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Shakespeare's Companies: William Shakespeare's Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594

example, reads the play in the context of the divergent demands made by humanist educators for imitatio and improvisation in order to show how university students gained the cultural literacy necessary for them to rise to positions of power in Church and state. This attention to both performance texts and performance circumstances is shared by most of the contributors, and is a key component of the volume’s success: it enlivens what can sometimes be quite dry primary material, and reinforces the connection between drama and lived experience that the plays themselves repeatedly make. Knight’s chapter is particularly successful at this, as it shows how several plays that might at first glance appear to be nothing more than whimsical fantasies in fact deal with pressing contemporary anxieties about graduate unemployment and the university’s role in the commonwealth. The quality and variety of essays presented in Jonathan Walker and Paul D. Streufert’s collection is commendable, and one leaves the volume energized by the groundbreaking material it contains. Walker closes his introduction by looking forward to ‘‘the work of others who will extend and enhance our conclusions’’ (p. 15). Such writers have a difficult act to follow.