Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Stage: Touring Practice in Shakespeare’s Day

  • Peter Davison
Chapter

Abstract

Although we know a considerable amount about touring drama in Shakespeare’s time, working out precisely what were touring practices and what were the economics of touring are not easy. This is not surprising. Imagine leaping forward to the year 2400 and then looking back to our time with the benefit of partial newspaper and documentary evidence, and perhaps an old video of The House (the series of programmes about the Royal Opera), and attempting to construct a rational account of opera in our day. How would the researcher reconcile the fact that in order to tour, the Royal Opera needed vast additional grants, whereas Welsh National Opera, because it toured most of the year, was deemed to need much less money to do so? Or imagine coming across complaints by Welsh and Scottish Opera that, despite their also visiting very small towns without theatres — for example, Cwmbran, Harlech, and in the Rhondda Valley — their grants were kept below the increase in inflation, whereas the Royal Opera House received a 39 per cent increase over two years, even though for nearly half that time it would not be performing a single opera or giving a single concert. It is difficult enough to understand the ‘logic’ of such economics today with all the evidence before us; how much more difficult looking back from the year 2400.

Keywords

Company Size Documentary Evidence Rival Company London Theatre Household Account 
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Notes and References

  1. 1.
    John Wasson, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean Touring Companies’, Theatre Notebook XLII (1988): 52; hereafter ‘Wasson’.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee: A History of the Yorkshire Theatres, from 1770 to the Present Time, 4 vols (York, printed for the author, 1795), IV: 45, 44; facsimile edition, 4 vols in 2 (Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1973).Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Private records of John and Daisy Tresahar (Helen Thimm), 6 vols, in the author’s possession.Google Scholar
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    ‘Itinerant, Roguish Entertainers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Norwich’, Theatre Notebook LII (1998): 125.Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    Andrew Gurr, in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), remarks that ‘Identifying what has been called the “rival” repertories that belonged to the duopoly of companies offering London playing through these years is made difficult by the varying character of the evidence’ for the Chamberlain’s Men and for that for Henslowe’s Rose Theatre (p. 152). I shall stress this ‘varying character of the evidence’ later.Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Later Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 211–22, in which he gives the evidences for performances between 1580 and 1613 between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. Hereafter ‘Barroll’.Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    Barroll, pp. 222–6.Google Scholar
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    Barroll, p. 173.Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Marlborough, General Accounts, 1572–1772, Wiltshire Records, Trowbridge, G22/1/205/2.Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Barroll shows they received £30 ‘for the pains and expenses’ of travelling from Mortlake (Barroll, pp. 112 and 114); in addition, they received an unprecedentedly large gift from the Masters and Burgesses of the Borough of £6 5s (Wiltshire Records, G25/1/91).Google Scholar
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    London wages were regulated by royal proclamation; see Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). For Wiltshire, see B. Howard Cunnington, Records of the County of Wilts (Devizes, 1932).Google Scholar
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    R. A. Foakes, in his New Cambridge edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), says’ shakespeare needed no other source than imagination working on life’ to create these characters (p. 9).Google Scholar
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    From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 58, and ch. 3 passim, pp. 58–74. Hereafter ‘Bradley’.Google Scholar
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    Wasson, p. 55.Google Scholar
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    Quoted by Michael Justin Davies in The Landscape of William Shakespeare (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1987), p. 55.Google Scholar
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    For a detailed account of these companies, see G. W. Boddy, ‘Players of Interludes in North Yorkshire in the Early Seventeenth Century’, North Yorkshire County Record Office Journal 3 (1976): 95–130.Google Scholar
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    For various depositions, see J. T. Murray, English Dramatic Companies, 1558–1642 (London: Constable, 1910), II: 163–7; hereafter ‘Murray’. See also Bradley, p. 62.Google Scholar
