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

• Published in: Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 2009, Vol.22, p.242-248
• Main Author: Bly, Mary
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Actors; Archivists; Audiences; Children; Collaboration; Historians; New Books on Theater History; Scholars; Theater
• ISSN: 0731-3403

"3 Organizing by repertory, she suggests, involves accepting that commercial strategies spring from company management, and that we have to explain the King's Men's success not only by reference to Shakespeare, but by looking at hacks whose plays were "valuable items in the company repertory - if only because their number, conventionality, and appeal to a spectrum of tastes" (13). [...]although many historians believe that the Queen's Revels took on their final name when they moved to the Whitefriars, Richard Dutton has suggested that the move wasn't so simple, and that in fact the Children of the Whitefriars was a brand new, amalgamated theater company, engineered as such by the Revels Office.5 The new company would have had some relation to the Queen's Revels, but would have used the defunct King's Revels patent, and had a new, less politically controversial, artistic policy. [...]Munro took on a company about which there is a welter of conflicting opinions. Munro suggests that we can look for social stress-points by focusing on jokes, puns, and jibes about social status, and that "standard comic structures are manipulated in order to confirm or confound audience expectation, with laughter playing a crucial role in the production or withholding of satisfaction" (57).