Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from Touchstone (www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk), a Shakespeare resource maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

The Arden Shakespeare third series began publication in 1995 with editions of Antony and Cleopatra, Henry V and Titus Andronicus. Thanks to the sustained commitment of a generation of scholars and other professionals, it was completed with the publication of Measure for Measure in 2020. Over those twenty-five years, the series navigated mergers and restructuring in the publishing industry, persisting through four changes in publishing house with the support of multiple publishing editors. It realized the vision of four General Editors who set more ambitious parameters and supported more variety in editorial practices than any of their predecessors. The efforts of fifty volume editors produced forty-four new editions that also added four new plays to the series and editions dedicated to the Sonnets and the Poems. These editions addressed some of the most significant changes to Shakespeare studies in this century and, in the process, helped to define editorial practice and shape the modern scholarly series. Now complete, Arden 3 stands as a book of memory and of aspiration, a record of our progress as a field and a profession, and a reminder of how much further we have to go.

Imagine this scene: an American high school student picks up an edition of Macbeth. The edition, however, differs from those read by her peers. It omits, for example, the moment Lady Macbeth describes dashing out an infant’s brains while nursing. It excludes the Porter’s drunken soliloquy as he pretends to stand watch at the gates of hell. It forgoes Malcolm’s fraudulent disclosure of his insatiable lust to Macduff. And when the student reaches the moment when the somnambulating Lady Macbeth scrubs Duncan’s blood from her hands, the line reads, ‘Out, foul spot!’ Other readers, of course, know it as ‘Out, damned spot’, but the text contains no indication of the change. One might wonder whether this student had unwittingly acquired Thomas Bowdler’s nineteenth-century Family Shakespeare, but no. This student is reading an edition of Shakespeare published in 2004 by A Beka Book out of Pensacola, Florida. A Beka, along with a cottage industry of other publishers, create editions of Macbeth for private and home-schooled students across America. This specific edition of Macbeth is marketed towards fundamentalist Protestants, who, editors believe, may find such material objectionable. Such editions do more than bowdlerize lines and scenes, they insert these plays – and Shakespeare himself – into a larger polemic against American mainstream education.

In a year of political turbulence, racial injustice and a devastating global pandemic that made not only democratic freedom but life itself feel more precious and precarious – bringing us closer to the lived experience of Shakespeare himself – critical works on Shakespeare and early modern drama have taken on new and more urgent meanings. This has sometimes been quite deliberate, with critics including James Shapiro and Jeffrey R. Wilson examining the relevance of Shakespearian tragedy to the current state of American politics, but it has also extended the resonance of works with a more tangential relationship to 2020’s multiple catastrophes.

‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.’ So said Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff for President-elect Obama, in November 2008. But, he continued, ‘what I mean … is that it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before’. Emanuel was hoping to persuade his listeners at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council that the financial crisis in 2008 presented the country with opportunities to address its serious problems – problems ignored for too long, problems so large solutions might come from either party. That, he said, is ‘the silver lining’. Twelve years later, in 2020, the country – and the world, too, as was also true in 2008 – faces another economic crisis, this time instigated by a novel coronavirus, itself a crisis, a pandemic with, as of this writing, no endgame. The long-term problems Emanuel spoke of were not addressed in the wake of the 2008 crisis, which presents us now with greater challenges but perhaps greater political will to address systemic problems – to do … something. Emanuel’s words hint at the difficulty, however.

This article addresses the place held by Shakespeare in a short-lived but influential educational endeavour 100 years ago. In 1919, a new school of humanities – or, literally, ‘faculty of letters’ – was set up in the recently founded University of Porto (1911– ), aiming to respond to the formative aspirations of the republican regime created in 1910 through the revolution that had put an end to Portugal’s constitutional monarchy. Education was ideologically central to the Republic’s secularizing project of creating a free and self-aware citizenry, and these ideals were explicitly invoked in pleas for the reshaping of Portuguese higher education voiced in Parliament, the press and other public fora.

This essay revisits Tim Supple’s film version of Twelfth Night (2003) 15 years after it was made in the light of some recent (2018) correspondence with its director. It shows how Supple’s multi-cultural version anticipates contemporary crises over asylum, immigration and refugees.

This essay explores the role of the story – allusion, paradigm, precedent and narrative structure – as an agent of change in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With a particular focus on women, this essay analyses the pivotal role that story telling provides in Shakespeare’s construction of both opportunity and imagination.

The title of Thomas Cartelli’s Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath: The Intermedial Turn and Turn to Embodiment calls for some clarification, which is provided in due course. Cartelli addresses the question of exactly what it is in which our ‘faith’ must be ‘awaked’ for Shakespeare’s plays ‘to engage their receivers/audiences with the kind of “nervous novelty” they presumably brought to the Elizabethan stage when Shakespeare himself took old matter and remixed it into new theatrical blends’ (17).

Friday 13th December, 2019. By a cruel and unusual coincidence, the deadline for filing this piece fell hours after a UK General Election in which the turkeys voted emphatically for Christmas. Amid the louring clouds, a small silver lining: it will be at least five years before the Prime Minister returns to his unfinished biography of William Shakespeare. It is not a pleasant thought, but I would rather he was finishing the book, even if (like his biography of Churchill) it is bound to be an exercise in regurgitation, vanity and self-projection. The relevance of the General Election result to this column – and especially those that follow it in the years ahead – lies in the direction of travel it implies for the UK and its cultural life. The new government will likely double down on the culture wars to distract from the continuing erosion of public services and the immiseration of large parts of the population. Leftie-bashing is back in vogue and this will be felt keenly by theatre-makers. Arts education will continue to be a privilege and not a right, a gift reserved largely for the privately educated, with severe implications for actor training and the pipeline of talent.

Discussing Coriolanus alongside Augustine’s Confessions, the essay argues that in both works the protagonist searches for a true and worthwhile voice amid urban noise. Treating the signal-noise ratio as something both protagonists anticipate and describe, it invites readers to respect Coriolanus’s search by comparing it to Augustine’s eminently respectable one.

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.

After nearly ten years as critical studies reviewer for Shakespeare Survey, I am looking fondly on my over-burdened and groaning table of books for the last time. To kick off my co-mixture of joy and lamentation, I begin with Genevieve Love’s Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. Here Love approaches the figure of disability, less as an embodiment of physical capacity than as a trope, a rhetorical figure, through which the theatre comes to express its primary function as both prosthesis and representation. The figure of her title is not then the body of the actor or character, the human subject or experience of being dis-abled, but the language through which the theatre experiences itself as a representation of something else.