a
Aaron, a *Moor and Tamora’s lover, is ultimately sentenced to be buried and starved, Titus Andronicus 5.3.
Anne Button
Abbess. She reveals herself to be Emilia, mother of the Antipholus twins, at the end of The Comedy of Errors.
Anne Button
Abbott, E(dwin) A(bbott) (1838–1926), English headmaster and grammarian, who addressed the first meeting of the New Shakespeare Society (13 March 1874). His A Shakespearian Grammar: An Attempt to Illustrate Some of the Differences between Elizabethan and Modern English (1869, repr. 1966) is an important attempt to describe Elizabethan syntax and idiom.
Tom Matheson
Abergavenny, Lord. He complains about Wolsey’s pride and is imprisoned alongside Buckingham in All Is True (Henry VIII) 1.1. The historical figure was George Neville, 3rd Baron Abergavenny (c. 1461–1535).
Anne Button
Abhorson, an executioner, defends his profession in Measure for Measure 4.2 and attempts to rouse drunken Barnadine for execution, 4.3.
Anne Button
‘above’. About half of Shakespeare’s plays need an elevated playing space which is often signalled by a stage direction of the kind ‘enter above’, and most of these use this location just once or twice. An actor appearing ‘above’ is usually to be thought of as appearing at a window, or upon the walls of a castle or fortified town. Contemporary accounts and drawings (most clearly the de Witt drawing of the *Swan) indicate a balcony set in the back wall of the stage which could be used as a spectating position but also would be ideal to provide the occasional ‘above’ acting space.
Gabriel Egan
Abraham (Abram), Montague’s servant, participates in a fight in Romeo and Juliet 1.1.
Anne Button
academic drama. See university performances.
Achilles, the treacherous champion of the Greek army (he appears in a more sympathetic light in *Homer’s Iliad), instructs his followers to kill the unarmed Hector, Troilus and Cressida 5.9.
Anne Button
act and scene divisions. Of the original quartos of Shakespeare’s plays, none is divided into numbered scenes (although in Q1 Romeo and Juliet a printer’s ornament occasionally appears where new scenes begin) and only Othello (1622) is divided into acts. In the First Folio, nineteen of the plays are divided into acts and scenes, and another ten are divided into acts. Nicholas Rowe’s edition (1709) was the first to divide all of the plays into numbered acts and scenes.
Division into scenes was a structural element of early English plays—a new scene began whenever the stage was clear and the action not continuous—but division into acts was a later convention, perhaps adopted from classical drama. Although very few plays written for the adult dramatic companies before 1607 are divided into acts, nearly every one of the extant printed plays written for those companies thereafter is divided into five acts. Gary Taylor has suggested that the transition to act-intervals occurred when the adult companies moved from outdoor to indoor theatres (the King’s Men acquired the Blackfriars playhouse in August of 1608). Pauses between acts would not only have been better facilitated in indoor theatres, but might also have been required so that candles could be trimmed. Shakespeare’s later plays were thus apparently written for a different convention from his early and middle ones.
Eric Rasmussen
acting, Elizabethan. The Elizabethan word for what we call acting was ‘playing’, and the word ‘acting’ was reserved for the gesticulations of an orator. We have little direct evidence about the style of Elizabethan acting, although a few general principles can be derived from the conditions of performance. The relative shortness of rehearsal periods and the large number of plays in the repertory at any one time suggest that an actor was not likely to think of his character as having a unique and complex human psychology in the way which, in our time, the *Stanislavskian technique encourages. Likewise, the distribution of parts as individual rolls of paper giving only the particular speeches needed for one character suggests that what we think of as dramatic interaction was less important than the individual’s interpretation of his speeches. Modern ensemble acting requires lengthy rehearsals which were unknown on the early modern stage. But this should not be taken as evidence that the acting was mere declamation without emotion. When the King’s Men played Othello at Oxford in 1610 an eyewitness was moved to report that Desdemona ‘killed by her husband, in her death moved us especially when, as she lay in her bed, her face alone implored the pity of the audience’. Likewise Simon Forman’s records of performances of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, and a play about Richard II clearly express his enjoyment of the intensity of the emotional experience, and hence the quality of the acting. The mere fact that boys played great tragic roles such as a Cleopatra, Desdemona, Hermione, and Lady Macbeth indicates that a degree of unrealistic formalism (symbolic gestures and convention) must have been used, but scholars do not agree about precisely how ‘naturalistic’ or ‘formalistic’ the acting usually was, or whether perhaps some mixed style was used.
There was hardly a professional acting tradition in existence in 1576 when James Burbage built the Theatre, and until the early 1600s most actors were men who had taken up this career having first trained in something else. Once the profession was established the system of apprenticeship must have helped systematize an actor’s training, although without a governing guild practice might have varied greatly from one master to another. Acting was taught as part of a standard grammar-school education and of course actors had to be literate, so despite the apparent low status of the profession actors were amongst the better-educated Elizabethans. Scholars have looked to the education system, and especially the instruction in oratory, for evidence of the acting style of the period; educational policy at least is well documented. Bernard Beckerman thought that the styles and conventional gestures of the Elizabethan orator and actor were essentially the same but found manuals of oratory rather vague: a number of gestures were offered to accompany a particular emotion and the individual orator was left to choose whichever best suited the occasion.
Another source of information about acting styles is the drama itself, and the most overused piece of evidence is Hamlet’s advice to the players (3.2.1–45) which includes ‘Speak the speech … trippingly on the tongue’, ‘do not saw the air too much with your hand’, and avoid imitating those who have ‘strutted and bellowed’ on the stage. This does not tell us much, and indeed the conscious contradiction of the general and transcendent (‘hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image’) and the particular and contingent (‘[show] the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’) makes this if anything an evasion of detailed instruction in acting style. Commentators have relied heavily upon Hamlet’s advice because we have no direct description of Elizabethan acting.
Despite the lack of direct evidence, certain trends which impinged upon acting can be traced across the period. The drama of the 1570s used strong rhyme and rhythm (especially the ‘galloping’ fourteen-syllable line) which gave an actor little scope for personal interpretation, whereas Marlowe’s looser verse style and increasingly subtle characterization gave the Admiral’s Men new opportunities for virtuoso acting. Stable long-term residences at the Rose and the Globe after 1594 allowed a star system to develop with Edward Alleyn for the Admiral’s and Richard Burbage for the Chamberlain’s Men being the most highly praised actors of their time. T. W. Baldwin developed a complex model of the character types (‘lines’) which were the special skills of particular actors of the period but other scholars feel that flexibility, not specialization, was the most valued attribute in an actor. Whether Shakespeare ever got the performances he wanted is uncertain. Shakespeare’s characters use acting as a metaphor for public behaviour of all kinds but, as M. C. Bradbrook noted, the descriptions (‘strutting player’, ‘frets’, ‘wooden dialogue’) are seldom complimentary.
The differences in conditions at different venues appear to have had an effect on the acting. Indoor theatres were smaller than the open-air amphitheatres and had less extraneous noise, so actors could afford to soften their voices and make smaller physical gestures. Players at the northern playhouses, especially the Fortune and Red Bull, were more commonly attacked for exaggerated acting once the private theatres had developed their own subtle style. Also, an actor in an amphitheatre is effectively surrounded on all sides by spectators and may choose to keep moving so that everyone has a chance to see him. The indoor theatres, however, had a greater mass of spectators directly in front of the stage and this probably encouraged playing ‘out front’ rather than ‘in the round’ as we would now call it. Adjusting between the two modes must have been fairly easy for the actors, however, as on tour they were unlikely to find many venues which provided the ‘in-the-round’ experience of the London amphitheatres.
Gabriel Egan
acting profession, Elizabethan and Jacobean. The Elizabethan word for an actor was ‘player’ and there were three classes: the sharer, the hired man, and the apprentice. The nucleus of the company was the sharers, typically between four and ten men, who were named on the patent which gave them the authority to perform and which identified their aristocratic patron. The sharers owned the capital of the company, its playbooks and costumes, in common and shared the profits earned. All other actors were the employees of the sharers. The sharers were not necessarily the finest actors but they would have to bring a significant contribution to the company in the form either of capital or, as in the case of Shakespeare, writing ability. The sharing took place after the rent on the venue—often simply consisting of the takings from the galleries—had been paid and the hired men had received their wages. There was no guild system in place to regulate the industry, so an apprentice was in the unusual position of being legally apprenticed in the secondary trade practised by the individual sharer who was his master.
The sharers of London companies selected a new play by audition reading and, if purchased, they would rehearse it in the morning while playing items from the current repertory in the afternoon. The inconclusive evidence from Henslowe’s account book suggests that at least two weeks were allowed for rehearsal of a new play, including time needed for the player to privately ‘study’ (memorize) his part. With no cheap mechanical means of reproducing an entire play, players were issued with rolls of paper containing only their own lines plus their cues. This practice and the short rehearsal periods suggests that acting skill was largely considered to reside in expressing the meanings and emotions in one’s part rather than reacting to the speeches of others.
The majority of players were hired men, and amongst these there was not a strict distinction between what we now call ‘front of house’ and ‘stage’ work: an entrance-fee gatherer or costumer might well be expected to take a minor role at need, and those providing musical accompaniment might have to portray onstage musicians. Fee-gathering was the only job open to women as well as men; apart from ambiguous evidence concerning Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611) there is nothing to suggest that women ever acted. Usually the apprentices played the female roles in the drama but because of the anomalous lack of a guild governing the acting profession we do not know the precise extent of an apprentice’s responsibilities, or if indeed any standard arrangements existed other than the customary provision of board, keep, and training.
There is little evidence that players were typecast although a dramatist attached to a company, as Shakespeare was, would have thought about his human resources during composition. However, there was a distinct position of ‘clown’ or ‘fool’ in each of the major companies and Richard Tarlton of the Queen’s Men and William Kempe and later Robert Armin of the Chamberlain’s Men had roles written to suit their abilities and did not perform in plays which lacked a ‘clown’ or ‘fool’ character. The emergence of actor ‘stars’ in the early 1590s appears to be related to the increasingly long residences at London playhouses which allowed audiences to follow the particular development of an individual’s career. Star actors could expect to take just one of the major roles in a play, but other actors, and especially hired men, would be expected to ‘double’ as needed.
Gabriel Egan
act-intervals. See act and scene divisions.
Act to Restrain Abuses of Players (1606), a parliamentary bill introducing a fine of £10 for each occasion upon which an actor ‘jestingly or profanely’ spoke the name of God or Jesus Christ. Plays written after this date have little or no such profanity, and plays already written show alteration of the offending phrases when revived, although the original unexpurgated text could safely be printed. Words such as ‘zounds’ (a contraction of ‘God’s wounds’) could be replaced by ‘why’ or ‘come’, and exclamations such as ‘O God!’ softened to ‘O heaven!’
Gabriel Egan
‘A cup of wine that’s brisk and fine’, sung by Silence in 2 Henry IV, 5.3.46; the original tune is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Adam, Oliver’s servant in As You Like It, helps Orlando escape into the forest of Ardenne.
Anne Button
Adams, J(ohn), C(ranford) (1903–86), American scholar, author of The Globe Playhouse: Its Design and Equipment (1942, 2nd edn. 1961), giving considerable prominence to the inner and the upper areas of the stage, now largely superseded. He was responsible for a reconstruction of the Globe for the Hofstra College Shakespeare Festival.
Tom Matheson
Adams, Joseph Quincy (1881–1946), American scholar, first director of the Folger Shakespeare Library (1934) and an editor of the New Variorum edition of Shakespeare. He was author of A Life of William Shakespeare (1916) and, using Revels records, Shakespearean Playhouses: A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration (1917).
Tom Matheson
adaptation. The practice of rewriting plays to fit them for conditions of performance different from those for which they were originally composed, in ways which go beyond cutting and the transposition of occasional scenes. Even leaving aside the questions as to whether Shakespeare’s use of dramatic sources itself constitutes adaptation (e.g. whether King Lear can be regarded as an adaptation of The True Chronicle History of King Leir), or whether his own *revisions to plays such as Hamlet and King Lear might be classed as such, the altering of Shakespeare’s scripts for later revivals certainly dates to before the publication of the *First Folio, which prints Macbeth in a form revised by Thomas *Middleton.
The adaptation of Shakespeare was at its most widespread, however, between the Restoration in 1660 and the middle of the 18th century (see Restoration and eighteenth-century Shakespearian production), when drastic changes in the design of playhouses (with the inception of elaborate changeable scenery), in the composition of theatre companies (with the advent of the professional actress), and in literary language and tastes (with the vogue for French neoclassicism, and its patriotic aftermath) motivated many playwrights and actor-managers to stage Shakespearian plays in heavily rewritten forms. The pioneer of adaptation was Sir William *Davenant, whose The Law against Lovers (1662) transplants Beatrice and Benedick into a sanitized Measure for Measure cast largely in rhyming couplets: this was followed by his immensely popular semi-operatic versions of Macbeth (1664) and The Tempest (1667), the latter co-written with one of his most successful followers in this vein, John *Dryden, who went on to write his own Antony and Cleopatra play All for Love (1677) and alter Troilus and Cressida (1679). Other major adaptors include Nahum *Tate (most famous for giving King Lear back the happy ending it had enjoyed in its sources, in 1681), Colley *Cibber, and David *Garrick.
