The boy actors, more than any other single feature, define the distance between early modern theatre and our own.18 Why precisely women did not perform on the English professional stage before the Civil War has never been explained; they certainly did so in Italy, France, and Spain, even if this was often a change within living memory. Contrary to the movie Shakespeare in Love (1999) there was no legal prohibition against it and there is no record of the Master of the Revels trying to enforce a ban. It was a matter of custom and practice, to some extent deriving from the peripatetic lifestyle of the players in the days before settled city playing; less scandal would attend on the men being accompanied by boys than by women, and that was an important consideration when they were representing a noble patron.19
Taking on boys as apprentices would have seemed natural in a context where many of the players were freemen of trade or livery companies. They would be used to the custom of boys being bound by indentures, usually for a period of seven years, until they themselves became freemen. The expectation was that they should be trained for a profession, and given board and lodging, but usually no wage – they were getting freeman status in one of the livery companies like the Merchant Taylors, Mercers, Grocers, Goldsmiths, or Haberdashers at the end of it, and that was a tangible social benefit in the City of London (see p. 12). In an era before social security, the status also offered a financial support structure in old age, times of poverty or bereavement. It was by no means necessary, however, that the boys should be trained in the trade with which their masters were associated. The earliest known theatrical apprentices were indentured with Richard Tarlton, who had served his own apprenticeship with the Haberdashers, but later transferred to the Vintners, probably because he ran an inn as a secondary profession (Kathman, 2006). There was nothing improper about him taking on apprentices to train as players, even though there was no guild of players for them to belong to (Kathman, 2009d, 422–3). They would themselves be free of the Haberdashers or Vintners, just as John Heminge’s many apprentices would be free of his own company, the Grocers.
The boys usually started their indentures around the age of thirteen, though anything up to sixteen was not unusual; and their term was commonly for seven years, though again anything up to twelve years was not out of the ordinary.20 It thus seems that boy actors performed the roles of women (as well, of course, as of pages, children, apprentices and others appropriate to their size and voice) between about the ages of thirteen and twenty‐two; puberty generally came two or three years later in less well‐nourished times than it does in the industrial world today. Although, as we have seen, Augustine Phillips took on at least two apprentices while he was with Shakespeare’s company, and Robert Armin, a Goldsmith, took on at least one (James Jones, bound July 15, 1608: Kathman, 2004b, 18), John Heminge, took on by far the most for the company, at least ten over his long career. And it so happens that we can identify quite a few of the roles they played (Kathman, 2009d, 419–20).
Heminge bound Thomas Belte on November12, 1595, and he must be the “T. Belt” assigned to play a servant and the female role of Panthea in the “plot” of The Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins, a play which David Kathman assigns to the Chamberlain’s Men around 1597/8 (see 205–17). Heminge then bound Alexander Cooke on January 26, 1597; in the same “plot” someone named “saunder” played the substantial female roles of Queen Videna and Progne and that is quite likely to have been Cooke, who went on to be a shareholder with the company. We may note here that in the period 1597–1601 the company contained at least two boy players capable of taking on challenging female roles and it is probably not coincidental that it is the time when Shakespeare wrote his three most famous cross‐dressing roles, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Viola in Twelfth Night, besides the major role of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. There is no record of John Rice being formally bound to Heminge, but when he presented a speech as the Angel of Gladness before King James in the guildhall of the Merchant Taylors in 1607 (“a very proper child, well spoken … with a taper of frankincense burning in his hand”) Heminge received £5 for supplying and preparing him, Rice himself 5 shillings; Rice would eventually be a sharer and leading player in the company.21 Heminge did bind George Birch or Burgh on July 4, 1610; by 1616 he is noted as playing Doll Common in a revival of Jonson’s The Alchemist and Lady Would‐Be in a revival of his Volpone – two substantial comic female roles.22
John Wilson, bound on February 18, 1611, is to be found in a stage direction in the First Folio text of Much Ado About Nothing, “Enter Prince, Leonato, Claudio and Jack Wilson”; this in part replaces the 1600 quarto stage direction “Enter Balthasar with music” (2.3.41.0). So Wilson had presumably played Balthasar, who goes on to sing “sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” in a revival of the play at some time between 1611 and 1623; he became free of the Grocers (as the phrase was) on October 21, 1621, ending his apprenticeship and so probably also his days of playing female roles. Richard Sharpe, bound February 21 1616, played the challenging title role in The Duchess of Malfi around 1621/22, and became a sharer in the company around 1624/5.23 Thomas Holcombe (April 22, 1619) played the Provost’s wife in Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt that same year; Robert Pallant (February 9, 1620) played Cariola, a lesser role, alongside the more experienced Sharpe in the same revival of The Duchess of Malfi. William Trigge, the last of Heminge’s apprentices, is recorded as having played numerous female roles between 1626 and 1632.
