This doubleness also characterizes the Stanley Earls of Derby, who were the Heskeths’ own patrons. The first earl won his title for supporting Richmond (Henry VII) at the Battle of Bosworth Field – events depicted by Shakespeare in the closing scenes of Richard III. Thereafter the family were staunch supporters of the Tudor regime, though successive earls were suspected of Catholic sympathies. This plays into the last link in the Hoghton Will theory of Shakespeare’s move to London. Hesketh died in 1588. Then if not before it has been supposed that “William Shakshafte” passed into the service of the Stanleys, and specifically of the enigmatic Ferdinando, Lord Strange heir to the earldom.
They had long welcomed traveling players at their three great estates in south Lancashire, Lathom House, New Park, and Knowsley Hall. We can catch a glimpse of the splendor in which they lived from the description of an elaborately carved hall screen at Lathom House, done by one Parker and celebrated in a poem by Thomas Chaloner. It depicted landscape, together with the astronomical and astrological workings of the heavens, showing:
how and when the moon in every month doth change,
And how she doth her light augment; and how she fades again,
And how she quarterly doth stand. Here may’st thou see full plain
The course of all the planets brought arising at the east,
By prim’ mobile, being led to sit again at west:
A deep design, it represents a practice good also,
That with his pains on earth the manor of the heavens doth show,
And how therewith the dozen signs are led and brought about,
A needful thing in such a place and to effect no doubt,
To show thee when the day is long and how it shortens night …19
It stood as both astrological chart and perpetual calendar, “amount[ing] to a theatrum mundi or depiction of the cosmos” (Manley and MacLean, 2014, 268). This was obviously by several orders of magnitude grander even than the fine hall screen at Rufford Old Hall, which gives some measure of the Stanleys, only one step below royalty (see p. 56). Lawrence Manley describes it as a possible “microcosmic backdrop” to playing at Lathom. I have argued earlier that it would be against necessary seating protocol for hall screens to act as “backdrops” to theatrical performances (p. 24). But it would certainly be a significant presence in a room doubtless also hung with fine tapestries, locating plays and players within their widest social and political contexts.
The Stanleys also had a long tradition of patronizing players, not just locally but in troupes which traveled the country extensively (MacLean, 2004). As mentioned when we considered Stratford, both the fourth earl and his son had troupes that were received at court in the early 1580s, though Strange’s troupe at that time seem to have been primarily acrobats; their court visits in late 1581 and early 1583, for example, are recorded as “activities” rather than play‐performances. But by the Revels season of 1591/2 we find them putting on no less than six plays there, an unprecedented number by a single company in a season; even the Queen’s Men (who that year only appeared once) had never performed more than five times.
Quite how the company managed this transformation into the highest league remains uncertain, though Lawrence Manley and Sally‐Beth MacLean’s Lord Strange’s Men and their Plays (2014) puts everything in much clearer perspective than it has been before. The following details, however, seem pertinent. The Earl of Leicester’s Men, already fractured in 1586 when Leicester took a troupe with him on his expedition to fight Spain in the Low Countries, was finally dissolved when he died in 1588. Some of his former players became Strange’s Men, including the great clown, Will Kemp. By November 1589 the company can be traced playing in London. The Lord Mayor attempted to close the playhouses and summoned the two troupes he could trace, the Lord Admiral’s and Strange’s. As he reported to Lord Burghley and the Privy Council: “The Lord Admiral’s players very dutifully obeyed, but the others in very contemptuous manner departing from me, went to the Cross Keys [an inn] and played that afternoon, to the great offence of the better sort that knew they were prohibited by order from your Lordship” (ES, 4: 305). Like James Burbage on an earlier occasion (see p. 31), players in the service of a great aristocrat stood on that dignity to resist “lesser” authorities. In this instance Lord Mayor Harte, who was acting on Privy Council instructions, imprisoned some of them for their contempt.
