Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays by Lawrence Manley, Sally-Beth MacLean (review)

This book is the most important contribution to the history of theatrical commerce in the Elizabethan marketplace since the 1998 publication of The Queen’s Men and Their Plays by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean. Like that predecessor, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays is the biography of a playing company. It too provides a shrewd analysis of received wisdom. But Manley and MacLean have an advantage over historians of the Queen’s Men: they have a richer cache of theatrical documents, anchored by records of 134 London performances at the Rose playhouse from the memorandum book (or diary) kept by Philip Henslowe for the better part of six months in 1592–93 (19 February–22 June 1592 and 29 December 1592–1 February 1593). The Henslowe records enable a fuller, “maximal” repertory list for Lord Strange’s Men than what McMillin and MacLean chose to compile for the Queen’s Men (9). Even so, guesswork is unavoidable. Manley and MacLean are open about their procedure: “We have tried, first, to make it clear when we are dealing with conjectures and speculations, and second, to build, where we can, from certainties toward possibilities and to avoid the mistake of building in the opposite direction” (10).

In earlier scholarship, Lord Strange’s Men were interesting because they were the prehistory of the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men. Manley and MacLean capitalize on the links of personnel but argue that the company was a force to be reckoned with in its own right. They present here a painstakingly delineated, provocative description of the company style of Strange’s Men based on “the plays in the repertory . . . , their connections with contemporary politics and religion, and their relevance to the family history and agenda of the company’s aristocratic patrons” (5). In support of their claim, they test the boundaries of mainstream theater history on managerial enterprise, repertory acquisition, and attention to and from patrons. Not everyone will be equally persuaded, point by point, but Manley and MacLean treat evidence and scholarly opinion at a level of disclosure and respect that makes their book the definitive reference on Lord Strange’s Men and their plays.

How enterprising were adult playing company managers? Until the 1960s, theater historians worked with a binary model caricatured at one extreme by Philip Henslowe’s sweatshop at the Rose that produced a repertory of filler, and at the other by the sharers at the Globe who worked in brotherly harmony to promote their Shakespearean offerings. McMillin and MacLean situated the Queen’s Men in this narrative by identifying a company style that in subject matter and political rhetoric advertised the crown through “a Protestant ideology [and] the ‘truth’ of Tudor history” (The Queen’s Men and Their Plays, 33). In their opinion, the impetus for such coherence came from Sir Francis Walsingham and the Earl of Leicester, not from the company sharers. Andrew Gurr designates another pair of politicians, claiming that Charles Howard and Henry Carey set up the Admiral’s Men and Chamberlain’s Men in 1594 with a playhouse, players, and a repertory. Manley and MacLean give the initiative to Strange’s company managers. Even though acknowledging the influence of playwrights and the industry-wide repertory system, they characterize Strange’s Men as self-defining “through their selection of plays and players with star quality and through their flair for grasping current interests and new literary fashions” (3).

Treatment of the repertory in Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays is the most wide-ranging yet in the field of theatrical commerce. Manley and MacLean work through Henslowe’s playlists, connecting uncontroversial titles to extant plays (“‘the lockinglasse’” as A Looking Glass for London and England [72]); variant titles to extant plays for which there is scholarly consensus (“‘the tragedey of the gvyes’” as The Massacre at Paris [88–90]); variant titles to...