INNOVATION AND OPTIMISM

1936–1950

Shakespeare and British television were close companions from the beginning. On 26 August 1936, The Times (London), under the heading 'First Television Broadcast', reported on a demonstration at Radio Olympia where the first experimental transmissions could be seen. Two programmes, lasting approximately ninety minutes, were transmitted daily from Alexandra Palace by the Baird system. At 12.49 and 5.19 visitors could see film excerpts, and among the films selected was Paul Czinner's As You Like It (1936). Elisabeth Bergner's name was mentioned as the selling point, Shakespeare's, the BBC's and Olivier's were not. Five months later on 5 February 1937 the first Shakespeare lines were spoken live on BBC television by Margaretta Scott (Rosalind) and Ion Swinley (Orlando) in Scenes From Shakespeare's 'As You Like It' (3.2) lasting eleven minutes.

Scenes from Shakespeare were transmitted monthly throughout television's first year of broadcasting. Shown in the mid afternoon, they employed actors and actresses well known from the stage, Michael Redgrave as Romeo, Celia Johnson as Desdemona. The scenes appear to have had no linking narration, audiences being expected to derive pleasure with no explanation of plot or setting, the BBC perhaps assuming that audiences would be familiar with the text, or if they were not then presenting famous passages from the greatest dramatist needed no apology or explanation, or perhaps they simply didn’t think of their small audiences very much at all.

Recording the number of times a particular word or phrase is used in a passage, or the relative frequency of a metrical feature or of a rhetorical figure, has been a familiar practice in Shakespeare studies for at least a century. This sort of measurement and comparison is a staple of authorship studies. Along the way these practices have suffered some swingeing blows, such as Sir E. K. Chambers’s attack of 1924 on the ‘disintegrators’, Samuel Schoenbaum’s ridicule of the ‘parallelographic school’ in the 1960s, and Brian Vickers’s recent demolition of the case for Shakespeare’s authorship of A Funerall Elegie. Nevertheless, they have proved indispensable (when soundly practised) as a complement to documentary evidence and to subjective estimates of what is, or is not, the authentic style of a particular writer. Statistical work plays a large part in Gary Taylor’s Textual Companion to the Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 1980), and in important recent books by Vickers himself and by MacDonald P. Jackson. It is sympathetically assessed in Harold Love’s Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2002).

Much less use has been made of these methods in describing Shakespeare’s style, or that of his peers, more generally, even in the age of effortless counting and calculation by the computer. Two exceptions are Barron Brainerd’s work on pronouns and other common words in relation to genre and period in Shakespeare’s works, and Jonathan Hope’s book on the sociolinguistics of Shakespeare’s idiolect in contrast with Fletcher’s. (Hope and Michael Whitmore have recently presented the results from a more ambitious computational stylistics venture using a complete set of Shakespeare plays.) Meanwhile there are promising precedents in other areas of English studies. John Burrows’s book Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen and an Experiment in Method (Oxford, 1987) offers remarkable insights into the patterning of Jane Austen’s language, and the subtly varied idiolects of her characters.

JANUARY 2006

Well before its inauguration, the RSC’s Complete Works Festival – a drive to stage or host productions of every play in the canon in Stratford between April 2006 and April 2007 – is already making 2006 an unusual year for the classical repertory in England. For one thing, it results in there being no Shakespeare at all on offer in Stratford for the first three months of the year, with the RSC playing adaptations of Chaucer and Dickens (reserve national poets?) while they gather their resources for what the publicity department is calling The Essential Year. The company administrators with whom I have corresponded sound slightly perplexed and, looking at the intricacy of the Complete Works Festival performance schedule available on the company’s website I can see why. Every Stratford venue possible has been mobilized: productions are to be mounted in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (prior to its closure for internal remodelling); in the Swan; in the temporary 900-seat Courtyard Theatre (a large corrugated steel shell occupying the Other Place car-park, due on completion to open with a revival of Michael Boyd’s production of the first tetralogy of histories, described in Survey 55); and, as if just to demonstrate which organization is the real spiritual and temporal power in Stratford-upon-Avon nowadays, the RSC has even gone beyond their own premises to borrow an extra performance space from the Church of England, conscripting Holy Trinity Church for a very brief run of Henry VIII in the late summer. One other local body has mucked in too: what is perhaps the least popular play in the canon, Timon of Athens, is to have a short autumn run in the Birthplace Trust’s little lecture hall at the Shakespeare Centre on Henley Street.

