I am by no means the first to suggest that literary criticism is in a transitional period – or perhaps at the end of one; only time will tell. In the short term, though, it is evident that the innovative, unorthodox and sometimes contentious critical approaches of the 1980s and early nineties have been, after a period of evaluation leading to something like general acceptance, gradually assimilated into the methods and language of much mainstream criticism. Possibly the most significant effect on early modern studies has been a renewed appreciation of the relationship between text and context. The revisionary end-of-the-century critical emphasis on the contexts within which Shakespeare wrote – social, cultural, economic, sexual – has apparently either influenced or determined the directions taken by many of the writers whose books are considered here. The most successful have in common innovation in the best sense: they cover new ground, open new doors, or look through a new lens – to use metaphors implying how the results also reveal the genuinely new or make us look again at what we have not really seen.

What is the point – of Shakespeare, art in general, life itself? In Play in a Godless World, Catherine Bates dismantles those ‘cheerful narratives of progress’ which describe play ‘as a gradual ascent towards moral, social, and intellectual achievement’ (p. iii) in favour of a Nietzschean ‘free play’ that ‘does not lead anywhere – towards higher, better, more advanced, or more developed things’, but ‘is completely pointless and mindless, going nowhere and enjoyed purely for itself’ (p. iv). Esthetic idealization ‘flattered man with pleasingly god-like powers by allowing him to think he’d mastered and controlled the raw material of experience’ (p. 64). Repeatability, the determining factor, allows Freud’s little Ernst to master trauma and functions in Huizinga as ‘perhaps the thing which elevated play to the higher realms of art and culture’ (p. 171). Tragedy, the supreme achievement, ‘doesn’t simply repeat any experience but specifically repeats’ the ultimate unpleasure, ‘death’s crushing finality’ (p. 175). ‘Tragedy is fort! da! for grownups. Tragedy laughs in the face of death because a represented and repeatable death is a non-death’ (p. 176). Shakespeare performs a crucial role for Bates at the end, with four plays chosen to illustrate the metadramatic scepticism through which intimations of transcendence disintegrate into disenchantment.

I want to start with a tableau taken from the cheap print of the period. It features a condemned felon on the gallows performing a good death, repenting his (or her) sins, admitting his guilt and throwing himself on the mercy of God in Christ. All this takes place under the eyes of the attendant minister and the presiding magistrate, as well as of a large, socially mixed (popular) audience. In the murder pamphlets from which it is culled, this scene was usually represented as the culmination of a heavily stylized, providentialized narrative which had started with an initial, often demonically sponsored, temptation, continued with a lapse into some master sin or other and a consequent descent down a chain of sins which ended in an often morally or physically gross and disgusting murder. This led to the often providential, or even frankly miraculous, capture of the felon and was followed by the trial, condemnation and usually (but not always) more or less repentant death on the gallows of the perpetrator. Sometimes that death was a really good one, the felon having been converted to a true faith and a full and frank confession not only of the particular crime that had brought him (or her) to the scaffold but also more generally of his or her sinful course of life. When such happy endings occurred the credit went first to the secular magistrate who had allowed various clerics to insert themselves into the interstices of the judicial process and then to the ministers themselves who had conferred with the felon in prison, instructed and converted him and then taught him the outward forms of a good death, which he then performed on the scaffold.

The popularity of Aristotle's maxim in English Renaissance literature seems partly due to its vagueness. Who is Aristotle's solitary man? Can he remain in society and yet be considered an outcast? Is he one who has chosen to live outside society or one who has been forced out? We might also ask who decides whether the subject is beast or God, and consider whether he can occupy those identities simultaneously. Aristotle's riddling definition of the solitary man was repeatedly quoted because it expressed an ambivalence understood by contemporary historians, philosophers, poets and dramatists as central to the experience of exile. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare exploited the dramatic possibilities of this ambivalence. The protagonist's banishment is partly incurred through his virtues; he is both the beast and god of Aristotle's dictum. Perhaps more unexpected is the influence of Aristotle's Politics and other paradigms of exile on The Tempest. Prospero's self-exile in his library allowed Antonio to usurp the kingdom; banishment brought Prospero to the island; alienation dictates his actions there. It is my contention that critics of The Tempest have not taken Prospero's banishment, or the identity crisis that it inspires, seriously enough. The competing discourses surrounding banishment at the time can be seen to shape not only Prospero's posturing as an exile but also, more startlingly, his identity as a magician and colonialist.

