The cause and effect of the events of July and August 1597, when theatre in London seemed to be in danger of being obliterated altogether, are not easy to piece together. On July 28 the Privy Council wrote to the magistrates in Middlesex and Surrey, ordering that “those playhouses that are erected and built only for such purposes shall be plucked down” both in Shoreditch, where the Theatre and Curtain were, and in Southwark, where the Rose and the recently‐built Swan stood (EPF, 100–1; see also Dutton, 1991: 102–16; Dutton, 2000: 16–40). They also suspended all playing. The orders were signed by, among others, the patrons of both the Chamberlain’s and the Admiral’s Men. On that very day the Court of Common Council of London had written to the Privy Council with what looks like a routine complaint, listing the familiar objections to the theatres – immorality, crime, absenteeism, spread of plague – and petitioning “for the present stay, and final suppressing, of the said stage plays” (EPF, 99). But there is nothing to suggest why the Privy Council should have reacted so dramatically on this occasion. There is, however, also no indication that anyone acted on the order to pluck the playhouses down.
It seems likely – though final evidence is lacking – that the Privy Council order was somehow linked with specific activity on the Bankside, focused on the new Swan theatre. It had been occupied by the Earl of Pembroke’s Men, who now constituted clear rivals to the Admiral’s Men, playing nearby at the Rose. Indeed they had been poaching some of their senior players, including Martin Slater (Gurr, 1996, 239). Over the next few months, however, Henslowe’s Diary shows that defectors were tempted back to the Admiral’s Men, and indeed some others of Pembroke’s Men joined them (Henslowe, 239–40).
A critical factor in reversing the flow was almost certainly the Council’s action against The Isle of Dogs, co‐written for Pembroke’s Men by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson; Jonson also performed in it. We do not know precisely when they took this action, but by August 15 they certainly had Jonson and other players in custody for their parts in the play, which supposedly “contain[ed] very seditious and slanderous matter” (ES, 4: 323). Moreover, they were employing the notorious inquisitor and licensed torturer, Richard Topcliffe, in pursuit of those responsible – the only time in the entire era that they demonstrated such naked aggression in their response to theatrical infractions. And it may well have been this play, rather than the petition from the Court of Common Council, which prompted the Privy Council’s actions against the playhouses (EPF, 101).
One clear outcome of all this – which, reading backwards, we might suspect had been intended all along – was that Pembroke’s Men went out of business and the Swan was largely unused for several years (Ingram 1978: 167–86, 313–14). Its owner, Francis Langley, unsuccessfully sued five of the players who had abandoned the Swan for the Rose (EPF, 437–46). Over the following months measures were put in place which gave public standing to the de facto pre‐eminence of the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s Men, notionally making it more difficult for rival companies to challenge it. Parliament passed an even harsher statute governing the Punishment of Rogues and Vagabonds (February 9, 1598), restricting travel by professional players to those who carried their aristocratic masters’ sealed warrant and removing certain privileges of mayors and justices in that regard in the earlier legislation (see p. 29). Then on February 19 Privy Council letters went out simultaneously to the Middlesex and Surrey magistrates and to Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels:
Whereas licence hath been granted unto two companies of stage players retained unto us, the Lord Admiral and Lord Chamberlain, to use and practice stage plays, whereby they might be better enabled and prepared to show such plays before Her Majesty as they shall be required at times meet and accustomed, to which end they have been chiefly licensed and tolerated as aforesaid; and whereas there is also a third company who of late (as we are informed) have by way of intrusion used likewise to play, having neither prepared any play for Her Majesty nor are bound to you, the Master of the Revels, for performing such orders as have been enjoined to be observed by the other two companies before mentioned. We have therefore thought good to require you upon receipt hereof to take order that the aforesaid third company may be suppressed, and none suffered hereafter to play but those two formerly named belonging to us, the Lord Admiral and Lord Chamberlain, unless you shall receive other direction from us. (EPF, 104)
Nothing earlier is as explicit about the interrelationship of these two “licensed” and “tolerated” companies, the Master of the Revels and the provision of plays for the Queen. Nor had anything specified that the individual authorities of the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral, in respect of the companies they patronized, carried the collective authority of the Privy Council. But this is unequivocal. Whatever understandings may have surrounded the emergence of these companies in 1594, these were now publicly stated policies of the Privy Council as far as the authorities in and around London were concerned.
