Part II

of _Choice Rarities of Ancient English Poetry_ (1876), were _Myrrha_ (1607), which has commendatory verses by his kinsman Robert Glover and I. W., Lewes Machin, and William Bagnall, and _Hiren_ (1611), which has sonnets to Henry Earl of Oxford, and Elizabeth Countess of Derby. On the title-page he describes himself as ‘one of the servants of his Maiesties Revels’. The surmise of Fleay, i. 29, that this was repeated from an earlier edition of _c._ 1607 now lost may receive some confirmation from the connexion of Machin with the King’s Revels; but it must also be remembered that the Whitefriars Revels’ company appears to be occasionally described as the King’s Revels in provincial records of _c._ 1611. A trivial anecdote of him is in J. Taylor, _Wit and Mirth_ (1629).

BARNE, WILLIAM. Admiral’s, 1602.

BARRY, DAVID (LORD). Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.

BARTLE (?). Alexander Bartle, son of ‘---- a player’, was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 27 February 1603 (B. 165).

BARTON, ONESIPHORUS. A ‘player’, buried at St. Giles’s on 9 March 1608 (B. 167).

BASSE, THOMAS. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613; Anne’s, 1617–19.

BAXTER, ROBERT. Chapel, 1601; Lady Elizabeth’s (?), 1613. Greg, _H. P._ 58, 87, however, thinks that the ‘Baxter’ of 1613, whose Christian name is not given, may be Barksted. Neither man is likely to have written the ‘Baxsters tragedy’ of 1602 (_H. P._ 58).

BAYLYE, THOMAS. Shrewsbury’s (provincial), 1581. J. Hunter, _Hallamshire_ 80, and Murray, ii. 388, print from _College of Arms, Talbot MS._ G. f. 74, a Latin letter written by him to Thomas Bawdewin from Sheffield on 25 April 1581, in which he mentions a brother William, thanks him for a tragedy played by the company on St. George’s day, and begs him to procure ‘librum aliquem brevem, novum, iucundum, venustum, lepidum, hilarem, scurrosum, nebulosum, rabulosum, et omnimodis camificiis, latrociniis et lenociniis refertum ... qua in re dicunt quod Wilsonus quidam Leycestrii comitis servus (fidibus pollens) multum vult et potest facere’.

BAYLYE. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

BEART, RUDOLF. Germany, 1608.

BEESTON, CHRISTOPHER, has been conjectured to be the ‘Kit’ who played a Lord and a Captain in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ for Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1. The actor-list of _Every Man in his Humour_ shows that he belonged to the Chamberlain’s men in 1598. He is not, however, named as a performer of Shakespeare’s plays in the Folio of 1623. Probably he was at one time the hired man of Augustine Phillips who left him 30_s._ as his ‘servant’ in 1605. By 1602 he had passed to Worcester’s men, and with this company, afterwards Queen Anne’s, he remained until it was reconstituted on the Queen’s death in 1619, taking a prominent part in the management of the company, after the death of Thomas Greene in 1612. He seems to have built or acquired the Cockpit theatre, and to have successively housed there Queen Anne’s men (1617–19), Prince Charles’s men (1619–22), Lady Elizabeth’s men (1622–5), Queen Henrietta’s men (1625–37), and ‘the King’s and Queen’s young company’, also known as ‘Beeston’s boys’ (1637). By 1639 he had been succeeded as ‘Governor’ of this company by his son William Beeston, and was doubtless dead. The Cockpit had passed by June 1639 to ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Beeston, alias Hutcheson’.[934] It appears from the lawsuit of 1623, in which Queen Anne’s men were concerned, that Christopher Beeston also bore the _alias_ of Hutcheson or Hutchinson. But if Elizabeth was his widow, she must have been a second wife, for the records of the Middlesex justices for 1615–17 record several true bills for recusancy as brought against a wife Jane. In these records Beeston, whose _alias_ is also given, is described as a gentleman or yeoman, and as ‘late of St. James-at-Clerkenwell’, or in one case ‘of Turmil streete’. In 1617 his house was burgled by Henry Baldwin and others.[935] The registers of St. James’s, Clerkenwell, record the baptism of a daughter Anne on 15 September 1611, and the burial of a servant on 1 July 1615.[936] But at an earlier date Beeston lived in St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, where his sons Augustine, Christopher, and Robert were baptized, and the first two buried between 16 November 1604 and 15 July 1610. Robert also was buried there on 26 December 1615, but Christopher was then described in the register as of Clerkenwell. Possibly he afterwards returned to Shoreditch, as Collier states that his name is traceable in the register up to 1637.[937] His son William, also a suspected recusant, was living in Bishopsgate Without just before his death in 1682.[938] An earlier William Beeston, with whom Christopher may have had some connexion, is the ‘Maister Apis Lapis’ and ‘Gentle M. William’, to whom Nashe addressed his _Strange Newes_ (1592).[939]

BEESTON, ROBERT. Anne’s, 1604, 1609.

BEESTON. A player at Barnstaple in 1560–1 (Murray, ii. 198).

BELT, T. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

BENFIELD, ROBERT, is first named in the actor-lists of Beaumont and Fletcher’s _The Coxcomb_ and _The Honest Man’s Fortune_, both of which probably represent performances by the Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1613. Subsequently he joined the King’s men, but at what date is uncertain. It may have been upon the death on 16 December 1614 of William Ostler, whom he succeeded in the part of Antonio in Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_. He is in the actor-list of _The Knight of Malta_ (1616–19) and in the patent of 1619. He seems to have been a member of the company to the end, as he signed the dedication of the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio in 1647. He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays. Collier found some late records of his family (B. 181).

BENTLEY, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583. He is named by Heywood as before his time, lauded by Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (1592) (_Works_, i. 215) with Tarlton, Alleyn, and Knell, coupled with Knell in the undated challenge to Alleyn (q.v.) to play one of their parts, and placed by Dekker in _A Knight’s Conjuring_ (1607) in the company of the poets, Watson, Kyd, and Achelow, ‘tho he had ben a player molded out of their pennes, yet because he had been their louer and register to the muse, inimitable Bentley’. He may be the John Bentley whose poems are mentioned by Ritson, _Bibliographia Poetica_ (1802), 129.

BIERDT, BURCHARD. Germany, 1612.

BILLINGESLY, JOHN. Payee for Westminster boys, 1572.

BIRCH, GEORGE. Interluders, 1538–59.

BIRCH, JOHN. Interluders, 1547–56.

BIRD, _alias_ BORNE, WILLIAM. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1622. Many personalia of his family and debts are recorded in Dulwich manuscripts and church registers (H. ii. 241; B. 204).

‘BLACK DICK.’ Admiral’s, 1597.

BLACKWOOD, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1602–3; Germany, 1603–6(?). The conjecture of Fleay, i. 290, that an earlier German tour is referred to in _How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad_ (1602) is baseless (H. ii. 244).

BLANEY, JOHN. Revels, 1609; Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived near the Red Bull in St. John’s Street in 1623 (J. 347).

BLANK, WILLIAM ALEXANDER. A Scottish dancer in Germany, 1605.

BOONE, WILLIAM. A ‘player’ mentioned in books of St. Saviour’s, _c._ 1600 (Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi). Possibly an error for Borne.

BORNE, WILLIAM. _Vide_ Birde.

BOWER, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1545–61, and possibly author of _Apius and Virginia_ (1575); cf. ch. xxiv.

BOWRINGE, GREGORY. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

BRADSHAW, RICHARD. Edward, Lord Dudley’s (provincial), 1595. He was Gabriel Spencer’s ‘man’ in 1598, and concerned in financial transactions with Henslowe during 1598–1601. He may be the same Richard Bradshaw who had a provincial company, with a licence to which his title was dubious, in 1630–33 (H. ii. 245; Murray, ii. 42, 106, 163).

BRADSTREET, JOHN. Germany, 1592–7, 1604. He _ob._ in 1618.

BRETTEN, WILLIAM. Chapel, >1546.

BRISTOW, JAMES. Augusten’s boy, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602 (H. ii. 245).

BROMEHAM. Paul’s, >1582.

BROWNE, EDWARD. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s, 1602. He was a witness for Henslowe in 1599 (H. ii. 246).

BROWNE, JOHN. Interluders, 1551–63.

BROWNE, JOHN. Revels (?), 1608.

BROWNE, ROBERT. Worcester’s, 1583; Holland, 1590; Germany, 1592–3, 1594 (?)-9; Derby’s, 1599–1601; Germany, 1601–7; Revels patentee, 1610; Germany, 1618–20. His wife and family died at Shoreditch in the plague of 1593, but a son Robert and daughter Elizabeth were baptized at St. Saviour’s on 19 October 1595 and 2 December 1599. On 11 April 1612 he wrote to Alleyn from Clerkenwell (_H. P._, 37, 63; B. 229; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi).

BROWNE, WILLIAM. Anne’s, _c._ 1616.

BROWNE. It is not safe to identify the Browne whom Henslowe paid to ‘feach’ for the Admiral’s in 1596 (H. i. 45), or the ‘old Browne’ who, as well as Edward, played in _1 Tamar Cham_ for the Admiral’s in 1602 (_H. P._ 148), or ‘Browne of the Boares head’ who, according to Alleyn’s wife on 21 Oct. 1603, ‘is dead & dyed very pore, he went not into the countrye at all’ (_H. P._ 59). The last may be the man whose widow married Thomas Greene (q.v.).

BRYAN, GEORGE, was one of the English company which visited Helsingör in Denmark and Dresden in Germany during 1586–7. He is one of the three actors distinguished as ‘Mr.’ in the plot of Tarlton’s _The Seven Deadly Sins_ as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, and is named in the Privy Council warrant for the travelling of Strange’s in 1593. He was payee for the Chamberlain’s men on 21 December 1596, but is not in the _Every Man in his Humour_ actor-list of 1598 or traceable at any later date amongst the Chamberlain’s or King’s men. Probably he left to take up duty as an ordinary Groom of the Chamber, as he is found holding this post at Elizabeth’s funeral in 1603 and still held it (_Chamber Accounts_) in 1611–13. His son George was baptized at St. Andrew’s Wardrobe on 17 February 1600.[940] He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays.

BUCKE, PAUL. A ‘player’ whose d. Sara was buried on 23 July 1580 and his bastard son Paul buried on 23 July 1599 at St. Anne’s (B. 237). It is apparently his name which, for whatever reason, appears at the end of Wilson’s _Three Ladies of London_ (1584). ‘Paule Bucke’s praier for Sir Humfrey Gilberte’ was entered in S. R. on 17 July 1578.

BUGBY, JOHN. Grammar Master of Chapel, 1401.

BULL, JOHN. Chapel, 1572 (?)->1586.

BULL, THOMAS. Denmark, 1579–80.

BURBADGE, JAMES. The Shakespearo-centric tendencies of literary historians have led them to suggest a regional connexion between the dramatist and the family of his most famous interpreter.[941] There was a Warwickshire family of Burbadge, of whom John was bailiff of Stratford-on-Avon in 1555, and Malone was thus led (_Var._ iii. 187) to ‘suspect’ that James Burbadge was Shakespeare’s countryman. Collier (iii. 258) having learnt that the arms claimed by Cuthbert Burbadge at the London visitation of 1634, ‘crest, a boar’s head; and three boars’ heads on a shield’ (_Harleian Soc._ xv), were those of a Hertfordshire family, attempted the explanation that the two families ‘were in some way related’. He committed himself deeply by publishing in 1835 (_New Facts_, 32; cf. Ingleby, 256) a forged letter from H. S. to Sir Thomas Egerton, containing the statement that Shakespeare and Richard Burbadge are ‘both of one countie, and indeede almost of one towne’. Burbadges are traceable in various parts of England, including Somerset, Oxfordshire, and Durham (Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 344; Stopes, 134, 243), and the conjecture has about as much value as Malone’s derivation of the name (_Var._ iii. 182) from ‘Borough-bridge’, or Chalmers’s from ‘Boar’s badge’. Nor is any connexion known between James Burbadge and various other Burbadges--Robert, John, and Edward--who appear in contemporary documents (Collier, iii. 282; Stopes, 152), although A. Wood (_Fasti Oxon._ i. 303) makes himself responsible for the statement that one John Burbadge, of Lincoln College, was nearly related to the actor. The name is indifferently spelt Burbadge, Burbage, or Burbege by contemporaries, but usually Burbadge in family signatures (Wallace, 61, 63 ‘James Burbage’, 252; Collier, iii. 294; _Malone Soc. Coll._ ii. 69, 76). James sealed the Blackfriars indentures of 1596 with a griffin.

James was about sixty on 16 February 1591 (Wallace, 61) and was therefore born in 1530–1. He was ‘by occupacion a joyner and reaping but a small lyving by the same, gave it over and became a commen player in playes’ (Wallace, 141). He was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1576, and apparently continued a ‘fellow’ of this or some other company for a year or two after he established the Theatre in 1576 (Wallace, 142). In this year he was a poor man, and of small credit, not worth above 100 marks (Wallace, 134, 141, 153), but he had enlisted the capital of John Brayne, whose sister Ellen he had married (Wallace, 40, 139). His business history thereafter is bound up with that of the Theatre (q.v.) and of the Blackfriars, which he planned, but probably never used, during the last years of his life. Cuthbert Burbadge says of him (_Blackfriars Sharers Papers_, 1635) that he ‘was the first builder of playhowses, and was himselfe in his younger yeeres a player’. He was described as ‘joyner’ in the lease of the Theatre site in 1576, but in later years usually as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’. Presumably he went to live in Shoreditch in 1576, as entries for his family then begin in the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139). They testify to the baptism (17 March 1576) of a daughter Alice, mentioned as Alice Walker in the will of Nicholas Tooley (q.v.) in 1623, and the burial (18 August 1582) of a daughter Joan. Another daughter, Helen, was buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 15 December 1595 (_Bodl._). Besides Alice and Helen he had in 1588 (Wallace, 39) two sons, Cuthbert and Richard, who would both have been born before 1576. James himself was buried at Shoreditch on 2 February 1597 and his widow on 8 May 1613. The registers generally give the family residence as ‘Halliwell Street’, and the ‘Halliwell’ which appears in 1597 and 1601 is perhaps an accidental variant. But the lawsuits suggest that James had built himself a house in the old inner cloister yard of the priory, which lay a little north of Halliwell Street, if that is the same as Holywell Lane (Wallace, 232, 236). They also represent him as a man of violent temper and not over-honest, while an independent record (App. D, No. lxxiv) refers to him as ‘a stubburne fellow’. Before his death he seems to have made over his interest in the Blackfriars to his son Richard, while that in the Theatre had passed by redemption of a mortgage to Cuthbert (Wallace, 55, 73, 108, 145, 278).

Cuthbert Burbadge, the elder son of James, was not an actor, although as holder of the leases of the Theatre and afterwards of the Globe (q.v.) he was concerned during the greater part of his life with theatrical management. On 16 February 1591 he was servant to Walter Cope, gentleman usher to Lord Burghley. He was then twenty-four, and must have been born in 1566–7. He was then probably living in the Strand (Stopes, 152), but the subsidy rolls for 1597 (Stopes, 195) show him as assessed at 10_s._ 8_d._ in Holywell Street, and the registers of St. Leonard’s have the records of his children, Walter (bapt. 22 June 1595), James (bur. 15 July 1597), and Elizabeth (bapt. 30 December 1601). Of these only Elizabeth, the wife first of Amias Maxey and secondly of George Bingley, was alive in 1634 and her son Amias had been adopted by his grandfather. Cuthbert himself was buried at Shoreditch on 17 September 1636, and his widow Elizabeth, daughter of John Cox, on 1 October 1636 (Stopes, 134, 140). His friendship with members of the King’s company is commemorated by notices in the wills of William Sly (1608), Richard Cowley (1618), and Nicholas Tooley, who died in his house in 1623. Collier (iii. 285) identified him with Cuthbert Burby the stationer, but Burby was in fact the son of Edmund Burby of Beds., husbandman (Arber, ii. 127). Possibly, however, the families were related, since Burby’s name is given at least once in the Stationers’ Register (Arber, ii. 612) as ‘Burbidge’.

