It is perhaps because Troilus and Cressida raises the question of women’s sexual identity that it was scarcely performed for three hundred years. I am going to discuss ways in which Shakespeare’s Cressida has been construed by recent critics, producers, and actresses, and how these interpretations might affect the understanding of the play by an audience in the 1980s. Until the 1970s most interpretations manifested precisely that coercive dominance of a particular set of cultural values which is the theme of the play. This was especially marked with respect to what G. Wilson Knight called ‘the pivot incident of the play’: Cressida’s arrival at the Greek army camp. My discussion will centre on this scene, to show how it is a key to the significance of one of the main questions posed by the play: whether a person’s nature or identity is determined by the valuation set on that person by others. This question forms part of the general platonic scepticism which the play develops with regard to the possibility of anything’s having absolute value or identity in a world subject to the digestive effects of time and human judgement. Within the world of the play Cressida is unable to maintain a sense of her own integrity. Similarly, in the course of changes in Western society, the character of Cressida in the text of the play has been subject to changing readings and widely divergent performances. This has inevitably affected the comprehension of the whole play.

Yoshiko Kawachi’s Calendar of English Renaissance Drama, 1558–1642 is likely to find its way on to the reference shelves of most libraries. It attempts to present, in tabular form and chronological order, as much essential information as possible about every known play, masque, or entertainment of consequence in the period, extant or lost, acted or not. (The only significant omissions would appear to be the less noteworthy provincial religious dramas and civic entertainments, which are being dutifully catalogued in the Records of Early English Drama series.) Each entry lists, in so far as the information can be determined, whether the work was performed or not, the date of first performance (subsequent recorded performances receive separate entries) or other early evidence of existence (such as date of licensing, entry in the Stationers’ Register, or publication), the place of performance and principal persons before whom it was performed, the actors, the title, the type of the work (tragedy, pastoral, masque etc.), the author(s), date of the earliest editions and existence of any manuscripts, and a brief indication of the source of the information. This is all cross-referenced by works, authors, and acting companies. There are, inevitably, limitations. Where, as in many cases, matters of dating or authorship are disputed, the Calendar does no more than suggest limits or note queries, relying for the most part on standard authorities like the Annals of English Drama, Chambers, and Bentley; it does not refer us to the most recent discussions of such matters.

OLD TIMERS

On anybody's list of great Shakespearians of the mid-twentieth century there would surely figure three names above all: C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye, and G. Wilson Knight.

C. L. Barber did not live to complete The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), and it fell to Richard P. Wheeler to prepare with painstaking care the manuscript documents for publication. It is tragic that Barber did not see the result, for it is his own 'whole journey' traced through the entire Shakespearian canon. He was loved and respected as a teacher and critic, and one can see the underlying reason for this in the nostalgic attractiveness of his assumptions concerning 'Shakespeare's ideal of a gracious, organic society' (p. 124) and its violation in plays like Richard III and Titus Andronicus. Barber retrieves an image of Shakespeare as generous, 'richly sociable', and empathetic, and whether or not these qualities lay in the dramatist, they belonged to the critic. He accounts for Shakespeare in predominantly psychological terms. Shakespeare's experiences of witnessing the worldly failure of a lovable father, and being cherished by a strong mother, who was inadvertently betrayed by the weakness of her husband, are seen to feed into patterns in the plays which are regarded as an evolving canon. The pattern is implicit in The Comedy of Errors as the intact family is refound, but in 'the whole journey' different aspects become prominent at different times.

Generations of scholars have grappled with the problems posed by the ending of Shakespeare's King Lear: not one of the solutions proposed to date has commanded general and lasting assent. As Bridget Lyons put it:

Such critical attempts have been varied in the extreme: for G. R. Hibbard, they range from the 'sentimental wishful thinking' of writers such as Paul N. Siegel to the 'reductive nihilistic rant' of Jan Kott. Reactions to these attempts have been equally varied: what to one scholar is sublime is ridiculous to another. As a result, one senses the tendency, at the present time, to feel that this is perhaps one of the Shakespearian mysteries we are not intended to solve: that we should be content to say of Lear, as the churlish priest said of Ophelia, that his end was doubtful. It is therefore clear that any further attempt to provide a solution to the enigma must, if it is to have the slightest hope of carrying conviction, be based on foundations laid with the very greatest care. I shall thus begin by inviting assent to a certain number of premises essential to my later arguments.

