The publication of the Norton facsimile of the First Folio, edited by Charlton Hinman, is the culminating achievement of many years of devoted labour by the editor and by earlier investigators of the printing of the Folio. In a real sense this is the first edition of the First Folio, of a book representing as nearly as is possible the ideal copy of the Folio as Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount intended to publish it. Where extant copies of the Folio may vary in formes corrected at press, this facsimile presents every variant forme in its latest or most fully corrected state and in addition it reproduces each page from the most legible exemplar to be found among thirty of the best copies of the Folio in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Editorial matter is limited to the marginal printing of through line numbers (as advocated by McKerrow) which will provide a new standard system of numbering for the Folio plays and to the supplying of cross-references to the conventional act, scene and line numbering at the foot of each page. The facsimile is followed by an appendix of fourteen plates illustrating the cancelland and cancel settings of the last page of Romeo and Juliet and the first of Troilus and Cressida, two of the extant proof-sheets, together with the corrected state of the pages involved and three selected pages in uncorrected and corrected states.

Edward Dowden noted that the death of the Princess’s father at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost gives the comedy a sour twist: “

In this connection the ending of the play is indeed significant. As Berowne complains:

The ending is not truly comic, with difficulties resolved and sins forgiven, but moralistic-punishments are meted out, nor is it clear that the eventual outcome will be a happy one.3 Shakespeare may not have the dramatic morality tradition of the Middle Ages directly in mind, but there is much in Loves Labour's Lost which is reminiscent of the morality plays. Thus the subject matter is shaped, often to the point of stylisation, round the development of a moral theme. The set scenes which make up much of the play are related to each other more by the theme than by the extremely tenuous plot.

These lines, from the last scene of T. S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, express an attitude towards language characteristic of our own moment of historical time. We live in a period marked by its profound mistrust of words. How this distrust has arisen, and what the role may have been of the mass media and of the revolution in philosophy instituted by Wittgenstein in producing it, is not my concern here. I would merely suggest that when Eliot, in another work, described his own craft of poetry as ‘a raid on the inarticulate, with shabby equipment, always deteriorating’, he spoke not merely for himself as an artist but for a modern society which has become obsessed with the limitations and inadequacies of speech.

Certainly the contemporary theatre reflects this obsession. For Beckett, for Pinter, for Albee and Ionesco, dialogue has become not so much a medium of understanding, the means through which human beings reveal themselves to one another, as a measure of the hopelessness of any attempt to communicate. Words measure the gap between individuals: they do not bridge it. Every man is an island in a sense slightly different from the one John Donne had in mind, but this fact is no longer a source of suspect spiritual pride. In it, we find our own particular despair.

In writing Hamlet Shakespeare, with his usual versatility, seems to have used several sources of various kinds. Not only did he draw on a previous version of the story but he also found material for his purposes in such works as Lyly’s Euphues, Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie, and Nashe’s Pierce Pennilesse. Another work which offers considerable evidence that it may belong to this list is a little-known pamphlet published in London in 1601, one of the several polemics which emanated from the current disputes within the English Catholic priesthood known as the Archpriest Controversy. Admittedly this is not the kind of work which Shakespeare, so far as we know, was in the habit of utilizing. Among his recognized sources the only one that even remotely resembles it, indeed the only example of a religious polemic, is Samuel Harsnet’s violently anti-Catholic A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures. Yet the pamphlet shows so many verbal and other resemblances to Hamlet that it raises the question whether it might have a connection with the play.

There is a tense moment at the end of certain modern dramatic productions (it is a feature which has recently shown itself at Stratford) when the actors suddenly turn on the audience and, in the name of communication, begin menacingly to advance on them with ferocious and implacable bonhomie. But let me put you out of fear. As this conference draws to an end, it is not my intention to come smilingly amongst you in any physical sense. I know my place. Nor does the title of my paper make mocking reference to any here present in their professional capacities. Dog does not eat dog.

But my subject does involve our communication with each other in a different, more general, but no less 'contemporary' way. For when Ben Jonson nominated language as' the only benefit man hath to expresse his excellencie of mind above other creatures' (Timber, or Discoveries), he was articulating an idea that has had modernity thrust upon it. In fact the concept of man as the Talking Animal, with language his distinctive feature, marking him off from the other animals, is one of those currently fashionable notions redeemed, we might now profitably allow, by its antiquity.