This – following the appointment of their new patron as Lord Chamberlain, after Lord Cobham’s death – must have offered reassurance to his players and helped steer them to the actions which followed. Denied use of both the Theatre and the Blackfriars, and not content with the old Curtain, they needed a new playhouse. But James Burbage had died in February 1597, having invested all his capital in the Blackfriars. The briefly remaining lease on the Theatre had earlier been conveyed into the hands of Cuthbert, the elder son, while the freehold of the Blackfriars building now passed to Richard. It was, however, a fact of some importance to the stability of the Chamberlain’s Men that the Burbage brothers seem to have acted cooperatively in all their theatrical affairs. Cuthbert, though never an actor or a sharer in any company, was engaged in theatrical finance all his life, currently owner of the Theatre, and must have taken a lead over the next few months.
By the end of the year they had identified a site for a new playhouse. Either seeking to emulate the success of Henslowe’s Rose or determined to make a clean break with the Shoreditch district, where there was continuing litigation with their landlord at the Theatre, they chose a piece of garden ground “situate in Maiden Lane on the Bankside in the County of Surrey” (from a Privy Council order of 1604; ES, 2: 416). Their new lease was executed on February 21, 1599, but backdated to run from the Christmas just passed for thirty‐one years. This relates to the reality that they had actually been occupying the site since then. Under cover of darkness on December 28, 1598, the Burbage brothers, Peter Street (a carpenter) and some dozen workmen
did riotously assemble themselves together and then and there armed themselves with divers and many unlawful and offensive weapons, as namely swords, daggers, bills, axes, and such like, and so armed did then repair unto the said Theatre. And then and there, armed as aforesaid, in very riotous, outrageous, and forcible manner, and contrary to the laws of your Highness’s realm, attempted to pull down the said Theatre, whereupon divers of your subjects, servants and farmers, then going about in peaceable manner to procure them to desist from that their unlawful enterprise, they, the said riotous persons aforesaid, notwithstanding procured then therein with great violence, not only then and there forcibly and riotously resisting your subjects, servants and farmers, but also then and there pulling, breaking and throwing down the said Theatre in very outrageous, violent and riotous sort, to the great disturbance and terrifying not only of your subjects, said servants and farmers, but of divers others of your Majesty’s loving subjects there near inhabiting.
(Wallace, 1913, 278–9)
Thus the indignant legalese of their former landlord, Giles Allen, some three years later, as he pursued Cuthbert Burbage through the courts. In fact Allen was legally correct; property standing on the site when the lease expired formally passed to him. But he was never able to get a court to rule in his favor. Meawhile the timbers of the Theatre were shipped across the Thames to the Bankside, where they were to be re‐erected, by Peter Street the carpenter, as the Globe. That will be the subject of the next chapter.
We do not know all the details of how the Burbages were able to afford all this; they may have borrowed money. But one feature of their arrangements is known and was to prove yet another element in preserving the stability and cohesiveness of the Chamberlain’s Men. The lease on the Globe site was assigned to seven persons: the Burbage brothers, William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, John Heminge, and Will Kemp. But the division was not equal. The Burbages had one moiety (half, or five tenths) of the lease between them, while Shakespeare and the other members of the company divided the other half (one tenth each), contributing £70 each towards the construction costs. The logical inference of all this is that these men had all invested their own money in building the Globe and so were naturally entitled to share in its profits. They thus became what were called “housekeepers” – in addition to remaining sharers in the company, the Chamberlain’s Men. So they became their own landlords and took a double profit in the operations of the Globe.
The disposition and value of the housekeeper shares would vary as their holders died or as agreement was reached to allow others into their ranks. There were attempts legally to bind the housekeepers into a “joint‐tenancy,” whereby they would only convey shares among themselves (ES, 2: 417–18). But this was certainly not observed in the long run; shares passed to widows and other heirs over time. There was also potential for friction between the housekeepers and those sharers who had no stake in the playhouse, not least since it would appear that there was more money (perhaps three times as much) in being a housekeeper than in merely being a company sharer. A replication of these divisions when the company also acquired use of the Blackfriars playhouse only compounded the pressures (see p. 292–3). These issues certainly boiled over in the 1630s, when some players became aggrieved at not being given the opportunity to obtain housekeeper shares as their predecessors had done. The Lord Chamberlain was called upon to arbitrate the matter and the Sharers’ Papers were the depositions put before him by various parties in the dispute, including Cuthbert Burbage who by then had a longer memory of everything that had happened than anyone else (Gurr, 2004a, 271–80). To all appearances these matters were handled amicably during Shakespeare’s working lifetime, though as early as 1615 they caused major discord within John Heminge’s own family (see p. 164).
