Acting troop

In Renaissance London, playing company was the usual term for a company of actors. These companies were organized around a group of ten or so shareholders (or "sharers"), who performed in the plays but were also responsible for management. The sharers employed "hired men" – that is, the minor actors and the workers behind the scenes. The major companies were based at specific theatres in London; the most successful of them, William Shakespeare's company the King's Men, had the open-air Globe Theatre for summer seasons and the enclosed Blackfriars Theatre in the winters. The Admiral's Men occupied the Rose Theatre in the 1590s, and the Fortune Theatre in the early 17th century.

Less fortunate companies spent most of their existences touring the provinces; when Worcester's Men gained official permission to perform in London in 1602, they were, in a manner of speaking, "coming in from the cold" of a life of constant touring.

The development of theatre in England in the 16th and 17th centuries was not an isolated phenomenon; similar developments occurred simultaneously in other European countries, to greater or lesser degrees. The same broad factors influenced English actors as those that affected actors in neighboring countries, especially Scotland, France, Denmark, and states in northern Germany like Saxony and the Rhineland Palatinate. Yet conditions in other societies also differed significantly from those in England; the following discussion applies specifically to England in the 16th century and 17th century.

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. English theatre benefited greatly from the predilection for theatricality displayed by the Tudors. 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 the early period the difference between players, acrobats and other entertainers was not hard and fast. A troupe of players, however, was more costly to keep than a jester; players (who usually had other household duties as well) could defray expenses by touring to various cities and performing for profit – a practice that began the evolution away from the medieval model of noble patronage and toward the commercial and capitalistic model of modern entertainment. It is from the scattered records of such touring, and from occasional performances at the English Royal Court, that our very limited knowledge of English Renaissance theatre in the early and middle 16th century derives.

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