high‐born women in Shakespeare’s day. Ben Jonson glances at them in his masque, Love Restored (1612), when he has Robin Goodfellow say that this was one of the disguises he adopted to try to get into court: “Then I took another figure, of an old tirewoman, but tired under that too, for none of the masquers would take note of me” (Jonson 2012l, lines 73–5). Part of the joke may well be that in this small‐scale and rather ad hoc entertainment by Jonson there were no lady masquers who would require her services to get dressed, though such persons would certainly be needed in the normal run of things for such masques as those commissioned by Queen Anne for herself and her ladies.
We know with unusual certainty that Shakespeare himself was acquainted with a tirewoman, because in 1604 he lodged in Silver Street, Cripplegate, with a Huguenot family, the Mountjoys, and that was the trade of the lady of the house, Marie Mountjoy. This circumstance has been explored at some length by Charles Nicholl in his The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, to which I am indebted here. Marie and her husband, Christopher, seem to have been at the high end of this profession, creating elaborate head‐tires – complex hairpieces – for fashionable ladies, and plausibly for use on the stage also. Marie twice appears in the household accounts for Queen Anne in 1604, perhaps not coincidentally the year of her first court masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. For the 1606 wedding masque of Hymenaei the Countess of Rutland’s accounts record her paying “To the tire woman for a coronet, £6” – and this was only one among many items which she acquired for this lavish entertainment (Nicholl, 158; we recall yet again that £10 was a comfortable annual income for the lower orders). Head‐tires involved expensive commodities: gold and silver wire and thread, silver‐coated wire to form the base of the structure, and human hair, very possibly from corpses. They could normally only be afforded by the moneyed classes, but when it came to clothing of all kinds those would include the leading acting companies, who spent prodigious amounts on impressive costumes and accessories. A 1598 inventory of the Admiral’s Men lists “6 head‐tires” and Henslowe twice mentions a Mrs Goosen in 1601; on each occasion she is paid 12 shillings “for a head tire” (318, 185, 198). On New Year’s Day 1603 a Mrs Calle received 10 shillings “for two coronets for head tires for the court” – one of several instances where it is clear that the company would lay out money especially to shine at court, though doubtless the items eventually found their way onto the public stage. The boy actor, John Rice, wore what was evidently an elaborate head tire (“a coronet of pearl and cockle‐shells on her head”) for a public entertainment staged to honor Prince Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales in 1610 (see p. 187).
Shakespeare several times brings tires into his dialogue. As early as Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590/92) Silvia laments “I think / If I had such a tire, this face of mine / Were full as lovely as this of hers” (4.4.183–5) and in Much Ado (circa 1598) the maidservant Margaret is critical of the new tire that Hero will wear for her wedding: “I like this new tire within excellently, if the hair were a thought browner” (3.4.12–13). Evidently the color of the tire does not exactly match that of Hero’s natural hair – a foreshadowing of the misfortune which will befall the wedding. But it is in Merry Wives that tires figure most prominently, as Falstaff tries to woo Mrs Ford with flattery: “Thou hast the right arched beauty of the brow that becomes the ship‐tire, the tire valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance” (3.3.47–51). That is, her brow is arched in such a way that it will show to advantage a tire shaped like a ship, or one perhaps of daunting (“valiant”) proportions, or indeed any tire that would pass for fashionable in Venice – a city of sophisticated tastes in headware as much as sexual behavior. Mrs Ford easily deflates him: “A plain kerchief, Sir John. My brows become nothing else, nor that well neither” (52–3). In the horribly confused text at the end of the folio version of the play Fenton tells us that Anne Page shall represent the Fairy Queen and “That quaint in green she shall be loose enrobed, / With ribbons pendent, flaring ’bout her head” (4.6.41–2). In the outcome it may be Mistress Quickly who plays the Fairy Queen – but the point is surely that whoever played it would be wearing a tire of sorts, befitting fairy royalty. There are no other specific clues about which characters wore these headpieces, but it makes sense that female deities might be so distinguished, such as “proud Titania” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Diana in Pericles. We might well imagine Juno descending in The Tempest, wearing a head‐tire – mimicking the appearance of an aristocratic lady masquer in one of Queen Anne’s court masques – while Hecate in Macbeth may have worn some malevolent antimasque equivalent.
It is unlikely that the Chamberlain’s Men included a tirewoman (in the sense of someone who made head tires) among their weekly salaried staff, but it is certainly not impossible that a woman was employed – as with the Children of the King’s Revels – whose duties included dressing and equipping the transvestite boy actors. But a tireman – or more likely tiremen – most certainly would have been on the regular staff. The male title alluded, not to headware, but to care of the stock of clothing that the company built up, which was its most valuable single asset. When Francis Langley’s attempt to set up the Earl of Pembroke’s Men in his Swan theatre went awry in 1597 it was a major point in his suit for reparations against the players that he should be reimbursed for “the great costs and charges he hath disbursed and laid out at and by their direction for … furnishing himself with sundry sorts of rich attire and apparel for them to play withal, whereof the defendant hath ever sithence had little use” (EPF, 444). Thomas Platter noted that “The comedians are most expensively and elegantly apparelled since” – he was apparently informed – “it is customary in England, when distinguished gentlemen or knights die, for nearly the finest of their clothes to be made over and given to their servants, and as it is not proper for them to wear such clothes but only to imitate them, they give them to the comedians to purchase for a small sum” (ES, 2: 365).
This account of how the players acquired their finery is not corroborated in Henslowe or elsewhere and may be something of an urban myth, since the Diary makes it very plain that they laid out great sums of money to acquire clothing for their productions – often significantly more than to acquire the script. In just eleven days (August 18–28, 1602) Henslowe advanced Worcester’s Men the following sums for costumes: £2 “to buy rebatos and farthingales”; £9 “to buy taffeta and other stuff to make two women’s gowns”; 5s “to buy buckram to make a pair of gyente [giant?] hose”; £12 “to buy a suit for ‘Oldcastle’ and a suit and a doublet of satin”; £4 for “a cloak of camlet [costly eastern fabric, or imitation of] lined with crimson taffeta, pinked,” followed by 14s. to pay the mercer for lace for the cloak; £6 for a man’s gown of branched [adorned with a figured pattern] velvet and a doublet; and 34s. “to pay unto the tailor for stuff and making of two women’s gowns” (Henslowe, 214–15).
