Pericles occupies a conspicuous position in the Shakespearian corpus. The play marks its author’s departure from the tragic genre in its plot, its characterization, and the sheer time span encompassed. More importantly, however, Pericles departs from the mode of tragedy in its re-examination of the power of language, for when facing the starkness of his misfortune, Pericles refuses to speak and, thus, suppresses a mode of language which has nourished a great number of the preceding plays. When the king finally speaks, his language is no longer that of the tragic character; it is a language of amazement, surprise and celebration. Thus, the play turns upon Pericles’ resumption of speech – an action which bears a significance beyond the immediacy of the plot. The king’s speech is an affirmation of language in a much wider context, a celebration of its ability to break through the tragic vision. The question which we ask ourselves here, therefore, is most pertinent: is there a new trust in language, or rather a new vision of language’s potential to be found in this first of the romances? We shall argue that Pericles not only employs a new pattern of interchange between its characters, but that it isolates a generative principle which lies at the heart of this newly found linguistic mode.

Two preliminary problems impose themselves at the outset of any study of Henry VIII. In both cases, the issues raised may in a narrow sense be dispatched rather quickly, though their wider ramifications continue to bear on our reading of the play.

The first problem, of course, is that of authorship, which has bedevilled criticism ever since Spedding, in 1850, attempted to substantiate Tennyson's intuition that the play was written by Shakespeare in collaboration with Fletcher. The burden of proof that necessarily rests with those who would follow Spedding is augmented by the fact that this hypothesis is unsupported by any external evidence. Indeed, since the surviving ballad concerning the burning of the Globe theatre in 1613 records that Heminges and Condell were both present at the fateful performance of Henry VIII, their inclusion of the play in the First Folio ten years later must have taken place with full knowledge of the circumstances of its composition and hence provides a measure of tangible evidence that it is not a collaboration. Strikingly, both Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the two other plays in the Shakespearian canon most often thought to have been written by more than one hand (the latter on the incontrovertible basis of the title page of the 1634 quarto and an 8 April 1634 entry in the Stationers' Register, both of which ascribe the play to Shakespeare and Fletcher), do not appear in the Folio, whereas the Hecate scenes in Macbeth, which might be cited as a counterexample, are a case of circumscribed interpolations rather than of an entire play written by Shakespeare jointly with a second playwright.

The experience of watching Deborah Warner’s RSC production of King John in the Pit at the Barbican two days after having seen the whole Henry VI-Richard III cycle, adapted as The Plantagenets, in the main theatre convinced me that in King John scenes are more subtly and dramatically conceived than in the Henry VI plays. They are more apt to be built around conflicts within characters as well as between them, to pose moral dilemmas, to be sharpened by ironies and shaped by tensions, and to develop towards climax and resolution. The progress in Shakespeare’s art is apparent both in public scenes in which those motivated by ‘commodity’ manoeuvre to defend or enhance their power and in more private scenes in which individuals suffer the consequences of these political machinations. And the poetry is more complex, the verse more flexible. A. R. Braunmuller must surely be right in deciding, after a careful consideration of the matter, that the anonymous The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591) was not derivative from Shakespeare’s play but served as a source for it, and that ‘King John was composed and performed in the mid 1590s, most probably 1595–6’ (p. 15).

What part does poetry play, characteristically, in the mental life of its readers? I suggest that a primary function of poetry is simply to provide the reader with the memory of words, phrases, lines, images, impressions and occasionally complete poems. On the other hand it is sometimes seen as providing myths or structures for comprehending life as a whole: the Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley have been seen in this way. That is to say their work as a whole has been seen as amounting to a comprehensive structure, a vast myth which comprises a view of life, or a 'philosophy' more or less (usually less) precisely formulable. It has also been seen, more recently, as a part of discourse in general, upon which ideological interpretation can get to work to disclose the workings of a particular society. This last role can, I think, be relegated to a subordinate position: something you can do with poetry after reading it and thinking about it as poetry (which is not to say that politics and ideology may not be also part of our immediate response to it as poetry).