The one really jarring note in early company relations came in fact with Will Kemp’s withdrawal from the consortium that had bought shares in the Globe; he withdrew from the agreement before it went into effect and his share was redistributed among Shakespeare, Phillips, Pope, and Heminge, leaving them with one and a‐quarter shares each. This was evidently a prelude to his departure from the company itself. Precisely when he left is unclear. The latest play we can associate him with, as we have seen, is Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour. He is not in the cast‐list for Every Man Out of His Humour, staged at the Globe in the autumn of 1599 – one of the first plays performed there (Jonson, 2012h, 239–40). And it seems likely that he had left before the company in fact moved to its new playhouse.
Thomas Platter, the Swiss tourist who described the penny‐by‐penny payment system, recorded visits to two performances where he had encountered it. He was only in England from September 18 to October 20, 1599, so both were in the same time‐frame. One, which I discuss later, was of Julius Caesar at the Globe (see p. 267). The other was of an unknown play “in Bishopgate,” which at this date must mean the Curtain. He described there a routine in which a master and servant “both got drunk, and the servant threw his shoe at his master’s head and they both fell asleep” (ES, 2: 365). In Every Man Out of His Humour, the tavern jester, Carlo Buffone remarks: “would I had one of Kemp’s shoes to throw after you” (4.5.118). Kemp in this scenario must have joined the company that succeeded the Chamberlain’s Men at the Curtain, and devised this comic routine for them. This is his old company’s salute to him.
Why Kemp left is a matter for conjecture. But it is surely telling that the break happened as the company prepared to cross the River Thames and take up residence at the Globe on the Bankside, very close to Henslowe’s Rose. Whether by accident or by design the move proved to be not only a geographical one, but one that changed the tone of the company’s repertory – in good part because of Kemp’s departure. It is likely that the sharers of the company discussed their professional objectives at this time, thinking about the types of audience they would hope to attract. They might feel it important to distinguish themselves from their rivals, the Admiral’s Men, who would now be performing barely 200 yards away – probably not knowing until their own plans were well advanced that the Admiral’s Men in turn would move to a new playhouse, the Fortune, which Henslowe built for them north of the City.
At the same time, however, they may have heard that moves were afoot to resuscitate the boy players who had been out of business for the best part of a decade. Indeed Paul’s boys re‐opened in their tiny indoor playhouse in the grounds of St Paul’s before the end of 1599, only weeks after the Globe welcomed its first audiences. And there were plans to revive the Children of the Queen’s Chapel by May of 1600, because Richard Burbage drew up a lease for them to use his father’s Blackfriars playhouse at a rent of £40 a year: it was executed on September 2. Evidently the company’s at least notional association with the royal chapel made it possible for them to play there when adult players could not.23 This must have been bittersweet for Burbage and the Chamberlain’s Men in general. It gave Burbage a financial return after all his family’s outlay on both the Blackfriars and the Globe. But it also gave an advantage to serious competitors, the “little eyases” who (in the folio version of Hamlet) are said to be responsible for driving the adult players out on their travels.
Any or all of these factors may have weighed with the company as they contemplated their move to the Bankside. And it may be that his colleagues felt that Kemp and his jigging, so long a mainstay of the company in the northern suburbs, were not well suited for attracting the kinds of audiences they hoped to bring to their new venue. What is indisputable is that they made no attempt to continue the tradition of jigs after Kemp left. It became a hallmark of the new playhouses in the northern suburbs, the Fortune (from 1601) and the Red Bull (1606), though even there it became disreputable (see p. 226). The Globe – and the boys – would offer different fare.
The change clearly left its mark on Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, which was radically revised before it appeared in his 1616 Works. The quarto text, as performed at the Curtain in 1598, clearly shows preparations for the jig that was to follow (Wiles, 54). Fifteen of the sixteen named characters come together to celebrate with “Doctor” Clement, who invites them all to “enjoy the very spirit of mirth” (5.3.379–80; Jonson, 2012g). The missing character is Cob, Kemp’s clown part (see p. 217 and Wiles, 94–8). His long‐suffering wife, Tib, is present and briefly condoled, but does not speak. And three characters are dismissed – Bobadilla, Matheo, and Peto – before the end of the scene. In the 1616 version all sixteen of the named characters are on stage by the end of the play and included in “Justice” Clement’s determination to dedicate the night “to friendship, love, and laughter” (5.5.71–2; Jonson, 2012h). Cob and Tib are there with the others and, as the Justice puts it, “married anew” (57–8) among the romantic festivities.
