I begin with two perceptions: first, the observation of Robert Y. Turner that English comedy did not really find a successful way to dramatize love in any psychological sense before Lyly began his career as a playwright, and second, that of Alfred Harbage and others that Love’s Labour’s Lost is the most Lylyan of Shakespeare’s plays. The Lyly play that immediately invites attention in this regard is Sappho and Phao, written in 1584, since, like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, it ends in a lack of romantic completion for the young lovers. Without wishing to argue that Shakespeare turned directly to Sappho and Phao as a kind of source, I should like to ask what we can learn from examining these two plays together. They are both centred on the experience of young men and women as they meet one another for the first time in amorous encounter, and in both plays the experience is a difficult one, evoking in the men sensations of apprehension, curiosity, fascination of course but also diminished self-regard and humiliation, all leading ultimately to a collapse or at least postponement of the negotiations in love. Both plays feature a princess or queen whose independence and regal self-assurance inspire an outspokenness in the women around her that the men find, in varying degrees, threatening.

Like many characters of historical fiction, Joan of Arc in Shakespeare's First Part of Henry the Sixth is largely a creation of other texts, and some would have the dramatist (perhaps in his late twenties) powerless to consolidate her amid the passions and contradictions that beset these texts. Noting the contrasts between Joan at the beginning and end of the play, Shaw supposed that Shakespeare

Nowadays scholars usually concede that Shakespeare wrote this uneven play, though a noteworthy case has been made for returning it to the composite authorship that was widely accepted, if on tenuous grounds, fifty years ago. 'Shakespeare's Joan', then - and inverted commas are implicit in everything that follows - refers to a literary character who is perhaps not the property of any author, who came to Shakespeare already 'created' by a century of chronicle writers, and whose devising, there is a good chance, may not have been Shakespeare's at all. For that matter, Shakespeare's reputed source, Raphael Holinshed, probably did not write the account of Joan usually attributed to him.

In previous discussions of the play of Sir Thomas More much has been said about the opening 'ill May Day' scenes and little about the play's third and final phase, Sir Thomas's fall. In this short paper I want to look at the play's ending and at some associated problems.

First, though, a question. What kind of play is it? Scott McMillin, in his important recent study, called it a history play, and, the history play being a 'hold-all' genre, perhaps rightly. I think, however, that a subgenre that became popular in the 1580s and 1590s provides a more useful label - the 'wise man play', which included Dr Faustus, Friar Bacon, John of Bordeaux, John a Kent and probably lost plays such as The Wise Man of Westchester. These plays celebrated the deeds of a non-aristocratic wise man who rises to be a friend of princes; he solves the prince's problems, plays tricks on others, and in some cases overcomes a rival wise man (Friar Bungay, John a Cumber; Sir Thomas More has a contest in courtesy with a rival scholar, Erasmus). Though Sir Thomas makes no use of magic, his play follows a recognizable model, which could end either as a tragedy, as does Dr Faustus, or with a hero still alive or even flourishing (Friar Bacon, John a Kent). I mention these alternatives because Munday and his fellow-dramatists could have ended the play with Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor, loved and respected by all.

In Act 3, Scene I of Sheridan's The Critic, Dangle and Sneer are watching the rehearsal of Mr Puff's tragedy about the Spanish Armada, and he excitedly awaits the entrance of his 'principal character', Lord Burleigh: 'I only hope the Lord High Treasurer is perfect - if he is but perfect!' When I first read the play, I did not understand this line. The joke, I thought, lay in the disproportion between the modesty of Puff's tone and the impossibility of his wish. In fact, the real point soon becomes apparent. Lord Burleigh enters, goes through an elaborate series of facial expressions, but says nothing. 'Hush!', Puff warns, 'or you'll put him out.'

The joke, in other words, is based on the fact that the theatrical meaning of the word 'perfect' is 'word-perfect'. An actor is the sum of his or her lines, and a perfect performance is one in which these lines have been perfectly learned. It is the association of being wordperfect with other kinds of perfection that I want to explore in this article.

It seems, oddly enough, to be a new topic. Actors' lapses of memory are generally regarded in the same category as other technical hitches, like doors that do not close properly and offstage noises in the wrong place. It is an unwritten rule that theatre reviews ignore all but the most spectacular lapses on the opening night of a production. By contrast, you can hardly read any actor's biography or memoirs without coming across anecdotes about 'drying', most of them comic, some of them extremely implausible.

