The first evidence of his career comes in 1626, when he played Cardona, a woman's role, in James Shirley's The Wedding with Queen Henrietta's Men.
Read appears to have spent the early 1630s with the King's Revels Men, but returned to the Queen Henrietta's company after the bubonic plague epidemic of 1636–37, when personnel of the two troupes combined.
Performances in English Renaissance theatre, even tragedies, ended with a clown dancing a jig, and Read was one of a long line of comics, reaching from Richard Tarlton through John Shank, who earned a large and welcoming audience through this practice.
The pamphlet presents the two leading comic actors of the day, Andrew Cane and Timothy Read, in a dialogue about the difficulties of the clowning life.
[3] The Puritan authorities of London closed the theatres in 1642, at the start of the English Civil War; but the actors continued to perform, when and where they could.