An increasing veneration for Shakespeare’s original texts had brought the practice of adaptation into disrepute in England by the middle of the 19th century, and while certain less canonical plays have regularly been retouched for performance since (notably the Henry VI plays, condensed at different times by both John *Barton and Adrian *Noble for the *Royal Shakespeare Company alone), full-scale adaptation has in modern times been more frequently associated with the work of translators fitting Shakespeare’s plays to performance traditions far removed from his own, and with the transformation of his plays into *ballets, *operas, and *films.
Although many adaptations of Shakespeare may now seem objectionable, or at best merely quaint (simplifying his language, plotting, characterization, and morality alike), some constitute intelligent and engaged contemporary critical responses to his plays, and a few more recent playwrights have continued to use the medium as a form of practical Shakespeare criticism, notably Charles *Marowitz. In certain cases successful adaptations or offshoots can affect the way the Shakespearian source itself is read and performed; Tom *Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has left an indelible mark on the performance of Hamlet’s two school friends in modern productions, and Jane Smiley’s suggestion in A Thousand Acres of an incestuous back story in King Lear has resurfaced in some ‘straight’ productions of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
With the global expansion of interest in Shakespeare in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has also come a greater focus on the relationship between the processes of translation and adaptation. In 2012 the *World Shakespeare Festival and *Globe to Globe Festival featured many productions, both non-English and English, adapted from one or more Shakespeare texts and made into something wholly new. This appreciation for new work based on Shakespearian source material seems set to continue: for 2016 the Hogarth Press, an imprint of Vintage, is planning a series of Shakespeare re-tellings by prominent 21st century novelists including Margaret Atwood (The Tempest), Jo Nesbø (Macbeth), Tracy Chevalier (Othello), and Gillian Flynn (Hamlet).
Michael Dobson, rev. Erin Sullivan
Addenbrooke, John, a ‘gentleman’ whom Shakespeare sued in the Stratford court of record for a debt of £6 in 1608. The case dragged on from 17 August 1608 to 7 June 1609. Addenbrooke was arrested but freed when Thomas Hornby, a blacksmith, stood surety for him. A jury awarded Shakespeare his debt and 24s. in costs which he tried to recover from Hornby as Addenbrooke could not be found.
Stanley Wells
Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), poet, playwright, and essayist, most famous as an author, with Sir Richard Steele, of the Spectator papers. In Spectator 40 he voiced one of the first attacks on Nahum Tate’s adaptation of King Lear, in particular its addition of a happy ending and use of poetic justice.
Jean Marsden
Admiral’s Men, the players of Charles Howard, second Lord Effingham—made Lord Admiral in 1585 and Earl of Nottingham in 1597—who were the main rivals of Shakespeare’s company. Also known as the Lord Howard’s Men (1576–85), the Earl of Nottingham’s Men (1597–1603), Prince Henry’s Men (1603–12), and Elector Palatine’s Men (1613–24), their greatest asset in the 1590s and 1600s was the actor Edward Alleyn, whose stepfather-in-law Philip Henslowe owned the Rose and Fortune playhouses used by the company.
Gabriel Egan
Adonis. See Venus and Adonis.
Adrian. (1) A Volscian who hears from the Roman Nicanor that Coriolanus has been banished from *Rome, Coriolanus 4.3.
(2) A lord shipwrecked with Alonso on Prospero’s island in The Tempest.
Anne Button
Adriana, wife to Antipholus of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors, is unable to distinguish between him and his twin.
Anne Button
advertising. The use of Shakespeare in advertising can be traced back to the adoption of an image based on the *Chandos portrait as the publisher Jacob Tonson’s trademark in 1710. More recently, some of the more famous characters from Shakespeare’s plays have provided manufacturers with richly associative brand names (the tobacco sector alone has given us Hamlet cigars, Romeo Y Julietta panatellas, and Falstaff cigars). Shakespeare’s characters also supply television commercials with conveniently familiar dramatic situations which can be rapidly established and then usually debased, for comic effect. Thus King Lear, ready to divide his kingdom, overlooks his two daughters who speak of love and loyalty for a third who offers a supply of ice-cold drinks (Coca-Cola, USA, 1997). Romeo woos Juliet, but only after her rumbling stomach has been prevented from joining in the dialogue (Shreddies Cereals, UK, 2000). Hamlet, about to meditate on Yorick’s skull, drops it, improvises a football pass, and is endorsed as a lager drinker who ‘gets it right’ (Carling Black Label, UK, 1986). True Shakespearian dialogue is rarely used, but longer speeches may be quoted for effect; John of Gaunt’s major speech from Richard II has been both used to convince consumers as to the Englishness of a certain tea (Typhoo, UK, 1994) and counterposed against images of dropped litter, to urge the use of refuse bins (Central Office of Information, UK, 1983). Likewise Prospero’s pronouncement that ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ has been used to inspire admiration for high-end cars (Alfa Romeo ‘Giulietta’, Europe, 2010) and flat-pack beds (Ikea, worldwide, 2014). Although The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens show that Shakespeare held much mercantile practice in low esteem, the epilogue to As You Like It suggests he took a more tolerant view of the advertising, such as it was, of his own day.
Charity Charity, rev. Erin Sullivan
aediles, assistants to the tribunes Brutus and Sicinius, appear in Coriolanus, speaking at 3.1 and 3.3.
Anne Button
Aemilius, a messenger in Titus Andronicus 4.4 and 5.1, presents Lucius as emperor, 5.3.
Anne Button
Aeneas, a Trojan commander in Troilus and Cressida (drawn from *Homer and *Virgil), gives Troilus the news that Cressida must be given to the Greeks, 4.3.
Anne Button
Aeschines, a lord of Tyre, appears with Helicanus, Pericles 3 and 8.
Anne Button
Aeschylus. See critical history; Greek drama.
East Africa.
Bishop Steere’s 1867 translation of *Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare into Swahili is an early instance of the missionary use of Shakespeare in what became in British East Africa common colonial and missionary pedagogic practice. In 1900, the University Missions to Central Africa in Zanzibar produced Hadithi Ingereza, a prose *translation into Swahili of versions of several plays. Kenya’s premier secondary school, Alliance High School, founded by a coalition of missionary groups in 1926, not only taught but put on annual productions of Shakespeare. Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes that, as a pupil at the school, between 1955 and 1958 he saw As You Like It, 1 Henry IV, King Lear, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The presence of Shakespeare within education was strengthened during the 1950s when Makerere University College in Uganda, for a long time the only university college in East and Central Africa, developed its links with the University of London. Alan Warner in his Makerere Inaugural Lecture ‘Shakespeare in the Tropics’ (1954) argued that the study of English literature would make Africans ‘citizens of the world’ but his compatriot David Cook, also at Makerere, contributed to the study of local literatures as well as to Shakespeare. Productions of Shakespeare included one of Macbeth, directed by an American with the first all-black cast in the Ugandan national theatre in 1964. Milton Obote is said, as a student, to have played Caesar in Julius Caesar. During the colonial period expatriate colonials organized performances for regular East African Shakespeare festivals.
During and since the period leading to independence for African states, some writers have continued to promote the presence and use of Shakespeare within cultural and educative practice. Ali Mazrui, head of the Department of Political Science at Makerere, wrote in 1967 of Shakespeare’s importance to African culture as ‘master of the English Language’ and ‘great creator of human characters and eternal situations’, also recommending Hamlet as good training for self-government. The first Swahili translations of complete Shakespeare plays are by Julius K. Nyere, as well the first president of Tanzania. In the 1960s he translated Julius Caesar and then The Merchant of Venice, the latter as Mabepari wa Venisi which means literally ‘the capitalists of Venice’. This version, unlike his earlier translation, is said to reflect more directly his socialist position and is an instance of the attempt by some African writers to appropriate Shakespeare in the context of immediate political struggle. Nyere’s translations were published by OUP in Kenya while, in 1968, S. S. Mushi’s translation of Macbeth was published by Tanzania Publishing House. Shakespeare has been appropriated to argue more explicitly the problematics of colonialism and neo-colonialism in a series of works, notably by Ngugi in his novel A Grain of Wheat (1968), by Murray Carlin, whose appropriation of Othello in Not now, Sweet Desdemona was first produced at the National Theatre of Uganda, Kampala, in 1968, and, further north, by the Sudanese author Tayib Salih who narrates the experiences of a contemporary North African version of Othello in Season of Migration to the North (1969).
Shakespeare has also been received in other ways in various countries in Central and East Africa as a problematic and complex phenomenon. In 1948 Octav Mannoni, using Prospero and Caliban as prototypes, evolved an inferiority-dependence theory of colonialism based on his experience of the Madagascan uprising of 1947–8, ideas later to be developed by Philip Mason, a colonial official who had worked in Africa. These ideas were strongly criticized by Franz Fanon and Aimé *Césaire, famous opponents of colonialism. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who criticized in 1981 the way in which Shakespeare, ‘who had the sharpest and most penetrating observations on the European bourgeois culture’, was taught to him in Kenya and Makerere as if ‘the only concern was with the universal themes of love, fear, birth and death’, and who, even more recently, in 1993 uses the Prospero–Caliban relationship to argue against what he sees as the neo-colonial hegemony of English, traces the beginnings of the rejection of Shakespeare and a move to the Africanization of education to the 1950s. In 1971 Wanjandey Songa was still calling for Africanization, arguing that Shakespeare was being promoted at Makerere and elsewhere at the expense of local cultures. After 1985 Shakespeare was in fact dropped from the Kenyan secondary school syllabus, but, as a result of the intervention of President Danial arap Moi, who in a public address on 25 July 1989 paid tribute to the ‘universal genius’ of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet was restored as a set text for the 1992 national examination.
At the end of the 20th century, while Shakespeare still features in secondary education in East African countries, there is little or no evidence of any current research at tertiary level or in the field of Shakespeare studies in general. Although, as late as 1996, F. Abiola Irene wrote in Research in African Literatures that ‘Shakespeare’s privileged position in African letters has been ensured essentially through the commanding force of his unique genius’, dearth of evidence of recent new publications or performances in East African countries suggests that Shakespeare’s influence, although still present, may be on the wane.
Southern Africa.
The history of Shakespeare in Southern Africa provides an object lesson for the argument that Shakespeare is always a political matter. As elsewhere, Shakespeare was introduced by missionaries and colonists and remained consistently important to settler communities, particularly those of British extraction. Nathaniel James Merriman, in a series of lectures delivered at Grahamstown halfway through the 19th century, recommended Shakespeare as exemplar of ‘mankind’, a sentiment echoed by the last prime minister of the Cape, John X. Merriman, in 1916 at the celebrations on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. Lovedale Seminary, founded by the Glasgow Missionary Society in 1841, was in the 1920s teaching plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. Both during the segregation and apartheid periods and after, Shakespeare has featured in secondary and tertiary education. The kind of Shakespeare taught for much of the 20th century has been strongly influenced by the teachings of Matthew *Arnold, the work of A. C. *Bradley, versions of *New Criticism, and the Scrutiny critics. As the inevitability of the demise of apartheid became clear the Shakespeare’s Schools Text Project, created by the chairman’s fund of Anglo-American Corporation in 1987, declared its intention, in a transitional and post-apartheid society, of promoting the survival of the teaching of Shakespeare at all South African secondary schools. Contributions to Shakespeare scholarship in the first half of the 20th century include F. C. Kolbe’s Shakespeare’s Way: A Psychological Study (1930), a study of key motifs in the texts. Geoffrey Durrant, Christina van Heyningen, Colin Gardner, and Derek Marsh (who emigrated to Australia) applied traditional South African approaches during the 1950s and beyond. By contrast, Wulf Sachs’s Black Hamlet (1937) offers in some respects a more adventurous approach. Sachs, a training psychoanalyst from Lithuania, attempts, in a discussion of the life of John Chavafambira, to explore the intersections between psychoanalysis, Hamlet as version of the universal condition, and the colonial/racial situation.
Performance of Shakespeare was also supported by settler communities in the 19th century. Early recorded productions of Shakespeare in Southern Africa include a performance of Hamlet by soldiers of the garrison at Port Elizabeth in 1799. In 1829 the first civilian theatre company was formed in Cape Town to provide, over the years, a number of Shakespeare productions for the homesick colonial populace. Othello was a much performed play during the 19th century—in what appear to be uniformly racist interpretations—whilst by contrast segregationist and apartheid South Africa in the 20th century avoided it. During the 20th century, productions of Shakespeare, whether in white schools, universities, or by local professional companies, have been mostly tied to current matriculation set plays; a more recent performance of Julius Caesar with black actors and a black director hardly challenged a long tradition of uninspired productions for captive audiences, providing profits for theatre practitioners but no new admirers for Shakespeare. Against this trend, Welcome Msomi’s Zulu appropriation of Macbeth, called Umabatha, first performed in the early 1970s and subsequently abroad including a run at London’s Aldwych theatre and more recently at the *Globe, engaged in part with an evocation of Zulu nationalism, although the conditions of its production and marketing have been criticized. Janet *Suzman’s Market Theatre production of Othello with John Kani in the title role during the late 1980s was a much-fêted attack upon racist and misogynist phobias, especially around interracial love.
