The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 2

ABYNGDON, HENRY. Master of Chapel, 1455–78.

ADAMS, JOHN. Sussex’s, 1576; Queen’s, 1583, 1588. He possibly played the clown Adam in A Looking Glass and Oberon in James IV.. It would hardly be justifiable to conjecture that he lived to join Hunsdon’s and play Adam in A. Y. L.

ALDERSON, WILLIAM. Chapel, 1509–13.

ALLEYN, EDWARD, was born on 1 September 1566 in the parish of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate.[916] His father was Edward Alleyn of Willen, Bucks, Innholder and porter to the Queen, who died in 1570; his mother, Margaret Townley, for whom he claimed a descent from the Townleys of Lancashire which modern genealogists hesitate to credit, re-married with one John Browne, a haberdasher, between whom and other Brownes who appear in theatrical annals no connexion can be proved. Edward Alleyn is said by Fuller in his Worthies to have been ‘bred a stage player’. In formal deeds he is generally described as ‘yeoman’ or ‘gentleman’, and once, in 1595, as ‘musician’.[917] In January 1583 he was one of Worcester’s players; at some later date he joined the Admiral’s men, and had as ‘fellow’ his brother John, with whom during 1589–91 he was associated in purchases of apparel. On 22 October 1592 he married Joan Woodward, step-daughter of Philip Henslowe, with whom he appears ever after in the closest business relations. A Dulwich tradition that he was already a widower probably rests on a mention of ‘Mistris Allene’ in an undated letter about a German tour by Richard Jones, which is commonly assigned to February 1592, but is more probably of later date.[918] Alleyn is specifically described as the Admiral’s servant in the Privy Council letter of assistance to Strange’s men (q.v.), with whom he travelled during the plague of 1593. Some of the letters passing between him and his wife and father-in-law during this tour are preserved at Dulwich, and are full of interesting domestic details about his white waistcoat and his orange tawny woollen stockings, the pasturing of his horse, his spinach bed, and the furnishing of his house.[919] His ‘tenants’ are mentioned and his ‘sister Phillipes & her husband’. He had by this time a high reputation as an actor, as witnessed by Nashe in his Pierce Penilesse of 1592, where he classes him with Tarlton, Knell, and Bentley, and says, ‘Not Roscius nor Aesope, those admyred tragedians that haue liued euer since before Christ was borne, could euer performe more in action than famous Ned Allen’; and in his Strange Newes of the same year, where he says of Edmund Spenser that ‘his very name (as that of Ned Allen on the common stage) was able to make an ill matter good’.[920] An undated letter at Dulwich, written to him by an admirer who signs himself W. P., offers a wager in which ‘Peele’s credit’ was also in some way concerned, and in which Alleyn was to have the choice of any one of Bentley’s or Knell’s plays, and promises that, even if he loses, ‘we must and will saie Ned Allen still’.[921] In 1594 The Knack to know a Knave is ascribed, quite exceptionally, on its title-page, not to the servants of a particular lord, but to ‘Ed. Allen and his Companie’. From 1594 to 1597 Alleyn was one of the Admiral’s men (q.v.) at the Rose. He then ‘leafte playnge’, but resumed at the request of the Queen, although apparently without becoming a full sharer of the company, when the Fortune (q.v.), which he had built for them, was opened in the autumn of 1600. He became a servant of Prince Henry with the rest of his fellows in 1604, and at the coronation procession on 15 March appeared as the Genius of the City and delivered a ‘gratulatory speech’ to James ‘with excellent action and a well-tun’de, audible voyce’.[922] Further testimonies to his talent are rendered by John Weever;[923] by Ben Jonson, Epigram lxxxix (1616), who equals him to Aesop and Roscius, and himself to Cicero, who praised them; by Heywood, who says, ‘Among so many dead let me not forget one yet alive, in his time the most worthy, famous Maister Edward Allen’;[924] and by Fuller, who says, ‘He was the Roscius of our age, so acting to the life that he made any part (especially a majestic one) to become him.’[925] Of his parts are recorded Faustus,[926] Tamburlaine, Barabas in The Jew of Malta,[927] and Cutlack in a play of that name revived by the Admiral’s men in 1594 and now lost,[928] while that of Orlando in Greene’s Orlando Furioso is amongst the papers at Dulwich.[929] Heywood, writing about 1608, speaks of Alleyn’s playing in the past. He probably retired finally soon after the beginning of the new reign. In 1605 he valued his ‘share of aparell’ at £100; but his name is not in the patent to the Prince’s men of 30 April 1606, although as late as 1611 he still retained his personal rank as servant to the prince. It is difficult to give much credit to the legend that his withdrawal was due to remorse, or, as one version has it, to an apparition of the devil when he was playing Faustus.[930] Certainly he continued to hold an interest in the Fortune, and conceivably in the Red Bull (q.v.) also. And certainly remorse did not prevent him from continuing to exercise the functions of Master of the Game of Paris Garden, a post which he acquired jointly with Henslowe in 1604, having already been interested in the Bear-garden itself since 1594. At this after it became the Hope (q.v.) he was still about 1617 entertaining players. But the time of his retirement synchronizes with the first beginnings of his foundation of a school and hospital by the name of the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich. By 1605 he was a wealthy man, with income from substantial investments in leasehold property as well as the profits from his enterprises, and on 25 October he took the first step in the purchase of the manor of Dulwich, which was completed by 1614 at a total cost of nearly £10,000. Here about 1613 he made his residence, moving from Southwark, where he had been churchwarden of St. Saviour’s in 1610. In 1613 also he began the building of the college, which was opened in 1617. Alleyn himself acted as manager and was in a position to spend upon the college and his own household some £1,700 a year. The endowment of the college included, besides house property in London, the freehold of the Fortune. Henslowe had died in January 1616 and his widow in the following year, and his papers passed to Alleyn and remain at Dulwich. Here, too, is Alleyn’s own diary for 1617–22, and this and his correspondence show him as a friend of persons of honour, and the patron of writers and the members of his own former profession. Alleyn’s wife Joan died on 28 June 1623 and on the following 3 December he married Constance, daughter of John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, settling on her £1,500. A letter of 23 July 1624 indicates that he was then desirous of obtaining ‘sum further dignetie’. He died on 25 November 1626.

