Of the eighteen productions covered in this year's review, eleven, including the whole of the RSC's main stage summer repertoire in Stratford, are of what the first Folio labels 'Comedies'. Whether this reflects financial managers' judgement of what will work best at the box office, or the current mood of directors, or whether there is felt to be a problem in matching available actors and the tragic protagonists' roles, are questions that might all be speculated upon; but not here. It is with this bumper crop of comedies that I begin.

Stephen Unwin made a spirited and energetic attempt to give a sense of newness to the distasteful story of the taming of Katharina Minola in his production of The Taming of the Shrew for English Touring Theatre, which made a national tour in the autumn. He set the play in a TV sit-com, lower middle-class world of Dagenham accents and rock music between the scenes. Kacey Ainsworth's Kate was a rebellious teenager in scruffy jeans and thicksoled trainers, sullen and surly, rather than angry, at her father's unfairness, making a journey through the play that was from androgyny to femininity rather than from shrewishness to tameness.

In the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, staged at the new Hope in 1614, Jonson set up a mock covenant by which the ‘Spectators, and Hearers’ waiting for the play would accept the performance and ‘agree to remaine in the places, their money or friends have put them in, with patience, for the space of two houres and an halfe, and somewhat more’. Such a specific timing for a mock-legal contract probably reflects the likelihood that Jonson, unlike most of his contemporaries, owned a watch. More likely it reflects his selfconscious awareness of the length of time the performance was expected to take, and possibly some discomfort at its likely duration. Two hours was the standard time for a performance. For The Alchemist with the King’s Men his prologue boasted that it took only ‘two short houres’. The distinctly apologetic tone with which he proclaimed the extra half-hour, and the reluctant admission that it might be even longer, is as explicit an apology for excessive length as the convoluted Jonson would ever allow himself to make. Since Bartholomew Fair has as many words as the Folio text of Hamlet, making them the longest plays of the time, his proclamation that the performance would run to less than two and three-quarter hours must have been defensive. Jonson knew what he was saying, however little he may have expected it to be swallowed whole.

As John Gross remarks in Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend, 'everyone who writes about the stage history of The Merchant of Venice is doomed to quote, sooner or later', the couplet supposedly spoken by Alexander Pope upon seeing Charles Macklin's portrayal in 1741:

Pope's comment shows that he considered Macklin's hard and bitterly malevolent interpretation to be a welcome corrective to the Shylock of Thomas Doggett and his successors in George Granville's adaptation, The Jew of Venice, a lurid burlesque of the role that had held the stage since 1701. It also shows a yearning, shared by all students of the play, to reconstruct somehow the first Shylock, about whom there is no reliable contemporary information whatsoever - the actor Thomas Jordan's doggerel description,

dates from 1664, when the theatre was not, contrary to the view of E. E. Stoll, 'still swayed by the tradition of Alleyn and Burbage'.

Measure for Measure was written within the first twenty-one months of King James’s reign, and probably first was seen on the stage when the Globe re-opened in the later summer of 1604, prior to the play’s recorded performance before the king at Whitehall Palace on St Stephen’s Day, 26 December. The long closure of the Globe, first for the death of Queen Elizabeth and then for the serious plague which immediately followed in 1603 and 1604, suggests on the one hand that Shakespeare would have had more leisure to write; on the other, that there would have been no compelling need for him to provide new plays when his company was largely inactive and had the prospect of remaining so. Court patronage provided welcome oases within this stretch of theatrical desert, and it has understandably fed suppositions that the grandly named King’s Men had a rather closer relationship with their monarch than did any players in the old queen’s reign. The payment of thirty pounds to Burbage on behalf of his fellows in February 1604 ‘for the mayntenance and releife of himselfe and the rest of his company being prohibited to prsente any playes publiquelie in or neere London’, ‘by way of his Maties free gifte’, particularly in the absence of similar payments to the other companies, may be taken as a sign of special favour. And if the company as a whole was favoured, their leading dramatist, ‘the King’s Playwright’ as he has been dubbed by Alvin Kernan, is quite likely to have responded with entertainment which reflected the new ruler’s theoretical interests in the properties of government and the procedures of the law.

