rehearsals and other parts of the premises which they occupied. The Master charges diet for himself and his men for every day between All Hallows and Ash Wednesday, together with an extra amount for each actual night of play or mask, and for a varying number of days of tilting and running at the ring and twenty days of 'airing' in the summer. The Comptroller, Clerk, and Yeoman get £13 6s. 8d. each and the Groom £6 13s. 4d. for the whole of their required attendance. Beyond a stray property or garment here and there, there is nothing spent on emptions of stuff or on tailors and the like. I think it is clear that the result of the policy initiated by Burghley had been to reduce the Revels, regarded as a branch of the Household organization, to comparative insignificance. Henceforward its domestic duties sink into the background of the quasi-political functions given to the Master as stage censor by the commissions of 1581 and 1603. But these functions were peculiar to the Master, who carried them out with the aid of his personal servants.[1] The other Revels officers had no claim to share in them, and though Tilney and Buck built up a considerable income out of licensing fees, which probably accounts for the discontinuance in Buck's case of the 'better recompense' of £100 granted by Elizabeth to Tilney, no penny of these fees ever passed through the Revels Accounts.
The slight increase of cost observable in course of time is mainly due to charges for lodgings. The want of accommodation at Hampton Court in the winter of 1603-4 obliged the officers to rent rooms at Kingston for a month at a cost of £4.[2] In 1607 a far more serious problem was presented by the impending loss of St. John's. This had remained in Crown hands throughout Elizabeth's time, although on 31 October 1601 we find John Chamberlain writing to Dudley Carleton, 'The Quene sells land still and the house of St. Johns is at sale'.[3] James, however, after leasing the Gatehouse for life to Sir Roger Wilbraham in 1604, carried out his predecessor's intention by selling the greater part of the
- ↑ Henslowe took receipts for licensing fees from Michael Bloomson, John Carnab, Robert Hassard, William Hatto, Robert Johnson, William Playstowe, Thomas and William Stonnard, Richard Veale, and Thomas Whittle, 'men' of the Master of the Revels, between 1595 and 1602. Johnson was of Leatherhead, where Tilney had a house. I regret to say that on one occasion Henslowe thought fit to make a loan to William Stonnard (Greg, Henslowe, i. 3, 5, 12, 28, 39, 40, 46, 54, 72, 83, 85, 103, 109, 116, 117, 121, 129, 132, 148, 160, 161; Dulwich MSS. i. 37).
- ↑ Declared Account.
- ↑ Chamberlain, 120. A proposal (c. 1589) for the establishment of an 'Accademye for the studye of Antiquitye and Historye' (Anglia, xxxii. 261) contains a suggestion that its library might be housed in St. John's.
