For all Jonson’s uneasiness about stage performance of his plays, and despite the generally accepted view (as promulgated by G. E. Bentley, 1971, 30–2) that Jonson did not write regularly for a single acting company or have a steady and consistent output, he seems in fact to have been loyal in his attachment throughout his career to two acting companies in the main. One of these companies went under the varying title, during the reign of Elizabeth I, of the Chapel Royal or the Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel. This company became the Queen’s Revels company under the sponsorship of Queen Anne after 1603–4, variously known also as the Children of Blackfriars (where they played from 1604 to 1608) or of Whitefriars (1609–13). These changes of names betokens a considerable amount of reorganization, as detailed by Chambers (1923) and Gurr (1996); the company may have stayed much the same, but moments of upheaval did disrupt continuity as they lost the Queen’s patronage, moved out of Blackfriars, and the like. In about 1614–15 the company seems to have merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, for whom Jonson wrote Bartholomew Fair in late 1614. Lady Elizabeth, the daughter of James I and Queen Anne, became Queen of Bohemia as a consequence of her marriage with the Elector Palatinate Frederick in 1613. (The Queen of Bohemia’s players, performing in 1628 and afterwards, were an entirely new company operating under a familiar name.)

After a decade in which they had been shut down because of their penchant for topical satire, the boys’ companies were allowed to reopen in 1599–1600. Jonson’s association with the Chapel/Blackfriars Children began very soon after that. The 1601 title-page of The Fountain of Self-Love, or Cynthia’s Revels announces that the play ‘hath been sundry times privately acted at the Blackfriars by the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel’. Poetaster, or His Arraignment was similarly produced; the phrasing on the 1602 quarto title-page is precisely the same. Eastward Ho!, on which Jonson collaborated with Chapman and Marston, was ‘played in the Blackfriars by the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels’ (1605 quarto title-page) after the company had been adopted by Queen Anne. The Case Is Altered, though acted originally in 1597 and early 1598 by an adult company while the boys’ companies were closed, was issued in quarto in 1609 with two distinct title-pages, both advertising the play ‘As it hath been sundry times acted by the children of Blackfriars’. Jonson would have had opportunity to rewrite this early play for the boy actors. Epicene, according to its 1616 folio title-page, was ‘acted in the year 1609 by the Children of Her Majesty’s Revels’ (which could mean 1609 or early 1610, if Jonson was using old-style chronology). When Bartholomew Fair was acted at the Hope Theatre on 31 October 1614 ‘by the Lady Elizabeth’s Servants’ (1631 folio title-page) and then the next day at court, the acting ensemble appears to have incorporated the remnants of the Queen’s Children, who may have been nudging adulthood by this time and who disappeared as a children’s troupe shortly afterward. Jonson’s association with the children was thus vital. He seems to have preferred the Chapel/Blackfriars Children to Paul’s Boys, perhaps because he considered the Chapel/Blackfriars repertory more adventuresome, perhaps too because Marston was so strongly identified with Paul’s Boys in 1599–1600.

Even more substantial and continuous is Jonson’s long-time association with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an adult company renamed the King’s Men or His Majesty’s Servants in 1603. No doubt this long-enduring acting company offered Jonson a more reliable source of income than did the boys, who were periodically being shut down or were dissolved into other entities. At first, not surprisingly, Jonson wrote for various adult troupes as he sought to become known. The boys’ companies were still closed when he collaborated with Nashe and others on a lost satirical comedy called The Isle of Dogs for Pembroke’s Men at the Swan in 1597, and with Henry Chettle and Henry Porter on another lost comedy called Hot Anger Soon Cold for the Admiral’s Men at the Rose in 1598. These were plays he chose not to include in his folio collection of 1616, however, in good part no doubt because they were collaborations (like Eastward Ho!, similarly excluded), or because Jonson did not hold the copyright or had lost the copies themselves (see Jonson’s Lost Plays, 99–100 below). In any event, they are now lost. His first solo effort, The Case Is Altered, seems not to have attracted wide notice when it was produced by some adult company in 1597–8. He appears to have done better in attracting public attention and favourable response with Every Man In His Humour, 1598. Then, with Every Man Out of His Humour in 1599, he seems (as David Kay has argued, 1970–1 and 1995) to have reached a decisive turning point in his career. Not coincidentally, both Every Man In (quarto version) and Every Man Out were performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s company, Every Man In presumably at the Curtain Theatre in 1598 and Every Man Out at the Globe in 1599. The 1601 quarto of Every Man In offers the play to its readers ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain His Servants’ (1616 folio title-page). Similarly, Every Man Out of His Humour, according to its 1616 folio title-page, was ‘acted in the year 1599 by the then Lord Chamberlain His Servants’. Thereafter, Jonson’s involvement with this company is the staple of his career as a public dramatist. After a try at a now-lost play called Richard Crookback for the Admiral’s Men in 1602, which he may not have completed, Jonson was back with the ‘King’s Majesty’s Servants’, their new title under James I, in Sejanus His Fall, 1603. Volpone followed, ‘acted in the year 1605 by the King’s Majesty’s Servants’ (1616 folio title-page). The Alchemist bears the same legend on its folio title-page for first performance in the year 1610. So too with Catiline His Conspiracy, ‘acted in the year 1611, by the King’s Majesty’s Servants’ (1616 folio title-page). The Devil Is an Ass is similarly identified with this company on its 1631 folio title-page as ‘acted in the year 1616’. Then, after a considerable hiatus (a time of numerous masques), The Staple of News was ‘acted in the year 1625 [i.e. February of 1626] by His Majesty’s Servants’ (1631 title-page). The New Inn appeared in octavo in 1631, having been acted by ‘the King’s Servants’ in 1629. The Magnetic Lady bears no information about acting company on its 1640 folio title-page but is known to have been performed by the King’s Men in 1632.

