The Island Princess (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Clare McManus.

Continuing its policy of publishing more obscure but provocative examples of early modern drama, The Island Princess offers the work of John Fletcher at the height of his powers, if dating is correct, during the period when he’s been installed as Shakespeare’s successor as the in-house writer for the King’s Men and at liberty to experiment with dramatic forms, in this case continuing his investigations into the possibilities of the tragicomedy. Opening as a kind of swashbuckling romance in which the titular royal offers one of three suitors her hand in marriage if they’re capable of rescuing her brother the king from captivity, the story slowly becomes a disturbing discourse on corruption, conspiracy and religious intolerance.

Covering similar themes to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Fletcher’s own The Sea Voyage, the story takes place against a backdrop of the spice-trade and islands in and around Indonesia, and the colonial clash between Christianity and Islam. In her introduction, editor Clare McManus explains how the playwright utilises this exoticism to reflect back to the audience the ongoing cross-cultural clash between Catholic and Protestantism and how even more than most plays of the period, our appreciation of the work has been diminished across time because of changes in our world view, how elements of language, even the removal of a beard however innocuous now, then carried great meaning.

McManus also moves to reclaim Quisara, the princess herself, as one of the great theatrical female heroines, noting that she may well have originated with Richard Sharpe who also premiered the title role in The Duchess of Malfi, indicating they’re roles of similar complexity. Throughout the play she oscillates between Amazonian confidence and victimhood, attempting to force a potential husband into converting for her benefit before agree to the same for him, sometimes feigning madness or at least giving the impression of such. This seems like another of those roles which is almost being held away from female actors because the repertory of plays still performed from this period is generally exclusive to one genius.

Nevertheless, McManus is able to dedicate a fifth of her introduction to the play's lack of theatrical history, at least in its purest form. Soon after Fletcher’s death, it found itself adapted under Charles II with the inclusion of allusions to topical events like the Great Fire of 1666 (which was the version Samuel Pepys saw three times).  French Huguenot Peter Motteux then utilised it as a source of a semi-opera, which due to its popularity became the form on which all subsequent revivals were based and is generally thought of as being enmeshed in the history of opera in that period, or until 1739 when it was retired from the stage taking the original with it, its bawdiness falling out of fashion.

There are only two recent revivals of note. In 1995 it heralded the beginning of the modern Shakespeare's Globe’s Read or Dead series starring Mark Rylance and Josette Simon and seven years later, an RSC production directed by Gregory Doran, a risky prospect in the wake of 9/11. McManus excellent commentary on this production demonstrates that theatre does not occur in a vacuum with scenes of Portuguese colonial violence that in the period of writing provided a context to the plays later descent into religious fanaticism being cut in case they're seen as being a “racist stereotype”. There’s an undercurrent of disappointment in McManus's tone, of how a play which has not been produced in many years was potentially undermined by the period of its staging.

The introduction concludes with what’s always my favourite section, the publication history. The Island Princess was published posthumously in the humongous first folio or "The Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher" (1947) which as the academic notices includes the work of about nine playwrights since it includes their collaborations with others, though not, curiously Shakespeare (we'd presumably still have Cardenio if it had). This play seems to be the work of a printing house owned by Susan Islip, one of two houses whose labours are only recently being given critical focus. Perhaps, as more and more of the plays from this volume become available, their work will be illuminated too.

The Island Princess (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Clare McManus. Methuen Drama. 2013. RRP: £13.99. ISBN: 978-1904271536. Review copy supplied.

Coriolanus (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Peter Holland.

If ever the preface area of a book threatens to derail the introduction and main text, it’s the preface area to this Arden 3rd edition of Coriolanus. Firstly because after the notes on the text, in his notes on the introduction, editor Peter Holland cautions us against expecting a formulaic consideration of the play, no discussion of plays major concerns, chronological production history, nothing on the current state of critical analysis (especially in footnotes). Secondly, due to the romantic picture he paints of writing the textual commentary, sitting on parallel desks with his wife Romana, also a professor (editing Stevie Smith’s poems), in an apartment in Montmartre, listening to Jazz CDs “looking out across the roof-tops at the Eiffel Tower”. Envious sigh.

Elsewhere, Holland offers some tangential explanation for his approach to the introduction. The extended gestation period meant that a number of other editions were published in the meantime, notably the Oxford and New Cambridge, whose quality he acknowledges. With these texts and the earlier Ardens still available and readily, it’s unlikely that a student will consult a single edition in study, so he’s decided it’s important to add to the critical mass rather than regurgitate it. Which is actually much in keeping with the “eclectic” nature of all these later Ardens, which have tended to go, for better or worse, with the given editor’s area of interest rather than forcing them into some rote consideration.

What that means for Corolanius is that Holland doesn’t offer much in the way of Freudian commentary on the Roman general’s relationship with his mother, or the implications of us only having a single version of the play in the First Folio rather than sundry other Quartos good and bad, or anything other than a cursory glance at contemporary staging. Which is fine to some extent. Philip Brockbank’s Arden 2nd does indeed cover all of that in a more typically methodological manner. But it is disconcerting to be suddenly thrust initially into a discussion of how the play inspired artists in the 1930s, in an eclectic US production, an unfinished TS Eliot adaptation and a Parisian translation which was turned into a Cause célèbre amongst various contemporary political factions.

Plus, in actuality Holland does still covering many of the topics you might expect to find in an introduction, just not necessarily in the typical order. A section entitled “Beginnings” investigates the sources of the play, from Liby and Virgin, Plutarch and North, and a close textual analysis suggests that like a screenwriter tackling a Jesus film when faced with the gospels (my analogy), Shakespeare utilised the various aspects of contradictory sources to craft his own story, extending the lives of some figures so that unlike is other tragedies, only the title character dies in the climax. The difference is that Holland expects the reader to already have some working knowledge of the play, that this isn’t the first time they’ve held a version in their hand. If you want an entry level introduction, I’d seek out the Oxford instead.

When you’ve returned you’ll find much that is of interest. In dating the play, Holland isn’t able to quite find anything conclusive, but his approach, an In Our Time style investigation of the peasant riots in the Midlands in roughly the same period as the writing of the play reveals many parallels with Shakespeare’s treatment of a populace so often either cut or left in the margins. Like the best Arden intros, Holland does however refuse to be drawn into suppositions and guesses and will only work with available evidence. We don’t know within which playhouse it originally premiered, the act and scene structuring of the Folio confirming nothing so much as the potential decisions of compositors or the stage traditions within which it was printed.

Holland also does still include much about the stage history of Coriolanus. In “shaping the play”, Holland notes how audience reactions change depending on the placement of the interval and how when, in 1964, Sir Peter Hall decided not to end his first modern half with the banishment scene, including instead the two coda scenes from the opening of act four, it disconcerted the audience who were already beginning to make for the bar. Hamlet’s rather like that too. The prince’s triumphant reaction to Claudius’s storming from The Mousetrap seems like the ideal conclusion, but I’ve seen productions which eek things out so that the second half begins with the closet scene or even with Hamlet being sent to England, which also has a logic due to the time gaps, all a reminder that Shakespeare was structuring his plays for a different audience and production sensibility.

Holland ends his introduction where he began with talk about adaptations, in this case Brecht and Osborne, and productions and so the recent Ralph Fiennes film. The former has some lovely bits of gossip about the NT production and recasting and the latter will be of interest to film students in relation to bringing the play to screen. Unlike in a theatre, perhaps, film allowed Fiennes even greater flexibility in reshaping the text. Holland’s less than pleased with some of his choices, presumably because this is the version which will be most popularly seen, particularly in the treatment of one of the supporting characters, which changes the sense of the play to some degree. Much as I enjoyed the film, I have some sympathy with that. Unlike Hamlet, there won’t be another Coriolanus film along to offer an alternative reading.

The textual commentary is in keeping with previous Ardens and with the newer innovation of longer notes at the back. The textual analysis explains the working methods of the compositors of F1 and indicates the challenges of making sense of their decisions and how all too often they underestimated the amount of text which would be required on each page leading to abbreviations and some re-engineering of what might have been the playwright’s original intent. A skeletal table listing notable productions follows then a discussion of how the play might be cast, how large a group of actors might be required.  In other words, Holland can't quite steer away from the conventions he says he's ignoring and ultimately this edition is the stronger for it.

Coriolanus (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Peter Holland. Bloomsbury. 2013. RRP: £8.99. ISBN: 978-1904271284. Review copy supplied.

Hamlet's Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare.

