One of the aspects of the academic profession that I have always found peculiarly difficult is that we are expected to produce a title and often an abstract for our talks, conference papers and book chapters long, long before we have begun to think through properly what on earth the eventuating product might be about. The result is often that one produces, as I did for this article when it began life as a lecture,1 something that is really rather too mysterious to tell our audiences much. If I had thought early enough about a subtitle it would have been something like ‘On Adapting and Not Adapting King Lear on Film’. Or perhaps something like ‘When Is an Adaptation of King Lear Not an Adaptation of King Lear?’ But each of these is probably just as mysterious as my first stab at the title was.

The question of who wrote Arden of Faversham remains open. In 1656, publisher Edward Archer (or an associate) assigned the play to Shakespeare in a ‘Catalogue’ appended to his edition of Massinger, Middleton and Rowley’s The Old Law, or A new way to please you.2 Five years later, bookseller Francis Kirkman re-designed the ‘Catalogue’, but this time left the Arden author’s name blank. In 1770, Faversham antiquary Edward Jacob produced an edition of the play ‘With a Preface; in which some Reasons are offered, in favour of its being the earliest dramatic Work of Shakespear’. In defence of this attribution, Jacob’s ‘Preface’ listed a series of verbal parallels between Arden and Shakespeare’s works.3 A little over a century later, Algernon Charles Swinburne deemed the play ‘no man’s youthful hand but Shakespeare’s’.4 In the later twentieth century, MacDonald P. Jackson proposed that the central scenes of the play (in particular, scene 8) belonged to Shakespeare.

Yearning for some entertainment following his nuptials with Hippolyta, predominantly to kill some time before they can retire to their wedding bed, Theseus asks the question above to find out what his ‘manager of mirth’ (5.1.35) has in store. In the context of the play, Theseus’s language of pain and suffering is excessive – a symptom of the character’s privileged perspective as Duke of Athens. His sentiment resonated anew, however, during the lockdown restrictions of 2020 and 2021, implemented around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As Pascale Aebischer observes, ‘Shakespeare, both as a cultural figure and in the shape of his plays, “went viral”’ during lockdown.

In his intemperate and inaccurate review of Ralph Fiennes’s film of Coriolanus (2011) – throughout he calls Caius Martius ‘Gaius Marcius’ – Laremy Legel asserts that Jacobean English and present-day settings can never comfortably cohabit: ‘Shakespeare’s language mixed with a “modern” update can’t help but lead to tonal problems, pacing problems, and relevancy problems.’2 The bit between his teeth, Legel presses on: ‘modern takes on Shakespeare that leave the original language untouched are just massively out of place in modern cinema’. Such a sweeping and condemnatory generalization would disqualify some of the most creative cinematic re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s work, including Fiennes’s Coriolanus, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Joss Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing (2013), and – needless to say – would, by implication, suggest that theatrical stagings of Shakespearian works that are not costumed in doublet-and-hose are guilty of similar flaws.

Setting aside the fancy (pleasing though it is) that Elizabethan and Jacobean society pullulated with hot lovers, critics have offered a range of weighty explanations for the popularity of the literature of obsession, from attracting the attention of the monarch, to artistic rivalry, to making subjectivity the subject of study.1 This article suggests a more tongue-in-cheek approach to advice on love in Sidney and Shakespeare, based on recent reappraisals of the use to which self-help books are put. Readers approach these as refreshing fantasies of a radical potential change in lifestyle, but with little intention of putting most (if any) of their advice into practice. From this perspective, Astrophil and Stella (1591) depicts a lover who encourages counsel only to resist it, a move which gives a new view of the love-cure game played between Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It (1599).

