In the climactic moments of the late romances, in Pericles and especially in The Winter’s Tale , a great part of the poetry is occupied in describing the principal people, praising them, doing them reverence, enhancing their meaning, while they present themselves, confront one another at gaze, or form a centre for the eyes of all beholders. This mode of presentation goes with the special sort of dramatic action which I want to outline in this paper, the transformation of persons into virtually sacred figures who yet remain persons. Before he knows that she is his daughter, Leontes says to Perdita and Florizel:

This might be a description of a moment of a court masque where some noble couple are presented in the roles of mythological deities; at court, the real identity of Proserpina and her consort would be known; the heaven and earth would be the work of Inigo Jones. One can think of more serious parallels in baroque religious painting, where the principals are highlighted in large space defined by streams of light connecting heaven and earth, while secondary figures gaze on them with wonder and awe. In The Winter’s Tale secondary figures come from the presence chamber to report to us the recognition of Perdita; some of their description might fit a painting by El Greco:

Love’s Labour’s Lost is probably better appreciated today than at any time since its earliest performances. It is now found to play well, it has had some extremely understanding criticism over the last two decades. Nowadays critics have slackened their efforts to expound the play as a sophisticated in-joke, a spoof on Lyly and on the School of Night. No doubt it is all that, but the concentration on the topical interest of Love’s Labour’s Lost tended to obscure its permanent value. The play retains its elusiveness, but is today generally regarded as a delicate and controlled movement towards an acceptance of reality. ‘Reality’ is a term that (however unsatisfactory philosophically) critics agree upon as a convenient designation for the target of the play’s probing. The word is not susceptible to exact definition, but it designates all those phenomena of life that are symbolized by the entry of Mercade. That entry is the key fact of the play: it is hardly possible to sustain the argument that it is ‘sudden, unprovided for, external to the inner necessity of the plot, and for that reason aesthetically unsatisfactory, though theatrically effective’. For the play has opened with an assault upon Time/Death (lines 1–14), as it closes with the acknowledgement of Time’s victory. The death-message is organically present in Scene ⅰ, as certain cells die shortly after the body’s birth. And the final Act makes sense only as a reversal of the first Act: the themes of light-darkness, folly-wisdom, fantasy-reality are initiated and resolved in the exposition and conclusion.

This discussion might well be entitled ‘Three Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale’, were I not anxious to avoid the implication that it offers only half the value already provided by Nevill Coghill in Shakespeare Survey 11. I hope instead to offer an analysis which, building upon Coghill’s insights, goes beyond them to call particular attention to the way in which Shakespeare, thus late in his career, had learned both to trust his actors and to manipulate audience response.

A beginning playwright is apt to think almost entirely in terms of putting necessary information into his lines. In setting the bare Elizabethan stage, no other course is open to him:

A passage in Seneca’s De Clementia throws light on the celebrated ‘just cause’ crux in Julius Caesar and offers a vantage point from which to make a reading of the play.

Shortly before the conspirators assault him in III, i, Caesar protests that his harshness in maintaining the banishment of Publius Cimber is not wrong and that the importunate suppliants have not given him sufficient reason to alter his determination in the matter:

Ben Jonson twice alluded to this passage, but both times he cited it in wording quite different from that of the Folio text. In Discoveries he gave as an example of Shakespeare's unbridled pen Caesar's supposed statement: 'Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause; Jonson labelled this line 'ridiculous'. In 1626, in the Induction to A Staple of News, Jonson had one character exclaim facetiously, 'Cry you mercy, you neuer did wrong, but with iust cause'.

The exuberant energy devoted in recent years to Shakespeare life studies seems at last to have ebbed away, and this year’s contributions to the subject have been both meagre and restrained. With the exception of M. K. Naik, whose delightful, if not highly original, picture of a ‘humanitarian’ Shakespeare is constructed by that process of judicious quotation from the text the dubious fruits of which we have long learned to suspect, scholars have eschewed the alluring paths of speculation and confined themselves to a rigorous re-appraisal of a number of items of evidence available to us. Thus the clothes in which the dramatist is depicted in the various contemporary representations of him, the identity of the subjects of the ‘Barnard’ portraits, the source of John Shakespeare’s spiritual testament, and fresh evidence that the ‘upstart crow’ reference may carry the implication of plagiarism have all been carefully examined, while possible extensions to the Shakespearian canon in the shape of The Double Falsehood or an early version of Titus Andronicus disguised as Titus and Vespasian have both been discounted. Meanwhile Hallett Smith in Shakespearean Research Opportunities urges the need for yet greater precision in the dating of the last plays and more certainty about the authorship of three of them.