All Shakespeare’s major tragedies but one take their source from true or mythical history, whether British or classical or European. To the Elizabethan mind, not yet as relativistic about history as ourselves, this plainly invested tragedy with a special privilege, a depth and reach, a stability as of truth itself. Othello is the exception; it takes its story from fiction only. Cinthio’s narrative of a jealous Moor in Venice, a man trapped in sexual intrigue, necessarily bequeaths to the play a yarn urban and realistic in its hard knowingness, its concise brutality, its final lack of the metaphysical. Jealousy, the very centre of the story, is nothing if not a function of love as possession and possessiveness. That Shakespeare was aware of these limiting pressures is clear from the brilliance of his evocation, in two plays, of Venice as the greatest trading-centre of Europe, its riches both extreme and vulnerable. All the many readers who have seen in Othello what Bradley once called its lack of universality, seen the problem of meaning in this tragedy of love-trade, are surely seeing in the play Cinthio’s source: tragedy as mere narrative.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, America’s ‘mighty evangelical churches and benevolent organizations’ began a fervent crusade to educate the nation’s women. By financing and propagating what came to be known as ‘female seminaries’, these groups helped make secondary education available to more women – including middle- and lower-class women – than ever before in the nation’s history. Their goal was to influence ‘women s supposedly unique self-sacrificial virtues’ so that they might in turn guarantee ‘the “salvation” of an otherwise overly expansive and competitive republic’. Believing that women could exert the greatest influence in the private realm, they prepared their students to enter one of two occupations, that of wife and mother, or, ‘in the case of middle- or lower-class single girls’, teacher. While women welcomed even these modest advances, they by no means found them sufficient. The gifted Abigail Adams, for instance, wrote that she considered the education offered her female contemporaries to be ‘trifling, narrow, [and] contracted’. Adams’s pointed criticism was not only succinct, but also quite valid. As Faith Chipperfield has demonstrated, in even ‘the best New England families’, women’s education ‘was traditionally confined to writing and arithmetic, with perhaps a little music and dancing’.

It is ironic that the Bard voted ‘Man of the Millennium’ in Britain has simultaneously been increasingly associated with a subversive Catholic minority in early modern England. This year has seen a growing tide of interest in Shakespeare’s connection with the culture of the Counter-Reformation. Biographical studies by Honan and Holden note that the theory that Shakespeare spent time in Lancashire in the service of the Catholic de Hoghton family is the most likely explanation for the so-called ‘lost years’. Manchester University Press has reprinted Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, the pioneering book that revived the theory in the mid-1980s. The new edition is very welcome, as this remains the best book-length collection and analysis of the evidence; it was frequently cited at Lancastrian Shakespeare: Region, Religion, Patronage and Performance, an international conference held at Hoghton Tower and Lancaster University (21–4 July 1999). Honigmann’s new edition contains a second preface, citing Richard Wilson’s recent research on the Lancashire theory. In ‘Shakespeare and the Jesuits: New Connections Supporting the Theory of the lost Catholic years in Lancashire’, Wilson draws striking links between John Cottom, schoolmaster at Stratford Grammar School, the de Hoghtons, and the Sodality of young Jesuit priests who were recruited by Edmund Campion.

In the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays, and even as he vigorously defended the playwright against attacks by other neo-classical critics, Samuel Johnson nonetheless also offered his own survey of Shakespeare's weaknesses. Among the better-known provocative remarks is his assessment of the endings of the plays:

That Measure for Measure, in particular, was taken to be an example of Shakespeare's tendency to 'remit his efforts', and that these failures created problems about the ending of the play symptomatic about larger issues of genre, plot, and character is testified to by Charlotte Lennox's often-quoted criticism:

INTRODUCTION

This essay is concerned with one small episode in the afterlife, long, rich and often strange, of The Tempest. At different times, to different people, the play has meant very different things: the triumph of harmony and order; the imposition of tyranny; a farewell to art. That last response is an especially persistent one. Legends of autobiography and finality have long invested the play. The beleaguered author, Shakespeare/Prospero, works his magic in splendid isolation, aided only by his own powers of inspiration; the end of the play is the end of the plays. That old interpretation - so well known and so very unfashionable now among critics - is important in the background of this essay; my subject is a sort of development of this, a development into something much less familiar.

