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Eva Griffith, A Jacobean Company and its Playhouse: The Queen's Servants at the Red Bull Theatre (c.1605–1619), Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. xiii + 291, £60.00, ISBN: 978-1-1070-4188-2

Ever since Eva Griffith produced two articles that challenged much of what we thought we knew about the Red Bull Playhouse – in Theatre Notebook, 5 (2001), and in Huntington Library Quarterly, 74 (2011) – the promise of a full-length monograph on this most controversial of early modern theatres has been a tantalising one. It is a pleasure to record that this eagerly-awaited volume amply fulfils expectations. The bad press that the Red Bull has received began very much whilst its earliest practitioners (and audiences) were alive to hear and read it, but once the first stirrings of dramatic criticism began to make themselves felt in the second half of the seventeenth century, its reputation as a rough and disorderly venue that delivered little more than crude spectacle, noisy pyrotechnics and scarcely literate texts to the meanest citizens in London hardened into a ‘fact’ of theatrical history that has proved astonishingly resilient. For devotees of the theatre in a Restoration London that struggled to sustain just two small and socially exclusive playhouses, the large amphitheatre built on the road leading to the capital’s principal meat market proved a convenient scapegoat upon which they could vent the fear and loathing they felt for the unruly city that had engendered rebellion and civil war. The publicity campaign launched against the Red Bull by the likes of John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard in the 1670s went, with only minor interruptions, largely unchallenged right to the end of the twentieth century. It is one of the major achievements of Eva Griffith’s book that she has, for once and for all, comprehensively demolished that myth. The first thing a reader of A Jacobean Company will notice is the meticulous rigour with which Griffith has assembled and documented the enormous amount of archival research required to make a project such as this one successful. Cambridge university Press are also to be commended for allowing her the space to do this – the book is a long and densely annotated one – and for affording her scholarship the exemplary formatting and production values it deserves; the volume is beautifully illustrated, footnotes are mercifully found at the foot of the page to which they refer, and copy-editing has been sufficiently thorough to eliminate the errors that blight so many works of this kind. From the first pages, Griffith presents, clearly and unfussily, new evidence that vastly complicates and enriches our understanding of the Red Bull’s origins and its position in the social and cultural milieu of Jacobean London. So, for instance, while we are encouraged to think carefully about the implications for the playhouse of its proximity to the slaughterhouses and brothels of Clerkenwell, we are also reminded that some of the city’s most distinguished families – the Chaloners, the