Career
As with many other performers of his historical era, nothing is known of Read"s early life. The first evidence of his career comes in 1626, when he played Cardona, a woman"s role, in James Shirley"s The Wedding with Queen Henrietta"s Men. Read appears to have spent the early 1630s with the King"s Revels Men, but returned to the Queen Henrietta"s company after the bubonic plague epidemic of 1636-1637, when personnel of the two troupes combined.
With the Queen"s company, Read played Buzzard in Richard Brome"s The English Moor, perhaps in 1637.
Performances in English Renaissance theatre, even tragedies, ended with a clown dancing a jig, and Read was one of a long line of comics, reaching from Richard Tarlton through John Shank, who earned a large and welcoming audience through this practice. One of the best indices of Read"s fame occurs in The Stage Player"s Complaint, a pamphlet printed in 1641.
The pamphlet presents the two leading comic actors of the day, Andrew Cane and Timothy Read, in a dialogue about the difficulties of the clowning life. (The summer of 1641 saw another theatre closure due to plague) In the pamphlet, Cane, renowned for his clever repartee, is called Quick.
Read, famous for his fast feet, is called Light.
Read was among the players arrested on 6 October 1647, during a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher"s A King and Number King at the Salisbury Court Theatre. Read"s end is mysterious. But his continuing fame is demonstrated by allusions to him, in works from his own and the next generation.
In the Praeludium of The Careless Shepherdess (published 1656), one speaker says.
