Few new editions of Shakespeare can deservedly be called 'magisterial', but The Winter's Tale in the New Variorum Shakespeare is one of those happy few. Robert Kean Turner and Virginia Westling Haas have produced a great and glorious piece of scholarship, representing a lifetime or two of detailed research and careful synthesis. After going through its 974 pages with fairly fine combs, a graduate assistant and I found only a paltry number of trivial errors. Although variorums are generally used as research tools rather than reading texts – and the searchable PDF file that comes on a disk bundled with this book will certainly make the vast amounts of data therein more readily accessible – the subtle brilliance of Turner's work also rewards sustained reading.

A New Variorum commentary note standardly provides the most salient remarks of previous critics, interspersed with sometimes lengthy responses by the editor. (In Marvin Spevack’s variorum edition of Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, the fairly typical note on tln 3305 includes forty lines of quotation from critics and an additional twenty-five lines of commentary from Spevack.)

Turner’s approach, on the other hand, is a model of elegant concision. He tends to preface each critical quotation with a single adverb or, at most, an adverbial phrase. Turner’s adverbs are comparative, evaluative, perspicacious and playful. Moreover, the use of adverbs rather than adjectives signals that the focus is (unapologetically) on the act of criticism, as the voices of commentators through the centuries are introduced with such modifiers as ‘more gently’, ‘less exactly’, ‘oddly’, ‘questionably’, ‘wrongly’, ‘more accurately’, ‘fruitlessly’ and ‘too delicately’. In the rare instances in which he ventures more than a single-word critique, Turner is nonetheless incisive, and often withering: ‘Parry alleges that few people worry about such things, though it is evident that Sh. did.’

The ‘nothing’ that persistently haunts the images of Macbeth has been interpreted in terms of a condition of language and of self. After murdering Duncan, Macbeth appears ‘lost’ in thought and tells his wife, ‘To know my deed, ’twere best not know myself’ (2.2.69–71). As he pursues a future foretold to him by the prophecies of the three Weird Sisters, he begins to identify less and less with his former self, until ‘All causes ... give way’ (3.4.135) and life is no more than a ‘walking shadow’, absent of truth or meaning (5.5.23). Terry Eagleton writes that, in seeking to take possession of the throne, Macbeth will, in fact, ‘become less than human in trying to become more’, until eventually too much ‘inverts itself into nothing at all’. Malcolm Evans extends a reading of the protagonist’s loss of identity to a more thorough exploration of ‘the crisis of the sign and unequivocal discourse in the play’. For Evans, the ‘potentially baffling opacity’ of the play’s linguistic modes is a disorder that moves beyond the ‘imperfect’ speaking of the Witches to several other central characters in Macbeth.

However, given the ‘double’ nature of the Witches in leading Macbeth towards a prophesized future that will both ‘scorn / The power of man’ (4.1.95–6) and bring about his own downfall, the most immediate explanation for the play’s signified nothing lies with the Witches themselves, or more specifically, with the ambiguous territory of the female body.5 For the male, to look on the naked female body and its external lack may provoke a sense of absence within the male himself, as the power of the incomprehensible female ‘nothing’ subsequently threatens to become everything: ‘a yawning abyss within which man can lose his virile identity’.

When Titus Andronicus appeared in the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623 it included a ‘new’ scene, not present in the 1597 quarto and possibly not performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime. This scene comprises eighty-six lines and runs to approximately five minutes’ performance time; its inclusion bears little impact on the textual or performative length of the play, and yet it remains one of the most powerful scenes of the drama. This extraordinary scene, known as the fly-scene, or mad scene, not only poses a significant problem to directors, actors and audiences of the theatre – how do you make a fly audible let alone visible? – but most importantly, ‘What purpose serveth the Fly’? Some six years later at the Globe, Jonson turns this iniquitous insect into a consummate actor: the brilliant and vital force of Mosca. Despite the difference between Titus’s organic matter and the more complex symbolic construction of Mosca, the fly, it seems, can be a theatrical prop, a pre-Cartesian anthropomorphic device, a metaphor and a symbol; whether it is riddled with ‘pretty buzzings’, ‘coal-black’ like the Moor or ‘but a poor observer’ like Mosca, the stage imports the fly to prey on the mind, incite petty violence, defy the madness of mutilation or turn the sinner upon himself.