There is no doubt that there could be genuine affection between apprentices and their masters. There is a charming letter which purports to come from the boy actor, John Pig or Pyk (see p. 170–2), to Edward Alleyn’s wife, Joan: “Mistress, your honest ancient and loving servant Pig hath this humble commendation to you and to my good Master Henslowe & mistress, and to my mistress’s sister, Bess; for all her hard dealing with me, I send her hearty commendation, hoping to be beholding to her again for the opening of the cupboard: and to my neighbour, Doll, for calling me up in a morning and to my wife Sara for making clean my shoes & to that old gentleman, Monsieur Pearle, that ever fought with me for the block in the chimney corner. And though you all look for the ready return of my proper person yet I swear to you by the faith of a fustian king never to return till fortune us bring with a joyful meeting with lovely London. I cease your petty, pretty, prattling, parleying Pig. By me, John Pyk.” In the left‐hand margin there is a note: “Mistress, I pay you keep this that my master may see it, for I got one to write it, Master Downton [the actor] and my master knows not of it.” The joke is that the letter is not in Thomas Downton’s hand at all; it is in that of Alleyn (a true “fustian king”) who, while on tour (with Pig doubtless in the company), wants to keep in loving touch with his wife and does so by evoking little details of their household life, as seen from Pig’s perspective. It would hardly be an effective joke if Pig were not genuinely a fond presence (“petty, pretty, prattling, parleying”) in their household whenever they were in “lovely London.”
Strictly speaking, Pig may not have been an apprentice. There are certainly instances in the Henslowe/Alleyn papers of boys being taken on formally as household servants, for a period of three years. Alleyn, for example, bound Richard Perkins, then aged seventeen, to a three‐year contract in 1596; Perkins went on to a long career in the theatre, becoming a sharer and notable leading man with the King’s Men. In many respects this would be similar to an apprenticeship, but it would not result in being made free of a livery company, with all the benefits attached to it. In both arrangements the usual assumption was that the boy would receive board and lodging, probably in the master’s household like Pig; as a servant he might well also receive wages. Philip Henslowe’s arrangements in respect of James Bristow give us some idea of the likely economics of such arrangements. Henslowe paid the player William Augustine £8 for the boy on December 18, 1597 (Henslowe, 241). Clearly there was a market of sorts in talented youngsters. And those who purchased their skills, whether from the boys’ parents or a third party, would expect a return on that outlay. Henslowe then effectively rented Bristow out to the Admiral’s Men at a rate of three shillings per week; notionally it was a wage for him, but it is likely that everything left after board and lodging finished up in Henslowe’s own pocket (Henslowe, 118, 164, 167). Presumably there were similar understandings in respect of apprentices. John Shank claimed in the 1630s that he had laid out £40 to retain the services of John Thomson for the King’s Men and “his part of £200 for other boys since his coming to the company” (Gurr, 2004a, 277); he did not reveal how much he, or Heminge and the others, would have made out of this investment, but this would have been one of the charges that fell to the sharers of the company to pay from their portion of the daily or weekly profits.24
We have evidence of even shorter‐term arrangements for some boy actors. In 1577, shortly after building the Theatre, James Burbage and John Brayne entered into an agreement with John Hind, a citizen and haberdasher (Mateer, 2006). They signed an indenture whereby Hind’s two sons, John Jr and Augustine, would be available twice a week to perform as boy players for the six months between October 13 andApril 6, 1578. Hind would receive twelve shillings a week for this while they remained in London, seven shillings a week whenever they were on tour. These rates of pay put the boys on a par with some highly skilled artisans; they must have been star performers to be worth so much (see p. 17). The boys in turn were required to be available, on reasonable notice, to perform in plays and other entertainments; also to learn their lines for stipulated plays, and to play the cithern and sing as required.