BURBADGE, RICHARD, makes his first appearance, picturesquely enough, in the brawl at the Theatre which followed upon the Chancery Order of 13 November 1590, restoring a moiety of the profits of the house to the widow Brayne (cf. p. 392). John Alleyn deposed (Wallace, 101) that he ‘found the foresaid Ry. Burbage the yongest sone of the said James Burbage there, w^t a broome staff in his hand, of whom when this deponente asked what sturre was there, he answered in laughing phrase hew they come for a moytie. But quod he (holding vppe the said broomes staff) I haue, I think, deliuered him a moytie with this & sent them packing.’ Nicholas Bishop (Wallace, 98, 115), one of Mrs. Brayne’s agents, adds the confirmatory detail that ‘the said Ry. Burbage scornfully & disdainfullye playing with this deponentes nose, sayd, that yf he delt in the matter, he wold beate him also, and did chalendge the field of him at that tyme’. Very possibly Richard was then playing with the Admiral’s men at the Theatre. His exact age is unknown, but he was younger than Cuthbert, born in 1566–7, and as Cuthbert, long after, spoke of the ‘35 yeeres paines, cost, and labour’ out of which his brother ‘made meanes to leave his wife and children some estate’ in 1619 (_Sharers Papers_), it may perhaps be inferred that his histrionic career began as early as 1584. The ‘plot’ of _The Dead Man’s Fortune_, wherein the doubtful direction (cf. p. 125) ‘Burbage a messenger’ suggests that he played a minor part, may belong to a performance by the Admiral’s _c._ 1590. It is a little more difficult to suppose that at a date when the Queen’s men were still active the Admiral’s or Strange’s had already acquired Tarlton’s _Seven Deadly Sins_, in the ‘plot’ of which ‘R. Burbadg’ is cast for the important characters of Gorboduc and Terens. But perhaps it is even less probable that, after the breach of the Admiral’s with his father in 1591, he took part in the performances of the same play by the amalgamated Admiral’s and Strange’s men at the Rose in 1592. His name does not appear amongst those of the Strange’s men who were travelling in 1593. But when the amalgamation broke up, and the Chamberlain’s company was formed, with some of its elements as a nucleus, in 1594, he joined that company, and became a prominent member, often acting as its representative or payee, both before and after its metamorphosis into the King’s men, and to the end of his own life. His name is constant in its lists (cf. ch. xiii), and his personal relations with his fellows are reflected in the wills of Augustine Phillips in 1605, Shakespeare in 1616, and Nicholas Tooley, whose ‘master’ he had been, in 1623. It would appear that in the somewhat irregular disposition of James Burbadge’s theatrical interests the Blackfriars freehold fell primarily to Richard. The leases of 1608 were made by him as lessor to his brother and other members of the King’s men’s syndicate as lessees. This, however, was doubtless a mere family arrangement, for Cuthbert spoke of the Blackfriars in 1635 as ‘our inheritance’, and the two brothers shared in the supplementary transactions which rounded off the original purchase (cf. ch. xvii). At the Globe, on the other hand, Cuthbert and Richard held in common a moiety of the housekeepers’ interest under the lease from Nicholas Brend (cf. ch. xvi). They continued to live as close neighbours in Halliwell Street, Shoreditch, where they shared the misfortune of having their houses burgled in 1615 (Jeaffreson, ii. 108) and where the registers of St. Leonard’s (Stopes, 139) record Richard’s children: Richard (bur. 16 August 1607), Julia or Juliet (bapt. 2 January 1603, bur. 12 September 1608), Frances (bapt. 16 September and bur. 19 September 1604), Anne (bapt. 8 August 1607), Winifred (bapt. 10 October 1613, bur. 14 October 1616), a second Julia (bapt. 26 December 1614, bur. 15 August 1615), William (bapt. 6 November 1616), and a posthumous Sara (bapt. 5 August 1619, bur. 29 April 1625). ‘Richard Burbadge, player’ was himself buried on 16 March 1619. He had died, not as Camden records in his _Annals_ on 9 March, but on 13 March, after making the day before a nuncupative will (Collier, iii. 293), witnessed by his brother and by Nicholas Tooley and Richard Robinson of the King’s men, in which he left his wife Winifred sole executrix. She subsequently married Richard Robinson, and was still alive, as was Burbadge’s son William, in 1635 (_Sharers Papers_). According to the gossip of the day he left ‘better than £300 land to his heirs’ (Collier, iii. 297).

Burbadge had a high reputation as a player, both in life and after death. A note of 13 March 1602 by John Manningham (_Diary_, 39) records how his impersonation of Richard III touched the heart of a citizen’s wife, and how Shakespeare prevented him at a resultant assignation. John Davies of Hereford coupled him with Shakespeare in 1603 (_Microcosmos_) among players whom he loved ‘for painting, poesie’, and in 1609 (_Civile Warres of Death and Fortune_) amongst those whom Fortune ‘guerdond not, to their desarts’. He is introduced _in propria persona_ into _2 Return from Parnassus_ (1602) and into Marston’s induction to _The Malcontent_ (1604). Probably he is the ‘one man’ of the London stage with whom the player in _Ratseis Ghost_ (1605; cf. ch. xviii) is advised ‘to play Hamlet for a wager’. Jonson, in _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), v. iii, makes Cokes ask the master of the puppets, ‘which is your _Burbage_ now?... your best _Actor_. Your _Field_?’ He was apparently the model for the _Character of an Actor_ in the _Characters_ of 1615 (App. C, No. lxi). And other evidences of his fame can be traced down to Restoration days in Richard Corbet’s _Iter Boreale_, in Sir Richard Baker’s _Chronicle_ and _Theatrum Redivivum_, and in Richard Flecknoe’s _Short Discourse of the English Stage_ and his _Euterpe Restored_ (cf. Collier, iii. 279; Stopes, 121; _Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse_, N.S.S., 128, 250).

Shortly after Burbadge’s death, on 20 May 1619, the Earl of Pembroke wrote to Lord Doncaster in Germany of a great supper given the same night by the Duke of Lennox to the French ambassador, and adds that the company were now at the play, ‘which I being tender-harted could not endure to see so soone after the loss of my old acquaintance Burbadg’ (E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ (1882), i. 103). Several epitaphs and elegies upon Burbadge are preserved. The shortest--‘Exit Burbadge’--was printed in Camden’s _Remaines_ (1674), 541. Another is by Middleton (Collier, iii. 280, 296). A third, which begins

Some skillfull limner helpe mee, yf not soe, Some sad tragedian, to expresse my woe,

has been the subject of much controversy (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 88; C. M. Ingleby, _The Elegy on Burbadge_, in _Shakespeare, the Man and the Book_, ii. 169). It exists in two versions, one of 86 lines, the other of 124 lines. Of the shorter version several undoubtedly genuine manuscripts are known, and it is probably only by accident that one of these omits ll. 2–5 of the following passage, which is given completely by all the rest:

Hee’s gone & with him what a world are dead, Which he reuiud, to be reuiued soe. No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe. Kind Leer, the greued Moore, and more beside, That liued in him, haue now for ever dy’de. Oft haue I seene him leap into the graue, Suiting the person which he seem’d to haue Of a sadd louer with soe true an eye, That theer I would haue sworne, he meant to dye. Oft haue I seene him play this part in ieast, Soe liuely, that spectators, and the rest Of his sad crew, whilst he but seem’d to bleed, Amazed, thought euen then hee dyed in deed.

In the longer version ll. 2–5 are not only omitted, but are replaced by an interpolation of many lines, detailing a number of parts, some of which belonged to other companies than the King’s, and are not likely to have been played by Burbadge. No manuscript of this version is forthcoming, and there can be little doubt that the interpolation is due to Collier, who referred to the version in his _New Particulars_ (1836), 27, and published it in his _Memoirs of the Actors_ (1846), 52, professedly from a manuscript in the possession of Richard Heber. Of the shorter version I can add to what has been recorded by others that in _Stowe MS._ 962, f. 62^v, I have found a copy of it, with the title ‘An Elegie on the death of the famous actor Rich: Burbage, who died 13 Martij A^o. 1618’, and an ascription to ‘Jo ffletcher’. Other copies also give the date of Burbadge’s death, or refer, as do the opening lines themselves, to the fact that he was skilled not only as an actor but as a limner. John Davies testifies to this in the verses of 1603 already cited. The accounts of the Earl of Rutland for the birthday tilt of 1613 contain the entry, ‘31 Martij, To M^r. Shakspeare in gold, about my Lordes impreso, 44^s. To Richard Burbage for paynting and makyng yt, in gold, 44^s’; and those for the tilt of 1616, ‘25 Martij, 1616, paid given Richard Burbidg for my Lordes shelde and for the embleance, 4^{li} 18^s’ (_H. M. C. Rutland MSS._ iv. 494, 508). The gallery at Dulwich contains a picture presented by William Cartwright, which is described in his catalogue as ‘a womans head on a boord done by M^r. Burbige y^e actor’. The inveterate tendency of mankind to guess has led to suggestions that he may have painted the portrait of himself in the same gallery, the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, or the original of the Droeshout print.

One other record of Burbadge, apart from his company, may be noted. On 31 May 1610 he was employed by the City, with his fellow James Rice, to deliver a speech to Prince Henry at a water-pageant on the Thames (cf. ch. iv). Presumably he represented Amphion, ‘a grave and judicious Prophet-like personage’, and Rice Corinea.

BURGES, ROBERT. A ‘player’ buried at St. Bennet’s, Gracechurch, 14 April 1559 (B. 251).

CANDLER, JAMES. Leader of a company at Ipswich, 1569–70 (_Hist. MSS._ ix. 1. 248).

CARIE (GARY), GILES. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613.

CARLETON, NICHOLAS. Paul’s, >1582.

CARPENTER, WILLIAM. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611; Charles’s, 1619, 1625. He was apparently porter at the Marshalsea in 1623 (J. 347).

CARTWRIGHT, WILLIAM. Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1598–1622 (H. ii. 247). He lived at the upper end of White Cross Street in 1623 (J. 347).

CASTLE, THOMAS. A ‘player’, whose son Nicholas and daughter Hester were baptized at St. Giles’s on 9 October 1608 and 15 April 1610 (B. 262).

CATTANES. Worcester’s, 1602 (H. ii. 248).

CAVALLERIZZO, CLAUDIO. Italians, 1576 (?).

CHAPPELL, JOHN. Chapel, 1600–1.

CHESSON, THOMAS. Oxford’s (?), 1580.

CLARK, SILL. Prince’s, 1603< >1641.

CLARKE, ROBERT. A ‘player’ whose son Ezekiel was buried at St. Giles’s, 7 November 1617 (B. 268).

CLARKE, THOMAS. Leicester’s, 1572.

CLAY, NATHANIEL. Anne’s, 1618; Chamber of Bristol, 1618.

CLEMENT, WILLIAM. London player, 1550 (App. D, No. v).

CLIFTON, THOMAS. Kidnapped for Chapel, 1600.

COBORNE, EDWARD. A ‘player’ whose son John was baptized at St. Giles’s on 23 Nov. 1616. Of other family entries, 1613–25, some are for Edward Coborne ‘gentleman’ (_Bodl._). He may be identical with COLBRAND.

COKE, RICHARD. Interluders, 1547–56.

COLBRAND, EDWARD. Palsgrave’s, 1610–13.

COLE. Paul’s, 1599.

COLMAN, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1509.

CONDELL, HENRY, has been conjectured to be the ‘Harry’ cast for Ferrex and a Lord in the ‘plot’ of _The Seven Deadly Sins_, as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1. The first definite notice of him is in the cast of Jonson’s _Every Man in his Humour_, as played by the Chamberlain’s men in 1598. Thereafter he appears in all formal lists of the Chamberlain’s and King’s men, up to the Caroline patent of 1625, including the list in the First Folio of 1623, of which, with Heminges, he acted as editor. He is also in all the casts up to _The Humourous Lieutenant_ (_c._ 1619). About this date he presumably ceased to play; his part of the Cardinal in _The Duchess of Malfi_ had passed to Richard Robinson by 1623. The fact that he took this part somewhat discredits the conjecture of John Roberts (_Answer to Pope_, 1729) that he was a comedian; nor can the statement of the same writer that he was a printer be verified. He is staged with other members of the company in Marston’s _Malcontent_ (1604), and appears as ‘Henry Condye’ in the verses on the burning of the Globe in 1613. He is assigned 26_s._ 8_d._ to buy a ring as Shakespeare’s ‘fellowe’ in his will of 1616, and appears also as a legatee in the will of Augustine Phillips in 1605, as trustee in that of Alexander Cooke in 1614, as executor and joint residuary legatee in that of Nicholas Tooley in 1623, under which also his wife and his daughter Elizabeth receive legacies, and as executor in that of John Underwood in 1625. By 1599 he was married and apparently settled in St. Mary Aldermanbury, where he held various parochial offices during 1606–21, and the register records his children: Elizabeth (bapt. 27 February 1599, bur. 11 April 1599), Anne (bapt. 4 April 1601, bur. 16 July 1610), Richard (bapt. 18 April 1602), Elizabeth (bapt. 14 April 1603, bur. 22 April 1603), Elizabeth (bapt. 26 October 1606), Mary (bapt. 30 January 1608, bur. from Hoxton at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, 24 March 1608), Henry (bapt. 6 May 1610, bur. 4 March 1630), William (bapt. 26 May 1611), Edward (bapt. 22 August 1614, bur. 23 August 1614).[942] Subsequently he had a ‘country house’ at Fulham, at which on 10 September 1625 a pamphlet written by certain players on their travels during the plague, as a reply to Dekker’s _A Rod for Run-awayes_, under the title of _The Run-awayes Answer_, was addressed to him, with an expression of gratitude for a ‘free and noble farewell’ which he had given the writers. At Fulham, too, on 13 December 1627, he made his will, leaving to his widow Elizabeth, his sons Henry and William, and his daughter Elizabeth, wife of Herbert Finch, much household property at Aldermanbury and elsewhere in London, including ‘rents and profits’ by ‘leases and terms of years’ of ‘messuages houses and places’ in Blackfriars and on the Bankside, which were to pass for a time to William and ultimately to the widow.[943] Condell had not been an original sharer in the house of the Globe, but by 1612 had acquired an interest jointly with Heminges; of the Blackfriars house he was an original sharer in 1608. _The Sharers Papers_ of 1635 indicate that Mrs. Condell had held four-sixteenths of the Globe and one-eighth of the Blackfriars, but had transferred two-sixteenths of the Globe when Taylor and Lowin were admitted as sharers. A minor legacy in Condell’s will is to his old servant, Elizabeth Wheaton, of her ‘place or priviledge’ in the Globe and Blackfriars. Heminges and Cuthbert Burbadge are named as overseers. Condell was buried on 29 December 1627, and his widow on 3 October 1635, both at St. Mary Aldermanbury.[944]

COOKE, ALEXANDER, has been conjectured to be the ‘Sander’ who is cast in the ‘plot’ of _The Seven Deadly Sins_ as played by Strange’s or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, for the parts of Videna in _Envy_ and Progne in _Lechery_. But, as far as this goes, he might just as well be the ‘San.’ who took the part of a player in _Taming of a Shrew_ (1594), ind. 1, which was a Pembroke’s play. Malone ‘presumes’, with some rashness, that he performed ‘all the principal female characters’ in Shakespeare’s plays.[945] It must be doubtful whether he was on the stage as early as 1592. He is traceable as a member of the King’s men in the casts of _Sejanus_ (1603), _Volpone_ (1605), _Alchemist_ (1610), _Catiline_ (1611), and _The Captain_ (1612–13). The fact that in the first two of these his name occurs at the end of the lists has been somewhat hazardously accepted as an indication that he played women’s parts. He is also in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. Augustine Phillips left him a legacy as his ‘fellow’ in 1605.

‘Mr. Cooke and his wife’ commend themselves to Alleyn in his wife’s letter of 21 October 1603.[946] The token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, show an Alexander Cooke in Hill’s Rents during 1604, 1607, 1609, and 1610; and the parish register, recording the baptism of Francis Cooke, son of Alexander, ‘a player’, on 27 October 1605, makes an identification possible. There were three more children, Rebecca (bapt. 11 October 1607), Alice (bapt. 3 November 1611), Alexander (bapt. 20 March 1614). This last was posthumous; the register records Alexander Cooke’s burial on 25 February 1614.[947] His will, dated 3 January 1614, leaves £50 each to Francis, Rebecca, and the unborn child, and the residue to his wife.[948] He owned £50 ‘which is in the hand of my fellowes, as my share of the stock’. He appoints ‘my master Hemings’, to whom he had presumably been apprenticed, and Condell trustees for his children, and mentions brothers Ellis and John, of whom the latter is conjectured by Collier to be the author of Greene’s _Tu Quoque_.

COOKE, EDWARD. Chapel, 1509.

COOKE, LIONEL. Queen’s, 1583, 1588.

COOKE, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1583.

COOKE, WILLIAM. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.

CORNISH, JOHN. Gentleman of Chapel, and pageant-master at wedding of Arthur in 1501.

CORNISH, KIT. A ‘ghost-name’ in Chapel records.

CORNISH, WILLIAM. Master of Song School, Westminster, 1479–80.

CORNISH, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1509–23. Conceivably identical with the last, and in any case probably of the same family.

COWLEY, RICHARD, was of Strange’s men in 1593. He had played minor parts with that company or the Admiral’s in _The Seven Deadly Sins_ of 1590–1, and is mentioned in Alleyn’s correspondence as travelling with the company. He joined the Chamberlain’s men, probably on their formation in 1594, and was payee for the company in 1601. The stage-directions to the Quarto (1600) and Folio texts of _Much Ado about Nothing_, IV. ii, show that he played Verges. He is in the 1603 and 1604 lists of the King’s men, and received a legacy from Augustine Phillips as his ‘fellow’ in 1605, but does not appear to have been a sharer in the houses of the Globe or Blackfriars. He is in the Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. He dwelt in Holywell, or for a short period in Alleyn’s Rents, both in the parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, whose register records his children, Robert (bapt. 8 March 1596, bur. (?) 20 March 1597), Cuthbert (bapt. 8 May 1597), Richard (bapt. 29 April 1598, bur. 26 February 1603), Elizabeth (bapt. 2 February 1602), as well as the funeral of his wife Elizabeth on 28 September 1616, and his own on 12 March 1619.[949] His will, dated on 13 January 1618, appoints his daughter Elizabeth Birch executrix and is witnessed by Heminges, Cuthbert Burbadge, Shank, and Thomas Ravenscroft, perhaps the madrigalist.[950]

CRANE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).

CRANE, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1523–45.

CROSSE, SAMUEL, is named amongst the performers of Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio, but in no list of the Chamberlain’s or King’s men. Probably, therefore, he belongs to the very beginning of Shakespeare’s career, and is to be identified with the Crosse named by Heywood amongst famous actors of a generation before his time.[951]

CUMBER, JOHN. Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived in Aldermanbury in 1623, and died in that year (J. 347; Fleay, 279).

CURTEYS, JAMES. Chapel, 1509.

CUTLER, JAMES. Chapel, > 1605.

DABORNE, ROBERT. Revels patentee, 1610, and dramatist.

DANIEL, JOHN. Chamber of Bristol patentee, 1615–17.

DANIEL, SAMUEL. Allower of Revels’ plays, 1604, and dramatist.

DARLOWE. Admiral’s, >1590.

DAVIES, HUGH. Admiral’s (?), 1601 (H. ii. 255).

DAWES, ROBERT. Duke of York’s, 1610; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614.

DAY, JOHN. Admiral’s (?), _c._ 1600. John, son of John Day, ‘player’, was baptized at St. Saviour’s, 3 June 1604 (B. 308; cf. ch. xxiii).

DAY, THOMAS. Chapel, 1601, 1602.

DOB. Admiral’s, 1598–1601.

