Stephen Hammerton

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Stephen Hammerton (flourished 1632 – 1642) was a boy player or child actor in English Renaissance theatre, one of the young performers who specialized in female roles in the period before women appeared on the stage. His case is interesting for the light it throws on the conditions of boy actors in this era.

Stephen Hammerton was the son of a Richard Hammerton of Hellfield, Yorkshire. In his youth he was apprenticed to a London merchant tailor, William Waverly, of the Strand. At the time, veteran actors Richard Gunnell and William Blagrave, founders of the Salisbury Court Theatre, were struggling to form a new company of child actors, similar to the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's of thirty years before.^[1] Those troupes, famous in their own time, had been highly effective at training young actors and funnelling them into the adult companies that needed their talent; but the troupes of boy players had been defunct for nearly fifteen years when Blagrave and Gunnell started their Children of the Revels troupe in 1629.

Blagrave had encountered the young Hammerton and decided that the Children of the Revels needed him. Blagrave purchased the remaining nine years of Hammerton's apprenticeship contract from Waverly, and the boy joined the dramatic profession (1629). This was not a unique transaction; there are other instances on record in which actors and theatre managers effectively bought the services of boys for their troupes.^[2]

Unfortunately, the new boys' company failed to attain success, because of a long closure of the theatres due to bubonic plague at the time. According to one report, the boys were left without adequate food and clothing, and one of the fourteen died of neglect. Hammerton faired better, though; sometime in 1632 he jumped to, or was recruited into, the King's Men, the most successful troupe of actors of the day. In November of 1632 Christopher Beeston, the theatre impressario who ran the Cockpit and Red Bull theatres and their associated troupes of actors, petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to recover Stephen Hammerton for his own theatrical enterprise. Beeston's claim on Hammerton's services is unclear, and may have had no legitimacy;^[3] it certainly was unsuccessful, since Hammerton acted with the King's Men for the next ten years, till the theatres were closed in August 1642 at the start of the English Civil War.

Hammerton started out by playing female roles, as would be expected; in 1632 he played Oriana, the heroine in John Fletcher's The Wild Goose Chase. In 1633, when William Prynne published Histrio-mastix, the Players' Scourge, his famous attack on the theatre and the players, he singled out Hammerton as "a most noted and beautiful woman-actor." Hammerton went on to play roles in Sir John Suckling's The Goblins, Thomas Killigrew's The Parson's Wedding, and James Shirley's The Doubtful Heir. Eventually, Hammerton graduated to yound male leads, like Amyntor in the Beaumont and Fletcher play The Maid's Tragedy.^[4] He acquired a reputation as a sort of seventeenth-century matinee idol, especially favored by the young women in the audience.

Hammerton was made a Groom of the Chamber on January 22, 1641, along with five other King's Men. After the theatres closed in 1642, Hammerton's fortunes, like those of the other King's Men, were eclipsed and obscured. He was one of the ten King's Men who signed the dedication to the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio in 1647.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Peter Thomson et al., eds., The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004; Vol. 1, p. 149.
2. ^ Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, Champaigne, University of Illinois Press, 1999; p. 184.
3. ^ Beeston was at the time the main theatrical rival of Gunnell and Blagrave at the Salisbury Court Theatre; in the mid-1630s the two sides would engage in a complex tug-of-war over the services of playwright Brome. See: Richard Brome.
4. ^ Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company 1594-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004; p. 229.