Plays in One may have been the two parts of Tarlton's Seven Deadly Sins.[1] The payment for this winter's plays was made to Robert Wilson.
There is no evidence that the company were travelling in 1585. They were at Court again on 26 December and on 1 January and 13 February 1586. During 1586 they were at Maidstone, in July at Bristol, on 22 August and later at Faversham, and before 29 September at Leicester. In 1585-6 they were also at Coventry. On 26 December 1586 and on 1 and 6 January and 28 February 1587 they were at Court, and in the same January a correspondent of Walsingham's names them amongst other companies then playing regularly in the City (App. D, No. lxxviii). During 1586-7 they were at Bath, Worcester, Canterbury, and Stratford-on-Avon, whence Malone thought that they might have enlisted Shakespeare.[2] They were at Bath again on 13 July 1587, and at Aldeburgh on 20 May and 19 July. Before 29 September they were at Leicester, on 9 September at York, where it is recorded that they 'cam in her Majesties lyvereys', twice in September at Coventry, and at Aldeburgh on 16 December. They were at Court on 26 December 1587 and on 6 January and 18 February 1588.
A subsidy list of 30 June 1588 shows that Tarlton, Laneham, Johnson, Towne, Adams, Garland, John Dutton, Singer, and Cooke were then still household players.[3] It can, perhaps, hardly be assumed that the whole of the company is here represented. Mills, Wilson, and Bentley may have dropped out since 1583. But one would have expected to find the name of Laurence Dutton beside that of John, as he was certainly a Queen's man by 1589. Knell also acted with Tarlton in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and must have belonged to the company. He also may have been dead by 1588. And this must certainly be the case if he is the William Knell whose widow Rebecca John Heminges married on 10 March 1588. There is some reason to suppose that Heminges himself joined the Queen's men, perhaps in right of his wife. The composition of the list of 1583 generally bears out the statement of Howes, that the Queen's men were selected as the best out of the companies of divers great lords, for Wilson, Laneham, and Johnson belonged to Leicester's in 1572, Adams to Sussex's in 1576, and Dutton, after a chameleon past, to Oxford's in 1580. Mr. Fleay, who did not know either the list of 1583 or that of 1588, declares that the original members of the