Since the demise of the Old Vic Company in 1963, Shakespeare production in England has been dominated by the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company operating mainly in Stratford-upon-Avon and London but also taking full seasons to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and touring the provinces. Other companies have come and gone - the Actors' Company (1972-83), Prospect Theatre Company (1961-79) - and the National Theatre has put on a number of productions, starting with John Dexter's Othello with Laurence Olivier (1964); but for two decades Shakespeare virtually disappeared from the West End and from the commercial theatre in general.

West End productions depend for their drawing power largely on the appeal of popular actors in leading roles. A result of the dwindling of such productions has been the increasing dominance of the director. Whereas Gielgud directed a Shakespeare production at Stratford during the 1950s when another actor, Anthony Quayle, was joint Artistic Director, since Peter Hall took over in i960 no leading actor or actress has directed a major production there. Another result has been an increasingly intellectual approach.

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In the first act of The Tempest, near the conclusion of Prospero's story of their past, Miranda asks an all-important question: 'I pray you, sir . . . your reason / For raising this sea-storm' (1.2.176-8). Prospero's reply is enigmatic:

The answer to Miranda's question is left to be inferred from the play's ending, or filled in according to each reader's expectation of how Prospero might deal with his enemies through the power that has enabled him to raise the storm. It is partly this absence of clearly stated intention that often leads commentators to express dissatisfaction at his perceived failure to achieve what they understand him to have set out to do: achieve revenge, for instance, or assure himself of his enemies' full repentance before he forgives, or (in the terms of a recent psychoanalytic approach) complete himself by working through his oedipal past.

In what is probably the most influential discussion to date of the relation between The Knight’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Philip Edwards leans heavily on ‘a Chaucerian view of the frailty of our determinations’ in making his case for a fundamental continuity of vision. Shakespeare and Fletcher, apparently, are far from misappropriating the romance, even if they skew its rueful irony regarding human subjection to chance, coincidence, and above all Venus, to match the intensely personal bitterness of a Shakespeare ‘looking dim-eyed at innocence and seeing salvation disappear with puberty’ (p. 104). It is as if the world-weary bard, having just recently bid farewell to the imperfect magic of his art in The Tempest, returns for a curtain call in the role of Theseus, presiding sagely over the fading of another insubstantial pageant:

Indeed, Theseus' magisterial resignation might appear to take us beyond the threat of 'despair' that troubles Prospero's 'ending' (The Tempest Epi.15) to something like the pallid stoicism of King Lear's concluding lines (either Edgar's or Albany's, depending on the text preferred): The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say' (Learf 5.3.299-300).

John Barton and Peter Hall reduced the three parts of Henry VI to two (Stratford, 1963), not only because of their length but also because they believed them to be, as Hall put it, ‘a mess of angry and undifferentiated barons, thrashing about in a mass of diffuse narrative’. When Terry Hands produced the most recent British stage version of the three plays in an unadapted form (Stratford, 1977) he converted some spectators but left others longing for the clarity and consistency of the Barton-Hall version. The key to the problem may lie in a remark made by Helen Mirren, the Queen Margaret of the production: ‘One isn’t playing in three plays, one is playing in a single long play – like a TV serial, or a serialized novel by Dickens.’ The success of Jane Howell’s BBC production of 1982 resulted partly from the fact that Howell, like Mirren, recognized the affinity of the tetralogy to a TV series: at one point she compared it to Dallas. Audiences of a serial which has several writers easily come to terms with the characteristics of the genre: cameo appearances of minor figures, inconsistencies of plot and characterization, even the writing in and out of characters to take account of casting changes. Moreover, the video recorder allows audiences to arrange viewing times to suit themselves, thus solving the purely practical difficulty of fitting in so many theatre visits in the right order. Television may well turn out to be the best home for the Henry VI plays.