I want to begin with two exemplary memorial moments. The first is from Henry V, in the lull before the battle at Agincourt. It is a famous moment of social remembering, framed as reminiscence in the future tense:

As Harry presents it, the source of social cohesion is the potential for future re-telling offered by the events that are about to take place. Both the soldiers clustered around Henry and the audience in the theatre are projected forward, into a narrative moment that will give the present (or, more precisely, the near-future) retrospective meaning. The story will be passed on, and embellished ('with advantages'), gaining a momentum of its own, a fictional reality that will allow it, among other things, to be staged at the Globe theatre almost two hundred years later.

In the last scene of The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight. Cranmer’s prophecy provides Elizabeth’s father with knowledge of the future not available at the play’s ostensible chronological cut-off point in 1533;; nor, because of the legal arrangements Henry left, was this future imaginable when Henry died in 1547. The panegyric delivered from the perspective of 1613 is a utopian evaluation of the Elizabethan past and the Jacobean present which the stage Henry receives as an ‘oracle of comfort’ (5.4.66), and the obvious flattery requires Cranmer’s prefatory affirmation that the words he utters are all ‘truth’ (15–16); less obvious in this context of apparently uncomplicated praise is that the prophecy builds on a series of real historical ironies and legal reversals that represented major defeats for Henry and his plans for the future. Henry learns here that Elizabeth will reign, but that she will die childless (thus extinguishing the direct line of succession with which he was obsessed); the second major piece of information Cranmer provides is buffered by linguistic evasions that neatly sidestep the problem of revealing the name of Elizabeth’s Stuart successor and the ultimate triumph of the Scottish line that Henry had passed over when he laid out his dispositions for succession in his last will and testament.

For at least the last two hundred years, 'race' has functioned as one of the most powerful and yet most fragile markers of social difference. It is one of the great ironies of imperial history that ideologies of racial differences have hardened as a direct response to racial and cultural crossovers; conversely, colonial enterprises have facilitated contact and exchange between people of different ethnicities, religions and cultures. Notions of alterity or exchange thus derive their meaning from one another. Here I want to explore some aspects of this mirrordance on the stages of Shakespeare's time - a time which can be characterized as either the last period in history where ethnic identities could be understood as fluid, or as the first moment of the emergence of modern notions of 'race'.

We are beginning to interrogate the crucial differences between twentieth-century and early modern ideologies of racial and cultural difference. Between the two stand four centuries of colonial relations which profoundly reshaped global relations.

Umabatha was presented in 1997 as part of the first season's repertory at the Globe theatre on London's Bankside. It was a curious piece, most memorable for the huge cast of astonishingly agile dancing extras and its energetic, but deafeningly loud, drumming. It was performed in Zulu with English sur-titles taken from text provided by Welcome Msomi and the programme included a scene by scene synopsis of the action. Yet, the play was recognizably Macbeth. It included all the play's familiar elements, including the witches, the bloody sergeant, the dagger scene, the ghost of Ban quo, the murder of Lady Macduff and her son, the sleepwalking scene, and the final battle in which Macbeth is defeated.

The narrative came from Shakespeare but the setting and the style signalled the play's African origins. The witches who opened the action were young women with beaded hair who performed their magic by casting stones (or were they bones?) in a calabash. The cast was dressed in leather skirts and furry leggings, the men were armed with short stabbing-spears. The drunken porter drank liberally from a gourd and when Macbeth saw the witches' vision of the procession of kings, he induced the spectacle by snorting a powder.

“You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (Hamlet 3.4.19-20) Peter Holland concludes his book English Shakespeares by praising foreign productions for 'rightly showing us that not everybody's Shakespeare is the one we possessively think we know' (p. 269). Several recent publications show the effects of Shakespeare's transposition within German, French, Russian and Irish cultures, past and present. In Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theatre Practice in the German Democratic Republic, J. Lawrence Gunter and Andrew M. McLean have brought together an illuminating range of essays and interviews with theatre practitioners which chart the changing production styles in the former East Germany in relation to their political contexts. For me at least, much of this was undiscovered country. A useful chronology of key productions and events from 1945 to 1990 sets a historical framework for the development of a tradition in which the German Shakespeare Society, and the work of Brecht and Robert Weimann are shown to be important influences. Weimann's own lucid essay gives 'a personal retrospect' of how 'Shakespeare' has been redefined over the period, assessing the 'uncanny threshold between unorthodoxy and complicity' (p. 137) unique to theatre practice in the GDR.

