THE BEAST AND THE SWAN

Along with 'the exquisite glorious delight' of tropical scenery, the encounter with the 'bona fide savages' of Tierra del Fuego marked the highlight of Charles Darwin's Beagle voyage (1831-6). Darwin was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure by 'the most curious and interesting spectacle' of Fuegians, whose attitudes and countenance were not only 'abject' but 'distrustful, surprised, and startled'. The tribes inhabiting Wollaston Island were in particular 'the most abject and miserable creatures' Darwin ever saw: 'These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity.' Darwin could hardly believe them to be 'fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world'. The difference between a primitive and civilized man seemed 'greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is a greater power of improvement', and, to Darwin, 'the cr[ie]s of domestic animals are far more intelligible' than the 'tones' and 'gesticulations' of Fuegians.

GRAMMAR, HISTORY AND METHOD

The relation between grammar and early modern drama is overdue for renewed analysis. To illustrate my point, the particular grammatical form I wish to focus on in this article is the Early Modern English modal auxiliary verb and the extraordinary work it does in articulating potential action in the new drama of the late sixteenth century, especially as that work is evidenced in such early Shakespeare plays as Titus Andronicus and Richard III. The 'close encounters' will be with dramatic exchanges taking shape around 'a play of modals', dialogic interactions highlighting and making theatrical meaning out of what might seem inconsequential linguistic detail - modality and its expression in modal auxiliary verbs. A long-standing semantic category for what becomes grammaticalized in languages in various ways, definition of modality is vexed and contested: I understand it here as concerned with the speaker's assessment of, or an agent's orientation to, the possible truth of a proposition or the potentiality of a state of affairs. By the 1590s, during a period of particularly rapid linguistic change in Early Modern English, a group of modal verbs including 'may', 'must', 'can', 'will', and 'shall' had become differentiated in syntactic form from the full lexical verbs they derived from in Old English, losing their non-finite forms, no longer taking non-verbal objects, and generally followed by infinitives without a to-link. They were also undergoing semantic and pragmatic changes that resulted, as we shall see, in a system with a curiously double register of meanings for auxiliary verbs like 'must' and 'may'. Modern-day linguists brought this double register into focus when they distinguished between epistemic modality, concerned with gradations of knowledge or belief about the truth of propositions, and deontic modality, concerned with duty, obligation and permission.

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre is currently undergoing a radical transformation. Described in company publicity as 'one of the world's most iconic theatrical sites', the theatre closed in 2007 for refurbishment, to reopen in 2010 as, it is hoped, 'the best theatre for Shakespeare in the world'. The 1930s cinema-style auditorium reviled by generations of its users has been demolished, to be replaced by what is described by the Royal Shakespeare Company's Artistic Director Michael Boyd as 'a theatre which celebrates interaction. . . a bold, thrust-stage, one-room auditorium - a modern take on the theatres of Shakespeare's day'. One of the distinctive elements of this latest attempt to reshape the conditions of Shakespearean performance is indicated by Boyd's description of the company's temporary replacement and prototype for the new theatre, the Courtyard, as 'a meeting place between audience and actors . . . where we can make some kind of fragile consensus together'. Summoning an egalitarian and inclusive ethos long associated with thrust stages, as well as current discourses of conflict resolution, the remark suggests that getting physically closer to Shakespeare in Stratford confers benefits beyond the theatrical: the Courtyard stage, and its permanent successor, are envisaged as not only neo-Elizabethan performance spaces but also as forums for creative dialogue, collective problem-solving and democratic participation. This is not new, in that the open stage has been subject to such a quasi-political inflection throughout the entire history of theatrical modernism; what is relatively unusual about Boyd's concern for consensus-building is that it emerges from a specific, and indeed acutely sensitive, local context.

