Scholars typically characterize the theatre of Shakespeare’s England as a secular stage, and they have good reasons for doing so. By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, the biblical drama of medieval England had all but died, from causes not entirely natural. It had been censored by Protestant officials concerned with its Catholic provenance, and censorship appears to have hampered the depiction of religious material in the new public theatres as well. Moralists such as Phillip Stubbes (1583) warned England that players allowed to dramatize the word of God would inevitably contaminate ‘divinity’ with their ‘bawdy, wanton shows & uncomely gestures’. Following a brief period (1588–9) in which church and state encouraged the theatres to vilify the radical puritan ‘Martin Marprelate’ for his attacks on bishops, the authorities did indeed recoil from the spectacle of ‘divinity’ handled, in their view, ‘without judgement or decorum’; by a 1606 act of Parliament, moreover, players were forbidden to ‘speak or use the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost or of the Trinity’ profanely. Whether or not these official strictures had any chilling effect, players in Shakespeare’s day showed little interest in replacing the ‘old Church-plays’ with a biblical drama of their own.

In 1911, looking back at an epoch, which had come to an end with Leo Tolstoy’s death, and forward, to an already palpable time of change, the philosopher, critic and poet Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote:

Ivanov's tri-partite typology profoundly reflects the state of the cultural debate in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century in circumstances of dramatic transition. The mighty imperial structure was unwillingly giving under the social pressures urging for democratization. The century began with student unrest and activities of leftist organizations. While the European fringe of the Empire was strengthened by counterproductive russification policies, the frontier in the Far East was crumbling.

Few would now deny that in Henry IV the character of Falstaff constitutes a deliberate and audacious caricature of a Protestant hero, the fourteenth-century champion of Wycliffe’s doctrines, Sir John Oldcastle, the first Lord Cobham, ‘Lollardus Lollardorum’. Shakespeare’s wicked joke, as Ernst Honigmann has called it, gave offence in his own time not only to Cobham’s distinguished titular descendants but also to earnest Protestants such as John Speed (1611), Richard James (c. 1625), and Thomas Fuller (1655), to the authors of the anti-Catholic response play, The first part of the true and honorable historie, the life of Sir John Old-castle, the Good Lord Cobham (1599), and no doubt to many playgoers of like persuasion. Defying the hagiographic efforts of John Bale and John Foxe, Shakespeare in effect took the Catholic side in a sectarian dispute about the character of the nobleman who was burned as a heretic shortly after his friend, the Prince of Wales, became Henry V; and although in Part 2 he changed his reprobate knight’s name from Sir John Oldcastle to Sir John Falstaff, his contemporaries would still have recognized his original intention and treated the Epilogue’s denial as tongue-in-cheek.

CULTURAL DRIFT AND THE LOST ANIMA

Last year my Latin class and I were reading Ovid and came upon Pyramus’ suicide: demisit in ilia ferrum (Met. 4.119): ‘he plunged the ferrum (iron, sword, knife) into his ilia’. Where, among the multiple dictionary possibilities for ilia, does Pyramus stab himself? ‘Entrails’, said one student cheerfully. (Golding had ‘guts’ by the way.) ‘Chest’ and ‘breast’ received solid support. I was a little uncomfortable; ilia actually are lower. But it was supposed to be a suicide and our conventions of self-stabbing support that location. The heart beneath has some sentimental resonance. And what about poetic licence, anyway? The pectoral group found themselves in the good company of the most brilliant English translator, Ted Hughes, and the most inept, that of Peter Quince and Nick Bottom: ‘With bloody, blameful blade – / He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast’ (MND, 5.1.145–6). No one, thankfully, wanted ‘stomach’, ‘abdomen’, or ‘diaphragm’, anatomically the more correct equivalents. Finally, pointing to a dictionary entry, Katelyn, a sophomore, ended the discussion: ‘It’s the groin! He’s a lover, isn’t he?’

