If Shakespeare were still alive to collect performance fees, 2003 would have been a lucrative year for the Bard, with some thirty revivals of his plays staged by major professional companies in England alone: unless, that is, a large part of the plays’ continuing appeal to the cash-strapped theatres of this country lies in the fact that they are safely out of copyright. Had Shakespeare been a current paid-up member of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society in 2003, for example, it is quite possible that the Royal Shakespeare Company would have avoided his work altogether. With budgetary shortfalls for once restraining the exuberance even of their designers (except Colin Peters, of whose adventures with As You Like It more later), and with the company’s management still in the uncertain interregnum between Adrian Noble’s Project Fleet (see Survey 55 and 56), and the full assumption of the Artistic Directorship by his successor Michael Boyd, the RSC announced only towards the end of 2003 that it would be performing new plays again (for the first time since 2001) late in the 2004 season. Despite reports in the summer that negotiations towards the establishment of a new London home for the company were on the verge of a successful outcome, and despite the news that the company’s forthcoming Swan productions of All’s Well That Ends Well and Othello would each transfer briefly to the Gielgud in spring 2004, only two RSC shows from its summer 2003 repertory, Gregory Doran’s interlinked revivals of The Taming of the Shrew and Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed will be transferring to London (for a short run at the Queen’s in early spring 2004). The bulk of the company’s 2003 repertoire closed at the end of its late autumn run in Newcastle, never reaching metropolitan audiences at all.

Last year I began with the crisis in publishing, and the difficulties young scholars now face with first monographs. Nothing suggests that the situation has eased; rather, the monograph itself is threatened. The consequences can be severe in academic cultures which require the production – I am choosing my words with care – of extended, continuous arguments between hard covers, not once but repeatedly. As publishers change their lists in the direction of ‘Companions’ and ‘Guides’, ‘Topics’ and ‘Accents’, and other collections targeted at student markets, good new work appears increasingly in formats once disdained by committees reviewing dossiers for appointment, tenure, promotion, merit awards, all the armature of careers. Increasingly, the wider publication in journals and reviews becomes necessary, and no longer simply to try out ideas which will be discussed and modified later, or which may not contribute to a larger argument. The Net offers potential alternatives, but resistance to Net publication is no doubt in part fuelled by the wild freedom which has given a disreputable glow to much that happens there. The uploading of journals is to be welcomed – for much of the wide world of scholarship, it revolutionizes access, although the prices of subscriptions remain a problem. A free site, such as Shaksper (www.shaksper.net, edited by Professor Hardy M. Cook), has the advantages and disadvantages typical of all discussion groups: above all, for better or for worse, quantity. The phenomenon is hardly restricted to the Net: the proliferation of journals, and of the ephemeral appearance of conference papers, raises questions about just how much the world of scholarship can sustain.

The second tetralogy begins with a king who, by calling those who condemn him ‘Pilates’ and his betrayers ‘Judases’, overtly styles himself as the Christ. This article will consider how one of Richard II’s successors revives his overt and inept imagery with subtlety and political insight and argue that Hal creates an implied, and thoroughgoing, symbolic connection between his and Christ’s redeeming action, while never explicitly equating his own power and mission with Christ’s. Henry’s stratagem of glittering Christian rhetoric, piety that has been questioned by a number of recent critics of Henry V, begins in Henry IV Part 1. Hal stages his own redemption in Christian terms: a Lenten period of expectant, self-imposed exile is followed by a reconciliation between a father and son through a decisive single combat which is staged with a resonant allusion to the harrowing of hell. The text contains reminiscences of the dramatic form of the Easter liturgy, the biblical story and the mystery plays which invest Hal’s history with their power. These allusions place Hal in the position of Christ but the connections are not simple analogies. Hal needs to redeem England and himself, but there is an uneasiness with both the glory and the humility he stages.

The harrowing of hell is the name given to a non-biblical episode in which Christ went down into limbo between his Crucifixion and Resurrection and rescued the souls of the dead. This doctrine remained the teaching of the Church of England in Shakespeare’s day and would have been well known to his audience. Some of Shakespeare’s audience may even have retained a visual image of the event from the survival of pre-Reformation images.

