Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 2).pdf/146

 *ments, that he was not yet a sharer when it was drawn up. Apparently, then, at least four of Strange's men, as we find them in 1593, besides Alleyn, had been playing at the Theatre about 1590-1. These were Pope, Phillips, Bryan, and Cowley. Obviously we cannot say whether it was to the original Admiral's or the original Strange's that they belonged. One other point of personnel must not be overlooked. Shakespeare contributed to the repertory of Strange's in 1592 and perhaps also in 1593. Greene calls him a Shake-scene, but neither the 'plott' of 1590, nor the licence of 1593, nor the Alleyn correspondence of the same year, yields his name.

Derby's men did not appear at Court during the winter of 1593-4. On 16 April 1594 Lord Derby died. On 16 May the company used the Countess's name at Winchester. It seems clear that during the summer there was some re-shuffling of the companies, that Alleyn took the leadership of a new body of Admiral's men, that several other members of the old combination, including Pope, Heminges, Kempe, and Phillips, joined with Burbadge, Shakespeare, and Sly, under the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, and that, after a short period of co-operation with each other and Henslowe, the two companies definitely parted. In the course of 1594 the name of Derby's men appeared upon the title-page of Titus Andronicus, probably because they had played it in its earlier form of Titus and Vespasian in 1592-3, before it passed to Pembroke's and from them to Sussex's. In the same year was published A Knack to Know a Knave (S. R. 7 January 1594) as played 'by Ed. Allen and his companie' and with 'merrimentes' by Kemp. This also belongs to the 1592-3 repertory, of the other plays in which 1 Henry VI, like Titus Andronicus, passed ultimately to the Chamberlain's men, and a considerable number, either as their own property or that of Henslowe, to the Admiral's. These included Tamar Cham, The Battle of Alcazar, ''The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre of Paris'', Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and probably Orlando Furioso, of Orlando's part in which a transcript, with alterations in Alleyn's hand, is preserved at Dulwich. The only play not named in Henslowe's diary which can be traced to the company is Fair Em, which bears the name of Lord Strange's men on its title-page, but of which the first edition is undated.

It is possible that those of the fifth Earl of Derby's men who did not take service with the Lord Chamberlain, passed into a provincial period of existence under his successor,