Jonson seems to have stuck doggedly to his affiliation with that company despite the public falling out in 1629. Yet he then gave A Tale of a Tub, licensed on 7 May 1633, to Queen Henrietta’s company – not the boys’ company known earlier as the Queen’s Revels company sponsored by Queen Anne, which had fallen apart well before the end of James’s reign, but a new Caroline company. Was this the consequence of disaffection at last, or of the King’s company’s no longer desiring his services? (This present edition regards the play as essentially a late work, despite the contention of Herford and Simpson that it was Jonson’s first play, written in 1596–7 and then substantially revised much later.) Its 1640 folio title-page gives no indication of theatrical auspices.

Jonson’s defection to Queen Henrietta’s company at the end of his career was perhaps a logical choice for him; this troupe was acquiring a reputation for elegance, refinement, and new writing by Massinger, Shirley, Ford, and others, so that it was a near rival to the King’s Men and a good place for Jonson to go when his relations soured with his usual company. Earlier, on the other hand, his choice of the King’s Men among the adult companies seems to have been guided at least in part by artistic preference. He had generally chosen not to work with the Admiral’s/Prince’s company or with other adult troupes with reputations for citizen-pleasing repertoires. The various plays he had worked on for the Admiral’s Men, such as Hot Anger Soon Cold and Richard Crookback, evidently did not seem to him worthy of inclusion in the 1616 folio. The King’s Men were better suited to his style. One advantage they offered Jonson was that, from 1608 onwards, they performed indoors at the Second Blackfriars as well as at the Globe. James Burbage had acquired Blackfriars in 1597 and had outfitted it for theatrical use. The building was leased to the Chapel Children from 1600 to 1603 and then to that same company, renamed the Children of the Queen’s Revels, from 1603 to 1608. Thereupon the King’s Men reclaimed the property for their own use so that they could comfortably perform indoors in the winter months. In doing so they were able also to attract a courtly, well-heeled, and sophisticated clientele.

How did Jonson adapt his dramatic style or styles to the contrasting theatrical environments of public and private stages? Every Man In His Humour seems to have been performed initially at the Curtain Theater in 1598 while the Chamberlain’s Men were in the midst of their dispute with the landlord of their nearby acting space, The Theatre, in Shoreditch. Every Man Out of His Humour was acted at the Globe on the Bankside in 1599, shortly after it opened in that year; Sejanus followed in 1603, and then Volpone in 1605. These are plays for Jonson’s adult company. Interestingly, Jonson’s title-pages never mention the Globe Theatre. Yet his dramaturgy seems vibrantly aware of the possibilities. Whereas plays like Epicene, The Alchemist, and The Devil Is an Ass capitalize on the claustrophobia of an enclosed and limited space, the stagecraft of Every Man Out, Sejanus, Volpone, Catiline, and Bartholomew Fair revels in the spaciousness that the Globe or Hope stages could afford, with their raised rectangular platforms surrounded on three sides by standing spectators, the pillars supporting the ‘heavens’ over the stage, the tiring-house facade surmounted by a gallery, the presumed ‘discovery’ space flanked on each side by large doors, and the large auditorium for seated spectators. These plays abound in huge casts, swirling crowd scenes, and big set-pieces dominated by large props such as Volpone’s bed. To be sure, we see evidence of cross-over in many instances, since some of these plays were acted in the varying locations of large public amphitheatres, the ‘private’ theatres, and Whitehall. Volpone’s mountebank scene, in which Celia appears at a window above, is compatible with public or indoors staging, even though arguably the presence of the crowd gathered around Volpone’s mountebank booth and the appearance of Celia ‘above’ is especially well suited to the Globe. Perhaps Jonson was more at home socially and politically in the sophisticated precincts of the Blackfriars, but theatrically he seems to have adapted his dramatic writing to the contrasting venues in which he found continued employment.

Beginning with The Alchemist in 1610, at any rate, and perhaps indeed earlier, performances of Jonson’s plays by the King’s Men can easily be imagined to have taken place in the Globe and the Blackfriars theatre. In this latter location, The Alchemist would have seemed uncannily well suited to the play’s setting in the Blackfriars district. The restriction of the scene to a single Blackfriars household and to a single day powerfully reinforces the play’s aesthetic commitment to neoclassical decorum. Insofar as Jonson is metatheatrically aware of his theatrical space as he writes The Alchemist, it is the theatrical space of Blackfriars and not of the Globe. As a result, the physical staging requirements for this play do not substantially differ from those of Epicene, a Queen’s Children’s play at Whitefriars in 1609–10. The actors, both adult and juvenile, were thoroughly at home in this space. The proximity of a Whitefriars Epicene to the play’s London setting along the Strand and Drury Lane must again have provided exactly the kind of plausible and familiar immediacy that Jonson wanted for these plays. During the years that Shakespeare, also at the Globe and Blackfriars, was calling upon his theatrical resources to stage divine epiphanies and fantastic trompe-l’oeil effects (Jupiter, Juno, Ceres, Iris, invisible spirits, harpies, food-laden tables suddenly appearing and disappearing), Jonson exploited the Blackfriars and Whitefriars theatres for their pertinence to the daily life of the city he both loved and satirized. He did so when writing for the King’s Men and for the Queen’s Children. Not coincidentally, this is the point in his career at which he began setting his plays in London rather than in Italy or other foreign realms.

