Chapter 3 links the company’s touring destinations in their second decade to Dudley’s attempts to influence the parliaments of 1571 and 1572 and to expand his landholdings. I argue that this should also make us rethink the players’ letter of 1572 and their receipt of a royal patent in 1574. Rather than a knee-jerk reaction to the Vagabond Act of 1572, the players’ letter leveraged their patron’s ambitions to expand their touring activity and to curry favour with the crown. Where the players did face renewed hostility was from within London. I argue that the patent of 1574, the company’s move out of the Red Lion, and the shift of their base of operations to the Theatre in Shoreditch by 1576, all respond to attempts by London’s mayors and aldermen to shut down their activities in or near the city. The second half of Chapter 3 focuses on making sense of the design of the Theatre and describes the company’s adoption of the repertory playing system as a logical extension of the goals that had not been fully accomplished with the Red Lion, along with the continued accumulation of theatrical capital during the 1570s.

The Earl of Leicester’s Men were the dominant adult playing company of the early Elizabethan stage before the Queen’s Men. In addition to being the leading court revels company for nearly two decades, Leicester’s Men were also responsible for mapping out the touring circuits used by later companies and for establishing the first major playhouses near London. This book details the history of this company, building on decades of established scholarship, while also offering a raft of new discoveries from primary sources. Parish records help to unlock the origins of the company within London, and this background is shown to inform the company’s responses to the circumstances that having one of the most powerful nobles of the era as a patron presented. Their stable familial and parochial networks enabled them to tour extensively while also expanding their theatrical capital closer to London. This capital allowed them to thrive as court performers and as innovators of the playhouse business.

Chapter 4 covers their final decade, during which the company underwent a series of changes to the core membership following two decades of stability. The company shifted around 1578 from supplementing personnel by hiring boy players to shoring up membership with an apprenticeship system. This enabled them to survive the departure of James Burbage by 1581 and the cull of members to help form the Queen’s Men in 1583. I identify evidence that several of the Queen’s Men not previously attached to any other company were likely members of Leicester’s Men, which also means the cull was greater than has been imagined in the past. A final crisis hit the company when five of their members were sent by Leicester into service in Europe for a year, but I show that Will Kempe’s development of the stage jig was ideally timed to enable the remaining few members to still tour widely with jigs as their primary play stocks. The final section explains reasons to doubt that Richard Burbage or Shakespeare were ever in Leicester’s Men, but did undoubtedly forge ties with this company’s members after Dudley died, ensuring the legacy of this company was carried forward to Shakespeare’s own career.

Chapter 2 shows the company’s first tour was planned according to protocols from Mary’s reign, and relied on age-old trade routes to find their way to two locations that served Dudley’s interests. Later, as Dudley’s interests shifted and as plague, extreme weather, and floods hit their routes, the company adopted the circuits we now associate with later companies. The players’ London origins also shaped their early approach to commercial playing, performing in inns and hiring livery company halls, but hostile city authorities compelled them to look beyond London’s walls, prompting the construction of the Red Lion. Drawing on new archaeological evidence, I argue the Red Lion was designed to reflect the Great Hall at Whitehall, to give public audiences a taste of the spaces the players enjoyed at court. The plays the company adopted in the 1560s promoted Dudley’s Protestant ethos and presented characters based on the very artisans and labourers who made up their audiences and in whose midst the players lived in London.

The Earl of Leicester’s Men were the dominant adult playing company of the early Elizabethan stage before the Queen’s Men. In addition to being the leading court revels company for nearly two decades, Leicester’s Men were also responsible for mapping out the touring circuits used by later companies and for establishing the first major playhouses near London. This book details the history of this company, building on decades of established scholarship, while also offering a raft of new discoveries from primary sources. Parish records help to unlock the origins of the company within London, and this background is shown to inform the company’s responses to the circumstances that having one of the most powerful nobles of the era as a patron presented. Their stable familial and parochial networks enabled them to tour extensively while also expanding their theatrical capital closer to London. This capital allowed them to thrive as court performers and as innovators of the playhouse business.

Standard theatre history accounts tend to assume that plays were received in the order in which they were first performed, but playgoers were not bound to watch plays chronologically. Considering Marlowe’s influential Tamburlaine plays, the chapter asks what happens when playgoers watch plays out of the expected order. While there is clear evidence that Tamburlaine had cultural cachet at this time, it does not follow, as is generally assumed, that all audience members would have encountered Tamburlaine before other, related plays.

Chapter 2 argues that Andrew Wise’s editions of Richard II, Richard III, 1 Henry IV, and 2 Henry IV established Shakespeare’s early print reputation as a dramatist of English monarchical history. The chapter begins by driving a wedge between stage and print patterns during the late sixteenth century, demonstrating that Shakespeare’s English histories were unrepresentative of the historical subjects that were popular on the London stages. It proposes that Wise’s selection and presentation strategies were contingent on three main factors: the book trade’s interest in English monarchical history and its application to Elizabethan politics; the connection of Wise to Shakespeare’s company and George Carey’s patronized writers, which can be seen as a flexible model of textual patronage that eschews a direct link between patron and stationer; and the growing marketability of Shakespeare’s name. The result is an assessment of Shakespeare’s histories and ideas of genre that reveals the intersection of multiple agendas: it draws attention to the book trade as a collaborative system of exchange that frustrates efforts at singularizing agency and notions of genre.

In this brief conclusion I revisit the metaphor, running throughout this book, of Rubin’s vase and reflect on the prejudice associated with viewing the corpus of early modern drama by prioritising extant plays over lost plays. To do so is to only see half the picture. Lost plays form an indispensable role in shaping or forming the extant canon; extant plays are to a large extent ‘produced’ through their relationship not only to each other, but to their lost counterparts. I argue that a shift in perspective is required before we can see what has always already been present but not prioritised. The surviving drama comes into sharper relief when its relationship to the lost drama is better understood.