Some of the concerns that underlay the “War of the Theaters” were allayed by the theatrical settlement reached when James I came peacefully to the throne, following the death of Elizabeth in March 1603. Considering how many other issues must have weighed with him, the beginnings of that settlement emerged surprisingly quickly. On May 19 a royal patent was issued to Shakespeare’s company, creating them the King’s Men. Over the next year or so all the other leading London companies similarly passed into royal patronage: the Admiral’s Men became Prince Henry’s Men, Worcester’s Men became the Queen’s (i.e Queen Anne’s) Men, and the Children of the Chapel, the Children of the Queen’s Revels (also patronized by Queen Anne). Only the small Paul’s Boys were not so graced, and that company went out of business by 1606.
This was a logical development from the de facto situation at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. As the Virgin Queen she had only one royal household. James initially had three – his own, his Queen’s, and his elder son’s, Prince Henry’s; eventually this would extend to include households for the younger son, Prince Charles, and his daughter, Princess Elizabeth. All of these patronized acting companies over time, and all of them brought the players in to court to entertain them during the Revels season. This led to an enormous increase in theatrical consumption there. In James’s first Revels season, for example, the King’s Men were called to court nine times – they had never been called more than six times during Elizabeth’s reign, and usually less. Moreover the new Queen’s Men also played twice and the Prince’s men five times; each of the boys’ companies was also called once. Companies did not only play for their own patron. The King’s Men, for example, performed twice for Prince Henry, who also paid for the two performances by the Queen’s Men.
And even when the king paid for it, it did not necessarily mean that he attended. The great extra demand for performances has sometimes led to the assumption that James was inordinately fond of theatre. He liked it well enough, but probably not as much as his wife and son (Barroll, 1988, 454ff; 1991, 22–69). He did, however, recognize – as Elizabeth had – that court entertainment befitted his princely magnificence and indulged it in that spirit. It was, however, by no means inevitable that he would choose the Chamberlain’s Men as his personal players. Their patron, the second Lord Hunsdon, had been ailing and his successor as Lord Chamberlain, Thomas Howard, soon to be Earl of Suffolk, had been deputizing. This may explain why they had only been called twice during Elizabeth’s last Revels season, 1602/3, against three times by the Admiral’s Men.
Someone else must have advocated for them. Edmund Tilney may have been consulted, as Master of the Revels, but decisions of this nature were probably made at a higher level, and it is unlikely that much serious business was done without reference to Sir Robert Cecil, the man who had engineered James’s smooth transition to the throne. The young Earl of Pembroke, one candidate for the “fair youth” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets has also been suggested. A factor that may have weighed heavily against the Admiral’s Men is that the incomparable Alleyn was known to be close to retirement. He had in fact retired once, in the 1590s, but had returned, possibly to boost the Fortune; some said at the request of the Queen herself. But he seems finally to have retired early in the new reign, pursuing other business goals.1
Since Shakespeare came into the public record with the Chambelain’s Men in 1595, there had been an ever closer correlation between his career and the links of his company with the royal court. Their appointment as the King’s Men was the last step in that process. We need to be clear, however, about the nature of this relationship. Some scholars have downplayed its significance by comparison with their commercial activities. Bernard Beckerman, for example, weighed its impact on their income:
From Elizabeth, and later from James, the Chamberlain‐King’s Men received ₤873 between 1599 and 1609, of which amount ₤70 was for relief of the company during plague time, and ₤30 for reimbursement for expenses incurred during unusually lengthy travel to and from the Court. Thus the annual average for playing was ₤77.6s., with the court payments in the later years substantially greater than in the early one. Grants from Elizabeth never totaled more than 5 per cent of the income the company earned at the Globe. Under James the percentage rose to a high of about fifteen by 1609. The increase in Court support, evident in these figures, ultimately led the Globe company to appeal increasingly to an aristocratic audience. But throughout the decade we are considering [1599–1609], the actors depend on the pence of a large, heterogeneous public more than upon the bounty of their prince. (1962, 22–3, citing ES, 4:166–75)
Beckerman concedes that “The players certainly tendered courtesy and respect to the Court, which after all was their main defense against puritanical suppression” (23), but the economics of the situation required them to cater first and foremost to “a large, heterogeneous public.”
