In the later Medieval and early Renaissance periods, wealthy and powerful English noble houses sometimes maintained a troupe of half a dozen "players", just as noblemen kept jesters or jugglers for entertainment.
Henry VII kept a company of players called the "Lusores Regis", which probably consisted of four men and a boy who were used to swift costume changes and multiple roles.
In time the practice took on a professional aspect and companies of child actors would play an important role in the development of drama through the Elizabethan era and into the Jacobean and Caroline periods that followed.
To a modern sensibility, this may sound quaint and odd; but when "a doublet and hose of seawater green satin cost £3",[8] the monetary value of Phillips' items was not negligible.
As an example, the King's Men bought discarded items of Gondomar's wardrobe for the actor playing the Black Knight in A Game at Chess.
[9] Often, "eminent lords and knights at their decease" would leave articles of their finery to their servants – much of it "unseemly" for servingmen and women to wear.
After 1623, companies circumvented the Lenten restriction through the simple expedient of paying bribes to Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels.
Through much of the English Renaissance period, the theatres were shut down when the death figures in the plague bill (the weekly mortality report for London and some suburban parishes) rose above a certain level.
The prevailing legal system in England[13] defined "masterless men" who traveled about the country as vagabonds, and subjected them to treatments of varying harshness.
In some cases, more so toward the end of the period, noble patronage was nothing more than that legal fig leaf; a company of actors was an independent entity, financially and otherwise.
The company had a small number of partners or shareholders, who pooled their funds to pay expenses and in turn shared the profits, in what was largely a de facto democratic way (at least for the sharers, if not for the hired men and apprentices they employed).
Their main rivals, the Admiral's Men, suffered in contrast under a less ideal version of capitalist organization: Philip Henslowe functioned more like a blend of big-business autocrat, landlord, and loan shark.
He managed multiple companies of actors and built and owned several theatres, and controlled players (sharers included) and playwrights by doling out payments and loans.
(The silver lining in this cloud is that Henslowe's surviving financial records provide a wealth of detailed knowledge about the theatre conditions in his era that is unparalleled by any other source.)
Drama in the age of Elizabeth was at best an organized disorder; suppression of individual companies, and even the profession as a whole, for political reasons was not unknown.
Individual companies of actors struggled and failed and recombined; tracking the changes has been the obsession of scholars and the bane of students.
Theatres proliferated, especially (though not exclusively) in neighborhoods outside the city's walls and the Corporation's control – in Shoreditch to the north, or the Bankside and Paris Garden in Southwark, on the southern bank of the River Thames: the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Fortune, the Globe, the Blackfrairs – a famous roster.
King James, "VI and I", was passionately fond of drama; and theatrical activity at Court accelerated from the start of his reign.