The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642 (review)

To a theater historian, reading Andrew Gurr's books can be a supremely frustrating experience. On the one hand, Gurr has few peers at gathering disparate facts and weaving them into a narrative that presents the big picture of Elizabethan theater history, as he has done so well in such books as The Shakespearean Stage, 1576–1642 and Playgoing in Shakespeare's London. His 1996 volume The Shakespearian Playing Companies is the most ambitious account of the pre-1642 English theater since Chambers and Bentley, full of what Mary Bly has called "brilliant and astonishingly broad ideas."¹ Yet, as Bly also notes, this very ambition sometimes leads Gurr to be distressingly sloppy with details, and to present his own narratives, sometimes idiosyncratic or doubtful, as though they were undisputed facts. These tendencies are not, of course, unique to Gurr. But they are more common than they should be in a scholar of Gurr's stature, and they pervade his latest book, The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642.

Gurr's focus in this book is the playing company known from 1594 to 1603 as the Lord Chamberlain's Men (except for a brief period as Hunsdon's Men) and from 1603 onward as the King's Men. The first third of the book, focusing on the social and economic conditions in which the company worked, contains some of the book's most interesting and typically Gurrian contributions. The opening chapter presents a narrative which Gurr has recounted numerous times before: the establishment in 1594 of the "duopoly" of the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the Lord Admiral's Men, and those two companies' dominance of the London theatrical scene into the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 has Gurr doing what he does best: presenting a concise but information-packed overview of such topics as touring, jigs, and stage accents, which were central to the seventeenth-century theatrical experience but are easily overlooked today. Chapter 3, on company finances, uses the few surviving facts plus prudent speculation to extrapolate what the company's revenue, expenditures, and profits might have looked like at various times in its history. Much guesswork is inevitable in such a project, as Gurr readily acknowledges, but I found this chapter very thought-provoking and stimulating.

Yet for all their valuable contributions, these chapters also illustrate the problems typical in Gurr's recent work. One such problem is the idiosyncratic or outdated nature of much of his narrative, and the dismissal of evidence that contradicts it. For example, Gurr gives the impression that the Chamberlain's and Admiral's Men competed essentially unchallenged in London from 1594 to 1600, a narrative fostered by nineteenth-century critics who imagined Shakespeare and his fellows facing down the moneygrubbing Philip Henslowe and ultimately triumphing. But the documentary evidence for the duopoly is actually much scantier than Gurr implies, and he virtually ignores the Swan (built in 1594–95 and used by Pembroke's Men in 1597) and the Boar's Head (built in 1598 and expanded in 1599). Important research on these playhouses published in 1978 (William Ingram's A London Life in the Brazen Age: Francis Langley, 1548–1602) and 1986 (Herbert Berry's The Boar's Head Playhouse) is absent from this book's bibliography.

More troubling are the dozens of errors and inconsistencies that pepper the opening section. Some of these are fairly harmless, as when Gurr says that Richard Sharpe married Richard Cowley's daughter (20), though her husband was actually George Birch, or when he asserts that Robert Gough was with the Admiral's Men in 1597–98 (18n26), an assertion for which no evidence exists. (The latter error also appears on page 253 of Gurr's Shakespearian Playing Companies, and apparently resulted from a printing error on pages 328–29 of the Foakes-Rickert edition of Henslowe's Diary.) In other cases, the mistakes have a direct impact on the narrative Gurr is trying to construct. For example, he claims (27) that Will Sly...