Shakespeare on Page & Stage: Selected Essays ed. by Stanley Wells, Paul Edmondson, and: Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh by Stanley Wells

Abstract

Shakespeare on Page & Stage: Selected Essays ed. by Stanley Wells, Paul Edmondson, and: Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh by Stanley Wells Denis Donoghue (bio) Stanley Wells, Paul Edmondson (ed.) Shakespeare on Page & Stage: Selected Essays, (Oxford University Press, 2016), 300 pp.; Stanley Wells, Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh (Oxford University Press, 2015), 288 pp. Stanley Wells took his first steps into the academic profession by editing several Elizabethan plays, and his next by joining T. J. B. Spencer in the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute project of a New Penguin Shakespeare, which Wells completed in 1980. He is one of the most admired textualists of Shakespeare. He knows the plays not like the back of his hand, but like his fingertips. I am ready to accept—a claim he has not made—that he has seen the plays performed more often, and more differently, than any other scholar alive. For him, a play is the play as performed, understood on the suggestive evidence of a text and then brought forward as a memorable event on a stage. Shakespeare on Page & Stage is a generous selection of his writings, divided into four sections: "Shakespearian Influences," "Essays on Particular Works," "Shakespeare in the Theatre," and "Shakespeare's Text." Every essay is a pleasure. Wells writes most engagingly, quotes well, knows the literature of his subject, the theatrical history of every play, the disputes among the critics. He is hardly ever contentious. Clearly he doesn't like Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, which appeared to great acclaim in English translation in 1964, but he is so generous to it that his account could be mistaken for praise. There is only one piece of phrasing that I winced at, where Wells refers to the New Cambridge Shakespeare, then edited by J. Dover Wilson: In 1964 it was struggling towards completion, which it achieved belatedly in 1966 with the publication of the now half-blind but eternally sprightly Wilson's edition of the Sonnets, the Introduction originally printed independently as a mischievous riposte to A. L. Rowse's views on the biographical aspects of the poems. Four winces, to be accurate. Among the many pleasures in Shakespeare on Page & Stage, the essay I most enjoyed was "Peter Hall's Coriolanus, 1959." Wells saw it several times: a great play (T. S. Eliot called it, "with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success"); a brilliant director; two great actors (Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus, Edith Evans as his mother Volumnia); a distinctive set by Boros Aronson; the smaller parts played by formidable actors, Harry Andrews, Ian Holm, and Roy Dotrice; and, as it happened, outside the theatre, there was a strike by the print industry, inciting images of burly shop-stewards, sullen workers, tense masters. Wells leads us equably through these items and recalls the moment—the "point" as theatre people call such thrills—when Coriolanus mocks the soft talk of Menenius and Cominius: [End Page 291] Cominius: Away! The tribunes do attend you: arm yourself To answer mildly; for they are prepar'd With accusations, as I hear, more strong Than are upon you yet. Coriolanus: The word is "mildly." Pray you, let us go: Let them accuse me by invention, I Will answer in mine honour. Menenius: Ay, but mildly. Coriolanus: Well, mildly be it then. Mildly! Wells reports that, instead of speaking the final word aloud, Olivier, "after a long pause, simply mouthed it." An unforgettable tour de force, Wells took it to be. Not everyone agreed with him, some thought it vulgar, but no matter, Wells has never lost the thrill. The scene of Coriolanus's death is another great point. Wells, generous to his colleagues, lets Kenneth Tynan describe it: At the close, faithful as ever to the characterization on which he has fixed, Olivier is roused to suicidal frenzy by Aufidius's gibe—"thou boy of tears!" "Boy!" shrieks the overmothered general, in an outburst of strangled fury, and leaps up a flight of precipitous steps to vent his rage. Arrived at the top, he relents and throws his sword away. After letting his voice fly high in the great, swinging line about how he...