In his keynote address on the Future of Shakespeare at the inaugural British Shakespeare Association conference in Leicester in September 2003, Jonathan Bate argued that future scholarly editions of Shakespeare would be online, because only the digital environment can show the depth and complexity of the scholarly project. This acknowledgement of the influence of the online environment follows a period of resistance to and upheaval in the development of the digital dissemination of Shakespeare’s work. What this statement acknowledges is the emergence of a series of what have been termed second-generation projects in digital editing, projects that have learned from the mistakes of the past. The question remains, however, of what form the online edition in this new stage of development will take. This essay attempts to bring that question, which has been debated for too long among only a small group of specialists, to a wider audience.

The history of digital editing is relatively short but filled with activity and drama. Given that many of the early digital projects were created on cd and are only available in the collections of those who purchased them at the time, it is important, at this crucial juncture, to document work that might otherwise disappear without a trace. The development of the online edition owes a great deal to these early experiments in that they mapped out the difficult and complex terrain of the digital world. The contested questions of copyright, intellectual property and ownership of the final edited texts has meant that even in the open environment of the Internet there remain only a handful of serious attempts to address the issue of what a scholarly online edition of the plays should look like and how it should function. In this essay, I will outline the nature of the crossroads we currently face by placing it into its historical context.

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 Traffic of the Stage database, also available on Touchstone, archives UK Shakespeare production information since January 1993, correlating information from listings and reviews held in the Shakespeare Institute Library. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

AS YOU LIKE IT

Forkbeard Fantasy, Theatre Royal Bath Young People’s Theatre, Ustinov Studio, Bath, 12– 13 March.

www.forkbeardfantasy.co.uk

Director: Katherine Lazare

Rosalind: Sophie Andrews

Part of the Bath Shakespeare Festival

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Tour 17 June – 1 August.

www.mad-dogs.org.uk

Groundlings Theatre Company, Tour 2 July – 29 August.

www.groundlings.co.uk

Centurion Theatre Company, Courtyard Theatre, London, 28 October – 21 November.

Director: Michael Sargent

Rosalind: Charlotte Endacott

Peter Hall Company, Rose of Kingston Theatre, 3–18 December.

members.aol.com/dramaddict/petrhall.htm

Director: Peter Hall

Rosalind: Rebecca Hall

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Oxford Stage Company, Lincoln’s Inn, London, 3 August–3 September.

www.oxfordstage.co.uk

Director: Chris Pickles

Antipholus: Henry Everett

Dromio: Cory English

Heartbreak Productions, Tour 9 June – 15 July.

www.heartbreakproductions.co.uk

Director: Maddy Kerr

CYMBELINE

Ludlow Shakespeare Festival, Ludlow Castle, Ludlow, 26 June – 9 July.

www.ludlowfestival.co.uk

Director: Michael Bogdanov

Cymbeline: John Labanowski

Imogen: Nia Roberts

Where do we locate the authentic Shakespeare? This was the question asked, rather less bluntly, by Stephen Orgel in his influential Representations essay of 1988. Taking and testing Shakespearian examples in manuscript, in print, in the theatre and in portraiture, Orgel asked how the category of the authentic varied historically in, and was varied historically by, these different but clearly related contexts. Orgel argued that although these locations can perform authenticity they cannot themselves be authentic; despite their variety, Shakespearian authenticity oddly still exists elsewhere:

What we want, as Orgel put it, others have wanted also; and this article explores an earlier version of those desires for Shakespearian authenticity: the Shakespeare forgeries of William-Henry Ireland. The story of those forgeries has been often told, and the narrative of the young William-Henry Ireland’s ‘discovery’ of a trunk of papers containing not only Shakespeare’s long-lost correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, Lord Southampton, Richard Burbage and others, but also manuscripts of King Lear and Hamlet, with, to top it all, two ‘lost’ plays, Vortigern and Henry II, does not need retelling here. Rather my argument focuses on the relation between the forgeries and their most devastating exposure, Edmond Malone’s An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments (1796).

