The year’s most substantial contribution to our thinking on the shape of Shakespeare’s life and career is E. A. J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’. Professor Honigmann has resurrected the suggestion first made by Oliver Baker in 1937, and later supported by E. K. Chambers, that the ‘William Shake-shafte’ mentioned in the 1581 will of Alexander Hoghton of Lea (in Lancashire) is in fact William Shakespeare. Douglas Hamer supposedly refuted the theory in 1970, but Professor Honigmann certainly knocks enough holes in that refutation to make a reopening of the case worthwhile; and in establishing a plausible Lancashire connection for Shakespeare – John Cottom, one of the Stratford schoolmasters during Shakespeare’s teens, was a native of Tarnacre, only ten miles from Hoghton’s Lea – he offers a possible answer to one of the more awkward questions posed by the whole proposition: why should a Midlander born and bred seek employment in the wilds of Lancashire? A further decisive factor would almost certainly have to be Roman Catholicism, since there is no doubt that the Cottom and Hoghton families, and their principal neighbours, had strong Catholic connections.

These observations are based on my experience of eighteen years at the BBC (mainly in educational broadcasting), during which time I worked on some fourteen Shakespearian productions, along with other important plays, poetry features, and literary commentaries. I aim at describing the particular advantages that radio offers, while taking into account the obvious disadvantages of a non-visual form of presentation. There are certain problems which producer, actors, and technical staff must solve; decisions to be made about the use of effects, music, and radiophonics. Most important, of course, are the specialized approach of actors to the text in question, the techniques that must be developed, and the virtues of an experienced company working together over years rather than months on many different plays: tragedies, comedies, histories and romances.

Hamlet's advice to the Players is as pertinent for radio as it is in the theatre. Of course the speech should come trippingly, and tearing a passion to tatters is all the more agonizing when only the ear and imagination are engaged: there should be no vocal sawing of the air. Just as too much 'business' on stage can disturb the flow of action and destroy the rhythms particular to tragedy and comedy as well as significantly distracting attention from the words, so too many aural tricks, over-elaborate effects, too much use of ingenious radiophonics or of music, can upset the delicate balance of a performance of Shakespeare on radio.

In order to appreciate the significance of The Television Shakespeare (the BBC series which broadcast thirty-seven plays between 3 December 1978 and 27 April 1985), it is necessary to think of it not just as Shakespeare but as television. Derek Longhurst wrote while the series was still in production that it 'needs to be evaluated in terms of the whole determining medium of television' and in a recent essay Graham Holderness has partly taken up this challenge. My intention is more modest and more formalistic.

I shall be looking at the work of two directors, Jane Ho well and Elijah Moshinsky, who between them directed eleven of the plays. Much of my evidence will be drawn from Howell's production of the first tetralogy (broadcast in England on 2, 9, 16 and 23 January 1983) and Moshinsky's production of Cymbeline (10 July 1983). In my opinion the originality (and success) of these directors in translating Shakespeare from one medium into another derived from a split in their allegiances. Ho well publicly acknowledged a struggle between television and the theatre. Moshinsky's case is more ambiguous, but it can be interpreted that he was frequently attempting to treat television as if it were cinema. In both cases the conventions of television drama were partly assimilated, partly challenged.

Oxford-Cambridge rivalry now extends to Shakespeare publishing by the two university presses. The new Cambridge editions, like the Oxford ones, present modern-spelling texts and imitate the Arden layout, but their textual analyses are placed in appendixes and they offer reading lists of books and articles, not Oxford’s indexes to the commentaries. Sketches by C. Walter Hodges reconstruct possible Elizabethan-Jacobean stagings of selected episodes. The pages are larger, though not more readable, than those in the Oxford and Arden series. The volumes are pleasant to look at and handle.

Ann Thompson's edition of The Taming of the Shrew, appearing soon after Brian Morris's new Arden (1981) and H. J. Oliver's Oxford (1982), is a worthy competitor. On the main scholarly issues she agrees with Morris against Oliver when they differ and with both men when they do not: she believes that the Folio text was set from a transcript rather than foul papers, that A Shrew (1594) derives from Shakespeare's play, that none of the discrepancies between the sub-plots of A Shrew and The Shrew imply major revision of the latter, but that The Shrew once contained equivalents of the additional Sly episodes preserved in A Shrew.

This has been a lively but uneven year for the English Shakespearian stage. It is not often, for example, that one can report not merely on exciting performances but also on two separate proposals to build scholarly reconstructions of Jacobean theatres. But the making of stages, as well as the playing upon them, has in 1983-4 involved an odd mixture of gratified hopes and worrying disappointments.