Most of the productions listed are by professional companies, but some amateur productions and adaptations are included. Information is taken from programmes, supplemented by reviews, held in the Birmingham Shakespeare Library. Details have been verified wherever possible, but the nature of the material prevents corroboration in every case.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

Flying Colours Theatre Company, Pentameters Theatre Club, Hampstead: 21 Sept-16 Oct. 1988 Directors: Stewart Gray, Graham Mitchell Helena: Stephi Hemelryk

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The National Theatre at the Olivier, London: 9 April 1987-6 Feb. 1988 See Shakespeare Survey 42, p. 149.

AS YOU LIKE IT

British Actors Touring Company, York Theatre Royal and tour: 1 Mar. 1988-

The company has no director

Rosalind: Kate O'Mara

Jaques: Patrick Marley

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh: 28 Oct.-19 Nov. 1988

Director: Hamish Glen

Designer: Peter Ling

Rosalind: Siobhan Redmond

Prehistoric standing stones represented Arden.

Tartan costumes indicated a Scottish location.

Renaissance Theatre Company, Birmingham

Repertory Theatre Studio, Phoenix Theatre

London and tour: 8 April 1988—

Director: Geraldine McEwan

Designer: Jenny Tiramani

Rosalind: Tarn Hoskyns

Touchstone: Kenneth Branagh

See Shakespeare Survey 42, p. 130.

The Duke's Theatre, Lancaster. Promenade production in Williamson Park: 14 June—23 July 1988

Director: Jonathan Petherbridge

Designer: Eve Stewart

Music: Andy Whitfield

Rosalind: Tracie Gillman

The remains of the Rose provide the first direct evidence concerning an Elizabethan public theatre. It will no doubt be some time before a full report on the excavations is available, and the significance of the finding can be fully established. The excavation nearby of a part of the foundations of the Globe may open up new perspectives on both this theatre and the Rose. It is possible, nevertheless, to begin to work out some implications provisionally of what is the most exciting theatre discovery in this century. The Rose was financed by Philip Henslowe in partnership with John Cholmley, and built by John Griggs, described in the deed of partnership as a carpenter, in 1587. Henslowe lists in his account-book or diary expenses for refurbishing the playhouse in the spring of 1592. The remains include part of the brick, chalk, and clunch or soft stone foundations of the original theatre, and also the foundations of a substantial extension northwards, including a new stage, which were presumably added in 1592. Hitherto the only visual evidence available has been that provided by John Norden in his three panoramas of London engraved one in 1593 and the others in 1600, which show the Rose schematically as hexagonal or round. The excavations carried out by the Department of Greater London Archaeology of the Museum of London have now brought to light what John Orrell and Andrew Gurr describe as ‘the first really trustworthy evidence about any of the playhouses that flourished in Shakespeare’s day’ in their preliminary report on the findings in the Times Literary Supplement, 9–15 June 1989; I have relied on their account for basic information.

My subject is The Tempest - how it has been read recently and how it might be read otherwise. My vehicle for approaching this subject is the poetic style, its most minute formal details. My immediate purpose is to read The Tempest in a way that offers an alternative to, and an implicit critique of, certain readings produced by American New Historicism and British Cultural Materialism. My larger aim is to discover uses for stylistic criticism that will reassert the value of textuality in a nontextual phase of criticism and that may contribute to the reconciliation of text and context, the aesthetic and the political.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed developments in Renaissance studies that treatments of The Tempest seldom concern themselves with the verse. Recent criticism looks beyond textual details and formal properties to concentrate on cultural surroundings, addressing the play almost solely in terms of social and political contexts, particularly its relation to colonial discourse. The essay by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme in John Drakakis' Alternative Shakespeares is typical: 'The ensemble of fictional and lived practices, which for convenience we will simply refer to here as “English colonialism”, provides The Tempest's dominant discursive “contexts”. We have chosen here to concentrate specifically on the figure of usurpation as the nodal point of the play's imbrication into this discourse of colonialism.' If American New Historicists seem slightly less virulent than British Cultural Materialists, their concerns are scarcely less political and their methods similarly contextual.

