This article covers the Shakespeare productions which had opened at Stratford-upon-Avon and at Stratford, Ontario by August 1980, four each, and the National Theatre's production of Othello.

The Stratford-upon-Avon season began with Terry Hands's production of As You Like It. An obvious companion-piece to his 1979 Twelfth Night, it was primarily about love, and only very secondarily about anything else: the centre of the play was marvellous, the frame questionable. As with Twelfth Night, a wintry, black-and-white first half gave place to a variegated, dappled world of warm browns and greens in the second. The white fur surfaces of Farrah's set, suggesting luxury at court and snow in the country, were replaced by moss-covered trees and (again as in Twelfth Night) a profusion of daffodils and other spring flowers. Everyone at court wore uniform black and silver, even Rosalind and Celia, whose severe black velvet dresses were edged with more white fur.

Dryden thought Mercutio was Shakespeare’s rather ill-bred idea of a Gentleman. Coleridge thought he was a man possessing ‘all the elements of a Poet’. Between them they may be taken to establish the two poles of preference, the one for the realistic, the other for the poetic, between which criticism has since oscillated. Many critics have settled the dilemma by sacrificing the play, for example Duthie, who agreed with Charlton that ‘as a pattern of the idea of tragedy [the play] is a failure’. Such critics excuse it as prentice work and concentrate on deciding whether it is trying to be mainly a medieval tragedy of the stars and Fortune, or a social tragedy, or a tragedy of character. The most sophisticated attempt to reconcile the poetry to the realism in defence of the play’s unity is by Nicholas Brooke, who argues: ‘The play depends, then, very much on formal patterning, like a sonnet; but explored, criticized, and penetrated, so that the formal surface not only restrains but also reveals the inner experience.’ I say ‘sophisticated’, for the argument, brilliant and illuminating though it is, verges on the sophistical in the way it recruits the play’s poetry against itself and so, in the last resort, into the service of a kind of realism.

Let the claret which Shakespeare drank, as we know, on expense account symbolize the general experience of Twelfth Night. The taste of this play has the same tension between sweetness and dryness, which translates easily into the indulgent reveries of the opening and the realities of rain, ageing, and work, in Feste’s final song. To analyse this tension is surely the business of criticism. The experience of Twelfth Night blends our sense of the title metaphor with the growing magnitude of the joke that goes too far, and with it our grasp of the relation between the gulling and romantic actions. It is a matter of changing expectations, of a modified sense of the initial données of the play. Twelfth Night is played out, as it were, on a metaphysical revolving stage, which slowly rotates through half a revolution: the profiles that were presented to us at the beginning are not those of the end. The heads remain the same, the presented view is much altered. In the end the audience is asked to revise its judgement, not simply of people, but of a convention, ‘festive’ comedy itself. And that is bound to be disturbing.

Two masters of the stage, writing mostly for the same actors and the same audience, achieving their full artistic powers in the same decade in the greatest age of English drama, would seem to invite, even to demand, simultaneous consideration. But received opinion holds that Shakespeare and Jonson resist comparison, that the search for resemblance is a waste of time. The disposition of authors in the normal university English curriculum reflects the conventional point of view: Shakespeare is given one course, ‘contemporaries of Shakespeare’ another. Modern reluctance to consider their work together is probably a function of the clumsy, tendentious way such comparisons have been conducted in the past. Dryden innocently established the terms of discourse when he confessed that he admired Jonson but loved Shakespeare, and since then, particularly in the first half of this century, Jonson has frequently been called in merely as evidence of the superior artistry and especially the deeper humanity of Shakespeare. The manifest impropriety of this practice seems to have generated a powerful backlash against outright comparison: most critics hesitate to put the two playwrights side by side, and some proclaim openly the perils of doing so.

‘The purpose of playing,’ says Hamlet, is ‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’ Hamlet himself employs ‘playing’, in various guises, as a means of penetrating false appearances to uncover hidden truths, but he also discovers how slippery illusions can be when their effects become entangled in the human world. Like Hamlet, but in a comic vein, Twelfth Night poses questions about ‘the purpose of playing’ and about whether illusion is perhaps too deeply embedded in human experience to be ever completely separated from reality.

Virtually every character in Twelfth Night is either an agent or a victim of illusion, and often a player will assume both these roles: as Viola is an impostor but also a prisoner of her own disguise, or as Sir Toby loses control of the deception he has contrived when he mistakes Sebastian for his twin. Illyria is a world populated by pretenders, which has led one critic to describe the action as 'a dance of maskers . . . for the assumption of the play is that no one is without a mask in the serio-comic business of the pursuit of happiness'. In the course of the story, many of these masks are stripped away or willingly set aside; but illusion itself plays a pivotal yet somewhat ambiguous role in this process.

