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 The resumption of playing after the plague years saw the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company to which Shakespeare was to belong for the rest of his career, as actor, shareholder and playwright. No other dramatist of the period had so stable a relationship with a single company. Shakespeare knew the actors for whom he was writing and the conditions in which they performed. The permanent company was made up of around twelve to fourteen players, but one actor often played more than one role in a play and additional actors were hired as needed. Led by the tragedian Richard Burbage (1568–1619) and, initially, the comic actor Will Kemp (d. 1603), they rapidly achieved a high reputation, and when King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 they were renamed as the King’s Men. All the women’s parts were played by boys; there is no evidence that any female role was ever played by a male actor over the age of about eighteen. Shakespeare had enough confidence in his boys to write for them long and demanding roles such as Rosalind (who, like other heroines of the romantic comedies, is disguised as a boy for much of the action) in As You Like It, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. But there are far more fathers than mothers, sons than daughters, in his plays, few if any of which require more than the company’s normal complement of three or four boys.
 The company played primarily in London’s public playhouses – there were almost none that we know of in the rest of the country – initially in the Theatre, built in Shoreditch in 1576, and from 1599 in the Globe, on Bankside. These were wooden, more or less circular structures, open to the air, with a thrust stage surmounted by a canopy and jutting into the area where spectators who paid one penny stood, and surrounded by galleries where it was possible to be seated on payment of an additional penny. Though properties such as cauldrons, stocks, artificial trees or beds could indicate locality, there was no representational scenery. Sound effects such as flourishes of trumpets, music both martial and amorous, and accompaniments to songs were provided by the company’s musicians. Actors entered through doors in the back wall of the stage. Above it was a balconied area that could represent the walls of a town (as in King John), or a castle (as in Richard II), and indeed a balcony (as in Romeo and Juliet). In 1609 the company also acquired the use of the Blackfriars, a smaller, indoor theatre to which admission was more expensive, and which permitted the use of more spectacular stage effects such as the descent of Jupiter on an eagle in Cymbeline and of goddesses in The Tempest. And they would frequently perform before the court in royal residences and, on their regular tours into the provinces, in non-theatrical spaces such as inns, guildhalls and the great halls of country houses.
 Early in his career Shakespeare may have worked in collaboration, perhaps with Thomas Nashe (1567–c. 1601) in Henry VI, Part I and with George Peele (1556–96) in Titus Andronicus. And towards the end he collaborated with George Wilkins (fl. 1604–8) in Pericles, and with his younger colleagues Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), in Timon of Athens, and John Fletcher (1579–1625), in Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost play Cardenio. Shakespeare’s output dwindled in his last years, and he died in 1616 in Stratford, where he owned a fine house, New Place, and much land. His only son had died at the age of eleven, in 1596, and his last descendant died in 1670. New Place was destroyed in the eighteenth century but the other Stratford houses associated with his life are maintained and displayed to the public by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
 One of the most remarkable features of Shakespeare’s plays is their intellectual and emotional scope. They span a great range from the lightest of comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors, to the profoundest of tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth. He maintained an output of around two plays a year, ringing the changes between comic and serious. All his comedies have serious elements: Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, almost reaches tragic dimensions, and Measure for Measure is profoundly serious in its examination of moral problems. Equally, none of his tragedies is without humour: Hamlet is as witty as any of his comic heroes, Macbeth has its Porter, and King Lear its Fool. His greatest comic character, Falstaff, inhabits the history plays and Henry V ends with a marriage, while Henry VI, Part Three, Richard II and Richard III culminate in the tragic deaths of their protagonists.
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