Shakespeare and the Second Blackfriars Theatre‪.‬

THE SECOND Blackfriars theater has drawn the attention of scholars in the last several decades either because they have been interested in the kinds of dramas that were performed in this new playing place or because they wished to determine the architecture of the playing area itself. (1) It is in some ways unfortunate that such competent and knowledgeable attention has remained focused largely on these issues because another (and admittedly speculative) area could benefit from further and more extensive questioning. The results of such questioning are likely to be of particular interest to theater historians and to biographers of Shakespeare. The questions that I have in mind, let me hasten to say, are not for the most part original. Just when did Shakespeare and his fellows begin presenting plays in the Blackfriars playing space? And why did the King's Servants perform plays there in the first place? Inevitably caught up in ideas about the "final comedies" as a homogeneous group, and about the trajectory of Shakespeare's "final years," these issues remain unresolved. Thus it should be useful to review once more the historical documents that deal with Blackfriars, bearing in mind of course that such documents do not themselves "reveal" events. They present indications from which historians construe events, and these indications are in turn configured by the interpreter to fit the narrative he or she has espoused.