One of the most curious and so most notable objects in last year's British Museum exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world was The Robben Island Bible, the hidden copy of the Alexander edition of the Complete Works which was passed around and inspired the inmates of the prison where Nelson Mandela and his ANC colleagues were held captive.  Throughout, the prisoners left their mark or signature on significant quotes or sections of the plays and in this exploration of the implications the book had for the prisoners, David Schalkwyk suggests that although their connection to the text can sometimes be overstated, its implications as an overall symbol of disobedience cannot.  The main thrust of the book compares the prisoner's experience to Hamlet, comparing quotations and memoir of inmates, Denmark being an emotional prison, with the young prince's speeches, a character's individual experience expressing a collective reality.

Hamlet's Dreams by David Schalkwyk is published by Bloomsbury and is out now.  RRP: £14.99.  ISBN: 978-1441129284.  Review copy supplied.

The Tragedy of Mariam (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Ramona Wray.

Elizabeth Cary was born in the mid-1590s at Burford Priory in Oxfordshire. She was educated at home, mostly in ancient languages including Hebrew. She was married in 1602 to the soldier John Davies and amid giving birth to ten children and following her husband’s promotion to Ireland, she became highly regarded in the community launching an apprenticeship scheme for poor and orphaned children. She would later return to England but after a short spell of imprisonment due to her conversion to Catholicism, and estrangement from her Protestant husband, poverty overwhelmed her and she died, penniless in 1639.

Ironically given the relative obscurity of her work outside academic circles then and now, our understanding of her life has been enhanced beyond most of her contemporaries because a decade after her birth her daughter Lucy penned a biography. If only one of Shakespeare’s children had been as interested. This work is also a reason why we know that during her already full life, she also became an accomplished scholar, with a strong published history which included historical texts, poetry and drama, including The Tragedy of Mariam, now published by Arden’s Early Modern Drama.

Billed as the first early modern play written by a woman, this dramatises the sixteen year relationship between notorious Herod and his wife Mariam “telescoped” into twenty-four hours retaining the classical unity of drama and synthesising as the cover synopsis describes a decade and half's worth of “family intrigues, missing monarchs and extra-marital liaisions” as well as “madness and martyrdom”. One of a number of plays in the that period working from religious subjects, this is widescreen epic four hundred years before Cecil B De Mille picked up a camera played amongst a cast of few within a private setting.

In contrast to the other texts in the series, Cary’s play is an example of closet drama written either to be read or performed within a private setting perhaps by amateurs (though there's no evidence of Mariam having been acted in her lifetime). As Wray’s blistering introduction indicates, that’s diminished its reputation and stifled academic consideration of the work; she mentions originally having greeted the play at college through a nearly unreadable version photocopied from microform. As I’ve said before, that’s why Arden’s work is so important, and that of New Mermaids too: producing readable copies of otherwise obscure plays, revealing a variety of drama from the period beyond the usual suspects.

But more recent editions have led to reappraisals and as Wray's discussion elucidates, Cary’s writing is as rich as any of her contemporaries with diverse literary allusions and a solid thematic apparatus investigating as sections of the introduction indicate, Jerusalem as a modern city, the tyranny of empires in this case Rome, the role of women in that society exemplified by Mariam treatment at the hands of her husband with her ensuing martyrdom and how beauty and sexuality are codified through her relationship with her sister Salome not to mention the parallels the story has with Cary's own biography.

As is customary, there’s a thorough discussion of the contemporary text, in this case a single Quarto publication in 1613, so there’s little need for the investigation into textual difference seen in other Arden, barring printing errors and sections omitted when the play entered the public realm. There’s also surprisingly a short production history which charts the efforts of colleges and the odd semi-professional theatre company to mount productions of Mariam the general consensus being that its entirely possible to produce an exciting, thoughtful evening with some ingenuity. As Wray suggests, it’s about time a professional theatre company took the work on board and revealed it to the wider public.

The Tragedy of Mariam (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Ramona Wray. Methuen Drama. 2012. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9781904271598. Review copy supplied.

Romeo and Juliet (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Rene Weis.

Finding new critical approaches to many of Shakespeare’s plays continues to be a challenge, perhaps even more so for academic editions which usually strive for a tone beyond a basic introduction that regurgitate the essentials.  Rene Weis’s interest in this new Arden edition of Romeo and Juliet is to investigate the balance between its main protagonists and suggest that for all the masculine prominence in the billing, the play’s really about the feminine side or rather that the title should more fittingly echo the final line of the play, “For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

Weis argues that Juliet has a more thorough back story, that more time is spent setting up her extended family even to the point of paralleling her with a child born to the Nurse at the same time as the young Capulet who didn’t live.  Shakespeare investigates far more deeply into the girl’s passage into womanhood and she receives the greater number of speeches capturing the aggressive passion of teenage love.  Romeo’s parents are near ciphers and when Romeo does have narrative agency it’s usually in service of rounding out Juliet’s character rather than the Montague, his only real character development in shifting from platitudes to poetry with his infatuation moves away from Rosalind.

The evidence continues into the section about  how Shakespeare’s utilises time, the play structuring itself carefully across four days.  Glance at the included chronology and we can see just how many of the scenes, especially in the latter half of the play are about Juliet dealing with this secret love, outside the gaze of her parents, of Paris being foisted upon her.  The parallels with A Midsummer Night’s Dream are worthwhile in comparing how a similar situation, which also includes the application of potions is resolved in a resolutely comedic fashion rather than the realistic, chaotic worlds of Verona which ends in tragedy.

From here Weis delves into the dating of the play which, thanks to the play's rich contemporary allusion, the editor puts at late summer to the early autumn 1596, within thirty years of the play’s primary source Brooke’s poem, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet.  Shakespeare’s genius is often brought into question because of these borrowings, but as Weis explains, Shakespeare’s genius was in taking these sometimes mundane works and transforming them into plays which stand the test of time; how many similar poems and stories remain obscure because the playwright wasn’t interested?

With so much to cram in, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the production history isn’t as detailed as in some Ardens, but expresses its worth in concentrating on adaptation over more traditional productions, from Garrick’s interpolations to Berlioz’s symphonie dramatique through Prokofiev’s ballet and Tchaikovsky.  The closest analysis is of the modern film versions, of West Side Story, of Zeferelli’s 1968 film and of Baz Lurhmann’s in 1996 which Weis bravely brands, “the greatest Shakespeare film ever”.  My personal taste would still put Branagh’s Hamlet above it, but it’s difficult to argue with that assessment in terms of popular appeal.

At page ninety-four, such criticism gives way to the text and textual analysis.  Like Hamlet, R+J exists primarily in an oddball first Quarto, more authoritative Q2 and of course F1 and like Hamlet the relationship between them is hotly contested.  R+J’s Q1 is about eight hundred lines shorter than its later sister work, with some sections omitted and others rewritten and the argument has generally shifted away from memorial reconstruction to a players edition produced either by a printer or Shakespeare himself for playing in the sticks.  It was certainly considered useful enough to be glanced at during the type setting of Q2 for textual confirmations.

Arden published Hamlet’s Q1 in a separate volume with F1, properly edited.  For Romeo & Juliet a facsimile of the British Library’s copy has been included as an appendix, some of the margin notes included, slightly abbreviated.  Part of me wishes that this too had instead been a properly edited version, but given the academic timescales and that its already been thirty years since the last Arden edition, it's understandable that Weis should concentrate on the play as it's best known with a few interpolations.  Plus facsimiles allow us to glimpse the text as it was originally seen by the Elizabethan public, without four hundred years of further editorial intervention.

Romeo and Juliet (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Rene Weis. Methuen Drama. 2012. RRP: £8.99. ISBN: 9781903436912. Review copy supplied.

Angels and Ducats: Shakespeare's Money and Medals by Barrie Cook.

Even before the Euro, there were many units of currency which travelled across national borders, one of which was the ducat. The ducat was first minted in Sicily in the 1140s but would eventually spread across the continent for the next eight hundred odd years. Eurosceptics will be pleased to hear that Britain stuck with pounds, shillings and pence, but it still became one of Shakespeare’s most used currencies as a way of conveying extreme wealth. Ducat appears four times in Hamlet, most memorably in the prince's cry as he accidentally runs Polonius through as a reminder that he believes he’s killing his father-in-law.

But the ducat is just one of dozens of units of currency which crop up in Shakepeare’s plays as they span history and geography and in Angels and Ducats: Shakespeare’s Money & Medals, Barrie Cook, the curator of Medieval and Early Modern Coinage at the British Museum utilises this national collection to explain some of the history of these now obscure units of commerce and their meaning within the texts.  The book's published to coincide with a display opening in April which like the Summer exhibitions, relates the objects to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, in theatrical economies of scale and the portrayal of royalty on the coins.