The Tempest has been many things to its recipients, but one thing it has hardly ever been is a love story. What critic has shared Prospero's concern for Miranda's sexuality? And yet, earlier in this century, the play did offer one class of reader a parable not only about creativity but about love. Not, however, Miranda's love. For at least two writers, both oncescandalous, the relationship between Prospero and Ariel provided an image of extraordinary suggestiveness and appeal.

Deciding on a batting order for productions to be discussed in this essay always seems rather arbitrary. Their chronological order of opening would have a sort of crude logic about it, but would offer little to the earnest essayist endeavouring to create an illusion of connectedness. My inclination as tenant of this space for the last few years has been to follow a 'Comedies, Histories, Tragedies' sort of progression in the effort to 'grow to a point'. For this, the last essay in my series, I find myself with an agenda of no histories, six comedies, six tragedies (one in two productions), and two revivals of Troilus and Cressida, and for no particular reason other than the desire for a change, I begin my final year with the tragedies.

Having been the subject of special articles in the last two volumes of Survey, this year's three Shakespeare productions at the Bankside Globe now come back within the province of this essay to find their level with the rest of the year's Shakespearian theatrical endeavour - and judged against the rest, that level is not a distinguished one. With very rare exceptions, the Globe seems to be attracting disappointingly few accomplished actors to its companies; nor have any of its directors, so far at least, had anything particularly illuminating to tell us about the plays they have presented.

To walk the streets of London by night, in the wind and rain, this was for Dickens the surest way to summon and greet his darkest visions. And this was how he staged himself for the readers of All the Year Round in one of his most astonishing pieces of non-fiction writing, the essay entitled 'Night Walks' (21 July 1860), subsequently gathered in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861, and later, expanded editions).

Unable to sleep, he recalls, he had wandered through the night past the great enclosures of the capital, past theatres, prisons, Bank, Hospital, Parliament, Law-Courts, Abbey, Market and railway terminus. His thoughts and imaginings are suffused with Shakespearian echoes, of Macbeth's sleeplessness and Hamlet's graveyard, but the words that reverberate most persistently have their source in King Lear: 'houseless' and 'houselessness'. Shakespeare finds the adjective for the moment at which Lear is seized by the thought of the 'poor naked wretches' whose condition he is now about to endure feelingly for the first time.

Back in 1876, an anonymous critic in The Cornell Review pronounced Coriolanus 'biography dramatized.' Brander Matthews said much the same thing about the play in 1913: 'Shakespeare rarely contradicts Plutarch whereas he often contradicted Holinshed; he speeds up Plutarch's passage of time, however, and makes no attempt to recreate the ancient world.' For John W. Draper in 1939, Plutarch's story is retold in Coriolanus in contemporary terms. Recently, in 1996, David Farley-Hills has repeated the idea that 'the sources of Coriolanus are . . . followed with considerable fidelity, with only those changes that help convert prose narrative into effective verse drama'.

Certainly Shakespeare followed the main events of Plutarch's 'Life of Caivs Martius Coriolanus': the citizen unrest in Rome, the war with Corioli, Coriolanus' standing for consul, his opposition to the tribunes and free corn, the mob violence, his trial and banishment, his alliance with the Volscians and attack on Rome, the embassy of women, his yielding to Volumnia, and assassination in Antium. Yet in Acts 1 and 3, particularly, Shakespeare added current and exciting material from 1607-8.

In a poem written no more than four years after the publication of Venus and Adonis, Thomas Nashe dramatizes that most humiliating of masculine moments – premature ejaculation. In the poem, variously known as ‘The choise of valentines’ or, more popularly (and in the early MSS), as ‘Nashe his Dildo’, the first-person narrator visits ‘mistris Francis’, a high-class and expensive prostitute, who ‘in hir velvet goune’s, / And ruffs, and periwigs as fresh as Maye / Can not be kept with half a croune a daye’ (lines 64–6). The narrator, deciding that this is money well spent, describes her overwhelming performance:

VERNACULAR CRITICISM . . .