I have become, apparently, a specialist, if not an expert, on editing collaboratively written drama. Although I profess surprise, the path is not really difficult to trace. I began my professional life writing on Beaumont and Fletcher for G. E. Bentley; I was soon editing; and, as many scholars, usually citing Bentley, have reiterated, the majority of early modern plays were collaboratively written. Ergo, to edit, logically enough, is to edit collaboration.

But no, not for most people, or at least not willingly. Most scholars want to edit Jonson, not Eastward Ho!, Middleton, not A Fair Quarrel, Shakespeare, not Pericles. Although I was flattered when Gary Taylor asked me to write the Introduction to The Spanish Gypsy for the Oxford Collected Middleton, perhaps no one else was foolish enough to undertake 5,000 words on a play whose 1653 title-page names Middleton and Rowley as the authors but which has been convincingly attributed primarily to Ford and Dekker. And now I find myself, in a satisfying return to origins, editing Philaster. Partly on the basis of my own editing experience, but also because as a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama, I, and my co-General Editors John Jowett and Gordon McMullan, have been faced with the complications that arise in the collaborative editing of collaborations, I will here offer a meditation on the practical consequences, for the real and lonely editor, of the mantra we all now repeat.

The famous three pages added by ‘Hand D’ to the multi-authored manuscript play Sir Thomas More have been accepted as Shakespeare’s by recent editors of his complete works. But scepticism about the attribution is still expressed by prominent scholars, and a new study by Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, in which the disputed material is subjected to their ‘silver bullet’ methods of computer-aided testing, concludes that the probabilities are solidly against Shakespeare’s authorship. Elsewhere I have attempted to rebut their arguments. Here I adduce some fresh evidence in favour of the majority view.

The approach to be reported on took advantage of the availability of the Chadwyck-Healey ‘Literature Online’ electronic database, which includes searchable texts of virtually all extant early modern English drama.4 For much of the twentieth century, scholars attempting to establish the authorship of anonymous plays of Shakespeare’s age, or to apportion shares in collaborative ones, relied on citing verbal parallels between a doubtful work and the writings of some favoured candidate. The main problem with this methodology was that it permitted only one outcome – the display of a certain number of similarities in phrasing, deemed ‘significant’ by the compiler, but difficult for any uncommitted judge to assess. Ostensibly impressive evidence of this kind could be collected in support of mutually exclusive theories. The implicit assumption was always that only common authorship could explain the quantity and quality of the parallels listed, but since different investigators, employing the same method, reached opposing conclusions, the assumption must often have been unjustified.

To discuss directors and their productions in relation to editors and their editions is at first glance to mix (or conflate) apples and oranges, cuts and emendations. To the scholar, the differences may far outweigh any similarities, but the essential problem facing both groups remains the same: when putting quill to paper, Shakespeare was fashioning his plays for players, playgoers, playhouses, and (perhaps) play readers that no longer exist. How does or should an editor or theatrical professional factor in the gap between the 1590s–early 1600s and the 1990s–early 2000s? To focus on the preparation of early modern English plays for presentation in today’s theatre is to bring into focus the problems and choices involved in a species of ‘editing’ geared to a larger arena and a less predictable audience.

When mounting a production of a Shakespeare play, today’s theatrical professionals take a wide range of approaches in choosing which words, speeches, and scenes to perform. Occasionally a textual adviser or dramaturg will be on hand to sort through the various options; some actors and directors deal directly with the Quarto or First Folio texts; others rely on a particular series as their chosen authority (e.g., the Arden, Oxford or Cambridge editions). One director told me that, after various paperbacks fell apart during the rigours of the rehearsal process, he chose a particular edition for its durable binding. During the rehearsal process some directors encourage their actors to use as many different editions as possible so as to highlight choices and anomalies, whereas others hand their personnel a playscript that contains pre-established cuts and transpositions, so that some cast members may never consult a full text of the play in question.

With characteristic flair for paradox, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes the protagonist of his parable Everything and Nothing in almost entirely negative terms:

Part of the joy of reading this extremely short text comes from the skilled and gradual way in which Borges allows the reader to fill in these instances of lack, these gaps, counterbalancing negative with positive terms, juxtaposing pieces of evidence to the point at which an identity can be surmised. When, in the final sentence, none other than the voice of God confirms the suspicions that have become a certainty, we also feel able to address the protagonist, intimately, as ‘my Shakespeare’.

