‘The study of literature has clearly changed profoundly in many ways during the last twenty years or so, and all of us have perforce participated in these changes with varying degrees of delight, resistance, confusion, excitement and so on.’ Edward Pechter’s summary is undeniably accurate, and over the last five years it has often been convenient to use the varying responses to this changing landscape as a means of structuring the first section of this annual survey. But in this, my final year, there seems to have come something of a change of temper. In place of often acrimonious confrontation there seems to be more interest in modes of accommodation between different critical perspectives. Edward Pechter’s book, What Was Shakespeare?, is, indeed, founded upon an attempt not to reconcile conflicting positions, but to accept the fact of disagreement as necessary, inevitable and irresolvable, and to characterize it as something to live with and through. In a series of rewritings of already published essays he gives his grounds, often wittily, for a belief that ‘the fundamental conflicts within Shakespeare criticism cannot be resolved’. But his response is neither despair, nor an embattled espousal of one or other critical position, but a Rortyinspired pragmatism, so that the answer to the question ‘What is to be done?’ turns out to be ‘business as usual’.

Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet share some staging features that in the original performances laid quite distinct demands on their venues: a large balcony, a trapdoor, separate entry doors, and a sufficiently ample opening for ‘discoveries’ to admit the use of a curtained bed. The playwright when writing these plays must either have chosen to be exceptionally demanding over what the playing-places he expected to be used for the play could provide, or have been confident that the plays would be performed only at places which had these resources. They are features that so far as we know all of the suburban open-air theatres of the time, even the Swan, could offer without difficulty. Titus was performed at the Rose up to 1594, and Romeo at the Theatre and from 1597 at the Curtain, so the facilities the plays demand must have been available there. The company or companies that staged these two plays did not, however, have any fixed venue for playing until after the establishment of the two leading companies as a ‘duopoly’ after May 1594. If either play was written before that development, we ought to wonder why their author should have laid such substantial demands on the then-expected venues.

A PAIR OF HAMLETS

The year’s two productions of Hamlet came with such hype that they provoked the postponement of a third, Sam Mendes’s planned production with Simon Russell Beale. Both were sharply defined by their choice of theatre. To mark the renaming of the Globe in Shaftesbury Avenue as the Gielgud Theatre in honour of Gielgud’s ninetieth birthday, Peter Hall directed Hamlet with his own company, starring Stephen Dillane, Horatio to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet in Zeffirelli’s film. It was the obvious choice of opening production, both a tribute to the greatest Hamlet of his generation and a way of defining a distance from the romantic, poetic Prince Gielgud made so emphatically his own between the wars. Jonathan Kent’s production for the Almeida company starring Ralph Fiennes, which must have been originally planned for the small scale of the Almeida, needed, in the aftermath of Fiennes’s huge success in Schindler’s List, to find a larger space before moving to New York where Fiennes’s performance won a Tony award. This Hamlet moved east, using the Hackney Empire, a decaying, once splendid and undeniably enormous theatre designed by Frank Matcham, now more commonly the home of Music Hall, the only theatre I have been in for some time that positively encourages the audience to take their drinks into the auditorium after the interval.

In Liverpool University in 1899, Kenneth Muir reports, Dr Friedel, a lecturer in French, was denied an extension to his appointment, much to the dismay of the then Professor of English, Sir Walter Raleigh. The main charge against Friedel was that he had set for translation into French prose Juliet's soliloquy, as she awaited the consummation of her marriage.

In 1817, in contrast, Hazlitt had deliberately cited the soliloquy precisely in the teeth of the ethos of Thomas Bowdler:

One of the curiosities about the afterlife of Romeo and Juliet – or any other Shakespeare play – is the scholarly neglect of one area of great activity and importance: school Shakespeare. Jonathan Miller roots his discussion of afterlife firmly in performance. Critical dialogue extends the concept to include its own transformative contribution, as it implicitly and explicitly records its own role in establishing, interpreting and evaluating the Shakespeare canon. But that substantial fraction of the afterlife: how Shakespeare is studied by students under nineteen years of age, goes largely unremarked in the major journals. When ‘teaching Shakespeare’ is addressed, the focus of attention is undergraduate level or higher. In the past dozen years, Shakespeare Quarterly has devoted two issues to the topic, but only three out of thirty-two articles concern schools. Shakespeare Survey is innocent of any direct address to pedagogy or to schools: the articulation of ‘Shakespearian studies and production’ with teaching is left for readers to infer.

