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Chapter 4 - Courting Controversy – Shakespeare and the King’s Men

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2021

David McInnis
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Summary

Shortly after Shakespeare’s company became the King’s Men, it acquired ‘the tragedie of Gowrie’ – a play about an attempt to assassinate their new patron. Perhaps that decision might be understood better in the context of another lost play they performed two months later: ‘The Spanish Maze’. No scholar has hazarded a guess about that play’s specific subject matter, but the possibility I propose – though highly conjectural – is appealing in that it offers a kind of ‘missing link’ between ‘Gowrie’ and Macbeth as plays that engage with political controversy and the king’s interests. The chapter ends with the company’s acquisition of the Blackfriars playhouse, and it was a lost play, ‘The Silver Mine’, that played a key role in the circumstances that enabled the King’s Men to lease the venue. Given the paucity of evidence about how the venue affected the company’s repertory, it is prudent to avoid making assumptions about what kinds of plays have been lost from the company’s repertory. The simple truth is that we do not actually know how the King’s Men’s repertory was (or was not) affected by the company’s simultaneous use of the Blackfriars and Globe playhouses.

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Shakespeare and Lost Plays
Reimagining Drama in Early Modern England
, pp. 118 - 149
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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