William Beeston

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William Beeston (b. 1606?—d. 1682) was a 17th-century actor and theatre manager, the son and successor to the more famous Christopher Beeston.

William was raised in the theatrical world of his father; he became an actor and his father's assistant in managing the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres and their associated companies of actors, including the company of younger players colloquially known as Beeston's Boys.

Upon his father's death in 1638, William Beeston inherited their theatrical enterprise—though he managed it with much less success than his father had. On May 4, 1640 he was thrown into the Marshalsea Prison for a Beeston's Boys' play that gave offense to Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels. The play was most likely The Court Beggar by Richard Brome, which satirized several members of Queen Henrietta Maria's circle of favorites, including Sir John Suckling and Sir William Davenant.^[1] Control of Beeston's theatres and actors was given to Davenant (in a royal warrant dated June 27, 1640). Davenant, though, was busy with other matters—politics and the coming revolution; Beeston was able to resume his position, sometime in the latter part of 1641 (only to face the closing of the theatres the next year, at the outbreak of the English Civil War).

Perhaps because of such difficulties, or his responses to them, William Beeston gained a reputation (justly or not) for unscrupulousness and shady dealing.

During the Interregnum, Beeston at one point tried to re-establish the Beeston's Boys troupe; in 1650 he paid for repairs to the Cockpit Theatre and then gathered a group of "prentices and covenant servants to instruct them in the quality of acting and fitting for the stage," as he would testify in a lawsuit a year later.^[2]

When theatres were re-opened at the start of the Restoration, William Beeston was able to re-form the Beeston's Boys company for a time.

As for William Beeston's legacy: he may have been the first manager in English Renaissance theatre to use scenery.^[3] He was also a source of information for the antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey. William Beeston was Aubrey's source on Shakespeare, and so helped to pass on traditions about the poet that were current in the theatrical world of his generation—i.e. that Shakespeare "understood Latin pretty well: for he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country," etc.

[edit] Notes

^ Gurr, p. 64.
^ Michael Shapiro, "The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensivess?," in Comensoli and Russell, p. 184.
^ Martin Butler, "The condition of the theatres in 1642," in Milling and Thomson, p. 450.

[edit] References

Comensoli, Vivana, and Anne Russell, eds. Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage. Champaigne, Illinois, University of Illinois Press, 1998.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642. Third edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
Milling, Jane, and Peter Thomson, eds. The Cambridge History of British Theatre. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.