We might have expected that the Hind brothers would have been used exclusively at the Theatre, but this is not the case. In the litigation which followed the falling‐out of the parties, Burbage and Brayne claimed that the boys had been given reasonable notice to appear one Sunday in a production at the Bell Inn in Gracechurch Street, but were not available as required (Mateer, 373).25 Burbage and Brayne were clearly not just theatrical landlords, but show promoters, possibly because the costs of setting up the Theatre had so taxed their resources. It is a testimony to the boys’ skills that they were “borrowed” by Lord Howard of Effingham to contribute to the 1578 New Year festivities at his estate in Reigate in Surrey – causing an absence which further stirred the litigation (374). This short‐term contract clearly ended in tears, but it indicates how important the boy players could be in the theatrical economy.
There is no record of what training exactly was given to apprentices “pur apprendre larte d’une Stageplayer” (“to learn the art of a stageplayer”).26 John Astington very reasonably suggests that “Working partners are always latent instructors” and that like most trade apprentices the boys essentially learned on the job, in conjunction with the masters who bound them and the other older players (2010, 99; see also Tribble, 2009). He argues that between 1613 and 1635 John Shank “was the principal working actor with responsibility for supervising the boys on the stages of the Globe and the Blackfriars” (ibid.). But there is evidence that those on the management side of theatre sometimes took a lead in training apprentices. In the case of John Heminge he cannot have been such a direct role‐model after circa 1611, since he withdrew from acting and concentrated on the business side of the company; but that may well still have involved some training of his apprentices. The epilogue to Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar (1640) commends to the audience the man [William Beeston, son of Shakespeare’s former colleague, Christopher] “by whose care and directions this stage is governed, who has for many years both in his father’s days, and since, directed poets to write and players to speak till he trained up these youths here to what they are now — ay, some of’ em from before they were able to say a grace of two lines long to have more parts in their pates than would fill so many dryfats” (Brome, 2010b).27 This may have been more the case in boy companies (Martin Slater undertook such a role with the King’s Revels boys: see p. 145) than with the adult companies.
One consistent thread runs through the records of the boy players, and that is musical accomplishment. From the Hind brothers in the 1570s who were expected to sing and play on the cittern, through Augustine Phillips’s two apprentices, one of whom received his bass viol in his will, and the other a cittern, bandore, and lute, to John Wilson among Heminge’s apprentices, they all either were or trained to be proficient musicians. The first quarto text of Hamlet tells us that the boy who played “Ofelia” entered “playing on a lute, and her hair down singing” when she went mad (Q1, G4v). John Wilson went on to be a notable musician and composer, employed extensively by the King’s Men; settings by him survive for songs in Thomas Middleton’s The Witch; Richard Brome’s The Northern Lass; John Fletcher’s The Beggar’s Bush, The Bloody Brother, The False One, Love’s Cure, The Loyal Subject, The Mad Lover, The Pilgrim, The Queen of Corinth, Valentinian, The Wild Goose Chase, and Women Pleased; and John Ford’s The Lovers’ Melancholy.
The one question we can probably never really answer is what people made at the time of the boys’ playing of female roles (see Barker, 2009). How convincing was it or did they attempt to make it? And what does it say about early modern ideas of sexuality? There were certainly those at the time who saw the practice as deeply unnatural. The most famous exponent of this view was the Oxford Puritan theologian, Dr John Rainolds, whose Th’Overthrow of Stage‐Plays (1599) pursues in detail the Biblical objections: “And so if any man do put on woman’s raiment, he is dishonest and defiled, because he trangresseth the bounds of modesty and comeliness, and weareth that which God forbiddeth him to wear, which man’s laws affirmeth he cannot wear without reproof … plays are charged, not for making young men come forth in whores’ attire, like the lewd woman in Proverbs, but for teaching them to counterfeit her actions, her wantonness, her impudent face, her wicked speech and enticements” (16–17). Freudians may wonder what to make of the fact that the young Rainolds had himself played Hippolyta in Richard Edwarde’s Palamon and Arcyte during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford 1566, described at the beginning of this book (see p. 4).
