This has been a notable year in textual studies; perhaps later generations will call it revolutionary. When has scholarly tradition been called so sharply in question as in F. P. Wilson’s lecture, ‘Marlowe and Shakespeare’? “Was it Shakespeare and Marlowe”, he inquires, “who first gave dignity and coherence to the historical play and raised it above the level of a chronicle? So we have always been taught to believe; but when we look for these early chronicle plays written before the Armada, where are they? . . . Many play-titles have survived [from the 1580’s], and a few plays, and if we go by these we are forced into this surprising conclusion: that there is no certain evidence that any popular dramatist before Shakespeare wrote a play based on English history.” And after dismissing the pretensions of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth and several of its ilk, he continues: “My conclusion is, though I am frightened at my own temerity in saying so, that for all we know there were no popular plays on English history before the Armada and that Shakespeare may have been the first to write one.” This is heady wine of a new orthodoxy with which to fortify oneself before venturing into the mazes of collaboration and revision that are detailed in the plays recently edited by John Dover Wilson.

In 1763, the Theatrical Review (No. 2) published a letter forged by George Steevens but supposed to have been written by George Peele to Christopher Marlowe. Showing a carefree disregard for chronological possibilities, the letter informed Marlowe that Shakespeare had based the speech about the “excellencie of acting” in Hamlet upon “opiniones gyven by Alleyn touchyng that subjecte”. Sir Sidney Lee has amply demonstrated the wide currency attained by this amiable fiction during the following hundred years. Its wide acceptance during the nineteenth century is of some interest because its exaltation of Alleyn into an authority on acting fit to instruct Shakespeare offers so diametrical a contrast to modern theories of the relationship between these two men. Alleyn’s reputation as an actor has certainly declined during the present century. “Somewhat over-heavy” and “an exaggerated style of acting” are recent and typical pronouncements on his histrionic art. Two reasons explain the rather patronizing tone of many modern assessments of Alleyn’s quality. First, it is assumed that when Burbage took the role of Hamlet and delivered his advice to the players at the Globe in 1602, he was indirectly criticizing the technique of Alleyn, the leading actor of the rival company at the Fortune playhouse. Thus Hamlet’s remarks about good and bad acting, far from having been originally expounded by Alleyn, are now widely believed to have been directed against him. Secondly, the discovery in 2 Henry Ⅳ of parodies of passages in plays acted by Alleyn’s men at the Rose has encouraged at least one critic to assume that Shakespeare was gibing at Alleyn’s style of acting even before he wrote Hamlet.

So, in the columns of Aris's Birmingham Gazette, wrote George Dawson, the celebrated Birmingham preacher, lecturer and politician, in the year 1861. He was writing in his capacity of President of the local Shakespeare Club and in furtherance of an idea first publicly mooted by another prominent citizen, Samuel Timmins, in 1858. The year 1863 saw the formation of a committee to pursue the project and collect donations. On 23 April 1864, the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, the then Mayor of Birmingham, William Holliday, gave a public breakfast at a local hotel, when a number of volumes were presented and an address and deed of gift were received and accepted by the Mayor on behalf of the town. In accordance with the deed of gift, a room was set apart in the Central Public Library, and, on 23 April 1868, the Shakespeare Memorial Library was opened to the public.

When the word orthographie came into English via French in the late Middle Ages, it meant ‘right writing’. As late as 1640 Simon Daines in Orthoepia Anglicana so defined it, and distinguished it from orthoepie, or ‘right speaking’. Most of Daines’s section on Orthography deals with capital letters, punctuation, elision, etc. Grammarians of an earlier generation, such as Hart and Bullokar, seemed to give to orthography a more restricted meaning (one favoured by the New English Dictionary), viz. “that part of grammar that determines the value of letters, individually or in combination, in making sounds or words”. This was nothing more nor less than spelling, which Hart and Bullokar realized needed reform and regularity. They failed in their proposals because writers and printers ignored them as the figments of pedants, and it was eventually the more practical consideration of haste during the polemic activity of the Civil War that compelled the printers to systematize.