With a few notable exceptions, Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) has not fared well with academic critics or reviewers in the popular press. Some object to the film on aesthetic grounds. They decry Branagh’s decision to cast actors, not trained singers and dancers, in a production whose central conceit is the substitution of song and dance conventions from the heyday of the American movie musical for the rhetorical and poetic fireworks of its sixteenth-century British original. A film whose subtitle is ‘a romantic musical comedy’ must, they argue, be judged, at least in part, on the quality of its singing and dancing, both of which are amateurish. Others have argued that Branagh appropriates (or misappropriates) the conventions of the American film musical of the 1930s, 1940s and even 1950s indiscriminately despite the film’s 1939 setting, and, in any case, these conventions violate the Shakespearian source text. The Hollywood musical requires that the couples’ final union be prepared for in the song and dance sequences, but in Shakespeare’s radical comedy the women not only refuse to dance during the ill-fated masque of the Muscovites, but in the end postpone any possible union beyond the bounds of the play’s action.

Bypassing questions of performance and genre, cultural critics have focused on Branagh’s negotiation of his own, as well as Shakespeare’s, identity in this unusual hybrid film. Is Branagh the Irish outsider who seeks to appropriate the cultural capital of British high culture, ‘Shakespeare’, for a contemporary, especially American, popular audience? Or is he the Olivier rival who deliberately sets his film at the moment just before Henry V claimed film as a medium for Shakespeare? Or, recognizing the subordinate position of British high culture to American popular film, has Branagh adopted the Hollywood role assigned to the African-American actor – the minstrel who enacts a caricature of his/her culture in order to make a decent living?

How do we account for the rise of the ‘original practices’ movement in the production of early modern drama over the past twenty years? How do we account for the increasingly energetic collaboration, and indeed collusion, of theatre historians and other kinds of scholars working in a sceptical and relativistic academic climate with a form of theatrical practice that is based on highly dubious, manifestly problematic notions of authenticity and the uses of history? The range of possible answers to these questions is as complex as the questions themselves are stark. In this article I provide one partial and very specific kind of answer. My purpose is to situate the original-practices movement firmly in the world of literary discourse and, consequently, to destabilize some of the powerful claims to authority it currently makes with reference to material process and embodied action. In the pages that follow, I discuss the development of the original-practices movement of the past twenty or so years – since the groundbreaking for the new Globe and the founding of the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, in 1987 and 1988 respectively – among and alongside one of the key developments in literary criticism during that same period, the reaction against new historicism. I argue that the original-practices movement seems in part to be both a critique of and an attempt to co-opt ‘new historicism’ broadly considered as both a critical and an ethical practice. In making this argument, I hope to identify with precision and with sympathy some of the impulses (beyond the quest for authority and authenticity) that drive the original-practices movement – to identify how it responds to a need, or a variety of needs, in the academic community, and to begin to suggest some ways in which these needs might be met without recourse to the dubious theoretical and methodological assumptions and practices upon which the movement currently relies.

Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) is one of a number of Shakespeare films in which media histories or sustained thematic attention to media regimes and practices play a central role. In such films as Olivier’s Henry V, Mazursky’s Tempest, Godard’s King Lear, Prospero’s Books, Loncraine’s Richard III;, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Titus and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, media themes rise to the level of subject matter, vying for attention with and sometimes supplanting the story line of the source play to such an extent that one may think of them as media fables or media allegories as well as Shakespeare adaptations. Not all of these films imply a narrative exclusively concerned with cinema – instead they often suggest journeys across media – from page or stage to screen, to be sure, but also, for example, from book to the magically animated and animating volumes in Prospero’s collection in the Greenaway film, or from toy analogue video camera to complex digital editing suite in Almereyda’s Hamlet or, in the case of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, in the blending of many media, including billboards, newspapers and newsmagazines, and broadcast television into a ubiquitous, reality-challenging array of simulacra.