On 5 September 1984 the Royal Shakespeare Company announced that an anonymous benefactor had given all the money needed to build a third auditorium in Stratford. To be called the Swan, this 430-seat theatre will have a large apron stage surrounded on three sides by three tiers of galleries. First planned in the late 1970s, and long since despaired of for lack of finance, this approximation of a Jacobean indoor playhouse will be open from the summer of 1986.

Just three weeks after this exhilarating news came a rather different announcement. For fifteen years Sam Wanamaker had been fighting to build a replica of the Globe close to its original site on Bankside. Much, though not all, of the money had been raised. An impressive list of rich and royal patrons had been gathered to the colours. Scholars and architects had collaborated on a design for a building in which Shakespeare's plays could be rendered in something very close to their original conditions. The Globe Trust reached an agreement with Southwark Council and the developers Derno whereby the cost of the site for the theatre would be financed by the construction of an adjacent office block.

In Book 7 of his great history of Rome, from her foundation to the time of Augustus, Titus Livius recounts, with a certain admixture of scepticism, the story of Marcus Curtius. In the year 362 bc, a chasm suddenly opened in the middle of the Forum. The soothsayers, when consulted, declared that only a ritual sacrifice of the thing ‘wherein the most puissance and greatnes of the people of Rome consisted’ could close the fissure and ‘make the state of Rome to remain sure forever’. Much discussion followed, but no one could determine what that precious thing might be. Then Marcus Curtius, described in Philemon Holland’s Elizabethan translation of Livy as ‘a right hardie knight and martiall yong gentleman’, ‘rebuked them therefore, because they doubted whether the Romanes had any earthly thing better than armour and valor’. Armed at all points, he mounted a horse ‘as richly trapped and set out as possible he could devise’, and – like Hotspur at Shrewsbury – ‘leapt into destruction’ (2 Henry IV, 1.3.33). The gulf closed.

All Shakespeare’s plays were subjected to political censorship. Every play had to be licensed before it could be performed or published; even after that, it could get its author or actors into trouble, if objection was subsequently taken to its performance. Editors recognize these facts, and can sometimes retrospectively save a writer from the censor. When a play survives in an early quarto, set from Shakespeare’s own draft, we can sometimes restore material excised in the First Folio. When a Jacobean text of an Elizabethan play shows little or no sign of authorial revision, but does omit an insulting reference to the Scots, it seems reasonable enough to infer that the change was made because the sensibility of William Shakespeare had in this instance to bow to that of James Stuart. We infer that the text has been censored, and we act on that inference. But in one play we can do more than ‘infer’ that political interference has occurred. In one case we possess abundant contemporary evidence that the text was changed, we know what Shakespeare originally wrote, what his company originally performed, and that political pressure was applied in order to force him to alter his text. Nevertheless, no editor has ever restored the original reading – despite the fact that in this case the censor’s intervention makes more difference to the meaning of the play than in any other known or suspected instance.

In reporting Queen Elizabeth’s conversation with William Lambarde, the Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, about the staging of Richard II on Saturday, 6 February 1601, most scholars emphasize the Queen’s words, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ Less often repeated but of much greater significance to the play which gave rise to the exchange and those that followed it, are the Queen’s next words which, in referring to Essex, make significant comment on the dramatic role into which she cast the treacherous earl. ‘He that will forget God,’ she said, ‘will also forget his benefactors . . .’ And Francis Bacon, who was one of the crown prosecutors at the trial which followed the unsuccessful insurrection, left no question as to the ultimate condemnation of any who would defy divine authority. In speaking of Sir Gilly Meyrick, one of Essex’s supporters, Bacon said, ‘So earnest hee was to satisfie his eyes with the sight of that tragedie which hee thought soone after his lord should bring from the stage to the state, but that God turned it upon their owne heads.’ Both of these speakers seem less concerned with Shakespeare’s hero than they are with the nature of Elizabeth’s antagonist and with divine providence. ‘That tragedie’ which was to have been brought from ‘the stage to the state’ would seem to refer as much to the usurpation of Richard’s throne as to his downfall and death, perhaps more.