DOWNTON (DOWTON, DOUTON (?), DOWTEN, DOWGHTON, DENYGTEN, DOUBTON), THOMAS. Strange’s, 1593; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–_c._ 1618. The St. Saviour’s registers record various family events, including the baptism of Christopher, son of Thomas Dowton ‘musycyon’ on 27 December 1592 and that of Thomas Dowton ‘baseborne, the supposed son of Thomas Dowton, a player’, 25 May 1600. He apparently married a vintner’s widow on 15 February 1618, became a vintner, and was still alive on 18 August 1622 (B. 316; H. ii. 262, 265). Dr. Greg regards him as one of the Dutton family.

DRAKE, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

DRAYTON, MICHAEL. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.

DREWE, BARTHOLOMEW. A ‘player’, whose son George was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 12 November 1614 (B. 314).

DREWE, THOMAS. Anne’s, 1616–19.

DROM, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1601.

DRUSIANO. _Vide_ MARTINELLI.

DUKE, JOHN. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Chamberlain’s, 1598; Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–9. Four children were baptized at St. Leonard’s, where he lived in Holywell Street, from July 1604 to January 1609 (H. ii. 265; Collier, _Actors_, xxxi).

DULANDT (DOWLAND?), ROBERT. Musician in Germany, 1623.

DUTTON, EDWARD. Admiral’s, 1597, with a boy ‘Dick’. Children of his were baptized at St. Saviour’s during 1600–2 (B. 326).

DUTTON, JOHN. Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1583, 1588–91. Lincoln’s Inn paid him for musicians in 1567–8 (Walker, i. 362). There are family records of a John Dutton at St. Botolph’s, who is called ‘player’ in the entry of a daughter Elizabeth’s baptism of 3 July 1586 (B. 328).

DUTTON, LAURENCE. Lane’s, 1571–2; Clinton’s, 1572–5; Warwick’s, 1575–6; Oxford’s, 1580; Queen’s, 1589–91. It is curious that a John and a Laurence Dutton also appear as Court Messengers. I find a payment on 23 May 1578 to John for carrying letters to Antwerp (_Pipe Office, Chamber Declared Account_ 541, m. 211^v), and Laurence was paid for ‘sondry jorneys’ in 1561–2 (ibid. m. 39) and was during 1576–82 one of the regular Messengers of the Chamber in attendance on the Privy Council (Dasent, ix. 223, x. 223, 228, xi. 437, xii. 23, xiii. 135, 392, etc.). The ‘Edward’ Dutton of the last entry may be an error. In 1592 the Council (xxii. 493) recommended John the son of Laurence who had ‘of long tyme served her Majestie’ as Messenger, for admission as a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster. But this Laurence can hardly have been the actor, for he was acting as Messenger on 20 May 1580, while the affray for which Laurence the actor had been committed to the Marshalsea on 13 April was still uninquired into. Somewhat earlier a Thomas Dutton was employed as a post between Edward VI’s Council and Thomas Gresham in Antwerp, and was Gresham’s agent in Hamburg, c. 1571 (Burgon, _Gresham_, i. 109; ii. 421). It is easier again to conjecture than to prove a connexion between the actors and the house of Dutton, which had a hereditary jurisdiction over minstrelsy in Cheshire (cf. ch. ix), although in this the names John and Laurence both appear. It is perhaps an accident that two of the recorded visits of the Queen’s men to Lord Derby’s northern seats in 1588–90 synchronize with visits by a Mr. Dutton (Murray, ii. 296).

ECCLESTONE, WILLIAM, appears as a King’s man in the casts of _The Alchemist_ (1610) and _Catiline_ (1611). Mr. Fleay’s statement that he joined the company from the Queen’s Revels in 1609 rests upon a confusion with Field.[952] In 1611 he became a member of the Lady Elizabeth’s men, but left them in 1613 after playing in _The Honest Man’s Fortune_ during that year. He returned to the King’s, and his name is found in the official lists of the company for 1619 and 1621 and in most of the casts of their plays, from _Bonduca_ in 1613–14 to _The Spanish Curate_ in 1622, as well as in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. Nicholas Tooley forgave him a debt in his will of 3 June 1623. As he is not in the Caroline patent of 1625, he had probably died or retired by that date. He may be the W. E. who writes commendatory verses to _The Wild-goose Chase_ in 1652. If he is also the ‘William Eglestone’ whose marriage to Anne Jacob is recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 20 February 1603, he lived to be an old man.[953]

EDMONDS, JOHN. Globe lessee, 1612; Chamber of Bristol, 1618–19. The St. Saviour’s registers record the marriage of a John Edmonds to Margaret Goodyere on 22 February 1600 and the baptism of children of John Edmonds, ‘player’, from 6 January 1605 to 17 July 1615 (B. 334). Probably the two are not identical and the player is the John Edmans who seems to have married his fellow-legatee, Mary Clarke, of the will of Thomas Pope (q.v.) in 1604.

EDWARDES, RICHARD. Master of Chapel, 1561–6, and dramatist.

EICHELIN. Germany, 1604.

ELDERTON, WILLIAM. One Elderton, dressed as a fool, played the part of one of the Lord of Misrule’s sons in George Ferrers’s Christmas revel of 1552–3 (Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 120; cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, i. 407). Conjecture may identify him with the Elderton who brought the Eton boys to Court on 6 January 1573 and the William Elderton who brought the Westminster boys on 1 January 1574, and with the rhyming William Elderton, some of whose ballads are preserved and reprinted in Collier, _Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies_ (1842, _Percy Soc._), 25, 45; H. Huth, _Ancient Ballads and Broadsides_ (1867, _Philobiblon Soc._); and H. L. Collman, _Ballads and Broadsides_ (1912, _Roxburghe Club_); or recorded, with ballads against him, in the Stationers’ Register (Arber, i. 179, 180, 181, 199, 384, 403, 439; ii. 338, 363, 369, 388, 396, 399; cf. v. lxxvi), while his ‘ale-crammed nose’ and ‘rymes lying a steepe in ale’ are subject for much humour among the pamphleteers (Lyly, iii. 398; Nashe, i. 197, 256, 280; iii. 123, 133, 177, 354). Stowe (_Survey_, i. 272) makes him an attorney in the sheriff’s courts at the Guildhall about 1568, but he can hardly be the ‘master Elderton’ who sat as a justice at the Guildhall in a coining case of 1562 (Machyn, 290). He appears to have been dead by 1592 (Harvey, i. 163; Nashe, i. 280). A recent paper on Elderton by H. E. Rollins is in _S. P._ xvii (1920), 199.

ENGLISH, JOHN. Interluders, 1494–1531.

EVANS, HENRY. Blackfriars lessee, 1583, 1600–8; payee for Oxford’s, 1584; manager of Chapel, 1600–3. He was a scrivener, and overseer to the will of Sebastian Westcott, Master of Paul’s, in 1582.

EVANS, THOMAS. Blackfriars lessee, 1608.

EVESEED, HENRY. Chapel, >1585.

FARNABY, RICHARD. Musician in Germany, 1623.

FARRANT, RICHARD. Master of Children of Windsor, 1564–80; Acting Master of Chapel and Blackfriars lessee, 1576–80.

FERRABOSCO, ALFONSO. Italians, 1576, and Court musician (cf. ch. ii).

FETHERSTON, WILLIAM. Of Danby, Yorks., unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

FIDGE, WILLIAM. H. R. Plomer (3 _Library_, ix. 252) cites from a Canterbury record of 1571, ‘William Fidge and Whetstone owe the said [Robert] Bettes [a painter] for their portions in buying of certen playebookes 35_s._ 4_d._’

FIELD, NATHAN, was the son of John Field, preacher and castigator of the stage (cf. App. C, No. xxxi), and was baptized at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 17 October 1587 (Collier, iii. 425). His name is always spelt Nathan in formal contemporary documents, although he was familiarly known as Nat or Nid. But he appears in many reputable modern works of learning as Nathaniel. This error perhaps originated with the compilers of the 1679 Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher, who in four out of the six actor-lists in which his name is found used the form Nathan and in two (_Loyal Subject_ and _Mad Lover_) Nathanael. It was certainly encouraged by a muddle of Collier, who finding in the Cripplegate registers that another son of John Field had been baptized Nathaniel on 13 June 1581, and not realizing that a cranky theological father might quite well use the names as distinct, thought it necessary to assume that this Nathaniel had died before 1587. As a matter of fact, he survived, was apprenticed to a stationer at Michaelmas 1596, took up his freedom on 3 June 1611, and between 1624 and 1627 published some books, including two sermons by a third brother, Theophilus Field, Bishop of Llandaff (McKerrow, _Dict._ 101). I need hardly linger over the suggestion that Nathan Field lived a double life as actor and bookseller. At this time of the apprenticeship he was not yet nine years old, and he was still a scholar of St. Paul’s Grammar School when, not earlier than 1600, he was impressed by Nathaniel Giles and his deputies to serve as one of the Children of the Chapel (_Clifton v. Robinson_ in Fleay, 128). His education was not entirely interrupted, for he fell into the hands of Ben Jonson, who told Drummond in 1619 that ‘Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the Satyres of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall’ (Laing, 11). Field remained a member of the Chapel and the Queen’s Revels throughout the vicissitudes of the company from 1600 to 1613. He is in the actor-lists of _Cynthia’s Revels_ (1600), _The Poetaster_ (1601), and _Epicoene_ (1609), and presumably played Humfrey in _K. B. P._ (1607).[954] With his fellows he became absorbed into the Lady Elizabeth’s in March 1613, contracted with Henslowe and Meade on behalf of this company (_Henslowe Papers_, 23), acted as their payee in 1615, and appears in the actor-lists of _The Coxcomb_, _The Honest Man’s Fortune_, and _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614), in the text of which Jonson compliments him (v. 3) as follows:

_Cokes._ Which is your _Burbage_ now?

_Lanterne._ What meane you by that, Sir?

_Cokes._ Your best Actor. Your _Field_?

He seems to have been suspected by the company of taking bribes from Henslowe to connive at transactions contrary to their interest (_Henslowe Papers_, 88). Certainly he was in financial straits and on more than one occasion appealed to Henslowe to secure his release from an arrest (_Henslowe Papers_, 66, 67). Perhaps it was as a result of this friction with his fellows that he abandoned their amalgamation with Prince Charles’s men in 1615. Instead he joined, at or about this date, the King’s men, and appears as one in the actor-lists of _The Loyal Subject_, _The Knight of Malta_, _The Queen of Corinth_, and _The Mad Lover_. It must, I think, have been by a slip that Cuthbert Burbadge, in the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635, spoke of him as joining the King’s with Ostler and Underwood in 1608 or 1609. It seems probable that Field brought with him to the King’s a share of the plays which had formed the repertory of the joint Lady Elizabeth’s and Queen’s Revels, including Chapman’s _Bussy D’Ambois_, in which a King’s prologue vaunts his success as Bussy. He did not stay with the company very long, for though he is in the patent of 27 March and the livery list of 19 May 1619, he is replaced by John Rice in the livery list of 7 April 1621. And as he does not appear and Rice does appear amongst the actors named in the stage-directions to _Sir John von Olden Barnevelt_ in August 1619, it is probable that he had left in the course of the summer (_M. L. R._ iv. 395). If so, his departure synchronizes with a scandal which attached itself to his name. His moral character was hardly becoming to the son of a preacher. More than one manuscript commonplace book (e. g. _Ashm. MS._ 47, f. 49, which appears from the spelling of the name to be a late copy) contains an epigram with some such heading as _On Nathaniell Feild suspected for too much familiarity with his M^{ris} Lady May_. And on 5 June 1619 Sir William Trumbull wrote from Brussels to Lord Hay (E. J. L. Scott in _Athenaeum_ (1882), i. 103) that he was told that the Earl of Argyll had paid for the nursing of a child, ‘which the world sayes is daughter to my lady and N. Feild the Player’. Lady Argyll was Anne, daughter of Sir William Cornwallis of Brome. Field’s later life is obscure. There is an unimportant jest about him in John Taylor’s _Wit and Mirth_ (1629). He was married to a wife Anne, and had children baptized and buried at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, during 1619–25. If another epigram, printed by Collier, iii. 437, can be trusted, he very properly suffered from jealousy. In relevant register entries the name is given as Nathan. The Blackfriars registers give children both of Nathan and of Nathaniel Field, and on 20 February 1633 occurs the burial of Nathaniel Field, whom, if the entry does not indicate that the confusion of persons had already begun, we are bound to take to be the bookseller. There is no reason why both brothers should not have resided in Blackfriars.

Field was dramatist, as well as actor. In addition to the two plays published under his single name, he collaborated with Massinger in _The Fatal Dowry_, which was a King’s play and not likely, therefore, to fall outside the dates 1616–19. And as the Henslowe correspondence (_Henslowe Papers_, 65, 84) show him as collaborating also with Fletcher, Massinger, and Daborne for the Lady Elizabeth’s, he has been conjectured as a possible sharer in the authorship of several of the plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher series. He also, about the time of his joining the King’s, wrote a defence of the stage, in the form of a remonstrance to Mr. Sutton, a preacher of St. Mary Overies (App. C, No. lxiii). A portrait of Field is at Dulwich.

FLETCHER, LAWRENCE. Scotland, 1595, 1599, 1601; Admiral’s (?), 1596; King’s, 1603. Although included as a King’s man in the royal patent, there is no reason to suppose that Fletcher ever joined the company

## acting at the Globe; the absence of his name from the actor-list in the

Shakespeare F_{1} of 1623 is strong evidence that he did not. He lived in St. Saviour’s, where he had a homonym, a victualler, who survived him. One of the two is shown by the token-books as housed in Hunt’s Rents, Maid Lane, during 1605–7; probably this was the actor, who was buried on 12 September 1608. The description ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a man: in the church’ of the register is amplified in a fee-book to ‘Lawrence Fletcher, a player, the King’s servant, buried in the church, with an afternoon’s knell of the great bell, 20s.’ (Collier, _Memoirs of the Actors_^1, x; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvii).

FLOWER. Admiral’s (?), _c._ 1600.

FOSTER, ALEXANDER. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1618; Charles’s, 1616.

FREYERBOTT, BARTHOLOMEUS. Germany, 1615.

FRITH, MOLL. It appears to be suggested in the Epilogue to _The Roaring Girl_ (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker) that this lady was to appear in person on the Fortune stage, _c._ 1610.

FROST, JOHN. Chapel, 1601.

GARLAND, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588; Lennox’s, 1605; Duke of York’s, 1610. He appears to have dwelt in 1605 at ‘the ould forde’ (H. ii. 267).

GARLICK. In I. H., _This World’s Folly_ (1615), an actor of this name is apparently said to have personated himself on the Fortune stage, ‘behung with chaynes of Garlicke’ (App. C, No. lix); cf. Dekker, _If This be not a Good Play_ (1610–12), sc. x (ed. Pearson, iii. 325), ‘Fortune fauours no body but Garlicke, nor Garlike neither now, yet she has strong reason to loue it; for tho Garlicke made her smell abhominably in the nostrills of the gallants, yet she had smelt and stuncke worse but for garlike’; H. Parrot, _Laquei Ridiculosi_ (1613), Epig. 131, ‘_Greene’s Tu Quoque_ and those Garlicke Jigs’; in Tailor, _Hog Hath Lost his Pearl_ (1614, ed. Dodsley^4, p. 434), a jig will draw more whores ‘than e’er Garlic had’.

GARRET, JOHN. Anne’s, 1619.

GEDION. Admiral’s, 1602.

‘GERRY.’ King’s Revels, 1607.

GEW. A blind player, referred to in _1 Ant. Mellida_ (1599), ind. 142, ‘’t had been a right part for Proteus or Gew. Ho! blind Gew would ha’ done ’t rarely, rarely’; E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), _Sat._ v, ‘One that for ape tricks can put Gue to schoole’, and _Epig._ xi, ‘Gue, hang thy selfe for woe, since gentlemen Are now grown cunning in thy apishness’; Jonson, _Epig._ cxxix, ‘Thou dost out-zany Cokely, Pod; nay, Gue.’ Pod was a puppet-showman.

GIBBS. Admiral’s, 1602.

GIBSON, RICHARD. Interluders, 1494–1508; afterwards Yeoman of the Revels.

GILBURNE, SAMUEL, is recorded in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. All that is known of him beyond this is that Augustine Phillips left him as his ‘late apprentice’ in his will of 1605 the sum of 40_s._, various garments, and a bass viol. Collier’s inference that he could play on the viol is a fairly harmless example of biographical conjecture.[955] The identification of him with the ‘b[oy?] Sam’ of the ‘plot’ of _The Dead Man’s Fortune_, a play probably belonging to the Admiral’s, and of a date not later than 1591, is more dangerous.[956]

GILES, NATHANIEL. Master of Windsor Choir, 1595–1634; Master of Chapel, 1597–1634.

GILES, THOMAS. Master of Paul’s, 1585–1590 <; Instructor in Music to Henry, 1606, and Charles, 1613.

GOODALE, BAPTISTE. ‘Ghost-name’ (?) in Queen’s list (1589) forged by Collier, _New Facts_, ii.

GOODALE, THOMAS. Berkeley’s, 1581; Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Chamberlain’s (?) at date of _Sir Thomas More_ (cf. ch. xxiv). If he is the Thomas Goodale, mercer, who entered with John Alleyn and Robert Lee into a bond to Edward Alleyn on 18 May 1593 (H. ii. 295, from _Dulwich MS._ iv. 29), he was not improbably connected with the Admiral’s >1590.

GOUGHE or GOFFE, ROBERT, was probably the ‘R. Go.’ entered in the ‘plot’ of _The Seven Deadly Sins_, as playing Aspasia in _Sloth_ for the Admiral’s or Strange’s men about 1590–1. Probably he belonged at an early date to the King’s men. He is a legatee in Thomas Pope’s will of 22 July 1603, and witnessed that of Augustine Phillips on 4 May 1605, in which Phillips names a sister Elizabeth Goughe, doubtless the Elizabeth ---- recorded in the register of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, as marrying Robert Gough on 13 February 1603. The token-books of St. Saviour’s indicate Gough’s residence in Hill’s Rents during 1604, Samson’s Rents during 1605 and 1606, and Austin’s Rents in 1612–22; and the registers, which generally call him a ‘player’, record his children Elizabeth (bapt. 30 May 1605), Nicholas (bapt. 24 November 1608), Dorothy (bapt. 10 February 1611, bur. 12 January 1613), Alexander (bapt. 7 August 1614), and his own burial on 19 February 1624.[957] His son Alexander became in his turn a player. A stage-direction to l. 1723 of _The Second Maiden’s Tragedy_ (1611) shows that he played Memphonius. He also played Leidenberch in _Sir John von Olden Barnevelt_ in 1619, and appears in the official lists of the King’s men for 1619 and 1621 and in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays.