As Cook explains, for all the apparent obscurity that some of the language has now, Shakespeare was always concerned with making his stories lucid even if they were set in an earlier time and so although there was enough knowledge available to offer an accurate portrayal, he was unafraid to employ anachronisms as an aid to understanding. The Comedy of Errors, set in the ancient Mediterranean world pinions on the movement of “angels” and “ducats”. But they also provide a useful element of punning and allusion, “nobles” and “crowns” appearing in all the history plays both in plain speech and as a way of conveying satirically the authority being fought for.

But those of us perhaps slightly more interested in theatrical history will find most useful the chapter on how the business of acting was financed.  Cook has compiled a chart itemising the cost of visiting the theatre in Shakespeare’s day and production budgets. What’s surprising is that theatre goers preferred comfort over visibility, the yard nearest the action (albeit standing) far cheaper than the upper galleries some way away from the stage, the exact opposite of the charging mechanics in modern theatres and concert halls were the cheap seats are at the very back, which in some older auditoriums might as well be in the pub next door.

The well chosen illustrations demonstrate that the physical nature of the currency hasn't changed that much across the centuries and almost always feature some monarch on one side, an indication of the denomination on the other. Cook also briefly touches on medals and they too follow a similar format which explains why they’re thought of as such an important part of our history. Some of the only illustrations we have of the notable Romans are the profiles which appear in archaeological discoveries, references to which are another way that Shakespeare is able make these ancient times and peoples more tangible.

Angels and Ducats: Shakespeare's Money and Medals by Barrie Cook is published by the British Museum.  2012.  RRP:  £9.99 paperback.  ISBN: 9780714118215.  Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare's Britain by Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton, with Rebecca Allen.

Perhaps sensing that some visitors to their Shakespeare: staging the world exhibition would rather have a more visual keepsake rather than a larger academic study, the British Museum have also published a much smaller, more focused distillation of the exhibition’s themes. Also authored by Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton with additional work by Becky Allen the exhibition’s project co-ordinator, Shakespeare’s Britain concentrates on high quality images of the objects and shorter, punchier explanations for their relevance to Shakespeare’s story.

One of the consequences of the distillation is that focuses on the more distasteful elements of the exhibition, the engravings depicting executions, reliquaries containing disembodied eyes and torture devices for witches not to mention once of the lanterns reputedly used in the Gunpowder plot. We’re also reminded of how limited the medieval view of the world could be, with the native peoples from other parts of the world treated as curiosities, something Shakespeare himself referenced in The Tempest when Trinculo suggests he could display Caliban in London for profit.

Of the two, assuming you have the money, I’d still recommend the much larger catalogue which collects almost all the objects in the exhibition plus a few more and whose textual real estate is something which can be dipped in and out of in conjunction with a more general study of the plays. But Shakespeare’s Britain would probably the perfect gift for a curious teenager (assuming they still exist) who’s already somewhat aware of his biography but aren’t quite ready for a full blown academic study.

Shakespeare's Britain by Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton, with Rebecca Allen is published by the British Museum. 2012. RRP: £9.99 paperback. ISBN: 9780714128269. Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare: staging the world by Jonathan Bate & Dora Thornton.

Pirates! What’s often forgotten about Hamlet is that amongst the psychological introspection and political intrigue, the prince’s mortality is delayed by the left of field plot device of joining a band of pirates. But what’s all the more remarkable that for all the indignation contemporary Horatio actors include in their performance when reading this ludicrous tale, it’s not there in the text. That's because for Shakespeare and so presumably his audience it was a fairly normal occurrence. In that period there was a spate of incidents in which bored or bankrupt nobles “turned Turk” and joined a Mediterranean pirate ship. We might even wonder if, since some of the most notorious cases happened over a decade after Hamlet was premiered, the play actually promoted piracy as a valid lifestyle choice.

Opening in July, the British Museum’s summer exhibition, Shakespeare: staging the world (which is their contribution to Cultural Olympiad) seeks to illuminate objects from the collection like the robes of a Mediterranean pirate through the prism of his plays, his life and his world. As with any cultural achievement, Shakespeare's work will have been understood by a specific collective memory and while most of us non-academics are able to gain a sense of the words and stories, even if we’re particularly familiar some of the plays there will still be certain specific references beyond our understanding. By presenting the visitor with the things which would have been familiar to the people of the period, the British Museum hopes we'll a greater understanding of the more curious aspects of the texts.

In this accompanying catalogue exhibition curator Dora Thornton and her Shakespearean consultant Jonathan Bate provide even greater context for the objects either because they’re specifically mentioned in the text, are directly related to Shakespeare biography in some way or as is most often the case are thematically connected to the plays. To extent this is a natural progression from the chapter in Bate’s Soul of the Age, which forensically reconstructed Shakespeare’s library based on the sources he must have read. This is a selection of objects that would or at least could have been equally inspirational, even indirectly. Some selections might initially seem tenuous but keep with it and connections fire off in all directions.

The book is packed with explanations as interesting as Hamlet’s brief naval dalliance.  When Othello mentions the kind of Spanish rapier he's utilising as his means of his suicide, Shakespeare isn’t simply providing colour, he’s still telling us something about the kind of man the moor is, as interested in fashion as the ability to defend oneself. When he says that's constructed from ‘ice-brook’s templar’ he’s indicating that a cheap dagger simply isn’t good enough to bring him down (and even in texts when it's read as “Insbrook” also a source of good quality metal). On the opposite page is a more traditional Turkish sword with its familiar banana shape, which is fine and with a simple hilt and broad, bland blade, still deadly but without the panache or sleek, smooth shape of Othello’s death bringer.

Unlike Soul of the Age, the catalogue lacks a single argument as such, preferring instead to choose single topics (witchcraft) or a geographical locations (Venice or The Tempest’s unnamed island) and provide case study which oscillates between general and specific, submerging the reader in the mountain of facts and anecdotes perhaps in an attempt to mimic the experience of travelling through the exhibition.  Ours eyes shift curiously from a bear skull to Horary quadrant the woollen cap which was compulsory for people over the age of six on Sundays and holidays in the 1570s.  The effect is bewildering and requires some effort on the part of the reader to reorientate themselves as the authors shift us back and forth through centuries at the turn of the page, from Richards II to III in an instant.

But it’s always rewarding. The book is strongest when considering those Histories in the context of what would have been for him the contemporary monarchy. A portrait of Richard II by an unknown artist is shown to be the reason for Elizabeth I’s oft repeated quote “I am Richard know yet not that?” rather than an “illegal” performance of the play as is commonly thought having been found “fastened to the backside of a door of a base room” in the Palace of Westminster and put in a more prominent position on the Queen’s orders. Its structure, the monarch bolt upright in his throne, orb and sceptre in hand, also influenced the coronation portrait of Elizabeth also included (and perhaps this shot of Ben Wishaw as Richard II in the new BBC adaptation of Shakespeare’s play).

There’s certainly an argument to be made for a more structured approach and that in some respects the text is justifying the inclusion in the exhibition of some gorgeous objects not often given the opportunity for exhibition that only have a tangential connection to Shakespeare. But in other senses it doesn’t matter given how memorable they are. Each page is filled with surprising objects and although some, like the Murano jug reputedly blown by writer Thomas Coryat on his grand tour aren’t done justice in photography, there’s still some excitement in seeing a painting of some anonymous noble and then an adjacent photo of the very tunic he’s wearing still in pristine condition.  Those of you able to see the actual exhibition when it opens will be very lucky indeed.

Shakespeare: staging the world by Jonathan Bate & Dora Thornton is published by the British Museum. 2012. £25 in paperback, ISBN 9780714128245. £40 in hardback, ISBN: 9780714128283. Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare's Poems (Arden Shakespeare: Third Revised Edition). Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.

Recently I’ve been pre-occupied with the question of whether I’ve ever truly been in love. Properly in love.  Head over heels.  The real thing.  Friends and ex-friends might offer a few examples of when it was perfectly possible that I must have been, because of all the talking, but it’s in these moments, right how, when I can honestly say that I’m not, that I wonder if I ever have. Then, I look at Shakespeare and he offers answers, just a few, as he did yesterday when I spent many hours reading this Arden Third Edition of his sonnets.

The reason Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds…” is popular is because it neatly explains to us how when we are in love, the world can be falling about around us, the person we’re in love with might even be the cause and yet, something within us continues to see something within them that and to paraphrase Laura Fraser in the underrated sci-fi romance Virtual Sexuality, our heart goes “ping!” As he says, love “looks on tempests and is never shaken”.

Which is enough to convince me. But what’s surprising about Shakespeare’s Sonnets is that for all its reputation as a collection of “love” poems, it offers a vast spectrum of emotions, not just passion, but also the kinds of melancholy and disappointment which can only be caused by a lover or, um, prospective lover, especially when realising that they aren’t a paragon, a venus or in Shakespeare’s case, Adonis, or as a school friend once cuttingly said “and then she opened her mouth”.