A half-century ago, John Allen noted that Dogberry had largely ‘escaped serious critical attention’, which Allen attempted to rectify by suggesting an equivalence between the ‘idiocy of Dogberry’ and ‘the equally irrational actions’ of his social superiors. Allen further described him as ‘pompous’, ‘inordinately self-admiring’ and ‘self-ignoran[t]’.2 In Kenneth Branagh’s film of Much Ado about Nothing, Michael Keaton’s portrayal of a demented Dogberry is not far removed from the usual animadversions on his ‘[c]onceited ignorance and vast self-importance’, the ‘stupidity’ that renders him ‘a pure joke’ – not to mention the general Dogberrian ‘asininity’ that the character of Conrade and critics see in him.3 To adapt Beatrice’s comment about Benedick, we ‘laugh at’ Dogberry, but then in our criticism we ‘beat him’.

Critical interest in Shakespeare and virtual reality (VR) has grown steadily in recent years, inspired in part by the proliferation of newly available VR productions or adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Peter Otto has helpfully observed that ‘by tying virtual reality to specific technologies’, scholars ‘preclude attempts to compare digital virtual realities with those constructed in other eras and with other media’.1 My interest, in this article, lies in extending Otto’s more capacious understanding of virtual reality to a consideration of sensory manipulation in a metaphorical sense in relation to the constructed, controlled or otherwise limited perspectives that I argue have become ingrained in the way we, as Shakespeare scholars, apprehend the field of early modern drama.

Shakespeare was to be seen everywhere in 2022 – sometimes in person. He was a character in two West End productions: Ben Elton’s stage version of The Upstart Crow, and the musical & Juliet (by David West Read and Max Martin); by the time you read this, he will also have appeared in Hamnet, a dramatization of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. In all three, he is overshadowed by clever, unjustly forgotten women. If Shakespeare in Love (1998) implies that woman’s role is simply to provide the great sex that enables great writing in men, other fictitious Shakespeares have owed a more intellectual debt.

The information is taken from Touchstone (www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk), a Shakespeare resource maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library. Touchstone includes a monthly list of current and forthcoming UK Shakespeare productions from listings information. UK theatres were closed from January to May 2021 due to the global pandemic and consequently a smaller number of productions are recorded. The websites provided for theatre companies were accurate at the time of going to press.

Shakespeare lives in adaptation. Drama is by nature ephemeral, meaning that Shakespeare’s plays, in the words of Margaret Jane Kidnie, only exist in ‘a dynamic process’ of reproduction and adaptation.1 The media which welcome such adaptation have a major impact upon the process of reception, so that ‘the medium is the message’, or at least a significant factor in its transmission.2 Yet, despite the various transformative possibilities which shape their creation, Shakespearian adaptations on stage, page and television or cinema screen traditionally preserve a clear separation between their (read or performed) text and their receiving audience. Video games, in contrast, refuse any such easy distinctions. When Shakespeare appears in video games, their actively creative users problematize the very foundations upon which theories of adaptation and reception are based.

From the earliest days, the Homeric poems have been read as educative models, and in particular the Telemachy of the Odyssey has offered a version of paideia (education, learning) in the moral education of Telemachus, as he is prepared, and prepares himself, to aid his father on Odysseus’ return and, over all, to be a fitting heir. In varying degrees, that theme of educative growth continued through the romance tradition that descended from the Odyssey.1 We teachers of literature have often thought of ourselves as imitating the pedagogical role of Athene and her mortal disguises in the shapes of Mentes and, especially, Mentor, as she provides an educative guide for Telemachus during his process of maturation. Shakespeare the dramatist in some ways participates in this broadly didactic tradition of literature, and indeed he repeatedly studies youth in the process of maturation, from his extended portrayal of Prince Hal in the history plays through his greatly foreshortened but vivid picture of Miranda in The Tempest, although his Mentor figures are perhaps harder to take seriously than his youths. One thinks of such inept pedagogical guides as Holofernes, Falstaff, Polonius and Volumnia. If there is any historicity at all in the legend of Shakespeare as country schoolmaster who turned to playwrighting, that early experience must have left him with considerable scepticism about the pedagogical role of moral guide, to judge from his dramatic portrayals of mentors.

