HOME





Richard Gunnell
Richard Gunnell (fl. 1613 – 1634) was an actor, playwright, and theatre manager in Jacobean and Caroline era London. He is best remembered for his role in the founding of the Salisbury Court Theatre. Actor and playwright Nothing is known of Gunnell's early life or the first phase of his stage career. He acted with the Admiral's Men, then called the Palsgrave's Men, from 1613 to 1622. When the Palsgrave's Men received their renewed charter and their new name on 4 January 1613, Gunnell was already a sharer in the company. Despite the scantiness of the documentary record for the Palsgrave's troupe, Gunnell can be seen moving up into a managerial responsibility over his years with the company. In the 1613 charter he is listed twelfth of the fourteen sharers. On the company's 1618 lease of the Fortune Playhouse from owner Edward Alleyn, Gunnell is fourth of ten. And when the company leased the rebuilt Fortune in 1622, Gunnell is listed first. The fire that destroyed the Fortune on ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Floruit
''Floruit'' (; abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for "they flourished") denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indicating the time when someone flourished. Etymology and use la, flōruit is the third-person singular perfect active indicative of the Latin verb ', ' "to bloom, flower, or flourish", from the noun ', ', "flower". Broadly, the term is employed in reference to the peak of activity for a person or movement. More specifically, it often is used in genealogy and historical writing when a person's birth or death dates are unknown, but some other evidence exists that indicates when they were alive. For example, if there are wills attested by John Jones in 1204, and 1229, and a record of his marriage in 1197, a record concerning him might be written as "John Jones (fl. 1197–1229)". The term is often used in art history when dating the care ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Boy Player
Boy player refers to children who performed in Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for the adult companies and performed the female roles as women did not perform on the English stage in this period. Others worked for children's companies in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys.   Children's companies In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, troupes appeared that were composed entirely of boy players. They are famously mentioned in Shakespeare's ''Hamlet'', in which a group of travelling actors has left the city due to rivalry with a troupe of "little eyases" (II, ii, 339); the term "eyas" means an unfledged hawk. The children's companies grew out of the choirs of boy singers that had been connected with cathedrals and similar institutions since the Middle Ages. (Similar boy choirs exist to this day.) Thus the choir attached to St. Paul's Cathedral in London since the 12th century was in the 16th century ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

17th-century English Male Actors
The 17th century lasted from January 1, 1601 ( MDCI), to December 31, 1700 ( MDCC). It falls into the early modern period of Europe and in that continent (whose impact on the world was increasing) was characterized by the Baroque cultural movement, the latter part of the Spanish Golden Age, the Dutch Golden Age, the French ''Grand Siècle'' dominated by Louis XIV, the Scientific Revolution, the world's first public company and megacorporation known as the Dutch East India Company, and according to some historians, the General Crisis. From the mid-17th century, European politics were increasingly dominated by the Kingdom of France of Louis XIV, where royal power was solidified domestically in the civil war of the Fronde. The semi-feudal territorial French nobility was weakened and subjugated to the power of an absolute monarchy through the reinvention of the Palace of Versailles from a hunting lodge to a gilded prison, in which a greatly expanded royal court could be more easily ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


