Playing in Markets and Game Places

Abstract

Professional players generally appear to have favoured playing indoors when on tour in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods but there are occasional instances of troupes performing outdoors in churchyards and inn-yards and at least one example of a patronised company performing in a market place. In 1584 the Earl of Essex’s players performed in Shrewsbury’s apple market. Six years later the Queen’s Men performed a tumbling display in the town’s neighbouring cornmarket.1 There is also a possibility that some touring players made use of the open-air ‘playing’ or ‘game’ places found in a number of Tudor and Stuart communities. The paucity of evidence regarding professional open-air playing in the early modern provinces has meant that such productions have received comparatively little attention. Yet, if we wish to have a fuller understanding of touring companies and their practices, and of the diversity of spaces used as theatrical venues outside Shakespearean London, what evidence there is needs to be taken into account. A study of travelling players’ performances in outdoor provincial spaces also affords an opportunity to explore one of the points of connection between amateur and professional theatrical culture in Renaissance England, as local amateur players also occasionally used open-air urban spaces as their temporary theatres.