Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Francis Beaumont: Dramatist: A Portrait, with Some Account of His Circle, Elizabethan and Jacobean,; And of His Association with John Fletcher
John Stuart Mill · en
The company was not that of St. Paul's; and the "house" was not a
school-house, but a regularly constituted theatre. Now, the only
theatre, public or private, that, at any rate between 1603 and 1611, had
been occupied by a boys' company for "this seven yeares" was
Blackfriars; and of Blackfriars the statement could be made only at a
date preceding January 4, 1610, and with reference to the Queen's
Revels' Children. On that date, as reorganized under Rossiter, Keysar,
and others, they received a Patent authorizing them to open at
Whitefriars, "or in any other convenient place." For about a month
before, they had filled an engagement at Blackfriars, the lease of which
had reverted on August 9, 1608 to Burbadge and Shakespeare's company of
the King's Players. They had ceased playing at Blackfriars as an
independent company in March 1608; the theatre had been tenantless
after that for six months and then had been closed until December 7,
1609, because of the prevalence of the plague. The Citizen's complaint
that the boys have been girding at citizens "this seven yeares there
hath been playes at this house" would lose all cogency if spoken of the
Queen's Revels' Children when they were acting during the month
following December 7, 1609, both because plays had been then intermitted
for the twenty months preceding, and because in 1609 it was not seven
but twelve years since the boys had begun their occupancy of "this
house." It could not apply to the seven years between 1597, when they
first occupied Blackfriars, and 1604, because _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_ was not written till after the _Travails of Three English
Brothers_ appeared, June 29, 1607. But it does apply, with all requisite
dramatic and chronological accuracy, to the seven years preceding the
last date,--or the date in March 1608, when, because of their scandalous
representation of the King of France and his mistress in Chapman's
_Tragedie of Charles, Duke of Byron_, and because of plays caricaturing
and vilifying King James, the Queen's Revels' Children were prohibited
from playing, their principal actors thrown into prison, and Blackfriars
suppressed. On September 29, 1600, Richard Burbadge had let Blackfriars
on a twenty-one-year lease to Henry Evans, the manager of the Queen's
Revels' Children, and under the organization of that date they had by
1607-1608 been giving plays exactly "this seven yeares at this house."
We are, as I have said, informed by the publisher of _The Knight_ that
the play was written in eight days. It might have been staged in two or
three. If the plague regulations were enforced during 1607-8, as I have
no doubt they were, _The Knight_ was acted between July 10 and 23, 1607,
or between December 26, 1607 and the Biron day in March 1608.