Holger Schott Syme – författare

Locating the Queen's Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on early modern England's most prominent acting company, from their establishment in 1583 into the 1590s. Offering a far more detailed critical engagement with the plays than is available elsewhere, this volume situates the company in the theatrical and economic context of their time. The essays gathered here focus on four different aspects: playing spaces, repertory, play-types, and performance style, beginning with essays devoted to touring conditions, performances in university towns, London inns and theatres, and the patronage system under Queen Elizabeth. Repertory studies, unique to this volume, consider the elements of the company's distinctive style, and how this style may have influenced, for example, Shakespeare's Henry V. Contributors explore two distinct genres, the morality and the history play, especially focussing on the use of stock characters and on male/female relationships. Revising standard accounts of late Elizabeth theatre history, this collection shows that the Queen's Men, often understood as the last rear-guard of the old theatre, were a vital force that enjoyed continued success in the provinces and in London, representative of the abiding appeal of an older, more ostentatiously theatrical form of drama.

Over the past decade, attribution scholars have come to a consensus that Shakespeare wrote some of the additions printed in the 1602 quarto of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. This new development in textual studies has far-reaching consequences for established theatre-historical narratives. Accounting for Shakespeare's involvement in The Spanish Tragedy requires us to rethink the history of two major theatre companies, the Admiral's and the Chamberlain's Men, and to reread much of the documentary record of late Elizabethan theatre. Modelling what a theatre-historical response to new attributionist arguments might look like, the author offers an in-depth reinterpretation of Philip Henslowe's records of new plays, develops a novel account of how theatre companies copied and adapted plays in one another's repertories (including a reconsideration of the 'Ur-Hamlet' and the two Shrew plays), and reconstructs an early modern cluster of Hieronimo plays that also allows us to reimagine Ben Jonson's career as an actor.

Holger Syme presents a radically new explanation for the theatre's importance in Shakespeare's time. He portrays early modern England as a culture of mediation, dominated by transactions in which one person stood in for another, giving voice to absent speakers or bringing past events to life. No art form related more immediately to this culture than the theatre. Arguing against the influential view that the period underwent a crisis of representation, Syme draws upon extensive archival research in the fields of law, demonology, historiography and science to trace a pervasive conviction that testimony and report, delivered by properly authorised figures, provided access to truth. Through detailed close readings of plays by Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare - in particular Volpone, Richard II and The Winter's Tale - and analyses of criminal trial procedures, the book constructs a revisionist account of the nature of representation on the early modern stage.