By this time the company seems to have lost the services of John Symons, their leader when their forte was acrobatics. In 1590 they apparently formed an association of sorts with the Admiral’s Men, then working with James Burbage at the Theatre; they put on a joint play and activities at court that December.20 But even by November 1590 there were tensions between Burbage and the Admiral’s Men, some of whom became involved in a dispute between him and Margaret Brayne, the widow of his former partner, who was claiming a moiety (share) in the profits of the Theatre. John Alleyn (Edward’s elder brother, also a player) later deposed that he “found there … Richard Burbage, the youngest son of the said James Burbage there, with a broom staff in his hand, of whom when this deponent asked what stir there was, he answered in laughing phrase how they came for a moiety. But quod he (holding up the said broom’s staff) I have, I think, delivered him a moiety with this and sent them packing” (ES, 2: 307). The man with the broom staff was shortly to become one of Shakespeare’s closest colleagues and one of the great actors of the era. When Alleyn threatened to “complain to their lord and master, the Lord Admiral [Howard]” about their behavior, the irascible James Burbage “in a rage” declared “by a great oath that he cared not for the three of the best lords of them all.”21
By February 1592, and probably somewhat earlier, Edward Alleyn had joined Strange’s Men (while anomalously remaining in the service of the Lord Admiral), possibly bringing a few of his fellow Admiral’s Men with him. And they had transferred to Henslowe’s Rose, on the Bankside (p. 32). Apparently in anticipation of this Henslowe spent over £100 rebuilding the Rose’s stage and tiring house, built only five years earlier, installing for example a permanent roof over the stage for the first time – which would not only keep the stage and the actors dry but might allow for relatively sophisticated “descent” scenes (J. Greenfield, 2007; Bowsher 2007). In October 1592 Alleyn married Henslowe’s stepdaughter, Joan.
It seems indisputable that what finally transformed Strange’s Men into the leading company of its day in 1591/2 was Alleyn’s star power. In Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil (1592) Thomas Nashe praised him extravagantly: “Not Roscius nor Aesop, those admired tragedians that have lived ever since before Christ was born, could ever perform more in action than famous Ned Allen” (F4v). But something else about this company was distinctive. Wherever exactly they played immediately after the falling out with Burbage they must have done so long enough and with a sufficiently varied repertoire to convince Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, that they warranted six slots on the Revels calendar of 1591/92 and a further three (again the highest number) the following year. What we can say incontrovertibly is that between February 19 and June 22, 1592 they performed the first fully recorded London season, playing continuously at the Rose; we know this – with the names of all the plays they performed, and Henslowe’s share of the takings – because of Henslowe’s so‐called Diary (see p. 13ff).
Prior to this, to the best of our knowledge, no company had attempted to set up more‐or‐less permanent residence in London. Companies had visited London as part of their touring circuit, hiring amphitheaters like the Theatre and the Rose, or (in winter) inns within the city for a time, probably exhausting their limited repertoire; but then moving on. There must have been some calculation on the part of Alleyn and Henslowe, in conjunction with the senior sharers in Strange’s Men that the time was ripe – the population of London was now around 200,000 – for a settled operation there. Attempts to identify the personnel of the company, and to estimate its size, are bedeviled by the contested status of two “plots” of plays that may have belonged to them, those of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins, and The Dead Men’s Fortune, which name quite a few players (see p. 205–6 and Kathman, 2004a). But we can be certain of the core personnel as of May 6, 1593, since the Privy Council gave them a special licence to tour during the time of plague, naming “Edward Alleyn, servant to the right honourable the Lord High Admiral, William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips and George Bryan, being one company, servants to our very good the lord the Lord Strange” (ES, 2: 123). Leaving aside Alleyn, all the others named were to be founder‐members with Shakespeare of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594/5.
All this strictly tells us is that Shakespeare was not one of the sharers of the company, the senior personnel who normally put capital into the enterprise and shared in the profits (see p. 140). He might have been a hired man, acting as required for a weekly wage. And/or he may simply have been employed to write for them. Among the plays which Henslowe lists in that first season is “harey the vi,” which was probably 1 Henry VI.22 Even as Nashe was praising Alleyn he was also deeply struck by this play: “How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to think that after two hundred year in the tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed by the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding” (Pierce Penniless, F3r). This was one of twenty‐seven plays that Strange’s Men staged in the 105 days of that first recorded season, a portent of one of the most striking differences between London playing and what had been the practice of traveling companies. As we saw, the Simpsons had precisely four plays that they were ready to perform (though three of them were surprisingly new). But even the grander companies would hardly have needed twenty‐seven plays in repertoire as they toured to be able to offer their customers variety. They could probably have made do with half as many, and there would be relatively little pressure to renew them. But in London there was a constant need for novelty to keep a limited pool of customers coming back for more. That was an essential precondition of the kind of career Shakespeare was to have from now on.
