Here am I presuming to adjudicate between actors and scholars, when I am not an actor and certainly no scholar. My only excuse is the old saying that “the onlooker sees most of the game”; and certainly in the last eight years and more I have been kept busy peeping at it from the touchline. For I have had the job, the very delightful job, of reporting for Shakespeare Survey on current productions. The delight lies in this, that my reporting has not had to be hurried, and I have had full time to browse. The regular critic, poor man, must telephone his notice to his paper as soon as the performance is ended—sometimes, we suspect, well before; and that is that. The Survey reporter, however, can wait to garner in not only the initial, the overall, impression of a production, but later amplifications and modifications of these first reactions. In other words he can go back and back, to see the play at different stages in its run and to concentrate in turn on particular elements in it.

Major Shakespearian productions run from knight to knight. The Old Vic 1956–7 season opened with a production by the theatre’s director, Michael Benthall, which brought back Sir Ralph Richardson to Shakespeare’s stage in Timon of Athens. The final production of the Stratford-upon-Avon 1957 season restored Sir John Gielgud’s Prospero (much changed since he was seen at the Old Vic in 1940) in a production of The Tempest by Peter Brook which had Drury Lane stamped all over it and was to transfer to that capacious cavern for what was once the pantomime season.

Sir Ralph's Timon and Sir John's Prospero were cousins once removed. Richardson's misanthrope in the wilderness was no vituperative, half-naked poor Tom. In his sheepskin coat he was protected against rough weather if not from man's ingratitude. His revulsion from human greed for gold was a molten melancholy that seethed inside him, not a volcano spitting scalding satire on all comers. Gielgud's Prospero came half-way back to meet him.

The Scudamore family, from whose papers the following excerpts are drawn, was an ancient one, with its seat at Holme-Lacy in the county of Hereford. Sir John Scudamore, who received the first letter quoted, was Gentleman Usher to Queen Elizabeth, Standard-bearer to the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners and one of the Council for the Marches of Wales. He sat in five Parliaments for the County of Herefore, was Custos Rotulorum and High Sheriff in 1581, a close friend of Sir Thomas Bodley, and a contributor to his Library. His son, Sir James, was the prototype of Sir Scudamore in the Faerie Queene.

The remainder of the following letters were addressed to Sir James's son, Sir John. Born in 1601, he was made a baronet on 1 June 1620, and became a follower of Buckingham. After being created Baron Dromore and Viscount Scudamore of Sligo on 1 July 1628, he retired to his seat, but kept informed of events by means of weekly newsletters from London. At the close of 1634 Charles appointed him Ambassador to France, a post which he filled from June 1635 until January 1639. While in Paris he kept in touch with his old friend Laud, and entertained Hobbes, Sir Kenelm Digby and Milton when they were there. He introduced Milton to Grotius in May 1638.

Two volumes have now been added to the New Cambridge Shakespeare: Pericles, edited by J. C. Maxwell, and Othello, jointly edited by Alice Walker and John Dover Wilson. Editing Pericles is a thankless job. The only text is a wretched repot, and no one but himself is likely to be satisfied with any editor’s solution of the problem of single or dual authorship. Maxwell is conservative in rejecting the suggestion that there was an Ur-Pericles and in believing in dual authorship. He is sound in dismissing George Wilkins, author of a prose romance about Pericles that is essentially a narrative report of the King’s Men’s play, as a collaborator; and he is courageous in checking doubtful readings in the play against the text of the novel. He disagrees with Mr Philip Edwards, a believer in Shakespeare’s sole authorship, who has argued that the extant text is the product of two reporters, the first of whom did incalculably greater damage to Shakespeare’s Acts I and II than his fellow did to Acts III–IV; and although he corrects Edwards in some details he does not, in my opinion, upset his hypothesis. Maxwell cannot decide whether Shakespeare had a collaborator or took a poor play and after touching up the first part wrote the last three acts afresh. If there was a collaborator, Maxwell inclines towards Thomas Heywood, though he admits that he cannot explain how a dramatist for the Queen’s Men offered a manuscript to the King’s or acquiesced in Shakespeare’s rewriting it.

