The Lord Chamberlain’s Men was the London acting company that William Shakespeare belonged to from 1594, its first year, and the company for which he wrote most of his plays, acted on stage, and held a share of the profits.
It took its name from its patron, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, who held the office of Lord Chamberlain at Elizabeth I’s court, and in 1603 it became the King’s Men. This article explains how the company began, who was in it, how it was organized, the playhouses it built, and what belonging to it meant for Shakespeare and his plays. For the wider story of his working life, see our article on Shakespeare’s career in London.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for quick reference.
How the Company Began
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men was born out of a disaster. Plague closed London’s playhouses for most of the time between June 1592 and May 1594, and the acting companies of the capital broke up, toured the provinces, or merged to survive. When playing resumed in 1594, the London stage was reorganized around two new companies, both formed largely from members of an older troupe, Lord Strange’s Men.
One was the Admiral’s Men, led by the tragedian Edward Alleyn and based at Philip Henslowe’s Rose playhouse. The other was the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The two companies first appear together in Henslowe’s accounts, playing a short joint season at a playhouse in Newington Butts, south of the Thames, from June 3 to 13, 1594. After that, the Chamberlain’s Men moved to the Theatre in Shoreditch, the playhouse James Burbage had built in 1576.
For the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, these two companies dominated the London theater. The court records show the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as the company most often called to perform before the queen, with the Admiral’s Men as their only serious rival, and the Chamberlain’s Men seem to have played in London almost continuously from 1594 to 1603. Our guide to Shakespeare’s contemporaries introduces Alleyn and the other writers and actors of the rival houses.
Why the Company Needed a Patron
The Lord Chamberlain was one of the senior officers of the royal household, and among his duties was the oversight of entertainments at court. Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, held the office from 1585 until his death in 1596. He was the queen’s cousin, the son of Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary, and a powerful figure on the Privy Council.
Actors needed a patron of this kind for a practical reason: the law. Under the Vagabonds Act of 1572, “common players of interludes” who were “not belonging to any baron of this realm, or to any other honourable person of greater degree” could be punished as vagabonds, whipped, and burned through the ear. A company that wore a nobleman’s livery and called itself his servants was protected. That is why the company’s earliest payment record describes Shakespeare and his fellows as “servants to the Lord Chamberlain,” and why the company changed its name when its patron changed.
A patron in Carey’s position could also shield the players from the London authorities, who distrusted the playhouses as sources of disorder and disease. What the name did not usually bring was money, a point the Closer Reading below takes up. Our guide to patronage and publication covers the other kind of patronage in Shakespeare’s career, the dedications of his poems.
Shakespeare’s First Appearance in the Company’s Records
Shakespeare’s name first appears in connection with the company in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, which record a payment on March 15, 1595, to “William Kempe, William Shakespeare, and Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain.” The money was for two plays performed before the queen at Greenwich Palace the previous Christmas, on St. Stephen’s Day and Innocents’ Day, December 26 and 28, 1594. The company received £20, a flat rate of £10 a play.
The document does not name the plays, and it says nothing about Shakespeare as a writer. But it shows that within months of the company’s formation he was one of its leaders, trusted to receive a royal payment alongside its star clown and its leading tragedian. Payees of this kind were senior members, and most scholars take the record as evidence that he was already a sharer. Before this, his London career is known mainly from Robert Greene’s 1592 attack on the “upstart crow” and his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. The years before that are the lost years.
How the Company Was Organized
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men was a partnership of actors. At its center were the sharers, a small group of senior players, probably eight at the start, who owned the company jointly. They bought its plays, costumes, and properties, paid its fees and wages, and divided whatever was left after each performance. When a play succeeded, they profited together; when plague closed the playhouses, they lost together.
Around the sharers worked hired men, paid wages to play minor parts, provide music, and run the backstage work, and a handful of boy players, some of them apprentices to the adult actors, who played the women’s roles. From 1599 there was a further layer of ownership: the housekeepers, who owned the playhouse itself and took a share of the takings from its galleries.
Shakespeare held both kinds of stake. He was a sharer in the company and, from 1599, a housekeeper of the Globe. Few playwrights of his time had either. Most sold their scripts to a company for a fee and had no further interest in them; Shakespeare, as far as the records show, wrote only for his own company from 1594 onward and shared in the takings whenever his plays were performed. The income is the likeliest explanation for how a playwright could buy New Place, one of the largest houses in Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1597.
The Actors
Shakespeare wrote for a group of actors he knew well, and several of them can be traced in the plays themselves.
Richard Burbage
The son of James Burbage, Richard was the company’s leading tragedian and one of the most celebrated actors of the age. He was the first Hamlet, and an anonymous elegy written after his death in March 1619 mourns the great roles that died with him: “No more young Hamlet, old Hieronimo, / Kind Lear, the grieved Moor.” Hieronimo is the hero of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy; the other three are Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello.