That’s presumably why they’ve maintained such longevity and certainly considered in higher public regard than his narrative poems and A Lover’s Complaint which was included in the original 1609 Quarto edition and is reproduced here. Whomever the sonnets are written for and directed too, male or female, they capture the same universal truths inherent in the plays and if you’ve ever been as reticent as I have about diving in, as a body of work they’re indispensable.

Katherine Duncan-Jones co-edited the third edition of the poems, but her introduction to this edition is more closely related to her biography, as she wades into the various puzzles which the sonnets perennially throw up, the identities of the youth and dark lady, the dedicatee Mr. W.H., dating the sonnets, publication order and the authorship of A Lover’s Complaint, forever aware that she’s not the first and won’t be the last.

I’ve previously been convinced by Jonathan Bate’s suggestion that Shakespeare, instead of writing autobiographically when constructing the sonnets, had instead rather like Meatloaf and Beyonce created a character or series of characters and then wrote with their voice about fictitious situations and that since there isn’t any documentary evidence to prove anything, although speculation is fun, it has the effect of sullying rather than illuminating our understanding of the sonnets.

Perhaps sensing a potential reader will want something richer, Duncan-Jones dives headlong into her own a document trail (her Mr. WH is William Herbert, the Third Earl of Pembroke) before coming up for air to admit that she too is just speculating because there’s little in the way of hard evidence. The process is not unlike the madcap mayhem of an authorship theory, the key difference being that Duncan-Jones understand that these are just theories, not “solid facts” being criminally ignored.

More interesting are the passages related to how and when the sonnets were written. They’re a microcosm of the treatment of Shakespeare’s canon as a whole. Just as Hamlet’s dating has causes decades of controversy, so single sonnets have proved equally difficult to pin down. The scrutiny applied to these parcels of fourteen lines has been ludicrous especially since, as Duncan-Jones explains, many of them may have gone through the same kind of process of revision as Hamlet.

In gathering this work for publication, and Duncan-Jones is very clear that this is the order he chose even if he wasn’t directly involved at the printing stage, Shakespeare pulled texts from throughout his career in 1609 and arranged them for best expression. If a “story” can’t easily be constructed (though some have tried) there is at least an emotional narrative, especially in the opening hundred odd sonnets directed at the youth, from the first blossoms of infatuation to loss and disappointment.

As proof, there’s a startling section that suggests Shakespeare was also interested in numerology, thematically linking the sonnet to its number. “When I do count the clock which tells the time” is Sonnet 12 (the number of hours on a clock face) and although some of the other associations are looser, it’s clear that these weren’t just a loose collection of poems (a reputation brought about by poor posthumous editing) but as carefully structured as any of his best plays.

A thorough critical history replaces the usual production run found in other editions. The critical treatment of the sonnets have been typically inconsistent as writers and academics have found it impossible, even recently, to reconcile Shakespeare’s muse (or apparent muse) with societal prejudices about homosexuality, especially after Oscar Wilde championed them, by attempting to deny the textual evidence and suggest they’re all about the female even implying corruption by a later hand.

The ludicrousness of that position is highlighted by the fact those same critics are able to cope with the same authorial voice writing strong female characters who’re equally able to communicate their infatuations, females who would have been portrayed by male youngsters on stage. Only recently have critics been able to bring themselves to the point of realising that the muse is besides the point and that it’s possible to offer close readings without caring about the context.

So Duncan-Jones offers an important survey and contribution to these debates. Based more closely than usual on the 1609 Quarto (the exclamation mark is back in Sonnet 123, “No! Time though shalt not boast that I do change…”), each is presented with extensive notes on the facing page with a short explanatory note at the top. These compasses prove invaluable for navigating Shakespeare’s fragmentary maps of the human heart, another helping hand for those of us who’ve become lost along the way.

Shakespeare's Poems (Arden Shakespeare: Third Revised Edition). Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Methuen Drama. 2010. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 978-1408017975. Review copy supplied.

The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. Eric Rasmussen.

If you’re one of those people and looking to steal a very rare book, whatever you do, never, and this should be underlined and repeated, never, steal a Shakespeare First Folio. Not because stealing a Shakespeare First Folio is necessarily that hard; if the heists detailed in Eric Rasmussen’s The Shakespeare Thefts are an example, it’s actually a relatively straightforward process to steal a Shakespeare First Folio. Not quite sticking a Harry Potter under your jumper in WH Smiths, but security in some places has been strangely loose and based on much trust between a reference library and the person purporting to be an academic.

No, the problem with stealing a Shakespeare First Folio is that you’ll never be able to sell it on. Well, you might, on the black market, assuming you have the right contacts, but only for a fraction of what it’s actually worth. The problem is, at least for a prospective thief is that not only do Rasmussen and a team of researchers have a record of the location for all the couple of hundred or so Shakespeare First Folios in existence, they’ve also tirelessly created a descriptive record of them all so that if a Folio is stolen and then another Folio appears on the market, they can tell relatively quickly if they’re one and the same.

Soon this data will been published. It’s in The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Index and although – based on the section quoted in this supplementary book – it’s going to be a fairly dry read it also provides added security to those owners who’ve agreed to have their Folio recorded. You may have seen the documentary on television last year, the story of how Raymond Rickett Scott carried a Folio into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington claiming to have bought it in Cuba, and although it was missing its covers and first pages, they were very quickly able to identify it as the copy stolen from Durham University ten years before.

The Shakespeare Thefts is a cautionary tale and there are numerous other examples of less educated thieves who’ve fallen into the same trap of assuming that stealing a Shakespeare First Folio is just like any other rare book. But Rasmussen seeks to underscore the point by revealing that it's not simply the description of each book which identifies it, but it's provenance. They’ve been able to identify who originally purchased each of these Folios and the book's journey through time, some simply sitting on a shelf in the intervening years, some having escaped war zones, some even having apparently saved lives, taking a bullet themselves.

All of which is very exciting, but the book itself is something of a curate’s egg, not quite sure what it wants to be. On the one hand it is about the thefts of the folios and on the other it is about their history. Then there’s a third hand about the actual processes of recording the folios and some anecdotes about that and the inevitable forth about those Folios out of reach, locked away in private vaults with orders for them not to be seen the frustration of which Rasmussen returns to on a number of occasions. He returns to a few subjects on a number of occasions even repeating the same information. This is a messy book. 

Perhaps a more schematic approach would have helped. The Descriptive Index promises to have full provenance details and perhaps a better approach here would have been to simply pick the more interesting Folios and offered the story of those with an anecdote about its recording as this attempts to do in a few chapters. But that would also have a required a slightly more academic tone and the other slightly problem is Rasmussen (who amongst other things co-edited the RSC Complete Works with Jonathan Bate) is attempting to write for that market and the popular history section which in some cases makes it very readable but in others slightly insubstantial. I managed to finish the book in about two hours.

It's worth adding, I think, that these comments are based on an Advanced Reader's Edition ("an uncorrected version") received through Amazon's Vine scheme which has warnings all over it that the quotes should be checked for accuracy.  Interestingly although this copy has 214 pages, the published copy advertised on Palgrave Macmillan's website (and pictured above)  boasts 240 pages but given the size of the text here, unless the font's even bigger, there has to be more content.  So it's possible this might be an early text too and due for much editing before it hits the shops or online retailer attempting to do away with shops.  Expect this review to be edited when I have more news.

As it stands, what is here is never less than enthralling and the slightly random approach does give it the tone of an extended after dinner speech or spending an entertaining evening in the office of an academic after hours as they regale you with war stories or fishing tales, the Folio destroyed in fires or nibbled by rats. There’s an excellent short chapter about the preparation of the text for the recent RSC Hamlet with David Tennant, the production we didn’t see, and the appendix is as clear a description of the process of the original publication of the folios as I’ve ever read. Approach it in the right spirit and this is a thoroughly entertaining read.

The Shakespeare Thefts In Search of the First Folios by Eric Rasmussen. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011. RRP: £16.99. ISBN: 9780230109414. Review copy supplied.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Sonia Massai.

The Arden Early Modern Drama edition of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore isn’t the easiest book to read on the bus.  As ever, the noise of the other passengers calling work to tell them they’re late or the sound of some teenager playing Beyonce through the speaker on their phone simply aren’t conducive to concentrating on an academic text. But there’s also the self-consciousness of watching the not so subtle glances of my fellow passengers, the double take in which they have to look again to make absolutely sure that they did see “whore” the first time peeping just above my index finger.

All of which is utterly crazy and probably says more about me than the book, not least since the same title with the same pejorative as plastered all over Liverpool during the Everyman production I missed last year due to it being sold out on the days I wanted to go. On the basis of this splendid edition (and the reviews of the production) I missed something of a treat, a potent investigation into human sexuality, morality and taboos (if my fellow bus passengers are anything to go by) that still resonates in modern society.  ITV’s Midsomer Murders utilised the story as the basis for the their first ever episode.