At one fairly inconspicuous moment in Heywood's play 1 The Fair Maid of the West, the Chorus to Act 5, the Chorus says, of a shipwreck scene,

The Fair Maid was moderately well known even before Heywood wrote a sequel for the Cockpit company who played it at Court in the early 1630s, when the two plays were first published.2 It was probably originally written in 1609-10, because The Roaring Girl refers to it, and that play can be dated precisely in 1611. The dating, very close to the time The Tempest was written, raises the question whether Shakespeare heard Heywood's lament before he wrote the shipwreck scene to open his play, or alternatively whether Heywood's Chorus was commenting on the failure of The Tempest's shipwreck scene. Either Shakespeare was showing Heywood what a different playhouse could do on its not-so-lame stage, or Heywood was disowning Shakespeare's failure.

Another play of Heywood's, written rather earlier, The Four Prentices of London, has a broadly similar display of modesty, this time prescribing exactly what he would have liked his stage to show.

At the beginning of the last act of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, Lovewit, returning to his house from the country now that the plague has abated, is met by a crowd of his neighbours. The neighbours are eager to tell him all about the peculiar events that have gone on in the house during his absence. As with great excitement and more than a little credulity - as one might expect in the play that finds credulousness to be a universal feature of the city - the six neighbours trip over each other breathlessly with yet more fragments of gossip and corroborating detail, their comments grow together until they become a chorus of Londoners:

The anonymous group of undifferentiated and undifferentiable voices can only vaguely be defined, even corporately, as a group. They are plainly of a lower social class than Lovewit himself; they keep addressing him as 'sir'. One of them, Neighbour 3, is a tradesman, 'a smith, and't please your worship' (line 43). But they are hardly individualized; their characters are dissolved into their choric function, a credulous chorus and they can claim no greater identity than that.

Among the papers at Keats House, Hampstead, is a marked-up copy of Shakespeare's Poetical Works, ignored, in large part, both by Keatsians and by students of his 'Presider'. Caroline Spurgeon may give us, in her classic study, the gist of Keats's notes to the plays, Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets; but, like every other praiser of Keats's 'Shakespearian' qualities, she neglects the marks and remarks which criss-cross A Lover's Complaint and Lucrece. The omission is a grave one, not only because it reinforces assumptions about what is distinctively 'Shakespearian' which Keats, allowed a hearing, might correct, but because the gathering of poems - a loan perhaps, then gift, from J. H. Reynolds - was so constant a companion and informing an influence during Keats's productive years that it deserves the fullest attention from those who wish to understand the growth of his genius.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of this volume is the dense underlining it shows throughout A Lover's Complaint. The poem has been read closely and with enjoyment. Keats and Reynolds, parleying, it appears, through annotation, underline, endorse each other's underlining with verticals in the margin, redouble those, and add enthusiastic footnotes.

It is an orthodoxy of theatre history that from the termination of Charles Kean’s management at the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 and that of Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells in 1862 the English classical theatre endured an interregnum until Henry Irving established his own regime at the Lyceum in 1878. Exceptions are admitted: Charles Fechter’s romantic Hamlet (1861 and 1864) and the Bancrofts’ meticulously researched Merchant of Venice (1875), but for sustained continuity in Shakespearian revivals it is necessary to look north to Manchester, where the principles of Free Trade went hand in hand with the flowering of civic pride, creating, in Asa Briggs’s words, the ‘Symbol of a New Age’. There, in ‘Cottonopolis’, between 1864 and 1874, Charles Calvert mounted a sequence of twelve Shakespearian revivals, which his friend and coadjutant, the architect Alfred Darbyshire, described, in the language of his profession, as ‘the cope-stone of effort . . . placed upon the beautiful edifice raised by the metropolitan managers’.

The question of whether the first (1599) Globe theatre had a sign, and if so what it showed, is one that has teased scholars for some time. Sir Edmund Chambers set a tone of scepticism when he concluded his account of the Globe with the comments: ‘Malone conjectured that the name “Globe” was taken from the sign, “which was a figure of Hercules supporting the Globe, under which was written Totus mundus agit histrionem”. I do not know where he got this information.’ Ernest Schanzer demonstrated that Malone in fact got his information from the great Shakespearian scholar, George Steevens, who in turn possibly got it from the antiquarian William Oldys (1696–1761), which does not establish it as fact but at least takes it out of the realm of pure conjecture, where Chambers seemed to imply that it belonged. We do know that other contemporary playhouses boasted such signs. Johannes de Witt noted in 1596 that the two ‘more magnificent’ of the four theatres he saw around London were sited south of the Thames ‘and from the signs suspended before them are called the Rose and the Swan’.