‘Let us . . . for a moment, put Shakespeare out of the question, and consider Hamlet as a real person, a recently deceased acquaintance.’ The suggestion comes from an essay by Hartley Coleridge, first published in Blackwoods Magazine in 1828. It is, in a way, an interesting proposal, partly because of its tone of cosy familiarity. The part about Hamlet being ‘recently deceased’ is particularly ingenious; acquaintances who have died no longer have the power to surprise or to disappoint us. They ‘achieve closure’ as characters in the narrative of our own lives. But the key point in Hartley Coleridge’s suggestion is not that Hamlet is ‘recently deceased’ but that he is someone with whom we can be acquainted in just the same way as we are acquainted with the real people who populate our own lives. A narrative has scope and extent beyond what is explicitly reported in a contingent text or performance. There are things that we can reliably infer about a fictional character’s moral disposition, motives, beliefs and desires that derive not from explicit textual cues but from everyday background knowledge of how the world generally works. The basic competence for understanding narrative as a process of filling in or completing gaps in the contingent storytelling is acquired at a very early stage of social learning. And this competence is a basic condition for the possibility of ‘getting the story’.

The most significant publication in this year’s critical archive is Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, though as a cultural event rather than a book. Its central claim – that Shakespeare’s characters furnish the self-reflexive models by which we acquire a self to reflect on – is less developed in coherent argument than asserted in a repetitive polemic. Bloom projects himself as a voice in the wilderness, warning the children of literature against the strange, resentful gods of history and politics. This amusing self-dramatization soon wears thin and detracts from the basic claim, which is neither eccentric nor new. The idea that Shakespeare invented the human was itself invented by the Romantics, whose powerful criticism contributed substantially to developing the institutional apparatus within which we still function. But simply to repeat the claims of Hazlitt, Lamb, Emerson, Herder, et al. sounds like parody (think of Bizet’s Classical Symphony). Bloom does not explain why most Shakespearian work is no longer sustained by the Romantics, just inveighs against apostasy. The invective has secured him a middlebrow celebrity, but the academic excoriation may be more worrisome. Every Shakespeare session I visited at the 1998 MLA included insouciant dismissals of Bloom, ‘not that I’ve read him’, as one speaker said, and audiences responded on cue with derisive laughter, though they probably had not read him either.

To paraphrase Hayden White, what are dramatic characters characterizations of? More specifically, how does the process of converting narrative material into dramatic form affect the shape and design, even the very concept, of character? The idea of character has fallen out of favour in the past two decades, as critics have instead pondered the birth and fashioning of subjectivity, in terms derived from Foucault and Lacan. Yet the lines demarcating the ideologically constructed, divided, and never selfauthorizing subject from the authorially constructed, conflicted, and never self-actualizing character have often seemed to be unclear, and their deployment more useful to the project of directing attention past the sovereign author than to that of understanding the complicated status of dramatized beings. Indeed, a critical era attuned to social constructionism has sometimes blurred the distinction between historical subjects, shaped by colliding ideological forces, and dramatic characters, subject on several dimensions to the same forces yet fundamentally different because of being the product of a dramatist's mind and an actor's embodiment.

In this essay I engage these issues by returning to the old question of Shakespeare's relation to the Plutarchan texts recognized as the primary sources of his Roman plays. Although Geoffrey Bullough's claim that source study presents a 'way open to us of watching Shakespeare the craftsman in his workshop' depends on notions of textual and authorial autonomy that would be difficult to support in our intertextual world, the basic recognition - that something important is happening in the passage between a clearly identified source and a later text - remains indisputable

All but one of the many views of London printed during Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline times show the city from the south and so can and nearly always do include places of entertainment on the south bank of the Thames. The exception calls itself The View of the Cittye of London from the North towards the Sowth. It does not show the south bank or its places of entertainment, but it does show at least one of the playhouses on the north side of the city, and in doing so provides the only contemporary picture of it, or them.

The View is a panoramic view rather than a map-view. It purports, that is, to show the city as one might see it in a photograph. Its topography extends from Holywell in the northeast (on the left) to Westminster in the southwest (on the right) and is about 1039 nun wide and 96 mm high. It does not mention its artist, engraver, publisher, place of publication, or date. People who have written about it have argued that it belongs to either 1600 or some years earlier. A single copy was thought to survive, in the Library of the University of Utrecht (formerly MS 1198, f. 83, now Gr. form. 12), accompanying a manuscript account by Abraham Booth of a visit to London, 1629-30. In the summer of 1996, however, Clive and Philip Burden found another and better copy in their own collections. They deal in and collect antique maps, books, and prints at Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire.