Moments of meeting and parting, in Shakespeare as elsewhere, are powerfully charged. Each joining or separation is a unique event. The coming together or parting of two characters is invariably a moment of great uncertainty at which there is the potential for something new (whether destructive or creative): however familiar the other may be, new possibilities unfold with each meeting; however short the interval between this meeting and the projected next one, new dangers subtend any separation. No-one can ever be sure that something unexpected will not take place in the interim; this might be the last time these two characters will meet on these precise terms (if at all).

Opening gambits and parting shots can tell us a great deal. One could, if one wished, read into the moment of first meeting the future development of the essential part of a relation; here we could make helpful use of Kenneth Burke's notion of the 'entelechial principle'- the thorough working-out of the implications intrinsic to any beginning. And if one can read all such moments as instances of 'prophetic greeting' (Macbeth, 1.3.76), one can also see in the form a parting takes a consummation of everything that has preceded it, reading backwards from the eventual ending or telos - what Burke called 'prophesying after the event'. One might even think of the entire development of a relation as contained in the seeds present at its very beginning - as a long drawn-out processing of what has taken place in those first few moments - and of a parting as a recapitulation or re-enactment of all that has gone before.

Tokyo is alive with Shakespeare productions. In 2007, for instance, there were fifty-two, excluding foreign productions, roughly one new Japanese production a week. This immense popularity of Shakespeare began in the early 1970s. Until the 1960s, Shakespeare's plays could be seen only two to seven times a year. The Royal Shakespeare Company's first visit to Japan in 1970 with Terry Hands's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Trevor Nunn's The Winter's Tale (with Judi Dench as Hermione/Perdita) was presumably a powerful impetus. The term 'Shakespeare boom' first appeared in newspapers in late 1971, when they announced the line-up of Shakespeare productions for the following year: the highly regarded theatre company Bungaku-za held a 'Shakespeare Festival', producing three plays, and the Royal Shakespeare Company visited Japan for the second time with three Shakespeare productions directed by John Barton. There were many more Shakespeare productions in that year: twenty-one in total, an amazingly large number, although rather few by twenty-first century standards.

But 1972 seemed to have been an exception, for in 1973 the number of Shakespeare productions decreased to ten; nevertheless, a sense of momentum was gradually recovered when Yukio Ninagawa directed his first Shakespeare production, Romeo and Juliet, in 1974, and in 1975 Norio Deguchi's Shakespeare Company started producing all the thirty-seven plays of Shakespeare, costumed in jeans and T-shirts, completing the cycle in six years. The ‘boom’ continued in the 1980s, and the construction of the Tokyo Globe in 1988 spurred it on. By the time that the World Shakespeare Congress was held in Tokyo in 1991, the yearly output of Shakespeare productions amounted to well over forty, culminating in fifty-two productions (including foreign ones) in 1993.

South African literary history is full of the effects of writers having had close encounters with the Shakespeare text. The results have been literary and personal, with writers displaying, and often-times clearly experiencing, a profound emotional connection to, especially, the plays. Since the days of the mission schools in colonial Southern Africa, Shakespeare has been a signifier of education, civility and erudition, as well as a vehicle for the expression of strong feelings. Encounters with the Shakespeare text have shaped hopes, allowed for public self-fashioning, and have influenced more intimate subjectivities as writers and scholars of a particular class stratification were educated in English Literature. Something has changed, though, in terms of what a close encounter with Shakespeare enables. If Shakespeare used to be part of a marker of class and social mobility located in the terms of a discourse of progress and modernity, knowledge of Shakespeare now comprises a much more publicly ambivalent display. Shakespeare once had a particular currency, acquired personally but activated publicly, which he appears to be losing. This article will attempt to account for the change, suggesting that it reveals the gap between theory and lived experience. Close encounters with Shakespeare viewed through a post-colonial lens illustrate that culture is hybrid. Nevertheless, in the face of ongoing socio-economic power differentials which operate along raced and classed axes, the logic of a binary structure of identity continues to inform an experience of Shakespeare in South Africa long after our own cultural artifacts reveal that binary models are an artificial and inadequate way to understand how people live, including how they live with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare in the Classroom