This article assesses the scope of Shakespeare's bibliographic presence in the early modern period. We have long known that approximately half of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime, that some were reprinted early on, and that thirty-six of them were gathered in the First Folio in 1623. Many companions to Shakespeare contain a chapter on the early editions: 'Shakespeare Published', 'Shakespeare's Plays in Print', 'Shakespeare Writ Small: Early Single Editions of Shakespeare's Plays', 'Shakespeare in Print, 1593-1640', and so on. The early chapters of David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare and the Book cover similar ground, and Andrew Murphy's Shakespeare in Print also devotes a chapter to 'The early quartos'. What these chapters, useful though they are, do not examine in any detail is the comparative popularity of Shakespeare in print: how present was Shakespeare as 'a man in print' compared to contemporary writers, in particular contemporary playwrights? Did Shakespeare sell well? Were his playbooks more or less popular than, say, Jonson's or Fletcher's? By how much? Judging by his presence as a man in print, what kind of authorial status did Shakespeare have in early modern England? These are some of the questions this article proposes to investigate.

It may be useful to start by taking a snapshot of the presence of Shakespeare's writings in the London book trade. Let us briefly look at a single year: 1600. It is true that this is an extraordinary year for Shakespeare, with more publications than in any other year during his life, yet the year's total book production, with approximately 300 titles produced and published in London, is also of unprecedented scope. The subject matter to which the greatest part of these titles was devoted is religion, which accounted for over a third of the total output.

Two books, particularly significant in that they will stimulate and enable new work, locate performance authority in two different agents. John Russell Brown’s The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare gathers thirty-one contributors each writing on a single director judged to be innovative in his (usually – on this more later) own time, to have a canon of work spanning some years to show development or change, and to have influenced other directors. Some of the figures highlighted are expected: it is good to have Maria Shevtsova’s account of Peter Brook’s working methods, and to read Matthew Wilson Smith’s reconstruction of the political and technical genesis of Orson Welles’s Harlem Macbeth. I for one was less familiar with some of the European directors selected: the work of Roger Planchon, including a prominent Henry IV in Lyons, or the importance of Giorgio Strehler to Italian dramatizations of Shakespeare with his commedia dell’arte Trinculo and Stephano (a relief from their so often being Scottish) and Brechtian Coriolanus. Some contributors have the knack of bringing productions into visual life – Carol Rutter on Deborah Warner’s Titus Andronicus, for example – although the understandable pragmatic decision not to include photographs does mean that a number of the productions cited remain very two-dimensional. The choice of subjects fills in some mid-century gaps with Guthrie, Byam Shaw, Iden Payne and Granville Barker all getting proper attention to their impact. Some directors are more familiar to English-speaking readers in relation to specific performances, and here the narrative accounts helpfully situate, say, Peter Zadek’s challenging Othello as a ‘Shakespearenegro, not a real one’ in the context of a longer career of engagement with Shakespeare’s plays in Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna. Directors known largely for Shakespeare films – Zeffirelli, Welles, Taymor – have their familiar and accessible cinema work revealingly reinstated alongside past theatrical explorations.

At the 1994 meeting of the International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford, Inga-Stina Ewbank delivered an impressive plenary devoted to 'Shakespeare and Translation as Cultural Exchange'. In this path-finding address, Ewbank observed that despite the cultural turn in Shakespeare studies, research into Shakespeare in translation was still mainly the pursuit of non-English-natives. Drawing on the work of Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D'hulst, Ewbank noted that - at least as perceived from the English omphalos - the study of translations was really 'an interesting and harmless occupation for researchers abroad'. There was, she argued, still little 'reciprocity' between Translation Studies on the one hand and English and American Shakespeare Studies on the other. During the early 1990s, seminars on translation had indeed become an inalienable part of Shakespeare conferences, in Stratford and elsewhere, but the attendance rate by native speakers of English, she argued, remained negligible.

Since 'Exchange' was the conference theme in 1994, Inga-Stina Ewbank sought to free Shakespearian translation from its Cinderella status and achieve a new, more fully integrated form of exchange around the topic. In an attempt to bring both non-native and native speakers of English together around their world author, Ewbank first countered the still widely held assumption that translation merely involved a potential element of corruption. Translation should not be seen as 'a somewhat embarrassing form of inverse colonialism' either. In an attempt to change this prevailing hegemonic perception, Ewbank invited the conference to recognize first of all that, '[t]ranslation is never a purely philological activity but a collusive re-creation in which cultural differences cling to grammar and syntax and history mediates the effect even of single words'.

Marc Chagall's black-and-white lithographs illustrating The Tempest, executed by the artist in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight, offer a very personal, autobiographical reading of the plot and characters of the play. Chagall's single attempt to illustrate a Shakespeare play is almost unknown among art historians and Shakespeare scholars alike and barely mentioned in the many books written on the painter. Except for the Bibliothèque Nationale, the book is also surprisingly missing from the online catalogues of the great libraries that I searched.

The publication details, which attest to the authenticity of the work, appear in the front and end matter. The volume was published in Monte Carlo, by Editions André Sauret, under the supervision of Charles Sorlier. The hand-set text, in the new font Romain du Roi engraved by Philippe Grandjean,was printed by the Imprimerie Nationale of France, while the original lithographs by Marc Chagall were printed on the presses of Fernand Mourlot in Paris.

Alongside the English text of the play, the book contains fifty original lithographs by Marc Chagall, of which thirty-one are full-page hors-texte illustrations and nineteen serve as headers or footers to the printed text, some of them half-page size. The total run was of two hundred and fifty numbered copies, plus twenty copies for contributors (numbered I to XX), printed on Vélin d'Arches paper, small folio size, 243 pages, loose sheets vellumboxed, and signed by the artist.

In 1841/2, a magic lanternist calling himself 'Timothy Toddle' wrote down, for his own reference, the running order for his slides. Alongside each numbered and titled slide, he scripted an accompanying commentary. Toddle, it seems, wanted to ensure both the correct sequencing of his material and the fluency of his public patter. His show opened, as was customary, with an introductory 'Welcome' slide and closed with one reading 'Good Night' and another 'God Save the Queen'. Between these end points, the show consisted of approximately 180 other slides, ranging significantly in theme and tone. The surviving running order reveals that in the midst of slide sequences such as 'A very clever trick of clowns', 'Miss Lucy swinging from a Walnut tree', 'Punch and Judy', 'Mr Pickwick running after his hat' and 'Lord Byron - a poet of the first rate talent but of the most seductive &dangerous principles', Toddle also dropped in slides illustrating two dramatic moments from Macbeth, each accompanied by a summarized narration of the relevant section of the drama and some select Shakespearian quotation.

Subsequently, Toddle's script passed to another lantern-lecturer who, in c.1870, made some modifications and additions to it in a discernibly different hand. This later lanternist's additions included two further Shakespearean sequences, from Hamlet and Richard III respectively. As had been the case for the original Macbeth section, both additional Shakespearian sequences were accompanied by some scripted narration and gobbets of appropriate quotation.

New Year's Day, 2008. Under a louring sky, Stratford-upon-Avon woke up to find (nine months after it officially closed) 'The Greatest Dramatist', 'The Essential Year', the RSC's 'Complete Works Festival' still somehow staggering on, not least in company press releases reluctant to kick the 'essential year's' addictive publicity habits. More bingeing was promised: a 'Once in a lifetime opportunity to see Shakespeare's complete History Cycle performed by one ensemble company of actors' (on the matter of the 'ensemble company', more anon). Reading that, some spectators may have felt a weary sense of déjà vu. Four of these eight histories had already been revived once, in 2006, recycled from original productions back in 2000, to pass muster as RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd's contribution to the 'Complete Works Festival'. Now, just when these veteran campaigners might have been thought honourably discharged and demobbed, here they were again, hauled back into active service, re-rehearsed one more time, and shoved up the front line of the new year's offerings. (It was, by the way, the prospect of taking up this 'once in a lifetime opportunity' that finally killed off Survey's last reviewer - see Shakespeare Survey 61.) But what I chiefly remember of New Year's Day was taking a late morning walk on the south bank of the Avon to shake off the last of the hangover - and being instantly sobered up by the sight that hit me, a sight you couldn't see on the town side of the river, where it was hidden behind a long stretch of hoardings plastered with giant-sized full-colour blow-ups of recent RSC 'greats' (Harriet Walter as Cleopatra, Chuk Iwuji as Henry VI).

Peter Greenaway’s 1991 Prospero’s Books has received critical attention primarily for its extraordinarily dense rendering of the visual field. The twenty-four books of Prospero – an allusion, Greenaway admits, to cinema’s twenty-four frames per second – provide a powerful structuring device for the film’s exploration of the inter-connected materiality of book and cinematic frame. The result is an extraordinarily complex and imagistic film, and the viewer is at first nearly overwhelmed by the level of visual detail and layering. Claus Schatz-Jacobsen’s discussion of the film provides an example of the critical preoccupation with the visual in the film: ‘It seems as if Greenaway has been inspired by Prospero-Shakespeare’s potent magic to pursue every conceivable visual possibility offered by the state of the art in film and television technology ... Nothing seems finally alien to Greenaway’s painterly urge to emulate by purely visual means the potent verbal magic of his ideal reflection in the mirror of the Tempest, Prospero-Shakespeare.’ While it is of course correct to call attention to the painterly nature of the film, the contention that it is ‘purely visual’ represents a misunderstanding of the full implications of its nature which, far from being exclusively visual, depends upon setting into play tensions and potential rivalries among cinematic image, post-production digital image, dialogue, sound and music. Moreover, it is also a mistake to conceive of The Tempestprimarily as a ‘verbal’ accomplishment, since the play’s emphasis upon spectacle, illusion and, especially, sound, is perhaps more marked than that of any other Shakespearian play.

Reviewing a big doorstep of a book such as the first volume of John O'Connor and Katharine Goodland's A Directory of Shakespeare in Performance 1970–2005, it's tempting to stress quantitative vital statistics in a sort of academic publishing version of Top Trumps. Length: 1756 pages: I win. Weight: I win again. Number of entries: 'almost 1200': me again. Price: yes, you got it. Or, to spar with other kinds of data. Did you know there are more index entries for the Guardian's veteran theatre critic Michael Billington than for Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall and Simon Russell Beale combined? Or that productions of Timon of Athens come round once every four years, while if you miss a Hamlet there'll be another along ere those shoes are old? Or that Laurence Olivier spoke a prologue written by Christopher Fry before a 1973 National Theatre touring production of Twelfth Night to celebrate Britain's entry into the EEC? What country, friends, is this? So what, avoiding the clichés of both 'did you ever?' and 'phew, what a whopper', does this Directory have to offer? A good deal. It's an immense standalone resource which, caveats about its coverage aside, gives a substantial snapshot of performance trends for particular plays, enables a preliminary trace of the careers of Shakespearian theatre professionals, and samples some pithy, informative newspaper reviewing. It will be an indispensable first point of call for anyone reading up the recent stage history of a particular play: neither overwhelming with detail like the Shakespeare in Production series nor over-interpreted as the Shakespeare in Performance series can be. Each entry has the details of cast and crew, of place and date, and then two or three gobbets from reviews in major newspapers and periodicals.

In the early 1960s the BBC television Shakespeare series, the fifteen-episode An Age of Kings, was a ‘stupendous’ success in America and England, seen by millions of viewers. It received England’s prestigious British Guild of Directors award for Excellence in Directing. Broadcast in America by National Educational Television (NET) it received the Peabody Award for ‘a brilliant and imaginative portrayal of Shakespeare’s rich pageant of English history’. Its ‘magnificent panoply’ was ‘the most exciting drama seen on television’ in ‘an extraordinary piece of work – marvelously made and presented with intelligence and dignity’. Much loved, highly praised, Kings then seemed to disappear from memory for the next forty years, overshadowed by the more visually sophisticated filmed-for-television The Wars of the Roses (1964), the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of the history plays, and the BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare Series (1978–85). An Age of Kings, which marked significant developmental stages for both the BBC and NET, was rebroadcast only once again in England (January–April 1962) and never issued in video, but kinescopes of the BBC and NET broadcasts have been preserved. It is only now that Kings is beginning to re-emerge through the efforts of the British Film Institute, scholarly articles, memoirs of youthful television viewing, internet web pages and, sadly, in the obituaries of its participants.

This article examines the trajectory taken by the first major BBC Shakespeare series – from its creation as an ambitious work of television entertainment to its final incarnation on American television as an educational programme. It looks closely at NET’s financially successful marketing of Kings as a pedagogical tool where an important component was the addition of a wraparound commentary by University of California professor Frank Baxter who introduced each episode with a genial explanation of Shakespeare for the viewer he refers to as ‘the Normal American’. His is an intriguing example of mid twentieth century Shakespeare teaching that presents the text as neither high brow nor low brow, but instead as the work of America’s literary ancestor. Baxter’s ‘normal American’ also represented the audience the newly formed NET needed to attract if its role in educational television was to succeed.