In 1904 Beerbohm *Tree’s production of The Tempest elicited a response from W. T. Stead, reading it in the context of King Lobengula and the Matebele uprising. Despite the use of Shakespeare within colonial, segregationist, and apartheid institutions, Shakespeare in the 20th century attracted the interest of an impressive list of black writers, politicians, activists, and thinkers in ways that evidence varying degrees of affiliation, appropriation, or active resistance. His plays have been frequently translated, most famously by Solomon T. Plaatje, who translated six plays into Sechuana only two of which, his version of The Comedy of Errors, Diphoshoso-Phoso (1930), and Julius Caesar (1937), survive. Other plays have also been translated into Sechuana, Xhosa, and Afrikaans. Plaatje, who contributed to Israel *Gollancz’s tercentenary collection A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, is also author of Native Life in South Africa, which offered a powerful argument against the anti-black land policies of the government of his day, as well as a founder member of what was to become the African National Congress. Recently his translations of Shakespeare have been viewed as appropriations designed to empower Sechuana culture rather than to promote Shakespeare. Z. K. Matthews, who wrote Freedom for my People, records the positive impact upon him of the study of Shakespeare at school in 1915–16. In the 1950s, Lewis Nkosi notes that knowledge of Shakespeare became for black students, as well as a status symbol, a means of affiliation with the erstwhile colonial centre—then perceived as more enlightened than apartheid South Africa. Ndabaningi Sithole of Zimbabwe in 1959 argued that a knowledge of Shakespeare contributed to African Nationalism. Others who have drawn on Shakespeare include Can Themba, Es’kia Mphahlele, Peter Abrahams, Bloke Modisane, the assassinated head of the South African Communist Party Chris Hani, and the former South African president Thabo Mbeki.
Since 1980 debate over the historical and present or future use of Shakespeare has intensified. In 1987 Martin Orkin, prompting an outcry from traditionalist South African Shakespearians, maintained that Shakespeare had been used within cultural and educational institutions in ways that complemented apartheid, and has argued then and on other occasions for appropriation of the text in struggles against reactionary or neo-colonial usages of it. David Johnson, almost a decade later, positions Shakespeare as always part of colonial conspiracy and use of him as always evidence of false consciousness. By contrast, the traditionalists, as apartheid seemed finally to be reaching its nadir, established in the 1980s the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, the activities of which remain determinedly Arnoldian and unrepentantly bardolatrous in inclination. More interrogative enquiry occurred at the conference entitled ‘Shakespeare—Postcoloniality—Johannesburg 1996’ which, held in Johannesburg, attracted an unprecedented number of international scholars not only from the West but from Asian, Middle Eastern, Australasian, as well as Southern African countries and which resulted in the appearance of the volume Postcolonial Shakespeares. In the 21st century, constituencies advocating a focus on local literatures argue for the abandonment of Shakespeare, described by some as already ‘dust in the townships’, university courses on Shakespeare dwindle noticeably, and little or no research is being undertaken. On the other hand his work continues to be admired, although mainly by South Africans of European descent. It is still performed on stage fairly regularly although, as earlier, mostly in tandem with current school curricula, where, again, its presence so far has been maintained.
West Africa.
Shakespeare is said to have first reached African waters on board a ship, anchored off Sierra Leone in 1607, where performances of Hamlet and Richard II were given, see *Keeling. As was the case in *East Africa, missionary and colonial activity from the 19th century on ensured the presence of Shakespeare in various educational and cultural practices. The Church Missionary Society established the Grammar School for Boys in Freetown, Sierre Leone, in 1849; Lemuel Johnson, who attended the school in the 20th century, recalls studying Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, 1 Henry IV, Henry V, and King Lear. Dependence on Cambridge University School and Higher School Certificate requirements during the colonial period and beyond ensured the continuing influence of Shakespeare. E. T. Johnson translated Julius Caesar into Yoruba in the 1930s and G. E. Hood of Achimota College, Accra, records performances at his school of Twelfth Night in the 1930s. Performances of Shakespeare in West Africa include a screen adaptation of Hamlet, shot in Ghana and shown at a Commonwealth Arts Festival, and, during the colonial period, visits by performers of Shakespeare arranged by the British Council. In 1954 Molly Mahood delivered her Inaugural Lecture at the University of Ibadan. Both she and Eldred Jones (Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone) have made significant contributions to Shakespeare studies, Jones contributing as well to the study of local literatures. Michael Echeruo (Nigeria) and Lemuel Johnson (Sierra Leone), who have also worked on Shakespeare, now work in the United States.
In an essay that has since become a ‘classic’ of cultural anthropology, Laura Bohannan gives an account of her attempt to impart Hamlet to the Tiv; the essay provides an example of the misrecognitions that may occur for all the participants in any cultural encounter or clash. However, in comparison with East, Central, and *Southern Africa, the reception of Shakespeare in West African countries appears markedly less interrogative of the problematics of a colonial Shakespeare. Hints of potentially complex views of the Shakespeare text are to be found in Ben Okri’s response in 1987 in the journal West Africa to an RSC production of Othello with Ben *Kingsley in the title role as well as in Lemuel Johnson’s recent work and in his appropriation in the 1970s of the figure of Caliban, relocated in Freetown and presented as victim of neocolonialism. Even so, as late as the early 1990s Shakespeare was still a compulsory text at secondary level in Sierra Leone, prompting Handel Kashope Wright to wonder, rather belatedly in comparison with the debate in other parts of Africa, why this continues at the expense of local literatures.
As in other parts of Africa, the reception of Shakespeare has involved politicians and cultural activists as well as writers. James Kwegyir Aggrey, who left the Gold Coast for the United States, cited Shakespeare as an important influence; a pamphlet in 1952 salutes Kwame Nkrumah by means of Shakespeare allusion; and in 1960 Nigeria’s Chief Awolowo insisted that ‘some of the mighty lines of Shakespeare must have influenced my outlook on life’. The specific influence of Shakespeare on a number of West African writers has also been remarked upon. Wole *Soyinka read English under George Wilson *Knight and the influence of Shakespeare on his work has been noted, especially that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as of Macbeth on A Dance in the Forests. Soyinka himself has noted that between 1899 and 1950 some sixteen plays of Shakespeare had been translated or adapted by *Arab poets and dramatists. The Nigerian playwright John Pepper Clark argues for the example of Shakespeare as model, taking up the instance of Caliban to advocate a variety of registers within African writing. Shakespeare’s influence has been detected too in the work of other Nigerians including the Onitsha Market Pamphleteers.
Martin Orkin
Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army (based on the character in *Homer’s Iliad) presides over meetings of his commanders in Troilus and Cressida.
Anne Button
Agrippa, friend to Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, suggests Antony should marry Octavia and hears Enobarbus’ description of Cleopatra, 2.2.
Anne Button
Aguecheek, Sir Andrew, Sir Toby Belch’s drinking companion in Twelfth Night.
Anne Button
Ajax, a Greek commander (based on the character in *Homer’s Iliad), fights Hector, Troilus and Cressida 4.7. When the fight is abandoned, he invites Hector to dine at the Greek camp.
Anne Button
Alarbus, Tamora’s eldest son in Titus Andronicus, is sacrificed to avenge the deaths of Titus’ sons, 1.1.
Anne Button
alarums, a battle call or signal, usually for *drum(s), but exceptionally for *trumpet; it occurs more than 80 times in stage directions and texts of Shakespeare’s plays.
Jeremy Barlow
Albany, Duke of. Husband of Goneril in King Lear, he moves from unease with Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall to defiance.
Anne Button
Albret, Charles d’. See Constable of France.
alchemy. See Scot, Reginald.
Alcibiades, exiled and disaffected, leads an army against his native Athens in Timon of Athens.
Anne Button
Aldridge, Ira (1807–67), African-American actor who, following the closure of the African Theatre in New York where he had played Romeo, moved to England where he appeared as Othello at the Royal Coburg in 1825. Though he added Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, and Aaron (in a drastically adapted version of Titus Andronicus) to his repertoire, it was with Othello that he was most closely identified in a career which was spent touring all over Europe. When he made his overdue West End debut at the Lyceum in 1858, Aldridge was praised for the originality of his interpretation in which Othello’s softer elements were to the fore. Lolita Chakrabarti dramatized Aldridge’s story in the play Red Velvet (2012), starring her husband Adrian *Lester. Lester went on to play Othello at the Royal National Theatre the following year.
Richard Foulkes, rev. Erin Sullivan
Alençon, Duke of. He gives militant advice to Charles the Dauphin, 1 Henry VI 5.2 and 5.7.
Anne Button
Alexander, servant to Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, describes Hector and Ajax to her, 1.2.
Anne Button
‘Alexander’. See Nathaniel, Sir.
Alexander, Peter (1894–1969), Scottish editor, biographer, and textual and literary critic. His Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III (1929) argues that the First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard III (both 1594) are not independent source plays but pirated ‘bad’ quartos of the second and third parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. This radical revision of the early canon is reflected in Alexander’s later Shakespeare’s Life and Art (1939), A Shakespeare Primer (1951), and Shakespeare (1964). His one-volume modernized edition of The Complete Works (1951) was adopted as a standard text by the BBC and many academic institutions.
Tom Matheson
alexandrine, the twelve-syllable line of classical French verse; or an English six-stress line (hexameter); sometimes found as a variant line in Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, also as the line of *Biron’s sonnet in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.2.106–19).
Chris Baldick
Alexas is one of Cleopatra’s attendants. His treachery and execution are related in Antony and Cleopatra 4.6.
Anne Button
Algeria. Following independence, theatrical activity in Algeria experienced a great development within the *Arab world. During the years of 1963–87, prestigious directors and playwrights such as Kateb Yacine (1929–89), Rachid Ksentini (1887–1944), and Mahieddine Bachetarzi (1899–1986) contributed to this flourishing. Most of the works were either about the Algerian national liberation war, or were famous masterpieces by socialist playwrights such as Maxim Gorki, *Bertolt Brecht, or Nikolai Gogol. In the 1960s a localized adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew was written by M. Kasdarli and directed by Allel El Mouhib. The play, written in Algerian Arabic, was performed by the newly created (1963) Algerian National Theatre Company and Agoumi Sid Ahmed and Abdelkader Alloula (1929–94), two great figures of the Algerian theatre, were in the cast. Unfortunately this period of glory was short lived. For more than a decade Algeria suffered an undeclared civil war in which several playwrights and artists were brutally murdered, including Alloula, Azzedine Medjoubi, and Tahar Djaout. Consequently several theatres were closed and performances came to a standstill. It is only since the turn of the 21st century that theatrical life has started to regain momentum. In 2004, during the Experimental Theatre Festival in Cairo, the Constantine National Theatre group successfully presented Word and Al-Bandir, written and produced by Al-Taybe, where three famous characters, Antara Ibn Chaddad, Al-Hallag, and Othello, are striving to destroy modern myths. The Professional Theatre Festival opened anew in 2006 with Twelfth Night. Adapted and produced by Ahmed Khoudi with the ISMA Group, the play was in Algerian Arabic and presented without scenery. In 2007 in Mostaganem a young director, Kamel Attouche, staged Ophelia’s Cry, an adaptation based on the Iraqi Khazaal El *Majidi’s translation. The play won three prizes in the *Moroccan Agadir Academic Theatre Festival the same year. In 2014 during the National Feminine Theatre Festival in Annaba, Meriem Allak presented a much-discussed work entitled Shakespeare’s Return. The work, which has no specific relation with the English Bard, is a sharp criticism against the prevailing conditions of the Algerian theatres today. The same year, Djamel Guermi directed a faithful rendering of Macbeth in Skikda.
Rafik Darragi
Alice, Catherine’s gentlewoman in Henry V, teaches her English, 3.4, and interprets for King Harry and Catherine, 5.2.
Anne Button
Allam, Roger (b. 1953), British actor of fine voice and presence. He joined the *Royal Shakespeare Company in 1981; his roles for them include Mercutio (1984), Theseus doubling Oberon (1984), Brutus, Duke Vincentio, and Toby Belch (1987), and Benedick (1990). He played Ulysses at the *National Theatre in 1999, and scored a great success as Falstaff at *Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010 and Prospero in 2013.
Michael Dobson
Allde, Edward. See printing and publishing.
Allen, Giles (d. 1608), owner of the site upon which the Theatre was built. On 13 April 1576 Allen leased a plot of land in Shoreditch to James Burbage who, with his brother-in-law John Brayne, built the Theatre on it. Allen and the Burbages failed to reach agreement on renewal of the lease in 1597, and December/January 1598–9 the Burbages removed their playhouse to re-erect it as the Bankside Globe. Allen’s ensuing legal battles with the Burbages provide much of our knowledge about the Theatre and the Globe.
