The King's Men was an acting company in England active in the 17th century. Formerly known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they became the King's Men in 1603 when King James I ascended the throne and became the company's patron. It was the company to which William Shakespeare (1564–1616) belonged for most of his career.
The royal patent of 19 May 1603 which authorised the King's Men company named the following players, in this order: Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, "and the rest of their associates...." The nine cited by name became Grooms of the Chamber. On 15 March 1604, each of the nine men named in the patent was supplied with four and a half yards of red cloth for the coronation procession.
Contents
Chronologically typed
To 1610
In their first winter season, between December 1603 and February 1604 the company performed eight times at Court and eleven times in their second, from November 1604 through February 1605, including seven plays by Shakespeare and two by Ben Jonson. This represented a workload twice as great as was typical under Elizabeth I. The King's Men needed more men, and in 1604 the number of sharers was increased from eight or nine, ten, eleven and twelve. The new sharers included John Lowin, Alexander Cooke, and Nicholas Tooley.
May 1605 brought the death of Augustine Phillips. In his will, Phillips left legacies to Shakespeare, Burbage, and eight other members of the company, plus two apprentices, and £5 to the hired men "of the company which I am of". (Phillips also leaves a bequest to Christopher Beeston, as a former "servant". Beeston was almost certainly another former apprentice.)
The company gave ten court performances in the winter of 1605–06 and, unusually, three Court performances in the summer of 1606, during a state visit by the King of Denmark. Each Court performance earned them £10. They also toured that summer, and were in Oxford at the end of July, among other stops. Nine performances at Court marked the winter of 1606-07, including a performance of 26 December of King Lear; the following winter, 1607–08, saw thirteen Court appearances.
From July to December 1608 the theatres were closed due to plague. The King's Men toured the countryside; they were in Coventry in late October. The Blackfriars Theatre, owned by the Burbage family, was organised into a partnership in August that year, with five of the seven shares going to members of the King's Men – Shakespeare, Burbage, Heminges, Condell, and Sly. Sly, however, died soon after, and his share was split among the other six. (The two non-actors involved in the arrangement were Cuthbert Burbage, Richard's brother, and Thomas Evans, agent for theatre manager Henry Evans.)
The acquisition of the Blackfriars represented an enormous advantage for the company. It allowed the company to perform year round instead of only in clement weather. The Blackfriars hall is thought to have been 66 by 46 feet (20 by 14 metres), including the stage; its maximum capacity was likely in the hundreds of spectators. This can be compared with the maximum capacity at the Globe Theatre of 2500 to 3000. Yet the ticket prices at the Blackfriars were five to six times higher than those at the Globe. Globe tickets ranged from a penny to sixpence (1d. to 6d.); tickets at the Blackfriars ranged from sixpence to two shillings sixpence (6d. to 2s. 6d.; 1 shilling = 12 pence). The cheapest admission at the Blackfriars equalled the most expensive at the Globe; the most expensive seat at the Blackfriars cost five times as much as its Globe counterpart. Adding the Blackfriars to the Globe should have allowed the King's Men to at least double their income from public performances.
Their new wealth allowed the King's Men to overcome major adversity: when the Globe Theatre burned down in 1613 (see below), the company could afford an expensive rebuild, replacing the vulnerable thatch roof with tile. The fact that the King's Men had a second theatre meant that they did not lose all their playscripts and costumes, as happened to the Admiral's/Palsgrave's Men in the Fortune Theatre fire of December 1621 (a disaster that was, for that company, the beginning of the end).
1609 was another plague year during which the company travelled, although nine plays were still performed at Court. (Royal patronage was an advantage in difficult times: special payments in times of plague were made to the company in 1603, 1608, 1609, and 1610.)
1610 was a better year, with public performances at the Globe – Othello and Jonson's Sejanus among others. By this time the company had been augmented by John Underwood and William Ostler, both veterans of the Children of the Chapel/Queen's Revels company. The company left London and performed in Oxford in August, 1610. They were paid by the Oxford Municipal Authorities. A letter by Oxford student at Corpus Christi, Henry Jackson and dated September 1610 and in latin, describes the King's Men performing Ben Jonson's The Alchemist and describes Desdemona (in Othello) both of which had been performed earlier that year in London. The record is held at Corpus Christi and a copy can be viewed at the Folger Exhibition, Shakespeare Documented.
