Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions are included. The information is taken from listings, company publicity and published reviews. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

Few editions were released this year as several Shakespeare series recently published their final instalments, and work on new ones, such as Arden 4, is in progress. Those that did appear in 2021–2022 provide exciting new ways of imagining Shakespeare’s plays in performance, be it on the stages of the Royal Shakespeare Company or as part of the repertory that travelled to central Europe in the early seventeenth century. The year 2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the Shakespeare First Folio, and the year’s work raises important questions about the authority of Folio texts whilst providing fresh ways of thinking about its status as a material book and the various agents who helped to produce it. Significant attention was also paid to vectors of influence, with new analysis of the relationship between versions of the Titus Andronicus story and the Ur-Titus, and the direction of travel between Q and F Merry Wives and Henry V.

In 1578, Appian’s An Auncient Historie and exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes warres, both Ciuile and Foren was printed by Henry Bynneman and Ralph Newbury in the translation of W. B., now identified as William Barker.1 At some point in the narrative, Antony recounts to his captains what happened during his funeral oration for Caesar

In 1797, Francis Godolphin Waldron published The Virgin Queen, A Drama in Five Acts.1 Waldron, considered in his own time as ‘an actor of very useful, rather than splendid, talents’, was also an occasional playwright.2 The title page of his work describes itself as ‘a Sequel to Shakespeare’s Tempest’. Yet, despite the promising subject matter, Waldron’s play was roundly dismissed by contemporaries as a ‘bad imitation’, prompting one biographer to declare that it ‘is generally regarded as one of the worst pieces of drama inspired by Shakespeare’.3 Aesthetic judgements notwithstanding, The Virgin Queen holds a special place in the literary and historical afterlife of The Tempest, since it might well be the first adaptation in which Caliban’s mother, Sycorax – who is already dead in Shakespeare’s play – has a dramatic speaking part.

When The Merchant of Venice was first introduced to Japan in the early years of the Meiji period, an overwhelming majority of the readers and members of the audience had not even heard the word ‘Jew’, let alone met one in the flesh. Japan had only recently (1854) abandoned its isolationist foreign policy that had severely limited relations with other countries and banned nearly all foreign nationals from entering the country for 265 years. James Shapiro has shown convincingly that, in England, Jews kept invoking cultural insecurities even after the Expulsion in 1290, and that the anxiety they generated directly influenced Shakespeare’s Jewish characters.2 Even the brilliant Columbia professor, however, would have difficulty locating a ‘Jewish question’ in Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration. In fact, it was Shakespeare’s Venetian comedy that would help frame that ‘question’ in Japanese minds.

Let us begin with a delicious pedagogical observation by Andrew DuBois. ‘Still today’, he writes, ‘with the supposed decline of New Criticism as institutional practice, it is not uncommon at even the highest levels of undergraduate education that students be asked to “do a close reading”, if only as a sort of hors d’oeuvre to the final extratextual platter.’2 The phrase ‘do a close reading’ indicates that critical closeness is as much a matter of the critic’s writing as of their reading – hence the ‘close’ style of some critical prose, with ‘closeness’ here existing in the atmospheric or meteorological sense of being dense or humid. Although the range of practices commonly referred to under the rubric of ‘close reading’ – the family resemblances, if you will, of American New Criticism and English practical criticism – are recognizable enough, what, I wonder, would constitute metrical close reading?

In late July 2022, in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the RSC Live from Stratford-upon-Avon team completed the recording of the project’s thirty-third production. Richard III, which was shown in cinemas from 28 September, brought to a close the company’s Histories Cycle of the past decade. It also marked former artistic director Gregory Doran’s final production before the appointment of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey as co-artistic directors in September.

The team has also recorded a screen version of Blanche McIntyre’s production of All’s Well That Ends Well, but this was done in a very different mode from the familiar ‘classical’ form employed to date. With the projected screening of All’s Well on Sky Arts in the spring of 2023, the project remained two shows short of completing a First Folio canon for the screen, having adapted neither Henry VIII nor, perhaps more surprisingly, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet.