In many ways, the differences in theatrical space available to Jonson did leave a significant impression on the kinds of plays he wrote; the architecture of his early plays for public amphitheatres is notably different from that of the plays he wrote after 1608. As Anne Barton (1984) and Martin Butler (2000, 26) cogently argue, Every Man Out of His Humour, Sejanus, and, to a lesser extent, Volpone make positive use of the spaciousness and openness of arena staging, with their characters ebbing and flowing in big public scenes such as trials, and with groups of framing figures standing on the sidelines in order to observe characters at the centre, whereas, by contrast, Jonson’s Whitefriars and Blackfriars plays are structured around a notion of enclosure, with predominantly interior scenes, a strong sense of the unities, and an illusion of overload and claustrophobia enabling the dramatist to exploit the constraints of enclosed space. Epicene offers a vivid example; and in The Devil Is an Ass the Prologue talks about not having enough room.

Even so, the fact that Jonson could move back and forth with relative ease between performances of his plays by the King’s Men and the Queen’s Children suggests that his plays were well adapted to multiple venues. The Blackfriars theatre featured a smaller stage than that at the Globe, but it was still rectangular. The theatre’s back wall or tiring-house facade featured three doors in a configuration seemingly not unlike that at the Globe. A gallery to the rear above the tiring-house wall afforded a space for appearances of actors ‘above’, as in the public theatres. Blackfriars had no need for pillars emerging through the stage to support a roof, and in any case Jonson does not make extensive use of the pillars for concealments and the like (as does Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, for example). The opening scene of Eastward Ho! demonstrates how Blackfriars could stage a ‘discovery’ scene and an artisan’s shop at the central door backstage; this option was similarly available in the public amphitheatres. The most essential differences at Blackfriars were the indoor location, the artificial lighting (which, however, could not easily be altered during performance to create special effects onstage), and the presence of a smaller, more affluent audience, all of its members in seats facing the stage or in galleries. Audience capacity in the so-called ‘private’ theatres might be around six hundred at best; the public amphitheatres were capable of holding between two and three thousand. Jonson appears on the one hand to have been at ease socially in the relative intimacy and homogeneity of the Blackfriars theatre, so much so that it is easier to visualize The Alchemist at Blackfriars than at the Globe. At the same time, we see in Bartholomew Fair a sprawling play that was acted by a combined company of adults and boys at a public amphitheatre, the Hope, on 31 October 1614 and then was taken to court on its second night. Volpone, after its initial performances at the Globe in 1605, travelled later on to smaller indoor halls in Oxford and Cambridge. These varying venues say a good deal about the dramaturgical adaptability of Jonson’s plays. He evidently also thought of them as readily adaptable to reading texts for admirers of fine dramatic poetry.

Jonson’s ambivalence about theatrical performance leaves its imprint in a number of ways. On the one hand his early plays proudly display the names of the acting companies on their title-pages and frequently add a list of the principal actors, especially when Jonson gets around to folio publication in 1616. The folio version of Every Man In His Humour bears such a list, as do Every Man Out of His Humour, Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster, Sejanus, Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist, and Catiline. Three of these are boys’ plays, six are for adult actors. Yet thereafter the lists disappear, to be replaced by a more laconic naming of the acting company and then, in The New Inn, a loud complaint that this comedy ‘was never acted, but most negligently played by some, the King’s Servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the King’s subjects’. The lack of any acting company’s name for A Tale of a Tub may also be symptomatic of a kind of estrangement, or that Jonson never finished preparing the play for publication. Jonson was noted for his dissatisfaction with certain pragmatic aspects of the stage, and for designing his published texts in the 1616 folio in the studiously classical format espoused by editors of Plautus and Terence, with characters’ names grouped at the heads of scenes usually without indication of when they are to enter, even if later in the scene. These are reading texts conceived as the depository of a major poet, not a script-writer. Jonson himself had been an actor, but laid aside that burden as soon as he could. His famous quarrels with Inigo Jones centred on the rival claims of the spectacular in the theatre as opposed to the literary, the verbal, the poetic. Jonson often spoke of his works as poems and of himself as a poet. On the title-page of his 1616 folio edition he characterized his writings as Works, and was jeered at by those who had rather supposed he wrote plays.

