Joseph Quincy Adams’s Shakespearean Playhouses is the foundational scholarly history of the physical theatres in which Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was performed. Drawing on legal documents, contracts, maps, and contemporary accounts, Adams reconstructs the Theatre, the Curtain, the Globe, the Blackfriars, and their competitors with meticulous archival detail.
For anyone interested in the material conditions of Shakespeare’s world — how plays were staged, who owned the buildings, and how audiences gathered — this work remains essential reading. Download the free EPUB for a comprehensive and rigorously sourced history of early English theatrical architecture and the business of the Elizabethan stage.