However it was acquired, such attire needed to be stored safely and in such order that items could regularly be found. It needed to be cleaned and mended as use demanded. It needed to be aired and kept dry as – in an era before artificial fabrics – a defense against both rot and moths. (At court, it was one of the responsibilities of the Revels Office – and specifically the Yeoman of the Revels – to protect the extensive collection of costumes used in court entertainments in this way.)11 All of this was the tireman’s first responsibility. The scale of it may be judged from the inventories which Edward Alleyn drew up in March 1598, presumably demarcating what the Admiral’s Men owned as distinct from the property of Henslowe and Alleyn themselves, at a point when the business relationship between them was changing.12
One list, ominously – and despite the draconian penalties for absconding with company stock – is headed “Gone and Lost” and contains some obviously valuable items, including “1 orange tawny satin doublet, laid thick with gold lace,” “1 pair of carnation satin Venetians [hose or breeches], laid with gold lace,” “1 longshank’s [= Edward 1] suit,” “1 Spanish [?] doublet, pinked [= cut so as to reveal the lining],” “1 Harry the Fifth’s velvet gown.” Another is “The Inventory of the Clowns’ Suits and Hermits’ Suits, with divers other” which contains many standard, reusable items, even when they were apparently bought for a particular play: “1 senator’s gown, 1 hood, and 5 senators’ capes,” “1 suit for Neptune; firedrake’s [fiery dragon’s] suits for Dobe [unidentified],” “4 janissaries’ gowns, and 4 torchbearers’ suits,” “3 pair of red strasers [trousers],” “4 Hereward’s coats, and 3 soldiers’ coats, and 1 green gown for Marian,” “6 green coats for Robin Hood, and 4 knaves’ suits,” “2 russet coats, and 1 black frese [coarse woolen] coat, and 3 priests’ coats,” “2 white shepherds’ coats, and 2 Danes’ suits, and one pair of Danes’ hose,” “4 friars’ gowns and 4 hoods to them, and 1 fool’s coat, cape, and bauble, and Branholt’s bodice, and Merlin gown and cape,” “2 black saye [fine textured cloth] gowns, and 2 cotton gowns, and 1 red saye gown,” “5 pair of hose for the clown, and 5 jerkins for them,” “1 yellow leather doublet for a clown,” “Eve’s bodice, and 3 dons’ hats,” “1 red suit of cloth for Pig [John Pig, boy actor], laid with white lace,” “1 pair of yellow cotton sleeves, 1 ghost’s suit, and 1 ghost’s bodice,” “5 shirts, and 1 serpelowes [? = surplice], 3 farthingales,” “6 head‐tires, 1 fane [flag, banner], 3 rebatos [large, stiffened collars], 2 gyrketruses [unexplained]” and “18 copes and hats.” Some entries include properties, as if perhaps they were expected to be used in the same show: “The Moor’s limbs, and Hercules’s limbs, and Will Summers’s suit,” “2 Orlates [unidentified] suits, hats and gorgets, and 7 antics’ [grotesques’, clowns’] coats,” and “Cathemer [unidentified] suit, 1 pair of cloth white stockings, 3 Turks’ heads,” “1 hat for Robin Hood, 1 hobby‐horse.”
A brief inventory covers items “Left above in the tire‐house in the chest,” another (see p. 109) lists properties, and yet another seems to list the more precious clothes:
These lists are far from complete and the sheer quantity of clothing is staggering – but obviously necessary with such a repertoire and every play containing twenty roles or more. And the range of materials is impressive: from various forms of coarse woolen material to more luxurious taffeta, satin, velvet, and sarcenet. And an array of colors, favoring peach‐colored, black, white, orange‐tawny, and occasional bright red, as (fittingly) in Tamburlaine’s breeches. Trimming with copper (white or red, to imitate silver or gold) was common and cheaper than the precious metals – but there was plenty of real gold and silver on display as well, just as there were “pinked” items, pierced or slashed in some way to show off a splendid lining.
And the tireman’s first responsibility was to keep all this investment in good order. The Chamberlain’s Men doubtless had a wardrobe as impressive and expensive. In the case of the Admiral’s Men we actually have the name of their tireman, Steven Maggett, and it is apparent in Henslowe’s pages that he was a trusted part of the team. We first hear of him January 1595, when Henslowe sold him a doublet and a pair of Venetians (trousers) with two laces, for 16s., agreeing to take payment at the rate of 1s. per week. In December 1596 Henslowe recorded: “dd unto Steven the tireman for to deliver unto the company to buy a head‐tire and rebato [stiffened collar or ruff support] & other things … £4 10s” – a significant investment, and also responsibility. In August 1601 we hear of Henslowe repaying him 14d. of his own money which he had used to buy tiffany [fine, transparent silk] for the play of Cardinal Wolsey (37, 50, 180).
Thereafter Steven presumably transferred with the Admiral’s Men to the Fortune and a different tireman – Henslowe refers to him only as “our tireman,” even in his tenancy accounts – worked for Worcester’s Men, who took over the Rose. We hear of him in September 1602, being paid 8s. 8d. “for making of William Kemp’s suit and the boy’s.” The next month he was lent 8s. to buy soutage, a coarse cloth, “to make devils” suits for the new play of the 2 Brothers’ Tragedy and a further 18s. “to buy saye … to make a witch’s gown” for the same play. He was paid later in the month for doing the work. The next year he was entrusted with over £5 to buy eight and a half yards of black satin to make a suit for “The Second Part of The Black Dog” (Henslowe, 247, 218, 219, 224). This tireman clearly had tailors’ skills and was employed to make up at least some of their clothes rather than buy them ready‐made. This may show thrift on the part of a company which was by no means as well established as the Admiral’s Men, and suffered from having to compete with the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe, a very short distance away.
