play-list to those of 1620 and 1626, with which Green was certainly connected, is confirmed by the existence of a German manuscript of Nobody and Somebody with a dedication by Green to Ferdinand's brother the Archduke Maximilian, who was certainly present at the Gräz performances, and by a letter which tells us that a company visiting Austria in 1617 was the same as that which had played at Gräz in the lifetime of the Archduchess Maria, who died in 1608. Unfortunately the identification of this company of 1617 with Green's is itself a matter of high probability, rather than of absolute certainty.[1] The end of the visit to Gräz was marked by a duel in which one of the English actors, 'the man with long red hair, who always played a little fiddle', killed a Frenchman.[2] Green now, like Browne, drops for some years out of the German records.
The Court functions at Cassel surrendered by Browne in 1607 were resumed by his predecessors, in whose leadership Reeve had now succeeded Machin; and the appearance of the Hessian company is recorded at Frankfort during both the fairs of 1608 and 1609, the Easter fair of 1610, the autumn fair of 1612, and the Easter fair of 1613. A proposed appearance for the coronation of the Emperor Mathias in June 1612 was prohibited, because the mourning for his predecessor Rudolph II was not yet over.[3] It is perhaps something of an assumption that the company was the same one throughout all these years. Reeve was in charge up to the autumn of 1609; after that no individual name is mentioned. The intervals between the fairs were presumably spent in the main at Cassel. In the summer of 1609 the company visited Stuttgart and Nuremberg and possibly other places, with a letter of recommendation from their lord.[4] In the autumn
- ↑ Meissner, 74, and in Sh.-Jahrbuch, xix. 128; cf. pp. 284-6. The text of Nobody and Somebody is printed from a manuscript at Rein by F. Bischoff in Mittheilungen des hist. Vereins für Steiermark, xlvii. 127. I think it is just possible that the companies of 1608 and 1617 may have been Spencer's. There seem to have been Saxoni, as well as Angli, playing. These do not seem to have constituted a distinct company, and are perhaps more likely to have been with Spencer than with Green. Spencer, as well as Green, was in relations with the imperial court in 1617; cf. p. 290. But I think that the evidence of the Rein manuscript is fairly decisive in favour of Green.
- ↑ This may have been Green himself. A drawing of a red-haired actor, in the traditional get-up of Nobody, is on the Rein manuscript.
- ↑ Mentzel, 54, 55, 56, 58.
- ↑ Archiv, xiv. 125; xv. 215. Herz, 41, ascribes to them anonymous appearances at Ulm, Nördlingen, and Augsburg. John Price, afterwards well known as a musician at Dresden and Stuttgart, is said to be recorded at Stuttgart in 1609 (Cohn, cxxxviii), and may have been with the Hessian company.