Editor Sonia Massai confronts these issues head on, beginning with the play’s central storyline, the disastrous incestuous relationship between brother and sister before dollying outwards to show the stunning effects that has on society, in this case the city of Parma. The play is often thought of as a rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, but as Massai notes, whereas Shakespeare’s text retains its comedic structure because the death of the lovers still has the power to unify the Montagues and Capulates, ‘Tis Pity falls into utter tragedy, as Annabella and Giovanni’s indiscretion leads to the wrecking of not only their own family but that of those for which they’re intended.

Massai demonstrates that the play is both very simple but also utterly complex, oscillating between the monosyllabic lust which grips the siblings and the intellectual justification offered by Giovanni (which essentially amounts to “Well, we’re already of one flesh so …”). As with other Arden Early Modern Drama editions, her textual notes show once again that it wasn’t just Shakespeare who was capable of creating a text rich with allusion, who was influenced by Ovid and other classical authors. Even less is known about Ford (born in Devon in 1586, matricated in Oxford in 1601) but he was clearly just as well read.

The content of the play has kept it in relative obscurity up until very recently. After a burst of contemporary productions, it was left largely unproduced for centuries (with the exception of a few private shows, one of which was attended by Samuel Pepys and an “ingenious lady” in the 1660s) until a strong unbroken run in the past sixty years where it’s generally been edited to focus on the incest plot, generally portraying the lovers as victims of circumstance. Which isn’t to say their haven’t been some spectacular performances. The book includes photos of the set used for Alan Ayckbourn’s 1988 NT production, a Renaissance urban landscape on many levels.

About my only criticism of this edition is that it's so brief.  The introduction is afforded just ninety pages, and Massai must be sitting on a wealth of research which she hasn't the room to fully explore  Some of the best material is in the footnotes, the reference to Pepys diary, comparisons with modern media (the aforementioned visit to Midsomer and a useful comparison to Stephen Poliakoff's film Close My Eyes) and seems to tease a longer more baroque, more comprehensive text.  But what is here is enthralling and I look forward to seeing what other non-Shakespearean dramas Arden will be publishing in the future.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Sonia Massai. Methuen Drama. 2011. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 978-1904271505. Review copy supplied.

The Duchess of Malfi (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Leah S. Marcus.

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is a (so far) atypical selection for the Arden Early Modern Drama series because it’s one of the few plays by a contemporary of Shakespeare which is still performed with great regularity, enjoying over forty commercial productions between the mid 1940s and late 80s (with countless others since). Which is doubly unusual given that most of Webster’s plays are lost, with only a couple of others including the equally popular The White Devil and a smattering of collaborations still available.

Which isn’t bad considering he was largely a part-time playright, with recent research uncovering evidence of a second life working in his father’s coach-building business. It’s also interesting that his authorship of the plays isn’t questioned even though he arguably received a less distinguished education than Shakespeare in a school run by his father’s firm. But as editor for this volume Leah S. Marcus demonstrates, he was not a man intellectually punching above himself, it was simply that his priorities were differently weighted in comparison to his colleagues.

Marcus offers a few conclusions as to why the play was so popular then, and continues to be so now. She talks at length about the nostalgic element, of Malfi as a reminder of Elizabeth I during the Jacobian period, her more unsavoury personality traits all but forgotten. There’s also the darkness of the plot, the clandestine marriage eventually destroyed by the lycanthropic Ferdinand and the details of the murders, not least the poisoned bible. More recently it is it’s capacity, like the best plays, to feed into contemporary allusion, even evoking the Holocaust in the 1940s.

But mostly it’s simply that it’s a damn good play. It’s based on historical sources, developed heavily from the life of a Duchess of Amalfi, an Italian Renaissance figure who also married and had children in secret, only to be captured and disappear as they attempted to flee to Siena once they’d been found out. Though Webster embellished the story somewhat (see above), there’s something very seductive about witnessing such an unbelievable story within a theatrical setting. This is a Hollywood narrative at its finest, but in the early 1600s.

The main documentary texts referred to are included as appendices, though like Shakespeare, Webster had a magpie approach to his writing and the text is filled with allusion and laced with elements of Delio and Donne (post conversion) Unlike many Arden editors, Marcus has decided to leave much of this discussion to the textual notes which makes for a much more focused and readable approach both there and in the introduction (which have sometimes, in other volumes, become bogged down with such things).

As ever, one of the more interesting passages concerns the text. For very tangible reasons, Malfi has two first quartos, an A and B. Printer Nicholas Oakes had quite happily prepared the text and was merrily knocking out editions when Webster happened to pop in to his shop to see how things were going. The firstly the playwright noticed a “Hymne” not by him had been added and there were a range of textual errors. Once the work began again, the “Hymne” had become a “ditty” with a disclaimer pointing to it not being by Webster and a range of other corrections applied.

That printing and the further three are also inextricably linked to the production history, since each contains information about the locations of the various shows and actors involved. These also mirror theatre history as boy casting gives way to actresses with Q3 showing Mary Betterton as (perhaps) the first time a female played Malfi (opposite her husband as Bosola, Ferdinand’s spy). As was the fashion, Q4 was heavily truncated close to the Restoration, and three other adaptations followed, with only the full text returning to rotation in the last century.

Sadly, not as much room is dedicated to the more contemporary productions though there are some useful the photographs of Judi Dench and Helen Mirren at the RSC in 1971 and Royal Exchange Manchester 1980 respectively, the costume of the latter heavily influenced by Elizabeth I. Nevertheless, this is another well turned out edition from Arden and for once we’re able to easily experience the play for ourselves. This useful 1972 BBC production has been uploaded to YouTube and I can also recommend this previously review Stage on Screen version.

The Duchess of Malfi (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Leah S. Marcus. Methuen Drama. 2009. RRP: £10.99. ISBN: 978-1904271512. Review copy supplied.

Philaster (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Suzanne Gossett.

Here is the story of Philaster. Look away now if you don’t want to know the result. The titular young Sicilian prince has usurped from the throne by “the king of Calabria” but continues to abide in court where he resists the urge to retake the crown. Arethusa is in love with him, and a page acts as a go-between, but Philaster through misunderstanding and distrust decides she’s being unfaithful with the page and stabs the both of them. But this being a tragicomedy, they both live and it’s revealed that the page was a girl all along and marriage and geographical recovery ensue.

I can’t believe it’s not Shakespeare, which it isn’t. It’s John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, writing at the same time as the Bard and it’s suspected giving the crowd what they want in the Jacobian period when the master’s work flow had slowed to a couple of plays a year. The blurb on the back of this Arden Early Modern Drama suggests this is a “Hamlet rewrite” but as its editor Suzanne Gossett identified, “the play is built from plot elements familiar from Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Pericles” as well as a number of plays by the same authors.

A modern comparison would be Miami Rhapsody or Far From Heaven which attempt to mimic the film-making styles of Woody Allen and Douglas Sirk respectively. But the approach is also positively post-modern even at the level of speeches, some of which are so suggestive of Cymbeline that there’s been some chatter over the years of which play influenced which, a chicken and egg scenario which can never be entirely resolved. Nevertheless it’s another work which ignorance has left sorely neglected, despite the participation of a Shakespeare collaborator.

Gossett employs a four pronged attack in attempting to rescue the play from obscurity. First there’s the usual contextual business and this case parallels with the politics of King James’s court. James’s rule over England and Scotland is paralleled in the Calbrian King and though the writers are generally thought of as royalists, it’s impossible not to see them suggesting that their new king was something of the usurper. Another strand of Philaster shows the king attempting to find strategic marriages for his children and that also reflects James seeking a union and so alliance in Spain.

Next there’s a short investigation into the form and style of the play. Fletcher claimed that tragicomedy “wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie”, which is a fair description of some of Shakespeare’s “problem” plays, especially Measure for Measure, which should also demonstrate the difficult of keeping within that tone. In Philaster, that’s communicated through pathos and melancholy, that life’s too short (even shorter then) and that happiness is relative.

This (too) soon this gives way to the usual production history, the transformation of Philaster into a ladies play during the restoration period due to the unusual number of female roles (making the page’s role a twist in plain sight), its three adaptations undertook at a time when these authors were better thought of than Shakespeare and most interestingly its single broadcast performance in the US as part of a public radio series created by directors and writers blacklisted by UnAmerican Activities Committee of the House of Representatives.

