Queen Henrietta's Men - Personnel

Personnel

At its start, the actors of the new company came from several different troupes then active. Richard Perkins had been with Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre and briefly (1623–25) with the King's Men. His success as Barabas in The Jew of Malta cemented his reputation as a great tragic actor. William Robbins also came from what had been Queen Anne's Men (it was generally called the Revels company, or simply the Red Bull company, after the 1619 death of Anne of Denmark). Robbins was the company's leading comic actor through the first phase of its existence.

William Shearlock and Anthony Turner were other prominent members; they were holdovers from the Lady Elizabeth's company. (The new company inherited that troupe's plays as well as its actors, works like George Chapman's Chabot, Massinger's The Renegado, and Shirley's Love Tricks.) Shearlock must have been a man of girth, since he performed the fat-man role of Lodam in Shirley's The Wedding. Apart from his other roles, Turner played a kitchen maid in Part 1 of Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, one of the few cases in which a mature actor, rather than a boy player or a young man, is known to have played a female role.

In addition, the company included William Allen, Theophilus Bird (or Bourne), Hugh Clark, John Sumner, and Michael Bowyer. Bowyer handled leading-man roles; Hugh Clark was a boy player taking female roles, who later switched to adult male parts. Bird also played female roles for the company; he later married Beeston's daughter and was a successful actor both before and after the Interregnum. Allen and Sumner took significant supporting parts.

Six cast lists survive from five of the company's plays: from The Renegado, The Wedding, Robert Davenport's King John and Matilda, Thomas Nabbes's Hannibal and Scipio, and from both parts of Heywood's two-part Fair Maid of the West. Two actors, Allen and Bowyer, appear on all six lists, and five more, Clark, Perkins, Shearlock, Sumner, and Turner, appear on five — arguably a good indication of their durability and importance to the troupe.

Additional personnel included:

• Robert Axell played roles in Hannibal and Scipio, both parts of Fair Maid, and perhaps King John too.

• John Blaney was a boy player in the Children of the Chapel when he appeared in Jonson's Epicene in 1609. After a stint with Queen Anne's Men, he playd Asambeg in The Renegado.

• Ezekiel Fenn played Sophonisba in Hannibal in 1635. In 1639 Henry Glapthorne published a poem, "For Ezekiel Fenn at his First Acting a Man's Part."

• Christopher Goad played with the company before moving to the King's Revels Men around 1635.

• John Page, like Bird, Clark, and Fenn, moved from female roles (as in The Wedding) to male (Hannibal and Scipio).

• Timothy Read was as early member (he was in The Wedding); after a period with the King's Revels Men, he returned for The English Moor c. 1637.

• Edward Rogers played women's roles in The Wedding and The Renegado, but then disappeared from the surviving records.

• George Stutfield pursued his career with several companies in the 1620s and '30s, including Queen Anne's Men and Prince Charles's Men.

• William Wilbraham played in The Wedding and Fair Maid. Like Goad, he later moved on to the King's Revels troupe. Surprisingly for a rather obscure actor, Wilbraham appears to have prospered: in 1640 he was able to lend £150 to Elizabeth Beeston, widow of Christopher — a loan secured by a mortgage on the Cockpit Theatre.

• Michael Mohun and Andrew Pennycuicke also served with the troupe as boy actors; William Cartwright and William Wintershall may have been members too.