Only a small number of substantial critical studies has become available for review in the period here covered. It seems likely that the increasing difficulties of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic are in part the explanation of this, since it is clear from the quantity of work appearing in journals that the race of Shakespearian commentators is in no danger of dying out. Nor do the commentators appear in any danger of running short of material, since they enjoy a constantly increasing scope in the discussion of one another’s views. If, as is probable, the journals are soon constrained to further economies in point of space, these writers will do well to sacrifice, in the first place, the element of elaborate debate which is at present fashionable among them. Critical essays now frequently take the form of a progress through veritable thickets of contemporary opinion, so that the total effect is of little more than a babel of voices. A laudable sense of academic courtesy is one factor predisposing to this, as is also, perhaps, an influence from techniques of investigation that have proved notably successful in the natural sciences. But to read extensively in interpretative studies conducted in this manner is to experience a mild intellecutal claustrophobia—or even a feeling that one is missing a good deal of the play as a result of the earnest, if not always lively, conference being conducted in the stalls. Many of those who write about Shakespeare might with great advantage—at least to themselves—write more directly. The hard fact is that when the impulse to do so is in abeyance the likelihood of interesting communication is small.

Pushkin was born in 1799. He wrote at a time when Russian secular literature emerged from a period of apprenticeship to one of mastery, a time which saw the composition of most of 'Russia's finest poetry, and finally one in which English literary influence predominated. He had himself an enormous field of creative activity which he was constantly enlarging, for his mind was always alive and receptive to new ideas. He found inspiration in English literature for his poetry, his drama and his prose.

In further illustration of Shakespeare as a “learned grammarian” T. W. Baldwin has turned to the non-dramatic poems and has explored in characteristic detail his debt to Ovid and the Renascence commentators. But in addition, by considering together passages from the poems and the plays where Shakespeare uses the same image, Baldwin tries to arrange them in chronological order on the assumption that the simpler form of the image and the less condensed expression will “almost certainly” be the earlier. Thus in Venus and Adonis the young man is anxious to keep “a false sond” from entering “the quiet closure of my breast”, which he calls the “bedchamber” of his heart; in Richard III Rivers, invoking Pomfret Castle, refers to the murder of Richard II “Within the guilty closure of the walls”; in Sonnet 48 “the gentle closure of my breast” is a prison, as in Richard III, in which the loved one can come and go at will. Although the verbal resemblance is greatest between Venus and Adonis and Sonnet 48, Baldwin believes that the Richard III passage intervened, introducing into the image the notion of prison. Evidence is thus produced for the dating of Sonnets and the early plays. The Sonnets are shown to have been written during the years 1593–9, and to have comprised six approximately equal series of some twenty-five sonnets each: each series would fill a quire of paper, and would be accompanied by one or more dedicatory sonnets. Baldwin accepts Southampton as the patron, but rejects the notion that the poet’s personal history is recorded. The Dark Lady is “a literary paradox”, close companion to Rosaline and Phoebe. It is perhaps significant that he has little to say on Sonnet 129.

Recently an American scholar, after discussing this century’s work in the presentation of Shakespear’s text, has suggested that even now there is room for editions of Shakespeare different from those we have, editions which will serve some purposes better than the existing editions do. Among such editions there is one which deserves special consideration—a text of the plays designed for those many French, German and other continental readers who are well acquainted with the English language but who are not concerned with the detailed apparatus proper and necessary for university students. Again and again readers of this kind, in their desire to enter into the spirit of Shakespeare’s poetic achievement, have turned to the plays as they appear in current editions but, finding themselves confronted by all sorts of difficulties, have been forced to abandon the English text and to revert to those translations from which they had hoped to escape. For them, it would seem, something must be provided different from anything that at present exists, some edition that would help them to realize the power of the poetry, that would induce in them the imaginative excitement without which poetry cannot be appreciated.

[The plays selected this year by our reviewer for extended criticism are Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, and Henry V at the Old Vic Theatre, October 1950-March 1951]

For some years before the war there was one theatre in England, and perhaps only one, which could be confidently relied upon to produce Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake—the Old Vic in the Waterloo Road. When in 1941 the building was damaged by bombs, the company moved to another theatre, in London’s west end; but though there were still individual productions of distinction and star performances of particular roles, something of the special glory of the Old Vic seemed to evaporate with the change of quarters. The post-war reorganization of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford, of the old double shrine of Ham and Whimsy, and the startling emergence there of a true Shakespearian style have since provided another stage on which authentic productions of Shakespeare’s plays may be expected. Yet even with this second stronghold in being, there are many who have waited anxiously for the reopening of the theatre in the Waterloo Road, in the hope that with it might reappear the old qualities, of faithfulness to the text and to the spirit of the plays, of star turns subordinated to team-work, and of stagecraft inventive but never fanciful or perverse.