Gabriel Egan
Alleyn, Edward (1566–1626), actor (Worcester’s Men 1583, Admiral’s/Prince Henry’s 1589–97 and 1600–6) and housekeeper. The 17-year-old Alleyn was named as one of Worcester’s Men in a licence of 14 January 1583 and he was already a renowned actor when, on 22 October 1592, he married Joan Woodward, the stepdaughter of Philip Henslowe, at whose Rose playhouse he had led Lord Strange’s Men from February to June that year. We know of Alleyn’s personal life through charming letters which passed between him and Joan while he led Lord Strange’s Men on tour in 1593, and we hear of his ever-rising professional fame through glowing reports by Thomas Nashe, amongst others. Contemporary allusions suggest that Alleyn was an unusually large man—which undoubtedly helped his celebrated presentation of Marlowe’s anti-hero Tamburlaine—and a surviving portrait and signet ring confirm that he was about 6 feet (2 m) tall, well above the period’s average. To augment his bulk Alleyn apparently developed a powerful style of large gestures and loud speaking which others mocked as ‘stalking’ or ‘strutting’ and ‘roaring’. Alleyn took the lead roles in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, Greene’s Orlando furioso, and also Sebastian in the anonymous Frederick and Basilea, Muly Mahamet in Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, and Tamar Cam in the anonymous 1 Tamar Cam. After three more years at the Rose (1594–7) Alleyn retired but he returned to the stage when Henslowe’s Fortune opened in 1600 and continued until some time before 30 April 1606 when the Prince’s Men were issued a patent which lacks his name. In early May 1608 Alleyn performed in an entertainment for James I at Salisbury House on the Strand and received £20. On 13 September 1619 Alleyn founded the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich which received Alleyn’s and Henslowe’s papers, most importantly the latter’s Diary, upon which much of our knowledge of the theatre is based. Joan Alleyn died on 28 June 1623 and on 3 December that year Alleyn married Constance, the eldest daughter of John Donne, the Dean of St Paul’s.
Gabriel Egan
All for Love. See Antony and Cleopatra.
All Is True See centre section.
alliteration, repetition of similar sounds (usually initial consonants) within any sequence of words:
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard
(Sonnet 12)
Alliteration may also link the initial stressed consonant of a word with that of a stressed syllable within a word: ‘Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity’ (Sonnet 62, l. 10); ‘When I did speak of some distressful stroke’ (Othello 1.3.157).
Chris Baldick
All’s Well that Ends Well. See centre section.
allusion, a passing or indirect reference to something (e.g. a written work, a legend, a historical figure) assumed to be understood by the audience or reader, as with the reference to the mythical Phoenix in Sonnet 19.
Chris Baldick
Alonso is the King of Naples in The Tempest. His son Ferdinand and Prospero’s daughter (Miranda) become betrothed, reconciling him to Prospero.
Anne Button
Amateur performance. Appropriately for a body of plays willing to depict forms of recreational performance in comedy, history, or tragedy—from the artisans’ efforts at ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Falstaff’s ‘play extempore’ in 1 Henry IV to Hamlet’s dilettante attempt at the death of Priam—the Shakespeare canon has been central to the development of amateur drama in the Anglophone world and beyond. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was itself being performed recreationally by apprentices as early as the 1650s (in the form of Robert *Cox’s *droll The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver), but over the ensuing two centuries non-professional productions of Shakespeare belonged more often to a pan-European vogue for aristocratic private theatricals, anticipated in 1623 by Sir Edward *Dering’s domestic performances of a conflation of 1 and 2 Henry IV. By the 19th century, such home theatricals generally preferred to stage only abbreviations or *burlesques of the plays, but at the same time many urban literary societies devoted to artisan-class self-improvement (such as the Manchester Athenaeum) were beginning to diversify into full-scale public theatrical production. In 1902 the first show mounted by the Stockport Garrick Society—a dressy Merchant of Venice at the Stockport Mechanics’ Institute—set an important precedent by which civic amateur dramatic societies sought to meet a demand for the kinds of serious drama which commercial managers regarded as too risky: in this the society was consciously anticipating and seeking to encourage the establishment of the subsidized companies which would take over this task after the Second World War, largely eclipsing their amateur colleagues. The *Royal Shakespeare Company celebrated its long-unacknowledged kinship with amateur Shakespearians with its ‘Open Stages’ project of 2011–12, lending personnel to help train the casts of amateur productions which competed to perform on the company’s stages during the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival.
In addition to its roles within British society, non-professional Shakespeare has also been a recurrent pursuit of military personnel (in situations which have sometimes preserved the single-sex traditions of the Renaissance stage: Ulysses S. Grant, for instance, played Desdemona while a young lieutenant in the 1840s) and among expatriates.
Michael Dobson
ambassadors. (1) French ambassadors bring ‘treasure’ (actually tennis balls) on behalf of the Dauphin to King Harry, Henry V 1.2.245–57. (2) Ambassadors from England announce the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet 5.2.321–6. (3) Antony uses his schoolmaster (see 3.11.71–2) as an ambassador, Antony and Cleopatra 3.12 and 3.13 (he was first named as Euphronius by *Capell, following Shakespeare’s source *Plutarch).
Anne Button
America. See United States of America; Latin America.
Amiens, one of Duke Senior’s attendants in As You Like It, sings in 2.5 and 2.7.
Anne Button
Amyot, Jacques. See Plutarch.
anachronism, the introduction of anything not belonging to the supposed time of a play’s action: most famously the clock in Julius Caesar (2.1.192). The term may also be applied to modern-dress productions of Shakespearian plays.
Chris Baldick
anacoluthon, a change of grammatical construction in mid-sentence, leaving the initial utterance unfinished:
Today as I came by I callèd there—
But I shall grieve you to report the rest
(Richard II 2.2.94–5)
Chris Baldick
anadiplosis, a rhetorical figure in which clauses, lines, or sentences are linked by repetition of the final word or phrase of the first in the initial word or phrase of the second:
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father …
(Richard II 5.5.6–7)
Chris Baldick
anagnorisis (Greek, ‘recognition’), the turning point in a drama at which the protagonist discovers the true state of affairs to which he or she had been blind—as with Othello’s recognition that Desdemona had not betrayed him.
Chris Baldick
anapaest, a metrical unit (‘foot’) comprising two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable, rarely found as the basis of full lines:
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey-nonny-no
(As You Like It 5.3.16)
Chris Baldick
anaphora, repetition of the same word or phrase at the start of successive clauses or lines:
This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this
England
(Richard II 2.1.50)
Chris Baldick
anaptyxis, insertion of an extra vowel, usually before a medial r or l and after the word’s principal accent. This occurs sometimes in words like ang-ry, Hen-ry, monst-rous, child-ren, fidd-ler, wrast-ler, and even Eng-land (Hamlet 4.3.46). Cf. Lady Macbeth’s ‘The raven himself is hoarse | That croaks the fatal ent-rance of Duncan | Under my battlements’ (1.5.38–40).
Chris Baldick
Anatomy of Abuses, The. See Stubbes, Philip.
Anderson, Dame Judith (1898–1992), American actress, who arrived in the USA from Australia in 1918. Throughout her career she specialized in operatic, grande dame roles, and came to be regarded as the last of the grand-style tragedy queens. Her Shakespearian roles included Gertrude (in John *Gielgud’s Hamlet in New York, 1936), Hamlet (in which she toured, remarkably, at the age of 71), and—famously and self-definingly—Lady Macbeth, first opposite *Olivier in London in 1937, and later opposite Maurice Evans in New York (1941, and again on film in 1960). Her last role was in an American daytime soap opera called Santa Barbara (1984).
Michael Dobson
Anderson, Mary (1858–1940), American actress, who made her debut in 1875 at Louisville, aged 16, as Juliet, a role to which her natural gifts of stature, face, and voice were well suited, as they were to Rosalind, Hermione, and Perdita. Within this limited range Mary Anderson adorned the stage on both sides of the Atlantic. Her Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum (1884), with William Terriss as Romeo and designs by Lewis Wingfield, enhanced her reputation at home as much as in London and she was fêted during her 1885–6 US tour, but later resentment at her European pretensions contributed to her breakdown (1889) and subsequent retirement to Broadway, England, where she wrote several volumes of memoirs.
The American actress Mary Anderson (1859–1940) as Perdita. She was the first to double the roles of Hermione and Perdita in The Winter’s Tale.
Richard Foulkes
‘And let me the cannikin clink’, sung by Iago in Othello 2.3.63; the original tune is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Andrewes, Robert, a scrivener who drew up and witnessed the documents for Shakespeare’s purchase of the *Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613. Another possible though faint Shakespearian connection is his preparing the will of Marie James, mother of the brewer Elias James, whose epitaph Shakespeare may have written.
Stanley Wells
‘And Robin Hood, Scarlet and John’, snatch of a *broadside ballad sung by Silence in 2 Henry IV 5.3.104; also alluded to by Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor 1.1.158. The original tune is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Andromache, Hector’s wife in Troilus and Cressida, tries to dissuade him from going into battle, 5.3.
Anne Button
Andronicus, Marcus, a Roman tribune in Titus Andronicus who helps his brother Titus take revenge.
Anne Button
Andronicus, Titus. See Titus Andronicus.
‘And sword and shield | In bloody field’, fragment sung by Pistol in Henry V 3.2.9; the original tune is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
‘And will a not come again’, sung by Ophelia in Hamlet 4.5.188. A tune with 17th-century origins (a variant of ‘The merry, merry milkmaids’) was apparently sung to the words at Drury Lane in the late 18th century.
Jeremy Barlow
Angelo. (1) A goldsmith in The Comedy of Errors, he has Antipholus of Ephesus arrested, 4.1.
(2) Given absolute power by the resigning Duke Vincentio, he threatens Isabella’s brother with execution if she refuses to have sex with him in Measure for Measure.
Anne Button
Angers, Citizen of. See Citizen of Angers.
Angus, a thane, announces Cawdor’s lost thaneship in Macbeth 1.2.107–14 and marches against Macbeth in Act 5.
Anne Button
animal shows. Baiting of bulls and bears using dogs was already a popular entertainment on Bankside when the first playhouses were constructed. Like open-air playhouses, baiting rings were wooden structures, approximately round, and scholars have conjectured that a travelling players’ booth placed within a baiting ring gave the design for the playhouses. However, baiting rings do not elevate the lowest auditorium gallery—which is essential in a playhouse else the yardlings obscure the view—because the baiting ring yard is necessarily free of spectators. Also, the barriers needed to contain animals make for poor sightlines. Philip Henslowe, joint Master and Keeper of the King’s Bears with Edward Alleyn from 1604, built the first combined playhouse and baiting ring, the Hope, in 1614.
Gabriel Egan
Animated Tales, The. See Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.
Anjou, Margaret of. See Margaret.
Anjou, René, Duke of. See René, Duke of Anjou, King of Naples.
Anne, Lady. She curses Richard and any future wife of his but is wooed and won by him, Richard III 1.2 (based on Anne Neville (1456–85), daughter of Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’).
Anne Button
Anne Hathaway’s Cottage (Hewland) is a timber-framed and thatched building in Shottery, a hamlet within the parish of Stratford-upon-Avon but just over a mile (1.5 km) from the town centre. It is known to have been held by the Hathaway family from at least 1543, as part of copyhold property granted then to John Hathaway. Hewland was the name attached to land belonging to one of two messuages included in this grant, and has come to be taken as the original name for Anne Hathaway’s Cottage itself. John’s holdings subsequently passed to Richard Hathaway, probably his son, whose daughter Anne married William Shakespeare in November 1582. Richard died in September 1581, when his property passed to his widow Joan, probably his second wife. She lived until 1599.
The term ‘cottage’ hardly does justice to the Hathaway family home, which, by the standards of the day, was a substantial residence of a well-to-do yeoman farmer. It appears to have been built in two stages. The lower part, adjoining the road, has been conclusively dated to the 1460s and consisted of a cross-passage, where the visitor enters today, with a hall to the left and kitchen to the right. The hall, when originally built, would probably have been open to the roof. On the first floor, above the cross-passage, is a space of matching size where the early construction of this part of the house is clearly visible. The evidence for this is a cruck, a pair of large and matching curved timbers reaching from the ground to the apex of the roof, a characteristic of medieval timber-framed buildings. On either side are bedchambers, the one to the west created when a floor was inserted into the open hall. The chimney stack, which runs up through this part of the house, probably dates from the time of this alteration: outside, it bears a plaque, with the date 1697 and the initials I. H. (for John Hathaway): this would seem rather late for the alterations to the hall and may simply record repairs or rebuilding of the exterior stonework.
In 1610, Richard’s son and heir Bartholomew Hathaway acquired the freehold of the family’s property and it may have been he who added a taller section to the house at the orchard end. This is now divided into three small rooms on the ground floor, with two bedchambers above. Ownership descended in the male line of the Hathaway family until the death, in 1746, of John Hathaway. It then passed, through his sister Susanna, to his nephew John Hathaway Taylor, whose son William Taylor lived there until his death in 1846. Financial problems had led to the division of the house into two cottages by 1836 and to its sale two years later, but Taylor had remained in occupation as tenant of one half. His daughter Mary, the wife of George Baker, was still living there in 1892 (in one of three cottages into which the house had been further divided), when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust purchased the property. Mary Baker, who died in 1899, was appointed first custodian. Subsequent changes have primarily affected the building’s setting, notably the redesign of the garden in the 1920s under the supervision of Ellen Ann Wilmot.
The earliest published attribution of the house as the home of Anne Hathaway, together with the first known drawing, is to be found in Samuel Ireland’s Picturesque Views on the Warwickshire Avon of 1795, although it is clear from his account that the tradition was well established, perhaps reaching back to the time of the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. Nicholas Rowe had been the first to record a local tradition that Anne’s maiden name was Hathaway, but it was not until the middle of the century that her name had first been linked to the Shottery family of that name. It is worth noting, in this instance, that the discovery, over 50 years later, of the documents recording Shakespeare’s marriage confirmed rather than disproved this tradition.
