Chamberlain's Men/King's Men

Chamberlain's Men/King's Men.
In May 1594 two privy counsellors, Henry Carey (the Lord Chamberlain) and Charles Howard (the Lord Admiral), established two acting companies, the Chamberlain's Men and the Admiral's Men, and gave them exclusive rights to perform in London at the Theatre and the Rose respectively. Shakespeare appears to have been one of the new Chamberlain's Men from the company's inception and his plays came with him, whether in his own possession or in the hands of fellow actors who performed in them for other companies we do not know.

The difficulty of distinguishing different plays on the same theme (there appears to have been more than one ‘Hamlet’ play in the 1590s) and of identifying single plays which might be known by more than one name (as might be the case with ‘The Taming of a/the Shrew’) makes the precise limits of the early Shakespeare canon uncertain. The nucleus of the company was composed of the actor-sharers...

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