Sussex's Men in 1594: The Evidence of Titus Andronicus and The Jew of Malta

Abstract

In 1594, as stability was about to return to the London stage after several years of disruption, a company under the patronage of the fifth Earl of Sussex played two brief engagements at Philip Henslowe's theatre, the Rose. Historians of the Elizabethan stage have had little to say about Sussex's men, for although the company appears fairly regularly in performance records of the 1590s, and although Henslowe's Diary lists their day-by-day repertory for a few weeks in 1594, their plays do not seem to have formed an important part of the Elizabethan drama (only George a Greene survives as a piece attributable solely to Sussex's men), and their personnel do not seem to have aroused sufficient interest to leave any record of an actor's name after 1576. Yet there may be a story to tell about Sussex's men after all. If we look closely at their repertory of 1594, keeping in mind the affairs of other companies at this time, we can see that the Sussex company may have briefly included some of the most important figures of the Elizabethan theatre.