A survey of recent textual work in Shakespeare may begin appropriately with companion essays by colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, one the editor of the Variorum 2 Henry IV; and the other the prospective editor of the Variorum Richard II. Rarely does one find the problems of an editor more delightfully explained. M. A. Shaaber notes the deficiencies of current editions of Shakespeare and describes the potential benefits of several types of edition not now in existence. “It is a strange anomaly”, he points out, “that, while the standard editions of most Elizabethan authors print the spelling of the contemporary books and manuscripts from which it is derived, there has never been a complete edition of Shakespeare in the old spelling. . . . Indeed I think there is room for an edition which would reproduce the most authoritative text of each play with no editing at all except to correct undoubted mistakes and make good undoubted omissions. This would serve chiefly as a convenient substitute for facsimiles. Just so it would be welcome, since there is no complete set of reliable facsimiles of the Quartos and all facsimiles are expensive.” Shaaber is confident that “in the future we can make better texts of Shakespeare than we have to-day”, and he illustrates the possibility by showing how little attention has been paid to the editorial policies and practices of the first Folio by the citation of passage after passage in the fifth Quarto text of I Henry IV that has been altered in the Folio. Pollard’s judgement about the absence of ‘editorial meddling’ in the latter has been reversed by Greg, who is of the opinion that the plays “underwent a good deal of modernization, and general tidying up in spelling, punctuation, grammar, metre, and so on”.

‘Open-air theatres’—a collective term for various types of theatre opposed to the enclosed play-house—have their own peculiar laws of dramaturgy which essentially differ from those of the theatre in the ordinary sense. Here, instead of an auditorium there is a spectators’ enclosure; instead of a stage, an open platform.

The facts that there is no curtain and that different dimensions apply to platform and arena, the lack of stage machinery and its capacity for scene changes, and the different acoustic and visual conditions demand that both the method of production and the form of the play chosen for production should be most carefully determined in accordance with the requirements of the stage. So far, however, the open-air theatre in Germany has proved incapable of stimulating the writing of special plays; and there is no 'open-air drama' worth mentioning. Dramas of 'local colour' and indifferent 'festival' plays have fallen quite deservedly into oblivion after only a short life on the stage.

In the many attempts that have been made during the last fifty years to establish a convincing reconstruction of the Shakespearian public playhouse the main force of effort and controversy has nearly always ranged around that area at the back of the stage which we call the ‘tiring-house façade’. The uses and appearance of this feature have occupied the keenest attention of reconstructors ever since the publication of the de Witt sketch of the Swan Playhouse, in 1888–particularly, of course, because this famous drawing tended so unhelpfully to disagree with certain theories held at that time, just as it has done, in one way or another, with all other theories held ever since. In their various assessments of the tiring-house façade most reconstructions disagree with one another, except in their universal, though somewhat apologetic, disagreement with the observations of Johannes de Witt. Yet while students have been concentrating with more and more eagerness upon this area of disagreement, they have accepted without much question a number of preconceived opinions about the nature of the actual stage, the platform structure, itself. In estimating the character of the Elizabethan theatre we are constantly being betrayed by the habits of our modern theatrical experience. We try, seemingly in very spite of our better knowledge, to find some sort of a proscenium somewhere upon the Elizabethan stage; to open up an inner-stage, no matter how questionable the evidence for its existence, and to thrust back into it a greater and greater portion of the action of the Elizabethan plays. In this way the tiring-house façade has seemed, like a magnet, to draw back both actors and students alike into itself, leaving the great stage before it empty and unattended.