To 1616
In 1611 Jonson's Catiline was performed; apart from Richard Robinson's substitution for Armin, the cast roster was the same as for Sejanus the previous year. This may have been John Heminges' last production; in 1613 he's described as "stuttering." Heminges normally received the payments for the company's Court performances, as far back as 1595; he continued to be active in the company's financial affairs even after he left the stage.
Between October 1611 and April 1612 the King's Men performed 22 plays at Court, including The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Their connection with The Second Maiden's Tragedy also dates from this period; the manuscript of that play reveals that Robert Gough was cast as Memphonius, while Richard Robinson was the Lady.
On Sunday 12 and Monday 13 January 1612, the King's Men joined with Queen Anne's Men to give Court performances of two Queen's Men's plays by Thomas Heywood, The Silver Age and The Rape of Lucrece. No cast list for these performances has survived; but given the two companies' known personnel, this might have been the first time Christopher Beeston acted with his old colleagues since leaving the Lord Chamberlain's Men nearly a decade earlier.
In the winter of 1612–13, great Court festivities celebrating the marriage of the Elector Palatine to King James' daughter Princess Elizabeth were held. The King's Men gave 20 performances, including seven plays by Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing twice), one by Jon
Cardenio was performed again at Court on 8 June 1613, before the ambassador from Savoy. The second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679 provides partial cast lists for three King's Men productions from the c. 1613 period, for Fletcher's Bonduca and Valentinian and the Beaumont and Fletcher collaboration The Captain.
On 29 June 1613, the Globe Theatre burned down, its thatch roof set afire by squibs set off during a lavish performance of the Shakespeare/Fletcher Henry VIII. The Globe was rebuilt by the following spring, at a cost of £1400. The thatch roof was replaced with tile. During the winter of 1613–14 the company played at Court sixteen times.
In 1614 Alexander Cooke and William Ostler both died; their places as sharers were taken, perhaps, by William Ecclestone and Robert Benfield. Ostler's death may have been sudden, and was problematic in that he died intestate. His father-in-law, John Heminges, seized control of his theatre shares. Ostler's widow, Thomasine Heminges Ostler, sued her father in 1615 for control of the shares – a suit that was apparently unsuccessful.
To 1623
Nathan Field's contribution to the King's Men is illustrated by the play The Knight of Malta, which Field wrote with Fletcher and Massinger. The first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647 gives a list of the principal cast in the company's production of the play, which included Burbage, Field himself, John Underwood, Richard Sharpe, Henry Condell, Robert Benfield, John Lowin, and Thomas Holcombe. (Sharpe and Holcombe were boy actors with the company.) The date of this production is unknown, but it must have occurred in the 1616–19 era, between Field's joining the company and Burbage's death. Field may also have played the title role in George Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois in this period. He is reported to have played the role at some time in his career, and the King's Men had the play in their repertory for many years.
1619 was a pivotal year in the company's history. The residents of the upscale Blackfriars neighbourhood, many of whom were wealthy and influential politically and socially, had never been happy about the presence of a theatre in their midst; in the spring of 1619 they complained more loudly than usual about the traffic problems associated with the theatre, which blocked access to the local churches. (All the playing companies were required to cease activity during Lent – a requirement they flouted whenever possible, often with impunity.) In response to this local opposition, the King's Men obtained a renewal of their royal patent dated 27 March 1619. The patent named the twelve current shareholders in the company; in addition to the veterans Burbage, Lowin, Heminges, and Condell, the list includes William Ecclestone, Robert Gough, Richard Robinson, Nicholas Tooley, and John Underwood, and the newest members, Nathan Field, Robert Benfield, and John Shank.
Shank would be the company's primary clown in the years to come; his specialties were dancing and knockabout physical comedy. He was a veteran of several troupes over the previous decades, going back perhaps to Pembroke's Men and Queen Elizabeth's Men in the reign of Elizabeth; he had been with the Admiral's/Prince Henry's/Palsgrave's company in the 1610–13 period. Shank may have taken Robert Armin's place in the King's Men after Armin's death in 1615. Shank also trained apprentices for the company – Thomas Holcombe, John Thompson, Thomas Pollard, and John Honyman. Robert Gough had been associated with the actors of the company perhaps as far back as 1591, when he may have been a boy player in The Seven Deadly Sins; he received a legacy in the 1603 will of Thomas Pope, and he witnessed the 1605 will of Augustine Phillips, whose sister he most likely married. Gough was never a prominent actor, and little is known about the roles he played.
