A Mystery Of Errors

His mother had died shortly after he was born, so he had never known her, and though he had spent his childhood years in the same house with his father and his stepmother, he had never truly known them, either. He had known his wet nurse, Nan, much better. While still a boy, he had been sent to his Uncle Tom’s to be raised and educated and taught the value of hard work while his father chased his lofty dreams. But he felt that it was not as if his father and stepmother were alone or even necessarily at fault for being so distant. Smythe knew that it was not unusual for children to be sent away to live with other families. Children often did not survive and convention held that if parents became overly attached, then the grief over a dead child would be too difficult to bear. In his case, there had been no siblings, either alive or dead, because his father’s second marriage had not been blessed with offspring. He would have been the heir, therefore, had his father left him something to inherit. Now there was nothing to hold him to the life he’d lived before, nothing to stop him from seeking the life that he so earnestly desired. The question was, how to make the transition from the one life to the other?

He was not even sure how one went about trying to join an acting company. Was there a waiting list for openings? He imagined there probably had to be, for he knew that most companies had only a few regular players who were shareholders and the rest were hired men who might be taken on for no more than one production, or even one performance. There would likely be apprentices that the senior actors would take into their homes and train in stagecraft, just as was done with apprentices in every craft and guild, but these would be young boys who would play the female roles in the productions until their voices changed or until they grew too big. And he was already too old for such consideration, to say nothing of his being much too large of frame to play a woman, and too deep of voice.

So what if there were no openings, he wondered as he proceeded on his way. What then? It was not as if there were an unlimited number of opportunities. There were only a few acting companies in London. Much like his father, the London city council did not look very favorably upon actors. The Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, passed in 1572, stipulated that all fencers, bear-wards, common players in interludes, and minstrels not belonging to any baron of the realm or other honorable personage of greater degree would be taken, adjudged, and deemed rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars. And the punishments were harsh.

A man so charged and then found guilty would be whipped and then burned through the ear with a hot poker. This was done in order to discourage gypsies and others of their ilk from wandering the countryside and making their living dishonestly at the expense of others, or cozenage, as it was known. And such idlers and masterless men were not tolerated within the London city limits, where they could at best make a nuisance of themselves or, at worst, instigate a riot that could cause damage to property and loss of life.

What the law meant for actors was that they had to be members of a company that had a noble for a patron, so they would then be “in service” to that lord, rather than masterless men. Thus, Lord Strange had his own company of players who bore his name, and then there were the Admiral’s Men, under the patronage of Lord Howard of Effingham, as well as Lord Worcester’s Men, and the Queen’s Players, under Her Majesty’s Master of the Revels. But there were not many more established companies than that and taking up with some itinerant band that merely claimed a noble’s patronage was only courting trouble.

Performances still took place in the courtyards of inns in the city and the surrounding countryside, with the audience of groundlings gathered around a stage erected in the courtyard and the wealthier people who had rooms at the inn watching the productions from the galleries. However, in 1576, a former carpenter named Burbage had built a playhouse where the old Holywell Priory had been in Shoreditch and the Theatre, as he called it, became the first permanent building for the purposes of staging plays. With the patronage of the Earl of Leicester, Burbage had secured a royal warrant, granting him permission to perform comedies, tragedies, interludes, and stage plays, subject to the approval of the Master of the Revels. And in the decade since, the Theatre had become famous throughout England.