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Production Finance at the Rose Theatre, 1596–98
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
One of the most consistently overlooked topics in Elizabethan theatre history is the internal organization of the acting companies. Modern scholarship has considerably enlarged our knowledge of the public and private playhouses, and of certain aspects of acting and staging, but we remain woefully ignorant of the way in which the actors went about the actual business of producing their plays. Our ignorance in these matters is the more surprising in that a substantial amount of primary evidence relating to production management and finance has long been known to exist in the so-called ‘diary’ and papers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. Whereas the relatively less accessible material relating to the theatres has been subjected to increasingly sophisticated analysis by various commentators in this century, Henslowe's diary remains a curiously neglected document.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1979
References
Notes
1. Greg, W. W., ed., Henslowe's Diary, 2 vols. (London, 1904–1908).Google Scholar
2. Notable exceptions to this generalization are Baldwin, T. W., ‘Posting Henslowe's Accounts’, JEGP, XXVI (1927), pp. 43–90Google Scholar, and The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton, 1927)Google Scholar; Beckerman, Bernard, ‘Philip Henslowe’, in Donahue, Joseph W., ed., The Theatrical Manager in England and America (Princeton, 1971).Google Scholar
3. Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage (London, 1923), I, pp. 361–2.Google Scholar
4. The suggestion that Henslowe's receipts represent one half of the gallery money taken as rent was first made by Greg and has been generally accepted ever since. There are certain difficulties with this interpretation of the figures as R. A. Foakes points out in the introduction to his edition of the diary, and it is probably wise to keep an open mind on the subject. (See Foakes, R. A. and Rickert, R. T., eds., Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge, 1961), p. xxviii).Google Scholar
5. Miscalculated by Henslowe as £7 6s 8d.
6. Foakes, R. A. has a full discussion of the problems of interpreting these figures (Diary, xxxiii–vi)Google Scholar. His own solution (that they reflect repayments made to Henslowe) does not seem to me to be consistent with the accounts Henslowe maintained before and after this period. At present it seems wise to confess that we do not know what is recorded in these mysterious five-column entries.
7. Baldwin supposes the sums to represent one quarter of the gallery money collected as rent. (‘Posting’, pp. 58–9).Google Scholar
8. The inventories are reproduced in Henslowe's Diary (1961), pp. 316–25.Google Scholar