Abstract

236 BOOK REVIEWS [Manchester: MUP, 2002] comes close) but this study provides an encouraging example of the value of combining documentary enquiry and historical imagination: ‘The approach taken in this book is, broadly speaking, historical and empirical. It assumes that language is as real a stuff as any other material and by definition translatable’ (9). While these chapters are rightly confident in the force and fascination of historical records, they are also aware that scraps require caveats. Even in the absence of a theory of fragments, Shakes- peare and London is a helpful addition to the vocabulary and methodology of theatre history — a discipline that remains, as William Ingram observed in 2011, strangely under-theorised (see ‘Intro- duction: Early Modern Theater History: Where areWeNow,HowWe GotHere, WhereWeGo Next’ in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre [Oxford, OUP]). Salkeld’s brief con- clusion tries its hand, like Ingram, at framing theatre-historical research, in part by suggesting how ‘incompleteness’ furnishes scholarship with both losses and discoveries. ‘Sometimes only scraps remain,’ Salkeld acknowledges in the conclusion (157). They are expertly organised here in impressive brevity, making this a go-to book for any student in search of an introduction to the social world of