King's Company

Last updated January 20, 2023

The King's Company was one of two enterprises granted the rights to mount theatrical productions in London, after the London theatre closure had been lifted at the start of the English Restoration. It existed from 1660 to 1682, when it merged with the Duke's Company to form the United Company.

History

On 21 August 1660, King Charles II granted Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant each official permission in the form of a temporary "privilege" to form acting companies. Killigrew's King's Company fell under the sponsorship of Charles himself; Davenant's Duke's Company under that of Charles's brother, then the Duke of York, later James II of England. The temporary privileges would be followed later by letters patent, issued on 25 April 1662 in Killigrew's case, cementing a hereditary monopoly on theatre for the patent-holders.^[1]

The first permanent venue for the King's Company was Gibbon's Tennis Court; in 1663, responding to competition from the Duke's Company's more advanced theatre in Lisle's Tennis Court, Killigrew built and opened the King's Playhouse, today's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This burned down in 1672 and was rebuilt and reopened in 1674. Killigrew sold most of his interests in the company by the early 1670s and management was in his son Charles' hands after 1671. In 1682, the King's Company and the Duke's Company merged to become the so-called United Company, under the leadership of the Duke's Company's people.^[2]

Company members

Among its senior actors, the early King's Company counted many of the more experienced actors still working at the time: Michael Mohun, Charles Hart, John Lacy, Edward Kynaston, Walter Clun, Thomas Betterton ^[3] and Elizabeth Weaver ^[4] were part of the initial group. Betterton would be "seduced" away to the Duke's Company by 5 November the same year, not long before the Lord Chamberlain issued orders forbidding such transfers from one company to the other. Such orders would be encoded into the 1662 letters patent as well.^[3]

On 28 January 1661, fifteen members of the new King's Company – Thomas Killigrew, Sir Robert Howard and thirteen actors – signed a lease with the Earl of Bedford ^[5] for the site of a new theatre, an agreement that also defined the sharers in the company. The thirteen actor/sharers were Hart, Mohun, Lacy, Clun, Kinaston, Richard Baxter, Theophilus Bird, Nicholas Blagden, Nicholas Burt, William Cartwright, Thomas Loveday, Robert Shatterell and William Wintershall.^[6]

Killigrew quickly expanded his troupe to include the first actresses on the English public stage, starting in 1661. His company included Margaret Hughes, Anne Marshall, Mary Knep, Elizabeth Boutell, Katherine Corey, Elizabeth Cox, Elizabeth James and Nell Gwyn.^[7]

Killigrew's motivations for entering into his theatrical enterprise were more monetary than artistic.^[1] During most of the 1660s, he seems not to have been a manager in the day-to-day sense; this task was delegated to the senior actors, including Hart, Lacy and Mohun.^[8] Killigrew did not exert – and probably could not have exerted – strong control over the artistic direction of the company.

Notes

1 2 Milhous, p. 4.
↑ Thomson, p. 17.
1 2 Milhous, p. 8.
↑ Highfill, Philip H.; Burnim, Kalman A.; Langhans, Edward A. (1993). A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. SIU Press. p. 305. ISBN 978-0-8093-1802-5.
↑ William Russell, 5th Earl, later 1st Duke of Bedford.
↑ Fitzgerald, pp. 27–8.
↑ Wilson, pp. 7–22 and ff.
↑ Milhous, p. 12.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Restoration comedy</span> Theatrical genre rooted in late 17th-century England

"Restoration comedy" is English comedy written and performed in the Restoration period of 1660–1710. Comedy of manners is used as a synonym for this. After public stage performances were banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, reopening of the theatres in 1660 marked a renaissance of English drama. Sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues:

The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper.... The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.

Elizabeth Barry was an English actress of the Restoration period.

Thomas Patrick Betterton, the leading male actor and theatre manager during Restoration England, son of an under-cook to King Charles I, was born in London.

Thomas Killigrew was an English dramatist and theatre manager. He was a witty, dissolute figure at the court of King Charles II of England.

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, commonly known as Drury Lane, is a West End theatre and Grade I listed building in Covent Garden, London, England. The building faces Catherine Street and backs onto Drury Lane. The building is the most recent in a line of four theatres which were built at the same location, the earliest of which dated back to 1663, making it the oldest theatre site in London still in use. According to the author Peter Thomson, for its first two centuries, Drury Lane could "reasonably have claimed to be London's leading theatre". For most of that time, it was one of a handful of patent theatres, granted monopoly rights to the production of "legitimate" drama in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Mohun</span>

Michael Mohun was a leading English actor both before and after the 1642–60 closing of the theatres.

Charles Hart was a prominent British Restoration actor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Restoration spectacular</span> 17th-century elaborately staged machine play

The Restoration spectacular was a type of theatre production of the late 17th-century Restoration period, defined by the amount of money, time, sets, and performers it required to be produced. Productions attracted audiences with elaborate action, acrobatics, dance, costume, scenery, illusionistic painting, trapdoors, and fireworks. Although they were popular with contemporary audiences, spectaculars have earned a reputation from theatre historians as vulgar in contrast to the witty Restoration drama.