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's König Johann, published in 1968, is described as a Bearbeitung (reworking or adaptation): it departs considerably from Shakespeare's original, inventing and modernizing freely, and sometimes inserting material from The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England.

Dürrenmatt's version is certainly more cynical (or at least more openly cynical) than Shakespeare's. There is, for instance, the arrival of the Archduke of Austria as ally to the French at the beginning of Act 2. Since he was responsible for the death of Richard Coeur de Lion, he might not seem an appropriate person to help restore the English crown to Richard's nephew Arthur: in Shakespeare we are told, by the French king, that he is doing this to make amends (no doubt this is the official version); in Dürrenmatt the French king remarks:

A more complex example is the bargain that ends the battle, by which France abandons Arthur's claim to the English throne in return for receiving the English possessions in France. In Shakespeare, the governor of Angiers proposes that further fighting be avoided by means of a match between Blanche of Spain, John's niece, and the Dauphin, which is accepted once John has offered 'Anjou and fair Touraine, Maine, Poitiers, / And all that we upon this side the sea . . . / Find liable to our crown and dignity.' (2.1.488-91)

Most of the productions listed are by professional or semi-professional companies. Productions originating in 1998 or earlier have only been included if there is new information. Details are mainly taken from newspaper reviews held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library. Many of the companies listed were involved in small-scale tours; where neither reviews nor listings mark these as professional they are starred. I have also included the principal annual Shakespeare festivals where, it is worth noting, the audience, as at the Globe, often seems younger and more culturally diverse than those at conventional theatre productions.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The ESC, tour continued. See Shakespeare Survey 53. The production toured in the UK and to the Perth Theatre Festival, Australia.

The RSC at the RST, Stratford: June 1999

Director: Steven Pimlott

Designer: Yolanda Sonnabend

Music: Jason Carr

Antony: Alan Howard

Cleopatra: Frances de la Tour

On transfer to the Barbican the controversial opening - Antony's head between Cleopatra's thighs - was omitted.

Shakespeare's Globe, London: July 1999

Master of Play and Verse: Marian Spon

Master of Clothing and Properties: Jenny Tiramani

Master of Music: Claire van Kampen

Antony: Paul Shelley

Cleopatra: Mark Rylance

All male cast. Mark Rylance received excellent notices.

A and BC Theatre Company, tour: August 1999

The first two translations of plays by Shakespeare into the Holy Tongue were the work of a convert, a Hebrew who did indeed turn Christian. He not only converted, but became a Presbyterian minister and a missionary to the Jews. It is thanks to his unique life-story that the first translations of complete plays were made directly from the English rather than from Russian or German, the languages more familiar to nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals, and from which most of the early Hebrew and Yiddish translations were made.

In this article, I shall investigate the connection between this translator's personal religious biography and the first Shakespeare play he chose to translate. I shall argue that this translation reflects his own spiritual journey and forms an integral part of his missionary work. Furthermore, I shall suggest that the clue to its appreciation is viewing the transformation of Shakespeare into biblical Hebrew as a textual conversion. So, it is within the religious discourse of conversion that I shall consider the first translation of Shakespeare into Hebrew.

Isaac Edward Salkinson was born in a small shtetl in Belorussia, within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, in 1820. His parents were orthodox and he received a traditional Jewish education. He was orphaned young, but carried on his religious studies in various yeshivas.

