Tom Rutter

Repertory studies: A survey

Repertory studies can broadly be defined as an approach to the study of drama that takes the acting company rather than, say, the individual dramatist or play as the subject of its enquiry. This doesn’t mean that it considers dramatists irrelevant, or that it eschews detailed criticism of single plays, but neither of these is accorded privileged status. The playwright is considered alongside other contributors to a company’s dramatic output, such as actors, sharers, playhouse owners (and the buildings themselves), audiences and patrons, whereas the play itself is understood both as the company’s basic commodity and as one of many plays that together constituted its repertory. As an approach to the early modern drama, repertory studies is not new. One early example is Robert Boies Sharpe’s The Real War of the Theaters (1935), which discusses play by play the repertories of the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s Men and posits an ongoing intertextual dialogue between them; George F. Reynolds’ The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theatre, 1605 1625 (1940) could be classed as another, since it deals largely with the staging practices of Queen Anne’s Men. A number of other works, although focusing on individual dramatists or plays rather than on the repertory as such, have strong affinities to repertory studies in so far as they relate plays to the material circumstances of the companies performing them, such as their personnel and size (Baldwin; McMillin’s ‘‘‘The Book of Sir Thomas More’’’, ‘‘Casting for Pembroke’s Men’’) or their playhouses (Bentley; Beckerman). However, over the last two and a half decades more and more books have focused specifically on acting companies: Reavley Gair’s The Children of Paul’s (1982), Roslyn Knutson’s The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company (1991), Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and their Plays (1998), Mary Bly’s Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage (2000), which deals with the King’s Revels Company, Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespeare Company (2004) and Lucy Munro’s Children of the Queen’s Revels (2005). Numerous essays and articles have appeared, of which my own list of References offers only a sample, and the journal Early Theatre has devoted Issues in Review segments to ‘‘Reading the Elizabethan Acting Companies’’ in 2001 and to ‘‘Popular Theatre and the Red Bull’’ in 2006. Early Theatre describes itself as ‘‘a journal associated with the Records of Early English Drama’’ (REED), and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the growth of repertory studies as a discipline has taken place since the massive scholarly enterprise of REED began. It’s not only that REED has made available a wealth of information about early modern dramatic performances; it’s also the case that the kind of information REED collects facilitates the study of playing companies much more than it does play-centred criticism or

Patient Grissil and Jonsonian Satire

It has generally been assumed that the relationship between Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton’s Patient Grissil and Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour is limited to the similarity between episodes where the characters Emulo and Brisk recount duels in which they have participated. In fact, in another of its subplots Patient Grissil responds to the satirical agenda of Jonson’s play, questioning in the disaffected scholar Laureo the motivation, the wisdom, and the capacity of the individual who criticizes the powerful.

The Cambridge introduction to Christopher Marlowe

Preface Key dates 1. Life and historical contexts 2. Tamburlaine, Parts One and Two 3. Doctor Faustus 4. The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris 5. Edward II 6. Dido, Queen of Carthage and Marlowes poetry 7. Marlowes afterlives Bibliography.

Review of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (directed by Jonathan Moore) at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, June 2008

The seven-sided auditorium of the Royal Exchange, and the in-the-round productions that its architecture entails, should make it a theatre well suited to Shakespearean drama, and this staging of The Revenger’s Tragedy put the affinity to good effect. The action took place on a tiled surface, cracked round the edges, beneath which dirt and bones could be seen; the tiles made up a mosaic depicting the structure of an atom. The playing-space itself thus placed human suffering and mortality in a cosmic frame in a way that recalled the threetier structure of an Elizabethan playhouse, with heaven above, and hell below the stage; the replacement of a religious context with a materialistic one, however, gave an added metaphysical resonance to the play’s questions, ‘‘Is there a hell besides this, villains?’’ and ‘‘Has not heaven an ear?’’ (3.5.182, 4.2.150). The symmetry of the stage, furthermore, was appropriate to a production that happily embraced the stylised, semi-allegorical nature of Middleton’s play. In 1.2, when the Judge (John Gillett, who later reappeared as Antonio) arose following Junior’s trial, he revealed his seat to have been a pile of dusty tomes making him seem like a mere creation of books in the manner of Arcimboldo’s ‘‘Librarian’’. In the subsequent scene, Lussurioso’s status as an embodiment of undifferentiated lust was confirmed by his gleeful response when his crotch was grabbed by Vindice/Piato (Stephen Tompkinson): ‘‘Wondrous knave!’’ (1.3.34). Lussurioso himself (Jonathan Keeble) sat in an enormous globular swivel-chair lined with fake tigerskin and decorated with a map, and a drinks cabinet in the shape of a globe stood near at hand: the intention may have been to suggest that this was a world ruled by lust, or to allude to the venue of the play’s original staging. When, two scenes later, Vindice/Piato attempted to corrupt his sister Castiza (Stephanie Brittain) and mother Gratiana (Eileen O’Brien) at Lussurioso’s command, the production again chose to emphasize the emblematic nature of the action. Gratiana was played as a forceful Irish matron, stiff-jawed, with (in this scene) mixing-bowl in hand, an embodiment of maternal authority: to see this indomitable figure scrabbling on the ground for the bundles of notes dropped from Piato’s briefcase was perhaps the most horrific moment in a play full of more lurid horrors. The scene worked precisely because it didn’t try to rationalize her transformation in psychological terms, offering instead a tableau of mother, daughter and bawd. By contrast, a later innovation that worked less well was the decision to have Lussurioso silently present, sipping water in a canvas folding chair, during Junior’s torture and execution to the tune of ‘‘My Favourite Things’’. This reminded me of Ian McKellen’s voyeuristic Richard III (in Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film version of the Richard Eyre production), and was perhaps meant to make the audience examine its own