"[3] This was a standard part of the King's Men's style of theatre; in the previous generation of Shakespeare and Burbage, hired man John Sinkler played thin-man roles like Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Shadow in Henry IV, Part 2.
Shank is known to have played at least one female role himself in these years, the minor part of the servant Petella in the company's 1632 revival of Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase.
This suggests that Shank taught boys and young men to play stage females based at least in part on his own experience.
With the passage of time, a majority of those shares passed to the widows and heirs of the original actors; younger members of the company were left out of the profitable system.
In 1635, Eliard Swanston, Robert Benfield, and Thomas Pollard, three actors in the King's Men who were sharers in the company but not "householders" or shareholders in the theatres, petitioned the Lord Chamberlain – then Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke – for the right to purchase shares in the theatres.
Shank complained that he and the three actors could not reach acceptable terms for a sale, and that they prevented him from performing with the company.
In an April 2000 production at the Albery Theatre, Shank was played by Michael Gambon in Nicholas Wright's comedy Cressida.