ALLEYN, JOHN. Admiral’s, 1589–91. Edward Alleyn had an elder brother John, who was born in 1556–7, and is described as servant to Lord Sheffield and an Innholder in 1580, and as servant to the Lord Admiral in 1589. He died about May 1596, being then of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and left a widow Margaret and son John. Presumably he was the Admiral’s player. But there was also an Allen family of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, one of whom, John, was a player. Here a John was baptized on 17 October 1570, a Lowin, son of John, baptized on 15 December 1588, a Joan buried on 13 May 1593, and a John on 18 May 1593. On 26 July 1596 is this curious baptismal entry: ‘Bennett, reputed daughter of J^no Allen, which J^no went with S^r Fr. Drake to the Indians in which time the child was got by a stage-player.’ Finally, on 18 October 1597, ‘Jone uxor Joh^is Allen player was buried with a still born child’ (H. ii. 239; Bodl.)

ALLEYN, RICHARD. Queen’s, (?) 1594; Admiral’s, 1597–1600. His daughters Anna and Elizabeth were baptized at St. Saviour’s, Southwark, on 13 May 1599 and 17 May 1601 respectively. Here he is traceable in the token-books during 1583–1601, and was buried on 18 November 1601, leaving a widow (Rendle, Bankside, xxvi; H. ii. 239; Bodl.).

ALLEYN (ALLEN), RICHARD. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613.

ANDREWE, HENRY. Chapel, 1509.

ANDREWES, RICHARD. Worcester’s, 1583.

ANDROWES, GEORGE. Whitefriars lessee, 1608.

APILEUTTER, CHRISTOPHER. Germany, 1615.

ARCHER, RICHARD. Vide Arkinstall.

ARCHER? (ARZSCHAR, ERTZER), ROBERT. Germany, 1608–16.

ARKINSTALL, JOHN. A common player of interludes under licence, with Richard Archer, Barker, and Anthony Ward as his fellows. He was at Hastings on 25 March 1603, and on 30 March laid an information of the proclamation of Lord Beauchamp as king by Lord Southampton (Hist. MSS. xii. 4. 126).