Attempts at reconstructing the earliest performances of Shakespeare's plays are notoriously hit-and-miss affairs: nowhere more so than when we attempt to gauge the impact of male actors playing female roles. We are so used to reading the plays (or, when we see them, to seeing true-sex interpretations of the various character-parts) that we too easily set up our modern experience of the plays as the goal towards which an Elizabethan performance was tending. The present paper invites us to reconsider this presupposition.

Samuel Johnson's claim that theatre audiences 'are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players' is typical of its period. When they came to discuss the large matter of the relationship between artistic representation and the reality to which such representation alludes, eighteenth-century authors regularly displayed both a lively interest and a great deal of intelligence and good sense. Samuel Richardson, for example, wrote a tactful letter to William Warburton in which he rejected the bishop's proposed Preface to Clarissa on the grounds that it punctured the illusion of reality which he wished his novel to maintain. In the small space available to him he manages to do a large amount of justice to a complex matter: he indeed wishes 'that the Air of Genuiness had been kept up' in Warburton's Preface, but hurries on to admit that 'I want not the Letters to be thought genuine'; he wishes merely that they 'should not prefatically be owned not to be genuine', and this in order to 'avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho' we know it to be Fiction'.

IDEOLOGY AND HISTORY

As a consequence of the reawakened interest in history as a mode of entrance into literary interpretation, Survey reviewers are beginning to have friendly demarcation disputes about what is 'Criticism' and what is 'Life and Times'. More and more commentators are coming to fashion criticism out of a close contextualization of Shakespeare's works. Having looked last year at new historicism as a movement, I want this time to examine more directly one of its underpinning concepts, ideology, a subject which was one of the themes at the Twenty-Third International Shakespeare Conference in 1988.

For those who are willing to jump in at the deep end, Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), is the place to start. In their helpful Introduction, the editors explain how an ideological historicism differs from traditional 'historical background' studies:

Lives, like texts, may be read many ways. Peter Levi’s The Life and Times of William Shakespeare is the reading of a distinguished poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, immersed in and thrilled by the range of Shakespeare’s verse, but less conversant with the scholarship of Elizabethan history, particularly theatrical history, and essentially out of sympathy with the modern ‘reductionist’ strain of academic Shakespearian biography, pre-eminently represented by S. Schoen-baum’s Compact Documentary Life. The temperamental difference between the two ‘readings’ is best indicated by their reactions to ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Schoenbaum originally overlooked the poem altogether, but grudgingly describes it in the revised edition as ‘a much discussed curiosity . . . [which] shows Shakespeare in the unfamiliar role of nonce poet’ (pp. 327–8). For Levi, it ‘is the most breathtaking of all his poems, and I have heard old critics, devoted to poetry of many kinds all their lives, agree on it as the greatest poem in the English language’ (p. 214). Shakespeare the writer of supreme verse, rather than Shakespeare the practical man of theatre, is Levi’s hero, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that – odd though it may sound to late twentieth-century ears.

Compared with almost any other play of Shakespeare’s, King John has had a poor press both in quantity of what is written about it and also in the faint praise accorded to it. This lack of interest has been reflected in its stage history. Arthur Colby Sprague wrote in 1945 that the play is ‘now almost unknown as an acting play’. When it was put on in the Old Vic season of 1953–4 the editors of a commemorative volume (Roger Wood and Mary Clarke) record that ‘it only just maintained a 75 per cent attendance record’, and that ‘this was in spite of good reviews and first-rate acting’ (by a cast which included Fay Compton as Constance, Richard Burton as Falconbridge, and Michael Hordern as John). They conclude that this lukewarm reception ‘must be attributed to the play’s own comparative unpopularity’. Wood and Clarke consider King John to be ‘purely medieval’, and add that ‘a play of such mixed fabric, where every man is for himself and no common purpose or theme emerges, presents many problems to the producer’. In 1988 one might feel less confident in declaring that a drama in which every man is out for himself represents the medieval rather than the modern world. Perhaps Garrick’s idea for a production which was ‘half old English and half modern’ both identifies and solves the problem. In the later twentieth century King John has not – at least until the advent of Deborah Warner’s excellent 1988 production at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon – shared notably in the revival of enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s other history plays set in motion by John Barton’s adaptations and productions.

