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Email required Address never made public. Condell's early life is obscure. It appears that he may have been born in in East Anglia , as his will mentions family in New Buckenham. Traditionally, he is associated with the "Harry" who appears in the cast list for Richard Tarlton 's "The Seven Deadly Sins" , but this identification is little more than conjecture.
If the connection is true, then Condell was an actor as early as , acting in Lord Strange's Men alongside Heminges and Augustine Phillips. Condell was definitely in London by , when he married Elizabeth Smart, a gentleman's daughter. They settled in St Mary Aldermanbury , the parish in which Heminges lived.
Condell, like Heminges, served as churchwarden in that church. He and Elizabeth baptized nine children, of whom only three survived to adulthood. In the next, dated 27 March , he is third after Heminges and Burbage and in fact came second, Burbage having died before the patent was in force.
The King's Men , like the Chamberlain's Men , never provided lists of members or cast-lists: however, Condell is known to have acted in four more plays by Jonson — Sejanus , Volpone , The Alchemist , and Catiline —between and , in addition, presumably, to all of Shakespeare's.
He also played the Cardinal in the first performance of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi , put on at Blackfriars probably in spring ; at a revival about , when he was busy editing the Shakespeare folio, he was replaced by Richard Robinson —who married Richard Burbage's widow, Winifred , in He was perhaps the principal player after Burbage , for when Phillips died in he left a will listing all members and associates of the company, beginning with Shakespeare and Condell and bequeathing them each a 30 s.
Condell and Heminges were uniquely qualified to edit Shakespeare's plays for the folio: they were the last surviving members of the original Chamberlain's Men established in They dedicated the folio to William, third earl of Pembroke , and Philip, earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke , declaring that they had so much favoured the plays in performance and the author in his lifetime that the new volume ' ask'd ' to be theirs.
It is sometimes supposed that the printers and publishers of the folio were also its editors, but they could not have matched Condell and Heminges in their long professional and personal association with the playwright—closely involved in each play from conception and casting, through rehearsals, to performance.
The scope and methods of the editors' attempts to ' collect ' and ' gather ' their words sources of information are the subject of ceaseless and highly conjectural study and debate. Individual plays could be bought and sold, and eighteen of Shakespeare's plays were printed in quarto before publication of the thirty-six in the folio.
The folio provided eighteen more hitherto unpublished texts, plus according to the editors ' perfect ' texts of imperfect quartos. In promoting their volume the editors claimed to have devoted much ' care, and paine ' to correcting ' diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors ' and to have restored the rest ' absolute in their numbers ' as Shakespeare had ' conceived ' them.
Chambers once observed that an epistle is an advertisement rather than an affidavit: perhaps a little grudgingly he conceded that ' genuine pains ' were taken to secure reliable texts. From , when the King's Men were able to move into their walled and roofed Blackfriars playing-place, everything of value would have been kept there for safety, and everything in the open-air second Globe—apart from the theatre itself—survived the fire during a performance in McClure , , 2.
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