ABSTRACT
After decades of archival research on the life of Shakespeare, the eminent eighteenth-
century scholar Edmond Malone had finally identified the company that Shakespeare
joined as an actor before arriving in London in the early 1590s (or perhaps the
late 1580s). Malone declared that Shakespeare, before launching his career as a
playwright, must have been a player with Lord Leicester’s servants. Or perhaps with
the Queen’s Men. Or maybe with Lord Warwick’s players (Malone, “The Life of
William Shakespeare” 166-7).