Shakespeare’s association with something called ‘the Globe’ began in the late 1590s, when the first playhouse of that name was built in South-wark. Shakespeare’s plays had been and would be performed in other locations, but the Globe has held a near-monopoly on the imaginations of later generations. There have been Globe theatres in England, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Canada and the United States and no doubt elsewhere. In 1997 ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, reconstructed with assiduous scholarly care, opened near the original site on the South Bank of the Thames. Scale drawings, physical models, cinematic representations, editions of the plays, virtual reality tours and countless references in scholarly and popular literature sustain the almost automatic pairing of playwright and playhouse. ‘The Globe’ has become a near synonym for Shakespeare’s work in the theatre.

This would not have been the case if the playhouse had been given a different name such as the Rose or the Curtain, for the local and historical embeddedness of the Globe is balanced by its being at the same time a reference to the world as a whole. Such a name helps reinforce the frequent claims that Shakespeare's plays are universal either in their appeal or in the accuracy and completeness of their representation of the human world. Before such a contemporary expression was ever uttered, Shakespeare had become a 'global' author.

The 1998 repertoire at Shakespeare’s Globe included two comedies, As You Like It, probably written for the original Globe in 1599, and The Merchant of Venice, revived there before Court performances in 1605. As in 1997, two further plays were added in August: Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, written for the Children of St Paul’s, at their small indoor theatre in the cathedral precinct; and The Honest Whore (part 1 by Thomas Dekker and Middleton; part 2 by Dekker alone), written for Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune (whose stage used the Globe’s as its model). One play, then, was both Shakespeare’s and a Globe play. Other performances at the Globe included a single performance of King John by the ‘Original Shakespeare Company’, and several concert performances of John Blow’s opera Venus and Adonis (whose libretto bears no relation to Shakespeare’s poem).

As the novelty of the Globe eases into familiarity, its attractions and its discomforts and discontents become clearer. Simply to enter the yard and stand in the building remains among its most reliable satisfactions. The enclosed space of the yard and timber galleries excludes the modern city around it. Even the nuisance of aircraft noise, especially hovering traffic helicopters, is taken in their stride by actors and audience alike, if anything creating a bond of sympathy.

I begin my consideration of Macbeth some years before the Folio, for what seem to me good historical reasons: while it is certainly true, as historians of the book from Stanley Morison to Donald McKenzie and Randall McLeod have insisted, that works of literature do not exist independent of their material embodiment in texts, the printing of Shakespeare’s plays is, nevertheless, really incidental. In their inception, in their conception, they are not books but scripts, designed to be realized in performance; and in this form they are not at all fixed by their material embodiment, whether Quarto or Folio (to say nothing of Riverside, Oxford or Norton), but fluid and open-ended. To realize them requires an infinite number of collaborative, often non-authorial, decisions, both textual and interpretive, which in turn eventuate in continual, increasingly non-authorial, revisions, excisions, additions. In this respect, Shakespeare plays have always been the free-floating signifiers of postmodern theory, standing for an infinitely variable range of signifieds. The play, that is, even in print, is always a process.

Most of the productions listed are by professional or semi-professional (pro/am) companies. Productions originating in 1996 or earlier have only been included if there is new information. Details are mainly taken from newspaper reviews held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

The New Shakespeare Company, the Open Air

Theatre, Regent's Park: June 1997—

Director: Helena Kaut-Howson

Designer: Claire Lyth

Set against the background of the Bosnia war.

The Oxford Stage Company, tour: August 1997

Director: Irina Brook

Set in a North African country and played as though by strolling players.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The Bridewell Theatre Company, London:

April 1997-

Director: Carol Metcalfe

Designer: Bridget Kimak

The set consisted of white hangings, lit red for the Egypt scenes.

