The world première of Paul Czinner's As You Like It at the Carlton cinema in London's Haymarket on Thursday, 3 September, 1936 was, by the standards of the time, quite an occasion. The attack on Czinner's As You Like It for being insufficiently cinematic allegedly finds confirmation in the reactions of contemporary reviewers. According to Cedric Messina, the initiator of the BBC/Time-Life Television Shakespeare and producer of its first and second series, As You Like It has the distinction of being the play that served as inspiration for the entire enterprise. The meanings of Coleman's As You Like It are, of course, not confined to its first broadcast and the response of its first audience is, equally, far from definitive. But, as with Czinner's version, paying attention to that response and its circumstances is a way of allowing the production its historical due.

Questions of genre are central to Lynn Meskill’s exploration of the ‘proto-Gothic obsessions’ of Ben Jonson, who is probably one of the least likely Renaissance authors to be associated with such an endeavour. However, as Meskill persuasively argues, the ‘labyrinthine poetics’ of Jonson’s comedies and his masques in particular testify to a ‘seventeenth century Gothic as combination of Jacobean charnel house and the Grotesque’. Meskill reads The Masque of Queenes in terms of the grotesque and hybrid with regard to characters, genres, registers and references. In this context Jonson’s excessive notes on the margins turn into an ‘account of authorial creation of a kind of monster out of fragments and pieces’. Thus his marginal references to witchcraft (drawn from ‘a variety of sources … from antiquity, folktales, modern authorities, personal memories of stories and rumours’) serve both to rationalize and to heighten the effect of terror, which culminates in Jonson’s ‘monstrous mixing of the living and the dead’ in his ‘vision of Queen Anne’, ‘crowned by the dead’ queens of past ages.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on how creative boldness in the spy and conspiracy genres has shifted between episodic series and 'novelistic' serial forms, and so the shift away from the series and towards the short-run serial might simply be read as part of this continuing ebb and flow. It may be the case that Spooks had provided such a thorough and definitive instance of the nation-centred spy series that other programmes have had to differentiate themselves simply to establish a separate identity. In this context, Spooks was devised as a new state-of-the-nation drama in the form of a procedural spy series, drawing together the counter-terror approach of Special Branch, the institutional politicking of The Sandbaggers and Tinker Tailor, and even elements of the radical politics and aesthetics of 1980s serials.

The political dimension of the construction of a Gothic Shakespeare in the eighteenth century is explored on a national scale in Dale Townshend’s historical analysis of the ‘complex relationship’ between the terms Scottish and Gothic. Distinguishing between a political and an aesthetic Gothicism, Townshend reads the construction of Scottish Gothic through a ‘phantasmatic projection’ of Shakespeare ‘as our British rather than English Gothic Bard’ in response to the ‘threat of Scottish nationalism’ embodied in Ossian as Scottish Bard. In this sense the rise of the Gothic novel is aptly linked to the ‘othering of Scotland’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Richard Wilson’s analysis of cryptomimesis in The Winter’s Tale centers on ‘an unhomely Gothic horror hidden beneath the homely dwelling of a romance’. Drawing on Kristeva’s notion of the abject, and linking Freud’s mourning and melancholia to Bataille and Derrida, Wilson explores the play’s monstrous liminality, tracing its ambivalences about the boundary between life and death, in terms of notions of resurrection and of being buried alive. ‘Retelling the play as a proto-Gothic text’ thus ‘through a “perversion” of Shakespeare brings the play’s own “perversities” to light’. In a truly Gothic twist Wilson ends his exploration of the ‘subterranean affinity between Shakespeare and Gothic narrative’ with a fascinating rendering of the haunting history of Shakespeare’s house in Stratford visited by E. A. Poe.

Although the 1990s proved something of a moribund period for the British television spy series, following the turn of the millennium the BBC would experience great success with Spooks (BBC 1, 2002-11), an ongoing espionage-themed drama developed as a new flagship programme for its majority interest channel BBC. In reality, however, by the time of the 9/11 attacks the initial six-episode run of Spooks had already been commissioned and largely planned out, with four scripts drafted. Although the series would come to position itself more strongly as a response to the 'war on terror' in later years, this chapter examines the first series in the context of its original broadcast in 2002. It explores how Spooks drew upon many new elements that had been popularised in a deregulated and globalised television era, including the popular form of the precinct series and a dynamic visual style derived from high-end American drama.

In 1973, Buzz Goodbody made her main-stage solo directorial debut with a production of As You Like It that was led by Eileen Atkins as Rosalind and Richard Pasco as Jaques. In what has become a familiar tactic in productions of this play, the strict, tightly-buttoned formality of the court scenes lent them a vaguely Edwardian than contemporary flavour, while the move to Arden released the lords and lovers into easy-going, casual-contemporary style. This was evident in the most remarked-upon of the production's costume decisions, its liberal use of denim. The programme for the As You Like It concisely articulated both the production's and the RSC's position in the 1980s theatrical marketplace. Twelve years later, the scene would be given a more pointedly metaphorical colouring in Adrian Noble's production, which was led by Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind, Fiona Shaw as Celia and Alan Rickman as Jaques.

