Queen Elizabeth’s Men was a playing company or troupe of actors in English Renaissance theatre. Formed in 1583 at the express command of Queen Elizabeth, it was the dominant acting company for the rest of the 1580s, as the Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men would be in the decade that followed.

Foundation[edit]

Since the Queen instigated the formation of the company, its inauguration is well documented by Elizabethan standards. The order came down on 10 March 1583 (new style) to Edmund Tilney, then the Master of the Revels; though Sir Francis Walsingham, head of intelligence operations for the Elizabethan court, was the official assigned to assemble the personnel.^[1] At that time the Earl of Sussex, who had been the court official in charge of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in its first Elizabethan incorporation, was nearing death. The Queen’s Men assumed the same functional role in the Elizabethan theatrical landscape as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men before and after them did: it was the company most directly responsible for providing entertainment at court (although other companies also performed before the Queen).

The task of convening the new troupe apparently needed Walsingham’s strong arm, since it was assembled by raiding the best performers from the companies existing at the time. But it also signaled a new awareness on behalf of the Queen and the privy council of the potential for combining theatrical and espionage activities, since players frequently traveled, both nationally and internationally, and could serve the crown in multiple ways, including the collection of information useful to Walsingham’s spy network.^{[citation needed]} Leicester’s Men, till then the leading company of the day, lost three to the new assemblage (Robert Wilson, John Laneham, and William Johnson), while Oxford’s troupe lost both of its leading men, the brothers John and Laurence Dutton; Sussex’s Men were pillaged of leader John Adams and star clown Richard Tarlton.^[2] Other prominent members of the new company were John Singer, William Knell and the “inimitable” John Bentley. Tarlton quickly became the star of the Queen’s Men – “for a wondrous plentiful pleasant extemporal wit, he was the wonder of his time.”^[3]

It has been proposed that Elizabeth had a specific political motive behind the formation of the company. Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford were using their companies of players to compete for attention and prestige at each year’s Christmas festivities at Court; Elizabeth and her councillors apparently judged the competition, and the noblemen’s egos, to be getting out of hand. By culling the best players in their troupes to form her own, she slapped down ambitious aristocrats and asserted her own priority.^[4]

Status[edit]

Their genesis made Queen Elizabeth’s Men unique among the acting companies of the age: “The Queen’s Men were a deliberately political company in origin, and their repertory appears to have followed the path no doubt pointed out for them by Sir Francis Walsingham.” In the plays they acted, “one finds no conflict or disturbance that is not settled in the interests of Tudor conservatism.”^[5] The political controversies that marked later companies and plays – The Isle of Dogs, The Isle of Gulls, and others – did not occur with the Queen’s Men. They may, however, have run afoul of higher authorities in 1589, shortly before their dissolution, for involving themselves too vigorously in the Martin Marprelate episode by parodying Martin on the public stage.^[6]

The Queen’s company was officially authorized to play at two locations in London, the Bel Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill, and the Bell Inn in Gracechurch Street, within the City near Bishopsgate in the western wall. The former was a large open-air venue, but the latter may have been enclosed. With this arrangement, Queen Elizabeth’s Men may have anticipated the dual summer and winter playing sites that the King’s Men achieved only a quarter-century later with the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres.^[7]