The Elizabethan Theatre IX ed. by G. R. Hibbard

Abstract

might begin to sound like the confused cries and murmurs jostling for a place in the House of Fame, any guide that can point us towards an appreciation of Chaucer’s poetry is welcome. NOTES 1 For a recent discussion of the subject, see the four essays and the discussion included in “ Chaucer’s Audience: A Symposium,” Chaucer Review 18 (19 8 3), 137-8 1. 2 George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and his Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19 15 ). a n n a s m o l / Mount Saint Vincent University G. R. Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre I X (Port Credit, Ontario: P. D. Meany, [1986]). 234. $35.00 As a collection of papers given at the Ninth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre at the University of Waterloo in 1981, this volume could be criticized for offering belated previews of longer works since pub­ lished by some of its contributors. However, it is a measure of the quality and importance of this conference that the five-year gap between presenta­ tion and publication merely transforms the collection from a preview to a useful and varied overview of some of the more important and occasionally controversial scholarship currently relating to the Elizabethan theatre. The theme of the conference, “The Staging of Plays in the Age of Shake­ speare,” was broad enough to encompass a wide and sometimes unexpected range of papers but focused enough to stimulate interchange between the presenters who often touch on the same issues from different perspectives. Editor George Hibbard has arranged the papers effectively so that several of them lead logically into others, thereby reinforcing connections. The volume opens with D. F. Rowan’s “ Inns, Inn-Yards, and Other Playing Places,” which scrutinizes the comfortably entrenched assumption that Elizabethan theatres had their origins in the inn-yards. Beginning with Edmund Malone, who first drew attention to the similarities between the inn-yard and the theatre, Rowan provides a useful analysis of the develop­ ment and perpetuation of the theory from the work of T. Fairman Ordish and W. J. Lawrence through the more recent work of C. Walter Hodges, Richard Leacroft, Richard Southern, and O. J. Brownstein. He notes numerous problems with the theory — most important, a persistent lack of evidence that players could and did perform regularly in inn-yards. Yet relying on David Galloway’s records of performance at the Red Lion in Norwich and Brownstein’s records concerning performances at the Saracen’s Head in Islington, the Bell Inn, and the Bell Savage Inn, Rowan cautiously 473 concludes that inn-yards must have had an influence — though not an ex­ clusive one — on theatrical architecture. His confident prediction “ that the thorough search of the provincial records being mounted by REED will turn up more records of performances in the inn-yards” (19) has not, how­ ever, proved prophetic — at least in the five years since he gave his paper. Consequently, the real extent of the inn-yard’s influence will remain in doubt until records demonstrate that professional players performed in inn-yards more regularly and universally. In “The King’s Men on Stage: Actors and Their Parts, 1611-32,” T. J. King approaches the conference theme from the perspective of casting and continues the questioning of “conjectural theories” by considering T. W. Baldwin’s assumption that Shakespeare’s characters were tailor-made accord­ ing to the measure of his actors’ personalities. King presents convincing statistical and documentary evidence to demonstrate that in the King’s company the determining factor in assigning parts was the size of the part — not character traits. Principal actors, both men and boys, took the parts with the largest number of lines and played only one character, while hired men doubled in multiple minor roles. Versatility was therefore required of the whole company — both the lesser actors who doubled and the principal actors whose parts could vary considerably from one play to the next. John Lowin, for instance, played Bosola in The Duchess of Maift, Eubulus in The Picture, and Belleur in The Wild Goose Chase. King does not, however, sufficiently consider the possibility that a playwright may also have been able to “fit the play...