Books of the past year include one, by M. M. Reese, which covers the whole of our field—life, times and stage—in a manner which seeks to “mediate” the conclusions of scholarship “in terms acceptable to ordinary men”. The author shows that he can do this lucidly, readably, and, except in the rather unnecessary chapter on the University Wits, without superficiality. Though taking most of his facts at second hand, he interprets them with skill and judgement. His sane balance in many controversial matters is shown especially in the biographical sections. Arguing the probability of Shakespeare’s grammar-school education, he reminds us of the lack of evidence for it; he reviews the theories about the “hidden” years without adding to them; a first-rate reconstruction of Shakespeare’s working life as playwright for an acting company ends with a sensitive recognition of how little as well as how much in his work this can explain. All the same, more than a little learning does not entirely avoid the dangers of relying upon secondary authorities: it cannot have been Peele himself who specified the three vials of blood and the sheep’s gather called for by the playhouse ‘plot’ of one of his plays, and the occurrence of variants in the First Folio does not show it to have been poorly printed by the standards of its day. Some slight doubts about the author’s security in textual matters come to a head when bad quartos are wrongly defined. Occasional statements which go beyond the evidence are made more dangerous by the confidence which the author’s usual scrupulousness is likely to inspire.

In Thomas Middleton’s Black Book, Lucifer, “as Prologue to his own Play”,

to ascend “this dusty theatre of the world”. Remembering the ‘vaulting’ Herods and Lucifers of Miracle tradition, readers of Elizabethan drama must have often wondered whether in Shakespeare’s time players ever stepped beyond the confines of their platform stages, or whether the stage-rails constituted a frail but sure barrier between the demesnes of actor and audience, a sacrosanct frontier between two inviolable territories, like the line of footlights on the modern ‘picture’ stage.

A clear case can, I think, be made out for some continuity of tradition and convention between the Miracle and Elizabethan theatres in these matters: gesture, delivery, contemporary costuming, sound and light effects, machinery, affection for gruesome properties, spectacles, music, songs and dancing, soliloquies and asides, 'simultaneous' setting, trapwork, unlocalized settings, attitude to the Unities, fusion of the Tragic and Comic, and other aspects of production. It is clear too that the two theatres shared the same basic tradition of intimacy between actor and audience.

A selection has here 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.

International Shakespeare Conference

The Sixth International Conference of Shakespeare Scholars was held at Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1953. Thirty-four delegates representing ten countries attended the Conference, at which papers were read and discussions held on various aspects of the chosen theme, Shakespeare's Comedies. On Friday, 14th August, the Conference began with a paper by Ludwig Borinski of Germany on * Shakespeare's Comic Prose', after which a public lecture was given by Sir Barry Jackson on 'The Production of Shakespeare's Comedies'. On Saturday 15th August, the private discussion, led by Karl Brunner of Austria, and the public lecture by J. Dover Wilson were devoted to The Merchant of Venice.

It has been remarked that the audience of an Elizabethan theatre must have been not very different from a modern cinema audience: they cared chiefly for the spectacular and the sensational. The influence of Senecan tragedy is responsible for the way in which the Elizabethan taste for thrillers developed, but assimilation takes place only when there exists an affinity: Seneca supplied the Elizabethan dramatists with a justification for horrors for which there was certainly a spontaneous taste. Plays like The Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Feversham, though posterior to The Spanish Tragedy which is clearly indebted to Seneca, cannot be traced to a foreign or classical influence, but are the direct outcome of a native interest in the police-court horrors of the time. Such interest is perhaps nowhere better witnessed than in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, with its sensationalism continually overreaching itself in the display of horrors piled upon horrors, and its iterated showman’s cries: “Prepare your eares and your teares, for neuer tyll thys thrust I anie tragecall matter vpon you.”

Shakespeare’s language is proving one of the most germinal topics in present-day Shakespeare studies and there is a stimulating variety of approach. For those who have wearied of the incessant detective work expended on the Elizabethan setting and in attempts to probe Shakespeare’s life-history, certain new tendencies and principles in literary criticism offer a refreshing alternative to the historical approach and seem to set the poet free from the bondage of Time and Change. Yet the language is basic and this language is Elizabethan. Wherever the critic ends, he must begin from a recognition of the Elizabethan factors in the language; he may, indeed, as in the recent rehabilitation of the pun, be moved to exploit them. In what follows I shall try to illustrate these Elizabethan factors and I have before me two primary objects or beliefs: first, the necessity of keeping continually in mind the oral aspects of Shakespeare’s language, originally conceived in the mind for an actor’s voice and published to the world on an actor’s lips; and, secondly, the conviction that the best solvent of pedantry is not less knowledge but more—that the more we know of the Elizabethan mind as it worked on and through language the more difficult it becomes to rivet on to Shakespeare certain modern pedantries.