Yet patently, school Shakespeare is an activity of major significance. The numbers involved are huge. Currently, in England and Wales alone, the National Curriculum requires that each year at least half a million fourteen yearolds must study, and be tested on, one of three plays: Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar. World-wide the numbers can only be guessed at.

Romeo and Juliet is a play crowded with lewd puns. Mercutio, Benvolio and Romeo toy with bawdy innuendoes; Gregory, Peter and Sampson delight in the proximity of maidenheads and their own naked weapons; the Nurse both puns and is punned about. The play’s lyricism contends with language intoxicated by carnality. Even Juliet, the romantic centre of the play, quibbles with erotic meaning, most notably in her epithalamium of 3.2. Juliet is chaste and desirous, a unique combination in plays of the early 1590s. This essay argues that Juliet’s erotic fluency had a marked influence on the shaping of comic heroines in the four to five years after the play’s first performances. I look first at Juliet’s language, and then at two parodic versions of Shakespeare’s heroine, written between 1598 and 1607. Romeo and Juliet was often imitated; what interests me are those balcony scenes in which pseudo-Juliet express erotic desire in clever puns. These imitative plays are among the very few extant Renaissance comedies portraying virginal heroines who make self-referential bawdy jokes. It seems that the act of parodying the enormously popular Shakespeare play created an odd sub-genre, that of romantic comedies whose heroines display a ribald humour.

Having wed Helena at the king of Rossillion's behest, Bertram, the king's ward, refuses to bed her and flies to Italy with her dower, leaving a conditional letter for her: 'When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband; but in such a “then” I write a “never”' (All's Well That Ends Well, 3.2.57-60)

Bertram's marriage, overseen by king and priest, counts as a solemnized de praesenti union for all practical purposes. And as Henry Swinburne confirms in his Treatise of Spousals, 'Spousals de praesenti, though not consummate, be in truth and substance very Matrimony, and therefore perpetually indissoluble.' This treatise, written around 1600 but published in 1686, is the only systematic exposition of marriage laws and the first handbook of canon law to be written in England. According to Swinburne, the use of long absence as a legal means for escape applied only to de futuro spousals.

What, then, is Bertram resisting by refusing to sleep with Helena? What is the status of his apparently impossible condition? This moment in the action has been interpreted by critics as the transformation of a legal possibility into a 'fairy-tale' one, Bertram's stipulation being read as a purely fantastic setting of tasks in the romance mode. But such readings fail to account for Helena's meeting of his terms as though they were an actual legal impediment, and her final securing of him in what is, effectively, a court of law.

Shakespeare’s drama has proved the most popular theatrical afterlife of the time-honoured story of Romeo and Juliet, and Franco Zeffirelli’s film (1968) continues to be its most popular filmic afterlife. Zeffirelli’s film deserves its success, especially for its cinematic brilliance in capturing the colourful and passionate intensity of Verona and its legendary lovers. However, Zeffirelli’s version does not fully succeed in rendering Shakespeare’s emphasis on moral philosophy and the rhetoric of paradox for the genre of tragedy. Shakespeare greatly improved upon these elements in his main literary source, Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), for his own staging of the uses and abuses of human nature. As a result, Zeffirelli lessens Romeo’s stature as a tragic protagonist and underestimates the importance of Friar Lawrence’s philosophical role in the play’s competing definitions of manhood in relation to the problem of violence. Shakespeare’s creation of Romeo as his tragic protagonist is a bit of a paradox in itself. He is arguably the least responsible of all Shakespearian tragic heroes in the canon. Yet Shakespeare also altered Brooke’s poem in ways that complicate and heighten Romeo’s role of tragic responsibility. For example, Brooke's Romeus fights Tybalt in self-defence, after trying to be a peacemaker on behalf of God and the commonwealth; his stated reasons for intervention are religious and political, making no mention of his personal love for Juliet (lines 999—1034).

