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 *sponds to, and was perhaps motived by, that of Pickleherring adopted by Robert Reinolds of the chief rival English company about the same date. Both had their prototype in Sackville's John Bouset. The Elector George William was no friend to actors, and to Spencer, as to others, the Thirty Years' War closed many doors. In February 1623 he came to Nuremberg with Sebastian Schadleutner, but was not allowed to play. And that is the last that is heard of him.

A few isolated records indicate the presence from time to time in northern Europe of players not yet mentioned, and not obviously connected either with the Browne or with the Spencer tradition. An English company under Peter de Prun of Brussels visited Nuremberg in April 1594. The name of the leader does not sound very English, and a company, not improbably the same, is described as 'niederländische' at Ulm in the following August. Heywood, however, speaks of an English company as in the pay of the Cardinal and Archduke Albert, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, about 1608. Maurice of Orange-Nassau, Stadtholder of the Dutch Netherlands (1584-1625), who gave a recommendation to Spencer in 1605, had also an English company of his own, which visited Frankfort at Easter 1611, and then claimed to be strange in Germany. To Augsburg in June 1602 came Fabian Penton and his company; to Leyden in September 1604 John Woods and his company, and to Leipzig in April 1613 Hans Leberwurst with his boys. Of none of these is anything further known, nor of William Alexander Blank, a Scottish dancer, who performed at Cologne in April 1605.

Traces of English players in southern Europe are few and far between. That Kempe's travels of 1601 took him to Italy has already been noted. There were some English acrobats at Madrid in January 1583.[10] On 25 May 1598 the Confrères de la Passion leased their theatre in Paris,