Gatherers

If any hired men were exclusively actors, they were very much a minority, probably no more than three or four at any one time. The King’s Revels arrangements put gatherers – also known as box‐holders – at the head of their list of necessary employees. As we saw with the Queen’s Men’s affray in Norfolk, it was thought important that reliable people be employed to gather in the take at the doors in the playhouses (see p. 39–40). The Actors’ Remonstrance, a satirical gibe of 1643 (by when Parliament had closed the playhouses) suggests that this did not always happen; the gatherers “cannot now … seem to scratch their heads where they itch not, and drop shillings and half crown‐pieces in at their collars” (ES, 1: 356n). Such dishonesty was obviously undesirable, and the sharers did their best to guard against it, requiring the gatherers to place money they collected in earthenware pots, with just a slot to take the coins: “One of the distinctive features of this form of money box is the fact that it is entirely sealed: there is no opening which would allow for the removal of the money stored within. In order to retrieve the contents, the jar has to be smashed” (Simpson, 2013). Shards of such pots have been found in the excavations of the Rose and the Theatre. But unscrupulous gatherers evidently got around this, and the issue was exacerbated in part because there were multiple entrances and payment points, and also because the income from different parts of the theatre went into different pockets.

The number of doors at which money was taken is indicated in the account of the Swiss visitor, Thomas Platter, who seems to be reflecting on his experience of playgoing at both the Curtain and the Globe in late 1599. He broadly confirms the penny‐by‐penny admission system described by Lambarde (see p. 95), which called for more gatherers than might otherwise have been necessary: “The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive. For whoever cares to stand below [in the pit] only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door, and pays another penny [the twopenny galleries], while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door” (Platter, 1937, 166). The “most comfortable seats” are probably what are sometimes referred to as the “gentlemen’s rooms,” well‐appointed sections of the galleries, very possibly those immediately adjacent to the left and right of the stage – so that the occupants not only had a very good view of the action but were also quite visible to much of the audience. Neither Lambarde nor Platter mentions a fourth option, the lords’ rooms, which were most expensive of all. Their omission is presumably because the elite contingent of the audience which used them gained access by a special entrance through the actors’ tiring house, which would not have been used by the general public. This in itself, however, required at least one extra gatherer. I discuss the lords’ rooms in relation to the Globe (p. 234).

There would thus seem to have been – assuming two general entrances, and one doorway to each category of gallery – at least five gatherers in such a theatre, though it must be likely that several would have been employed at a main external door to handle the crush. (And there is some evidence that there were eventually more than were strictly necessary, because of the patronage system by which many were appointed.) The main reason for this elaborate penny‐entrance tiering must have been the common practice of paying rent to the theatre owner(s) which was not a fixed sum but a proportion of the take from all or some of the galleries. In the Sharers’ Papers of 1635, for example, we learn that the housekeepers of both the Globe and the Blackfriars (those who held shares in the physical structure of the playhouses, rather than in the acting company) were entitled to receive a full moiety (half), “without any defalcation or abatement at all,” of all takings from the galleries and boxes in both houses and from the tiring house door of the Globe.

There were presumably similar divisions elsewhere, though the proportions may have varied. In Henslowe’s Diary, for example, we find the entries: “Here I begin to … receive the whole galleries, from this day being the 29 of July 1598” and “Here I began to receive the galleries again which they received, beginning at Michaelmas week, being the 6 of October 1599,” listing and totaling weekly items thereafter (Henslowe 94, 120). This suggests that the contractual arrangement for the payment of Henslowe’s rent changed at this time; he was henceforth to receive “the wholegalleries” (my emphasis). Quite what the change amounts to is obscure to us, but must have been clear to the parties concerned. (There were, of course, no housekeepers for Henslowe to share these takings with.) And in such arrangements it was critical to know what sums were collected at which doors and to keep them separate. Dishonest gatherers might thus be trying to feather their own nests or tilt the balance in the division of the take.