Borges places the reader in a proprietary position that is also one of authorship. The efficacy of the parable relies on the prior knowledge of the reader of such clues as ‘small Latin and less Greek’, depends, in fact, on her ability to guess the solution before she is told it, creating the identity of the subject herself and coming to own it through the possessive pronoun ‘my’. The reader authors, and owns, Shakespeare, a Shakespeare, moreover, who is in the last sentence explicitly connected to the divine in a phrase that also recalls the title, as God tells him, ‘you, like myself, are many and no one’.

For the first time in fifty-four years, the editors of Shakespeare Survey have devoted an issue to ‘Editing Shakespeare’. Perhaps they are motivated by a concern that has been gaining in currency since at least as early as 1988, when Randall McLeod chose ‘Crisis in Editing’ as the theme for the annual Conference on Editorial Problems at the University of Toronto. The Division of the Kingdoms had appeared five years earlier and McLeod’s own ‘UN Editing Shak-speare’ a year before that; but ‘Crisis in Editing’ extended its claims beyond the special problems of the Lear text or any particular quarrel with received opinion to suggest that editing itself was in a critical condition.

This idea, in one form or another, has been in regular circulation ever since. In 1993, Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, reflecting on the proliferation of Lear versions, foresaw ‘a radical change indeed’ not just in textual criticism but in all forms of Shakespearian practice. ‘As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same.’ The editors of two recent collections on editorial matters claim we are in the midst of a transformation analogous to the sweeping institutional and conceptual revolutions – the new maps, the Reformation, print dissemination – of the Renaissance itself. Implicit in these momentous re-enactments is the notion of a paradigm shift and, in the most recent Cambridge Companion, Barbara Mowat adopts this idea as the organizing principle for her analysis, concluding with a catalogue of the recently produced ‘paradigm-threatening’ critiques as a result of which ‘hardly a “fact” supporting New Bibliographical assumptions remains standing’.

In the last quarter of a century, no textual variant in the works of Shakespeare has captured the attention of his serious readers quite like The Tempest’s wise / wife crux. During the wedding masque presented by Juno, Ceres, and Isis in Act 4, Ferdinand either praises both Miranda and Prospero’s powerful magic –

–or he praises exclusively his father-in-law’s magic and ignores altogether his newly betrothed:

Both textual scholars (bibliographers and textual critics) and literary critics have invested considerable time and energy to debating the issues concerning the variant. In preparation for the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, Peter S. Donaldson gave it a remarkably high profile: ‘In the early stages of planning the digital Folio collection’, he recounts, ‘I used this variant in our first prototype, creating digital images of the line from several of the Folger copies’. Similar status is accorded to the crux by the Arden3 editors, who find in it a fitting conclusion to their introductory discussion of The Tempest. For them, the crux ‘encapsulates several of the play’s major issues: the role of a chaste female (daughter/wife) in Prospero’s generative project; the magician’s wisdom and control of events (or lack thereof); and, most centrally, the question of what it takes to turn a paradise into a “brave new world” in a universe corrupted by greed and egoism’. As the editors suggest, the crux cuts across the lines of inquiry initiated by both textual scholars and literary critics; the Vaughans are, after all, both editing The Tempest and commenting on the implications the crux has for interpretations of the play as a whole.

THE THREE-TEXT HAMLET: PARALLEL TEXTS OF THE FIRST AND SECOND QUARTOS AND FIRST FOLIO

At the beginning, there was the Modern Language Association’s New Variorum Hamlet project. The original team, which began working before 1990, included Paul Bertram as text editor. Almost immediately, he and I realized that having the three early texts of Hamlet in front of us in a compact and legible form would be useful for textual collations as well as commentary notes based on textual variants – the material we were collecting for the variorum edition. Encouraged by the many vital works that AMS Press had made available through its reprints, we approached Gabriel Hornstein, President of AMS, with a plan for publishing a Three-Text Hamlet, which he readily accepted. Though the idea of electronic versions of our new variorum work was very much a part of my original planning, Paul Bertram and I also felt that we needed a book to place by our computers for easy consulting. The flow between paper and electrons is a hallmark of our efforts in all our texts.