GOUGHE, THOMAS. Lane’s, 1572.

GRACE, FRANCIS. Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1610–22. He lived at George Alley, Golden Lane, in 1623 (J. 347).

GRAUNGER, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.

GREAVES, JOHN. Lane’s, 1572.

GREEN, JOHN. Germany, 1608; France, >1608; Holland, 1613; Germany, 1615–20, 1626. On his verses and portrait, 1608, cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. _Nobody and Somebody_. He may have been brother of the following.

GREENE, THOMAS. Anne’s, 1604–12. In R. Braithwaite, _Remains after Death_ (1618) are four epigrams on him, one of which says that he ‘new come from sea, made but one face and dide’. A couplet on his death, signed W. R., is in Cooke’s _Greene’s Tu Quoque_. I. H., _World’s Folly_ (1615), mentions his performance of a baboon (cf. App. C, No. lix). He was of St. James’s, Clerkenwell, in 1612, when he made his will (Fleay, 192), naming his wife Susan, daughter Honor, sons-in-law (i.e. stepsons) Robert and William Browne, daughters-in-law Susanna, Elizabeth, and Anne Browne, brothers John and Jeffery Greene, and sister Elizabeth Barrett. A conjecture that he was of Stratford origin has no foundation (Lee, 54).

GREUM, HENRY. Germany, 1608.

GRIFFEN. Admiral’s, 1597.

GRIGORIE, JACK. Admiral’s, 1602.

GRYMES, THOMAS. Chapel, 1600–1.

GUNNELL, RICHARD. Palsgrave’s, 1613–22. Family notes appear in the registers of St. Giles’s, 1614–30 (B. 409).

GYLLOME, FOKE. Player (?) to Alexander Houghton, 1581 (cf. ch. ix, p. 280).

GYRKE, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).

HALLAWAIE, ‘the younger’. Paul’s, 1580.

HAMLEN (HAMLETT), ROBERT. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611–13; Charles’s, 1616, 1625.

HAMMOND, JOHN. Interluders, 1494.

HAMOND. Worcester’s, 1565.

HARRISON, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose daughter Suzanna by wife Anne was baptized at St. Helen’s on 10 January 1602.

HARRISON, WILLIAM. Worcester’s, 1583.

HARVEY. Chamberlain’s, 1597.

HAWKINS, ALEXANDER. Blackfriars lessee, 1601; Revels patentee, 1604.

HAYNE, WILLIAM. Head Master of Merchant Taylors’, 1599–1625.

HAYSELL, GEORGE. Worcester’s, 1583. For a possible notice of the same man, cf. ch. xxiv, s.v. _Misogonus_.

HEARNE, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1597.

HELLE, JOHN. Admiral’s, 1597.

HEMINGES, JOHN, whose name is variously spelt, appearing, for example, as ‘Heminge’ in his signature to the dedication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and as ‘Hemmings’ in the actor-list in the same volume, is known to have had a wife Rebecca, and may fairly be identified with the ‘John Hemminge, gent.’ of St. Mary Cornhill, who was married on 10 March 1588 to Rebecca Knell, widow, relict of William Knell, gent., late of St. Mary Aldermanbury. In the same parish William Knell had married Rebecca Edwards on 30 January 1586, and an older William Knell had been buried on 24 September 1578.[958] One of these was not improbably the early actor celebrated by Heywood. Malone found a family of Heming at Shottery, and conjectured that of this family John was born at some date earlier than the opening of the Stratford-on-Avon register in 1558.[959] But this is rendered improbable by a confirmation of arms in 1629 to ‘John Hemings of London Gent. of long tyme Servant to Queen Elizabeth of happie Memory, also to King James hir Royal Successor and to King Charles his Sonne’, in which he is described as ‘Sonne and Heire of George Hemings of Draytwiche in the Countye of Worcester Gent.’[960] There seems little reason to doubt that this John Hemings is the player. He very probably began his theatrical career with the Queen’s company, to which also Knell had belonged. By May 1593, however, he had joined Strange’s men, from whom he passed to the Chamberlain’s men, probably on the original formation in 1594. Of this company, afterwards the King’s men, he remained a member to the end of his career. He appears in all the official lists of the company up to 1629, and regularly acted as their payee for Court performances, generally with a colleague from 1596 to 1601, and thereafter alone. This and his prominence in the negotiations of the company and the lawsuits arising out of them, suggest that he acted as their business manager. As an actor he appears in all the casts up to _Catiline_ in 1611, but not thereafter; possibly he may have resigned

## acting, and devoted himself to business. The unreliable John Roberts,

_Answer to Pope_ (1729), conjectures that he was a ‘tragedian’. Malone had seen a statement in some tract of which he had forgotten the title, that he was the original performer of Falstaff.[961] The lines on the burning of the Globe in 1613 thus describe him:

Then with swolne eyes, like druncken Flemminges, Distressed stood old stuttering Heminges.

He is ‘old Master Hemings’ in Jonson’s _Masque of Christmas_ (1616). He lent his ‘boy’ John Rice (q.v.) to the Merchant Taylors for their entertainment of James on 16 July 1607, and another ‘boy’ for Chapman’s mask of 1613. He is named as a legatee and overseer in the will of Augustine Phillips in 1605, and as executor in the event of the widow’s re-marriage; also as a trustee in the will of Alexander Cooke, who calls him his ‘master’, in 1614; as a witness in that of Richard Cowley in 1618; as a legatee in that of Shakespeare in 1616; and as a legatee and overseer in those of Underwood in 1624 and of Condell in 1627. He was appointed a trustee for Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property in 1613,[962] and acted with Condell as editor of the First Folio of the plays in 1623. This fact is probably the origin of the statement of Roberts that he was engaged with Condell in business as a printer. He filled various parochial posts from 1608 to 1619 in St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, and the registers contain records of the following children: Alice (bapt. 10 November 1590, married John Atkins 11 February 1612), Mary (bapt. 26 May 1592, bur. 9 August 1592), Judith (bapt. 29 August 1593), Thomasine (bapt. 15 January 1595), Joan (bapt. 2 May 1596), John (bapt. 12 August 1599), Beavis (bapt. 24 May 1601), William (bapt. 3 October 1602), George (bapt. 12 Feb. 1604), Rebecca (bapt. 4 February 1605), Elizabeth (bapt. 6 March 1608), Mary (bapt. 21 June 1611, bur. 23 July 1611).[963] In the same parish ‘John Heminge, player’ was himself buried on 12 October 1630, beside his wife Rebecca, who preceded him on 2 September 1619. He is registered as a ‘stranger’ and was therefore probably residing elsewhere. In his will, made on 9 October, he describes himself as ‘citizen and grocer of London’, appoints his son William executor and trustee for his unmarried and unadvanced children, and Cuthbert Burbadge and ‘Mr. Rice’, possibly the actor, overseers, and leaves legacies to his daughters Rebecca, wife of Captain William Smith, Margaret, wife of Mr. Thomas Sheppard, who is not mentioned in the register, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Merefield, and to his son-in-law Atkins ‘and his now wife’, and his grandchild Richard Atkins. He also leaves 10_s._ for a ring ‘unto every of my fellows and sharers, his majesties servants.[964] William Heminges went to Westminster and Christ Church, and became a playwright.[965] Unnamed in the will is Thomasine, who may have been dead, but certainly had quarrelled seriously with her father. She had married William Ostler of the King’s men in 1611 and her son Beaumont was baptized at St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, on 18 May 1612. Ostler died intestate on 16 December 1614 in possession of shares in the leases both of the Globe and the Blackfriars. These passed of right to Thomasine as his administratrix, and formed all the provision left for her maintenance and her husband’s debts. The leases, however, passed into the hands of Heminges, who retained them and asserted that Ostler had created a trust, of which Thomasine declared that she knew nothing. On 20 September 1615 she entered a bill in Chancery against her father, and subpœnaed him to appear during the coming Michaelmas term. On 26 September Heminges promised that if she would withdraw her suit, and would also ‘doe her dutie’ to him and to her mother Rebecca, he would satisfy her to the value of the shares. Thomasine states that on the same day kneeling and in tears she made her submission at her father’s house in Aldermanbury. She also stayed her suit, but Heminges, although called upon to fulfil his promise on 5 October, failed to do so, and on 9 October Thomasine brought a common law action against him for damages to the amount of £600, which she estimated to be the value of the shares.[966] The issue of the case is unknown, but it would seem probable from the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 that Heminges succeeded in retaining the shares, and that at his death they passed to his son William. Professor Wallace states that in 1616 Thomasine Ostler was involved in another lawsuit with Walter Raleigh, son of Sir Walter, and obtained a verdict of £250 against him for insult and slander. One way and another, Heminges seems to have acquired a considerable financial interest in the Globe and Blackfriars. He had an original seventh of a moiety of the Globe lease in 1599, and an original seventh of the Blackfriars lease in 1608. But as executor to Phillips (q.v.) and otherwise he had opportunities of adding to these holdings. The _Sharers Papers_ show that at his death he had four sixteenths of the Globe and probably two eighths of the Blackfriars; and these, or some of them, he had enjoyed ‘thirty yeeres without any molestacion, beeing the most of the sayd yeeres both player and houskeeper, and after hee gave over playing diverse yeeres’. In _Witter v. Heminges and Condell_ he is described as being in 1619 of ‘greate lyveinge wealth and power’.[967] The play-house shares seem to have been the chief part of the property left by his will. They passed to William Heminges as his executor. He seems to have gradually disposed of them, first selling one share in the Globe by arrangement with the company to Taylor and Lowin, and later, by transactions which some of his fellows resented, one share in each house to John Shank during 1633 for £156, and the remaining shares also to John Shank during 1634, for £350. He was then in difficulties, and Shank disbursed additional small sums to him in prison. It was these sales to Shank which brought about the petition to the Lord Chamberlain recorded in the _Sharers Papers_.

HENSLOWE, FRANCIS. Queen’s, 1594; Lennox’s, 1605. He was son of Richard and nephew of Philip Henslowe, and various entries in the diary and other Dulwich MSS. record his imprisonments, more than once on criminal charges, his employment during 1593–4 in his uncle’s pawnbroking, and his loans, one of which on 1 June 1595 was of £9 ‘to laye downe for his hallfe share with the company which he dothe playe with all’ (H. i. 6), conceivably, as Dr. Greg suggests, some company other than the Queen’s, in which he had already acquired a half share in 1594. He dwelt in the Clink in 1594, took a house called the Upper Ground on Bankside in 1597, and was of St. George’s, Southwark, in 1606, in which year, between 30 March and 6 October, both he and his wife died (H. ii. 277).

HENSLOWE, PHILIP. Owner of Rose, Fortune, Hope, and perhaps lessee of Whitefriars; cf. ch. xi.

HERIOT, HENRY. Interluders, 1547–52.

HEYWOOD, JOHN. For his possible connexion with Paul’s, cf. ch. xii, s.v. Chapel.

HEYWOOD, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1598; Worcester’s Anne’s, 1602–19, and dramatist.

HINSTOCK, ROBERT. Interluders, 1538–51.

HOBBES, THOMAS. Charles’s, 1610, 1616–25. He lived at the upper end of Shoreditch in 1623 (J. 348).

HOLE, RICHARD. Interluders, 1526–30.

HOLLAND, J. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

HOLT, JAMES. Anne’s, 1604–19.

HOLT, JOHN. A ‘momer’, who helped the Westminster boys in 1561, probably identical with the Yeoman of the Revels of that name (cf. ch. iii), who helped them in 1564–5.

HOLZHEW, BEHRENDT. Germany, 1614–15.

HOVELL, WILLIAM. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615.

HOWARD, THOMAS. A ‘player’ named in St. Saviour’s records _c._ 1600 (Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi).

HUDSON, RICHARD. Weaver of Hutton Bushell, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

HÜLL, JOHN. Germany, 1600–1.

HUNNIS, JOHN. A ‘ghost-name’ by an error for the following.

HUNNIS, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1566–97, and dramatist.

HUNT (HONTE), THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1599, 1602; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611 (H. ii. 285).

HUNTLEY, DICK. Actor in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_ (_vide_ l. 14).

HUSE, RICHARD. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

IVY, NICHOLAS. Chapel, 1509.

JEFFES, ANTHONY. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1597–>1613. Anthony, son of Richard Jeffes, baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 14 December 1578, may be the same who married Faith Jones there on 19 February 1601. Children of Anthony Jeffes ‘player’ are recorded in the registers of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, from 11 June 1602 to 1 May 1609; in later entries from 30 May 1610 to 30 October 1616, Anthony is called ‘brewer’ (H. ii. 286; _Bodl._).

JEFFES, HUMPHREY. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1616<. He was buried at St. Giles’s, 21 August 1618. A daughter Mary was baptized at St. Saviour’s, 25 January 1601 (H. ii. 287; Collier, _Actors_, xxx).

JOHNSON, WILLIAM. Leicester’s, 1572–4; Queen’s, 1583, 1587–8. The baptismal entries at St. Giles’s include on 10 February 1587 ‘Comedia, baseborne daughter of Alice Bowker, and, as she saithe, the father’s name is William Johnson, one of the Queen’s plaiers’, and the burials on 3 March 1593 ‘Comedia, daughter of William Johnson, player’. Is he the William Johnson, vintner, who was trustee of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars property 1613–18 (Lee, 459, 493)?

JONES, RICHARD. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s (?), >1589; Germany, 1592–3; Admiral’s, 1594–6; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602; Revels patentee, 1610; Germany (?), 1615; Germany, 1620, 1622–4. His wife Harris inherited a lease of the Leopard’s Head in Shoreditch from her father in 1620. A Richard Jones is traceable in the Southwark token-books from 1588 to 1607 and may or may not be the same who married Anne Jube there on 14 February 1602 (H. ii. 288; _H. P._ 94; _Bodl._).

JONES, ROBERT. Germany, 1602; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615.

JONNS, DANIEL. Denmark, 1586.

JONSON, BENJAMIN. Pembroke’s (?), 1597; Chamberlain’s (?), _c._ 1598; and dramatist.

JUBY, EDWARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1594–1618, Fortune lessee, 1618. An Edward Juby is traceable during 1598 to 1619 in the token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark. In the last year he is marked ‘dead’, and his burial was registered on 20 November 1618. In 1610 and 1614 he filled parish offices. He may fairly be identified with the ‘player’ whose children occur in the registers from 3 June 1599 to 15 September 1614. His widow Francis held his share of the Fortune lease in 1622 (H. ii. 290; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi; _Bodl._).

JUBY, RICHARD. Admiral’s, 1602. His son Richard was baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 1 May 1602 (_Bodl._).

JUBY, WILLIAM (?). Admiral’s, 1599–1602 (H. ii. 290).

JUGLER, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

KEMP, JOHN. Germany, 1601.

KEMPE, WILLIAM, cannot be securely identified or connected with any one of various homonyms who have been traced in _D. N. B._ and elsewhere.[968] He probably emerges as one of Leicester’s men in the Low Countries during 1585–6 and thence made his way to Denmark. He was in London and had already won a comic reputation by 1590 when the dedication of _An Almond for a Parrat_ (Nashe, iii. 341), ‘To that most Comicall and conceited Caualeire Monsieur du Kempe, Jestmonger and Vice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton,’ tells how the anonymous author, possibly Nashe, had been asked by ‘that famous Francatrip’ Harlicken’ at Bergamo in the previous summer, whether he knew ‘any such Parabolano here in London as Signior Chiarlatano Kempino’ of whose ‘pleasance’ Harlicken had heard ‘report’. In _Four Letters Confuted_ (1592) Nashe says of an action of Harvey’s, ‘Will Kempe, I mistrust it will fall to thy lot for a merriment, one of these dayes’ (i. 287). An example of Kempe’s merriments is to be found in sc. xii of _A Knack to Know a Knave_ (1594) played by Strange’s men, to whom Kempe belonged by 1593. He was also famous for his jigs. Four of these are entered in the Stationers’ Register during 1591–5 (cf. ch. xviii) but are not preserved, and ‘Kemps jiggs’ is the heading to some music collected by John Dowland and preserved in _Camb. Univ. Libr. MS._ Dd. ii. 11 (cf. Halliwell, _MS. Rarities_, 8). Marston (iii. 372), _Scourge of Villainy_ (1598), sat. xi. 30, ‘the orbs celestial Will dance Kempe’s jig,’ and E. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), sat. v, ‘Whores, bedles, bawdes, and sergeants filthily Chaunt Kemps Jigge, or the Burgonians tragedy,’ show his vogue. In 1594–5 he was one of the recently constituted Chamberlain’s men and the intrusion of his name into stage-directions to _R. J._ iv. 5. 102 (Q_{2}) and _M. Ado_, iv. 2, shows that he played Peter in the one play and Dogberry in the other. Oddly enough, one of his speeches (iv. 2. 4) in _M. Ado_ is assigned to ‘Andrew’, possibly a generic name for a clown or ‘merry-Andrew’. He is in the actor-list of _Every Man in his Humour_ (1598) but not in that of _Every Man out of his Humour_ (1599), and this fact, together with his sale of his share in the Globe soon after the lease of 21 February 1599 was signed, points to his leaving the company. ‘Would I had one of Kemps shooes to throw after you,’ says a speaker in _E. M. O._ IV. v (q.v.). This may be an allusion to some clownery by Kempe, perhaps in a performance with some other company at the Curtain in the autumn of 1599 after the Chamberlain’s left that house; or, less probably, to Kempe’s famous morris-dance for a wager from London to Norwich, at the end of which he hung his buskins in the Guildhall, for this began on 11 February 1600 and ended on 11 March, the year being fixed by the mayoralty (1599–1600) of Roger Weld at Norwich. Another allusion to ‘Kemps morice’ is in _Jack Drum’s Entertainment_ (1600), i. 45. Dudley Carleton wrote to John Chamberlain on 13 October 1600 (_S. P. D. Eliz._ cclxxv. 93) that on his way from Witham to Englefield ‘we met a company of mad wenches, whereof M^{rs}. Mary Wroughton and young Stafford were ringleaders, who travelled from house to house, and to some places where they were little known, attended with a concert of musicians, as if they had undertaken the like adventure as Kemp did from London to Norwich’. Kempe’s own account of his adventure was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘Kemps morris to Norwiche’ on 22 April 1600 (Arber, iii. 160). In the Epistle to Anne Fitton, whom, possibly by confusion with her sister Mary, he describes as maid of honour to Elizabeth, he refers to unentered ballads on the subject, and when he says that ‘I haue daunst my selfe out of the world’ is not improbably jesting on his departure from the Globe. At the end he foreshadows crossing to Calais, which he no doubt did. A John Kemp, who was in charge of a touring company, which had been in Holland and reached Münster by November 1601, may have been a relative. But William Kempe had returned to England, after visiting Italy as well as Germany, on 2 September 1601, as is shown by the following interpolation in a diary of one William Smith of Abingdon, in _Sloane MS._ 414, f. 56 (wrongly cited by Halliwell, _Ludus Coventriae_ 410, as _Sloane MS._ 392, f. 401; cf. F. J. Furnivall in _N.S.S. Trans. 1880–6_, 65):

‘Sep. 2. Kemp, mimus quidam, qui peregrinationem quandam in Germaniam et Italiam instituerat, post multos errores, et infortunia sua, reversus: multa refert de Anthonio Sherley, equite aurato, quem Romae (legatum Persicum agentem) convenerat.’

