The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 2 — Story, Setting & Ideas

Company Hierarchies and Patronage Networks

The volume opens with the boy companies, whose legal status as choristers or chapel servants gave them a distinct position. Chambers traces the Children of Paul’s from their early performances to their later rivalry with adult troupes, noting how patronage ties—such as those to the Queen or noble households—determined a company’s longevity. The adult companies are arranged by patron, from the Earl of Leicester’s Men to the King’s Men, with each entry detailing shifts in membership and touring routes. Chambers’s method is to collate payment records, license applications, and legal complaints, often letting the documents speak for themselves. For instance, the section on the Lord Admiral’s Men includes references to the Fortune contract, which specifies the dimensions and materials of the playhouse, a rare survival that illuminates building practices.

The Playhouse as Physical and Legal Entity

Book IV turns to the playhouses themselves, beginning with inns like the Red Lion and the Bull before moving to purpose-built structures. Chambers describes the Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, and the Globe, drawing on maps, building contracts, and lawsuits. The entry on the Globe includes details from the 1599 contract for its construction, noting that the timber was taken from the Theatre and reassembled on Bankside. Chambers also records the disputes over leases and shares that plagued playhouse owners, such as the conflict between the Burbages and Giles Allen. The private theatres, Blackfriars and Whitefriars, receive separate treatment, with emphasis on their indoor lighting, higher admission prices, and more select audiences. Throughout, Chambers anchors his descriptions in specific documents: the Fortune contract, the Hope’s dual purpose as a bear-baiting arena, and the legal wrangling over Porter’s Hall.

Actors’ Lives and Afterlives

Chambers devotes a substantial section to individual actors, compiling biographical data from wills, parish registers, and court cases. The entry on Richard Tarlton is exemplary: Chambers quotes from his will, a Chancery dispute over its validity, and a death-bed petition to Walsingham. He also cites a contemporary account of Tarlton’s jests before the Queen, which led to his banishment from court. The actor’s posthumous reputation is tracked through pamphlets and ballads that exploited his name. Other actors, such as Edward Alleyn and William Kemp, receive similar treatment, with Chambers noting their financial dealings and family connections. The evidence is fragmentary—a lawsuit here, a baptism record there—but Chambers assembles it into a coherent picture of a profession that was both precarious and lucrative.

International and Touring Companies

A brief section covers Italian players in England and English players abroad. Chambers records visits by Italian troupes, including a commedia dell’arte company that performed at court in the 1570s, and the travels of English actors to Scotland and the Continent. The entries are necessarily sparse, relying on diplomatic correspondence and municipal records. Chambers notes that English players in Germany and the Netherlands often adapted their repertoire to local tastes, performing plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare in translation. The section underscores the mobility of Elizabethan performers and the networks that connected London to provincial and foreign stages. Chambers does not speculate on the cultural impact of these exchanges but limits himself to documenting what the archives reveal: payments, licenses, and occasional complaints about unruly players.

Readers approaching this volume should treat it as a reference work rather than a narrative history. Chambers’s strength lies in his meticulous documentation; his weakness is a reluctance to synthesize. The index and cross-references are essential for navigating the dense entries. For those interested in a single company or playhouse, the relevant section can be read independently. The volume rewards patience: the details of a lawsuit or a building contract often illuminate larger patterns of patronage and competition that shaped Elizabethan drama.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to Chambers’s meticulous entries on the boy companies, their vanished laughter and legal squabbles. Somewhere between the patent disputes and the Globe’s timber, I remembered another kind of theatrical blunder—a quieter, colder one. I set the volume aside and found myself opening The Blunderer — Inside the Classic, and the rain seemed to change tempo, almost knowingly.