Prince Charles's Men

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prince Charles's Men (known as the Duke of York's Men from 1608 to 1612) was a playing company or troupe of actors in Jacobean and Caroline England.

The company was formed in 1608 as the Duke of York's Men, under the titular patronage of King James' second son, the eight-year-old Charles (1600-1649), then the Duke of York. Upon the death of his elder brother, Prince Henry (1612), the company changed its name to Prince Charles's Men. They played mainly in the provinces for the first two years of their existence, but in 1610 they received a renewed royal patent that authorized them to play in London, "in such usual houses as themselves shall provide."

Seven actors are listed in the patent: John Garland, William Rowley, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Dawes, Joseph Taylor, John Newton, and Gilbert Reason. Rowley was their dramatist and clown; Joseph Taylor would be their leading man in future years, and then fill the same function with the King's Men, when he replaced the late Richard Burbage in May of 1619.

For a short time around 1614-15, they joined forces with the Lady Elizabeth's Men at Philip Henslowe's recently-built Hope Theatre, but separated again in 1616 when the Lady Elizabeth's company left London to tour the provinces. Taylor transferred to the King's Men in 1619; in the same year, Prince Charles's Men left Henslowe's Hope (a less-than-ideal venue for drama, since it doubled as a bear-baiting ring) and moved into Christopher Beeston's Cockpit Theatre, and were thereafter closely associated with Beeston's theatrical enterprise. They acted at the Cockpit from 1619 till 1622, and after that, at Beeston's Red Bull Theatre.

When their patron became King Charles I in 1625, the King chose to renew his father's patronage of the King's Men, the company of Shakespeare and Burbage that had maintained its reputation as the best in drama. Prince Charles's Men disbanded, at least officially; some of the troupe's members may have continued with the so-called Red Bull company that occupied that theatre from 1625 on. Little is known about them. In the confused theatre scene of the Caroline era—what Andrew Gurr has called "a complex game of musical playhouses"^[1] in which companies switched theatres and changed their names—there was a company that acted under the name of the earlier troupe in the 1631-42 period, though it lacked any actual royal patronage; it is sometimes designated by scholars as Prince Charles's Men (II). They were at the Salisbury Court Theatre in the 1631-3 era, and at the Red Bull Theatre in 1634 and after.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, p. 438.

[edit] References

• Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.