King's Company - Company Members

Company Members

Among its senior actors, the early King's Company counted many of the more experienced actors still working at the time: Michael Mohun, Charles Hart, John Lacy, Edward Kynaston, Walter Clun, and Thomas Betterton were part of the initial group. Betterton would be "seduced" away to the Duke's Company by November 5 of the same year, not long before the Lord Chamberlain issued orders forbidding such transfers from one company to the other. Such orders would be encoded into the 1662 letters patent as well.

On January 28, 1661, fifteen members of the new King's Company — Thomas Killigrew, Sir Robert Howard, and thirteen actors — signed a lease with the Earl of Bedford for the site of a new theatre, an agreement that also defined the sharers in the company. The thirteen actor/sharers were Hart, Mohun, Lacy, Clun, Kinaston, Richard Baxter, Theophilus Bird, Nicholas Blagden, Nicholas Burt, William Cartwright, Thomas Loveday, Robert Shatterell, and William Wintershall.

Killigrew quickly expanded his troupe to include the first actresses on the English public stage, starting in 1661. His company included Margaret Hughes, Anne Marshall, Mary Knep, Elizabeth Boutell, Katherine Corey, Elizabeth Cox, Elizabeth James, and, most famous of all, Nell Gwyn.

Killigrew's motivations for entering into his theatrical enterprise were more monetary than artistic. During most of the 1660s, he seems not to have been a manager in the day-to-day sense; this task was delegated to the senior actors, including Hart, Lacy, and Mohun. Killigrew did not exert — and probably could not have exerted — strong control over the artistic direction of the company.