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Index
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- 02 January 1948, pp 134-144
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International News
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- 02 January 1948, pp 112-117
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Summary
As has been noted above, no attempt is made by Shakespeare Survey to provide either a complete bibliography of recent writings on Shakespeare or a catalogue of his plays in production. In the following pages selection has been made—chiefly from the reports of our correspondents—with the object of presenting a general picture of the Shakespearian scene and of stressing what appear to be the most interesting and noteworthy trends.
Audiences in Great Britain have had an opportunity of seeing numerous Shakespearian dramas presented on the boards, and it is encouraging to observe how widely spread these performances have been—thanks largely to the Arts Council's sponsorship of local repertory and touring companies. Not only have many among the better-known plays thus been brought before audiences outside of London: these audiences have on occasion had the privilege of witnessing performances of works rarely given on the stage. Although it is impossible to review all of these productions, some indication of their scope is given elsewhere in this volume. The one fact that England has had four presentations of King Lear may be taken as a symbol of recent activities in this direction.
If the theatrical record here is encouraging, a dash of disappointment must be felt when Shakespeare's fortunes in other parts of the English-speaking world are brought under review. Perhaps no surprise need be experienced when we note the rarity of his appearance on the stage in the rest of the Commonwealth, since we fully appreciate with what peculiar difficulties theatrical endeavour in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa has to contend. Although interest in Shakespeare is strong in all these countries, the paucity of professional companies offers but few chances for more than occasional performances of the plays. Indeed, the only production of this kind that has been reported by our correspondents is that of Hamlet—and that was an Afrikaans version by L. I. Coertze, given at Johannesburg by the African Consolidated Theatres in May 1947.
Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre
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- 02 January 1948, pp 38-50
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It is necessary at the outset in a discussion of this sort to place Shakespeare in what seems to me his proper context—a context which none but the Baconians and Oxfordians deny, but which most scholars and critics tend to ignore. That context is the London commercial theatre and the organized professional acting troupe.
Shakespeare was more completely and continuously involved with theatres and acting companies than any other Elizabethan dramatist whose life we know. Most Elizabethan dramatists had only their writing connection with the theatres, but Shakespeare belonged to the small group which both wrote and acted. In this small group of actor-dramatists, the best-known names are those of Heywood, Rowley, Field and Shakespeare. Of this thoroughly professionalized band, Shakespeare is the one most closely bound to his company and his theatre, for he is the only one of the four who did not shift about from company to company but maintained his close association with a single acting troupe for more than twenty years. Besides this, he was bound to theatres and actors in still another fashion which makes him unique among all Elizabethan dramatists: he is the only dramatist we know who owned stock in theatre buildings over an extended period. His income was derived from acting, from writing plays, from shares in dramatic enterprises, and from theatre rents. From the beginning to the end of his writing career we must see him in a theatrical context if we are not to do violence to the recorded facts. At the beginning is our first reference to him in Greene's allusion to the “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde”; at the end are his own last words, so far as we know them, in his will. This will is mostly concerned with Stratford affairs, but when he does turn to the years of his London life and his many London associates, he singles out only three for a last remembrance. These men are John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage—all three actors, all three fellow-sharers in the acting company of the King's men, all three fellow-stockholders in the Globe and the Blackfriars. If Shakespeare's proper context is not the London commercial theatres and the professional troupes, then evidence has no meaning, and one man's irresponsible fancies are as good as another's.
Plate section
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Four Lears
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- 02 January 1948, pp 98-102
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The middle-aged and the old admit that the English Theatre is, to-day, at the richest point within their memory. Wealth is offered on every side and certainly no generation before has been given the opportunity of seeing four different interpretations of Lear in as many months, all offered by companies of reputation. I myself, with my grey hairs, have only twice before seen the play.
