Barely ten years after John Batman, one of the first settlers in Victoria, had made a treaty with the aborigines which the central government a few years later decided to ignore, Othello was played in Melbourne. It was the first Shakespeare play to be staged in the colony, on 4 September 1843, under the management of Conrad Knowles, in a wooden shed in Bourke Street which seated 500 and was called the Pavilion. It was astonishing that Shakespeare was produced at all, for instead of the ‘fashionable’ house that The Port Phillip Gazette anticipated, Knowles had to contend with wild, unruly audiences. When he played Shylock in September ‘certain parties were refused admission to the dress circle’. This was the Yahoo period of Australian stage history when barbarism reigned triumphant.

The hope that more 'fashionable' audiences might turn up led to the construction of a new playhouse at the corner of Little Bourke and Queen Street, begun in August, 1843, and completed with tortoise-like speed in 1845. Francis Nesbitt, the best-known Shakespearian actor of the day after Knowles, became its manager. The Queen's Theatre, larger than the Pavilion, could hold 800 persons; by London standards it was considered a 'little theatre', but for the next eight years it changed nothing. Audiences remained buoyantly insensitive.

IN GENERAL!: CRITICAL QUESTIONS, TRENDS, APPROACHES

‘You are confusing two concepts,’ wrote Chekhov, ‘The solution of a problem and the correct posing of a question. Only the second is obligatory for an artist.’ This observation seems obviously relevant to Shakespeare’s works and, by extension, to critical interpretations of them. Indeed, some of the most interesting essays published recently seem designed, not to posit final solutions, but to consider the ways in which various questions are posed within the works themselves. Representative discussions of The Merchant of Venice may serve to illustrate these points.

In his article on ' The Jew and Shylock', D. M. Cohen confronts, head-on, the problems posed by the overt anti-Semitism of Shakespeare's text. Cohen concludes that critical arguments whereby (a) Shylock is 'a better man than we might be disposed to believe', or (b) that he is' not really human', or that (c) the play is not anti-Jewish (just anti-Shylock), simply cannot account for the 'fear and shame that Jewish viewers and readers have always felt from the moment of Shylock's entrance to his final exit'. These feelings, Cohen argues, represent a more honest and accurate response to the text than sophisticated rationalizations which attempt to 'exonerate Shakespeare from the charge of Semitism'.

It has for some time been fashionable to view the four young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a group with little individual characterization. Stanley Wells, in his Introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play (Harmondsworth, 1967), wrote:

The last sentence suggests that much of the characters’ individuality must depend on the physical characteristics and mannerisms of the actors, and such externals as costume. Harold Brooks, on the other hand, in the new Arden edition of the play (1979), concedes that Demetrius and Lysander ‘ are very properly not endowed with much distinctive character’, but finds Helena and Hermia ‘ strongly contrasted in temperament’ (pp. cx-cxi). His conclusion derives from a survey of the lovers' actions. It seems to me, however, that a study of the lovers' use of language reveals that Shakespeare took some pains to endow each of the four with a distinct personality.

Since Francis Douce’s pioneering study of the ‘clowns and fools’ of the Elizabethan stage, a good deal of scholarly scrutiny and critical interpretation has been directed towards Shakespeare’s use of his inheritance from popular drama in general and from traditions of fooling in particular. But compared with the detailed studies that have been devoted to the serious dramatic functions that Shakespeare developed for the solo-turn exemplified by Launce’s monologues in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the porter scene in Macbeth, that other familiar routine of popular comedy–the double-act–has been somewhat neglected. William Willeford traces the origins of the ‘knockabout fool pair’ to the interplay between the Devil and the Vice in the Tudor moralities; and Austin Gray identifies the comic personalities of the actors Will Kemp and Dick Cowley behind the long line of Shakespearian double-acts, from Launce and Speed to the grave-diggers in Hamlet, offering this account of the relationship between the stooge and the lead comedian:

