On December 26, 1594 the Chamberlain’s Men performed at court for the first time. The Queen had elected that year to spend Christmas at Greenwich, one of the four royal palaces then in use. The previous year she had used Hampton Court, the next year she would use Richmond, and the year after that Whitehall – which James was to make virtually his settled place of residence and entertainment. But Elizabeth followed the old tradition of moving regularly – carrying virtually her entire government and household with her – partly in order to allow these intensely‐occupied buildings to air out after use.
Greenwich itself had been built by her father as a mark of particular royal magnificence. It stood on the site of what is now Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Naval Hospital, overlooking the River Thames, as did all the royal palaces. This was a practical as well as an aesthetic consideration. Access to water was critical, not least for dealing with sewage. And transport by river was much easier and faster than on land, horseback only excepted. One of the attractions of performing at the Cross Keys must have been that it made getting to Greenwich – on the south shore of the Thames, east of the City – much easier than it would have been from Shoreditch and the Theatre. They most likely took boats to the palace, carrying their costumes and properties; the land journey, having to cross over London Bridge, would have been much more arduous. Using the river also made it quite practical to perform at the inn that afternoon, concluding before five, and to be at the palace well before their performance was to begin, which would be after supper, around 9 p.m.
In each of the palaces dramatic performances were normally staged in one of two rooms, the Hall or the (usually smaller) Great Chamber. Whitehall additionally had structures known as Banqueting Houses. The decisions about which to use would be driven by considerations of the whole festive calendar, planned attendance, and the practicalities of mounting and demounting everything required. In 1594/5 the Great Chamber at Greenwich seems to have been used for all the plays performed by the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s Men (see p. 182–3). But the Hall was used after the Revels season, in March, when the Gentlemen of Gray’s Inn presented the Queen with a masque, Proteus and the Adamantine Rock.
The Great Chamber at Greenwich, as in all the palaces, was the antechamber to the Queen’s private quarters in the royal suite; it was constantly busy and always guarded (it was also known as the Guard Chamber). The fact that it could be set up at this time to use for plays was a mark that this was truly a holiday season. It would also have been decorated to impress, especially since this was the room where visitors were first brought. As John Astington explains: “The royal department of the Wardrobe looked after the preparation of rooms in this fashion [hanging the vertical surfaces with arras or woven cloth], and their responsibilities could easily have been extended to the stage facilities. The chamber was ‘made ready’ with hangings covering the walls, and following a particular event the yeomen and grooms busied themselves ‘taking down stuff and laying it up’ – returning the valuable fabrics to the rooms or cupboards where they were stored” (Astington, 1999, 151). Sometimes we have details of the designs. For the wedding of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon in 1501 the Hall of Richmond Palace was splendidly decorated: “The walls of this pleasant hall are hanged with rich cloths of Arras, their works representing many noble battle and sieges, as of Jerusalem, Troy, Alba, and many other; that this whole apparement [equipment, outfit] was most glorious and joyful to consider and behold” (60–1, quoting Grose, 1808, 2: 315.) And after the execution of Charles I in 1649 many royal hangings were sold off: “Tapestries to hang in chambers came in matching themes (“Six pieces of Vulcan and Venus,” “Five pieces of hangings of King David,” etc.), but also in landscape designs and with other non‐figurative motifs (“Flower pots and pillars”; “flower Deluces”; “beasts bearing the Arms of England”)” (153, quoting W. G. Thomson, 1930, 314–29). Such hangings adjacent to the stage must always have been in a dialogue of sorts with the narrative of a performance.
John Astington describes what a court playing space would normally look like. The audience were:
mostly seated, and no one would have occupied the space between the Queen’s seat, set on a dias somewhere near the centre of the auditorium, and the actors’ stage, a custom‐built platform set across one end of the space, and possibly as large as their playhouse playing area. The court audience would have sat … in sloping banks of seating set against the side walls and the rear wall behind the Queen’s seat, creating more of the effect of a modern sports arena. The chief difference as one looked out from the stage, Shakespeare’s point of view, would have been the effect of the glow and shimmer of numerous candles, suspended on decorated chandeliers hung from the roof, and burning in candleholders set against the wall and posts all around the room. The aura of this scintillating lighting would have been picked up in the jewels and spangled fabrics of the richly‐dressed and high‐born audience assembled to watch the play. Brilliance was the mark of court performance.