Laughter with the audience can be and has been approached from at least two quite different angles: on the one hand from that of the theatre and social custom and ritual, on the other from that of aesthetics and the theory of comedy. Dover Wilson was perhaps the first to remark, many years ago, that Shakespeare ‘gets his audience to laugh, quite as often with his characters as at them’. In more recent years, the social and dramatic background of the actor–audience relationship has been brilliantly explored by Anne Righter and C. L. Barber, and this has— in connexion with the reassessment of the Elizabethan platform stage by G. F. Reynolds, Richard Hosley, W. C. Hodges, Glynne Wickham, Bernard Beckerman and others—considerably modified our conceptions not only of the Elizabethan theatre but of the theatrical modes and possibilities of Shakespearian comedy and, of course, of laughter in this comedy.

Now such laughter on the comic stage has both a history and a theory, and from a comparative point of view it may perhaps be desirable to try and link up the historical (or theatrical), and the theoretical (or typological) aspects. Quite to integrate them must in the last resort involve both a historical view of theory and a theoretical view of history, and it would of course call for a vast amount of documentation.2 It seems therefore more fruitful just to raise the problem (without necessarily suggesting all the answers) and to do so within the limited context of one Shakespearian play.

An extreme version of the general modern reaction to All’s Well occurs in a review of Tyrone Guthrie’s 1959 production: ‘the tone of the play and its confusion of values . . . raises a dozen issues, only to drop them all with a cynical, indifferent ‘all’s well that ends well’. No wonder Shaw liked it so much’. Now I am convinced that whatever else the ending of this play may be called—puzzling, unsatisfactory, even bungled—Shakespeare was by no means ‘indifferent’ and certainly not ‘cynical’. I think that his own personal poetry, in the Sonnets, sheds an interesting light on exactly why he thought the play ended well, and accounts, especially, for his uncompromising treatment of Helena and Bertram. G. K. Hunter rightly calls it a ‘peculiar’ play, but he emphasizes ‘the peculiar force’ of both the idealism and the satire. Forceful writing does not reflect ‘indifference’; and E. M. W. Tillyard, in finding the play ‘full of suffering’, isolates the most important characteristic of Helena’s love and Bertram’s reactions, upon which the Sonnets provide an illuminating commentary.

If another confrontation between Shakespeare and Jonson is still allowable, then the challenger should be allowed to arm himself with one of his Latin epigraphs. So, on the title-page of Sejanus, the author warns the reader not to look for centaurs or gorgons or harpies; these particular pages will savour of man. The distich is quoted from Martial, an acknowledged kindred spirit ofJonson's, and it seems a curious point of departure for a tragedy, since Martial's epigram (x, iv) had excluded from his life-like pages such monstrous figures as Oedipus and Thyestes. Jonson cut the quotation conveniently short, yet it hints at the limitations that might emerge from a critical comparison of Sejanus or Catiline with Coriolanus or Antony and Cleopatra. For the younger playwright, always more interested in human machinations than in the workings of destiny, tragedy could be reduced to conspiracy. Hence it differed from comedy only to the extent that, in the words of the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour, crimes may differ from follies. That prologue, introducing a revision which shifted the setting from Italy to England, heralds a more realistic drama by condemning the extravagances and ineptitudes of the popular theatre. After casting an invidious glance at such rivals, and appealing for the more judicious laughter of the audience, it concludes by hoping: 'You, that haue so grae'd monsters, may like men'.

The Old and New Comedy forms in Greek literature are highly stylized and conventionalized forms, each the product of very specific cultural and historical conditions that can never recur. Each may be of course imitated in later ages: the Comedy of Errors adapts Plautus, and there is some imitation of Aristophanes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But more important than the possibility of imitation is the fact that the two Greek forms are species of larger dramatic genera. The kind of comedy they represent may and inevitably will recur, when a larger pattern of cultural and historical factors makes it possible.