For Grigori Kozintsev, writing the journal about his film, Karol Lir, that turned out so splendidly, Lear surprises us with everything he says and does: ‘From the very first moment his every action is unexpected: it is impossible to guess what he will do next, what tricks he is capable of . . .’ For Stephen Booth in his provocative essay, each sequence in Hamlet should surprise us: ‘From its very first lines, Hamlet frustrates and fulfills expectations simultaneously. . . . The audience’s sensation of being unexpectedly and very slightly out of step is repeated regularly.’

Yet these statements can be reversed, in effect, and the alternative perspectives seem to me valid as well, even though it is difficult to find careful, probing discussion of the ways in which what we expect shapes how we interpret. Unless we anticipate, however wrongly, there can be very little surprise, no frustration, no fulfilment. Most of us 'know' or all-but-know from the first scene of The Merchant of Venice that none of Antonio's ships will return quickly and safely. Later we feel sure that Shylock will not manage to gain his pound of Antonio's flesh. Probably none of us expects Benedick to carry out Beatrice's command: 'Kill Claudio.' And when we read Measure for Measure, do we for long expect Angelo to succeed in killing the other Claudio?

‘Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death’, says Mercutio mortally wounded before being led off stage; and Hamlet, at the climactic point of the graveyard scene, faces Laertes in Ophelia’s grave with ‘Swounds, show me what thou’t do’. Modern producers are uncertain whether to keep the old-fashioned strong oaths (Christ’s wounds), or to accept the weak replacements suggested by the Folio versions, ‘What’ and ‘Come’ respectively, though there is no need today to take those precautions that the King’s Men took in their time. If the 1606 Act imposing a ten-pound fine on the actors each time a swear word or even mildly blasphemous expression was used on the stage were still in operation now, the contemporary London stage would be one of the major contributors to the British economy, and comfortable prospects would open up for professional informers, who were rewarded with half of the fines collected. I am not advocating a re-enactment of that law; on the contrary, I deplore that it was enforced, because it has deprived us of what I consider an important element in assessing one of Shakespeare’s most relevant rhetorical devices: the gradation in the use of oaths and interjections. Apart from Fluellen’s “Sblood’ in Henry V, 4.8.9 (but that’s Welsh, anyway), only the bastard Faulconbridge’s ‘Zounds’ in King John, 2.1.466, escaped Heminges and Condell’s overcareful expurgation of the texts – overcareful because the act applied only to performances and not to the printed page: but being actors themselves, it is likely that they had suffered personally from it.

BOOKS AND COUNTERBOOKS

‘A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete’, wrote Borges, describing the books of ‘Tlön’ which invariably include ‘the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine’. This also seems a strikingly accurate account of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Possibly because his strongest case in favour of something is, characteristically, countered by the best possible arguments against it – and vice versa – Shakespeare often seems to confront us with the very books and counterbooks of life itself. This, of course, has provided critics with countless subjects for fruitful speculation. But it poses grave difficulties for those who attempt to interpret his works in terms of a single doctrine or one-sided theory. And there is always the danger of mistaking a counter-argument for the main one. Several recently published books, as well as certain articles which will be considered later on, may serve to illustrate these points.

For some time now we have watched the ironic critics working their way through Shakespeare’s canon, demonstrating that his major characters must not be ‘taken at face value’, which invariably means that they must be taken at a good deal less than face value. One by one, thanks to their ‘new readings’, the heroes and heroines who seemed to be presented sympathetically have been exposed as ridiculous or reprehensible figures meant to evoke our antipathy. There was no reason to expect that Lucrece would escape this fate, and we now have several studies of the poem named for her which assert that she is not supposed to be viewed as an admirable model of chastity and fidelity, or even as a pathetic victim, but as one of the guilty parties. Although the authors of these studies differ in their indictment of her (one calls her crime ‘a little beyond forgiveness’, another finds it is ‘reciprocal’ with Tarquin’s), and in their manner of proving it, they usually claim to base their case, or at least a substantial part of it, upon historical grounds – upon a contemporary ‘perspective’ or ‘world view’, as they call it, which would have predisposed Shakespeare and his readers to condemn Lucrece. As evidence for this ‘perspective’ they cite a number of authoritative texts that stated or embodied it, including Petrarch, Landino, Fabrini, Tyndale, several books of the Bible, and above all St Augustine, whose attack on Lucrece (City of God, I, xix) they regard as decisive.

