all three
were members of the company that originally owned the play, and that
this was the Queen's company is generally conceded by critics.

In order to restore their own acting strength the depleted Queen's
company appears now to have formed similar affiliations with the Earl of
Sussex's company, continuing the connection until 1594. In this year
Strange's men (now the Lord Chamberlain's men) returned to Burbage while
the Admiral's portion of the combination stayed with Henslowe as the
Lord Admiral's company. These two companies now restored their full
numbers by taking on men from the Earl of Pembroke's and the Earl of
Sussex's companies; both of which now cease to work as independent
companies, though the portion of Pembroke's men that returned to
Henslowe, including Spencer and Jeffes, appear to have retained their
own licensed identity until 1597, when several of them definitely joined
Henslowe as Admiral men. Some Pembroke's and Sussex's men, not taken by
Burbage or Henslowe in 1594, evidently joined the Queen's company at
that time. Henslowe financed his brother Francis Henslowe in the
purchase of a share in the Queen's company at about this time.]

[Footnote 12: _Queen Elizabeth and Her Times_, by Thomas Wright, 1838.]

[Footnote 13: Sir Sidney Lee, who as a rule follows Halliwell-Phillipps
implicitly, in _A Life of William Shakespeare_, p. 59, writes: "James
Burbage, in spite of pecuniary embarrassments, remained manager and
owner of the Theatre for twenty-one years"; but in a footnote on p. 52,
writes: "During 1584 an unnamed person, vaguely described as 'the owner
of the Theatre,' claimed that he was under Lord Hunsdon's protection;
the reference is probably to one John Hyde, to whom the Theatre was
mortgaged." There is surely nothing vague in the expression "owner of
the Theatre," especially when we remember that it was used by an
important legal functionary in one of his weekly reports to Lord
Treasurer Burghley. Recorder Fleetwood was a very exact and legal-minded
official, and in using the term "the owner" he undoubtedly meant the
owner and, it may be implied from the context, also the manager. Burbage
was clearly manager and owner of the Theatre at this period.]

[Footnote 14: This Browne was in all probability the notorious Ned
Browne of whom Robert Greene wrote in 1592, _The Blacke Bookes
Messenger_, "Laying open the life and death of Ned Browne one of the
worst cutpurses, crosbiters, and conycatc