An Oxford scholar also left us one of the most affecting accounts of a boy’s acting, having seen the King’s Men perform Othello there in 1610: “But that Desdemona, murdered by her husband in our presence, although she always pled her case excellently, yet when killed moved us more, while stretched out on her bed she begged the spectators’ pity with her very facial expression.”28 This was very probably John Rice, who earlier that summer had appeared with Richard Burbage in a water pageant to mark Prince Henry’s formal creation as Prince of Wales. Described by an observer as “two absolute actors even the very best our instant time can yield,” Burbage played “Amphion, the father of harmony or music,” and Rice “a very fair and beautiful nymph, representing the genius of old Corineus’s Queen of the province Cornwall, suited in her watery habit yet rich and costly with a coronet of pearl and cockle‐shells on her head.”29
Rice then left the company for a number of years and was replaced as the leading boy actor by Richard Robinson, who years later would marry Burbage’s widow. Jonson includes a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about “Dick” Robinson in The Devil is An Ass – a play in which Robinson himself appeared – telling how he was brought to a “gossip’s feast … Dressed like a lawyer’s wife.” One character says “They say he’s an ingenious youth” and another replies “Oh, sir! And dresses himself the best! Beyond / Forty o’your very ladies” (2.8.69–70; 75–7; Jonson 2012d). If there is any truth in this, his cross‐dressing was not restricted to the stage. But on it he probably created the role of the Duchess of Malfi and earned this praise (along with Webster) from Thomas Middleton:
Thy epitaph only the title be –
Write “Duchess,” that will fetch a tear for thee,
For who e’er saw this duchess live, and die,
That could get off under a bleeding eye?
(Webster, 2009, 78)
Michael Shapiro has drawn attention to two passages in Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (part‐published 1621) which draw on the cross‐dressing of boy actors for metaphoric effect (1989, 187–93). In one overwrought scene a queen has taken a lover and persuaded him to kill her husband; she then falls in love with a stranger who comes to pay his respects to the dead king. Her lover secretly sees the new wooing: “there he [the first lover] saw her with all passionate ardency seek and sue for the stranger’s love; yet he [the stranger], unmovable, was no further wrought than if he had seen a delicate play‐boy act a loving woman’s part and, knowing him a boy, liked only his actions.” The second passage, written in the narrator’s voice, is a kind of character‐study of a vain, insincere and deceitful lady, “being for her over‐acting fashion more like a play‐boy dressed gaudily up to show a fond loving woman’s part than a great lady; so busy, so full of talk, and in such a set formality, with so many framed looks, feigned smiles and nods, with a deceitful down‐cast look, instead of purest modesty and bashfulness; too rich jewels for her rotten cabinet to contain …” . In both passages the underlying implication is that an observer can perceive a distance between the actor and his role, and admire his technical skill without being seduced by the credibility of the impersonation. The boy‐actor remained a boy, for all his skill in appearing womanly.
Of course, the puritans who fulminated against cross‐dressing did not see it that way and the repertory of, in particular, the Children of the King’s Revels does seem to have gone out of its way to exploit their sexual ambiguity (Bly, 2000). Does it make a difference here that Lady Mary was a woman? Would a man have seen things differently? It is probably an irresolvable debate. We have lost the convention and, despite frequent all‐male performances of Shakespeare these days, cannot resurrect it in this very different culture.
Conclusions
This exhausts the categories of persons known to have been employed by the sharers of the acting companies. The ten or so sharers themselves were always the dominant presences, both artistically and commercially. They commissioned, assessed and purchased all plays; they authorized all payments and hiring of personnel. Philip Henslowe and Sir Henry Herbert are usually careful to accord the sharers they deal with the honorific “Mr.” But they were assisted by a substantial body of “hired men” or associates, perhaps sixteen or so in the years before 1608 (excluding women and boys). They included a few strong actors in line to become sharers, and a few others with very clearly designated roles, such as the book‐keeper, the stage‐keeper, and the tiremen; but many were multi‐talented, able to act a little, or play an instrument, or perform some tailoring (assisting the designated tireman), or serve as a gatherer. There would also have been perhaps four or five apprentices or contracted servants, primarily to act the female roles and to add musical variety, but also possibly to serve as the call‐boys which the book‐keeper required when they were not otherwise involved in a production. And there would have been a smaller number of women, notably acting as gatherers but also assisting with dressing the boys, especially with specialist items like head‐tires. The regular personnel at the Theatre and the Globe must have added up to over thirty persons, all with roles to play in getting a performance on stage and the paying customers accommodated.