This chapter examines two pieces of popular Shakespeare in Japan, 2006. The first is the adaptation of Julius Caesar by the Takarazuka Revue (directed by Shinji Kimura), and the second is Shinkansen RS’s adaptation of Macbeth, titled Metal Macbeth (script by Kankurô Kudô, directed by Hidenori Inoue). In the former, Julius Caesar is appropriated as a means to express populist nationalism in today’s Japan, and in the latter Macbeth is turned into sci-fi to express the fin-de-siècle pessimism which Japan in the twenty-first century has not yet succeeded in overcoming.

The two are ‘pop’ in different registers. Takarazuka, with a longer history, is a theatre for devoted female fans who are constructed as ‘ordinary people’, while Shinkansen RS has affinities with recent ‘geeky’ ‘nerdy’ postmodern cultures such as manga(Japanese graphic novels) and computer games. Both display, in different degrees and manners, ambivalence towards the cultural authority of ‘proper’ Shakespeare, of avant-garde Shakespeare performances and academic Shakespeare. They audaciously appropriate the original works and are unabashedly proud of their ‘pop’ quality.

At the same time, both Takarazuka and Shinkansen have high status. Takarazuka is a highly respected theatrical institution with a long history (more than ninety years), even though, because of its ‘pop’ quality, it is sometimes derided as a theatre suitable only for unsophisticated women. Shinkansen RS’s Metal Macbeth includes an acting ‘aristocracy’ of stars who have played in Ninagawa Shakespeare productions, or who come from top Kabuki families. Because of their ambivalent status, the two are most suitable formy purpose in this article to examine the blurring boundaries between pop culture and high culture in Shakespeare productions in Japan.

At the opening of the well-known film Shakespeare in Love (1998) we are told that in 1593 ‘two [London] theatres were fighting it out for playwrights and audiences’. One of these was the Rose Playhouse, located on Bankside, south of the River Thames, a theatre owned by a dyer named Philip Henslowe. Tom Stoppard, who wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, described Henslowe as ‘a man with a cash flow problem’; and Geoffrey Rush, who portrayed him in the film, depicted the theatre owner as a naive but lucky buffoon. As viewers of Shakespeare in Love are informed, Henslowe knows little about theatrical performance and even less about playwriting. In his words a good play is one that includes ‘mistaken identities, a shipwreck, a pirate king, a bit with a dog, and love triumphant’.

Philip Henslowe similarly, if more sympathetically – as a theatre manager whose primary interest was hearing the sound of pennies jingling in the collection box. Consequently, for some time now Henslowe has been identified as a ‘banker’, an ‘entrepreneur’, or simply a ‘financier’, impressions that grow naturally out of the extant evidence that has come down to us – most of it consisting of financial papers relating to Henslowe’s businesses. Of course, the terms by which Henslowe has been commonly identified are not, in themselves, mutually exclusive. Each characterizes some part of his life. However, the very list of terms – ranging from ‘manager’ to ‘impresario’ – points up our uncertainty about Henslowe’s position vis-à-vis the playhouses he owned and the playing companies that occupied them. But as it turns out, even such a lengthy list of terms is insufficient to suggest the many complexities of Philip Henslowe’s life, or to explain how some of the seemingly disparate elements within his life actually complement one another.

In this chapter, I argue that The Taming of the Shrew shows Kate being tamed not by her husband alone but by society’s active collusion with him. A man and a woman never are truly alone, as Petruccio’s grammatical slippage in the phrase, ‘when men and women are alone’ inadvertently indicates. Through a close study of language, especially pronouns, singulars and plurals, I argue that the play represents and critiques ‘men and women’ – the weight of material conditions that structure gender and the power politics that uphold male domination – as always present in every particular male–female interaction, however private it may seem. I thus differ both from those who read the play as a celebration of a companionate marriage, and also from those who read it as a misogynist reinforcement of patriarchal ideology. Through an examination of Elizabethan marriage manuals, I demonstrate that both Petruccio’s taming methods and Kate’s unquestioning obedience violate contemporaneous ideals of a good Christian marriage.

My reading evolved from a student production that I co-directed at Delhi University, India, in 1992, which cross-dressed the sexes, with women playing male parts and men female parts. In my work on Mariological images in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII, I began to notice connections and verbal echoes between Shakespeare’s representations of his first Kate and his last, which I explore at the end of the essay.

This annus mirabilis in Shakespearian editing welcomed two monumental editions: the Arden3 Hamlet and the Oxford Othello. I don't imagine that there are many Shakespearians on the planet who did not know of Arden's long-announced plan to present a groundbreaking edition of all three textual versions of Hamlet. The fact that Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor have prepared critical editions of q1, q2 and f – the latter two being the longest texts in the Shakespeare canon – in about a decade is an extraordinary achievement (it took Harold Jenkins thirty-six years to finish his Arden2 edition). Just as the 1982 Arden2 Hamlet marked the culmination of the tradition of conflated editions, Arden3 is a milestone in the recent history of version-based editing.