ENTER q1

When the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was rediscovered in Henry Bunbury’s closet two hundred years after the publication of the First Folio, it came in such a questionable shape that it has haunted critics ever since. The First Quarto of Hamlet (q1) was printed in 1603, a year or so before the Second Quarto (q2) of 1604–5 and twenty years before the First Folio (f) version of 1623. Though they contain notable differences, q2 and f are close, sharing some of Shakespeare’s most celebrated verse, characters who behave similarly and a comparable chronology of scenes. However, q1, or the ‘bad’ quarto, is an oddity. Barely more than half the length of the other two variants, it comprises characters who differ in name and action from their q2 and f counterparts, a radically divergent chronology of scenes and verse that is often patchy, ‘To die, to sleep: is that all? Ay all. / No, to sleep, to dream; ay marry, there it goes.’ Indeed, the first quarto is so erratic that it seems doubtful that Shakespeare could possibly have written it as it stands. Thomas Clayton’s opinion that the printed text is a memorial reconstruction recalled by a player who had been in a version of Hamlet is widely held: ‘In my view, much of the dialogue of q1 is very much inferior to that of q2 and f, and memorial reconstruction seems the most eligible explanation for it as such.’ The question then arises, what lies behind the text of q1? Almost invariably critics have sought the answer by textual comparison, particularly concentrating on the order in which the plays behind the published texts of q1, q2 and f may have been conceived.

OVERVIEW

The RSC Shakespeare is the first freshly edited Complete Works since the Oxford Shakespeare of 1986. It is in many ways a substantial achievement: the outcome of many years' work, a significantly different edition from its rivals, and a handsomely solid artifact. However, for reasons that will be explained, it has been edited according to principles that, though beguiling at first glance, do not withstand scrutiny.

Questions of design and apparatus content have been carefully reconsidered at every level. The book, unusually for a Complete Works, presents most texts in a single column. The layout is therefore unusually spacious, and there is scope for stronger differentiation between verse and prose than is customary. The text is presented in an attractive and readable typeface. A distinct advantage over the Oxford Shakespeare in its current format is that the RSC edition supplies commentaries at the foot of the page. A panel of ‘key facts’ is printed after the introduction to each work. These usefully include a plot summary, a list of major parts with a statistical analysis of the length of each role, an analysis of the percentage of verse and prose, a discussion of date, a summary of sources, and a note on the text. Skeleton textual notes are printed after each text. There are black and white illustrations, mostly depicting scenes from RSC productions.

The editors make a strong and convincing team. Jonathan Bate is one of our finest Shakespeare critics and Eric Rasmussen amongst the most experienced and rigorous of Shakespearian textual scholars. Within the scope of their remit, they have done an excellent job. Rasmussen ensures that the text is reliable as regards both accuracy and consistency of presentation. The objections to the procedure I register below do not detract from the rigour and determination with which it has been implemented. The commentaries, supervised and partly written by Héloïse Sénéchal, offer apt and well-judged but unofficious help. Pre-publication publicity made much of the attention to sexual innuendo in the notes. For the most part this is in fact not overdone, though at Romeo and Juliet 2.3.106, where ‘too much for a score’ is glossed ‘not worth having sex with’, the note seems to impose a modern sense of ‘score’, and the information that Giulio Romano was ‘infamous for erotic works’, if true, seems determinedly beside the point.

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from Touchstone ( www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk ), a Shakespeare website maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Royal Shakespeare Company. Swan Theatre, 19 April–14 October.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Gregory Doran

Antony: Patrick Stewart

Cleopatra: Harriet Walter

AS YOU LIKE IT

Royal Shakespeare Company. Novello Theatre, London, 7–25 March.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Dominic Cooke

Rosalind: Lia Williams

Celia: Amanda Harris

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Royal Shakespeare Company. Novello Theatre, 10–28 January. Transfer from Stratford-upon- Avon.

www.rsc.org.uk

Director: Nancy Meckler

Bell Shakespeare Company (Australia). Theatre Royal, Bath, 7–11 March.

www.bellshakespeare.com.au

Director: John Bell

Part of Bath Shakespeare Festival.

Bard in the Botanics. Botanical Gardens, Glasgow, 21 June–8 July.

www.bardinthebotanics.org

Director: Gordon Barr

Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 1 August– 7 October.

www.shakespeares-globe.org

Director: Christopher Luscombe

CORIOLANUS

Stamford Shakespeare Festival. Rutland Open Air Theatre, Tolethorpe Hall, Tolethorpe, June– September.

www.stamfordshakespeare.co.uk

Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 10 May–13 August.

