This essay revisits questions of creativity, co-authorship, and co-operation in the career of John Fletcher, who is best-known today for his collaborations with Francis Beaumont and William Shakespeare, but was also the author of important solo plays. Bringing together biography, theater history, and repertory studies, it offers a new angle on Fletcher’s career by examining in detail his underrated work for the Children of the Queen’s Revels at the Whitefriars playhouse between 1609 and 1615, and by drawing on a set of new documentary materials that illuminate his writing life. These sources not only help to embed Fletcher within the playing company but also suggest that his experience of writing plays at the Whitefriars may have differed from that of his colleagues in significant ways. These insights are brought to bear on Four Plays or Moral Representations in One, the first play that Fletcher wrote with the actor-dramatist Nathan Field. Examining the ways in which it reworks Fletcher’s habitual preoccupation with gender and the abuse of power, I argue that Four Plays offers new ways of understanding the place of solo writing within broader structures of collaboration.

This article draws attention to the ways in which dramatic folios published in England between 1616 and 1652 exploit not only the figure of the author but also the authority of the playing company. Arguing that the history of the dramatic folio is entwined with that of the King’s Men, the company in which Shakespeare himself had been a sharer, it examines in detail the paratextual materials of the first Jonson folio of 1616, the first Shakespeare folio of 1623, the “Beaumont and Fletcher” folio of 1647 and the single-play folio of Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase, issued in 1652 as a supplement to the 1647 folio. It identifies in these volumes a complex interaction between stage and page, one in which competing models of authority combine to support the development of the dramatic folio and promote the interests of the playing company.

This review considers Chris Laoutaris's Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio.

Journal Article The Names of the Actors: The First Folio and Theater History Get access Lucy Munro Lucy Munro Email: lucy.munro@kcl.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 4, Winter 2023, Pages 314–338, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad037 Published: 19 December 2023

Journal Article Christopher Highley. Blackfriars in Early Modern London: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood Get access Christopher Highley. Blackfriars in Early Modern London: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood. Pp. xii+286. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Hardback, £70. Lucy Munro Lucy Munro King’s College London, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, hgad057, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgad057 Published: 19 May 2023 Article history Received: 16 April 2023 Editorial decision: 10 May 2023 Accepted: 11 May 2023 Corrected and typeset: 19 May 2023 Published: 19 May 2023

On 27 July 1608, the burial of a child was entered in the parish register of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, a couple of miles away from the City of London: ‘Beniamyn son of Ben: Johnson of blackfriers from brookstreet buryed xxvij day’.1 ‘Ben: Johnson of blackfriers’ can be securely identified with the poet and playwright Ben Jonson, who signed the epistle to the first edition of Volpone (1607) ‘From my house in the Blackfriars’.2 The burial entry, which does not appear to have been published before, documents a new personal tragedy for Ben Jonson, who had already lost two children in the early years of the seventeenth century, Mary and another Benjamin, for whom he wrote the elegies ‘On my First Daughter’ and ‘On my First Son’.3 It also helps to illuminate a broader story of the lives and deaths of Jonson’s children, and his relationship with his wife, Anne Lewis Jonson.

While Shakespeare’s uses of music at the Theatre and Globe playhouses have been the subject of a good deal of scholarly attention, the soundscapes of other outdoor playhouses such as the Curtain, Rose, Boar’s Head, Fortune, and Red Bull have been largely dismissed or ignored. Yet from Robert Greene in the late 1580s and early 1590s, to plays written specifically for the outdoor playhouses in the 1620s, to Richard Brome at the Globe and Red Bull in the 1630s, the outdoor playhouses presented varied and often markedly experimental soundscapes. This chapter examines the musical traditions of the outdoor playhouses in detail for the first time, offering a new perspective on Shakespeare’s musical practice. It surveys the period between the construction of the outdoor Red Lion playhouse in 1567 and the acquisition of the indoor Blackfriars by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, paying particular attention to the late 1580s and 1590s, the years during which Shakespeare established himself as a dramatist. Looking at song and instrumental music, it draws on the histories of the playhouses, playing companies and individual actor-musicians, contemporary commentaries, and a range of plays and jigs, paying particular attention to the work of Robert Wilson, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and William Kemp. It argues first that Shakespeare’s early musical practices are in line with those of other playwrights working for outdoor playhouses, and second that the musical traditions of those playhouses are more wide-ranging, original, and inventive than scholars have generally recognized.

