King's Company

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The King's Company was one of two enterprises granted the rights to mount theatrical productions in London at the start of the English Restoration. It existed from 1660 to 1682.

On 21 August 1660, King Charles II granted Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant each official permission in the form of a temporary "privilege" to proceed with forming acting companies (Milhous 4). Killigrew's King's Company fell under the sponsership of Charles himself; Davenant's Duke's Company under that of Charles' brother, James II of England, then the Duke of York. The temporary privileges would be followed several years later by letters patent, issued on 25 April 1662 in Killigrew's case (Milhous 4), cementing a hereditary monopoly on theatre for the patent-holders.

Among its senior actors, the early King's Company counted many of the more experienced actors still working at the time: Michael Mohun, Charles Hart, John Lacy, Edward Kynaston, Walter Clun, and Thomas Betterton were part of the initial group (Milhous 8). Betterton would be "seduced" away to the Duke's Company by 5 November of the same year, not long before the Lord Chamberlain issued orders forbidding such transfers from one company to the other (Milhous 8). Such orders would be encoded into the 1662 letters patent as well.

According to Milhous (p. 4), Killigrew's motivations for entering into his theatrical enterprise were more monetary than artistic. During most of the 1660s, he seems not to have been a manager in the day-to-day sense: this was delegated to senior actors including Hart, Lacy, and Mohun (Milhous 12). Killigrew did not — and probably could not — exert strong control over the artistic direction of the company.

The first permanent venue for the King's Company was Gibbon's Tennis Court; in 1663, responding to competition from the Duke's Company's more advanced theatre in Lisle's Tennis Court, Killigrew built and opened the King's Playhouse, today's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This burned down in 1672 and was rebuilt and reopened in 1674. Killigrew sold most of his interests in the company by the early 1670s and management was in his son Charles' hands after 1671. In 1682, the King's Company and the Duke's Company merged to become the so-called United Company, under the leadership of the Duke's company's people.

[edit] References

• Holland, Peter (1995). "Killigrew, Thomas", in Banham, Martin: The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge University Press, p. 600. ISBN 0-521-43437-8. 
• Milhous, Judith (1979), Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1696–1708. Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press.