Lord Chamberlain's Men

• 1. Introduction

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  Lord Chamberlain's Men gathered for the first time around 1594, in a city of roughly 200,000 people where more than 15,000 men and women attended plays every single week. London's theatrical world was in flux. Companies rose and fell with their patrons. Actors drifted between troupes. Into that unstable landscape stepped a group of eight sharers who would, within a decade, become the most consequential playing company in the English language.

  They took their name from Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain who oversaw court entertainments and agreed to lend them his protection. They found a lead actor in Richard Burbage and a resident playwright in William Shakespeare. They built a theatre from the salvaged beams of another. And when Queen Elizabeth died and King James ascended the throne in 1603, the new monarch himself stepped in as their patron.

  What made this company different from every other troupe of its era? What were the pressures, the controversies, and the quiet decisions that kept it together long enough to stage some of the most enduring plays ever written?

• 2. Origins and Patronage

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  Henry Carey died on the 23rd of July 1596, leaving the company without its named patron at a delicate moment. The actors temporarily passed to the protection of his son, George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, and the troupe briefly became known as Lord Hunsdon's Men. That awkward interlude ended on the 17th of March 1597, when George Carey himself became Lord Chamberlain and the company reclaimed its original name.

  The company's formation grew partly out of a moment of departure. Edward Alleyn, the era's other great actor, left Lord Strange's Men in the spring of 1594, and Lord Strange himself died that same season. The disruption scattered experienced players, and several of them folded into the new company. George Bryan and Thomas Pope both came from Strange's Men; so did Augustine Phillips, Henry Condell, and John Heminges.

  Bryan had history stretching back to Leicester's Men in the 1580s; he and William Kempe had performed together at Elsinore in 1586. Pope, another Leicester's veteran, retired from the stage in 1600 and died in 1603. Bryan appears to have retired from acting around 1597 or 1598, though he lived on; records from the reign of James list him as a Groom of the Chamber as late as 1613, indicating he found a quieter place in royal life after the theatre.

• 3. The Burbage Dynasty

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  James Burbage assembled the company and directed its activities until his death in 1597. That connection to the Burbages placed the Chamberlain's Men at the center of a longer story. In 1574, James Burbage had led the first group of actors to be formally protected under the 1572 statute against rogues and vagabonds, effectively marking the beginning of professional theatre in Renaissance London.

  His sons Richard and Cuthbert both belonged to the company, though Cuthbert did not act. Richard became the leading man, taking on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Relatively unknown in 1594, he rose to achieve a fame and wealth that, by the era's reckoning, only Edward Alleyn surpassed.

  The Burbages also controlled the company's physical home. When their landlord dispute at The Theatre in Shoreditch became untenable in 1597, the troupe moved to the nearby Curtain. Then, on the night of the 29th of December 1598, the Burbage brothers acted with striking boldness. Together with William Smith, their financial backer, a carpenter named Peter Street, and ten to twelve workmen, they dismantled The Theatre beam by beam and carried those timbers south across the river to Southwark. Those recycled materials became the Globe.

• 4. A Theatre Built from Ruins

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  The Globe opened in 1599 and could hold 3,000 people. It gave the company the largest outdoor venue in London, a stage proportional to Shakespeare's most ambitious writing. Julius Caesar and Henry V may both have opened that building; Hamlet may have appeared first at the Curtain, just before or around the time the Globe came into use.

  On the 29th of June 1613, the Globe burned to the ground in a fire. It was rebuilt and reopened by June 1614, then finally closed in 1642, when Parliament prohibited the stage entirely. That final closure brought the story of the company full circle: the King's Men, as they were then known, were among the acting companies shut down by that parliamentary order, the same system that James Burbage had first navigated when he sought protection under the 1572 statute nearly seven decades earlier.

  In 1609, the company had expanded its operations by beginning to perform at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre, which held 600 people. The minimum price at Blackfriars was sixpence, six times what a groundling paid at the Globe; better seats went for eighteen and thirty pence. The two venues together allowed the company to generate income year-round, regardless of weather.