Will Kemp
Kemp was the company’s clown, one of the most famous comic performers of the 1590s, and his name survives by accident in the early printed texts. In the 1599 quarto of Romeo and Juliet, a stage direction reads “Enter Will Kemp” where the servant Peter should enter. In the 1600 quarto of Much Ado About Nothing, some of Dogberry’s and Verges’s speeches are headed “Kemp” and “Cowley,” the names of the actors who played them. Kemp is also widely thought to have been the first Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He left the company in 1599, for reasons that are not recorded, and in early 1600 he danced a morris from London to Norwich, a stunt he celebrated in a pamphlet, Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder. When Hamlet warns the players, “let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,” many readers hear a glance at Kemp’s habit of improvising, though that is interpretation.
Robert Armin
Kemp’s replacement was a different kind of comedian: a writer of ballads and comic pamphlets and a wit rather than a knockabout clown. Armin is generally credited with the “licensed fools” of the plays that followed, including Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear, and probably Touchstone in As You Like It. The change in Shakespeare’s comic writing around 1600 is often traced to him. Our guide to the role of the fool follows that change.
Heminges, Condell, and the Others
John Heminges handled much of the company’s business, and he and Henry Condell stayed with it for decades. In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the two of them collected his plays in the First Folio, without which about half of them might have been lost. Other early members included Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, Richard Cowley, and William Sly.
Shakespeare as an Actor
Shakespeare acted as well as wrote. When Ben Jonson printed his collected works in 1616, he listed the original casts of two of his plays, and Shakespeare’s name appears among the “principal comedians” of Every Man in His Humour, first acted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598, and among the “principal tragedians” of Sejanus in 1603. The First Folio puts his name first in its list of the principal actors in his plays. Which parts he played in his own plays is not recorded. A later theatrical tradition says he played the Ghost in Hamlet and old Adam in As You Like It, but no contemporary document confirms either.
Lord Hunsdon’s Men: A Change of Patron
Henry Carey died on July 23, 1596. His son George Carey, the 2nd Lord Hunsdon, took over the company, but not the office: the post of Lord Chamberlain went instead to William Brooke, Lord Cobham. For several months the players were therefore Lord Hunsdon’s Men. Cobham died in March 1597, George Carey was appointed Lord Chamberlain that spring, and the company took back its old name.
The interval left a mark on a title page. The first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, printed in 1597, says the play had been acted “by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Servants.” The second quarto of 1599 credits “the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants.” The change of wording has helped scholars date the performances the first quarto describes.
The same summer was a hard one for Shakespeare personally. His son, Hamnet, was buried in Stratford on August 11, 1596. Our article on Hamnet Shakespeare tells what the records show.
From the Theatre to the Globe
The company’s greatest crisis was a problem of property. The lease on the land under the Theatre was due to expire in 1597, and its landlord, Giles Allen, would not renew it on acceptable terms. James Burbage prepared an alternative. In February 1596 he bought a set of rooms in Blackfriars, a wealthy district on the site of a former monastery, for £600, and converted them into an indoor playhouse for the company.
The plan failed. In November 1596 the inhabitants of Blackfriars petitioned the Privy Council to stop Burbage from opening a “common playhouse” among them, and the Council agreed. Burbage died in February 1597, the Theatre lease ran out, and the company moved to the nearby Curtain.
The solution came at the end of 1598. On the night of December 28, according to the landlord’s later lawsuit, James Burbage’s sons Richard and Cuthbert, the carpenter Peter Street, and a team of workmen pulled down the Theatre and carried its timbers to Bankside, south of the Thames, where they used them to build the Globe. The lease for the new site, signed on February 21, 1599, and backdated to Christmas 1598, divided the property in two. The Burbage brothers held one half. The other half was shared by five senior actors: Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and Will Kemp. Shakespeare’s initial stake was therefore one-tenth of the playhouse.
The Globe was open by the autumn. On September 21, 1599, a Swiss visitor, Thomas Platter, crossed the river and saw “the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar” in a playhouse with a thatched roof. It was almost certainly the Globe, and the play was probably Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, though the Rose, nearby, also had a thatched roof and had staged plays about Caesar of its own.
The Plays Shakespeare Wrote for the Company
The Lord Chamberlain’s years, from 1594 to 1603, were among the most productive of Shakespeare’s career. The plays first staged in that decade include, in their approximate order of writing, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, the two parts of Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Henry V, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. Many of the exact dates are uncertain, and our guide to all of Shakespeare’s plays gives the usual estimates.
The company did not perform Shakespeare alone. It staged plays by other writers too, among them Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour in 1598 and Every Man out of His Humour in 1599. But Shakespeare was its principal playwright, and the plays show how closely he wrote for the people who would perform them: the broad clowns of the mid-1590s belong to Kemp, the wise and melancholy fools after 1600 to Armin, and the great tragic parts to Burbage.