There is magic enough in Shakespeare, of one kind or another, from his very first play onwards. We may be inclined to reject Talbot’s conception of the Pucelle, in 1 Henry VI , as a witch, a servant of the Devil, and a sorceress, as inconsistent with her characterization and speeches, until we reach Act V, Scene iii, when we unexpectedly find her busy with spells and conjuration of fiends who appear only to indicate the end of their intervention on her behalf. In comedy, Puck’s first entry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduces the theme of magic fairy power which is the motive force in the geometrical plot of four lovers of changing allegiance. It may well be doubted whether in either play the possible relation of the fictional magic to current beliefs and superstitions was of any consequence to the dramatist or to the audience. It was not so in some of Shakespeare’s later plays, in Macbeth or in The Tempest, for example. In them it is a matter of importance that the magic which lies at the dramatic heart of the play should find a response in the serious attention of the audience.

It is noteworthy that the element of the supernatural should play an increasing part in the plays of Shakespeare's last period. In The Tempest, of course, it is all-pervasive. In Cymbeline an elaborate and spectacular vision embodies a dream of the sleeping Posthumus in prison. A soothsayer reports a private vision portending success to the Roman wars in Britain, and at the end of the play expounds the oracular message discussed by Posthumus upon his awakening. Both prophetic visions are accomplished in the event. In The Winter's Tale the oracle of Apollo speaks and is reported at the trial of Hermione who has put herself upon his judgement. The oracle convinces Leontes of his injustice and he accepts the divine punishment inflicted upon him in the death of Mamillius and the apparent death of Hermione.

The experience of time makes us aware of both cycle and crisis. On the one hand, today repeats yesterday’s pattern and foreshadows tomorrow’s, the seasons revolve, and the life-patterns of the generations are at one with each other. On the other hand, we have the notion of the decisive happening, the moment of truth and of choice, beyond which there is no going back, no recurrence of what preceded that special point of time. In forms of art that make use of the time-dimension—literature, music, drama, film—both these aspects will potentially exist, and either may receive the greater stress. The opposing extremes can be illustrated in the news-reel (for cinema or television) and the documentary film. In the first, there is the record of a unique event, the coronation of a queen, the marriage or burial of a popular figure, a conflagration, or an incident from war: each of these is presented to us as a moment with interesting causes and effects, a key-moment in a series. In the second, there is the suggestion of a recurrent pattern, the making of a particular product, the general habit of life of a community, the passing of the seasons within one spatial context. Dylan Thomas’ radio-play, Under Milk Wood, is an obvious example of this cyclic representation, despite the poet’s highly individual interpretation of life in Llaregyb; so too is Georges Rouquier’s film Farrébique, ou les quatre saisons; and Vladimir and Estragon, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, spend each day in the same pattern of waiting and improvised stratagem. On a different scale, we find a similar phenomenon in the long novel that merely narrates a hero’s adventures, suggesting both the variety within the individual life-pattern and the near-repetition of that pattern within a particular community. Jack Wilton and Nicholas Nickleby are not individualized and are basically unaffected by event: their stories are only nominally theirs. But in the generality of writing the cyclic representation tends to be less extreme.

It would be vainglory to suggest that recent criticism has succeeded in justifying the large claims it has made for Shakespeare’s Romances. Though we may be convinced, because of the constant insistence, that the Romances are important, it is hard to point to the critic who has shown where the importance lies. At any rate, a retrospect of this century’s work on the last plays has little progress to report. “We cannot enlarge our conceptions,” said Hazlitt, “we can only shift our point of view.” The chronological story of the changing attitude to the Romances is often told; to repeat it here would give a false impression of organic development. The views of Dowden, Strachey and Wilson Knight do not act out Tillyard’s tragic scheme of Prosperity, Destruction and Regeneration. Although critics may see themselves as moving on from positions already reached, confounding the errors and enlarging on the hints of those who have preceded them, the chart of criticism over the years shows no continuous course, but a series of different vectors from different starting points. To make any sense out of the record of twentieth-century criticism of Shakespeare’s last plays, with its bewildering disagreements on what the plays contain, it is essential to discuss criticism in the light of the assumptions the writers make about literature. This essay is more of an attempt to distinguish between the prevailing critical attitudes to the Romances in the last fifty years than an account of work done. I have chosen some two dozen studies in order to illustrate the four or five main critical approaches and the different conclusions which writers using a similar approach may come to. I am particularly sorry that this scheme, partly because it is rather arbitrarily selective and partly because it gives weight to criticism relating to the Romances as a group, does not allow me to discuss many important studies of individual plays.

