This Stage-Play World, by Julia Briggs (Oxford University Press, 1983), embodies in its title most of the themes which have dominated this year’s work. Shakespeare’s ‘Stage’ has swallowed up his ‘Life’ and ‘Times’; writers vie with one another to show that life was (and is) theatrical, that politics and theatre are inseparable, and that the visual side of the theatre - its architecture, its staging, its iconography - was after all as important as the words that were spoken there. I shall consider some of the reasons for this emphasis later, but first I shall look at some general works, starting with the one I just mentioned.

Julia Briggs’s excellent book is thematically structured, with examples from literary works illustrating chapters on Renaissance politics, religion, society, and so on. Though the theatre gets a chapter to itself, drama is shown to be interwoven with every aspect of the period: it provides an analogy for the Platonic view of life as a shadow, as well as for the formal and ceremonial nature of society, and it allows the expression, if not necessarily the resolution, of ‘passionately conflicting convictions’.

Dealing with plot in terms derived and adapted from Aristotle and the Terentian theorists, and applying it to the protasis of Shakespeare’s early comedies, requires some explanatory, if not apologetic, introductory remarks. For plot, a few recent critical efforts notwithstanding, is not an accepted critical tool. We may no longer be guilty of the downright denunciation formulated by an anonymous mid-Victorian critic who levelled the charge of puerility against plot: ‘Few men’, he stated apodictically, ‘feel interested in a plot after nineteen.’ What we are guilty of is something possibly even more deadly – neglect. Plot, for Aristotle the soul of drama, has virtually disappeared from critical vocabulary, as is evidenced in P. G. Phialas’s statement: ‘Of the components of drama, structure, theme, and character are the most important.’ The relegation of plot to the status of ‘the most primitive of guides to our experience of a play’ by another recent critic of Shakespeare’s comedies illuminates the esteem plot-analysis currently enjoys. The reason for this neglect, if not contempt, of plot and the art of plotting by twentieth-century novelists, dramatists, and critics alike can be traced to definitions such as R. G. Moulton’s. For him plot is 'the purely intellectual side of action', any play's ultimate 'reduction to order'. From reduction, it is but a short step to reductiveness, to regarding plot as an intellectual contrivance, a blueprint for mechanical construction. (And from reductiveness, it is but a short step to Virginia Woolf's typically modern aversion to all those ' neat designs of life that are drawn up on half sheets of note paper'.)

Nowadays, The Taming of the Shrew is taken in its entirety, without mutilation, crude business with whips (imported by Kemble) or announcements of the embarrassing incompetence of the prentice Shakespeare. It is winning increasing praise, for the structure of its interlocking parts among other things, and is becoming understood as a fast-moving play about various kinds of romance and fulfilment in marriage.

Problems remain, of course, particularly with Katherine’s final speech: modern solutions making it a statement of contemporary doctrine, or of male fantasy, or of almost unbelievably sustained irony, do not any of them seem to suggest that there is much for Katherine and Petruchio to look forward to in marriage. The speech is a disappointment after the tender moment of ‘Nay, I will give thee a kiss’ (5.1.133) which suggested that something was coming with a lot of good feeling in it, an impression later supported by her having the wit to win Petruchio’s wager for him. Moreover, submission, as it is first, and strongly, presented in the play, in the Induction, scene 1, is denigration, a game played by pretended attendants; and wifely submission, shown even more strongly in the following scene, is sport by a page dressed as the sham wife of a ridiculously deceived ‘husband’. It is all a pastime, and false.

Half-way through the Henry VI trilogy, as Jack Cade’s army swarms into London, the Lord Mayor sends to the Tower for help against the rebels. Lord Scales replies that while he is very willing to help, ‘I am troubled here with them myself’ (Part Two, 4.5.7); he suggests instead that the citizens should gather head in Smithfield, ‘And thither I will send you Matthew Gough’ (4.5.10). This, as it turns out, is no great help, for twenty lines later, after a brief intervening scene for Cade, there comes the terse stage direction: ‘Alarums. Matthew Gough is slain, and all the rest’ (4.7.0).