The final sections deal with the play's wayward textual history. Ironically, like Hamlet, the play has a substantially corrupted Q1 and more substantial Q2 (which forms the basis of this edition) and a Folio (although that was printed fifty years after the play was written) and debate rages about how the first printed quite got into that state (censors? rewrites?) and yet why it contains better stage directions than Q2 (readers copy?). Side by side passages of both are included in the appendices so we can to make up our own minds. Or at least have a go.

Philaster (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Suzanne Gossett. Methuen Drama. 2010. RRP: £11.99. ISBN: 978-1904271734. Review copy supplied.

The Taming of the Shrew (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Barbara Hodgdon.

The Arden Shakespeare third series edition of The Taming of the Shrew offers two plays for the price of one. As well as the text printed in the First Folio edited to Arden’s usual standards, Appendix 3 features an unedited facsimile of The Taming of a Shrew, the anonymous play, often mentioned in critical studies but rarely published. It’s the ur-Hamlet or Hamlet Q1 of Shrew, a work which simultaneously aids and infuriates our understanding of the Folio text, and a prop which has recently helped the play’s feminist credentials as it eases into the modern world.

Perhaps recognising the weight of feminist criticism which already exists in relation to the play, Hodgson instead spends much the pagination investigating both plays as part of a tradition of Shrew narratives. Jan Harold Brunvand recently carried out a study of these tales (similar to Vladimir Propp’s classification of fairy tales) listing a wide range of “motif complexes” and “free floating narrative elements” of which The Shrew matches at least eleven, suggesting Shakespeare was calcifying a story which already had a strong oral tradition.

Like the Hamlet texts, critics have become very exercised over the years as to whether one is a rewrite of the other, the extent of Shakespeare’s involvement in A Shrew and the implications that in terms of attribution in contemporary written records. The mention in Henslow’s diary could relate to either play, which has implications when dating The Shrew whose writing has variously been put somewhere across over two decades, only recently having settled somewhere in the late 1880s thanks to textual similarities with the earlier histories.

As is often the case in this Arden third series, editor Barbara Hodgdon is reluctant to make sweeping decisions simply there isn’t enough evidence either way. The easy option is that it’s an earlier play, which a young Shakespeare still learning the ropes as a kind of script doctor gutted, improved and readied for his new company. There’s certainly enough textual similarities to suggest that. Another suggestion is that it’s an early play by Shakespeare which he later extensively rewrote. The rather more murkier idea is that it’s a memorial reconstruction.

But like the various iterations of Hamlet, the theatrical history of The Shrew is intertwined with A Shrew, because of the implications it has on the famous final scene in which the shrew, Katherina, apparently does an unheralded about face and falls in line withthe tamer, Petruccio. For some feminists that makes the play as misogynistic as The Merchant of Venice is anti-semetic and for decades has created fundamental issues for some directors and actors on how to portray that speech as part of the character’s logical trajectory.

Which is where A Shrew comes in. The Shrew’s folio edition already includes an “induction” in which a drunk, Christopher Sly is tricked into believing himself nobility and The Shrew becomes a theatrical fantasy being performed for him after his indiscretions with a hostess. A Shrew extends Sly’s contribution across the play, the drunk and attendant lords commenting on the action, the final scene giving way to a coda that concludes this parallel narrative, the Pyramus and Thisbe conceit from A Midsummer Night’s Dream spread across a whole play.

These framing scenes are now often included in modern productions, in effect of nullifying Katherina’s about face as the fantasies of Sly or at least the slightly nefarious writer of this play within a play. This has the effect of, as Guardian critic Michael Billington suggests, transforming “(a brutally sexist polemic) totally offensive to our age and society” into “just a play”. You could also argue that it ruins the verisimilitude of the characters but since Shakespeare’s characters perennially address the audience, that’s less of a concern than it might be.

But in illuminating these issues, Hodgdon underlines that Shakespeare’s plays, far from being static entities, become transformed through interpretation and that even The Shrew which has received acres of negative criticism across the years, can become a feminist symbol and even critical of the male psyche depending on the staging. What Shakespeare himself was implying we’ll never know, but considering his facility with writing strong female roles (including Katherina for the most part), thanks to the induction, it seems to be men who are the butt of this joke.

The Taming of the Shrew (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Barbara Hodgdon. Methuen Drama. 2010. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 978-1903436936. Review copy supplied.

The Winter's Tale (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series). Edited by John Pitcher.

The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s most innovative of plays, both in structure and content. Unusually for a play of this period, the story is structured into two distinct sections, with the tragic action of the first three acts giving way to romance in the final two fitting perfectly into the two halves required in modern theatre presentation. The other is the inherent ambiguity of Hermione’s mortality with Shakespeare leaving it up to the reader or theatre company to decide whether Leontes’s wife dies, returns as a ghostly apparition and is then magically recreated via a statue Pygmalian-style at the end or if she lives, is squirrelled away only to return at the end and given the aspect of a statue so as to draw out Leontes understanding of what he lost.

As John Pitcher explains in his introduction to Arden third edition, as is typical with pre-contemporary critical reactions to such things, the general impression was that both of these elements were “failures” on the part of Shakespeare rather than artistic choices. Theories developed suggesting that he rewrote parts of it leading to inconsistencies of tone or mistakes (see also Bohemia having coast), or that someone else had a hand in it, actors or impresarios before its first publication in the Folio or that the great man just didn’t know what he was doing. In reality he was experimenting with form testing classical genre rules in his contemporary drama and leaving the motivations of his characters and explanations for parts of the action deliberately empty to increase audience interest.

The appearance of a bear at mid-point is an especially bizarre inclusion, even if as Pitcher notes it does introduce some much needed panto at one of the play’s darkest moments. It’s not inconceivable a real bear appeared at that point, but the editor suggests that this isn't simply the kind of act of frippery classical playwright Horace grumbled about when his work was disrupted in the middle by the unheralded inclusion of some boxers or bears to keep the less high-brow audience members happy. Shakespeare actually uses the word “bear” plus its derivations, rhymes and synonyms throughout the play to underscore the themes of birth, rebirth and endurance so the appearance of the animal also becomes an on stage visual reference to that.

All of which indicates The Winter’s Tale deserves to be produced more than it is. There are difficulties. The change of setting in the middle brings a whole new collection of characters and set requirements and although some doubling up can be done, it’s rarely done satisfactorily with such unlikely scenarios as the actress playing Hermione doubling up as her daughter Pardita messing up the mechanics of the final scene in which both characters are required on stage. There are plenty of songs, all printed in the appendices here with sheet music, and although they’re easily cuttable (deliberately so according to some critics) the tone of the Bohemian section loses some of its whimsy. There’s a lengthy scene in the middle of the play, Act 4 / Sc 4, which can become rather drawn out if not treated properly.

But as I saw in a rousing production at the RSC in 2009 and as Pitcher convincingly demonstrates with other exmples it can be done and was, even a few years after Shakespeare’s death. Then it was a very commercial play, pastorals being all the rage, which is one of the reasons the playwright challenged himself to write one. It’s only later that it fell out of fashion for many of the reasons already discussed (that bear!) only really finding favour again early in the last century. What the play could do with is an excellent new celluloid version (something Pitcher suggests he’ll discuss the medium then doesn’t – a rare error). Modern film is used to mixing genres, contrasting distant locales, showing lost children growing in an instant and would finally have magical the capacity to bring Hermione’s statue to life.

The Winter's Tale (Arden Shakespeare.Third Series). Edited by John Pitcher. Methuen Drama. 2010. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 978-1903436356. Review copy supplied.

Everyman and Mankind (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen.

Arden’s Early Modern Drama series applies the scholarly approach they’ve brought so successfully to Shakespeare to a collection of plays published between the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, plays which may have influenced and been influenced by him. They recognise that an emphasis on Shakespeare in recent times has somewhat eclipsed other great works from that period and offer a chance to approach these texts in a form which has been analysed with Arden’s usual editorial zeal.

Everyman and Mankind, two anonymous miracle plays from the late 1400s, are perfect examples of that ethic. Neither plays has gone unpublished before but in each case the editors Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen (the latter co-author on the recent RSC Complete Works) have returned to the available copies of the texts only glancing at later interpretations when absolutely necessary. Though the spellings and punctuation have been modernised as per Arden’s usually editorial standards, both have the atmosphere of looking backwards into a forgotten time.

Both offer their only challenges. The only existing historic copy of Mankind is an incomplete manuscript held by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Pages are reproduced and to my untrained eye they’re in gobbledygook and to make matters worse the first of the two transcribers wrote in very tight lines so as to save paper. There are four quarto editions of The Summoning of Everyman (to give its full title) in existence but only two are relatively complete and of the others only fragments exist and all differ wildly in content, sometimes words, sometimes whole lines.