More than twenty-five years ago, R. A. Foakes spoke out persuasively for a new approach to Shakespeare’s imagery that would go beyond the lines laid down by Caroline Spurgeon. Specifically, he appealed for attention to dramatic as well as poetic imagery, including props and stage effects; and for analysis and classification of images on bases other than subject-matter. By and large, critics have heeded the first call more than the second. Recent times have witnessed a new concentration on the direct imagery of stage production, and a corollary withdrawal from verbal imagery – for fear of committing the new cardinal sin, reading the play as a poem. Other critics remain faithful to ‘the poetry’, assuming that Hamlet can be apprehended in the same way as, say, Paradise Lost. Yet drama is a temporal art, much more so than poetry, and its essence is action. Perhaps one reason that image-critics of the traditional sort and theatre-oriented critics have little to say to each other is that the former are, for the most part, still attending only to image patterns created by static subject-matter, recurring objects like jewels or qualities like darkness. But verbs have their effect in Shakespeare’s language as well as nouns and adjectives. Images create other patterns through repeated motion, and it is this dynamic aspect of imagery that connects most naturally with stage movements and groupings.

Trends in Recent Criticism

There is nothing like enough space here to do justice to the best – or the worst – critical studies of Shakespeare available for review this year. The first part of this survey concentrates on publications which seem to indicate the way that things are going nowadays, while discussions of specific genres, texts, and topics will be cited later on.

Of obvious importance is a collection of some of the best papers presented to the first Congress of the International Shakespeare Association.l Their titles will indicate the range of essays by (among others) Alistair Cooke ('Shakespeare in America'); Joel Hurstfield (' The Search for the Good Society in Shakespeare's Day and Our Own'); Helen Gardner ('Tragic Mysteries'); Alvin Kernan ('Shakespeare and the Abstraction of History');

In this essay, I wish to suggest that, in writing two of his plays, Shakespeare was more than usually aware of the sometimes complementary, sometimes opposing functions of the mind and the body in human life; and that this awareness may be discerned in the layout of the narrative – the overall design – in the characterisation, and in the language: not simply the diction, but also the choice of sentiments to be uttered. I do not suggest that a reliance on these concepts accounts for every aspect of the plays’ structure, nor that Shakespeare may not have had other guiding principles, too. But I hope that an analysis of the plays with these ideas in mind may tell us something about how they are made; I hope, too, that the juxtaposition of two essentially very different plays may also be fruitful.

The relationship between mind, or soul, and body was a common topic in Renaissance writings about religion, philosophy, morality, and physiology. There is, to give just one example, an essay about it in Plutarch's Moralia which, interestingly enough, first appeared in English translation (by Philemon Holland) in 1603, shortly before the composition of King Lear, though I can find no evidence of direct relationship. Shakespeare has many glancing references to the theme, and some longer treatments of it. The plays with which I am concerned are not the only ones to which, I believe, it can provide a useful critical approach.

Throughout the period under review there has been a wide measure of agreement that King Lear is the greatest of all the plays, and, perhaps as a consequence, an equally wide measure of disagreement about what it says. In the course of the many scrutinies it has been subjected to, almost every significant word in it has been examined with minute care, as though the drama were an extended metaphysical poem; yet, paradoxically enough, there is no general consensus among editors as to what Shakespeare actually wrote; and editions differ greatly from one another in the texts they offer. G. K. Hunter, for example, in his New Penguin edition first published in 1972, lists well over a hundred readings in which his text does not concur with those of Peter Alexander (1951), Kenneth Muir (1952), and Dover Wilson and G. I. Duthie (1960). The prime cause of the variations is, of course, that there are two substantive texts not one: the Quarto of 1608, containing some 300 lines not found in the Folio, and the Folio itself, containing 100 lines not found in the Quarto. The editor must, therefore, or has hitherto felt that he must, make use of both while knowing full well, to complicate his task still further, that neither of them was set up from a manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand. Nevertheless, one great advance has been made. In a classic study, published in 1940, W. W. Greg established conclusively that the Quarto of 1608, in a copy which, like all extant copies, was made up of both corrected and uncorrected sheets, was used for setting the Folio text.

It is a truism that in King Lear Shakespeare takes us into a world which is upside-down. We enter a great and terrible feast of misrule where the king gives away his kingdom and becomes a subject, where parents become wards of their children, asses are borne on men’s backs over the dirt, and one goes to supper in the morning and to bed at noon. This is ‘the upheaval of all nature, the reversal of all histories’. Approaching such a paradoxical and apparently sprawling piece of art, commentators generally have sought some kind of orientation through imposing a shape or schema on the play. The most recent emblem for King Lear is the prism –‘the multiply-shaped thing’, as it is called in Rosalie Colie’s and Leo Flahiff’s book Some Facets of ‘ King Lear ’: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. As a figure for the play the prism image certainly is superior to the very old-fashioned way of charting a drama as rising action, peak, falling action – the hunt-the-climax pattern which dates back to the 1860s and the German scholar Gustav Freytag. Where, after all, is the ‘climax’ of King Lear? If we should begin to chart it as a ‘rising action’ we might simply find ourselves following it helplessly up and up and up . . .: this play after all qualifies as scene individable and poem unlimited.