The substantial farmhouse owned by the Hathaways of Shottery, originally known as ‘Hewland’ but now almost universally famous as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.
Robert Bearman
Anne of Denmark, Queen of England and Scotland (1574–1619), consort of James I and VI. Independent and literate, she studied Italian with John *Florio, who dedicated both his Montaigne translation and his dictionary to her. For the first decade of the reign, she was the principal patron of the court masque, and *Jonson essentially reinvented the form to her taste. It is probably in deference to her that the references to drunkenness as a Danish national trait in Hamlet 1.4 are omitted from Q2 (1604).
Stephen Orgel
Anne Page. See Page, Anne.
‘An old hare hoar’, sung by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet 2.3.125; the original tune is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Anonymous A film (2011), directed by Roland Emmerich, in which Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is portrayed as the author of Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare himself is depicted as an illiterate and drunken buffoon.
Stanley Wells
anonymous publications. The earliest *quarto texts of Shakespeare’s plays—Titus Andronicus (1594), The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) (1594), Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) (*octavo, 1595), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Richard II (1597), Richard III (1597)—were printed without naming the dramatist on the *title page. Shakespeare’s name first appeared on the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost, although in the same year 1 Henry IV was published anonymously, as was Henry V in 1600. Later quartos prominently advertised their texts as ‘Written by William Shakespeare’. The dramatist received top billing in the largest type-font on the title page of King Lear (1608), and the publisher of Othello (1622) wrote that ‘the author’s name is sufficient to vent his work’. In recent years two anonymous publications considered part of the Shakespeare *apocrypha, Arden of Faversham (1592) and Edward III (1596), have come increasingly to be viewed as part-authored by Shakespeare.
Eric Rasmussen, rev. Will Sharpe
Antenor, based on the character from *Homer’s Iliad, is exchanged for Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, Act 4.
Anne Button
Anthony, Mark. See Antony and Cleopatra; Julius Caesar.
anticlimax, a deflating descent into banality, usually knowingly—as distinct from inadvertent bathos:
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And looking on it with lack-lustre eye
Says very wisely, ‘It is ten o’clock.’
(As You Like It 2.7.20–2)
Chris Baldick
Antigonus, husband of Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, is killed by a bear as he attempts to abandon baby Perdita.
Anne Button
Antiochus is King of Antioch. His incest with his daughter is discovered by Pericles, Pericles 1.1.
Anne Button
Antiochus’ Daughter. See Antiochus.
Antipholus of Ephesus, long estranged from his family, is eventually reunited with his parents and twin of the same name (who has come to Ephesus from Syracuse to seek him) in The Comedy of Errors.
Anne Button
Antipholus of Syracuse. See Antipholus of Ephesus.
anti-theatrical polemic. The first important attack on the theatre was Stephen Gosson’s rather mild The School of Abuse (1579), followed by the stronger Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582). The former was dedicated, without authority, to Philip Sidney, whose Defence of Poetry partly answers it. In January 1583 the bear-baiting stadium at Paris Garden collapsed killing many in the lowest gallery and Puritan preachers hailed this as God’s judgement. Later the same year Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses (1583), complained that ‘the running to Theaters and Curtains, daily and hourly, time and tide, to see plays and interludes’ was bound to ‘insinuate foolery, and renew the remembrance of heathen idolatory’ and to ‘induce whoredom and uncleanness’. Two aspects of playing were subject to criticism in these attacks. The subject matter was likely to incite irreligious sensual pleasure via spectacles of ‘wrath, cruelty, incest, injury [and] murder’ in the tragedies and ‘love, cozenage, flattery, bawdry [and] sly conveyance of whoredom’ in the comedies, as Gosson put it. Furthermore, acting itself was suspect because commoners feigned the actions of monarchs and men the actions of women, which might suggest that God-given social and sexual distinctions were matters merely of conduct rather than being.
In a sermon at Paul’s Cross delivered on 3 November 1577, Thomas White broke off his attack on Sunday pleasures in general to focus on playing: ‘behold the sumptuous Theatre houses, a continual monument of London’s prodigality and folly.’ White welcomed the cessation of playing due to the plague and saw a spiritual as well as a practical causal connection: ‘the cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well, and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ Puritanism had initially been a movement to expunge remaining elements of Catholicism from the Church of England, but the reform movement fragmented and there was no simple Puritan objection to the stage. John *Milton was a Puritan playgoer and many reformist aristocrats patronized playing companies. Dramatists often represented Puritans as anti-sensual hypocrites (Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair is a fine example) but historians no longer see the court as essentially pro-theatre and the city authorities (dominated by Puritans) as essentially anti-theatre. Rather, the theatre industry was one of the sites upon which was played out the larger political conflict between court and city. The longest anti-theatrical polemic was William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix: The Players’ Scourge of 1633 which specifically laments the folio format, once reserved for Bibles and other high-quality work, being used for play anthologies such as ‘Ben Johnsons, Shackspeers and others’. Prynne was imprisoned and his ears were removed because his condemnation of women acting was taken to be a direct reference to Queen *Henrietta Maria’s participation in a masque, but his book was influential in the suppression of playing in 1642.
Gabriel Egan
antithesis, an effect of contrast produced by framing opposed terms in parallel syntactical constructions: ‘Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream’ (Sonnet 129).
Chris Baldick
Antium, Citizen of. See Citizen of Antium.
Antoine, Théâtre, founded by the naturalist director André Antoine (1858–1948) in 1897 on a Parisian ‘Boulevard’ and still operating independently. Its innovative electrical fittings allowed for safe, complete darkness on stage and in the auditorium. Antoine staged his first memorable Shakespearian drama, King Lear (1904), in Loti and Vedel’s integral translation.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Antonio. (1) He is the father of Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. (2) Having failed to repay a debt to Shylock, he narrowly escapes having to give him a pound of his flesh in The Merchant of Venice. (3) He is Leonato’s brother in Much Ado About Nothing. (4) He lends Sebastian his purse and is dismayed when ‘Cesario’—whom he believes to be Sebastian—disavows him when he is arrested in Twelfth Night. (5) Having usurped his brother Prospero’s dukedom of *Milan many years before the action of the play, he is shipwrecked on Prospero’s island in The Tempest.
Anne Button
Antony, Mark (Marcus Antonius). See Antony and Cleopatra; Julius Caesar.
Antony and Cleopatra See centre section.
Apemantus, ‘a churlish philosopher’ in Timon of Athens, anticipates Timon’s misanthropy with his own, but is reviled by Timon in the woods, 4.3.
Anne Button
apocrypha, a term, borrowed from biblical studies, used to denote works which have at one time or another been attributed to Shakespeare but are not currently regarded as part of the *canon. Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the small Shakespearian portion of Sir Thomas More, though excluded from the First Folio, are no longer regarded as apocryphal, but seven plays which the Third Folio (1664), following the example of their Jacobean quartos, did attribute to Shakespeare are no longer considered to be by Shakespeare, namely *Locrine, The *London Prodigal, The *Puritan, *Sir John Oldcastle, *Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and A *Yorkshire Tragedy. Other apocryphal plays attributed to Shakespeare by 17th-century printers or booksellers are The *Troublesome Reign of King John, The *Birth of Merlin, *Arden of Faversham, *Fair Em, and *Mucedorus. The apocrypha also include some plays never attributed to Shakespeare in his own time at all, but claimed as his by modern scholars on internal evidence alone. These include Edmund Ironside, and the apocryphal play with the strongest claim to be considered genuine, *Edward III, which has come to be considered as securely part-Shakespearian as Sir Thomas More by many scholars, albeit the latter identification rests on palaeographic as well as stylistic evidence. Strong and convincing claims have likewise been made for parts of Arden of Faversham, the 1602 revised text of *Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and *Double Falsehood as genuine additions to the Shakespeare canon in recent years, though the circumstances of Shakespeare’s input in each seem to vary greatly, and can by no means straightforwardly be reconstructed or explained. *Mucedorus is also beginning to attract fresh critical attention as a Shakespearian maybe.
Michael Dobson, rev. Will Sharpe
Apology for Actors, An. See Heywood, Thomas.
aporia, a rhetorical figure in which the speaker hesitates between alternatives. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy is the most celebrated extended example.
Chris Baldick
Apothecary He sells poison to Romeo, Romeo and Juliet 5.1.
Anne Button
apparitions, three. In turn they tell Macbeth to ‘beware Macduff’, that ‘none of woman born’ shall harm him, and that he ‘shall never vanquished be’ until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, Macbeth 4.1.
Anne Button
apprentices. See boy actors.
appropriation, the more aggressive cousin of *adaptation. Although there is no absolute distinction between these two categories of creative intervention, appropriation literally means ‘to make one’s own’, and appropriations of Shakespeare are often taken to be those re-envisionings that dramatically and sometimes almost unrecognizably rework elements of character, genre, narrative, and especially ideology in their source texts. Some poststructural and postcolonial appropriations of Shakespeare have sought to draw attention to and deconstruct the plays’ canonical authority, wresting from them their status as tools of empire and giving voice to alternative perspectives in the process. Less political appropriations may use Shakespeare as a form of intertext or allusive echo, creating new stories that eschew direct comparison with their Shakespearian predecessors.
Erin Sullivan
apron stage, the technical name for the part of the modern stage projecting in front of the curtain, but used anachronistically to refer to the entire stage of Shakespeare’s time which projected into the audience (seated at the indoor theatres and standing at the open-air theatres) who thus surrounded it on three sides. Also known as the thrust stage and to be contrasted with the proscenium arch stage.
Gabriel Egan
Apuleius, Lucius (b. c.ad 123), Roman writer and rhetorician, educated at Carthage and Athens, who travelled in the East before returning to Africa to marry a rich widow. The Golden Ass, translated into English by William Adlington in 1566, with reprints in 1571, 1582, and 1596, is the only surviving Latin novel. Recycling Greek and Roman narratives, including the Ovidian tale of Midas’ transformation into an ass, it tells how one Lucius, in this asinine shape, attracts the attention of a powerful woman, but is finally restored to human form by Isis. This precursor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream may also have influenced Venus and Adonis, Macbeth, and Cymbeline.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Arab world. The first translator of Shakespeare in the Arab world was the Egyptian writer Najib El Haddad (1867–99) and the first Shakespearian play ever performed in *Egypt was Othello (produced by Suleimen Effendi Kerdahy in November 1887).
Several prestigious Arab poets and writers felt the need to translate or adapt Shakespeare such as Tanyus Abduh (Hamlet, 1902), Khalil Mutran (Othello, 1912, Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Merchant of Venice), Muhammad Hamdi (Julius Caesar, 1912), Sami Al-Juraidini (Julius Caesar, 1912), Muhammad Lutfi Jumʿa (Hamlet), Muhammad Al-Sibaʿi (Coriolanus), Mahmood Ahmed Al-ʿAqqad (Julius Caesar), Muhammad Awad Ibraheem (Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It), Jabra Ibraheem Jabra (most of Shakespeare’s works, including the Sonnets), Ali Al-Raʿi, Muhammad Teymour, Mahmood Teymour, Iz Al-Deen Ismaʿil, Lewis Awad, Abdel Oadir Al-Out, etc.
Because they had to comply with the prevailing taste of the public, the early translators did not hesitate to change the titles of some plays and even to give Arabic names to popular dramatis personae: Utail or AttaʿUllah for Othello, Ghalban for Caliban, Yaʿqub for lago, etc. Given the operatic trend in that period, not a single play, including Hamlet, was ever performed without songs. The Egyptian actor and producer Cheik Salama El Higazy, whose company had staged successfully a musical comedy with a happy ending adapted from Romeo and Juliet under the title The Martyrs of Love in 1906, gave up the songs when he produced Hamlet the following year, but the public was so much disappointed that he thought fit to ask his friend, the great poet Ahmed Shawky, for some songs. The success of the Shakespearian play, in which the hero does not die on stage, lasted until 1914.
Hamlet inspired many Arab playwrights such as Alfred Farag (Sulaiman Al-Halabv and Ali Janah Al-Tabrizi Wa-Tabia Ghufa), Salah Abdul Sabour (Leila and Majnoun), and Mamdouh Adwan (Hamlet Yastaghs Mutaakhar). Great actors including Youssef Wahby, Abdelaziz Khalil, Aly El Kassar, and George Abyadh staged it not only in Egypt but also in many Arab countries. It was Suleimen Effendi Kerdahy who performed Hamlet for the first time in 1909 in Tunis, along with Othello and Romeo and Juliet, before he died a few weeks later. In *Algeria, Hamlet was played by the great actor Muhiʿl-Din in 1953.
Most of the translators used literary Arabic prose; however, there were a few attempts at verse translations by Muhammad Iffat (Macbeth, 1911, The Tempest, 1909), but without much success. Other translators, like Ahmed Zaky Abu Shady (The Tempest, 1930), Muhammad Ferid Abu Hadid (Macbeth, 1934), and Aly Ahmad Bakathir (Romeo and Juliet, 1936), adopted the Shakespearian blank verse.
