Of all the documents on which our knowledge of the Elizabethan stage is founded, none is more tantalizing than the Fortune contract. It is unique in giving precise dimensions for a public theatre, but it is in just these specifications that it is most likely to differ from its models, the other theatres of the age and especially the first Globe. Four times it mentions ‘the late erected Plaiehowse On the Banck in the saide pishe of Ste Saviors Called the Globe’, and on three of these occasions it is to avoid having to go into unnecessary detail when the model is so readily available and its building of such recent memory. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the contract goes into most detail when the proposals for the Fortune differ most from the example of the Globe, and in nothing is this truer than in the very dimensions which give the document its dangerous fascination. Some scholars, anxious to seize on any evidence that will lead towards an understanding of Shakespeare’s playhouse, have too hastily assumed that the stage at the Globe was 43 feet (13.11 m) across, simply because that is the figure given for the Fortune. Yet on this point the language of the contract is ambiguous, to say the least.

With his victory at Actium still hanging in the balance, Shakespeare's Octavius speaks prophetically of a new era of peace:

That the 'universal peace' Octavius envisions nearly coincides with that proclaimed thirty years later at Christ's nativity (Luke, ii, 14) is, of course, beyond the capacity of Octavius to see; but a tradition of Christian historiography extending from the early Church Fathers through the Renaissance regards the proximity of these two events with a different awareness. Christian historians viewing the advent of the Pax Romana retrospectively could see in it an adumbration of the Pax Christiana, and they could see in the closeness with which one event followed the other the unfolding of a providential plan. Thus Eusebius, for instance, speaks of the twin triumphs of monarchy and monotheism as emanations from a common source:

The two outstanding Shakespeare productions of 1979 were the RSC Pericles at the Other Place in Stratford and the National Theatre’s As You Like It: both broke new ground. But the main Stratford season was exceptionally uneven, and no neat summary is possible for so very disparate a group of plays and productions as those covered by this article, including the 1978 Antony and Cleopatra which opened too late for review last year.

Even in what he called a 'year of consolidation', Trevor Nunn's ostensibly 'new' Merry Wives of Windsor amounted to little more than a refining and paring down of the previous RSC production by Terry Hands. Production ideas were carried over: children played conkers between scenes; there was a strong contrast between the rural accents of the Windsor citizens and the aristocrats Fenton and Falstaff; the finale in Windsor Forest was a Hallowe'en revel.

While some scholars hold that the production of articles on the habits of the compositors of Shakespeare’s plays is of questionable value, other scholars continue to produce such articles; the past year seems to have been generously supplied with provocative studies of the busy typesetters of Folio and Quartos. Jaggard’s Compositor B of the First Folio has received the closest scrutiny.

In articles on the texts of All's Well that Ends Well and of Julius Caesar, Fredson Bowers addresses the fidelity of B in the formal detail of copying speech prefixes. Though this quality of B’s work is not the primary concern of these studies, it is of interest that Bowers depends on that fidelity for the conclusions of both of them: ‘Compositor B. . . , would not be likely to go against copy [for a prefix] except perhaps in mechanical matters of abbreviation... [or] in the establishment of a favorite short form of the same prefix’ (p. 68).

The battle in act V between Cordelia’s army and the combined armies of Albany and Edmund must rank among the most important events in King Lear. Structurally, we have been led to expect such civil war from the very first scene of the play, when Lear divided his kingdom, and that expectation has been stoked by repeated allusions in the first two acts to ‘likely wars toward, twixt the Dukes’, and thereafter by news of and responses to the French invasion. Thematically that invasion is the dominant reaction to the main action of the play’s first half, the rebellion of the children, the deposing of the parents; it represents what we are inclined and encouraged to regard as the inevitable recoil of the moral universe against the violation of its laws by Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Cornwall. Given the remarkable division of the characters into good and evil camps, the battle between them inevitably takes on apocalyptic overtones, and the play appears to be organizing itself around a familiar mythical pattern: the abdication of temporal order, followed by chaos and the reign of Antichrist, culminating in armageddon and the foundation of a new order, temporal and spiritual. Causally, it is the defeat of Cordelia which leads to her own death (and subsequently Lear’s), while at the same time, by removing the pressure of a common enemy, it allows the suppressed divisions between the victors to come explosively to the surface.

JWRM. It's eighteen months since I first heard that you were rejoining the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Benedick and King Lear. I particularly wanted to see your Lear because I've always admired the things that you've done, and the play is a favourite of mine. Now that I've finally seen it during the Aldwych run, I find that the production poses a number of questions for me as an academic. But before we get down to specifics, perhaps you'd tell me how you go about preparing a Shakespeare role, one that you haven't previously done.