Notes
1 See p. 277 on the taking of the Chamberlain’s, Admiral’s, and Worcester’s Men, and the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, into royal patronage in 1603/4.2 The document used to be in the Henslowe papers at Dulwich College, where it was transcribed. But the original has been lost. I take it here from EPF, 282–3, with these differences: to make it more readable I have usually condensed the names of Henslowe and Meade to initials and omitted phrases like “the said Robert Dawes” when “he” is clear enough. The “[to*]” in the transcript reads “[by]”, but the sense is clearly that the apparel has been furnished to the company by Henslowe and Meade. I have omitted the ending of the document, which mainly relates to Dawes conceding the rights of Henslowe and Meade to one playing day in four at the Hope for bear‐baiting, the profits from which were to be entirely their own. This would inevitably reduce the players’ profits.3 EPF, 657–6; see Haaker, 1968. Eleanor Collins has questioned the typicality of Brome’s contracts, suggesting that such arrangements were a product of specific circumstances rather than normal, long‐term practices. She does not speculate about Shakespeare, but notes of Fletcher that his “dramatic production does not resemble exclusive contractual behavior until after Shakespeare’s death, after which he may have taken a share in the company that would effectively ensure his loyalty” (2007, 121). It is an intriguing idea, but there is no evidence for it.4 An example of an ephemeral epilogue is one which Juliet Dusinberre argues may have been written for a Shrovetide court performance of As You Like It, replacing Rosalind’s more familiar one in the printed text of the play (Dusinberre, 2003, 371–405; and Shakespeare, 2006, Appendix 1, 349–54). Her claims for Shakespeare’s authorship and its relationship to As You Like It have not been universally accepted (Hattaway, 2009; Hackett, 2012).5 Official Elizabethan documents have a range of terms for what we would lump together as plays, presumably to limit wriggle‐room. The Royal Patent granted to Leicester’s Men in 1574 specifically allowed them to perform “comedies, tragedies, interludes, and stage plays.” By the same token, performers were variously comedians, tragedians, stage or common players, or players of interludes, but only rarely actors.6 Of course, the sun in England did not always cooperate. John Webster, in his epistle to the 1612 text of The White Devil, performed by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull, complained that “it was acted in so dull a time of winter, presented in so open and black a theatre, that it wanted … a full and understanding auditory.”7 It is not clear if this number includes the gatherers, those who took the entrance money, or is restricted to those specifically involved in performances. It muddies the waters somewhat that we know gatherers did occasionally take minor roles.8 Bentley, 1984, 107. Note that this contract binds Kendall to the theatre, rather than to the company, at a time when Henslowe was acquiring more managerial control of the company, doubtless aided by Alleyn. They may have been hedging bets against the Admiral’s Men looking to find a different base. There were probably no parallels with the Chamberlain’s Men.9 This section is particularly indebted to Natasha Korda, 2009: 456–73 and to Gurr 2004b.10 This was evidently not the Robert Browne (d. 1603) who had been married to Susan Baskerville. Herbert Berry explains: “There were obviously at least two and could easily have been three or more Robert Brownes who had to do with the companies and playhouses of the time” (1986, 197).11 The Yeoman’s oversight of costumes evidently opened up opportunities to make a profit. In 1572 there was a complaint from Thomas Giles, a haberdasher, against the Yeoman of the Revels, John Arnold. He accused him of hiring out costumes from the office (presumably for his private profit) and was quite specific about the competition this represented to his own rental business. On Valentine’s Day Arnold hired out gowns for an event in Fleet Street; the week before Shrove Sunday he hired out others for a wedding masque in Kent; and on Shrove Tuesday he hired out yet more for an event at Charterhouse Yard (Feuillerat, 1908, 409–10; see also Streitberger, 2016, 108). Will Fisher wonders whether Arnold’s successor, Edward Kirkham, was engaged in a similar business when he became part of the management team for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, early in James’s reign (2006, 84). When William Hunt fell ill in 1635, Yeoman since 1611, Sir Henry Herbert asked the King not to fill his place without consulting him (Herbert, 198). In fact Hunt lived four more years, but his eventual successor proved to be Joseph Taylor (patent November 11,1639), one of the leading players with the King’s Men (Bentley, 1941–68, 2: 590–8). Taylor may have been handling costumes for some time. On January 6, 1634 Herbert recorded: “Fletcher’s pastoral called The Faithful Shepherdess [was presented at Denmark House] in the clothes the Queen had given Taylor the year