Only as recently as 200 years ago, on Saturday, 30 September 1769, to be precise, was a French theatre audience treated for the first time to a stage version of a Shakespeare play. The play was Hamlet and its adaptor Jean-François Ducis. This was by no means the first the French had heard of Shakespeare or indeed of the Prince. Voltaire had frequently labelled the play an unbridled monstrosity and its author an ignorant barbarian. True, he had been unable to avoid recognising that Shakespeare had an undeniable natural genius, but what Voltaire could not forgive was the Englishman’s ignorance of the rules of the drama and his abhorrent lack of good taste. Voltaire’s criticisms were repeated, though in less virulent terms, by other eighteenth-century French critics such as L’Abbé Prévost and L’Abbé Le Blanc. The La Place translation of the play, which appeared in 1746, was a miserably emasculated effort which failed to fulfil the promise of its author’s very perceptive preliminary ‘Discours’ and succeeded only in proving once more that the neo-classical concept of tragedy was still very much alive. If at heart Voltaire was a devout Racinian and believed unquestioningly in the validity of Aristotle’s rules, in the unities, in propriety, in dignity of language and in, to use Racine’s own formula, ‘une action simple, chargée de peu de matière’, he was none the less aware of the need for tragedy to speak a little less to the ears and a little more to the eyes and advocated a slightly less stringent application of the basic doctrine.

When the Painter in Timon of Athens puts the Poet in his place by pointing out that not only is his message ‘common’ but it also needs another medium –

then, obviously, neither interlocutor is concerned with the idea of a 'theatre poet'. Despite his fine lines on the nature of poetic inspiration, the Poet thinks of poetry mainly as something which gives outward form to an inner moral. And his narrow definition of style as a garment is so tied up with his sycophantic use of poetry that both can be punctured by the disillusioned Timon, in an even more relentless reminder of the limits of language:

Criticism of Shakespeare’s Pericles has most often concerned itself with those of the play’s problems that might offer a solution to patient inquiry. If the results have been disappointing, they have been intelligibly so; and yet, were the evidence less fragmentary and indecisive, and we could reach confident conclusions about authorship, literary genesis, and the skills and frailties of compositors A and B, the essential mystery of the play might still elude us, for it has to do with the insights and devices by which art attempts to encompass human mortality. If we wonder why the plays of Shakespeare’s time, flourishing as they do upon a medieval root, offer so little reassurance about personal survival in a life to come, we may reflect with Wittgenstein that, ‘Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through’. The plays are pre-eminently about what is lived through.

There is a poem of D. H. Lawrence’s called ‘The Work of Creation’, in which he speaks of the creative process as it is experienced by God and also by the artist:

I quote this poem because it seems to me that the point Lawrence makes about the creative imagination is particularly worth stressing in relation to Shakespeare. Shakespeare criticism, as we all know, is a highly sophisticated business and a good deal of learning and ingenuity, not to speak of baring of the soul, goes into the interpretation of the plays. The tendency of these studies, whether by intention or not, often seems to be to encourage the notion that Shakespeare worked in each play according to a pre-formed and carefully articulated intellectual scheme which study can identify.

A conference on the theme of Shakespeare, theatre poet, encourages the reiteration of commonplaces: and, if my argument is familiar, two sentences which, according to Boswell, were deleted from The Vicar of Wakefield, may serve as an apology. ‘When I was a young man, being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over, for I found that generally what was new was false.’

Shakespeare's greatness as a poet has never been in doubt in English-speaking countries; the critics and actors have always paid lip-service to his greatness as a dramatist. Yet it is only during the last hundred years that we have known enough about the conventions of the Elizabethan theatre to judge Shakespeare's technical competence. Early this century, Robert Bridges, reacting against Bradley, wrote his famous attack on Shakespeare's carelessness and incompetence. He had the excuse that Victorian productions, however brilliantly acted, were merely adaptations. This was brought home to me very forcibly by Sir Donald Wolfit's production of Cymbeline in which he made precisely the same cuts as Irving had done half a century earlier. As a result the last act was completely unintelligible to those who had not read the play. Memories of the Irving production seduced Bernard Shaw into rewriting the last act for a production at the Stratford Memorial Theatre; but when he re-read Shakespeare's fifth act he frankly confessed that it was better than his own.

There is some indication that in recent years more critics are prepared to tackle the whole range of Shakespeare’s achievement. The first two parts of what will ultimately be such a general critical account have appeared from Gareth Lloyd Evans. The plan is to follow the dramatist’s career more or less chronologically, with volume I being devoted to the years 1564–92, and volume II 1587–98. Together they represent about as good a commentary on the early and middle plays as one could find for the intelligent non-professional reader of Shakespeare. Certainly they aim at offering in a very readable manner the accepted state of scholarly knowledge; but at the same time they contain a very personal approach to the works which is based upon theatrical as well as classroom expertise and which never becomes merely eccentric.

In discussing the early plays, Lloyd Evans displays his critical strengths best in the essays on the Henry VI plays. He conveys well just how dramatically 'promising' these works are, demonstrating the way in which the larger political issues are located in single scenes and details of character, perceiving the thematic and theatrical relationships between Joan and Talbot or Cade and Gloucester, explaining with real insight the dramaturgical problems which faced Shakespeare in part 3, and in general managing to move gracefully between abstracted ideas and detailed analyses of particular passages.

Shakespeare the theater poet was certainly writing his lines to be heard – as spoken by actors with appropriate intonation, pace, rhythm and volume. Yet when one seeks to hear Antony and Cleopatra in one’s mind’s ear one finds remarkably little help from commentators. Bradley and Wilson Knight have several fine paragraphs each on the overall tone of the play. Granville-Barker has a valuable page on the range of tones that Cleopatra deploys. Now and again a critical interpreter will follow the changing tones and rhythms of a scene or episode. Editors occasionally suggest the manner in which they think a word or speech should be spoken. But the upshot of this commentary is incidental and fragmentary. Nowhere in print is there a sustained effort to hear the whole play.

Why this neglect? One reason is that the commentators' interest has been elsewhere. In their search for Shakespeare's meanings, scholars have focused either on the very small areas of glossing words and phrases or on the very large areas of tracing themes which extend through the whole play. It is quite possible, though risky, to deal with these matters tonelessly, not 'hearing' the lines at all but merely gathering their bare gist. It is in the middle-sized areas of meaning-of speeches and groups of speeches - that matters of tone are most important. These too have been relatively neglected.

Innumerable insights into the personality and private life of the world’s foremost playwright have, it seems, long lain readily available to us had we but viewed that riddling perspective, his sonnets, aright, perceiving there not one face but two – the authentic features of the dramatist side by side with those of ‘his patron, his companion in a turbulent love affair, his correspondent in the sonnets, and the woman who influenced him throughout his creative life’, the Countess of Southampton. Seen, as Elizabeth Beach would have us see them, as a kind of verse dialogue between Shakespeare and his equally gifted patroness, the Sonnets cease to be problematic, Shakespeare’s sexual reputation is vindicated, and we are presented with a treasure-house of knowledge about the bard and his beloved. Unfortunately the reviewer lacked the necessary faith in Lady Mary’s creative ability to pass into this biographical wonderland. More conventional means of plucking out the heart of the mystery have been employed in Donald Neil Friesner’s ‘William Shakespeare, Conservative’. Friesner ponders the dramatist’s social background, his firm links with Stratford, and the political philosophy of the plays, and postulates a Shakespeare conservative by temperament and conviction. The limitations of this particular deductive method are self- evident – attitudes are not necessarily determined by social origin nor do the plays lend themselves to easy categorisation. The detective endeavours of both Beach and Friesner pale however beside the dazzling ingenuity of B. N. De Luna’s The Queen Declined, an interpretation of Willobie His Avisa together with a text of the original edition.

Shakespeare is unique and those who present his plays in the theatre should try to take this into account: usual ways of working may be quite inappropriate.

Matthew Arnold's description of Shakespeare's special qualities has become proverbial:

In our own words, most of us would agree that we cannot nail down his purposes or be sure that we understand. Returning to a play after a few years, we realise that we have seen only what we had looked for, and that as we have changed so, it seems, has he. But we are also aware of a direct, involving engagement and, like Keats, we will not sit down to read King Lear again without some prologue, at least a moment of adjustment:

Shakespeare seems to draw us into his creation, into fresh discovery and active imagination: we 'burn through' a re-creation of the play in our own minds.

The world is a fit theatre to-day in which any part may be acted. There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life that men lead anywhere, or that imagination can paint. By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in Florida, or a mackerel fisher off Cape Sable, or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea. So wide is the choice of parts, what a pity if the part of Hamlet be left out!

As Thoreau recognized in 1840, America was not a land likely to produce Hamlets. The mood of the country was expansionist and brash, the summons of the West being responded to with fervor and the needed technology for a bustling nation rapidly developing. 'Puritan fanatics like Goodyear brought to the vulcanization of rubber the same intense passion that Thoreau brought to Nature', Lewis Mumford has observed (The Golden Day), and it hardly needs adding that the national passion which was to gain the ascendancy was decisively that for rubber.

Many of the commentators on Romeo and Juliet have suggested that the tragic outcome of the plot hinges merely on a series of coincidences in the time structure of the plot. Capulet hastens Juliet’s marriage to Paris, Friar John arrives too late in Mantua and Juliet awakens just too late to prevent Romeo from suicide. Yet the play has far more force than simply a sad story of young lovers. The play is about ‘the fearful passage of their death-marked love’ and it arouses a feeling of tragic inevitability which runs throughout the plot and creates a suspense for which the tragic outcome is the only possible resolution. This feeling has to be aroused from the very beginning of the action and Shakespeare succeeds in this by presenting the meeting of the lovers in a masque. The masque solves perfectly the plot problem of how to get Romeo into the Capulet household but it also makes it into a theatrically significant event by the spectacular nature of the scene and the atmosphere which it creates. Romeo must enter the Capulet banquet as the herald of love and the masque evokes this atmosphere of youth and revelling.