Thompson and Taylor have produced unapologetically conservative editions of all three texts. Those of us who have criticized version-based editions that do not follow their control texts will find much to applaud here. This is version-based editing at its best. Their Second Quarto text makes remarkably few emendations (128 compared to Jenkins's 297) and their Folio text preserves many more f readings than any previous Folio-based edition. My personal favourite comes in the opening line to 1.4 where Folio editors such as Gary Taylor, Philip Edwards and G. R. Hibbard all emend f's 'is it very cold?' to Q2's 'it is very cold'. Thompson and Taylor are surely correct in retaining this small but essential difference: Hamlet in the Folio is so distracted that he does not know whether it is cold or not and has to ask.

In the California Building Gallery in South Minneapolis, Aidan, a nine-year-old boy is trying to get the attention of the actor playing his father, in a workshop production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. The actors are having a break and are discussing the end of the presentation: how will the company leave the playing space once Martius has been killed? F1 has the Volscians leave the stage ‘bearing the dead body of Martius’. If we have Jim Bovino, who is playing Martius, carried off stage, it must be through the audience, as they surround the action throughout the piece. No one is taking much notice of Aidan. He starts to mould his onstage father into a monumental pose, right arm curved in front of him, fist clenched, left arm up as if brandishing a sword. Having studiously ignored this activity for a while, it occurs to Bovino that Aidan’s idea for a human sculpture is something of an inspired one, and the Coriolanus that I directed for Flaneur Productions in the California Building Gallery, Minneapolis, and Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota in April 2006, ended as the Volscians hauled Martius onto his feet, onto the block where he has just been killed and on which he had stood to receive the citizens’ vote in his gown of humility in 2.3. At the end of each performance, Martius’ son climbed onto the block, pulled from his father the Volscian shirt Martius had acquired when he left Rome for Actium and moulded him into a monument to Roman virtus. Or Mother Russia. Or Saddam Hussein. Or the Statue of Liberty, perhaps. When the boy was satisfied with the monument he had made of his father, he left the playing space.

I recall a single, memorable moment of looking: Alexandra Gilbreath as Katherina in Gregory Doran’s 2003 Taming of the Shrew, kitted out for her wedding. Absorbed in her costume’s artifice – a paradise of ribbon rosettes, its skirt distended by a huge flat-topped farthingale – actor and character receded into the background: she was ‘all clothes’. In performance, this was a wedding dress that mattered. But when, much later, it surfaced in the archive on a mannequin, Kate’s costume bore little resemblance to my memory of what I had seen – a parody of the dress worn by Elizabeth I in the Ditchley portrait (illustration ). It is, of course, always surprising to see a costume’s theatrical life frozen on display, missing the intimacy of the body and, in this case, the farthingale. That I had mapped one gown over the other points not just to the tricksiness of looking and memory – one dress shadowing or haunting the other (ghosts on both sides) – but also to how fashion and theatre, avatars of one another, compose subjects as well as histories. ‘Speak, clothes, for me’, says the actor-as-character, says the play’s written language of costume. So what costume plot does Shakespeare write for Shrew, and especially for the actor who plays its title role? And how do Kate’s clothes – those worn by Gilbreath and by other Kate-actors – play with the most serious theme of human, and theatrical, consciousness – Who am I? – to perform the double dream of identity and play which lies at the heart of Shrew’s theatrical self-fashioning? The story that emerges from these questions involves double looking. First, setting Shrew’s written language of clothes alongside early modern social customs, I imagine how costume acts out and supports historical and cultural meanings; then, I explore how theatre’s fabrications have invited spectators to look at (and listen to) Kate’s speaking body in performance. This strand of my story, which returns to Gilbreath’s Kate, is and is not about that absent farthingale.

The following conversation took place on a number of occasions beginning on Friday 3 September, 2004 and ending on 4 February 2005, in Cardiff, where Michael Bogdanov’s Wales Theatre Company has its administrative base. It has often been the case that discussions of literary and artistic matters have historically taken place against backdrops of national politics or crises. Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy was cast in the form of a dialogue that was conducted against the backdrop of an Anglo-Dutch trade war, and these interviews with Bogdanov were no exception: on the day of the first interview the siege of the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, that was to end in massive loss of infant life, was in its third day; the aftermath of the war in Iraq continued, with President Bush of the USA announcing an aggressive foreign policy directed at ‘changing the world’, and declaring the USA to be ‘liberty central’. At the same time as being sensitive to larger global issues, Bogdanov’s theatrical endeavours are also firmly rooted in a strong sense of community; indeed the two are integrated at a fundamental level in his own thinking.