www.shakespeares-globe.org

Director: Dominic Dromgoole

Coriolanus: Jonathan Cake

Dromgoole’s inaugural production as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Cinema has been less kind to Richard II; than to its companion plays of the second historical tetralogy. The two spectacular Technicolor versions of Henry V starring Laurence Olivier (1944) and Kenneth Branagh (1989) are familiar to everybody interested in the performance history of the play. And Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966), essentially an elegiac conflation of the two parts of Henry IV with a bit of Henry V added, is almost equally famous, partly because Welles himself played Falstaff with memorable warmth, enlisting John Gielgud for the role of Bolingbroke, who portrayed him as imperious and remote. Gus Van Sant’s imaginatively free adaptation of the same three plays in My Own Private Idaho (1991) – a film about male prostitution in Portland, Oregon, featuring River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves (the Prince Hal figure) with William Richert as the Falstaff surrogate – is justly admired for its sensitive melding of gay underworld culture in 1990s America with Shakespeare’s story of a ne’er-do-well son maturing, not without arrogance, into the privilege guaranteed by his pedigree. No one as culturally gifted or technically distinguished as Olivier, Branagh, Welles or Van Sant has yet succeeded in capturing the splendour or complexity of Richard II; on film, although at least nine attempts to bring this most pageant-like of Shakespeare’s histories to the screen have been recorded.

BEFORE SHAKESPEARE

Janette Dillon’s Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre is a nicely judged, sensibly structured, lucidly written introduction to medieval and early Renaissance drama, complete with a variety of illustrations and quotations from all kinds of relevant documents helpfully set off in shaded boxes. Every now and then Dillon judiciously breaks away from her main narrative to focus for a couple of pages on an exemplary piece of representative dramatic entertainment: Mankind (1465–70), The Death of Herod (1450–75), Tamburlaine Parts One and Two (1587–8), The Masque of Blackness (1605). These case studies are supplemented by shorter considerations of other plays: for example, The Lady of May (1578–9), King Lear (1605–6) and A Game at Chess (1624). The chronological arc of the book is only just noticeable as Dillon prefers to deal with her subject-matter under a number of mutually illuminating thematic links: genre and tradition, instruction and spectacle, actors and audiences, and the like. Overall it’s a lively, entertaining and stimulating mix, modelled, one might say, on the very material under consideration.

For we learn that this material is not easily pegged or sharply demarcated. It’s slippery stuff. There is an essential blurring of boundaries, categories, binaries and chronologies. The indispensable term here is the sixteenth-century mot juste, ‘mingle-mangle’. The history of early English theatre, Dillon claims, is far more mingled (and much less mangled) than we have up to now been led to believe. For one thing, the dramatic past continued into the dramatic present in all manner of ways. Continuities abounded. Indoor theatres, for instance, were mainly conversions of halls originally designed for other purposes. (It’s instructive to learn, by the way, that in 1525 there were more active playhouses than at any time in Elizabeth’s reign.)

Romantic era theatregoers left behind a comet’s trail of praise for the dramatic brilliance of Sarah Siddons. The accolades include Hazlitt’s hyperventilated tribute to ‘a being of a superior order [who] had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world’, and Mary Robinson’s effusive description of the actress whose ‘soul beam[s] through every veil of fiction ... making art more lovely than even nature in all its fairest adornments’. I take these testimonials at face value, while privately nursing a grudge against Siddons. When Mary Robinson sought out the actress, Siddons refused to meet her, citing the impossibility of an association which, ‘however laudable or innocent, would draw down the malice and reproach of those prudent people who never do ill’. My Sarah Siddons is a bit of a prig, and all Hazlitt’s declarations of the power seated on her brow or the passion emanating from her breast never overshadow the cautious woman holding her skirts out of Robinson’s path for fear of damaging her own reputation. I began to think about Siddons’s voice out of a desire to understand, at a visceral level and as a corrective to my prejudice against her, what made Siddons so great. I think it might be possible, by analysing the acoustic culture of Siddons’s vocal performances in key roles, to re-animate a romantic era dramatic repertoire long derided by critics as consisting of mangled versions of Shakespeare’s plays and long-forgotten theatrical set-pieces.

Within Anglo-American criticism, the phenomenon of Shakespearian appropriation has been framed largely as an encounter between ‘mighty opposites’. Harold Bloom’s competitive model from The Anxiety of Influence (1973) offers the best-known version of this critical narrative. Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism is sometimes offered as an alternative to the dominance/submission dynamic of Bloom; in this model, Bard and appropriator engage in a serious, dignified conversation between equals. Either construction entails critical costs. Bloom’s model is exclusionary; you cannot have true anxiety of influence unless you are Shakespeare or Milton and have already gained admittance to the canon. The Bakhtinian model, which can elide the distance between ‘dialogism’ and ‘dialogue’, assumes a similarity of voice, as well as an (often unexamined) equality between two writers who may have vastly different backgrounds and goals.

APPROPRIATION AS THRIFT AND THEFT

My own approach to appropriation posits a more equitable (although not necessarily equal) exchange between texts and writers by considering appropriation as a form of imaginative ‘donation’ as well as a potential theft of intellectual property or cultural capital. Graham Holderness reminds us that my translation of the term works better in American than in British English. But even more broadly, from a rhetorical perspective some of the persistent theoretical barriers to imagining appropriation as a two-way exchange, or a process of give-and-take, are inherent to the theoretical frameworks that inform appropriation studies: first, the economic metaphors that govern Foucault’s concept of authorship; and second, an insistently textual bias in post-Derridean notions of performativity. Both have tended to equate Shakespearian appropriation with the norms of print culture.

Tim Supple's film of Twelfth Night, or What You Will (2003) begins with a familiar gesture of caution and ends with an equally well-known sign, now primarily - at least partly - of affection, just as often understood as a seal of joy and promise of happiness at the end of a 'romantic comedy'. In both cases a male touches the lips of one - the same - female. The first does it with the tip of his finger, quickly, not imperiously but firmly commanding her to 'hold her peace' lest a sound deprive both of their lives. The second does it with a kiss, after offering his hand no longer as that of a master to the now 'master's mistress'. To be accurate - and fair - in the latter scene man and woman lean towards each other in apparent, and tender, achievement of much repressed and delayed desires. This is what happy endings look like, they say. It is, however, also an action that makes the woman 'hold her peace' again.

A careful exchange of shots prior to the kiss contributes to this closing touch being uncomfortably more ambiguous than expected. Another woman is shown in close-up immediately before the newly acknowledged 'mistress' and her 'former master' hold hands and kiss; she says: 'A sister, you are she' (5.1.325), with a hopeful smile. Supple and co-writer Andrew Bannerman chose Olivia's half-line to be the very last words in their adaptation of Shakespeare's play, relocating it at the end of the film, together with Orsino's 'Your master quits you' (5.1.320-5), so that both occur after the disclosure of identities and Malvolio's exit.

In this article I use the sense of rupture implicit in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze to explore film adaptations of Hamlet. My discussion focuses on three well-known adaptations of the play: Olivier, Branagh and Almereyda. I particularly employ Slavoj Žižek’s conception of Lacan’s ‘anamorphic stain’, and Henry Krips’s reading of the points of rupture of the gaze to investigate the symbiotic relationship between the demands Shakespeare’s text makes on film-production, and filmmakers’ manipulation of libidinal-looking in conceiving diegetic space. My contention, that negotiation of concretized film space is the central issue to be confronted in the adaptation of Shakespeare to the genre codes of film, directs my attention to instances of what I term ‘liminal space’, sites of apparent filmic resistance to the concrete (visually defined, realistic, photographic, naturalistic) space of the film diegesis. Though psychoanalytic theory is central to my paper, I attempt to address the recent ‘post-Theory’ theses proposed by Bordwell et al., by grounding theory always in discussion of filmic style, directorial technique and the various signifiers that compose the screen image.

MIRROR TRICKS AND SPECTRAL PRESENCES

At the very opening of the era of cinema, theatrical productions begin to incorporate a series of special effects that uncannily seem to anticipate the future of new form – partially due to technological advances, and partly in order to maintain interest in customers wooed by forerunners to the silver screen. ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, the use of two reflective screens of glass to make a ghost appear on stage, was developed by Henry Dircks in 1862 and perfected for theatrical use by Henry Pepper towards the end of the nineteenth century. The technique required that a second stage be constructed beneath the actual stage, and two reflective screens of glass put into place, the first set at a ninety-degree angle above the lower stage, the second in front of it.