Box 4.4 Women in the Theatres

It is a notorious truism that there were no women on the professional stage in England prior to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.⁹ It is not, in fact, entirely true, though the exceptions are such as effectively to prove the rule. We know, for example, that when Middleton and Dekker wrote The Roaring Girl about the notorious cross‐dressing, pipe‐smoking pickpocket and fence, Moll Frith, Moll herself appeared on stage during the play’s run at the Fortune, though not actually performing the role; she is reported to have sat “upon the stage … in man’s apparel and played upon her lute and sang a song” (Mullholland, 1977, 31). Another exception was in troupes visiting from the Continent where, by Shakespeare’s time, the resistance to women on stage had been overcome. A troupe of Italian players, for example, visited England in 1574 and entertained Elizabeth while she was on progress at both Windsor and Reading; that November Thomas Norton fulminated against “the unchaste, shameless and unnatural tumbling of the Italian women” (ES, 2: 262). A commedia dell’arte company was rewarded at court in August 1602, and since that was the form of theatre in which women had first appeared on the professional stage in Italy there is a good chance that there were women among the “comedians,” though there is no actual record of this – or of them performing on public stages (Nicoll, 1976, 169).

We can also find numerous exceptions to the rule outside the professional theatre. As Phyllis Rackin has argued, “there were many women who performed in the guild plays, May games, and civic entertainments that were regular features of village life, and there were many women among the itinerant musicians, acrobats, and other performers who toured the English countryside” (Rackin, 2005, 25; Brown and Parolin, 2005). Aristocratic women also appeared on stage in Jacobean and Caroline court masques, though their “performing” was limited to dancing, not speaking or singing (Wynne‐Davies, 1992; McManus, 2002). By the same token, highly educated aristocratic women wrote plays, though they never intended them for commercial performance; the most notable in Shakespeare’s own time were Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (sister of Sir Philip Sidney), who translated the French tragedy of Robert Garnier, Antonie, and wrote an entertainment for a visit of Queen Elizabeth, Astraea (or “A Dialogue Between Two Shepherds, Thenot and Piers”); and Elizabeth Cary, whose Tragedy of Mariam was the first English tragedy by a woman to be printed (1613). At a later date, semi‐private theatrical activity involving women flourished in some aristocratic households, such as that of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, whose daughters Jane and Elizabeth both wrote plays and performed in them (Cerasano and Wynne‐Davies, 1996; Findlay and Hodgson‐Wright, 2000). Such exceptions only underscore the reality that female roles on the English professional stage did not exist. Kathleen McLuskie observed that the commercial theatres “had no women shareholders, actors, writers, or stage hands,” and, as Dympna Callaghan categorically puts it, “there were no women on Shakespeare’s stage” (McLuskie, 1985, 92; Callaghan, 2000, 7).

There were, however, women in Shakespeare’s theatres. Among those paid as “hired men” two groups certainly included women: the gatherers, who collected the entrance fees, and the tirewomen, whom I discuss below (see pp. 159; 167). But at least two other categories of women made an impact on the theatre, although their impact is difficult to measure. One was those who helped compose the audience; the other was the wives and widows of some of the principal players and theatre‐owners, who were more actively involved in the business than we might have supposed – and did indeed become householder sharers. The presence of women in the audiences is widely attested (Wynne‐Davies, 2009). The poet, Edmund Spenser, for example, wrote of “a troublous noise, / That seemed some perilous tumult to design, / Confused with women’s cries and shouts of boys, / Such as the troubled theatres oftimes annoys” (The Faerie Queene, 4.3.37; 1596). But far too much of the evidence is filtered through the besetting misogyny of the era, fuelled it would seem by deep male insecurities, which blends all too readily with pervasive anti‐theatrical rhetoric.

So commentators claimed that women were easily corrupted by what they saw on stage. As early as 1580 an anonymous writer (possibly, ironically, the playwright Anthony Munday) categorically writes that “some citizens” wives … have even on their deathbeds with tears confessed that they have received at those spectacles such filthy infections as have turned their minds from chaste cogitations, and made them of honest women light huswives [i.e. hussies]” (A Third Blast of Retreat From Plays and Theatres, 1580, 125). By 1631 Richard Braithwait had tied the generalization to a concrete example: “a gentlewoman of our nation, who so fairly bestowed the expense of her best hours upon the stage, as being surprised by sickness, even unto death, she became so deaf to such as admonished her, she closed her dying scene with a vehement calling on Hieronimo [i.e. the protagonist of The Spanish Tragedy]” (1631, 53). William Prynne was so taken with the anecdote that he embroidered it, telling how she “cried out Hieronimo, Hieronimo; oh let me see Hieronimo acted (calling out for a play instead of crying unto God for mercy)” (1633, fol. 556). This was in his rabidly anti‐theatrical Histriomastix, over 1,000 pages long, which contains an entry in the index: “women players: notorious whores.”

