From Text to Performance in the Elizabethan Theatre: Preparing the Play for the Stage.

Renaissance theater historians have been slower than most to rethink their basic assumptions, largely because the evidence about theater practices in Shakespeare's time is so fragmentary and yet so tangible in its application to the plays that reappraisals have little to go on. You can scour the known materials, reordering the evidence to put the conclusions drawn from them onto a sounder base. Or you can find a fresh idea about some of the fragments and apply it, questioning in the process the generalizations that are usually based on them. T.J. King's book exemplifies the first method; David Bradley tries the second. With their different approaches, each of them offers a distinct advance in knowledge of the ways Elizabethan plays were prepared for performance on their stages.

Given the speculative games that have been so popular in recent years over role doubling in the original performances, we might expect both books to focus on redefining the parameters that Baldwin, Bevington, and Ringler laid down. King's book is largely a refinement of the evidence on which Baldwin based his Organisation and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company nearly seventy years ago. It offers a rigorously conservative set of tables of the …