Charles Nicholl, below, and Nicholas Robins, right, look at studies that place Shakespeare’s theatre in context.

The patronage system was a fact of literary life in Shakespeare’s England, and those who failed to play by its rules (as for instance Thomas Nashe) did not last long. To us this seems archaic and rather demeaning. Nowadays, after all, a writer does not have to please the tastes and expectations of “my Lord What-call-ye-him”, only those of W H Smith.

Despite its importance, patronage is not much studied as a subject in its own right, so it is refreshing to read Alvin Kernan’s elegant and informative study which examines Shakespeare’s professional relations with the court of King James and his artistic responses to “the stresses and rewards” of royal patronage.

Shakespeare’s Elizabethan career saw service to various patrons - notably the Earl of Southampton, for whom he wrote his narrative poems and the Hunsdon family, who patronised his troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men - but he was never the Queen’s poet per se. With James’s accession, the Chamberlain’s Men were instantly elevated to royal service. They became the King’s Men. Their warrant is dated May 19 1603, two months before James’s coronation: he was keen to annex their huge popularity. The players, among them William “Shaxberd”, had the technical rank of “grooms extraordinary”. This was above page-boys but below sergeants and yeomen in the courtly pecking-order. These were unimagined social heights for the hitherto parlous profession of “playmaker”.

Their first royal performance was in December 1603 at Wilton House, where they played As You Like It. Over the next ten years, Kernan computes, they played before the court 138 times, an average of nearly 14 performances a year, as against three court performances a year by the same troupe in Elizabeth’s time.

Between obsequiousness and offensiveness there was a narrow line to tread. In late 1604, thinking to please their royal patron, the King’s Men put on a play called The Tragedy of Gowrie. The Earl of Gowrie had been put to death by James in 1600, charged with conspiring to assassinate him (though actually, it was rumoured, for rebuffing his amorous advances). Despite its affirmation of royal power (“Gowrie Day” was then celebrated, as “Guy Fawkes Day” would later be) the play was deemed too close to the political bone. The authorities were “displeased”, wrote John Chamberlain, thinking it “unlawful that princes should be played on the stage in their lifetime”. The play was removed from the repertoire, and no textual trace of it remains today.

Their continued functioning as a public company, at the Globe, gave the King’s Men a certain autonomy. Shakespeare’s work is distinct from the court masques of Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson, which “gave brilliant reality to divine-right ideology”, but it is nonetheless conditioned by the context of royal patronage. Kernan examines reflections of recent Stuart history in Hamlet; succession and kingship in Macbeth and Lear; questions of royal prerogative in Measure for Measure; the problems of an old military aristocracy during peace-time in Coriolanus; sexuality and corruption at court in Antony and Cleopatra and so on.

These are not necessarily new viewpoints on these plays, as he admits, but his specific insights are often highly original, and the book is remarkable for its fluency and wit, and its immensely skilful use of contemporary sources, from the entertainingly anecdotal to the scrupulously documentary. It also contains a useful “calender” of the King’s Men’s performances at Court from 1603 to 1614; and diagrammatic reconstructions of stagings at Hampton Court, Whitehall and Christ Church Hall, Oxford.

Charles Nicholl’s most recent books are The Reckoning (Picador) and The Creature in the Map (Cape).