There is sometimes a perceived divide between the scholarly monograph and the textbook, at least in the minds of the academic community and its funding bodies. Certainly this is the case in the UK's all-consuming Research Assessment Exercise - the method by which all Higher Education Institutions are vetted and rated for their 'research quality' by the funding arm of the British government - the influence of which on this year's output of critical studies is palpable in terms of monographs by UK academics (many of which I will come to in the last section of this article). Only the 'scholarly', 'full-length' monograph is usually deemed suitable for submission as part of an individual academic's publishing and research profile. And yet, as a host of publications this year demonstrate, some fine work is published in the textbook domain, and is frequently fed directly by cutting-edge research. The shorter, pithier book may do its intellectual work more efficiently and with a potentially broader reading audience than some over-stretched 'full-length' rivals. One of the interesting themes to emerge, then, amongst this year's batch of books is a deep concern with Shakespeare in the classroom, how we deploy his works, the manner and context of our teaching of Shakespeare, but also how we encourage students to do their own things with those works. Two collections of essays are notable in this regard: G. B. Shand’s Teaching Shakespeare: Passing it On and Laurie Maguire’s How to Do Things with Shakespeare.

In reviewing The RSC Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen’s edition of the Complete Works (2007), in the TLS (17 August 2007), I complained that ‘the RSC-ness of The RSC Shakespeare is an invisible element’, for, apart from the title-page, a one-page foreword by the RSC’s Artistic Director, Michael Boyd, and a single insert of some photographs from RSC productions, there was no sign of the RSC’s work informing the edition. Now, with the appearance in 2008 of the first five volumes of individual plays in the series, there has been a distinct turn for the better.

Chosen in part to match the RSC’s 2008 repertory, the editions of (in F1 order) The Tempest, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Ⅲ and Hamlet use the introductions, texts, commentary and collations from the Complete Works, unaltered as far as I have checked. But they add to them brief but deft ‘Overviews’ of each play’s stage-history by Jan Sewell, a more extended and well-researched examination of the play in performance at the RSC by Karin Brown and, probably most significantly, interviews with and, in some cases, an essay by actors, directors and designers who have been involved in productions, mostly, though not always, at the RSC. Richard III, for instance, has interviews with the actor Simon Russell Beale (Richard in 1992), the director Bill Alexander (1984) and the designer Tom Piper (2006) and an essay by Richard Eyre reflecting on his National Theatre production (1990), while Hamlet has interviews with Ron Daniels (RSC 1984 and 1989), John Caird (NT 2000) and Michael Boyd (RSC 2004).

EDITIONS

The programme note is an undervalued genre. Although the programmes sold in the lobbies at major Shakespearian productions often include superbly incisive accounts of the play and its reception history, usually written by a prominent figure in the profession, they are virtually never cited in scholarly discourse. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find programme notes given pride of place in Roger Warren’s new Oxford edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Warren begins his introductory essay by quoting at length from Hilary Spurling’s description of the world of the play in her programme note for a 1970 RSC production. The next section of the introduction similarly opens by citing Anne Barton’s programme note for her husband’s 1981 production, in which she defines the central topic of the play as ‘how to bring love and friendship into a constructive and mutually enhancing relationship’.

Warren’s unconventional use of programme notes is one of the features that distinguishes this edition as the work of a man of the theatre. Whereas the ‘stage history’ in many editions can be a tired distillation of previous reviewers’ accounts,Warren’s descriptions of productions over the last forty-odd years draw extensively on his firsthand experience. Warren does not suffer bad acting gladly. He witheringly characterizes the BBC Television version of the play as a ‘vilely spoken’ production in which ‘few of the actors know how to speak verse – the main fault is to stress personal pronouns when the text doesn’t’. When Warren’s recollection of a given production differs from that in a published review, he attempts to adjudicate the discrepancy by tracking down the original players. In reviewing Robin Phillips’s 1970 production of the play, Robert Smallwood reported seeing ‘a little enigmatic flicker of a smile’ on the face of the actor playing Proteus, Finbar Lynch, before he began to speak his crucial lines in the final scene. Warren, however, ‘recalled a clenching of the mouth that spoke of inner tension, even resentment’, and so asked Lynch ‘to cast his mind back fifteen years to that moment’. Lynch reported that ‘both he and his director believed that Proteus’ repentance was genuine’.