All of which suggests that respectable gentlewomen were indeed going to the theatres, or such admonitions would have rung false; it does not, of course, establish that they received such “filthy infections” there, though even the fantasy of a woman calling upon Hieronimo on her deathbed speaks to the impact of the perennially popular Spanish Tragedy. Other writers make much of the fact that the Bankside playhouses were notoriously adjacent to brothels, some even owned by the Bishop of Winchester so that their prostitutes were known as “Winchester geese.” Some claim that the prostitutes attended the theatre (“harlots, utterly beyond shame, press to the forefront of the scaffolds, to the end to show their impudency, and to be as an object to all men’s eyes”: A Third Blast, 139) and others imply that respectable women who attended reduced themselves to the level of prostitutes. Nervous husbands doubtless concurred with Samuel Rowlands’s view of “a good wife” in The Bride(1617): “At public plays she never will be seen / … She knows how wise men censure of such dames” (E1r–1v).

Evidently none of this stopped women of all social ranks attending the theatre. Francis Beaumont, for example, was not fantasizing when he made a thoroughly respectable citizen’s wife part of the onstage “audience” for The Knight of the Burning Pestle(1607). By the 1620s and 1630s aristocratic ladies certainly went to the theatres, especially the indoor private theatres, where authors sometimes acknowledged their presence in prologues and epilogues. It has even been argued that their presence affected the repertoires of those theatres (Neill, 1978). Most famously, the Queen herself, Henrietta Maria attended the Blackfriars theatre four times in the 1630s, twice accompanied by foreign royalty (Gurr, 2004b, 234). But that would have been unthinkable during Shakespeare’s lifetime, when the theatre invariably went to court, rather than vice versa. There is ample evidence, however, of less elevated women attending his playhouses.

In Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London Andrew Gurr lists all those who can positively be identified (I confine myself to the period pre‐1620): Sarah Archdall twice met the astrologer Simon Forman, who was wooing her, at the Curtain; Elizabeth Cary’s daughter attests that her mother was a frequent playgoer in her youth; Lady Anne Clifford is recorded as seeing The Mad Lover in 1617; Elizabeth Wybarn took a party to the Globe in 1612, which included one of her nieces, possibly Margaret Franke; Elizabeth Hattrell, a serving‐woman of about twenty, visited the Curtain in 1611; Mrs Overall, wife of John Overall, Dean of St Paul’s, is reported as being much admired by the gallants at the playhouse; Elizabeth Reignoldes was escorted to plays by John Cotton; Mrs Watton was reprimanded in a 1610 London Consistory Court – which tried sexual misdemeanors – for attending a play without her husband; Elizabeth Williams, sister‐in‐law of Sir Dudley Carleton, is recorded as attending the rebuilt Globe in April 1614 (224, 226, 227, 231, 246, 239, 240, 244). It was clearly expected that respectable women would be accompanied by a male relative or other chaperone, but otherwise their presence was unremarkable. The number of men who can be similarly identified is, unsurprisingly, considerably greater, but the difference shrinks appreciably if we exclude those reported for affrays and other criminal activity. In the end I am inclined to agree with Gurr: “Evidence for a plentiful supply of women playgoers is there throughout the period, although few assertions, beyond the bare fact that women were present, can be trusted entirely” (Gurr, 2004b, 67).

Evidence of the influence of the wives of actors and theatre owners is more difficult to pin down, but is in some respects more telling. For one thing, inter‐marriage within the theatrical community was very pronounced. Less than a year after William Knell of the Queen’s Men was killed, his widow, Rebecca, married Shakespeare’s future fellow, John Heminge (see p. 31); Heminge’s own daughter, Thomasine, married the King’s Man, William Ostler in 1611 – a union with unfortunate consequences for father and daughter (Edmond, 2004). Edward Alleyn married Henslowe’s stepdaughter. Augustine Phillips’ sister, Mary, married his fellow, Robert Gough. When Richard Burbage died, his widow, Winifred, married Richard Robinson, a former boy actor but by 1619 a sharer in the King’s Men (see p. 187). And so on.