The tireman’s duties clearly extended to helping with make‐up and other functions around the stage. In Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, a boys’ play for Paul’s playhouse, a character comes on complaining “The tiring man hath not glued my beard half fast enough” (2.1.30–1); both Lyly’s Endymion and Marston’s What You Will have a stage direction: “Enter tireman with lights,” while in the Induction to the The Malcontent as staged by the King’s Men the opening stage‐direction is “Enter W. Sly, a tireman following him with a stool” (1.1.0). In the Induction to Jonson’s The Staple of News (performed at the Blackfriars in 1626) the Book‐holder (i.e. book‐keeper) commands “Mend your lights, gentlemen. Master Prologue, begin” and the stage direction follows: “The TIREMEN enter to mend the lights” (40–1); evidently, in the candle‐lit indoor playhouses, it fell to the tiremen (note the plural) to trim the candles (2012o). It is confirmed elsewhere that, like the gatherers, the tireman could on occasion be called on to take on walk‐on parts (Greg, 1907, 152). This is thus another case of hired men having a very specific responsibility within the company, but being expected to help out wherever necessary at performance time.
The King’s Revels list of charges of the house includes “music,” while (as we shall see) in the 1624 list of “necessary attendants” to the King’s Men musicians are the only category specifically named (p. 301ff). The Blackfriars theatre had its famous consort of musicians and they are presumably what Sir Henry Herbert had primarily in mind when he drew up that list, making musicians so prominent. But music was an essential element of all professional drama in the period; and every leading troupe employed professional musicians (doubtless in smaller numbers than the Blackfriars) to provide it. They fell into at least two categories. On the one hand there were those who played the drums and trumpets; on the other there were those who would play chamber music or accompany songs, playing woodwind or stringed instruments. Such sets of instruments would not have been expected to perform together at this date.
Drums and trumpets had a very specific role outside the playhouse: in announcing the arrival of traveling players at a new venue and in making people aware that a show was about to begin at one of the London theatres. Hence they figure prominently in the anti‐theatrical literature. For example John Stockwood, in a 1578 sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, bewailed “Will not a filthy play, with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to the sermon a hundred?” (ES, 4: 199). It was a point often made. And when the Lord Mayor in 1580 wrote to the Earl of Warwick about his players appearing in venues near the city, he is careful to spell out that if their leader “obtain lawfully to play at the Theatre or any other open place out of the City, he hath and shall have my permission with his company, drums, and show to pass openly through the City, being not upon the Sunday” (291). The Lord Mayor remains respectful, but he stands his ground: they must get proper permission, they mustn’t perform on Sundays. In such a context allowing the use of drums at all is a gracious concession. When James Burbage was building the second Blackfriars theatre, however, it was part of the (successful) objection of the local residents “that the same playhouse is so near the church that the noise of the drums and trumpets will greatly disturb and hinder both the ministers and parishioners in time of divine service and sermons” (320). And when Lord Hunsdon negotiated with the Lord Mayor to allow his new company to use the Cross Keys inn during the winter of 1594/5, he made the very specific concession that they “will not use any drums or trumpets at all for the calling of people together” (316).
Nevertheless, there would always be work for drummers and trumpeters within performances themselves, since between them they provided the musical soundtracks of warfare and royal ceremony. In Act 4 of Richard III a stage direction reads “Enter King Richard and his train, marching with drums and trumpets” (Q1 1597, 4.4.135.1) and shortly thereafter Richard commands: “A flourish, trumpets! Strike alarum, drums” (149). The OED describes such a flourish as “A fanfare (of horns, trumpets, etc.), esp. to announce the approach of a person of distinction” (n, 7a) and it preceded warlike royalty everywhere in Elizabethan plays, while the alarum or call to arms goes up on almost every battlefield, accompanied by drums and/or trumpets. In 3 Henry VI, for example, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5. and 5.7 all begin with flourishes, while 5.2 begins and 5.4 ends with an alarum: as 2 Henry VI puts it, “When the angry trumpets sound alarum” (5.2.3). These probably corresponded to actual signals on the contemporary battlefield, but for less warlike settings it seems that the Elizabethan theatre devised its own convention for announcing royalty, the sennet, which the OED describes as “A set of notes on the trumpet or cornet, ordered in the stage‐directions of Elizabethan plays, apparently as a signal for the ceremonial entrance or exit of a body of players.” So in Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, a stage direction reads “Trumpets sound a flourish, and then a sennet” (3.2.0 SD); in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, 2.4 opens with “Trumpets, sennet, and cornetts.” Fletcher’s own Valentinian 5. 8 calls for “A sennet with trumpets.”
The only other instrument so specifically and regularly called for in play texts for the public theatres is the hautboy, a precursor of the modern oboe, though Lucy Munro points out that they “are extremely rare in adult company plays performed before 1608” (2009, 548, n. 22). We find it required, for example, at the beginnings of both 1.6 and 1.7 in Macbeth, ominously contrasting scenes in which King Duncan approaches Macbeth’s castle (“The castle hath a pleasant seat”) and Macbeth plots murder (“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly”). In the second quarto (1604) of Hamlet the dumb‐show commences with “The trumpets sound,” but in the folio version (1623) the direction is “Hautboys play.” Early in Timon of Athens a feast begins with “Hautboys playing loud music” (1.2.0 SD). These are all texts first printed in 1623, we note, and may well not reflect their earliest staging.
But the theatres certainly had a much wider range of instruments at their disposal than this. In Alleyn’s inventories of the Admiral’s Men’s property at the Rose, beside three trumpets and a drum, he listed “a treble viol, a bass viol, a bandore, a cittern.”13 These are all instruments that might be used to accompany singing. It cannot be accidental that Augustine Phillips bequeathed to his “late apprentice,” Samuel Gilburne, his “bass viol” and to his current apprentice, James Sands, “a cittern, and a bandore, and a lute” (EPF, 198–9). There was a consistent relationship between music and the boy players, and not just those in the all‐boy companies, which had their roots in the choir schools.