It is strange how scant is the attention customarily paid to the precise locality of the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Agnes Latham, in her New Arden edition of the play (1975), expresses the general opinion that it is set in ‘the Ardennes on the border of Belgium and Luxemburg’, while allowing that Shakespeare and many in his audience ‘could identify it easily with those parts of Warwickshire still known as Arden’ (p. 8). This identification may be traced back to Edmond Malone, who identified the forest even more precisely as ‘that in French Flanders, lying near the Meuse and between Charlemont and Rocroy’ (quoted in the New Variorum edition of the play, p. 16). If for the source of these statements we go back to Shakespeare’s source, Thomas Lodge’s pastoral romance of Rosalynde, we find that the main setting is what he calls (like Shakespeare) ‘the forest of Arden’, but that the forest he has in mind is not so much that to the North-East of France as a vast unidentified forest between ‘the province of Bordeaux’, from which his hero Rosader (Shakespeare’s Orlando) sets forth with his old servant, and the city of Lyons, to which they make their way. This is evidently to the South of the royal capital of Paris, where the usurping king Torismond has his court (Shakespeare’s duke Frederick).

There is no more vulgar mistake, so I was taught, than taking metaphors literally or trying to check the truth-value of a poetic statement, especially out of context. Yet reading these lines of William Cowper's The Task, one is tempted to make an exception to see whether their literal meaning, if such a thing can be construed from a poem at all, will stand up to close scrutiny, and in what sense Garrick might be considered the founder of a new quasi-religion, initiating a newly formed community into its liturgy and ritual. In other words the question is whether Cowper's lines can be used as a heuristic device to reveal the underlying quasireligious pattern of the otherwise miscellaneous happenings at the 1769 Stratford Jubilee, and to discover the changing yet discernible role of latent religious attitudes omnipresent in our various dealings with Shakespeare ever since.

In view of this question Garrick's religious sensibility deserves more attention than it usually receives. The most amply documented biography tells us that the Lichfield of his childhood was dominated by the army and the church, hence much of the intellectual life of this cathedral town centred in the cathedral close, complementing the yearly cycle of services in the cathedral; we may also learn that Garrick inherited his place in this community because his mother was a granddaughter and daughter of vicars choral, he also had three uncles who were vicars choral and several of his acquaintances were sons of vicars, and his mentor, Gilbert Walmesley, was registrar of the ecclesiastical court and lived in the bishop's palace.

In 1966 John Lennon caused an uproar by suggesting that Jesus Christ was less popular than the Beatles: in the year of the said Messiah’s official two thousandth birthday it appeared as though the profile of the man from Nazareth had been eclipsed instead by that of a man from Stratford, but no one, in Britain at least, seemed to be at all shocked. Shakespeare, chosen as Man of the Millennium by listeners to BBC Radio 4, featured at least as prominently in public celebrations of the year 2000 as did Christ: supposedly the last safe symbol of common culture for a nation increasingly committed to religious diversity, his complete plays were even acted in abbreviated versions by schoolchildren in a number of British cities (notably at the Millennium Dome in London, an edifice whose souvenir book, The Official Commemorative Album for the Millennium, devotes nearly as much space to Shakespeare as it does to religion). Shakespeare plays were selected as millennial offerings, too, by an unusually large range of theatre companies, amateur and professional.

Records show that Shakespeare's plays were performed in Europe during his lifetime; but no extant records, to my knowledge, show what those performances were like or how European audiences received them. I propose in this paper to use contemporary records and our wider knowledge of European performance traditions to build up a picture of the kinds of emphasis that may have prevailed in performing Shakespeare to mainland European audiences in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and to assess how far these kinds of emphasis accorded with contemporary performance styles in England. The materials I cite here are not newly discovered; instead they are assembled largely from the neglected work of older scholars in a way that creates, I think, an unfamiliar emphasis in the study of Shakespeare.