This must in general have reinforced the cohesive ties within the theatrical community, personal attachments overlaying professional ones. In the case of wives of theatre‐owners we can sometimes glimpse them at work alongside their husbands; Agnes Henslowe, for example, sometimes appears in Philip’s Diary, handling moneylending items, with players, members of the family and other customers alike. She lent ten shillings, for instance, to Thomas Towne, the actor who killed William Knell; and five shillings to William Bird or Borne, both sharers in the Admiral’s Men. She also dealt with an Isabel Keys, who had property dealings with Philip (Henslowe, 62, 76, 83). Christopher Beeston, who in later years owned the Cockpit theatre, appointed his wife, Elizabeth Hutchinson, “full and sole executrix” of his estate, “by reason I do owe many great debts and am engaged for great sums of money, which no one but my wife understands where or how to receive, pay or take in”; he also directs “that my said executrix shall … provide and find for the said company [the King’s and Queen’s Young Company] a sufficient and good stock of apparel fitting for their use” (Honigmann and Brock, 1993, 192–3). As Natasha Korda notes, “It seems unlikely that Beeston would have entrusted his wife with this task if she had no prior experience in the procurement of costumes for the stage” (Korda, 2009, 469).

Finally, and less harmoniously, some of the theatre widows played the specter at the feast when their husbands’ former partners tried to overlook continuing contractual obligations after their deaths. We have already observed Margaret Brayne, widow of John, unsuccessfully suing her brother‐in‐law, James Burbage, over continuing rights she claimed in the Theatre (see p. 31–2). Thomasine Heminge sued her own father to try to hold on to her late husband’s estate. She had married William Ostler, a sharer in the company, who died intestate in December 1614, leaving her as his administrator. His shares of the leases in the Globe and Blackfriars should by rights have gone to her, but somehow passed into her father’s hands – leaving her no means of support. In September 1615 she entered a bill in Chancery to claim the value of the shares; by October 9, despite promises to make good her loss, he had still not done so, and she entered a common law suit for damages amounting to £600, her estimate of the shares’ value of. Unfortunately the outcome is unknown (p. 151).

But the most tenacious of theatre widows, and a presence in theatrical affairs from 1592 to the closing of the theatres, was Susan Browne Greene Baskerville, a multiple wife, widow, and mother of actors, and fierce defender of their legacies. She first married in 1592 the actor, Robert Browne, who was with the Earl of Derby’s Men in 1599 and manager for them of the Boar’s Head playhouse. One of their sons was William Browne, who acted with Queen Anne’s Men and Prince Charles’s Men between 1616 and his death in 1634. The Boar’s Head enterprise was bedeviled throughout Robert Browne’s time by the bad faith of some involved in the enterprise (Berry, 1986). Derby’s Men were replaced by Worcester’s, and when Browne died in October 1603 he seemed to Joan Alleyn, wife of Edward, “very poor” (Henslowe, 297). She was not aware, apparently, that Browne had a part‐ownership in the Boar’s Head, which passed to his widow.

Susan’s second husband was the famous clown Thomas Greene, a leading figure with Queen Anne’s Men; he died in August 1612. Susan married her third husband, James Baskerville in June 1613. Thomas Greene’s will, dated July 25, 1612, had left the value of his share in Queen Anne’s Men, worth £80, to his wife. At the time of his death, the company owed Greene an additional £37 10.s, also due to Susan. In an attempt to retrieve this money she appealed to Viscount Lisle, Chamberlain of Queen Anne’s Household, whose authority derived from the Queen’s patronage of the company; he arbitrated that she should receive half the company’s profits until the sum was met (ES, 2: 237). Hardly any of this was forthcoming. In 1615, after negotiations, the Baskervilles agreed to invest another £57 10s. in the company; they would receive in return a pension of 1s. 8d. every day the company played, for the rest of the Baskervilles’ lives. The company predictably fell behind in its payments; in 1616, in return for further investment of £38, they raised the payment to 3s. 8d. The Queen’s Men were now even less able to meet their payments to Susan Baskerville; they also failed to pay her son William, then a hired man with them. At this point, James Baskerville, apparently a bigamist, abandoned Susan and left for Ireland in 1617. Undeterred, Susan sued Ellis Worth and other members of the Queen’s Men. She pressed her suit again in 1623, against the only three sharers still with the company who had agreed to her latest settlement. She was successful to the extent that the company, now known as the Players of the Revels or the Players of the Red Bull (since Queen Anne had died in 1619) broke up.

