Читать книгу A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles - Sir Sidney Lee - Страница 38

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The patron’s functions in relation to the companies seem to have been mainly confined to the grant or renewal of the actors’ licenses. Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each company’s history. But there seems no doubt that the most influential of the companies named—that under the nominal patronage of the Earl of Leicester—passed on his death in September 1588 to the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on September 25, 1592. When the Earl of Derby died on April 16, 1594, his place as patron and licenser was successively filled by Henry Carey, first lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain (d. July 23, 1596), and by his son and heir, George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became Lord Chamberlain in March 1597. After King James’s succession in May 1603 the company was promoted to be the King’s players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it fully maintained the supremacy which, under its successive titles, it had already long enjoyed.