Shakespeare on Tour

Besides performing six times a week at their main playhouse, Shakespeare’s company was often invited to give special evening shows of the newer plays in the repertory.

The company regularly entertained the nobility in their London residences, although we know the details of only one performance in the city. This was of the newly-written Richard II at Sir Thomas Hoby’s house on the Strand in December 1595. The event was in honour of Sir Robert Cecil, soon to replace his father Lord Burleigh as Elizabeth’s chief minister.

Shakespeare’s company also left London periodically and toured the provinces. In 1594, for instance, the new company performed in Marlborough. In the following year they visited first Ipswich and then Cambridge, where they played in the town because the University banned all professional companies. At the beginning of August 1596 we know they went to Faversham in Kent, and, at a similar time next year, Rye and Dover. In the same summer they travelled west to Marlborough and on to Bath and Bristol.

The main incentive for such tours was not to perform in market towns (although these performances are far better documented) but at great houses while the Court was out of the city. Exiled from the pleasures of London and reluctantly trapped on their estates through the summer, the English aristocracy wanted entertainment at their country houses.

One such invitation certainly came from the newly elevated Lord Harrington of Exton, who summoned them to perform Titus Andronicus as part of the celebrations at his new estate in Rutland, on 1 January 1596. They must have been moved by a strong sense of obligation because the 100 miles up the Great North Road from London to Rutland was a three or four-day trek in each direction. Moreover, they had to squeeze both the journey and the play into the eight days that lay between the performances they were scheduled to give at Court. Summer tours were easier.

During the five unstable years that followed – from the time they lost the Theatre in Shoreditch in April 1597 until 1602 – the Chamberlain’s Men seem not to have gone on tour at all. They were doubtless struggling to build the Globe and to establish the new playhouse as a major London venue. In 1602 they went to Ipswich and Shrewsbury, and almost certainly to Shropshire on an invitation from Edward Herbert, the new Earl of Pembroke, who may have been the ‘lord of my love’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The company was responding to old ties. In 1592-3 Shakespeare had acted with Burbage and others in an old company patronised by Herbert’s father, the second Earl.

This pattern of going north in the summer continued. In 1603, during a lengthy closure of the London playhouses owing to an outbreak of the plague, the company, now the King’s Men, made quick visits to Coventry, Bridgnorth in Shropshire, Oxford and Bath. In December 1603, during the same epidemic, they were gathered at Mortlake, safely out of London, where the actor Augustine Phillips had just bought a new house. On 3 December, the company was summoned to Wilton House to perform as part of the Earl of Pembroke’s entertainments in honour of the new king.

During lean times, such summonses were a welcome source of extra income for Shakespeare’s company.

Andrew Gurr is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading and former Director of Research at Shakespeare’s Globe.

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