'Pigmentation,' explains the Duke in Charles Marowitz's An Othello, 'is the outward face of the inner soul - for just as clouds are white as they appear to the naked eye, so are they white in the inner soul or substance, and just as milk is white in its outer appearance, so is milk white in its inner soul or substance, and so, in a sense are all things white, if they are indeed white, and if black, perforce the same applies.' Marowitz's reworking of Othello was produced in 1972 as a direct response to the Civil Rights struggle in his native United States and to the emergence of Black Power separatism in the later phase of that upheaval. In a strategy of deliberate anachronism, Marowitz interrogates Shakespeare's Othello by juxtaposing modern idiomatic dialogue with passages lifted directly from the original text: thus, as the action unfolds, the Duke discards his antique eloquence to become a caricature of Southern white prejudice, suggesting a direct line of descent from Shakespeare's Venetians to twentieth-century segregationists. The Duke himself emerges as the intellectual descendant of Shakespeare's frequently quoted contemporary, George Best, for whom the 'black and loathsome' colour of 'all those Moors that are in Africa' was an indelible mark of reprobation, 'a spectacle of disobedience to all the world' visited upon them by God for the sin of their ancestor Ham.

‘I WANT TO SMELL THAT FEAR’

Rehearsals for a Christmas Eve pick-up production of Shakespeare's Hamlet have just begun in an insufficiently heated provincial village church in Kenneth Branagh's 1995 film, In the Bleak Midwinter (released in the United States as A Midwinter's Tale). Joe (Michael Maloney), a semi-employed actor who is directing, co-producing and starring in the production, is rehearsing his small ensemble of actors in the first scene. Carnforth (Gerald Horan), a bit-part character actor in provincial rep who routinely hides behind putty noses and crepe hair, is having trouble conveying Barnardo's fear in the play's first line, 'Who's there?' Joe instantly sees that Carnforth has no emotional connection to the material or the situation, and tells him, 'I want to see that fear - I want to smell that fear.' The actor repeats the line the same way. 'Let's take a little time out, here,' Joe then suggests, 'to ground this in some sort of reality. You tell me, Carnforth, when was the last time you were really terrified[?] Can you remember when that was or if there was such a time[?]'(p. 45). Carnforth remembers that his hands shook when he once tried to change a punctured tyre on the motorway on hisway to a birthday brunch for his mum. Joe asks him to try to recapture that fear, expecting him to bring the fear to the scene's given circumstances. But Carnforth misunderstands the exercise. He speaks the lines of the play, not as though he were on the battlements of Elsinore, but miming changing a tyre, as if he were on the shoulder of the motorway (illustration 56).

In Declan Donnellan's 2008 production of Troilus and Cressida for Cheek by Jowl, Helen of Troy (Marianne Oldham) initially featured as the Face that Launched a Thousand Copies of Hello! Magazine. Decked in a chic white evening gown, she delivered the play's Prologue while stalking with feline satisfaction among the soldiers who would die for her (illustration 48). Later, she and Paris primped and posed for a series of glamour photos, looking for all the world like a Shakespearian Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. When Pandarus began his song, 'Love, love, nothing but love', Helen proved her star power by joining her voice with his, offering, one critic asserted, 'the best singing of the night'. At this point, however, something surprising happened. The song's lascivious words seemed increasingly to disturb her; her voice began to tremble, her eyes filled with tears, and by the end of the song she had to pause to compose herself. Soon the mask cracked altogether and she broke weeping from the stage. The audience had witnessed Helen's transformation from a plastic icon into a psychologically complex 'character' in the realist tradition.

Depending on one's perspective, such an approach to Helen may appear either self-evident or thoroughly wrong-headed. Some version of realist acting informs most mainstream American and British productions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Its shaping force guarantees that many actors and directors will explore the inner objectives and past histories that drive their characters' words and actions, creating complex emotional subtexts to flow beneath the complex Shakespearian text. Moreover, many audience members will judge the resulting performances as much or even more in terms of the richness, plausibility and clarity of their implied emotional narratives as in terms of any relationship to the literary play-text. Yet this process has come under increasing fire from scholars, who have branded it ahistorical, apolitical and insufficiently conscious of its own tortuous relationship to the perceived authority of the Shakespearian text.