This tiny episode is based on a fuller treatment in Edward Hall’s Chronicle. Hall explains that Lord Scales appointed Matthew Gough ‘to assist the Mayor and the Londoners, because he was both of manhood and experience greatly renowned’ but that, while the King’s forces defended London Bridge ‘all the night valiantly’, the rebels were victorious, and slew many, including ‘Matthew Gough, a man of great . . . experience in feats of chivalry, the which in continual wars had valiantly served the King . . . beyond the sea’. Beside this detailed information which Hall provides about Matthew Gough, Shakespeare’s Gough is a ghost character. There is, indeed, no way in which an audience could pick up who he is when he appears only to be killed immediately.

Critics have often approached Portia’s disguise as Balthazar with expectations implicitly shaped by the disguises of Julia, Rosalind, and Viola. Peter Hyland remarks that in The Merchant of Venice ‘Shakespeare was still at the stage of experiment and his use of disguise here is less successful than it was in The Two Gentlemen of Verona’. Juliet Dusinberre expresses the widely held opinion that ‘Shakespeare evaded in The Merchant of Venice the problems that he created for himself in Twelfth Night and As You Like It’. Such comments assume that the dramatic nature of sexual disguise must necessarily be the same in all contexts. What is most striking about Portia’s disguise as Balthazar is the absence of the psychological and sexual ambiguity that informs the disguises of the other heroines. If we turn to Portia’s disguise looking for this quality we will inevitably conclude that it is poorer in conception and execution than the other disguises. Critics have rarely considered the possibility that Shakespeare, confronting different problems in The Merchant of Venice, conceived sexual disguise in different terms. The dramatic relation between Balthazar as a role and Portia as a character is fundamentally different from that between the other heroines and their disguises.

One of W. H. Auden’s own poems, though it is about another poet, offers two points of departure for an exploration of Auden’s use of Shakespeare. In his celebrated elegy on Yeats, he says of the poet’s works after his death,

The second point of departure comes a bit later, the blunt statement that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.

A poet becomes what his readers want to make of him, in their historical situations and individual needs, and the same is true of Shakespeare as read and seen by Auden. In an essay of 1959, he admits cheerfully that Shakespeare critics tell more about themselves than about Shakespeare; 'but', he goes on, 'perhaps this is the great value of drama of the Shakespearian kind, namely, that whatever he may see taking place on stage, its final effect on each spectator is a self-revelation'. The self that Auden brought to this Shakespearian mirror was a poet, and - after 1940 - a Christian. Because there was a tension between these two professions, a fear that poetry is in the religious sense beside the point, the self-revelation that Auden seeks is also a self-justification, a place for his art inside religious values and priorities. Almost all of Auden's work about or based on Shakespeare belongs to the 1940s and 1950s, the period after his conversion when he was still working out its implications.

Clown-names seem to have had a way of attaching themselves to individual English actors travelling on the Continent so that the companies to which they belonged between 1590 and 1620 apparently succeeded in popularizing certain clownish figures. Three of these, John Posset, Stockfish and Pickleherring, have come to be generally acknowledged as representative clownish types in the standard accounts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. Yet, having gone through the evidence on which this general consensus is based, I have come to the conclusion that, for the time being, there is only one clown-name for whose existence there is ample evidence, both in archival material and in printed texts, and that is the figure of John Bouset or Posset, a name that became associated with Thomas Sackville, an English actor at the court of Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick (1564–1613) in Wolfenbüttel. As to the fishnames for the clown, those of (Hans) Stockfish and Pickleherring have been all too carelessly attached to the actors John Spencer and Robert Reynolds, although there is very little that can be advanced in support of the identifications. It is the purpose of this paper to show that there is little justification for looking upon Reynolds as one of the chief actors to introduce the humorous character of Pickleherring on to the German stage; and that, on the contrary, archival evidence points to another English Pickleherring-player whose career has only quite recently begun to emerge from the records.

‘I am not in the least traditional,’ said Theodore Komisarjevsky, in his motto-statement to the press shortly before the opening of his first Stratford production. This was no other than the truth, and Komisarjevsky went on to illustrate it in six remarkable productions at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, from 1932 to 1939. They amused, astonished, and outraged. They gave the Theatre what international distinction it possessed during an otherwise lean period. They anticipated much of what has come to be regarded as normal, on today’s stage. Even so, Komisarjevsky’s seven seasons at Stratford have until recently been thought of as the work of a brilliant prankster, a professional enfant terrible. It is time to review as a whole Komisarjevsky’s work at Stratford.

