Richard Gunnell

Richard Gunnell (fl. 1613 – 1634) was an actor, playwright, and theatre manager in Jacobean and Caroline era London. He is best remembered for his role in the founding of the Salisbury Court Theatre.

Nothing is known of Gunnell's early life or the first phase of his stage career. He acted with the Admiral's Men, then called the Palsgrave's Men, from 1613 to 1622. When the Palsgrave's Men received their renewed charter and their new name on 4 January 1613, Gunnell was already a sharer in the company. Despite the scantiness of the documentary record for the Palsgrave's troupe, Gunnell can be seen moving up into a managerial responsibility over his years with the company. In the 1613 charter he is listed twelfth of the fourteen sharers. On the company's 1618 lease of the Fortune Playhouse from owner Edward Alleyn, Gunnell is fourth of ten. And when the company leased the rebuilt Fortune in 1622, Gunnell is listed first.

The fire that destroyed the Fortune on 9 December 1621 also wiped out the costumes and play manuscripts of the Palsgrave's Men. In the difficult period that followed, Gunnell appears to have left acting to concentrate of management. He also made a venture at writing plays. His comedy The Hungarian Lion appeared in 1623, and his The Way to Content All Women, or How a Man May Please His Wife followed in 1624. Neither of his plays has survived.

Gunnell partnered with William Blagrave, Sir Henry Herbert's assistant in the office of the Master of the Revels, to establish the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1629. The Salisbury Court was one of the so-called "private" theatres of the era, comparable to the Blackfriars or the Cockpit, as opposed to the "public" theatres like the Fortune or the Globe that catered to a broad audience. Since the private theatres were prestigious and lucrative – their minimum ticket price was five or six times higher than the public theatres' penny – the move from public to private made business sense, and Gunnell was not the first theatre manager to pursue this course. (Christopher Beeston, manager of the public Red Bull Theatre, built the private Cockpit in 1616–17.)

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