of the same year John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg (1608-19), who often entertained a company of his own, but appears to have been temporarily without one, wrote to Maurice to borrow them for the wedding of his brother at Berlin.[1] In April 1610 they may not improbably, though there is no evidence of the fact, have followed Maurice to the Diet at Prague.[2] In 1611 they are said to have been at Darmstadt.[3] They certainly played at the wedding of the Margrave Joachim Ernest, uncle of the Elector of Brandenburg, at Anspach in October 1612, and later in the same month paid a visit to Nuremberg.[4] No more is heard of them, or of any other English actors in the service of Maurice of Hesse-Cassel, after 1613.[5] Reeve was a member of Rosseter's syndicate for the building of the Porter's Hall theatre at Blackfriars in 1615, and with him were associated Philip Kingman and Robert Jones, the last notices of whom in Germany are as 'fellows' of Robert Browne in 1596 and 1602 respectively.
The appearance of Blackwood and Thare, late of Worcester's men, in company with Browne at the Frankfort Easter fair of 1603, has already been noted. The only further record of either of them is of Thare at Ulm and Augsburg in the following December.[6] But by a series of conjectures, to which I hesitate to subscribe, they have been identified with a company which came to Stuttgart in September 1603 in the train of Lord Spencer and Sir William Dethick, ambassadors from England carrying the insignia of the Garter to Frederick Duke of Württemberg, and there gave a play of Susanna[7]; with a company which visited Nördlingen and other places in January 1604 under the leadership of one Eichelin, apparently a German, but with a repertory which included a Romeo and Juliet and a Pyramus and Thisbe[8]; with a company*
- ↑ Cohn, lix; Duncker, 272.
- ↑ Meissner, 46; Duncker, 272. Herz, 41, ascribes to them anonymous appearances at the wedding of the Margrave John George, brother of the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Princess Christina of Saxony at Jägerndorf in July, and at Nuremberg and Ulm in November.
- ↑ Cohn, lix, without reference. Herz, 41, adds an anonymous performance of The Merchant of Venice at the Court of Margrave Christian of Brandenburg at Halle.
- ↑ Archiv, xiv. 126.
- ↑ Duncker, 273.
- ↑ Archiv, xiii. 319. If this is the company which, according to Alvensleben, Allgemeine Theaterchronik (1832), No. 158, played Daniel, The Chaste Susanna, and The Two Judges in Israel at Ulm in 1602, the identification with the company found at Nördlingen and Rothenburg is assisted.
- ↑ Cohn, lxxvii, from Erhard Cellius, Eques Auratus Anglo-Wirtembergicus (1605); cf. Rye, cvii.
- ↑ Archiv, xi. 625; xiii. 70. They also played Daniel in the Lions' Den,