before of her own pastoral [i.e. Montagu’s Shepherd’s Paradise]” (Herbert, 186). The Queen’s gift was for Taylor’s rehearsing of herself and her ladies in their pastoral, so it was specifically to him rather than to the King’s Men. Presumably Taylor then sold or loaned the costumes to the company. There was clearly profit to be made from costumes that might derive one way or another from the court. Taylor’s later service as Yeoman of the Revels may in effect have institutionalized it.12 These inventories were originally with Henslowe’s Diary, but have since been lost. They were, however, transcribed by Edmund Malone (1790, I: pt.2: 300–7). R. A. Foakes dates them to “between 8 and 13 March 1598”, noting that “a statement of debt was acknowledged by the sharers” of the Lord Admiral’s Men to Henslowe at that time” (Henslowe, 316; my transcription is from pp. 317–23).13 Henslowe, 318. The cithern or cittern was a guitar‐like instrument, though strung with wire and played with a plectrum; the bandalore was guitar‐ or lute‐like, and played as bass to the cithern.14 Phillips’s apprentice, Samuel Gilburne, appears in the First Folio list of those who performed in Shakespeare’s plays, but there is no record of him as an adult player.15This can only partly explain Herbert’s peremptory behavior over The Tamer Tamed, which (its heroine, Maria, gains complete control over her husband) was probably suspected of having acquired a particular relevance in respect of Queen Henrietta Maria, her influence over the king, and her Catholicism (Dutton, 2000, 41–61).16 The Act of Abuses applied only to performance, not to printed texts. So as late as 1622 Othello was printed in quarto with its oaths as originally written, circa 1602–3. The version in the 1623 Folio had been revised, presumably for a later performance. The 1607 quarto of Jonson’s Volpone similarly contains oaths, but efforts have been made in the 1616 folio to bring it into line.17 “The quality” was a common term for the profession or brotherhood of players (OED n. 6a; see p. 180, 263).18 This section is particularly indebted to the pioneering work of David Kathman, especially in 2004b, 2005 and 2009d.19 It is not within my remit to say much about the all‐boy companies of the era, since Shakespeare never wrote for them. But they operated on a very different basis from the adult companies. Most had their origins in choir schools attached to the court (the Children of the Chapel Royal), cathedrals like St Paul’s, and various regular schools, like Westminster and Merchant Taylors. Drama was part of their curriculum, helping to enhance their students’ skills in rhetoric and public speaking; singing was part of choral duties. A tradition grew up of presenting plays as gift‐offerings to Queen Elizabeth at Christmas and for the first half of her reign they were her favorite performers. By the 1580s if not earlier they had become commercial operations, their “rehearsals” being in fact public performances. All boy companies went out of business during the 1590s, but Paul’s Boys and the Children of the Chapel Royal were revived in 1599/1600 and created real competition for the adult companies, their indoor (“private”) theatres and sophisticated repertoires designed to appeal to the wealthy, educated and politically savvy classes. In 1601 one Henry Clifton complained to the court of Star Chamber about the impressment of his son, Thomas, by the management of the Children of the Chapel Royal, arguing that it was for the purposes of commercial playing and not – as the impressment powers of the chapels was intended – to maintain the quality of the choir. He was vindicated and thereafter impressment for the boy companies ceased (ES, 2: 43–5). Paul’s Boys survived until 1606; the Children of the Royal Chapel, later Children of the Queen’s Revels or simply the Blackfriars Boys, survived until 1608. Indeed they notionally reformed as the Queen’s Revels in 1610. But by then few if any of them were truly children.20 In the boy companies they sometimes started as early as ten.21 Baldwin, 1927, p. 227; see also Jonson, 2012n, 220.22 This assumes he is the “R. Birch” assigned these roles in early handwritten notes in a copy of Jonson’s 1616 Works (Riddell, 1969).23 He was one who signed an abject apology to Sir Henry Herbert in December 1624 for having performed in an unauthorized play, The Spanish Viceroy (Herbert, 183): see p. 90.24For evidence of apprentices playing with provincial troupes, see the case of Thomas Pant, p. 59.25 It was not until 1579 that the Privy Council issued an order to prevent Sunday playing in London and Middlesex (i.e. the site of the Theatre and the Curtain).26 The phrase in legal Norman French was used in William Trigge’s petition to be released from his indenture after Heminge’s death (Kathman, 2009d, 423–4).27 The “youths” would be members of the King’s and Queen’s Young Company, also known as Beeston’s Boys, a late recreation of a boy company (Gurr, 1996, 423–4).28The Latin original was first printed by Geoffrey Tillotson (1933, 494). The translation is by Dana F. Sutton (2006).29 Cited from The Athenaeum. May 19, 1888: 641.