I discuss this further under Apprentices (p. 182). For now I wish simply to point out that, so long as the adult companies retained apprentices – and, moreover, recruited a growing number of their sharers both from among those apprentices and from the boy companies – they were never short of musicians trained in singing and in the use of stringed instruments. In the Chamberlain’s / King’s Men, for example, Alexander Cooke made the transition from apprentice to sharer, while William Ostler, John Underwood, and Nathan Field all derived, directly or indirectly, from the Blackfriars boys.14 This ensured, for example, that when the famous opening of Twelfth Night appears to call for onstage musicians – “If music be the food of love, play on” – it would not have been difficult to provide them from within the sharer players, without recourse to hired men. When Viola asks Feste “Dost thou live by thy tabor” (3.1.1–2) it probably indicates that Robert Armin was playing the tabor [small drum] and pipe as Tarlton had done in earlier years (see Figure 2.1 and p. 44). When Amiens sings “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” in As You Like It (2.7.180–93), and other songs, probably to the accompaniment of one or more stringed instruments, it would hardly have taxed resources at all.
Musical costs in the theatre would also have included some commissioning of new songs. To some extent they would have got by on their own resources, with authors setting their own words to existing popular tunes. For example, when Edgar as Poor Tom bursts into “Come o’er the burn, Bessy, to me” (3.6.25) he is singing a ballad by William Birche, first published in 1558; when Desdemona sang “The Willow Song” (Othello, 4.3.43–59), which she calls “An old thing” (31), she was probably doing so to a lute tune first published in 1583. But the King’s Men certainly employed people to write original songs and settings for them, perhaps more regularly after they took over use of the Blackfriars. All those so employed that we know of held positions as musicians at court. The most notable of these was Robert Johnson, a lutenist who was for a time in the employment of the younger Lord Hunsdon, patron of the company while it was the Chamberlain’s Men. Johnson wrote surviving settings for songs in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (circa 1609), The Winter’s Tale (circa 1611), and The Tempest (1611), Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (circa 1613), Middleton’s The Witch (circa 1616), Jonson’s masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621), and five plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, The Captain (circa 1612), Valentinian (circa 1614), The Mad Lover (circa 1616), The Chances (circa 1617), and The Lover’s Progress (1623).
Alphono Ferrabosco, a viol player, was another composer who we know worked for them on at least one play, Jonson’s Volpone, performed at the Globe in 1606; his settings included one for its famous seduction song, “Come, my Celia, let us prove.” Jonson had worked with Ferrabosco on The Masque of Blackness (1605) and Hymenaei (1606), elaborate and extravagant court masques, to which music was central. Since the King’s Men supplied the speaking and singing roles for these events (while royalty and aristocrats posed and danced) a natural connection grew up between the actors and such musicians. Jonson praised Ferrabosco in the printed text of Hymenaei: “I do for honour’s sake, and the pledge of our friendship, name Master Alphonso Ferrabosco, a man planted by himself in that divine sphere, and mastering all the spirits of music; to whose judicial care, and as absolute performance, were committed all those difficulties both of song and otherwise; wherein, what his merit made to the soul of our invention would ask to be expressed in tunes no less ravishing than his” (Jonson 2012j, lines 584–8).
Such men were never regular employees of the company, and would be paid strictly on a commission basis. Songs always enjoyed a somewhat semidetached relationship to the plays in which they appeared and are often not printed with them (Stern, 2009a, 120–73). Most of John Lyly’s plays for boy companies in the 1580s, for example, first appeared without their songs; it was only in the collection of Six Court Comedies (1632) that their lyrics found their way into print. The stage directions in the quarto text of Merry Wives tell us that the “fairies” who torment Falstaff at the end of the play “sing a song about him” (G2, G3), but the words do not appear; they only survive in the folio version (5.5.93–102).
The King’s Revels agreement, lastly, called for a book‐keeper to be paid among the hired men, to which I add another position we know of among the adult companies, that of stage‐keeper. The positions are famously paired in the Induction to Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, where the stage‐keeper regales the audience with tales of how much better it was “in Master Tarlton’s time, I thank my stars” (2012b, line 28), and the book‐keeper appears “not for want of a prologue but by way of a new one” (44–5) to introduce a Scrivener, who will read Articles of Agreement supposedly binding the audience and the author of the play. It is not impossible that the actual book‐keeper and stage‐keeper of Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Hope playhouse played themselves in this sequence. Evidently the jobs they performed were familiar to the audience.
The book‐keeper’s (sometimes called book‐holder’s) role, minimally, seems to have been to act as prompter during a performance, helping actors who were “out”; to track entrances and exits; and to ensure that properties were where they should be when needed. Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet speaks of a “without‐book prologue, faintly spoke / After the prompter” (1.4.7–8: Q1 only) – a nonce‐prologue which is not part of “the book,” being spoken softly to the running prompts of the book‐keeper. In Every Woman In Her Humour we hear of someone who “would … stamp and stare (God bless us), like a playhouse book‐keeper when the actors miss their entrance” (1609, B3). In a joke at his own expense, Jonson has one of the children in the Praeludium to Cynthia’s Revels deny that they have the author “in the tiring‐house to prompt us aloud, stamp at the book‐holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tire‐man, rail the music out of tune” (Jonson 2012c, lines 128–30). The book‐holder thus merged aspects of the modern roles of prompter and stage manager.
The precise function of the surviving “plots” or “plats” among the Henslowe–Alleyn papers (and others which may have originated there) has been much debated but were probably, at least in part, a “map” to help the book‐keeper in his duty of keeping a performance on the rails (see p. 113). It is a common but unsubstantiated assumption that it was also part of the book‐holder’s responsibility to tidy up the company’s playbooks and mark them up for production purposes, in the way we might expect of a modern prompt‐copy. As William B. Long has demonstrated, the surviving eighteen playbooks of the period, manuscripts demonstrably used within the theatres, simply do not bear this out (1985; 1999). The book‐holder’s interventions are fewer than we might expect, and mainly aimed (it would seem) at making details more readily noticeable on the page, rather than regularizing the playwrights’ stage‐directions or specifying numbers of attendants and other minor roles (as editors of plays have often supposed). Such functions are much more apparent in the surviving “plots,” but we do not know who was responsible for those. G. E. Bentley makes the logical point that “The prompter would have been the obvious man to make, or at least to supervise the making of such Plots,” though when a play came from a company’s “ordinary poet” he could just as readily have done the job (1984, 85). The book‐holder had an important role in the company, but it was as a servant to a team of professionals, not in any directorial capacity.
