a heavy payment with which they were debited, by charging the common stock with loans made to individuals, by putting an inflated value upon apparel taken over from himself, by saddling them with the cost of an excessive number of gatherers and with bonuses which he had promised out of his own pocket, in order to induce particular actors to join the company. Under these heads they claim a heavy rebate against the debt of £600 which he was maintaining to be due from them. They assert that, to gain his ends, he had bribed their own representative Field; that while bonds had been taken from them to an amount far in excess of their real obligations, the articles binding Henslowe and Meade had never been signed; that Henslowe had taken advantage of this to repudiate his liability to hand over the apparel and play-books, for the greater part of which the company had already paid; and that he had similarly taken advantage of the fact that the agreements with the hired men were in his name to withdraw these men, and thus force a reconstruction of the company, whenever it suited his convenience. Thus, they say, 'within three yeares hee hath broken and dissmembred five companies'. It is a little difficult to make up the number of five companies, even if the Children of the Revels, who during the years covered by the statement were absorbed for a time in the Lady Elizabeth's men, are included. But the transactions described serve well to illustrate the distinction between the status of a company as a body of household servants and its status as a legal association, since there is no reason to doubt that, throughout all the shifting phases of its relations to Henslowe, a continuous body of players performed in public and at Court under the title of the Lady Elizabeth's men, and by authority of the patent issued to these men in 1611. One other point, in which Henslowe's earlier practice appears to have undergone modification by the period of his connexion with the Lady Elizabeth's men, emerges from his correspondence with the playwright Robert Daborne. Instead of merely paying for Daborne's plays as agent for the company, as had been his practice for the Admiral's and Lord Worcester's men, he appears to have bought the plays himself, and resold them, probably at a profit, to the company.[1]
The protesting players represent Henslowe's dealings with them as governed by a desire to be what the modern capitalist calls 'master in his own house'. They declare that he gave the reason of his often breaking with them in his own words,
- ↑ Cf. p. 375.