Given this is my first experience of either play, I can’t intelligently analyse the editorial choices though it's interesting to read that thanks to one of those fragments of Everyman, the Q2, having only recently having been discovered, they’ve used it in conjunction with Q1, to produce a brand new variant of the play, somewhat different to that seen in other editions which rely almost exclusively on Q3. That fits in well with the rest of Arden’s recent mission to fight against orthodoxy and offer an alternative.

But what of the plays? As was usually the case in pre-Reformation drama, they feature an archetypal figure experiencing some kind of symbolic trial explaining the ways of God to man. Mankind is tempted by the vices of New-Guise (the fashion), Nought (nothingness) and Nowadays (living for the moment) and ultimately seeks mercy from a character called Mercy for succumbing to their charms. Everyman is visited by Death (yes, the Death) and we witness their earthly belongings deserting them as they're ultimately tested for their worth and face the grave.

Mankind was as far as can be ascertained from the text, written and performed by the monks at the abbey of St Edmund in Bury (yes, as in the modern Bury St Edmunds) and toured within the South East region between King’s Lynn and Cambridge and may have been bankrolled by the ten nobles very specifically named in the text. Perhaps more interestingly, since it shows that English-language remakes are not a new phenomena, Everyman is a translation of a Dutch play, Elckerlijc, its satire blunted slightly to remove material critical of the Catholic faith.

Neither sounds particularly entertaining and in truth it’s impossible not to look at either of them without a certain detachment, especially if you’re the kind of person whose unlikely to draw solace from a story developed from the Book of Job just as Mankind is. We’re also used to symbolism, themes and allegory being buried deep within our dramedy, a characters we can somewhat identify with emotionally wrestling with the implications (thank to the reformation). Morality plays turn that notion inside and symbolism, themes and allegory are given character names.

But in parts they are incredibly funny. Mankind in particular was kept out of production for many years because of the lewdness of its language, one song in particular as scatological as a gross out film comedy, indeed more so because the participating audience is dragged into the mess. The writers understood, even at this early stage, that the best way to carry a message is through a mix of humour and drama and you can see the roots of how Shakespeare also would later include comedic scenes even in his blackest of tragedies.

The introduction is relatively short but that just reflects not only the brevity of the plays themselves – neither is much more than nine hundred lines each and feature continuous action – but also the relatively negligible critical and performance histories. Brusher and Rasmussen make light work of revealing how the medieval mind would approach both plays and what they might draw from the text. There are no deep psychological discussions of the characters since their characterisation is less important than the effects they might have on the audience.

Just as useful in production terms are the staging discussions in the back which attempt to define just how large a cast both plays would require. Anyone who’s seen the underrated film about a troop of medieval actors The Reckoning (starring Paul Bettany) might have some idea of the conditions in which these plays were produced but it’s fun to see the mechanics of how certain characters must have been doubled up simply because it means a performer would have to sit out much of the show which is hardly cost-effective.

Perhaps that’s one of the only frustrations of finally greeting these plays. The Shakespeare effect means that neither is readily available in a modern professional recording. I like to hear these words performed and I’m not sure I did Mankind justice reading it out to myself (I certainly lost much of the sense). There is a copy of the 1955 recording of Everyman featuring Burgess Meredith (as mentioned in the Arden introduction) available on Spotify (link) but the treatment of the text is ponderous with only a couple of the actors properly catching its satirical tone.

Either way, Arden Early Modern Drama’s Everyman and Mankind is an illuminating read and a reminder of just how much drama developed even in the hundred years leading up to Shakespeare’s birth. Plus its impossible, just now and then, not to wonder if he read these words himself. When in Everyman, Fellowship says “In faith, Everyman, farewell now at the end. / For you I will remember that parting is mourning”, it’s impossible not to hear Juliet’s line to her Romeo: “Parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Everyman and Mankind (Arden Early Modern Drama). Edited by Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen. Methuen Drama. 2009. RRP: £10.99. ISBN: 978-1904271628. Review copy supplied.

Doing Shakespeare by Simon Palfrey.

Above my desk is a postcard which reads: “A library may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so useful as one that is small but well arranged.” It’s from Schopenhauer in an essay on thinking for onesself. He continues: “In the same way, a man may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly pondered.” The Eggheads might have a thing or two to say in contradiction to that, but it’s quite possible to think of Shakespeare’s writing in those terms.

As well as a collection of forty-something dramas, these are also texts filled with poetry and a depth of meaning few brains can totally comprehend. The work of critics and historians mirrors that of archivists and librarians attempting to apply some order to the chaos through interpretation. Like the man in the second quote most of them can only become experts in one small part, but collectively they have managed to create a certain agreement as to how the texts were assembled, from word to word, verse to verse, character to character, story to story. Which makes Simon Palfrey’s Doing Shakespeare, the literary criticism equivalent of a classification system.

Generally ignoring an appreciation of the plays in performance, Palfrey seeks to strip the text down to its essentials and confront, oscillating between simple explanations and deep investigation, the various elements of Shakespeare’s writing, answering a series of why questions. Why metaphors? Why hendiadys? Repetition? “High style”? Rhyme? Prose? Puns? Characters? Soliloquies? This the academic equivalent of Arden’s other far lighter Miscellany with far less interest in trivia and focusing on the construction of the writing, grasping towards the reason why the plays went from the playhouse to the printed book.

As Palfrey explains in his introduction, the book's structure demands a reader dips in and out, reads the chapters in any order. Doing Shakespeare can’t be usefully ploughed through from cover to cover. Each chapter is set out in a very particular way, with a basic introduction to the topic, an explanation, then contextual discussion, a dense ransacking of often just a few words, revealed to be packed with meaning. Through this method, the author hopes that we’ll then be able to look at similar usages elsewhere in the canon and have a greater understanding of what Shakespeare is trying to achieve.

Of the chapters I have had a chance to dip into, the overall message is that there are few words or speeches in Shakespeare that haven’t been carefully thought through and which don’t have some implication for our understand of not just the story but the speaker. Even during his lifetime, Shakespeare was criticised for overwriting, in some cases offering pages of lines when a few world communicate the same information. What Palfrey demonstrates is if a character like Canterbury in Henry V does offer what looks like great oratory over a relatively small matter, it’s Shakespeare very specifically giving that character that mode of speech.

If you’re prepared to attack it with a fresh brain, the book can be highly rewarding. Palfrey dedicates four pages to Macbeth’s oft quoted and usually in the wrong context “If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well / It were done quickly.” As he indicates there are two ways to interpret the central clause. This could be Macbeth stuttering over his words, replacing the inherent element of doubt within “if” with “when”. But this could also be Macbeth simply repeating the same phrase for emphasis. Indeed the phrase is pregnant with the predestination at the centre of the play, that when Macbeth meets the witches nothing he could do would change matters. He is a broken human the instant they hail him.

As you would expect, Hamlet is covered in some detail, the best section considering Ophelia’s sexuality. As Jonathan Bate describes in The Genius of Shakespeare, the genius of Shakespeare is the apparently deliberate ambiguity within the text and characters but within very specific options. In this case, have they or haven’t they? This is one of the few occasions when Palfrey holds his hands up and suggests that it is something which can’t be developed from the text, that the answer hovers somewhere between the page, interpretation and performance. Even in a library, it’s impossible to satisfactorily classify every book. All the cataloguer can do is make an educated guess.

Ophelia (2006)

Of all Shakespeare’s female roles, Ophelia is one the most misunderstood. Too often a director and actress portray her as something of a wet blanket, torn by the machinations of the men in her life, her father, brother, Claudius and Hamlet, no more than the forerunner of the kinds of later female roles in both theatre and film that just exist to reflect the masculine uncertainties of the male lead. It’s true that the brevity of her role does lend itself to that reading, and she does spend the bottom half of the play out her wits.

But a careful scrutiny of Shakespeare’s text reveals her to be much more subtly intelligent figure, well read and educated, assuming you take the more contemporary view that the content of a character’s speech reflects their intellect as well as the playwrights. I've only rarely seen this reflected in performance. It’s there in both of the Branagh productions in Winslet and Thomson and most pronounced in the Naxos audio starring Lesser with Emma Fielding as a very modern Ophelia. It’s also the Ophelia who tells her story in Lisa Klein’s fictional autobiographical interpretation of the play.

Klein’s book opens with a ten-year-old Ophelia joining Hamlet Snr’s court and becoming a maid in Gertrude’s household, moving up the ranks as a lady in waiting. From a young age she’s desperate to read Ovid and though she’s informed that she won’t get anywhere with men if they think she’s more intelligent than they are, it’s precisely her wit which leads to her gaining Hamlet’s attraction, the one thing which sets her apart from her bitchy court rival Cristina. Slowly events edge towards the action of Shakespeare’s play but it's quickly apparent that not everything will be as it seems.