This note revisits a lawsuit in the Court of King’s Bench between Robert Browne of St Saviour, Southwark, gentleman, and Benjamin Jonson, citizen and bricklayer of London. The suit was discovered by Leslie Hotson, who found an entry in the King’s Bench plea rolls for Hilary Term 1600 (The National Archives [TNA], KB 27/1360, rot. 1075d), which ran from 23 January to 12 February. The first reference to the suit in print is that of W.G. Bell in his 1938 history of the Tylers and Bricklayers’ company.1 It was then brought to the wider attention of Jonson scholars when it was included in the ‘Supplementary Notes’ on Jonson’s life in the eleventh volume of The Oxford Jonson, published in 1952.2 Unfortunately, as Mark Eccles points out in his 1988 Notes and Queries piece, ‘Ben Jonson, “Citizen and Bricklayer”’, The Oxford Jonson makes some errors, placing the entry a year too early, in January 1599, and recording the date on which Jonson sealed a bond with Browne to pay him £10 as 2 April 1598, rather than 7 April 1599.3

Early modern drama was a product of the new theatrical spaces that began to open from the 1560s onward, multiple venues in and just outside London that played to a significant proportion of Londoners on most afternoons. Revisiting the evidence for this historical moment offers the opportunity to look afresh at the playhouses, plays, and playmakers that drove this new theatrical culture. These three terms include the inns and indoor spaces that regularly hosted plays, alongside the now more familiar outdoor, amphitheatrical venues the Theatre and the Rose; plays onstage, plays in print, and plays that are now lost; and the writers, actors, company managers, and male and female playhouse builders and investors who made the creation and performance of those plays possible. Conventional histories of this period’s theaters have tended to concentrate on the opening of the Theatre in 1576 as the first such playhouse. Scholarship of the late 20th and early 21st centuries shows that this event was not the initiating formative act it has come to seem, and emphasizes instead the multiple decades and kinds of playing space that need to be attended to in understanding the earliest years of the playhouses. Multiple kinds of playing company, too, operated in this period, in particular companies made up of predominantly adult male performers, with boys playing female roles, and companies composed entirely of boy performers.

Eubanks Winkler and Schoch reveal how – and why – the first generation to stage Shakespeare after Shakespeare’s lifetime changed absolutely everything. Founder of the Duke’s Company, Sir William Davenant influenced how Shakespeare was performed in a profound and lasting way. This book provides the first performance-based account of Restoration Shakespeare, exploring the precursors to Davenant’s approach to Restoration Shakespeare, the cultural context of Restoration theatre, the theatre spaces in which the Duke’s Company performed, Davenant’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, acting styles, and the lasting legacy of Davenant’s approach to staging Shakespeare. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Queen’s University Belfast.

Created when James I granted royal patronage to the former Chamberlain’s Men in 1603, the King’s Men was the first playing company to exercise a transformative influence on Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare was at the heart of its activities for nearly four decades, as player, playwright and theatrical commodity, and these interconnecting versions of ‘Shakespeare’ are the subject of Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men. The book draws on theatre history, performance studies and cultural history in order to reappraise the company as theatre makers in their own right. It analyses in detail the performance practices, cultural contexts and political pressures that helped to shape and reshape Shakespeare’s plays between 1603 and 1660. Exploring questions of authority, service, commodity and collaboration that were crucial to the company’s practices, it presents case-studies of the early performance histories of some of the most enduringly popular plays – Othello, Pericles, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II and Henry VIII – alongside a detailed reappraisal of the repertory of the company and the place of Shakespeare’s plays within it.

Abstract:An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart Drama and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.

This essay places Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! at the center of a set of textual, theatrical, and financial negotiations that are revealed by a hitherto overlooked lawsuit in the Court of Chancery. It reveals for the first time that Jonson—like Marston—had a financial stake in the Blackfriars playhouse where Eastward Ho! was performed, and it argues that the play both epitomizes and scrutinizes a set of social and literary transactions surrounding the playhouse. In doing so, it reappraises three important contexts for the production of Eastward Ho! First, it revises our understanding of the Blackfriars enterprise and its investors. Second, it reassesses the careers of Jonson and Marston in the years 1604–1606—revisiting their collaboration with Chapman, their interpersonal relationships, and the revision of Jonson’s The Case is Altered and Every Man in his Humor—and offers a new picture of Jonson as a company man. Third, it offers fresh insights into city comedy’s engagements with London during a crucial period of its development. A coda turns to Jonson’s The Alchemist, suggesting that this play glances back at Jonson’s own contractual and emotional involvement with the Blackfriars venture and its entangled financial structures. [L.M.]