rabulosum, et omnimodis camificiis, latrociniis et lenociniis refertum . . . qua in re dicunt quod Wilsonus quidam Leycestrii comitis servus (fidibus pollens) multum vult et potest facere'.
BAYLYE. Paul's chorister, >1582.
BEART, RUDOLF. Germany, 1608.
BEESTON, CHRISTOPHER, has been conjectured to be the 'Kit' who played a Lord and a Captain in 2 Seven Deadly Sins for Strange's or the Admiral's about 1590-1. The actor-list of Every Man in his Humour shows that he belonged to the Chamberlain's men in 1598. He is not, however, named as a performer of Shakespeare's plays in the Folio of 1623. Probably he was at one time the hired man of Augustine Phillips who left him 30s. as his 'servant' in 1605. By 1602 he had passed to Worcester's men, and with this company, afterwards Queen Anne's, he remained until it was reconstituted on the Queen's death in 1619, taking a prominent part in the management of the company, after the death of Thomas Greene in 1612. He seems to have built or acquired the Cockpit theatre, and to have successively housed there Queen Anne's men (1617-19), Prince Charles's men (1619-22), Lady Elizabeth's men (1622-5), Queen Henrietta's men (1625-37), and 'the King's and Queen's young company', also known as 'Beeston's boys' (1637). By 1639 he had been succeeded as 'Governor' of this company by his son William Beeston, and was doubtless dead. The Cockpit had passed by June 1639 to 'Mrs. Elizabeth Beeston, alias Hutcheson'.[1] It appears from the lawsuit of 1623, in which Queen Anne's men were concerned, that Christopher Beeston also bore the alias of Hutcheson or Hutchinson. But if Elizabeth was his widow, she must have been a second wife, for the records of the Middlesex justices for 1615-17 record several true bills for recusancy as brought against a wife Jane. In these records Beeston, whose alias is also given, is described as a gentleman or yeoman, and as 'late of St. James-at-Clerkenwell', or in one case 'of Turmil streete'. In 1617 his house was burgled by Henry Baldwin and others.[2] The registers of St. James's, Clerkenwell, record the baptism of a daughter Anne on 15 September 1611, and the burial of a servant on 1 July 1615.[3] But at an earlier date Beeston lived in St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, where his sons Augustine, Christopher, and Robert were baptized, and the first two buried between 16 November 1604 and 15 July 1610. Robert also was buried there on 26 December 1615, but Christopher was then described in the register as of Clerkenwell. Possibly he afterwards returned to Shoreditch, as Collier states that his name is traceable in the register up to 1637.[4] His son William, also a suspected recusant, was living in Bishopsgate Without just before his death in 1682.[5] An earlier William Beeston, with whom Christopher may have had some connexion, is the 'Maister Apis Lapis' and 'Gentle M. William', to whom Nashe addressed his Strange Newes (1592).[6]
