Richard Dutton, who will also propose a Companion on the same subject as his history, to add to the four Companions to Shakespeare's Works he has co-edited with Jean Howard, is probably the world's leading authority on the history of the Shakespeare's theatre and more broadly, theatre in England through the Tudor to the Jacobean period. What is more his sophistication as a cultural theorist and historicist is widely acknowledged by his peers. He writes lucidly and accessibly. His proposal is also especially timely. It is thirty years since G. E. Bentley poured a lifetime’s work on the early modern English stage into
The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590-1642 (1971), complemented and rounded out later by
The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590-1642 (1984). Between them, these represented the summation of a tradition of scholarship on the working conditions of Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists -- on the kinds of theatre, audiences, patrons and players for which they wrote. It went back through Bentley’s own work on the Jacobean and Caroline theatres, and the parallel labours of such as Glynne Wickham, through E. K. Chambers’ magisterial
The Elizabethan Stage (1923), and ultimately back to the pioneering efforts of Edmond Malone at the end of the eighteenth century to locate these matters within a coherent and comprehensible historical record.
This was the tradition that also produced, for example, Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975), and was conveniently encapsulated for more general consumption in the first edition of Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage (1970). It was positivist theatrical history, heavily driven by conservative interpretations of what it chose to accept as factual evidence, chary of social, economic, cultural and political explanations which were not tangibly part of the written record. At the same time, it was often dogged (more or less unconsciously) by a Whiggish view of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a struggle between authoritarian monarchies and elements in the country which resisted arbitrary and repressive government -- a struggle which culminated in the Civil War. The theatre was often cast as an unfortunate pawn in this struggle: a popular/professional art-form adopted by the aristocracy, reviled and resisted by puritans (especially in the City of London), latterly made decadent by over-dependence on the court, and finally swept away by the closure of the theatres in 1642.
Much of the evidence-base unearthed by this tradition of theatre history remains indispensable. But since Bentley our understanding of the early modern era (a terminology itself loaded with cultural freight) has been transformed out of all recognition: by social and political historians (Marxist and revisionist both), and by new historicist, cultural materialist and feminist-historicist literary scholars, as well as by more conventional theatre historians. To mention only some of the most obvious and far-reaching issues:
* the nature of patronage in the period has been re-examined by scholars too numerous to mention, revealing it to be less a matter of aristocratic largesse than part of the essential socio-economic fabric, a system of nuanced reciprocal exchanges which bound society together; these matters are beginning to be explored in relation to dramatic patronage, where the nature of the implied relationship is still little understood -- a major collection of essays on this subject, edited by Paul W. White and Suzanne Westfall, was recently published by Cambridge UP.
* our understanding of theatrical practice in the period is being radically changed by the coming to fruition of the Records of Early English Drama project, as may be seen in such publications as Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996) and Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and their Plays (1999): the latter is the first sustained attempt to make the theatrical ‘company’ (a term also in debate) the centre of attention, rather than playwrights, theatres or dramatic genres; critically, this work has forced us to look earlier than the 1590 watershed favoured by Chambers and Bentley (as the putative starting point of Shakespeare’s career) and wider than the heavy London focus which this implied, enabling us to see the earlier drama not just as a clumsy fumbling towards the wonders of the Globe and making us rethink such questions as theatrical touring; these issues will be addressed again in two forthcoming Lancastrian Shakespeare volumes (Manchester UP, ed. Findlay, Wilson & Dutton).
* our knowledge of the economics of Elizabethan theatre (and with it our understanding of the ‘objections’ to it by various City of London authorities) has been transformed by such pioneering studies as those of Susan Cerasano on Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, and by William Ingram’s major works, especially The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan London (1992); this meshes with much work looking at theatre practices in relation to cognate social practices, such as the organisation of trade guilds (to which many of the actors belonged), money-lending and share-holding.
* the social and sexual composition of early modern theatre audiences -- once supposedly ‘settled’ by Alfred Harbage -- became the focus of a spirited, and unresolved, debate in the 1980s, involving such figures as Anne Jennalie Cook, Andrew Gurr, Martin Butler and Kathleen McLuskie.
* parallel to this, the practice of boys/young men playing the roles of women on the early modern stage has been ransacked for its implications, both as a business practice and as a matter of gender signification.
* the physical nature of the theatres themselves, and sometimes the business dealings surrounding their building and use, have been examined by such as John Orrell, Andrew Gurr, Jean MacIntyre, William Ingram and Herbert Berry, studies given further impetus by the rediscovery of remains of the Rose and the Globe in the 1990s; the ‘places’ of the stage -- both its physical and cultural locations -- have been hotly debated since Steven Mullaney’s famous study (1988).
