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Global Economics: A History of the Theater Business, the Chamberlain's/ King's Men, and Their Plays, 1599-1642 (review)

The more important contributions to scholarship are to be found in part 1, where a number of essays explore interesting aspects of Blackfriars or indoor practices, companies, and contexts. Jeanne H. McCarthy’s essay, focusing on the King’s Men’s occupation of the Blackfriars as a turning point for the boy companies, as well as for the King’s Men themselves, argues that the children were primarily an Elizabethan phenomenon, linked to a political agenda determined by female sovereignty and part of Elizabeth’s characteristic figuring of authority over her subjects through tropes of maternity. Michael Shapiro brings the neglected subject of grammar-school performance into prominence, using it to revisit the question of the relationship between patronage and profit as a more tense relationship than he once thought. Alan Somerset, the only contributor to explore issues of space, looks at provincial spaces analogous to the Blackfriars, rightly highlighting the fact that when the King’s Men took possession of the Blackfriars “they were not making a radical departure but were, on the contrary, setting up in the familiar circumstances of an indoor hall” (81). Ian Borden brings a new perspective by discussing the Blackfriars as a place that played host to fencing contests, possibly even before 1538, when the monastery was dissolved. Borden provides full and useful information about this aspect of the Blackfriars’s history, but he could have done more to consider how this history changed the nature and perception of the space. John R. Ford, writing about bearbaiting references in Twelfth Night, quotes Jason Scott-Warren as remarking that “‘the overlap between the rival entertainments was not just a coincidence of space; it was also a matter of converging spatial practices’” (177). This kind of attention could have set Borden’s observations in sharper relation to the Blackfriars as theater. Other pieces worth attending to are Roslyn Knutson’s timely reminder that the available evidence does not support the idea that there was a specific “Blackfriars repertory” and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s discussion of the apparent link after 1610 between indoor theaters and plays that included blackface roles.