GENERAL STUDIES AND COLLECTIONS

At the very moment of finishing this review the British Prime Minister, John Major, has denounced ‘airy-fairy theory’ as part of a more general demonizing of the inheritance of the sixties which has marked the last year or so of political discourse in Britain. It is tempting to see Brian Vickers’s counterblast to current literary theory, Appropriating Shakespeare (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) as animated by very much the same hostility. It has been greeted already with considerable enthusiasm by those who feel alienated from, threatened by or contemptuous of the directions in which critical practices have been moving for the last thirty years or so. Like John Major, Vickers sees the sixties as the cause of our going astray. Unlike the politician, however, Vickers mounts his attack not out of a vague nostalgia and determined anti-intellectualism, but through a detailed and systematic scholarly critique of the appropriation (or misappropriation) of the work of Saussure which he argues underlies French literary theory. In subsequent chapters Vickers attacks each modern ‘heresy’ in turn. Deconstructionists don’t understand how language works; psychoanalysts are doomed to failure because their founding father is a fraud; new historicists just don’t do their history well enough; feminists (like everyone else) misread the texts because of their determination to find their own political/ideological theories represented therein; Christians and (some) Marxists – oddly bracketed together – are guilty of treating texts as allegories. There are many shrewd hits in the course of the book and some occasional touches of pure vituperatio that enliven what is sometimes a rather stodgy (and very long) text.

The question of whether Shakespeare could read Italian remains uncertain although the plots of many of his plays were based on Italian sources. Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure were based either wholly or in part on Italian narratives written by Cinthio, Bandello, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino and others. Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor were heavily indebted to the anonymous Italian play Gl' Ingannati and Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone. Many other Italian sources were used to a lesser extent in other plays.

Did Shakespeare read these sources in Italian, or did he have to rely on English and French translations of these works? Nothing certain is known. The claim that Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin enabled him to read Italian cannot be supported. The differences in the two languages are so great that even one versed in classical Latin cannot necessarily read Italian. For Shakespeare to have known Italian so as to be able to read the novelle of Cinthio and Bandello, he would have had to make some study of Italian as a separate language.

John Florio, well known in London's intellectual circles and Italian tutor in Southampton's household, published two Italian- English manuals, Firste Fruites in 1578, and Second Frvtes in 1591 (STC 11096-7). These were manuals of polite conversation as well as textbooks for teaching Italian to .Englishmen and English to Italians. They also come within the courtesy book tradition with their discussions of fencing, tennis, polite conversation, hunting, hawking, and other activities suitable for a gentleman.

The Globe, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Lyceum, Her Majesty’s, the Old Vic, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the National Theatre – these are the theatres which resonate through the annals of theatre history, the places where actors – and latterly directors – have sought the stamp of contemporary acclaim and a passport to immortality. But for Shakespeare’s plays there has always been ‘a world elsewhere’: the stock companies, the London ‘minor’ theatres, the touring circuit and the repertory theatres. Quantitatively these alternative places have outstripped the patent and national theatres in their output of Shakespeare; qualitatively they have achieved standards at least high enough to sustain Shakespeare in their repertoires, but, with rare exceptions, their work has been overlooked. No doubt this is partly because of the relatively scant records available – no lengthy reviews in the national press, few memoirs by or biographies of the performers, little memorabilia beyond programmes, rarely a promptbook or stage design, only occasional glimpses through the photographer’s lens. And yet the endeavours of these Shakespearians are worthy of attention; indeed to echo Linda Loman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, ‘attention must be paid’.

In no sphere is this truer than the repertory movement, which from Miss Horniman's pioneering work at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester (1908), transformed the nature of the nation's theatre outside London and remains its foundation to this day. Shakespeare's plays were always fundamental to repertory, but, Barry Jackson at the Birmingham Rep apart, attention has not been paid to their achievements.

“A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.” Such was Shakespeare's description of the theatrical space in which he wished his plays to be performed. Or rather, so Thomas Morton, a reader of plays at Drury Lane, sought to defend the existing system of dramatic regulation in nineteenth-century London. Shakespeare's plays, he claimed, should be performed 'only in the noblest temples of the Muses'.

Until 1843, theatrical legislation permitted only Drury Lane and Covent Garden (the 'patent' theatres) to perform Shakespeare within the metropolis. This article discusses certain 'illegitimate' performances of Shakespeare which took place at the London 'minor' playhouses. These establishments included the Royal Circus/Surrey in Southwark, the theatre in Tottenham Street, the Pavilion and Garrick theatres in Whitechapel, and perhaps most importantly, the Coburg theatre, now the Old Vic. Often converted from other non-cultural uses - an old clothes factory, a shop or a disused chapel - these new playhouses attracted not only the local gentry, but also petit bourgeois and artisan spectators: butchers, shopkeepers, sugar bakers, tailors and mechanics as well as hackney coachmen, sweeps and dustmen.

