Waits, musicians, bearwards and players: the inter-urban road travel and performances of itinerant entertainers in sixteenth and seventeenth century England

Abstract

By the reign of Elizabeth, a cosmopolite group of entertainers including musicians, town waits, actors, and those with ‘exotic’ animals were undertaking lengthy provincial tours to perform for audiences all over the country. Theatre historians have done much to recover details about England's Tudor and Stuart companies of travelling players. By contrast, historical geographers have paid little attention to the scope or character of the journeys undertaken by itinerant entertainers in the early modern period. Drawing partly on the work of theatre scholars, as well as on other published and unpublished evidence, this paper explores the travels of performers rewarded for playing before civic dignitaries in a sample of English towns and cities in the period between c.1525 and c.1640. The distances travelled, modes of transport employed, and frequencies of visits are discussed. In this context, the role and importance of royal and noble patrons in supporting groups of touring musicians, actors and bearwards, and the payments normally received for performances, are examined. By the later sixteenth century, a readiness by well-defined groups of entertainers to travel extensively by road throughout the realm reinforced links between communities located across the English regions. Moreover, while distinctive local entertainment traditions persisted in many places, the journeys of Elizabethan and Jacobean touring performers provided the means by which provincial audiences shared in the performance arts developed at Court and in the metropolis.