Repertory studies: A survey

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Notes

1. Another two volumes forthcoming in the near future are Terence Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare's Companies: William Shakespeare's Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594 and Helen Ostovich et al., Locating the Queen's Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing.

2. The uncertain nature of such deductions is illustrated by the diversity of explanations given for the failure of Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the Blackfriars around 1607: for Harbage, it failed because it was insufficiently anticitizen to please an elite audience (107–8), for Gurr, it was too anticitizen to please a mixed audience (Playgoing 74), and for Munro, the issue is not audience composition but the play's own defiance of generic conventions (Children 59–60, 212n).

3. An invaluable resource against which to check Gurr's performance data is the REED Patrons and Performances website at <http://link.library.utoronto.ca/reed/index.cfm>.

4. Gurr is here quoting Anthony Scoloker, Daiphantus; or, The Passions of Loue, A2r: an Epistle to the Reader should be “like Friendly Shake-speares Tragedies, where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on Tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet”.

5. In her earlier essay “Early Modern Drama and the Repertory Approach”, Munro offers an articulate justification for “looking at plays not primarily in terms of their authorship, but in terms of the theatre companies for which they were written” (2). She points out that it “enables us to look at texts by canonical and non-canonical authors on an equal footing, and to examine the input of the full range of people involved with dramatic production, from actors to patrons and audiences” (28).