“Harey the vi” was certainly one of the hits of that early 1592 season. It is first recorded on March 3, marked a “ne,” one of Henslowe’s enigmatic annotations which usually seems to mean that it was a new play that day or at least a revised and relicensed one; companies charged novelty‐seeking audiences more, usually double, for such first performances. Henslowe also recorded takings of 76s. 8d. (£3 16s. 8d.).23 This was not the full income for the day but reflected Henslowe’s own proportion of the take, his income for allowing the actors to use his theatre (Henslowe, xxxii). We are not certain about his arrangement with Strange’s Men, but it would be typical if his share derived from takings in the galleries, the tiered, covered sections around the inner wall of the Rose, where customers paid more for the luxury of shelter and seating (see p. 93). Whatever precisely was the case, this was a healthy return for the new play.
It was staged again on March 7 (60s.); March 11 (47s. 6d.); March 16 (31s. 6d.); March 28 (68s.); April 5 (41s.); Apri l 13 (26s.); April 21 (33s.); May 4 (56s.); May 7 (22s.); May 14 (50s.); May 19 (30s.); May 25 (24s.); June 12 (32s,); June 19 (31s.). Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta – not, apparently, new but a famous role for Alleyn – actually did better in the run overall, but I Henry VI generated the second best returns. There were three other “ne” plays in this season, Titus and Vespacia (or Vespasian), The Tanner of Denmark, and A Knack to Know a Knave24. All three started with takings over 60s. but, though the other two settled into the repertory well enough, The Tanner of Denmark never recurs again in Henslowe’s accounts. Our best guess for an explanation would have to be very negative audience response to the first performance. In a business where the margins were probably always tight and interruption by the plague was a constant threat, failure had to mean failure.25
Plague was certainly part of the undoing of Strange’s Men, but the loss of their patron was the final blow. The Privy Council ordered all London playing to stop on June 23, 1592 because of the level of plague deaths. The company took to the road by July 13 and were still traveling on December 19. They were back at the Rose for a very brief season, from December 29 to the end of January 1593. But that is their final appearance in Henslowe’s Diary (19–20). The plague set in again with a vengeance and scarcely remitted until the middle of 1594. They seem to have hung on as long as they could in London, until need drove them back on the road, under the special Privy Council licence quoted above. Among various letters that have survived from this period, between members of the Henslowe/Alleyn family, one from Edward Alleyn to his wife, Joan, gives some sense both of the terror of the plague and of the privations of touring:
Emmanuel
My good sweet mouse, I commend me heartily to you, and to my father, my mother and my sister Bess, hoping in God though the sickness be round about you yet by his mercy it may escape your house. Which by the grace of God it shall therefore use this course: keep your house fair and clean, which I know you will, and every evening throw water before your door and in your backside, and have in your windows good store of rue and herb of grace, and withall the grace of God which must be obtained by prayers. And so doing no doubt but the lord will mercifully defend you.
Now, good mouse, I have no news to send you but this that we have all our health, for which the Lord be praised. I received your letter at Bristol by Richard Cowley [an actor], for which I thank you. I have sent you this bearer, Thomas Pope’s kinsman, my white waistcoat, because it is a trouble to me to carry it; receive it with this letter. And lay it up for me till I come. If you send any more letters, send to me by the carriers of Shrewsbury or to Westchester or to York to be kept till my Lord Strange’s players come. And this sweet heart with my hearty commendations to all our friends I cease.
From Bristol this Wednesday after St James his day, being ready to begin the play of Harry of Cornwall. Mouse, do my hearty commendations to Master Griggs [the carpenter who built the Rose and refurbished it in 1592], his wife and all his household, and to my sister Phillips.
Your loving husband, E. Alleyn
Mouse, you send me no news of any things you should send of your domestical matters, such things as happens at home, as how your distilled water proves, or this or that or anything what you will.
[vertically in margin] And Jug, I pray you let my orange tawny stockings of woolen be dyed a very good black, against I come home to wear in the winter. You sent me not word of my garden, but next time you will. But remember this in any case: that all that bed which was parsley, in the month of September you sow it with spinach, for then is the time. I would do it myself but will not come home till Allholland tide [All Saints’ Day, November 1]. And so sweet mouse farewell, and brook our long journey with patience.
[addressed] This to be delivered to Mr Henslowe, one of the grooms of Her Majesty’s Chamber, dwelling on the Bankside, right over against the Clink [a prison].