To gain a proper estimate of Shakespeare in Denmark during the first half of the twentieth century one should bear in mind certain facts. The Danish people consists of four million inhabitants only—in 1900 there were only two-and-a-half million. The capital has no less than one million inhabitants. On the other hand, the largest town but four has only 50,000. Even in proportion to this the number of theatres is quite small. The Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, which is subsidized by the State, performs plays, operas, and ballets; but apart from that there are few theatres in the capital and the provinces, and they have great difficulties in maintaining a good literary standard. On the other hand, the Royal Theatre, which is now 200 years old, is regarded with remarkable interest and reverence; according to Danish traditions this theatre is a cultural and not a commercial enterprise. Another proof of the remarkable centralization in Denmark is the fact that, till a few years ago, the country had only one university, situated in Copenhagen. Like other small nations, the Danes have been fortunate in that they were forced to acquaint themselves with foreign languages and influences. The geographical position of the country has meant that these influences have never been one-sided. Quite naturally the German influence has been the strongest; rather early, however, an important contact was established with England, whereas the connexion with France after 1800 has been comparatively weak. Danish literary taste has always been determined by these facts, and it is also of great importance to note that the cultural element is largely fostered by an enlightened middle class. Danish civilization rests on a broad basis and is only to a small extent guided by a little group of high-brows.

This year’s critical work shows some interesting developments in line with, but by no means repeating, those of the last two years. The tendency to give first place to the art and poetry of Shakespeare is confirmed and some searching and penetrating work in this field gives promise of a coming renascence in dramatic aesthetics. A new edition, by Napoleone Orsini, of Benedetto Croce’s Shakespeare is symptomatic of the growing interest in the older criticism, as is also the constant reference back to Bradley, but one of the healthiest signs is the divergence of opinion on certain branches of Shakespeare’s dramatic technique and the acute and close arguing which, in three or four volumes, accompanies the investigation of the functions and relations of these to the forms of specific plays and to the nature of dramatic art itself. Though many aspects of Shakespeare’s work have here come in for their share–thought, structure, character, style and imagery—the treatment of character and its dramatic function has invited the widest range of critical judgements, from those of Henri Fluchère and of J. F. Danby, who, in different forms, deny psychological reality to character in drama (even in Shakespeare’s drama), to those of H. B. Charlton and J. I. M. Stewart who stoutly maintain the fundamental truth of the character-drawing in the plays. Clearly the question of the relation of ‘character’ in drama to the basic nature of the art is disturbing some of our assumptions, and the problems that this uneasiness will ultimately disclose may tax to the full our powers of thought, even as those raised by the nature of dramatic imagery did some twenty years ago. Another tendency noticed last year, the detailed study of a single play in a volume of some length, also continues: last year’s favourite play was Hamlet; this year’s is Lear.

Seeing that no fewer than twenty-three early Shakespeare quartos came to the Museum with his library it is hardly fair to quote George III’s remark to Fanny Burney on the subject of Shakespeare, but one is forced to conclude that his alleged attitude to the Bard was not at variance with that of his immediate forebears. For the Old Royal Library, when it came to the British Museum in 1757, had not a single Shakespeare on its shelves!

The catalogue of Sir Hans Sloane's printed books, which formed the Museum's original stock, is arranged in a way that makes it wellnigh impossible to trace the works of a particular author, but it is safe to say that the British Museum Library opened its doors to the public in 1759 almost without a single Shakespeare quarto, or folio, to its name. It owes its collection of early printed Shakespeariana largely to a few generous donors, though, in this as in many other fields, tribute should be paid to those members of the staff, in the days of the Museum's great expansion in the nineteenth century, who bought widely and intelligently.

John Selden is reported to have said: “No man is the wiser for his learning: it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon, but wit and wisdom are born with a man.” For two and a half centuries we have been asking how far learning administered matter for Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom to work in or objects for them to work upon. If a friend had put to Shakespeare the Second Outlaw’s question “Have you the tongues?”, would he have answered, with Valentine, “My youthful travail therein made me happy”?

Soon after his death two poets wrote about Shakespeare in terms that suggest that his learning, that is, his knowledge of Greek and Latin, was scanty. One of them said that he had "small Latin, and less Greek": the other praised him as Fancy's child, warbling "his native wood-notes wild". But Jonson and Milton are among the most learned scholar-poets this country has produced; and if we test Shakespeare, as perhaps they were testing him, by their own severe standards of scholarship, then indeed we must say he had not even the "edging or trimming of a scholar".

