In an article castigating those modern critics who wish to interpret Shakespeare’s tragedies in Christian terms and to see Othello and Lear in particular saved, Sylvan Barnet observes that to extend the lives of characters beyond the play into the next world is just as much an error as the old fault of reconstructing their career before the play begins; he continues:

If it is possible to discern a devout Shakespeare, it is also possible to shape out a pagan Shakespeare, or even, according to Paul Arnold, a Rosicrucian Shakespeare. He believes that in Esotérisme de Shakespeare he is revealing for the first time the true meaning of the last plays and several comedies, as expressions of a cabalistic philosophy, which, it seems, was the major preoccupation of the Elizabethan élite, and the sole genuine interest of all the poets and dramatists.

Some years ago an experiment in producing Shakespeare’s plays was tried by the Earle Grey Shakespeare Company in the spacious grounds of Trinity College, University of Toronto. The completion of the first eight years of the annual open-air Shakespeare Festival in Toronto, Canada, seems to be as good a time as any to relate how this company came into being, what were its principles, and how far these latter have been followed.

It is a commonplace that chance plays a great part in any enterprise. So it was with the Festival. During the war years chance placed us in Toronto. Strangers in the city, my wife (Mary Godwin) and I spent one morning exploring its University grounds, which lie in its heart. Among the many fine buildings there we were especially attracted towards one in particular. Built of stone, in early Jacobean style, it closely resembled an English college. It was Trinity College, founded some ninety years before by Bishop Strachan, an Anglican.

It is surprising to find Shakespearian critics in agreement, yet almost to a man they have concurred in their verdict on the merits of Titus Andronicus. The word which most nearly sums up their feelings is “disgust”. Ravenscroft called the play “a heap of rubbish” Coleridge said that it was “obviously intended to excite vulgar audiences by its scenes of blood and horror—to our ears shocking and disgusting”; Dover Wilson recently called it a “broken-down cart, laden with bleeding corpses from an Elizabethan scaffold”. Only a few critics have had so much as a word of praise for this early Shakespearian tragedy.

The features of Titus Andronicus which have had such enduring power to repel the critics are easy to identify. The succession of extraordinarily violent episodes has given rise to the opinion that the play is crude—fit only for "vulgar audiences". The florid style of many of the speeches has seemed appallingly overwrought. Now it is a curious fact that this second feature should logically lead to a quite different opinion about the play. Miss M. C. Bradbrook has well characterized the tone as "cool and cultured".4 If the style is crude in a way, it is not the crudity of the bear-baiting pit or the Elizabethan scaffold. The trouble seems to be an excess of refinement, or an overloading with classical allusion—surely caviare for the bear-baiting crowd.

The question was already being asked in his life-time and no conclusive answer has yet been found. Certainly none will be offered in what follows; perhaps none ever will. Yet in a volume dealing in the main with Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, it is well that the question should be posed and that some of the relevant evidence should at least be glanced at. I shall even dare to suggest a fresh line of approach, which, if followed up, might lead somewhere.

I begin, as everyone must, with Ben Jonson's claim that Shakespeare's plays were worthy to rank with those of the greatest Greek and Latin dramatists, though he had " small Latin and less Greek". It comes, of course, from the fine laudatio which Ben wrote for the First Folio edition of his dead friend's plays. For they were friends, we cannot doubt of that; and though his praise seems today in no way exaggerated, he probably felt a generous glow as he wrote it, felt indeed that he owed it to his "beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare" to pitch it rather higher than the truth. Certainly, in the lines about Shakespeare's art, he attributed qualities to him which he denied in private talk and in notes he left behind him.

The teaching of Shakespeare’s plays in the grammar school, particularly in forms taking courses leading to the General Certificate of Education Examination, Ordinary Level, has its critics: some allege unsympathetic, biased and insensitive treatment of the plays; others assert that the plays should not be in the curriculum at all, on the grounds that not only are the classroom methods used unsuitable, but that the language and conventions of the plays themselves are too difficult for immature minds to grasp. All contend that irreparable harm is being done.

Why, in fact, are Shakespeare's plays included in the curriculum?