(Henslowe, 276–7)
It tells us something that this Bristol performance appears in no official city record. Those records, as we have seen, only record payment for the “Mayor’s play” but no such record for Strange’s Men appears in this period. Possibly that formality was sometimes overlooked, yet some commercial performances allowed. It would indeed have been a long journey, from Bristol, up the Welsh marches and on to York. But the record shows that they in fact turned to Bath before heading all the way to Norwich on the east coast, and then the usually lucrative east Midland centers of Coventy and Leicester. Possibly the change of plan was linked with a change in status of their patron: on September 25 Lord Strange succeeded his father as Earl of Derby, and henceforth his players were Derby’s Men. But this only lasted until April 16, 1594, when the new earl in turn died, amid rumors of poison (Kathman, 2004c). A troupe of the same name toured under the patronage of his brother, the sixth earl, but by then they had lost all their key personnel and their access to court.
Strange’s Men have the unique distinction of being the first known truly London‐based company and the presence of what at least seems to be 1 Henry VI in their repertoire associates Shakespeare with them. The title page of Titus Andronicus, as we have seen, also suggests a link with them (see p. 37, Note 14). But nothing else strictly does, though Shakespeare’s depiction of the Stanleys in his history plays and the use of Lord Strange’s unusual name, Ferdinand, for the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost fuel speculation (Manley and MacLean, 2014, 280–320). Shakespeare’s name appears in none of the “plots” possibly associated with the company, nor in the Alleyn–Henslowe correspondence, nor in their special traveling licence. So possibly he was just a hired man, or simply a playwright who wrote for a fee. Nevertheless, as Terence G. Schoone‐Jongen observes, “The belief that Shakespeare performed with Strange’s [Men] is probably the most popular” of all the theories about Shakespeare’s early career (2008, 103). But none of this requires that he should have been part of Strange’s Men before they settled in London.
Box 2.2 A Postscript to Strange’s Men: Prescot
Given the circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare was associated with Strange’s Men in the early 1590s, whether as a performer, playwright, or both, we should at least consider the possibility that he accompanied them to the little‐known but remarkable Prescot playhouse in what was then Lancashire (now Merseyside). The bare facts of this shadowy enterprise are as follows: It is first mentioned around 1603 by the vicar of Prescot, Thomas Meade, who noted that 2s. 6d. was owing to Prescot Grammar School for “the play house builded upon the wast by Mr Richard Harrington” (George, 1991, 77). This sum was evidently a ground rent. Several subsequent documents refer to this same building as a “play house,” confirming its existences and apparent usage. The “wast” on which it stood was probably common ground (“In legal use … a piece of such land not in any man’s occupation, but lying for common”: OED “waste,” n. 2). David George has argued that it was specifically on the Town Moss, though that would have implied a bog or swamp, which would hardly have been appropriate for such a building (2004, 230). Elspeth Graham and Rosemary Tyler locate it on the north side of Newgate Street, the modern Eccleston Street, close to the town’s Flat Iron Building (2011, 114.) In a document of 1615 we learn the dimensions of the plot on which the playhouse stood: 57 feet (17 m) long on its north and south sides, 29 feet (8.8 m) on the east and 15 feet (4.6 m) on the west, giving it the shape of a tapering trapezoid. This would give the property a floor space approximately half of that of the Globe or Fortune playhouses in London. Unfortunately we have no idea how the stage or the accommodations for the audience were disposed.
We do not know, moreover, when Harrington had built “the play house.” There is a survey of Prescot from 1592, which makes no reference to such a distinctive feature, so it presumably did not exist at that date. It may or may not be suggestive that in 1595 Harrington had acquired a cottage and garden which was only 150 yards from the playhouse site and which might have been useful in its management. David George concludes from this that we “can put the construction date confidently between 1593 and 1595” (2004, 234). He himself pushes the argument for 1593, at the height of the prolonged plague in London, when Strange’s Men took to the road and may have felt the need of a playing base well outside the capital (see p. 63). More recently Elspeth Graham and Rosemary Tyler, supposing the involvement of the sixth Earl of Derby in the enterprise – rather than Shakespeare’s putative early patron, the fifth earl, formerly Lord Strange – have argued for a start date of 1597/8 (Graham and Tyler, 115).