• 5. Shakespeare and His Fellow Sharers

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  Shakespeare's activities before 1594 remain uncertain; scholars have suggested he may have been with Pembroke's Men and Derby's Men in the early 1590s. When he joined the Chamberlain's Men as a sharer, he was at first equally important as actor and playwright. He continued to act at least until 1603, when he performed in Ben Jonson's Sejanus.

  A Midsummer Night's Dream may have been the first play he wrote specifically for the new company. A concentrated burst followed over the next two years: Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, and the plays of the second tetralogy. Later came Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, and the early Jacobean tragedies.

  Henry Condell and John Heminges, both relatively young in 1594, stayed with the company long enough to outlive King James. Their decades of continuity had a consequence that reached far beyond the stage: they collected and edited the plays of Shakespeare's First Folio, published in 1623. Without that act of preservation, many of Shakespeare's plays might not have survived.

• 6. Clowns and Replacements

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  William Kempe was probably the most famous company member in the 1590s. He had been with Leicester's Men in the 1580s and is identified with Peter in the quarto of Romeo and Juliet; he most likely also originated Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hamlet's famous complaint about clowns who improvise has long been associated with Kempe, whether fairly or not.

  Kempe had left the company by 1601. The circumstances remain unclear. He was a stakeholder in the Globe property and may have performed there in its first year. During Lent of an uncertain year, when the company lay idle, he completed his famous morris dance to Norwich; his account of that stunt, Nine Days' Wonder, mentions in a hastily added epilogue his plan to return to solo performances.

  His replacement was Robert Armin, formerly of Chandos's Men and a writer himself. Where Kempe had been broad and physical, Armin was small and subtle. Shakespeare's writing shifted noticeably with the transition. Armin is credited with originating Feste in Twelfth Night, Touchstone in As You Like It, and the Fool in King Lear, characters whose wit runs quieter and sharper than the roles Kempe had held.

• 7. Essex, Bridewell, and the Crown

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  On the 7th of February 1601, the day before the Earl of Essex launched his failed insurrection, the company performed Shakespeare's Richard II at the request of Essex's supporters. The play's central spectacle, a king deposed, was chosen deliberately. Elizabeth I later remarked, "I am Richard II, know ye not that?"

  Augustine Phillips was summoned before the investigating authorities and gave a deposition. He testified that the company had been offered 40 shillings above their usual fee and had agreed to perform for that reason alone. The authorities accepted the explanation. The company and its members went unpunished. Three weeks later, on the 24th of February, the troupe performed for Elizabeth at Whitehall, the day before Essex was executed.

  The following year brought a different kind of trouble. Christopher Beeston faced a rape charge in 1602, and some of the Lord Chamberlain's Men appear to have accompanied him to his pretrial hearing at Bridewell, where they caused a disturbance. The details are sparse. Beeston later left the company at the start of James's reign and eventually became a wealthy impresario in his own right, a career trajectory that showed how far a boy player or hired man might rise from the bottom of the company's hierarchy.

• 8. Performing for a City

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  Six different plays every week: that was the demand the audience placed on the company as its popularity grew. Actors memorized parts from multiple plays simultaneously and had little or no time for rehearsal. The theatres sat in a rough part of London, near drinking establishments, gambling, and prostitution. Cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-baiting drew the same crowds.

  The company competed for those crowds with court performances as well. As early as 1595, just one year after forming, the Chamberlain's Men gave four performances at court. The following year they gave six, then four more in 1597. Those court engagements confirmed their standing and brought revenue outside the regular run of public shows.

  Not every production was a smooth triumph. In 1597, the theatrical world was disrupted when the satirical play The Isle of Dogs caused an uproar and the authorities temporarily closed all the theatres. Records from Dover and Bristol confirm that at least part of the company toured that summer. The character of Falstaff, wildly popular from his first appearance, drew a complaint from Lord Cobham, who objected to the original name Oldcastle, a name borrowed from a member of his own family. The company changed it. A modern reconstruction of the original Globe, known as Shakespeare's Globe, opened in 1997 near the site of the original theatre, drawing audiences to a stage shaped by all of those pressures.