The quarto thus clearly makes provision for Kemp and three fellows to stage a jig when the comedy winds up and the other characters leave the stage. But the 1616 text makes no such provision. The business of the afternoon’s playing is fully resolved within the terms and conditions of the printed text. It might be that the company felt that they could not follow Kemp in a form he had made so much his own, though Augustine Phillips is also credited with writing a lost jig, Phillips His Slipper. Or simply that the audience at the Globe had less stomach for the boisterous, bawdy, lawless jig. But the change certainly happened.
There are signs that the parting of the ways was not amicable. In February–March of 1600, by which time he had clearly left, Kemp morris‐danced from London to Norwich – a distance of some hundred miles – in nine days, spread over several weeks; it was an impressive physical achievement, which says much for his stamina and athletic ability. He took wagers against his failure as a way to profit from the stunt. Later that year he commemorated the achievement in Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder (see Figure 3.3). In his dedication of his book he acknowledges that he has “danced himself out of the world” (punning on “globe”) and proudly announces himself to be “one … that hath spent his life in mad jigs and merry jests.” Later on, however, he addresses “the impudent generation of ballad‐makers and their coherents” – apparently the originators of “slanders” against him mentioned on the title page – as “my notable Shakerags.” It is difficult not to see this as aimed personally at Shakespeare, while the “coherents” might be the rest of the company.
But Shakespeare may not have been above some pointed comments of his own. In Julius Caesar (which may well have been the first new play in the Globe) Brutus refers contemptuously to jigging fools (4.3.136). Might this be one of Kemp’s supposed “slanders”? Another one appears in Hamlet. The version printed in the first quarto (1603) seems related to the moment when the boy companies reopened; the “Tragedians of the City” are said to be traveling “For the principal public audience that / Came to them are turned to private plays, / And to the humour of children” (E3). This would be late 1599 or 1600. This text of the play contains a less familiar version of Hamlet’s famous rebuke to certain clowns:
And do you hear? Let not your clown speak
More than is set down. There be of them I can tell you
That will laugh themselves, to set on some
Quantity of barren spectators to laugh with them,
Albeit there is some necessary point in the play
Then to be observed. O, t’is vile, and shows
A pitiful ambition in the fool that useth it. (Q1, sig.F2)
In this, as indeed in everything he says about acting, Hamlet is at least partly talking about himself: his “antic disposition” is a kind of clowning, which repeatedly defers “some necessary point” in his own plans for revenge. But it is difficult to believe that this would not also be taken as an extra‐textual reference to Kemp and the way his extempore clowning sometimes cut across the artistry of Shakespeare’s plays.
There may, therefore, have been a personal edge in this parting of the ways. But it seems to have been all of a piece with what we might call professional and artistic differences. Kemp went on the continent for a time, before he returned and in 1602 joined Worcester’s Men, resuscitating his trademark jig. But he died the following year. That company, however – later Queen Anne’s Men, playing at the Red Bull – was one of those noted for keeping jigs alive and other forms of populist theatre, such as pyrotechnics, when such fare was no longer fashionable at the Globe. The Chamberlain’s Men, as we shall see, replaced Kemp with a very different style of comedian (see p. 264).
