Many years ago, after watching the Rosalind played by Edith Evans, an enthusiastic critic exclaimed, ‘She made the audience one Orlando’. However imprecise this phrase may be, it captures some essential virtues of a superb portrayal: the ability to seduce us, to hypnotize, to convince us of charm and vigor–those qualities that come across immediately and fully in an excellent production. Like pace, rhythm, and humor, such virtues tend to elude us in our private studies and our chalky class-rooms. We all recognize that, unfortunately, the personal magnetism of an Edith Evans is not a universal option, but a rare one. The Rosalinds, for example, that I have been able to see, stopped far short of making me into an Orlando. They range from the actress, best left nameless, who played the role as if she were a rookie offensive guard for the New York Giants, to Ronald Pickup, the lead in the all-male Old Vic version of 1968. Pickup was a charming Rosalind, but far weaker than both a virile Orlando and a wryly witty Celia.

As You Like It can succeed whether its heroine is idealized or realistic, brilliant or subdued. But the charisma of a great Rosalind - Shakespeare's most effectively dominating comic heroine - would probably distort many other leading roles in his comedies. For recent audiences Valentine, Bassanio, and Claudio seem more credible if their unappealing selfishness receives some sporadic emphasis than if they are treated as nearly flawless conventional romance figures. Successful productions often induce diverging attitudes toward the same character or idea.

Shakespeare might have taken the title of Measure for Measure from any one of the three synoptic gospels “For with what iudgement yee iudge, ye shall be iudged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall bee measured to you againe” (Matthew vii 2); “With what measure ye mete, it shall bee measured vnto you” (Mark iv 24); “For with what measure ye mete with the same shal men mete to you again” (Luke vi 38). Few Shakespeare editions consider a source for the title and those that do generally give 3 Henry VI or Matthew vii without arguing the point, and apparently without having examined the contexts in the three gospels. A. D. Nuttall, however, has suggested that Shakespeare was probably thinking of Mark iv as he wrote because the Duke’s lines, ‘Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, / Not light them for themselves’ (i, i, 32–3) are a restatement of Mark iv 21: ‘Is the candle lighted to be put vnder a bushell, or vnder the table, and not to be put on a candlesticke?’ An examination of Mark iv reveals other striking analogues to the language of Measure for Measure and – beyond language – to the characterization and theme of the play; it can be argued that Mark iv was the focus of Shakespeare’s biblical background for the play, though elements from all three evangelists are woven into its fabric.

The words Kipling gave to his Shakespeare were true. The Tempest interweaves a variety of details from the Bermuda pamphlets with fragmentary echoes of Vergil; one speech draws on Montaigne, and another on Golding's Ovid, but no origin has been found for its central theme. Yet by an odd coincidence Kipling almost stumbled against a hitherto neglected source for the play, in the jeu d'esprit from which the quotation above is taken. For here he imagined Shakespeare in his Stratford orchard, whiling away a summer afternoon with Ben Jonson, translating some verses of the Bible, which had been surreptitiously entrusted to him by a neighbouring Oxford divine in difficulties with his part of the translation for the new, Authorised Version. And the verses Kipling happened to choose, for their Shakespearian splendour of phrase, come from the book of Isaiah. 'How I came to write that, I know', Shakespeare says mysteriously of The Tempest, mocking the author who made him speak: one of the sources for The Tempest is, very probably, Isaiah xxix.

The history of The Tempest on the English-speaking stage from the Restoration era through mid nineteenth century is mainly a story of highly theatrical adaptations and alterations or of spectacular ‘illustrations’ of Shakespeare’s play. While, by the close of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s original text was the basis of presentations, many minor producers were still imitating the theatrical innovations of Samuel Phelps’s 1847 revival and major ones, such as Augustin Daly and Herbert Beerbohm Tree, were attempting to surpass the lavish illustrations of Charles Kean’s 1857 extravaganza.

But, at the same time, a new trend was evident, one which conflicted with the highly theatrical theory of staging and indicated a new direction for Tempest revivals in the twentieth century. For, at the turn of the century, some professional producers were intentionally attempting to pare down the traditionally superimposed spectacles rather than condensing the text to make room for them, and others, because of financial limitations, chose to present a simpler theatrical version rather than none at all. A study of this era is then particularly interesting because two conflicting theories of Tempest staging were being tested, providing reviewers and critics with an opportunity for comparison.