The significance of festivity in Shakespeare’s work has always been recognized. Incidentally, or centrally, allusions to the ritual of the liturgical year and seasonal folk custom are found throughout the plays. Recently Francois Laroque’s study Shakespeare’s Festive World (1991) has examined in great detail the interrelationship between the patterned cycle of calendary festival, Elizabethan society and Shakespeare. In the 1950s Northrop Frye drew on Frazerian anthropology and fertility myth to suggest the regenerative ‘green world’, as he calls it, of Shakespeare’s comedy, which symbolizes the conflict between court and country, culture and nature. However, since 1959, the best-known study in this area has been C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, the sub-title of which stresses the fundamental concern, ‘A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom’. In the concept of ‘clarification’ Barber suggests a kind of comic catharsis in festivity by which the individual experiences a heightened awareness between man and nature. In effect this hypostasis of nature depoliticizes the festive, displacing the social by something vaguely spiritual.

At least three interlocking applications of the word 'culture' are currently identified: first, a general process of intellectual and spiritual development, once conceived as a unilinear movement from innocence or barbarism to civilization; second, a particular way of life, specific manners, habits, practices located in a particular people, or period, or group; and third, the works and products of intellectual and artistic activity - music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film - perhaps also philosophy and history.

If, as seems appropriate, we regard culture as an active system rather than as a passive collection of disparate traits, then cultural exchange (or acculturation) is a necessary and inevitable condition of any kind of social existence: a continuous reciprocal contact between individuals, families, groups, classes, nations, and races; involving money, food, work, property, possessions, commerce, sex, and every kind of leisure and recreation, including literature and ideas. It is facilitated at every level by technology, education, communications, economic prosperity, and genuinely democratic institutions. The only naturally occurring barrier to cultural exchange is language; and even that can be overcome by translation. But it is restricted by the artificial barriers of economic, political, and ideological oppression. Governments anywhere may and do seek to regulate and control its operation; but by its nature it is spontaneous, expansive, and innovative, having the character and force of an evolutionary mechanism.

Shakespeare productions intersect with many histories. When the Duke tells Angelo, ‘There is a kind of character in thy life / That to th’observer doth thy history / Fully unfold’ (1.1.27–9), he is probably as wrong about Angelo as commentators tend to be about any theatre production. Thomas Postlewait’s brilliant analysis of the difficulties and contradictions of writing theatre history, using as his example the first London production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, is as applicable to the problems of writing about a production one has seen as to the problems of recovering information about a production one has not. Yet only parts of the history can be unfolded and parts of a production’s engagement with some of the interlocking patterns of history can be much more fully set out than others.

Productions intersect with the stage-history of the play, with the history of the theatre company, with the individual histories of all those associated with the development of the project (actors, director, designers). They set out, with more or less clarity, their engagement with specific historical moments: the moment of the play's first production, the moment of their own production, and the moments of history to which a production may allude. Their historical connections may interconnect with their geography, their place in the theatrical map as well as the places in which play and production are set: Measure for Measure's Vienna means different things at different times and a production in Stratford-upon-Avon means something different from a production in Stevenage.

Who is the mysterious dramatist who has shot to world-wide fame in our century because of his political relevance? His plays were performed before the incipiently fascist public in France and the actually fascist public in Germany during the 1930s, and he was acclaimed for his vigorous portrayal of the dangers of mob rule and the need for strong leadership, as well as for his awareness of the ineradicable enmity between Christian generosity and the Jewish fixation on money. At some point during the war he appears to have moved to England, since he wrote a film script for Laurence Olivier depicting the courage and resourcefulness of the English when fighting on the continent, and was much praised for his patriotism. After the war, his series of plays on English history showed the desirability of hereditary monarchy and the dangers of civil war; but after the student uprisings of 1968 he appears to have treated revolution much more sympathetically. His taste for a deliberately antiquated style and archaic diction lends (paradoxically) a sharpness to his critique of contemporary politics; his passion for anonymity and seclusion has kept biographers guessing, and has fascinated the public; and his obvious wanderlust has enabled him to exert an influence in every major country in the world.

There is some uncertainty even about his name: it has come to us in various spellings, and there are even theories that this was not his name at all, but that of an actor whom the dramatist used to disguise his true identity. Since in this essay I intend to discuss the anti- Semitic play he wrote when in Nazi Germany, I shall use the German form of his given name, and avoid all orthographical controversy by abbreviating his surname: I shall call him Wilhelm S. Although we cannot be sure that he was actually German, there is no doubt about the great success he enjoyed there.

