Robert Browne (died October 1603) was an English actor of the Elizabethan era, and the owner and manager of the Boar's Head Theatre.
Early twentieth-century scholars, like E. K. Chambers[1] and Edwin Nunzeger,[2] assumed that these records referred to a single individual.
Later scholars, principally Charles Jasper Sisson[3][4] and Herbert Berry,[5] argued persuasively that two separate individuals had been confused and conflated into one.
The career of the "other" Robert Browne extended through the first two decades of the seventeenth century; he can sensibly be called a Jacobean actor.
"[10] It is not impossible that there was a family relationship between the two Brownes, since familial connections were common among actors and theatre people in the era: consider John and Lawrence Dutton[11] in Queen Elizabeth's Men, Anthony and Humphrey Jeffes[12] in the Admiral's Men a generation later, plus Robert Pallant father and son (apparently),[13] and other such pairs.