Rye Chamberlain's Accounts: Payment to the Lord Chamberlain's Players for 20 shillings

This document, part of the Rye Chamberlain’s Accounts, includes an August 1597 entry for a payment of 20 shillings to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. At the time, the company was on a provincial tour visiting the Cinque Port of Rye, in Sussex, as well as Dover, Bristol, Bath, Marlborough, and possibly Faversham. They went on tour after a July 28 Privy Council order led to the closure of the London playhouses until Allhallowtide (October 31 to November 2). It is not known whether Shakespeare joined the tour or what plays were performed at Rye. The meager payments by municipal authorities suggests that companies may have supplemented their expenses by performing in private houses en route (for example, the King’s Men were paid 30 pounds for a performance at Wilton in 1603).

The first entry on folio 59 recto of the Rye Chamberlain’s accounts for August 1597 reads:

Paid for a reward given to my Lord Chamberlen’s
Players at the Assignement of Mr Maior   XXs

Folio 58 recto notes that the 20 shilling payment was made on August 27:

The laste opening of the Boxes
Being the xxvijth of August.

The “Great Box” and the “Lesser Box” housed the Rye tax revenues. Accounts were entered retrospectively under the name of the Mayor who had ordered the expenditure. Rye mayor-making took place in public on the first Sunday after St. Bartholomew’s Day, which in 1597 fell on August 24. Therefore, Thomas Hamon, whose yearlong mayoralty ended the following day, Sunday, August 28, ordered the payment to the players on August 27. This suggests that Mayor Hamon paid the Lord Chamberlain’s men for their involvement in celebrating the imminent election of the new mayor, John Fowtrell (whose name is shown on folio 61). Previous scholarship has suggested that the payment was made in early September, but the date of the opening of the boxes suggests that it was contemporaneous with the mayor-making.

Provincial tours by the London companies were not unusual. Outbreaks of plague had seen London playhouses closed by the authorities in previous summers. The 1597 tour was different as it was set against a background of food shortages and an increase in vagrancy, following three consecutive years of failed harvests, and the authorities may have been particularly alert to the dangers of riotous assembly. The Privy Council may well have been prompted to close the playhouses after a performance at The Swan on Bankside of a “seditious” play, “The Isle of Dogs,” now lost, written by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson. Although often linked to The Isle of Dogs, the prohibition does not mention any specific play, and it was not until August 15, some two weeks later, that Privy Council ordered the interrogation of those responsible for the performance (For detailed insight into The Isle of Dogs, see Ingram, pgs. 168-190).