He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Leicester's Men and their Plays: An Early Elizabethan Playing Company and its Legacy, and reported the following:
With Leicester’s Men and Their Plays, I attempted to follow the model established by other book-length studies of early modern playing companies, such as Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean’s The Queen’s Men and their Plays (1998) while tackling the issue of the relative paucity of surviving records from the era. If Shakespeare scholars have long grappled with the low survival rate for documents from Shakespeare’s life and career, the study of a company that flourished for three decades before Shakespeare even began his theatrical career is faced with an even lower survival rate. This book thus also features a host of explanations about historical and literary method -- how to meaningfully fill in the gaps in the documentary record. Page 99 catches me, as it happens, in just such a moment, attempting to make connections between various seemingly unrelated pieces of evidence to reconstruct in part the company’s early repertory from 1559 to 1568. We know the company featured at Elizabeth’s court revels during these years and also that they toured more extensively than any other company of this early era, yet we know next to nothing about the plays upon which they built their dominance of playing at the time. Here, I extend Paul Whitfield White’s claim that Leicester’s Men were the most likely company to have performed the plays of William Wager, and identify other plays of similar kinds from the era.Learn more about Leicester's Men and their Plays at the Cambridge University Press.
The page begins thus:Elisabetta Tarantino argues that Trial was not written by Wager but counts it among earlier examples of plays that deploy “literary nonsense” in their Vice characters, a tradition on which Wager’s plays evidently build. If Trial is not by Wager, then, his willingness to copy elements of this play in his writing for Leicester’s Men nevertheless lends credence to the idea that Trial was performed by the same company, with one member being particularly adept at playing Vice figures. If Perkin had indeed been an assistant to the Lord of Misrule in the royal entertainments of 1552-3, this experience may well have equipped him for just such a specialisation in the early plays of this company. By looking similarly for other plays from which Wager may have drawn inspiration, it may be possible to reconstruct some sense of the early plays used by Dudley’s company. The inventory taken of John Dudley’s possessions between 1545 and 1551, in which a copy of Walshe’s Conjectures is recorded, offers some clues.I proceed to then outline these clues, identify titles to which these clues point, and develop a further argument for why Leicester’s Men might be the strongest contender to have played each one. While this section of the book captures me in the moment of addressing questions about the company’s plays, each chapter also examines significant milestones that we now associate with Shakespearean playing companies in general, to understand how Leicester’s Men developed the playing company business model in response to various circumstances they encountered over the course of three decades. I explore the role of women in keeping the company together for that duration while also explaining how and why the company adopted the first large London playhouse (the Red Lion, 1567) as well as the first amphitheatre-style playhouse (the Theatre, 1576), and why they developed the shareholder system and playing apprentices system. As I argue, while records may be sparse, they are not non-existent, and there is enough material to help us to overturn some of our old assumptions about playing in England before Shakespeare.
--Marshal Zeringue
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