not necessarily those falling in the year of issue, you will not find a New Year's Day, or for the matter of that a Twelfth Night, since the opening of the Blackfriars, which, if a play-day at all, is not occupied either by some Chapel or Paul's play of which the name is known, or by some other company altogether.[1] The conjecture seems inevitable that, when he found himself in financial straits and with the rivalry of the Queen's men to face in 1583, Hunnis came to an arrangement with the Paul's boys, who had recently lost Sebastian Westcott, on the one hand, and with the Earl of Oxford and his agents Lyly and Evans on the other, and put the Blackfriars at the disposal of a combination of boys from all three companies, who appeared indifferently at Court under the name of the Master or that of the Earl. In the course of 1584 Sir William More resumed possession of the Blackfriars. Henry Evans must have made some temporary arrangement to enable the company to appear at Court during the winter of 1584-5.[2] But for a year or two thereafter there were no boys acting in London until in 1586 an arrangement with Thomas Giles, Westcott's successor at St. Paul's, afforded a new opportunity for Lyly's pen.[3]
The Chapel had contributed pretty continuously to Court drama for nearly a century. They now drop out of its story for about seventeen years.[4] In addition to the two plays of Lyly, one other of their recent pieces, Peele's Arraignment of Paris, was printed in 1584. Two former Children, Henry Eveseed and John Bull, afterwards well known as a musician, became Gentlemen on 30 November 1585 and in January 1586 respectively.[5] Absence from Court did not entail an absolute cessation of dramatic activities. Performances by the Children are recorded at Ipswich and Norwich in 1586-7 and at Leicester before Michaelmas in 1591. There is, however, little to bear out the suggestion that the Chapel
- ↑ Feuillerat, Eliz. 470. Sapho and Phao might, however, have been the unnamed Chapel play of Shrove Tuesday (27 Feb.) 1582.
- ↑ Perhaps Lyly was still associated with him. F. S. Boas (M. L. R. vi. 92) records payments in connexion with a visit by Leicester to Christ Church, Oxford, to Mr. Lyly and his man for the loan of apparel, as well as one of £5 to one Tipslowe 'for the Revels' (January 1585).
- ↑ Cf. supra (Paul's).
- ↑ I have no means of dating 'The order of the show to be done at the Turret, entring into the parke at Grenewich, the musick being within the turrett', which is preserved in Egerton MS. 2877, f. 182, as 'acted before Q. Elizabeth'. A speech of forty lines beginning 'He Jove himselfe, that guides the golden spheare', was delivered by 'one of the biggest children of her Ma^{tes} Chappell' as Goodwill, and was followed by a song beginning 'Ye Helicon muses'.
- ↑ Rimbault, 4. A note of Anthony Wood's (cf. D. N. B.) suggests that Bull joined the Chapel about 1572.