The first edition of The Three-Text Hamlet appeared in 1991 and was useful beyond our expectations not only to us but to the many scholars, students, and theatre practitioners who wrote to tell us how much they valued it. Though many of the users had facsimiles of the First Quarto (q1), the Second Quarto (q2) and the First Folio (f1), our book simplified comparing the three texts through the parallel columns in which we arranged them. If we had chosen to model our work on the example of Michael Warren’s excellent Lear books, we might have xeroxed the facsimiles and cut them up to produce the parallel texts, but given the technology available at that time we would not have been able to generate electronic texts from facsimiles.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE NEW

I thought of calling this section something like ‘Extravagant Imaginative Dimensions’ in order to convey my sense of Shakespeare criticism’s often tortuous desire these days for originality. Shakespeare’s critics, like his lunatics, lovers and poets, often seem to be of imagination all compact. To take Theseus’s dim view of the workings of the imagination, however, hardly does justice to a deeply imaginative book that seems at first blush to set itself apart from any desire for originality. Yet it is, of course, completely original and I deal with it at the beginning of these reviews to remind us why we should bother to wrack our imaginations on Shakespeare in the first place. Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity is a set of meditations on seven of Shakespeare’s tragedies that has been a long time gestating, the interim end-product of an on-going conversation about them with friends and students. Leggatt prises the term ‘thick readings’ away from the company it usually keeps in anthropological and cultural circles in order to describe his ‘close engagement with the plays themselves’ in his attempt to ‘keep them free to do their own thinking’, although the thinking in question is in fact the creatively synthetic thinking of the critic himself.

Leggatt gives us seven bracing chapters on Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. They are valuably interconnected. He opens the second chapter, for instance, the one on Romeo and Juliet, with the remark that ‘Romeo’s first meeting with Juliet seems designed not only to begin the love story of Romeo and Juliet but to heal the wounds of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus.’ His concluding chapter begins: ‘We began with Lavinia dehumanised by violence; we end with the death of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the perpetrators of violence, humanised.’

This chapter engages with a growing body of criticism that analyses early modern drama from the perspective of insular literary tradition. Its eventual focus is on Shakespeare’s Tempest but it begins in Anglo-Saxon literature, before moving on to the foundation myth that appears in the medieval Brut, or Chronicles of England. These sources illuminate the play’s engagement with political and religious controversies that were current in England when the play was first performed in November 1611. This approach adds another dimension to the established post-colonial critique of the play and adds depth and complexity to the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as it exposes additional cultural significance in the manipulation of images deployed in the play. Although these images reflect traditional eschatological and mythical sources, those sources have hitherto been obscured by the overwhelming preoccupation of earlier critics with classical influences.

The best-known form of the mythical founding of Britain recounts the coming of Brutus, grandson of Aeneas of Troy, from Armorica, with a band of Trojans. They kill the giants they find when they land at Totnes in Devon and settle down to create a city-based society. European foundation myths citing Greek or Roman ancestors first appear in the work of the seventh-century Frankish chronicler, Fredegar. These myths offer explanations of how a society, civilization or realm came into being and include etiological material and eponymous characters. Many British myths, legends and stories include giants. From the work of Anglo-Saxon poets to that of sixteenth-century antiquarians, giants appear as the original inhabitants of the island of Britain. They are, of course, part of many foundation myths. The Titans of Greek legend are the classical version, and Genesis 6: 4 tells us that before the Flood ‘there were giants in the earth in those days’. Giants are the quintessential primary inhabitants in the myths of many realms and regions.

Sándor Petőfi (1823–49), a major Romantic poet writing in Hungarian, translated William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in 1848. Whose Coriolanus?, we should pause and ask, bearing in mind the long and distinguished tradition of editing Shakespeare. Is it the Coriolanus of John Heminges and Henry Condell, Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, William Warburton, Thomas Hanmer, Samuel Johnson, Edward Capell, George Steevens and Isaac Reed, Edmond Malone and James Boswell, Samuel W. Singer, Charles Knight or John Payne Collier? Any historical survey on editing Shakespeare will reveal the differences between these editors, and monographs on the individual achievements often present the edition in question as a paradigm shift. The corpus we know as ‘Shakespeare’ is redefined by each editor and in each edition.