All’s Well that Ends Well is not an entirely successful work. Its problems have been discussed at length and its shortcomings pointed out, sometimes with little compassion. From Dr Johnson, who could not reconcile his heart to Bertram, to the late Poet Laureate, who found Helena ‘a woman who practises a borrowed art, not for art’s sake, nor for charity, but, woman fashion, for a selfish end’, its principal characters have seemed to critics inadequate or disturbing. Even the first editor of this journal found that the ‘kindest thing’ he could do with All’s Well that Ends Well was to suggest that it was ‘penned by Shakespeare in a time of illness or mental disturbance’. And yet its two most recent Stratford productions have been surprisingly well received, and it contains, in Helena, what Coleridge called Shakespeare’s ‘loveliest character’, and, in the Countess, Bernard Shaw’s idea of ‘the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written’. This mixture of undoubted success and apparent failure is familiar, of course, in that play with which All’s Well that Ends Well is often linked, Measure for Measure. But while the problems of Measure for Measure seem, to some extent at least, to be imposed by Shakespeare himself – he it is who makes Isabella a novice, adds Mariana to the characters he inherited from Whetstone, and imports the bed-trick – those which remain in All’s Well that Ends Well are fundamental to the story Shakespeare has chosen to dramatise.

Of all Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is our play. It could be rediscovered only by a sensibility tuned to artistic discontinuity and preoccupied with the realities of love and war; and so it had to wait for cubism and atonality, for fascism and Freud. So given over to ‘philosophy’ and debate, it had to wait for Shaw to rescue this dramatic mode, and probably for the kind of painstaking analysis of texts apart from performance that modern criticism has indulged. In a narrower sense, it is our play because it makes sense to Americans in the 1970s. We know, albeit still in a remote and mostly vicarious way, the meaning of a protracted seven years’ war. We know how the designs of war fail in their promised largeness and how the Greeks must have felt tented in a foreign land, so many hollow factions, with their great engine Achilles useless in seeming mockery of their very designs. Like the Trojans, too, we have heard endlessly the arguments for carrying on a war of doubtful justification, and we know what it really means to settle only for an ‘honorable peace’. We have seen good men who spoke truth in council, even in public, suddenly capitulate to save the corporate image. Within the walls of our capital cities — or more accurately, in their gilded suburbs — we may observe an elegant and seething triviality to match the palace society of Troy. Last and worst, we know what this society and its war has done to our best youth — those not literally destroyed have suffered a degradation of spirit, and of those whose ideals are not fully corrupted, many have chosen a life of irreconcilable alienation. There is no doubt, Troilus and Cressida gives back our own world.

Thirty years ago, the highlight of the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare season was Theodore Komisarjevsky’s production of The Comedy of Errors. Between the house of Antipholus and The Porpentine a large clock-tower dominated the setting. ‘To emphasize the note of farce’, wrote the critic of the Birmingham Gazette, ‘the clock in the tower between the two inns every now and again strikes an hour to which the hands of the clock are not pointing. And the hands gallop to overtake the time.’ Other comments, including the producer’s own, make it evident that Komisarjevsky considered the play itself to be a poor thing at best, and that therefore the more liberties taken with it the better. The business with the clock may be regarded as a typical instance, another being the weird mélange of costumes from all times and places, presumably to emphasise an Ephesus beyond the range of any time or place. It is therefore mildly ironical that these touches, especially that of the clock, intended as bold and original strokes of production (which indeed they were) should nevertheless be profoundly true to one of the chief concerns of the play, the movement of time and its apparent aberrations.

g.l.e. John Barton, you are, I think, one of the few directors who have produced all of the so-called Problem Plays. Do you find this a useful label?

j.b. No, I don't really. I hate categorising plays, and find it difficult to say what is a tragedy, what is a comedy, what is a romance, etc. But if I did, I think I would link All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure with Twelfth Night. I believe that they carried through something that was coming to the boil in As You Like It and Twelfth Night, i.e. Shakespeare's very conscious split between the 'happy-ever-after' world of romantic comedy and his sense of what life and people are really like. I see it in As You Like It to some extent, and even more so in Twelfth Night where what happens at the end to Malvolio and Belch and Maria is set against the conventional romantic ending given to Olivia, Orsino, Viola and Sebastian. That sense of reality breaking in on convention goes further in All's Well and Measure for Measure, where a wry sense of what life's really like and what people are really like is at odds with what the story-line dictates. I think that Troilus is a much profounder, more complex, and richer play.

One of our most skilful actresses – Stratford’s Portia of 1971 – has suggested informally that Shakespeare wrote comedies, tragedies, histories, and The Merchant of Venice. For her the play’s ‘problem’ is that it has no attractive characters – not even Portia. (How, then, can it be so popular?)

What a far cry from the sunny sounds of another person of the theatre, writing in 1930:

The Merchant is surely more of a problem play than Granville-Barker allowed. It is, as Auden calls it, one of Shakespeare's Plays Unpleasant. We have no easy way, for example, round the problem of Shylock. But it is doubtful if the marriage of Portia and Bassanio was the problem for Shakespeare that it becomes in this Stratford production by Terry Hands.

Portia is generally regarded as one of Shakespeare's most attractive and admirable women. Jessica says of her, though not at Stratford:

A survey of attitudes since 1920 towards Shakespeare’s Problem Plays or Dark Comedies, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, invites two observations neither of which would be true of any other Shakespearian group. First, the plays – particularly Measure for Measure and Troilus – have undergone a revaluation so radical as to amount to a rediscovery, and this re-assessment itself reflects changes in literary and theatrical taste. Second, the aesthetic validity and critical usefulness of regarding these plays as a group has been increasingly questioned. A third point is that, while the study of texts and sources has advanced, research has unearthed no new fact about the original date of writing or the circumstances of first performance of any of the plays.

Today, when Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida are set books at 'A'-level, and when all three plays come up regularly, not just for a token staging, but for their full quota of performances in repertory at Stratford and elsewhere, it seems incredible that around 1870 William Poel (the first modern director ever to stage all three plays) was recommended by his tutor never to read Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, as being improper; or that in 1906 townspeople in Oxford opposed an undergraduate performance of Measure for Measure; or that in 1913 F. R. Benson had such qualms about himself staging Troilus at Stratford that he preferred to invite Poel to revive his production for two performances on a single day.

On the upper slopes of Shakespearian textual studies, where the air is thin and advances are measured in proudly gained inches, Professor Kristian Smidt and Professor J. K. Walton are already familiar figures. Both have returned this year to the scene of previous struggles, the question of the copy for the Folio Richard III. As before, they propose different solutions, although Smidt’s support for the sixth Quarto, 1622, as providing the printed basis for the F text is attended with more qualifications than he once admitted, while Walton’s championship of the third Quarto, 1602, has become, if anything, more absolute, so that he now speaks of its use as copy for F not as hypothetical but as an established fact.

Their two books are of very different scope and character. Smidt's short monograph restates and reassesses the evidence bearing on the nature of the Q text of Richard III and on the identification of the particular Quarto used as copy for F. Walton's aim is more ambitious: by examining the whole body of Folio plays printed from Quarto copy, whether or not the Quartos were annotated, he sets out to create a new context for the discussion of those few plays in F about which no consensus of opinion yet exists as to whether they were printed from Q copy or from independent manuscripts, or as to the identity of the particular Quarto edition used for copy.

In trying to define the mood and the artistic movement of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, it is provocative to imagine what the season of the setting ought to be. Since much of the action takes place out of doors, the season is important to the realist; and if any symbolic or ritual progress is to be discerned, the season is significant in establishing the tone and in possibly indicating the occasion.

The text of the play itself is not very helpful. 'Birding' is a sport which can be indulged in at any season; and laundry might conceivably be sent to the Thames any time, though certainly spring, summer, and fall are more likely than winter. The reference by Simple (i, i, 211)1 to the use of a Book of Riddles on 'Allhallowmas last' is interesting but inconclusive. And Mistress Page's reference to the fact that Herne the hunter wanders in the winter forest (i, iv, 30) does not necessarily set the season for the current action.

Traditionally The Merry Wives has been thought of as a summer play. William Mark Clark, for example, in 1835 spoke lyrically of the 'sylvan splendour of its enchanting scenes' with special reference to Herne's Oak, immortalized 'fresh and green' for succeeding generations. Charles Cowden Clarke in 1863 refers similarly to the visions conjured up in the play of 'leafy nooks' on the Thames, with 'barges lapsing on its tranquil tide'. John Middleton Murry finds the play' redolent of early summer', with 'the air . . . full of May or June'.

Most critics who have written on the subject of Much Ado about Nothing seem agreed that the play must take its pace in Shakespeare’s incessant debate about the conflict between appearance and reality, and the difficulties which beset an individual when he attempts to make a right choice, particularly in love, between superficial seeming and inner truth. Few readers, I imagine, would quarrel with the following verdict:

I agree with this reading, and would like to attempt to amplify it by using a methodology pioneered by Miss Dorothy Hockey. Taking her stand upon Helge Kökeritz's treatment of Richard Grant White's suggestion that the play's title may contain a pun upon 'Nothing' and 'noting', Miss Hockey reads the play as an extended treatment of the implications of this pun, and examines in detail all the occasions during the play when attention to the act of 'noting', of eavesdropping and observing, enhances our understanding of the play's structure and morality.

A complete survey of six major productions is hardly possible in a short article. What therefore I shall try to do is to pick out some leading ideas and broad comparisons which these productions, when considered together, have suggested and which may have wider implications. But I ought first to establish just what is my own standpoint in viewing a production of Shakespeare and what are the criteria that I find applicable in its appreciation. Our opinions of these performances may well differ and it is as well to know in advance whether such differences arise because of the variations of individual judgement or because we start from quite different premisses.

I will, then, briefly set out my criteria under two main heads. My first axiom is, I am glad to think, a totally obvious and accepted one, though this certainly was not so even fifteen years ago. It is that Shakespeare wrote for the theatre, and except in the theatre his work cannot be fully appreciated but must remain as it were two-dimensional, lacking the visual pointing, the human resonance, and the general heightening of attention that only live performance can create. I am satisfied, moreover, that Shakespeare was a highly professional and experienced writer for the theatre, who knew just what effects he wanted to achieve in stage terms and how to achieve them. Indeed, it is salutary to remember how very closely his plays were bound up with a particular theatre and a particular company. They were expressly written for what can be described as a permanent repertory company.

Very little has hitherto been known about the minor dramatist and pamphleteer, George Wilkins. From all the available evidence, it seems likely that he wrote the first two acts of Pericles Prince of Tyre, and that Shakespeare wrote the last three, apart from the Gower choruses. Several of his works survive, but he is not mentioned by his contemporaries, and hardly any facts about him have come to light. This is the more to be regretted because Pericles is an important experiment. It was the turning-point which led to the other late Romance plays. It is interesting that Shakespeare should have derived half his play, and possibly the original conception, from a minor dramatist like Wilkins. In these circumstances, any information about Wilkins is of particular value.

It is therefore extremely fortunate that a great quantity of such information has been preserved among the records of the seventeenth-century Middlesex Sessions in the Greater London Record Office (Middlesex Section). Professor Mark Eccles seems to be the first and only scholar ever to have pointed this out, in his Christopher Marlowe in London. He writes there that he intends to describe the records in full elsewhere, but, if he did so, it has eluded me and all other writers on Wilkins that I have come across. The Sessions records reveal much about Wilkins that is new, and positively confirm what had already been inferred from other evidence.

The celebrations which marked the 400th anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare at Stratford first gave Professor Schoenbaum the idea of ‘a little book narrating the quest for knowledge of Shakespeare the man; a book describing the different, sometimes opposing ideas of him that people over the centuries had entertained’. The little book which he has now produced runs to over 850 pages. It fulfills his original intention by giving an account, by turns fascinating, alarming and pathetic, of all those who have attempted to discover, or been tempted to invent, facts about the life of William Shakespeare. It exceeds that intention since it is not merely a history of opposed views and a study of the opponents who held them – it is a brilliant piece of modern historical scholarship which will endure as long as the study which it chronicles. No one who sets out to consider the life of Shakespeare can afford to ignore this book since it provides the scholar with the opportunity of reading down to his own starting point.

Many of the critical approaches to Shakespeare used during the past forty years or so have appeared to offer methods of perceiving the plays’ central issues, but have been in fact means of isolating some single aspect of their complexity. In his 1969 Academy lecture, Alfred Harbage looks with wit and good sense at one class of these: the efforts aimed at giving Shakespeare a modern complexion of one sort or another. He realises that most modernisers produce their often spectacular results by ignoring the fact that ‘action in a Shakespearian play has . . . more meanings without the words than with them’. And by following up the implications of his idea that ‘words are a limiting factor: they restrict our interpretations of an action in the direction of . . . the author’s intention’, he is able to clip the wings of Kott’s reputation, to estimate the degree to which one may speak valuably of a Christian Shakespeare, to indicate fairly the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet criticism, and to contemplate judiciously the possibility of an Absurdist Bard. Clearly Harbage’s own sympathy is with the silent critics all over the world who read the plays regularly and apply the only valid test for determining whether a work of art is being justly seen, in its own age or later, which is ‘to observe how much of its data is being taken into account’.

Scholars are now generally agreed that Q1 of Romeo and Juliet (1597) is a bad Quarto which represents a memorial reconstruction of the play, and that Q2 (1599) is a good Quarto based at first or second hand on Shakespeare’s foul papers. If this is so, however, we must then recognize that ‘the bad text seems a good deal better and the good text a good deal worse, than we are accustomed to find’. The superiority of Q1 in many readings has been recognized by most editors since Pope, and not only such standard eclectic texts as the old Cambridge or Oxford, but even recent editions founded on strict bibliographical principles, admit many words, even whole lines, solely on its authority. Moreover, it is clear that the occasional surprising goodness of Q1 and surprising badness of Q2 cannot be explained simply by the varying competence or carefulness of the compositors of the two Quartos. There is unmistakeable evidence that the presumed Shakespearian manuscript which served as copy for Q2 was ‘in a state of unusual disorder’, often virtually illegible and possibly lacking a continuous passage of almost one hundred lines. And on the other hand, many sections of Q1, especially in acts I and II, seem to be so remarkably accurate as to make it necessary that we assume either that the reporter was gifted with an extraordinary memory and an almost infallible metrical sense, or that he had some access to an authoritative manuscript.