The eighteenth century inherited two versions of The Tempest. One was an established classic, immensely popular in the theatre and the subject of countless allusions outside it: The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, adapted by Dryden and Davenant in 1667 and provided with further operatic embellishments by Shadwell in 1674. The other was the play which appears first in the Shakespeare Folio, The Tempest, which had not been performed since its author’s lifetime and would not be revived in anything like its original form until 1746. The history of these competing texts in eighteenth-century culture, which this paper will endeavour to illuminate, is not a simple matter of the Restoration’s spurious, usurping Enchanted Island gradually succumbing to the inevitable rise of Bardolatry in favour of the true, Shakespearian Tempest, although this is how it has always tended to be represented. It is rather the history of how new concepts of Shakespeare – new ideas of the meanings and uses of Great English Literature – conspire both with and against new readings of The Tempest to produce a series of new Prosperos, new Mirandas, and new Calibans over the course of the century – whether in fresh stage versions like Garrick’s operetta of 1756, the puppet version of 1780 or Kemble’s play of 1789, or in other media: novels, statues, poems, literary criticism.

Most historians today see the religious changes that took place during the reign of Henry VIII as a series of discrete events that only gradually were understood to constitute a Protestant Reformation. The text that was published in the Shakespeare first folio with the title, The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight, is part of that process of interpretation. Performed first in 1613, it appeared while rumours of a second Spanish Armada were kindling anti-Catholic feeling and a few months after the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, an alliance intended to strengthen the Protestant cause in Europe. Produced at a time of widespread nationalistic and Protestant fervour, the play interprets events in the reign of Henry VIII as the legitimating origins of Stuart England.

Despite the folio title, the play dramatizes not the life of Henry VIII but a series of individual changes of fortune that taken together chart Henry's emergence as a powerful king. Henry takes no direct part in the first major episode, the Duke of Buckingham's conviction for treason, which seems to be orchestrated by Cardinal Wolsey. Initially, Wolsey also seems to be the source of Katherine of Aragon's problems, intruding between Henry and Katherine as he intrudes between the King and his subjects. Although Henry later traces his doubts about the legitimacy of his marriage to the French ambassador rather than to the Cardinal, he still seems to rely heavily on the judgement of others and possibly to be an unwitting pawn in games of international intrigue. Clearly, his will is frustrated by the power of the ecclesiastical court.

This essay addresses itself to some works by three Scandinavians who in various ways wrote 'after The Tempest'. It also examines that play's tendency to turn, in the hands of writers and critics, into a seashell. What you hear when you hold a shell to your ear are processes of life within yourself - as, in the lines quoted above, Indra's daughter explains to the Poet in the Fingal's Cave scene of Strindberg's A Dreamplay. The neurobiological details of her image may be somewhat dubious, but the bearing of the image itself is clear. In its context it becomes particularly self-reflexive, for in the cave, which is shaped both like a shell and an ear, the god listens to humans and humans listen to winds and waves, trying to find a language to define 'reality', 'poetry', 'dreams'.

It so happens that A Dreamplay is one of many works, from many cultures and languages, in which The Tempest is present, not necessarily as a verbally identifiable 'source' or 'influence' but as a shell which the writer has held to his or her ear. That peculiar quality of The Tempest which Anne Barton identifies, in her Introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play, as 'secretive', depending 'upon the suppressed and the unspoken', this quality also, as she puts it, 'compels a peculiarly creative response'.

