Decline
In 1583, the foundation of a new company, Queen Elizabeth's Men, stripped Leicester's Men of its three most talented and prominent members, Robert Wilson, John Laneham, and Richard Tarlton. (William Johnson may also have joined the Queen's Men at this time or soon after.) It is thought that Leicester's company was rifled of its best men deliberately, to tamp down the rivalry between Leicester and the Earl of Oxford as they expressed it through their competing companies of actors. Leicester's Men never fully recovered their former prominence and prestige after 1583.
Still, the company persevered: it was on tour in 1584 and '85. In the latter year the Earl of Leicester was appointed commander of the English troops in The Netherlands; his progress through Utrecht, Leyden and The Hague was noted for the lavish pageants that were enacted in his honor. At least one member of Leicester's Men, William Kempe, accompanied the Earl to Holland; others also may have made the journey. The company was touring again through the 1586–88 period, and performed at Court in December 1586.
With the Earl's death in 1588 Leicester's Men passed out of existence. Kempe and some other members went on to work with other companies.
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Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)