Nicholas Tooley

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Nicholas Tooley (c. 1575 – June 1623) was a Renaissance actor in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and King's Men, the acting companies for which Shakespeare wrote.

Tooley's birth name was Wilkinson; he has been associated with the "Nick" in the surviving "plot" of The Seven Deadly Sins (perhaps by Richard Tarlton), usually dated ca. 1591. The association, if accurate, strengthens the belief that he began as a boy player. He was apprenticed to Richard Burbage, and may have followed that actor to the Lord Chamberlain's Men when that company re-formed in 1594. In his record of the joke about Shakespeare and Burbage, John Manningham reports that he heard the joke from a man named Tooley or Towley.

Tooley is mentioned in a letter of Joan Alleyn, Edward Alleyn's wife, in 1603, and he received a 20-shilling bequest in Augustine Phillips' 1605 will. He became a sharer in the King's Men in 1605, replacing the short-lived Samuel Crosse. He witnessed Richard Burbage's will in 1619.

It is difficult to generalize about Tooley's roles for the company. He appears in speech prefixes in the folio The Taming of the Shrew, and in the cast lists for Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (1610), Sejanus (the 1610 revival), and Catiline (1611); and also in those for numerous plays by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, among them Bonduca (ca. 1613), The Queen of Corinth, Women Pleased, The Custom of the Country, and Sir John van Olden Barnavelt. In the last of these he seems to have played a woman's role. In the revival of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi staged shortly before his death, he played non-speaking roles as Forobosco and a madman.

In his will of June 3, 1623, Tooley names Henry Condell and Cuthbert Burbage as his executors and residuary legatees. The bequests in Tooley's will are interesting for the light they throw on the actors of the King's Men, and the close relationship Tooley shared with the Burbage family. Those bequests include:

£10 to Cuthbert Burbage's wife, in whose house in St. Giles, Cripplegate he lodged at the time of his death;
£10 to her daughter;
another £10 to Alice Walker, a sister of Richard and Cuthbert Burbage;
£29 13s. to Richard Burbage's daughter Sara, an amount owed to Tooley by fellow King's Man Richard Robinson;
£5 to Henry Condell's wife;
another £10 to their daughter; and
£10 to fellow King's Man Joseph Taylor.

Tooley forgives the debts owed to him by William Ecclestone and John Underwood, two more members of the King's Men company. He was buried at St. Giles Church, Cripplegate, on June 5, 1623.