By then Shakespeare was securely a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, who are never known to have toured in Lancashire. So the argument for Shakespeare’s personal involvement with the Prescot playhouse hangs rather precariously on the earliest, 1593, dating – for which there is no documentary evidence. The appearance of Venus and Adonis that year, dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, rather suggests that he was pursuing another patronage strategy, though of course there was nothing to prevent him from backing two horses at the same time. But it also seems telling that he is not named alongside the six senior players in the special licence granted to Strange’s Men by the Privy Council on 4 May 1593 – the permission they needed to travel out of London and the earliest date they could have taken up residence in Prescot; there is evidence, however, that at least two hired men – Thomas Downton and Richard Cowley – accompanied the named sharers on their travels, so Shakespeare could conceivably have done the same (Gurr, 1996, 264–5). But, all in all, Shakespeare’s personal involvement with Prescot hangs by the thinnest shred of supposition.
Nevertheless the mere existence of a playhouse there (on the face of it such an improbable occurrence) tells us something of the theatrical world within which Shakespeare operated and the forces which shaped it. Prescot was in many ways the antithesis of London, a place of no more than 400 inhabitants and in an area which, as Graham and Tyler note, was described at the time as “so unbridled & badde an handfull of England.” The main local industries were the making clay pots and mining coal, and in 1586 Thomas Mead, reporting to his masters at King’s College, Cambridge, the landlords of the whole area, gave a bleak picture of conditions there: “There is in this poor town of Prescot one hundred and five several families, among which there be scarce 20 that be able to help themselves without begging” (George, 2003, 227). It is clear that there was no resident community with the wealth to support a professional playhouse in the way that Londoners supported the Theatre or the Globe. If we ask why Harrington should have built it where he did the answer must somehow be tied in with the interests of the Stanleys, the Earls of Derby, and their family. He was himself the younger brother of Percival Harrington, deputy steward of Prescot for the Stanleys; Percival presided over the local assizes, the court leet, on their behalf. One of the principal Stanley estates, Knowsley, was only three or four miles from the town; the family had a long association with actors and acting, and regularly welcomed traveling companies to Knowsley, as well as to their other major Lancashire estates, Lathom and New Hall (MacLean, 2004). The fourth, fifth and sixth earls all patronized their own companies and any one of them might have sanctioned the building of the playhouse in a part of the country where they wielded royal or quasi‐royal authority. Henry, the fourth earl, died in September 1593, Ferdinando, the fifth, died the following April, and William, the sixth, lived on until 1642, so which might first have supported Harrington’s project depends entirely upon its unknown date.
But Harrington was not going to make a profit by staging daily performances to the local populace, with prices starting at 1d. a head, on the business plan of the Theatre or the Globe. The nearest town of any substance was Liverpool, but even there the population was less than a thousand, and that was some nine miles away – an impractical distance to travel on foot just to see a show. So what might he have had in mind? Graham and Tyler have argued that too strong an emphasis on the poverty of the town ignores important social, cultural, and economic features of the wider community of south Lancashire, describing Prescot as a “surprisingly complex small town that contained quite anomalously high levels of entertainment provision and activity” (2011, 124). The town sustained a weekly market on Tuesdays, where the rich and varied agricultural produce of neighboring regions was traded, alongside goods from much further afield. And in summer it held a fair on the Thursday and Saturday of Corpus Christi, which involved livestock sales and was known of as far away as London. The town apparently adapted to cater for these regular influxes of traders and their customers, having a surprising number of hostelries: “Prescot indeed had a disproportionately large number of alehouses: nineteen in 1592 and an astonishing forty‐three by 1626” (121). The town also boasted a cock‐fighting den at a time when there were only five in the whole of Lancashire, and it was apparently a magnet for the gentry of much of the county. In a journal entry of June 2, 1618 Nicholas Assheton of Downham Hall near Clitheroe, in the far east of the county, recorded: “We all to Prescod to a cocking. Sir Ric. Cooz Assheton to Leaver. Sir Jo. Talbot of Bashall, Cooz Bradyll, and very pleasant. Tabled all night” (quoted, p. 123). This outing involved a round trip of ninety miles. The pleasure of the cockfighting was magnified many times by the gambling associated with it, and clearly some of those alehouses catered for those who wanted to play backgammon into the early hours.