Richard II and the Essex Rebellion
The company came close to real danger in February 1601. A group of supporters of the Earl of Essex, including Sir Charles Percy, Sir Josceline Percy, and Lord Monteagle, asked the players to perform “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second” at the Globe on Saturday, February 7, and promised them 40 shillings more than their usual fee. The next day, Essex led his followers into the streets of London in a rising against the queen’s councilors that was over almost as soon as it began.
The play was almost certainly Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which a king is forced to give up his crown, though at least one historian has argued that it was a different play on the same subject. The Privy Council questioned Augustine Phillips on February 18, 1601. He told them that the players had wanted to perform something else, holding the play to be “so old and so long out of use” that few people would come to see it, and had agreed only after the extra money was offered.
The explanation seems to have satisfied the authorities. The company was not punished, and on February 24, 1601, it performed for the queen at Whitehall, the night before Essex was executed.
From the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men
Elizabeth I died in March 1603, and her successor, James VI of Scotland, took the company under his own patronage almost at once. Royal letters patent dated May 19, 1603, licensed “these our servants” to perform, naming nine of them in this order: Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, and Richard Cowley, “and the rest of their associates.” From then on they were the King’s Men.
The new status was more than a name. The nine men named in the patent became Grooms of the Chamber, and in March 1604 each of them was issued four and a half yards of red cloth for the king’s procession through London. In August 1604, twelve members of the company attended the Spanish ambassador at Somerset House, where the Spanish delegation was lodged to conclude the peace treaty with England. Court performances became far more frequent than they had been under Elizabeth.
In 1608 the company at last took over the Blackfriars playhouse that James Burbage had bought twelve years earlier, and Shakespeare was one of its seven shareholders. From about 1609 the King’s Men played at Blackfriars in winter and at the Globe in summer, and the company continued until the London theaters were closed in 1642. Our article on Shakespeare’s later life and death follows his last years with the company.
A Closer Reading: “Not Belonging to Any Baron”
The company’s name makes it sound like a nobleman’s household troupe, as if the actors were Lord Hunsdon’s employees. The records point almost the other way. The patron’s name kept the players within the law, but what kept them in business was something they built for themselves: ownership.
The pattern was set long before 1594. In January 1572, James Burbage wrote on behalf of the Earl of Leicester’s players, asking the earl to make them his household servants so that they could come and go without restriction. In the same letter they told him they expected no “further stipend or benefit” from him. They wanted his protection, not his money, and they meant to run their own business under his name. The Vagabonds Act passed later that year made the arrangement a necessity for any company that wanted to perform without fear of arrest.
The Lord Chamberlain’s Men learned how little a patron’s name could do when their future was at stake. The Blackfriars petition of November 1596, which kept them out of the playhouse James Burbage had bought for them, survives in a later copy with a list of the residents who signed it. Among the signatures is that of George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, who had just become the company’s patron. Why he signed is not recorded. But the man whose name the players wore helped to block their new theater.
The company’s answer was not to appeal to a lord but to become owners. The Burbages took apart their own building and carried it across the river, and the lease for the Globe put half of the new playhouse into the hands of the actors themselves. Shakespeare’s wealth came from the same source: his shares in the company and in the Globe, not a nobleman’s purse.
That ownership explains a great deal about the plays. Because the sharers stayed together, Shakespeare could write for the same actors for nearly twenty years, shaping Hamlet for Burbage and Feste for Armin. And because the company owned its scripts, two of its sharers, Heminges and Condell, were in a position to gather them into the First Folio after his death. The patron gave the company its name, but the sharers made it last. Our guide to the quarto and folio editions explains how those scripts reached print.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, answered briefly.
What Was the Lord Chamberlain’s Men?
A London acting company formed in 1594, owned jointly by its leading actors. Shakespeare was one of them, and he wrote most of his plays for it. It became the King’s Men in 1603.
Why Was It Called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men?
Because its patron, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, was the Lord Chamberlain, the court officer in charge of royal entertainments. Players needed a noble patron to avoid being treated as vagabonds under the law, and companies were named after their patrons.
Who Were the Members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men?
The best known are William Shakespeare, the tragedian Richard Burbage, the clowns Will Kemp and Robert Armin, and John Heminges and Henry Condell, who later compiled the First Folio. Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, George Bryan, Richard Cowley, and William Sly were also members.
When Did the Lord Chamberlain’s Men Become the King’s Men?
In May 1603, shortly after James I came to the throne. Letters patent dated May 19, 1603, placed the company under the king’s patronage and named Shakespeare second among its nine leading members.
Did Shakespeare Own Part of the Globe?
Yes. Under the lease signed in February 1599, the Burbage brothers held half of the Globe and five actors, Shakespeare among them, shared the other half, which gave him a one-tenth stake at the start.
Explore His Life
Three articles about the working world Shakespeare shared with his company.