ABSTRACT
It is perhaps a legacy of Romantic thinking to believe that a writer is free to go wherever their imagination may lead. If this were ever true, it is certainly not true of writing that seeks to succeed commercially. Shakespeare and his fellow writers depended for their livelihood on writing plays that they knew a theatre company would buy. Theatre companies looked for scripts that could build on the success of other popular plays. Theatre Companies
The appearance of the first professional theatres in Elizabethan London was a remarkable feature of the age. Key figures in this respect were Philip Henslowe and James Burbage, entrepreneurs who put up the capital and managed the companies of actors.
Each company was named after its aristocratic or royal patron. A company’s core comprised eight to ten ‘sharers’: performers, and sometimes writers, who bought into the company and shared its profits. Another ten or so actors, musicians, costume managers, a prompter, front-of-house staff, and so on were hired on contract, and paid very little. Some of the hired backstage staff were female. Companies were rather unstable, with actors moving from one to another, and back again. When Burbage built The Globe in 1599 Shakespeare became a shareholder, making the sharers of his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s (subsequently the King’s Men) majority owners of their own playhouse. Clearly this was a more stable arrangement, and it was copied by other companies. With up to 2,500 playgoers a day at The Globe, there was much money to be made. The company was later able to expand into the Blackfriars Theatre.
Companies performed six days a week in the public playhouses, putting on a different play each day. A new play would be added every two weeks or so, with more popular plays repeated and others abandoned. Henslowe’s company offered 38 plays in its 1594–5 season, of which 21 were new. The demand for new plays was high and playwrights often collaborated in teams or reworked others’ material.
Playwrights sold individual plays to company managers. Additional payment seems to have come from ‘benefit days’, when the dramatist took all profits from a performance. The plays were usually considered the property of the company which bought them, but Shakespeare seems to have kept ownership of his early plays and to have taken them with him when he changed companies in 1594. A few established writers were put under contract to produce a certain number of plays in a specified time, receiving a ‘salary’ on top of the usual payments. Shakespeare’s 1594 contract with the Lord Chamberlain’s Company (probably for one ‘serious’ and one ‘light’ play during the year) was, so far as we know, the first of these rare arrangements.
When King James came to power in 1603 he and his family became patrons of London’s three main companies. The Lord Chamberlain’s Company became The King’s Men, alongside the Queen Anne’s Men and Prince Henry’s Men. For the companies this meant regular and lucrative performances in the royal palaces, but it also gave the court some influence over the theatre.