In August 1994 the Guardian’s drama critic concluded his review of Peter Zadek’s production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Edinburgh Festival by claiming that its value to him lay in its not being in English: ‘Shakespeare in a foreign tongue’, he wrote, ‘becomes an analogue to the original that gives the director new freedom’, and ‘it will be hard’, after this, ‘to go back to traditional productions’. While it could be argued that Michael Billington, in journalistic haste, is confusing the strength of a ‘startling, radical, Brechtian’ production with the alienation effect of a foreign language, this was not so with Clement Scott, the formidable Daily Telegraph reviewer, when nearly a hundred years ago he praised Sarah Bernhardt in his book on Some Notable Hamlets of the Present Time (1900). Amazingly he manages to go into raptures over Madame Bernhardt's performance without once commenting on her gender; but he is explicit about the language of this Hamlet: 'With the French version of the immortal text I was charmed. It conveyed Shakespeare's idea in a nutshell' (p. 51). Both then and now, it seems, drama reviewers can be Sentimental Travellers: 'They order this matter better in France' . . . or in Germany . . . or Japan.

But I wonder, when it comes to thinking about the implications of Billington's and Scott's proclaimed positions, if academic critics are such travellers? And, how seriously do we think about those implications? I wonder, that is, whether to the immensely fertile body of current Shakespeare studies, the study of translations might not be a stepchild — 'an interesting and harmless occupation for researchers abroad', as the editors of the recently published and excellently thought-provoking collection of essays on European Shakespeares put it, lamenting the lack of reciprocity between their discipline and English and American Shakespeare studies.

Shakespeare’s plays, with their inherently flexible structure and openness of style, positively invite distinctive re-interpretations in performance. They can be cut and amplified, bent this way or that in translation, and, in staging, transported lock, stock, and barrel into the here-and-now or almost any other time and place. Even at their most intense and sustained moments – perhaps especially then – the dialogue can support a wide variety of characterizations: Shylock, Hamlet, Falstaff, Prince Hal, Prospero have all served many purposes, taking shape and spirit from the actors and directors who have laid hands on the very same printed words. Arguments can be readjusted at will, so that a Shakespeare play becomes a director’s opportunity to say whatever he or she wishes under cover of serving its author and taking advantage of his reputation. In a politically conscious world, Shakespeare’s plays can speak politically, in an anxious world psychologically, in a religious world religiously; in a closed world of theatre-making they can become gentle or hectic fantasies of minimal moral or political interest. In most theatres, a director’s conceptual choices are reinforced by a quartet of designers, for set, costumes, light, and sound, whose overwhelming effects thrill an audience and render it submissive to each new interpretation.

Any production can be read as an indication of the culture that supports its theatre, but that message is not always clear. What is far more readily perceived is a distinctive reading, concept, or message created by the production's director, which uses the text in ways which challenge accepted notions of the play's meanings. Representations of something as complex as a culture would be work of a quite different order.

PAST AND PRESENT

R. G. Collingwood once remarked that all historical writing is a selective process governed by a sense of contemporary relevance. Most historical critics who have sought to interpret Shakespeare’s interpretation of the past in 1 and 2 Henry IV seem to have been in agreement with this view. There has, however, been remarkable divergence among both recent and not-so-recent historicists on how the play (I shall use the singular term for convenience’s sake) connects with sixteenth-century practice and ideas; on how, in other words, we should define the context (or larger ‘text’) which makes most sense of its conceptual orientation. E. M. W. Tillyard tied the play to the Tudor, providentialist philosophy of history focused on the Wars of the Roses and the birth of the Tudor dynasty. But he saw in it nothing more specific to sixteenth-century political experience than a large, approving picture of Elizabethan England, rendered vivid by its social and topographical detail. Like Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell read the play as an uncomplicated endorsement of Tudor political orthodoxy; she was much concerned, however, to establish a central analogy with the Northern Rebellion of 1569–70 (an idea first advanced by Richard Simpson in 1874), as well as a number of politically significant parallels between some of the dramatis personae and contemporary individuals.