William Browne, by then a sharer in the company, died in November 1634, leaving his mother as his executor; Susan Baskerville thus acquired control of his share in the Red Bull company. Less than a year later she was embroiled in litigation with William’s widow, Anne Browne. Susan Baskerville also bought a share in the second Fortune Theatre, which Edward Alleyn rebuilt after the original burned down in 1621, bringing together a syndicate of investors; yet another lawsuit, begun in 1637, shows that Baskerville owned one of the twenty‐four shares. The issue was still active in 1648, the year before she died, when Baskerville filed a deposition in the matter. It is a remarkably persistent record of involvement in theatrical affairs. Wives and daughters in Shakespeare’s day were legally and socially at a considerable disadvantage; but widows were another story.

There may have been no women on Shakespeare’s stage, but women were certainly employed in the theatrical operation; they contributed a highly visible part of the audience; the gatherers among them would be familiar front‐of‐house, while the tirewomen played an essential role in the tiring house; and a few of them pulled considerable strings behind the scenes.

It may not have helped matters that some of the gatherers’ positions were contractually in the gift of people with a significant stake in the enterprise. When Aaron Holland built the Red Bull playhouse, around 1606, he assigned one‐seventh of the house to the player, Thomas Swinnerton, “with a gatherer’s place thereto belonging” (Bentley, 1984, 98). Such arrangements had much potential for embarrassment, since it fell to the actor‐sharers to pay those appointed. It was so in a case where William Bird (or Borne), a sharer with Prince Henry’s Men, had to write to Edward Alleyn to complain about the dishonesty of one John Russell, “that by your appointment was made a gatherer with us,” accusing him of being “often false.” He explains that the company will no longer let him “take the box,” but will pay his wages as “a necessary attendant on the stage” and if he likes also employ him as a tailor (Greg, 1907, 85). Was Russell stealing for himself or falsifying the take on Alleyn’s behalf? It would always be in the interests of individual gatherers to maximize the take of whoever controlled the shares by which their positions were allocated. Given the authority Alleyn had with Prince Henry’s Men this must have been a difficult negotiation. Although they believe Russell to be dishonest they will continue to find paid employment for him (as Alleyn has the right to insist), but not in this most delicate of positions.

That case probably casts light on another general feature of the position of gatherers. They were only required in that specific role for a couple of hours during the afternoons; it was responsible work, but hardly a full‐time job. Possibly it was normally the only work in the theatre for those appointed by patronage. But for other hired men it was probably one function among many, including working as “necessary attendant[s] on the stage,” tailors or some such, when they were not actually collecting entrance money. In the “plot” for Frederick and Basilea (first performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1597) various unnamed “gatherers” and other attendants are assigned to perform minor roles in the play (Bentley, 1984, 213). It suggests that there were more gatherers than were strictly necessary, if some of them could be called away to perform on stage as needed.

We may hazard a guess – since no one mentions the issue – that none of the gatherers who played minor roles were women. But this is one theatrical job that we know women performed. We know of a Joan Hewes (Hughes) who was a gatherer for the twopenny galleries at the Red Bull in 1607 and was still employed there in 1618; Mary Phillips was also a gatherer at that playhouse in 1607. The Actors’ Remonstrance (1643) satirically describes the straits of those employed in the theatres, since their closing: “Nay, our very doorkeepers, men and women, most grievously complain that by this cessation they are robbed of the privilege of stealing from us with licence” (ES, 1: 356n; my emphasis). On April 11, 1612, a Robert Browne wrote to Edward Alleyn on behalf of his fellow player, Mr Rose, who was already with the Prince’s Men; Rose wanted Alleyn’s help to get a gatherer’s position for his wife: “he hath requested me to be solicitous for him to you (who he knows can strike a greater stroke amongst them than this) as to procure him but a gathering place for his wife, for he hath had many crosses and it will be some comfort and help to them both, and he makes no doubt but she shall so carry herself in that place as they shall think it well bestowed by reason of her upright dealing in that nature” (Greg 1907, 63).¹⁰

We do not know if Rose was successful in his petition. But we do know that Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s veteran colleague, exercised his patronage as a housekeeper at both the Globe and the Blackfriars to the benefit of his old servant, Elizabeth Wheaton. In his 1627 will he left her a mourning gown, 40s. and “that place of privilege which she now exerciseth and enjoyeth in the houses of the Blackfriars, London, and the Globe on the Bankside [for life] if my estate shall so long continue in the premises.” Condell’s widow, also Elizabeth, renewed the bequest in her own will, leaving her £20 and “the gathering place at the Globe during my lease” (Bentley, 1984, 94).