I suggest that the logic of this is almost exactly back‐to‐front. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were only able to make the very substantial sums we presume that they did at the Globe because the court protected them and gave them very significant privileges. Both Elizabeth and James made extensive use of monopolies to reward people in their service, an indirect form of payment which cost them nothing (though, as the House of Commons repeatedly complained, it cost the people a good deal). Elizabeth, for example, granted the Earl of Leicester a monopoly to tax imports of sweet wines, a monopoly which passed after his death to the Earl of Essex. The situation of the leading players was not identical, but it was analogous. Only a small number of companies ever had access to the profits that could be generated from sustained playing in London, and that access was only granted to those who served the court. They always knew which side their bread was buttered on.
The appointment of Shakespeare’s company as the King’s Men was thus a major coup. Their new licence names William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminge, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, and Richard Cowley. A familiar name missing is that of Thomas Pope, one of the originators of the company and one of the first housekeepers in the Globe. He had apparently retired through ill‐health, making out his will on July 22, 1603; it was proved the following February. With his death the first shares in the Globe went outside the company, to his legatees, though this did not raise any problems in the first instance. But Pope is replaced among the sharers by a new name, in fact the first on the list, Lawrence Fletcher.
The addition of Fletcher to the company’s sharers is sometimes dismissed as a polite concession to the king, since he appears in no other record of the company’s activities. Yet he could have been a useful colleague, even if only as a consultant. Fletcher had been connected with the new king since at least 1594, when he was one of the “Inglis comedianis” recorded in Edinburgh, perhaps to take part in festivities for the baptism of Prince Henry Frederick on August 30 (Dibdin, 1888, 20). They received a generous gift of ₤333 6s. 8d. (Scots) from the king.2 Fletcher’s association with this group, apparently its leader, is vouched for in the gossip of the English agent in Edinburgh. In March 1595 George Nicholson wrote to Robert Bowes, the treasurer of Berwick: “The King heard that Fletcher, the player, was hanged, and told him [i.e. Nicholson] and Robert Ashton [a Scottish courtier] so, in merry words, not believing it, saying very pleasantly that if it were true he would hang them also” (cited in ES, 2: 266). James was clearly already familiar with Fletcher.
He became much more so in the years 1599–1601 when the return of Fletcher’s company caused a direct confrontation between the king and the Kirk of Edinburgh.3 They performed several times before James and were then allowed to purchase a warrant “to the bailiffs of Edinburgh, to get them an house within the town. Upon Monday, the 12th of November [1599], they gave warning by trumpets and drums through the streets of Edinburgh, to all that pleased, to come to the Black Friars’ Wynd [a narrow lane] to see the acting of their comedies” (Calderwood, 1842–49, 5: 765). The four sessions of the Kirk were convened and passed an act “that none resort to these profane comedies, for eschewing offence of God, and of evil example to others” (ibid.). This angered the king, who told their representatives that the act contravened the warrant he had granted the actors, which was clearly intended to allow them to perform before the public. He ordered them to rescind it or face the consequences, and eventually the Kirk backed down. Whatever James’s personal interest in plays and players, he was fully prepared to stand up on their behalf to the Calvinist Kirk when it attempted to cut across his royal prerogative. The actors received several gifts from the king, culminating in December 1599 with one matching that of 1594. By 1601 they were able to travel to Aberdeen, bearing a letter of recommendation from the king and styling themselves his majesty’s servants; the burgh register specifically records the presence of “Laurence Fletcher, comedian to his Majesty” (ES, 2: 269). All of this was a useful preparation for James’s time in England. When he entered his new kingdom he did so well prepared to face down any threats to his court’s consumption of theatre, and comfortable with the idea that royal players should normally earn their living commercially, with only modest subventions from their patrons.
People from the theatrical world in England, like everyone else, looked to see what would come with the new reign when Elizabeth died. Only a week after her death, when the pronouncement of James as her successor was unopposed, the Corporation of London began preparations for his triumphal entry into the city, with a number of ornamental arches along the route. Thomas Dekker was appointed to write appropriate speeches. Jonson was commissioned to write an entertainment for Queen Anne and Prince Henry on their journey south, at Althorp, the Northamptonshire estate of Sir John Spenser (2012f, 2: 393–412). He was also brought belatedly into the writing for James’s entry into the city, which the plague delayed until March 1604. In all these quarters, people were anxious to know the tastes of the new royal family. Nobody knew James’s taste in theatre, or that of Queen Anne, better than Fletcher, and that might have made him a useful ally in the early days of the new reign and of the reconstituted company.
