Page:The Elizabethan stage (Volume 2).pdf/219

 in the transfer to Lord Hunsdon. It is, however, little more than conjecture that finds Henry Condell and Christopher Beeston in the 'Harry' and 'Kitt', or Alexander Cooke, Nicholas Tooley, and Robert Gough, who were numbered amongst the King's men at a later date, in the 'Saunder', 'Nick', and 'R. Go.' of the 2 Seven Deadly Sins plot. Alleyn's correspondence of 1593 adds Richard Cowley to the list of Lord Strange's men, and, as we shall find him acting as a payee for the Chamberlain's men in 1601, he may have been one of them from the beginning. In any case he had joined them by 1598, as the stage-directions of ''Much Ado about Nothing'' show that he played Verges to Kempe's Dogberry.

There is, of course, one conspicuous Chamberlain's man who is not discoverable either in the Privy Council letter of 1593 or in the 2 Seven Deadly Sins of 1590-1. Even the audacity of Mr. Fleay has not attempted to identify the 'Will' of the plot with Will Shakespeare. Some relations, if only as author, Shakespeare must have had with Lord Strange's men, when they produced 1 Henry VI on 3 March 1592, and Greene's satire of him as a 'Shake-scene' in the same year must indicate that he was an actor as well as an author. He may have stood aside altogether during the period of the provincial tours, and devoted himself to poetry, and perhaps, although this is very conjectural, to travel abroad. Or he may, as I have already suggested, have joined Lord Pembroke's men (q.v.), whom I suspect to have been an offshoot for provincial purposes of the Strange's combination, and have passed from them to Lord Sussex's, ultimately rejoining his old fellows in 1594. The possibility of identifying certain minor members of the Chamberlain's company is also affected by this somewhat obscure problem of Pembroke's men. The most obvious of these is John Sincler or Sincklo, who was in the cast of 2 Seven Deadly Sins as played by the Admiral's or Strange's about 1590-1, and must have ultimately joined the Chamberlain's, as his name occurs in a stage-direction to Q_{1} of 2 Henry IV (1600), and in the induction to ''The Malcontent'' (1604). It also occurs in stage-directions to 3 Henry VI and the Taming of The Shrew in the Folio of 1623. These both happen to be plays which passed through the hands of Pembroke's, and the inference may be that Sincler