(Astington, 2009, 309)
As was usual the Great Chamber at Greenwich was on the second storey, and seems to have been similar in size to that at Whitehall, about 60 ft (18.28m) by 30 ft (9.14m).28 Somewhat less usual, the Hall was little bigger, some 68 ft (20.73m) by 30 ft, making it not much more than half the size of the equivalent room at Whitehall (approximately 90 ft [27.43m] by 40 ft [12.19m]) or Hampton Court (the only one of the four which still stands, 106 ft [32.31m] long overall and 40 ft wide). Those larger rooms must really have tested the vocal range of the actors, being almost twice as long as any distance they would have to carry over the yards of one of the amphitheaters, though indoors. As a general rule, therefore, the Halls were usually used for larger events, with an expanded attendance; the Great Chamber for somewhat more intimate occasions, though probably still involving up to 500 attendees.
There is a ground‐plan for a banquet in the Great Chamber at Whitehall on Twelfth Night 1601, which we have noted was very similar in size to that at Greenwich. The plan is highly suggestive for the use of that room when theatricals were performed there, as they were later that night – including Shakespeare’s company (see Figure 3.4).29 We see that the Queen’s Presence Chamber lay to the south of the Great Chamber; she would enter from there, requiring that her “state” or ceremonial seat would be at that end of the room. Indeed, it is apparent that there were special fittings to hold the “state” in place, so that protocol required that all the other seating would always be arrayed so as to make it the center of attention. In this ground plan we can see that all tables and cupboards have been pushed back to the walls and the seating is arranged in such away that the Queen and the space below her, where the actors would perform, were always the focus of attention. To a slightly lesser extent so to were her most notable quests, who on this occasion included Virginio Orsino, Duke of Bracciano, and ambassadors from Muscovy, seated close by her in positions of honor. For most spectators, they were all backdrops to the theatricals, very much as the hangings on the walls were (Astington, 1991, 6–11).
Figure 3.4 Diagram of seating arrangements in the Great Chamber at Whitehall.
Source: College of Arms, MS Vincent 151, pp. 156–7.
This arrangement afforded the actors no equivalent to their tiring houses in the theatres: no base for entrances and exits, no place to change costumes or conceal properties until they were needed. They were simply too far from the door at the north end of the room, via which they and most of the audience would have entered, and there are no alternative options. As they had been doing for decades, the players would have improvised. That is, a “house” or “houses” would have served as a tiring house. The Revels Accounts for the end of Elizabeth’s reign are lost. But the early Jacobean Accounts bear out this supposition. Those for 1604/5 charge “For 12 ells of canvas for the Office of the Revels for the tiring house” (Streitberger, 1986b, 12). This might conceivably have been augmented by the use of smaller, similarly canvas‐covered but richly painted “houses” or booths as localized points for action, and entry and exit, within the action of the play proper and defining its geography (see p. 2, 21). The Revels Office had regularly provided these for court entertainments in earlier decades; their use seems to have been declining by the 1590s, but as late as 1614 Sir George Buc’s Revels Accounts record expenditure on “canvas for the booths and other necessaries for a play called Bartholomew Fair” (70). (I discuss them further in relation to Gray’s Inn, in the next section). Those same accounts also record “Music houses three at Whitehall,” one requiring “taffeta for a curtain,” presumably similar temporary constructions (ibid.).
We have a brief glimpse of Elizabeth seated on her “state” for the last‐ever performance at court of the Queen’s Men, early in 1594. Thomas Birch recorded that “Mr [Anthony] Standen was at the play and dancing on Twelfth Night, which lasted until one after midnight, more by constraint than by choice, the Earl of Essex having committed him to the placing and entertaining of certain Germans. The Queen appeared there in a high throne, richly adorned, and “as beautiful,” says he, “to my old sight, as ever I saw her; and next to her chair the earl, with whom she often devised in sweet and favourable manner” (Birch, 1754, 1.146). The Queen and the last of her great favorites were of more interest than the Queen’s Men, a salutary reminder of the place of theatricals in the great scheme of things.
