Disability autobiography may be regarded as a postcolonial – indeed, an anticolonial – phenomenon, a form of autoethnography, as Mary Louise Pratt has defined it: ‘instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with [read: contest] the colonizer’s own terms’.

The century in which Shakespeare was born and started his career as a playwright saw two major instances of mass violence linked to religious issues: the Sack of Rome in 1527, and the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris. These events were mirror images of each other in more than just their dates: in the former case, it was the See of Catholicism that was attacked by the Emperor’s troops, which included a Lutheran contingent; in the latter, it was the French Protestants, or Huguenots, who were attacked by the Catholic population.

In homage to Patricia Parker’s brilliant and baroque book, Shakespearean Intersections: Language, Contexts, Critical Keywords, I start where I should end with the ‘arsy-versy’ or the preposterous, as a new collective noun for a group of books on Shakespeare. In this amblongus pie of textual delicacies, Parker addresses ‘key’ terms through which other words or phrases may be unlocked or interconnected. Returning to many of the avenues and intersections that Parker explored in her – now classic – Shakespeare from the Margins, the book devotes itself to the ebullient performances of meaning that take place across the drama and invites us to the often indigestible feast of language as both a guest and an onlooker.

However sophisticated or assertive a director or designer may be, it is the actor and his or her body that carry the ultimate authority in most kinds of theatre, especially in ‘live’ performance. ‘Liveness’ is a category debated in a number of the works reviewed this year, and evidence from the archive is always both invaluable and to be questioned. Nevertheless, the power of the actor to ‘fix’ posthumously an image of a character, assisted in this case by the photographer’s camera, is asserted in Angus McBean’s photograph of Richard Burton as Prince Henry in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s 1951 production of Henry IV, Part Two, which forms the front cover of Shakespeare by McBean, edited by Adrian Woodhouse.

Character, so central to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century appreciation of Shakespeare, fell out of favour in the mid twentieth century. This first occurred at the hands of the ‘New Criticism’. L. C. Knights, in ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, was instrumental in the classic shift of critical focus from the life and humanity of the fictional people in Shakespeare’s plays (exemplified by A. C. Bradley)1 to a view of the texts as elaborate poetic forms, to be read for their network of figurative structures and connections rather than for the psychology of their characters.

Dividing this review into two sections for the first time this year made painfully evident just how much Shakespearian performance goes on in the capital. With Paul Prescott taking on reviewing duties for productions outside of London, and me confining myself to those performed within the bounds of the M25, we split the usual length of the Survey review equally between us. The smorgasbord of Shakespeare on offer within my geographical remit, combined with a particularly Shakespeare-heavy summer season at Shakespeare’s Globe, meant that I ended up having to forgo a number of London-based productions: revivals were out, so I missed Filter’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric Hammersmith, and Jonathan Munby’s King Lear in the West End; I was unable to attend a number of shows with shorter runs, such as Max Webster’s As You Like It at Regent’s Park and Paper Cinema’s Macbeth at Battersea Arts Centre.

Writing for the New York Times in 1981, Frank Rich began his witty review of a production of Shakespeare’s Cabaret with the following: ‘[a]s theater lyricists go, William Shakespeare is hard to beat. He may even be better than Lorenz Hart.’1 Hart was, of course, the lyricist half of the famous American song-writing team of Rodgers and Hart, contributing to such well-known compositions as ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’.

The titular quotation, ‘rude wind’, comes from the meeting of Albany and Goneril in Act 4 of King Lear. She remarks that she has ‘been worth the whistling’ (4.2.30). Registering her iniquity, he adopts her suffluent adage and both inflates and poisons it: ‘[o]h Goneril, / You are not worth the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face’ (4.2.30–2). Wind is associated with rudeness; rudeness in the sense of ‘harsh’, ‘stormy’, ‘destructive’, but also in the sense of ‘unmannerly’ or, as OED has it, ‘offensively or deliberately discourteous’ (OED, 4).

This article concerns the repetition of war motifs in Shakespeare’s work, and the uses and meanings to which the plays are currently being put in therapeutic interventions with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is part of two larger projects: on repetition and on applied arts. The emotional and cognitive work that veterans bring to performing Shakespeare, and the intense enjoyment and camaraderie they derive from the experience, are exceptionally moving to behold.

In this article, I want to review evidence, from the early modern period, for the staging of siege scenes in particular, and battle sequences in general. This reveals that playhouse combats were often ritualized or emblematized, and very often minimalized. It is plausible that they were less prominent than in many contemporary stage productions and in most screen versions. Filmmakers, in order to satisfy contemporary demands for spectacle, can film on location and exhibit the vasty fields of France, but they also tend to magnify the battles, making them both more life-like and more climactic than they originally were.