The field of study which I propose for consideration has to do with Shakespeare’s plots in two aspects, the general and the detailed. When he utters the familiar lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

he gives a perfect description of the most fundamental operation of the human mind. As the possessor of one of the greatest minds on record, he is at the same time describing his own transcendent skill.

There is usually to be discovered in Shakespeare's plays a form or pattern, sometimes easily identified, sometimes not; sometimes apparently consciously developed, sometimes seemingly almost accidental. These are "the forms of things unknown". The power of determining forms, that is, of regarding as irrelevant all attending circumstances except a certain conceptual form that controls the complex of events, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind, and in the recognition of significant form in any configuration presented to experience Shakespeare excelled.

So far as can be determined, the history of Shakespeare in Slovakia starts with the year 1806. It was then that a voluminous collection of poems entitled Poezye was published by the poet Bohuslav Tablic, who later made a great contribution to Anglo-Czechoslovak cultural relations by publishing in 1831 an anthology of translations from English poets called ‘The English Muses in Czechoslovak Garb’. His Poezye contained a translation of the famous ‘To be or not to be’, wherein the spirit of the original was not unsuccessfully rendered, even though the Slovak poet permitted himself much freedom and changed Shakespeare’s iambic measure into trochaics.

The first attempt at a systematic translation of Shakespeare's plays was made by Bohuslav Križak (d. 1847). He produced versions of Hamlet, Macbeth and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but none of these has come down to us complete. At the same time, the impress of Shakespeare was laid heavily on the work of many of the young romantic poets and dramatists active about the middle of the nineteenth century. Other translations were made later,5 but it is only when we come to the great Slovak poet Hviezdoslav (1849-1921), that we find anything of real value. Hviezdoslav produced his translation of Hamlet (1903) and of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1905) after much fruitful activity in the fields of poetry and drama, and his seriousness of purpose is shown by his own declaration that he was "imbued with true piety towards the author's masterpiece", and "inspired by a special reverence for each word that had come from his pen".

The Three Parts of Henry VI, unquestionably written before the beginning of March 1592, as I hope to show on a later occasion, are, if Shakespeare’s, probably the earliest productions we have from his pen. But are they his? And if so, are they his entirely? Their inclusion in the First Folio shows that Heminges and Condell considered him to be, at least in part, responsible for them all. On the other hand, it is impossible to deny their unequal quality; poor scenes and pedestrian or over-pretentious verse being interspersed with scenes and verse which all but extreme disintegrators accept as authentic Shakespeare. In 1790 Malone offered an explanation of this state of affairs which satisfied most students until twenty years ago. The trilogy, he argued, was originally composed by two or more of Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors (he suspected Greene and Peele) and was afterwards rehandled and in part rewritten by him. These views he set forth in A Dissertation on the Three Parts of Henry VI, which, apart from Farmer’s Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, 1767, was the earliest and most elaborate treatise yet written on a single point of Shakespearian scholarship and was pronounced on its appearance by no less distinguished a scholar than Porson to be “one of the most convincing pieces of criticism he had ever met with”. That it no longer convinces is due to the disproof of a proposition which held a conspicuous place in the thesis.

The translation, interpretation and performance of Shakespeare in the South Slav lands have passed through two phases and are now in the third. The first began in the forties of last century and lasted until the first World War, a period when only a minority of the South Slavs had an independent State, the majority being under Austria-Hungary or Turkey. The second phase covers the period between the two World Wars, after the South Slav peoples had attained political independence, and were united in the sovereign state of Yugoslavia. The third phase begins after the second World War, in the new, socialist Yugoslavia (a federation of the republics of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro). The quality of translation, acting and staging has improved in the course of time; in the second phase they reached a fairly high level, and have touched a still higher one in the third.

Before 1914 twenty-one of Shakespeare's plays had been performed in Croatia, in translation from the German, except in the case of two which were possibly from the English and of one from the French. Of the printed translations of nine of Shakespeare's plays, only one was from the English original.1 In the Serbian lands, six of Shakespeare's plays were acted in translations from the English and five from the German, while altogether thirteen translations were printed, ten of which were from the original English. The principal translators of Shakespeare during this period were: in Croatia, the novelist A. Šenoa and the poets A. Harambašić, H. Badalic and V. Nazor; in the Serbian lands, the poets L. Kostic and S. Stefanović; in Slovenia, the shortstory writer I. Cankar and the poets A. Funtek and O. Župančič.