Aziz Abadah’s Qaysar is almost a faithful adaptation of Julius Caesar. Though inspired by Garnier’s work, Shawky’s Masr’a Cleopatra (The Death of Cleopatra, 1929) evokes the Shakespearian play in so far as the two heroines experience through death the same catharsis, heralding the same message of love and freedom. More recent works are Saad Al-Khadim’s Dr Othello and Abdul Karim Barsheed’s Othello Wal-Kail Wal-Baroud (1965).
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and poems, known to the Arab world through F. T. Palgrave’s popular anthology, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), influenced several Arab poets, such as Abderrahman Chokry, Al Aqqad (Egypt), Abul Kacem Echebbi (*Tunisia), and Nazek Al-Malayika (*Iraq).
After the Second World War, the Arab League decided, in collaboration with UNESCO, and the supervision of the great Egyptian writer Taha Hussain, to have all Shakespeare’s work translated and printed. In the late decades of the 20th century, with the development of mass media and the cinema industry, Arab translators continued to take interest in Shakespeare’s works but with a change in the primary motivation. Most of them aimed not at economic gain but rather at publication and recognition. Among them were university professors such as the Palestinian Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920–94), the Iraqi Azher Suleiman, and the Egyptians Mohammed Mustafa Badawi (1925–2012), Mohamed Enani, and Mustapha Safouan, as well as poets and journalists such as the *Lebanese Ounsi el-Hage (1937–2014) and the Iraqis Salah Nyazi and Sargon Boulus. Moreover, in the mid-1990s, the BBC Arabic service commissioned the translation of some plays including The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Richard II. In 2013 the ‘Kalima’ project in Abu Dhabi published the Sonnets, translated by Dr Abul-Wahid Lo’loah.
As one might guess, Othello has remained the focus of multiple adaptations. Following Khalil Mutran’s Arabization of the play in 1912, many Arab novels of various aesthetic worth made use of this play, such as the Sudanese Tayeb Salih’s (1926–2009) Mawsim al hijrah ila al-shimal (1966) (published in English in 1969 as Season of Migration to the North) and the Palestinian-Israeli Emile Habibi’s (1921–96) Al-W’aqai’ al-gharibah fi hayat Sa’id Abu Al-Vahs al-mutasha’il (The Extraordinary Adventures of Saeed, the Pessoptimist), which was first published in Haïfa in 1974.
In 2007, the *Kuwaiti playwright and director Sulayman Al-Bassam presented the first Arab Shakespearian adaptation in Stratford-on-Avon. Entitled Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, it was performed as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2006–7 Complete Works Festival, as well as in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord theatre in 2000. The play, set in a Gulf Arab country with Arab actors, is in the Gulf colloquial Arabic, with English subtitles. Like Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy deals with issues of tyranny and tribal and religious conflict. The originality of Al-Bassam’s adaptation lies in creative additions. Significantly, the setting recalls Baghdad with its ‘Green Zone’ and the American presence. The military atmosphere is emphasized throughout the play. Gloucester delivers his first soliloquy dressed in an imposing uniform of a high-ranking officer, underlining the fact that the Wars of the Roses are being used to explain not only the context of his ascension to the throne, but also to shed light on the on-going ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq. Thus, right from the first scene, following the brief presentation of Queen Margaret, the director sets his play in the very modern Arab world, with Gloucester announcing the end of the wars on TV and receiving an e-mail from Buckingham telling him about the impending death of Edward. If generals, he says in his first soliloquy, are able to wage war and destroy the world with Microsoft Powerpoint, why can’t he reduce it to ashes with a few Semtex boxes? The famous *Syrian actor Fayez Kazak played the role of Richard.
In 1998 in Damascus, Kazak had produced an open-air adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream very successfully. He also played the role of The Mullah in Sulayman Al-Bassam’s new production, The Speaker’s Progress, an unconventional interpretation of Twelfth Night. Performed in English and Arabic with English surtitles, it was presented in 2011 in Boston by Al-Bassam’s newly titled group, Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre (SABABP). In the same vein as his other works, The Speaker’s Progress offers a new perception of Arab society. In a Gulf country ruled by religious dictates against theatre, an old director discovered Twelfth Night and used it secretly to question such issues as cultural heritage, identity, and the meaning of history. Despite the tension and the growing doctrinal differences prevailing in the world today, Shakespeare’s works are still leading to a rich, varied appropriation in the Arab countries. They have forged a visual culture and confronted such questions as power, tyranny, freedom and justice, resonating loudly with contemporary, relevant, realities.
Rafik Darragi
Aragon, Catherine of. See Katherine.
Aragon, Prince of. One of Portia’s unsuccessful suitors in The Merchant of Venice 2.9.
Anne Button
Arc, Joan of. See Joan la Pucelle.
archbishops. See Canterbury, Archbishop of; York, Archbishop of.
Archer, William (1856–1924), Scottish dramatic critic, best known for his promotion, with G. B. Shaw, of Ibsen’s works, but also author of ‘What We Know of the Elizabethan Stage’ in the Quarterly Review (1908) and The Old Drama and the New (1923), vindicating contemporary drama against its predecessors, exempting only Shakespeare.
Tom Matheson
Archidamus comments on the hospitality of Leontes and praises his son Mamillius, The Winter’s Tale 1.1.
Anne Button
Arcite, Palamon’s rival for Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen, dies when thrown by his horse, 5.6.
Anne Button
Arden, forest of, an extensive area of woodland north of Stratford, largely cleared by Shakespeare’s time, which has the name of Shakespeare’s mother’s family. The name derives from Ardenna silva, the Latin name for the Ardennes; and in Britannia (Latin version 1586, English 1610) William Camden writes of ‘Arden; which word the Gauls and Britons heretofore seem to have used for a wood, since two great forests, the one in Gallia Belgica, the other amongst us in Warwickshire, are both called by one and the same name of Arden’; Camden opines, correctly, that ‘woodland’ and ‘arden’ ‘are words importing the same thing’.
The forest of Arden—or Ardenne, as the Oxford edition has it—in As You Like It derives from Thomas *Lodge’s Rosalynde, which has a clearly French setting; it begins ‘There dwelled adjoining to the city of Bordeaux a knight of most honourable parentage.’ Lodge uses the spelling ‘Arden’, which is also found in the Folio text of As You Like It. Much of Shakespeare’s play too is localized in France, and Arden is clearly distinguished from England when Charles the wrestler says (in the Folio spelling) that the old Duke ‘is already in the Forrest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they liue like the old Robin Hood of England’ (1.1.109–11). Nevertheless Shakespeare seems to have conflated the two forests in his imagination; the flora and fauna of the play are not compatible with any single location. The idea that Shakespeare alludes to his mother’s name seems purely sentimental.
Stanley Wells
Arden, Mary (d. 1608). Shakespeare’s mother, wife of John *Shakespeare, was the youngest of the eight daughters of a prosperous farmer, Robert Arden, by his first wife, whose name is unknown. Mary’s date of birth, too, is unknown; her father married his second wife, Agnes Hill, who brought with her two sons and two daughters, in 1548, and Mary was unmarried on 24 November 1556 when her father, who died soon afterwards, made his will, naming her as one of his two executors and leaving her ‘all my land in Wilmcote called *Asbies and the crop upon the ground sown and tilled as it is’ along with 10 marks. She probably married in 1557; her first child, Joan, was christened on 15 September 1558, her last, Edmund, on 3 May 1580. The story of her marriage, in so far as it is known, is chronicled in the entry for her husband. She made her mark on a deed of 1579; this does not necessarily imply that she could not read, or even write.
Stanley Wells
Ardenne. See Arden, forest of.
Arden of Faversham anonymous domestic tragedy, written in 1592 and first attributed to Shakespeare in mid-17th-century printers’ catalogues (see apocrypha). Edward Jacob published it in 1770 as ‘the earliest dramatic work of Shakespeare now remaining’. Thomas *Kyd has since been suggested as a possible author, a position that has recently been reasserted in strong terms, though an equally fervent groundswell of opposition continues to push towards Shakespearian part-authorship.
Based on an actual murder committed in Kent in 1551, Arden of Faversham provides a vivid account of the social and economic conflicts that marked the rise of the middle classes in the early modern period. Arden’s murderers include his wife’s upstart lover Mosbie, Arden’s servant Michael, a victim of the law of primogeniture, and Master Greene, who is left destitute after Arden’s unlawful enclosure of the lands of the abbey of Faversham.
Sonia Massai, rev. Will Sharpe
Arden Shakespeare. The first volume in the Arden Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Edward Dowden, appeared in 1899, and although the quality of the volumes that followed was variable, the series at once set a new standard for editions of individual works by printing a textual collation and extensive explanatory notes on the same pages as the text. The spaciousness of a handsome edition that included also a critical introduction and had room for appendices and passages from sources guaranteed its success. The first general editor, W. J. Craig (1899–1906), was succeeded by R. H. Case in 1909, who remained in charge until the completion of the series in 1924. A second series intended to replace the by now outmoded older volumes was launched under the general editorship of Una Ellis-Fermor with the publication of Kenneth *Muir’s editions of Macbeth and King Lear in 1951–2. These two were ‘based on’ the earlier Ardens, and at first an attempt was made to use the stereotype plates from the old edition, but this idea had to be quickly abandoned, and the revision of the Arden became to all intents and purposes a new edition, though it retained the general appearance of Arden 1, only changing the colour of the covers from red to blue. Arden 2, later guided by Harold Brooks, Harold Jenkins, and Brian Morris, was edited by a more distinguished cast of scholars than the first, and rapidly gained recognition as the foremost critical edition of Shakespeare’s works in its time, providing a very full apparatus and commentary, and reconsidering the nature of all the textual problems. However, the earlier volumes in this series also began to look textually and critically obsolescent by 1982, when Harold Jenkins’s massive edition of Hamlet appeared, and a third Arden series began to appear in 1995, under general editors Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan. Arden 3 includes illustrations, takes note of the many advances in textual scholarship that have occurred from the 1980s to the present day, and has a greater concern with performance on stage and screen than does Arden 2. In 2009 Arden launched the Arden Early Modern Drama series to complement its Shakespeare titles, presenting a series of popular medieval, Renaissance, and Restoration plays modelled on the Arden 3 series in appearance, length, and style. Titles thus far include Thomas *Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, John *Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore.
R. A. Foakes, rev. Will Sharpe
Argentina. See Latin America.
Ariel. The characterization of Ariel, the ‘airy spirit’ (sometimes classified among Shakespeare’s *fairies) who serves Prospero in The Tempest, is enigmatic. Performers, literary critics, and, conspicuously, painters have sought to interpret his relationship with Prospero. It might be easier to see the ugly and earth-bound *Caliban as his slave, who in Prospero’s words is ‘a born devil’, than the ‘dainty’ Ariel, whom Prospero claims to love ‘dearly’: yet they are both held to servitude with similar threats of torture. Performers have had to decide how far Ariel is in sympathy with Prospero’s revenge, of which he seems to be the primary, if not sole, instrument. These performers have been both male and female: we are never told why Ariel is dressed as a sea-nymph in Act 1 (even though he is invisible as such to everyone except Prospero), a harpy thereafter, and finally Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and fertility, in the *masque of Act 4. Ariel was almost invariably a female role from the Restoration onwards, until the (male) dancer Leslie French played it at the Old Vic in 1930. Post-war Ariels in major productions have nearly all been male.
Anne Button
Ariosto, Lodovico (1474–1533), Italian poet and dramatist, central figure of the Italian Renaissance, whose work exerted a powerful influence upon English Renaissance literature. His prose comedy I suppositi (1509) was translated by George Gascoigne as Supposes in 1573 and provided the sub-plot of The Taming of the Shrew. But it was Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando furioso, published in Italian (1516, 1532), and translated into English by Sir John Harington (1591), that secured his fame. Robert Greene dramatized part of it in a play of the same title (1591). Edmund Spenser used the epic as a model for The Faerie Queene. Orlando’s influence upon Shakespeare is suggested by the name of As You Like It’s male protagonist and by the story of Hero and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Aristophanes. See critical history; Greek drama.
Armado, Don Adriano de. A Spanish ‘braggart’ who loves Jaquenetta in Love’s Labour’s Lost, he presents ‘The Nine Worthies’, 5.2, in which he plays Hector.
Anne Button
Armin, Robert (c. 1568–1615), comic actor in the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men. William *Kempe left the Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 and was replaced by Armin, a successful writer and comedian first heard of as apprenticed to the goldsmith John Lonyson in 1581. During his apprenticeship Armin wrote a number of popular ballads and after completing his term he joined Chandos’s Men. A collection of tales called Fool upon Fool was published in 1600 by the author ‘Clonnico de Curtanio Snuffe’ (Snuff, the clown at the Curtain) and was reprinted in 1605 under the authorship ‘Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe’ (Snuff, the clown at the Globe) and finally under Armin’s name as A Nest of Ninnies in 1608. Armin’s association with the Curtain may well indicate that he was already a member of the Chamberlain’s Men before Kempe’s departure, which might then have been hastened by the availability of a suitable internal replacement.
Armin took over Kempe’s existing roles while Shakespeare adjusted his comic output to suit the new star’s less physical, more cerebral, style of wit. Roles in the style included Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and the Fool in King Lear. Although small in stature Armin was dependent less on the comedy of physical deformity than his predecessors *Tarlton and Kempe and although he continued their tradition of singing, he was not a dancer of vigorous jigs. A successful dramatist in his own right, Armin had more reason than Kempe to share Hamlet’s, and presumably Shakespeare’s, annoyance at clowns who unbalance the performance by straying from the text. The title page of Armin’s Two Maids of More-Clacke (printed in 1609) has a woodcut which may well represent Armin himself in costume.