All over the world the problems created by asylum seekers, and the hostility aroused by legal and illegal immigrants, grow more acute. Shakespeare dramatized these problems – the anti-alien feeling that flared up at various times in London, and a wonderfully compassionate statement on behalf of refugees, in a scene of three pages that he added to the play of Sir Thomas More. As a former asylum seeker, some of whose relatives perished in concentration camps, I would like to comment on the originality of a scene that is sometimes described as hastily written, ‘with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed’, to explain why Shakespeare wrote it and why no one else could have written it.

Let us consider first how Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas rebukes the anti-alien rioters in London, remembering that his speech ‘was intended to reflect the crisis over aliens that was troubling the City’ at the very time (1593) when the play is thought to have been composed.

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.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Royal Shakespeare Company. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 11 April–13 July; Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, 28 August–21 September; Theatre Royal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 8–12 October. www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Michael Attenborough

Antony: Stuart Wilson

Cleopatra: Sinead Cusack

AS YOU LIKE IT

New Shakespeare Company. Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, London, 30 May–7 September. www.openairtheatre.org

Director: Rachel Kavanaugh

Rosalind: Rebecca Johnson

Theatre Set-up. Touring production,

June-August. www.ts-u.co.uk

Director: Wendy Macphee

Open-air Shakespeare company.

Illyria Company. Open-air touring production, summer 2002. www.illyria.uk.com

Director: Oliver Gray

Open-air touring Shakespeare company with a cast of five actors.

Natural Perspectives Theatre Company. Royal Observatory, London, 28 July–11 August.

Director: Adam Megiddo

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Adaptation

The Bomb-itty of Errors

Edinburgh Fringe Festival, August.

Rap version with cast of four and DJ.

Commending the victorious Macbeth with these lines, King Duncan sets up a model of mutual nourishment between lord and vassal, between political father and son. Duncan’s praise is commodiously ambiguous, potentially pointing both to other thanes’ reports of Macbeth’s valour as nourishment for Duncan and to Duncan’s advancement of Macbeth as itself a source of nourishment: by praising him, I am fed; his valour and my remarking that valour constitute the mise en place for concocting the comedic feast of successful community. ‘Banquet’ evokes both social and natural, both festive celebration and quotidian requirement. Being ‘fed’ – here in provocatively passive construction – also signals the way that food functions as a liminal substance that is both part and not part of the individual who ingests it, the way eating enacts both agency (the eater masticating, consuming, metabolizing the foodstuff) and dependence (without sustenance, no agent survives). All these resonances accrue to the dramatic logic of food as a leitmotif in Macbeth.

Billy Morissette’s film Scotland, PA (premiered at the 2001 Sundance festival and commercially released by Lot 47 films in 2002) playfully literalizes Duncan’s ‘banquet’, exploring these questions of agency and identity in the context of depressed – if officially only ‘recessed’ – 1970s rural America. This black comedy, Morissette’s first feature film, offers a surprisingly detailed and nuanced set of ways to think about identity and agency in both Macbeth and the 1970s.

In an attempt to forge some kind of workable historical method of criticism in light of challenges from structuralism, semiotics, phenomenology, deconstruction, reader-response theory, New Historicism, and various psychological approaches to literature, Robert D. Hume some time ago set out as his first principle that ‘Historicism at bottom implies the illumination of text by context’, arguing that

Thus extracted, the proposition seems almost commonplace, for much of the critical work since Hume wrote has excavated, dissected, and analysed contextual materials in Shakespeare’s time to understand more reliably the cultural moment in which he wrote: the culture that formed his thinking and the culture of those who constituted his audiences. Such examinations, furthermore, have complicated the issue of combination (and occasionally also of simultaneity) by understanding the further issue of representation: that the ‘objectivity’ of past events and the records of past cultural beliefs when scrutinized provide no securely objective record at all, but rather the subjectivity of past documents and the necessary partiality of their observations, statements, and arguments.