In 1728 Lewis Theobald published The Double Falsehood; or, The Distressed Lovers, a play he claimed to be ‘Written Originally by W. Shakespeare; And now Revised and Adapted to the Stage by Mr Theobald . . . Even a cursory reading of the play would seem to discount the possibility that Theobald’s claim has any merit. Yet one or two facts seem to demand we give the claim further attention. The play is based on the story of Cardenio in Don Quixote. Cardenno is the title of a play twice acted by Shakespeare’s company at the court of James I during 1612–13. Among unpublished manuscripts of that company acquired by Humphrey Mosely was one entered to him in the Stationers’ Register in 1653 as ‘The History of Cardenio, by Mr Fletcher & Shakespeare.’ This information did not come to light until long after Theobald’s death; it is unlikely that Theobald knew it; he certainly never made use of it to justify his claims, even in the face of a campaign of ridicule.

With almost Pinteresque insistence The Tempest dramatizes conflicts of dominance and subservience. ‘Where’s the master?’ (1.1.9–10) – this is the question the first scene raises. With Prospero’s decision to present himself as he was, ‘sometime Milan’ (5.1.86), the last act seems to provide an answer. These conflicts The Tempest embodies variedly and invariably in the relationships of father and child, master and servant, ruler and subject. Even young love is discussed in terms of freedom and bondage (3.1.88–9) and is objectively, if playfully, correlated with the checkings and matings of rival kings and queens. Small wonder that recent criticism has considered The Tempest first and foremost as a political play, emphasizing its patriarchal structures or lodging it within ever-widening contexts of colonial discourses. That the play deals with problems of power, of authority, and their representation, these studies have made abundantly and convincingly clear. They have laid bare many of the material and ideological assumptions and contexts within which the play’s meanings unfold.

DISTINGUISHED SHAKESPEARIANS

Some distinguished Shakespearians who are neither elderly nor particularly stately are none the less moving into the ranks of elder states-persons with the appearance of collections of their essays.

Barbara Everett has reprinted some of her valuable essays in Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Pieces on the four major tragedies are reprinted from the Times Higher Educational Supplement and the London Review of Books, and the original publishing context has allowed free play to Everett's distinctively lively and intimate tone as she constantly draws the reader into sharing delicately glimpsed moments which unobtrusively lead to firm pictures of the plays as totalities. The other essays have been published before in academic journals, but they retain the qualities of wit and quiet wisdom: Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello - and a ring-in comedy, Twelfth Night. I hope the inclusion of the last does not mean that we cannot look forward to a volume of Everett on the Comedies.

Ernst Honigmann has published Myriad- Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies (London: Macmillan, Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare, 1989). Most of the essays are either reprinted, or interestingly conflate several different pieces. Formerly unpublished pieces include an essay on Julius Caesar, and one on All's Well (is it a 'feminist play'?). Most of the essays show Honigmann as critic rather than textual scholar, although there is his classic article on stage-directions and a lively amalgam 'Shakespeare at work: preparing, writing, rewriting'.

‘What care these roarers for the name of Duke?’ exclaims Trincalo, the Boatswain in The Enchanted Island, Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation of the Tempest; ‘to Cabin; silence; trouble us not’ (1.1.22). The temptation to see this as one of the absurdities of restoration royalism is strong. Driven by the desire to expunge any critique of monarchy from the plays of an earlier generation, the adaptors replaced the name of king with the name of duke. The ocean’s ‘roarers’ no longer suggest a crowd resentful of divine right claims, and the Boatswain is guilty of a certain rudeness to a duke but not of the more frightening crime of lèsemajesté. The duke’s notion that his ‘name’ might still the storm becomes itself absurd; only the name of king can match the force of nature. And it is a name that is not spoken in Dryden and Davenant’s play.

The traumas of civil wars, regicide, and restoration seem to have locked the theatre into a state of denial, at least until the 1680s, when opposition voices would again be heard in Parliament and (briefly) upon the stage. Heroic dramas indeed concentrated upon conflicts of allegiance and impossible divisions of loyalties, but did so in exotic settings, where an Amurath might succeed an Amurath, never a Harry a Harry, or a Charles a Charles.