This is the first complete history of the theater company in which Shakespeare acted and which staged all his plays. Created in 1594, the company became the King's Men in 1603 and ran for forty-eight years up to the closure of 1642. Andrew Gurr provides a study of the company's activities, explores its social role in its time and examines its repertoire of plays. This comprehensive illustrated history will be an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to know more about the conditions under which Shakespeare and his successors worked.

Considering both Shakespeare's fellow writers as well as members of his acting company Shakespeare in Company offers a unique insight into the company kept by William Shakespeare and how it impacted on his writing.

Focusing on a period (c.1577-1594) that is often neglected in Elizabethan theater histories, this study considers Shakespeare's involvement with the various London acting companies before his membership in the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594. Locating Shakespeare in the confusing records of the early London theater scene has long been one of the many unresolved problems in Shakespeare studies and is a key issue in theatre history, Shakespeare biography, and historiography. The aim in this book is to explain, analyze, and assess the competing claims about Shakespeare's pre-1594 acting company affiliations. Schoone-Jongen does not demonstrate that one particular claim is correct but provides a possible framework for Shakespeare's activities in the 1570s and 1580s, an overview of both London and provincial playing, and then offers a detailed analysis of the historical plausibility and probability of the warring claims made by biographers, ranging from the earliest sixteenth-century references to contemporary arguments. Full chapters are devoted to four specific acting companies, their activities, and a summary and critique of the arguments for Shakespeare's involvement in them (The Queen's Men, Strange's Men, Pembroke's Men, and Sussex's Men), a further chapter is dedicated to the proposition Shakespeare's first theatrical involvement was in a recusant Lancashire household, and a final chapter focuses on arguments for Shakespeare's membership in a half dozen other companies (most prominently Leicester's Men). Shakespeare's Companies simultaneously opens up twenty years of theatrical activity to inquiry and investigation while providing a critique of Shakespearean biographers and their historical methodologies.

Focusing on a period (c.1577-1594) that is often neglected in Elizabethan theater histories, this study considers Shakespeare's involvement with the various London acting companies before his membership in the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594. Locating Shakespeare in the confusing records of the early London theater scene has long been one of the many unresolved problems in Shakespeare studies and is a key issue in theatre history, Shakespeare biography, and historiography. The aim in this book is to explain, analyze, and assess the competing claims about Shakespeare's pre-1594 acting company affiliations. Schoone-Jongen does not demonstrate that one particular claim is correct but provides a possible framework for Shakespeare's activities in the 1570s and 1580s, an overview of both London and provincial playing, and then offers a detailed analysis of the historical plausibility and probability of the warring claims made by biographers, ranging from the earliest sixteenth-century references to contemporary arguments. Full chapters are devoted to four specific acting companies, their activities, and a summary and critique of the arguments for Shakespeare's involvement in them (The Queen's Men, Strange's Men, Pembroke's Men, and Sussex's Men), a further chapter is dedicated to the proposition Shakespeare's first theatrical involvement was in a recusant Lancashire household, and a final chapter focuses on arguments for Shakespeare's membership in a half dozen other companies (most prominently Leicester's Men). Shakespeare's Companies simultaneously opens up twenty years of theatrical activity to inquiry and investigation while providing a critique of Shakespearean biographers and their historical methodologies.

Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare's London explores the intimate and dynamic relationship between acting companies and playwrights in this seminal era in English theatre history. Siobhan Keenan's analysis includes chapters on the traditions and workings of contemporary acting companies, playwriting practices, stages and staging, audiences and patrons, each illustrated with detailed case studies of individual acting companies and their plays, including troupes such as Lady Elizabeth's players, 'Beeston's Boys' and the King's Men and works by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Brome and Heywood. We are accustomed to focusing on individual playwrights: Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare's London makes the case that we also need to think about the companies for which dramatists wrote and with whose members they collaborated, if we wish to better understand the dramas of the English Renaissance stage.

Drawing wide acclaim in hardcovera brilliant guide to management based on the principles explored in Shakespeares plays. Timelessly wise and externally popular, the plays of Shakespeare are packed with essential insights into human psychology and the use and abuse of power. In Shakespeare in Charge, Norman Augustine, former Fortune 500 CEO, and Kenneth Adelman, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, show how the Bards shrewd understanding of palace politics and the strategies of warfare can just as easily be applied to the twists and turns of the corporate world.