John Shank - Controversy

Controversy

When veteran King's Man John Heminges died in 1630, his shares in the company's two theatres, the Globe and the Blackfriars, passed to his son William Heminges. Between 1633 and 1635, the younger Heminges sold the three shares that he owned in the Globe (the theatre was divided into sixteen shares total), and his two shares in the Blackfriars (out of a total of eight), to Shank, who paid Heminges £506. The sales may have been clandestine, since ownership of the theatre shares was a sensitive subject within the company. When the shareholder system was established for the Globe (1599) and the Blackfriars (1608), most of the shareholders were the company's actors.With the passage of time, a majority of those shares passed to the widows and heirs of the original actors; younger members of the company were left out of the profitable system.

In 1635, Eliard Swanston, Robert Benfield, and Thomas Pollard, three actors in the King's Men who were sharers in the company but not "householders" or shareholders in the theatres, petitioned the Lord Chamberlain — then Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke — for the right to purchase shares in the theatres. Pembroke ordered Shank and the Burbage family to sell shares to the three actors; but Shank and Cuthbert Burbage both protested the ruling. The dispute generated a back-and-forth documentation, sometimes called the "sharers' papers," that has provided subsequent generations of scholars and researchers with important data on the theatre business of the age. Shank complained that he and the three actors could not reach acceptable terms for a sale, and that they prevented him from performing with the company. The dispute seems to have injected a significant degree of bitterness into the last year of Shank's life.