[1018] Henslowe, i. 47, 63, 67, 'Rᵈ. of Bengemenes Johnsones share as ffoloweth'; 'Rᵈ. of Gabrell Spencer at severall tymes of his share in the gallereyes as foloweth'; 'A juste acownte of the money which I haue receued of Humfreye Jeaffes hallffe sheare ... as foloweth.... This some was payd backe agayne vnto the companey of my lord admeralles players ... & they shared yt amonste them'. In such cases Henslowe may merely have acted as agent of the company in securing the payment out of gallery money of sums due from incoming sharers.
[1019] Henslowe Papers, 18, 23, 86, 111, 123; cf. ch. xiii (Lady Elizabeth's).
[1020] Cf. p. 375.
[1021] Henslowe, ii. 19.
[1022] Henslowe Papers, 90, 93; cf. ch. xiii (Prince Charles's).
[1023] Henslowe Papers, 67, 70.
[1024] Henslowe, ii. 19.
[1025] Similar methods were employed by Henslowe's rival, Francis Langley, at the Swan (q.v.) in 1597. He provided apparel for a company, and was allowed for it out of their 'moytie of the gains for the seuerall standinges in the galleries of the said howse which belonged to them'. Having quarrelled with the company before he was completely reimbursed, he kept the apparel. He took individual bonds to play with him for three years, released some of the company from their bonds, and sued the rest, who could not play without their fellows, for breach of contract.
[1026] J. Hall, Virgedemiarum (1597), i. 3, appears to satirize performances by amateurs 'upon a hired stage'; cf. p. 361.
[1027] Similarly in Keysar v. Burbadge (1610) the pleadings of Robert Keysar grossly exaggerated the profits of the Blackfriars.
[1028] Cf. ch. vii.
[1029] Cf. App. B.
[1030] Variorum, iii. 266.
[1031] Lee, 315; cf. A. Thaler, Shakespeare's Income (S. P. xv. 82), who halves Lee's estimate.
[1032] In 1628 Sir Henry Herbert notes in his office-book (Variorum, iii. 176), 'The Kinges company with a general consent and alacritye [poor devils! E. K. C.] have given mee the benefitt of too dayes in the yeare, the one in summer, thother in winter, to bee taken out of the second daye of a revived playe, att my owne choyse. The housekeepers have likewyse given their shares, their dayly charge only deducted, which comes to some 2ˡ 5ˢ. this 25 May, 1628.' Herbert words it oddly, but the 'dayly charge' must be that of the sharers, not the housekeepers, who had none, and the estimate agrees fairly with that of 1635. Herbert took during 1628-33 sums of from £1 5s. to £6 7s., averaging £4 8s. 6d., out of five performances at the Globe, and £9 16s. to £17 10s., averaging £13 10s., from five performances at the Blackfriars. The gross takings averaged therefore £6 13s. 6d. at the Globe and £15 15s. at the Blackfriars. In 1633 Herbert compounded for a payment of £10 at Christmas and £10 at Midsummer. But in 1662 (Variorum, iii. 266) he included amongst the incomings of his office the profits of a summer's day and a winter's day at the Blackfriars, which he valued at £50 each.
[1033] Cf. p. 363 and ch. xiii (Admiral's).
[1034] Cf. W. W. Greg in T. L. S. (12 Feb. 1920) and his analysis of the Dulwich 'plots' (H. P. 152). Here also we find the tireman, gatherers, and attendants used as 'supers'.
[1035] Puttenham, i. 14, says that Roscius 'brought vp these vizards, which we see at this day vsed'. In The Longer Thou Livest, 1748, 1796, God's Judgement has 'a terrible visure' and Confusion 'an ill fauowred visure', and in All For Money, 389, 1440, 1462, Damnation, Judas, and Dives have vizards. But this is early evidence, and perhaps drawn from the private stage. Harington, Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596, An Anatomy, 5), speaks of 'an ill-favoured vizor, such as I have seen in stage plays, when they dance Machachinas', but this rather tells against the use by ordinary actors at that date.
[1036] Women only began to act regularly at the Restoration; cf. Ward, iii. 253. There had been occasional earlier examples; even in 1611 Coryat, Crudities, i. 386, says that at Venice 'I saw women acte, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hathe beene sometimes used in London'. The exceptions are, I think, such as prove the rule; private plays such as Hymen's Triumph, Venner's gulling show of England's Joy, the Italian tumblers of 1574, the virago Moll Frith at the Fortune (cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Dekker, Roaring Girl). On 22 Feb. 1583 Richard Madox 'went to the theater to see a scurvie play set out al by one virgin, which there proved a fyemarten without voice, so that we stayed not the matter' (Cotton MSS. App. xlvii, f. 6ᵛ; cf. S. P. Colonial, E. Indies, 221). As to the skill of the boys, cf. Ben Jonson on Richard Robinson in The Devil is an Ass, II. viii. 64.
