Playing Company - The Elizabethan Age

The Elizabethan Age

The explosion of popular drama that began when James Burbage built the first fixed and permanent venue for drama, The Theatre, in 1576 was the one great step away from the medieval organizational model and toward the commercial theatre; but that evolution was, at best, a "work in progress" throughout the English Renaissance. Throughout this period, troupes of actors needed to maintain the patronage of a noble household. The prevailing legal system in England defined "masterless men" who travelled about the country as vagabonds, and subjected them to treatments of varying harshness. Local authorities tended to be more hostile than welcoming toward players; the Corporation of London, from the Lord Mayor and aldermen down, was famously hostile to acting troupes, as were the Puritans. Noble patronage was, at the very least, the legal fig leaf that allowed professional players to function in society.

In some cases, more so toward the end of the period, noble patronage was nothing more than that legal fig leaf; a company of actors was an independent entity, financially and otherwise. Conversely, some noblemen were beneficent patrons of their players. The Lords Hunsdon — Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon (c. 1524–96), and his son George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon (1547–1603) — were valuable protectors of their own company, and, when they served in the office of Lord Chamberlain (1585–96 and 1597–1603 respectively), of English drama as a whole.

That company of Hunsdon's, known to posterity as The Lord Chamberlain's Men, was organized somewhat like a modern joint-stock commercial company (the concept of which was just beginning to evolve in this era) at its re-formation in 1594, after the long plague closure. The company had a small number of partners or shareholders, who pooled their funds to pay expenses and in turn shared the profits, in what was largely a de facto democratic way (at least for the sharers, if not for the hired men and apprentices they employed). Their main rivals, the Admiral's Men, suffered in contrast under a less ideal version of capitalist organization: Philip Henslowe functioned more like a blend of big-business autocrat, landlord, and loan shark. He managed multiple companies of actors and built and owned several theatres, and controlled players (sharers included) and playwrights by doling out payments and loans. (The silver lining in this cloud is that Henslowe's surviving financial records provide a wealth of detailed knowledge about the theatre conditions in his era that is unparalleled by any other source.) Other companies varied between these extremes of organization. (Francis Langley, builder of the Swan Theatre, operated much as Henslowe did, though less successfully, and for a shorter time.)

Drama in the age of Elizabeth was at best an organized disorder; suppression of individual companies, and even the profession as a whole, for political reasons was not unknown. Local residents sometimes opposed theatres in their neighborhoods. Individual companies of actors struggled and failed and recombined; tracking the changes has been the obsession of scholars and the bain of students.

Yet the drama was also enormously popular, from the Queen and Court down to the commonest of the common people; indeed, the odd polarity of the theatre audience in this period, with the High and the Low favoring the drama, and the middle class generally more hostile with the growth of Puritan sentiments, is a surprising and intriguing phenomenon. Theatres proliferated, especially (though not exclusively) in neighborhoods outside the city's walls and the Corporation's control — in Shoreditch to the north, or the Bankside and Paris Garden in Southwark, on the southern bank of the River Thames: the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Fortune, the Globe, the Blackfrairs — a famous roster.