Edmund Tylney

Edmund Tilney (c. 1536 - 1610) was a courtier best known now as Master of the Revels to Elizabeth I and James I.

He was the son of Phillip Tilney, an usher to Henry VIII, and Malyn Chambre, who had served Catherine Howard, and was briefly imprisoned after that queen's downfall. The Tilneys' ties to the Howard family remained strong; mother and son may have stayed with Agnes Howard after Phillip's death in 1541. No record of his education survives, but he evidently learned Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, and may have visited Europe.

In 1568, he published "The Flower of Friendship", a humanist dialogue on marriage that went through five editions in the century. In 1572, he represented Gatton, Surrey in Parliament. One of his fellows, Charles Howard secured for him the post of Master of the Revels, which he retained from 1578 until his death.

Tilney occupied this position as it underwent a significant change in focus. When he began his work, it consisted principally of planning and conducting royal entertainments, as a unit of the Lord Chamberlain's office. This charge remained unchanged; in fulfilling it, though, Tilney relied more heavily on the developing public, commercial theater of the period. He extended his power to review plays for royal performance into the public arena, in effect becoming the official censor of the period's drama. The duties of his office required him to examine and approve all plays for performance before they could be staged. Unlike those of Henry Herbert, Tilney's records have not survived, but evidence of Elizabethan censorship (for instance, in the manuscript of "Sir Thomas More") indicates the same types of concerns as his successors that the playwrights avoid politically sensitive topics and matter that could arouse popular passion or aristocratic resentment.

But if Tilney's censorship restricted the writers, his support protected them from generally hostile civic authorities. The polite fiction of aristocratic patronage did not obscure the reality that the troupes were commercial enterprises; however, that fiction brought the theaters under royal protection; in 1592, the Lord Mayor of London named Tilney as one of the obstacles to ending public drama in the city. Tilney also worked to regularize the acting companies. In 1583, when rivalry between the various nobles with companies had grown acute, he aided Francis Walsingham in selecting actors for the new Queen's Men, a sort of supergroup that was supposed to end such competition.

Tilney's successors, George Buck and Herbert, regularized and expanded his operations to include licensing companies and playhouses, and (most lucratively) licensing plays for printing. That Tilney worked at a time when the acting world was still largely chaotic is demonstrated by the failure of the Queen's Men, who by the 1590s had all but disappeared from London.

In the movie "Shakespeare in Love", he was portrayed by the actor Simon Callow.

He lived in the town of Leatherhead, Surrey, in the building known as the Mansion House. In the 1990's, a new Wetherspoons Pub in the Leatherhead High Street was named after him.

He is buried in St. Leonard's Church, Streatham, London. A rather fine monument was erected in his memory; it is mentioned in Pevsner.