In a recent interview on trends in Shakespeare studies (among many other things) Kenneth Muir, who ought to know, answered Gareth Lloyd Evans’s question ‘Is the file on Shakespeare’s sources closed now?’ with an emphatic negative. Professor Muir appears to have changed his mind since he wrote fifteen years ago in ‘The Future of Source-Hunting’ that with the completion of Geoffrey Bullough’s work there was little more to be discovered of plot sources, but that our knowledge of Shakespeare’s reading is still fragmentary. Little shards and slivers are hopefully breathed, shined and blown up in Notes and Queries and elsewhere, but John Erskine Hankins’s new book is a veritable museum of exhibits, systematically catalogued and, for the most part, elegantly presented. Professor Hankins, who in Shakespeare’s Derived Imagery provided a serviceable set of criteria for evaluating the validity of hypothetical sources, concentrates mainly on Shakespeare’s use of science and philosophy. The strategy is to survey general intellectual sources and then focus on Shakespearian examples. Sometimes the survey, while interesting in itself, does not illuminate Shakespeare very much and in general it is fair to say that the author is more concerned to note the occurrence of a particular idea or image in Shakespeare than to examine his use of it; that is, he has virtually no interest in context or criticism.

Sir Edmund K. Chambers and Walter Wilson Greg devoted their best efforts to disentangling the complicated threads of the theatrical history of the early nineties in Elizabethan England and very few voices have been raised in dissent from the interpretations they proposed. It is nevertheless hoped that new light can be shed on a period of disorganisation in the theatre world around 1590 by examining the careers of certain English actors who seem to have spent the best part of their lives wandering about the continent. As everyone knows, numerous acting companies had sprung into existence at this time and to list and discuss them all is certainly not my aim. As to the actors, those who are of central importance in the following pages are Robert Browne and Thomas Sackville, who are mentioned together with John Bradstreet and Richard Jones in a passport granting permission for a continental journey, issued on 10 February 1592, by the Lord High Admiral. Since this passport is used in many scholarly works in the incomplete and inaccurate version printed in Albert Cohn’s Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1865), pp. xxviii-xxix (no fewer than ten words are missing), we had better begin by giving a fresh transcript of the original.

It is not surprising that in the constant talk of Shakespeare’s ‘tragic vision’ and ‘comic vision’ the fact that ‘vision’, properly speaking, denotes not what is seen, but the process of seeing, should frequently have been over-looked: but it is much to be regretted that it has. If we are persuaded that King Lear is the bleakest of the tragedies, it is tempting for us to accept it as a testament of bleakness, taking ‘tragedy’ to be the denotation not simply of the artistic medium employed by Shakespeare in this play, but also of the quality of life he is describing. To do so is, of course, to confuse what is seen with the manner in which it is revealed, the object with the medium or filter through which it is viewed. It is more than forty years since Sisson attacked some of the cruder precipitations of this confusion, insisting that for criticism, ‘it is in the main a question of the artistic problems which Shakespeare set himself, not of the problems which life set Shakespeare’ (p. 24). That was well said, but unfortunately Sisson’s admiration of the tragedies led him to a conclusion in which there is a good deal more faith and speculation than objective assessment. The fact that tragedy has nearly always made the greatest theatrical impact tends to blind us to the fact that Shakespeare himself did not consistently regard it as the best medium for what he wanted to say, and that eventually he seems to have found tragic form too constricting, and perhaps even reductive.

Act III. [A heath.] The storm and king rage: the moment of greatest dramatic tension in King Lear comes precisely at the center of the play and remains the work’s fulcrum, yet where did Shakespeare get the idea for it? We have dozens of possible sources for Lear, yet none seems to yield sufficient clue. Lightning flashes twice in Shakespeare’s most certain source, The True Chronicle Historie of King Leir and His Three Daughters (?1594; 1605), where it frightens the messenger who is sent by Ragan to murder Leir and Perillus in the thicket, but the lightning is seen there by the three men as a sign of heavenly judgement, as flashes of cosmic omen, not as a raging storm within the broader kingdom or the little mind of man. Another likely source for Shakespeare, Book II, chapter 10 of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590), provided the playwright with a foul storm which allows Sidney to tell the story of the Paphlagonian king overheard by Pyrocles and Musidorus and now accepted as the basis for the subplot of Gloucester, Edmund, and Edgar. Sidney’s single Ciceronian sentence elongates the effectiveness of his description.