“Still and all, it was an interesting year.”

—An Interview with Roslyn L. Knutson

Today, we’re delighted to speak with Roslyn L. Knutson, Professor of English Emerita at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. She is the author of Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (2001) and The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (1991) and has published widely on theater history. Her essay “What’s So Special about 1594?” appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly’s special issue “1594.”

Are Shakespeare specialists and theater historians laying too much stress on the year 1594—or not enough?

Theater historians, just like other historians, want to construct a narrative from the bits of evidence they have available. And they’ve gotten into the field to begin with because they think some people, or events, matter more than others. When the desire for narrative is added to a set of priorities, the inevitable result is to promote some pieces of evidence above others. One of my friends, complimenting my “1594” essay, emailed me with the tactful observation that “still and all, it [1594] was an interesting year.” Of course it was. But it is hard to find a year when nothing happened of significance to the business of playing. The elevation of 1594 has as much to do with scholars’ fascination with Shakespeare and a cultural belief that politicians saw the playing companies as useful pawns in some power game as it does with any specific event that occurred.

Your comment about a “cultural belief” seems to point to the duopoly theory—or are you speaking more broadly, perhaps, to historicist concerns with power and governance?

One of the reasons why the field of theater history has been so interesting in the last thirty years is that a number of its practitioners have paid less attention to Shakespeare and VIPs and more to the ordinary lives of players; records of theatrical activity in the provinces; playhouses and other theatrical venues where the Chamberlain’s / King’s men did not play; plays not by Shakespeare; and (self-servingly) lost plays. These pursuits have changed the elitist paradigm by which theater history was designed, and the necessary result is that old markers of significance such as a given year (1594), a given playwright (Shakespeare), and a given political agent (the Privy Council) are not still significant in the same way. To put it another way, the conflict is between the sort of history historians used to tell that focused on kings and laws versus a more modern focus on ordinary people and the practicalities of everyday life. Everything—especially interpretations of the past—is a matter of perspective.

It’s interesting that the “elitist paradigm” that we would comfortably associate with the bad old past has been overtaken by equally top-down emphases on those in power.

Yes, despite the recent fashion of New Historicism that appeared to (and sometimes did) redirect our attention to commoners and their pursuits, there has remained a stubborn strain in theatrical narratives that privileges the court over the marketplace. (Oxfordians rely on a similar elitism.) In the roundtable, there was an exchange about a company’s dominance at court. It is important to narratives that depend on hierarchies, but there is no explicit link between a company’s appearance at court and its complementary improvement in market share.

The players themselves perpetuated the fiction, though. In 1584, civic authorities complained that in the previous year the Queen’s men only had had the Privy Council’s permission to play, yet “all the places of playing were filled with men calling themselues the Quenes players” (Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:302). Everyone knew the fiction that commercial playing was tolerated under the guise of players’ being prepared to perform for the queen, but even in this snapshot of complaint it is obvious that having one authorized company did not dampen the commerce of other troupes.

Your essay draws on primary archival research—for example, records of London plague deaths. You also draw attention to the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project and how its activities are expanding—even overturning—our assumptions about the types of theatrical activity and the working habits of theatrical companies in Shakespeare’s time. Could you address the importance of archival research as it’s impacted your own work? Do you have recommendations for the place it should have in others’ work?

I’m not sufficiently trained as a historian to speak cogently about discrepancies between sets of records. I do know that the Privy Council feared an increase in plague in London and its surrounding counties in January 1593. I have not compared the number of deaths in every parish in London for each month of 1592–94, so I cannot say for a fact that the council’s fears were premature. What moves me about these parish records are the family tragedies they reveal, and no other records can tell these stories quite so starkly. In St. Leonard Eastcheap in 1593, for example, deaths in four families account for fifteen of the twenty-eight burials from August to November: one family lost six members in less than a month.

For a few years back in the 1990s, I spent a lot of time reading London parish registers. It served as a kind of reality check, in that there was virtually nothing that hinted at the larger stage of royalty and parliament. In one memorable exception, the parish clerk of St. Botoph Algate entered a note in his memoranda books about the ringing of the bells on 9 February 1586/7 “ffor Ioye that the Queene of Skottes that Eennemye to ower most noble Queenes Majesties and ower contrie Was Beheaded.”

But the clerk’s books are full of ordinary deaths (one of my favorites is a man who died “of a thought”—take that, Hamlet). In 1590, there is a report of a coroner’s jury, which finds that a woman named Amy Stokes had intentionally hanged herself, and it is ordered that she be buried at “some Cross way neare the townes end” with a stake through her heart so that passersby “might take heede” against similarly committing suicide. This insignificant tragedy bespeaks volumes about daily life as the players and playwrights knew it, even though it has no apparent relevance to theatrical commerce.

In terms of the players themselves, we now have an enormous body of information (largely, but not entirely) from parish registers. It is easy to use this information to confirm our anxiety that all those antitheatrical critics in the 1500s were right about the moral character of players and, by association, the danger of playing to public morality. I think, for example, of the entry in the register of St. Giles Cripplegate (10 February 1586/7) of a child named “Comedia,” daughter of William Johnson, a player with the Queen’s Men; the entry continues: “Base born of Alyce Booker.” But on the whole this information has taught us that players generally were upstanding members of the community with unremarkable lives. Had they been wilder, we’d have records of their behavior from the law courts.

