On March 15,1595 William Shakespeare finally entered the written record as the member of an acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The Treasurer of the Chamber’s Accounts record: “To William Kemp, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain, upon the Council’s warrant … for two several comedies or interludes showed by them before her Majesty in Christmas time last past, viz. upon St. Stephen’s Day [26 December] and Innocents” Day [28 December] £13 6s. 8d. and by way of her Majesty’s reward £6 13s. and 4d.” (ES, 4: 164–5). Other than the inclusion of Shakespeare’s name this is a very typical entry. It was normal that a senior member or members of the company, trusted by their colleagues, would be paid for performances at court. In later years the most regular payee was John Heminge, who emerged over time as a kind of company manager. But in this first year they sent Kemp, the most famous living clown; Burbage was not yet the great tragedian he was to become, but was presumably there because he represented the company’s association with its now‐normal London home, the Theatre; and Shakespeare’s presence suggests that he had acquired some stature in his earlier company associations, even though we cannot trace them in the records.
The amounts they received add up to £10 per performance, the normal court payment throughout the period. The division of the sums into a fee and the Queen’s “reward” was a formality, but a reminder that performance at court was not simply a commercial activity. The players were “servants” of a leading aristocrat (and indeed Elizabeth’s first cousin) and they came to court – very much as they would come to another great house or a city guildhall – in the spirit of a gift‐offering from their patron to their sovereign. So the Queen not only paid them for their pains, but awarded them a gratuity – a gift‐offering of her own – in addition. In many ways this sums up the midway status of Elizabethan players between being lowly figures in a traditional, deferential, hierarchical class system (and “vagabonds” if they strayed outside it) and commercial entrepreneurs, a lucky few of whom made very substantial wealth by skill and shrewd investment.
It was clearly the case that those lucky enough to be allowed to play regularly in London made most of their money out of playing in their theatres; the court payments could never have been more than a fraction of their total income (Dutton, 2016, 13–14). On the other hand, they were well aware that regular London playing was a privilege only made possible by the court’s authority. They needed each other. Besides, court performances took place at night, after supper, starting usually around 9 p.m.; in most cases the company would have given one of their usual performances at the Theatre in the afternoon and then made their way to court (another virtue of being “done between four and five”). This was an opportunity to make extra money that would not otherwise be available.
These Chamber Accounts tell us the dates of performances but not what was played. Between 1594 and the Queen’s death in 1603 the only plays we know with certainty that Shakespeare’s company put on at court (because title pages of early editions tell us) are Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor. But even there we do not know on which dates. We can make shrewd guesses about other titles and particular dates, but this is another of those glasses in which we see darkly. In the 1595 record we may not even be able to trust the Chamber accounts about one of the dates. On the evening of December 28, 1594, as we shall see, the Chamberlain’s Men gave a performance of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn, one of the Inns of Court or law schools in London; it is unlikely that they played twice in the same evening in venues so far apart (the court was then resident in Greenwich, some five miles south of the city). Besides, the Admiral’s Men are also credited in the accounts with appearing at court on that date, and while it was not unknown for two companies to appear on the same evening it was not common. So the Chamberlain’s Men probably appeared on the 27th. The St. Stephen’s Day date, however, is almost certainly correct. In the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign that was invariably the first day of the Revels season (which extended intermittently through Candlemas to Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday), and from 1595 the Chamberlain’s Men occupied that opening slot until the end of her reign. That first year the Admiral’s Men received payment for three appearances (one of their payees was Edward Alleyn), the Chamberlain’s only two. But the proportions of court performances thereafter almost always favored Shakespeare’s company.