So much has been written about the London Old Vic production that I will be brief about it. At the risk of being deemed a blasphemer, let me say that I did not think this a great King Lear nor did I think it one of Sir Laurence Olivier's great performances. I did not feel that it could compare with either his Richard Third or his Oedipus, in both of which parts he had sought and found the soul of the character. In Lear, it seemed to me, he was not concerned to identify himself with the raging torrent that stormed through the mind of the poor madman; his chief aim, I felt, was to make the public accept his own objective interpretation of an old dotard. One should not be hide-bound by tradition, but it is difficult to believe in a Lear whose “Every inch a king” is not a boastful assertion of his unquestionable majesty, but a casual aside which, to those who do not know the play, might pass unnoticed. Surely the words demand declamation and no other intention can have been in the author's mind. It is only the incomparable magnetism and vigour of Olivier's personality that made one understand the carefully thought-out reason behind this interpretation. His Lear is a king who has always been a king, who has never questioned his own majesty, and when Gloucester asks him “Is it the King?” the matter to him is so obvious that it hardly seems worth a reply. It was on this conception that the whole performance was built. The deliberate caprice and pranking of the first act gave us a testy old man for whom it was difficult to obtain sympathy in the later scenes; but it would be wrong to suggest that it was possible to sit unmoved whilst Olivier's overwhelming sense of poetry wafted us through the grandeurs of the last act. Olivier is master of the unexpected.
A Note on the Swan Theatre Drawing
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- 02 January 1948, pp 23-24
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So familiar to all is the drawing of the Swan Theatre that it might seem as though no good purpose could be served by reproducing it once more in this volume. Full justification for its appearance here is, however, to be found in three rather surprising facts. First, most of the existing reproductions either have been taken from inadequate copies of the original or else have been rendered by line-block, thus partly destroying the quality of the drawing itself. Second, hardly ever is the reproduction of the sketch accompanied by the explanatory commentary to which it is attached. And, third, not one of the theatre histories which quote this commentary has given an impeccable transcription of the original. For these reasons it seems that those interested in the Elizabethan stage may find it convenient to have the Swan Theatre drawing and the relevant text reproduced directly from photographs made especially for this purpose.
The facts concerning the document in which the drawing appears are well enough known and need not be repeated here, but attention may be drawn to a recent article in which fresh biographical information is provided concerning Johannes de Wit or de Witt (who originally sketched the Swan Theatre during a visit to London) and Arend Van Buchel, his friend (who copied the drawing and recorded de Wit's comments upon it). The article presents the texts of numerous extant letters to diverse correspondents written by these two men. The reference is: A. Hulshof and P. S. Breuning, “Brieven van Johannes de Wit aan Arend Van Buchel en anderen” (Bijdragen en mededeelingen, Historisch Genootschap, Utrecht, lx, 1939, 87-208).
The Bankside Theatres: Early Engravings
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- 02 January 1948, pp 25-37
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By the end of the sixteenth century there were four theatres in Southwark: (1) the Beargarden, rebuilt after its much publicized collapse in 1583, (2) the Rose, built by Henslowe in 1587 or 1588, (3) the Swan, built by Francis Langley probably in 1595, and (4) the first Globe, built by the two Burbages, Shakespeare, Heminges and others in the first half of 1599. About their sites and shapes there has been much controversy and attempts have been made to reconstruct the design of each. Unfortunately, these discussions are all vitiated by uncritical acceptance of certain Jacobean and Caroline engravings. The pictorial and documentary information about the Southwark playhouses must be considered as a whole before we can safely draw from part of it inferences about any one building; through lack of such general study erroneous assertions are current about every one of these theatres. This article is an attempt to survey the pictorial evidence, and to collate it with the relevant documentary data.
First, it is essential to determine the date and authenticity of various views and maps often put forward as evidence. A single example will serve to show the worthlessness of some of these. One view of Southwark and London that has frequently been reproduced is illustrated in Plate XII: although unsigned and undated, it has been commonly stated to belong to a period about 1604-5. Cursory examination of its portrayal of the Tower, London Bridge and St Paul's, not to mention other glaring errors, should have made it immediately suspect. It is in fact a rehash of the background of an engraved portrait (not Delaram's) of James I on horseback, unsigned but dated 1621, of which Plate XI reproduces the lower portion. Comparison will show that the engraver of the view has drawn on his imagination for those parts of the background masked by the horse's legs and tail in the portrait. Judging by its wild inaccuracy, the view was made far from London and Londoners, probably abroad. It must be later than 1621, and is worthless as topographical evidence.
Studies in the Elizabethan Stage since 1900
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Of one thing in particular Shakespearian scholarship during the past fifty years may justly be proud: only within the present century have we approached within measurable distance of an understanding of the methods employed in the original production of Elizabethan plays or endeavoured to set these plays, in our imagination, firmly against the background of their theatrical environment. No other field of investigation more characteristically belongs to our own age than this.