SHAKE SPEARE EN FRANCE

The ‘afterlife of Macbeth’ in France raises issues which any study of ‘Shakespeare offshoots’ must address, but extends them to a different linguistic and cultural situation: what constitutes ‘adaptation’ as it moves towards a new work; the intertextual status of the new work and reception by its audiences; the historical moment and contexts in which it is written and received, from theatrical fashions to national and world events; to politics broadly speaking; to its place in the developing oeuvre of its adaptor. In France, circumstances have coincided to make this play exceptionally intriguing, beyond the defamiliarization which anglophone readers may experience in considering a play beyond our own linguistic boundaries. As a case history, French Macbeths require rather more history than may be necessary elsewhere: in order to draw the portrait I need the landscape, setting Alfred Jarry and Eugène Ionesco in a series of conjonctures, for however well established and confident French theatrical culture was in either period, it was always vulnerable to innovative attack. The treble, even quadruple context means beginning with a brief reminder of early French translations of Shakespeare; moving to how Shakespeare was known (not quite ‘read’ and ‘seen’), via the French Opera composer, Verdi (whose second version of Macbeth was revised for Paris, with Paris conventions in mind); before concentrating on a schoolboy publicist and a Rumanian playwright. Two things above all: in France, as elsewhere in continental Europe, ‘Shakespeare’ never implied ‘familiar’, and, until the last two decades never implied ‘known’ at all. Concomitantly, unfamiliarity has allowed the erection of a genealogy which is widely accepted, and, as I shall demonstrate, false.

In 1908, rumours began to circulate in New York’s theatrical circles that the variety stage comedian Eddie Foy planned to change his name to Mr Edwin Fitzgerald, because he felt he required a more distinguished moniker before venturing into the legit by undertaking the role of Hamlet. When asked about the rumour, Foy would answer:

Despite the remark that ‘no artist can be sure of success in Shakespearian drama’, Eddie Foy could be sure of success on the variety stage, where he had long enjoyed starring roles across the country as a comedian in musical shows and vaudeville. Whether playing a comic chef (Hotel Topsey Turvey), jailer (The Strollers), or sandman (Piff Paff Pouf ), a travelling hypnotist (Paracelsus Noodle in The Wild Rose), a dog-trainer and would-be earl ( Jim Cheese in The Earl and the Girl), a head gardener (Artie Choke in The Orchid), or Sister Anne in Mr Bluebeard, Jr, Eddie Foy was a godsend to management because his shows made money. And Foy required money since he and his third wife (his first two wives had died) were raising a large family: eight children in all. (Later Foy and his family formed a famously successful vaudeville act, called the Seven Little Foys.) When Eddie Foy played on a vaudeville bill, he was a well-paid headliner.

I want in this essay to read Kierkegaard and Macbeth as mutual illuminators, examining one in the light of the other. The ambition brings with it basic problems, although of a kind that Kierkegaard himself would dismiss as materialistic frippery. For Kierkegaard assumes – as we cannot – that the inwardness he locates in Macbeth is of the same essential kind as his own. As befits his imperative of urgently self-appropriative reading, his Macbeth is unapologetically his. Kierkegaard wasn’t interested in historical differences between mid-nineteenth century Copenhagen and Jacobean England (and still less eleventh-century Scotland). Kierkegaard is interested only in ‘subjective truth, the truth of appropriation’: his reading always obeys this injunction. The young man’s account in Repetition of how he reads Job might serve to describe all of Kierkegaard’s most passionate textual engagements:

That Shakespeare in performance has come of critical age seems to be signalled by the volume dedicated to it in Cambridge University Press’s Companion series. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton joins Companions to ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Shakespeare on Film’, ‘Shakespearian Comedy’, ‘Shakespeare’s History Plays’ and, forthcoming, ‘Shakespeare’s Tragedies’. The asymmetry of this taxonomic division may seem rather like Foucault’s report of the Chinese encyclopaedia’s distribution of the animal kingdom: the rationale offered in the volume is a response to ‘the increasing number of courses devoted to the history of Shakespeare in performance’ (p. xv). Something more explicit on the demands, opportunities and theory of this pedagogical shift might have been useful – a curious lack of reflection on methodological issues emerges as a dominant theme of writing on Shakespeare in performance – but the contributions map an elegant conspectus of approaches to the subject. The collection opens with ‘Shakespeare’s Plays on Renaissance Stages’, and then there are chapters on Restoration, Romantic, Victorian, neo-Elizabethan and twentieth-century production trends. A clutch of chapters consider non-English stage traditions, in North America, Asia and Africa, and there are chapters on political Shakespeare, on women, on touring, and on comic and tragic actors.

