Shakespeare’s Companies: William Shakespeare’s Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594 (review)

Terence G. Schoone-Jongen’s goal in Shakespeare’s Companies is “to explain, analyze, and assess the competing claims about Shakespeare’s pre-1594 acting company affiliations” (3) because “no one has ever attempted to systematically identify, outline, and analyze all of these competing theories” (2). The subject, Shakespeare’s “lost years,” is undeniably compelling, but Schoone-Jongen’s choice of structure and organization significantly less so. Arguing that “by focusing on this one troublesome aspect of Shakespeare’s biography,” he seeks “to shift attention away from . . . a too exclusive focus on Shakespeare” (4), he presents “key issues in Elizabethan theatre history, Shakespearean biography, and historiography” (3). Part 1 strives to identify the competing biographical claims for the years between 1577 and 1594, part 2 postulates both provincial and London theatrical contexts, and part 3 lays out the differing claims for companies competing for Shakespeare’s presence during those years. As Schoone-Jongen notes, “Because of the structure of this study, there is necessarily a fair amount of repetition” (7).

Repetition there is—but of far greater concern are the surviving data and the uses to which Schoone-Jongen puts them. One is always gratified to see a study which acknowledges an undeniable debt to the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project; but in this case, it is important to note that much material remains to be sifted. Although the author credits REED with having published nineteen volumes by 2007, REED has twenty-seven volumes currently in print—with over thirty planned volumes yet to be published. Schoone-Jongen consulted various unpublished transcriptions held in the REED office, but most of them (Beverley, Yorkshire and the West Riding, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire) are still in preliminary draft from archival forays in the 1980s.¹ I would caution the author about how he has characterized these records: the majority of household accounts they reflect are not “noble,” and these gentry accounts—whether household or pantry—frequently record more than “a given company’s name, the year of its visit, and the payment awarded it” (44).

More disturbing is Schoone-Jongen’s reversion to a matter REED has been at no little pains to correct, namely, assuming that the terms “players,” “men,” “lads,” or “servants” refer to stage players rather than to town waits, household musicians, or other entertainers. He is not alone: Glynne Wickham made the same error when writing of the “players” at Selby Abbey in his Early English Stages and E. K. Chambers was regularly cavalier in his terminology in The Elizabethan Stage. So when Schoone-Jongen repeatedly refers to “Cavendish’s Men,” he would be advised to identify Henry Cavendish’s musicians. Neither William Cavendish, his mother, Elizabeth Shrewsbury, nor his son kept players. Similarly, this study’s tendency to use a unique piece of extant evidence to support overarching generalizations is unsettling. Simon Jewell’s will becomes the norm of what traveling players carried, one Master of Revels note to the town of Leicester supports original play texts being carried with touring troupes, a single 1605 Leicester record compensating a citizen for a chair broken by actors underwrites wholesale borrowing of “necessary set pieces . . . from the locals” (52), and “references to nobles planning speeches for common players” (50), as well as Hamlet’s addition to the Player’s speech, suggest “that the patron, or a member of the audience with literary aspirations, supplied players with material” (50).

Such sophisticated and complex questions as means of transportation, licensing, touring routes, and playing texts are settled with scant evidence, while in reality these questions remain the subjects of lively, productive theater history debate. That debate rests, or ought to rest, on hard data, and too often Schoone-Jongen’s seem unreliable. Noting that Shakespeare “may have participated in Christmas mummings,” Schoone-Jongen cites several Shakespeare biographers who have speculated that John...