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 website 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 Exchange Theatre Company. Royal Exchange, Manchester, 23 February–9 April.

www.royalexchange.co.uk

Director: Braham Murray

Antony: Tom Mannion

Cleopatra: Josette Bushell-Mingo

AS YOU LIKE IT

Young Vic Theatre Company.Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 3 June–3 September.

www.youngvic.org

Director: David Lan

Rosalind: Helen McCrory

Celia: Sienna Miller

Set in 1940s France.

Creation Theatre Company. Headington Hill Park, Oxford, 3 June–9 August.

www.creationtheatre.co.uk

Director: Charlotte Conquest

Royal Shakespeare Company. Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5 August–13 October.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Dominic Cooke

Rosalind: Lia Williams

Nottingham Playhouse and Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 17 September–15 October.

www.lyceum.org.uk

Director: Mark Thomson

Rosalind: Emma Cunniffe

LOCAL SHAKESPEARES

All Shakespeare criticism is irrepressibly local. As recent literary theory has insisted, we can't help but read or play him in ways that inevitably expose our own positions – ideological, historical, geographical – whether we like it or not. Some criticism likes it a great deal and, responding to the metacritical impulse of our times, self-consciously, not to say cathartically, examines the myriad ways Shakespeare's texts take on the camouflage of the cultures in which they find themselves. An omnibus case in point is Celia R. Daileader's street-smart, provocative, sometimes infuriating book, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee, which traces the career of the Othello story in a series of local reworkings of it, from a vulgar recension by Thomas Dekker in the seventeenth century, Lust's Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen, to Spike Lee's movies in the twentieth which, comfortably in the Dekker tradition, celebrate the machinations of 'snaky white women'. He and before him other writers such as Aphra Behn in her tragedy Abdelazar (1676) and her novella Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688), Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, James Fennimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights, Bram Stoker in Dracula, Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind – all are mesmerized by what Daileader calls the 'siren-song of Othellophilia', doomed, like Coleridge's mariner, to retell a version of the same story of inter-racial or inter-cultural tragic love.

On first reading, the subtitle to Christoph Clausen's comparative study of Verdi's and Shakespeare's Macbeth seems a little unwieldy: 'negotiating historical and medial difference'. Amplified by Clausen's own metaphor of travelling between his two texts as 'two nations', however, it offers three axes for the development of the field of performance criticism evidenced in the books under consideration. Performances in different times and places are usefully triangulated by a notion of performance as the translation of Shakespeare's texts into different media: visual art, film and music as well as theatre.

Stuart Sillars's Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 argues that the visual artists he discusses derive their inspiration from reading, rather than seeing, Shakespeare. He begins with John Wootton's 1750 painting Macbeth and Banquo meeting the Weird Sisters. Wootton depicts the two captains in plumed helmets and Jacobite drapes in the bottom centre of a forbidding khaki woodland scene from which three piratical female figures in chimneypot hats emerge, barefoot and leaning on sticks. Two birds are silhouetted against the bright break in the clouds. The composition of the picture bears down heavily on the figures, overwhelming them with the dark tones of windswept vegetation. It is one of sixteen colour plates – not enough – and 101 black and white illustrations to this volume. Sillars expertly sketches the ways in which this illustration draws on naturalistic painting conventions and on Gaspard Dughtet and Poussin, rather than on the theatrical Macbeth reintroduced by Garrick, arguing that its context is textual and art historical rather than dramatic.

At the Thirty-Second International Shakespeare Conference, held in Stratford-upon-Avon, at the Shakespeare Institute, in August 2006, Andrew Lavender and Simon Shepherd offered ‘A Presentation in 13 Bits’ about Shakespeare performance in a postdramatic theatre, a twenty-first century theatre of digitization, effect, and affect. Appearing together, Lavender and Shepherd alternated in addressing the audience of Shakespearians, with Lavender at the podium and Shepherd elsewhere, a bit to the side, sometimes near or on, and sometimes roving around, a table, which, it later became apparent, housed some props. Lavender and Shepherd told the Shakespearians that today’s theatre increasingly depends upon the kinesthetic and the phenomenal; a significant source of an audience’s engagement with the onstage action, they contended, is the ability of visual stimuli directly to affect the bodies of the audience.