The best-known comment on Shakespeare from a European witnessing a contemporary performance of one of his plays is the Swiss Thomas Platter's account of a visit to the Globe in London in 1599, when he witnessed, he says,

Jan Kott recalls in Aloes that, during one of his many encounters with Peter Brook, the British director was very excitedly discussing what the shadow (or ghost) of Hamlet’s father should do to an audience. After insisting ‘this ghost must make you shiver with fear, it must’, Brook showed Kott a pair of stone figurines – small reproductions of ‘demons from Sumatra’ – and asked: ‘Don’t they make you afraid?’ They didn’t, says Kott; actually, they looked a bit ridiculous. But then,

Despite its evident emphasis on religion and mind (on providence, doubt, scepticism, procrastination, and the like), to me, Hamlet is Shakespeare's most provocative engagement with shadows - the darkest shadows. For the shades, dreams, images and ghosts that appear in other plays seem less dense, less obscure and threatening when compared to the shadows that populate Elsinore. Every character in Hamlet becomes a shadow, or the shadow of another. Following Shakespeare's own example, it is possible to say that the characters of Hamlet are translated into shadows: Hamlet senior stalks Hamlet junior as much as Polonius shadows him and orders Ophelia to play a similar game, while Hamlet drops in on Claudius, who has Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play the clownish detectives shadowing Hamlet's every move, and so on.

I wonder how widely it is realized that of all the Shakespearian characters who either kill themselves or think of killing themselves relatively few are overtly conscious of the sinfulness of the act. Both Romeo and Juliet are almost jubilant when they end their lives, and the same is certainly true about Pyramus and Thisbe, who can be interpreted as burlesque versions of the star-crossed lovers. Gloucester in King Lear is far from elated when he tries to kill himself, and his affliction seems to be simply too great to allow him time to consider the religious implications of the act he is about to perform. We are not quite certain about the state of mind Lady Macbeth and Goneril are in when they commit suicide as their deaths are not enacted on stage but only briefly reported to the audience. Still it would be safe to assume that their sense of guilt is far more overwhelming than any scruples they might have. We had better look elsewhere to encounter a Shakespearian character who thinks twice before proceeding to the act of fatal self-destruction.

One notable case is of course the central character of Hamlet with his reference to the everlasting fixing his canon against self-slaughter. Later in the play the priest talks disparagingly about Ophelia's death which he says is 'doubtful', but his remark does not really come as a surprise since he is professionally expected to be critical about suicide, and in any case Laertes's possibly sacrilegious attack against him might counterbalance the attitude the man holds.

In his curious science-fiction novel entitled The Return of William Shakespeare, Hugh Kingsmill shows a remarkable understanding of the cultural forces that determine our picture of Shakespeare, of how this image is constructed and how it is inextricably interwoven with questions of political power. As a time-travel narrative, the book briefly holds out the promise of unmediated access to Shakespeare himself through the blessings of modern technology, but then proceeds to undermine the real possibility of ever recovering one authentic and objective truth, even within the fictional framework. In Kingsmill’s novel, Shakespeare is transported from the year 1607 to the novel’s present, the nineteen-twenties, by some unspecified process. As it turns out, however, the ‘reintegrated’ Shakespeare is depressed, and hardly presentable to the general public: he cries much of the time, speaks in ‘an odd lingo, and accent you could cut through with a knife’ (51), and worst of all, he does not remember anything. However, there are pressing reasons, not the least financial, for presenting Shakespeare to the public; and so a conspiracy is set up among the organizers of the time travel experiment to disguise one of them, a PR man, as Shakespeare. Unlike the real Shakespeare, the imposter ‘corresponded roughly to the generalized impression the ordinary Englishman has of Shakespeare’ (69).

Falling, as it inevitably did, on 23 April 1864, the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth coincided with a period of exceptionally intense religious controversy. In 1859 Charles Darwin had finally committed The Origin of Species to print; Essays and Reviews (the contentious collection of seven essays on theological and scientific issues, whose contributors included the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett) appeared in 1860; Bishop Colenso’s The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined, in which the author applied his mathematical skills to the Five Books of Moses with theologically disconcerting results, followed in 1862–3 and in January 1863 Man’s Place in Nature, by T. H. Huxley – the Apostle of Unbelief, who coined the word ‘agnostic’ – was published. The two areas of dispute were firstly the implication of scientific discoveries of evolution for religion and secondly revisionist biblical scholarship, originating in Germany, but with its exponents in Britain. Shakespeare was pertinent to both these issues. Already established as England’s greatest dramatist, his tercentenary gave rise to increasingly expansive claims on his behalf by his fellow-countrymen, thereby framing anew the question of how genius occurred. Could traditional religious doctrine on the subject withstand the challenge of new evolutionary ideas?