Conventionally understood as the movement of émigrés across national borders, transnationalism has been described as affecting ‘groups ... no longer occupying discrete spaces or ... cultures’, as prompting individuals to forge ‘relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement’ and as encouraging the creation of ‘geographically dispersed ... migrant communities’. The reverberations accompanying transnationalism are most easily identified in the flows of capital that traverse state parameters, in deterritorialized constructions of space, in the development of hybridized identities, in the determining power of technology and in the simultaneous collapse and reinforcement of local–global associations. Complementary interpretations of transnationalism pursue the phenomenon’s ideological meanings and implications. Commentators are interested in the ways in which transnationalism licenses exchanges and interactions that contribute to the ‘intermingling of cultures’; as Aihwa Ong writes, ‘transnationality ... alludes to the transversal ... the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary ... imagination ... the multiplicity of ... conceptions of culture’. Such transactions are not bound by the physicality of place, since, as a number of observers have pointed up, ‘we attempt’ more and more to comprehend ‘our . . . transnational world’ via ‘symbolic and imaginary geographies’. Transnationalism is a historically specific and economically determined product of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; at the same time, it is indissoluble from a unique aesthetic that might function as a register of collaborative and cross-fertilizing cultural processes.

‘THE PARTICULAR INTENSITY AND NERVES OF THIS’

In early February 1964 when the buzz around the scandalous affair between Richard Burton and American screen goddess Elizabeth Taylor was at a fever-pitch, a new Broadway-bound production of Hamlet began to take shape in Toronto under the direction of the already legendary John Gielgud and starring Burton in his third go-round in the title role. Rehearsals with a uniformly accomplished supporting cast of British and American actors – which included such then and later-to-become stage-luminaries as Hume Cronyn, George Rose and John Cullum – proceeded at a speedy clip, though not without distractions prompted by occasional sightings of Ms Taylor. Sources indicate that Burton accepted instruction from Gielgud in an understatedly deferential manner – amicably trading anecdotes with him about fellow stage-legends, Ralph Richardson and ‘Larry’ Olivier – but seldom followed the old master’s directives, much less seemed to work very hard at mastering his lines. Although the cast uniformly evinced respect and admiration for Gielgud – who seemed to know all their parts by heart and could rehearse them backwards and forwards – they also found themselves at sea without a rudder as opening night beckoned, lacking any determinate sense of an overarching concept or sustained interpretive focus for the production itself. Seriously professional to a fault, the cast was often bewildered by the variability of Gielgud’s daily notes and directives, which would require, for example, the actor playing Guildenstern to be meekly obsequious in one scene, aggressively inquisitorial in another, without developing a consistent through-line of interpretation that would render his changes in tone coherent.

In a world where feature film production has increasingly become an international enterprise, television Shakespeare is often positioned as more local than global. Feature filmmakers and producers must now take into account the foreign market that will generate important global earnings; they frequently extend their imaginative reach into different lands and incorporate filming on location in different countries. By contrast, television production is more embedded in national or regional contexts because those performances must appeal to viewers and sponsors who inhabit the same cultural and geographical space as the TV producers. As a result, television writers and producers embrace situations and settings of immediate local relevance, a tendency that has significant implications for televised Shakespeare.

Although some Shakespearian television productions like the BBC Shakespeare and Shakespeare: The Animated Tales are presented as international in intended audiences and, in the case of The Animated Tales, in collaborative production, television nonetheless still retains the potential for ‘local’ programming. ShakespeaRe-told makes this trait of television explicit by transposing Much Ado about Nothing into the office politics of a local British news show, Wessex Tonight. The topical immediacy of local news as well as the eavesdropping potential of the TV station audio equipment recontextualize the slandered maiden and quarrelling lovers. US, UK and Canadian television localize Shakespeare by positioning the plots within national political, historical and artistic contexts.

