Eliard Swanston - Controversy

Controversy

In the mid-1630s Swanston became involved in a major controversy within the King's Men. In the 1633–35 period, comedian John Shank purchased three shares in the Globe Theatre and two in the Blackfriars Theatre from William Heminges, the son and heir of John Heminges. Swanston at the time was a sharer in the acting company, but not in either of the company's theatres, which were separately organized. Swanston and two other men in the same situation, Robert Benfield and Thomas Pollard, petitioned the Lord Chamberlain, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, for the right to purchase lucrative theatre shares from Shanks and the Burbage family (Cuthbert Burbage and Winifred Robinson, Richard Burbage's widow). Pembroke ruled in their favor, and Shank and the Burbages protested. The affair generated a supply of documents, sometimes called the "sharers' papers," that throw light on the theatre conditions of the era. Shanks, for example, asserted that each of the three petitioners, as a sharer in the company, had an annual income of £180, a very comfortable living for that era. The Burbages and Shank also complained that Swanston owned a third of one of the eight shares in the Blackfriars, and so wasn't entirely excluded from the householders' profits. The disagreement was not fatal for Swanston's credit in the troupe, by any means: on 5 June 1638, Swanston alone signed for a payment of £240 for the company's Court performances (though by then both Shanks and Cuthbert Burbage were dead).