The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 by Gerald Eades Bentley (review)

REVIEWS Gerald Eades Bentley. The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590-1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 315. $25.00. Some years ago, I had occasion to look up The Jacobean and Caroline Stage in the catalogue of the British Library. Its author was listed as Gerald Eades Bentley the Elder. That was perhaps the only occasion on which I regretted not naming my son with the name my parents had given me. As I read The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, it occurred to me that Professor Bentley has earned the title “Elder” in more ways than one. He is an elder in the field of Renaissance drama scholarship and in the practice of a rigorous, well-documented sort of theatre history. This latest book merely confirms his right to such a title. The purpose and design of this study of the player are abundantly clear. Written as a companion piece to The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, it aims to set out, as fully as possible, “what was normal in the conduct of one of the two major components in that phenomenal creative outburst we call the ‘Elizabethan Drama’ ” (p. ix ). To that end, Professor Bentley devotes individual chapters to various categories of players—sharers, hired men, apprentices, managers— and to relevant topics—the player and his company, London companies on tour, and casting. All these matters are then reviewed in a lucid and compre­ hensive conclusion. The lengthy appendix (30 pages) reproduces the casts and lists of players from all the known sources, both printed quartos and formal manuscripts. About Professor Bentley’s argument, two points should be made at the outset. The first is this: he handles his material with scrupulous care and scholarly honesty, qualifying his conclusions when necessary and never taxing his evidence with assertions heavier than it will bear. The second is this (and it involves serious implications for the book’s com­ pleteness and its persuasive force): the evidence on any of the topics he considers is often slight, unbalanced, or both. Let me offer examples to demonstrate each of these points. In Chapter VI, “Managers,” Bentley tries to define the functions and responsibilities of the manager, a figure in each theatrical company who was responsible for a broad range of activities, most of them having to do with financial affairs, public rela­ tions, and political requirements of one sort or another. Bentley admits that the power of the “players’ representatives” he identifies was slighter than that of later figures who are more properly designated managers (Davenant, Killigrew, Garrick). He further admits that the power “these earlier ‘managers’ did exercise appears to have varied a good deal from company to company and from the rather chaotic days of the 1590s to the more strictly organized times of the 1630s” (p. 148). Finally, after relating in detail the known record of John Heminges, Bentley moves on to others who functioned as managers, pausing first to say that the 363 364 Comparative Drama activities of Heminges “were more or less typical of the office in the time” (p. 155). But Bentley’s habit of scrupulous regard for accuracy in both evidence and interpretation underscores my second point. It is no accident that Heminges occupies the most prominent place in the discussion of theatre managers. In nearly every matter that comes under Bentley’s purview, the evidence is likely to be thrown out of balance by the simple fact that the records of the King’s Company are more complete and detailed than the records of any other company. The chief division, as Bentley recog­ nizes, is between the King’s Company and all others. Thus at the close of his chapter on sharers, Bentley points out that “the records testify to the overwhelming dominance of the King’s company and the fallacy of taking anything that happened to its members as typical of the lives of London players” (p. 63). Sometimes his awareness of the imbalance or incompleteness of the available evidence causes Professor Bentley to repeat his view as though he himself were in need of reassurance: thus he says in consecutive paragraphs, “In spite...