As at Oxford in 1566, the focus on the Queen is all‐important. She is as much the center of attention (indeed, more so) than the actors – it is crucial that the audience can see her as well as the stage. She is the courtly equivalent of the hosts in great houses, mayors in towns and cities, senior academics in colleges being placed in seats of honor, where they are as visible as the players (see p. 57–8). This would have been enhanced by the lighting that was a distinctive feature of court shows, which were almost always staged in the dead of night. Shakespeare had encountered something of this in great houses where he played, but the court would be lit to a much higher level.
By this time it fell to the Office of Works to set up the stage and the seating, but the Revels Office still deployed its traditional skills in installing the candle lighting, using twisted copper wire. The 1608/9 Accounts are typical in charging for “Branches 16, viz. 8 at 40s the piece (£16) and 8 at 20s (£8) … wire rods, 8 containing 140 foot the piece being twisted three great wires into one rod … ropes to hang the branches, 8 … pipes of plate to save the ropes from burning, 16 … pulleys for branches, 8 … staples to strain the wires, 4 dozen … pendants … candleplates, 4 dozen … candlesticks, 4 dozen” (Streitberger, 1986b, 32–3). As in other venues, the whole room was lit, not just the stage, and there was presumably some scope to enhance lighting and coloring around the action for particular effects: the 1612–13 Accounts charge for “Looking glasses, 40 dozen to set upon the branches” and “bladders gilt to hang upon the branches, six dozen” (58). There were also the usual practical consequences of the candles, which here more than anywhere needed to be trimmed from time to time to stop wax dripping. The play had thus to be stopped, requiring (as we have noted before) what were in fact, if not in intention, act breaks (p. 58).
We see an instance of this in one of the rare accounts we have of a play by professionals being performed at court. The departure of the French Ambassador, La Trémoille, was marked by feasting and a play at Whitehall in May 1619, hosted by the King’s cousin, the Duke of Lennox. The King’s Men performed Pericles for the event:
The Marquise Trenell on Thursday last took leave of the King: that night was feasted at White Hall, by the Duke of Lennox in the Queen’s great chamber … to the King’s great Chamber they went to see the play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which lasted till 2 o’clock. After two acts, the players ceased till the French all refreshed them with sweetmeats brought on chiney voiders, & wine & ale in bottles, after the players began anew.30
This is the most precisely timed and detailed description of a court play (as distinct from masque) that we have. Assuming they had supper at the usual time, the performance began before 10 p.m. and certainly finished at 2 a.m., taking far longer than any modern performance of Pericles would – the text we have is quite short – even with intermissions. But it was interrupted for a relatively modest dessert after the second act, and we have no way of knowing how much time that took.31 The fact that plays at court took breaks for refreshments, and had seating for the majority of those present, must have made the performance of ultra‐long plays like Hamlet or Bartholomew Fair far more acceptable from an audience’s point of view (Astington, 1999, 84, 117, 172–3). The rhythms of playing at court must have been very different, from the actors’ point of view, from those in their regular theatres. Getting back to the Theatre in the dead of night on those winter nights – the Shakesperean era was a mini ice‐age, when the Thames several times froze over – must also have been a daunting task.
We have no idea what plays the Chamberlain’s Men staged at Greenwich late in December 1594, though we do know that they had The Comedy of Errorsprepared for performance at Gray’s Inn on the 28th and Edmund Tilney might well have thought it suitable fare for the court Revels season. Whatever the plays, the opulence must have been impressive. Not only would the Queen and her courtiers have been resplendent in their best dresses and doublets, while sergeants‐at‐arms and other guards would have been in full uniform, and the walls and stage would have been covered with hangings we have described. Like much of the clothing in the room, some would be shot through with gold and silver thread, further enhancing the glittering light from the candles. The tapestries’ depictions of Biblical, classical, or mythological scenes placed the plays in ancient traditions of storytelling. The platform on which the players acted may literally have been pretty much bare, but the whole room in which they performed when at court was a richly embellished meta‐stage in which their playing blended into a larger pageantry of royal majesty, visually very different from the common playhouses.