It is strange that the role of anticipation and foreboding in Shakespearian drama has so far not received adequate attention and treatment. For here we find an important feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic art which is closely connected not only with the dramatist’s technique of preparation, but also with his art of characterization. It bears, too, on the composition and structure of his plays, since the peculiar function of anticipation and foreboding often consists in establishing subtle correspondences between earlier and later utterances or situations in the drama, or in binding together various threads of the action. Until now, however, the only aspect under which foreboding in Shakespeare’s drama has been studied connectedly seems to have been Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural. But the role played by foreboding is, with Shakespeare, in no way exhausted by his use of omen, prophecies and other portents which could be classified as more or less supernatural. And it is this very extension of the device of foreboding beyond the traditional realm of prophecy, omen, dream, etc., which makes a study of this particular feature so interesting and displays Shakespeare’s superiority over his contemporaries and predecessors in such a singular manner. For although we find anticipation and foreboding in all great dramatists, in Sophocles and Euripides as well as in Calderón and Ibsen, it can safely be said that with no other dramatist has this feature been turned to so manifold use and developed into such a refined and subtle instrument of dramatic art as with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Histories are not popular. They are generally regarded as inferior works, neither flesh nor fowl, lacking alike the Tragedies' direct assault on the emotions and the poetry and fancy of the Comedies. Recent commentators have not made appreciation easier by claiming that the Lancastrian Histories, at least, are not eight plays but one, a continuous argument on the duties of kingship and the dangers of disorder progressively developed through eight linked sections. The man in the street goes to the theatre for a play, not for a political treatise. He is hardly prepared to stomach a trilogy, much less an 'octology' and, if he were, few theatres to-day could stage such entertainments as a matter of routine. The greater honour, then, to the Stratford Governors for devoting almost the whole of their Festival season to a sequence of Shakespeare's four plays on the rise of the House of Lancaster. They thereby provided a unique opportunity of studying Shakespeare's Histories in the most highly recommended perspective, and so of judging what were his purpose and plan in writing them.

The Director, having undertaken to present the plays in accordance with modern theory, very properly committed himself to it wholeheartedly. The programme note to Richard II stated unequivocally: "It is generally agreed that the four plays of this season's historical cycle form a tetralogy and were planned by Shakespeare as one great play." Everything in Anthony Quayle's production was focused on continuity, on the connexions and the likenesses between the plays, and their differences were studiously toned down.

It is always dangerous to treat a great Shakespearian speech as an isolated piece of verse, since the greatest speech will be the most deeply rooted in the total context of the play. On the other hand, there are some speeches which are, as it were, focal, gathering up the main themes and concentrating the “extended metaphor” of the whole play. Detailed analysis of such passages, far from constituting a risky ‘academic exercise’, is in fact imperative. And it goes without saying that the speech which I have chosen (Othello’s “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul”), seems to me eminently suitable for such an analysis; for without analysis at this point there is the danger of a simple, emotional surrender, and, consequently, of a fatal misinterpretation.

I have undertaken this study as an actor, but it would be false to imagine that I am deliberately aiming to represent the 'actor's point of view', or to suggest a method of 'characterization', or to offer any opposed alternative to the academic approach. Instead, I hope to indicate not an opposition, but a fundamental uniformity. Shakespearian actor and Shakespearian critic meet in the study of the words, but the actor's 'characterization' and the critic's analysis are alike valueless, unless they are related to the play in its wholeness. There are two approaches, but there is only one end.

A selection has here 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.

Australia

The Old Vic visited Australia in 1948 presenting Richard III (along with two other non-Shakespearian plays). In 1949-50 the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company brought productions of Macbeth and Much Ado about Nothing. These were the last professional companies to play Shakespeare in Australia until the John Alden Shakespearian Company, an amateur Australian group, became professional in December 1951. This company started with a production of King Lear which ran for six months in Sydney. The repertoire now includes A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Othello and The Tempest will soon be added.

The National Theatre Movement of Australia in Melbourne, an organization which receives financial support from the State of Victoria, has produced three Shakespearian plays during the year. They started with a semi-professional production of The Taming of the Shrew with Petruchio and Katherina portrayed by professional English actors while the rest of the cast were local amateurs. Later in the season Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice were presented.