There’s a danger in these first person retellings that a Mary-Sue element will encroach on proper storytelling and though the book (as the cover might suggest) does employ some of the idioms of the bodice-ripper, hearts beating in chests and an undercurrent of emotional desolation, Klein works hard to make Ophelia a credible figure. Written for teens but at no point lacking in sophistication, the language is of cod-poetic style which in the wrong hands could have come across as parodic but much of the time has such commitment it's easy to imagine that this is exactly how the character would have communicated her adventures.

The world of Elsinore, Klein through Ophelia conjures is very much in the mood, thanks to the thorough descriptions of fashions and furnishings of the late-Victorian or early Edwardian painters and the author has even included an image from W.G. Simmonds's The Drowning of Ophelia on her website. But time captions sets the play in and around the turn of the 17th century and it's possible to recognise the machinations of the court of that period following the hints in Shakespeare's text that he's writing as much about the English monarchy in his own lifetime as a far off place he's reputedly never visited.

Klein steers a steady course between adapting that play and as she suggests in the acknowledgements making sure that “Ophelia now has her due”. Unlike Stoppard who worked with the irony of two peripheral characters with little idea of the events they’ve tumbled into, Klein sometimes does have to strain to keep Ophelia aware of the darkness in court which is shaping her life. She’ll be hiding behind furniture and doors snatching glimpses and phrases, wedging them with rumours and gossip in an attempt to piece together how safe she remains in court, even resorting to some of Hamlet’s tactics in order to survive.

That means that Klein rarely simply novelises the play by-rote and even when we are in the midst of one of Ophelia's big scenes, we're more pre-occupied by Ophelia's thought processes than the action. Similarly, the author uses our hindsight knowledge of the plot to create a Hitchcockian tension even in those moments of high explostion as we await Ophelia's reaction. But the book is at its best when it's making its own course, as in those moments when Ophelia finds herself in some fairly deep philosophical discussions that seek to extrapolate the themes of the play in another form.

Ophelia also isn't the only character to gain weight in Klein's treatment. Horatio becomes her confident as much as Hamlets and Gertrude too is given a mountain of rational for her actions, of the kind which an actress would usually employ to underscore her performance in the hopes that the audience will see behind the her general silence in places. That's probably the best way to view the novel; like any theatre production Klein isn't attempting to piece together a definitive version of the story, just her interpretation of what's there already.

What also makes this a richer read than some Shakespeare prose adaptations is that it refuses to treat the his text in isolation. There are veiled references to plenty of other plays, most specifically Romeo & Juliet. As well as Ovid, Ophelia’s knowledge of botany is from the same sources Shakespeare is presumed to have read and it’s clear that this was much a scholarly exercise as an act of fiction. But it’s also a very imaginative reading especially in the surprising final third which sends Ophelia on an even greater emotional journey than the play allows.

Ophelia by Lisa Klein was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. RRP: £5.99. ISBN: 978-0747587330

The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare). Edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan.

Even if, because I’m yet to see a convincing production, The Tempest isn’t my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays, it does contain my favourite line: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” As well as encapsulating human existence in eighteen lines, it’s always seemed to me to be a moment when Prospero breaks from the suspended disbelief of his fictional world and considers his own existence as a construct and in a way that slots in the space in reality between the actor portraying him and the audience.

Such woolly mysticism is probably nonsense but as Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T Vaughan (henceforth known as the Vaughans) demonstrate in their superb introduction to the newly revised third series Arden Shakespeare edition, of all Shakespeare’s plays The Tempest, because so much of it's world and characterisation have apparently been left deliberately vague, critics and creatives across the centuries have fallen over themselves to pour into the precipice all kinds of what some might describe as analytical construction and others dated prejudices. Imagine the six years the internet spent talking about tv's Lost (itself heavily influenced by the play) stretched across four centuries.

That’s true of much of the canon, but in The Tempest’s case the depth of investigation is particularly rigorous and resolves about twin, linked subjects: the location of the island and the nationality of Caliban. Unable to accept this receptacle of Propero’s Arts as a fantastical construct, writers have sought to position it geographically and metaphorically as anywhere from the North Atlantic coast of Africa to Ireland to encompassing both North and South America, with Caliban revealed to be a cannibalistic expression of any number of their inhabitants.

This makes for uncomfortable reading. By the early twentieth century The Tempest was actively being described as Shakespeare’s American play, with Prospero symbolic of White colonial powers and Caliban as the savage, subjugated native Americans even though as American Scholar Elmer Edgar Still noted “there is not a word in The Tempest about America or Virginia, colonies or colonizing, Indians or tomahawks, maize, mocking-birds, or tobacco. Nothing but the Bermudas, once barely mentioned as a faraway place like Tokio or Mandalay.”

Such diversions consume a high proportion of the Vaughan’s work though much is spoken of sources which are numerous but inconclusive. The Tempest lacks an ur-text, though it’s thematically informed by Ovid and Virgil and tales of exploration by Willam Strachey and Montaigne, both reproduced in the appendix, the product of Shakespeare’s magpie mind which makes for one of the shorter literary antecedent sections seen in an Arden. There’s still some room to consider the Freudian readings of the play though as you’d expect they're rather less baroque than for Hamlet.

All of this is cleanly presented and because the Vaughans are steeped in The Tempest having both produced separate volumes about the play, their attempts to cram in as much detail as possible into the introduction makes for a very dense read. But refreshingly their work lacks an agenda; probably because they’ve worked through their own opinions elsewhere they’re more relaxed about simply presenting the arguments of others and letting the reader decide as to their merits, pleasingly giving due prominence to contemporary thinkers like Bate, Wells and Kermode.

The Tempest (Arden Shakespeare) edited by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan is published by Methuen Drama. RRP £8.99 paperback. ISBN: 978-1408133477.

Cardenio. Edited by Gregory Doran, Antonio Alamo.

Right up front I should admit I have not read the play. Given that a new text for Cardenio distributes itself through over eighty percent of this publication for most of you my usefulness as a reviewer is at an end and the next few paragraph simple prose landfill. Sorry, and especially sorry to the publisher who was nice enough to send me a review copy. Luckily, the erudite textual analysis you probably require is available elsewhere, not least in this Illuminations blog post which aggregates a range of opinion, mainly about the theatrical performance at the RSC’s Swan Theatre.

There’s a long term academic discussion about the extent to which Shakespeare wrote his plays to be read as well as presented on the stage (particular in relation to Troilus and Cressida which didn’t have a recorded performance during his lifetime and Hamlet’s Second Quarto) and for many people this edition of Cardenio is part of a long tradition of reader’s editions that stretches right back to Heminges and Condell (though the copyright page does contain details for obtaining Amateur Performing Rights). If only they’d seen fit to include the original in the First Folio.

But as a fan of theatre, of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in particular, I want to experience Cardenio in its native environment, in performance. If I’m lucky it could be at the Swan, or if we’re all lucky through broadcast (does anyone have the telephone number for the commissioning editor at the BBC’s Drama on Radio 3?). For all the excitement of seeing how a company tackles a play you're familiar with, there’s still nothing to replace the thrill of experiencing the words for the first time as I discovered whilst gripped by ArkAngel’s recording of The Two Noble Kinsmen the other week.

Here, then is a toothless glance at the supporting text. The title page is entertaining, containing as many names as the credit role for a 90s Hollywood blockbuster. If this was a 90s Hollywood blockbuster, the credit role would surely read “Story by Miguel de Cerantes and Thomas Shelton. Screenplay by John Fletcher & William Shakespeare and Lewis Theobald and Sir William Davenant and Gregory Doran, Antonio Alamo & Duncan Wheeler”. There are more names, but this is all of the hands which physically wrote some of the words.

Director Doran seems to be in the defensive in the introduction, justifying his decision to adapt Double Falsehood, rather than simply present Theobald’s text (which is now a part of the canon as far as Arden is concerned). Just as Garrick in the 1740s when he tried to break over a century of theatrical tradition by returning as much of Shakespeare's own verse to various popular adaptations, Doran’s motive is to resurrect some of the show's psychological complexity by interpolating from Cervantes the scenes which Shakespeare’s narrative interests suggest would have been included but Theobald cut.

In  an epilogue, framed as a letter to Theobald, Doran is pretty forgiving of his predecessor for all that but sits on the fence in relation to whether the text he’s been working from really was based on the play performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime or a fabrication. The Arden edition suggests he's on pretty firm ground, that it’s at least Shakespearean if not completely Shakespeare. Perhaps this version is good enough to supplant the Theobald as the standard text. Part of me wants to dive in and see. But I have to wait, I must wait. It would be a pity to do otherwise.

Cardenio. Edited by Gregory Doran, Antonio Alamo is published by Nick Hern Books. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9781848421806. Review copy supplied.