Possibly Kempe rejoined the Chamberlain’s for a while. In _3 Parnassus_ (? January 1602), iv. 3, he is introduced as a fellow of Burbadge and Shakespeare, and greeted with allusions to his ‘dancing the morrice ouer the Alpes’ and ‘the Emperour of Germany’. But on 10 March 1602 he had a loan from Henslowe, and during the winter of 1602–3 he was certainly one of Worcester’s men. The dates do not lend support to the suggestion of Fleay, ii. 20, that he had already in 1599–1600 been at the Rose with Pembroke’s men. After the end of Elizabeth’s reign he is not traceable, and he is mentioned as dead in Heywood, _Apology_ (_c._ 1608), and dead or retired in Dekker, _Gull’s Hornbook_ (1609), 11, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fools that now come drawling behind them, never played the clown more naturally.’ A William Kempe is recorded in token-books of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, as living in Samson’s Rents in 1595, 1596, 1598, and 1599, in Langley’s New Rents in 1602, and later near the old play-house (Collier, iii. 351, and _Bodl._; Rendle, _Bankside_, xxvi). Collier, but not Rendle, gives the date ‘1605’ for the last entry, probably with a view to supporting his notice of Kempe, as playing with Armin at the Blackfriars (q.v.) in 1605, which is doubtless a fabrication. On the other hand, though the date is plausible, the notice of ‘Kempe a man’ as buried at St. Saviour’s on 2 November 1603 (Rendle, xxvii) is not so worded as to be absolutely conclusive. The name was a common one, and Collier, _Actors_, xxxvi, gives notices of it from other parishes. In T. Weelkes, _Ayres on Phantasticke Sprites_ (1608), it is said of Kempe that ‘into France He took pains to skip it’. His visit to Venice and meeting with Sherley are dramatized in _Travels of Three English Brothers_ (1607) and apparently misdated after the _Englands Joy_ of November 1602. Finally, an epitaph upon him is in R. Braithwaite, _Remains after Death_ (1618), sig. F 8^v, which suggests that he died not long after his morris.

KENDALL, THOMAS. Blackfriars manager, 1602; Revels patentee, 1604. He died in 1608.

KENDALL, WILLIAM. Admiral’s, 1597–8; Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, >1614. His son John was baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 5 January 1615 (_Bodl._).

KEYSAR, ROBERT. Revels manager, 1606–10 (?); Blackfriars lessee, 1606–8. To him was written the epistle to _K. B. P._

KING, ARTHUR. Berkeley’s, 1581.

KING, THOMAS. Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.

KINGMAN (KINGSMAN), PHILIP. Germany, 1596; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615. ‘M^r Kyngman the elder’ was a witness for Henslowe on 16 April 1599 (H. i. 205).

KINGSMAN, ROBERT. Germany, 1599, 1601; afterwards a tradesman in Strassburg, 1606 (?), 1618, 1626.

KIRCK (KIRCKMANN), JOHN. Denmark, 1579–80.

KIRKHAM, EDWARD. Chapel manager, 1602; Revels patentee, 1604–6. He is probably the Yeoman of the Revels (cf. ch. iii).

KITE, JOHN. Gentleman of Chapel, 1508; afterwards Abp. of Armagh.

KNAGGES, RICHARD. Of Moorsham, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

KNELL, WILLIAM (?). Queen’s, >1588. A Rebecca, widow of William Knell, married John Heminges (q.v.), 10 March 1588. Heywood notes Knell as before his time. Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (1592, _Works_, i. 215), names him with Tarlton, Alleyn, and Bentley, and he is coupled with Bentley in the undated challenge to Alleyn (q.v.) to play one of their parts.

KNIGHT, ROBERT. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

KOSTRESSEN, JOHAN, musician. Germany, 1623.

KRAFFT, JOHN. Denmark, 1579–80.

LANEHAM, JOHN. Leicester’s, 1572–4; Queen’s, 1583, 1588–91. Heywood notes him as before his time. Was he related to Robert Laneham, Keeper of the Council Chamber door, who described the Kenilworth entertainment (cf. ch. xxiv) in 1575?

LANMAN, HENRY. Owner of Curtain, 1581–92. Adams, 80, suggests, apparently from the similarity of the names, that he was a brother of John Laneham.

LEBERWURST, HANS. Germany, 1613.

LEDBETTER, ROBERT. Admiral’s, 1597; Germany, 1599, 1601, 1606.

LEE, ROBERT. Admiral’s (?), >1591; Anne’s, 1604–19; Revels Company, 1622. He had a business transaction with Edward and John Alleyn and Thomas Goodale (q.v.) in 1593. He lived in Clerkenwell Close in 1623 (H. ii. 294; J. 347; Murray, i. 198).

LEEKE, DAVID. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, c. 1571 (_3 Library_, ix. 253).

LEVESON, ROBERT. Oxford’s, 1580.

LISTER, EDWARD. Weaver of Allerston, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

LONG, NICHOLAS. Revels (provincial) manager, 1612, 1617; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614–15. For his later career, cf. Murray, i. 192, 361; ii. 101. He was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 21 January 1622 (_Bodl._).

LOVEKYN, ARTHUR. Chapel, 1509–13.

LOWIN, JOHN, was a member of Worcester’s company during their season of 1602–3 with Henslowe at the Rose. On 12 March 1603 Henslowe lent him money to go into the country with the company, but during the course of the year he must have transferred his services to the King’s men, presumably as a hireling, since, although in the cast of _Sejanus_ (1603) and the Induction to _Malcontent_ (1604) he is not in the official lists of 1603 and 1604. A portrait of him in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, has the inscription ‘1640, Aetat. 64’, and he may therefore be identified with the John, son of Richard Lowen, baptized at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 9 December 1576. If so, his father seems to have been a carpenter, and he had a sister Susan and a brother William.[969] He remained through a long life with the King’s men, appearing in most of the casts, in the actor-list of the First Folio, and in the official lists from 1619 onwards. He played Bosola in _The Duchess of Malfi_. A pamphlet entitled _Conclusions upon Dances_ (1607) has a dedication to Lord Denny, dated 23 November 1606, and signed ‘I. L. _Roscio_’. Collier claims to have found in a copy of this the note ‘By Jhon Lowin. Witnesseth Tho. D. 1610’.[970] A John Lowen married Joan Hall, widow, by licence, in St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on 29 October 1607.[971] Shortly afterwards a John Lowin was paying a poor-rate of 2_d._ weekly in the liberty of the Clink. The Southwark token-books attest his residence ‘near the play-house’ and in other parts of the parish at various dates from 1601 to 1642.[972] He was overseer of Paris Garden in 1617–18.[973] But in 1623 he lived in Lambeth (J. 348). He is named as a legatee and overseer in the will of his ‘fellow’ John Underwood in 1624. It appears from the _Sharers Papers_ that he had no interest in the play-houses until after the death of Heminges in 1630, when he was admitted to purchase two sixteenths of the Globe and one eighth of the Blackfriars. From this time onwards he seems to have shared the business responsibilities of the company with Joseph Taylor. He was also prominent as an actor.[974] Wright enumerates amongst his parts Shakespeare’s Falstaff; but when Roberts adds Hamlet and Henry VIII, he is presumably guessing that Lowin was ‘fat and scant of breath’. He may have been the original Henry VIII, for Downes reports that Betterton was instructed in the part by Sir William Davenant, ‘who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had his instructions from Mr. Shakespeare himself’.[975] Wright tells us that at the outbreak of civil war he was ‘superannuated’, and ‘in his latter days kept an inn (the Three Pigeons) at Brentford, where he dyed very old (for he was an actor of eminent note in the reign of King James the First), and his poverty was as great as his age’.[976] He signed with Taylor the dedication to Fletcher’s _The Wild-goose Chase_ in 1652, the publication of which was an attempt to relieve their necessities. A ‘John Lewin’ who left a widow Martha, was buried at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields on 18 March 1659, and a ‘John Lowen’ at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, on 16 March 1669.[977] Probably a G. Lowin who played Barnaveldt’s daughter to Lowin’s Barnaveldt in 1619 was his son.

LYLY, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1583; Oxford’s payee, 1584; and dramatist.

MACHIN, RICHARD. Germany, 1600–3, 1605–6.

MAGETT, STEPHEN. Admiral’s tireman, 1596, 1599 (?) (H. ii. 295).

MARBECK, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1602.

MARSHALL, CHARLES. Palsgrave’s (provincial), 1616.

MARSTON, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1603–8, and dramatist.

MARTINELLI (?), ANGELICA. Italians, >1598.

MARTINELLI, DRUSIANO. Italians, 1578.

MARTON, THOMAS. Chapel, 1602.

MARTYN, WILLIAM. Payee for a company at Ipswich, 20 February 1572 (Murray, ii. 290).

MASON, JOHN. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, and dramatist.

MASSEY (MASSYE), CHARLES. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–>1635 (?); Fortune lessee, 1618–>1635; and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii). He is probably the Charles Marcy or Mercy, variously described as ‘player’, ‘gentleman’, and ‘yeoman’ in the registers of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, from 30 December 1610 to 20 July 1625. He died before 6 December 1635, leaving a widow Elianor, and had a cousin Ned Collins (H. ii. 296; _Bodl._).

MAXE, ROBERT. Chapel, 1509–>1513.

MAY, EDWARD. Interluders, 1494–1503.

MAY, NATHAN. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615. Possibly the name, as given in Murray, ii. 340, may be a mistake for Clay (q.v.).

MAYLER, GEORGE. Interluders, 1525–40.

MEADE, JACOB. Keeper of the Bears, by 1599, and partner with Henslowe in the Bear Garden and Hope. He was buried at St. Saviour’s on 9 July 1624 (_Bodl._).

MELYONEK, JOHN. Master of Chapel (?), 1483–5.

MERYELL, HENRY. Chapel, 1509.

MILS (MYLLES), TOBIAS. Queen’s, 1583. Heywood notes him as before his time. He was buried as ‘one of the Queenes Maiesties players’ at St. Olave’s, Southwark, on 11 July 1585, and his sons William and Toby were baptized on 3 January 1584 and 5 September 1585 (_Bodl._). Probably, therefore, ‘one Myles, one of my lord of Summersettes players’, whose testimony to the value of Bath waters for the gout is cited in a hydropathic treatise of 1557 (Collier, i. 139), was of an older generation. Somerset was beheaded on 22 January 1552. Robert Cecil had a Secretary Milles, whose son Tobias was buried at Chelsea on 9 April 1599 (R. Davies, _Chelsea Old Church_, 296).

MOON, PETER. Payee for a company of players at Ipswich, 1562 (Murray, ii. 287).

MOORE, JOSEPH. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611; 1616–29. He lived at the Harrow in Barbican in 1623 (Murray, i. 252; J. 347).

MOTTERAM, JOHN. Chapel, 1600–1.

MUFFORD, JOHN. Beauchamp’s, 10 June 1590 (Murray, ii. 337).

MULCASTER (MONCASTER), RICHARD. Head Master of Merchant Taylors, 1561–86; of St. Paul’s Grammar School, 1596–1608.

MUNDAY, ANTONY. A player before 1582, according to a contemporary pamphlet, possibly with Oxford’s, whose ‘servant’ he was in 1580, and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii).

NASION. Paul’s chorister, >1582.

‘NED.’ Musician (?) in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament, prol._ 7.

‘NED.’ Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

NETHE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

NETHERSALL, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

NEWARK, WILLIAM. Master of Chapel, 1493–1509.

NEWMAN, JOHN. Blackfriars lessee, 1581–3.

NEWTON, JOHN. Charles’s, 1610, 1616, 1619, 1625.

‘NICK.’ Admiral’s, 1601–3. See also TOOLEY.

NILL, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose daughter Alice was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 13 August 1601 (_Bodl._).

NORWOOD. Paul’s, 1599.

NYCOWLLES, ROBERT. A ‘player’ who witnessed a loan to Francis Henslowe on 1 June 1595 (H. i. 6).

OFFLEY, THOMAS. Paul’s, _c._ 1522.

OSTLER, WILLIAM, began his career as a boy actor in the Chapel company. He took a part in Jonson’s _Poetaster_ in 1601. From the _Sharers Papers_ we learn that on growing up he was, like Field and Underwood, ‘taken to strengthen the King’s service’.[978] He first appears amongst the King’s men in the cast of Jonson’s _The Alchemist_ in 1610, and played also in _Catiline_, _The Captain_, _The Duchess of Malfi_, in which he took the part of Antonio, _Valentinian_, and _Bonduca_. The following epigram in John Davies, _Scourge of Folly_ (_c._ 1611), attests his fame and his participation in some forgotten brawl:

_To the Roscius of these Times, Mr. W. Ostler._

Ostler, thou took’st a knock thou would’st have giv’n, Neere sent thee to thy latest home: but O! Where was thine action, when thy crown was riv’n, Sole King of Actors! then wast idle? No: Thou hadst it, for thou would’st bee doing? Thus Good actors deeds are oft most dangerous; But if thou plaist thy dying part as well As thy stage parts, thou hast no part in hell.

Ostler married Thomasine, daughter of John Heminges, in 1611. His son Beaumont was baptized at St. Mary’s, Aldermanbury, on 18 May 1612.[979] He acquired shares in the Blackfriars on 20 May 1611, and the Globe on 20 February 1612, and died on 16 December 1614, leaving his shares a subject for litigation between his widow and Heminges (q.v.).

PAGE, OLIVER. A London player in 1550 (App. D, No. v).

PALLANT, ROBERT. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–19; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1614; Charles’s, 1616; King’s, 1619, unless, indeed, the R. Pallant who played the female part of Cariola in _Duchess of Malfi_ was of a younger generation. This is not unlikely, for while the St. Saviour’s registers record the burial of Robert Pallant, ‘a man,’ on 4 September 1619, the token-books give the name in 1621 as well as in 1612 and 1616. Ephraim and Hanburye, sons of Robert Pallant ‘player’, were baptized there on 1 January 1611 and 3 July 1614 respectively. There were others earlier. Pallant wrote commendatory verses for Heywood’s _Apology_ (1612), and is noted as visiting Henslowe on his death-bed on 6 January 1616 (H. ii. 20, 300; _Bodl._).

PANT, THOMAS. Unlicensed player, 1607–10 (cf. ch. ix, p. 304).

PARR, WILLIAM. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1602–20.

PARROWE (PARLOWE), RICHARD. Interluders, 1538–45.

PARSELEY, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

PARSONS, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1597, 1602 (H. ii. 301).

PATESON, WILLIAM. Worcester’s, 1584.

PAVY. Admiral’s, 1602.

PAVY, SALATHIEL (SALMON). Chapel, 1600–3. An epitaph on him is in Jonson’s _Epigrams_ (1616), cxx, which gives his age at death, after three years of playing, as 13. He was ‘apprentice to one Peerce’, when he was pressed for the Chapel. This is not likely to have been the Master of Paul’s, from whom it would have been rash to take a boy.

PAYNE, ROBERT. Revels patentee, 1604.

PEACOCKE, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

PEARCE (PIERS), EDWARD. Gentleman of Chapel, 1589; Master of Paul’s, 1600.

PEDEL, ABRAHAM. Germany, 1614–15; Palsgrave’s, 1623. He lived at George Alley in Golden Lane in 1623 (J. 348, 350).

PEDEL (BEHEL, BIEL), JACOB. Germany, 1597, 1614–15.

PEDEL, WILLIAM. Holland, 1608; Germany, 1614–15. Children of a William Peadle, variously described as ‘tumbler’ and ‘gentleman’, were baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1610, 1617, and 1629 (_Bodl._).

PENN, WILLIAM. Revels, 1609; Charles’s, 1616, 1625. He lived at George Alley, Golden Lane, in 1623 and had children baptized and buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, in 1636 (J. 347; _Bodl._).

PENTON, FABIAN. Germany, 1602.

PEPEREL, GILES. Possibly an actor in the _Bugbears_ of John Jeffere (cf. ch. xxiii).

PERKIN, JOHN. Leicester’s, 1572–4. Is he the Parkins who assisted George Ferrers as Lord of Misrule in 1552–3 (Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 120)?