Many studies of Othello confront as a vital problem what they see as some inherent randomness in the play. The current agreement, too, that the work is a ‘domestic tragedy’ may more tacitly voice the same reaction, depending as it seems to do on Bradley’s sense of the play as less great than the others of the Big Four, because the dramatist had not fully succeeded in universalizing his materials – a judgement that brings us back to that ‘randomness’ again. This widespread reaction among readers and critics is not my subject here; I want to use it only to suggest that if that randomness really does survive in Othello as an achieved work of art, then it surely originates from the play’s main source, Cinthio’s prose narrative. It is hard for a reader of Shakespeare not to define literary merit as quantity of meaning – even in a case like Othello where the ‘meaning’ in a higher sense is still distinctly moot; the play, despite all the doubt, means a good deal to us. Of merit or meaning in that sense Cinthio’s story has little. Given what we cannot help finding the mere externality of its avowed moral, its only meaning lies in the purposiveness of the Ensign’s love-jealousy; when Shakespeare removes or blurs this he leaves what remains of the narrative as a succession of events that are’ cruel’, almost in the modern sense of ‘absurd’.

The notable work of the year in Textual Studies has been the support and momentum given to the thesis that there are two texts of King Lear, both Shakespearian, both acceptable. The year has produced one article and two book-length studies of the problem. The article ‘The War in “ King Lear ”’, by Gary Taylor, was noticed in these columns after its oral presentation in 1980. An important contribution to the argument, it reinforces the position taken by Steven Urkowitz in Shakespeare’s Revision of ‘ King Lear’. One chapter in this volume, ‘The Role of Albany in the Quarto and Folio’, argues in detail the position advanced by Michael J. Warren in his seminal paper delivered at the International Shakespeare Association Congress in 1976, but the remarkable value of the study resides in Urkowitz’s keen sense of the dramatic spectacle–action on stage. ‘Variants [from the Quarto] in the Folio text introduce complex changes in characterization [e.g. Albany], as well as simpler adjustments in the rhythms and the sense of dialogues. Major variants also create new designs for individual scenes and for the succession of scenes. Other significant variants present revised instructions to individual actors and to groups of actors for their entrances and exits. . . . With only one or two exceptions, . . . [all of these] variants may be seen as intentional revisions, in the light of the ordinary dramatic practices of Shakespeare and his acting company’ (p. 17).

It has long been held that Shakespeare reflects abiding human truths, the greatness and endurance of his plays flowing from their knowledge about life and from the poetic grandeur expressing this. I would not deny our author's 'universality', but I hope to redefine it, examining less 'what he has to say' than a coherence of materials and theme, historical context and cognitive form which makes communication with audiences possible at all.

To suggest this, however modestly in such an essay, I use methods pioneered by Claude Levi- Strauss which, in turn, reinforce insights of Marx. The discussion is, without question, preliminary (even of the dramas selected); yet it may be considered self-sufficient, and is intended as provocative of later research whose final achievements may require computers and Boolean algebra. Using orthodox general interpretations of The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream, I do not struggle to impose new fundamental readings. Instead, I hope to identify something of how and why particular dramatic rhythms engaged Shakespeare's imagination, and therefore something of how and why they continue to attract us who bear a like (although inferior) sensibility - one compounded of socially-educated responses and yet, perhaps, also of cognitively innate predispositions.

Bradley’s disquiet at the new King’s rejection of Falstaff at the end of 2 Henry IV continues to be suggestive because it raises so vividly questions about dramatic presentation and construction. Bradley is constantly bringing us up against the problem of how personal relations in the plays are constituted: How do the Prince and Falstaff communicate? How do we understand their relationship? Does the Prince have any affection for Falstaff? How would such affection be displayed? And alongside these are questions of structure: How is the conclusion prepared for? Which movements in the play culminate in this cruel confrontation? One way of approaching these problems is by looking at those of Bradley’s remarks which draw attention to the structure of the plays by suggesting that Shakespeare might have written them differently.

Bradley considers two ways in which Shakespeare might have tried to improve the plays. First, he might have strengthened sympathy for the Prince, or at least have provided him with some protection against charges of coldness and cruelty. This would not have been too difficult because it is obvious where Hal went wrong: 'He ought in honour long ago to have given Sir John to understand that they must say good-bye on the day of his accession' (p. 254).