We know a fair amount about the actors who appeared in Jonson’s plays from 1598 to 1611, since he published cast lists during that period. The children of the Royal Chapel and Queen’s Revels understandably experienced a fair amount of turnover, since the boys reached sufficient maturity to master demanding roles only a relatively short time before their voices would change. To be sure, David Kathman (2005) has shown that boy actors played female roles for more years than used to be supposed, as teenagers who were ‘no more than about 21’, but eventually they did need to refashion themselves as young adult actors. The Fountain of Self-Love (the name at the time for what became Cynthia’s Revels) in 1600 featured Nathan Field, Salomon Pavy, Thomas Day, John Underwood, Robert Baxter, and John Frost. (Pavy was evidently special for Jonson: he is the subject of a Jonson poem, and is addressed by the name ‘Sall’ as one of three child actors on stage in the quarto Praeludium, 176.) For Poetaster, only the next year, the first four of these boys are back, together with William Ostler and Thomas Martin. Eastward Ho! has no list. By the time of Epicene in 1609–10, only Field remains from the first two lists. He is accompanied by Giles Carey, Hugh Attwell, John Smith, William Barksted, William Penn, Richard Allen, and John Blaney. According to a set of notations in a seventeenth-century hand on the cast list of the Huntington Library copy of the 1616 folio (RB 499968), La Foole was played by Attwell and Morose by Barksted (Riddell, 1969). These attributions are plausible enough, but some other annotations in the Huntington folio are of questionable reliability, as we shall see shortly. Despite this rapid turnover in boy actors at their peak, most of the boys here named did not leave the acting profession; they became young adult actors, and in many cases, actor–sharers in adult companies. Field, the Chapel/Revels most acclaimed actor and presumably the leading boy in Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, also took the lead in The Knight of the Burning Pestle and then stayed with the company as a young adult; he was about 21 at the time of Epicene. He joined the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613, appearing in The Honest Man’s Fortune in that year, and then became a member of the King’s Men as an actor-writer in about 1616 until his death in 1620. He wrote a play for the Queen’s Revels. Underwood and Ostler eventually moved up to become King’s Men, like Field. Underwood played Delio and a madman in The Duchess of Malfi and was a company member until he died in 1623 or 1624. Ostler was a sharer by the time of his death in 1614. Carey too became an adult actor, with Lady Elizabeth’s Men. Field, Carey, Attwell, and Barksted all played in the Queen’s Revels’ production of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb in 1609. Attwell, Barksted, and Penn were Lady Elizabeth’s players by 1616. Barksted soon left for Prince Charles’s company at the Red Bull; like Field, he was a sometime playwright. Blaney went on to become an adult member of Queen Anne’s players and then the Red Bull (Revels) company. These careers attest to the longevity of many of these boys in the acting profession, presumably in recognition of their superior quality. They did not, of course, remain boys for long, and they often moved to new companies.

Among the adult players of the Chamberlain’s and then King’s company, stability of personnel was common. Every Man In was presented in 1598, according to the 1616 folio list, by Will Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, Henry Condell, Will Sly, Will Kemp, Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Thomas Pope, Christopher Beeston, and John Duke. Of these, Burbage, Heminges, and Condell were the most stalwart and regular; they appear in all the extant casting lists. John Lowin and Alexander Cooke (the latter originally a boy apprenticed to Heminges) joined the company in time to serve as hired men in Sejanus, 1603; thereafter they became sharers and important actors in the remainder of the Jonson plays with casting lists. Lowin also played Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi in 1612–14. Sly appeared in the first four of Jonson’s plays put on by Chamberlain’s/King’s, down through Volpone in 1605; he died some four years later. Phillips took part in the first three plays down through Sejanus; he died in 1605. Shakespeare took part in Every Man In and Sejanus, after which he appears to have given up acting, though of course he remained a company member. Pope (who died in 1603), Kemp, Beeston, and Duke are listed only for Every Man In. Armin appeared in The Alchemist in 1610 (probably as Abel Drugger; see 1.3.32 and 4.7.69); he had joined the company in time to play fools’ roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It (1599), Feste in Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, and the Fool in King Lear. One would like to know whether Armin took some part in Sejanus and Volpone, though the casting lists do not name him among the major players. The list of ‘Principal Tragedians’ for Catiline in 1611 is identical to that of The Alchemist except that Armin’s name is now missing, while Richard Robinson, who was apprenticed as a boy to Richard Burbage and later replaced Condell as the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi, is newly added.

As indicated earlier, a copy of the 1616 folio now at the Huntington Library (RB 499968) is annotated in seventeenth-century handwriting with casting assignments for Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist (see Riddell, 1969). Some of these assignments are inherently plausible, others questionable or even unlikely, and the dating is uncertain. The assignments for Volpone cast Burbage as Volpone, Condell as Mosca, Nathan Field as Voltore, Heminges as Corbaccio, Nicholas Tooley as Corvino, John Underwood as Bonario, Robert Goffe (or Gough) as Peregrine, Lowin as Sir Politic Would-Be, and Richard (or George?) Birch as Madame Would-Be. Of these, Field, born in 1587, seems to have been a member of the Chapel/Queen’s Revels company from 1600 to 1613, acting in Cynthia’s Revels (1600), Poetaster (1601), and Epicene (1609–10); he did not join the King’s Men until 1615–16, so that if he played Voltore it would appear to have been in a later revival. William Ostler, John Underwood, Nicholas Tooley, and William Ecclestone are subsequently listed in the printed 1616 folio casting list for The Alchemist in 1610, along with Burbage, Lowin, Condell, Cooke, Armin, Heminges, and Ostler. The Huntington Library copy of the 1616 folio adds in pen to ‘The Persons of the Play’ the names of Burbage as Subtle, Field as Face, Birch as Doll Common, Condell as Surly, Tooley as Ananias, Lowin as Mammon, Underwood as Dapper, Bentley (probably Robert Benfield) as Lovewit, and Ecclestone as Kastril. (Some of these identifications are then repeated at the end of the play in the list of ‘The Principal Comedians’, where, interestingly, Armin’s role is not specified.) Again, some of these assignments must be doubted: Field was not yet a member of the King’s Men in 1610, and Benfield seems to have been one of the Lady Elizabeth’s Men still in 1613, not joining the King’s Men until sometime around the second cast list of The Duchess of Malfi (1615?). James Wright corroborates the casting of Lowin as Mammon (Wright, 1699), but Wright’s evidence about Lowin and other actors refers to the 1630s, when Wright was attending the playhouses and Lowin was much more mature figure than in 1610. The assignments for Epicene in 1609–10 (Atwell for La Foole and Barksted for Morose) are plausible enough, but, in view of other questionable assertions in the Huntington notations, not certainly based on firsthand knowledge. Conceivably, the annotator of the Huntington folio might have been penning his memories of later revivals rather than recollecting ‘original’ performances. This hypothesis could explain why his lists of names fail to supply parts for Sly and Cooke in Volpone when the 1616 folio itself identifies them as players, and similarly with Cooke, Ostler, and Heminges in The Alchemist.