The comic actor, singer, and writer Robert Armin, the original Touchstone, Feste, and Lear’s Fool. This title page illustration shows him dressed as ‘John of the Hospital’ in his own play The History of the Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609).
Gabriel Egan
arms, Shakespeare’s coat of. In 1596 John Shakespeare, or perhaps William acting for his father, applied to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms, conferring upon him and his descendants the status of gentleman. Two surviving drafts of a document prepared by William Dethick, Garter king-of-arms, dated 20 October grant the request. A note indicates that John had initiated a similar application 20 years before, that he was a justice of the peace in Stratford and had served as bailiff, that he had ‘lands and tenements of good wealth and substance, £500’, and that he had married ‘a daughter and heir of Arden, a gentleman of worship’. Now he was granted the right to a shield depicting a spear, and, as his ‘crest or cognizance’, a falcon, ‘his wings displayed’, standing on a wreath and supporting a spear set upon a helmet. The spear alludes to the family name; the falcon, punningly ‘shaking’ its wings, may indicate an interest in falconry. The inscription ‘Non sans droit’—‘not without right’—is presumably a motto. The shield and crest are displayed on William Shakespeare’s monument and on Susanna Hall’s seal.
In 1599 John applied to combine his arms with those of the Ardens. Three years later his right to the arms was questioned on the grounds that they were not distinct enough from those of Lord Mauley, and that the Shakespeares were unworthy: a note ‘Shakespeare the player by Garter’ seems to suggest that an actor could not deserve the distinction, but a reply denies the former charge and reaffirms John Shakespeare’s claims.
Stanley Wells
Arne, Thomas Augustine (1710–78), English composer. As the most important English theatrical composer during the mid-18th century, Arne composed music for a number of Shakespearian productions at a time when Shakespeare’s ‘originals’ (rather than the adaptations of the previous 70 years) were being restored to the theatre. He is best remembered for his ‘Where the bee sucks’ (1746) and a wonderfully spirited setting of ‘Sigh no more ladies’ (1748; pub. 1749).
Irena Cholij
Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), English poet and critic. His preface to Poems (1853) uses Shakespeare as a touchstone for both ancient Greeks and modern Germans. Shakespeare’s ‘self-schooled’ genius is remote and inscrutable, concealed behind his work. His sonnet ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free’ (1849) emphasizes this objectivity.
Tom Matheson
Arragon, Prince of. See Aragon, Prince of.
art. The comparative paucity of references to the visual arts in Shakespeare’s works—largely confined to figurative tapestries (such as those which decorate Innogen’s bedchamber, Cymbeline 2.4.68–76) and to portraits (most famously those of King Hamlet and Claudius, Hamlet 3.4.52–66)—accurately reflects the poverty and inaccessibility of the visual arts in Shakespeare’s England. The only contemporary painter named in the canon, ‘that rare Italian master Giulio Romano’ (The Winter’s Tale 5.2.96), is cited as a sculptor (on the authority of the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari, probably at second or third hand; it is profoundly unlikely that Shakespeare had seen any of Giulio *Romano’s work, whether on canvas or in stone), while the painting of the siege of Troy in Lucrece’s room (The Rape of Lucrece 1366–1463) owes far more to literary sources than to visual ones. Although there was a strong native tradition of ornament (exemplified not only in textiles but in book design, the page borders in the Folio providing a good example), and although Nicholas *Hilliard was producing exquisite portrait miniatures, England lagged well behind continental Europe in book illustration, in genre painting, in still life, and in landscape. Woodcuts were comparatively crude, and their exponents were more accustomed to providing them for emblem books than to tackling more naturalistic subjects. It is not surprising, then, that the first works of art on Shakespearian subjects are *portraits of Shakespeare himself, with the *painting of scenes from the plays (and of actors in them) not gathering momentum until the 18th century.
The Shakespeare coat of arms, as granted by Garter King-of-Arms, 20 October 1596.
Michael Dobson
Artaud, Antonin (1896–1948), French director and dramatic theorist, who turned to Elizabethan drama to promote a theatre without scenery but with a multi-levelled stage. A solo staged reading of Richard II in 1934 illustrated his Theatre of Cruelty (1932). The Theatre and its Double (1938) and his conception of acting as ‘affective athletism’ influenced many theatre directors including Roger Blin, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Peter Brook.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Artemidorus vainly attempts to give Caesar a paper (read out, 2.3) warning him about his enemies, Julius Caesar 3.1.
Anne Button
Artesius, a silent attendant, appears in The Two Noble Kinsmen 1.1.
Anne Button
Arthur, Prince. He contests the throne of his uncle (King John) and dies in an attempt to escape his custody, King John 4.3.
Anne Button
Arviragus, stolen by Belarius along with his brother Guiderius, is reunited with the King his father, Cymbeline 5.6.
Anne Button
Asbies (Asbyes), the name of the area of land in *Wilmcote that Robert *Arden left in 1556 to his youngest daughter Mary, Shakespeare’s mother, possibly in anticipation of her marriage, which took place the following year. The fact that Robert Arden’s will does not mention a house suggests that this was the 70 acres (28 ha) of arable land and 16 acres (6.5 ha) of meadow and pasture that John and Mary Shakespeare leased to Thomas Webbe and Humphrey Hooper in 1578, but it could be the estate mortgaged to Edmund *Lambert in the same year. No house of this name is known, though in 1794 John *Jordan attached it to the property known until 2000 as Mary *Arden’s House.
Stanley Wells
Ashbourne (Kingston) portrait, three-quarter length, oil, *Folger Collection. This portrait of c.1611 first emerged in 1847, when it was bought by the Revd Clement Kingston of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, after whom the image is named. Upon its discovery, the portrait was identified as a likely representation of Shakespeare. Restoration work undertaken in 1979, however, revealed a coat of arms and the motto ‘honore et amore’ beneath heavy layers of patina. Both the motto and heraldic insignia were later discovered to have been those of Sir Hugh Hammersley, a prominent public figure during the first half of the 17th century, a finding which undermined the earlier identification of the sitter.
Catherine Tite
Ashcroft, Dame Peggy (1907–91), British actress. She made her mark as *Desdemona to Paul Robeson’s Othello in London in 1930 and two years later first acted Juliet as a guest of Oxford undergraduates directed by John *Gielgud, with whom she was often to collaborate. At the *Old Vic in 1932–3 she played a range of Shakespeare’s young heroines (roles to which she returned) and was Juliet in the West End when Gielgud and Laurence *Olivier exchanged roles as Mercutio and Romeo. At this time she was admired as a fresh, lyrical actress though sometimes criticized for a too English gentility. In 1950 at Stratford she was Beatrice to Gielgud’s Benedick—a pinnacle of high comedy playing. That year she was Viola in Twelfth Night when the Old Vic reopened after bomb damage. At Stratford in her fifties she gave the illusion of young ardour as Rosalind and Imogen; she also rose to the challenge of Cleopatra. She was a valued member of Peter *Hall’s ensemble at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre; in The Wars of the Roses she took Margaret from young princess to vituperative queen. In Trevor *Nunn’s autumnal All’s Well That Ends Well (1981) her old Countess had a valedictory quality. A committed socialist, she passionately believed in state support for the theatre.
Dame Peggy Ashcroft in her last Shakespearian role, the Countess in All’s Well That Ends Well (RSC, directed by Trevor Nunn, 1981), with Geoffrey Hutchings as Lavatch.
Michael Jamieson
Ashland, Oregon. See United States of America.
Asnath. See Bolingbroke, Roger.
Aspinall, Alexander, master of Stratford grammar school from 1582 until he died in 1624, and the subject of a ‘posy’ ascribed to Shakespeare in a manuscript miscellany compiled by Sir Francis Fane (1611–80):
The gift is small,
The will is all,
Alexander Aspinall.
Fane added the note ‘Shakespeare upon a pair of gloves that master sent to his mistress’ and it has been conjectured that Aspinall bought the gloves from John Shakespeare for his betrothed before his marriage in 1594; *Fripp proposed him (on no evidence) as a model for Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. A Lancashire man, he graduated BA from Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1575 and took his MA in 1578. He became a leading and respected townsman, and many of his pupils also went to Oxford. The posy resembles Pericles 14, 17: ‘Yet my good will is great, though the gift small.’
Stanley Wells
Aspley, William. See colophon; folios; printing and publishing.
assembled texts. A theory first proposed by Edmond *Malone held that if *manuscript playbooks were not available for all of the plays in the *First Folio, certain play texts may have been assembled for the printer by combining actors’ individual parts with the *‘plot’ of the play. Proponents of this theory have argued that the massed entrance directions in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Winter’s Tale, which list all of the characters who appear in a scene in a single opening direction regardless of whether they enter at the beginning or later, would be characteristic of the ‘plot’ but not of a playbook; others have suggested that massed entries may represent a *neoclassical convention imposed upon the texts by the scribe Ralph *Crane in the course of preparing *transcripts.
Eric Rasmussen
Aston Cantlow, a parish which included Wilmcote, home of Shakespeare’s mother Mary *Arden. Presumably she married John Shakespeare in its church, but there are no registers for this period.
Stanley Wells
Astrana Marín, Luis (1889–1960), Spanish scholar and translator of Shakespeare, of whom he also wrote a biography (1930). He was the first to translate Shakespeare’s complete works into Spanish (1929), though in prose. Astrana’s understanding of Shakespeare’s language has sometimes been found wanting, and his unremittingly high-sounding and verbose Spanish now sounds old-fashioned. Until recently, Astrana’s were the most widely distributed translations of Shakespeare both in Spain and in Spanish-speaking countries.
A. Luis Pujante
Astringer, Gentle. See Austringer, Gentleman.
astrology, a pseudo-science arising in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium bc and elaborated over many centuries, which pretends to predict terrestrial events through a minute analysis of the positions of celestial objects. During the Renaissance natural astrology (astronomy) and judicial astrology (astromancy) enjoyed equal footing, and leading scientists such as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Digges, and John Dee moved easily between them. Professional astrologers found followers in all classes. Dee was patronized by Queen Elizabeth and luminaries including Leicester, Pembroke, Oxford, Ralegh, and John Cheke. Even Francis Bacon could not entirely free himself from the grasp of the ubiquitous superstition. The religious community was, generally, antagonistic to astromancy. Luther and Calvin were outspoken opponents, but Cardinal Wolsey and Philip Melanchthon were lifelong adherents. In 16th-century intellectual circles, attacks by the humanists Pietro Pomponazzi and Pico della Mirandola challenged the standing of astromancy, as did the Copernican heliocentric solar system which deprived mankind of its position as the focus of the universe. During Shakespeare’s working lifetime the legitimacy of judicial astrology was hotly debated; John Chamber’s Treatise against (1601) was answered by Christopher Heydon’s Defence (1603). The fatal blow would be Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica (1687), which provided a purely mechanistic explanation of planetary movement.
The lover of Shakespeare’s Sonnets imputes to the stars an influence over human destiny, but doubts that persons can interpret their stars correctly (Sonnet 14). This may be a précis of the poet’s own view. Shakespeare ascribes a belief in judicial astrology to various characters in his plays set in ancient times: Gloucester and Kent in The History of King Lear 2.96–104 and 17.33–6, Aaron in Titus Andronicus 4.2.32–3, Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra 5.1.46–8. Among his medieval and Renaissance characters, Shakespeare seems to associate these beliefs with light-mindedness, e.g. King Richard in Richard II 4.1.21–2, Henry VI in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 4.6.21–2, Malvolio in Twelfth Night 2.5.140. By contrast, Shakespeare’s pragmatists—Cassius in Julius Caesar 1.2.139–40, Warwick in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 4.6.26–9, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well 1.1.186–215—either exploit another’s credulous faith in astrology or deplore the practice as ‘the excellent foppery of the world’ (Edmund in The History of King Lear 2.105–17). A London astrologer, Simon *Forman, left the most detailed eyewitness accounts of performances of Shakespeare’s plays during the playwright’s lifetime.
Steve Sohmer
As You Like It See centre section.
Athenian, Old. He is the father of the woman that Lucilius wishes to marry, Timon of Athens 1.1.
Anne Button
Athens, the ancient capital of Greece, provides settings for both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Timon of Athens.
Anne Button
Atkins, Robert (1886–1972), British actor and director. A robust player, he devoted his long life to keeping Shakespeare on the stage. He acted with Beerbohm *Tree but his Shakespearian affinities were with Frank *Benson, Ben *Greet, and William *Poel. Before war service in 1916 he played leading parts under Greet in the first regular Shakespeare seasons at the *Old Vic. He so impressed the formidable manager Lilian Baylis that she appointed him her director and from 1920 to 1925 he staged all but one of the 36 plays in the First Folio, acting in many of them. He then ran the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, where his own parts included Bottom, Sir Toby Belch, Falstaff, and Caliban (played, after *Granville-Barker, as ‘a missing link’). In 1938 he directed Henry V at a boxing ring in Blackfriars in an approximation of Elizabethan stage conditions. From 1944 to 1945 he was director of productions at Stratford-upon-Avon, staging sixteen plays and acting in some of them. He then returned to his activities at Regent’s Park and to touring in Shakespeare. His simple, ungimmicky productions were admired by Arthur Colby Sprague whose essay on Atkins is appended to the autobiography.
