Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England (review)

In Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England Siobhan Keenan purports "to study the touring practices and performances of professional traveling players in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the venues in which they performed" (xv). Such a claim prepares the reader for something similar in concept to the laundering-and-shrinking of extant scholarship found in Andrew Gurr's The Shakespearean Stage, 1574-1642 (1970, 1980, 1992), but Travelling Players is neither as comprehensive nor as coherent. Keenan assembles an extensive body of scholarship on provincial drama, but the raw data from which the book is constructed resist the generalizations necessary for an overview or digest. The problem is not just that much of the work on provincial theatrical activity undertaken for the Records of Early English Drama project (REED) is still in progress, but also that the data, no matter how fully recovered, will slip out of neat categories due to the inconsistency and survival rate of provincial records. Travelling Playersin Shakespeare's England may be a handier place to look for information than the REED volumes, but readers should be aware that conceptual issues and documentary Xaws undermine its scholarly value.

Keenan has a good idea in focusing the middle seven of nine chapters on playing places: town halls, churches, country houses, drinking houses, schools and universities, markets and game places, and purpose-built playhouses. This decision enables her to include scholarship by local and social historians on the towns and spaces germane to provincial drama. Also, it illustrates the diversity of playing sites, thus further displacing the tenaciously-held but mistaken view that touring meant playing on the village green. And it emphasizes the range of political concerns, commerce, and availability that led players to perform in one space or another. The sections in each chapter on playing venues are consequently informative, but those on performances become repetitive, as it turns out that provincial productions have a lot in common, whatever the playing space. These sections further repeat, but extend very little, thumbnail treatments in the opening chapter of practical issues of touring: licensing, travel routes, motives for touring, the basics of performance, contacts with local officials, advertisement of performances, audience response, and rewards.

Having conceived this project as an overview of professional traveling players, Keenan too seldom questions how digestible the data on touring really is. An exception is the final chapter, in which she discusses the apparent decline of provincial playing and earnestly attempts to explore its causes. But in earlier chapters she often cites examples without asking when the evidence of scattered data represents the norm and when it indicates something peculiar to time and place. For example, in a section on changing attitudes toward touring players, Keenan cites examples of regulations by town officials that are disparate geographically and chronologically: York in 1582, Worcester in 1622, Hadleigh in 1598, Durham in 1608 (33). A related instance occurs in the discussion of the church as a playing place, where Keenan implies a significance to Leicester's Men having "almost half" of the performances in churches (46), when her "half" turns out to be three of seven records (196n), and those disparate in location and date. A conceptual problem of another kind is the decision to focus on "patronized . . . companies" (24) or "royal and noble players" (32), as Keenan calls them. Yet a unique feature of the evidence on touring is that provincial chamberlains' accounts and mayors' books list payments to player organizations known locally in their own time alongside companies widely known for their powerful patrons, London-based business, and accomplished dramatists. Perhaps an overview cannot be so inclusive, but only in the provincial records do players such as Quince's Men join ranks with companies such as the Chamberlain's Men.

The documentation in Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England is more troubling than the treatment of subject matter. For the most part, Keenan documents her sources diligently but ineffectively. Because she does not situate...