Robert Browne (Jacobean Actor) - Two Robert Brownes

Two Robert Brownes

The historical records of English Renaissance drama contain repeated mentions of "Robert Browne." Early scholars like E. K. Chambers and Edwin Nunzeger interpreted the records to indicate a single individual. Later scholars, principally Charles Jasper Sisson and Herbert Berry, demonstrated that two different men of the same name had been confused and conflated together.

The "other" Robert Browne died in 1603, and so can accurately be termed an Elizabethan actor. The Robert Browne who is the subject of this article had a career that extended through the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and in that sense can, as a differentiation, be called a Jacobean actor.