Casting for Pembroke’s Men: The Henry VI Quartos and The Taming of A Shrew

Abstract

ET us glance at the current understanding of two of the earliest Shakespearian quartos and then try to make further headway. In the late 1920'S Peter Alexander and Madeleine . Doran, working independently, demonstrated that the quarto versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI are memorial reconstructions of the corresponding folio texts.' Since the quartos (Q) had usually been taken as source plays which Shakespeare later reworked into the folio versions (F), the Alexander-Doran hypothesis changed the direction of criticism on the Henry VI plays. As the hypothesis gained acceptance, it became clear that the peculiarities of Q, for which scholars had spent long arguments trying to make one dramatist or another responsible, were really attributable to whatever group of actors undertook the memorial reconstructions. And Shakespeare-assuming that he was not one of those actors-was left free of such entanglements to be studied as the venturesome young author who as early as I590-9i designed a serious and realistic group of plays on the Wars of the Roses, in a form close to F, and thereby influenced the maturing of Elizabethan drama as decisively as did Marlowe with Tamburlaine or Kyd with The Spanish Tragedy.2 One result of the Alexander-Doran hypothesis has been a growing conviction that Shakespeare found an early theatrical association with a company which in the I590's passed briefly under the patronage of the second Earl of Pembroke. It is virtually certain that Pembroke's men performed the quarto versions of the history plays, The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the . . . Houses of York and Lancaster (hereafter i Contention) and The True