Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time. By Roslyn Lander Knutson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; pp. x + 198. $54.95 hardcover; Rough Magic: Making Theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company. By Steven Adler. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001; pp. xxii + 272. $50 hardcover, $20 paperback

Abstract

It's ironic that Shakespeare is in the title of Roslyn Lander Knutson's book, since “Shakespeare” and centuries of Shakespeare scholarship are parts of the problem she is addressing in Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time. Forget everything you think you know, she tells her readers, about the great rivalries of early modern commercial theatre practice. Forget the rivalry between the Lord Admiral's Men and the Lord Chamberlain's/King's Men, between landlords Philip Henslowe and James Burbage, actors Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage, and their spouses and in-laws and partners. Forget the passage in Hamlet about the “Little Eyases” of the boy companies whose success has forced the adult players to tour Elsinore, the “Rival Traditions” of the populist public theatres and the elitist private ones, and forget, above all, the “War of the Theatres,” the battles of wits in which Ben Jonson and his contemporaries lobbed satiric portraits at one another in rival plays written between 1599 and 1601 for the rival adult and boy companies. These putative rivalries, she explains, are the product of a misguided and self-perpetuating narrative, sculpted in the eighteenth century and cast in bronze in the nineteenth, a narrative that, in part, sought to exceptionalize Shakespeare and the theatre enterprise that nourished both his works and the writer whose genius inspired envy among his contemporary actors, playwrights, and theatre companies, and left them to fight for leftover scraps of business. To support this exceptionalism, Knutson advances a piece of court testimony from 1589–1590 by Edward Alleyn's brother John, testifying how James Burbage quarreled with the widow of his brother-in-law and business partner until his son Richard chased her out with a broom, testimony that morphed into a master narrative of cutthroat personal rivalries and even more cutthroat business practices.