The study of repertory has greatly illuminated practices among playwrights and playing companies in the later sixteenth century. The repertory approach has yet to be applied to early and mid-Tudor drama, although this method holds out the promise of recovering the collaborative practices connected with John Rastell's stage-the first public stage in London. This article urges scholars active in repertory studies to take a fresh look at Henrician drama and theatrical practices, and employs Heywood and Rastell's play Gentylnes and Nobylyte as a case study in the forces that shaped repertory in this earlier period. In the past twenty-five years the emergence and growth of repertory studies-greatly enabled by the discoveries of the Records of Early English Drama project-has enriched our understanding of the interrelations among playing, playwriting, and performance practices on Elizabethan and Stuart stages. 1 As a method of inquiry, the study of repertory employs 'literary-critical, bibliographical, and theatrical' approaches 2 that focus not only on plays as texts, but also on plays as material artifacts that raise and respond to questions regarding a host of theatrical mysteries. Repertory methods have yet to be applied to early and mid-Tudor drama even though this perspective holds out the possibility of illuminating vexed issues concerning patronage, performance space, performance practice, spectatorship, and authorshipparticularly collaborative authorship. For works from this period, authorship is frequently difficult to determine, but it is useful to analyze plays with contested attribution for the clues they may hold to the practices of playwrights and producers and the collaborative networks within which they operated. 3 This essay examines the playwriting and producing activities of John Rastell and his network in light of such repertorial considerations. Although London theatrical practices changed radically with the development of the later sixteenth-century professional playing companies and commercial theatres, the roots of later stage practices are traceable to the activities of earlier playwrights, players, and patrons. Indeed, the development and

Over the last half-century, scholars have extensively studied and debated the use and function of instrumental and vocal music in the English mystery plays, 3 but music in the secular English interlude drama has yet to receive similar treatment. 4 This is not without good reason: the subject of music in the interludes is fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. Although the extant interludes contain many indications of song in the form of references, snatches, cues, stage directions, and even full song texts, very little scored music has been preserved in either manuscript or print. 5 Richard Rastall's observation with regard to music in early English religious drama might also be made of music in the interludes: 'the surviving written music is only a fraction of that actually required in performance'. 6 To be sure, absent musical scores and elided stage directions present special problems for the researcher. Thus, very sensibly, discussions of music in secular interlude drama have tended to limit themselves to those rare play texts that contain significant music in score, such as John Rastell's The Four Elements and Ulpian Fulwell's Like Will to Like. 7 As Richard Rastall further notes, since documentation is quite scarce 'informed guesswork is the only way forward' in discussions of music in early English drama, 'although the word "informed" is one that needs to be stressed'. 8 Suzanne Westfall observes that 'entertainments in great households were almost always occasional, ephemeral and frequently nontextual due to their multi-mediality. Consequently, they are extremely difficult to recover without some documentation such as visual representation, musical score, or some description of movement and dance'. 9 Amidst non-textuality and the resulting shortage of extant scores to serve as documentation of musical activity, even the most restrained speculative approach still leads to the conclusion that music and musicians were crucial