Since the Blackfriars playhouse was famous for its music, it is interesting to find a musician among the sharers in the Revels company early in the reign of James Ⅰ. Martin Peerson wrote music for the voice, and it is possible—though this is conjecture—that he may have helped train the boys’ voices and may have composed or arranged songs for the Blackfriars, as Marston, another sharer, wrote plays. The Children of the Chapel began to act at the Blackfriars in 1600, when Richard Burbage leased the theatre to Henry Evans. On Twelfth Night, 1600/1, the boys presented before Queen Elizabeth “a showe with musycke and speciall songes”. Songs star their plays, from Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster to The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Their patent of 1610, after the boys had left the Blackfriars to the King’s Men, includes the name of another musician, Philip Rosseter.

The sources of Cymbeline are sufficiently known. What now are we to do with them? Source-hunting offers its own satisfactions and it is an acceptable mode of conspicuous leisure, but it should be possible still to bring it to bear more closely on the problems of literary criticism. Its bearing, however, may differ from play to play. It is salutary, for instance, to recognize that striking debt owed by The Tempest to travel literature. When we find that Shakespeare’s contemporaries allegorized the historical event we may more readily discount E. E. Stoll’s scepticism about allegory in the play. I think, too, that the play sheds a backward light upon its sources, making us more alive to their dramatic and poetic potential.

Cymbeline is a different problem. It is not so self-evident a masterpiece. There is the common passage and there is the strain of rareness. The sources and analogues could be used to explain away whatever fails to make an immediate, effacing impression. But they have too, I think, a more positive value. They can show that many of the play's uniquely impressive effects could have been won only out of that specific area of convention that Shakespeare chose to explore. Within this area we can distinguish something like a dramatic genre, and as a label we might take Polonius' infelicity 'historical-pastoral' or, in deference to received opinion, 'historical romance'. Such labels are useful because they tell us what sort of conventions to look out for, although each play is apt to define its own area, make its own map. My emphasis will be on the 'historical', for there is, I think, a way of reading the sources which lends support to Wilson Knight's claim that Cymbeline is to be regarded "mainly as an historical play"

This engraving is in the collection of prints bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by the antiquary, Francis Douce. The press-mark is Douce Prints, Portfolio 138, no. 89. No other copy is known, and it is shown here, in reduced facsimile, for the first time. The original measures some 11 ⅞ × 8 ⅜ inches. Of the printseller, Thomas Geele, little is known. His name appears in the imprint of the 1630 reprint of Baziliwlogia, a series of engravings of English monarchs. In the first issue the imprint reads: “Printed for H: Holland, and are to be sold by Comp: Holland ouer against th’exchange 1618”: in 1630 this becomes “Are to be sould by Thomas Geele at the dagger in Lumbard street 1630”. His name is not found on the title of the reprints of 1628, 1638, and 1662. For information about another set of prints published by Geele I am indebted to Professor W. A. Jackson. He issued c. 1626 and from the same address a set of twelve plates illustrating the Months, with verses signed on the last plate “A[braham]. H[olland].” (Abraham Holland, who died in 1626, Henry Holland, and possibly Compton Holland were sons of Philemon Holland of Coventry, the “translator-general in his age”.) The only copy traced is in the Huth (now Harvard) copy of Nicholas Breton’s Fantasticks (1626). There they are bound up at the appropriate places, but as they are found only in this copy and as they illustrate Breton’s text only in the most general way, the probability is that they were not made for the book.

[The following notes refer to the article on 'Hamlet Costumes' by D. A. Russell in Shakespeare Survey, 9.]

In his 'Hamlet Costumes from Garrick to Gielgud', D. A. Russell makes reference to our Hamlet Through the Ages (1952; second impression, revised and enlarged, 1955). Though not actually quoting us wrongly, he does by certain mistakes give the impression that we must be in error in our information. We are glad of this opportunity to correct a number of factual errors in the article, which, lest they might lead others astray, need correction. We propose to deal with the text and illustrations together in order, and to note only factual errors, not those of interpretation.

1. Plate I, 2 is not an engraving of Samuel Foote, who only played Hamlet during his first engagement at the Haymarket in 1744. It is a picture of John F. Foote, who played Hamlet at Drury Lane on 12 November 1802. This completely destroys the author's idea that any costume other than contemporary dress was used before the advent of Kemble in 1783.

2. Plate I, 3. Henderson is depicted in the grave-yard scene, in which Hamlet would naturally not be wearing royal insignia, being hastily returned from England.

