Writing retrospectively in his three-volume Itinerary (1617) of what he had seen with his own eyes during extensive travels across Britain and Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Fynes Morison commented that: ‘There be, in my opinion, more plays in London than in all parts of the world I have seen…’. It is the task in part of this Introduction to explain why and how by 1617 this was the case. Why had London become the epicentre of an unparalleled theatre industry, with a raft of purpose-built playhouses, competing companies, and playwrights of the stature of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton vying for business from spectators and the publishing houses alike? What made this such an exciting moment of discovery and experimentation, one in which acting styles, the reach of dramatic language, notions of genre, ways of writing and working, and ideas about what might physically and intellectually be achieved on a stage, were stretched almost to breaking point?

From the outset, it must be made clear that the early modern professional theatre with which this study largely concerns itself did not appear fully formed from nowhere. There were much longer traditions and legacies of playing and performance on which early modern theatre was founded and to which it constantly referred and alluded. Janette Dillon has written that