The first moments of Coriolanus capture the clamour and defiance of 'a company of mutinous Citizens' and provide a fitting initiation into a dramatic environment that is saturated with competing forms of language. With this demonstration, a collision of voices that will be maintained and exploited over the course of the play is powerfully introduced. On one hand, the dominant noise belongs to the starving and querulous mob, whose chanted words seem unhinged from their typical interactive and communicative functions. The doubled words, all clipped vowels and hard consonants, acquire an incantatory quality more in line with extra-linguistic sounds than with units of dialogue. Yet even in the midst of this collective howl, a counter-force emerges. Out of the din rises the enlivening voice of the First Citizen, clarifying and directing the sound of the multitude. The result is a confluence of verbal styles; the mob's chanting is offset by a discrete, articulate voice, so that two systems of language - the excited babble of a group, and the exhortative voice of an orator - collide. The pattern of competing voices that is established here is repeated throughout the play and, indeed, the various implications of ‘voice’ provide a potent subtext. The mob’s racket provides a visceral signal of the warring voices that will populate the play, and the words of the individual citizens that emerge from the rabble reinforce the point. There is an early, marked emphasis on the conflict between command and resistance, especially in regard to permitted speech.

An older generation of critics frequently talked about the world of King Lear as a sort of framework within which the characters and events of the play exist. By drawing on early modern conventions of constructing and using maps, John Gillies's commentary in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference offers a new vocabulary for talking about this creation of a space within which the tragedy is worked out. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a great age of map-making, in part as they dealt with the discovery, exploration and colonization of the New World. Gillies argues that the Globe Theatre itself, in which King Lear had its early productions, was 'a kind of map: a quasi-cartographic product of the same type of cosmographic imagination which produced the world maps of Ortelius and Mercator'. Gillies justifies calling the Globe a map by applying J. B. Harley's definition of maps as 'graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world'. It is sometimes assumed that the movement toward new, more accurate modes of geographic representation in early modern map-making entailed a movement away from expressive representation, as in older maps, toward an objective, scientific kind of map; but Gillies argues persuasively that maps down even to the present remain full of expressive content, though precisely what is expressed may change in different maps with different social roles. What then is it that was mapped for an audience in 1607 or 2007 as they attended to King Lear?

This essay focuses on New Bibliographical method and on its application to analysis of the particular texts - those of John Fletcher's play Bonduca - on which Sir Walter Wilson Greg depended for his influential conception of 'foul papers'. New Bibliographical method, in large part Greg's own creation, requires us to attend to what separates us as readers from our authors. As Greg once put it, New Bibliographical method concerns 'how a number of steps often intervene between the work as it formed itself in the author's mind and as it reaches modern readers'. For example, Greg went on, the New Bibliographer will 'describe the conditions under which manuscripts were . . . copied, the kinds of mistake that scribes habitually made, [and] the extent of corruption to be expected.' And Greg issued a dire warning to editors who fail to employ his method: 'Everywhere the editor suffers from not being a bibliographer; he gives himself all sorts of unnecessary trouble and arrives at all sorts of impossible results.'

My object is to demonstrate that in the essay where Greg developed his conception of 'foul papers', he himself did not employ New Bibliographical method, and as a consequence he arrived at impossible results. These have vitiated much editorial work on early modern drama during the period when his paradigm has been in force, despite formidable challenges to it by such comparable luminaries as R. B. McKerrow and Fredson Bowers. For most of that period it was not possible to identify Greg's crucial mistake because the essay in which he made it lay unpublished. Instead, in book after book including The Shakespeare First Folio (1955), Greg’s massive authority carried the day as he asserted his theory of ‘foul papers’. According to his theory, dramatists submitted their plays to theatrical companies as manuscripts too messy to be used to guide production, with the result that the companies had to have the plays copied in order to perform them. The companies, he argued, retained the authorial ‘foul papers’ and often provided them to the stationers who published plays. Cruces in these printed texts, on Greg’s theory, are to be resolved with reference to putative authorial sloppiness in the printer’s copy.