Analysing Shakespeare’s development as a poet, George Rylands has said: “He was first an Elizabethan poet and it is of this stuff [i.e. the sonnets of Petrarch, the Pléiade, Lyly, etc.] that Elizabethan poetry was made.” That is undeniably the case; but Rylands goes on to say:

Unless a work of art is to be studied in absolute terms as a timeless contribution to human culture, there can be no through understanding and appreciation of it until it has been fitted into a chronological pattern that will relate it to the other works in the canon and throw light on the development of the mind of the artist. Nor can a writer be studied intelligently without reference to the age in which he lived, the other writers of the time, and the events and movements which moulded, or were moulded by, them. It is the neglect or ignorance of this fundamental truth which leads to the framing of the questions one frequently hears: “What does it matter who wrote ‘Shakespeare’? We have the plays, haven’t we?” No rational account of the development of Elizabethan literature can be written unless we recognize that the author of ‘Shakespeare’ was a man who flourished at precisely the time of William Shakespeare of Stratford—neither earlier nor later—and accept the overwhelming evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford is the author of the works then and now attributed to him. But the biographical records of playwrights of that age being scanty, there are gaps in the history and puzzles in the chronology of all the writers which continue to challenge our best efforts.

Tradition, according to the dictionary, is “the handing down of customs, opinion or doctrines from ancestors to posterity, from the past to the present, by oral communication: an opinion, custom or doctrine thus handed down: principles or accumulated experiences of earlier generations handed on to others”.

It is often said that the English stage has none of the great tradition of acting which has given dignity and substance to the theatres of France, Germany and Russia in their finest days. The National Theatre, we are told, will create a similar tradition in England, a permanent company for acting classic plays with style. Style (I read again in my dictionary) is “the general formal characteristics of any fine art”. A broad generalization, surely, and not a particularly illuminating definition. What exactly is style in acting and stage production? Does it mean the correct wearing of costume, appropriate deportment and the nice conduct of a clouded cane? Does it mean correct interpretation of the text without extravagance or eccentricity, an elegant sense of period, and beautiful (but unself-conscious) speaking, by a balanced and versatile company of actors, used to working together, flexible instruments under the hand of an inspired director? Such were the theatres of Stanislavsky in Russia, of Copeau and, afterwards, the Compagnie des Quinze in France, and, during certain years of Reinhardt’s supremacy, in Germany.

Whether there was or was not a ‘tarras’ in Shakespeare’s Globe and its successor is in itself perhaps of minor importance. But the question has a wider significance, because the arguments advanced for the tarras are typical of a distinctive point of view toward the whole of Elizabethan stagecraft, not to say of drama in general. Discussion of the tarras is possible in a limited space, but leads to conclusions of broad significance.

John C. Adams has presented the latest and longest argument in support of the existence of a tarras. He describes it as part of the balcony in the second story of the theatre, twenty-four feet long stretching across the back of the stage from one obliquely placed window to the other, and as three or four feet deep, this depth being secured by letting it project over the lower stage from the tiring-house wall. A light railing protected its front edge, and a curtain at the rear separated it from what Adams calls the * chamber'. This arrangement of the balcony is consistently thought out and sounds convincing, even obvious, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that C. Walter Hodges in his attractive little book, Shakespeare and the Players (1948), accepts it, as have also some other scholars in various modern reconstructions of the old stage.

