Shakespeare in Company by Bart Van Es (review)

This is an important book that ably treads the fine line between, on the one hand, explaining or even discounting the artistic work by recourse to a consideration of its conditions of production, and, on the other, consigning it to an autonomous decontextualized realm of "universality":

There is inevitably a connection between the literary features of a work and the material conditions of its creation. Of course, lines of poetry are crafted by individuals, but they are also moulded by surrounding social contexts and tailored to specific practical demands.

(37)

The author claims, and makes his argument with considerable sophistication, that the strength of his approach lies in the welding of theater history to textual criticism—an approach that enables the development of a complex argument that, without minimizing their artistic and literary merit, places Shakespeare's plays in their historical context of production and delineates the ways in which they reflect that context:

This book has set out a history of Shakespeare's writing that is based on his evolving material circumstances and institutional affiliations.... It could be said to bring together two separate stands of current thought on the playwright. On the one hand there is the work of theatre historians, doing more and more to uncover the practical realities of early modern performance.... On the other there is a more literary criticism that explores the classically informed wit of the playwright and connects him to a Renaissance culture of imitation.

(309)

At its center is the argument "that Shakespeare's decision to become a stake-holder in the theatre industry transformed and would continue to affect the way that he wrote his plays" (2). But Shakespeare was always, Van Es argues, writing "in company": initially in the literary company of other playwrights, with whose works the early plays are in intertextual dialogue; then in the company of actors when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men; then in the closer company of sharers and householders at their new fixed venue, the Globe; and finally again in the company of playwrights through collaboration and (again) intertextual links to the work in particular of Fletcher.

Van Es stresses "the deep, fibrous intertextuality of Shakespeare's early work" (28); his suggestion that it is "often spectacularly imitative" (36) has important ramifications for reading characters such as Aaron in Titus Andronicus, or Richard III.

He then links already well-attested stylistic developments around 1594 to the fact that at this time Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (81). He argues for the significance of an emerging interest in the mechanics of a play's preparation for the stage in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream (79), a move to relational characterization (93), and evidence of writing for the skills and profiles of the performers of the company (98). "The company—its sharers, its hired men, and its apprenticed boy players taking women's and children's parts—were the matrix through which he could structure his thinking" (111).

This put Shakespeare in a unique position among his contemporaries (125), a singularity further increased with the building of the Globe in 1599: "During these early years of the fellowship Shakespeare was singular as a playwright within a company of relative equals, but with the construction of the Globe the nature of this singularity would change" (146). The author's treatment of the Globe period (1599 until the long-postponed initiation of Blackfriars in 1608) concentrates on Shakespeare's relations with Robert Armin and Richard Burbage, and the extent to which their particular talents and "roles" fed into the plays: "More fully than any other player, Armin illustrates the effect of Shakespeare's position as a sharer and housekeeper. The two men were bound together in a close association that left its imprint on at least five plays" (193). Van Es argues that the initiation of the Blackfriars as a second performance venue in 1608 was another watershed, but...