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John Underwood (died October 1624) was an early 17th-century actor, a member of the King's Men, the theatrics company of William Shakespeare.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2013) |
John Underwood (died October 1624) was an early 17th-century actor, a member of the King's Men, the theatrics company of William Shakespeare.
Underwood began as a boy player with the Children of the Chapel, and was cast in that company's productions of Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601). In 1608 or soon after, he joined the King's Men along with William Ostler, another former member of the Chapel Children troupe. Underwood was a member of the cast of the King's Men's production of Jonson's The Alchemist in 1610, and was in the casts of many productions that followed, including Jonson's Catiline (1611) and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (the revival of c. 1621).
In the 25 cast lists added to plays in the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, Underwood is mentioned in the casts of 18 dramas:
His total appearances equals those of Joseph Taylor and Robert Benfield, and is exceeded only by John Lowin's 21. Considering that his career was two decades shorter than Taylor's or Benfield's (both of whom acted until the theatres closed in 1642), Underwood was clearly a mainstay of the company during his acting career.
Underwood died between 4 and 10 October 1624. His last will and testament was drawn up on the 4th; a codicil was appended on the 11th, after his death. He left his property in a trust for his five minor children (John, Elizabeth, Burbage, Thomas, and Isabel). His executors and overseers, who included John Lowin, Henry Condell, and John Heminges, were left 11 shillings each to buy memorial rings. [1] Shakespeare's 1616 will had left Condell, Heminges and Richard Burbage 28 shillings sixpence (28s. 6d.) each for the same purpose.
Underwood's property included shares in the King's Men's theatres, the Globe and the Blackfriars, as well as a share in the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. The last is a significant point. Thomas Pope, a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men who died in 1603, had also possessed a share in the Curtain and had listed it in his will. [2] As far as is known, Henry Lanman, who built the Curtain in 1577, had originally run that theatre as his private business; yet sometime before 1603 the Curtain had clearly been re-organized into a shareholders' enterprise. The fact that two men of Shakespeare's troupe owned shares in the Curtain suggests that this re-organization occurred around the time the Lord Chamberlain's Men were acting at the Curtain in the 1597–99 period. (Pope was a member of the company at that time, while Underwood was not; the implication is that Underwood purchased his share in the Curtain from another troupe member.)
When the brothers Richard and Cuthbert Burbage built The Globe Theatre in early 1599, they organized it as a shareholders' concern, keeping 50% of the business for themselves and dividing the other 50% among four of the Lord Chamberlain's Men – Shakespeare, Pope, Heminges, and Augustine Phillips. (Originally William Kempe was meant to be the seventh partner, but he sold out to the other four minority shareholders, giving each of them a 12.5% stake instead of 10%.) It has been argued that the Burbages pursued this arrangement out of necessity: their financial problems involving The Theatre and the Blackfriars left them in need of outside investors. [3] It is generally held that the Globe arrangement constituted the first case in which the standard sharers' partnership in a playing company was extended to theatre construction and ownership. Yet the Curtain Theatre shares owned by Underwood and Pope suggest that the Globe was perhaps not the initial instance of such an arrangement, and that the Burbages applied to the Globe a structure that was already familiar to the Lord Chamberlain's Men from the Curtain.
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.
John Heminges was an actor in the King's Men, the playing company for which William Shakespeare wrote. Along with Henry Condell, he was an editor of the First Folio, the collected plays of Shakespeare, published in 1623. He was also the financial manager for the King's Men.
Henry Condell was an actor in the King's Men, the playing company for which William Shakespeare wrote. With John Heminges, he was instrumental in preparing and editing the First Folio, the collected plays of Shakespeare, published in 1623.
The Curtain Theatre was an Elizabethan playhouse located in Hewett Street, Shoreditch, just outside the City of London. It opened in 1577, and continued staging plays until 1624.
The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a company of actors, or a "playing company", for which Shakespeare wrote during most of his career. Richard Burbage played most of the lead roles, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Formed at the end of a period of flux in the theatrical world of London, it had become, by 1603, one of the two leading companies of the city and was subsequently patronized by James I.
Blackfriars Theatre was the name given to two separate theatres located in the former Blackfriars Dominican priory in the City of London during the Renaissance. The first theatre began as a venue for the Children of the Chapel Royal, child actors associated with the Queen's chapel choirs, and who from 1576 to 1584 staged plays in the vast hall of the former monastery. The second theatre dates from the purchase of the upper part of the priory and another building by James Burbage in 1596, which included the Parliament Chamber on the upper floor that was converted into the playhouse. The Children of the Chapel played in the theatre beginning in the autumn of 1600 until the King's Men took over in 1608. They successfully used it as their winter playhouse until all the theatres were closed in 1642 when the English Civil War began.
Sejanus His Fall, a 1603 play by Ben Jonson, is a tragedy about Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the favourite of the Roman emperor Tiberius.
John Lowin was an English actor.
Thomas Pope was an Elizabethan actor, a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and a colleague of William Shakespeare. Pope was a "comedian and acrobat."
Joseph Taylor was a 17th-century English actor. As the successor of Richard Burbage as the leading actor with the King's Men, he was arguably the most important actor in the later Jacobean and the Caroline eras.
William Sly was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a colleague of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men.
Richard Cowley was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a colleague of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men.
Richard Robinson was an actor in English Renaissance theatre and a member of Shakespeare's company the King's Men.
Catiline His Conspiracy is a Jacobean tragedy written by Ben Jonson. It is one of the two Roman tragedies that Jonson hoped would cement his dramatic achievement and reputation, the other being Sejanus His Fall (1603).
William Ostler was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a member of the King's Men, the company of William Shakespeare.
Robert Benfield was a seventeenth-century actor, noted for his longtime membership in the King's Men in the years and decades after William Shakespeare's retirement and death.
Eliard Swanston, alternatively spelled Heliard, Hilliard, Elyard, Ellyardt, Ellyaerdt, and Eyloerdt, was an English actor in the Caroline era. He became a leading man in the King's Men, the company of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, in the final phase of its existence.
John Shank was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a leading comedian in the King's Men during the 1620s and 1630s.
King's Men personnel were the people who worked with and for the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men from 1594 to 1642. The company was the major theatrical enterprise of its era and featured some of the leading actors of their generation – Richard Burbage, John Lowin, and Joseph Taylor among other – and some leading clowns and comedians, like Will Kempe and Robert Armin. The company benefitted from the services of William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger as regular dramatists.
William Heminges, also Hemminges, Heminge, and other variants, was a playwright and theatrical figure of the Caroline period. He was the ninth child and third son of John Heminges, the actor and colleague of William Shakespeare, and his wife Rebecca.