The Elizabethan Stagein the Nineteenth Century
Even in recognizing the truth of this fact, however, we should not close our eyes to the very real achievements made in this direction by the romantic period preceding our own. Fully a hundred and fifty years ago that vigorous investigator, Edmund Malone, had succeeded in defining some of the main features of the theatres in which Shakespeare had worked. Although he possessed no information about the earliest of all professional London playhouses, the Theatre in Shoreditch, and was not sure when the Globe was built, he knew that the actors originally performed in inn-yards, that the home of Shakespeare's company was round or polygonal, that the audience stood in the yard or sat in the galleries, that dramatic action proceeded both on an upper-stage and on a lower and that the plays were graced with few or no scenic embellishments.
Following Malone came numerous other scholars, each intent on unearthing documentary material, each adding his discoveries to the common store: Collier, Cunningham, Halliwell- Phillipps and others thus actively added to the accumulation of knowledge until, by the century's end, men had a very fair general conception of the way in which the Elizabethan stage differed from the kind of theatre made colourful by an Irving and a Tree.
Shakespeare’s Bad Poetry
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- By Hardin Craig
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- 02 January 1948, pp 51-56
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[A paper read at the Shakespeare Conference, Stratford-upon-Avon, August 1947. Two portions delivered on that occasion have been omitted.]
In my book, The Enchanted Glass, I endeavoured to emphasize the intense expressiveness of the English Renaissance, in accordance with the belief current at that time in the power of expressed truth. If these opinions should be called in question, it is only necessary to point out that rhetoric was the central core of Renaissance education and the very foundation of virtue. The power of speech distinguished men from the brutes, and rhetoric was the symbol of man’s dignity. We know that the persuasive aim of ancient rhetoric had also been transferred to poetry. The object of humanistic education, as stated by my pupil Dr Madeleine Doran, was to prepare men to use rational discourse and persuasive eloquence in the service of truth and the public good. In this aim rhetoric and poetry came together. Poetry sought to teach with delight and to move men to great achievement, and, since the medieval conception of rhetoric as merely the ornamental aspect of discourse still prevailed, poetry in some sense superseded rhetoric, inherited the ancient estate of rhetoric, and itself became a primary agent for moving men to rational thought and virtuous action. The word itself was irresistible. Of course schools fell far short of their ideals, and rhetorical doctrine suffered mechanization. The whole paraphernalia of the divisions and patterns of oratory were ruthlessly applied to all discourse—to the composition of letters, to the writing of history, and even to the writing of poetry itself. Thus rhetoricians, or general teachers, saw the problem of drama, epic, and lyric in terms of oratory, its divisions and its style.
Stratford Productions
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- 02 January 1948, pp 107-111
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The new regime at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, inaugurated by the Executive Council of the Governors of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the chairmanship of Lieut.-Col. Fordham Flower, and directed by Sir Barry Jackson, has two seasons to its credit, so that one can distinguish the main changes in policy and attempt an estimate of what has been achieved. The most significant innovation has been the employment of a diversity of producers. Sir Barry has thrown his net wide—from Norwich to Yale, the old hand and the new, actor and academic, age and youth, ingenious experiment and sturdy tradition. This has been a great stimulus to all members of the company, and a valuable education hardly to be gained elsewhere. At the same time the method has its drawbacks. The players are constantly being called on to respond to a new producer and to accommodate themselves to very different views. This prevents stagnation, but is a severe tax on players who are asked to present a full series of plays each week as well as to rehearse the forthcoming productions.
The next notable change in policy is revealed in the lavish and sometimes extravagant expenditure on scenery and costume. While there have been some comparatively simple settings, such as that of Otis Riggs for Measure for Measure, or that of Sir Barry Jackson for Pericles, others have been more ambitious and less successful. Take, for example, the elaborate sets designed by Hal Burton for Richard II. These undoubtedly pleased the eye, but at times necessitated groupings and movements which lacked significance, or even militated against the realization of Shakespeare's ideas. The Deposition scene, which is the heart of the play, had none of the formal beauty of grouping and utterance which were clearly intended. Richard was too restless, and certainly the throne of contention should be set in the middle of the stage, as indeed must Richard be in the prison scene for the complicated soliloquy which expresses the Hamlet element in him—an element that Robert Harris or Walter Hudd failed, or perhaps did not desire, to convey.
