Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-wq2xx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-16T15:10:58.641Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Extortion in the Name of Art in Elizabethan England: The Impressment of Thomas Clifton for the Queen's Chapel Boys

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

James H. Forse
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1599–1600, after a lapse of almost ten years, the children's acting companies reappeared in London. The Paul's Children seem to have been the first to resume playing, quietly and modestly, no doubt testing the waters. After all, the boys' companies had one after another been officially suppressed between 1584 and 1590 because of their penchant for controversial material and the continual litigation among investors in the various earlier companies. Seeing the growing success of Paul's Boys, one of these earlier investors, Henry Evans, a Welsh scrivener, worked to reconstitute a company of boy actors at Blackfriars, seeking to make good on his aborted first attempt as a theatrical entrepreneur.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , November 1990 , pp. 165 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Smith, Irwin, Shakespeare's Blackfriars ‘Playhouse (New York: New York University, 1964Google Scholar) reproduces the lease to Richard Fanant for Blackfriars’ first use as a theatre and litigations among various leaseholders after his death (463–68; 505–08). For the boys' companies in the 1570s and 80s, see Smith, 130–52; Bentley, CE., The Profession of Player in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 136–45Google Scholar; Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 33, 93–97Google Scholar; and his Play going in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 129–32. The fullest accounts of the boys' companies are Hillebrand, Harold Newcomb, The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 11 (Urbana, IL. University of Illinois, 1926)Google Scholar, and Shapiro, Michael, Children of the Revels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

2 Terms of the lease are found in litigations involving Evans: see Smith, 509–46 and 175–90. The lawsuits often refer to the supposed use of Blackfriars as a school. For example, the landlord, Sir William, More, asserted, “Fanant pretended unto me to use the house only for the teaching of the Children of the Chapel.” Frequently there is mention of a separate area at Blackfriars called “the schoolhouse.” See Smith, 467, 518, and 528–30.Google Scholar

3 Clifton's deposition is reproduced in Smith, 484–86. Later litigation over Blackfriars recounts Evans' censure and subsequent absence from London (544). See also Gurr, , Shakespearean Stage, 50, 94Google Scholar; Bentley, G.E., The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 47–48.Google Scholar For Clifton's Arms see The Visitacion of Norfolk, Anno 1563 and Anno 1613 (London: Harleian Society, vol. 32, 1891), 75, and The Visitation of Norfolk, Anno 1664 (London: Harleian Society, vol. 85, 1933), 50. For the Norfolk nobility see Smith, Alfred H., County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 52–58Google Scholar, 167–73, 363. Clifton may have descended from John Clyfton, knight, named in the Commissioners’ List of 1433 of the Gentry of Norfolk. See Fuller, Thomas, The Worthies of England, II (London: J.G.W. and W.G., 1662; rpt, New York: AMS, 1965) II, 469.Google Scholar Thanks to my colleague Thomas Knox for bibliographical suggestions.

4 See Smith, 463–68, 505–508.

5 Clifton deposition in Smith, 486.

6 Ibid., 485.

7 Burbage's terms appear in litigations in Smith, 509–46. For the earlier lease see Hunnis and Newman vs. Anne Farrant (505–508). For discussion of that lease and its transferral to Hunnis and then to Evans, see 135, 150–51.

8 Evans took over management in 1583, but was forced out by the landlord by Easter, 1584. Perhaps he took the boys on tour until 1591. After that date there is no record of their performance. For the workings of the boys' companies and the arrangements of “managers” with the Court as Masters of the Children of the Chapel, see Smith, 133, 148–52, 159; Chambers, E.K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 2:40–1Google Scholar; Gurr, , Shakespearean Stage 33–4Google Scholar, 49–53, and Playgoing, 22–25; and Bentley, , Player, 32–3Google Scholar, 47–8, 165–6, 176–7. For comparisons to Elizabethan artisan wages, and for Langle/s expenses see Forse, J.H., “Ben Jonson's The Isle of Dogs': Politics and Playwriting in Elizabethan England,” Selected Papers, Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia, 14 (1989–90), 64–5.Google Scholar