In a year of exceptional financial crisis for the Royal Shakespeare Company, relieved at last (though only temporarily) by the promise of massive sponsorship from the Royal Insurance Company, a year during which the government made clear that funding for the arts would depend increasingly upon the private sector – including people who pay for tickets – theatregoers were offered a good selection of Shakespeare’s more popular histories, comedies, and tragedies, the only comparative rarity – Titus Andronicus – playing in a smaller auditorium, the Swan. And in spite of financial stringencies, the year saw performances, given in the provinces, at the Old Vic, and overseas, by a newly formed group, the English Shakespeare Company, in which the considerable but diverse talents of Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington unite in the effort ‘to produce and to tour large-scale classical drama’.

The new company's first production presented Parts One and Two of Henry IV along with Henry V as a cycle, and I saw all three plays at the Old Vic during a single day. Such theatrical endurance tests, though popular, are of doubtful validity. Of course, this one provided an opportunity to enjoy within a short space of time an extraordinary diversity of dramatic writing linked by a narrative thread. It also brought audiences together in a curious sort of bonding with their fellow theatregoers and the performers, with both of whom they experienced an unnaturally close relationship for a concentrated period of time.

When Peter Hall assumed the directorship of Stratford’s Memorial Theatre and founded The Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 he established a bold new direction in the modern staging of Shakespeare. Hall came to Stratford committed to building a permanent ensemble of actors who, through intense training and discipline, could discover a contemporary approach to Shakespeare’s rhetoric. As he explained in his 1964 essay, ‘Shakespeare and the Modern Director’, the core problem centred on Shakespeare’s language and modern assumptions about meaning:

'Editing might... be provisionally defined as a total waste of time which periodically reconstructs our image of the past.' Gary Taylor ends the first paragraph of his introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare's Textual Companion with this quip about the double-bind in which editors are caught: those who evade ridicule as pedantic drudges fussing over trivia expose themselves to charges of recklessness, presumption, and cultural vandalism.

Nobody is likely to dismiss the Oxford editors' prodigious labours as inconsequential drudgery. They have produced two separate volumes of Complete Works, one in old spelling and one modernized, that are spectacularly unlike any other. Reviewers wishing to convict them of 'hurlyburly innovation' that threatens a national monument as the Percies threatened King Henry the Fourth's state must somehow demolish Taylor's general defence of the editors' procedures, rebut the evidence supporting hypotheses about the textual histories of individual plays, and challenge the arguments with which the four editors have justified their choices of variants and their emendations. 'No edition of Shakespeare can or should be definitive', writes Taylor. 'Of the variety of possible and desirable undefinitive editions one asks only that they define their own aims and limitations: that they be selfconscious, coherent, and explicit about the ways in which they mediate between writer and reader' (TC, pp. 3-4).

In writing the comic episode of Malvolio's imprisonment, in the second scene of act four of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare created an action which is not altogether easy to transfer to the stage. In his own time, if we are to believe the direction in the Folio ('Maluolio within' (4.2.20.1)), it was performed with Malvolio entirely out of sight and speaking from the tiring house, possibly from behind one of the stage doors; Feste would have had the entire expanse of the platform stage on which to play his games of changing identities, and we might imagine that the actor would naturally have broadened his antics to retain contact with the audience. In an Elizabethan public theatre, action near the stage doors was well removed from most of the spectators.

Staged thus, the scene does establish an important visual point, in that it is a reversal of the 'box-tree' scene (2.5), during which Malvolio holds the prominent downstage position while the conspirators spy on him from concealment upstage. The comedy of this earlier scene, a theatrical chestnut, depends on our being able both to hear and to see Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Fabian as they watch their gull take the bait; their stealth and circumspection are preposterously inept, and as a result farcical stage business has quite rightly been a tradition of the scene in performance.

