Robert Daborne

Robert Daborne (c. 1580 – 23 March 1628) was an English dramatist of the Jacobean era.

His father was also Robert Daborne, heir to family property in Guildford, Surrey and other places, including London, and a wealthy haberdasher by trade. He is now thought to have been a "sizar"—an undergraduate exempt from fees—at King's College, Cambridge in 1598. His marriage record suggests that he was a Gent. and member of the Inner Temple. Daborne was married to Anne Younger in 1602 at St Mary's Church South Walsham by the local cleric, who was nephew to Anne's father, Robert Younger, the owner of Old Hall, South Burlingham; they had at least one child, a daughter, but his wife Anne died in childbirth. He was living with his father-in-law in Shoreditch by 1609, but his father-in-law died and there was a bitter dispute among the family members subsequently regarding the inheritance. A 1608 document show that Daborne owed £50 to Robert Keysar, one of the managers of the Children of the Queen's Revels. In January 1610 Daborne is listed as one of the patentees (partners or backers) of the Queen's Revels Children when Philip Rosseter re-organized that troupe of boy actors. It is generally assumed that Daborne wrote for that company as a dramatist, and when the troupe linked with the Lady Elizabeth's Men for a time around 1613, Daborne came into the circle of playwrights who worked for impresario Philip Henslowe.

Henslowe's records in the collection of Dulwich College contain more than thirty references to Daborne in letters, receipts, and other documents in the 1613-15 period. Constantly impecunious, like so many of his writing contemporaries, Daborne relied on the self-interested generosity of Henslowe, to whom he was indebted for a series of small loans. He worked on at least five plays for Henslowe in this era, either alone or with collaborators who included Cyril Tourneur, John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger. None of these plays, with titles like Machiavel and the Devil, The Arraignment of London, and The She Saint, have survived.

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