It is possible that the distinct position of book‐holder developed over time, once regular playing in the London playhouses was established. The earliest book‐holder to whom we can put a name is recalled by John Taylor, the Water‐Poet: “I myself did know one Thomas Vincent that was a book‐keeper or prompter at the Globe playhouse near the Bank‐end in Maid Lane” (1638, 66). He was referring to a time pre‐1612. But that is all we securely know of Vincent (see p. 209). By the time Edward Knight held the position with the King’s Men it carried some responsibility. He was the first of those named in the Sir Henry Herbert’s 1624 Protection List of the company’s “servants” (Herbert 158; see p. 301). In the 1630s he was on the fringes of one theatrical awkwardness and at the heart of another. In October 1632 Sir Henry recorded “Received of Knight, for allowing of Ben Jonson’s play called Humours Reconciled, or The Magnetic Lady, to be acted … £2” (176). He did not normally keep a record of who delivered his licensing fee, but in this case he mentions Knight by name. Was this prudential on his part? A year later this play had both Herbert and Jonson in trouble with the Court of High Commission over some lines delivered in performance which caused offence, probably relating to Archbishop Laud’s reforms of the church (Butler, 1992; Dutton, 2000, 42–3). Herbert and Jonson insisted that the lines were not in the “allowed” text, the actors that they were. In the end the Court found against the players (184). No one would actually have been better placed to know if unlicensed additions had been made to a text than the book‐keeper.
A year later Knight was centrally involved. On October 19, 1633 Herbert most unusually gave a last‐minute order to the King’s Men not to stage a revival of Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (or, The Woman’s Prize) “upon complaints of foul and offensive matters contained therein” (see p. 90, 112). “On Saturday morning following the book was brought me and … I returned it to the players the Monday morning after, purged of oaths, profaneness, and ribaldry” (182). In 1606 Parliament had passed an Act of Abuses, aimed at restricting the use of profane oaths in the theatres; it was mainly focused on preventing the naming of God and the Trinity. In the intense church politics of the 1630s Herbert became particularly sensitive to this issue and insisted on reviewing plays formerly allowed by his predecessors but possibly not meeting the standards he now required.15 From 1606 onwards the company’s book‐holder would have been particularly well‐placed to ensure that the “allowed” copy of their plays met the legal requirements, overseeing necessary revisions when an earlier play was revived.16
That was now more important than ever, as Sir Henry’s message to Edward Knight spelled out:
Mr. Knight,
In many things you have saved me labour; yet where your judgment or pen failed you, I have made bold to use mine. Purge their parts, as I have the book. And I hope every hearer and players will think I have done God good service, and the quality no wrong;17 who hath no greater enemies than oaths, profaneness, and public ribaldry, which for the future I do absolutely forbid to be presented unto me in any playbook, as you will answer it at your peril. 21 October 1633.
This was subscribed to their play of The Tamer Tamed, and directed to Knight, their book‐keeper
(Herbert, 183).
Knight thus found himself in the delicate position of messenger to the players and their playwrights in this sensitive matter. He had to make sure that both the “allowed book” and the players’ “parts” were in line with Herbert’s directions (on “parts,” see p. 108).
On a more relaxed note, however, his role became the butt of repeated metatheatrical in‐jokes. In the Fletcher and Rowley comedy, The Maid in the Mill (performed 1623), as the plot gets more complicated, the clown Bustofa, played by William Rowley himself, reflects “they are out of their parts, sure. / It may be ’tis the book‐holder’s fault. I’ll go see” (1647, p. 8). Similarly, in Richard Brome’s Antipodes, when a voice “within” orders “Dismiss the court,” Lord Leroy says “Dismiss the court: can you not hear the prompter?” (2010a, 3.8.628–30). It has been argued, from experience at “Shakespeare’s Globe,” that the role of prompter was unworkable on the Elizabethan stage. But there are enough references in the texts from Romeo and Juliet (Q1) onwards to prove that there was such a figure, and that he doubled up as the book‐keeper in wider senses. He was clearly a pivotal figure during performances but also important in taking care of the company’s precious manuscripts and liaising with the Master of the Revels.
We know rather less about stage‐keepers. We have no grounds to suppose that the men who actually performed this duty were as garrulous, fixed in their (poor) judgments, or convinced that everything was so much better in Tarlton’s time as the character in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair. Little in that role relates to his real work, except when he talks of his “judgment” and the book‐keeper asks him “For what? Sweeping the stage, or gathering up broken apples for the bears within?” (2012b, 37–9). Collecting up discarded apple‐cores for the bears would only apply to the Hope, where Jonson’s play was staged; it doubled as a bear‐baiting arena. But stages doubtless always needed sweeping, being fairly open to the elements. And they would have been strewn with fresh green rushes for each performance, a common recourse in houses with wooden floors; they helped freshen a room, protected the floors, absorbed or hid stains, and possibly softened the sounds of movement (see p. 268).
We know that rushes were also used for freshness in the gentlemen’s rooms and may suppose that was the case in the lords’ rooms (p. 234). It would make sense for the stage‐keeper to attend to all these contexts. And there would always have been need to tidy up the playhouse after a large crowd. Yet again, however, this hardly seems like a full‐time job. Possibly he was responsible for overseeing stage machinery, such as descent apparatus and trapdoors, but there is no record of this. He also might have had some responsibility for the security of the building, which housed so much of the company’s property.
The playwright Robert Daborne does suggests another function the stage‐keeper fulfilled, in a letter to Henslowe: “I pray you, sir, let the boy give order this night to the stage‐keeper to set up bills against Monday for Eastward Ho and on Wednesday the new play [i.e. the one Daborne was writing]” (Greg, 1907, 71). Bills were an important – and still quite novel – way of advertising the companies and their offerings: such mass entertainment as they were able to offer from the 1570s onwards was a new phenomenon, and it would be essential to spread the word when a company came to town, especially if it was putting on a play in a suburban amphitheater, some way from where most people lived (see p. 106). Even with an established company, it would be essential to keep spreading the word about an ever‐changing repertoire. From at least 1587 these bills were printed rather than handwritten – the right to print them became a lucrative monopoly for one printer at a time – and so could be posted in numbers (Stern, 2006).
