John and Laurence Dutton, Leaders of the Queen’s Men

Abstract

Relatively little-discussed today, the brothers John andLaurence Dutton were significant figures in the Elizabethan theatrical world.1 From the early 1570s to the early 1590s, in several categories of records, they are visible, obtaining funding, recruiting actors, commissioning plays, negotiating the right to perform, and accepting payments. They are recorded at court and touring the regions, and between around 1588 and 1593 they were coleaders of the Queen’s Men, the most significant theater company of its era.2 They were, as it appears, in charge of that company when it produced many of the best-known of its nine surviving plays. And if, as is widely thought, Shakespeare was involved with the Queen’s Men in some way in his early career, then he would have had to work with the Duttons.3 This essay, first, outlines the career of the theater Duttons, arguing that they were pivotal creative figures both before and during their time in the Queen’s Men—in the period, that is, to use its currently contested name, “before Shakespeare.” Next, it reviews and reinforces the case, most recently made by the scholar Richard Dutton, that the theater Duttons had some claim to gentry status and that we might expect to find their origins somewhere on the fringes of the Duttons of Dutton, a significant family of Cheshire landowners.4 Third, it presents information about a John and Laurence Dutton from Cheshire who are recorded in several contemporary documents—most important, Laurence’s submission to the 1623 Heralds’ Visitation of Gloucestershire—and it attempts to identify them with John and Laurence Dutton, theater-makers. Finally, it argues that if the players are these particular Cheshire Duttons, then their apparent retirement around 1593 becomes more intelligible; and that even if they remain merely unidentifiable Cheshire Duttons, their local affiliation is still useful leverage for discussing both their career and the career of the Dutton-era Queen’s Men.

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