Looked at in this light Prescot was quite a dynamic community, adept at relieving those who came to visit of their money. And Harrington’s playhouse may have been a calculated attempt to cash in further. Even with all these visitors to the town, however, there could hardly have been audiences sufficient to fill even a smallish playhouse on a daily basis in the manner reflected in Henslowe’s Diary. His marketing strategy must, moreover, have been driven by the availability of performers. It is pretty much unthinkable that he could have employed a permanent local troupe: it was only in the early 1590s that any troupe tried to settle quasi‐permanently even in London. It was still overwhelmingly the norm for acting companies to tour, looking for a welcome variously in great houses, guildhalls and town inns (pp. 47–8). South Lancashire, however, posed problems in this regard. Although there were certainly the great houses of the Stanleys in the region and a few lesser gentry who might have welcomed them, there were few towns of any substance and so (one supposes) few inns capable of accommodating substantial audiences in the manner of the inn at Norwich where the Queen’s Men had their unfortunate affray (p. 39–40).
This may help to explain why records of visiting players in the region are so sparse. We do know that the most prestigious groups, including the Queen’s Men and Leicester’s Men, visited the Stanley properties in the 1580s, but otherwise the record is extremely thin. David George found records of only four notable companies – the Earl of Essex’s Men (1594), Lord Vaux’s Men (1602–3), the Earl of Hertford’s Men (1606) and James Lord Strange’s Men (1609) – in the region throughout the entire period of 1593–1609 when he supposes the Prescot playhouse was in operation (2003, 237). He found a few more recorded in Cheshire to the south and Cumberland and Westmoreland in the north and supposes that they may have also visited Lancashire. But there is nothing to substantiate the notion of flourishing professional theatrical touring in the region at this time. This may well in part be the consequence of so few records having survived. Even with the Stanleys, only a single household book, spanning 1587–90, is extant; a few more of those might have painted a very different picture. Yet the geography of the region may also have played its part. The River Mersey to the south and the Pennine hills to the east were significant barriers, neither insurmountable but both deterrents to players who had easier or more lucrative routes to pursue.
Nevertheless, the situation cannot have been so grim that Harrington did not see ways of capitalizing on its opportunities. And one stray piece of information may point to some success. In June 1618 the Prescot Court Leet records give details of an altercation in the town; its constables “present[ed] James Ditchfield for making a tussle upon one of the Queen’s Servants, a player, and the said player with others of his fellows for the like upon James Ditchfield. Pledge for them all Henry Stanley Esquire” (Gurr, 1996, 334). As Graham and Tyler show, Ditchfield was an interesting character, the owner of the cockpit and various other properties, operator of an alehouse, and someone repeatedly in trouble for brawling and defying ordinances against gaming. We have no idea why he made “a tussle” with one of Queen Anne’s Men. The real question is why members of Queen Anne’s Men would have been in Prescot at all at this time. They might, admittedly, have been en route to or from Knowsley. We do know, however, that they had visited Gawthorpe Hall, some thirty miles east, on March 10 of that year, which suggests that they had circulated in the region for at least three months. One possibility is that the Prescot playhouse had been revived by this date (as we shall see, it was certainly out of action in 1609) and that they were in residence for some of that time, as traveling companies continued to do at playhouses like the Curtain and the Swan which never seem to have had permanently resident tenants.
Yet how could this work, given the low level of population? I suggest that it might have worked in precisely the way that the cockpit worked, not by drawing in very large crowds, but by enticing significant numbers of high‐end customers like Nicholas Assheton and his cousins to pay a visit on an occasional but regular basis. The real model for the Prescot playhouse may not, then, have been the Theatre but the indoor “private” playhouses favored by the boy companies. Two of these were revived in 1599/1600 – one playing at Paul’s playhouse and the other at James Burbage’s Blackfriars playhouse (see p. 270). Interestingly, William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby, helped finance the revival of the Children of Paul’s and worked himself with its playwrights, including John Marston; in the summer of 1599 we was said to have “busied” himself “only in penning comedies for the common players” (Berry, 1986, 34). He would well have understood the business model I am suggesting: offering a select experience for the moneyed class, who would pay higher than ordinary fees; on such a basis, like the reopened boy companies, it might only be necessary to perform as little as once a week to be profitable. Instead of the likes of Queen Anne’s Men having to visit multiple gentry houses, the gentry would come to them. With the added attraction of the cockpit and the gaming tables, Prescot’s playhouse might have offered an attractive temporary base for traveling companies passing through.