Hence in the anti‐theatrical literature bills are often coupled with the drums and trumpets which similarly announced the company’s presence, both signs of the devil at work. This is the thrust of an anonymous rant to Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s Secretary of State, in 1587: “The daily abuse of the stage plays is such an offence to the godly, and so great a hindrance to the Gospel, as the papists so exceedingly rejoice at the blemish thereof, and not without cause; for every day in the week the players’ bills are set up in sundry place of the city … so that when the bells toll to the lecturer [preacher], the trumpets sound to the stages” (ES, 4: 303–4). In 1581 the Lord Mayor of London had given specific orders to his officials not to allow theatrical bills to be posted: “give straight charge and commandment to all the inhabitants within the same ward that they do not at any time hereafter suffer any person or persons whatsoever to set up or fix any briefs upon any posts, houses, or other places within your wards, for the show or setting out of any plays, interludes or prizes within this city … and that if any such shall be set up, the same presently to be pulled down and defaced” (ES, 4: 283). This order had no lasting effect – as the letter to Walsingham attests.
Some “person or persons,” then, had the chore “every day of the week” of posting these bills for the players “in sundry places” (“posts, houses”) all over the city. This apparently included the doors of the theatres themselves. During the Commonwealth period Richard Flecknoe bemoaned: “From thence passing on to the Blackfriars, and seeing never a playbill on the gate, no coaches on the place, nor doorkeeper at the playhouse door” (1653, 141). It is unlikely that the stage‐keeper would have handled the whole operation on his own, but he does seem to have been involved.
The boy actors, more than any other single feature, define the distance between early modern theatre and our own.18 Why precisely women did not perform on the English professional stage before the Civil War has never been explained; they certainly did so in Italy, France, and Spain, even if this was often a change within living memory. Contrary to the movie Shakespeare in Love (1999) there was no legal prohibition against it and there is no record of the Master of the Revels trying to enforce a ban. It was a matter of custom and practice, to some extent deriving from the peripatetic lifestyle of the players in the days before settled city playing; less scandal would attend on the men being accompanied by boys than by women, and that was an important consideration when they were representing a noble patron.19
Taking on boys as apprentices would have seemed natural in a context where many of the players were freemen of trade or livery companies. They would be used to the custom of boys being bound by indentures, usually for a period of seven years, until they themselves became freemen. The expectation was that they should be trained for a profession, and given board and lodging, but usually no wage – they were getting freeman status in one of the livery companies like the Merchant Taylors, Mercers, Grocers, Goldsmiths, or Haberdashers at the end of it, and that was a tangible social benefit in the City of London (see p. 12). In an era before social security, the status also offered a financial support structure in old age, times of poverty or bereavement. It was by no means necessary, however, that the boys should be trained in the trade with which their masters were associated. The earliest known theatrical apprentices were indentured with Richard Tarlton, who had served his own apprenticeship with the Haberdashers, but later transferred to the Vintners, probably because he ran an inn as a secondary profession (Kathman, 2006). There was nothing improper about him taking on apprentices to train as players, even though there was no guild of players for them to belong to (Kathman, 2009d, 422–3). They would themselves be free of the Haberdashers or Vintners, just as John Heminge’s many apprentices would be free of his own company, the Grocers.
The boys usually started their indentures around the age of thirteen, though anything up to sixteen was not unusual; and their term was commonly for seven years, though again anything up to twelve years was not out of the ordinary.20 It thus seems that boy actors performed the roles of women (as well, of course, as of pages, children, apprentices and others appropriate to their size and voice) between about the ages of thirteen and twenty‐two; puberty generally came two or three years later in less well‐nourished times than it does in the industrial world today. Although, as we have seen, Augustine Phillips took on at least two apprentices while he was with Shakespeare’s company, and Robert Armin, a Goldsmith, took on at least one (James Jones, bound July 15, 1608: Kathman, 2004b, 18), John Heminge, took on by far the most for the company, at least ten over his long career. And it so happens that we can identify quite a few of the roles they played (Kathman, 2009d, 419–20).
Heminge bound Thomas Belte on November12, 1595, and he must be the “T. Belt” assigned to play a servant and the female role of Panthea in the “plot” of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, a play which David Kathman assigns to the Chamberlain’s Men around 1597/8 (see 205–17). Heminge then bound Alexander Cooke on January 26, 1597; in the same “plot” someone named “saunder” played the substantial female roles of Queen Videna and Progne and that is quite likely to have been Cooke, who went on to be a shareholder with the company. We may note here that in the period 1597–1601 the company contained at least two boy players capable of taking on challenging female roles and it is probably not coincidental that it is the time when Shakespeare wrote his three most famous cross‐dressing roles, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night, besides the major role of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. There is no record of John Rice being formally bound to Heminge, but when he presented a speech as the Angel of Gladness before King James in the guildhall of the Merchant Taylors in 1607 (“a very proper child, well spoken … with a taper of frankincense burning in his hand”) Heminge received £5 for supplying and preparing him, Rice himself 5 shillings; Rice would eventually be a sharer and leading player in the company.21 Heminge did bind George Birch or Burgh on July 4, 1610; by 1616 he is noted as playing Doll Common in a revival of Jonson’s The Alchemist and Lady Would‐Be in a revival of his Volpone – two substantial comic female roles.22
John Wilson, bound on February 18, 1611, is to be found in a stage direction in the First Folio text of Much Ado About Nothing, “Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio and Jack Wilson”; this in part replaces the 1600 quarto stage direction “Enter Balthasar with music” (2.3.41.0). So Wilson had presumably played Balthasar, who goes on to sing “sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” in a revival of the play at some time between 1611 and 1623; he became free of the Grocers (as the phrase was) on October 21, 1621, ending his apprenticeship and so probably also his days of playing female roles. Richard Sharpe, bound February 21 1616, played the challenging title role in The Duchess of Malfi around 1621/22, and became a sharer in the company around 1624/5.23 Thomas Holcombe (April 22, 1619) played the Provost’s wife in Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt that same year; Robert Pallant (February 9, 1620) played Cariola, a lesser role, alongside the more experienced Sharpe in the same revival of The Duchess of Malfi. William Trigge, the last of Heminge’s apprentices, is recorded as having played numerous female roles between 1626 and 1632.