Education, properly conceived, demands not only the acquiring of skills, the assimilation of knowledge, the training of thought processes, but the leading of pupils to respond to works of art and thereby to increase and refine their understanding and enjoyment of artistic achievement. English Literature is the only subject, in schools where there is no classics side, that can consistently give this particular training. Music, Painting and Drawing are normally treated in a different way, they are more dependent on special skills and so are less accessible to children.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Elizabethan drama is the requirement of numerous plays that action be performed in a production-area somewhere above the stage. I believe we shall not be far from the mark if, without denying the possibility of alternative arrangements, we take this raised production-area to have been, at least in the public theatres of Shakespeare’s time, a gallery over the stage generally similar to the one depicted by Arend van Buchell in his well-known drawing of the interior of the Swan Playhouse, based on an original made by Johannes de Witt around 1596. It must be emphasized, however, that the gallery shown in the Swan drawing is not an “upper stage” in the usual sense of that rather inappropriate and in some respects misleading term, for it has neither curtains nor balustrade and is probably divided into boxes each about seven feet wide. Although it is impossible to say exactly how many public theatres of Shakespeare’s time had a gallery over the stage comparable to the one at the Swan, there is minimal evidence that some of them, notably the Rose, the first Globe, and the Red Bull, probably had a generally similar gallery. Moreover, it is at least possible that they all had such a gallery, those at any rate that had two-storey tiring-houses, for the apparently widespread and certainly long-lived custom of sitting “over the stage i’ the Lords roome” (as Jonson refers to it in 1599) suggests that it would have been an act of economic naïveté on the part of house-keepers (because of the consequent loss of revenue) to use the upper storey of a public-theatre tiring-house for any other general purpose than as a spectators’ gallery which, when occasionally required, might function secondarily and simultaneously as a raised production-area.

What is Tragedy? The two-thousand-three-hundred-year-old question, as evasive of answer as Pilate's, has recently been raised again. The latest to attempt the riddle, Peter Alexander in his Northcliffe lectures, defines it (after Aristotle) as that which produces a certain special response in an audience; and he declares that what conditions the response is the nature of the chief character presented. Tragedy, then, is a demonstration of the virtue the Greeks called Arete, nobility of spirit triumphing over disaster and death. The argument is witty and exciting, and succeeds in determining more precisely the species of pleasure that Tragedy brings. But the tragic hero's cap, as cut by Alexander, fits his chosen mannequin Hamlet with difficulty, and only after some bodging of the prayer-scene. There is still much to explain.

I suggest that the one essential thing about a tragedy is its shape. It is a progress, a development, a course. The man who runs it (both the character and the actor who presents that character) must, it is true, be of such a nature that the audience is under compulsion not merely to follow his fortunes intently but to become emotionally engaged. The nature of the tragic hero, however, admits of much wider variation than does the nature of the tragic progress, which can be plotted with much the same mathematical accuracy as the fall of a wave or the flight of a shell. Of course there are waves of different wave-length and shells of varying trajectory, but each follows the same general pattern. Upon the plotting of the tragic curve, first by the playwright and then by producer and actors, depends the entire success of the play in the theatre.

If these articles retain the interest of any reader, lay or learned, actor or ‘customer’, let him picture the writer wrapped in a white sheet and surrounded by the tapers of penitence as he sits at his desk to pick up the thread of his discourse after a break of two years. For a serial in an annual review is in any case absurd, and one that began in 1953 with a brief introduction and continued in 1954 with a lengthy digression has become an inexcusable contradiction in terms. The sinner can only plead that last year’s article on Romeo and Juliet will at least have shown that the “new way” involves issues of real importance to actors and general readers.

The old way with Shakespeare's texts, as I pointed out in my introduction, was a purely eclectic one since editors knew little more than the editors of the ancient classics about the character of their authors' original manuscripts or about the intermediary links between those manuscripts and the earliest printed texts; and what they did know only weakened any confidence they might have had in the integrity of the latter. All this, I also pointed out, is now changed. Thanks to the rise of modern bibliography, together with an increase in our knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre and of the dramatic documents that have come down from that period, confidence has largely replaced perplexity or despair in regard to the quartos and First Folio; and editors today feel tolerably sure that a Shakespearian manuscript or at worst a theatrical prompt-book lies either immediately, or at only one or two removes, behind most of them. The change was revolutionary and, as I noted finally, it came suddenly. There was little opposition and within a decade most scholars had been converted. "The door of Shakespeare's workshop stands ajar"1 I was emboldened to write in 1921.