9 Bentley, , Dramatist, 88–110Google Scholar; Chambers, 2, 372–5. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) and Henslowe Papers, being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary, ed. W.W. Greg (London: A.H. Bullen, 1907), are replete with references to advances paid to playwrights and their chronic pleas of poverty. Gurr notes Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and Poetaster and Chapman's, May-Day were produced at Blackfriars in 1601 (Shakespearean Stage, 217, 222).Google Scholar

10 Bentley, , Player, 152–3.Google Scholar For “gifts” at court see below, n. 20.

11 Evans vs. Kirkham, in Smith, 528–29.

12 Hunnis' petition in Smith, 478–9. Excerpts from the diary of the Duke of Stettin-Pomerania and from the license for the Children of the Queen's Revels describe the keeping and training of boys attached to the Chapel (551–52,488).

13 M. St. Byrne, Clare, Elizabethan life in Town and Country, 8th edn., revised (London: Methuen, 1961), 203–4.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 205.

15 Ibid., 204–5, 308–12.

16 A court interluder in Elizabeth's time was paid the same stipend as in the reign of her father. See Nungezer, Edwin, A Dictionary of Actors … before 1642 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929) 250, 333, 403.Google ScholarNeale, J.E. stresses Elizabeth's parsimony in Queen Elizabeth I (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957).Google Scholar The courtier Sir Naunton, Robert (1563–1635) described Elizabeth's frugality, even to favorites, in Fragmenta Regalia, edited by Cerovski, John S. from original MSS (1641; Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1985), 16–18.Google Scholar Christopher Haigh discusses Elizabeth's bestowal of wardenships, leases, and licenses as rewards, and her attempts to hold down military costs in Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1988), 89–93; 132–33, 141–42.

17 Clifton deposition in Smith, 484–86.

18 Harrison, G.B., The Elizabethan Journals (1938; rpt. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), second pagination, 283–94.Google Scholar Harrison gathers Acts of the Privy Council, State Papers, memoirs, letters, and other source materials to give a year-by-year glimpse of Elizabethan topics of public concern. See also Neale, 301, 399–402; Naunton, 16–18; and Haigh, 89–92, 108, 119, 121, 127, 130–32, 137–38.

19 Giles' Commission in Smith, 482–83.

20 See Starkey, D., et al., The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the civil War (London: Longman, 1987), 162–5Google Scholar, for the custom of bestowing “gifts” for favors from those in authority. Bentley's descriptions of Heminges' and Beeston's “gifts” demonstrate that theatre businessmen understood that custom (Player, 152–3).

21 My thanks to Terry P. Morris for his valuable suggestions concerning the Clifton affair. Mr. Morris suggests that Justice Shallow's opening lines in The Merry Wives of Windsor, “Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star Chamber matter of it,” may be a topical allusion to the Clifton incident. Morris shows that the character Sir Hugh Evans, a Welsh parson, is a caricature of Henry Evans, Welsh scrivener. Through comparison of textual evidence from the play and evidence concerning the life of Ben Jonson, he proffers that the character of Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives may be the “purge” (i.e., criticism) of Jonson by Shakespeare mentioned in the Parnassus Plays. See his paper, “Shakespeare hath given him a purge to bewray his credit,” presented before the Shakespeare and Renaissance Association of West Virginia (April, 1990).

22 Smith, 185; Gurr, , Shakespearean Stage, 50–51.Google Scholar

23 The Parliament of 1601 sat from 27 October to 19 December see Kinney, Arthur, Titled Elizabethans (New York: Archon, 1973), 9.Google Scholar The Clifton case was heard in Star Chamber on 15 December.

24 Haigh describes the relationships between local gentry and the nobility and the importance of having the ear of someone with influence at Court, especially someone (like Fortescue) in constant attendance at the Privy council (48–49, 66–68, 87–91, and 97–99).

25 Edmund Lodge lists several of Elizabeth's grants of monopolies and privilege gleaned from the papers of the Earl of Shrewsbury in Illustrations of British History … in the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London: G. Nicol, 1791), 3:6–10. See also Naunton, 16–18; and Neale, 399–402. Sidney and Beatrice Webb describe the collection of fees by prison wardens for virtually everything, including entrance and exit fees, in their History of English Local Government, 6: English Prisons under Local Government (1922; rpt Hamden, CT: Archon, 1963), 1–12. A “gig” mill was a mill for the fulling of woolen cloth.