Review: Shakespeare and Co by Stanley Wells

When Shakespeare turned up in London in the late 1580s, the Elizabethan theatre was fully fledged.

The biggest name in the business, Kit Marlowe, was writing Tamburlaine and in Shoreditch the Burbages had already built the playhouse known as the Theatre. Shakespeare did not invent the drama of his age. Others got there before him, collaborated with him from time to time, and continued to write after his death. Too often, the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries have been short-changed by the critics because of the long shadow cast by his supreme achievement.

Stanley Wells's enjoyable book makes us want to look again at some of them, particularly as scripts for the theatre, since time and again, and against the odds, many of them have been successfully revived on the stage. Wells writes with clarity and precision and this book will appeal to lay audiences as much as to his peers in the field. …

Wells shows that, as actor and playwright, Shakespeare was so deeply embedded in his troupe that he wrote parts for particular players. …

The great female roles of Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra and Volumnia all suggest that the company must then have enjoyed the services of an outstanding boy actor, since women were not allowed to perform. Similarly with As You Like It and Twelfth Night: both feature transvestite heroines, young women playing young men inside the fiction of the plays while, in reality, being boys all along. Wells ventures several guesses at parts that Shakespeare may himself have played, roles in which "his own voice seems to sound most clearly": notably, the chorus in Henry V, the Duke in Measure for Measure, or Prospero in The Tempest. …

What makes this book such a pleasure to read is Wells's unerring eye for the kind of detail that renders the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries more than fringe entertainment hitching a lift from the bard. The sheer Dickensian vitality of the London drama of Dekker and Jonson is both rhetorical and physical. No holds are barred. …

Professor René Weis (UCL English Language & Literature), 'The Independent'