[1037] Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 316.
[1038] Cf. ch. xvi (Swan).
[1039] Cf. ch. xiii (Admiral's).
[1040] Cf. ch. vii.
[1041] Cf. ch. xiii (Admiral's).
[1042] Cf. the account of Platter in 1599 (ch. xvi, introduction); also Donne, Satire, iv. 180 (ed. Muses' Library, ii. 196):
and Jonson, Underwoods, xxxii:
[1043] Cf. App. C, Nos. xxx, xlvi; Case Is Altered, ii. 4, 'Theatres! ay, and plays too, both tragedy and comedy, and set forth with as much state as can be imagined'; cf. Graves, 68.
[1044] Cf. chh. xx, xxi passim, and Henslowe Papers, 113.
[1045] Wegener, 135.
[1046] Henslowe Papers, 117, 'j lyone skin; j beares skyne ... j dragon in fostes [Faustus] j lyone; ij lyone heades; j great horse with his leages; j black dogge'. For brown paper monsters, cf. App. C, Nos. xxii, xxx, and for a controversy as to the use of live animals, ch. xx.
[1047] E. Hoe, IV. ii. 92, 'thy name shall be written upon conduits, and thy deeds plaid i' thy lifetime by the best companies of actors, and be call'd their get-peny'; Barth. Fair, V. i. 13 (of a 'motion'), 'the Gunpowder-plot, there was a get-peny! I haue presented that to an eighteene, or twenty pence audience, nine times in an afternoone'. Dekker, News from Hell (1606, Works, ii. 146), speaks of 'a Cobler of Poetrie called a play-patcher'.
[1048] Henslowe, ii. 115; cf. ch. x. By the end of Sir Henry Herbert's time the fee had been raised to £2; even for an old play he exacted £1 (Variorum, iii. 266).
[1049] C. IS A. I. i.
[1050] Henslowe, i. 113, 136 (Admiral's, 1599, 1601), 181 (Worcester's, 1602), 'for Mʳ. Mundaye & the reste of the poets at the playnge of Sʳ John Oldcastell the ferste tyme' [in margin, 'as a gefte']; 'John Daye ... after the playinge of the 2 part of Strowde'; 'Thomas Deckers ... over & above his price of his boocke called A Medysen for a Cvrste Wiffe'. These are exceptional disbursements. The Daborne-Henslowe correspondence of 1613-14 (Henslowe Papers, 71, 75, 76, 82) suggests a more regular practice: 'I pay you half my earnings in the play'; 'We will hav but twelv pownds and the overplus of the second day'; 'You shall hav the whole companies bonds to pay you the first day of my play being playd'; 'I desyr you should disburse but 12ˡ a play till they be playd'. Probably the actual day selected for the poet's benefit varied; thus the third day is suggested by Dekker's prologue to If It be not Good, the Devil is in It (1612), a Red Bull play:
Malone (Variorum, iii. 157) quotes later evidence for a variation of days, together with Davenant, The Play-house to be Let:
The actual term 'benefit' appears first in connexion with the interest of the Master of the Revels (cf. p. 370), not that of the poet. Nor do we know what exactly the 'overplus' assigned to the poet was calculated upon.
[1051] B. Fair, V. iii. 30, 'What, doe you not know the Author, fellow Filcher? you must take no money of him; he must come in gratis: Mʳ. Littlewit is a voluntary; he is the Author'.
[1052] Henslowe, i. 83, 100, 101, 107, 119 (Admiral's, 1598-1600), 'to disecharge Mʳ. Dicker owt of the cownter in the Powltrey'; 'Harey Chettell to paye his charges in the Marshallsey'; 'to descarge Thomas Dickers frome the areaste of my lord chamberlens men'; 'to descarge Harey Chettell of his areste from Ingrome'; 'Wᵐ Harton to releace hime owt of the Clyncke'; also Henslowe, i. 103, 165 (Admiral's, 1599, 1602), 'Harey Porter ... gaue me his faythfulle promysse that I shold haue alle the boockes which he writte ether him sellfe or with any other'; 'at the sealleynge of H. Chettells band to writte for them'.
[1053] Henslowe Papers, 67; cf. ch. xiii (Lady Elizabeth's).