When in 1933 L. C. Knights pleaded that “the only profitable approach to Shakespeare is a consideration of his plays as dramatic poems”, he was putting forward an extreme point of view, reacting against what he considered the established way of regarding Shakespeare’s plays, as studies in character. For at that time the study of Shakespeare’s imagery, concentration on the poetry rather than on the action of the plays, was a comparatively new trend in Shakespearian criticism, although notable books had been published in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s by G. Wilson Knight, Elizabeth Holmes, H. W. Wells and others. More recently, and especially since the publication of C. F. E. Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery in 1935, the volume of writings on the imagery of the plays has increased enormously. Discussion of verse and imagery appears in many books dealing mainly with other aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, and a fair proportion of current Shakespearian criticism is concerned with imagery and language alone. By 1948 A. H. Sackton could observe that

New Place holds a peculiarly important position among the landmarks of Shakespeare’s life. At the beginning of his thirty-third year, at a time when his fame as a playwright was just becoming established, and several years before the period of his greatest triumphs, he seems to have put whatever money he had saved into the purchase of this, the second largest house in his native Stratford, described in 1496 by its original builder, Sir Hugh Clopton, as “my grete house in Stratford upon Avon”. Later Shakespeare retired to New Place, and there he died.

The fortunes of New Place before its purchase by Shakespeare in 1597 and its vicissitudes after his death are well documented. Unfortunately, however, the existing structure was pulled down about 1702, and a new house built in its stead, a house which in its turn was destroyed in 1759.

Apart from one or two brief and rather vague descriptions of the original "praty howse of brike and tymbar", nothing has hitherto been known of its appearance. Hence the pen-and-ink sketch reproduced here has more than common interest (Plate I). The sketch itself shows the frontage on Church Street, but since this was only the gate-house and servants' quarters, behind which lay an inner garden-court leading to the 'Great House', we gain from the drawing the impression of a much nobler and more impressive mansion than we do from the extant descriptions. This was no ordinary Stratford dwelling but something much nearer to a manor house.

The play of Pericles, Prince of Tyre bristles with problems, but the cardinal one, to which all others are subsidiary, is, of course, the puzzle of how far it is Shakespeare’s work. The style of the play is very unequal and there is the additional complication that, although three times printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime with his name on the title-page, it was excluded from the First Folio. Dryden thought to account for its unevenness by allotting the play to the earliest part of Shakespeare’s career, but since Rowe in 1709 found (unspecified) “good Reason” for believing that “the greatest part” of the play was not Shakespeare’s, the hypothesis of divided authorship has in general ruled. Many different theories have been advanced. We are told that Shakespeare collaborated with one or more named or unnamed fellow-dramatists, that he revised an old play, or that an old play of his was revised by another; his hand has been seen in one act only, or in two, three, four or even all five acts. But it is not too much to say that the weight of opinion regards the earlier part of the play as largely non-Shakespearian and the later largely Shakespeare’s.

There is still no commonly accepted procedure in Shakespeare criticism. Yet method to a great extent determines results. Unfortunately no one to-day can have a specialist’s familiarity with every department of Shakespeare studies: indeed, it is arguable that the talents of the critic and those required by the modern textual scholar are seldom to be found in the same person. The critic is usually willing to defer to specialist authority on textual and bibliographical questions, but other departments of scholarship, notably the study of Elizabethan thought and Elizabethan theatrical conditions, are indispensable. Without these safeguards the approach to Shakespeare’s imagery is especially perilous.

Method

The study of poetic imagery is without doubt one of the most important innovations in Shakespeare criticism, but, unless a method is followed which brings imagery into due subordination to other aspects of dramatic expression, it can lead only to the construction of individual fantasies. There would seem to have been hitherto a good deal of confusion about the nature and function of Shakespeare's imagery and about the critical technique required to deal with it. It might be useful to examine some of the more important problems involved.

Abuse of the commentators and of the editors is a form of recreation with which many readers of Shakespeare have from time to time diverted themselves. Familiar, perhaps from their early years, with his plays in some well-known and standard text, they come in their maturer days upon remarks that disturb their repose in their long-cherished knowledge or on suggestions that offend their sense of propriety. Such reactions may be wise or unwise according to circumstances and the capacity of the reader; they are at least natural, but only some familiarity with the commentator’s problem will enable even the judicious reader to pass a fair judgement on new suggestions and to reject them, if necessary, with the charitable allowance that the case usually deserves. For the commentator is doing his best to help in what is both a difficult and a delicate task, and only an arrogant assumption of omniscience on his part should call forth the reader’s objurgation.