The list includes some amateur productions and adaptations. Information is taken from programmes, supplemented by reviews, held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library. Details have been verified wherever possible, but the nature of the material prevents corroboration in every case.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Theatre Clwyd, Mold; Theatre Royal, Haymarket: 26 May 1986-

Directors: Toby Robertson and Christopher Selbie

Designer: Simon Higlett

Cleopatra: Vanessa Redgrave

Antony: Timothy Dalton

See Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), pp. 181-3.

Played in repertory with The Taming of the Shrew.

AS YOU LIKE IT

Royal Exchange Company, Manchester: 9

Jan.-15 Feb.; and tour 7 April-17 May 1986

Director: Nicholas Hytner

Designer: Di Seymour

Rosalind: Janet McTeer

See Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), p. 174.

RSC at The Barbican, London, in rep: 12 Dec. 1985-

Director: Adrian Noble

Designer: Bob Crowley

Rosalind: Juliet Stevenson

See Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987), pp. 199-203, for a review of this production's Stratford run.

TAG Theatre Company, Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, at the Edinburgh Festival; and tour: 18 Aug.-10 Oct. 1986

Director: Ian Brown

Designer: Stewart Laing

An adaptation for seven actors, incorporating music and dance.

Just how did Shakespeare intend the dying Antony to be raised to Cleopatra in her monument? By what means? By whom? How high? To where? Was there a balustrade to get him over? Was there a window to get him through? These questions have long puzzled theatre historians, and a variety of ingenious answers has been offered.1 The text has become a basis for speculation on the physical characteristics of the Globe Theatre both because of and despite the fact that it provides no direction other than: 'They heave Antony aloft to Cleopatra (4.16.38.1). While it is usually assumed that more explicit stage directions are missing, it is also possible that what we have is sufficient and an indication that Shakespeare knew what he wanted and how it would be done. Certainly, given his theatrical experience, it is most unlikely that he would have created staging problems requiring complex and therefore expensive and restrictive solutions.

Emendations and additions proposed by most modern scholars are made in the belief that without them the raising of Antony would be disconcertingly and unsuitably awkward. Perhaps, however, we should consider whether Shakespeare intended exactly this effect, and we should begin by asking not 'how' but 'why' Antony is raised aloft.

‘The usefulness of QI is . . . that it throws light on the theatrical and textual history of Shakespeare’s play. It suggests something of the performances . . . for which such a version was provided, and it tells us something of the performances which the actor-reporter had known . . . The stage directions indicate not what the author envisaged but what an actor remembered actually taking place.’ Though Harold Jenkins here has Hamlet in mind, his observation is valid of all reported texts. A reported text, or ‘bad quarto’, has as its textual authority not authorial copy, nor authorial copy adapted for use in the playhouse, but an actual production of the play, usually, we suppose, one which has been in performance for some time and has, therefore, been theatrically ‘broken in’. An ideal bad quarto would be one which reported with absolute accuracy not a promptbook or any other written document, but what was said and what happened on stage, just as an ideal printed text would be one which reproduced its copy with total fidelity. But this is not an ideal world: reported texts are all mediated not only by the circumstances of their printing, but also by the memories of their reporters. This is at once their theatrical advantage and their textual downfall. A reporter who witnessed – and probably took part in – the performance he reports will recall with sometimes only indifferent accuracy what he heard said, but he will also recall what he saw and what sounds he heard, and he may preserve some of these non-verbal recollections in his report.

The orthodox account of the relationship between Shakespeare and his favourite classical poet, Ovid, proposes that it was explicit early in his career when his schoolboy reading of the Metamorphoses was fresh in his mind (thus Titus Andronicus, Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece are his most overtly Ovidian works), implicit in the metamorphic art of the comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream especially), and profoundly reawakened in the late romances. Put like this, there is an obvious gap which has occasioned surprisingly little critical attention: are we to suppose that an influence the importance of which was second to none early and late in Shakespeare's career was non-existent or dormant in the middle of it? This essay, which represents work in progress towards a full-scale revaluation of the question of Shakespeare and Ovid, uses Othello and King Lear as test cases in an attempt to read the mature tragedies in Ovidian terms.

One reason for the neglect of the tragedies' Ovidianism is the fact that the Metamorphoses tend to bring to mind the golden age, with its associations of the forest, the springtime, leisure, youth, and love. But Ovid described the age of iron too, and the language in which he does so may suggest to us the world of Shakespeare's tragedies.