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee helped establish Shakespeare as a national poet and as a permanent cultural fixture, one who, in Jane Austen’s familiar phrase, would soon enough become part of an Englishman’s constitution. Garrick’s subsequent play – called The Jubilee and written for those unable to attend the celebrations in Stratford – further secured this reputation, while positioning Shakespeare against those at the periphery of English culture. The Jubilee includes a bumbling unnamed ‘Irishman’ who travels from Dublin to witness the festivities only to sleep through them and return, as he says, to ‘go home and be nowhere’. The play also contains a comic exchange between Stratford locals, who, when they hear celebratory fireworks, fear that ‘’Tis certainly a plot of the Jews and Papishes’, a confusion no doubt exacerbated by the fact that to them, the word ‘ju-bil-ee’ sounded a lot like ‘Jew Bill’. Sukey, a young woman of Stratford, explains to her friend Nancy (who wonders ‘who is this Shakespur, that they make such a rout about ‘en?’) that had ‘you lived at Birmingham or Coventry, or any other polite cities, as I have done, you would have known better than to talk so of Shakespur and the Jewbill’. By framing the Jubilee events with the skewed perspective of these outsiders, incapable of grasping the difference between a local hero and a Jewish threat, Garrick offers up a Shakespeare who cannot possibly belong to Stratford, let alone to the boorish Irish, but is the rightful property of a cultivated London society that can properly know his worth.

The art of translation was known in Georgia from early times. Translations of the Bible appeared as far back as the fourth century. Practically all major Byzantine writings had been rendered into Georgian as early as the tenth and thirteenth centuries, the same being true of Eastern literature and lore. Incidentally, The Wisdom of Balavar or Barlaam and Josaphat legend was also translated by unknown translators into Georgian, and there is a remote and intriguing link between this translation and Shakespeare, however mysterious it may seem. The parable of the caskets could hardly have found its way into The Merchant of Venice unless the first Christian version of the legend had been available – I quote from the Encyclopaedia Britannica – “... from the Arabic by the Georgians ... The Greek recension ... which is a highly embroidered rendering of the Georgian, was made on Mt Athos by St Euthymius (d. 1028) the Iberian (that is Georgian), possibly in collaboration with Greek monks there ... From the Greek came the Latin, Slavonic, Christian Arabic and other Christian versions.”

Shakespeare himself was hardly aware of Georgia, a small country in the Caucasus of which the West learnt later. And yet it is The Merchant of Venice in which we find these lines:

It is no coincidence that the now hugely influential reading of The Tempest in the context of ‘the discourse of colonialism’ began for the purposes of the Anglo-American academy with Stephen Greenblatt’s essay ‘Learning to Curse’, published in 1976, in a book called First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old which explicitly marked – in troubled fashion – the bicentenary of the American Declaration of Independence. As was the case more recently in Australia, official celebrations of a young nation’s coming to the age of two hundred released an anguished cry from the liberal intelligentsia as they came to full realization of the exploitation and oppression on which their nation was built. Fashionable criticism is interested in assuaging the guilt of empire by making the author of The Tempest a scapegoat. But I find it mildly ironic that very few of the ‘radical’ critics of the 1970s and 1980s have acknowledged that a revisionary reading of The Tempest had already been undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s by non-white non-Europeans. I have to admit to my shame that I have been much longer familiar with the ‘new historicist’ readings of anguished Stefanos like Stephen Greenblatt, Stephen Orgel and Steven Mullaney than with the remarkable creative work done a generation before them by self-proclaimed Calibans like George Lamming, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar.

Looking at commercial exchange may prove a convenient way of approaching the problem of cultural exchange in general, for commerce is steeped in all sorts of constraints and traditions and, pragmatic though it appears, still measures desire as much as reason, and reflects an estimated balance of power between seller and buyer. The proverb ‘exchange is no robbery’ (Heywood, 1542) is significant of a conceptual impediment. No less significant is the adjectival crutch it often uses in order to reassure itself and us that ‘a fair exchange is no robbery’. Yet what is a ‘fair’ exchange? At one end of the scale, exchanging or bartering one necessity for another – so long as the need for the things exchanged is similarly pressing for both parties – may in all likelihood be accounted fair. At the other end of the scale, trading one luxury for another may be found fair as long as it suits the whims and plans of the exchanging parties. The trickster king, Richard III, exclaims ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse’ (5.7.7). It is Shakespeare who adds the exchange suggestion. All that the source (Hall) says is that when they see that the battle is lost, the king’s party ‘brought to hym a swyfte and a lyght horse to convey hym awaie’. Are we to understand that Shakespeare’s Richard is pinning a low price on his kingdom and a high price on a horse?