The 1980s had seen the development of a new kind of serialised conspiracy drama demonstrating great anxiety over the growing hegemony of Thatcherite politics. In the final years of the decade, however, a new conspiracy drama would take a somewhat different approach, beginning instead with the apparent defeat of Thatcherism. A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988) opens with the coming to power of a radical socialist Labour government in an imagined General Election of 1991 on a manifesto of reversing a decade of Thatcherite policies and unilateral nuclear disarmament. The victory of a socialist Labour government is therefore sited in an imagined popular disenchantment with the dominant political culture of the 1980s, and furthermore a reformed social-democratic consensus to reclaim the country on behalf of the economically marginalised. A Very British Coup converges two paranoid visions of the intelligence world.

Elisabeth Bronfen introduces the issue of gender into her discussion of the political and aesthetic deployment of spectral apparitions. Focusing on Queen Margaret’s uncanniness as ‘woman and ruler’, who ‘embod[ies] the political unconscious of her world’, her reading of Shakespeare’s history plays ‘through the lens of contemporary popular culture’ allows her to locate the plays’ ‘Gothic sensibility’ in the ‘ambivalence about feminine political power read through subsequent recycling, resurfacing in contemporary cultural imagination’ such as Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton (2007). At issue in her reading is the Gothic legacy of the monstrous female body as this gives voice both then and now to ‘dark positions in political power games’. At the same time, linking current films attesting to a cultural anxiety about female politicians and Shakespeare’s Gothic warrior queen in his early history plays, she also locates ‘the spectral power on which the mutual implication of dramatic violence on stage and political violence off stage thrives’, as another part of the cultural legacy of Gothic sensibility.

This chapter examines two key programmes from the 1970s which were among the first to discard the thinly defined fictional agencies of the 1960s and make more serious claims towards representations of an ostensible 'real thing'. It also examines Special Branch (ITV, 1969-74), a series focused on the Metropolitan Police unit of the same name whose brief was focused on maintaining national security, gathering intelligence and protecting the state against threats of subversion. The chapter then describes The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978-80), a series which focused on a fictional Special Operations section within SIS, which was notable for its unprecedented drive to demystify the bureaucracies of the intelligence world. The chapter provides some background information regarding shifts in the aesthetics of television drama over the late 1960s and early 1970s, arguing that this too had a key impact on changing conceptions of 'realism'.

Andreas Höfele examines the ‘monstrous legacy of a Renaissance construe[d] as irrepressibly Gothic and ominously modern’ in a reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest through Oscar Wilde’s late nineteenth century Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Höfele takes Wilde’s reference to Caliban in the preface of the novel as a starting-point for a comparative investigation into the human/animal boundary within early modern and post-Darwinian discourses revealing ‘the grounds of the late nineteenth century Gothicization of the Renaissance’ in the striking affinities between unstable early modern boundaries and the ‘metamorphic’, ‘abhuman’ Gothic body of the fin de siècle (Hurley). Foregrounding a fascinating ‘swap of epistemic affiliations’, Höfele shows how ‘Dorian Gray roots himself in Renaissance Knowledge culture’, while ‘Caliban is adopted into the image store of popular science’ turning into the ‘Shakespearean icon of Darwinism’.

This chapter focuses on two all-male versions of the play: Clifford Williams's for the National Theatre in 1967, and Declan Donnellan's for Cheek by Jowl in 1991 and 1994. If it goes without saying that As You Like It has, throughout its performance history, been implicated in questions of sexual and gender identity. These productions particularly foreground issues of transvestite masquerade and same-sex desire that the tradition of female Rosalinds has largely occluded. Reflecting on the production two decades after it was made, director Declan Donnellan recalled its historic and political context. For Donnellan, the central point was to invite the audience 'to tread a tightrope of willed belief, a quintessentially theatrical act of faith'. Inverting Brechtian logic, the director stated that [e]xposing the nuts and bolts of theatre actually makes you more involved in the play.

The Folio As You Like It is a document whose relation to original conditions and circumstances of performance within, possibly, at least three settings - court, public playhouse, private theatre - is at best uncertain. It offers some violent physical action, a sharp-witted clown with one foot firmly in the playhouse, a good deal of singing, and the recycling of a number of devices used by Shakespeare in previous romantic comedies. These include a structural division between court and country, a green world, and, driving the play's action, a voluble, witty and resourceful cross-dressed heroine. This chapter considers how the task might have been carried out within the frameworks of rehearsal and repertory. In order to situate Rosalind's role within the larger part-based ecology of playhouse rehearsal and performance practice, one needs to acknowledge the broader early modern context of part-based playmaking.

The point of departure of John Drakakis’ investigation of notions of death and decay is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Drakakis takes the use of a real skull in Gregory Doran’s RSC production of the play (2008) as the starting-point for a discussion of the implications of rereading the Renaissance through the history of the Gothic in terms of the current obsession with notions of death, material and virtual reality. Drawing on a wide variety of Renaissance writers including Donne, Webster and Middleton as well as on Gothic novelists such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Isabella Kelly, he discusses possible connections and their legitimacy in connection to theoretical approaches from Freud to Bataille and Derrida.