This volume seeks a better understanding of the dominant adult theater company in 1580s London, the decade in which Shakespeare began acting and, perhaps, writing. It is a remarkable fusion of archival, historical, and performance-based research: it not only builds from and extends Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean's The Queen's Men and Their Plays (Cambridge, 1998) and rethinks the information gathered together in the multivolume and ongoing Records of Early English Drama, but it is also informed by a theatrical experiment in which a group of actors staged Queen's Men plays in repertory on a short tour in Canada in 2006.

Many contributions are excellent, and the editors’ introduction is particularly helpful for the way in which it sets out the current state of knowledge about this company. The first section, studying the Queen's Men on tour and in London, will be especially useful for theater historians, and Roslyn Knutson's chapter on the company repertory, Alan Desson on allegorical drama, and Richard Dutton on the various versions of Henry V's life all provide new ways into the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Eleanor Rycroft's chapter on facial hair and onstage masculinity is thought provoking, the first part of the chapter revealing unrealized nuances in Shakespeare, while the second section (called the appendix) describes performances of Queen's Men plays on the 2006 tour.

Across the volume a debate takes place about the utility of performance-based research. Rycroft tells us that such work “is necessary, if not crucial” (226), a surprisingly lukewarm recommendation in a book that also includes Tiffany Stern's warning “about what it is exactly that we ‘get back’ from performance reconstructions,” advising us to beware of “what ‘reconstructed theatres’ cannot do: recreate the past” (96). It is left to Peter Cockett to argue to the rest of the company repertory that the 2006 performances revealed that Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay works differently onstage in its demands on an ensemble and demonstrated the political, theatrical, and practical requirements of Elizabeth's company (see 234 and 240–41). Cockett's chapter suggests that early modern players had little time to consider the politics of the plays they performed: given the lack of rehearsal time and players’ access to only their part of the script, Cockett suggests that “the process itself makes radical re-interpretations initiated by actors unlikely” (237). But with the throwaway phrase, “as the date of the first performance approached” (237), Cockett reveals that he and his actors were working to at least one modern model, a rehearsal period leading up to a short run of performances, whereas early modern actors returned to popular plays frequently over time, and these latter engagements with the plays gave them every opportunity to be political and powerful.

Given the volume's interest in contextualizing the company, it is surprising that little attention is given to other forms of 1580s theater. The claim that the Queen's Men “dominated the English theatrical world between 1583 and the early 1590s” (4) needs to acknowledge the competing claims of the various boy companies of that period. Greater knowledge of the period's book market might also have produced more interesting readings of the company's play publications. The volume's editors are surprisingly downbeat about the company's fortunes in the book market, where they find that the Queen's Men “decline paradigm takes on a more tangible form” since the company's plays “fizzled in book form once they entered the market en masse in 1594” (8–9). Such a reading overlooks the fact that the market for plays only really began in 1594 itself, as recent work by Zachary Lesser and Alan Farmer has shown, and so the plays’ apparent lack of success as books may indicate that they were ahead of their time rather than simply obsolete. There was no established market for printed plays during the Queen's Men's first decade, and so the “success” or “failure” of their plays in print has little to tell us about the popularity of the company itself. However, there were some plays being published before 1594, and one contributor's claim that “only two plays were published in the 1580s” (115) is therefore inexplicable. The volume's fully realized interest in theater history would have been better served by closer attention to book history.

This is, however, an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate over Shakespeare's contemporaries. Dessen's chapter on dramaturgical structure reminds us that there are other ways to structure a play than a single protagonist's linear psychological journey, while Stern helpfully situates play going as a cultural practice invested in other priorities apart from the play itself. The volume's earlier essays on theater history focus on marginalized forms of drama. Barbara Palmer reveals the way early (and not so early) editions of Queen's Men plays offer stage directions that assume a permanent playhouse rather than the town halls to which the company toured; Paul Whitfield White suggests that the Queen's Men reopened Cambridge to touring players; David Kathman helpfully insists on the vibrancy of inn playing within London itself, arguing that the inns were “more popular than the three purpose-built playhouses on the City's outskirts” (66). This is an incisive collection of essays, and it will be fascinating to see how future scholars and performers will respond.