Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time, first published in 2011, examines the nature of commercial relations among the theatre companies in London during the time of Shakespeare. Roslyn Knutson argues that the playing companies cooperated in the adoption of business practices that would enable the theatrical enterprise to flourish. Suggesting the guild as a model of economic cooperation, Knutson considers the networks of fellowship among players, the marketing strategies of the repertory, and company relationships with playwrights and members of the book trade. The book challenges two entrenched views about theatrical commerce: that companies engaged in cut-throat rivalry to drive one another out of business and that companies based business decisions on the personal and professional quarrels of the players and dramatists with whom they worked. This important contribution to theatre history will be of interest to scholars as well as historians.

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There is much evidence, it seems, that Elizabethan dramatists spent a measure of their creative energy revising old playbooks. The title pages of some quartos advertise that their contents are ‘amended’ or ‘newly corrected’, and the similarity of plays on such subjects as the Yorkist kings and tamable shrews have made it plausible that one text is a revision of the other. In the 1908 edition of Henslowe's Diary, W. W. Greg lent sanction to the idea of playhouse revision; defending the sign ‘ne’ as the mark of new plays, he offered as an exception a play ‘new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations’. In the Cambridge editions of Shakespeare's plays, J. Dover Wilson systematically identified textual variants and cruxes in the early plays as evidence of revisions, allegedly made for a revival. Over the years, editions of and monographs on plays with more than one textual version have reinforced the association of major alterations with a play's return to the stage after some period of retirement. For such an apparently widespread playhouse practice, G. E. Bentley developed a ‘rule of thumb’: ‘almost any play … kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain later revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company’.

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at Little Rock Cambridge published The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre by Janette Dillon in 2006. That book approached its subject from a traditional perspective with chapters entitled 'Places of performance', 'Actors and audiences', 'Writers, controllers, and the place of the theatre', 'Genre and tradition', and 'Instruction and spectacle'. In other words, it was an introduction to theatre history in Shakespeare's time. This book by Julie Sanders, despite its duplicative title, is not that. It is, according to the Preface, 'all about making connections' (x). Those connections are between early modern drama and 'the wider performance cultures of the court, of noble households and estates, and of civic communities, including that of the burgeoning capital city of London itself' (x). Its chapters use genre-'Tragedy', 'Revenge drama', 'Histories', 'Comedy, pastoral and romantic', 'City comedies', 'Satire', and 'Tragicomedy'-as the primary organizing principle, and the book punctuates these chapters with thirteen case studies, many of which explore aspects of early modern dramaturgy. The discussions are intentionally not chronological 'in order to allow the rich lines of connection and synergy between [early and late plays] to emerge in fresh and unrestricted ways' (x). Nonetheless, in a nod toward readers seeking a linear treatment of historical events with dramatic and non-dramatic literature, Sanders appends a selective chronology. The strength of an approach by way of networks is that Sanders provides numerous engaging readings of those moments on stage from the early modern period that are very popular now and might have been so in their own time, moments such as the Porter's drunken ramblings about damnation in Macbeth and the testy exchange among the con artists that opens The Alchemist. A weakness is that readers do still need to know a lot of theatre history in order to appreciate the connections explored in those readings of stage moments. Recognizing this fact, Sanders devotes the introduction to an overview of what she calls 'deep theatre history' (3) in which she addresses the rise of outdoor playhouses in the 1570s, major theatrical participants