The turn to the traumatic has gained considerable currency in a range of humanities’ disciplines over the last fifteen years, alongside an increased popular usage of the term following the inclusion of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Trauma, which derives from the Greek τραύμα, literally meaning ‘wound’, denotes both a ‘wound, or external bodily injury in general’ (OED 1), and, in the context of developments in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, it emerges in the late nineteenth century as a ‘psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed; an internal injury, esp. to the brain, which may result in a behavioural disorder of organic origin’ (OED 2a). The shift to the realm of the psychic, which can be traced through the work of John Erichsen, Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer and, more recently, Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Kirby Farrell, Ruth Leys and Ann Cvetkovich, among others, retains the language of the wound and injury but variously associates it with both behavioural responses to physical injury and, crucially for this article and work in the humanities, to ‘emotional shock’, the effects of which are still being felt. As Caruth summarizes, ‘trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena’. She goes on to argue that this opens a paradox in the traumatic experience: ‘that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness’.

To observe that Troilus and Cressida is a play full of puns is hardly news: nearly two centuries ago, William Hazlitt described the whole play as ‘a kind of double entendre’, and at times it is a play which could well be summarized by that now passé bowdlerizing editorial shorthand, ‘with a bawdy quibble’. As Patricia Parker comments in the opening paragraph of Shakespeare from the Margins (1996), ‘Wordplay itself has frequently been reduced to the purely decorative “quibble”. . . [yet] both comic wordplay and what Kenneth Muir called the “uncomic pun” lead us to linkages operating not only within but between Shakespeare’s plays.’ Troilus and Cressida provides rich material for such an approach: its puns are dense and both uncomic and revoltingly (or even painfully) funny, and its quibbles are frequently not at all ‘quibbling’, but rather substantive, far-reaching and unsettling, a crucial part of the play’s thick verbal texture and unstable moral universe. They cannot be dismissed. Here I offer a close reading of one passage from the play, which pays attention not simply to quibbles, puns and other forms of linguistic play, but also to the material context of the passage, in terms of both performance issues and early modern material culture. We are getting better at attending to the material circumstances of performance, at considering what impact such awareness might have upon the more purely linguistically oriented close reading of texts, and, indeed, at breaking down the distinctions between ‘text’ and ‘performance’. But the degree of slippage between the categories of the verbal, the visual and the material in Troilus and Cressida can still take us by surprise by showing that there could be a pun on a thing, or a quibble that is in part material. Such fluidity and expansiveness of interpretation seem to have been second nature to Shakespeare and his audience.

BODY, SPEECH, TRANSLATION

Asian Shakespeare productions typically create an 'intercultural' action by introducing a gap between the verbal and embodied dimensions of the performance. As distinct from the older, looser notion of adaptation, intercultural performance strategies reflexively emphasize and capitalize upon the differences between the disparate cultural systems of theatre forms. In these stage encounters between cultures, Asian theatres have played a central role, and the classical forms in particular offer striking opportunities for juxtaposing their formalized conventions of music, singing, gesture, dance, costume and make-up, as well as their cultural and aesthetic foundations, against Western theatre conventions. By comparison with many theatre forms in Asian cultures, Shakespeare presents an exorbitantly word-heavy theatrical idiom. When the RSC King Lear played in Singapore recently with Ian McKellen in the title role, I was conscious of hearing the language as a startling, ringing dimension of a foreign culture, quite unlike how it sounds to me in London or Stratford-upon-Avon, simply because I was watching the performance within a community to whom it would not just be an archaic form of English but a culturally alien mode of performance.

In considering the Shakespeare that Anne Brontë knew, three kinds of close textual encounters emerge. First, the Shakespearian text the Brontë family might have read, and the context in which they read it; second, Anne Brontë's actual copy of Shakespeare's plays and how she might have read them; and third the kinds of Shakespeare allusions which are traceable in her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These close encounters with a reader and her writing will further our understanding of Shakespeare's importance in relation to Anne Brontë's creativity as well as to her life.