There are a lot of funerals in Hamlet: four, if you count the first for Hamlet’s father, marred by that one hasty wedding, the ‘hugger-mugger’ (4.5.82) burial of Polonius, Ophelia’s abbreviated obsequies, and finally the somewhat incongruous soldier’s funeral for Hamlet himself. The first three leave the chief mourners bitterly disappointed, and both are almost as distressed by the funeral arrangements as they are by the deaths of their loved ones. Laertes is furious at the ignominious obscurity of his father’s interment, and he is enraged at the priest for denying his sister ‘sage requiem’ (5.1.232). Hamlet is nearly mad with melancholy at the shocking brevity of his mother’s mourning. From beginning to end, this is a play obsessed with getting a decent burial, and nobody seems to get one. What constitutes a decent burial in Shakespeare’s time? The answer is not clear because the Elizabethan religious settlement was so ambiguous on this point. A growing belief in predestination, the subordination of human works to faith alone, and the abolition of purgatory and indulgences made traditional Catholic funeral practices such as the requiem, the annual obit, and other intercessory rites and prayers unnecessary. Elizabeth’s bishops, meeting in convocation in 1563, reaffirmed the Protestant position and denounced ‘sacrifices of Masses . . . for the quick and the dead’ as ‘blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits’, and the requiem continued to be left out of the vernacular funeral service in The Book of Common Prayer.

Character, personality, its threatened loss and its restitution, are issues habitually discussed in Shakespeare using metaphors of water, tears and melting. Moreover, when Shakespeare's characters use such language, their very syntax tends to float, to become inexact or ambiguous. What can this tell us about the characters that possess this language? Many of these watery sites can also be located in a larger mechanism of symbols, specifically ports, shipwreck and the story of the falling Icarus. How are these two mechanisms of watery syntax and watery symbols connected? Though not a collocation of Shakespeare's invention, I shall suggest in this essay that this cluster of associations nevertheless proves particularly complex in his work.

The corollary to this enquiry works with the converse of the above contention, and now and then this twin breaks the surface. This second thesis is that, while the operation of melting undoes character or personality, the operation of naming fixes it. A famous example will show how these two ideas are connected.

When Richard II decrowns himself in the fourth act of his play, his language flits melodramatically between a search for various names or roles which can be used to fix his sense of identity, and an opposing tendency to think about various unfixing, mobile, liquid actions. He

How shall we represent God?

This question has preoccupied humanity far more often, and with far more consequence, than the question 'Does God exist?' Because 'How shall we represent God?' entails the question 'Who shall be God's representative?', and that question is as much political as theological; how you answered it in early modern Europe determined not only whether you were Catholic or Protestant, but also what kind of Protestant you were (presbyterian or episcopal) - and which governments you would obey. 'How shall we represent God?' also entails 'Where shall we represent God?' and 'By what means shall we represent God?' The Reformation reformed divine representation: the personnel, texts, actions and artifacts, by which medieval Christianity had represented the divine. Protestant iconoclasts physically attacked the rood, the paintings, carvings, statues, stained-glass windows which had filled (or cluttered) medieval churches; they ended the ritual re-enactments of medieval biblical drama, and banned God, in both body and name, from the public stage. God is truth, the theatre is falsehood, falsehood cannot represent truth, the theatre cannot represent God.

They banned God, but they did not ban gods. It is no violation of decorum for a false god to be represented by lies and disguises. Indeed, 'The Devil', Stephen Gosson declared, reiterating centuries of Christian diatribes, 'is the efficient cause of plays.'