Since the First Folio says that Shakespeare wrote history plays I think there is a great deal to be said for assuming not only that he did so but did so in the plays thus designated and no others; let evidence precede definition. It is true of course that the evidence available is mixed; Elizabethan generic vocabulary is notoriously spongy: contemporary title pages give us such hybrids as The Tragedy of Richard II, The Tragedy of Richard III, The History of Troilus and Cressida, The True Chronicle History of King Lear, A Pleasant Conceited History called The Taming of a Shrew. The Folio's generic divisions seem to belong, however, to a different mode of discourse: F1 is a company volume, and I have no doubt that its division of plays into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies reflects company understanding of the repertory, and so, I take it, the understanding of that good company man, William Shakespeare.

Academic critics inevitably prefer definitions to be less blandly empirical, for what space for dazzling reinventions, for pulling rabbits out of hats, not to mention a name in lights, is left available by so preconditioning an acceptance? As professional systematizers we like to be seen to generate our definitions from general principles and our first chapters from titles such as 'What is a history play? Some problems and answers'.

The list includes some amateur productions and adaptations. 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

Leicester Haymarket Studio Company,

Leicester and tour: 18 Feb. 1987-

Director: Helena Kaut-Howson

Designer: Bunny Christie

Helena: Kate O'Connell

The action was set among the international jet set, and interpreted as a duel between Helena and Paroles to win Bertram.

Leeds Playhouse, Leeds: 4-27 June 1987

Director: John Harrison

Designer: Fran Thompson

Helena: Jenny Funnell

Set in the Napoleonic wars, and interpreted as domestic comedy, with Helena and Bertram equally serious.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

The National Theatre at the Olivier, London: 9 April 1987-

Director: Peter Hall

Designer: Alison Chitty

Music: Dominic Muldowney

Antony: Anthony Hopkins

Cleopatra: Judi Dench

Octavius: Tim Pigott-Smith

See Shakespeare Survey 41, pp. 176-8.

Contact Theatre, Manchester: 20 May-13 June 1987

Director: Brigid Larmour

Designer: Nettie Edwards

Antony: Wyllie Longmore

Cleopatra: Clare Dow

The establishment by two actors – Kenneth Branagh and David Parfitt – of the Renaissance Theatre Company offering productions directed by other actors seemed designed to consolidate a shift in the balance of power marked by the English Shakespeare Company’s earlier union of the talents of the director Michael Bogdanov and the actor Michael Pennington. And both companies toured during the current year, challenging the theatrical dominance of Stratford and London. The Bogdanov/Pennington completion of the history cycle played mostly overseas, whereas Branagh’s group opened its three-play season in the heart of England, in the studio of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and travelled in the provinces before its London season at the Phoenix Theatre. The predominantly young company had only fifteen members, one of whom turned up in five different roles in Hamlet (for the record, Barnardo, Lucianus, First Player, Sailor, and English Ambassador). Settings were simple, though not undecorative, and sometimes made ingenious use of limited resources. Though the directors, new to their roles, disclaimed the attempt to project ‘concepts’ of the plays, these were not emptily neutral productions; each represented a coherent attempt to rethink the play for a modern audience.

In an influential article some years ago on Shakespeare's method in 'Pyramus and Thisbe', Kenneth Muir claimed it was the playwright's purpose to mock earlier Elizabethan writers who had treated the story awkwardly and clumsily. Muir saw Thomas Mouffet as Shakespeare's main quarry, but prominent among the other writers to whom he referred was Arthur Golding. Since Muir wrote, editors of A Midsummer Night's Dream, sceptical about Mouffet's part in the proceedings, have increasingly tended to read the burlesque as a parody of Golding's translation: R. A. Foakes in his New Cambridge edition, for example, is convinced that it is based on 'the story as told in Golding', and Harold Brooks, the Arden editor of the play, also has no doubt that' “Pyramus and Thisbe” is patently from Golding's version in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.' Yet there is reason for unease with this situation. Although constantly referred to incidentally by editors and critics, Shakespeare's use of Golding has never received specific attention and is itself somewhat problematic. Neither the extent nor the precise nature of the debt to the translator has ever been accurately gauged, a point emphasized recently by the case of Titus Andronicus.