To 1642
1624: Eliard Swanston left the Lady Elizabeth's Men to join the King's Men. Previous Lady Elizabeth's veterans to join include Nathan Field, John Rice, and (via Prince Charles's Men) Joseph Taylor. Swanston is reported to have played Othello and Richard III during his years with the company (which extended at least through 1642).
Robert Gough died in 1624.
Also in 1624, the King's Men gave their sensational production of Middleton's A Game at Chess, which ran for an unprecedented nine days straight (6–16 August, Sundays excepted), and also got them prosecuted and fined by the Privy Council. The company got into more trouble in December, for performing Massinger's The Spanish Viceroy without a license from the Master of the Revels.
The sharers in the King's Men depended upon a crew of hired men to make their performances work. On 27 December 1624, Sir Henry Herbert issued a list of the company's 21 hired men who could not be arrested or "press'd for soldiers" without the allowance of the Lord Chamberlain or the Master of the Revels. The list includes supporting actors like Robert Pallant, musicians, and functionaries like Edward Knight the prompter and John Rhodes the wardrobe keeper.
The spring of 1625 brought a period of uncertainty. The new king, Charles I, had long had his own troupe of actors, Prince Charles's Men; would he make them the new King's Men? The existing company's established prestige – they were widely recognised the best in the land – led to a continuance of royal patronage. The Prince Charles's company folded after their patron became king, with three of its members, Thomas Hobbs, William Penn, and Anthony Smith, joining the King's Men. Though the early-to-mid-1620s was a period of economic depression in England, the King's Men prospered: the company had fifteen sharers in 1625. This abundance of personnel allowed the company to stage productions with larger casts than before [see: The Lover's Melancholy; The Novella].
Also in 1625, Richard Perkins terminated his brief period with the King's Men to become the leading man of the newly formed Queen Henrietta's Men.
When the King's Men premiered Massinger's The Roman Actor late in 1626, the cast included a new boy player, John Honyman, aged 13. William Trigg was another boy playing female roles for the company in the 1626–32 period; but after that his activities are unknown.
Aftermath
1642: the Puritans in Parliament gained control over the city of London at the beginning of the English Civil War, and ordered the closing of all theatres on 2 September. The theatres remained officially closed until the Restoration in 1660.
In 1646, the King's Men received back-pay from Parliament, money they were still owed for pre-1642 performances.
Clandestine and sporadic theatre activity occurred. 1647 was a year of relative official leniency, when theatrical performances were not uncommon. Ten actors signed the dedication in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio as the King's Men; these were Robert Benfield, Theophilus Bird, Hugh Clark, Stephen Hammerton, John Lowin, Thomas Pollard, Richard Robinson, Joseph Taylor, Eliard Swanston, and William Allen. The first seven men on that list also signed a contract as sharers in the King's Men on 28 January 1648, showing that the company was re-activating, or attempting to re-activate, at that time. This iteration of the company collapsed in July the same year when it failed to make a payment.
Another attempt to revive the troupe followed during the winter of 1648–49, with a younger group of actors than the previous crew of veterans; this new group of 16 included Walter Clun and Charles Hart, who had played with the King's Men as boys before the 1642 closing. These two plus eight others signed a contract on 27 December 1648 with one Walter Conway, an upholsterer who was their financier. This effort also failed, and was producing litigation as late as 1661.
Repression grew stronger after 1647: in February 1648 and January 1649, King's Men players were arrested in the midst of performances. [See: Rollo Duke of Normandy.]
Some company members chose alternative careers; Eliard Swanston became a jeweller, while hired men Alexander Gough and Andrew Pennycuicke became stationers.
By the time the theatres formally re-opened in 1660, few of the old players and playwrights remained, and the old theatrical practices and traditions had largely been lost. Female roles were soon performed by women rather than boys [see Edward Kynaston; Margaret Hughes], and the open-air playhouses common in the past were no more; the more elite higher-priced indoor theatres became the norm.