Box 3.4 Patronage and its Practices
“Patronage” is a broad term, which encompasses many of the characteristic practices of early modern England. “Patronage, broadly defined, was the central social system of the era. It dominated political life and permeated the structure of the church and universities. Its influence on the economy was enormous, and the assumptions behind it were reflected in religious thought, in cosmological speculation, and in the organization and daily detail of family life” (Evans, 1989, 23). Through it, offices, gifts, employment, rewards, authority, land tenancy, influence, opportunities all flowed from the highest in the land down to the lowest in society, in a rigidly hierarchical structure; it forged bonds of reciprocal beneficence and obligation, binding patron and patronized in quasi‐familial ties.
A writer, like Shakespeare, might seek to exploit the benefits offered by the patronage system in one of various ways. At a very basic level he might seek permission to dedicate a work to someone of stature, ideally a wealthy aristocrat; this honored the patron and spread his fame, and might bring the author a reward of perhaps a few pounds. This is what Shakespeare was after when he dedicated both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to the young Earl of Southampton, though it is not impossible that he hoped for a higher level of patronage beyond that: perhaps employment in a role where his linguistic skills were of value, such as a tutor or a secretary. So, for example, the poet John Donne achieved a significant position as chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Lord Egerton (though he threw it away when he secretly married Egerton’s niece); the poet and dramatist, Samuel Daniel, served as a tutor in the household of the great Countess of Pembroke, and later as tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Cumberland (see Robbins, 2003).
Patronage of an acting company was a rather different business. As we have seen, its origins lay in the fact that aristocrats and gentry employed household players and musicians, some of whom toured to neighboring establishments and earned gratuities, a practice which gradually extended and became professionalised. Some notable aristocrats seem to have encouraged their players to carry their livery widely around the country as a testament to their prestige, cementing relationships and alliances. So, for example, in 1559 Lord Robert Dudley (later the great Earl of Leicester) wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, in his role as Lord President of the North, seeking the latter’s permission for his players to travel in Yorkshire, as they already traveled widely elsewhere: “Where my servants … be such as are players of interludes, and for the same have the licence of divers of my lords here under their seals … I have thought among the rest by my letters to beseech your good lordship’s conformity to them likewise, that they may have your hand and seal to their licence for the like liberty in Yorkshire; being honest men, and such as shall play none other matters (I trust) but tolerable and convenient … for whom I shall have good cause to thank your lordship and to remain your lordship’s to the best that shall lie in my little power” (EPF, 205). So Dudley begs a favor of Shrewsbury, while promising to reciprocate (with “my little power”) in the future; in this he financially benefits his players, but they in turn reflect his magnificence across the country, at essentially no cost to himself. Patronage oiled many wheels simultaneously.
We have already observed later provisions in the 1570s, prompted by both court and Parliament, which sought to limit such theatrical patronage to the narrow ranks of the aristocracy (excluding the gentry), so reducing the number of troupes and keeping them more securely within the proper limits of authority (see pp. 29–30). What we know very little about in all of this is the nature of the personal relationship between a lord and his players. To what extent were men like Leicester or Lord Strange, or Shakespeare’s theatrical patrons, the Hunsdons, actually interested in theatre or in the plays they performed? To what extent did the players and their writers feel obliged to reflect their patrons’ interests in their works? The evidence is very thin.
Writing for Patrons?
To return for a moment to the Revels season at Greenwich in the winter of 1594/5 (see p. 22): it is possible that the Chamberlain’s Men made one further appearance in Great Chamber there, though there is no record of it. As John Stow’s Annals record: “The 26 of January [1595], the Earl of Derby married the Earl of Oxford’s daughter at the court then at Greenwich, which marriage feast was most royally kept” (Stow, 1605, 1279). The Queen then accompanied the couple to Burghley House (ES 4: 109, notes 10 and 11). This is one of the occasions on which it is often supposed that the Chamberlain’s Men performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a wedding play with its polite obeisance to the “fair vestal thronèd by the west” (2.1.158), which is certainly an allusion to the Virgin Queen as a votaress of Diana and possibly one to the Earl of Hertford’s entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham in 1591. The bridegroom was the younger brother of the late Lord Strange whom many of the company had served and the bride was the grand‐daughter of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, so this was a marriage of consequence and one for which it would be fitting for Shakespeare’s company to provide entertainment. The date is, moreover, close to when for other reasons scholars usually place the composition of the play.