The commercial survival of local playhouses depended on their ability to target the interests of spectators from the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, managers also wished to encourage the lucrative patronage of genteel theatre-goers from Westminster. What deterred such spectators were the unrespectable neighbourhoods in which the minor theatres were often situated, and the 'vulgar' social constituencies which attended them.

It is often noted that A Midsummer Night’s Dream shares with Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest a common lack of a clearly defined adequate narrative source. As Stanley Wells remarks in his essay ‘Shakespeare without Sources’

That seems unexceptionable and my summary of it in my phrase 'clearly defined adequate narrative source' perhaps equally so. There are no sources for A Midsummer Night's Dream sufficient to identify all the elements of the action — Theseus, lovers, fairies and workers — nor even any three of the list. There are, though, many ways of rethinking this view in relation to the play. One could argue that across a remarkable number of features Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale' constitutes a sufficient narrative source for at least much of A Midsummer Night's Dream, more than the framework of Theseus and his marriage.

Any space we occupy deeply affects how we perceive events inside it. We are bodies which occupy space and, metaphorically speaking, are occupied by it; especially when we are present in a space marked off from the mundane, like a holy temple or a chamber for the exercise of power, we are likely to alter not only our behaviour but our frame of mental reference. Theatres, which are spaces separate from ordinary life by definition, affect us not only by their architecture and decor but also by the spatial relationship established between actor and spectator. From the hillside amphitheatres of Athens in the fifth century BC to the concrete cinema bunkers of late twentieth-century suburban shopping malls, a theatre space is inscribed with ideas about the position of drama within the culture that built it.

For Shakespeare the issue of space has assumed particular importance, and in the modern era has been highly contested, partly because the status of Shakespeare's plays has focused attention on where they can be seen to best advantage. While most of us imagine Burbage's the Theatre or the Globe when we think of the original productions, the plays were performed in their own time in a variety of public, private and royal spaces, a fact that should make us question the common notion that they were 'written for' the public theatre or were somehow contained by it.

There were only two books in the ‘Theatre’ section of the Times Literary Supplement listings page in the issue for the week ending 15 February 1990. One was called Theatre Semiotics. The other was Broadway Anecdotes. It is a memorable juxtaposition which neatly defines the epistemological range of the subject, albeit in terms of its extremes: knowledge can be either unapproachably abstract or insignificantly concrete, with the attendant dangers of, on the one hand, producing entries for Pseuds Corner (of which more later), and, on the other, achieving mediocrity as mere anecdote is loosed upon the world. The best work in the field usually cultivates the art of landing gracefully between two stools, and there are many ways of doing so with distinction.

A perennial interest, at the theoretical end of the scale, is the interpretation of what actually happens at performances, not in the sense of recording hard fact but of developing a more precise understanding of the process of theatre in general. Several critics this year have converged, from the very different angles of texts, productions, and theory, on the issue of how and where authority is located in performance. At two extremes of the debate we find Ralph Berry and Balz Engler.

It may seem a little extravagant to use Dryden’s lines on Congreve to introduce a fully annotated text of King Lear based on the Folio alone, but after so much talk and work, it is a moment of some interest. One question worth asking about recent textual work on Shakespeare is whether the past ten or so years have witnessed an editorial revolution or, less dramatically, a publishing one. Of course, some important matters have been valuably addressed, from the difficulties posed by modernization to the relationship between literary and theatrical texts. But the steady flow of impressive volumes from Cambridge and Oxford may make the reader occasionally pause to wonder how different in practice these editions are from those of a decade or more ago.

Jay L. Halio's edition of what has been called 'the bibliographer's Everest', King Lear? is large and generous, with a lengthy critical and historical introduction and over eighty pages devoted to textual matters, including detailed comparisons of Q/F parallel passages and fully edited versions of Q-only passages. Halio takes a modest view of the editor's role; he is clear sighted and level headed, accurate and in control of his material. The result is an edition of the play which consolidates much recent Lear scholarship and brings aspects of its textual and theatrical history into sharp focus. It allows the reader to reconstruct most of the story - or at least one version of it - and gain access to the materials behind the play's two texts.