PERKINS, RICHARD. Worcester’s-Anne’s, 1602–19; for his later history, cf. Murray, i. 198, 200, 266. He wrote commendatory verses for Heywood’s _Apology_ (1612), and Webster praises his acting in _The White Devil_ (1612) in a note at the end of the print. His portrait is at Dulwich. He lived at the upper end of St. John’s Street in 1623 (H. ii. 301; J. 347).

PERRY, WILLIAM. Licensee for 2 King’s Revels, 1615; Queen’s Revels manager, 1617.

PERSJ (PERSTEN), ROBERT (RUPERT). Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.

PERSONN, JOHANN. Denmark, 1579–80.

PERY, ROBERT. Chapel, 1529–31.

PERY, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1530.

‘PETER’ (?). King’s. At _Taming of the Shrew_, iv. 4. 68, F_{1} has the s.d. ‘Enter Peter’, apparently a servant of Tranio, who does not speak.

PFLUGBEIL, AUGUST. Germany, 1614–15.

PHILIP, ROBERT. Chapel, 1514.

PHILLIPPE, ROBERT. A ‘momer’, buried at St. Leonard’s, on 9 April 1559 (Collier, _Actors_, 79). He might be identical with the foregoing.

PHILLIPS, AUGUSTINE, is included in the 1593 list of Strange’s men, and played for them or the Admiral’s in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ about 1590–1 as ‘Mr. Phillipps’. Probably he joined the Chamberlain’s men on their formation in 1594. He appears in the actor-lists of 1598 and 1599, was one of the original Globe shareholders of 1599, and on 18 February 1601 gave evidence as to the performance of _Richard II_ by the company before the Essex rising. He is also in the official lists of the King’s men in 1603 and 1604, in the actor-list of _Sejanus_ in 1603, and in that of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. ‘Phillips his gygg of the slyppers’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 26 May 1595 (cf. p. 552). It has been conjectured that Phillips was a brother-in-law of Alleyn, to whom Henslowe wrote on 28 September 1593, ‘Your sister Phillipes & her husband hath leced two or thre owt of ther howsse, yt they in good health & doth hartily comend them unto you.’ If so, his wife was probably Elizabeth Woodward. But it is also possible that the family in question was that of one Edward Phillipes, who was also in relations with Henslowe and Alleyn.[980] An Augustine Phillipps buried at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1592, was probably a relative of the actor, whose children the register of the same parish records as Magdalen (bapt. 29 September 1594), Rebecca (bapt. 11 July 1596), and Austen or Augustine (bapt. 29 November 1601, bur. 1 July 1604). The father is designated _histrio_, ‘player,’ or ‘player of interludes’. The parish token-books show that he dwelt in Horseshoe Court during 1593 and 1595, thereafter near the Swan in Paris Garden, in Montagu Close during 1601, in ‘Bradshaw’s Rents’ during 1602, and in Horseshoe Court again during 1604.[981] But by 4 May 1605, when he made his will, he was of Mortlake, Surrey, where he had a house and land of which he had lately purchased the lease.[982] Doubtless he had prospered. A note of heraldic irregularities delivered by William Smith, Rouge dragon, to the Earl of Northampton as commissioner for the Earl Marshal states that ‘Phillipps the player had graven in a gold ring the armes of S^r W^m Phillipp, Lord Bardolph, with the said L. Bardolph’s cote quartred, which I shewed to M^r. York at a small gravers shopp in Foster Lane’.[983] The will mentions Phillips’s wife, whose name was not Elizabeth but Anne, his daughters Magdalen, Rebecca, Anne, and Elizabeth, his mother Agnes Bennett, his brothers William and James Webb, his sister Margery Borne, and her sons Miles and Philipps, and his sister Elizabeth Gough. Elizabeth had been married at St. Saviour’s in 1603, to Robert Gough (q.v.) of the King’s men, who witnesses the will.[984] Margery Borne may have been the wife of William Borne _alias_ Bird (q.v.) of the Prince’s men. Presumably the Webbs were his brothers-in-law, in which case his wife was obviously not a Woodward. There are legacies of £5 to ‘the hyred men of the company which I am of’, of 30_s._ pieces to his ‘fellows’ William Shakespeare and Henry Condell, and his ‘servant’ Christopher Beeston, of 20_s._ pieces to his ‘fellows’ Laurence Fletcher, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, Alexander Cook and Nicholas Tooley, of silver bowls to John Heminges, Richard Burbadge, and William Sly, and of £20 to Timothy Whithorne. Samuel Gilburne, ‘my late apprentice’ is to have 40_s._ and ‘my mouse colloured velvit hose and a white taffety dublet, a blacke taffety sute, my purple cloke, sword, and dagger, and my base viall’. James Sands ‘my apprentice’ is to have 40_s._ and ‘a citterne, a bandore and a lute’. The widow is appointed executrix, but if she re-marries she is to have ‘no parte or porcion of my goods or chattells’, and is to be replaced by the overseers of the will, Heminges, Richard Burbadge, Sly, and Whithorne. After proving the will on 13 May 1605, the widow did in fact re-marry, with John Witter, and it was proved again by John Heminges on 16 May 1607. His share in the Globe was subsequently the subject of litigation.[985] Heywood (_c._ 1608) praises his deserts with those of other dead actors.

PICKERING, JAMES. Mason of Bowlby, Yorks, unlicensed player, 1612 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

PLUMMER, JOHN. Master of Chapel, 1444–55.

POKELEY, RICHARD. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

POLE. Gate-keeper at Paul’s, 1582.

POPE, THOMAS, was one of the English players, who visited Denmark and Germany in 1586 and 1587. He is in the 1593 list of Strange’s men and played as ‘Mr. Pope’ for them or the Admiral’s in _2 Deadly Sins_ about 1590–1. He joined the Chamberlain’s men, probably on their foundation in 1594, was joint payee for them with Heminge from 1597–9, and appears in the actor-lists of 1598 and 1599. On 30 August 1598, William Bird borrowed 10_s._ of Henslowe, ‘to folowe the sewt agenst Thomas Poope’.[986] In 1600 he is mentioned, with Singer of the Admiral’s, by Samuel Rowlands in _The Letting of Humour’s Blood in the Head-Vein_, sat. iv:

What meanes Singer then, And Pope, the clowne, to speak so boorish, when They counterfaite the clownes upon the Stage?

He had an original fifth share of a moiety of the Globe, increased to a fourth on the retirement of Kempe. But he does not appear in the lists of the King’s men, and had therefore probably retired by 1603. On 22 July of that year he made his will, which was proved on 13 February 1604.[987] He leaves his interests in the Globe and Curtain to Mary Clark, _alias_ Wood, and Thomas Bromley, and legacies to Robert Gough and John Edmans. He mentions the house in Southwark, in which he dwelt, held with other tenements of the late Francis Langley; also his brothers John and William Pope, and his mother Agnes Webbe. This hardly justifies Collier in connecting him with the Webbes of Snitterfield, Shakespeare’s kin. Bazell Nicholl, scrivener, and John Wrench, are left executors. As in 1612 a sixth of the Globe was in the hands of Basil Nicoll and John and Mary Edmonds, it is probable that John Edmonds married Mary Clark. It appears from the Southwark token-books that one Pope lived in Blamer’s Rents during 1593, in Wrench’s Rents during 1595, and in Mr. Langley’s New Rents during 1596, 1598, 1600, and 1602.[988] Dr. Greg thinks that Thomas Pope, rather than a Morgan Pope who also had interests in Southwark, was the ‘Mr. Pope’ with whom Henslowe had an interview on 25 June 1603, ‘at the scryveners shope wher he lisse’, concerning the renewal of the lease of the Rose.[989] But Thomas Pope clearly lived in his own house. Collier (_Actors_, xxxvi) gives a marriage of a Thomas Pope and Elizabeth Baly at St. Botolph’s on 20 December 1584, but the indications of the will do not suggest a married man. William Smith complains that ‘Pope the player would have no other armes but the armes of Sir Thomas Pope, Chancelor of y^e Augmentations’.[990] Heywood mentions the ‘deserts’ of Pope in his _Apology_. He is included in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare.

POWLTON, THOMAS. Worcester’s, 1584.

PRICE, JOHN. Musician in Germany, 1609.

PRICE (PRYOR?), RICHARD. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1600 (?), 1610, 1613, 1622. He lived in White Cross Street in 1623, and records of his children are in the registers of St. Giles, Cripplegate, from 1620 to 1627, where he is variously entered as ‘gentleman’, ‘yeoman’, and ‘player’ (J. 348; _Bodl._).

PROCTOR. Admiral’s, 1599.

PRUN, PETER DE. Germany, 1594. He was of Brussels.

PUDSEY, EDWARD. Germany, 1626. He was presumably the owner of the manuscript note-book from which extracts are given in R. Savage, _Stratford-upon-Avon Notebooks_ (1888), i; cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Chapman, _Blind Beggar of Alexandria_.

PULHAM, GEORGE. Anne’s, 1612.

PYE, JOHN. A ‘momer’, whose son Samuel was baptized at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 28 May 1559 (_Bodl._).

PYK (PIK, PYGE, PIGGE), JOHN. Strange’s, 1593; Admiral’s, 1597–9 (H. ii. 303).

PYKMAN, PHILIP. Chapel, 1600–1.

RADSTONE, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

RASTALL, WILLIAM. Chapel manager, 1602. He died in 1608.

RAWLYNS, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

READE, EMANUEL. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613; Anne’s, 1613 (?)-17.

READING, WILLIAM. Interluders, 1559–63 (cf. App. D, No. v).

REASON, GILBERT. Charles’s, 1610, 1616, 1625.

REDFORD, JOHN. Master of Paul’s, _c._ 1540, and dramatist (cf. _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 454).

REEVE, RALPH. Germany, 1603–9; Revels manager (provincial), 1611; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615.

REYNOLDS, ROBERT. Anne’s, 1616–17; Germany, 1616, 1618–20, 1626. He was known in Germany by the clown-name Pickleherring. He and his wife Jane were indicted for non-attendance at church in 1616 and 1617 (Jeaffreson, ii. 120, 127).

RICE, JOHN, was ‘boy’ to Heminges when he delivered a speech in Merchant Taylors’ hall on 16 July 1607, and must have been still with the King’s men when he took part as Corinea with Burbadge in the water-pageant of 31 May 1610. He became one of the original Lady Elizabeth’s men in 1611, and seems to have joined the King’s men again in 1619. The Southwark token-books indicate a John Rice as a resident in 1615, 1619, 1621, and 1623, with an ‘uxor’ in 1621, and another record names John Rice ‘of the Bankside’ amongst players in 1623.[991] He is not in the official list of May of that year, but played in _Sir John van Olden Barnavelt_ about August, and is in the official list of 1621. He is traceable up to the list of 1625, but is not in that of 1629. It is not improbable that he retired, and went into Orders, for Heminges, in his will of 1630, leaves 20_s._ to ‘John Rice, clerk, of St. Saviour’s in Southwark’, and also names ‘Mr. Rice’ as overseer. Rice is in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare.

‘ROBIN.’ Chapel, 1518.

ROBINS (ROBINSON), WILLIAM. Anne’s, 1616–19. He lived on Clerkenwell Hill in 1623 (J. 348).

ROBINSON, JAMES. Chapel manager, 1600.

ROBINSON, RICHARD, first appears in the _Catiline_ actor-list of the King’s men in 1611, and as playing the Lady in a stage direction (l. 1929) to _The Second Maiden’s Tragedy_ of the same year. In _The Devil is an Ass_ (1616), ii. 8. 64, Merecroft describes ‘Dicke Robinson’ as a lad, and as masquerading ‘drest like a lawyer’s wife’. I think it not impossible that he was a son of James Robinson, who was a member of the Children of the Chapel syndicate in 1600. If so, he may have been a Blackfriars boy. He played in _Bonduca_ (_c._ 1613), is in the 1619 patent to the King’s men, and in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare, and is traceable as a King’s man up to the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647. He may have married Richard Burbadge’s widow, who held shares in the Globe and Blackfriars as Mrs. Robinson in 1635. He owed Tooley £29 13_s._ when the latter made his will in 1623. According to Wright he was a comedian. The same author states that he took up arms for the King, and was killed by Major Harrison at the taking of Basing House, on 14 October 1645. A contemporary report of this event by Hugh Peters confirms the death of ‘Robinson, the player, who, a little before the storm, was known to be mocking and scorning the Parliament’. There were, however, other actors named Robinson, and probably this was one of them. If Richard had been killed in 1645, he could not have signed the dedication of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays in 1647. Moreover, the register of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, records the burial of ‘Richard Robinson, a player’ on 23 March 1648.[992] He seems to have lived at the upper end of Shoreditch in 1623 (J. 347).

ROBINSON, THOMAS. Germany, 1626.

ROLL (ROE), JOHN. Interluders, 1530. He died in 1539.

RONNER, JOHN. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

ROSE. Henry’s, 1612, where his wife became (?) a gatherer (_H. P._ 63).

ROSSETER, PHILIP. Whitefriars lessee, 1609–15; Revels patentee, 1610; Porter’s Hall patentee, 1615; Revels manager, 1617. He was one of the royal lutenists from Midsummer 1604 to Easter 1623, and published _A Booke of Ayres_ (1601) with Campion, who left him his property in 1620. He died on 5 May 1623 (_D. N. B._; _Chamber Accounts_).

ROSSILL. Chamberlain’s, 1597.

ROWLEY, SAMUEL. Admiral’s-Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1597–1624 (?), and dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii; H. ii. 307).

ROWLEY, THOMAS. Admiral’s, 1602.

ROWLEY, WILLIAM. Charles’s, 1610–19; King’s, 1623–5. But he remained technically a Prince’s man until the death of James in 1625 (Murray, i. 162, 172, table).

RUSSELL, JOHN. Gatherer for Palsgrave’s, _c._ 1617 (_H. P._ 28, 29, 85).

RUTTER, WILLIAM. Interluders, 1503.

SACKVILLE, THOMAS. Germany, 1592–3, 1597–1602. He used the clown-name Johannes Bouset, was a merchant in Frankfort, 1604–17, and died in 1628.

‘SAM.’ Admiral’s, >1591.

SANDERSON, GREGORY. Anne’s, 1617–19.

SANDS, JAMES. King’s, 1605; Anne’s, _c._ 1617? He received legacies from Augustine Phillips (q.v.), to whom he was apprentice, in 1605 and from William Sly (q.v.) in 1608. A James Sands appears in the Southwark token-books in 1596, 1598, and 1612 (_Bodl._).

SANDT, BERNHARDT. Germany, 1600–1.

SAUNDERS, WILLIAM. Chapel, >1517.

SAUSS, EVERHART. Netherlands, 1592.

SAVAGE, JEROME. Warwick’s, 1575–9.

SAVEREY, ABRAHAM. Lennox’s, 1605.

SCHADLEUTNER, SEBASTIAN. Germany, 1623.

SCARLETT, JOHN. A ‘player’ whose son Richard was baptized at St. Giles’s on 1 September, and buried on 19 September 1605 (_Bodl._).

SCARLETT, RICHARD. A ‘player’, buried on 23 April 1609 at St. Giles’s, where his daughter Susan had been baptized on 11 February 1607 and his wife Marie buried on 12 February 1607. Several Scarletts were royal trumpeters--Edward, William, and William the younger in 1483, John in 1509, Arthur in 1559–1603, John in 1677–9 (_Bodl._; _Chamber Accounts_; Lafontaine, 1, 3, 325, 341).

SCOTT, JOHN. Interluders, 1503–28.

SEBECK, HENRY. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1617.

SEHAIS, JEHAN. France, 1598. Possibly the John Shaa, who witnessed an Admiral’s payment to Dekker, 24 November 1599 (H. i. 114). ‘John’ appears for ‘Robert’ Shaw, probably by an error, in a play warrant of 1600 as given in the P. C. Acts (cf. App. B).

SHAKESPEARE, EDMOND. The burials at St. Saviour’s include, on 31 December 1607, ‘Edmond Shakespeare, a player: in the church,’ which is expanded in a fee-book as ‘Edmund Shakespeare, a player, buried in the church, with a forenoone knell of the great bell, 20_s._ (Collier, _Actors_, xiv). Presumably this is the brother of William.

SHAKESPEARE, EDWARD. The baptisms at St. Giles’s include, on 12 August 1607, ‘Edward, sonne of Edward Schackspeere, Player: base borne’ (Collier, _Actors_, xv; J. Hunter in _Addl. MS._ 24589, f. 24).

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Strange’s, 1592; Pembroke’s (?), 1593; Sussex’s (?), 1594; Chamberlain’s-King’s, 1594–1616; and dramatist.

SHAKSHAFTE, WILLIAM. Player (?) to Alexander Houghton, 1581 (cf. ch. ix, p. 280).

SHANBROOKE, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried on 17 Sept. 1618 at St. Giles’s, where his children appear in the registers from 10 June 1610 to 4 June 1618 (_Bodl._).

SHANK, JOHN, or SHANKS, for the name is variously spelt, describes himself to Lord Chamberlain Pembroke in the _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 as ‘beeing an old man in this quality, who in his youth first served your noble father, and after that the late Queene Elizabeth, then King James, and now his royall Majestye’.[993] Presumably the Pembroke’s company in question was that of 1597–1600, and the Queen Elizabeth’s men the travelling company of the latter years of the reign. Shank’s account of his own career may be amplified from the records of his name in the 1610 list of Prince Henry’s men and in the patent issued to the same company when they became the Elector Palatine’s men in 1613. He lived in Rochester Yard, Southwark, in 1605, but the register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, shows him later in Golden Lane, and records several baptisms and burials of his children between 1610 and 1629.[994] He had joined the King’s men between 1613 and 1619, as his name is in the patent of the latter year. It recurs in the official lists of the company up to 1629, but occasionally only in actor-lists up to 1631, including that of the First Folio Shakespeare. Amongst his ‘boyes’ or apprentices were Thomas Pollard, John Thompson, John Honiman, and Thomas Holcome. Thompson cost him £40; for other boys he had spent by 1635 as much as £200. After the death of John Heminges, Shank bought from his son William, surreptitiously, as his fellows averred, two shares in the Blackfriars and three in the Globe, for a total sum of £506. It was these transactions, which took place between 1633 and 1635, that led to the petition of Benfield, Swanston, and Pollard to the Lord Chamberlain recorded in the _Sharers Papers_. As a result Shank was directed to transfer one share in each house to the petitioners. He, however, complained that he could not get satisfactory terms from them, and that they restrained him from the stage. The Cripplegate register records Shank’s burial on 27 January 1636.[995] James Wright calls him a ‘comedian’,[996] and the following verses, signed W. Turner, and quoted by Collier from Turner’s _Dish of Stuff, or a Gallimaufry_, may perhaps be taken as confirming this[997]:

That’s the fat fool of the Curtain, And the lean fool of the Bull: Since Shancke did leave to sing his rhimes, He is counted but a gull: The players on the Bankside, The round Globe and the Swan, Will teach you idle tricks of love, But the Bull will play the man.