This survey of twentieth-century criticism will be mainly confined to works of interpretation. Bibliographical and textual works will be entirely excluded; biographical works will be discussed only in so far as they contain criticism, so that for the present purpose E. K. Chambers’s Shakespeare: A Survey is more relevant than his imposing and indispensable Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems; works of scholarship which deal with special problems, such as authenticity or sources, will be mentioned only incidentally; and little attempt will be made to do justice to the many valuable books which have appeared during the last fifty years on such subjects as the Elizabethan Stage—books which have profoundly affected our understanding of Shakespeare’s own works. Impressive as much of the interpretative criticism of the period has been, it might be argued that it has not been the literary critics who have added most to our understanding of the plays but rather the textual critics who have brought us nearer to what Shakespeare wrote, the scholars who have increased our knowledge of the stage and audience for which he wrote and of the mental climate in which he lived, and the producers who have given us a chance of seeing Shakespeare’s plays more or less as they were written, so that we can see that many of their alleged faults vanish when they are performed with some understanding of Elizabethan conventions. As a last caveat, it should be mentioned that although an attempt will be made to consider all important English-speaking critics only occasional reference will be made to those who have written in other languages.

Roy Walker has followed up his full-length study of Hamlet, noticed in the last number of Shakespeare Survey, with a similar study of Macbeth. His method is essentially imaginative, the full significance of the tragic pattern revealing itself through a pondering of the processes of free association which one or another poetic image sets in motion. The hazards are obvious, and the book comes to a good many conclusions with which few will agree: for example, that the problematical Third Murderer is a “dramatic personification of Macbeth’s guilt”, and that Hecate (put into the play by Shakespeare himself, but without a speaking part) is correspondingly the guilty spirit of Lady Macbeth. But Walker tells us that although he fully expects to be assailed on particular judgements, he nevertheless believes that his “method of interpretation is genuinely in communication with Shakespeare’s creative activity”; and that it is, moreover, “somewhat akin to an X-ray examination, in which the normal surfaces are rendered transparent and almost invisible so that the inner structure may be observed and knowledge of the organism and its functioning increased”. This bold claim is justified. Walker combines an ability to view the play as a whole, ranging swiftly and sensitively over its whole surface and through its various depths, with an answering ability never to lose contact with its serial nature, its weight and impact as action.

Dr Johnson was the last critic who dared to say that Shakespeare’s most characteristic and most inspired work lay in his comedies. The Romantics, putting an exaggerated value on tragedy as in some way nearer to the heart of the matter, degraded the comedies to the status of pot-boilers; and even to-day we have hardly escaped from the Romantics’ spell. We have one expounder of the comedies for every ten on the tragedies; and for a Granville-Barker to stoop to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or an Edith Evans to Rosalind, is exceptional.

We may not agree with Johnson that the comedies deserve more effort than the tragedies, but clearly they require more if they are to make a comparable impression on a modern audience. Tragedy is large in gesture and effect, and even when its overtones are lost and the subsidiary strokes bungled, its main import can hardly be missed. Comedy depends much more on detail, on delicate adjustments of balance and of contrast; it seeks to reproduce the climate rather than the actual predicaments of real life and its method is rather allusiveness than direct presentation. Comedy has more and finer points of attachment to the world in which it is composed than has tragedy. For this reason, comedy dates the more rapidly and the more thoroughly, and after a lapse of years a tragedy based even on so fantastic a convention as Fletcher's is easier to grasp than a comedy of Jonson or Middleton, for all its firm grounding in human nature. Tragedy can be understood in the original, as it were, even by those unacquainted with the tongue; whereas comedy, to be appreciated by a modern audience, must undergo some degree of translation into modern terms.

A very broad definition of ‘sources’ must be my excuse for considering so familiar a topic as the origins of Macbeth. In this, the most concentrated of the tragedies, a particularly wide diversity of material was fused into unity. “In the quick forge and working-house of thought”, Shakespeare wrought at white heat. The material to be considered falls into three classes. First, the Scottish and English Chronicles supplied the facts, and one important scene; secondly, various works on witchcraft and demonology, including those of King James, gave some material for the witches’ scenes (but here the interest lies rather in Shakespeare’s innovations than in his borrowings); thirdly, earlier works by Shakespeare himself present in a simpler form some of the ingredients of this play, and an examination of what might be called the internal sources elucidates its inward structure. The repetitions, echoes and restatements which are to be detected in Shakespeare offer more than mere opportunity for pedantic correlation; they are alternative statements, varied embodiments of those deep-seated and permanent impulses which underlie all his work and make it, in spite of its variety, a vast and comprehensive whole—a single structure, though of Gothic design.