Shakespeare’s first formal editor, Nicholas Rowe, was mildly interested in the problem of chronology, but lacked the equipment and the intellectual curiosity to solve it. “It would be without a doubt”, he wrote in 1709, “a pleasure to any man, curious in things of this kind, to see and know what was the first essay of a fancy like Shakespeare’s. Perhaps we are not to look for his beginnings, like those of other writers, among their least perfect writings, art had so little, and nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best.” To which Dr Johnson wisely replied in 1765 that “Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned; and as he must increase his ideas, like other mortals, by gradual acquisition, he, like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could display life better, as he knew it more, and could instruct with more efficacy, as he was himself more amply instructed”.

This year a single production of a Shakespeare play has been selected by our reviewer for an extended description and critical analysis. It is hoped that this may prove of interest to readers who did not have the opportunity of seeing the performance itself, and that it may have some permanent value as an historical record.

I have selected the Stratford production of Henry VIII for a 'descriptive analysis' for various reasons, chief among them being the producer's evident desire to remain faithful to the author's intentions, his treatment of the text, and his utilization of a kind of stage which permitted him to secure effects impossible in an ordinary picture-frame set.

When the audience entered the theatre, instead of seeing a curtain, they had before their eyes a lighted permanent set which remained unchanged and unhidden until the end (see Plate VIII A). An excellent compromise between a platform and a picture-frame stage, it suggests a basic design which might well provide a happy and practicable solution to the problem of securing the effect of the Elizabethan stage within our modern theatres. Miss Tanya Moiseiwitsch is to be congratulated on the pleasing and dignified appearance as well as on the admirably functional qualities of this set, with its varied levels, its ample forestage, fifteen feet deep, and its wellthought- out modifications and rearrangements of the gallery and the inner-stage.

Nine years ago we knew that Alan Keen had discovered a copy of Hall’s Chronicle with numerous marginalia believed to have some connexion with Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy. Now Moray McLaren has produced a book in which the marginalia are claimed to be in Shakespeare’s hand. He usefully gives an appendix in which the notes relating to the subject-matter of Richard II are set out, along with the passages from Hall that they annotate and the corresponding lines from the play. It might indeed have been better at this stage to have devoted the book to a reproduction of all the 406 notes: a basis for judgement would have been more securely provided in this way than by McLaren’s rather impulsive pleadings. Space is given, for example, to the arguments that the annotator was ‘poetically minded’ because he writes the words “Prisoners pitifully slayne”, and that he was not unfamiliar with the theatre because, like the author of Thomas of Woodstock, he used the name ‘Woodstock’ for Gloucester. Certainly there are interesting points of contact between some of the marginalia and passages in Shakespeare; there is, too, the sketch of a large-nosed face against Hall’s account of the soldier hanged for stealing the pyx; but many other parallels adduced by McLaren are altogether nugatory. Nor is it helpful to read that, if Shakespeare was a schoolmaster, he would have had to use Hall as a text-book for the teaching of English history.

The nineteen-twenties, distrustful of ‘enthusiasm’, strove to see Shakespeare as above all the practical dramatist, led to the choice and the manipulation of his stories, to his manner of theatrical speech and character-presentation, by the stage-conditions of his time and the passing fashion of dramatic taste. This approach strengthened our understanding of Elizabethan stage-technique, and it was a useful corrective to the heavily romanticized Shakespeare of earlier years. But when the student of stage-conditions set up as the complete interpreter, the limitations of the approach were obvious enough. The poetic and the dramatic power were only foster-children of the industrious apprenticeship to the stage: the heart of the matter was not to be weighed in a Shakespeare laboratory.

It would be instructive to relate the history of Shakespearian biography to that of biography in general, from its beginnings in Ben Jonson’s Conversations or the prefatory verses of the First Folio, on to the first formal Life prefaced by Rowe to his edition of 1709, and so to the foundations of modern documented study in Malone’s Life and History of the Stage in their latest form in the Variorum of 1821. Certain main trends of development are plainly observable.