REED research has brought about a similar revolution in terms of companies no one had heard of or cared about until a compilation of provincial records showed their activity to be the norm in villages and country estates all across England. If only we had the texts of some of the plays these local companies performed! It is very easy to assume that provincial activity was rough and amateurish without textual evidence to illustrate otherwise (and even with that evidence, we might “read” what we see with little understanding). But the very fact that we know there was so much provincial activity forces us to concede that ordinary people had a means to develop theatrical tastes, and that alone contributed to the professionalism of the most successful companies over time, in London and on the road.

At some point, every scholar has to work back to original documents. Not all of us will develop the expertise in secretary hand and Elizabethan legal Latin to move about as freely in the archives as we might like, but nothing compares to the thrill of holding in hand a document no one except an archivist might have touched in 400 years.

In the roundtable, Holger Syme remarked that Harbage’s Annals were “about the least reliable source of theater-historical evidence in existence.” Has Harbage (and Schoenbaum’s supplements) been superseded by REED, other sources, or simply the necessity to slog through the archives?

I agree that the Annals by Harbage and his successors are virtually useless as documents of anything. And after Schoenbaum’s supplement, errors were introduced that deceive the unwary. All Harbage did was troll through standard references such as F. G. Fleay, W. W. Greg, and E. K. Chambers and attempt a chronology. The Annals is a convenient guide, and we use it for the Lost Plays Database for that reason (and because Harbage is now out of copyright). But we’ve repeatedly found that entries in the Lost Plays Database revise and refine Harbage’s guesses on dating and genre—even, in some cases, on company, venue, and authorship. But that is what scholarship is supposed to do. In Harbage’s defense, he trusted his sources. We all do that too, until our own research forces us to raise questions.

So much attention is devoted to the Chamberlain’s Men, some to the Admiral’s Men. We’re awaiting Sally-Beth Maclean and Lawrence Manly’s book on Strange’s Men. But your essay reminds us that we need to make our assumptions about lesser-studied (even understudied) companies more nuanced. Specifically, you note that scholars misinterpret the breakup of Pembroke’s Men in the summer of 1593 as a sign of the wider collapse of the “business of playing,” and that too little attention has been paid to Sussex’s Men, who demonstrate the very “expertise” and professionalism that theories such as that of the duopoly deny actors and other “theatrical professionals.”

Among the great liabilities of working with theatrical companies is our inability to make lists of company sharers over time and lists of plays in performance. Due to Henslowe’s Diary, we do have a lot of information on these topics for Strange’s Men (1592–93) and the Admiral’s Men (1594–1603). But even then, neither company has quite been given its due in commercial terms. The desire to make Shakespeare and his company the premier combination is just too powerful.

However (and here I step up on my soap box), I believe that one way to speed the reassessment of company repertories is to pay more attention to lost plays. Henslowe’s Diary alone provides the titles of well over two hundred lost plays, most of which have been invisible in arguments about company commerce. Or the titles have been misidentified as plays we do have. Working with the title of a lost play, I cannot say what the text would have been like, but I can suggest story materials it might have relied on. In some cases, those story materials suggest details of costuming and staging that dramatists might have used. This is all guesswork, and no one is required to perceive it as true, but it nonetheless broadens a perception of the daily fare at a playing venue at a given time.

Could you address further the intriguing possibility raised in your essay that Shakespeare was not “fully [committed]” to the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594?

I would love to know in even one case whether Shakespeare chose a theatrical subject for himself or his company did. And are we to suppose he sold his plays to the company or just offered them as part of his professional engagement with their commerce? Did he get the same price for a Love’s Labor’s Lost as a King Lear? And what about piecework? Did he get 40s. for mending some play for the court, as dramatists did at the Rose? Scholars have gotten it into their heads that Shakespeare was tight with his money. I don’t know what the evidence of that belief is. But what I really don’t know is what was considered prudent business finances in Shakespeare’s time and what “tight” would have meant. I am repeatedly confounded, working with Henslowe’s Diary, in finding that the Admiral’s Men (for example) didn’t make the choices in repertorial scheduling that make sense to me. I am thus reminded that I need to evaluate their business as the records suggest, not warp them to my preferences.

Could you tell us something about your current projects?

I have two research projects underway. One is a repertory study of the commercial marketplace over the years when Christopher Marlowe was writing new plays (1587–93). I see this as a series of articles. Although many of my colleagues will disagree, I do not want to write another book (books require too much coherence!). I’d much rather have the freedom to focus on a particular question and write that up. I have one such article in progress on the topic of Marlovian imitation. In it, I react to the notion that Marlowe’s influence produced “weak sons,” and I argue rather that these plays had successful commercial careers.

The other project is the Lost Plays Database that I co-edit with David McInnis. It is a wiki-style database, and we welcome contributors. As I indicate above, I have become convinced that one factor in the narratives we tell about playing companies and commerce is our incomplete appreciation of the spread and diversity of companies’ repertories. The gaping hole in our knowledge of those repertories is the lost plays. The LPD is a gathering of documentary and narrative information about lost plays, as well as a guide to extant criticism. Each entry is a little essay (sometimes not so little). To the curious, I recommend checking out entries on the following: “Henry the Una,” “The Conquest of the West Indies,” “Oldcastle,” and “Galiaso.”