ABSTRACT
The entrepreneur Philip Henslowe was a fastidious man. This is perhaps the one feature of his personality that can be gleaned with any accuracy from the mass of paperwork that survived him-from 1592 until 1609, he maintained accounts of loans, payments, and receipts on the spare sheets of a ledger that had been handed down to him from his deceased brother, John. The narrative of Shakespeare's career has evolved over time as each new document that is unearthed with information about the playwright or the theatres and companies with which he occupied himself is incorporated into the narrative or disregarded as irrelevant. The "subversion-containment" debates that accompanied the "cultural turn" in Shakespeare studies in the 1980s and 1990s provide a cautionary tale for those of us who pursue historical lines of investigation within this subject area. Pages of history seem to be no help in identifying any Clement Bowle who might have been an associate of Henslowe's circa 1592.
