Children of the Queen's Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory

Description

This is the first book-length study of the Children of the Queen's Revels, the most enduring and influential of the Jacobean children's companies. Between 1603 and 1613 the Queen's Revels staged plays by Francis Beaumont, George Chapman, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, all of whom were at their most innovative when writing for this company. Combining theatre history and critical analysis, this study provides a history of the Children of the Queen's Revels, and an account of their repertory. It examines the 'biography' of the company - demonstrating the involvement in dramatic production of dramatists, shareholders, patrons, audiences and actors alike, and reappraising issues such as management, performance style and audience composition - before exploring their ground-breaking practices in comedy, tragicomedy and tragedy. The book also includes five documentary appendices detailing the plays, people and performances of the Queen's Revels company.

Lucy Munro is a lecturer in English at Keele University. She has edited Edward Sharpham's The Fleer and is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), The Book of the Play in Early Modern England, ed. Marta Straznicky (forthcoming) and Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield and Garrett A. Sullivan (2004). She reviews regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, New Theatre Quarterly, Around the Globe, and The Year's Work in English Studies, and is a regular contributor to Smoke: A London Peculiar.

"Munro makes two significant decisions: she focuses on the company rather than its dramatists, and she organizes the discussion of plays by way of genre not chronology. As a result she redefines the template for company histories." -Roslyn L. Knutson, University of Arkansas at Little Rock "This is a valuable resource book. It is very well written and not overwrought with precious vocabulary. Theater historians will find the scholarly apparatus, by itself, worth the price of the book...it is easy to say that probably anyone interested in Renaissance drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period will need this book." -Ben Jonson Journal