The verses are dated 1662, but the theatres named indicate a much earlier date.

SHAW (SHAA, autograph), ROBERT. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1597–1602. John, son of Robert Shaw, ‘player’, was baptized on 10 April 1603, at St. Saviour’s, and Robert Shaw, ‘a man’, buried on 12 September 1603 (H. ii. 309; _Bodl._).

SHEALDEN. A ‘player’, who witnessed a loan for Henslowe on 24 August 1594 (H. i. 76).

SHEPARD. Paul’s door-keeper, 1582.

SHEPPARD, WILLIAM. A ‘player’, whose son Robert by his wife Johane was baptized at St. Helen’s, 26 November 1602.

SIBTHORPE, EDWARD. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.

SIMPSON, CHRISTOPHER. Shoemaker of Egton, Yorks, recusant and unlicensed player in 1610–12 (cf. ch. ix, p. 305).

SIMPSON, CUTHBERT. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (_ibid._).

SIMPSON, JOHN. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (_ibid._).

SIMPSON, RICHARD. Of Egton, recusant and unlicensed player, 1616 (_ibid._).

SIMPSON, ROBERT. Shoemaker of Staythes, Yorks, recusant and unlicensed player, 1612, 1616 (_ibid._).

SINCLER (SINKLO, SINCKLO), JOHN. Strange’s (?), 1590–1; Pembroke’s (?), 1592–3; Chamberlain’s, 1594 (?)-1604.

SINGER, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588; Admiral’s, 1594–1603. He became an ordinary Groom of the Chamber in 1603. A John Singer in 1571 owed money to a Canterbury citizen, who had also debts from players (H. R. Plomer in _3 Library_, ix. 253). Children of John Singer, ‘player’, appear in the St. Saviour’s register from 1 August 1597 to 5 October 1609, and his name is in the token-books from 1596 to 1602 (_Bodl._). The _Quips upon Questions_ (1600) of Armin (q. v.) has been ascribed to Singer in error. Rowlands couples him as a clown with Pope (q. v.) in 1600, and Dekker, _Gull’s Horn Book_ (1609), says, ‘Tarlton, Kemp, nor Singer, nor all the litter of fooles that now come drawling behind them, never played the clowns more naturally than the arrantest sot of you all shall’. Heywood praised him as dead in the same year (H. ii. 310).

SKINNER, RICHARD. Interluders, 1547–58.

SLATER (SLAUGHTER), MARTIN. Admiral’s, 1594–7; Scotland, 1599; Hertford’s, 1603; Anne’s, 1606; King’s Revels manager, 1608; Chamber of Bristol, 1618–19. He is sometimes recorded by his Christian name only. He had a wife on 22 July 1604, and is described as a citizen and ironmonger in 1608. His name is in the Southwark token-books from 1595 to 1602, and Martin Slawter, ‘a servant’, was buried there on 4 August 1625 (H. ii. 310; _Bodl._).

SLAUGHTER, WILLIAM. ‘Ghost-name’ evolved by Mr. Fleay for a supposed Queen’s man.

SLEE (SLYE), JOHN. Queen Jane’s, >1537; Interluders, 1539–40.

SLY, WILLIAM, was doubtless of Strange’s men or the Admiral’s about 1590–1, when he played in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_. On 11 October 1594 Henslowe sold him ‘a jewell of gowld seat with a whitte safer’ for 8_s._ to be paid for at the rate of 1_s._ weekly.[998] But apparently he never paid more than 6_s._ 6_d._ An inventory of garments belonging to the Admiral’s men on 13 March 1598 includes ‘Perowes sewt, which W^m Sley were’.[999] Presumably this had come from Strange’s men, as Sly is never traceable as a member of the Admiral’s company. Probably he joined the Chamberlain’s men on their formation in 1594. He is in all the lists of this company from 1598 to 1605, and in the Induction to _The Malcontent_ (1604). He is also in the actor-list of the First Folio Shakespeare. The fact that ‘Christopher Sly, old Sly’s son of Burton Heath’ is the name given to the beggar in _The Taming of the Shrew_ (_c._ 1594), led Collier to suggest that he migrated from Warwickshire about the same time as Shakespeare. But the beggar in _A Shrew_ is already Sly, and the name occurs in various parts of London. The Southwark token-books show a William Sly in Norman’s Rents during 1588, in Horseshoe Court during 1593, and in Rose Alley during 1595 and 1596.[1000] In 1605 he was named as one of the overseers and residuary executors, with a legacy, in the will of Augustine Phillips. The register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, records the baptism on 24 September and the burial on 4 October 1606 of John, base-born son of William Sly, player, by Margaret Chambers; and the register of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, records his own burial on 16 August 1608, from Halliwell Street. His nuncupative will was made on 4 August 1608. He left legacies to Cuthbert Burbadge, and James Sandes, and the rest of his property to Robert and Cecily Browne and their daughter Jane. Robert is to have his part of the Globe, and Cecily is appointed executrix. The will was witnessed by several illiterate women, and disputed by a relative named William Sly, but proved on 24 August.[1001] He was not one of the original shareholders in the Globe, but was admitted to a share in 1605 or later. On 9 August 1608, between the date of his will and that of his death, he was granted a lease of a seventh share in the Blackfriars, and this his executrix afterwards surrendered to Richard Burbadge.[1002] Heywood names Sly (_c._ 1608) amongst other dead players, whose ‘deserts’ he commemorates.

SMITH, ANTONY. Charles’s, 1616, 1625.

SMITH, JOHN. Interluders, _c._ 1547–80. Is he the John Smith who assisted George Ferrers as Lord of Misrule in 1552–3 (Feuillerat, _Edw. and Mary_, 120)?

SMITH, JOHN. Revels, 1609.

SMYGHT, WILLIAM. A ‘player’ who witnessed a loan from Philip to Francis Henslowe on 1 June 1595 (H. i. 6; ii. 312).

SOMERSET, GEORGE. Admiral’s, 1601–2. See also JOHN WILSON.

SOUTHEY, THOMAS. Interluders, 1547–56.

SOUTHYN, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

SPENCER, GABRIEL. Chamberlain’s (?), 1597; Pembroke’s, 1597; Admiral’s, 1598. He was slain by Ben Jonson (cf. ch. xxiii) on 22 September 1598, and was buried on the next day but one at St. Leonard’s, where the register records him as from Hogge Lane (Collier, _Actors_, xxii). On 3 December 1596 a coroner’s inquest found that he had himself slain James Feake with a rapier in the house of Richard East, barber, in St. Leonard’s (Jeaffreson, i. xlv, 234). Henslowe sometimes describes him merely as ‘Gabriel’, and under this name Heywood praises him (H. ii. 312).

SPENCER, JOHN. Germany, 1605–23. He was known by the clown-name of Hans Stockfisch.

SQUIRE, LAWRENCE. Master of Chapel, 1486–93.

STEVENS, THOMAS. Denmark-Germany, 1586–7.

STOKEDALE, EDMUND. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

STRATFORD, WILLIAM. Henry’s-Palsgrave’s, 1610–23. He lived at the upper end of White Cross Street in 1623. His children appear in the St. Giles’s register in that year, and he was buried as a ‘player’ there on 27 August 1625 (J. 348, 350; _Bodl._).

STROWDEWIKE, EDMUND. Interluders, 1559–68.

SUDBURY, THOMAS. Interluders, 1530.

SUTTON, ROBERT. A London player in 1550 (cf. App. D, No. v).

SWANSTON, ELIARD. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1622; King’s, 1624–42 (Murray, i. 172, 255).

SWINNERTON (SWETHERTON), THOMAS. Anne’s, 1604–19; for his later career cf. Murray, ii. 101, 105.

SYFERWESTE, RICHARD. Worcester’s (?), 1602 (H. ii. 314).

SYMCOCKES. Lennox’s, 1605.

SYMONS, JOHN. A tumbler. Strange’s, 1583; Oxford’s, 1585; Strange’s, 1586–8 (?); Queen’s, 1588 (?)-9.

TAILOR, ROBERT. Admiral’s, 1601–2.

TARBUCK, JOHN. Revels patentee, 1610.

TARLTON, RICHARD, first appears in the ‘Q^d Richard Tarlton’ at the end of a ballad called _A very lamentable and wofull discours of the fierce fluds ... the 5. of October, 1570_ (Arber, i. 440).[1003] This is preserved (Halliwell, 126; Collier, _Old Ballads_, 78; H. L. Collman, _Ballads and Broadsides_, 265). The Stationers’ Registers also record in 1576 ‘a newe booke in Englishe verse intituled Tarltons Toyes’ (Arber, ii. 306), in 1578 ‘Tarltons Tragical Treatises conteyninge sundrie discourses and pretie conceiptes bothe in prose and verse’ (Arber, ii. 323), and in 1579 ‘Tarltons devise upon this unlooked for great snowe’ (Arber, ii. 346); but these are all lost. _Tarltons Jigge of a horse loade of Fooles_ (Halliwell, xx) should, if it is genuine, date from about 1579, as the jest at the Puritan fool ‘Goose son’ is obviously aimed at Stephen Gosson; but it reads to me like a fake, and Halliwell took it from a manuscript belonging to Collier, who had already quoted it in his tainted _New Facts_, 18. It is improbable that Richard is the ‘one Tarlton’ whose house in Paris Garden is included in a list of suspected papist resorts sent by Richard Frith to Alderman Martin at some date not earlier than 1585 (Wright, _Eliz._ ii. 250). The first mention of him is by Gabriel Harvey (cf. p. 4) in 1579, when he had already acquired some reputation. He became an original member of the Queen’s men (q. v.) in 1583, and remained their principal comedian until his death in 1588. For this company he wrote _The Seven Deadly Sins_ (q. v.) in 1585. Music for some of his jigs is in existence (Halliwell, _Cambridge Manuscript Rarities_, 8) and his facility as a jester made him, until he pushed it too far, a _persona grata_ in Elizabeth’s presence. Bohun, 352, says that the Queen admitted ‘Tarleton, a famous comedian, and a pleasant talker, and other such like men, to divert her with stories of the town and the common jests or accidents, but so that they kept within the bounds of modesty and chastity’. He adds, ‘Tarleton, who was then the best comedian in England, had made a pleasant play, and when it was acting before the Queen, he pointed at Sir Walter Raleigh and said “See, the Knave commands the Queen”, for which he was corrected by a frown from the Queen; yet he had the confidence to add that he was of too much and too intolerable a power; and going on with the same liberty, he reflected on the overgreat power and riches of the Earl of Leicester, which was so universally applauded by all that were present, that she thought best to bear these reflections with a seeming unconcernedness. But yet she was so offended, that she forbad Tarleton and all her jesters from coming near her table, being inwardly displeased with this impudent and unseasonable liberty.’ An anecdote of Tarlton ‘playing the God Luz with a flitch of bacon at his back’, fighting the Queen’s little dog Perrico de Faldes with sword and long staff, and exchanging chaff with the Earl of Sussex (Halliwell, _Death-bed_, 30, from _S. P. Dom. Eliz._ ccxv, 89) might have some point if Luz was a take-off of Leicester. On 27 October 1587 Tarlton was allowed as a Master of Fence, and is described as an ‘ordenary grome off her majestes chamber’ (_Sloane MS._ 2530, f. 6). The same description recurs in his will, which was signed on 3 September 1588, the actual day of his burial at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, from Halliwell Street. He left his property to his son Philip, as whose guardians he appointed his mother Katharine, then a widow, his friend Robert Adams, and his fellow of the Queen’s men, William Johnson. One of the witnesses, Charles Barnard, was his sister’s husband. This will was disputed by Katharine Tarlton, who brought a bill in Chancery, alleging that after signing it and making over property worth £700 to Adams, Tarlton repented, tried in vain to recall the will, and made another. A rejoinder by Adams accuses Katharine of acting under the influence of another son-in-law, Thomas Lee, a butcher, and describes how Adams was called to Tarlton’s death-bed in the house of one Emma Ball in Shoreditch, ‘of a very bad reputacion’. Some colour is given to his mother’s complaint by a death-bed petition from Tarlton to Walsingham, begging his protection for Philip, who was Sidney’s godson, against ‘a sly fellow, on Addames’ (_S. P. Dom. Eliz._ ccxv. 90). There is no mention of Tarlton’s wife; the boy was six years old. Robert Adams was apparently a lawyer, and to be distinguished from John Adams of the Queen’s men, who is referred to as a fellow of Tarlton’s by the stage keeper in _Bartholomew Fair_ (Induction 38), ‘I kept the Stage in Master _Tarletons_ time, I thanke my starres. Ho! and that man had liu’d to haue play’d in _Bartholmew Fayre_, you should ha’ seene him ha’ come in, and ha’ beene coozened i’ the Cloath-quarter, so finely. And _Adams_, the Rogue, ha’ leap’d and caper’d vpon him, and ha’ dealt his vermine about, as though they had cost him nothing.’ After Tarlton’s death, several pamphlets, ascribed to him or otherwise exploiting his popularity, came to the press; in 1588 ‘a ballad intituled Tarltons Farewell’ (Arber, ii. 500); in 1589 ‘a sorowfull newe sonnette, intituled Tarltons Recantacon uppon this theame gyven him by a gentleman at the Bel savage without Ludgate (nowe or ells never) beinge the laste theame he songe’ (Arber, ii. 526); in 1589 ‘Tarltons repentance of his farewell to his frendes in his sicknes a little before his deathe’ (Arber, ii. 531); in 1590 ‘a pleasant dyttye dialogue wise betwene Tarltons ghost and Robyn Good Fellowe’ (Arber, ii. 559). These are lost, unless, indeed, _Tarltons Farewell_ is identical with ‘A pretie new ballad, entituled Willie and Peggie, to the tune of Tarlton’s Carroll’, printed in _Archiv._ cxiv. 341, and A. Clark, _Shirburn Ballads_, 351, from _Rawl. Poet. MS._ 185, f. 10. This ends ‘qd. Richard Tarlton’, but it is in fact a lament over the death of Tarlton under the name of Willie, as is clearly shown by lines 23 ‘None would be wery to see him one stage’, 41 ‘A groome of her chamber my Willie was made’, 55 ‘To singe them their themes he never denied’. These verses support the theory, based upon a contemporary note in a copy of Spenser (cf. _6 N. Q._ xi. 417; Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 394), that Tarlton is the ‘pleasant Willy’ mourned as dead in the _Tears of the Muses_ (1591), 208, and if he is also the Yorick of _Hamlet_, v. 1. 201, he was sufficiently honoured. Another ballad in the same manuscript on the Armada (_Archiv._ cxiv. 344; _Ballads from MS._ ii. 92) also claims to be to the tune of Tarlton’s ‘carroll’; the ‘Carroll’ itself is unknown. ‘_Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie. Onelye such a jest as his Jigge, fit for Gentlemen to laugh at an houre, &c. Published by an old companion of his, Robin Goodfellow_’ (n.d., but entered in S. R. 26 June 1590; Arber, ii. 553) is a volume of _novelle_, put into the mouth of Tarlton’s ghost. The writer describes him as ‘only superficially seene in learning, having no more but a bare insight into the Latin tung’, and physically as ‘one attired in russet, with a buttond cap on his head, a great bag by his side, and a strong bat in his hand’. Similarly, Henry Chettle, who put into his mouth a defence of plays forming a section of _Kind-hartes Dreame_ (1592; cf. App. C, No. xlix), knew him in a dream ‘by his sute of russet, his buttond cap, his taber, his standing on the toe, and other tricks’. _The Cobler of Caunterburie or an Invective against Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie_ (1590) is also a volume of _novelle_, and has practically nothing about Tarlton. On the other hand, _Tarltons Jests_ at least claims to be biographical, although its material, like that of Peele’s _Jests_, largely consists of the flotsam and jetsam of all the jest-books. The earliest extant edition is of 1611. But it was transferred from one publisher to another in 1609 (Arber, iii. 402), the second of its three parts, which mentions the Globe (Halliwell, 23), was entered in S. R. on 4 August 1600 (Arber, iii. 168), and probably therefore the first part was already in print in the sixteenth century. It speaks of Tarlton as a Queen’s man (Halliwell, 13, 27, 29, 30, 33), as playing at the Bull in Bishopsgate (13, 24), where he did both the clown and the judge in ‘Henry the Fifth’ (_The Famous Victories_) to Knell’s Harry, the Curtain (16), and the Bell in Gracechurch Street (24), as singing themes (16, 27, 28, 40), and as jesting in clown’s apparel in the royal presence or in the Great Chamber at Court (7, 8). It also tells us, for what the statements are worth, that his father lived at Ilford (40), that he had a wife Kate of light character (17, 19), that he kept the Saba tavern in Gracechurch Street, where he was scavenger of the ward (15, 21, 22), and an ordinary in Paternoster Row (21, 26), and that he had a squint (12) and a flat nose (28). A woodcut on the title-page confirms these peculiarities of feature, and represents a short, broad-faced, cunning-looking man, with curly hair, an elaborate moustache and a starved beard, wearing a cap, and a bag or moneybox slung at his side, and playing on a tabor and a pipe. This appears to be taken from a drawing by John Scottowe in an initial letter to some verses on Tarlton’s death in _Harl. MS._ 3885, f. 19. Nashe, _Pierce Penilesse_ (1592, _Works_, i. 188), gives us a hint of his stage methods in describing how at a provincial performance, as the Queen’s men ‘were now entring into their first merriment (as they call it) the people began exceedingly to laugh, when _Tarlton_ first peeped out his head’, and how a ‘cholericke wise Iustice’ laid his staff about their pates, ‘in that they, being but Farmers & poore countrey Hyndes, would presume to laugh at the Queenes men, and make no more account of her cloath in his presence’. According to Fuller (_Worthies_, iii. 139) Tarlton was born at Condover in Shropshire, and kept his father’s swine there, until a servant of the Earl of Leicester, struck with his witty replies, brought him to Court. On the other hand, in the _Three Lords and Three Ladies of London_ (1590), by his fellow Robert Wilson, Simplicity produces his picture, and says he was ‘a prentice in his youth of this honorable city: ... when he was yoong he was leaning to the trade ... waterbearing: I wis he hath tossed a tankard in Cornehil er now’ (sign. C^v). Halliwell (xxx) has collected a large number of allusions to Tarleton and his humours, lasting well into the middle of the seventeenth century. Taverns were named after him, and one is said to have still stood in Southwark in 1798. Much of the action of W. Percy’s _Cuck-Queanes and Cuckolds Errants_ (q. v.) takes place at the Tarlton Inn, Colchester, of which he is said to have been the ‘quondam controller and induperator’. Tarlton himself speaks the prologue to the play. George Wilson, _The Commendation of Cockes and Cock-fighting_ (1607), records that on 4 May 1602 there fought at Norwich ‘a cocke called Tarleton, who was so intituled, because he alwayes came to the fight like a drummer, making a thundering noyse with his winges, which cocke fought many batels with mighty and fierce adversaries’.