Titus Andronicus on the Stage in 1595
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In The Library for March 1925 Sir Edmund Chambers drew the attention of scholars, virtually for the first time, to the presence among the manuscripts in the library of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat (Harley Papers, vol. 1, f. 159 v.) of a contemporary drawing illustrating an incident in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus. The drawing in question was originally on p. 1 of a folded paper giving two leaves. Beneath it stand forty lines of text in manuscript, with what appears to be a dated signature near the foot of the left-hand margin; and on p. 4 is found an endorsement “Henrye Peachams Hande 1595”. Sir Edmund published a collotype facsimile of the whole recto of the first leaf in The Library, together with a descriptive note entitled “The First Illustration to ‘Shakespeare’”. But he reproduced the drawing without the text in his William Shakespeare (1930), and again when he reprinted The Library article in his Shakespearean Gleanings (1944). This was somewhat unfortunate, inasmuch as the document is of first-class importance, The Library is a specialist journal not so well known as it should be to the ordinary student of Shakespeare, and the drawing presents several puzzling features which can be solved only in relation to the text that accompanies it. Some of these features have been noted by Sir Edmund, and others were first observed by the late J. Quincy Adams, in a valuable note on the document towards the end of his Introduction to a facsimile of the only extant copy of the First Quarto of Titus Andronicus, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Neither scholar has, however, been able to decide what is the exact incident the drawing attempts to depict, or to determine its date.
London Productions
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- 02 January 1948, pp 103-106
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This season has seen some interesting groups of productions, both of Shakespeare’s plays and of the Elizabethan or Jacobean drama closely associated with Shakespeare, by several London companies. Shakespeare seasons were given by the Old Vic Company, the Advance Players Association, and the Regent’s Park Outdoor Theatre, covering between them a fair proportion of the plays and reaching out to include contemporary drama such as The Alchemist, Volpone and The White Devil.
A surprising feature of the season has been the coincidence of four performances of Lear. Clearly these could best be studied by grouping them together—such an opportunity for close and immediate comparison of various techniques and interpretations rarely arises—and this subject has been treated separately by Charles Landstone, as a single unit (see pp. 98-102). A large part of the Old Vic's work has, in the same way, been dealt with by George Rylands in a general survey, while a short note on the Advance Players' series and on the later Old Vic Richard II will be found at the end of this notice.
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA IN THE WEST END
reviewed by George Rylands
During the war and since, the Old Vic has undergone a complete transformation. The ideals of Miss Bayliss were directed towards the straightforward presentation of Shakespeare at a reasonable cost, the training of young actors, the orchestral rather than the virtuoso performance. These ideals have faded. More has been lost than has been gained and instead of the veterans and tyros of the Waterloo Road we have had a company whose work is very showy, somewhat superficial, and highly successful. It was inevitable that under the conditions of war the public and the critics should become quite undiscriminating. The inherent weaknesses and inequalities of most of the productions and the abandonment of the old tradition and of proper standards within certain necessary limitations have escaped the notice of eyes blinded by the glamour of a few bright particular stars. On the credit side we readily allow that certain individual performances have made theatrical history. Sir Laurence Olivier as Richard III, as Hotspur, as Justice Shallow: Sir Ralph Richardson as Falstaff; Alec Guiness as Lear's Fool. For these creations much may be forgiven.
Shakespeare Survey
- Volume 1, Shakespeare and his Stage
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Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948 Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of the previous year's textual and critical studies and of major British performances. The books are illustrated with a variety of Shakespearean images and production photographs. The current editor of Survey is Peter Holland. The first eighteen volumes were edited by Allardyce Nicoll, numbers 19-33 by Kenneth Muir and numbers 34-52 by Stanley Wells. The virtues of accessible scholarship and a keen interest in performance, from Shakespeare's time to our own, have characterised the journal from the start. For the first time, numbers 1-50 are being reissued in paperback, available separately and as a set.
Books Received
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- 02 January 1948, pp 132-133
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3 - Textual Studies
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- 02 January 1948, pp 127-131
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Any year in which three volumes of the New Cambridge Shakespeare are published can be accounted profitable for the students of Shakespeare’s text. Perhaps the choice of titles (1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V) was fortuitious, but a careful reading of these plays is peculiarly appropriate in these post-war years, and their publication has the same timeliness that John Dover Wilson discovers in Shakespeare’s composition of Henry V.
