In episode 3 of the satirical comedy Ten Per Cent – the English-language remake of French hit Call My Agent – resides a fine critique of contemporary British Shakespeare. Actor Dominic West, playing actor Dominic West, has been cast in a West End production of Hamlet directed by a young auteur called Robert. Robert has a clear concept for his production, seeing Hamlet’s narcissism and self-reflection as an indictment of selfie culture and social media, Hamlet’s solipsism as that of the twenty-first century. But West – forced to take selfies with Yorick’s skull, to film his own assault on Gertrude as he straddles her, to tweet his own soliloquies as he speaks them – can’t find the truth in this version of Hamlet, which is meant to be his big theatrical comeback.

Advertising the company’s 2021 tour of its three-person Romeo and Juliet, The Handlebards cheekily embraced the comical–tragical paradoxes of performing Shakespeare during an ongoing pandemic. Artwork featuring a masked Juliet (Lucy Green) and Romeo (Paul Moss) snogging passionately through two layers of fabric (Figure 18) acted as a neat encapsulation of a theatre returning to business, but not yet to business as usual. It also, to indulge in an over-reading, visualized the sense of being so near yet so far, a gratification muted by the necessary compromises that allowed in-person Shakespeare to take place in a limited capacity. But this photograph is also a reminder of the creative and self-reflexive ways in which companies worked to make Shakespeare happen around the country, complementing the rich vein of born-digital Shakespeare productions that continued throughout the year.

Paul Prescott concluded the last survey of Shakespeare productions outside London with mention of his favourite production of 2019, a Hamlet in Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. His injunction to remember that there is ‘a world elsewhere’ feels ever more timely in a year that has seen the UK government neglecting (or forgetting) Northern Ireland as it negotiates trade deals, and whose devolved policies on COVID-19 restrictions have made border crossings within mainland Britain an unusually fraught process. In inheriting this column – with its remit to cover productions in England outside London – the question of borders that separate Theatr Clwyd from Liverpool Everyman (my two local theatres growing up) or Watford Palace from the Globe (at what point is one outside London?) feels part and parcel of an England that too often forgets it is not, in John of Gaunt’s words, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’.

This chapter considers the ways in which filmmakers have established the ‘tragic universe’ in screen adaptations of Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, through attention to the environment. Filmmakers repeatedly foreground the interplay between human body, physical surroundings and filmic space in ways that foreground the tragic environment as subjectively experienced and produced, and in turn see that environment producing and influencing its human subjects. The chapter moves between three kinds of tragic environment. The open spaces of films by Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Justin Kurzel, and Grigori Kozintsev frame human conflict within the natural world, a world that often suffers ecological catastrophe alongside its inhabitants, but which also endures. Another strand of films, including work by Michael Almereyda, Penny Woolcock, Don Boyd and Vishal Bhardwaj, establishes urban environments that privilege an interpretive focus on community, claustrophobia, consumption, and class. Finally, other filmmakers from Laurence Olivier to Kit Monkman, as well as directors of stage-to-screen adaptations, utilise cinematic technique to foreground inner psychological space, with environments constructed subjectively around their protagonists.

Following a number of years which have seen major new Complete Works volumes or brand-new series of editions, 2018–19 was a quieter year for Shakespeare editions, with one new Arden, a rare Variorum, and a large number of second and third issues of pre-existing editions with minor updates. Collectively – and in concert with a number of excellent books aimed at newcomers to textual studies – they represent an effort to update and revise knowledge, with a focus on entry points into interpreting the Shakespearian text and understanding the afterlives of plays and poems.

Following two years that have featured major new Complete Works projects, 2017–18 has been something of a year of consolidation and diversification in the world of Shakespeare editing. The projects surveyed in this essay comprise primarily new introductions, revised editions and a new series reorienting the Arden Shakespeare at practitioners. The reframing of existing edited texts at new audiences has been accompanied by some thoughtful work reflecting on both the history and future of Shakespeare in print, making this a good year to reflect on how today’s texts are shaping future histories.