Later Years
In 1617 the company moved to the Cockpit Theatre, in the increasingly fashionable Drury Lane. This final move, which brought significantly higher admission prices, engendered indignation among their audience: the Cockpit was set on fire during a Shrove Tuesday riot in 1617 and had to be rebuilt. The Queen's troupe seems to have remained at the Cockpit for only a relatively brief time; within a couple of years they were back at the Red Bull.
The actors lost their patron at the death of Queen Anne in 1619; they continued on as the Company of the Revels, often known simply as the Red Bull Company after their theatre. Their final years were marked by a major legal dispute: Thomas Greene's widow, remarried as Susan Baskervile, sued for moneys owed her through her late husband's share in the troupe and loans she had extended over the years. The outcome of the so-called Baskerville or Worth/Baskerville suit was that the actors lost and the company was forced to dissolve in 1623.
Some members moved on to other troupes; Richard Perkins, for example, would acquire a reputation as perhaps the major tragedian of his generation while acting with Queen Henrietta's Men from 1625 to 1642. Christopher Beeston would attain prominence as the dominant theatre manager and impressario of the 1620s and 1630s.
Read more about this topic: Queen Anne's Men
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“But you were not living at all,
and I was half-living,
so where the years blight these others,
we, who were not of the years,
have escaped,
we got nowhere.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)