Most of the actors in the Chamberlain’s/King’s company appear to have been lifelong professionals. Burbage was the leading player of his company. He had become one of the original members of the Lord Chamberlain’s company in 1594, along with Shakespeare, Heminges, Kemp, Phillips, and Pope, the latter four having come from Strange/Derby’s Men. Burbage stayed on as lead actor until his death in 1619. Heminges and Condell lived long enough as company members to become the editors of the Shakespeare folio of 1623. Condell was the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi. Kemp, famous for his clowning parts including Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet, left the company in 1599, to be replaced by Robert Armin. Beeston, an important actor, left in 1600 for Worcester’s Men and went on to open a hall playhouse at the Cockpit for the Red Bull company. John Duke also left for Worcester’s, but by 1610 he was back in the King’s company. Ostler and Underwood, young adult actors in the King’s company in 1610–11 and sharers by 1619, had been members of the Chapel boys’ company, both having been cast in Poetaster in 1601 and Underwood in Cynthia’s Revels in 1600; since the King’s company played during the winter months in the Blackfriars theatre from 1608 onwards, the boys found themselves in familiar surroundings. Tooley had been a King’s player since 1605, having been apprenticed as a boy to Richard Burbage, and was to enact Forobosco and a madman in The Duchess of Malfi; he remained in the company until his death in 1623–4. Ecclestone was still in the King’s company in 1619. Robert Gough, a brother-in-law of Augustine Phillips and an apprentice of Thomas Pope, played minor roles for the Chamberlain’s/King’s company from about 1592 into the seventeenth century. Robert Benfield, evidently a boy actor at first who then seems to have played Lovewit in The Alchemist, served for some time as a regular if not particularly distinguished member of the King’s company. So too with the ‘Richard Birch’ identified in Huntington RB 499968 as having played Madam Would-Be in Volpone and Doll Common in The Alchemist; he may be the George Birch who was later a minor player with the King’s.

From these brief biographies we can see that Jonson must have enjoyed a long-term professional relationship with the actors in both companies who put on his plays. Burbage was his leading man as much as Shakespeare’s. As he wrote, Jonson could presumably calculate the number of experienced boys he had for female roles in his adult-company plays, what clown actors were available, and the like. In what ways do Jonson’s plays appear to adapt themselves to the acting companies for whom he wrote?

When he wrote for the Chapel/Revels boys at Whitefriars, Jonson presumably could count on a large troupe of boys who would obviate the need for much if any doubling of parts. Minor roles abound. In Cynthia’s Revels, for instance, in a scene (5.3) not appearing in the quarto, Jonson brings on stage ‘Morphides, Amorphus, Asotus, Hedon, Anaides, the throng, ladies, Citizen, Wife, pages, Taylor, Mercer, Perfumer, Jeweler, etc.’ The use of ‘throng’, ‘ladies’, and ‘etc.’ bespeaks a desire to fill the stage with the entire company roster. To be sure, these casting requirements pertain to Jonson’s revised version, about which we cannot be sure of the date of revision or even whether it was ever performed. Even so, many of these roles are carried over from 4.3 of the quarto text, where we encounter Amorphus, Asotus, Hedon, Anaides, Mercury, Cupid, Morus, Phantaste, Philautia, Argurion, and Moria. Act 4, scene 5 features Arete, Moria, Phantaste, Philautia, Anaides, Gelaia, Morus, Cos, Prosaites, Amorphus, Asotus, Hedon, Mercury, and Cupid. Act 5, scene 6 brings on Hesperus, Cynthia, Arete, Timè, Phronesis, and Thauma. Virtually the entire sizable cast of the play (twenty-three parts in all for Cynthia’s Revels) is brought together in the play’s final sequences. These casting demands provide little opportunity for doubling, and indeed in boys’ plays the need may have been rather to find parts for as many younger boys as feasible; John Lyly’s productions of the 1580s for Paul’s boys and then Oxford’s boys employ this strategy. At the same time, Jonson’s cast list names only six boys as ‘the principal comedians’, indicating the extent to which he structured the play for a few well-trained boys at the top of their bent (in such roles as Cupid, Mercury, Echo, Amorphus, Crites, and Asotus) and a large number of relatively untested juveniles, some of whom are given reasonably important parts (Phantaste, Philautia, etc.) This is a large-cast play in which doubling patterns are largely indiscernible.