Shakespeare's impact on the work of the Brontë sisters is considerable. In Charlotte's novel, Shirley, there is a chapter entitled 'Coriolanus'. Shakespeare is there appropriated as an emotional and political nexus for the relationship between Caroline Helstone and Robert Moore. Shakespeare is appropriated, to a lesser extent, in Jane Eyre and The Professor. In Emily's Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare's influence is much more submerged, just one of the imaginative and influential threads that Emily weaves together.

Although it includes the Life of Sir Walter Scott, the Lord Wharton Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost, no edition of Shakespeare is listed in the inventory of 'Books belonging to or inscribed by members of the Brontë family and held in the Brontë Parsonage Museum'. This should not be too surprising. The inventory is small and the most commonly read books tend not to survive. The Brontës' knowledge of Shakespeare can be safely assumed.

Lynne Reid Banks imagines the reading environment of the Brontës in her 1986 biographical novel, Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës:

’marry, that “marry” is the very theme’ : comedy and marry-age

Marriage and merriment form two points in a triangular configuration of meaning in Shakespearian comedy. The importance of the first term is well attested to in recent criticism. In Catherine Bate’s phrase, Shakespearian comedies are about courtship ‘if they are about anything’: ‘Men and women meet, match, marry and mate. This is the eternal story which Shakespeare’s comedies retell again and again.’ Understood as ‘wit’, merriment’s place within Shakespearian comedy is, if anything, still more critically established. Samuel Johnson famously (if too negatively) observed it in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765):

It is, perhaps, to be expected that professional academic Shakespearians often make for cynical and jaded theatre audiences. They have, after all, seen it all before, if only in their heads. But alongside the bored response to what is familiar there is often something closer to indignation, a frustrated outrage - oft overheard in the intermission bar - about the extent to which the production is 'wrong'. Recent RSC offerings are a case in point. I thoroughly enjoyed the 2008 Hamlet (dir. Doran) and loathed the Shrew in the same season (dir. Morrison), but found some of my academic colleagues defended their likes and dislikes about the shows - in admittedly informal and spontaneous conversation - solely in terms of how they read the plays as text. Some objected to portions cut from the Hamlet script, others to the invasive nature of theatrical visuals (why isn't Hamlet wearing shoes?). I hated the Shrew production, it was alleged, because I misrecognized the play's unrelenting misogyny. Yes, this production was less romantic, less fun, than many others, but it got the play right. Now, I would argue that I hated that production not because of its conceptual approach, but because I found it tedious and unfunny despite the fact that it was trying hard - excruciatingly hard, in fact - to be the opposite. What I faulted the production for was a crassness of approach (as was the case with Morrison’s Macbeth the previous year) coupled with woeful execution, and while I might be persuaded that this is in some way interesting I can’t be persuaded that such failings are eradicated by the production’s derivation from a particular reading of the play.

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from Touchstone (www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk), a Shakespeare resource maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Royal Shakespeare Company. Novello Theatre, London, 15 January–17 February.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Gregory Doran

AS YOU LIKE IT

Sheffield Theatres. Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 7–24 February; Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon- Avon, 6–10 March.

www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk

Director: Samuel West

Rosalind: Eve Best

Derby Playhouse Company. Derby Playhouse, 26 May–23 June.

www.derbyplayhouse.co.uk

Director: David Freeman

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Royal Shakespeare Company. UK tour 19 October–8 December.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Nancy Meckler

Theatre Set-Up. Tour 9 June–27 August.

www.ts-u.co.uk

Ludlow Castle, 25 June–7 July.

Director: Glen Walford

Oddsocks Theatre Company. Tour 1 July–27 August.

www.oddsocks.co.uk

CORIOLANUS

Royal Shakespeare Company. Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 6–31 March.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Gregory Doran

Coriolanus: William Houston

Volumnia: Janet Suzman

The last production before the refurbishment of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Ninagawa Company. Barbican, London, 25–29 April.

Director: Yukio Ninagawa

Samurai-themed production in Japanese.

Mercury Theatre Company. Mercury Theatre, Colchester, 22 October–3 November.

www.mercurytheatre.co.uk

Director: Tina Packer