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 upon the character of the reports themselves.

U.S.A.: Shakespeare Leads the Way

If the Bard of Avon, touring the world in his astral body, had chosen the year 1949 to visit this benighted land, he would have found, on Broadway, his memory revered, but his plays neglected, while at the same time his Hamlet was leading the way in new fields of adventure and enterprise.

Only two productions have been seen in New York during the past twelve months: Richard III appeared briefly on the boards (in February) in a compact production designed, directed and performed by Richard Whorf; and a pleasant, fresh Twelfth Night, directed by one of our mid-western college producers, Valentine Windt, and employing an agreeable young cast, was seen in New York for a month or so in the autumn. Looming on the horizon is a Theatre Guild production of As You Like It starring Katharine Hepburn—recaptured from the films for the occasion—and directed by England’s Michael Benthall (Plate VIII). This highly publicized production is a cause for rejoicing, for New York theatre-goers are starved for Shakespeare.

The first paper in Leslie Hotson’s new book has led to prolonged discussion and remarkable difference of opinion. His case is that Sonnets 107, 123 and 124 contain topical references which date them c. 1589: the ‘mortall Moone’ of 107 is the Armada the ‘pyramids’ of 123 are the obelisks which Sixtus V re-erected in the years 1586–9; the ‘childe of state’ of 124 is the French King Henri III. Of the three identifications, Hotson is most convincing on the first, and brings forward a number of contemporary references to the Armada as a moon-shaped formations as it advanced into the Channel. The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, accepting the argument as a whole, wrote that the essay “may prove to be the most significant contribution to Shakespearian studies of recent years”: the dark lady can, we are told, now be seen as causing only “the transient passion of youth”. Not all correspondents of the Supplement have agreed: on 17 February Hugh Ross Williamson suggested that Sonnet 107 refers to the Third Armada, of 1597; on 31 March the Countess C. Longworth Chambrun expressed her continuing devotion to the Southampton theory. More important is the evidence brought forward by John Sparrow on 3 March and by I. A. Shapiro on 21 April that references to the crescent-formation of the Armada are frequent for many years after 1588.

In 1948 the Trustees and Guardians of Shakespeare’s Birthplace acquired an early copy of Shakespeare’s will which, so far as is known, ranks as the earliest transcript in existence.

Its immediate previous owner was Miss C. Hartwell Lucy, a descendant of a family prominent in Stratford-upon-Avon in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Miss Lucy’s great grandfather built the present mill on the Avon below the church at Stratford-upon-Avon and also the large residence, now a private hotel, called Avonside nearby. The copy of the will was discovered by Miss Lucy among a few papers in a deed box which belonged to her grandfather, the Reverend Edmund Lane, M.A., D.C.L. This gentleman, born and educated in Stratford, was a brilliant but rather peculiar person, whose absorbing hobby was the collection of rare books, manuscripts and the like. He spent the last twenty years or so of his life as Episcopalian Rector of St John's, Selkirk, and died in 1898 or 1899. His library was subsequently dispersed to sundry dealers, and it was by extraordinary good fortune that the precious document, folded up in an insignificant foolscap-sized envelope, endorsed ' Shakespeare's will' in typical Victorian handwriting, survived among a few family papers. How it came into Lane's possession is not known.

[Translated by Sir Barry Jackson] Of all the tragedies of Shakespeare, Othello is undoubtedly the one which the French theatre-goer has been able to accept with least perplexity. The action is complete, developing with compact logic. Louis Gillet, the French critic, says: “In form, Othello is the author’s finest work. No play is so simple, so well constructed, or more in accord with the classic spirit. The poet has left us nothing more complete and rounded. . . . All the reactions are of common humanity, entirely comprehensible, with no place for the supernatural or the marvellous.” There is truth in this statement: although perhaps it might be better re-phrased in a slightly different manner—in Othello the mysterious, always repellent to Latin races, does not immediately make itself apparent, and might indeed in desultory reading be thought to be absent altogether, while the characters are so conceived that French actors, trained by classic discipline, will always be more at ease in this play than in any other of the poet’s works.