However, some editions receive more and some less attention in this process of redefinition. The historiography of editing Shakespeare has its privileged areas of research. The textual schools of the twentieth century, New Bibliography and the post-structuralist schools triggered a new theoretical interest in both the seventeenth-century early printings and in the ‘long eighteenth-century’ of Shakespeare-editing (1709–1821). On the contrary, the history of nineteenth-century editions is an under-researched field. Although Andrew Murphy in his indispensable Shakespeare in Print devotes two chapters to the popular and scholarly editions in the nineteenth-century from the perspectives of editing and publishing, by the nature of such a comprehensive historical account it cannot extend to case studies.

In the literature, nineteenth-century editors are either perceived as derivative of the grand eighteenth-century traditions or as representatives of an interim period (in want of theory) falling in between two great centuries of Shakespearean editorial theory. For the first attitude I quote Andrew Murphy who writes that ‘the eighteenth-century editorial tradition cast something of a long shadow beyond its own immediate period’ and ‘[m]ost of the editions produced for the popular market over the course of the 1800s were highly derivative’. To illustrate the second claim, Paul Werstine notes when comparing the editions of Charles Knight (idealizing the Folio) and John Payne Collier (championing the Quartos) that ‘[t]he wide differences between the editions of Knight and Collier testify to the lack of consensus on the relations among the early printed texts. No theory was available in the absence of documents that could be construed as the ground of such a theory.’

Between the years of 1903 and 1913 two remarkable women, Charlotte Endymion Porter and Helen Armstrong Clarke, published three editions of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Before that they had already edited the complete works of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and founded a literary journal still in existence called Poet-Lore. Throughout their careers they were extraordinarily productive. The Library of Congress catalogue lists sixty-nine titles for Porter and sixty-seven for Clarke.

The publishing careers of these two amazing women began in Philadelphia. In 1875 Charlotte Porter had been one of the graduates of Wells College in Aurora, New York (illustration 4) where she had created scale models of Shakespeare’s stage (illustration 5) and planned to write a series of essays on ‘Staging Shakespeare’s Wit’. She had studied briefly at the Sorbonne and then settled in Philadelphia. There, in 1883, with the encouragement of Horace Howard Furness, she became editor of a new periodical called Shakespeariana (begun by the Shakespeare Society of New York). Among the articles she published in the journal was one on Shakespeare’s music by Helen A. Clarke, a young scholar with a certificate in music from the still all-male University of Pennsylvania. Porter and Clarke formed a life-long friendship.

The two women lived unconventional lives. The best source of information about them is a long account of their friendship written by Porter and published in their journal Poet-Lore after Clarke’s death. The Wells College archive contains not only the early photographs, but also some letters and poems; and the Folger copy of the women’s First Folio Shakespeare has, pasted into A Midsummer Night’s Dream (vol. 8), three fascinating photographs of the two women (illustration 6). One shows them in a study with a reproduction of Shakespeare’s epitaph among the pictures on the wall.

We are all aware of passages from Shakespeare where the editorially emended text has become not only what is familiar but possibly also what is preferred or even beloved. One of the most famous and frequently cited is Theobald’s ‘a babled of green fields’ in the scene of Falstaff’s death in Henry V, a ‘babbled’ that in modern editions replaces the Folio’s ‘a Table of greene fields’ and the potential sexual allusion to backgammon and its ‘green fields’ that has recently been argued for these lines. What I want to consider here is a much less well-known case of editorial reconstruction, though of an equally familiar text – the letter of the Letter Scene in Twelfth Night, in which the famous formula starting with ‘some are born great’ appears nowhere in any of the Folio texts and the familiar ‘Fortunate-Unhappy’ signature does not appear until the eighteenth century, when it was created by Capell, and accorded its own separate line by Malone, the form in which we usually see it in modern editions.

