Queen Elizabeth's Men - Dominance

Dominance

The creation of the company took advantage of the growing versatility and professionalism of the community of actors in this era. Elizabeth's Court had had a troupe of interlude players in previous years and decades; but they were judged unsatisfactory, and the Court depended on the companies of child actors for better-quality entertainment. But as John Stow wrote of this period in his Annals (1615):

"Comedians and stage-players of former times were very poor and ignorant...but being

now grown very skillful and exquisite actors for all matters, they were entertained into

the service of diverse great lords: out of which there were twelve of the best chosen,

and...were sworn the Queen's servants and were allowed wages and liveries as Grooms

of the Chamber."

The company entertained at Court primarily in the winter, and during the summer they toured the towns of the shires; they may have reached as far as Scotland in 1589. In London they were initially allowed to perform only at the Bull and Bell Inns – though in later years they may have acted at James Burbage's Theatre too.

The number of twelve founding members is more revealing than it seems at first: Queen Elizabeth's Men was the first large company of actors in English Renaissance theatre, twice the size of its predecessors. (Sussex's Men had six members in the 1570s. When Elsinore Castle receives a troupe of touring players in Hamlet, Act II, scene ii, their number is only "four or five." The players in Sir Thomas More are "four men and a boy....") The size of the new company enabled it to act a new kind of play, built on a larger scale than ever before. In particular, the development of the history play, which was such a distinctive feature of the later 1580s and the 1590s, would not have been possible without a large company to handle the performances. Famous Victories of Henry V (c. 1583), one of the earliest of this type of play, has twenty speaking parts in the first 500 lines; and the plays that were to follow, including Shakespeare's histories, are constructed on a similar scale. These were, in effect, the "Hollywood spectaculars" of their era, and represent a leap to a new level of complexity and professionalism; prior to the establishment of the Queen's Men, such plays would have been unactable. When the Queen's Men were finally supplanted at Court in the winter of 1591–92, it required an assemblage of personnel from both the Admiral's Men and Lord Strange's Men to fill their place.

An extreme instance of the above phenomenon may be found in the example of the Queen's Men's production of The True Tragedy of Richard III. By one reconstruction, four actors were required to play seven roles each, and the boy actors, unusually, also had to double roles, for the Queen's Men to fill the 68 separate roles in the play.