TAWYER, WILLIAM. At _M. N. D._ v. 1. 128, F_{1} has the s. d. ‘Tawyer with a Trumpet before them’. The St. Saviour’s burials give in June 1625, ‘William Tawier, M^r Heminges man’.

TAYLOR, JOHN. Choir Master at St. Mary’s, Woolnoth, 1557; at Westminster, 1561–7.

TAYLOR, JOSEPH, is conjectured by Collier to be the Joseph Taylor who was baptized at St. Andrew’s by the Wardrobe in Blackfriars on 6 February 1586, the Joseph Taylor who married Elizabeth Ingle, widow, at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 2 May 1610, and the Joseph Taylor who is shown by the Southwark token-books as dwelling in ‘M^r Langley’s new rents, near the play-house’ during 1607, in Austen’s Rents during 1612 and 1615, as ‘gone’ in 1617, and as dwelling ‘near the play-house’ in 1623 and 1629, ‘on the Bankside’ in 1631, and in Gravel Lane during 1633. ‘Joseph Taylor, player,’ is entered in the St. Saviour’s registers as the father of Elsabeth (bapt. 12 July 1612), Dixsye and Joseph (bapt. 21 July 1614), Jone (bapt. 11 January 1616), Robert (bapt. 1 June 1617), and Anne (bapt. 24 August 1623).[1004] On the other hand, a Joseph Taylor, not improbably a player, was living in Bishopsgate near the Spittle in 1623 (J. 347). He was a member of the Duke of York’s company in 1610, but left them without the consent of his fellows for the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1611, and thereby involved himself during the same year in a lawsuit with John Heminges.[1005] He is in the actor-lists of _The Honest Man’s Fortune_ (1613) and of _The Coxcomb_, as played by the Lady Elizabeth’s men about the same date, and is also named in the text of their _Bartholomew Fair_ (1614). There seems to have been some sort of amalgamation between the Duke of York’s, now Prince Charles’s, and the Lady Elizabeth’s in 1615, and when this terminated in the following year, Taylor became again a member of the Prince’s company. He was still with them between 6 January and 2 February 1619, when he appeared as Dr. Almanac in Middleton and Rowley’s _Mask of Heroes_, but on 19 May 1619 he appears in a livery warrant issued for the King’s men. As he is not in their patent of the previous 27 March, it is to be supposed that he joined them to replace Burbadge, who had died on 13 March.[1006] The rest of his stage career was spent with the King’s men. He succeeded Burbadge in several of his characters, including Ferdinand in the _Duchess of Malfi_ and Hamlet, although the incidence of dates must cast some doubt upon the statement of Downes that he was instructed in the part ‘by the Author M^r Shakespear’.[1007] Wright says that he played it ‘incomparably well’, and praises him also as Iago in _Othello_, Truewit in _Epicoene_, and Face in _The Alchemist_.[1008] He is included in the First Folio list of performers in Shakespeare’s plays. In 1623 Nicholas Tooley left him £10 to pay a debt for which Tooley had become his surety. With Lowin he seems to have assumed the leadership of the company in succession to Heminges and Condell, and after Heminges’s death in 1630 he was admitted to two shares in the ‘house’ of the Globe and one in that of the Blackfriars, which he still held in 1635. About 1637 he petitioned for a waiter’s place in the Custom House of London,[1009] and on 11 November 1639 he obtained the post of Yeoman of the Revels, probably through the influence of Sir Henry Herbert, with whom he had been in frequent contact as representative of his company.[1010] After the closing of the theatres he joined his fellows of the King’s men in publishing the First Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays in 1647, and for his benefit and Lowin’s _The Wild-goose Chase_ was added in 1652. He died at Richmond and was there buried on 4 November 1652.[1011] The ascription to his brush of the ‘Chandos’ portrait of Shakespeare is now discredited.

THARE (THAYER), JOHN. Worcester’s, 1602–3; Germany, 1603–6 (?).

TILBERY, JOHN. Chapel, 1405.

TOMSONE, JOHN. A ‘player’ who borrowed 5_s._ from Henslowe on 22 December 1598 (H. i. 40).

TOOLEY, NICHOLAS, appears in the 1619 patent to the King’s men, but not in that of 1603. He probably joined the company about 1605, as he received a legacy under the will of Phillips on 4 May as his ‘fellow’. He is not in the actor-list of _Volpone_ in that year, but is in most of the later actor-lists from _The Alchemist_ (1610) to _The Spanish Curate_ (1622), and in that of the First Folio Shakespeare. In 1619 he witnessed Richard Burbadge’s will. He made his own will as Nicholas Tooley, Gentleman, on 3 June 1623. After legacies to charity, to the families of ‘my good friend Mr. Cuthbert Burbadge (in whose house I do now lodge)’, of ‘my late Mr. Richard Burbadge deceased’, and of ‘my good friend Mr. Henry Condell’, and to Joseph Taylor, and remissions of debt to John Underwood and William Ecclestone, but not to Richard Robinson, he ends by making Burbadge and Condell his executors and residuary legatees. By a codicil of the same date, signed as Nicholas Wilkinson _alias_ Tooley, he guards against any danger of invalidity due to his failure to use the name of Wilkinson.[1012] Presumably, therefore, Wilkinson, and not Tooley, was his original name. The name of Tooley was fairly common in London, and more than one Nicholas Wilkinson has been traced. He may have been the Nicholas, son of Charles Wilkinson, baptized at St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, on 3 February 1575.[1013] There seems no reason to connect him with a Nicholas Tooley found on the Warwickshire muster-book in 1569.[1013] His reference to Richard Burbadge as his ‘master’ suggests that he was his apprentice. It is tempting, but arbitrary, to identify him with the ‘Nick’ who played with Strange’s men in _2 Seven Deadly Sins_ about 1592, or the ‘Nycke’ who tumbled before Elizabeth for the Admiral’s in 1601 and is commended by Joan to Edward Alleyn on 21 October 1603.[1014] The register of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, records the burial of ‘Nicholas Tooley, gentleman, from the house of Cuthbert Burbidge, gentleman’, on 5 June 1623.[1015]

TOTTNELL, HARRY. A ‘player’ whose daughter Joan was baptized at St. Saviour’s on 20 March 1591 (_Bodl._).

TOWNE, JOHN. Queen’s, 1583, 1588, 1594–7. Greg (H. ii. 315) rather arbitrarily suggests that Henslowe’s note of him as a witness to a loan to Francis Henslowe of the Queen’s on 8 May 1593 (H. i. 4) is by an error for Thomas (q. v.).

TOWNE, THOMAS. Admiral’s-Henry’s, 1594–1610. His name is in a s. d. to _1 Honest Whore_ (1604). Alleyn’s papers record a widow Agnes. Towne’s name is in the Southwark token-books during 1600–7, and Thomas Towne ‘a man’ was buried on 9 August 1612. Towne’s will of 4 July 1612 names his wife, whom he calls Ann, and his brother John, of Dunwich in Suffolk (‘if he be still living’) and leaves £3 to his fellows Borne, Downton, Juby, Rowley, Massey, and Humphrey Jeffes, ‘to make them a supper when it shall please them to call for it’ (H. ii. 316; _Bodl._, citing will in P. C. C.).

TOWNSEND, JOHN. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1616–32 (?); for his later career, cf. Murray, i. 252–60; ii. 8.

TOY. The performer of Will Summer in _Summer’s Last Will and Testament_.

TREVELL, WILLIAM. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.

TRUSSELL, ALVERY. Chapel, 1600–1.

TUNSTALL (DONSTALL, DONSTONE), JAMES. Worcester’s, 1583; Admiral’s, 1590–1, 1594–7. Guilpin, _Skialetheia_ (1598), refers to him in conjunction with Alleyn (q. v.). The variation in his name is made more, rather than less, puzzling by the baptism at St. Botolph’s of Dunstone Tunstall on 20 August 1572 (H. ii. 261).

UBALDINI, PETRUCCIO. Italians, 1576 (?).

UNDERELL. Worcester’s, 1602. A Thomas Underell was a royal trumpeter in 1609–24 (_Chamber Accounts_).

UNDERWOOD, JOHN, was a Chapel boy in the year 1601, and continued at Blackfriars until, as the _Sharers Papers_ state, on growing up to be a man, he was taken to strengthen the King’s service. This was in 1608 or a little later. He is not in the Queen’s Revels actor-list of _Epicoene_ (1609), and is in the King’s men’s actor-list of _The Alchemist_ (1610), and thereafter in the official lists and most of the actor-lists of the company, including that of the First Folio Shakespeare, up to 1624. Tooley in his will of 1623 forgave him a debt. His own will was made on 4 October 1624 and has a codicil appended on 10 October, doubtless from his oral directions, but after his death. He describes himself as ‘of the parish of Saint Bartholomew the Less, in London, gent.’, and leaves his shares in the Blackfriars, Globe, and Curtain to his executors, of whom Henry Condell is one, in trust for his five children, all under twenty-one--John, Elizabeth, Burbage, Thomas, and Isabel. The executors and his ‘fellowes’, Mr. John Heminges and John Lowin, who are appointed overseers, have 11s. each for rings.[1016] The baptism of his son John on 27 December 1610 is in the register of Saint Bartholomew the Less, West Smithfield.[1017] The trust was still unexpired at Condell’s death in 1627, and was handed on by him to his wife. The _Sharers Papers_ of 1635 show one share in the Blackfriars still in the hands of an Underwood; but apparently a third of it had been parted with about 1632 to Eliart Swanston.[1018]

VINCENT. Strange’s (?), 1590–1.

VIRNIUS, JOHANN FRIEDRICH. Germany, 1615.

WAKEFIELD, EDWARD. Germany, 1597, 1602.

WALPOLE, FRANCIS. Anne’s, 1616–17.

WARD, ANTHONY. Vide ARKINSTALL.

WAYMUS (WAMBUS), FRANCIS. Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1617–24.

WEBSTER, GEORGE. Germany, 1598, 1600–3.

WEBSTER, JOHN. Germany, 1596. Is he identical with the dramatist?

WESTCOTT, SEBASTIAN. Master of Paul’s, 1557–82. He is sometimes described by his Christian name alone.

WHETSTONE, _c._ 1571. Cf. s.v. FIDGE. Plomer suggests that he might be George Whetstone (cf. ch. xxiii).

WHITELOCKE, JAMES, afterwards Sir James. Merchant Taylors, 1575–86.

WILDER, PHILIP VAN. Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and lutenist, commissioned to raise a royal company of young minstrels in 1550; cf. ch. xii, s.v. Chapel.

‘WILL.’ Strange’s, 1590–1.

‘WILL.’ Admiral’s, 1597.

WILLIAMS, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.

WILSON, JOHN. In _Much Ado_, ii. 3. 38, for the ‘Enter Balthaser with musicke’ of Q_{1}, F_{1} has ‘Enter ... Iacke Wilson’, who therefore, at some date before 1623, sang ‘Sigh no more, ladies!’ He is probably the son of Nicholas Wilson, ‘minstrel’, baptized at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 24 April 1585. He had an elder brother Adam, and buried a wife Joan on 17 July 1624, and an unnamed son on 3 September 1624 at St. Giles’s from the house of George Sommerset, musician (Collier, _Actors_, xviii). He seems to have become a city ‘wait’ about 1622 and to have still held his post in 1641, and has been confused (Collier in _Sh. Soc. Papers_, ii. 33; E. F. Rimbault, _Who was Jacke Wilson?_, 1846) with another John Wilson, born in 1595, a royal lutenist and musician of distinction (cf. _D. N. B._). One or other of them was concerned with a performance of _M. N. D._ in the house of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on 27 September 1631, which gave offence to the Puritans (Murray, ii. 148).

WILSON, ROBERT, was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1581. A reference in Gabriel Harvey’s correspondence of 1579 suggests that he was conspicuous amongst the actors of the day, and Lodge’s praise about the same date in the _Defence of Plays_ of his _Shorte and Sweete_, ‘the practice of a good scholler,’ shows that he was also a playwright. This piece Lodge compares with Gosson’s _Catiline’s Conspiracies_, and it may have been on the same theme. Further evidence of his reputation is in the letter of 1581 from T. Baylye (q. v.). In 1583 he joined the Queen’s men, and is described by Howes in his account of the formation of that company as a ‘rare’ man ‘for a quicke, delicate, refined, extemporall witt’. He is not in the Queen’s list of 1588. This may not be quite complete; on the other hand he may by then have left the company. I see no solid foundation for the conjectures of Fleay, ii. 279, that he was the player of _Greenes Groatsworth of Wit_ (cf. App. C, No. xlviii) who penned the _Moral of Man’s Wit_ and the _Dialogue of Dives_, that he wrote _Fair Em_, that he left the Queen’s for Strange’s in 1590 and thereby incurred Greene’s hostility, that he is the Roscius of Nashe’s _Menaphon_ epistle, that he died of the plague in 1593. It is extremely unlikely that he died in 1593, for in his _Palladis Tamia_ of 1598, after lauding Tarlton as famous for ‘extemporall verse’, Meres continues, ‘And so is now our wittie Wilson, who for learning and extemporall witte in this facultie is without compare or compeere, as to his great and eternall commendations he manifested in his chalenge at the Swanne on the Banke side.’ The common use by Meres and Howes of the phrase ‘extemporall witte’ renders it almost impossible to suppose that they are not speaking of the same man. It is true that, in the _Apology for Actors_, Heywood, whose knowledge of the stage must have gone back at least to 1594, classes Wilson with the older generation of actors, whom he never saw, as being before his time, and I take it the explanation is that, at or before the virtual break-up of the Queen’s men in the plague of 1592–3, Wilson gave up acting, and devoted himself to writing, and occasional extemporizing on themes. He is generally supposed to be the R. W. of _The Three Ladies of London_ (1584) and _The Three Lords of London_ (1590), and the ‘Robert Wilson, Gent.’ of _The Cobbler’s Prophecy_ (1594). The ‘Gent.’ is hardly an insuperable obstacle to identifying him with the ‘Robert Wilson, yoman (a player)’, who was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 20 November 1600 (Collier, _Actors_, xviii). A Wilson is in the suspected Admiral’s cast of _c._ January 1600. But now comes the real difficulty. Meres, also in the _Palladis Tamia_ and without any indication that he has another man in mind, includes ‘Wilson’ in a group of ‘the best for comedy amongst vs’, which is composed of the principal writers for the Admiral’s in 1598, and amongst these writers, as shown by Henslowe’s papers, was a Robert Wilson, who collaborated in eleven plays during 1598, and in three more during 1599 and 1600. He is last mentioned in a letter of 14 June 1600. This is generally taken to be a younger man than the Queen’s player, possibly a Robert Wilson who was baptized at St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on 22 September 1579, and married Mary Eaton there on 24 June 1606, possibly the Robert Wilson (not described as ‘a player and the younger’ as Collier suggests in _Bodl._) whose son Robert was baptized at St. Leonard’s on 15 January 1601 (Stopes, _Burbage_, 141), possibly the Robert Wilson whose burial is recorded at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 21 October 1610. On the whole, I am inclined to think that, in view of the character of Meres’ references, of the use of Catiline as a play-theme both about 1580 and in 1598 (cf. ch. xxiii), and of the sudden disappearance of Wilson from Henslowe’s diary in the year of the ‘player’s’ death, the balance of evidence is in favour of one playwright rather than two. The undefined share of the Admiral’s man in the extant _1 Sir John Oldcastle_ does not really afford a basis for stylistic comparison with the more old-fashioned manners of the 1584–94 plays. There is nothing to show that the Bishopsgate man had any connexion with the stage, still less that he was a son of the Queen’s player, as has been suggested.

WINTER, RICHARD. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, _c._ 1571 (_3 Library_, ix. 253).

WODERAM, RICHARD. Oxford’s, 1586–7 (?).

WOODFORD, THOMAS. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.

WOODS, JOHN. Holland, 1604.

WORTH, ELLIS. Anne’s, 1615–19; for his later career, cf. Murray, i. 198, 218. He is described as ‘gentleman’ in the register of St. Giles’s at the baptism of his daughter Jane on 19 July 1613, and as ‘player’ at that of his son Elizeus on 12 March 1629 (_Bodl._).

WYLKYNSON, JOHN. A London ‘coriour’, who maintained players in his house in 1549 (cf. App. D, No. ii).

YOUNG, JOHN. Queen Jane’s, >1537; Interluders, 1539–53 (?). He seems to have been still alive in 1569–70.

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