Shakespeare's Rivals

There's an interesting article in the Times Literary Supplement about who was better - Shakespeare's company or the Admiral's Men.

From the piece...

Before 1594, the kaleidoscope of acting companies was becoming impossible for the City authorities to control. Then deals were done, and for six years, from about 1594 to 1600, a monopoly – or duopoly – was granted to two companies only, the Admiral’s and the Chamberlain’s. The Chamberlain’s (the King’s Men) had Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon as patron, and Shakespeare as writer. The patrons of the Admiral’s Men were Charles Howard and later Prince Henry, then Lord Palsgrave, Earl Palatine. Only in the late 1590s was the duopoly encroached on by the companies of three earls – Worcester, Oxford and Derby – and by the Paul’s Boys and Blackfriars Boys. There were five competitors by 1602; but even then the duopoly companies continued to dominate.

The Chamberlain’s Men were a company of sharers: a team performing the masterpieces of a great dramatist. But the Admiral's Men had Marlowe’s crowd-pulling plays, with the unmatched star Edward Alleyn to act them. They were the first company to be controlled by a single impresario: Philip Henslowe, Alleyn’s father-in-law. They acted throughout the year for citizen playgoers in outdoor playhouses (the Rose and subsequently the Fortune), in contrast to the Chamberlain’s Men, who acted outdoors at the Globe only in summer, and eventually indoors in winter at Blackfriar’s. In Gurr’s view the stable duopoly arrangement enabled both companies to meet the demands of repertory and yet maintain high standards of performance. He judges the Admiral’s company to be the more original and theatrically brilliant: necessarily a speculative judgement, since the texts of most of their plays were lost in the 1621 fire at the Fortune.