In 1998 a team of Deaf and hearing artists set out to translate a full-length Shakespearian play into American Sign Language (ASL). Earlier attempts to translate Shakespeare, most notably those by the National Theater of the Deaf, had resulted in an adaptation of Hamlet, entitled Ophelia, as well as an hour-long version of Macbeth and a series of selected scenes and monologues from Shakespeare’s best-known works entitled Shakespeare Unmasked. Deaf schools and theatres around the country have produced dozens of Shakespeare’s plays over the years, but without any coherent methodology of translating his works into ASL and with few archives as examples. The aim of the ASL Shakespeare Project experiment was twofold. First, to translate one play, Twelfth Night, by means of a systematic and intellectually rigorous model, using digital technology to record the translation, and further to use the translation for a professional production of the play that was to open in Philadelphia almost two years after the translation process began. The second goal of the ASL Shakespeare Project was to disseminate the play itself as well as information about the process on a website completely accessible to Deaf students in both ASL and English. The result is www.aslshakespeare.com, the first bilingual and bicultural website on Shakespeare on the internet, and a full-length production of Twelfth Night (on DVD) performed in American Sign Language with simultaneous English voice-over and optional captioning. Translating one of Shakespeare’s most musical of plays into a visual and manual language has created a new Shakespearian artifact that fuses text with performance and provides a new perspective on both. This paper not only details the practical and theoretical implications underlying a translation of Shakespeare’s play into a visual/manual text, but also advocates for a re-envisioned definition of text itself.

Unrealized Shakespeare films have their peculiar attraction: Max Reinhardt’s Twelfth Night, Laurence Olivier’s Macbeth and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Tempest remain tantalizing possibilities, promising plans (some reaching an advanced stage of script development) that foundered for a variety of reasons, sometimes suggesting plausible additions to the roster of plays adapted for the screen . Richard II, though, seems an unlikely proposition for a movie, with its hero who remains unheroic until late in the day and its lack of a decisive battle to be fought or imbroglio to be untangled in the final half-hour. However, on one occasion at least a film of the play has seemed possible – or at least plausible enough to engage its proposers in a search for funds and resources.

On 21 March 1951 the New York Times columnist Sam Zolotow announced that ‘Stage Stars Plan Shakespeare Film. Maurice Evans and Margaret Webster Working on Movie of King Richard II ’. Evans and Webster, ‘considered tops in their respective Shakespearian departments as actor and director’, would ‘pool their know-how’ on a film that was due to begin photography (‘cameras are to start clicking’) in New York during the summer, and the executive producer of the project, budgeted at $1,500,000, was to be Filippo del Giudice, whose credits included (readers were reminded) Olivier’s films of Henry V and Hamlet and Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve. Webster was to fulfil the same function as Alan Dent on Olivier’s films – and Evans would supervise casting and ‘treatment’. Zolotow noted that ‘A Shakespearian film representation without the directorial services of Miss Webster was thought to be inconceivable by one observer.’ The team would adopt ‘an entirely different approach’ to that of Hollywood in filming Shakespeare, and ‘the screen transcription would follow the stage offering, meaning the predominant emphasis would be placed on the Bard’. More discussions were to be held, and Evans expected to be able to say more after Easter.

Whatever other side-effects it may have had, the impending collapse of the British economy caused by the fetchingly titled Great Credit Squeeze of 2007 had still, by December, failed to discourage the nation’s theatre companies from continuing to mount an impressive and expensive range of productions of Shakespeare. In fact in one instance the poor financial outlook may even have brought one Shakespeare play more onto the boards: with the autumn news bulletins full of predictions about rising numbers of bankruptcies and repossessions, the Globe were moved to announce that their 2008 season would include their first-ever production of Timon of Athens, a play which by the time it opens is likely to look very topical indeed. What ought to have been the most conspicuous tranche of productions in 2007, however, the last four months of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival, in the event concluded with what in terms of publicity at least was a whimper rather than a bang. The year-long project to stage or host productions of each of Shakespeare’s plays between April 2006 and April 2007 had been scheduled to culminate with the opening of Trevor Nunn’s King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre on 3 April, with Sir Ian McKellen in the title role, but when Frances Barber, cast as Goneril, damaged her ankle in a cycling accident late in rehearsals the company, although they cancelled no performances, decided to postpone the press night. The result was that several thousand people had already seen the show before anyone in the media was allowed to say what it was like, some weeks of excellent work by Barber’s understudy Melanie Jessop went compulsorily unsung, and any number of projected features in the Sunday newspapers and on the BBC’s arts programmes that had planned to combine an account of McKellen’s Lear with a retrospective look at the entire festival were never published or broadcast.