Robert Benfield
British actor
Robert Benfield (died July 1649) was a seventeenth-century actor, noted for his longtime membership in the King's Men in the years and decades after William Shakespeare's retirement and death.
Nothing is known of Benfield's early life. He was most likely with the Lady Elizabeth's Men in 1613, and acted in their productions of Fletcher's The Coxcomb and the Fletcher/Massinger play The Honest Man's Fortune in that year. Benfield soon joined the King's Men, possibly to replace William Ostler, who died unexpectedly in December 1614. He acted in the company's production of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi c. 1621.
He was a shareholder in the company by 1619, when he is listed in the renewed patent for the King's Men issued in that year. Benfield also eventually became a sharer in both the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, but only after a conflict: in 1635 he was one of three King's Men (the others were Thomas Pollard and Eliard Swanston) who petitioned the Lord Chamberlain, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, for the right to buy shares from fellow King's Man John Shank and from Cuthbert Burbage.
Benfield was one of the ten King's Men who signed the dedication of the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647. In the 25 cast lists added to the second Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1679, Benfield is mentioned 18 times:
Benfield's total equals those of Joseph Taylor and John Underwood, and is second only to John Lowin's 21.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7342019. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1649, 1613, 1614 and 1621.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Benfield” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.