Per Sivefors investigates Renaissance dream theories in relation to notions of conscience, arguing for an increasingly ‘ambiguous status of conscience [which] pushes dreams in direction of a psychologizing approach – dreams as revealing truths about the human self’ after the Reformation. Thus the Reformation shift towards linking individualized interiority, conscience and guilt is seen as prefiguration of the ‘internalized conscience’ of the Gothic (Sage). In this context the (proto-)Gothicism of the nightmares in Shakespeare’s Richard III is connected to their ‘function of a guilty conscience’. The ‘staged vision of the ghosts becomes an image of Richard’s divided interior’ as ‘the level of introspection is more important than the level of divine retribution’. In this sense the Shakespearean nightmares anticipate ‘an irresolution between supernatural and psychological causes’ in Gothic fiction (Hogle 213).

Duncan Salkeld recognizes ‘the fusion of death and desire’ on the early modern English stage as origin ‘of the kind of aesthetic now recognisable as the Gothic’. Identifying the courtesan as the embodiment of this fusion, he reads the Zoppino dialogue as a paradigmatic text signalling the shift from a dialectic relation to a fusion of fascination and revulsion with a ‘contaminating female body’ through a scopophobic experience. Salkeld traces this obsessive desire for the dead female body on to the English Renaissance stage, and to plays like The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.

At the end of the 1970s, however, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) would, for arguably the first time, take the initiative in spy genre with a seven-part serialised adaptation of John le Carre's novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In deciding to adapt a le Carre novel as a classic serial, the BBC by implication accepted his literary status albeit in a consciously bold and daring move. This chapter expresses Tinker Tailor as a key moment of intervention in both the television spy genre and British television drama. It provides a close analysis of the serial, adopting what Sarah Cardwell describes as a 'televisual' approach to the classic novel adaptation through considering how features specific to the medium shape textual characteristics. Whilst Callan and The Sandbaggers have been relatively marginalised in the history of British television drama as somewhat ephemeral texts, Tinker Tailor is a far more iconic programme.

As You Like It reappeared in 1920 and at regular intervals thereafter, but the stag did not, and Playfair's theatrical modernism became part of the mainstream of staging practice at Stratford, as it did elsewhere. The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald insisted that 'it has been said a thousand times before: we know exactly where we are with As You Like It. For all its thin veneer of disguise, the Forest of Arden is rural Warwickshire, and the snake and hungry lioness but escapees from a passing circus. Once in the forest we are in Shakespeare's own country, where the purest of love reigns' (7 July). For some, though, this was an Arden in which the prospect of picnics was not untouched by the more troubling aspects of rural life, manifested most obviously in a staging of 4.2.

Catherine Belsey uses a historical approach to explore Shakespeare’s introduction of ‘mystery, uncertainty, equivocation (the components of the uncanny)’ to the Renaissance stage through an integration of ‘the popular tradition of fireside ghost stories’ in the intertextual web of his plays. Taking up key terms of the Gothic such as the macabre, terror, equivocation and the uncanny, Belsey explores Shakespeare’s use of ghostly apparitions for a ‘blending of existing conventions to change the parameters for fiction’, addressing uncertainties about the relation between spirit and matter, about the reliability of the senses. Belsey locates the difference of Shakespearean ghosts from earlier stage ghosts rooted in the classical tradition in their direct interaction with the world of the living, in the evocation of terror shared by the onstage characters, and in the persistence of uncertainty and equivocation.

Ulrike Zimmermann marks the link between death and desire (in religious and sexual terms) as one of the key features of ‘Gothic affinities in metaphysical poetry’. Her reading of Donne’s poetry foregrounds the proto-Gothic mode as a way to deal critically with historical and cultural heritage, particularly with Petrarchan love poetry via assimilation, parody, and distortion through notions of excess and literalization, as in ‘The Dampe’, where the speaker’s deadly female lover is scrutinised with medical expertise.

This chapter considers several dramas, all of which were produced by the BBC. With ITV showing little apparent interest in the conspiracy genre during 1973, these serials can be broadly positioned in a specifically public service impulse to provide challenging dramatic engagements with contemporary issues. Firstly Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) is largely focused on anxiety surrounding the free market economy, particularly through the growing influence of sinister forces from an increasingly integrated Europe. The chapter explores the emphasis that the narrative places on computers and the surveillance state, adding new terrain for both individual agency and fear of political repression. It examines Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985), a far more stylish and prestigious drama which mounts a sombre examination of the nuclear state in a climate of increased Cold War tension.

Garrett Sullivan explores connections between Spenser’s Fairie Queene and Gothic readings of Acrasia as vampire, arguing that ‘readings of Spenser’s text that centre on psychic processes such as projection, or denial, or abjection find substantiation in the tripartite soul’, as ‘the tripartite soul introduces into the conception of human vitality a vocabulary for depicting and exploring the nature of self-division’. Thus, while respecting historical differences, ‘the tripartite soul enables the Gothic to recognize itself in Spenser’.

In the second week of October 1934, the city of Paris saw the première of two productions of As You Like It. Both had been eagerly anticipated, though for very different reasons. This chapter addresses two productions beyond the English (and English-speaking) theatre context. The first of these, seen at l'Atelier in Paris in 1934, is Jacques Copeau's redaction Rosalinde; the second is Peter Stein's monumental four-hour production for the Schaubühne Berlin in 1977. The latter, described by Dennis Kennedy as 'one of Stein's greatest productions' (Kennedy 261), and was a landmark in the history of European Shakespeare. It is also one deeply embedded in the politics and history of its troubled times. Rosalinde marked the return to the Parisian stage of a figure who had been at the forefront of theatrical reform in the second decade of the twentieth century, and who had directed two acclaimed Shakespeare productions.

During a run of 51 performances that began on 15 May and ended on 5 September, the Globe As You Like It would have been seen by up to 50,000 men, women and children. For some, this might have been their first, last or only encounter with the play, with the theatre or with Shakespeare. For others, it might have been their fifth or fiftieth. But for all of them, for all of us, As You Like It will occupy a greater or lesser place in the ongoing, and for the time being unfinished, narratives of our lives. The Shakespeare and the theatre establishments are out in force today and later we find ourselves in an oak-panelled room at Court Lodge with Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells, Paul Prescott and Michael Dobson. Paul and the author swap impressions of the Globe production, and the conversation turns to As You Like It.