Similarly, Poetaster names only six principal comedians while offering a total of twenty-six roles plus ‘pyrgi’ (Tucca’s pages), ‘maids’, ‘lictors’, and ‘equites Romani’. Many of the supernumeraries are actively involved in Act 5, along with Caesar, Maecenas, Cornelius Gallus, Tibullus, Horace, Virgil, Lupus, Tucca, Histrio, Crispinus, and Demetrius. The banished Ovid, along with Julia and others like Chloe, Cytheris, Plautia, and Albius, are prominent in Act 4. A few earlier minor parts (especially Envy and Prologue) could be distributed among actors with other roles, though the likelihood is that such doubling was quite beside the point. As in Fountain/Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster provides numerous opportunities for singing; the actors chosen to play Crispinus and Hermogenes must have had especially mellifluous voices (2.2.136–60, 4.3.57–69, 4.5.149–72). Crispinus plays as well as sings. Many or most of the boy actors had been trained as choristers. Staging effects are sometimes impressive: Envy begins matters by ‘arising in the midst of the stage’ and then descending, and in her farewell to the banished Ovid, Julia ‘appeareth above, as at her chamber window’ (4.9.0 SD).

Epicene deftly displays some ways in which Jonson wrote with boy actors very much in mind. The cast comprise types that the boys were famed for doing well. Of the cast of seventeen plus pages and servants, five are women: Madam Haughty and her fellow collegiates Centaur and Mavis, plus Haughty’s woman Trusty and Mrs Otter. The speaking parts given to servants, including Clerimont’s Boy, Morose’s not entirely mute Mute, and the barber Cutbeard, are well designed for youngsters. Morose is an older gentleman (played it seems by Will Barksted), a type of role that the boy actors took on with satirical gusto. La Foole (seemingly played by Hugh Attwell) and Daw are gulls, ripe for sending up; so too with Otter. The three witty young gentlemen, Dauphine, Clerimont, and Truewit, must have seemed compatible assignments for boy actors. And then there is Epicene, whose ambiguous gender is the whole point of the play’s hilarious denouement: of course Epicene is a boy! The audience ‘knows’ this all along, but must assume that in the dramatic fiction of the theatre the boy actor is understood to be taking a woman’s role, as elsewhere in Epicene. Without a boy’s company, Epicene would lose much of the point of this deliberate and outrageous stage trickery. The central ‘conceit’ of the play thus originates in the play’s theatrical surroundings and auspices.

Bartholomew Fair, at the Hope on 31 October 1614 and then at court the next day, must have employed all the resources of the recently combined Children of Whitefriars with the Lady Elizabeth’s Servants to bring on stage its stunning panoply of human folly and greed. As an arena amphitheatre, the Hope provided a physical environment quite different from that of Blackfriars or Whitefriars; and performance at court presented still another challenge. We do not know how the roles were apportioned out among these two companies, but perhaps the adult actors would have taken Littlewit, Busy, Winwife, Quarlous, Wasp, Overdo, Lantern Leatherhead, Edgworth, Nightingale, Mooncalf, Knockem, Cutting, Whit, and Troubleall – fourteen roles already, not including the watchmen, Filcher, Sharkwell, etc., a number of which could have gone to hired men. Doubling the roles of the Induction (Stage-Keeper, Book-Holder, and Scrivener) would have been easy, and some of the adult roles named above are also sufficiently transient in the carnival world of the Fair that doubling was feasible. The boys were presumably employed for Win-the-Fight Littlewit, Dame Purecraft, Dame Alice Overdo, Grace Wellborn, Joan Trash, Ursula, and Punk Alice, though possibly an adult comic actor was used for Ursula. Conversely, the boys might have been deemed suitable for Winwife and Quarlous, since they had presumably undertaken similar parts (Clerimont, Truewit, Dauphine) in Epicene. This play has more women’s parts than we find in Jonson’s plays for the Chamberlain/King’s company. At all events, it appears likely that Jonson’s most ambitious play in theatrical terms became possible for him through the coming together of an adult and a juvenile company. John Lyly had been provided a similar opportunity with Endymion in 1587–8.

When he wrote for the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, Jonson knew that he had to accommodate his play to a group of nine or ten actor sharers, a few boys of whom perhaps two might be at the top of their form, and a few unspecified supernumeraries. The quarto Every Man In, at the Curtain Theatre in 1598, illustrates how the casting might work. The parts for the chief adult actors would seem to include Lorenzo Senior and his son, Prospero, Thorello, Giuliano, Thorello, Doctor Clement, Bobadilla, Musco, and Cob. The boys would have been assigned Bianca, Hesperida, and perhaps Tib, though adult males probably could play broadly comic women’s parts of this sort. Servants and clerks like Piso and Peto could be played by skilled hired men, like the Richard Cowley who played Verges in Much Ado, or the ‘Sinklo’ (or John Sinkler or Sincler) whom Andrew Gurr suspects of having played Shift in Every Man Out and Nano the dwarf in Volpone because of his skinniness (Gurr, 280). What role Burbage may have played in Every Man In is not immediately evident. The jealous Thorello is a role that later lead actors sometimes coveted, notably David Garrick in 1751 and afterwards. Charles Dickens, on the other hand, chose the part of Bobadill (in the 1616 folio version) when he staged amateur theatricals in 1845, 1847, 1848, and 1850. It is as though Jonson, just getting used to the opportunity of writing for the Chamberlain’s company, did not provide his play with a single dominating role for the star actor. In other ways, though, the casting is a perfect fit. It offers more or less equally demanding roles for all the actor sharers. They were experienced at sorting themselves out in this way among themselves, relying much more on versatility than on type casting. Shakespeare’s name appears first in the casting list: was he possibly Lorenzo Senior? Perhaps Kemp, the famous clown, played Cob. Jonson’s casting solution does not rely on doubling; that was not his usual way, and may have seemed to him troublesomely non-classical. The casting demands for the 1616 folio Every Man In are identical with those of the quarto version.