The criticism of Hamlet is marked by its extent, its variety and its frequent aggressiveness. A. A. Raven’s A Hamlet Bibliography and Reference Guide 1877–1935 (Chicago, 1936) listed 2167 items: in the last twenty years the tide has not slackened. The Prince has been seen as too sensitive for the rough world, as given to metaphysical speculation, as shocked out of normality by incest and murder, as an effective stage-figure resistant to psychological probing, as a man of sanguine temperament falling into melancholy adust, as the victim of an Oedipus complex, and as an altogether vigorous and right-thinking young man who would stir no suspicion in the mind of an immigration officer. The play presents itself to some as good craftsman’s work; to others it is a palimpsest, with fragments of sources and early drafts unsatisfactorily showing themselves in the final version. For most critics the Prince dominates the play and their interest, but some would have us give at least comparable importance to other figures or would remind us that a dramatic poem exists primarily as a pattern of words. And it is possible, but rare, to be modest and tentative in writing of this play: more frequently we are offered a ‘solution’ which is, for good and all, to pluck out the play’s heart and banish its mystery. Because of the vast extent of this critical writing, it can happen that such a ‘solution’ is an old acquaintance innocently offered as new. The extreme divergence of critical opinion may suggest a flaw in the play, that the dramatist did not come to a full awareness, or at least a full dramatic realization, of his central idea.

The mystery of Shakespeare’s life seems to provoke a monstrous deal of speculation for each poor pennyworth of fact. Those who enjoy pure speculation may derive pleasure from Arthur Field’s Recent Discoveries Relating to the Life and Works of William Shakespeare, which makes some staggering claims, based largely on marginal notes in copies of old books, which, if the ‘facsimiles’ provided are accurate, are neither intelligible nor Elizabethan. Jean Paris cleverly presents a picture of Shakespeare, his age, and his treatment of various themes in carefully chosen quotations from the plays and poems. Shakespeare par lui-même is lavishly illustrated with photographs and facsimiles, and the author’s commentary gives the essential facts, but also airs again the Baconian and other heresies; Abel Lefranc and Percy Allen are named in the bibliography, but not E. K. Chambers. One or two further details relating to Shakespeare have been put forward in articles and notes. H. A. Shield identifies the five people associated with Shakespeare in a complaint of 1615 against Matthew Bacon, and finds a tenuous connexion between one of them and Grafton, Northants, which gave its name to a portrait of the playwright. Sir Giles Isham supports G. M. Young’s suggestion that the story of Lear may be related to the life of Brian Annesley (died 1604), whose youngest daughter of three he now shows was called Cordelia.

A selection has been made from the reports received from our correspondents, those which present material of a particularly interesting kind being printed wholly or largely in their entirety. It should be emphasized that the choice of countries to be thus represented has depended on the nature of the information presented in the reports, not upon either the importance of the countries concerned or upon the character of the reports themselves.

Canada

Shakespearian activities are now dominated by the Canadian Stratford Festival held in a little town of 20,000 people on Canada's River Avon.

In its second season, the Festival, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie and Cecil Clarke, presented The Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure. The Taming of the Shrew had much of pantomime in it, and included such extraneous things as a motor car and a stage horse. The production did not please purists, but was widely accepted by the Festival audiences.

With James Mason as Angelo and Frances Hyland as Isabella, Measure for Measure was a much more satisfying performance, especially since Lloyd Bochner, who played the Duke, provided the strong central character often missing in this play.

Though, in the following notes, no attempt is made to give an adequate idea of the wealth of the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, it is no doubt advisable, by way of introduction, to give some information on the origin of the library and explain what has inspired and is still inspiring its development.

The Bibliotheca Bodmeriana is a private collection originating in the passionate interest felt by its founder and present owner, Martin Bodmer, for the greatest literary masterpieces of the world. He has built it up for now nearly forty years with rare devotion and a wholly admirable single-mindedness.

In the sixteenth century, at the time of the Reformation, a Bodmer left his native village in the upper Rhone valley and settled at Zurich, where his descendants soon played a not inconspicuous part in the life of the small republic. In the latter part of the eighteenth century they turned their talents to the already flourishing textile industry, gave it a new impetus and henceforth counted among those citizens who, in the course of the last hundred and fifty years, made of Zurich the important business centre it now is. From his forebears, Martin Bodmer inherited, besides a large fortune, a tradition of wide and deep culture, a genuine love of the arts.

Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee held at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 generated a series of reactions that gave testimony to its almost unique power as Shakespearian publicity. The terms in which it publicized Shakespeare were markedly romantic. The Jubilee was a clear prefiguration of characteristic romantic attitudes towards Shakespeare, and the varied reactions to it in England, France and Germany were premonitory of the varied courses romanticism would follow. By overt statement and by dramatic presentation the Jubilee announced and fostered the interest in the poet’s biography and milieu, the connexion of his writings with medieval times, the emphasis on subjective, emotional reaction which resulted in widespread democratization of critical authority, and most specifically the concept of Shakespeare as almost literally a creator of living characters. In England these concepts were met and modified by the force of satire in the press and on the stage. Of the vast amount of writing elicited by the Jubilee, by far the greater portion was satiric, and Garrick himself was quickly forced into a compromise position by the power of public opinion. The stage productions based on the Jubilee as they appeared the following season display one by one an increasing element of ridicule. Garrick’s own play The Jubilee, staged 91 nights at Drury Lane, satirized the event he referred to by that time as “that foolish hobby-horse of mine”. The production represented a compromise, for within the satiric play Garrick retained the ‘blasphemous’ procession of Shakespearian characters that marched from the street through the audience to do obeisance to their ‘creator’s’ image on the stage, with unprecedented demand for audience participation in the idolatry. The play had the record run of the century, in 1769–70, and another extended run in the year 1776.

The court of Elsinore which is the focal point of all the action in Hamlet has a dual character, realized largely by means of style and imagery. The good values of the court are presented through its honour and dignity, through qualities associated with the majesty and eloquence of style in the play; the unpleasant side of the court through the imagery that springs from and extends the significance of the action. These aspects are important in setting the tone and establishing the themes, for they are made actual on the stage from the beginning, and the final revelation of evil is brought about through the conflict between them. Writers on the imagery of Hamlet have given a gloomy picture of the play’s atmosphere as one in which poison, disease and corruption are ‘dominant’; this is misleading, for though corruption underlies the play’s action, it exists chiefly in Hamlet’s imagination: as a result, it is latent rather than actual, like the murder of Hamlet’s father, which is not seen, but remains always in the background. The oppositions between the honour and the prison-like nature of the court are at least as important in creating the atmosphere of Hamlet, and a consideration of them suggests a more balanced picture. For corruption is significant only in relation to what is good or fine, and plays in which it is dominant, as several Jacobean examples testify, tend to be horrific or grotesque.

Allardyce Nicoll in his British Academy lecture answers the complaint, with which those who survey the year’s work must have a sneaking sympathy, that Shakespeare is being buried beneath his commentators. Although we may share Louis Wright’s depression about the state of Shakespearian scholarship, “a great deal of energy . . . being wasted on minutiae that will add up to very little”, Nicoll points out that “many things accomplished in the past urgently need to be done again” and “many productive areas await proper exploitation”. He gives a number of examples—texts which demand proper editing, documents which await detailed examination, further investigation of Shakespeare’s imagery, and, he might have added, the imagery of his contemporaries, “the imaginative consideration of Shakespeare’s creative genius in the light of” his sources, the examination of Shakespeare’s style, the publication of an adequate dictionary of Elizabethan English, the provision of an ‘authorized’ text. Nicoll concludes, not unnaturally, that such a programme can be carried out only by team-work. L. C. Knights, on the other hand, offers a warning on the limitations of historical scholarship as exemplified by Virgil K. Whitaker’s Shakespeare’s Use of Learning. He emphasizes that in applying Elizabethan ideas to our study of Shakespeare

C. J. Sisson, meanwhile, gives the general reader a brief guide3 to Shakespeare and his critics. He is well-balanced and catholic in his sympathies, though he seems to regard some admired modern criticism with suspicion.

An enduring link between Shakespeare’s work and “fair Bohemia” has been forged by the poet himself. His fanciful geography has for ever endeared him to the land-locked Bohemians, and The Winter’s Tale has frequently been produced with elaborate splendour and appropriate local colour in Prague. In the magnificent tercentenary pageant of 1864, unique in the annals of the continental stage, it was sweet Perdita, symbolizing the long-lost and newly recovered arts of Bohemia, who played the most prominent part among the two hundred and thirty Shakespearian characters represented.

First Translation

In tracing the successive stages of the cult of Shakespeare in Bohemia and of the invigorating impact of his genius on the revival of the Czech national spirit one has to bear in mind the complexities of the historical background. The collapse of Bohemian independence after 1620 left the German and Catholic minorities in possession of the country. As a result of a system of calculated oppression the Czech language, banished from polite use, gradually declined to the level of a peasant patois. With the upper classes exiled or alienated and the political centre shifted to Vienna, the social and intellectual life of the Bohemian cities was exposed to intense Germanization. By 1781, however, the year of the edicts guaranteeing partial religious toleration and emancipation of the enslaved peasantry, the long night was ending—and it is noteworthy that in the following year the first crude Czech paraphrases of Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice were printed in a provincial town of South Bohemia in the form of popular chapbooks.