The Shakespearian Playing Companies

This is one of those monumental works that will last for many generations. ... , he retains in his accounts of the history of playing a lively sense of interdependence of plays and players. ... The lists and statistics are as full and as accurate as current research permits. At that level, this book is uniquely valuable. But it is much more than a compendium of known facts. ... It is a significant aspect of this important book that it carries the story through to its conclusion in the 1642 closure of the theatres. Vivid towards the end of Gurr's narrative, and vital to it throughout, is his feeling for the impact on the entertainment industry of the struggles for power and salvation that divided the nation. The playing place is always social space./Peter Thomson, University of Exeter/ Theatre Research International Vol 23 No 1
an attempt at the largest context, a comprehensive history of the companies which generated the London plays and first put them on stage. /Around The Globe/ d 01/01/98
outstanding new study ... his magisterial new book is his most important contribution yet to our understanding of Renaissance theatre activity, the first volume ever devoted to providing a general history of the London theatre companies ... in this rich work, it is his identification of the creation of London theatre culture that is most significant. As the Royal Shakespeare Company changes its working patterns, abandoning its London "home" to tour for six months each year. Andrew Gurr's charting of an earlier change seems remarkably timely. * Times Literary Supplement *
outstanding new study ... Scholars and students working on theatre history have long had reason to be grateful to Andrew Gurr. But his magisterial new book is his most important contribution yet to our understanding of Renaissance theatre activity, the first volume ever devoted to providing a general history of the London theatre companies ... although The Shakespearian Playing Companies looks like, and will be used as, an assemblage of the state of scholarly knowledge about the theatre companies accumulated over the course of the century, it is much more than that ... in this rich work, it is his identification of the creation of London theatre culture that is most significant. * Times Literary Supplement *
a "comprehensive history" of the eighty years of London playing companies ... Gurr's effort to apply his research to the plays themselves and their "highly mobile social and political concerns," makes the book especially useful for students of early modern drama ... this book represents a major contribution to our knowledge of the London stage, and is destined to remain the authoritative study of its subject for many years to come. * Douglas Brooks, Columbia University, Sixteenth Century Journal XXVIII/1 (1997) *
an attempt at the largest context, a comprehensive history of the companies which generated the London plays and first put them on stage ... no single individual or company did much entirely on their own to shape the major changes that this history of the companies and their products reveals ... It is a story without heroes. * Around the Globe *
Gurr's wide knowledge of the field makdes the book fascinating reading.../ an interesting, vastly learned book .../ The 'Shakespearean Playing Companies' will undoubtedly become an ubiquitously cited tool in scholarship.../ ... the many brilliant and broad ideas that appear in 'The Shakespearean Playing Companies'./ Mary Bly, Medieval and Renaissancedrama in England, Vol . II, 1999.
The prospects opened by this book are always enlivening, for this is the kind of work that rewrites the major issue itself. It now seems necessary to write early theater history along the lines Gurr has laid out, with the companies at the center and with his argument as the magnet which brought them there. I can think of no more exciting and far-reaching challenge for the next generation of theater historians. * Scott McMillin, Cornell University, Modern Philology *
A huge and exciting topic... focus on playing companies is... for the theater history of this period, refreshing and useful. * Anne Lancashire, Shakespeare Quarterly *