In 1599, while the first Globe playhouse began opening its doors to the London public, Shakespeare’s fellow actor, Will Kemp, set out on his ‘Nine-days Wonder’ morris-dance to what was then England’s second most important city, Norwich. Fittingly, it was near the spot where Kemp ended his dance in Norwich that the Maddermarket Theatre, the first permanent Elizabethan-style theatre to be built in modern times, was opened on 26 September 1921. The Maddermarket Theatre was built by W. Nugent Monck, who was arguably the most accomplished and influential of the generation of directors who passed on the legacy of William Poel. By 1933, when Monck completed the Shakespeare canon – making him the first producer known to have done so – he was one of the most highly regarded Shakespearian producers in England and his Maddermarket Theatre among the best-known ‘Little Theatres’ in the world. Today, with the International Shakespeare Globe Centre building its new Globe near the site of the 1599 original, it seems especially appropriate to revisit the Maddermarket experiment and the work Nugent Monck did there.

Nugent Monck was twenty-four when he joined William Poel's highly influential revival of the medieval classic, Everyman, in 1902. Monck played the part of Fellowship and for the next ten years he acted in Poel's productions and served regularly as his stage manager. Monck was able to observe Poel's methods in meticulous detail and seems to have grasped both the great potential and the serious limitations of Poel's approach.

“Elizabethan drama”, Muriel Bradbrook wrote in 1962, “was . . . an embodied art, and existed for performance. To treat it as book art is to do it great violence.” The belief that interpretation of Elizabethan theatre must derive from an informed and flexible sense of its staging remained central to Bradbrook's writing throughout a long career, until her death in June 1993. A discussion of her criticism of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama, the main but by no means the exclusive focus of her scholarly work, together with some account of its personal origins, will serve as implicit commentary on developments in critical practice and theatre performance over the last sixty years.

Muriel Bradbrook's first published book (out of an eventual total of more than twenty) was her Harness Prize Essay of 1931, Elizabethan Stage Conditions. The work of a Cambridge graduate student of twenty-two, the book exhibits at the outset the essential characteristics, and charts the essential convictions, that mark her work throughout. With, for a novice, extraordinary imperturbability Bradbrook runs through the critics of the past and finds them wanting as commentators on Shakespeare's stage. Hazlitt, for example, 'though he was interested in the virtuosity of the actor' failed as critic due to his general mistrust of theatre; Coleridge, on the other hand, won't do because 'his historical knowledge was neither detailed nor extensive'. Such limitations are for Bradbrook significant and symptomatic.

It is a critical commonplace that Macbeth’s opening line – ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’ (1.3.36), whatever its particular referents may be – ‘is singularly important to Macbeth’s character, echoing as it does the enigmatic and ominous chant of the Witches as they conclude their first appearance: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.10). That the play begins with the witches strikingly adumbrates their immanent presence throughout the play; that they are the first to mention the name of the hero confirms their importance. The play and the character both will live under the shadow and the menace of these opening lines – the shortest first scene in the canon. The scene includes this gnomic utterance that destroys ‘the distinction [between] . . . foul and fair’; with it the Witches verbalize their position, standing for ‘those who have said “Evil, be thou my good.”’ Their contrasting adjectives occur often in proverbial contexts in English, but the paradox here suggested is unusual, though not unique, in the tradition. ‘Fair without but foul within’, says the proverb; the Witches say that fairness and foulness are the same, a point that Shakespeare had expressed with extraordinary foreshadowing in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “‘Fair” in “all hail” is foul, as I conceive’ (5.2.340).

By repeating the adjectives and reversing their sequence in the second half of the Witches' line, Shakespeare calls particular attention to these words, invests them with mystery, and fixes them in our minds so that when Macbeth speaks them just over one hundred lines later, his echo of the Witches' diction comes in with an eerie, secondary force (independently of the speaker's presumed intention).

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions and adaptations are included. Information is taken from reviews and programmes held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library. Details have been verified wherever possible, but the nature of the material prevents corroboration in every case.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

The RSC at the Swan Theatre, Stratford: June 1992-

Director: Sir Peter Hall

Designer: John Gunter

Music: Guy Woolfenden

Helena: Sophie Thompson

The Countess: Barbara Jefford

Bertram: Toby Stephens

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The RSC at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford: October 1992-

Director: John Caird

Designer: Sue Blane

Music: Ilona Sekacz

Antony: Richard Johnson

Cleopatra: Claire Higgins

AS YOU LIKE IT

Cheek by Jowl: Tour continues. See Shakespeare Survey 46.

Joe Dixon won the Ian Charleson Award for his portrayal of Rosalind.

