nothing. The adoption of the name of Children of the Queen's Revels should perhaps be taken as indicating that, as the boy-actors grew older, the original connexion with the Chapel became looser. The use of Giles's commission as a method of obtaining recruits was probably abandoned, and there is no evidence that he had any further personal association with the theatre.[1] The commission itself was, however, renewed on 13 September 1604, with a new provision for the further education of boys whose voices had changed;[2] and in December Giles was successful in getting the board-wages allowed for his charges raised from 6d. to 10d. a day.[3]
The Revels children started gaily on the new phase of their career, and the Hamlet allusion is echoed in Middleton's advice to a gallant, 'if his humour so serve him, to call in at the Blackfriars, where he should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man'.[4] They were at Court on 21 February 1604 and on 1 and 3 January 1605. Their payees were Kirkham for the first year and Evans and Daniel for the second. Evidently Daniel was taking a more active part in the management than that of a mere licenser. Their play of 1 January 1605 was Chapman's All Fools (1605), and to 1603-5 may also be assigned his Monsieur d'Olive (1606), and possibly his Bussy d'Ambois (1607), and Day's Law Tricks (1608). I venture to conjecture that the boys' companies were much more under the influence of their poets than were their adult rivals; it is noteworthy that plays written for them got published much more rapidly than the King's or Prince's men ever permitted.[5] And it is known that one poet, who now began for the first time to work for the Blackfriars, acquired a financial interest in the undertaking. This was John Marston, to whom Evans parted, at an unspecified date, with a third of the moiety which the arrangement of 1602 had left on his hands.[6] Marston's earliest contributions were probably The Malcontent (1604) and The Dutch Courtesan (1605). From
- ↑ Wallace, ii. 80, mentions a case of the employment of a boy at the Blackfriars during James's reign under a contract with his mother.
- ↑ M. S. C. i. 359. On 7 Oct. 1605 the Wardrobe provided holland for shirts for the 12 children and 'for James Cutler, a Chappell boy gone off' (Lafontaine, 46, from L. C. 804).
- ↑ Rimbault, 60; Stowe, Annales (ed. Howes), 1037. An order of 17 July 1604 (H. O. 301) continued the allowance of an increase of meat at festival times which the children had presumably enjoyed under Elizabeth.
- ↑ Middleton, Father Hubbard's Tales (Works, viii. 64, 77). A reference in the same book to an ant as 'this small actor in less than decimo sexto' recalls the jest in the Induction to the Malcontent at the boys who played Jeronimo 'in decimo sexto'.
- ↑ Cf. ch. xi.
- ↑ K. v. B. 340.