The Institute had prepared for presentations requiring digital projection, and a large screen loomed behind the podium. Many speakers availed themselves of technology, showing photos or data or offering up summaries of their major points, but the screen was in use even when a speaker read a paper and presented nothing more: the speaker’s head and shoulders were projected onto the screen behind him or her, somewhat disconcertingly in my opinion, for I never knew where to focus my attention, large head or small. Of all the speakers, Lavender and Shepherd made best use of the available technology when, late in their presentation, Shepherd began to discuss Macbeth and slowly revealed his hands to be covered in blood. Scooping up a video camera, Lavender began to film Shepherd, circling him as he spoke, so that a close-up of the bloody hands projected onto the screen. In the next of the thirteen bits, again thanks to Lavender’s camera, we watched on the screen and in person as Shepherd undid the effect – slowly, he poured bottled water on his hands, washing them carefully to avoid getting the blood on his nicely tailored and very pale linen suit, and then drying them on the sheets of paper from which he had just read.

The following article summarizes professional theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in the years from 1568 to 1597, a period when payments for more than thirty visits to the town by travelling companies are recorded in the Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Stratford was, in the years in question, a fairly average Midlands town with a population of 1500–2000. It may therefore stand for any number of towns visited by travelling companies, an aspect of England’s theatre culture being progressively revealed by volumes in the Records of Early English Drama series. The present discussion is indebted to the generosity of Alan Somerset, editor of the forthcoming Warwickshire volume, who has allowed me to quote from his unpublished work. I am also much indebted to Sally-Beth MacLean, whose remarkable The Queen’s Men and their Plays, written with the late Scott McMillin, has set a scholarly standard for everyone working in the field. Published studies by Andrew Gurr and Siobhan Keenan have made my own immeasurably more modest enquiries possible. Research by Edgar I. Fripp, J. O. Halliwell, Richard Savage, Levi Fox and John Tucker Murray, sometimes neglected by today’s scholars, has been called on, as well as recent historical and sociological studies by Robert Bearman and others. I am grateful to Margaret Shewring for scholarly and practical help.

In July 1648 John Evelyn, early and influential member of the Royal Society, sat for prolific portraitist Robert Walker.

The painting was designed to accompany Instructions Oeconomique, a treatise on marriage written for Evelyn’s (very) young wife. He had hoped to have it executed as a miniature ’by Peter Oliver, Hoskins or Johnson‚, but with Oliver dead and the other two unavailable, Evelyn ’could meet with none capable‚. This context of marital intimacy now seems out of keeping with the image, which displays Evelyn with one hand embracing a human skull, and is annotated by a Greek motto (‘Repentance is the beginning of Philosophy’) and a quotation from Seneca on the importance of preparing for death.

If you are an adventurous (or hypertextual, perhaps performative) reader I invite you to skip this introduction and go straight to the puzzle (you can always come back); what follows here is an orientation, a way into and around the main body of this article. If, as Umberto Eco writes, ‘A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them’, then the next few pages aim to (slightly) un-muddle, though certainly not regiment, access to the puzzle through explanation of my title and method. I feel, at once, that I should apologize for this title and perhaps I would have abandoned the initial monstrosity altogether had its tripartite awkwardness not so neatly encapsulated the method. Writing about (Shakespearian) performance often involves such apologies, especially when the writing is deliberately methodological rather than descriptive of performance itself – I mean not writing about performance, but writing about writing about performance – and this is perhaps a tacit acknowledgement that writing cannot hope to reproduce a given production, neither its materiality nor ephemerality. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, to whom I will return, defend their discrete disciplines of theatre and archaeology with ‘Apologia’ before less apologetically and less obviously bringing them together into a fruitful interdisciplinary blend. Michael Dobson begins his reflection on ‘Writing about [Shakespearian] Performance’ most deferentially (which is not always the way he writes about Shakespearian performances): ‘I should apologize first of all for starting this chapter thus in the first person’ and then he further excuses the article, which is ‘purely personal’ and ‘very cursory and simplistic’; he also defends a title about which he feels uncomfortable. Broken down, my title reveals an attempt to create a form of writing which thickly describes Shakespearian production – in this case an adaptation of Othello I directed in 2003/4 called Othellophobia – and to weave together the most pressing textual and contextual concerns. Thus: the form of the writing is (post)structured by the number puzzle sudoku; the content is Shakespeare’s Othello – the text itself, its more recent production history and the way that my production shaped the play; and the analysis of the content, which is facilitated by the form, is represented by phobia, which signals my concern here with (sub)textual and cultural anxieties generated and sustained by the play in performance.