Siobhan Keenan joined De Montfort University as a Senior Lecturer in English in January 2005. Her research interests include Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Women's Writing. She has published a number of essays on theatre history and Renaissance drama, and is the author of Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England (2002) and Renaissance Literature (2008). More recently she edited The Emperor's Favourite (2010), a previously unpublished seventeenth-century tragedy which uses Roman history to comment on the career of Stuart court favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare's London explores the intimate and dynamic relationship between acting companies and playwrights in this seminal era in English theatre history.

Siobhan Keenan's analysis includes chapters on the traditions and workings of contemporary acting companies, playwriting practices, stages and staging, audiences and patrons, each illustrated with detailed case studies of individual acting companies and their plays, including troupes such as Lady Elizabeth's players, 'Beeston's Boys' and the King's Men and works by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Brome and Heywood.
We are accustomed to focusing on individual playwrights: Acting Companies and their Plays in Shakespeare's London makes the case that we also need to think about the companies for which dramatists wrote and with whose members they collaborated, if we wish to better understand the dramas of the English Renaissance stage.

Acknowledgements
Textual Note
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Acting Companies
Chapter 3: Playwrights and Playwriting
Chapter 4: Stages and Staging
Chapter 5: Audiences
Chapter 6: Patrons and Patronage
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography