Robert Browne (Jacobean actor)

Robert Browne (1563 – c. 1622) was an English actor and theatre manager and investor of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was also part of a long-standing confusion in the scholarship of English Renaissance theatre.

The historical records of English Renaissance drama contain repeated mentions of "Robert Browne." Early scholars like E. K. Chambers and Edwin Nunzeger interpreted the records to indicate a single individual. Later scholars, principally Charles Jasper Sisson and Herbert Berry, demonstrated that two different men of the same name had been confused and conflated together.

The "other" Robert Browne died in 1603, and so can accurately be termed an Elizabethan actor. The Robert Browne who is the subject of this article had a career that extended through the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and in that sense can, as a differentiation, be called a Jacobean actor.

Born in 1563, Robert Browne's acting career began by the time he was twenty years old, when he was a member of Worcester's Men (1583). He was one of the English actors who performed on the Continent, especially in Germany, where English actors were especially favored. (Some names are known: Thomas Sackville, a clown; John Broadstreet, a "springer", accompanied by Richard Jones, a musician). Browne worked in Holland in 1590, and for Henry Julius, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Wolfenbüttel, in Frankfurt and Nuremberg in the 1592–94 period. He was in Germany again from 1601 through 1607, and once more in 1618–20. This does not mean Browne was consistently abroad during those years; rather he passed back and forth between England and the Continent.

Browne was in Frankfurt in September 1602, and in Augsburg later that year; he was in Nuremberg in February 1603. He was in Frankfurt again in 1606; he and other English actors were under the patronage of Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who had built for the 'Englische Komoedianten', in Kassel 1605, a roofed theatre, the oldest extant such building in Germany, although nowadays used as a wildlife museum; in 1606 and 1607. In 1618 he was with English players in Nuremberg in May, in Strassburg in June and July, and in Frankfurt in the autumn. He spent the winter of 1619–20 in Prague, at the court of Frederick and Elizabeth, King and Queen of Bohemia. He was back in Germany in early 1620.

...
Wikipedia