"Explain this Dark Enigma":The Queen's Men and Performance-as-Research in Stratford-upon-Avon Oliver Jones In his 2003 TV documentary series, In Search of Shakespeare, Michael Wood suggests that during the years before his arriving in London, William Shakespeare may have taken up a position with the Queen's Men, the royal touring company founded in 1583 by the Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, at the behest of the Secretary of State, Francis Walsingham. When the company first arrived in Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1587, they had not long suffered the loss of one of their principal actors, William Knell, who during a stop at Thame in Oxfordshire quarreled fatally with another actor (McMillin and MacLean 160). While it is impossible based on current evidence to prove that Shakespeare joined any particular company prior to his London debut (see Schoone-Jongen 101), the prospect that Knell's demise may have been Shakespeare's big break nonetheless makes for a good TV narrative. To illustrate the prospect, Wood invites Greg Doran, then Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, to work with a company of actors to restage extracts of the Queen's Men plays in Stratford's Guildhall, now part of the King Edward VI School. In Wood's documentary, we see how as they arrive both actors and director immediately assess the space in which they are expected to perform—a long hall some seventy feet long and twenty-two feet wide, open to the rafters and with windows running the length of the west side, occupied by school desks and other furniture (fig. 1). One actor worries about the size of the playing space, while another queries the layout of the chairs. On entering the hall, the space is set up as it has been for many performances by the school's resident boys' company, Edward's Boys, founded in 2003 by Perry Mills. In these boys' productions, the staging is frequently set against the length of the hall wall, where multiple doors [End Page 267] offer a variety of useful access points from the stairs and rooms beyond. However, Doran instinctively gravitates towards the schoolmaster's chair, located at one end of the hall, observing that "It seems odd not to have King John sat on his throne." Both actors and director quickly see in the hall a space that offers a variety of staging possibilities, and choose the configuration that seems to be most appropriate. In their scratch performance, the company decides to use the end of the hall, with the schoolmaster's chair on its raised platform now promoted to throne, and providing the central focus. The audience are then arranged sitting on pupils' desk benches in rows that stretch to the rear wall of the hall. The performance staged by Doran and company was conducted as an illustration for TV of the kind of theater an audience in sixteenth-century Stratford might have enjoyed, and one in which Shakespeare may have had some kind of role, before his arrival in London. The company took the space in which they performed as they found it, and by performing in daylight, with the minimum of rehearsal, hoped to reconstruct (approximately) something of an original performance. However, the visiting RSC troupe and the various iterations of the Edward's Boys company have chosen to configure the hall space in a variety of ways to suit the needs of their particular productions best. To think that these configurations represent the conditions of an original performance is to remain unaware of the material changes that the Guildhall building has undergone in its long history, and of the local social and political tensions experienced in Stratford during the 1580s and 1590s. It is my contention that these would have had a direct impact on a company's presentation and an audience's reception of a particular play. It remains true that much discussion views early modern theater primarily as a metropolitan phenomenon, despite the encouragement Sally-Beth MacLean's work on touring, and projects like REED's Patrons and Performance and the Canadian Shakespeare and the Queen's Men, might offer to...