With opening credits that announce the film as ‘A Playboy Production’, and list Hugh Hefner as Executive Producer, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth is nothing if not a period piece. In his autobiography, Roman, by Polanski, Polanski recalls his creative collaboration with Kenneth Tynan (who also wrote for Playboy) in terms that situate it within the sybaritic world of the late sixties and early seventies. As they rehearsed the murder of Duncan in a Belgravia flat, with Tynan reclining on the bed and Polanski, as Macbeth, bent over him, an open window allowed their game to be witnessed by a clique of fascinated elderly residents who stared, ‘transfixed, sherry glasses frozen in midair’. Polanski concludes, ‘they doubtless assumed that our actions were all part of the swinging London scene’. Along with its association with the international party crowd, Polanski’s Macbeth was mired in controversy from its inception. While its graphic depiction of violence and nudity earned the film an ‘X’ rating before its release in autumn 1971, the grisly murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by Charles Manson and his followers in August of 1969 made it impossible to view the film, and, in particular, its obsessive return to visual images of hanging and stabbing, without recalling the events of that terrible summer. Queried by Tynan about the amount of blood shed by the injured and dying bodies in the film, Polanski referred to his own experiences to authorize his directorial choices: ‘You didn’t see my house last summer. I know about bleeding.’

Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays makes a case for George Peele’s authorship of part of Titus Andronicus that has rocked the profession – or at least sent palpable tremors through it, with the Arden 3 editor of the play publicly recanting his argument that ‘the play was wholly by Shakespeare’. The study’s other conclusions – that Middleton co-wrote Timon of Athens, Wilkins co-wrote Pericles, and Fletcher co-wrote Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen – have had less of an impact, since the attributions in question are already widely accepted by Shakespearians. But Vickers – determined to confound what he views as a lingering ‘orthodoxy of Shakespeare the Non-Collaborator’ – has performed a valuable service by assembling an impressive array of evidence for his claims, including stylistic and verse tests put forward in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, corroborating results from more sophisticated statistical tests undertaken in recent attribution studies, and some original evidence of his own.

Indeed, Shakespeare, Co-Author may be seen as a culmination of the growing interest in Shakespeare as collaborator, which perhaps had its beginnings in Kenneth Muir’s book on the subject in 1960. It was further fuelled in the 1980s by the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare (who presented detailed cases for collaborative authorship of several plays), and has most recently been made manifest on the title pages of critical editions, such as the Oxford (1999) and Arden 3 (2000) editions of Henry VIII, which feature other authors’ names alongside Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare, Co-Author now provides a compendium of the relevant evidence pointing to collaborative authorship, a treasure-trove of data that future editors of Titus, Timon, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen will be bound to acknowledge.

MACBETH AND THE GHOST OF SUCCESS

The reputations of performers and performances have a marked tendency to ossify in the afterlife. The starting point for this discussion of the memory of six Macbeth actors is an assertion made by A. R. Braunmuller in the introduction to his Cambridge edition of the play. Braunmuller writes: ‘David Garrick’s performances as Macbeth were supported by those of Hannah Pritchard as Lady Macbeth – he effectively abandoned the rôle after her retirement – and he remains perhaps the only English actor to have conquered the part.’ There is some virtue in that ‘perhaps’, but the fundamental sentiment invites controversy. As if to substantiate his claim, Braunmuller continues:

That distinguished critic was James Agate responding to Olivier’s performance in 1937 and Braunmuller’s citation affords a good example of how habits of thought are reinforced through intertextual reiteration. The authority of Agate’s verdict and its value as evidence are not questioned, despite the fact that what Agate (like Braunmuller) knows of Garrick’s Macbeth is only, can only be, via the body of texts the performance generated.