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    As quoted by David George in ‘Jacobean Actors and the Great Hall at Gawthorpe, Lancashire’, Theatre Notebook XXXVII (1983): 111; hereafter ‘George’.Google Scholar
  25. 25.
    Murray, II, 165.Google Scholar
  26. 26.
    Tarltons Iests (London: J. Budge, 1613), D1r. Tarlton also tells of travelling by ship from Southampton to London and encountering a storm (D3v). It is at least possible that actors made journeys along the south coast by sea.Google Scholar
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    Foakes and Rickert, p. 280. This is referred to in the same letter, that of 28 September 1593, which refers to Pembroke’s Men selling their apparel: see n. 19.Google Scholar
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    Marlborough accounts for 1606 show that 18d was spent on hiring two horses to go to Littlecote, ten miles away (G22/1/205/2). The Bath accounts for 1619 show that to hire a horse for two days cost two shillings, Records of Early English Drama, Somerset including Bath, ed. James Stokes and for Bath, Robert J. Alexander (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), I: 18.Google Scholar
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    See above and n. 19.Google Scholar
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    Chambers gives some account of supporting staff engaged: II: 80–1. Supporting staff nowadays overwhelm in numbers the actors engaged.Google Scholar
  32. 32.
    For fuller details see my edition of The First Quarto of King Richard III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 37–48 (hereafter ‘Davison’); and ‘Commerce and Patronage: The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s Tour of 1597’, Scaena Conference, Cambridge, 13 August 1997; amplified in Shakespeare Performed, ed. Grace Ioppolo (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), pp. 56–71.Google Scholar
  33. 33.
    That they were different visits is certain because in 1596 they were properly described in the Faversham records as Lord Hunsdon’s Men (the title-page of Romeo and Juliet, 1597, states that that play was performed by ‘L. of Hunsdon his Seruants’); Hunsdon became Lord Chamberlain on 17 March 1597 and the company took their patron’s new title and this is recorded in the Faversham accounts for 1597.Google Scholar
  34. 34.
    Foakes and Rickert, p. 60.Google Scholar
  35. 35.
    Lady Elizabeth was James I’s daughter and became Queen of Bohemia; she is often called ‘the Winter Queen’.Google Scholar
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    Foakes and Rickert, pp. 56–7; Davison, pp. 42–4.Google Scholar
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    Bradley, pp. 17–20, 71, 229; for the Admiral’s Company in 1597, see p. 234.Google Scholar
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    ‘The Cost of Touring’, Renaissance and Medieval Drama in England 6 (1993): 59; quoted by Alan Somerset in his very useful ‘“How Chances it they Travel”: Provincial Touring, Playing Places, and the King’s Men’, Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 51. Somerset calculates that one of the places visited, the Leicester Guildhall (which still stands and which he illustrates on p. 58), could accommodate an audience of 300–355 (p. 59).Google Scholar
  39. 39.
    Bradley, p. 59 and ch. 3 passim pp. 58–74. The Welsh National Opera regularly reduces the size of its company when touring small towns; the Royal Ballet splits into two for its annual winter tours of small towns.Google Scholar
  40. 40.
    See especially Davison, Tables 2 and 3, pp. 17, 19.Google Scholar
  41. 41.
    George, p. 113.Google Scholar
  42. 42.
    See Laurence Stone, ‘Companies of Players Entertained by the Earl of Cumberland and Lord Clifford, 1607–39’, Malone Society, Collections V, 1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); The House and Farm Accounts of the Shuttleworths of Gawthorpe Hall in the County of Lancaster and Gawthorpe, September 1582–1621, ed. John Harland (Chetham Society, 1856–58), IV (as vol XLVI): 893–4; and see George, pp. 109–21, especially 112–15.Google Scholar
  43. 43.
    Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 43. A drawing of a scene from Titus Andronicus of about 1595 is now among the papers in the library of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat House, Wiltshire. It cannot be related to any performance at Longleat House, but Longleat (completed 1580; about 25 miles from Wilton and 35 miles from Marlborough) would be a possible venue for visiting players in Shakespeare’s day. For the drawing and a commentary, seeGoogle Scholar
  44. R. A. Foakes, Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642 (London: Scolar Press, 1985), pp. 48–51.Google Scholar
  45. 44.
    Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1962), p. 309.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Peter Davison 2001

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  • Peter Davison

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