The trouble with characterization is that we think we know what character is, or rather we think we know where it is and what kind of discourse best describes it. We think, or at least we generally speak as if we think, that it is to be found inside people, and we answer questions about character with summaries of inner qualities. This is a reasonable procedure and, it should be stressed, not a recent one. Nevertheless, it is true that in the past 150 years or so the description has tended more and more to stress the problematical and the psychological; character is seen as elusive, a subject for puzzle and argument, depending on the difficult and never entirely satisfactory attempt to chart the way someone’s mind works. And debate about dramatic character is likely to turn on whether it is reasonable to expect this kind of novelistic presentation of character from plays, especially plays written before the nineteenth century.

It is at this point that the discussion of character in drama becomes dangerously tangled, through the operation of hidden assumptions. For the implication in the typical debate 1 have described is that the psychological discourse of novels and novelizing psychology is the most accurate form for describing character in what we helplessly refer to as real life. But does our experience of other people correspond more to the helpful summaries of a novel or to the un-narratized encounters of a play?

An interest in Shakespeare’s characters is as old as an interest in Shakespeare himself. Among the earliest allusions to his plays in the early seventeenth century we find tributes to the drawing-power of Falstaff, or Hamlet, or Malvolio, and among the earliest pieces of formal literary criticism are praises for his skill in creating characters: in general terms by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle in 1662 (vol. 1, pp. 42 ff.), and more specifically by Dryden in his accounts of Falstaff (vol. 1, pp. 139 ff., 257 ff.) and Caliban (p. 260). Commentary on the characters continued as part of the discussion of a play under the traditional neoclassical categories of action, plot, characters, manners, instruction, diction and so on: we find discussions of varying lengths and subtlety by Rymer, Dennis, Rowe, Gildon, Steele, John Hughes, Lewis Theobald, Warburton, George Stubbes, Joseph Warton, Upton, Kames, and of course Dr Johnson. Such criticism is to be found in the footnotes to editions, in periodical and other essays, all of which give a complete account of the plays.

By far the most exciting book I have read in the last twelve months within the general category of ‘Life, Times and Stage’ is Philip Edwards’s masterly study of Elizabethan and Irish drama in relation to emergent nationalism. Most of the material which the author considers, whether plays or masques on the one hand or historical information on the other, is thoroughly familiar, which makes his achievement in juxtaposing them to make them yield new insights into both drama and history all the more striking. Among the many fine things in the book is an excellent account of court masque with a keen-edged discussion of flattery and the moral problems raised by it for Jonson as masque-maker, as well as the connection between the ‘flattering’ and the ‘nonflattering’ works. This occurs within a widerranging inquiry into the way in which Jonson ‘theorized on, dramatized and lived out his view of the relationship between prince and poet’ which illustrates very well Professor Edwards’s gift for setting familiar material in a new and revealing light. Similarly stimulating is the comment that in The Tempest Shakespeare finds room for both epic and burlesque views of colonization, or that in the Histories national pride is transformed from belief into longing, or the inquiry prompted by the question: why, around 1630, should two of England’s leading dramatists (Massinger and Ford) choose to write a play sympathetic to a defeated pretender to the throne?

Can realism have anything to do with reality? I answer, yes, it can, but find that this innocent response now needs a careful defence. In his introduction to the eleventh issue of Communications, the issue devoted to vraisemblance, Tsvetan Todorov writes, ‘A work is described as having verisimilitude in so far as it tries to make us believe that it conforms to the real and not to its own laws; in other words, the vraisemblable is the mask in which the laws of the text are dressed up, a mask which we are supposed to take for relation to reality.’ We have here an assumption and a thesis. Todorov assumes that conformity to the real and conformity to literary laws are mutually exclusive; if you are doing the one you can’t be doing the other. And he asserts that artists in fact do the second; that, even when they claim to be addressing reality, they are really doing something quite different, namely following the laws of literature.