To begin with, the Stratford seasons contain almost all of Komisarjevsky's Shakespearian work on the English-speaking stage. His King Lear at Oxford in 1927 (with Randle Ayrton as Lear) was a pilot for the Stratford Lear of 1936. The notorious Antony and Cleopatra (New Theatre, 1936) was his only Shakespearian production of the 1930s in London. There is a late appendix, which I shall deal with in its place. Otherwise, there is nothing of substance; and Komisarjevsky was generally known as a director of modern plays, above all as a master of Chekhov. It is in that capacity that Gielgud praises him highly in his memoirs. When Komisarjevsky came to direct The Merchant of Venice at Stratford in 1932, he was a month short of his fiftieth birthday: his reputation was already made, almost entirely outside Shakespeare.

Although at some times popular, Shakespeare has at others been a rare guest on the Swedish stage. The Second World War stands out as a particularly lean period. During these years only nine of his plays were mounted at major theatres, three of them – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, significantly, Macbeth and Henry V – not being put on until 1944/5. When Macbeth opened at a provincial theatre in November 1944, a Stockholm critic thought it astonishing that this most topical of Shakespeare’s plays had not been performed at other theatres. He was not aware, apparently, that the director, Ingmar Bergman, had produced Macbeth at a student theatre in Stockholm at the beginning of the war.

All through his career, Bergman has constantly returned to certain classical authors such as Ibsen, Moliere and Strindberg, and to some of their works in particular. However, it is equally striking that he has produced very little Shakespeare. An amateur production in 1941 of A Midsummer Night's Dream and productions in 1975 and 1979 of Twelfth Night are the only works he has directed apart from Macbeth.

The never-waning interest in Hamlet has, since the beginning of the twentieth century, spilled over to fields of intellectual endeavour beyond that of literary criticism, causing Hamlet to be interpreted more variously than before – in the light of Freudian psychology or of existentialist philosophy, for instance – with the result that ‘Hamletology’ has practically become a multidiscipline research challenge. Likewise, throughout the lay world reader and audience response continues to be enthusiastic, a credit to Ben Jonson’s prophetic tribute that Shakespeare ‘was not of an age, but for all time’. It is true that Hamlet’s forte does not lie in an unswerving resolve or in a single-minded and vigorous execution of it, so much so that Hamlet, in Bradley’s opinion, is not entitled to the giant stature that Shakespeare’s later tragic heroes such as Othello have customarily been accorded. However, it is precisely here, if anywhere, that resides the durable Hamlet motif – neither ‘all virtue’ nor ‘all vice’ simplistically, being at once ‘the Nemean lion’ and a ‘muddy-mettled’ and ‘pigeon-livered’ ‘John-a-dreams’ – a motif, in short, of the three-dimensional man of flesh and blood rather than of a dramatis persona.

We do not know who wrote Arden of Faversham, but we know that it belongs to the late 1580s or early 1590s, a period when new and often ambitious talents were appearing and when dramatic genres were being self-consciously shaped and reshaped. It was a time when playwrights were staking out their territory, as Marlowe does in his Prologue to Tamburlaine the Great, a play roughly contemporary with Arden:

The play is going to be exotic, heroic, exalted in language, tragic in dignity. The author of Arden of Faversham gives us a similar statement, staking out a very different territory:

These have been two years of transition for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and awkward ones at that. Three circumstances combined to make things difficult. The company's London home moved, in June 1982, from the Aldwych and The Warehouse to the Barbican Theatre and The Pit. Several young directors were learning to use the main stage at Stratford. And all the work lay under the long shadow of a hit production which had nothing to do with Shakespeare. After the extraordinary success of Nicholas Nickleby, Ken Campbell renamed its creators the Royal Dickens Company. At times it looked as if the joke had been taken to heart.