There is no doubt that there could be genuine affection between apprentices and their masters. There is a charming letter which purports to come from the boy actor, John Pig or Pyk (see p. 170–2), to Edward Alleyn’s wife, Joan: “Mistress, your honest ancient and loving servant Pig hath this humble commendation to you and to my good Master Henslowe & mistress, and to my mistress’s sister, Bess; for all her hard dealing with me, I send her hearty commendation, hoping to be beholding to her again for the opening of the cupboard: and to my neighbour, Doll, for calling me up in a morning and to my wife Sara for making clean my shoes & to that old gentleman, Monsieur Pearle, that ever fought with me for the block in the chimney corner. And though you all look for the ready return of my proper person yet I swear to you by the faith of a fustian king never to return till fortune us bring with a joyful meeting with lovely London. I cease your petty, pretty, prattling, parleying Pig. By me, John Pyk.” In the left‐hand margin there is a note: “Mistress, I pay you keep this that my master may see it, for I got one to write it, Master Downton [the actor] and my master knows not of it.” The joke is that the letter is not in Thomas Downton’s hand at all; it is in that of Alleyn (a true “fustian king”) who, while on tour (with Pig doubtless in the company), wants to keep in loving touch with his wife and does so by evoking little details of their household life, as seen from Pig’s perspective. It would hardly be an effective joke if Pig were not genuinely a fond presence (“petty, pretty, prattling, parleying”) in their household whenever they were in “lovely London.”
Strictly speaking, Pig may not have been an apprentice. There are certainly instances in the Henslowe/Alleyn papers of boys being taken on formally as household servants, for a period of three years. Alleyn, for example, bound Richard Perkins, then aged seventeen, to a three‐year contract in 1596; Perkins went on to a long career in the theatre, becoming a sharer and notable leading man with the King’s Men. In many respects this would be similar to an apprenticeship, but it would not result in being made free of a livery company, with all the benefits attached to it. In both arrangements the usual assumption was that the boy would receive board and lodging, probably in the master’s household like Pig; as a servant he might well also receive wages. Philip Henslowe’s arrangements in respect of James Bristow give us some idea of the likely economics of such arrangements. Henslowe paid the player William Augustine £8 for the boy on December 18, 1597 (Henslowe, 241). Clearly there was a market of sorts in talented youngsters. And those who purchased their skills, whether from the boys’ parents or a third party, would expect a return on that outlay. Henslowe then effectively rented Bristow out to the Admiral’s Men at a rate of three shillings per week; notionally it was a wage for him, but it is likely that everything left after board and lodging finished up in Henslowe’s own pocket (Henslowe, 118, 164, 167). Presumably there were similar understandings in respect of apprentices. John Shank claimed in the 1630s that he had laid out £40 to retain the services of John Thomson for the King’s Men and “his part of £200 for other boys since his coming to the company” (Gurr, 2004a, 277); he did not reveal how much he, or Heminge and the others, would have made out of this investment, but this would have been one of the charges that fell to the sharers of the company to pay from their portion of the daily or weekly profits.24
We have evidence of even shorter‐term arrangements for some boy actors. In 1577, shortly after building the Theatre, James Burbage and John Brayne entered into an agreement with John Hind, a citizen and haberdasher (Mateer, 2006). They signed an indenture whereby Hind’s two sons, John Jr and Augustine, would be available twice a week to perform as boy players for the six months between October 13 andApril 6, 1578. Hind would receive twelve shillings a week for this while they remained in London, seven shillings a week whenever they were on tour. These rates of pay put the boys on a par with some highly skilled artisans; they must have been star performers to be worth so much (see p. 17). The boys in turn were required to be available, on reasonable notice, to perform in plays and other entertainments; also to learn their lines for stipulated plays, and to play the cithern and sing as required.
We might have expected that the Hind brothers would have been used exclusively at the Theatre, but this is not the case. In the litigation which followed the falling‐out of the parties, Burbage and Brayne claimed that the boys had been given reasonable notice to appear one Sunday in a production at the Bell Inn in Gracechurch Street, but were not available as required (Mateer, 373).25 Burbage and Brayne were clearly not just theatrical landlords, but show promoters, possibly because the costs of setting up the Theatre had so taxed their resources. It is a testimony to the boys’ skills that they were “borrowed” by Lord Howard of Effingham to contribute to the 1578 New Year festivities at his estate in Reigate in Surrey – causing an absence which further stirred the litigation (374). This short‐term contract clearly ended in tears, but it indicates how important the boy players could be in the theatrical economy.
There is no record of what training exactly was given to apprentices “pur apprendre larte d’une Stageplayer” (“to learn the art of a stageplayer”).26 John Astington very reasonably suggests that “Working partners are always latent instructors” and that like most trade apprentices the boys essentially learned on the job, in conjunction with the masters who bound them and the other older players (2010, 99; see also Tribble, 2009). He argues that between 1613 and 1635 John Shank “was the principal working actor with responsibility for supervising the boys on the stages of the Globe and the Blackfriars” (ibid.). But there is evidence that those on the management side of theatre sometimes took a lead in training apprentices. In the case of John Heminge he cannot have been such a direct role‐model after circa 1611, since he withdrew from acting and concentrated on the business side of the company; but that may well still have involved some training of his apprentices. The epilogue to Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar (1640) commends to the audience the man [William Beeston, son of Shakespeare’s former colleague, Christopher] “by whose care and directions this stage is governed, who has for many years both in his father’s days, and since, directed poets to write and players to speak till he trained up these youths here to what they are now — ay, some of’ em from before they were able to say a grace of two lines long to have more parts in their pates than would fill so many dryfats” (Brome, 2010b).27 This may have been more the case in boy companies (Martin Slater undertook such a role with the King’s Revels boys: see p. 145) than with the adult companies.