The RSC at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford: April 1992-

Director: David Thacker

Designer: Johan Engels

Music: Gary Yershon

Rosalind: Samantha Bond

Greenwich Theatre, London: April—June 1992

Director: James Robert Carson

Designer: Kathy Strachan

Rosalind: Jemma Redgrave

New Shakespeare Company, Regent's Park: June 1992—

Director: Maria Aitken

Designer: Bruno Santini

Rosalind: Cathryn Harrison

Jaques/The Film Director: Betty Bourne

Conceived as a film with the chief roles played by 'professionals' the other roles by 'enthusiastic amateurs' with 'close-ups' and 'repeats'. The Director/Jaques was played by the drag artist Betty Bourne. Some reviewers felt the conceit upstaged the play.

If there is one cry heard more often than any other when the state of the arts in England is being discussed, it is the accusation that the arts are treated far too much of the time as if nothing significant ever happens outside London. Sponsorship, Arts Council grants and, above all, press coverage are all subject to the grave charge of being London-centred. For a theatre production to be reviewed in the national press it seems it must travel to London before it can be noticed. Of course the claim is put too strongly; of course theatre reviewers are occasionally to be seen in the regions and some papers have regional reviewers of great brilliance. Yet there is truth in the argument nonetheless.

For Shakespearians in England the similar accusation might be 'Stratford-centrism'. Niky Rathbone's listings in Survey show the extraordinary quantity of Shakespeare activity in the professional theatre across the country. Yet few Shakespearians, even those most devoted to productions, see more than a tiny fragment of it.

But, even for the most Stratford-centred, it was striking how firmly the centre of attention to the Shakespeare theatre industry shifted to London at the close of 1992 and early in 1993. The RSC opened a Shakespeare production in London; an innovative touring production arrived at the Riverside; the Royal Court, the Royal National Theatre and the West End were all responsible for important productions.

Hamlet’s question provides our earliest surviving evidence of curiosity about actors’ provincial touring – his interest is aroused because, as he realizes, ‘their [the actors’] residence both in reputation and profit was better both ways’ (2.2.331–2). Rosencrantz replies, puzzingly, with two explanations, alluding to ‘the late innovation’ and the ‘eyrie of children’ as the reasons why the tragedians of the city have taken to the road. The moment in the play passes, but curiosity about provincial touring does not; attempts to answer Hamlet’s query have recurred throughout the three hundred and ninety-odd years since he asked it. This essay tackles an old question, then, in the hope that some new light may be shed on it. As well as asking why players toured, we will try to discover when tours took place (a question closely related to the first) and how they were organized. I am curious, as well, about the physical conditions and economics of touring along with the related issue of the type of reception the touring players might expect. Finally, we will enquire into where players toured – their touring routes – and most importantly, about the playing places in which they acted during their sojourns in provincial cities and towns through the length and breadth of England, Scotland and Ireland.

When Prospero begs the audience not to spellbind him ‘in this bare island’ it is not unreasonable to wonder where we are supposed to think we are. From the unique and startling shipwreck scene that set us on shore to that unique and peculiar octosyllabic Epilogue, we have been on an island full of noises and magic that hurt not. At the end, after the ‘Exeunt all’, the courtiers still in their clothes for Claribel’s wedding, the seamen dry again, and Prospero’s robe, book and staff all gone, Prospero speaks his last speech bare of his trappings. Is his adjective a transferred epithet? I think not, even in the wake of all the colourful apparel that has just walked offstage. Prospero stands alone on the stage island in the middle of a sea of offaces, asking for human breath to blow his sail to Naples, if he is not to be imprisoned on the island. Like Hamlet’s ground, that other ‘stale promontory’, Prospero’s stage island has lost its fresh decorations. What, in the original performances, was it bared of, though? A lot of people, certainly, some of them colourfully dressed. Prospero’s own props, his magic gown and staff, must have gone too. Was the stage shorn of fabric and colour? Was it all bare boards? Were there no hangings left across the front of the tiring house and Prospero’s cell? Was there no painting on the stage posts to make them look like marble as De Witt described them? It would be nice to know. For all the riches of the recent archaeological findings, the Shakespearian mise en scène, the geography of the stage island, is not so much bare as undiscovered.

Edward Alleyn embarked on his Fortune playhouse project late in 1599, soon after the Globe had opened on Bankside. On 22 December he leased a site near Cripplegate, and within three weeks had signed up Peter Street, the Globe's carpenter. Only two years earlier he had quitted the stage to concentrate on business affairs, but short retirement urges sweet return, and already he was planning his comeback, for which the new playhouse was to be the elegant setting. He paid for it himself, and looked for another sort of return from the income generated by its galleries. The Fortune was the player's investment in his own confident talent.