If there is a god who might challenge Cupid’s place as the presiding deity of Love’s Labour’s Lost it has to be Mercury. Obsessed with the use, and abuse of words, the play closes with the gnomic utterance, ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’ (5.2.914–15), which, as they appear in the Folio, may be taken proleptically to refer to the announcement of separation which follows: ‘You that way, we this way’ (line 915). The utterance has attracted a diversity of interpretations, predictably given its enigmatic and sentential character, but there is a more or less general consensus that Mercury and his harsh words represent some form of reality principle which breaks up the Arcadian fantasy world of (the) play, and which is embodied in the figure of Marcade, the messenger who brings the news of the death of the princess’s father. Not only does Marcade correspond to contemporary versions of the god’s name, as several critics have pointed out, but his function corresponds to Mercury’s functions as messenger and psychopomp. There is, however, a more prominent figure that the play invites spectators to associate with Mercury. Linked to Marcade by his dramatic function as well as by his office – he is sometimes grouped with Marcade in the ‘persons of the play’ – ‘honey- tongued’ (5.2.335) Boyet, the only major male figure at the princess’s court, is associated with ‘sweet tong’d’ Mercury both through more general features and, more importantly, through the specific features attributed to him in the two portraits by Berowne, especially the first (5.2.316–35).

Once one has seen or read a play like Macbeth, it has perforce an afterlife in memory, in imaginative and emotional recollections of the experience of the performance or the reading. That sort of afterlife remains private and is as varied in content as readers are in nature and number. The sort of afterlife on which this paper focuses, however, is of a different sort, a public afterlife captured in literary, graphic or cinematic artefacts, or in any or all of the theatrical productions that have followed since the play’s first staging by the King’s Men. I have coined the term, ‘afterfact’– conflated from ‘artefacts of the afterlife’ – as a convenient label for this second sort of survival.

Macbeth afterfacts can be divided into two classes. The first consists of those productions on stage or film that purport to represent the original, ranging from reverent attempts to reproduce a simulacrum of the historical original, to the ‘30 Minute Macbeth’ chanted almost entirely by the witches staged at Oxford in the mid 1950s. The second group of afterfacts clearly has a relationship to the original, but does not claim to represent it in anything like its entirety. Films like Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, or Men of Respect may be somewhere on a borderline between the two classes, but Gruach, Ubu Roi, Macbett, and Cahoot’s Macbeth, as well as Barbara Garson’s Macbird!, my topic, are clearly members of the second class.

Nicky Watson and I moved house in the summer of 2002, and since this was I think the tenth time we’ve wound up doing so since we were married, the feeling of shame and humiliation which overwhelmed us as our miscellaneous worldly goods were exposed to the view of the removers was pretty familiar. This time, though, the sensation was made a little more specific. Among the crack team of musclebound Vikings who arrived on the great day to throw our worldly goods into boxes and then throw those boxes into a lorry was one trainee, who had yet to learn the complete, silent, non-judgemental tact that must necessarily characterize anyone who aspires to a long-term future in that demanding service trade. Carrying yet another box of books and a stone bust towards the lorry through the blazing heat of the day, this mover met my eye and raised his eyebrows. ‘Like Shakespeare, do we, sir?’, he asked. The tone wasn’t primarily of mockery: it was intended to express pity, though it came out with a strong poorly camouflaged undertone of derision. It was as if he had found ten bookshelves detailing all the railway engine numbers currently in service on Network South-East, or several complete sets of ankle bells and a hobby horse. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, several of us were publishing books all about how William Shakespeare became the great figure of authority which he remains for English-speaking culture, and I suppose one of the incidental questions I want to raise in this article, during this short examination of the strange interrelations between Shakespeare and the traditions of English comedy and of English professionalism since his death, is simply this: who did we think we were kidding?

Othello begins at the moment when comedies end, with a happy marriage. It begins, too, where The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night leave off, with the question of ethnic or social outsiders - Shylock, Malvolio - as the catalysts for the destructive elements within society. It might seem that here the terms are reversed, with the dangerous alien now the hero, while the mysterious, incomprehensibly malicious, diabolical villain is the insider, one of us. But in fact, the insider/outsider dichotomy is really a false one, because just as Shylock is essential to Bassanio's wooing, and Malvolio is essential to both Olivia's household and ultimately even to the marriage of Viola and Orsino, so is Othello essential to the safety and prosperity of the Venetian state. The tragedy is not that Othello is essential to Venice, but that Iago is essential to Othello.

We have, historically, focused on the interracial marriage as the crucial source of tension and tragedy in the play. But the larger issue in Othello has to do with the tragic implications not of miscegenation but of patriarchy on the one hand, and patronage or gender bonding (not limited to males in this case) on the other. I begin with the first: patriarchy is an issue that often provides both the principal motivation of comedy and a strong tragic element within it - as in the cases of Celia's villainous father in As You Like It and the obdurate Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream.