Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Research Articles

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, creator; Paul Edmondson and Anjna Chouhan, hosts. Shakespeare Alive

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, creator; Paul Edmondson and Anjna Chouhan, hosts. Shakespeare Alive

Designing Shakespeare: Tibor Reich and the 1964 Shakespeare Quatercentenary

ABSTRACT This article explores the work of the designer, Tibor Reich (1916–1996) as part of the material heritage of William Shakespeare. It suggests Reich’s partnership with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is a significant means of investigating the influence of artists and designers of the 1930s diaspora as purveyors of modernism and their impact on the visual arts and interior design in Britain. It situates Reich’s work for the 1964 Shakespeare quatercentenary, an anniversary marked internationally, in the broader context of the cultural and social history to which William Shakespeare’s material heritage responds.

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

The Angel in the Publishing House: Authorial Self-Fashioning, Gender, and Orphanhood in Marie Corelli's Innocent

The best-selling Victorian novelist Marie Corelli (1855–1924) is a literary figure enmeshed in contradictions. Famously refusing to identify as a New Woman writer, she was known for her womanly heroines and her own ultra-feminine style of dress. She shunned press photographers and ferociously protected her privacy. But Corelli was equally ferocious in her ambition for literary success and fame, and she does not altogether fit in with those women writers of the nineteenth century who staged an outer show of dominant domestic vocation and cast their fame as an unsought consequence of their natural genius. Through examination of Corelli's self-fashioned orphanhood, this article seeks to highlight her as an example of a fin-de-siècle woman writer who resisted consignment to the transgressive New Woman image and more traditional gender roles. Taking Corelli's critically neglected 1914 novel Innocent: Her Fancy and His Fact as its focal point, and analysing the success of her self-fashioning by drawing upon the remembrances of members of Corelli's local community in Stratford-upon-Avon, recorded as part of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's Oral History Project, this article explores the ways in which Corelli strengthened her orphan identity in her later fiction and, in so doing, strove to legitimise female authorship and celebrity.

Michael Bogdanov’s Iconoclastic Approach to Political Shakespeare

Between 1986 and 1989, Michael Bogdanov directed The Wars of the Roses (an ambitious seven-play Shakespeare cycle that won him the Olivier Award for Best Director in 1990), introducing an accessible and pertinent Shakespeare to 1980s audiences and paving the way for later politicized versions of Shakespeare’s plays – such as, recently, the New York Public Theater’s 2017 production of Julius Caesar. Following Bogdanov’s death in 2017, the time seems right for a new appraisal of his work as a radical, political director. The collection of Bogdanov’s personal papers at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the director’s mind. The papers include annotated scripts, production records, prompt books, reviews, programmes, unpublished manuscripts, and two volumes of The Director’s Cut – documents spanning Bogdanov’s entire theatrical career. In this article Darren Freebury-Jones engages with these materials, as well as the influences of theoretical movements such as cultural materialism on the director’s approach, in order to shed light on the ways in which Bogdanov stimulated and inspired new readings of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Thomas Dekker Revealed in the Henslowe–Alleyn Papers

In current scholarship the obscurity of the early years of Thomas Dekker is akin to his opacity in Philip Henslowe's Diary, which awaits full analytical interpretation. While the Diary usefully tells us about Henslowe's theatre business, it also imparts interwoven stories about many playwrights whose works are being rigorously tested in today's theatres. In this essay Chi-fang Sophia Li offers a theatre-based critique of the early life of Dekker, when, she argues, he quickly became a ‘fully paid-up member’ of the theatrical community. Thus his theatrical strengths, productive potential, writing interests, collaborative patterns, earning power, and working relationships with Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, and Henry Chettle can be interpreted afresh. The Diary supplies frequent, intensive sightings of Dekker, whose biographical implications mutually inform a cultural life of Dekker's peers. This is the first attempt to elucidate in full Dekker's presence in the Henslowe–Alleyn papers alongside other historical and literary documents. Chi-fang Sophia Li is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. She has published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, English Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, and in Chinese in Review of English and American Literature. She gave public lectures for the anniversaries of Shakespeare's birth and death for the Globe Theatre on tour to Taiwan in 2014 and for the Shakespeare Exhibition in 2015 for the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Reviewed by: Macbeth by William Shakespeare Tamar LeRoy Macbeth. By William Shakespeare. Adapted by William Davenant. Directed by Robert Richmond. Folger Theatre. September 4–23, 2018. Through this richly “collaborat[ive]” production of Macbeth, director Robert Richmond, the cast, the Folger Consort, and scholars including Amanda Winkler, Richard Schoch, and Claude Fretz have accomplished an impressive feat—bringing a Restoration adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most popular tragedies to the stage and, moreover, demonstrating that Restoration revisions of Shakespeare are extremely fun and fascinating in performance (“Performing Restoration Shakespeare,” 7). This limited-release production is the “culmination of a. . . . partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust . . . bring[ing] together scholars and practitioners in theater and music to investigate how and why Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare succeeded in performance in their own time . . . and how and why they can succeed in performance today” (“Performing Restoration Shakespeare,” 7). To this end, this staging of Davenant’s Macbeth plays upon the combination of novelty and diversity of spectacle that so appealed to Restoration audiences, creating a playgoing experience that is evocative of the one experienced by Samuel Pepys, who after seeing the same play in 1667, recorded it to be “a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable” (“Performing Restoration Shakespeare,” 6). The similar combination of “deep tragedy,” visual interest, and musical “divertisement” in this new production—including the comic fun and operatic virtuosity of the witches and the beauty of the music and stage effects—is shown not to detract from the tragedy of the play but to further its interpretive range and richness. What results is a Macbeth that is both warmly familiar and wonderfully novel and strange. The metatheatrical and intermedia approach to this production dispenses with the iconicity that is often expected when producing one of the most popular tragedies in English. The Macbeths, played by Ian Merrill Peakes and Kate Eastwood Norris, return to their roles from an acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Folger Theatre several years earlier, which heightens the sense that performance (here, but also in general) is intended to be interpretive and referential more than definitive or iconic. To this end, a frame is added to Davenant’s text, and this Macbeth is a play within a play—a performance put on by inmates in Bedlam. This frame eases the audience into this encounter with a version of Macbeth that is rather different from the ones they are familiar with and lays the interpretive groundwork for enjoying the play for these differences, especially its distinctly Restoration-era artifice and variety. What is produced is an exciting combination of the familiar and unexpected that encourages playgoers to notice and enjoy the moments where the plays diverge. The Bedlam framing plot renders the play an ambivalent but powerful examination of the legitimacy of power. The warden stages the performance and has sadistic guards and inmates of the asylum who are clearly unhinged and unwell play the characters while he plays King Duncan. Visually, Duncan’s costly Restoration costume (compared to the inmates’ sullied ones), rakish swagger, and elaborate wig (which looks like an auburn version [End Page 138] of Charles II’s black curls) reference legitimate kingship while also pointing to its artifice, bombast, and (through the Bedlam frame), its underlying violence. This connection of violence with the maintenance of power (including power that is lawfully sanctioned) is picked up throughout the production, blurring the action of Macbeth proper with the play-within-a-play context. Inmates acting in the play continue to be manhandled by the guards while performing. Most unsettlingly, in the background of some key parts of the tragedy—such as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth discussing the murder—inmates are tortured in a recessive section behind the main stage that resembles a jail cell with bars. The warden/King Duncan presides over these torture sessions, making it especially understandable when the warden is actually slain and real bedlam breaks loose. The murder of Duncan occurs behind a screen made...

David Crouch, ed., The Newburgh Earldom of Warwick and Its Charters: 1088–1253, with an introduction and appendix by Richard Dace. (Publications of the Dugdale Society 48.) Bristol: Dugdale Society in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2015. Pp. xx, 370; five black-and-white figures, three tables, three maps, and 1 genealogical table. £30. ISBN: 978-0-85220-099-5.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsDavid Crouch, ed., The Newburgh Earldom of Warwick and Its Charters: 1088–1253, with an introduction and appendix by Richard Dace. (Publications of the Dugdale Society 48.) Bristol: Dugdale Society in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2015. Pp. xx, 370; five black-and-white figures, three tables, three maps, and 1 genealogical table. £30. ISBN: 978-0-85220-099-5.Alice TaylorAlice TaylorKing’s College London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 92, Number 4October 2017 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/693725 Views: 32Total views on this site Copyright 2017 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Introduction: Shakespeare in Modern Japan

In Newsletter sent from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Lisa Peter writes:As Shakespeare is generally considered one of the most English playwrights, it is quite astonishing that his plays travel so well. After all, why should, for example, the story of a Scottish king like Macbeth be of any relevance to people in India or in China?1In my view, the story of Macbeth is relevant to people in Japan. Akira Kurosawa's Kumonosu-jo [Throne of Blood], a world famous film adaptation of Macbeth, proves the relevance. Seeking the beauty of Noh in it, he succeeded in fusing Shakespeare and Japanese culture.Shakespeare, a globe-trotter, arrived in Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century when she promoted her rapid Westernization or modernization. To the Japanese, being modern meant having an economic system of industrial capitalism and a political system of liberal constitutionalism built up in the United States and European countries. Calling Shakespeare Sao affectionately, the Japanese accepted him as a cultural hero, and read translations of his works and saw his plays adapted for the Japanese stage.A notable feature of Shakespeare appropriation in the Meiji era (1868-1927) was to adapt his plays for Kabuki theatre, because hardly anyone had seen European drama. This method was highly effective to popularize Shakespeare and disseminate Western culture as well as to give the Japanese an opportunity to know things European. The Japan premiere of Shakespearean drama was Sakuradoki Zeni no Yononaka [The season of Cherrry Blossoms: The World of Money], an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice which was dramatized by Hikozo Katsu and performed by the Nakamura Sojuro Kabuki Company in 1885. In 1884 Shoyo Tsubouchi translated Julius Caesar in Joruri (ballad drama) style, using the Japanese native poetic form of seven-five syllable metre used in tanka, haiku, and the dramatic form of Kabuki and Noh. This was a free and loose translation, whose title was Shizaru Kidan: Jiyu no Tachi Nagori no Kireaji [Caesar's Strange Tale: Residual Sharpness of the Sword of Freedom].Tsubouchi, who brought out the Shakespearean canon in Japanese during the period from 1909 to 1928, was the first to give a serious consideration to what the Japanese should learn from Shakespeare and how contemporary Japanese drama should be improved by his dramaturgy. His motto was to interpret Shakespeare from Japanese standpoint and to try to perform his drama for the Japanese sake. His Shizaru Kidan and Udagawa's Sakuradoki may be the fountainhead of Kurosawa's film adaptations and Yukio Ninagawa's stage adaptations in the half of the twentieth century.In the late Meiji era there was an enhanced interest in shingeki (new drama) which deliberately cut off traditional dramatic forms in favour of an intellectual and realistic approach. Shingeki movement expressed opposition to the established stage, and there was a tendency among directors and actors to separate from Kabuki and classics. The members of the movement thought Noh and Kabuki were out of date, and wanted to Westernize the theatre world. Tsubouchi was the leader of a group of amateurs working for a more cultivated theatre. In 1906 he established the Bungei Kyokai (The Association of Literature and Arts) and threw his energy into the training actors and the improvement of drama. His faithful translation of Hamlet produced by the Bungei Kyokai in 1911 is considered as the first presentation of shingeki. But Tsubouchi disbanded the Bungei Kyokai in 1913. Therefore, Kaoru Osanai and Yoshi Hijikata founded the Tsukiji Shogekijo (little theatre) as the base of shingeki in 1924.In 1939 World War II started, and Shakespeare's drama became chiefly the object of a scholary study. After the war ended, Hijikata directed Shakespeare's plays for the public. In 1955 Tsuneari Fukuda directed his translation of Hamlet. This performance was an epoch-making event on the history of Shakespearean stage in Japan. …

The Roaring Girl in Retrospect: the RSC Production of 1983

With its second revival of The Roaring Girl now in the Royal Shakespeare Company's repertory, Chi-fang Sophia Li documents in this article the making of the first production, as directed by Barry Kyle in 1983. She reviews the other RSC productions that informed Kyle's directorial approach, and, using the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library's archival materials and a research interview, she attempts a reconstructive criticism of Kyle's project of ‘theatrical archaeology’, arguing that what Kyle did was adapt Dekker and Middleton's Jacobean angst about the radical economic changes of the first decade of King James's reign to articulate current anxieties about Thatcherite economic ‘reforms’. The revival became compellingly invested with Kyle's critical reflections on triumphalist capitalism and ‘Victorian values’. Chi-fang Sophia Li is Assistant Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. She has also published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, and English Studies (Routledge), and in Chinese in Review of English and American Literature.

Shakespeare, Globalization, and the Digital Revolution

In an interview given during a lecture tour in Scandinavia organized by the universities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Aarhus in October and November, 2012, Stanley Wells talks about his own career in Shakespeare studies and discusses past and present major changes and issues within the field, including his own Oxford Complete Works of 1986, co-edited with Gary Taylor et al., revision and collaboration theories, global Shakespeare, and new challenges for Shakespearean scholars. He shares thoughts on his own current and future research projects, which include a new monograph on Shakespearean actors through time, and he also comments on the relationship between academic scholars and theatre practitioners, and ways in which to understand the ever-shifting concept of a Shakespearean play in relation to performance, reading, and personal and critical responses. Following a long career of many publications and editions, Stanley Wells is now Professor Emeritus of the University of Birmingham, and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Anne Sophie Haahr Refskou is a Doctoral Fellow in English and Dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark. She works with Shakespearean acting and dramaturgy, focusing on the relationship between text and performance, particularly in relation to the actor's body and physical expressions.

A Renaissance for New Place in Shakespearean Biography?

The ways in which New Place has been written about in Shakespearean biographies are changing. This article suggests that the biographical stories we tell ourselves, recycle, and develop are in part influenced by the curating of the material cultural remains associated with the subject which, in the case of New Place, is the responsibility of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. A newly fashioned New Place is emerging before us as the archaeological dig started in 2010 shares its findings in the context of a cultural organisation willing to tell a revisionist story about the site.

Becoming the RSC: Terry Hands in Conversation

In 2011 the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) celebrated its 50th birthday. In this interview, Terry Hands, who joined the company in 1966 as an assistant director and went on to run it as Artistic Director from 1983 to 1991, remembers the first decade, when the RSC was “becoming” itself. He remembers the “Builders”: Peter Hall, John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Peter Brook and himself, the young Terry Hands. He talks about the people – actors, designers, writers, administrators – and policies that established the RSC as the world's most significant Shakespeare theatre company, and he gives insight into the company's early practices, both on stage and in the rehearsal room. Terry Hands rehearsing Pericles, R.S.C.1969 (photo credit: Reg Wilson; © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)

“My Travail’s History”: Perspectives on the Roads to Othello , Stratford-upon-Avon 1959

This article seeks to unite theatre history with the 'real' histories of economics, ideology and race by looking beyond conventional archive materials, tracing the genesis of one of the 20th century's most lauded yet also undermined performances: that of singer, actor, athlete, and anti-fascist activist Paul Robeson as Othello in 1959. The study incorporates archival materials from the RSC and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, as well as those from less likely sources, including records held by the FBI and MI5. These materials reveal the tireless efforts of the American and British authorities to prevent Robeson from using the role of Othello as a vehicle for his activism, drawing parallels between the actor's plight and Sergei Yutkevich's 1956 Russian Othello , in which he was refused the right to star despite having received great acclaim for his performances of the role in London (1930) and on Broadway (1942-45). In contextualising the socio-political backdrops against which these earlier productions were set, the article addresses the racial opposition and misrepresentation faced by Robeson for more than 30 years, shedding light on the ways the actor made Othello a symbol of race relations in the twentieth century and how his opponents, echoing the conflicts in Shakespeare's play.

Boys Should be Girls: Shakespeare's Female Roles and the Boy Players

Recent performances of female roles in Shakespeare's plays by adult males help to perpetuate the myth that this was the practice of Shakespeare's time. This article attempts to reinforce the view that all female roles were played by boys – i.e., young males with unbroken voices – by analyzing the demands made by the plays. Shakespeare regularly had available to him up to four boy actors, perhaps more. Yet some plays have as few as two female roles, and few have more than four. The conclusion is that Shakespeare would have been highly unlikely to waste the resources of his company by calling upon adult males to play parts that make use of the talents of his boys. Stanley Wells is Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. A former editor of Shakespeare Survey and director of the Shakespeare Institute, he is author of numerous books on Shakespeare, general editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Shakespeare, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.

Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), First Duchess of Chandos, Life and Letters by Rosemary O’Day

58 losopher who maintained a consistent and outspoken commitment to ‘‘feminist Country ideology.’’ Sarah Scott assumed the title ‘‘author’’ as ‘‘a merely occasional label’’ and dreamed of transcending ‘‘barriers of gender, geography, genre and status.’’ Ms. Schellenberg’s comparison of the different modes of selffashioning (Sarah Fielding as a ‘‘person of letters’’ and Charlotte Lennox as a ‘‘professional writer’’) provides us with an understanding of ‘‘the interdependent double faces of the modern author.’’ A chapter that compares eighteenthcentury evaluations of less well-known, but also prolific, novel writers—the Minifie sisters and Edward Kimber— argues that the period’s standards of aesthetic value were applied universally , without regard to the author’s gender. The book’s final chapters use Frances Burney as their starting point for a study of the ‘‘strategic naming and forgetting’’ undertaken by women writing literary history in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ms. Schellenberg’s excellent overview of the mid-century print marketplace questions any simple notion of gender as the primary determinant in a woman author’s career. Like all books that seek to shift a critical paradigm, this one sometimes overstates its case. ‘‘If I have succeeded at all,’’ writes Ms. Schellenberg, ‘‘we may find new ways to talk about mid-eighteenth-century women writers—as variously ambitious, variously professionalized, variously influential—even, as interesting.’’ The book implies, at times, that critics who study sexism reify women as passive victims, whereas those who focus their attention on other concerns restore purposeful agency to them, an opposition that depreciates the complex assessments of power and powerlessness provided by an earlier generation of critics. In attending to the gap between ‘‘the eighteenth-century evidence and the late twentieth-century perspective,’’ Ms. Schellenberg perhaps underestimates the extent to which all historical narratives are shaped by contemporary concerns; it behooves us to reflect on our critical investments in relation to the present, as well as the past—especially in a book as polemical as this. Ms. Schellenberg has thrown down the gauntlet, and it will be interesting to see how critics writing on eighteenth-century women authors in the years ahead respond to her challenge . Alison Conway University of Western Ontario ROSEMARY O’DAY. Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), First Duchess of Chandos , Life and Letters. Woodbridge: Boydell , 2007. Pp. viii ⫹ 442. $145; £75. In eighteenth-century history, politics and patronage, James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), protégé of the powerful general, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, is an interesting case study. (I was so intrigued that I wrote his biography Portrait of a Patron. The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), Ashgate, 2007.) At his right hand, and clearly a figure worthy of study in her own right, is his second wife, his cousin, Lady Cassandra Willoughby (1670–1735). In 1713, Cassandra gave up her single life of housekeeping for her brother to marry at forty-three, and her dowry provided the money—£23,000—for her new husband to expand his country house at Cannons, now the site of North London Collegiate Girls’ School. Cassandra’s 59 experience, good taste, economic independence , and her importance to the political and artistic activities of her husband , are Ms. O’Day subjects. Although Joan Johnson’s short biography Excellent Cassandra (Stroud, 1981) is out of print, Ms. O’Day’s is not a new biography of the Duchess, but an annotated volume of ‘‘all known extant letters’’ taken from three principal archives : Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, Stratford-upon-Avon; North London Collegiate School; and the Huntington Library. The letters are compelling documents of an early eighteenth-century, well-connected, family -oriented noblewoman, and Ms. O’Day contextualizes them well in her excellent Introduction. She evaluates the recent scholarship relating to the role of women in areas assumed to be traditional male preoccupations, for instance patronage networks and financial investments . Duchess Cassandra stated that the purpose of her marriage was to be useful to her family and to further their interests . To this end, she sought from her husband political and other posts for her relatives, mediating between them and the Duke. She also applied herself to matchmaking...

Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story Kate Pogue Stanley Wells. Shakespeare & Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Pp. xv + 286. $26.00. Stanley Wells's lifetime of experience with Shakespeare's life and work is reflected in Shakespeare & Co, an illuminating, entertaining, and much needed examination of Shakespeare and his working colleagues. An emeritus professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Wells adds Shakespeare & Co. to a long list of distinguished works, including, most recently, Shakespeare: For All Time (2003), published while he was coediting The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works. He begins his new book by placing Shakespeare in London at the turn of the sixteenth century, aged thirty-seven, in the midst of writing Hamlet. From this vantage point, Wells orients us to those writers who influenced Shakespeare's early career (Lyly, Peele, Kyd, Greene, and Marlowe), acknowledges those who were his contemporaries (Chapman, Dekker, Jonson, Heywood, Marston, Fletcher, Middleton, and Beaumont), and looks forward to those who would follow him (Webster, Massinger, Ford). Wells "aims to place Shakespeare within his theatrical context, to chart his relationship with his fellow actors and dramatists, and to sketch the shifting reputations and lasting achievements of his fellow playwrights" (5). He succeeds admirably. The book is chockablock with insights to surprise and delight even the most experienced scholar. Wells reveals, for instance, that "whereas in the public [outdoor] theatres plays were acted without a break, in the private theatres they were customarily divided into five acts, for the practical reason that candles used for illumination had to be trimmed at frequent intervals" (17). He cites Henslowe's diary concerning little-known playwright Robert Daborne to demonstrate that a playwright normally read his new play to the company (24). This triggers images of Shakespeare first reading his plays to his colleagues, speaking the lines himself, letting the actors hear them as he heard them. Later, Wells observes that during the six weeks of Lent, performances were forbidden, thereby suggesting that late winter/early spring might have brought Shakespeare back to Stratford and given him a predictable time of year in which to write. When Wells turns to Shakespeare and the actors, revelations again abound. Generous quotations from Will Kemp's Nine Days Wonder, the autobiographical record of Kemp's jig from London to Norwich in February of 1600, bring to life the existence of the itinerate freelance performer. Wells reveals that Robert Armin (who succeeded Kemp as the primary comedian in Shakespeare's company) achieved guild status as a goldsmith, while James Burbage had been a joiner before becoming one of the most innovative theater producers of his (or any) [End Page 522] time (examples which suggest that actors have always needed a second profession to support themselves in hard times). Fine sleuthing enables Wells to trace the career of actor John Sinclo through the 1590s to the turn of the century and to establish that the man described as playing a "starved bloodhound" and "thin thing" in Henry IV, Part Two was likely the same who created Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night several years later (50). Wells contributes materially to Shakespeare studies by illuminating the lives of these theater folk and by making Shakespeare's relations with them so clear. In "Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare's Other Early Contemporaries," Wells zeroes in on Shakespeare's earliest writing colleagues. Devoting a page or two each to John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Kyd, he takes the rest of the chapter to write in detail about the most influential playwright in London at the time: Christopher Marlowe. In describing the life and work of all these writers Wells has an unerring instinct for the telling biographical detail, the lively anecdote, and the apt quotation. Furthermore, his liberal citations from each writer's work give the reader an experience with the variety of styles surrounding the young Shakespeare as he began practicing his craft. This is especially true of...

:Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001

Shakespeare's career-long fascination with the Mediterranean made the association a natural one for this first World Shakespeare Congress of the Third Millennium. The plenary lectures and selected papers in this volume represent some of the best contemporary thought and writing on Shakespeare, in the ranging plenary lectures by Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare's islands and the Muslim connection, Michael Coveney's on the late Sir John Gielgud, Robert Ellrodt's on Shakespeare's sonnets and Montaigne's essays, Stephen Orgel's on Shakespeare's own Shylock, and Marina Warner's on Shakespeare's fairy-tale uses of magic. Also included in the volume's several sections are original pagers selected from special sessions and seminars by other distinguished writers, including Jean E. Howard, Gary Taylor, and Richard Wilson. Tom Clayton is Regents' Professor of English Language and Literature and chair of the Classical Civilization Program at the University of Minnesota. Susan Brock is Head of Library and Information Resources at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and Honorary Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham. Vicente Fores is Associate Professor of English at the University of Valencia.