3. …

In his handsomely produced pictorial biography of Shakespeare, F. E. Halliday dresses up the facts with some genially sentimental speculation, discovering the profound effect on the play-wright of the death of Hamnet, and the inspiration his grand-daughter provided for the last plays; it is all most enjoyable and should have a wide appeal to Stratford audiences fresh from the theatre. At least this book shows how many facts are known about Shakespeare’s life, and perhaps not many more will be discovered; this year has produced only a further note on his possible acquaintances. But in view of the endless spate of speculation which is so often presented as if it were fact, Robert Adger Law has performed a useful service in comparing three recent works relating to Shakespeare’s early life and career, and showing not only that each is unfounded, but that they mutually contradict one another. It is not easy for critics to avoid some prejudice or distortion in their account of the poet, as is brought out by Horst Oppel, who surveys a variety of beliefs ranging from the assertion that he was the most characteristic figure of his age, to the claim that he was the least typical: these extreme attitudes illustrate the difficulty of seeing Shakespeare as fully belonging to his own age, and also as a unique artist distanced by his universality from his contemporaries, and Oppel suggests that a right perspective would reconcile both views. A right perspective eludes W. Schrickx, who presents a Shakespeare too passionately interested in the squabbles of Harvey, Nashe and Greene to be credible. He would relate Love’s Labour’s Lost and an early draft of As You Like It, dating these in 1592–3, to their pamphlet war, finding parallels and allusions everywhere; the trouble is that assumptions multiplied do not approach certainty, as the author seems to think, and their importance for the interpretation of the plays is at best marginal.

Bonamy Dobrée, alarmed at some recent criticism of Shakespeare, reminds us, in a civilized essay, that the plays were, after all, written to be enjoyed; and Ernest Barker, equally alarmed by the application of the techniques of classical scholarship to the text of Shakespeare, asks for the use of imagination and common sense in the interpretation of the plays. Although these warnings are salutary, there are a few books published each year which add to our understanding without detracting from our enjoyment. In the period under review the most stimulating criticism is to be found in M. M. Mahood’s study of Shakespeare’s quibbles. Expanding her essay entitled ‘The Fatal Cleopatra’, and applying its ideas to five plays and the sonnets, Miss Mahood provides the first comprehensive study of the subject. Not only does she throw light on scores of passages, but she also increases our understanding of the subtlety and complexity of Shakespeare’s style and meaning. In her last chapter she outlines Shakespeare’s chaning attitude to the problem of meaning, and shows that in the tragic period there is a conflict between “the world of words and the world of facts”.

Recently, the Shakespeare Institute acquired a portrait of the Moorish ambassador to Elizabeth in 1600—a portrait which is of considerable interest to students of history, of art and of the theatre (Plate ). For the historian it gives character to an episode, nowhere fully recorded, in the diplomatic relations between England and Barbary. It forms, too, a handsome and out-of-the-common addition to the gallery of Tudor portraits. For those concerned with the theatre its interest is twofold. First, although it lacks the direct relevance to stage-history attaching to Peacham’s sketch of Aaron, it may well assist a producer of The Merchant of Venice when he comes to the stage-direction, “Enter Morochus, a tawny Moore all in white”. The second point of theatrical interest is at once more speculative and much more significant. The picture presents “ocular proof” of what the Elizabethans saw as a Moor of rank, one whose presence with his companions in London a year or so before the usually agreed date of Othello caused much contemporary comment. Idle speculation, of course, must be curbed; but at least we are entitled to wonder whether an audience alert for the topical would not look for a true Barbarian on their stage. This ambassador from Mauretania, we have to remember, was Othello’s countryman. Iago refers to his master as a “Barbary horse” and elsewhere uses the term “barbarian”; after the dismissal from Cyprus, he tells Roderigo that Othello is going to Mauretania, a lie designed to imply the general’s final disgrace—his loss of high office among Christians and his ignominious return to his own people.

Most of the Elizabethan beliefs about music remain with us as familiar myths whose full implications are ignored. We know of the Platonic notion of the music of the spheres and of the Orpheus legend. We are aware, too, that for a Christian age there was literal truth in Job, xxxviii. 7: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy”, and in the singing and playing of the angels before the throne of God in Revelation. The faculty which has tended to desert us with the passing of time is that of being permanently conscious of and responsive to the place of music in the Elizabethan scheme of things, of seeing it not simply as a diversion but as an act of faith, and as something no less essential to the overall pattern than the concepts of degree, the body politic, the elements and humours, and the like. Since, moreover, the dance was associated with music as a heavenly dispensation, Elizabethan attitudes are not easily borne in mind in an age like ours, when music in general is secular in intention, and that which accompanies the dance has little perceptible connexion with belief, religious or otherwise.