The most immediate issue to the company in mid‐1603 was the very plague which caused James’s royal entry to be postponed. It followed hard on a precautionary closing of the playhouses when Elizabeth was clearly dying. They then remained closed almost continuously until the following Spring, losing the players a whole year’s income. The situation became so acute during the winter (with touring impractical and no sign of the plague relenting) the king presented Burbage with £30 “for the relief of himself and the rest of his company, being prohibited to present any plays publicly in or around London … by way of his Majesty’s free gift” (ES, 4: 168–9). The extra performances at court must also have been welcome in this regard though, as we have noted, the income from such commissions was less significant than the profits from public performances which continuing royal favor normally made possible (see p. 278).
The plague also inhibited royal business. Protocol demanded that the king’s coronation should take place as soon as possible, and it did so in July 1603, but the public were banned and a ceremonial procession through the streets of London was deferred until the plague lifted, which turned out to be March 15, 1604. For that event each of those named in the new patent for the King’s Men was entitled to receive four and a half yards of scarlet‐red cloth for his livery, being now an unpaid Groom of the Chamber and so a member (albeit a lowly one) of the king’s household (Law, 1910). There is no record of them actually marching in the procession, but this is a marker of their growing status and prestige. The following year, moreover, they wore the livery in earnest. A long and intermittent war with Spain was ended in 1604 by the Treaty of London, and in August the first Spanish ambassador for many years was welcomed in some style; he stayed in the Queen’s palace, Somerset House, and was waited on for eighteen days by twelve members of the King’s Men (some of them evidently not sharers). They were paid the princely sum of £21 12s., and the line between acting and reality must have seemed very blurred. Such developments led the satirical writer, J. Cocke to observe a decade later how times had changed, now “that players may not be called rogues: For they be chief ornaments of his Majesty’s Revels” (“A Common Player,” 1615; quoted in ES 4: 257).
One unusual consequence of the change of reigns is that the licensing and censorship of one of the companies – the Children of the Queen’s Revels – was taken out of the hands of the Master of the Revels, Tilney, and given to the courtier poet and dramatist, Samuel Daniel. As we shall see, this was an unfortunate decision. But I suspect it helps to explain the curious circumstance whereby The Malcontent, a play written by John Marston (switching allegiance from Paul’s boys) for the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Blackfriars came into the hands of the King’s Men at the Globe. Versions of the play – as performed both by the boys and by the adults – have survived, and a comparison of the two shows us a good deal about both operations.
The King’s Men made several decisions about how the play was to be adapted. They decided they needed an Induction to explain how and why they had taken over a play with which the audience might already be familiar in another venue. They judged that they could not match the music which accompanied performances at the Blackfriars, both before the show and during intermissions (see p. 300). As it happens, they had recently experimented along these lines. Ben Jonson, returning to their fold, had written a tragedy, Sejanus, in severely classical mode; it is the last play in which we have a record of Shakespeare performing. One breach of classical decorum, however, is that Jonson dispensed with the conventional chorus, and called for a Musicorum Chorus – chorus of musicians – between the acts instead. Thus the action would not have flowed continuously, as it usually did on the public stages, but more in the manner Jonson had been used to at the Blackfriars, with act‐breaks. For whatever reason, Sejanus was an unmitigated disaster. In dedicating it to a cousin of the king, Jonson wrote: “It is a poem that, if I well remember, in Your Lordship’s sight suffered no less violence from our people here than the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome” (2012m). One of the commendatory poems in the 1605 quarto of the play also recalled the event:
When in the Globe’s fair ring, our world’s best stage,
I saw Sejanus, set with that rich foil,
I looked the author should have borne the spoil
Of conquest from the writers of the age;
But when I viewed the people’s beastly rage,
Bent to confound thy grave and learned toil …
(p. 228, lines 1–6)
The sharers of the King’s Men had no interest in seeing The Malcontent subject to “the people’s beastly rage” and abandoned the inter‐act music of its “private” theatre staging. They were fortunate that this did not pose continuity issues. Where the boys’ plays had such breaks there was no problem about having actors on stage at the end of one act back on stage (but in a different locale) at the beginning of the next; but that was not possible with the continuous staging in the public theatres. The nearest example of such a problem in The Malcontent was between Acts 1 and 2; the protagonist, Malevole, is on stage in the last scene of the first and the first scene of the second. But he leaves the stage nearly thirty lines before the end of Act 1, which would be more than adequate for a turnaround, even if a change of costume had been called for.