If this supposed performance took place while the “marriage feast was most royally kept” at Greenwich, then it took place in the Great Chamber – the only room at that time set up for theatricals. The main problem with this hypothesis is that there is no record of any performance at court at that time; the Chamber Accounts detail costs of the feasting, but no payments for a play. It is not impossible, however, that those responsible for the wedding would have paid from their own pockets. (One Arthur Throgmorton desperately petitioned Sir Robert Cecil to be allowed to contrive a masque for the wedding, as a way to return to Elizabeth’s favor. There is no evidence that he was successful [ES, 1: 168n].) Proponents of the Dream theory have alternatively suggested that there could have been a performance at Burghley House, though there is no record of a performance there either.
Others, however, have favored different weddings at which the play might have been performed.32 One is the February 1596 wedding of Elizabeth Carey to Thomas, son of Henry, Lord Berkeley; it took place in Blackfriars, presumably at the residence of the bride’s father, Sir George Carey. Elizabeth Carey was the grand‐daughter of Henry, Lord Hunsdon, patron of Shakespeare’s company. Yet again, however, there is no recorded performance. Neither of these suggestions is inherently implausible and the absence of records is more the norm than an invalidating objection in chronicling Elizabethan theatre. The more critical issue is whether – as many proponents of these notions suppose – the play was not just performed at such an event but written for one.
As we saw in relation to Strange’s Men, Shakespeare’s early history plays seem to show particular care in their treatment of the Stanley family, Lord Strange’s ancestors. This is most notably the case in Richard III where Ernst Honigmann (one of the key proponents of the “Lancastrian Shakespeare” thesis) argued that “Shakespeare rearranged history so as to make Stanley’s [i.e. Thomas Stanley, first Earl of Derby] services to the incoming Tudor dynasty seem more momentous than they really were.”33He also points to the sympathetic treatment of Old and Young Clifford in 2 and 3 Henry VI, noting that “Ferdinando, Lord Strange, was the son of Margaret Clifford and was therefore the direct descendant of the Cliffords represented in Henry VI” (154).
Lawrence Manley and Sally‐Beth MacLean further develop these points in their chapter on “Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men,” arguing also that changes (softening?) to the depiction of the Duchess of Gloucester’s witchcraft between the quarto version (The First Part of the Contention … of York and Lancaster) and that in 2 Henry VI, may have been in deference to striking parallels between what happened to her and to Strange’s mother, Lady Margaret Stanley (Manley and MacLean, 2014, 280–320). Both Honigmann and Manley/MacLean also make much of the possible parallels between Ferdinando Stanley and Ferdinando, King of Navarre, in Love’s Labour’s Lost. All of these arguments assume a deeper and more extended connection between Shakespeare and Lord Strange’s Men, or Stanley patronage more generally, than the historical record can vouch for. They also require some assumptions about the dating of plays, or of versions of plays, that may be open to question. The only version of Love’s Labour’s Lost that we have, for example, was published in 1598; but that text explicitly tells us that the play has been revised. We neither know when the original was written nor what it looked like. In short, there are a lot of intriguing possibilities here, but no smoking gun.
The same might be said of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Ever since Leslie Hotson suggested in 1931 that the play might have been written in connection with the elevation of the second Lord Hunsdon to the Order of the Garter in 1597, most editors of the play have treated this as established fact (Hotson, 1931). There is in fact no record of any theatrical performance connected with the Garter ceremony that year, or with the Garter feast some months later. And 1597 is earlier than other indications might suggest for the play.34 Moreover, the play’s detailed references to St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the chapel associated with the Garter Knights, only appear in the 1623 folio version of the play, not in its 1602 quarto. The folio version of the play is certainly associated with the Garter, the senior order of chivalry in England, but whether the play should really be linked with Shakespeare’s patron’s becoming a member of it has to be questionable (Dutton, 2016, 245–58).