The contract drawn up between Alleyn, his partner Philip Henslowe, and their builder is a tantalizing document, holding back as much information as it offers. To save going into a mass of particulars it cites another building - the Globe - as a defining prototype, a shortcut often found in such agreements, and made especially effective in this case by the carpenter's intimate knowledge of the model. The Fortune was, in untold ways though certainly not in everything, a replication of the 'round' Bankside playhouse.

Yet its plan, the contract tells us, was to be 'sett square', a radical if not altogether surprising departure from the Globe's example. To Alleyn, contemplating the building of a new playhouse during the closing months of 1599, London offered a variety of models. The old public theatre type, perhaps initiated as long ago as 1567 at the Red Lion in Whitechapel, was still the main standard.

Of all the many defences against the scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets-Platonism, for example, or the Renaissance ideal of friendship – John Benson’s is undoubtedly the most radical. In order to cover up the fact that the first 126 of the Sonnets were written to a male, Benson in his 1640 Poems: Written by Wil Shake-speare. Gent. changed masculine pronouns to feminine and introduced titles which directed sonnets to the young man to a mistress. By these simple editorial interventions, he succeeded in converting a shameful homosexual love to an acceptable heterosexual one, a conversion reproduced in the numerous reprintings of the 1640 Poems up through the eighteenth century. The source for this account is Hyder E. Rollins’s authoritative 1944 variorum Sonnets, the first edition to detail Benson’s pronominal changes and titular insertions. Subsequent editions have reproduced his conclusions, for example John Kerrigan’s 1986 edition which faults Benson for inflicting on the Sonnets ‘a series of unforgivable injuries’, above all ‘a single recurring revision: he emended the masculine pronouns used of the friend in 1 to 126 to “her”, “hers”, and “she”’. With varying degrees of indignation and amusement, critical works on the Sonnets have repeated the charge.

The charge, however, is wrong. Benson did not attempt to convert a male beloved to a female. To begin with, the number of his alterations has been greatly exaggerated. Of the seventy-five titles Benson assigned to Shakespeare's sonnets, only three of them direct sonnets from the first group of the 1609 Quarto (sonnets 1-126) to a woman. Furthermore, because none of the sonnets in question specifies the gender of the beloved, Benson had no reason to believe a male addressee was intended.

To those for whom Shakespeare's plays still have value as works of dramatic and poetic art that move and enlighten the receptive, the last words of his tragic protagonists and other major characters should be of special interest and importance as momentous and definitive, because they evidently were for Shakespeare, whether composing or revising, and beginning quite early on, in Richard III and Richard II, for example; but they seem to take on special resonance and significance in the later tragedies, notably A. C. Bradley's Big Four, and also Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens.

Shakespeare constructed the ending of Othello in such a way that Desdemona and Othello both expire on the terminal note of a single heroic couplet, each concerned primarily and affectionately with the other. Othello's last lines have been noticed often enough, and Desdemona's, too, especially in recent years; but they have seldom been attended to in any detail and their significant complementarity has apparently gone unnoticed, no doubt partly because 'Soft you, a word or two . . . And smote him thus' - Othello's 'last great speech', in T. S. Eliot's phrase - has come so to dominate almost every kind of commentary on the endplay. But the complementarity was evidently deliberate, not fortuitous, and this seems to be Shakespeare's first dramatic and dialogical expression in extremis of special endplay effects of the kind inchoate in Hamlet and extended further in Othello and further still in King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, the latter three of which match a dying protagonist with a dead loved one.

The inception of the ‘Shakespeare industry’ during the eighteenth century, with which I shall be largely concerned in this paper, has not always been considered an especially sexy topic, I admit, and it is probably still true that for most historians of Shakespeare criticism the period which gave us the first ‘scholarly’ edition (Rowe’s, 1709), the first public squabble over textual editing (between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald, 1725–6), and the first solemn pilgrimage to Stratford (Garrick’s Jubilee, 1769) isn’t one with any very obvious erotic overtones. Nonetheless, it is precisely the sexual dimension of the Enlightenment’s processing of Shakespeare that I mean to sketch here, and especially its inextricable connection with the development of English nationalism. I shall be suggesting that the definition of Shakespeare as an object of nostalgic veneration during the eighteenth century is inseparably bound up with both the construction of modern sexuality and the construction of English national identity; so bound up, in fact, that it would be possible to regard the Enlightenment Shakespeare we still largely inherit as not just the ally but the offspring of Bowdler and Britannia, propriety and nationalism. In the course of this argument I shall be illustrating how in the eighteenth century Shakespeare came to embody the national libido-albeit, paradoxically, at the expense of his own.