Chamberlain's men were at Court as usual in the winter of 1602, any absence from London, which their unlucky performance of Richard II may have rendered discreet, can only have been of short duration; that the most plausible reading of the Scottish evidence is that Fletcher's company were in the service of James as Court comedians from 1599 to 1601; and that there is nothing whatever to indicate that Fletcher ever belonged to the Chamberlain's company at all. In fact, very little is known of him outside Scotland, although it is just possible that he may have been the object of two advances made by Henslowe to the Admiral's men about October 1596, and described respectively as 'lent vnto Martyne to feache Fleacher' and 'lent the company to geue Fleatcher'.[1] If Fletcher was the King's man in Scotland, it was not unnatural that he should retain that status when James came to England; and it is very doubtful whether the insertion of his name in the patent in any way entailed his being taken into business relations with his 'fellows'. I strongly suspect that his companion at Edinburgh, Martin, was put into a precisely similar position amongst Queen Anne's men, for who can Martin be but Martin Slater, who is often, as in the passage quoted above, called Martin tout court in Henslowe's Diary, and who certainly left the Admiral's men in 1597? iii. ENGLISH PLAYERS ON THE CONTINENT [Bibliographical Note.—The earliest comprehensive study of the foreign travels of English actors is that of A. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1865). Much material has been collected, mostly since Cohn wrote, in a number of local histories and special studies, of which the most important are: C. M. Plümicke, Entwurf einer Theatergeschichte von Berlin (1781); D. C. von Rommel, Geschichte von Hessen (1820-38); J. E. Schlager, Über das alte Wiener Hoftheater in Sitzungsberichte der phil.-hist. Classe der Kaiserlichen Akad. der Wissenschaften, vi (1851), 147; M. Fürstenau, Zur Geschichte der Musik und des Theaters am Hofe der Kurfürsten von Sachsen (1861); E. Mentzel, Geschichte der Schauspielkunst in Frankfurt am Main (1882); O. Teuber, Geschichte des Prager Theaters (1883); J. Meissner, in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xix. 113 (Austria), and Die englischen Comoedianten zur Zeit Shakespeares in Oesterreich (1884); K. Trautmann in Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte, xii. 319 (Munich, Augsburg); xiii. 34 (Suabia), 315 (Ulm); xiv. 113 (Nuremberg), 225 (Suabia); xv. 209 (Ulm, Stuttgart, Tübingen); in Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte, vii (Rothenburg); and in Jahrbuch für Münchener Geschichte, iii. 259; J. Crüger in Archiv für Litteraturgeschichte, xv. 113 (Strassburg); Duncker, Landgraf Moritz von Hessen und die englischen Komödianten in Deutsche Rundschau, xlviii (1886), 260; A. Cohn in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xxi. 245 (Cologne); J. Bolte in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xxiii. 99 (Denmark and Sweden), and Das Danziger Theater im
- ↑ Henslowe, i. 45