My reason for foregrounding these influential emendations is that in the course of preparing a new Norton Critical Edition of Twelfth Night, I have found that the fact that neither of these appears in the Folio texts of the play came as a surprise not only to me but to other experienced Shakespearians. What I want, then, to do in what follows is to trace the historical process of their editorial creation, and to open up for discussion other possibilities for considering the Folio texts themselves, as well as ways of making the process of historical production more visible to readers.

As Walter Ong said in his study of the interface between oral and literate cultures, ‘Print encourages a sense of closure.’ Editors are bound to aim at identifying and fixing a single version of their play, chiefly for reasons that acknowledge the current dominance of the reader over the listener. They elevate the literate culture over the oral that still was just about dominant when Shakespeare composed his plays. We live now in the literate culture’s hope of attaining so-called ‘definitive’ editions, in the process closing, as Ong suggests, the range of possibilities that are inherent in any text designed for speaking rather than reading. The real problem is not so much a simple consequence of the literate culture’s prioritization of writing over speaking as the effect of long reliance on the written word for its superior precision. Writing allows precise memorization to become the top priority. The original Shakespeare company lacked such a priority and such precision. Perhaps we really are enriched by the concern our editors share, that they must fix the precise wordings of Shakespeare’s plays. But we should recognize at the same time that a lot can be lost by such a priority.

Editors need not only closure but consistency, and it can be dangerous. All modern editors assume, for instance, that Caliban must always speak in verse, despite the case that can be made against it. This assumption requires us to ignore completely the alternative that Stefano, whom he takes as his new master in 2.2, offers him instead. Much has been made in recent years of the curse that Caliban says Prospero laid on him, his language. Much less has been made, though, of the language Stefano offers him in its place. At their first meeting, at 2.2.79 (tln 1125), after wondering how such a beast came to ‘learn our language’, Stefano gives Caliban his bottle, and says ‘Here is that which will give language to you, cat.’ His cure for Trinculo’s and Caliban’s fear is his invitation to drink, that is, as he says (blasphemously), to ‘kisse the Booke’ (tln 1174). Stefano’s book has obviously different attractions to Caliban from Prospero’s. His subsequent over-use of the new book makes him drunk. Should that not mean that he gradually adopts a new language, drunken prose, in place of Prospero’s elevated verse? Such a change seems to be written as a design into Stefano’s euphemisms about a new language for Caliban through his use of Stefano’s ‘Booke’.

The most interventionist, inventive, outrageous, radical and immediately accountable editors of early modern texts are those preparing a play text for a specific performance event, usually directors and dramaturgs. Away from the constraints of a publishing series house style, although often limited by the requirements of a theatre house style, directors can treat early modern texts with a daring that can sometimes seem by traditional scholarly editing standards to border on the reckless: what modern editor would actually dare leave out the first two scenes of The Taming of the Shrew (although continuing to label what the Folio text calls ‘Actus Primus. Scaena Prima’ an ‘Induction’ does invite the reader to discount these scenes)? But how many theatre directors, including Jonathan Miller in the so-called complete works broadcast by the BBC, have discarded The Taming of the Shrew’s first two scenes? How many of those editors who are convinced of the significance of the full Sly framework have actually had the nerve to plough straight on from 5.2 into Sly’s final scenes from the Quarto Taming of A Shrew? Robert Atkins does, in his 1925 edition for Samuel French, but this is a specialist edition aimed at performers, and Atkins was only guesting as an editor: most of his working life was spent as a theatre director. Atkins was also the first director bold enough to bring the full Shrew epilogue back on to the stage, in 1922 at the Old Vic, but while in relation to the theatrical restoration of Sly, Atkins the director has many followers, Atkins the editor has few disciples.