In the Jacobean phase of his career, questions about the topicality of his plays hang most pointedly over King Lear and its associations with King James’s known desire to unite the parliaments of his two countries, as he had united their crowns. As Andrew Gurr puts it: “Nobody there for the presentation of the play at court at the opening of the 1606 Christmas season could possibly have missed [the play’s] applications as an inverted image of the still disunited kingdoms of England and Scotland … the court’s spectators might see the King’s Men offering support to their patron through their play’s obvious ‘application’” (1996, 300; Marcus, 1988, 148–59). But in trying to assess the weight of such “applications” in relation to a court performance we must always bear in mind the regulating figure of the Master of the Revels, who insisted that all plays be “rehearsed, corrected and perfected” under his guidance before they were put on at court (see p. 85). The play was printed in 1608 “As it was played before the King’s Majesty at Whitehall upon St. Stephen’s night in Christmas Holidays. By his Majesty’s servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside.” That leaves plenty of scope for assuming that the performance differed in some respects from what would have been staged in public. Any “application” that might have been drawn that St Stephen’s Night was one sanctioned by Edmund Tilney and need not have squared with Shakespeare’s original intentions – though of course Tilney would hardly have chosen the play in the first place, if it had not seemed to him to have proper potential.
These questions ask us to determine where Shakespeare and his fellows precisely were in a spectrum of royal service, company patronage, and commercial operation. There is no proven instance of a playwright for the public theatres being commissioned to write a play for an aristocratic event like a wedding or some mark of royal recognition. Of course one or two (Ben Jonson is the prime example) were commissioned to write masques for the court and entertainments for such as the London livery companies (see p. 12). But that is not the same thing as a play, which is a companyundertaking, especially if it is written (as it would be by Shakespeare) by their “ordinary poet.” To return to our original example, Francis Meres mentions A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palladis Tamia (1598), so it was certainly public knowledge by then; and it was published in 1600 “As it hath been sundry times publicly acted.” There is no evidence that it was ever performed anywhere else until a play of “Robin Goodfellow” was staged at court on New Year’s Night, 1604. A betting man would lay strong odds that it had been performed before Elizabeth on one of the thirty‐two occasions when we know the Chamberlain’s Men were at her court, but we do not know what they played (Dutton, 2016, 34–7; Streitberger, 2016, 281–92).
An intriguing example of a patron who clearly did take a real interest in his players and their work is the sixth Earl of Derby, brother of Lord Strange, who was described in 1599 as “busy penning comedies for the common players” – presumably his own Derby’s Men, who that year briefly broke into the privileged ranks of chosen performers at court, though possibly the revived Paul’s boys, in whom he invested (see p. 70). It may also tell us something that Thomas Heywood dedicated all his non‐dramatic works to the Earl of Worcester or his son, long after Worcester ceded patronage of Heywood’s acting company to Queen Anne in 1604; this continued until Worcester died in 1628, suggesting a genuine link between patron and client. But in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is perhaps safest to conclude that Shakespeare and commercial playwrights like him were not specifically commissioned to write plays for their patrons and their particular occasions. Yet it is difficult to believe that some level of identification with their patrons did not make its mark on the plays written for them, in the manner of those plays apparently associated with Lord Strange.
While we might speculate that Shakespeare may have worked with the Queen’s Men and/or Strange’s Men there is no evidence that he was ever a permanent member of either company. The only companies in which he was a sharer were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594–1603) and its subsequent reincarnation, the King’s Men (1603–circa 1613): see p. 277. So, leaving aside James I (see p. 277), the only theatrical patrons we can be sure Shakespeare served were the father and son, Henry and George Carey, first and second Lords Hunsdon, who both served as Lord Chamberlain – the man who oversaw the running of most aspects of the royal household, and so had particular influence over access to the Queen – for most of the time between 1594 and 1603.
Henry Carey (1526–96) (Figure 3.5) was first cousin to Queen Elizabeth on her mother (Anne Boleyn’s) side. Largely because of this he received early honors when she came to the throne (1558), including being created Lord Hunsdon and made a Knight of the Garter. But he had to work hard in her service to achieve the influence and rewards he sought. Early in the reign this service focused mainly on the Scottish borders, a sensitive region at a time when Mary, Queen of Scots laid claim to the English crown and Scottish politics were in turmoil. In 1568 he was appointed governor of the key border town of Berwick and next year was involved in resistance to the revolt of the northern earls against Elizabeth, making a name for himself in 1570 when he defeated the larger forces of the rebel, Leonard Dacre. He was promoted to warden of the east marches (i.e. the eastern section of the Scottish border).
Figure 3.5 Portrait of Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon.