In a word [he writes], Henry V, so apposite in theme and spirit, as I and many others discovered, to the dispatch of a great expeditionary force in 1914, was actually written for a similar occasion in 1599 [the invasion of Ireland under the Earl of Essex]. Yet it would have been written in any case about this time, and the occasion was for Shakespeare a stroke of luck. . . . For the zenith of the play is not the victory—that is lightly passed over, and (in itself miraculous) is ascribed to God alone—but the King’s speeches before the battle is joined, the battle which all but the King think already lost. Every line of what Henry then says breathes the English temper, but one above all—
We happy few, we band of brothers.
If History never repeats itself, the human spirit often does: Henry’s words before Agincourt, and Churchill’s after the Battle of Britain, come from the same national mint.
Three Shakespearian Productions: A Conversation
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Scene: A stone terrace in Sicily.
Personages
Hilton Edwards, a producer Micheál MacLiammóir, an actor and designer
Macliammóir (emerging into the evening sunshine as he continues a sentence presumably launched upon indoors)...“and anyway, who wants to talk of the stage in such a setting? Are you anxious, now you have escaped to Paradise for a season, to recall the agonies endured in a dusty theatre in Dublin, to consider seriously the drawbacks and advantages of the Elizabethan manner, to rack your brains in an endeavour to remember exactly why you were a little bored by any modern effort to revive that manner, or why the Shakespearian producer is at sea the moment that manner is abandoned?
Edwards I would not have been bored in Shakespeare's day. Not because my own mentality as a spectator would have been different, but because the actors themselves, with their fresher understanding, their surety of purpose, their reliance on their own craft instead of the electricians' and the dressmakers', their direct contact with their audience which is a forgotten secret of Shakespeare's magic, would have revealed the plays as no mouthing nineteenth-century Hamlet or muttering, impotent Othello of our own day can do, with all the ingenuity of our lighting, our swiftly-changing scenery, our amusing, fashionable disguises.
The Heritage of Shakespeare’s Birthplace
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- By Levi Fox
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“The truly heart-stirring relic of a most glorious period, and of England’s immortal bard . . . the most honoured monument of the greatest genius that ever lived.”
Such was the description of “Shakspeare’s house, Stratford-upon-Avon, which appeared on a poster advertising its sale by public auction in London on 16 September 1847. The centenary of the sale and of the purchase of the property for preservation as a national memorial to the dramatist accordingly presents an appropriate occasion both for reviewing some aspects of the history of the fabric of the building and its associations and for relating the circumstances of the sale. It also affords an opportunity to record something of the work of the trustees who have been responsible’ for the preservation and administration of the property during the past hundred years.
The literature on the subject, though extensive, is of varying value, and no comprehensive study has yet appeared. The older descriptive guides, though generally reliable, are inadequate, and are too sentimental in their treatment. A few items have been conceived in a spirit of partiality and are, therefore, misleading. Much of the material relating to the sale in 1847 is scattered and needs to be pieced together, while most of the information regarding the latest chapter of the building's history is contained in minute-books belonging to the Birthplace Trustees.
2 - Shakespeare’s Life and Times
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The period under review has been made notable by the appearance of Sir Edmund Chambers’s Sources for a Biography of Shakespeare. This short book “records the substance and often preserves the language of a course of lectures given to students working for the Bachelorship of Letters at Oxford during 1929 to 1938”. The aim is to treat Shakespeare as a typical subject for biographical research in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Chambers briefly surveys the variety of historical records (Tenurial, Ecclesiastical, Municipal, Occupational, Court, National and Personal) and other, less reliable, sources of information. There is, of course, no intention of bringing together here the sum-total of knowledge and conjecture that the exploration of Shakespeare’s life has produced, but rather to indicate how biographers of his contemporaries may apply to their tasks the methods which have been found useful in Shakespearian research. The less professional reader, however, might find the book’s usefulness increased if references to Chambers’s longer works were given: these would indicate what results had been achieved through the use of the sources here surveyed, and would bring out the typical character of the facts and speculations concerning Shakespeare’s life which find a place in the present volume.