In 1924, E. K. Chambers delivered his British Academy Lecture, ‘The Disintegration of Shakespeare’, whose title neatly categorized a range of textual activities associated with the reattribution of Shakespeare’s plays to non-Shakespearian sources. Among these were the attribution studies of F. G. Fleay and J. M. Robertson, both of whom receive significant critical attention in the lecture. Robertson had been famously praised by T. S. Eliot in his earlier 1919 essay on Hamlet for ‘moving in the other direction’ of romantic idealization in favour of historical and intellectually rigorous scholarship. In what would become a remarkably sustained attempt to decode the authorship of Shakespeare’s lesser plays and passages through metrical and stylistic analysis, Robertson completed his five-volume analysis of the Shakespeare canon in 1930. Despite their claim to objective methodical analysis, Robertson and his contemporaries such as E. E. Stoll relied on preconceived ideals of Shakespeare’s literary quality and were, Chambers noted, as equally idealistic as the defenders of the canon. After 1924, despite Eliot’s praise, Robertson and his contemporaries would be better remembered as ‘disintegrating’ critics. This label is really rather remarkable, if only insofar as the idea of canonical disintegration entirely misrepresents such studies of attribution in a language antithetical to their (however misguided) pursuit, that is, identifying and characterizing the authentic Shakespeare text. More significant, though, is the rather morbid metaphoric dimension of Shakespeare’s disintegration.

Today Orson Welles (1915–85) is known to most in the Shakespeare community for his work on the New York stage in the 1930s, primarily the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth (1936) and ‘fascist’ Julius Caesar (1937), and for his film adaptations of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1965 ). Less well known is that at the very outset of his career Welles co-edited three Shakespeare plays with Roger Hill, his former prep school headmaster at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. Everybody’s Shakespeare was published by Todd Press in 1934, and included modern spelling versions of The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. These first appeared in individual editions, but later they were collected and published as one book. The primary audience was high school and college students, and the editorial apparatus was designed to get them not to study the plays but rather ‘Read them. Enjoy them. Act them.’ To this end Hill cut the texts, Welles created nearly 500 drawings to illustrate the plays, they wrote detailed stage directions together, and each penned introductory essays (Hill on the life and the editorial tradition; Welles on staging the plays). It was a true work of collaboration, and produced at a time when Welles was still in his teens.

While over the years Welles’s stage and film work has been the subject of much scholarship, these ‘performances’ on the page have not received nearly enough attention. Simon Callow argues that ‘Welles’s sense of theatre, the wit and point of his drawing, and the articulate enthusiasm of his approach makes Everybody’s Shakespeare one of the outstanding achievements of his entire output’ (p. 185). His editorial work on The Merchant of Venice especially deserves wider recognition today because, apart from a few minutes of film shot years later, this is the only evidence we have of Welles engaging with 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 website maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. The Traffic of the Stage database, also available on Touchstone, archives UK Shakespeare production information since January 1993, correlating information from listings with reviews held in the Shakespeare Institute Library. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Royal Shakespeare Company. Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 3 December 2003– 7 February 2004.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Gregory Doran

Countess: Dame Judi Dench

Helena: Claudie Blakley

Parolles: Guy Henry

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Glasgow Repertory Company. Botanic Gardens, Glasgow (Bard in the Botanics season). 15–27 July.

www.glasgowrep.org

Director: Scott Palmer

Set in 18th century India.

AS YOU LIKE IT

Sphinx Theatre Company (formally Women’s Theatre Group). Bridewell Theatre, London, 19–26 February and on tour.

Director: Sue Parrish

Rosalind: Danielle King

Royal Shakespeare Company. Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 13 March–8 November.s

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Gregory Thompson

Rosalind: Nina Sosanya

Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory. Tobacco Factory, Bedminster, Bristol, 20 March–26 April. www.shakespeareatthetobaccofactory.co.uk

Director: Andrew Hilton

Rosalind: Saskia Portway

R J Williamson Company. Nottingham Castle, Nottingham, 15 July–10 August and tour.

www.openairshakespeare.co.uk

Directors: Robert Williamson and Frank Jarvis

Rosalind: Martha Swann

Touchstone: Robert Williamson

Peter Hall Company. Theatre Royal, Bath, 11–30 August and international tour.

Director: Sir Peter Hall

Designer: John Gunter

Rosalind: Rebecca Hall

Touchstone: Michael Siberry

Jaques: Philip Voss

Oxford Stage Company. Lincoln’s Inn, London, 14–16 August. www.oxfordstage.co.uk

Director: Kevin Hosier