In Edward III (performed c.1592 and printed anonymously in 1596), King Edward attempts to seduce the married Countess of Salisbury by employing Lodwick, his secretary, to compose a love lyric for her. We see Lodwick writing this poem with ‘pen, ink and paper’ on stage.1 This ghost-writing arrangement replicates a practice that occurred off stage at this time: in 1596, Thomas Nashe admitted that he similarly ‘prostitute[d] [his] pen in hope of gaine’ by writing ‘amorous Villanellas and Quipassas’ for various ‘Galiardos, and Senior Fantasticos’.2 In the play, however, Lodwick is not a very obliging poet (intentionally, we suspect). He composes only two lines, reconstructed here from his interrupted delivery: ‘More fair and chaste than is the queen of shades, / More bold in constancy … than Judith was … ’ (2.333–5). Edward is unimpressed: ‘I thank thee then thou hast done little ill, / But what is done is passing, passing ill’ (2.340–1). His criticism of Lodwick’s lines is twofold. He takes issue with their content, which encourages the Countess’s resistance rather than surrender. But he also objects to their poetic quality and weak comparisons: ‘Compar’st thou her to the pale queen of night, / Who being set in dark seems therefore light?’ (2.309–10).

Emilia is a cipher. Shakespeare repeatedly asks us to scrutinize her reticence: at the quayside; after she gives Iago the handkerchief; when she does not tell Desdemona where the handkerchief has gone; as she prepares Desdemona for bed. At the same time, Emilia is candid. Shakespeare repeatedly asks us to marvel at her outspokenness: after Othello interrogates Desdemona about the handkerchief; at the end of the ‘Willow’ scene; in the face of Iago’s threats after the truth of the handkerchief plot has been revealed. On the whole, critics have synthesized the competing demands of Emilia’s character into a sympathetic interpretation: if she errs in giving the handkerchief to Iago and concealing its whereabouts, she does so without malice (possibly under compulsion) and more than redeems herself when, in the final scene, she speaks out for the honesty of Desdemona and against the villainy of the men who have destroyed her. Often, Emilia’s relationship to Desdemona is characterized as one defined by loyalty, devotion, friendship and even love.2 Often, as well, her actions and speech are represented as circumscribed or overdetermined by the dramatic or social roles – lower-class foil to Desdemona, leery wife of a vicious husband, clear-eyed ‘shrew’ in a misogynist world – to which she is readily consigned.

Pity is a major emotion in Shakespearian tragedy, but its relation to critical race studies and gender studies has been comparatively under-examined.2 Pity fundamentally depends on an exchange of sympathy between the pitying, often in a position of advantage or at least of security, and the pitied, typically in a position of disadvantage. In Shakespeare’s era, and in many before and since, differences in race and gender have entailed certain advantages and disadvantages: in his England, white male figures (at least those of a certain class) typically possessed more legal advantages than female figures or persons of other races.3 Attentive to difference regarding both race and gender, Othello draws pity from audiences through its portrayals of these intertwined concerns, brought together pointedly through the marriage of Othello and Desdemona.

In her Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber reminds us of the ‘geographical shift … from a civilized place to a wild one, from a locale of order and law to a place of passion and confusion’ that Othello presented.1 In view of the role architecture plays in constructing the sense of place and locale, this article further sorts out how specific architectural components of the built environment enrich the play’s representation of reason and passion, and values and rights. In this interdisciplinary, architecturally centred enquiry, I examine the way these components help to shape themes, focusing on imagery of built forms as a visual counterpart to the play’s verbal narrative. I argue that there is an architectural ‘narrative’ alongside verbal narrative in the play, and these narratives complement one another in the phasal portrayal of Othello’s tragedy. Examining the representation of forms and functions of architectural creations, I focus on the set of generated spatial meanings, demonstrating that strong architectural impressions as well as the interplay between built forms and narrative are pertinent to the delivery of the play’s key themes and idea, helping to build up a purposeful, intricate system of ethical reasoning and assertions. Assigning the built environment a prominent role and value for reading and understanding, I hope to offer a refreshingly revisionist, architectural perspective on the set of challenges that Othello faces in the institutional system within which he functions.