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repeate it again, That his G. had vowed they should never play more, but should first begg their bred and he wold have his vow performed, And therefore my lo. chamberlain by himselfe or your ll. at the table should take order to dissolve them, and to punish the maker besides.'

Sir Thomas Lake appears to have been under the impression that two companies were concerned, and that the 'matters of France' were not played by the Children of Blackfriars. If so, we must suppose that Byron was originally produced elsewhere, perhaps by the King's Revels, and transferred to the Blackfriars after 'reformation' by the Council. M. de la Boderie, however, writes as if the same company were responsible for both plays, and perhaps it is on the whole more probable that Sir Thomas Lake misunderstood the situation. I feel very little doubt that the maker of the play on the mines was once more Marston, who was certainly summoned before the Privy Council and committed to Newgate, on some offence not specified in the extant record, on 8 June 1608. And this was probably the end of his stormy connexion with the stage. He disappeared from the Blackfriars and from literary life, leaving The Insatiate Countess unfinished, and selling the share in the syndicate which he had acquired from Evans about 1603 to Robert Keysar for £100. Before making his purchase, Keysar, who tells us that he put a value of £600 on the whole of the enterprise, got an assurance, as he thought, from the King's men that they would not come to any arrangement with Henry Evans which would prejudice his interests. This the King's men afterwards denied, and as a matter of fact the negotiations, tentatively opened as far back as 1603, between Evans and Burbadge for a surrender of the lease were now coming to a head, and its actual surrender took place about August 1608. On the ninth of that month Burbadge executed fresh leases of the theatre to a new syndicate representing the King's men. The circumstances leading up to Evans's part in this transaction became subsequently the subject of hostile criticism by Kirkham, who asserted that the lease, which Alexander Hawkins held in trust, had been stolen from his custody by Mrs. Evans, and that the surrender was effected with the fraudulent intention of excluding Kirkham from the profits to which he was entitled under the settlement of 1602. According to Evans, however, Kirkham was at least implicitly