The early seventeenth century was a remarkable time for those working in the relatively new career of professional actor. John Lowin advanced as an actor during the Jacobean period to reach the peak of his profession in the Caroline age. As such, his career certainly warrants a book-length study. Barbara Wooding’s John Lowin and the English Theatre, 1607–1647: Acting and Cultural Politics on the Jacobean and Caroline Stage fills this niche and provides a fascinating case study about how the profession developed during this period.

One drawback of Wooding’s approach, however, is indicated by the subtitle of her work. This is a project that lacks critical focus and that attempts to do too many things in one study. At times there are hints toward a justification for the dual focuses of the work. For example, Wooding’s treatment of Lowin’s pamphlet, Brief Conclusions upon Dances, both of this age and of the olde (1607), is particularly strong, dealing as it does with Lowin’s religious conviction. Wooding has done an excellent job gathering together a large amount of disparate trace evidence, reexamining “surviving evidence about Lowin’s life, art and career, in parish archives, records of guilds and of court performances, published play texts, and theatrical manuscripts, within the social, economic, and political framework of Jacobean and Caroline England” (2). But in the end it might have been more useful to write a short biographical study of Lowin and, in a separate study, to broaden out her work on the cultural politics of the Jacobean and Caroline stage.

That said, there are some really useful aspects of the work. For example, the book is arranged in chronological order and, very helpfully, treats the sequence of parts that we know Lowin played (Mayor Lepston, Sir Epicure Mammon, Melantius, King Henry VIII, Bosola, Domitianus Caesar, and Eubulus). This also means, however, that the thematic headings of chapters often gather together irreconcilably different materials. Outside of the theater, the section titled “Parish and Playhouse” begins by giving a useful sketch of ordinary Bankside life using the Accounts of the Overseers of the Poor in Paris Garden 1608–1671. These accounts provide Wooding with the basis for conjecturing how Lowin’s life in the Paris Garden area of Southwark might have been. But, perhaps too swiftly, we reach the conclusion that, “From sparse fragments . . . emerge tantalising and shadowy images of the actor away from the theatre and among his parish acquaintances” (72). The trouble is that the records from inside the theater directly relating to Lowin are also rather sparse, and in neither case has Wooding been willing to allow them to remain shadowy. Instead, Wooding has fallen foul of their tantalizing nature and has filled in detail without enough evidence. If the book was a speculative biography that would be, perhaps, justifiable; but it is out of place in a serious account of theater history.

At other times, Lowin is pushed to the fringes of the work as the interesting figures of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, or Burbage and the King’s Men (as a more general group), distract Wooding from her original focus. One interesting observation that does center on Lowin is the suggestion that Beaumont and Fletcher “acknowledg[ed] Lowin’s capability of assuming a complex leading role” (35) earlier than Shakespeare did by writing the part of Melantius for him in The Maid’s Tragedy. This is plausible given Lowin’s origins as a boy player performing with the children of the Queen’s Revels, where Beaumont and Fletcher were writing before Lowin joined the King’s Men, and for whom Fletcher began to write exclusively as house playwright (although not a shareholder). But Wooding never makes it this far in her observations. There are also potentially interesting threads in Lowin’s relationship with the other lead actors of the company — for example, in Wooding’s observation that Lowin and Taylor “swapped the characteristics of the roles they played” between The Roman Actor and Rollo (The Bloody Brother). This is where the study had strong potential to explore an interesting company dynamic, and where Wooding had enough evidence to work with. In the end there is potential here for two very good short books, but instead we are presented with a single lengthy monograph that feels overburdened and crammed but that makes, nonetheless, a valuable contribution to the study of theater history.