For this Henslowe covenanted to pay him £20. In June he was also completing The Arraignment of London, of which he had given an act to Cyril Tourneur to write; and to this The Bellman of London, for which he and a colleague, perhaps again Tourneur, asked no more than £12 and 'the overplus of the second day' in August, was probably a sequel.[1] This may be the play which he had delivered to Henslowe about the beginning of December. About July he seems also to have been occupied upon a play in collaboration with Field, Fletcher, and Massinger. This is not named, and Mr. Fleay's identification of it with The Honest Man's Fortune is rather hazardous.[2] In December he began The Owl, for which his price fell to £10; and on 11 March 1614 he had finished this, and was beginning The She Saint and asking 'but 12^l a play till they be playd.' The correspondence has a gap between the middle of August and the middle of October 1613. Probably the company were on tour; they are found at Coventry, Shrewsbury, and Marlborough in 1612-13, Canterbury on 4 July 1613, Dover between 12 July and 7 August, and Leicester on 13 October. In the spring they had been at Bristol and Norwich. On 12 December they repeated one of their plays of the preceding winter, Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, before Charles, and on 25 January 1614 gave Eastward Ho! which they had been playing in public during the summer, before James. Taylor was again their payee for this Christmas.
The statement of grievances indicates another reconstruction of the company in March 1614. In this transaction, which apparently involved the buying out of Rosseter's interest, Meade was in partnership with Henslowe, and Field was presumably in some position of authority on behalf of the players, as it is alleged that Henslowe bribed him, in order to obtain his assent to the modification of a covenant under which he was to make an allowance for a withdrawal of the theatre once a fortnight for baiting. The terms recited agree with those of an undated and mutilated agreement between Henslowe and Jacob Meade on one side and Field on behalf of an unnamed company of players on the other. The text of this follows:[3]*
- ↑ Dr. Greg (Henslowe Papers, 75) makes them the same play, founded on Dekker's tracts, The Bellman of London (1608) and Lanthorn and Candlelight, or the Bellman's Second Night-walk (1609), but The Arraignment seems to have been too nearly finished on 5 June for this identification (Henslowe Papers, 72).
- ↑ Still more so the ascription (Fleay, i. 81) of The Faithful Friends to Daborne and the Lady Elizabeth's men.
- ↑ Henslowe Papers, 23; also in Collier, Memoirs of Alleyn, 118. A few