The collection of oral evidence or of tradition is superseded by the collection of facts resting upon documents, and the man Shakespeare is recorded in the setting of the London theatre world with which in his life he was mostly concerned. From the history of the stage it was a short step to the study of the Elizabethan world in which Shakespeare lived, in London or in Stratford-upon-Avon, to complete the setting for the picture of his life.

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.

Austria: Shakespeare in the Villages

Not very much can be said on Shakespeare performances in Austria during the year 1948-9. The leading Vienna theatres had no new performances in the current year, although the Volkstheater brought out Twelfth Night and the Theater in der Josefstadt produced The Winter's Tale, both good average performances without any special distinction.

The subject of this paper is not, on the whole, one to which scholars have devoted much attention, and the results of this lack of interest have in some ways been unfortunate. Shakespeare’s tragedies seem to conform outwardly to the conventional Aristotelian triangle well enough to foster on the one hand the impression that the triangular scheme is the only possible one and that playwrights such as Fletcher who have worked on other principles are lacking in form, while on the other certain un-Aristotelian tendencies, such as the frequent disappearance of the hero during the decline, or the rather abrupt episodic nature of the structure, have been overlooked and even, for instance in discussing the doubtful plays, been regarded as un-Shakespearian while in fact they are typical.

Of the four great tragedies it is Hamlet that seems to exhibit the Shakespearian pattern most perfectly. The opening scene is a wonderful piece of atmosphere: a solitary sentry pacing up and down, muffled in an inky cloak to suggest the dark and the cold; to him another figure, similarly muffled, a hasty snatch of conversation in muffled tones, betraying a sense of uneasiness—then more figures, more talk, and out of it, abruptly dropped, the cause of the uneasiness—"What, has this thing appear'd again to-night?"

It is well known, not only to scholars, that besides the good texts of Hamlet preserved in the Quarto printed in 1604 and in the Folio of 1623 there is a strange version of Shakespeare’s tragedy which has come down to us in a quarto dated 1603. This quarto boldly proclaims that it represents the play “as it hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse servants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where”. Few, if any, of the other Shakespeare quartos can boast a title-page quite as impressive as this one, and few are more pretentious or misleading in their claims. It is possible that Hamlet was played at both the Universities and in the city of London, though the Globe Theatre, the normal habitat of the King’s Players, was in Southwark. What appears manifestly impossible is that the version preserved in this particular quarto was performed in any of these places. There is virtue, however, in the ‘else-where’, which we may take to be the operative word. Modern research has rendered it highly probable that the 1603 Quarto perpetuates the attempt to portray something resembling Shakespeare’s Hamlet before provincial audiences.

The following transcript of Shakespeare’s deposition, reproduced in Plates II and III, has been made by Arthur Brown and checked by Charles J. Sisson. Square brackets denote deletions in the manuscript; pointed brackets denote mutilations in the manuscript (with the number of letters missing, when determinable, indicated by dots within the brackets); half-square brackets denote interlineations.

In May 1607 a spark of revolt fell in Northamptonshire. The area, as Sir Edward Montague, one of the county members, had warned Parliament in 1604, was tinder; and, blazing up, the flames ran swiftly over Northamptonshire into the adjacent counties. But, after some hesitant half-measures on the part of the local justices, the fire was rapidly and effectively beaten down. It was the old story—a doomed outburst of desperate, ill-organized peasants, so badly equipped that they were short even of spades and shovels to set about their task of laying open enclosures and filling up ditches, so poorly armed that a handful of mounted gentry, with their retainers, was enough to rout a thousand of them. And the aftermath was the familiar one—executions, a Royal Commission of Inquiry, some vague promises of redress.

Most history books ignore the revolt or dismiss it in a line or two. It was, wrote E. F. Gay, "weak and ineffective". Yet this same historian also states that the outbreak "had something more than the dimensions of the ordinary local riot", and that there had been nothing on the same scale since the northern rebellion of 1569. Moreover, most of us, in our alarm, have a habit of magnifying any sort of civil disturbance; and, however insignificant this revolt may appear from the remote distance of three hundred and fifty years, it is reasonable to suppose that many Englishmen of the time were profoundly disturbed by it.