whose own name, perhaps for reasons of diplomacy, does not appear in the patent. He may, of course, have retired, but a lawsuit which he brought in 1610 suggests that his connexion with the company was not altogether broken. The Whitefriars had not the tradition of the Blackfriars, and Keysar was aggrieved at the surrender of the Blackfriars lease by Evans over his head. On 8 February 1610 he laid a bill in the Court of Requests against the housekeepers of the King's men, claiming a share in their profits since the date of surrender, which he estimated at £1,500, on the strength of the one-sixth interest in the lease assigned by Evans to Marston and by Marston to him.[1] He asserted that he had kept boys two years in the hope of playing 'vpon the ceasing of the generall sicknes', and had spent £500 on that and on making provision in the house, and had now, at a loss of £1,000, had to disperse 'a companye of the moste exparte and skilful actors within the realme of England to the number of eighteane or twentye persons all or moste of them trayned vp in that service, in the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth for ten yeares togeather and afterwardes preferred into her Maiesties service to be the Chilldren of her Revells'.[2] Burbadge and his fellows denied that they had made £1,500, or that they had attempted to defraud Keysar either about the surrender of the lease or, as he also alleged, the 'dead rent' to Paul's, and they pointed out that his losses were really due to the plague. He could recover his share of the theatrical stock from Evans. Evans had had no legal right to assign his interest under the lease. As only the pleadings in the case and not the depositions or the order of the court are extant, we do not know what Evans, who was to be a witness, had to say.[3] The fact that one of the new Blackfriars leases of 1608 was to a Thomas Evans leaves the transaction between Henry Evans and Burbadge not altogether free from a suspicion of bad faith. Kirkham also found that he had been either hasty or outwitted in 1608, and as the deaths of Rastall and Kendall in that year had left him the sole claimant to any interest under the arrangement of 1602, he had recourse to litigation. In the course of 1611 and 1612 he brought a 'multiplicitie of suites' against Evans and Hawkins, and was finally non-suited in the King's Bench.[4] Then, in May 1612, Evans in his turn brought a Chancery action against
- ↑ K. v. B. 343.
- ↑ K. v. B. 343, 350.
- ↑ Evans, Mrs. Evans, Field, Underwood, Ostler, Baxstead, Rosseter, Marston, and Mrs. Hawkins were to be examined for the King's men.
- ↑ E. v. K. 213. I presume that some of these are amongst the 'twelve additional suits' which Wallace, ii. 36, claims to have found.