The Lincoln Shakespeare Company: November 1997

Director: Rob Smith

A pro/am production

The Globe playhouse occupies special places in the collective conscious and unconscious of Shakespeare studies and – where id was, there shall ego be – the Wanamaker reconstruction has brought important theoretical and practical conflicts into the open. The validity of historical methods and pursuit of authenticity have always been contentious issues, but the act of making a physical reconstruction focuses the minds of supporters and objectors in a way that no hypothetical model can. The Wanamaker project can be credited with the achievement of accelerating research into the design and operation of the Globe so that in the last thirty years the body of published work on the subject has more than doubled. Whether or not the reconstructed building itself aids scholarship, the research underlying its claim to authenticity represents a considerable return on the capital outlay.

UNIVERSALITY AND DIFFERENCE

Most critics in the eighteenth century, unlike academic critics today, were confident of at least one assumption about great literature: that the truths it embodied were universal and that, in the words of Dr Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare, ‘Nothing can please many and please long but just representations of general nature.’ It is a view which depends of course on even more basic assumptions – that there is such an entity as ‘general nature’ (or at least that the category is useful); and that in turn there is such an entity (or meaningful category) as ‘human nature’ – a certain intrinsic ‘humanness’ which remains in some way constant despite variations from country to country and race to race, and despite the changes in behaviour over time. But while it might be agreed that there are some constant factors in human behaviour (without which it is difficult to see how we could respond to the literature of the past at all), the notion of a ‘human nature’ (whether as an essence, a useful category or some kind of shadowy ideal), has become (notoriously) in recent years almost impossible to use. It is probably fair to say that some such view lay behind nearly all literary criticism from Johnson’s time (and indeed before) to our own. Questioned or rejected as these ideas have been by the various forms of deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism and the like, literary criticism has, again notoriously, become uncertain of its foundations and has looked about for new ones.

In his essay for A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ‘Shakespearian Criticism from Dryden to Coleridge’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), T. S. Eliot took much care to underpin his argument with what he described as a ‘very simple’ point: ‘Shakespeare criticism will always change as the world changes’ (p. 288). Yet while arguing for critical difference, he explored the growth of eighteenth-century criticism that was based on textual study rather than performance by singling out Maurice Morgann’s essay On the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) and applauding the piece in terms typical of 1930s character criticism. Iris Murdoch, in a 1961 Encounter article, ‘Against Dryness’, contrasted Shakespeare’s unique facility ‘to create at the highest level both images and people’ with the empirical rationality of representations of man which she deplored in contemporary literature. She illustrated her argument with a historical parallel which considered the enduring influence of Hume and Kant and suggested

Most of the productions listed here are by professional or semi-professional companies. Information is mainly taken from newspaper reviews held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Manchester Royal Exchange: September 1996

Director: Matthew Lloyd

Designer: Ashley Martin-Davies

Performed in the round, in the company's touring theatre tent, and set in the Second World War.

The Prince Theatre, the Prince of Orange pub, Greenwich, London: October 1996.

Director: Paul James

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Northern Broadsides, tour continues. See Shakespeare Survey 30

1157 Theatre Company at the Tabard, London: June 1996

Director: Alasdair Middleton Warm baths taken on stage were used as a symbol of Egyptian degeneracy.

AS YOU LIKE IT

The RSC at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford: April 1996-

Director: Steven Pimlott

Designer: Ashley Martin-Davis

Music: Jason Can-

Rosalind: Niamh Cusack

The BAC, Lavender Hill, Battersea, London: June 1996

Director/Music: Peter Brewis

Designer: Caroline Grebbell

Open Hand Productions, the Oxford Shakespeare Festival: July 1996

The Northcott Theatre, Exeter, in Rougemont Gardens: July 1996

Director: John Durnin

Rosalind: Tanya Ronder

A semi-musical production, set in the 1920s.

Bold and Saucy Theatre Company with Open Hand Productions, played in Oxford college gardens: July 1996

Contraband Theatre Company, in Queen's Park, London: August 1996

An all-female cast, with the exception of Touchstone, played by a man in drag.

R. J. Williamson Productions, tour of northern England, with Much Ado About Nothing: August 1996—

Theatre Unbound, tour of open-air sites, with Much Ado About Nothing: July 1996—