I begin with New Comedy, as the more familiar, and as having something more like a continuous line of tradition. The distinguishing feature of New Comedy is the teleological plot: perhaps this feature had something to do with Aristotle's approval of it. As a rule the main theme of this plot is that of the alienated lover moving towards sexual fulfilment. New Comedy reaches a telos in its final scene, which is superficially marriage, and, more profoundly, a rebirth. A new society is created on the stage in the last moments of a typical New Comedy, when objections, oppositions, misunderstandings and the schemes of rivals are all cleared out of the way. This newborn society is frequently balanced by a recognition scene and a theme of the restoring of a birthright, the recognition (cognitio) being connected with the secret of somebody's birth in the very common device of the foundling plot. Much simpler and more popular is the comedy in which a hero, after many setbacks, succeeds in doing something that wins him the heroine and a new sense of identity.

Faced with a body of material as heterogeneous and sometimes as strange as that dramatized in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and with a scene that is, to quote Malone, set ‘dispersedly in various countries’, the present reviewer, seeking to make a ‘true Relation’ not of ‘the whole Historie’ but of as much of it as has come his way, cannot but be grateful for having been provided with an ‘ancient Gower’ to serve as Prologue and even on occasions as Chorus. Walter Whiter died in 1832, yet there are two good reasons why his A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare, admirably edited by the late Alan Over and Mary Bell, should appear in this context. First, there is much here that has never been published before, since the editors have wisely chosen to include the additions and revisions Whiter made for a projected second edition of his original publication (1794) that was never called for. Secondly, however, Whiter is, in a sense, a modern critic, because it is only during the last thirty years or so that the significance of his approach and findings has come to be recognized. His main aim, at least when he began his work, was to establish the validity of his theory, based on the ideas of Locke, about the role of association in creative writing. He says: ‘I define therefore the power of this association over the genius of the poet, to consist in supplying him with words and with ideas, which have been suggested to the mind by a principle of union unperceived by himself, and independent of the subject to which they are applied’ (pp. 62–3). And he goes on to insist that the writer is ‘totally unconscious of the effect and principle of their union’ (p. 64).

A great many of Australia’s first colonists were drawn from that section of eighteenth-century society described by moralists of the day as ‘undesirables who frequent play-houses’. As well as a genuine love of the drama—sometimes as onlookers, sometimes as performers of the more menial theatrical characters and tasks—they had a love for the easy pickings and the good times to be had in theatre company. But while most of them gave up, or were forced to give up their evil ways on arrival at Port Jackson, none of them lost his or her love of the theatre. They had been brought up with it; it was almost the sole and certainly the most popular form of public amusement available to them.

In all the theatres left behind them by these men and women the fare had been basically the same. There was always the solid core of old favourites, including the many rewritten or otherwise arranged versions of Shakespeare's Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies such as the Garrick version of The Taming of the Shrew. No wonder that in their idle moments—and there were to be plenty of these, as well as hungry ones—the thoughts of Australia's unwilling first colonists should turn to the theatre.

In the final moments of Edward Albee’s The American Dream, the mother—a bit tipsy—begins to seduce The Young Man, who has just been adopted by her family to replace another young man, now lost. Mommy mumbles:

Then Grandma interrupts and speaks directly to the audience:

Albee's Grandma protests too much. Certainly she knows that, for a traditional comedy, the audience does not expect the kind of situation that has been developing. Although Albee tries to answer critics of his play by insisting in his brief preface that it is a comedy, he goes on to ask a few lines later:

E. K. Chambers gives a list of Elizabethan actors which includes the following:

E. Nungezer adds that these actors were members of a troupe of English players at the Danish court and gives as source an article by Johannes Bolte.

These players were first recognized by V. C. Ravn, who pieced together information in the Rentemester Regnskaber (R.R.) - account books of the receiver of the Revenue-and in the associated Maaneds og Kostpenge Registeret (Kp.R.) - the register of monthly wages and boardwages. These are now in Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen.

This paper is based on a new study of these documents and of other available sources which yield some supplementary information concerning these and other supposedly English artists at the court of Frederick II. A full account is also given of the fate of one of them, Thomas Bull, which is not without human interest.