The patent theatres were the theatres that were licensed to perform "spoken drama" after the Restoration of Charles II as King of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1660. Other theatres were prohibited from performing such "serious" drama, but were permitted to show comedy, pantomime or melodrama. Drama was also interspersed with singing or dancing, to prevent the whole being too serious or dramatic.

The Dorset Garden Theatre in London, built in 1671, was in its early years also known as the Duke of York's Theatre, or the Duke's Theatre. In 1685, King Charles II died and his brother, the Duke of York, was crowned as James II. When the Duke became King, the theatre became the Queen's Theatre in 1685, referring to James' second wife, Mary of Modena. The name remained when William III and Mary II came to the throne in 1689.

Lisle's Tennis Court was a building off Portugal Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse during two periods, 1661–1674 and 1695–1705. During the early period, the theatre was called Lincoln's Inn Fields Playhouse, also known as The Duke's Playhouse, The New Theatre or The Opera. The building was demolished and replaced by a purpose-built theatre for a third period, 1714–1728. The tennis court theatre was the first public playhouse in London to feature the moveable scenery that would become a standard feature of Restoration theatres.

Gibbon's Tennis Court was a building off Vere Street and Clare Market, near Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, England. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse from 1660 to 1663, shortly after the English Restoration. As a theatre, it has been variously called the "Theatre Royal, Vere Street", the "Vere Street Theatre", or simply "The Theatre". It was the first permanent home for Thomas Killigrew's King's Company and was the stage for some of the earliest appearances by professional actresses.

Mary Saunderson (1637–1712), later known as Mary Saunderson Betterton after her marriage to Thomas Betterton, was an actress and singer in England during the 1660s and 1690s. She is considered one of the first English actresses.

The Duke's Company was a theatre company chartered by King Charles II at the start of the Restoration era, 1660. Sir William Davenant was manager of the company under the patronage of Prince James, Duke of York. During that period, theatres began to flourish again after they had been closed from the restrictions throughout the English Civil War and the Interregnum. The Duke's Company existed from 1660 to 1682, when it merged with the King's Company to form the United Company.

John Rhodes was a theatrical figure of the early and middle seventeenth century. He rose to a brief prominence in 1660 when the London theatres re-opened at the start of the English Restoration era.

George Jolly, or Joliffe was an actor, an early actor-manager and a theatre impresario of the middle seventeenth century. He was "an experienced, courageous, and obstinate actor-manager" who proved a persistent rival for the main theatrical figures of Restoration theatre, Sir William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew.

The United Company was a London theatre company formed in 1682 with the merger of the King's Company and the Duke's Company.

Nicholas Burt, or Birt or Burght among other variants, was a prominent English actor of the seventeenth century. In a long career, he was perhaps best known as the first actor to play the role of Othello in the Restoration era.

Anne Shadwell was an English stage actor of the seventeenth century. She was one of the first English actresses to appear on stage following the Restoration She was one of six actors recruited in 1660 by William Davenant for the new Duke's Company, acting under her maiden name Anne Gibbs. Sometime between 1663 and 1667 she married the playwright Thomas Shadwell with whom she had four children. While some sources have her acting late into the century, it may be she effectively retired with the formation of the United Company in 1682. Her appearances had decreased since 1672. Following her husband's death in 1692 she was left the bulk of his estate. She had an investment in the Drury Lane Theatre in 1709, when she joined a petition to Queen Anne by the manager Christopher Rich, but nothing is known about her after this point.

Henry Harris was an English stage actor and theatre manager. Initially a painter he was a founder member of the new Duke's Company in 1660 following the Restoration which established itself at the old Salisbury Court Theatre before moving to the new Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre shortly afterwards. Due to his background Harris may have been a set designer and painter during his early years with the company. However, by 1661 he was acting, and his first recorded role was in William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes that summer. He quickly established himself as the second actor in the troupe after Thomas Betterton.

References

Holland, Peter (1995). "Killigrew, Thomas" . In Banham, Martin (ed.). The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge University Press. p. 600. ISBN 0-521-43437-8.
Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington. A New History of the English Stage. London, Tinsley Brothers, 1882.
Milhous, Judith. Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1696–1708. Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1979.
Thomson, Peter (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-83925-9.
Wilson, John Harold. All the King's Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[Milhous,_p._4-1] 1 2 Milhous, p. 4.

[2] Thomson, p. 17.

[wholeparamaybe-3] 1 2 Milhous, p. 8.

[4] Highfill, Philip H.; Burnim, Kalman A.; Langhans, Edward A. (1993). A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. SIU Press. p. 305. ISBN 978-0-8093-1802-5.

[5] William Russell, 5th Earl, later 1st Duke of Bedford.

[6] Fitzgerald, pp. 27–8.

[7] Wilson, pp. 7–22 and ff.

[8] Milhous, p. 12.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]