Every Man Out of His Humour pushes the Chamberlain’s company to its limit. It appears to solve its casting requirements by sharply distinguishing major from minor roles, with some doubling among the latter. ‘The Names of the Actors’ in the 1616 folio text groups its names under the headings of ten major players: Asper/Macilente, Puntarvolo, Carlo Buffone, Fastidious Brisk, Deliro, Sordido, Fungoso, Sogliardo, and the ‘Grex’ speakers, Cordatus and Mitis. The boys in major women’s parts are Fallace and Saviolina. Clustered around these figures are Puntarvolo’s lady, Shift, Clove (perhaps played by Sinkler), and Orange, along with other parts for hired men: waiting-gentlewomen, a huntsman, servingmen, the servant Fido, a tailor, haberdasher, and shoemaker, a groom, drawers, ‘rustici’ or country bumpkins, constables, officers, and musicians. As in Every Man In, we find fewer important women’s roles as compared with the boys’ plays. The play is sharply satirical, in a vein that might not seem inappropriate at Blackfriars, but in casting Every Man Out is manifestly designed for the Chamberlain’s Men. The role of Macilente/Asper seems well conceived for Burbage, though once again as in Every Man In the most observable feature of casting is that balanced and substantial roles are provided for all the major players. To be sure, only six are named in the casting list, so that we are left to guess which were more dominant or juicy parts. Most of the major roles offer ample opportunity for some splendid satirical exaggeration. As Helen Ostovich observes, the large Globe stage enables Jonson to make much of his dramaturgical practice of presenting several simultaneous activities onstage together, especially in his depiction of Paul’s Walk (3.1). He also employs his onstage chorus, or Grex, as a means of providing ‘a vital perspective on the theatricality of the whole play’ (Ostovich, EMO, p. 42).

Sejanus, first performed in 1603, lists eight ‘principal tragedians’, Shakespeare and Burbage among them. Casting requirements are interestingly not very different from those of Poetaster, a classical play for boys with four women plus ‘maids’ in its roster; Sejanus has three (Agrippina, Livia, and Sosia). The classical subject overrides to some extent the differences of theatrical environment. With its thirty-five roles overall plus tribunes, praecones, lictors, ‘ministri’, a nuntius, and so on, Sejanus necessarily employs some doubling in order to fill its stage as fully as possible with the personages of ancient classical history. The play did not succeed at the Globe in 1604, perhaps because it was attempting something other than what public audiences had learned to appreciate. It is, as Philip Ayres suggests, the first Jonsonian play to ‘express a thoroughly pessimistic outlook on the human condition, and the first to concentrate its action exclusively about a central intrigue’ (p. 10). That focus at least provided handy stage work for Burbage as Sejanus; the other professional actors were presumably expected to take on numerous supportive roles. Herford and Simpson (9.191) hazard a guess that Shakespeare played Tiberius because of a contemporary poem (John Davies of Hereford, The Scourge of Folly) praising him for ‘Kingly parts’.

Volpone, early 1606, has a big title role for Burbage, seemingly in tandem with Henry Condell as Mosca. Other major roles, notably Voltore, Corbaccio, Corvino, and Sir Politic Would-Be, would have been assigned to leading actor sharers (that is, to Field, Heminges, Tooley, and Lowin, according to the Huntington penned notations), together with Bonario, Peregrine, and Madam Would-Be as assignments for less senior members (Underwood, Gough, Birch). Another boy actor, unnamed, would have taken the role of Celia. Two more ‘women’ are needed in bit parts for Sir Politic’s household in 4.5. The dwarf, eunuch, and hermaphrodite in Volpone’s household may well have required the distinctive features of particular players to depict physical and behavioural humours, as suggested above.

In fitting The Alchemist to the acting capacities of the King’s Men, Jonson discovered that he could reuse the configurations of casting he had devised for Volpone in a series of one-on-one substitutions: Subtle and Face for Volpone and Mosca, Surly and Dame Pliant for Bonario and Celia, the various outwitted schemers (Dapper, Drugger, Mammon, Tribulation, Ananias) for Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, and Lovewit for the Avocatori. This is not to deny that moral alignments are substantially changed in these transformations, but to make the point that the casting pattern of The Alchemist elaborates and rings changes on its predecessor. The two women, Doll Common and Dame Pliant, are well within the capacities of the King’s Men to supply well-trained boys. Apart from them, the ten major roles are easily distributed among the actor–sharers, not excluding Kastril, the angry boy. The Alchemist is Jonson’s most perfectly designed play for its acting company.

The similarity in the casting patterns of Volpone and The Alchemist does not mean that the company members ordinarily took the same ‘type’ role from one play to the next. To be sure, Burbage did perform both Volpone and Subtle, on the evidence of the penned annotations in the Huntington folio; he played opposite Henry Condell as Mosca in the first play and Nathan Field as Face in the second. On the other hand, John Underwood as Bonario did not then take the role of Surly in 1610; and so on across the lists. The four years between 1606 and 1610 saw important changes in the age and acting capabilities of the company’s personnel. The ‘type’ casting urged by T. W. Baldwin (1927) is a deeply flawed and unworkable argument.