There is, to be sure, not a scrap of evidence that this is how the playhouse was actually operated. But there is one detail in the records of the place which suggests that it might have been an enclosed building rather than an open auditorium, “private” rather than “public” in the London distinctions. Harrington died in 1603, the year the playhouse is first documented, and it passed to his widow, Elizabeth. By 1609 there were problems. The Court Leet presented a Thomas Malbon for converting the playhouse into “a howse for habitacion” and letting it to an undesirable tenant named Whiteside. It seems likely that this Malbon had married the widow Harrington and so taken control of her property. He ignored the Court Leet’s findings and did nothing to remove Whiteside, but the following year the Court Leet decided that the tenant was so undesirable that it ordered him to be driven from the town. There is no record of any further tenants and in 1614 Malbon lost control of the property when Elizabeth died. It came under the control of Henry Stanley, the steward of the manor.26 It seems possible therefore, as I have supposed, that the playhouse was returned to its intended purpose some time after 1610.
So the most persuasive evidence that the playhouse may have been an indoor one lies in the fact that it had, at least for a time, been converted into “a house for habitation.” It is difficult to imagine anything built along the lines of the Theatre or the Globe being converted for domestic use. Only the tiring house and any galleries would be covered, and they would constitute an odd domestic dwelling. An indoor theatre, however, would have been roofed from the start and, while its inner space would have been oddly distributed, would have been much more readily adaptable as a habitation. Such conditions might also help to explain how the building survived as late as 1668, still apparently generating “rent, revenue, and profit” for its tenants (George, 2003, 229). A building which was mostly open to the elements would surely have required substantial maintenance to last productively – either as habitation or playhouse – for so long.27
Of course the Prescot playhouse was a monopoly. It did not, like the revived boy companies, have to fight to establish niche positions in a competitive market. It was clearly in its interest to try to attract higher‐paying gentry on the model I have suggested. But this need not preclude the possibility of catering to more popular audiences, say on market day. Adaptability would have been an important virtue.
The Prescot theatre remains an enigma. It was, for a time, the only purpose‐built professional playhouse in the British Isles outside of London. Others would follow, but in substantial cities like York or Bristol. Samuel Daniel’s brother, John, set up the Children of Bristol. Their 1615 patent allowed them to play “in and about our … city of Bristol in such usual houses as themselves shall provide” (ES, 2:68). A burgeoning city like Bristol seems, on the face of it, a much more likely prospect for a resident playhouse than Prescot, but we hear little more about the company except for a couple of records of it on tour. In 1635 James Ogilby built a playhouse in St Werburgh Street in Dublin, which would be run for several years by the dramatist, James Shirley; as I have surmised about Prescot, it was an indoor, “private” theatre, catering for a monied audience from among the residents of the Irish pale (Dutton, 2006). But it never exactly flourished, if the tone of the prologues that Shirley wrote are to be trusted, and it was killed off by the Civil War. On the face of it, Prescot faced even greater challenges from the start. London remained stubbornly the home basis of English theatre for many years to come, and Shakespeare’s presence there from 1595 onwards played no small part in making that so.
Notes
1 Full documents from the investigation that followed are in Galloway, 1984, 66–76. Quotations here are from EPF, 246–50. See also Roberts‐Smith, 2006.2 Edmund Howes in his expansion of John Stowe’s Annals (1615), 697; as quoted in ES, 2: 104–5. Shoreditch, beyond the City walls to the north‐east, was the site of the Theatre and the Curtain.3 This is no place to debate the authorship of Sir Thomas More and the additions made to the original manuscript (apparently) after being severely censored by Edmund Tilney. For a thorough recent survey of these issues, see Bate and Rasmussen, 2013, 683–97 (written by Will Sharpe); quotations are from the play in that volume, pp. 349–420. The various parts of the surviving manuscript have, at different times, been dated between 1593 and 1604; one section of the text, dubbed Hand D, is widely believed to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting. Neither dating nor authorship is relevant to the discussion here. This part of the play (4.1) is mostly from the original text, in the hand of Anthony Munday and generally thought to be by Munday himself, perhaps with help from Henry Chettle. The last fifty lines or so (after line 275) are from one of the additions, possibly in Thomas Heywood’s hand. See also McMillin, 1987.4 For a fuller discussion of the interlude, and the significance of hair in it, see John Jowett, 2005.5 Impatient Poverty, Four PP, Lusty Juventus, and The Marriage of Wit and Wisdomhave all survived, though the text of The Marriage