William Wintershall
William Wintershall (died July 1679), also Wintersall or Wintersell, was a noted seventeenth-century English actor. His career spanned the difficult years of mid-century, when English theatres were closed from 1642 to 1660, during the English Civil War and the Interregnum. According to James Wright's '' Historia Histrionica'' ( 1699), Wintershall's career began in the final years of the period of English Renaissance theatre; he was likely a young member of Queen Henrietta's Men at the Salisbury Court Theatre in the 1637–42 years. During the theatre closure, 1642–60, Wintershall was one of the English actors who performed in Europe, mainly in The Hague and Paris, in the middle 1640s. Wintershall became involved in a lawsuit with fellow actor Andrew Cane in 1654. The suit involved a thirty-year-old debt of £40, between Richard Gunnell, builder of the Salisbury Court Theatre, and his actors, including Cane; Wintershall had married Gunnell's daughter Margaret in 1641 o ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Cripplegate
Cripplegate was a gate in the London Wall which once enclosed the City of London. The gate gave its name to the Cripplegate ward of the City which straddles the line of the former wall and gate, a line which continues to divide the ward into two parts: ''Cripplegate Within'' and ''Cripplegate Without'', with a beadle and a deputy (alderman) appointed for each part. Since the 1994 (City) and 2003 (ward) boundary changes, most of the ward is Without, with the ward of Bassishaw having expanded considerably into the Within area. Until World War II, the area approximating to ''Cripplegate Without'' was commonly known as simply ''Cripplegate''. The area was almost entirely destroyed in the Blitz of World War II, causing the term to fall out of colloquial speech. Cripplegate Without is the site of the Barbican Estate and Barbican Centre, with a small part of these lying in neighbouring Aldersgate Without. The gate The origins of the gate's name are unclear. One theory, bols ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Prince Charles's Men
Prince Charles's Men (known as the Duke of York's Men from 1608 to 1612) was a playing company or troupe of actors in Jacobean and Caroline England. The Jacobean era troupe The company was formed in 1608 as the Duke of York's Men, under the titular patronage of King James' second son, the eight-year-old Charles (1600–49), then the Duke of York. Upon the death of Charles's elder brother Prince Henry in 1612, the company became Prince Charles's Men. They played mainly in the provinces for the first two years of their existence, but in 1610 they received a renewed royal patent that authorized them to play in London, "in such usual houses as themselves shall provide." Seven actors are listed in the patent: John Garland, William Rowley, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Dawes, Joseph Taylor, John Newton, and Gilbert Reason. Rowley was their dramatist and clown; Joseph Taylor would be their leading man in future years, and then fill the same function with the King's Men, when he replaced ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Gerald Eades Bentley
Gerald Eades Bentley (September 15, 1901 – July 25, 1994) was an American academic and literary scholar, best remembered for his seven-volume work, ''The Jacobean and Caroline Stage,'' published by Oxford University Press between 1941 and 1968. That work, modeled on Edmund Kerchever Chambers' classic four-volume ''The Elizabethan Stage,'' has itself become a standard and essential reference work on English Renaissance theatre. Bentley was born in Brazil, Indiana, the son of a Methodist clergyman. Originally intending to be a creative writer, he changed his career to literary scholarship during his graduate studies. He earned his B.A. at DePauw University (1923), his M.A. in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (1926), and his Ph.D. at the University of London (1929), studying under Allardyce Nicoll. Bentley taught at the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945 before accepting a position as Murray Professor of English at Princeton University in 1945, where h ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Andrew John Gurr
Andrew John Gurr (born 23 December 1936) is a contemporary literary scholar who specializes in William Shakespeare and English Renaissance theatre. Life and work Born in Leicester, Gurr was raised in New Zealand, and educated at the University of Auckland and at Cambridge University. He has taught at the Universities of Wellington, Leeds, and Nairobi (1969–73); at the latter institution he was also head of his department. From 1976 until his retirement in 2002 he was professor of English at the University of Reading (head of department, 1979–86), where he taught Shakespeare studies and where he is now Emeritus Professor. Gurr co-wrote a 1981 study of Katherine Mansfield (with Claire Hanson) and two books on African literature; but he is best known for his books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the theatre of that historical era—books that are recognized and utilized as essential references on English Renaissance drama. He has authored a wide range of article ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


King's Men (playing Company)
The King's Men is the acting company to which William Shakespeare (1564–1616) belonged for most of his career. Formerly known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they became the King's Men in 1603 when King James I ascended the throne and became the company's patron. The royal patent of 19 May 1603 which authorised the King's Men company named the following players, in this order: Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, "and the rest of their associates...." The nine cited by name became Grooms of the Chamber. On 15 March 1604, each of the nine men named in the patent was supplied with four and a half yards of red cloth for the coronation procession. Chronologically typed To 1610 In their first winter season, between December 1603 and February 1604 the company performed eight times at Court and eleven times in their second, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Stephen Hammerton
Stephen Hammerton (fl. 1629–47) was a boy player or child actor in English Renaissance theatre, one of the young performers who specialized in female roles in the period before women appeared on the stage. His case illuminates the conditions of boy actors in this era. Beginnings Stephen Hammerton was the son of a Richard Hammerton of Hellifield, Yorkshire. In his youth he was apprenticed to a London merchant tailor, William Waverly, of the Strand. At the time, veteran actors Richard Gunnell and William Blagrave, founders of the Salisbury Court Theatre, were struggling to form a new company of child actors, similar to the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's of thirty years before. Those troupes, famous in their own time, had been highly effective at training young actors and funnelling them into the adult companies that needed their talent; but the troupes of boy players had been defunct for nearly fifteen years when Blagrave and Gunnell started their Childr ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Bubonic Plague
Bubonic plague is one of three types of plague caused by the plague bacterium ('' Yersinia pestis''). One to seven days after exposure to the bacteria, flu-like symptoms develop. These symptoms include fever, headaches, and vomiting, as well as swollen and painful lymph nodes occurring in the area closest to where the bacteria entered the skin. Acral necrosis, the dark discoloration of skin, is another symptom. Occasionally, swollen lymph nodes, known as " buboes," may break open. The three types of plague are the result of the route of infection: bubonic plague, septicemic plague, and pneumonic plague. Bubonic plague is mainly spread by infected fleas from small animals. It may also result from exposure to the body fluids from a dead plague-infected animal. Mammals such as rabbits, hares, and some cat species are susceptible to bubonic plague, and typically die upon contraction. In the bubonic form of plague, the bacteria enter through the skin through a flea bite ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Beeston's Boys
Beeston's Boys was the popular and colloquial name of The King and Queen's Young Company, a troupe of boy actors of the Caroline period, active mainly in the years 1637–1642. Origin The troupe was formed in early 1637, under a royal warrant, by the theatre manager and impresario Christopher Beeston, during a time of disorder and reorganisation in the theatre profession; the London playhouses had been closed since the summer of 1636 because of bubonic plague. The creation of a company of boy actors was a return to a practice of the early 17th century, the era of companies like the Children of Paul's and the Children of the Chapel. Those companies, while controversial in their time, had been effective at developing and educating young talent, to the eventual benefit of the adult companies and the theatrical profession as a whole. Beeston's formation of the Young Company was an attempt to recover that training function – as well as to provide effective drama while paying relat ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]