Jonson’s subsequent plays for the King’s Men offer few surprises in casting. Catiline is very much like Sejanus, long on men and short on women (Aurelia, Fulvia, Sempronia, Galla). The women are grouped together at the foot of one column in ‘The Persons of the Play’. The Devil Is an Ass has four women (Mistress Frances Dottrell, Lady Either-side, her woman Pitfall, and Lady Tailbush) along with sixteen men, of whom several are secondary roles open to doubling options. The Staple of News calls for Pecunia and her nurse Mortgage along with three lesser female roles and some thirteen adult male roles before moving into such minor functionaries as a secretary, a cook, linener, haberdasher, shoemaker, spurrier, etc., and a four-person chorus. The New Inn provides a ‘short characterism of the chief actors’, among whom are four women (the Nurse, Frances, Prudence, and Pinnacia Stuff) and approximately nine men before tapering off into a hostler, a ‘broken’ citizen, a cheater, a tapster, a lady’s tailor, and a coachman or two. The Magnetic Lady gives us no fewer than six ladies in Lady Loadstone, Mrs Polish, Placentia her niece, Pleasance her waiting-woman, Mrs Keep (Placentia’s nurse), and the midwife Mother Chair, all grouped in untypical ordering at the top of ‘The Persons that Act’, as though this were a play for boys. The chorus too is spoken by ‘a boy of the house’. Yet the play is known to have been acted by the King’s Men in 1632, and certainly the nine remaining male roles would have posed no problem for the adult actors. Long before this time, to be sure, the King’s Men were acting a good deal of the time indoors, in Blackfriars.

Jonson’s intermittent quarrel with the stage manifests itself in a number of ways. He seems on the whole more comfortable in writing plays for the boys than for the adult companies; the boys’ satirical bent suited his purposes, and one could imagine him writing Every Man Out for them if circumstances had permitted. He was of course unhappy about his failures on the public stage, notably with Sejanus. Volpone is a magnificent play, and yet it posed problems for Jonson that he found hard to solve, most of all the ending in harsh punishments for Volpone and Mosca; as a comedy, the play seemed to go against his own critical dictum (in the 1616 folio Prologue to Every Man In) that comedy should ‘sport with human follies, not with crimes’. Because Volpone’s assault on Celia is indeed criminal, the ending must be presided over by the Avocatori, imperfect instruments as they are. Jonson seldom has a good word for the intervention of the state in meting out justice in his plays; he prefers the humorous style of that merry magistrate, Doctor Clement in Every Man In (Justice Clement in the 1616 folio version). Thus it is that The Alchemist, even though also written for an adult company, offers up a more thoroughly Jonsonian ending than does Volpone: Lovewit dismisses the officers and his irate neighbors, strikes up an agreement with Face or Jeremy to leave the spoils with Lovewit in return for forgiveness of Jeremy’s prank, and marries the wealthy Pliant into the bargain. This ending suggests a way of handling justice in a publicly performed play with which Jonson could be thoroughly comfortable. It comes at a time when the King’s Men were performing more and more indoors, at the Blackfriars, and turning their back on puritan-leaning spectators in favour of the courtly and intellectual set.

In Bartholomew Fair, the combination of juvenile and adult actors allowed Jonson’s comic and satirical genius to flourish at its very best. Thereafter, his disillusionment with the stage is steadily on the increase, as we see in his complaining of the King’s company’s negligent performance of The New Inn. Both The Magnetic Lady and A Tale of a Tub offer themselves simply as ‘a comedy composed by Ben Jonson’ with no mention of the acting company. The Sad Shepherd, left unfinished at Jonson’s death in 1637, necessarily names no acting company. With six substantial female parts, it seems overall like a play that boy actors might have put on, though the planning may not have got that far. Indeed, boys’ companies of the sort needed for this play had been less active in London since the demise of the Queen’s Revels in the 1610s than before that date. To be sure, two late attempts had been made to return to that model: the Salisbury Court King’s Revels, which seems to have run unsuccessfully as a boys’ operation for a few months in 1629–31, and the King and Queen’s Young Company that Christopher Beeston was running at the Drury Lane Cockpit in the final years (1637–42) before the Civil War. Conceivably, Jonson was writing for Beeston; even though Jonson died before Beeston managed to open in October 1637 after the plague closure of 1636–7, Beeston had by then broken up the old Queen Henrietta’s Men and was presumably in rehearsal for his new venture, so that he might have solicited a new play from Jonson. This situation would clarify Jonson’s plea to his auditors in the Prologue, speaking as a playwright who has ‘feasted you these forty years’ and who now begs that ‘you would vouchsafe for your own sake / To hear him this once more’ (1–8), hinting that Jonson was conscious of producing his last work. The implied use of scenery in The Sad Shepherd ties in with other evidence we have about Beeston’s use of scenery at the Cockpit. All this is speculative, of course, but seems in keeping with what we know of Jonson’s final detachment from the acting companies with whom he had so long collaborated. If Jonson was possibly writing Sad Shepherd for some sort of private entertainment rather than for Beeston, the sense of estrangement from his long attachments in the theatre would seem no less.