is very different from the fragment we see in Sir Thomas More.6 McMillin and MacLean, 1998, 44. This section owes a good deal to their pioneering study.7 The earliest extant edition of Tarlton’s Jests dates from 1611, but it seems to have first been printed somewhat earlier.8 The cloth‐quarter was originally a line of booths leading to the site of Bartholomew Fair, which started out as a cloth fair. The joke is that Tarlton, playing a rustic, is cheated of his clothes by Adams, who then distributes the vermin in them – lice, fleas etc. – as if they were precious. Jonson, born in 1572, could have seen this routine.9 For details of payments made by Henry, Lord Berkeley, one aristocrat fond of entertainment, see Greenfield 1983; also Greenfield 1988.10 Gurr, 1996, 201, quoting from a licence of the Court of Aldermen, November 28, 1583. The number of their performances was restricted; the licence ran from November 28, 1583 to March 3, 1584 – Shrovetide, the end of the Revels season at court.11 Charles Howard is better remembered as the Lord Admiral who oversaw the defeat of the Spanish Armada and who was patron of the chief rivals to Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. But he was Lord Chamberlain 1583–85 and always seems to have had a particular interest in theatrical matters. He was probably the single most influential figure at court in these matters in the last twenty years of the reign. Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, owed his appointment to him. See Gurr, 2002; Dutton, 1991, 43–5.12 Cited from Bearman, 2002, 93. Relevant portions of the will are reproduced, pp. 93–4.13 The case was first fully made in Baker, 1937, and significantly reinforced by E. A. J. Honigmann, 1985. See also Wilson, 2004. The case has met with a lot of resistance: which is not relevant in the context of exploring this only as a possible and plausible route for Shakespeare into his profession.14 Quoted in Schoenbaum, 1987, 110. Aubrey had this from William Beeston, son of Christopher Beeston, a leading theatrical manager of the 1630s who was a member of the Chamberlain’s Men with Shakespeare in the 1590s. Jonson tells us they performed together in his Every Man In His Humour (1598): see p. 140.15 Details of all patrons and venues discussed here are primarily from the Records of Early English Drama’s Patrons and Performances website (https://reed.library.utoronto.ca).16 Such visits had probably been going on since Sir Edward’s time, but surviving records only start at the time of his death. The steward who made these entries could not be expected to keep track of all such changes.17 See Details of Sir Cuthbert Halsall’s players at Dunkenhalgh Hall are at https://reed.library.utoronto.ca/node/288632. Those for the Warrens’ players are at https://reed.library.utoronto.ca/node/288630, 288617, 288644, and 288633.18 For details of Sir Peter Legh’s players, see https://reed.library.utoronto.ca/node/288595 and 288601.19 Lines 46–55. From a transcript of the poem (BL MS Harley 1927, ff.10v–12), by Lawrence Manley, for which I am most grateful.20 Andrew Gurr (1993) argues cogently that this was not a grand amalgamation of the two companies, as earlier scholars had suggested.21 The dates and details of these disputes are not easy to follow, though they centered on the sharing of profits from the Theatre. The legal records were printed in C. W. Wallace (1913), from which quotations here derive (pp. 100, 127). But for differences in interpreting them see (e.g.), ES, 2: 392–3; and Manley and MacLean, 47–8.22 There is a fairly general consensus these days that 1 Henry VI is not solely by Shakespeare, though it was published in the First Folio of his plays. See Taylor, 1995; Vickers, 2007; Chernaik, 2014. But this is not relevant here. 1 Henry VI remains the earliest text in which Shakespeare had a hand that we can identify in the performance record. It is widely thought that early versions of what we know as 2 and 3 Henry VI were actually written and performed earlier, but we do not know where or by whom.23 See p. 16, for an account of the value of money.24 A Knack to Know a Knave is the only one of these to survive in print; on its title page it is uniquely and tellingly described as “played by Ed. Alleyn and his company.” Other surviving plays from that season include Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Orlando, and “Jeronymo”, which is very probably Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. The attrition rate in terms of non‐survivals is typical.25 Several plays are known to have been notable failures in their first performances, including Ben Jonson’s Sejanus (1603), Catiline (1611), and The New Inn (1629), all hissed from the stage – though by the end of the century Catiline was the most admired tragedy of its era. Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) also failed; Walter Burre, its publisher, put it down to “the wide world … not understanding the privy mark of irony.”26 Henry Stanley was the illegitimate half‐brother of the fifth and sixth Earls of Derby; he presided over the Court Leet in the 1618 prosecution of James Ditchfield.27 The tenants of the playhouse in 1668 were still descendants of Richard Harrington, through his daughter, Jane, who married one Edward Stockley. There is no evidence of when playing might have ceased, if indeed it had recommenced by 1618.