Anything like a serious probing into the nature of Shakespearian Comedy, an attempt to discover, as it were, its governing principle, has been rare. One may hold the view that such an effort is hardly necessary, that, as has been suggested in the case of Tragedy, each Comedy could best be studied for its peculiar kind of unity of theme, structure, and effect, rather than as illustrative of the Shakespearian comic idea.

Shakespeare, at any rate, seems to write his Comedy with little concern for conformity to the established genre. The tradition associated with the form gave but a general direction to his attitudes. 'What distinguishes Shakespeare's Comedies from most contemporary ones is the amount of blending. Each play is sharply individualized, and yet nearly every one contains in different proportion all the elements of the others.'1 The peculiar blend of several modes has produced a kind of 'polyphonic music', to use Miss Bradbrook's phrase, asking of the reader a continual switching of interest and also a capacity to respond with a kind of multi-consciousness to the situation.

Marvin Spevack has used the resources of the German Computing Centre, Darmstadt, to compile a new and unprecedentedly complete concordance to the works of Shakespeare. The first two volumes contain separate concordances to the comedies and histories and to each of their characters, and the second ends with separate and consolidated concordances to the non-dramatic works. Volume three is to cover the tragedies, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Shakespearian portion of Sir Thomas More, while a further three volumes will be occupied by a consolidated concordance to the complete works. The present volumes supply exhaustive statistical information about the vocabulary of the texts they include, beginning with act, scene and line reference for every occurrence of every word, and extending to data about the incidence of verse and prose and about the vocabulary of every speaking part. The concordance is based on a modernized, American-spelling text which is to be published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. Wherever this text departs from the readings of the early text on which it is based, the concordance indicates the fact, but does not record the rejected reading. Homographs differently etymologized by the O.E.D. are separately listed and indicated with an asterisk. This concordance will clearly be an indispensable tool for future analysts of Shakespeare’s language.

We can view Shakespeare and Jonson either as the twin pillars of Elizabethan comedy or as its opposite poles: one romantic, positive and attractive; the other satiric, negative and (now and then) repelling. If we take the latter view, it is partly because Jonson indicated his contempt for the absurdities of Shakespeare’s romantic fables. Instead of improbable fictions like Pericles, he offered to his audiences the comic truth in ‘deeds and language such as men do use’. In his plays the audiences were to find ‘an image of the times’, a living record of their affectations and follies. Jonson’s determination to strike out on a new path of satiric realistic comedy was, no doubt, inevitable and right. But in deliberately rejecting the earlier romantic mode of comedy, Jonson, I suspect, denied something of his own genius, for there is in his earliest masterpiece, Every Man in His Humour, a sweetness and amiableness of temper not to be found again in his art. The point of view, if not the subject matter, of Every Man in His Humour is almost Shakespearian. Here, near the start of his career, was a tolerant amused acceptance of humours that blunts the edge of corrective satire. Contemptuous as he was of romantic fabling, Jonson had, moreover, an instinct for romantic variety and multiplicity which, though severely disciplined in Volpone and The Alchemist, burst forth in the noisy carnivals of Epicene and Bartholomew Fair. The maker of elegant courtly masques fashioned his comedies out of the coarse and common stuff of Elizabethan life, that Shakespeare preferred to ignore or varnish.

Exactly three hundred years ago, in September 1668, in the presence of the Russian ambassadors, Molière was performing his great success of that year, Amphitryon, a comedy based on a play of Plautus which, as it happens, Shakespeare had also used in his only imitation of the Latin poet. In the eyes of one who has been invited to speak of Molière on the occasion of a Shakespeare Conference—a rather perplexing privilege—the coincidence is too remarkable not to seem, as Duke Vincentio would say, ‘an accident that Heaven provides’. I see no reason to deny myself the benefit of this happy coincidence, especially since there is much more in common between The Comedy of Errors and Amphitryon than their comparatively unimportant debt to Plautus.

It is currently said that Shakespeare, whose plot is chiefly drawn from the more down-to-earth, naturalistic, Menaechmi, went to the play of Amphitruo for the sake of additional comic effects, the double master-servant theme, and the incident of the husband locked out of his own house. This may be true, but does not invalidate deeper motives. Always a very intelligent reader, he may well have been shrewd enough to recognize that The Menaechmi and Amphitruo are substantially the same kind of story.