It’s time to cue Ariel. We have the odd experience today of having Mark present on the screen at a very slight delay, and having a representation of his body, or a souvenir of his body, with us in person on the stage. Mark says he’s very glad he’s not within smelling range of this garment, his famous Ariel body-stocking. For those of you unfortunate enough not to be familiar with Mark’s work, he has just been made an Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And deservedly. He first performed at the RSC in Written on the Heart, David Edgar’s 2011 play about the translation of the Bible.

‘It is, it is not, what is that?’ (‘arimas, arimasen, are wa nan deska’): the very first printed version of Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy in Japan is in incomprehensible pidgin Japanese. It appears in the British satirical magazine The Japan Punch in 1874, alongside a cartoon by Charles Wirgman featuring a man in samurai garb standing on a stage, deep in thought (Figure 6).

On 18 June 2019, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus – written by Taylor Mac, directed by George C. Wolfe, and starring Nathan Lane, Kristine Nielsen and Julie White – closed seven weeks ahead of schedule on Broadway, in part because its weekly average earned only 24 per cent of its projected box office takings. In this epilogue to Shakespeare’s play, Gary lingers after Titus Andronicus’s final butchery and considers what comes next. The plot is simple and Beckettian. Gary, the previously unnamed messenger from Shakespeare’s play, has been newly hired as part of the clean-up crew working under the head maid, Janice, to sort through the mess left by Titus’s revenge and dispose of the many leftover bodies. In a space variously described as ‘the storage of Hell’1 and ‘the Judgement place’,2 Gary and Janice bicker over his starry-eyed desire to be visible to the ruling classes and her pragmatic wish to finish the job as quickly as possible.

What does it mean to be present – with others, with a work of art, with oneself? This is a question that has preoccupied – and even obsessed – me for the better part of the last fifteen years. During those years, I have been exploring how to teach online, how to engage with theatre online, and how to live my own life online. All, I would suggest, are a kind of performance. They involve people coming together, in some sort of communal place, to create meaning through shared experience. But, as we all now know after several years of pandemic-affected life, what that shared experience looks and feels like can vary enormously. I need only gesture to the make-up of the 2022 International Shakespeare Conference (ISC), the occasion for which this article was originally written, to illustrate how differently we can be present with one another in a digitally connected, hybrid culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents innumerable, incalculable loss. Surviving it is a privilege, but we are far from finished processing the experiences of the past three years, particularly as the virus continues to mutate and shape our lives. The idea of re-visiting the earliest lockdowns – those freeze-frames of isolation and uncertainty – may not be a pleasant thought. But Lockdown Shakespeare: New Evolutions in Performance and Adaptation, is a remarkably cathartic read. Editors Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb and Erin Sullivan have curated a collection of essays, reflections and testimonies to record how Shakespearians spent the first fourteen months of the pandemic imagining, creating and reaching out to each other on a global scale. While acknowledging the toll that COVID-19 took on the world, the book refutes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s assertion that the pandemic shut down all forms of theatre.

In episode 3 of the satirical comedy Ten Per Cent – the English-language remake of French hit Call My Agent – resides a fine critique of contemporary British Shakespeare. Actor Dominic West, playing actor Dominic West, has been cast in a West End production of Hamlet directed by a young auteur called Robert. Robert has a clear concept for his production, seeing Hamlet’s narcissism and self-reflection as an indictment of selfie culture and social media, Hamlet’s solipsism as that of the twenty-first century. But West – forced to take selfies with Yorick’s skull, to film his own assault on Gertrude as he straddles her, to tweet his own soliloquies as he speaks them – can’t find the truth in this version of Hamlet, which is meant to be his big theatrical comeback.

This year, Shakespeare criticism is full of bodies: bodies that desire and are desired, that live and die, that are performed and interpreted, that are actors, spectators, and readers too. Although not all these works necessarily situate themselves in body studies, our interactions with bodies and our own embodied interactions with the world and texts are embedded throughout this year of critical studies. To what extent this can be attributed to the dominance of post- (and still current) pandemic thinking remains to be seen, but bodies have nonetheless proved central to much of 2022’s Shakespeare criticism.

Despite this interest with embodiment and identity, it is surprising to see that race has featured so little in this year’s selection of critical studies.