The other consequence of losing the incidental music was that the running time of the show was now less than the Globe customers were used to. At some 1,908 lines it would play (at modern acting speeds) for a bare two hours – though some people believe that Elizabethan actors spoke quicker than we do today (Erne, 2003, 140–4). At all events, the decision was made to expand the text, in addition to the Induction (137 lines), by some 457 lines spread over eleven passages (Marston, 1975b, lii). That might give half an hour’s extra playing time. The Induction was written by John Webster, and the additions to the text seem to have been shared between Marston and Webster. A substantial part of those additions involved creating a fool’s part (Passarello) for Armin, since the boy companies had no tradition of clown roles (xlix).
As we have noted, the Induction uses the conceit of having members of the company come on to play “themselves” and discuss the production (see p. 158). The three who do so are Burbage (referred to familiarly as “Dick”), Condell and John Lowin. To them comes Will Sly, playing a gallant who “hath seen this play often [i.e. at the Blackfriars] and can give [the players] intelligence for their action: I have most of the jests here in my table‐book” (lines 14–16). In a neat metatheatrical twist Sly asks “Where’s Harry Condell, Dick Burbage and Will Sly?” (11–12), which all speaks to the celebrity culture now surrounding the Globe. The jest of Will Sly asking to speak to himself would hardly work if many of the audience had not recognized him.
As a gallant Sly had come prepared to sit on the stage, as they do at the Blackfriars (“We may sit upon the stage at the private house”: 2). The tire‐man who has accompanied him on stage is carrying a stool (presumably as stage property), and Sly assumes he can hire it: “I would have given you but sixpence for your stool” (7–8) – the going price of an onstage stool at the Blackfriars (see p. 295). Perhaps Sly is not quite the gallant‐about‐the‐theatre he pretends to be. When the tire‐man will not loan him the stool he assumes he is being protected from adverse audience reactions to his preening behavior – not simply because this was not the custom in public playhouses. Eventually Lowin convinces him that he has to go: “Good sir, will you leave the stage? I’ll help you to a private room” (125) – presumably one of the “gentlemen’s rooms” (see p. 240ff on sitting on the stage).
While Sly remains on stage, however, he pumps the actors on how they come to be performing this play, “another company having interest in it” (75–6). The Master of the Revels’s licence normally conferred a copyright of sorts on the company to which it was granted, at least in the London theatres. Companies could not just steal from each other, even when a play got into print. So unless the King’s Men had come to a private arrangement with the Blackfriars management, they had no right to perform The Malcontent. That may have happened or – I think the likelier – the change in the licensing of the Blackfriars boys opened up a gray area over performing rights, which the King’s Men exploited. Tilney, as Master of the Revels, would hardly object to their theft of a play for which he had not been responsible; in fact he would now get a fee for (re)licensing it. And Daniel had no immediate authority over the King’s Men. All that Condell evasively admits is that the play was “lost.” He also justifies it as a quid‐pro‐quo: “Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimo‐sexto with them?” (77–8). The reference is to paper sizes, folio big, decimo‐sexto small, like the respective actors.
Malevole is the chief protagonist of The Macontent. “Jeronimo” is something of a puzzle. The name is that of the central character in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, a play long in the repertory of the Admiral’s Men, not that of the Chamberlain’s Men.4 There was another play, called The First Part of Jeronimo or The Comedy of Jeronimo, but it never had anything like the reputation implied here. So what precisely the boys’ theft amounted to is difficult to assess. One thing is clear, however: both the Blackfriars boys and the King’s Men were acquiring revenge plays wherever they could. Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems to have rejuvenated this elderly genre, as we saw with Marston’s earlier work for Paul’s Boys (though they seem to have concentrated on city comedies in the new reign). Henry Chettle wrote a revenge play, Hoffman (circa 1602), for the Admiral’s/Prince Henry’s Men, though there is less evidence that they built any reputation with such plays, except for Kyd’s play. Nor, apparently, did the Blackfriars boys. This was one area where they could not keep up with the King’s Men, even if they did commission The Malcontent and steal “Jeronimo”; there is no wider evidence of them building on this part of the repertory. But the King’s Men certainly did. They very probably wanted The Malcontent to play it alongside Hamlet, which in so many respects it shadows. If they really had also secured The Spanish Tragedy, the great‐grand‐daddy of the genre, that would further compound their range; it was certainly consolidated again when they acquired The Revenger’s Tragedy (circa 1606) from Thomas Middleton. They were cornering the market in revenge plays, with the incomparable Burbage taking the lead in all of them. Sequels had long been a stock‐in‐trade of the theatrical repertory, a way of cashing in on success – 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, 1 and 2 Henry IV (with The Merry Wives of Windsor tacked on), 1 and 2 Sir John Oldcastle, and so on. But it was perhaps new to build a repertory, not around a single character, but around similar plot motifs and character‐types, showing off Burbage’s skills to the very best advantage (Knutson, 1991).