Far from transcending farce, as critics have claimed, The Comedy of Errors ‘uses farce to achieve ends that are proper to farce – surprise, suspense, laughter’; in this play characters ‘do not so much relate as collide with one another’. Patrick Swinden’s no-nonsense account remains true to one’s experience of the play in performance: the hectic pace of the complicated plot ensures that its puppets have about as much psychological and emotional reality as Keystone Cops. It seemed wholly apt that in the BBC TV production Egeon’s long opening tale of woe – in which a delightfully improbable series of coincidences and mishaps serves to set up the situation for the delightfully improbable confusions that follow – was comically mimed by a troupe of street-theatre harlequins, and drew histrionic sniffles and tears from the listening Ephesians.

T. S. Dorsch, editor of the New Cambridge Comedy of Errors, takes the more common view that 'we must... feel deeply for Egeon as he tells his woeful story' (p. 14). He sees the play as 'a finely-balanced mixture of pathos and suspense, illusion and delusion, love turned bitter and love that is sweet, farce and fun' (p. 12), and briefly expands this description in the kind of old-fashioned character analysis that worries away at the differences in the dispositions of Dromio of Ephesus and his Syracusan twin. It is true, of course, that the play incorporates Adriana's jealousy, the wooing of her sister Luciana by Antipholus of Syracuse, and the hurt perplexity of Egeon in the closing scene before the joyous family reunion.

'A little touch of Harry in the night' makes such a splendid finish to the famous Act 4 prologue of Henry V that directors are tempted to cut the following final six lines:

Apart from the fact that the prologue does indeed lead directly to 'a little touch of Harry', with the Battle of Agincourt to follow some time later, another cause for this omission might be that the director does not wish to call attention to what will in fact be a 'brawl ridiculous' - combat scenes on the modern Shakespearian stage are all too often a cause for merriment rather than intense excitement.

What of the Elizabethans themselves? Were they also frequently contemptuous of actors' attempts to represent a great battle on stage, or if they were not, was Shakespeare merely adding some spectacle to please the uncultured masses standing in the yard - 'sit and see' being directed to the more refined patrons in the galleries?

Early in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom announces that ‘the greatest poet in our language is excluded from the argument of this book’. He gives three reasons for this exclusion, one historical, one generic, and one individual. Historically, Bloom states, ‘Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness’; only with eighteenth-century and Romantic notions of genius and originality does ‘the burden of the past’ become the poet’s overriding problem. Generically, Bloom thinks, drama is less susceptible to anxiety than is lyric: ‘As poetry has become more subjective, the shadow cast by the precursors has become more dominant.’ But for Bloom – and this accords with the essentially Freudian mode of his criticism – the most important cause is the individual one: ‘Shakespeare’s prime precursor was Marlowe, a poet very much smaller than his inheritor . . . Shakespeare is the largest instance in the language of a phenomenon that stands outside the concern of this book: the absolute absorption of the precursor. Battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads; only this is my subject here.’

On the controversy over Shakespeare's handwriting in Sir Thomas More, the best arguments supporting Shakespeare are to be found in Shakespeare and the Play of Sir Thomas More (Cambridge, 1923), edited by A. W. Pollard. Here, the most persuasive contributions are those of Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, J. Dover Wilson, and R. W. Chambers. A chapter by the last of these in his Man's Unconquerable Mind (London, 1939) made a further cogent contribution.

All the best work on the subject up to 1948 is reviewed and expanded by R. C. Bald in his 'Booke of Sir Thomas More and its Problems' in Shakespeare Survey 2. Bald believed that the attribution of the 147 lines of Hand D was correct. Greg a little later concurred in that view. In my own view, Thompson's article in the book cited above, 'The Handwriting of the Three Pages Attributed to Shakespeare Compared with his Signatures', by itself leaves little room for doubt. Yet the steady stream of contrary argument runs on apace, and most of those who count themselves believers are but 90 per cent believers. Had it been otherwise when the 1983 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America was being planned, the need for a seminar on 'Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More' would hardly have been felt.