eyes of its lord was not quite the same as its constitution from the point of view of business relations, and I should suppose that Haysell, who was evidently not himself acting at the time, was the financier of the enterprise, and gave the bonds which Tilney would probably require for the satisfaction of the covenants of his indenture of licence. The other difficulty is that Leicester is not the only place in which the presence of a Master of the Revels' company is recorded. Such a company was at Ludlow on 7 December 1583 and at Bath in 1583-4.[1] But, after all, this need mean no more than that the bogus company kept up their fraud for two or three months before they were exposed. If Tilney had really started a company of his own, it might have been expected to have a longer life. The establishment in 1583 of the Queen's men makes it the less probable that he did so.
The list of this provincial company, as it stood in January 1583, is interesting, because at least four of its members, Robert Browne, Richard Jones, James Tunstall, and above all Edward Alleyn, then only a lad of sixteen, were destined to take a considerable share in the stage history of the future. Edward Browne, too, was afterwards one of the Admiral's men. Of the rest, William Harrison, Thomas Cooke, Richard Andrewes, as well as of George Haysell (cf. ch. xv) and of the two players who were not named in the warrant, Thomas Powlton and William Pateson, Lord Herbert's man, nothing or practically nothing further is known.[2] It is possible that the escapades of the company at Norwich and Leicester came, after all, to Worcester's ears and aroused his displeasure. Visits are recorded to Coventry and Stratford in 1583-4, to Maidstone in 1584-5, to York in March 1585, and thereafter no more. It is also possible that the company passed from Worcester's service into that of Lord Howard, when the latter became Lord Admiral in 1585. If so, a conveyance by Richard Jones to Edward Alleyn on 3 January 1589 of his share in a stock of apparel, play-books, and so forth, held jointly with Edward and John Alleyn and Robert Browne, must relate, not to a break up of Worcester's men shortly before the death of the third earl, but to some internal change in the organization of the Admiral's men.[3] In any case Mr. Fleay's theory that Worcester's men, other than Alleyn, became Pembroke's in 1589 and only joined the
- ↑ Halliwell-Phillipps, Notices of Players Acting at Ludlow; B. S. Penley, The Bath Stage, 12, from account for year ending 16 June 1584.
- ↑ Lord Herbert was, of course, Worcester's son; not, as Dr. Greg (Henslowe, ii. 104) seems to think, one of the Pembroke family.
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 31; cf. supra (Admiral's).
