George Jolly

George Jolly, or Joliffe (in Germany, Joris Joliphus or Jollifous) (fl. 1640 – 1673) was an actor, an early actor-manager and a theatre impresario of the middle seventeenth century. He was "an experienced, courageous, and obstinate actor-manager" who proved a persistent rival for the main theatrical figures of Restoration theatre, Sir William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew.

Nothing is known of Jolly's early life. He began his acting career c. 1640, at the crisis point of Caroline era theatre and society, when the English Civil War was about to start. The Puritan authorities suppressed the London theatres in September 1642; Jolly, like most actors, playwrights, and poets, was a royalist supporter, and served Prince Charles, then Prince of Wales, in Paris until 1646. Jolly eventually organised a company of fourteen actors, his English Comedian Players, and led them around Europe from 1648 to 1659. They began in Germany, and were in Poland and Sweden in 1649 and 1650. They regularly performed in Vienna and Frankfurt, and may have performed before the future King Charles II in Frankfurt in September 1655. The company came to include German as well as English actors over time, and apparently adapted its personnel to the countries in which it operated. Jolly also brought woman actors onto the stage in Germany in 1654, anticipating the greatest innovation of the Restoration theatre in England by several years. At Krachbein in Germany, Jolly used a tennis court as a theatre, another technique that would be followed later in London, at Lisle's Tennis Court and Gibbon's Tennis Court.

With the end of the Interregnum period and the return of Charles to the throne, the London theatres re-opened; in August 1660 Killigrew and Davenant received a patent to establish two theatre companies under royal patronage, the King's Company and the Duke's Company respectively – their famous "duopoly." Jolly had set up his own acting troupe by November 1660; on 24 December 1660, Jolly obtained his own patent from the King to run a company and theatre. Jolly's 1660 company was apparently made up mostly of personnel from William Beeston's last effort, and acted at first at the Cockpit Theatre. By March 1661 they were at the old Red Bull Theatre, where Samuel Pepys saw them perform William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust. They were working in the Salisbury Court Theatre by September of that year. Soon, though, they were back at the Cockpit; Jolly's company appears to have worked in whatever theatre was available to them. Their repertory probably included Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; Pepys and his wife saw a performance of that play at the Red Bull on 26 May 1662, though he found it "so wretchedly done that we were sick of it." (The 1663 edition of Faustus may reflect the version of the play that Jolly staged.)

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