DS. Well, you mustn't take this personally, Bob, but I never read any authorities; and the first thing I do is go through my text and cross out all stage directions.

JWRM. What text do you use?

DS. For Lear we used — not because of its value as a text-we used the New Penguin Shakespeare, merely because of its size.

JWRM. I think it's a very good text.

The first passage quoted, where Hamlet declares that 'there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow', is of key importance in the longstanding critical debate about Hamlet and Christianity. The way we relate it to the attitudes represented in the quotations from Calvin and Seneca bears crucially upon our choice between three rival interpretations of the play.

‘By the end of King Lear, we should see that Cordelia possesses everything that is genuinely worth having.’ This might be a quotation from Shakespearean Tragedy, but it comes from a recent book by John Reibetanz. The approach is new, but the conclusions are familiar: ‘through his sufferings Lear has won an enlightened soul’; ‘we protest so strongly against Cordelia’s death because we are not of her world’; ‘Material goods are fetters and the body a husk to be discarded so that the fruit can be reached.’ Reibetanz acknowledges the obvious debt to Bradley, but he is no ordinary disciple. He admits his master’s weaknesses, and emphasises them by considering precisely those areas Bradley ignored: the nature of the public and private theatres; Shakespeare’s use and adaptation of contemporary stage tradition and the expectations of an audience moulded by regular playgoing. In the light of this, it is ironic that he reaches similar conclusions to the man who argued the play was ‘too huge for the stage’. Much less ironic is the fact that while I find most of Reibetanz’s commentary thoroughly convincing, it leads me to an exactly opposite conclusion.

Theme in The Winter’s Tale is both one and many-sided. It can be stated symbolically as the victory of spring over winter. But inherent in this, as in a seed, are flowerings of implication and amplification. Emotionally, joy comes to supersede sorrow, though to do so it must first wade in tears. Morally, a virtuous innocence succeeds over vice and tyranny. Metaphysically, order surmounts disorder, and harmony replaces discord. Theologically, grace is victorious over sin, and faith over doubt and suspicion. In religious terms, the hopes of a palace and a garden, the court and the country, find their fulfilment in a chapel, where art achieves a breathtaking holiness and nature an immortal art. Socially, a broken marriage is mended and regenerated in a more glorious form, with two new marriages added for a triple epiphany. The disbranched have been regrafted into an enlarged family tree. Alienations between parents and children and servants end in a household communion that spans the generations.

The most significant contribution to the year’s work has been the publication of the New Variorum As You Like It by the Modern Language Association of America. The New Variorum series, initiated by Horace Howard Furness in 1871, continued by his son, transferred to the Modern Language Association, has been near moribund since the publication in 1955 of Richard II, edited by the late Matthew Black. But hope has not died, and under the patient perseverance of James G. McManaway, now General Editor Emeritus, and the able direction of Robert K. Turner, Jr, General Editor, the giant has risen to new energies. Commenting on the vigor of this ‘New New Variorum’ Richard Knowles, the Associate Editor of the series, and the editor of the As You Like It, has announced in a paper delivered before the Variorum Committee that Measure for Measure was sent to the printer in December 1977, that seven editions are nearly complete, and that fourteen others are in active preparation. Some of these editions, like the present volume, are intended to supersede earlier volumes (the Furness edition of As You Like It appeared in 1890); others will present plays not previously included and thus complete the original design.

George Bernard Shaw, writing to The Daily News in 1905 to make clear his position on Shakespeare, claimed that the playwright had attempted ‘to make the public accept real studies of life and character in – for instance – Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well’ but had failed to overcome the public’s philistine preference for ‘a fantastic sugar doll, like Rosalind’. The eighth point of his polemic was ‘That people who spoil paper and waste ink by describing Rosalind as a perfect type of womanhood are the descendants of the same blockheads whom Shakespeare, with the coat of arms and the lands in Warwickshire in view, had to please when he wrote plays as they liked them.’

Shaw was attacking not a handful of eccentrics, but the main body of Victorian critical opinion in the theatre and out of it. It is the intention of this article to describe the principal features of this orthodoxy, and to examine some of its theatrical manifestations.