* several of Shakespeare’s major contemporaries have been ‘revisioned’ in ways which have wider implications -- Jonson, hitherto never the subject of a scholarly biography, has now had three (Rosalind Miles, 1986; David Riggs, 1989; David Kay, 1995) and another is in progress (Ian Donaldson); Middleton’s status has been radically re-thought in the studies which have followed on Margot Heinemann’s Puritanism and Theatre (1980) and led to the new Oxford edition of his works (gen. ed. Gary Taylor, forthcoming); Kathleen McLuskie has challenged the traditional pigeon-holing of Dekker and Heywood as ‘popular’ hacks (1994); whole genres have similarly been completely rethought, notably court masques (Orgel et al) and civic pageants (Bergeron et al)
* changes in the philosophy and practice of scholarly editing have called into question all our assumptions about ‘foul papers’, ‘pirated’ texts, ‘playhouse copy’, authorised and unauthorised publication, and so the nature of all play-texts in the era. Inevitably Shakespeare led the way: the 1980s debate about the quarto and folio texts of King Lear (most visible in The Division of the Kingdoms, ed. Taylor and Warren (1983)) led to wider questions of Shakespeare revising his own plays;the Oxford Shakespeare (gen. eds. Wells and Taylor, 1986) was revolutionary in its determination to privilege, as far as possible, the plays as performed, in a way that implicitly challenges any other state. The Oxford Middleton and forthcoming Cambridge Ben Jonson will in other ways challenge traditional assumptions about those authors and their plays.
* the Oxford Shakespeare also put the issue of the joint-authorship of plays firmly on the agenda, since it found significant contributions not only from Fletcher (who has long been suspected) but also Middleton in ‘Shakespeare’s’ texts; to traditionalists who insisted on Shakespeare’s individual genius it was a demeaning practice, the mark of hack commercialism, but that argument has been comprehensively challenged by Jeffrey Masten (1997), not only in respect of Shakespeare but more widely in terms of what dramatic authorship represented in that cultural economy.
* parallel to the rethinking of modern editorial practice has developed a much more informed understanding of Elizabethan publishing practices; this was led by Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1978) but has latterly focused largely on Peter Blayney’s ground-breaking work on publishing and the Stationers’ Company (including The Texts of ‘King Lear’ and Their Origins, Vol 1 (1982) and The First Folio of Shakespeare (1991), all of which has forced us to rethink how any Elizabethan plays got into print.
* the nature of the control, licensing and censorship of Elizabethan plays and books has been radically re-examined by, among others, Janet Clare, Philip Finkelpearl, Richard Burt, N. W. Bawcutt, Cyndia Susan Clegg, Lindsay Kaplan and myself.
* the nature of the repertoire in the early modern theatre, and of professional relations between the playing companies, has been addressed in major studies by Roslyn Knutson (1991, 2001) and James Bednarz (2001).
* the issue of royal patronage of theatre (esp. after 1603) has been re-thought by Martin Butler (1984), Leeds Barroll (1988), Alvin Kernan (1995), John Astington (2001) and others, while the distinctive roles of the queens consort -- Queen Anna and Queen Henrietta-Maria -- have been brought out for the first time by feminists (Barbara Lewalski, 1993) and others; even the traditional story of the closure of the theatre by the puritans in 1642 has been shown to be inadequate.
The challenge for Shakespeare’s Theatre: A History is to subsume all this material, and more, in a lucid and coherent narrative which will be as authoritative in relation to modern scholarship as Bentley’s was to his own era. Bentley’s own model involved breaking the material down thematically, with separate chapters on the theatres, patronage, playwrights etc. This produced a very focused narrative, but with two specific draw-backs: one is that it underplayed the degree of change over the period -- theatres as disparate in cultural space as Newington Butts and the Salisbury Court, or dramatists as different as Robert Wilson and James Shirley, all rub shoulders with each other. The other is that it underplayed the synergistic relationship between all the elements in the cultural mix: as the McMillin/MacLean study of the Queen’s Men graphically shows, matters of personnel, patronage, politics, playwrighting, touring and court performance all depended implicitly on each other, and as the one changed so did all the others.
So a diachronic model is essential. And one which focuses on ‘the companies’ will be useful in keeping the interplay of the different elements to the fore. But that will need to be matched with a capacity for standing back and examining the dynamic interplay between various models of company, and assessing these within the broader pictures of court, country, city, economy and politics. No other recent study attempts to encompass all of this.