[1054] Henslowe, ii. 20.
[1055] Lodge, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589):
[1056] The pun on 'comoedians' and 'camoelions' had been made by 'certayne gentlemen' against the Duttons as early as 1580; cf. ch. xiii (Warwick's). It is still in use in Ratseis Ghost (1605); cf. p. 340, n. 2.
[1057] The Aesopic allusion is complicated by another to the story in Macrobius, Saturnalia, ii. 4, 30, perhaps based on Martial, xiv. 73, of the cobbler who tried to teach a crow to say 'Ave Caesar' in flattery of Augustus after the battle of Actium; cf. Mr. McKerrow's note to Nashe's Pierce Penilesse (Works, iv. 105). Both ideas are suggested in Nashe's Menaphon preface, and Greene, in Francescos Fortunes (App. C, No. xliii), combines them with a third story, also due, perhaps through Cornelius Agrippa (App. C, No. xii), to Macrobius (Sat. III. xiv. 12), of a debate on the respective powers of orator and actor between Cicero and Roscius, into an obviously apocryphal jest: 'Cicero. Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glory of others feathers? Of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler hath taught thee to say Aue Caesar, disdain not thy tutor, because thou pratest in a kings chamber.' Fleay, i. 258, chooses to identify the cobbler with Marlowe and Roscius with Robert Wilson, and (being ignorant of Macrobius) cites the use of the phrase 'Ave Caesar' in Edward III, I. i. 164, which he ascribes to Marlowe, as evidence. Such equations are always hazardous. The point of the passage is in the indebtedness of the players as a body to the poets as a body. If any individual actor were designated as Roscius about 1590, it would be more likely to be Alleyn than another; the compliment to him is not unusual later (cf. ch. xv). But he had hardly a monopoly of the name; and in the present case there is really no reason to suppose that Greene had any individual in mind, other than the historical Roscius. The name is given to Ostler (q.v.) in 1611, and was in common generic use for a player; cf. e.g. Marston, Satires (1598), ii. 42:
and Scourge of Villainy (1598), xi. 40:
Similarly Fleay, ii. 279, has no real ground for supposing that the player in the Groatsworth of Wit is Wilson in particular. If, again, any individual is meant, it might just as well be James Burbage. Throughout Fleay is inclined to exaggerate the extent of the theatrical references in the pamphlets of Greene and Nashe. But R. Simpson is much worse in his hopelessly uncritical Introduction to Faire Em in The School of Shakspere, ii. 339, which is an attempt to trace a vendetta against the actors and especially Shakespeare as a main motive in Greene's writing from 1584 onwards. As far as I can see, Greene's attacks on the stage are limited to the three pamphlets named in the text, and Nashe's to the Menaphon preface. It is doubtful whether Greene was writing for the stage at all before about 1590; in any case it may be assumed that neither writer was normally engaged in tilting against his paymasters.
[1058] Cuthbert Conny-Catcher, The Defence of Conny-Catching (1592, Greene, Works, xi. 75), 'What if I should prove you a Conny-Catcher, Maister R. G. would it not make you blush at the matter?... Aske the Queens Players, if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty Nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same Play to the Lord Admirals men for as much more. Was not this plaine Conny-Catching, Maister R. G.?... But I hear, when this was objected, you made this excuse; that there was no more faith to be held with players than with them that valued faith at the price of a feather; for as they were comedians to act, so the actions of their lives were Camelion-like; that they were uncertain, variable, time-pleasers, men that measured honesty by profit, and that regarded their authors not by desert, but by necessity of time.'
[1059] Dekker, Jests to Make you Merrie (1607, Works, ii. 303, 352), 'As proud as a player that feedes on the fruité of diuine poetry (as swine on acorns).... O you that are the Poets of these sinfull times, ouer whome the Players haue now got the vpper hand, by making fooles of the poore country people, in driuing them like flockes of geese to sit cackling in an old barne: and to swallow downe those playes for new which here euery punck and her squire (like the interpreter and his poppet) can rand out by heart they are so stale, and therefore so stincking; I know the Lady Pecunia and you come very hardly together, & therefore trouble not you'; cf. his references to 'strowlers' in note to p. 332. Another seventeenth-century critic is H[enry] P[arrot], Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks (1613), Epig. 131, Theatrum Licentia:
[1060] Mediaeval Stage, ii. 194, 214. For Elizabethan school-plays at Shrewsbury, cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Ashton. Murray, ii. 204, 216, 243, 324, 364, 382, records plays by schoolboys or other children at Bath (1602), Bristol (1594), Coventry (1601-2), Ludlow (1562, 1575-6), Norwich (1564-5), Plymouth (Totnes boys, 1564-74).
