Richard Burbage - Life

Life

After the death of their father in February 1597, Richard and his brother Cuthbert stepped in to rescue the family's interests in two London theatres, and ended up tied up in lawsuits. The Blackfriars Theatre they kept but leased to lawyer and impressario Henry Evans, who used it for a troupe of child actors. The other, called simply The Theatre, was dismantled when they could not resolve terms for a new lease with Giles Allen, the landowner. The beams, posts, and other remnants of The Theatre were moved to a new location on the south side of the Thames River and reassembled into a new playhouse called the Globe. Income from the Blackfriars lease helped fund the move to the Globe. In 1608 the brothers ended the Blackfriars lease and moved the company's performances to the theatre.

The brothers maintained a close working and personal relationship throughout their lives; they were neighbors on Halliwell Street in Shoreditch, near the Theatre. Burbage fathered at least eight children; after his death his widow Winifred married another of the King's Men, Richard Robinson.

It has sometimes been argued that the famous Chandos portrait of Shakespeare was painted by Burbage; he had a strong interest in painting. Dulwich College holds a painting of a female head in a roughly similar style that was generally regarded as his work until it was found out in 1987 that it was probably misattributed to him and that it is a work by a North Italian painter.

Unlike Alleyn or his fellow King's Man Shakespeare, Burbage never retired from the stage; he continued acting until his death in 1619. He was not as acute a businessman as either Alleyn or Shakespeare; at his death he was said to have left his widow "better than £300" in land—a respectable estate but far less than Alleyn's substantial wealth, and less than the net worth of Shakespeare at his death in 1616.

Burbage was buried in St Leonard's, Shoreditch, a church close to the Theatre. His gravestone is now lost, but a memorial to him and his brothers was erected in a later century. An anonymous poet composed for him A Funerall Elegye on the Death of the famous Actor Richard Burbage who died on Saturday in Lent the 13 of March 1619, an excerpt of which reads:

He's gone and with him what a world are dead.

Which he review'd, to be revived so,

No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo

Kind Lear, the Grieved Moor, and more beside,

That lived in him have now for ever died.

Of the many elegies that followed his passing, perhaps the most poignant is the brief epitaph:

Exit Burbage.