I submit that this assumption is wrong and that the thesis is by consequence also wrong. Reference to the real, so far from being at odds with adherence to convention, actually presupposes it. This is most obviously true at the level of language, which is endlessly formulaic, endlessly conventional. But if language cannot refer to reality we may as well all go home. It is fashionable to speak of the mysterious void which yawns between language and the world, a void constituted by the fatal heterogeneity of words and objects. But if words were indistinguishable from objects they could not be used to refer or designate. You don't point at a cat with a cat, you use your finger or a stick - or a word.

Relatively early in Shakespeare’s career the minor poet John Weever affirmed the devotion of ‘thousands’ of spectators or readers to Romeo, Richard and others of Shakespeare’s characters, his ‘children’ as the heavy–handed eulogist dubs them. In the movement of opinion that established Shakespeare as the supreme dramatic poet in the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, progressively clearing him of reproach for offending against the neoclassical rules of construction, his gift of character portrayal was the outstanding theme for praise and wonder, and character study became the leading occupation of criticism. And the Elizabethan’s metaphor of fatherhood, biological creation, re–emerged as an accepted critical fiction, almost a critical doctrine. Pope had repeated that Shakespeare was an instrument of nature, not a mere copier, and had said that each of his people was as distinct as an individual in real life; Johnson added, with a different emphasis, that this lifelikeness was not the result of any searching after personal idiosyncrasies but of Shakespeare’s truth to typical human nature; others, like Morgann, began to treat the plays like psychological case–books, probing the depths of separate characters as if they were independent human beings. What impressed the commentators so forcibly was not merely the wealth of observation revealed by Shakespeare’s people but their air of spontaneity, of free–standing autonomy, uninhibited by theatrical contrivance.

The social dimension in Shakespeare’s conception of character suggests itself perhaps most strikingly when Ulysses, in pursuing his well-devised strategy of ‘strangeness’ and ‘pride’ towards Achilles, is made to remark

The weight of the passage, over and beyond the immediate scheme of the Greek general, is underlined by Ulysses himself in his earlier reference to that 'strange fellow' who

One of the embarrassments of writing about Shakespeare is to discover when one appears in print that, as Hector remarked about Troilus and Paris, one has glozed but superficially on the question at issue. I grew up in the age of Bradley; and, like most Shakespearians of my generation, I was later influenced by the criticisms made of his method by Edgar Elmer Stoll, Lily Bess Campbell, Levin Schücking, and L. C. Knights. I came to assume that Bradley read subtleties into the plays which would have astonished an Elizabethan audience or, indeed, the poet himself; that he was too little aware of theatrical considerations; and that (as Knights put it) he did not know that Macbeth was more like The Waste Land than A Doll’s House. In fact, as we now know, Bradley was a keen playgoer and he always believed and asserted that Shakespeare’s plays were essentially dramatic poems. Some of the most memorable passages in his Shakespearean Tragedy are on a subject he professedly omitted – the poetry of the plays; while, on the other hand, the most memorable passages of his critics are not those where the plays are considered specifically as dramatic poems, but rather those which concentrate on the moral issues raised in them.

The Arden Shakespeare has graced the year with the publication of two volumes, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, so happily paired that we are tempted to suppose that the General Editors, joined now by Brian Morris, planned it that way from the beginning. It is not so, of course, for Brian Gibbons, the successor to the late John Crow in the editorship of Romeo and Juliet, began his work ‘from scratch in 1973’; and Harold F. Brooks confesses in his preface that ‘ A Midsummer Night’s Dream has had a pre-eminent place’ in his affections since the afternoon in 1914 when he attended Granville-Barker’s golden production. It is not too much to say that Brooks’s edition, bearing yet the marks of that inspiration, began at that matinée.

The conjunction of the two volumes sharpens our perspective on the relationships between the two plays. The most interesting of these to this reviewer is the question of dating. Brooks assembles all possible material on the date of A Midsummer Night's Dream from literary, topical, occasional, and stylistic considerations (twenty-three pages) and concludes that it 'was composed in the winter of 1595-6, for the Carey wedding' on 19 February 1596 (p. lvii) and that it probably followed Romeo and Juliet (p. xliii).