[1061] Poetaster, III. iv. 344, 'O, it will get vs a huge deale of money, Captaine, and wee haue need on't; for this winter ha's made vs all poorer, then so many staru'd snakes: No bodie comes at vs; not a gentleman, nor a ——.'
[1062] Hamlet, II. ii. 339. This is the Folio text. The Second Quarto omits all but the first ten lines, but that there was some reference to the children in the original version of the play, the date of which may be 1601, is shown by the First Quarto text:
[1063] The main interest of the 'war of the theatres', or 'Poetomachia' as Dekker, Satiromastix, Epist. 10, calls it, is for literature and biography, rather than for stage-history. I refer to it under the plays concerned in chh. xxiii, xxiv, and can only add a brief summary here. The treatment of R. A. Small, The Stage Quarrel (1899), is excellent, and may be supplemented by H. C. Hart's papers, Gabriel Harvey, Marston and Ben Jonson (9 N. Q. xi. 201, 281, 343, 501; xii. 161, 263, 342, 403, 482) and On Carlo Buffone (10 N. Q. i. 381), while the less critical view, partly derived from Fleay, of J. H. Penniman, The War of the Theatres (1897), is revised in his edition of Poetaster and Satiromastix. The protagonists are Jonson and Marston, with whom became allied Dekker. Daniel and many others, whose names have been brought under discussion, do not seem to have been really concerned. Jonson himself tells us, in the Apologetical Dialogue, probably written late in 1601, to Poetaster that 'three yeeres, They did provoke me with their petulant stiles On every stage'. This takes us to 1599, up to which year there is no just ground for suggesting any conflict between Jonson and Marston. Jonson may then have taken offence at Marston's portrait of him, intended to be complimentary, as Chrisoganus in Histriomastix. In the same year he criticized Marston's style in E. M. O. In 1600 Marston satirized Jonson as Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment, and in 1601 as Lampatho Doria in What You Will. Jonson in turn brought Marston into Poetaster (1601) as Crispinus, and added Dekker as Demetrius. Dekker retorted a month or two later with his caricature of Jonson as Horace in Satiromastix. Some unascertained part in the 'purge' given to Jonson is ascribed in 3 Parnassus (1601) to Shakespeare. Jonson and Marston seem to have been reconciled by 1603; but the dispute had not been merely a paper one, for Jonson, Conversations, 11, 20, claims that he 'beat Marston, and took his pistol from him'.
[1064] Small, 67, has an excellent analysis of Histriomastix. He dates it in 1596, but not convincingly. It might just as well be 1588-90. The text is in R. Simpson, The School of Shakespeare, ii. 1, and needs re-editing. Moreover, Simpson thought that Posthaste was Shakespeare. The actor-scenes are i. 112-62; ii. 70-147, 188-344; iii. 179-243, 265-78; iv. 159-201; v. 61-102, 238-43; vi. 187-240. Of these I think that ii. 247-80; iii. 179-217, 265-78 may belong to the Marstonian revision.
[1065] Cf. Hamlet, II. ii. 415, 'The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited'.
[1066] Poetaster, III. iv; IV. iv; V. iii. 108-38.
[1067] Can the Aesop episode be a reminiscence of the part played by Augustine Phillips in the Essex innovation? Cf. vol. ii, p. 205.
[1068] 2 Return from Parnassus, iv. 3; v. 1.
[1069] In certain other plays which have actors amongst their dramatis personae (e.g. Midsummer-Night's Dream and Middleton's Mayor of Queenborough) the point is reversed, and it is the regular companies who satirize provincial companies or amateurs.
[1070] Thus in 1618 the Mayor of Exeter complained of a company travelling under Daniel's patent for the Children of Bristol (q.v.) that, though the patent was for children, the company consisted of men, with only five youths amongst them.
[1071] Cf. ch. xii, introduction.
[1072] Cf. App. C, No. lviii.
[1073] Murray, ii. 235, 400, 410.
[1074] Ibid. 199, 231, 264, 312, 341, 384, &c.
[1075] The Order was appended to A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, For the appeasing and quietting of all unlawfull Tumults and Insurrections in the severall Counties of England, and Dominion of Wales (1642). The whole pamphlet is facsimiled in J. Knight's edition of J. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1886).
[1076] Hazlitt, E. D. S. 65.
[1077] Wright, Historia Histrionica, 409, 411.