One consistent thread runs through the records of the boy players, and that is musical accomplishment. From the Hind brothers in the 1570s who were expected to sing and play on the cittern, through Augustine Phillips’s two apprentices, one of whom received his bass viol in his will, and the other a cittern, bandore, and lute, to John Wilson among Heminge’s apprentices, they all either were or trained to be proficient musicians. The first quarto text of Hamlet tells us that the boy who played “Ofelia” entered “playing on a lute, and her hair down singing” when she went mad (Q1, G4v). John Wilson went on to be a notable musician and composer, employed extensively by the King’s Men; settings by him survive for songs in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch; Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass; John Fletcher’s The Beggar’s Bush, The Bloody Brother, The False One, Love’s Cure, The Loyal Subject, The Mad Lover, The Pilgrim, The Queen of Corinth, Valentinian, The Wild Goose Chase, and Women Pleased; and John Ford’s The Lovers’ Melancholy.
The one question we can probably never really answer is what people made at the time of the boys’ playing of female roles (see Barker, 2009). How convincing was it or did they attempt to make it? And what does it say about early modern ideas of sexuality? There were certainly those at the time who saw the practice as deeply unnatural. The most famous exponent of this view was the Oxford Puritan theologian, Dr John Rainolds, whose Th’Overthrow of Stage‐Plays (1599) pursues in detail the Biblical objections: “And so if any man do put on woman’s raiment, he is dishonest and defiled, because he trangresseth the bounds of modesty and comeliness, and weareth that which God forbiddeth him to wear, which man’s laws affirmeth he cannot wear without reproof … plays are charged, not for making young men come forth in whores’ attire, like the lewd woman in Proverbs, but for teaching them to counterfeit her actions, her wantonness, her impudent face, her wicked speech and enticements” (16–17). Freudians may wonder what to make of the fact that the young Rainolds had himself played Hippolyta in Richard Edwarde’s Palamon and Arcyte during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford 1566, described at the beginning of this book (see p. 4).
An Oxford scholar also left us one of the most affecting accounts of a boy’s acting, having seen the King’s Men perform Othello there in 1610: “But that Desdemona, murdered by her husband in our presence, although she always pled her case excellently, yet when killed moved us more, while stretched out on her bed she begged the spectators’ pity with her very facial expression.”28 This was very probably John Rice, who earlier that summer had appeared with Richard Burbage in a water pageant to mark Prince Henry’s formal creation as Prince of Wales. Described by an observer as “two absolute actors even the very best our instant time can yield,” Burbage played “Amphion, the father of harmony or music,” and Rice “a very fair and beautiful nymph, representing the genius of old Corineus’s Queen of the province Cornwall, suited in her watery habit yet rich and costly with a coronet of pearl and cockle‐shells on her head.”29
Rice then left the company for a number of years and was replaced as the leading boy actor by Richard Robinson, who years later would marry Burbage’s widow. Jonson includes a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about “Dick” Robinson in The Devil is An Ass – a play in which Robinson himself appeared – telling how he was brought to a “gossip’s feast … Dressed like a lawyer’s wife.” One character says “They say he’s an ingenious youth” and another replies “Oh, sir! And dresses himself the best! Beyond / Forty o’your very ladies” (2.8.69–70; 75–7; Jonson 2012d). If there is any truth in this, his cross‐dressing was not restricted to the stage. But on it he probably created the role of the Duchess of Malfi and earned this praise (along with Webster) from Thomas Middleton:
Thy epitaph only the title be –
Write “Duchess,” that will fetch a tear for thee,
For who e’er saw this duchess live, and die,
That could get off under a bleeding eye?
(Webster, 2009, 78)
Michael Shapiro has drawn attention to two passages in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (part‐published 1621) which draw on the cross‐dressing of boy actors for metaphoric effect (1989, 187–93). In one overwrought scene a queen has taken a lover and persuaded him to kill her husband; she then falls in love with a stranger who comes to pay his respects to the dead king. Her lover secretly sees the new wooing: “there he [the first lover] saw her with all passionate ardency seek and sue for the stranger’s love; yet he [the stranger], unmovable, was no further wrought than if he had seen a delicate play‐boy act a loving woman’s part and, knowing him a boy, liked only his actions.” The second passage, written in the narrator’s voice, is a kind of character‐study of a vain, insincere and deceitful lady, “being for her over‐acting fashion more like a play‐boy dressed gaudily up to show a fond loving woman’s part than a great lady; so busy, so full of talk, and in such a set formality, with so many framed looks, feigned smiles and nods, with a deceitful down‐cast look, instead of purest modesty and bashfulness; too rich jewels for her rotten cabinet to contain …” . In both passages the underlying implication is that an observer can perceive a distance between the actor and his role, and admire his technical skill without being seduced by the credibility of the impersonation. The boy‐actor remained a boy, for all his skill in appearing womanly.
Of course, the puritans who fulminated against cross‐dressing did not see it that way and the repertory of, in particular, the Children of the King’s Revels does seem to have gone out of its way to exploit their sexual ambiguity (Bly, 2000). Does it make a difference here that Lady Mary was a woman? Would a man have seen things differently? It is probably an irresolvable debate. We have lost the convention and, despite frequent all‐male performances of Shakespeare these days, cannot resurrect it in this very different culture.
This exhausts the categories of persons known to have been employed by the sharers of the acting companies. The ten or so sharers themselves were always the dominant presences, both artistically and commercially. They commissioned, assessed and purchased all plays; they authorized all payments and hiring of personnel. Philip Henslowe and Sir Henry Herbert are usually careful to accord the sharers they deal with the honorific “Mr.” But they were assisted by a substantial body of “hired men” or associates, perhaps sixteen or so in the years before 1608 (excluding women and boys). They included a few strong actors in line to become sharers, and a few others with very clearly designated roles, such as the book‐keeper, the stage‐keeper, and the tiremen; but many were multi‐talented, able to act a little, or play an instrument, or perform some tailoring (assisting the designated tireman), or serve as a gatherer. There would also have been perhaps four or five apprentices or contracted servants, primarily to act the female roles and to add musical variety, but also possibly to serve as the call‐boys which the book‐keeper required when they were not otherwise involved in a production. And there would have been a smaller number of women, notably acting as gatherers but also assisting with dressing the boys, especially with specialist items like head‐tires. The regular personnel at the Theatre and the Globe must have added up to over thirty persons, all with roles to play in getting a performance on stage and the paying customers accommodated.