Playing Companies and Repertory

Abstract

This chapter surveys the most prominent adult playing companies in early modern England, c.1570–1642, with emphasis on the Shakespearean era. It comments generally on topics such as patronage, venues in London and the provinces, player personnel, and repertory holdings. It sets the playing companies against a backdrop of political interest in the theater as well as nontheatrical constraints, including plague. It implies a mode of commerce in which companies operated by a similar system of repertorial acquisition in the distribution of plays across the conventional genres of comedy, history, and tragedy. It implies further that the companies, though in competition with one another, riffed off of one another's commercial hits by acquiring similar plays for themselves. The conclusion here is that the early modern theater was a successful business that lasted with only superficial changes to its practices for the better part of seventy-five years.

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