Notes
1 Lord Hunsdon occupied the old Infirmary, which was also not far from the proposed playhouse.2 Holger Schott Syme (2010) is right to point out that there is no evidence that Burbage built the Blackfriars specifically as a playhouse for the Chamberlain’s Men. Family attachments apart, he may simply have been looking for a new investment and hoping to lease it to another company. The Oldcastle controversy, however, lends some support to the assumption that the Chamberlain’s Men were aggrieved with Lord Chamberlain Cobham about something and his role in blocking the use of the Blackfriars seems to me the best explanation we have.3 See Paul Yachnin’s notion of “populuxe art” in Dawson and Yachnin, 2001; Yachnin 2005.4 I am implicitly here questioning the account of the liberties given in Steven Mullaney’s influential The Place of the Stage (1988), esp. pp. vii–ix, 21–2, 44–60. It is true that some of the liberties had unsavoury associations; that of the Clink had the Rose – and subsequently the Globe – rubbing shoulders with extensive brothels. But the playhouses always remained under direct royal control, policed by the Masters of the Revels and subject to the authority of relevant county justices. Blackfriars never had such unsavoury associations.5 See, for example, early announcements in The Guardian and The Evening Standard, with pictures: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jun/06/shakespeare‐curtain‐theatre‐shoreditch‐east‐lonfon;http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/curtain‐lifts‐on‐open‐air‐stage‐at‐shakespeare‐theatre‐site‐in‐shoreditch‐8464712.html. The square shape was discussed on US radio (NPR): http://www.npr.org/2016/05/21/478962867/.6 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk‐england‐london‐36304627.7 Virtually everything we used to know about the Curtain prior to the discovery of its remains is included in Stern, 2009c. My section here is indebted to it; also Ingram, 1979.8 It is partly odd because the phrasing “discovers himself” normally means “removes his disguise.” But the context here makes that extremely unlikely. This is the first we see of Bobadilla, who has no motivation at this point to be in disguise.9 Corambis is renamed Polonius in the second quarto (1604/5) and folio versions of the play, where there is no overt reference to an arras.10 I am one of a small minority who believes that the reference is not to Essex, but to his successor in Ireland, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, the man who actually did bring “rebellion broachèd on his sword.” See Dutton, 2016, 173–99.11 In Antonio’s Revenge, for Paul’s boys, Marston signals the the different genre of this play from the earlier Antonio and Mellida when he refers in the Prologue to “our black‐visaged shows” (20). In Northward Ho! (also Paul’s boys) Webster and Dekker talk of “the stage hung all with black velvet,” though the reference is specifically to plays at court – where the cloth would naturally be more expensive (1607, E3).12 In instances such as those in Thomas, Lord Cromwell (“The music plays, they bring out a banquet”) or Macbeth (“Banquet prepared”, 3.4.0 SD) an illusion of realism could be maintained by having the stage personnel dressed as servants.13 The “plat” or “plot” of 2 The Seven Deadly Sins is catalogued as MSS 19 in the Henslowe–Alleyn papers at Dulwich College and can be accessed online: http://www.henslowe‐alleyn.org.uk/images/MSS‐19/01r.html. The online commentary suggests that the “Ned” named in the “plot” is Edward Alleyn but this is highly unlikely. Other senior and adult players are identified either by the honorific “Mr” (Master) or at least given a full surname. “Ned” has the single, minor and transvestite role of Rodope and would be played by a boy or young man, not by Master Alleyn.14 See Kathman, 2004a. This was challenged by Andrew Gurr (2007), to which Kathman replied – in my view definitively – in (2011). The long‐standing assumption that the “plot” must reflect a production involving Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage would locate it circa 1591; that starts with the presumption that it involved Alleyn, even though he is not named in it, since it can be traced in the Henslowe–Alleyn papers in Dulwich College for centuries. One strength of Kathman’s argument is that he offers a plausible explanation for how it might have found its way there after Alleyn’s death. It is an anomalous item there, whatever else we make of it. The debate is best chronicled in the Lost Plays Database established by Roslyn Knutson. See http://www.lostplays.org/index.php/Second_Part_of_the_Seven_Deadly_Sins,_The.15 Gurr, 2007, 79. Gurr is in fact arguing for the old association of the play with Strange’s Men in the early 1590s, which I do not agree with. But the unique status of Kemp was the same in both companies.16 The Scourge of Folly is cited from Schoenbaum, 1987, 200.17 According to Mary Edmond (2004), Condell was probably born in 1576 and so would be around twenty‐one at the time of the “plot”, a good age for Ferrex. He was married in 1596 to the daughter of a gentleman of means and it has reasonably been speculated that he might have bought his share in the company – perhaps taking the place of Bryan – with the dowry she brought.18 Lydgate’s reputation has fallen considerably since. It has never really recovered from a withering eighteenth‐century description of him as “a voluminous, prosaic and drivelling monk.”19 From Martin and Marsorius (1589), B3v. The “pudding” was the pig’s bladder on the end of the fool’s stick and the wooden ladle was to collect money from the audience.20 Kemp is not known to have visited Germany, though he certainly visited Denmark. He and two other future fellows of Shakespeare, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, entertained Frederick II of Denmark at the castle we know as Elsinore.21 Wiles, 1987, 51. This section is indebted to the chapter, “Kemp’s Jigs”, pp. 43–60. See also West, 2009 and Astington, 2014.22 The conventions for the clowns’ roles in tragedies were different and it seems less likely that they were followed by jigs – though Thomas Platter’s account of Julius Caesar certainly suggests it concluded with dancing (see p. 267–8).23 The licensing of the boy companies was on a different basis from that of the adult companies, which is why they were both free to compete with the near‐monopoly of the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s Men.