The ensemble manner, the musical punctuation and, on occasion, the Victorian decor of Nicholas Nickleby all reappeared. Henry IV was played on a larger version of its set and, appropriately enough, echoed its crowd effects to evoke the low life of medieval London. King Lear borrowed its striking Fool and many of its spectacular tricks from the nineteenth-century popular theatre. Even Macbeth, otherwise studiously ahistorical in setting, brought on a Victorian doctor for the sleep-walking scene.

The three categories specified in the title of this review are difficult to distinguish and still more difficult to delimit: how does one trace the circumference of a circle in the water? As I write, for instance, the Times Literary Supplement is the scene of a mild scholarly debate, caused by Eric Sams’s contention that Shakespeare might have written Edmund Ironside during the so-called ‘missing years’ before the first mention of him in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. Whether this news item belongs to Shakespeare’s Life or only to his Times depends on how one feels about the argument. Like many others, I rushed out and read the play at once: it doesn’t sound much like Shakespeare, but then the argument is that early Shakespeare wouldn’t have sounded like Shakespeare anyway. Less subjective rebuttals (based on the Common Source argument) have since appeared; Sams has replied to these; and I suspect that the excitement will have died down by the time this is read.

With the passage of time, Tom Stoppard’s first Hamlet begins to look like his Romeo and Juliet: an experiment undertaken during a period of energetic theatrical activity in England, and a spirited union of materials from various dramatic and non-dramatic sources. As soon as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead appeared in performance, reviewers and academic commentators recognized its derivation not only from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but also from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. They have noticed other influences as well: Pirandello, T. S. Eliot, Wilde, Kafka, and Pinter have left theatrical or literary traces, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late Investigations provide philosophical bearings. For the most part, critics describe the composition of Stoppard’s play as if it had been neatly prescribed by a recipe: plot and characters from Shakespeare folded into a Beckettian ambiance, or vice versa; a dash of concept, echo or tone from the other dramatic or literary sources; and Wittgenstein’s philosophy cracked, its language-games separated and used to bind the other ingredients. Yet the texture of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead hardly resembles that of a pudding, or any other confection assembled in a predictable way. Let that be the character note of Stoppard’s dramaturgy.

That tart response from Sean O’Casey to Yeats will be familiar to many. O’Casey is not of course a ‘living’ dramatist, but I am certain that no one here expects a coroner’s interpretation of that expression. O'Casey could have picked no worthier defender of his arguments; the universal puzzle of Shakespeare's evocative power often leads to speculations – in various degrees of whimsy - about his real identity. That is only another way of questing after the unrecorded things he actually did in real life - especially in the area of travel. If Shakespeare was never at Actium or Philippi contemporaneously with the events which he dramatized on these sites, he must have stood on their ruins or visited their living replicas in his wanderings - preferably press-ganged into one of those notorious merchant ships while he was hanging around the theatres, waiting to audition for a small role. Is it any wonder that the Middle Eastern poets and dramatists claim that he must, at the very least, have been a sometime visitor to North Africa and the Arabian peninsula? How else, for instance, could he have encountered the legend of Majnun Layla which he transformed - albeit without acknowledgement - into Romeo and Juliet? And so Ali Ahmad Ba-Kathir (who died in 1969), an Indonesian-born poet who became a naturalized Egyptian, restored to his adopted race what belonged to Arab literature in the first place - he translated Romeo and Juliet into Arabic free verse.

The twentieth-century interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays faces significant problems. Perhaps most basic is the simple fact that the dialogue and stage directions are not directed at us. Thus, as R.B. McKerrow noted shrewdly over fifty years ago, Shakespeare’s original manuscript of Hamlet or King Lear ‘would not have been written with any thought of the press. It was not intended for the study, or for the minutediscussion of students three hundred years away in the future. It was not a literary document at all.’ Rather, as McKerrow argues, that original manuscript ‘was merely the substance, or rather the bare bones, of a performance on the stage, intended to be interpreted by actors skilled in their craft, who would have no difficulty in reading it as it was meant to be read’. Those manuscripts, then, were not literary texts but theatrical scripts, written to be interpreted and performed by Elizabethan theatrical professionals who shared with both author and spectator a common language that included not only the words themselves but also stage conventions, emblematic costumes and properties, and an overall logic of presentation that today we may no longer recognize or appreciate.