have been traveling in
the spring of 1601.]

[Footnote 328: Cf. Middleton's _Father Hubbard's Tales_, already
quoted, "a nest of boys." Possibly the idea was suggested by the fact
that the children were lodged and fed in the building.]

The passage ends with the question from Hamlet: "Do the boys carry it
away?" which gives Rosencrantz an opportunity to pun on the sign of
the Globe Playhouse: "Ay, that they do, my lord; Hercules and his
load, too."

Shortly after the great dramatist had penned these words, the
management of Blackfriars met with disaster. The cause, however, went
back to December 13, 1600, when Giles and Evans were gathering their
players. In their overweening confidence they made a stupid blunder in
"taking up" for their troupe the only son and heir of Henry Clifton, a
well-to-do gentleman of Norfolk, who had come to London for the
purpose of educating the boy. Clifton says in his complaint that
Giles, Evans, and their confederates, "well knowing that your
subject's said son had no manner of sight in song, nor skill in
music," on the 13th day of December, 1600, did "waylay the said Thomas
Clifton" as he was "walking quietly from your subject's said house
towards the said school," and "with great force and violence did seize
and surprise, and him with like force and violence did, to the great
terror and hurt of him, the said Thomas Clifton, haul, pull, drag, and
carry away to the said playhouse." As soon as the father learned of
this, he hurried to the playhouse and "made request to have his said
son released." But Giles and Evans "utterly and scornfully refused to
do" this. Whereupon Clifton threatened to complain to the Privy
Council. But Evans and Giles "in very scornful manner willed your said
subject to complain to whom he would." Clifton suggested that "it was
not fit that a gentleman of his sort should have his son and heir
(and that his only son) to be so basely used." Giles and Evans "most
arrogantly then and there answered that they had authority sufficient
so to take any nobleman's son in this land"; and further to irritate
the father, they immediately put into young Thomas's hand "a scroll of
paper, containing part of one of their said plays or interludes, and
him, the said Thomas Clifton, commanded to learn the same by heart,"
with the admonition that "if he did not obey the said Evans, he should
be surely whipped."[329]

[Footnote 329: The full complaint is printed by Fleay, _op. cit._