ARMIN, ROBERT, is said to have been apprentice to a goldsmith in Lombard Street, and to have been encouraged as a ‘wag’ by Tarlton (ob. 1588), who prophesied that he should ‘enjoy my clownes sute after me’. He ‘used to’ Tarlton’s plays, and in time became himself a player ‘and at this houre performes the same, where, at the Globe on the Banks side men may see him’.[931] But his earliest reputation was as a writer. He wrote a preface to A Brief Resolution of the Right Religion (1590) and probably other things now unknown, for he is referred to as a son of Elderton in Nashe’s Foure Letters Confuted of 1592 (Works, i. 280). R. A. wrote verses to Robert Tofte’s Alba (1598), and R. A. compiled England’s Parnassus (1600); the latter is generally taken to be Robert Allot. The first dramatic company in which Armin can be traced is Lord Chandos’s men. In an epistle to Mary, widow of William Lord Chandos (1594–1602) prefixed to his kinsman Gilbert Dugdale’s True Discourse of the Practises of Elizabeth Caldwell, &c. (1604), he says, ‘Your good honor knowes Pinck’s poor heart, who in all my services to your late deceased kind lord, never savoured of flatterie or fixion.’ In his Foole upon Foole, or Six Sortes of Sottes (1600) he tells an incident which took place at Pershore in Worcestershire, during a tour of ‘the Lord Shandoyes players’, at which he was himself present, not improbably playing the clown ‘Grumball’.[932] By 1599, however, he had probably joined the Chamberlain’s men, for in the first edition of Foole upon Foole he describes himself as ‘Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe’. In a later edition of 1605 this becomes ‘Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe’. Both issues are anonymous, but Armin put his name to an enlargement entitled A Nest of Ninnies (1608).[933] ‘Clunnyco de Curtanio Snuffe’ is also on the title-page of Quips upon Questions (1600), which must therefore be by Armin and not by J. Singer, whose autograph Collier (Bibl. Cat. ii. 203) said that he found on a copy. This is a book of quatrains on stage ‘themes’ (cf. ch. xviii). It was written, as a reference to 28 December as on a Friday shows, in 1599. The author serves a master at Hackney (A ij). Later editions of 1601 and 1602 are said to have been in the Harley collection, and there is a reprint by F. Ouvry (1875). His name is in the 1603 licence for the King’s men and in the Coronation list of 1604. In 1605 Augustine Phillips left him 20s. as his ‘fellow’. Collier’s statement that in the same year he and Kempe (q.v.) were in trouble for libelling aldermen cannot be verified. He is a King’s man on the title-page of his Two Maids of Moreclacke (1609), produced by the King’s Revels, and on the title-page and in the S. R. entry on 6 February 1609 of his Phantasma, the Italian Tailor and his Boy. This is a translation from Straparola and is dedicated to Lord and Lady Haddington. In it he claims to have been ‘writ down an ass in his time’ and refers to ‘his constableship’, from which it is inferred that he played Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing. Fleay, L. of S. 300, finds a pun on ‘armine’ (= wretch) in London Prodigal (c. 1603), v. i. 179, and suggests that Armin played Matthew Flowerdale. There is a clown Robin in Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), and a clown Grumball in If it be not Good (1610–12), but this was a play of Anne’s men. He is in the actor-list of Jonson’s Alchemist (1610). An epigram on ‘honest gamesome Robert Armin’ is in John Davies of Hereford’s Scourge of Folly (S.R. 8 October 1610). He is not in the actor-list of Jonson’s Catiline (1611), nor has any later notice of him been found. That Armin is the R. A. whose play The Valiant Welshman was published in 1615 is only a conjecture. He is in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare’s plays. It is possible that a woodcut on the title-page of the Two Maids (q.v.) gives his portrait.

ARTHUR, THOMAS. Interluders, 1528.

ATTEWELL (OTTEWELL, OTWELL), GEORGE. Strange’s, 1591; Queen’s, (?) 1595. ‘M^r Otwell’ lived in St. Saviour’s Close in 1599. He is perhaps more likely than the following to be the author or singer of ‘M^r Attowel’s Jigge: betweene Francis, a Gentleman; Richard, a farmer; and their wives’, printed in A. Clark, Shirburn Ballads, lxi (H. ii. 240; B. 147).

ATTWELL (OTTEWELL), HUGH. Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1613; Charles’s, 1616–21; ob. 25 September 1621.

AUGUSTEN (AGUSTEN), WILLIAM. A ‘player’, from whom Henslowe bought his ‘boy’ Bristow in 1597 (H. ii. 240).

AYNSWORTH, JOHN. A ‘player’ buried at St. Leonard’s 28 September 1581 (B. 153).

BAKER, HARRY. Performer of Vertumnus in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1567.

BANASTER, GILBERT. Master of Chapel, 1478–83 (?).

BARFIELD, ROGER. Anne’s, 1606. His d. Isabell was baptized at St. Giles’s on 2 January 1611, and his d. Susan buried there on 3 July 1614 (B. 157).

BARKER. Vide Arkinstall.

BARKSTED (BACKSTEAD), WILLIAM. King’s Revels (?), 1607; Revels, 1609; Lady Elizabeth’s, 1611, 1613; Charles’s, 1616; also a dramatist (cf. ch. xxiii) and a poet. His Poems, edited by A. B. Grosart as 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 30s. 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 10s. 8d. 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