Source: Berkeley Castle.
In 1577 he achieved a central position in Elizabeth’s administration when he was made a Privy Councilor, one of the body that effectively ruled England in the Queen’s name. He got on well with the key figure, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, but also managed to stay on good terms with the Queen’s great favorite, the Earl of Leicester. He gained a reputation as a blunt, plain‐speaking man of affairs, with little of a courtier’s proverbial guile. In 1585 he was appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household, succeeding his son‐in‐law, Lord Howard of Effingham (husband of his eldest daughter), who in turn became Lord Admiral. As noted earlier, Lord Admiral Howard retained an interest in theatrical affairs, so that father‐ and son‐in‐law potentially represented an important axis within the Privy Council whenever theatrical issues came to their attention – a factor in Andrew Gurr’s assumption that the situation in 1594 was engineered by the Council (pp. 72, Note 11; 77–8).
By the 1570s most Lord Chamberlains had assumed the responsibility of patronizing a leading troupe that might serve the Queen. The office required that he be at court with the Queen even over Christmas, so it made sense that they should perform there rather than at his own country estate. The Earl of Sussex, for example, who was Lord Chamberlain from 1572 until 1583 had one of the leading companies of the day and they performed at court most Christmases. Lord Hunsdon had patronized players intermittently since the 1560s, but by the time he came to office the formation of the Queen’s Men in 1583 had effectively settled the choice of court playing for several years, until Strange’s Men emerged (see pp. 41; 61). His players appear occasionally in provincial records, but he apparently patronized none at all between 1590 and the appearance of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the record from 1594 onwards; they were clearly a new formation, built on what was left of Strange’s Men, though critically without Edward Alleyn. He had left to lead Lord Admiral Howard’s Men, the principal rivals to Hunsdon’s own players for the next decade. Whether this was centrally planned or not, it effected a significant reorganization of London playing that set the pattern for the future. And Hunsdon, as Lord Chamberlain, played an important part.
Hunsdon was not an uncritical supporter of players. When in 1584 James Burbage defied the London authorities on the basis of his status as Hunsdon’s “servant,” he promptly backed the authorities (see p. 29). But, as I relate elsewhere, he was not opposed to James Burbage’s building of a playhouse in the Blackfriars, where he was looking for new quarters himself, or to its use by his own players (see p. 196). Had he lived the scheme might have succeeded. But he died on July 22, 1596. Thomas Nashe’s comments in a letter to William Cotton spell out the consequences: “now the players … are piteously persecuted by the Lord Mayor and the aldermen, and however in their old lord’s time they thought their state settled, it is now so uncertain they cannot build upon it” (Nashe, 1904–10, 5: 194).
Ironically, his eldest son, George Carey, 2nd Lord Hunsdon (1547–1603), signed the petition of Blackfriars residents opposed to Burbage’s plans, an unfortunate first involvement with the players he was to patronize (see p. 196). He dearly wanted to succeed his father in office, but Elizabeth as ever cannily spread her favors and appointed another long‐serving retainer, William Brooke, tenth Lord Cobham. Cobham himself, however, died in March 1597, and the younger Hunsdon finally did succeed his father as Lord Chamberlain, a Privy Councilor and member of the Order of the Garter. The younger Hunsdon was not as prominent a figure as his father, but had a typical track‐record of military, parliamentary, and judicial appointments before achieving real prominence. He assumed patronage of the players as soon as his father died; they were known simply as Lord Hunsdon’s Men until he took on his father’s old role. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign he was a sick man and one of King James’ first decisions in London was to relieve him of his duties as Lord Chamberlain (May 4, 1603). But this represented no threat to the players since only two weeks later they acquired the highest patron of them all, the king himself. The younger Hunsdon died on September 8 that year.
There is nothing in Shakespeare’s works that connects them with the Hunsdons like those features of the early plays that may speak to his association with Lord Strange. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written for a particular family wedding, there is no known trace of it in the text. The most teasing case is the figure of Falstaff, who appears in three plays – the two parts of Henry IV as well as Merry Wives – and was promised, in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV, to appear in Henry V, though all we get there is an account of his death. It is just possible that all this was associated with Shakespeare’s Hunsdon patrons. I pursue the case elsewhere (see p. 194ff).