Not so long ago, within the memory of some professors emeriti yet living, a number of Shakespearian critics spent considerable time and energy in attempts to determine ‘what Shakespeare believed’ about some subject, which usually meant what they wanted him to believe, which always meant what they themselves believed. They had no trouble in demonstrating, by a judicious selection of supporting evidence from the plays, and a judicious avoidance of any evidence to the contrary, that he shared their views on art, family, friendship, honour, justice, love, marriage, nature, religion, revenge, sex, war and many other subjects. But they had a great deal of trouble with his view of politics, because they wanted him to believe in democracy but he obviously did not. He only gives us three extended treatments of ‘the people’ as a separate political entity and agency in the action – Jack Cade’s rebels in Act 4 of 2 Henry VI, and the Roman plebeians in the first three acts of Julius Caesar and of Coriolanus – and in all three plays they are presented as a ‘rabble’ who are mindless, fickle, easily swayed and murderous. Moreover, they are always shown to be wrong. Cade’s rebels set out to exterminate the middle and upper classes (hence their notorious proposal to ‘kill all the lawyers’) and establish an egalitarian utopia where food and claret wine are free and ‘all things shall be in common’, including wives, but finally, in one brief scene (4.8), they are persuaded by Clifford to yield to the King, and then by Cade to continue their rebellion, and then by Clifford to abandon Cade and go off to fight the French. The plebeians in Julius Caesarcheer Caesar at the Lupercalia, but after his assassination they are persuaded by Brutus to approve of the conspirators responsible for it, and then they are persuaded by Mark Antony to go on a violent rampage against them (during which they kill the wrong Cinna), and this results in civil war and the destruction of the Roman republic.

In September 1950, a journalist for the Miami News ran a story that staggered the American imagination and intensified the anti-Communist feelings that were fostering the Cold War. Edward Hunter, who was also a CIA agent, warned Americans that post-revolutionary China was using insidious and heretofore unknown psychological techniques to force the Chinese into the Communist Party. He labelled these techniques with the term ‘brainwashing’, a derisive translation of the Chinese his-nao, which literally means ‘to cleanse the mind’. Hunter’s theories not only reached a receptive audience, but were also quickly verified by other experts, who described similar techniques in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union . Americans were alerted to the possibility that the Communists had ‘cracked the brain’s code’ and were capable not only of controlling but of changing the will of their fellow citizens. Psychologist Joost Meerloo, a Dutch émigré from Nazi-occupied Holland, warned in his 1956 book Rape of the Mind that brainwashing techniques, which he dubbed with the far more sinister appellation menticide, were being used on an unsuspecting American public:

The reaction of Americans was rather spectacular. Quite rapidly, a panic over the threat of brainwashing spread throughout the country. Americans had already been conditioned to fear nuclear war, but the imagined loss of cherished American autonomy and free will was even more terrifying. Brainwashing embodied cultural fears of losing control and Meerloo’s paradigm for menticide became America’s paradigm for anxiety.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s first Shakespeare radio programme was on 16 February 1923. Since then, the Corporation’s output has been too vast, the numbers of people involved too large, and the variety of shows too varied for this article to give more than a sampling. We can see the broad outlines of this work by considering three carefully chosen directors whose Shakespeare productions seem intrinsically interesting, and noting the range of broadcasts they produced.

Critics have lately problematized an old and simple concept, that of retelling stories, in this case stories created for the stage retold on radio. Perhaps they are correct to do this, for adaptations take on different characteristics over time, in different media, at the hands of different adapters, and as Courtney Lehmann points out, there are vastly different degrees of adaptation. For the sake of simplicity, I mean here by adaptation what the BBC and its directors usually mean when they use the word: putting a more or less full-length Shakespeare play on the radio, with adjustments made for time and radio’s non-visual needs.

The BBC was the first to broadcast Shakespeare, and has done so more than anyone else. The US had several broadcasts in the nineteen twenties and two short Shakespeare series in the thirties, but the plays all but disappeared by the nineteen fifties, except for the annual broadcasts by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on the National Broadcasting Company and National Public Radio. Canada could boast of the first North American Shakespeare broadcast, and there were regular productions in the nineteen thirties, forties, fifties and nineties. Australia may be the first country to produce the canon as it was then constituted, which they did from 1936–8. These ninety-minute broadcasts had impressive ratings, but future shows were sporadic. The BBC has produced multiple Shakespeare broadcasts nearly every year since the beginning.