At around this time the management of the Children of the Queen’s Revels went down a very different commercial route. They began to focus on recent history and political satire. At a time when the Essex rebellion was still a very touchy subject (see p. 153–4), and there were tensions between the English and the Scots whom King James had brought south with him, this was an incendiary mix, which repeatedly brought them to the notice of the authorities. A play by their own licenser, Samuel Daniel, set the pattern; his Philotas (1604) was expressly accused of shadowing Essex’s downfall, and it is likely this – at least in part – which also got Chapman’s two‐part Byron plays (1608) into trouble. Chapman, Jonson and Marston’s Eastward Ho! (1605) and John Day’s Isle of Gulls (1606) both satirized the Scots and got their authors into trouble. The company lost the Queen as its patron. They were henceforth known variously as the Children of the Revels or Children of the Blackfriars. There are signs that other playing companies worried that this policy might have consequences for the profession in general. Thomas Heywood concluded his Apology for Actors (written circa 1607–8) with this:
Now to speak of some abuse lately crept into the quality, as an inveighing against the state, the court, the law, the city, and their governements, with the particularizing of private men’s humours (yet alive), noblemen and others. I know it distastes many; neither do I any way approve it, nor dare I by any means excuse it. The liberty which some arrogate to themselves, committing their bitterness, and liberal invectives against all estates, to the mouths of children, supposing their juniority to be a privilege for any railing, be it never so violent: I could advise all such to curb and limit this presumed liberty within the bands of discretion and government. But wise and judicial censurers, before whom such complaints shall at any time hereafter come, will not (I hope) impute these abuses to any transgression in us, who have ever been careful and provident to shun the like. (G3v)
And I follow Roslyn Knutson in thinking that it was probably about the same time that Shakespeare added a famous passage to Hamlet, which only appears in the folio text:
HAMLET:
ROSENCRANTZ:
HAMLET:
ROSENCRANTZ:
HAMLET:
ROSENCRANTZ:
HAMLET:
GUILDENSTERN:
HAMLET:
ROSENCRANTZ:
(2.2. 334–62; see Knutson,1995)
So the “ordinary poets” of two leading adult companies – Queen Anne’s Men and the King’s Men – went out of their way to condemn the practices of the Blackfriars management and the authors they employ. Shakespeare projects them as shortsighted, endangering the future livelihood of the boys who want to go on to be adult actors. He also suggests that they are keeping the gentry (“many wearing rapiers”) away from the public theatres, since they are scared of being satirized by the Blackfriars writers. He suggests that the Globe in particular is suffering – “Hercules and his load too” apparently refers to the sign or flag of the Globe, depicting Hercules carrying the world on his shoulders (Dutton, 1988).
Eventually the King himself lost his temper. The French ambassador complained about the Byron plays for an insulting depiction of the Queen of France (compounding the offense of their allusions to Essex) and shortly thereafter the company staged a play about a Scottish mine, with uncomplimentary references to James’s Scots favorites. On March 11, 1608 Sir Thomas Lake, the Secretary of State, wrote to the Earl of Salisbury as secretary of the Privy Council:
His majesty was well pleased with that which your lordship advertiseth concerning the committing [imprisonment] of the players that have offended in the matter of France and commanded me to signify to your lordship that for the others who have offended in the matter of the mines and other lewd words, which is the Children of the Blackfriars, that though he had signified his mind to your lordship by my Lord of Montgomery, yet I should repeat it again: that his grace had vowed they should never play more, but should first beg their bread, and he would have his vow performed. And therefore my Lord Chamberlain by himself, or your lordships at the table [the Privy Council], should take order to dissolve them and punish the maker [playwright] besides.6
The company was indeed dissolved and its licence was revoked; its goods were divided among the remaining management in July. The lease of the playhouse property was surrendered in August, and twelve years after James Burbage built the second Blackfriars playhouse, it became available for the use of Richard Burbage’s company, now the King’s Men. Whatever reservations the people of Blackfriars may have had about adult actors performing in their neighborhood, the fact that they now enjoyed the king’s own patronage must have overridden any objections.