At the end of Henry VIII Cranmer delivers a prophecy of the golden age of Queen Elizabeth, in a speech that seems designed both as the last in a series of striking set-pieces and as the culmination of the play’s action. The elaborate and sometimes devious historical process the play has shown has been designed, we now realize, to allow Elizabeth to be born and to make this golden age possible. For the characters in the play, however, the age of Elizabeth lies in the future and, we are told, ‘Few now living can behold that goodness’ (5.4.22). For the audience it lies in the past. Like all golden ages it is just the other side of the horizon. If the author had been content to leave it there we might have been content to accept the convention. But Cranmer extends his idealizing vision to the present, to the reign of James; this too is part of the golden age. At this point the more realistic spectators might have reflected on the difference between dream and reality, and concluded that nothing gold can stay. The same train of thought might have prompted memories of the dark, unsettled end of Elizabeth’s reign, memories against which Cranmer’s vision could be tested. Cranmer is not just taking his audience somewhere over the rainbow; he is also asking it to see its own present, and its own immediate past, as a golden age. Outside the special conditions of court masque and complimentary verse, that takes some doing. And it was not what Jacobean drama normally did.

In the autumn of 1601, in the miserable atmosphere which followed the rebellion and execution of the Earl of Essex, the antiquary William Lambarde came to Greenwich to present to Elizabeth I the fruits of his long years of research in the royal archives. Turning the pages of his book, the Queen reached the reign of Richard II and said, 'I am Richard II, know ye not that?' Lambarde took her meaning at once, for earlier in the year the identification had been so commonly made by the Essex faction that the Earl's supporters had commissioned a special performance by the Lord Chamberlain's Men of Shakespeare's Richard II, despite the fact that it had been long out of the repertory and that the actors prophesied a poor audience.

This is a well-known episode, but it does have something to say about the problems of relating the plays of William Shakespeare to the world he lived in - indeed, about the whole vexed relationship between literature and history. Insisting on the historical dimension in a book or a play is not universally welcomed by students of literature, and literature and literary evidence is certainly out of fashion among historians. They have lost the old confidence that if we want to see an Elizabethan pedlar we have only to look at Autolycus, and that we can learn everything about the Elizabethan military machine by watching Falstaff press men for Henry IV's army and march off with the diseased and feeble, and £3 in Bardolph's pocket for freeing the able-bodied. As for artistic imagination, this is feared as a distortion, not welcomed as an illumination.

Hotspur is a character whose career runs the gamut of dramatic expression. Commencing on a note of furious, even farcical, comedy, it concludes on a note of tragic grief so poignantly realized as to have inspired Northrop Frye’s perception that his dying remark, ‘thoughts, the slaves of life’, comes out of the heart of the tragic vision. Hotspur’s brave death is placed squarely and deliberately before the audience and provides the final means by which they can comprehend the nature and meaning of his life. Gradually the character has been moulded and determined by forces and events that culminate in the great encounter between himself and Prince Hal. The forces, both those seen by and those hidden from Hotspur, are the means by which the audience and reader are able to apprehend the development of a character whose existence has been bent into the shape of tragic suffering shown by that last speech:

To begin with, Rome, and two worthwhile books, Howard Erskine-Hill’s The Idea of Augustus in English Literature and Robert S. Miola’s Shakespeare’s Rome. Erskine-Hill devotes only one chapter to Shakespeare, but the entire first half of his book is of interest to Shakespearians. It begins with a lucid and well-substantiated account of Augustus and his Rome, derived not only from classical but also from twentieth-century historians, and then traces the response of patristic, medieval, and European Renaissance writers, especially Bodin, Machiavelli, and Lipsius. Shakespeare himself is introduced by way of Donne and the satirists, and – interestingly – the Ben Jonson of The Poetaster and the royal entry entertainment of the Temple of Janus (1604). Parts of Erskine-Hill’s account will be familiar to scholars, but the overall grasp is impressive: thorough scholarship, presented through a sturdy structure of argument, yields a great deal of significant information in a readily accessible form. Ideas of Rome’s Augustan age, Erskine-Hill shows, ‘have been a presence in English in all periods, reaching back even to the circle of King Alfred’, but more importantly, we should note, a pattern of fairly stable associations concerning Augustus ‘had been fully assembled by the sixteenth century’.

Like the 1984 International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon (where some papers in this Survey were given), that of the Shakespeare Gesellschaft West for 1982 was devoted to Shakespeare and History. It seems appropriate, then, to begin with its Jahrbuch, which contains special contributions from historians. Two of these are of great interest. G. R. Elton asks how far recent work on the fifteenth century has modified the image offered in Shakespeare’s two tetralogies. The study of local records has shown, for instance, the fictitiousness of the image of an England ravaged by the Wars of the Roses: the struggle of a couple of claimants to the throne was not the whole history of England. This lively lecture (the Jahrbuch, more than the Survey, preserves the speaking voice) does however concede to Shakespeare an acute insight into the psychology of social types (such as Hotspur, whom he sees as a characteristic product of the feudal nobility) and a sense of concreteness and detail aspired to by, but lacking in, many historians.