It is widely known amongst scholars of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre that the contemporary English ‘Continental’ companies were extremely active and popular in the Protestant and Catholic countries of Western and Central Europe for many decades. However, the news that at the beginning of the seventeenth century a permanent public theatre was built in the city of Gdansk on the Baltic coast, and that this theatre was modelled on London’s Fortune, will be received with a large dose of understandable scepticism. The Fortune, of course, has been one of the ‘favourite’ theatres of reconstructors, but in spite of the fact that it is actually the only London theatre about which a vast amount of valid written evidence is preserved, with the builder’s contract being most important, its numerous modern reconstructions have mostly been of a highly conjectural nature. This discrepancy arises from the lack of pictorial evidence for the reconstructors; the only substitute being to take some details from other sources, like De Witt’s drawing of the Swan or Hollar’s ‘Long View of London’, and fuse them together with the features of the Fortune as described in the contract. This situation gave rise to a series of eclectic designs composed of elements taken from various sources.

Orsino’s attitude to love, particularly in the play’s opening speech, has often provoked charges of self-indulgence and self-deception, and one critic is even driven to declare him ‘a narcissistic fool’. However, the association with Narcissus can be more precisely defined, since Orsino’s luxuriant musing on the appetite that craves to die in its own too much, the music that cloys the sense so that it seems no longer sweet and the capacious spirit of love in which anything of value ‘falls into abatement and low price’ (I, i, 13) plays upon the motif ‘inopem me copia fecit’, the complaint of Ovid’s Narcissus translated by Golding as ‘my plentie makes me poore’ (l. 587). In its original context, ‘inopem me copia fecit’ expresses the paradoxical realisation of Narcissus that he himself is the unattainable object of his insatiable desire, but the Elizabethan poets appropriated the tag as a paradigm of unrequited love.

Leslie Hotson’s latest book is in its way biography. It is not based directly on some new discovery in the archives but upon an elaborate study of a portrait miniature, dated 1588, that has long been known to exist in two versions by Nicholas Hilliard. Hotson contends that the sitter (who was accepted before 1700 as the Earl of Essex) is in reality William Shakespeare. With the arcane knowledge and something of the ingenuity of a Sir Thomas Browne, Hotson amasses the evidence of iconography to sustain his argument that the mysterious linked hands in the portrait signify at once the sitter’s association with Lord Strange’s Men, who may conceivably have worn some such badge, and with some mortal friend to whom the sitter is as a Mercury to an Apollo. Building upon the foundations of his own Mr. W. H. and other books, Hotson identifies the Apollo-like friend as the Young Man amongst Roses (depicted in the miniature that is Hilliard’s acknowledged masterpiece), as the Fair Friend of the Sonnets, as Mr W. H., and as William Hatcliffe, Prince of Purpoole in the Gray’s Inn revels. There are links between Shakespeare and Mercury in the minds of contemporaries who admired him.

The last of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies contains a good many quibbles and enigmatic passages that up to now have defied explanation. The midnight scene in which Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Feste indulge in revelling and carousing, for instance, presents a number of unsolved textual problems. Sir Toby proposes to his boon companions to rouse Malvolio in a catch. They accept and together they intone ‘Hold thy peace’. The rioting alarms Maria who hastens to warn the unruly company to put an end to their disorder (ii, iii, 74-8o):

In dealing with the female page disguise in Renaissance drama, one is invariably struck by the complexity of the double sex reversal implied by the presence of the boy actor. Lamb’s remarks are typical: ‘What an odd double confusion it must have made, to see a boy play a woman playing a man: one cannot disentangle the perplexity without some violence to the imagination.’ Perhaps because most of us share Lamb’s perplexity, not much work has been done on the subject other than a general acknowledgement that the device is both interesting and complex. Recently, however, sexual disguise has begun to attract attention from feminist critics because it seems to offer a way to combine Shakespearian criticism with contemporary social concerns. Although more work is needed, and welcome, on this complex dramatic device, the tendency to regard it solely in terms of social and sexual roles seems to me misguided. While some aspects of the disguise are common to all the plays in which it appears, its dramatic function is shaped by the particular design of each play; and the differences are fully as important as the similarities in understanding the complexity of the device in Shakespeare’s hands.

It is remarkable that As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s greatest and best-loved comedies, should – as William Winter, in his history of Shakespeare on the Stage, put it – have ‘sunk into abeyance and remained for a long time unused’ after the closing of the theatres. It was not until December 1740 that it was presented at Drury Lane, the playbill for that production declaring that it had not been acted for forty years. John Genest’s comment on this, that it had probably been unperformed since the Restoration, is taken by that other great stage-historian, C. B. Hogan, to be ‘almost certainly correct’.

Comedy never has been as popular as tragedy, it is true, and the gradual revival of interest in it amplified only after 1740 with an increased demand for the original texts. Nevertheless, many Shakespearian comedies were always available in various forms: briefly but successfully, so was As You Like It.