It is not easy to be precise about the beginnings of the Shakespeare collection in Trinity College, Cambridge, because of the absence of early and detailed records concerning the books in the Library. But one of the earliest and much the most notable component in that collection was the gift in 1779 of his books by Edward Capell, the Shakespearian editor. This contained, among other items, the four folios and fifty-one quarto plays, besides four quarto editions of the separate poems, and the octavo Passionate Pilgrim, 1599 and Venus and Adonis, 1620. Perhaps before the advent of the Capell books the College may have possessed two of its four Fourth Folios, and perhaps also the collected editions of Rowe, Pope and Theobald. Then in 1863 came second copies of the First, Second and Third Folios, part of the library of William Grylls, scholar of the College. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Library was enriched by W. Aldis Wright, one of the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare and later Vice-Master of the College. He gave several eighteenth-century editions, besides other books which will be mentioned later. But it seems that donors were never lacking to provide the Library with editions of Shakespeare. From the early 1700’s and excluding the Capell collection there are sixty-one editions in English up to 1900, besides one in French and two in German.

Though it is customary to speak of Nicholas Rowe as the first editor of Shakespeare, the editing began at least as early as the First Folio. Evidence is not wanting that those responsible for this volume were at some pains to publish better texts than had been available previously. King Lear is a case in point, a play printed in the Folio from a copy of the ‘Pied Bull’ Quarto that had been elaborately corrected by reference to the playhouse manuscript. Somewhat the same thing was done with Troilus and Cressida, a play of which the slightly longer Folio text differs repeatedly from that of the Quarto. Final proof of this fact is presented by Philip Williams, who is thus able to dismiss once and for all the rival hypothesis that the printer of the First Folio used an independent manuscript. In the 1609 Quarto of Troilus, the printer followed certain conventions in the use of roman and italic types; so did the printer of the Folio, though the conventions were not necessarily the same. The Quarto was set by two compositors with easily recognizable habits of spelling and treatment of speech-headings; so was the Folio text of Troilus, as Edwin E. Willoughby demonstrated twenty years ago. Now Williams reports the discovery of so many cases in which the Folio agrees—abnormally — with the Quarto in the use of italic and roman types, in the abbreviation of speech-headings, and in idiosyncratic spellings, that one, and only one, explanation will suffice: a marked copy of the Quarto served as printer’s copy for the Folio.

The way in which Shakespeare’s plays have been incorporated into the literary traditions of countries other than his own is of no greater interest than his incorporation into the theatre—his reappearance year after year on their stages. When did this incorporation start? Which plays are most popular? Has production method followed the same changes it has in England? Are the roles given similar interpretations by the actors? These are some of the questions this paper will attempt to answer for the Flemish-speaking stage of Belgium.

Shakespeare as a part of the Belgian theatrical tradition is difficult to survey, for (as is perhaps too little realized) even the Belgian National Theatre is, in reality, two distinct theatres representing two linguistic and cultural groups.

Information of all kinds coming from Belgium is in French, and it may be a surprise to some to learn that four and a half of its eight million inhabitants speak, not French, but Flemish, and that the Belgian National Theatre, founded in 1945 by the Ministry of Education, has one French-speaking theatre to three that perform in Flemish.

A selection has here been made from the reports received from our correspondents, those which present material of a particularly interesting kind being printed wholly or largely in their entirety. It should be emphasized that the choice of countries to be thus represented has depended on the nature of the information presented in the reports, not upon either the importance of the countries concerned or the character of the reports themselves.

Austria

In the summer of 1950 Shakespeare's Twelfth Night devoted to Shakespeare. In addition to an article on was included in the performances of the Salzburg Lear> another appeared on Othello—which the Comedie Musical and Theatrical Festival. The actors were of the Francaise presented at the Theatre Royal du Pare for Vienna Burgtheater, which, in the autumn, brought a f e w performances. Aime Clariond played Othello; this comedy into its regular repertoire.

The Bodleian Library was formally opened by the Vice-Chancellor of the University on 8 November 1602. Yet we cannot suppose that in the last thirteen years of his life Shakespeare ever saw the transformation effected by Sir Thomas Bodley in that “great desolate roome” which he had found over the Divinity School. The use of the Library was restricted to graduates of the University. At best we may conjecture that Shakespeare on his visits to Oxford saw the outside of the original library building and may have seen the new quadrangle in course of construction. It was begun in 1610 but not finally completed until 1623.

History

The University Library which Sir Thomas Bodley refounded was naturally enough a library built up by scholars for scholars, and more particularly a library built up by Protestant theological scholars for Protestant theologians. Bodley himself had lectured in Greek to the University before he entered the diplomatic service of Queen Elizabeth. But it is more important that he began his education in Geneva, whither his parents had fled to escape the Marian persecution, and had there studied under Calvin. His diplomatic career had for the most part been spent amongst the congenial and Calvinistic Dutch. Thomas James, Bodley’s choice as the first librarian of his foundation, left behind him, according to Anthony Wood, “this character that 'he was the most industrious and indefatigable writer against the Papists, that had been educated in Oxon since the reformation of religion’”. The Library was therefore primarily intended by the Founder and the Librarian as a Protestant armoury in the paper war against the Counter- Reformation.