When Harold Jenkins wrote his survey of criticism of the English history plays from 1900 to 1951 for Shakespeare Survey 6 (Cambridge, 1953) two critical approaches were dominant: firstly the reading of them in the light of the historical thesis which they were seen to present and which was particularly associated with E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's English History Plays (1944), and secondly close analysis of their style and imagery. It might be useful first to consider how these two modes of interpretation have developed in the period presently under review.

THE OVERALL PATTERN

The influence of Tillyard's thesis can be seen in the amount of reference to it in later work. Its attraction was that it provided the English histories with an intellectual dimension that they had previously lacked. Instead of being seen as immature and formless, perhaps the result of collaboration and revision by different hands, they were given the weight of a philosophical and political thesis. The interpretation of them in the light of the 'Tudor myth', reading English history from Richard II to Henry VIII as the working-out of a process of punishment and expiation for the deposition and murder of Richard II, God's judgement falling particularly on the house of Lancaster and more generally on the nation, provided the plays with coherence and dignity. An extract from a contemporary review of Tillyard's book illustrates in a small way how the thesis brought new significance to the plays: 'that dull old stick, Alexander Iden, becomes a steadying symbol of degree and of duty done in the allotted state of life'.

The literary and dramatic qualities of the addition in Hand D to the manuscript of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore are outside of my brief here. I am not concerned with its artistic value per se, or with the identification of Hand D with Shakespeare or any other Elizabethan playwright. What is disturbing, I feel, is that those three pages have been from the beginning and are still beset, even at a merely textual approach, by a number of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. No doubt this is largely due to the state of the manuscript, with all the deletions, corrections, interlineations and additions in two separate hands which, following Greg’s critical edition of 1911 for the Malone Society, we are accustomed to call D and C. There have been since a number of more and more sophisticated and annotated diplomatic transcriptions of the text, beginning with Greg himself in the appendix to the collective volume Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of ‘Sir Thomas More’ (Cambridge, 1923), reprinted in Peter Alexander’s Tudor Shakespeare (1951), Thomas Clayton (The ‘Shakespearean’ Addition to The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, Shakespeare Studies Monographs, 1, Dubuque, Iowa, 1969), and finally G. Blakemore Evans (Riverside Shakespeare, Boston, 1974); but in spite of the fact that they provide in visual terms clear representations of the actual state of the manuscript, the necessary inclusion in them of all the alterations it originally underwent obscures to a certain extent a precise understanding of the intentions of D when he first drafted it.

Even among Shakespeare's plays The Tempest inspires an unusual amount of confusion and multiple interpretation. Mark Van Doren finds his way through all the commentary to a less than helpful conclusion:' Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field. Its meaning, in other words, is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.' Rather than offer still another reading, I want to look at the confusion as a phenomenon in the play itself, though some implications about meaning are likely to emerge despite my self-restraint.

One might consider the difficulty of The Tempest a non-problem, invented by modern hyper-ingenuity, but after all our difficulties of understanding are shared by the characters in the play. On looking from the critics back to the text, we may recognize ourselves in Prospero's diagnosis of Alonso's state: 'thy brains, / Now useless, boil'd within thy skull!' Alonso is not alone. Repeatedly characters do not know what to make of what they see, and when they think they understand something, they are frequently wrong. In the Renaissance the locus dassicus for analysing this kind of confusion in human affairs is Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond, and it is a truism of modern criticism that Montaigne is one of the inspiring figures behind The Tempest.

Shakespeare, unlike Chaucer, is still intelligible to us directly. But though his language in general needs no translation for speakers of modern English, his ideas often do. In particular his ideas about the hidden workings of our body were quite different from our own. For instance, he thought that sighing caused loss of blood, that tears were an overflow from the brain, and that falling in love was caused by the liver. The temptation is to hurry over these oddities, understanding statements of fact in a metaphorical sense, or, where this won’t do, glossing them with a synonym. So we may be told that ‘spirits’ means ‘energy’ or ‘character’ or ‘resolve’ as the context demands. The deception works if the cases are far enough apart. But if allegedly different meanings for the same word come in the same line we lose confidence. Another kind of confusion can be caused by the gloss itself. For instance on one occasion we are told by Dover Wilson that ‘blood’ means ‘spirit’. But it does not. Blood was a kind of liquid in the veins and spirit was a kind of air in the arteries. It cannot be right to explain them as if they were interchangeable, even if in some situations they perform equivalent functions. We would hardly approve a glossator in the microwave future who explained to his readers a point that was obscure to them in a twentieth-century kitchen scene by cheerfully writing ‘gas = electricity’.