King Richard III by Gillian Day, and: The Merchant of Venice by Miriam Gilbert, and: The Winter’s Tale by Patricia E. Tatspaugh (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 165 contrast with modern reader expectations as to identify the factors that created the original texts. An anti-modernizer, he argues for 'critical old-spelling editions [. . .] in order to bring out the formative role of individual reading acts in the creation of historically specific meanings' (p. 135). Above all he asks for better contextual infor? mation, using what he calls 'the not-yet-existingbody of Historical Reader-Response Criticism'. That, he says, is 'the best hope forscholarship'. In effecteach essay in the book provides an exemplar of such criticism fordifferenttexts. It is a scholar's book. University of Reading Andrew Gurr King Richard III. By Gillian Day. (Shakespeare at Stratford, published by The Arden Shakespeare in association with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) Lon? don: Thomson Learning. 2002. xiii + 259pp. ?!5-99- ISBN 1-903436-12-5. The Merchant of Venice. By Miriam Gilbert. (Shakespeare at Stratford, published by The Arden Shakespeare in association with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) London: Thomson Learning. 2002. xv+183 pp. ?*5-99- ISBN 1903436 -I3-3The Winter's Tale. By Patricia E. Tatspaugh. (Shakespeare at Stratford, published by The Arden Shakespeare in association with The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) London: Thomson Learning. 2002. xv + 240 pp. ?15.99. ISBN 1903436 -16-8. These three titles comprise the first in a new series that examines Shakespeare's plays in performance. As general editor Robert Smallwood notes in his two-page preface (variously paginated), the theatre archive located in Stratford's Shakespeare Centre Library contains an embarrassment of riches: 'promptbooks, press reviews, photographs in their hundreds of thousands, [. . .] archival video recordings, [. . .] theatre programmes, costume designs, stage managers' performance reports [. . .]'. This concentration of resources has often given 'general performance histories of Shakespeare's plays an unintentional Stratford bias; the aim of the Shakespeare at Stratford series is to exploit, and indeed revel in, the archive's riches'. Each volume, then, focuses on the post-1945 Stratford performance history of a particular play, a concentration furtherjustified by Smallwood's claim that Stratford productions offer 'a representative cross-section ofthe main trends in [a play's] theatrical interpretation in the second half of the twentieth century'. However, each volume opens 'with an introduction that sets this Stratford half-century in the wider context of the main trends of its play's performance history before this period and of significant produc? tions elsewhere during it'. These first three volumes illustrate both the worth and the limitations of such a project, as well as how far its own aims have been realized. With a close focus on the Stratford productions themselves and (presumably) a strict word-count, the supposedly contextualizing introductions prove rather sketchy: anyone wanting really to understand how the Stratford productions fitinto the plays' overall performance histories will need to look elsewhere. Miriam Gilbert, for example, begins with a series of useful questions about The Merchant of Venice, 'both those asked within the play and those it insistently raises for actors, directors, designers and audiences' (p. 2), before moving on to a two-paragraph long consideration of pre-war Stratford productions and the continuing influence of Henry Irving's portrayal of Shylock; the rest of her introduction focuses, first,on the way programmes for the thirteen post? war productions she considers helped to shape responses to the play and, second, on how photographs reveal 'how much the look of the play keeps changing' (p. 20). She 166 Reviews also briefly introduces Jonathan Miller's 1970 National Theatre production, rightly calling it 'a ground-breaking interpretation in a number ofways' and 'one that haunts the imagination still' (pp. 23-24). The fact that it does so marks one ofthe limitations ofthe series: in her ensuing examination of Stratford productions, although Gilbert continues to referto aspects of Miller's production that proved influential, she seems in some places to ignore Stratford's indebtedness to it. For example, she notes that Roger Michell's 1986 touring production 'seemed to have derived its Victorian look [. . .] from its opening scene at a cafe table to its formally clad Shylock' from John Barton's second production of the play in 1981 (p. 31). Why credit Barton when Miller was there first?The centrality...

Shakespeare, More or Less: A.W. Pollard and Twentieth-Century Shakespeare Editing

Those who have disputed Shakespeare's authorship of the plays and poems usually attributed to him have been inclined to name the eminent Shakespeare scholars who have vilified the anti-Stratfordian cause. In the Preface to his 1908 book The Shakes-peare Problem Restated, the urbane Sir Granville George Greenwood quoted Sidney Lee, then chair of Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust, mocking the Baconian theory as "foolish craze,' morbid psychology,' madhouse chatter" (vii) and John Churton Collins, chair of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, denouncing it as "ignorance and vanity" (viii). More recently, Charlton Ogburn has listed among the detractors of the Oxfordian theory Louis B. Wright, former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library (154, 161, 168); S. Schoenbaum, author of Shakespeare's Lives, which devotes one hundred pages "to denigration of...anti-Stratfordian articles and books" (152); and Harvard Shakespeare professors G. Blakemore Evans and Harry Levin (256-57). In view of the energy and labour expended by numerous prominent scholars defending Shakespearean authorship, it is not surprising to discover that this defence has influenced reception of Shakespeare's works and their editorial reproductions. This essay deals with the very successful resistance movement against the anti-Stratfordians that was led by A.W. Pollard from 1916 to 1923, and with the peculiar influence that Pollard's efforts have continued to exert, even upon today's Shakespeare editors.