Michael Jamieson
Atkinson, William (b. 1571), witness to Shakespeare’s purchase of the *Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613. Like John *Heminges and Henry *Condell, he lived in the London parish of St Mary Aldermanbury, and as clerk of the Brewers’ Company probably knew Shakespeare’s trustees in the purchase, William Johnson, host of the Mermaid Tavern, and John Jackson, who drank there.
Stanley Wells
Aubrey, John (1626–97), antiquary and compiler of over 400 biographical sketches known as the Brief Lives. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, Aubrey carefully enquired into Shakespeare’s life and left brief and hectic jottings about it, amidst a chaos of manuscripts first edited by Andrew Clark in 1898. Aubrey is exceedingly important among Shakespeare’s early biographers. Free of moral bias, he is sometimes inaccurate, but he recorded what he heard. Thus he wrote of the poet’s relations with John and Jane Davenant, Oxford tavern-keepers, after consulting several of their children (he knew Jane, Robert, and Sir William). Stratford ‘neighbours’ had told him of Shakespeare’s early feats as the son of a ‘Butcher’. They were doubtless wrong; but around 1681 Aubrey sought out a more likely authority, namely William Beeston (a son of Christopher, the poet’s colleague in the Chamberlain’s Servants), who is the source for the remark that Shakespeare knew Latin ‘pretty well’ for he had been a ‘schoolmaster in the country’. Aubrey twice states that Shakespeare visited Stratford ‘once a year’, and discusses his appearance, personality, and it seems his circumspect behaviour (‘not a company keeper’) in notes which deserve one’s caution and high respect alike.
Park Honan
Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73), English poet and critic. Auden’s attention to Shakespeare is continuous. He lectured on Shakespeare in New York in 1946–7 and in Oxford in 1957 (collected as part of The Dyer’s Hand, 1962; notes of the New York lectures were published in 2000 as Auden on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch). His long semi-dramatized poem The Sea and the Mirror (1944) is subtitled ‘A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest’. His introduction to the Sonnets (Signet, 1964) spurns biographical speculation, concentrating on formal and technical questions and the ‘mystical’ Vision of Eros. Love’s Labour’s Lost, adapted (with Chester Kallman) as an opera libretto from Shakespeare’s play, was premièred, with music by Nicolas Nabokov, in Brussels, 1973.
Tom Matheson
audiences. The minimum price of admission at open-air playhouses (for example the Theatre and the Globe) was traditionally a penny—about 10% of an artisan’s daily pay—while at the indoor playhouses (for example the Blackfriars) it was sixpence. Thus the wealthy might attend either type of venue but the average worker was likely to visit only the open-air playhouses. Women of all social classes attended the playhouses and although their presence at the open-air theatres was criticized as dangerous folly, if not flagrant prostitution, their numbers rose steadily in line with the increased respectability of the industry in the reigns of James and Charles. Pickpockets and prostitutes naturally found the open-air playhouses, with their crowds and bustle, more productive than the sedentary indoor playhouses.
The different types of theatre accommodated different tastes: the indoor theatres providing masque-like spectacles and subtle music while the open-air playhouses had jigs and explosive sound effects. However, each had elements of the other’s specialism and the King’s Men showed the same plays at the Blackfriars and the Globe at least until the 1620s. When the Queen’s Men left the Red Bull to open Christopher Beeston’s new Cockpit in Drury Lane in late 1616, rioting apprentices vented frustration at their elitist move up market by attacking the Cockpit and Beeston’s adjoining home. The ultimate triumph of the indoor playhouses—no open-air amphitheatres were built in the Restoration—marks the disappearance of the truly popular (in the sense of appealing to all classes) theatrical tradition.
Gabriel Egan
Audley, Maxine (1923–92), British actress. When in 1951 this dark and voluptuous player acted Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra she was obviously capable of taking the lead. Her effective Shakespearian roles included Goneril in King Lear, Emilia in Othello, and Lady Macbeth. Her most memorable performance was as the Empress Tamora in Peter *Brook’s great Titus Andronicus in 1955–7.
Michael Jamieson
Audrey, a goatherd, is wooed and won by Touchstone in As You Like It.
Anne Button
Aufidius, Tullus. Coriolanus’ adversary, he allies with Coriolanus, 4.5, but joins the conspirators who kill him, 5.6.
Anne Button
Augustus Caesar. See Caesar, Octavius.
Aumerle, Duke of. One of Richard’s supporters, his father the Duke of York denounces him to King Henry in Richard II 5.3 (based on Edward Plantagenet, 1373–1415). See also York, Duke of.
Anne Button
Austen, Jane (1775–1817), English novelist. Although some commentators have found structural resemblances between Pride and Prejudice and Much Ado About Nothing, Austen’s engagement with Shakespeare is most visible in Mansfield Park (1814), which takes its three daughters from King Lear and elements of its love plot from All’s Well That Ends Well (hence its hero’s surname, Bertram). Henry Crawford reveals his insincerity by the skill with which he reads aloud from Henry VIII in his attempt to court Fanny Price, though Austen clearly endorses his identification of Shakespeare as ‘part of an Englishman’s constitution’.
Nicola Watson
Australia. Although Shakespeare was inevitably part of the cultural baggage brought to Australia by its British colonizers in 1788, the first evidence of performance is a playbill dated 8 April 1800 for ‘the favorite play Henry the Fourth’ at Robert Sidaway’s theatre; it is not known if the play was performed. The authorities closed the four-year-old theatre the same year, considering drama unsuitable for a convict settlement, but on 26 December 1833 Richard III in *Cibber’s version with John Meredith as Richard inaugurated professional Shakespeare in the colony. Conrad Knowles was the country’s first Hamlet and played eight other Shakespearian roles before dying in 1844; his protégée Eliza Winstanley was Australia’s first significant Shakespearian actress. The gold rush which began in 1851 attracted American and British actors including G. V. Brooke, who appeared in 73 plays between 1855 and 1861, 23 by Shakespeare. Barry Sullivan, Charles and Ellen Kean, James Anderson, and Walter Montgomery were all acclaimed, but Shakespeare’s popularity declined until George Rignold’s spectacular Henry V (1876) and Essie Jenyns, the first Australian-born Shakespearian star, played Juliet and the heroines of the comedies (1885–8). Shakespeare societies, established in cities and towns including Melbourne (1884), Adelaide (1885), and Wagga Wagga (1895), helped move Shakespeare away from popular theatre into the lecture hall.
During the early 20th century lavish imported productions retarded development of an Australian Shakespearian tradition, and the first Shakespearian company, established in 1920 by *Irving idolater Allan Wilkie, continued in the English mould; however Wilkie’s frequently simple staging allowed a more fluent performance style. Touring Australia and New Zealand for a decade, he aimed to present all the plays and, astonishingly, achieved 27. The dearth of commercial productions between 1930 and 1960 led to the growth of amateur companies, stimulated by visits from the *Old Vic with the *Oliviers (1948), expatriate Robert Helpmann and Katharine Hepburn (1955), and the Stratford Memorial Theatre, led by Anthony Quayle (1949, 1953). Such visits reinforced belief that English Shakespeare was the best and only model, and underpinned the John Alden company which, beginning as amateur in 1948, toured professionally but intermittently 1952–61. By then Hugh Hunt had directed Twelfth Night and Hamlet for the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, a funding body formed in 1954, and the Young Elizabethan Players were touring schools with Shakespearian adaptations.
In 1970 John Bell, who at 22 had played Hamlet, returned to Sydney after five years acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Bristol Old Vic; with Ken Horler he formed the Nimrod Theatre Company, producing new plays and the classics, especially Shakespeare, with a radical disregard for tradition. Jim Sharman produced an irreverent As You Like It with Australian accents in 1971 at Sydney’s Old Tote Theatre and Bell’s 1973 Hamlet was spoken with ‘normal’ voices; at an exciting time politically and theatrically for Australia the plays were becoming more accessible to a public wider than the middle- and upper-class theatre-going audience.
The *Bell Shakespeare Company was formed in 1990, John Bell as artistic director saying, ‘We want to evolve a way of playing Shakespeare that makes sense to Australians young and old, and to encourage actors of varied ethnic backgrounds to join our troupe so that we may truly reflect the face of Australian society.’ By 2014 the company had staged 93 productions, including 29 Shakespeare plays and 20 by other authors. It had appeared in all Australian states as well as making five overseas tours. In 2012 Peter Evans was appointed co-artistic director with John Bell. Until the 1980s Shakespeare was a compulsory study in state education systems, and Wilkie, Alden, and Bell all played to large school audiences.
Subsidized companies, founded mostly in the capital cities in the 1960s, usually staged an annual Shakespeare production, some, such as Sharman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Adelaide, 1983), thrillingly innovative. Independent outdoor productions drew huge crowds—Glenn Elston’s energetic A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1987) in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens ran for twelve weeks, went on tour, and was revived four times. An Aboriginal interpretation of the same play for the 1997 Sydney Festival of the Dreaming was the first staging of a classic play by an all-indigenous cast. Elsewhere, the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble was founded in 2001.
The taste for Shakespeare was further boosted by films and television, particularly the anomalously titled William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (1996) directed by Baz Luhrmann, whose 1993 production of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Australian Opera was a 1994 Edinburgh Festival hit. Ballets of that play were created by Barry Moreland (Perth, 1990) and Harold Collins (Brisbane, 1991), two of several choreographers to produce Shakespearian works. Arts festivals, particularly those held in Perth since 1953 and Adelaide since 1960, have brought productions from many countries, outstandingly from Georgia, Poland, Britain, China, Japan, and Holland. The first Australian Shakespeare Festival was held in Bowral in 1997, and the annual Brisbane Festival now incorporates a substantial number of Shakespearian productions.
As well as those mentioned, Australia has given many notable Shakespearian actors and directors to the world, among them Oscar Asche (1871–1936), Judith *Anderson (1898–1992), Coral Browne (1913–91), Leo McKern (1920–2002), Keith Michell (b. 1928), Patricia Conolly (b. 1933), Geoffrey Rush (b. 1951), Gale Edwards (b. 1955), and Neil Armfield (b. 1955).
The new century brought a resurgence of interest in Shakespeare. Outdoor performances grew more popular. Though no longer compulsory, the plays began to be taught more widely in schools and universities, undoubtedly owing to vigorous education policies by Bell Shakespeare particularly, but also by state regional companies. Enthusiasm was fed by tours such as Ian *McKellen’s King Lear (2007) and Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s six-hour Roman Tragedies (Adelaide Festival 2014) as well as an increasing number of notable local productions, including The War of the Roses, directed by Benedict Andrews for the Sydney Theatre Company with Cate Blanchett as Richard II (2009).
Printed reviews, essential resources for performance history, have contributed to the rich store of Australian writing on Shakespeare since the early 19th century. William à Beckett’s Lectures on the Poets and Poetry of Great Britain (1839) included Shakespeare, F. W. Haddon’s The Hamlet Controversy: Was Hamlet Mad? (1867) reprinted comments aroused by the performances of Montgomery and Anderson, and editions of the plays range from Rignold’s acting versions (1876–9) to the Bell Shakespeare, begun in 1994. The academic Shakespearian tradition stemming principally from Sydney University’s Mungo McCallum (Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background, 1910) prospered and from the 1920s onward books, articles, and editions by Australian scholars were being published at home and abroad in increasing numbers. The Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association, formed at Monash University, Melbourne, in 1990, held its first international conference in Adelaide in 1992.
In no way considered the ‘national poet’ as he could be as late as 1900, Shakespeare continues potently in Australian culture generally. In 1891 a horse called Malvolio won the nation’s premier sporting event, the Melbourne Cup; in 1999 a horse named Classic Romeo was racing in Queensland.
Alan Brissenden
Austria is usually mentioned in a negative context in Shakespeare’s plays, and Vienna is the morally perverted setting for the action in Measure for Measure. In the city of Graz, as early as 1608, an English play ‘about the Jew’ was performed; however, this was possibly The Jew of Malta rather than The Merchant of Venice. In the late 18th century, *Mozart saw Shakespearian characters performed by Emanuel Schikaneder in the popular Viennese tradition. When he attempted to revolutionize the opera, Mozart expressly referred to Hamlet. Franz *Schubert wrote three lieder with texts adapted from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline (1826).
During the first decades of the 20th century there was another remarkable period of Shakespearian activity. After Sigmund *Freud had started interpreting Shakespearian characters using his own psychoanalytical theory, Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote his tragedy Elektra (1904, used as an opera libretto by Richard Strauss), in which the protagonist in certain respects both resembles Hamlet and contrasts with him. The great language critic Karl Kraus adapted some Shakespearian plays and made a rather free German translation of the Sonnets (1932). The now unjustly forgotten Richard Flatter translated the plays with close attention to the ‘marks of expression’ in the First Folio, which he for the first time examined in his book Shakespeare’s Producing Hand (1948).
Shakespeare was first performed at the annual Salzburg Festival in 1927, when Max Reinhardt delighted the audience with his wonderfully poetic A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A considerable number of Shakespearian highlights were presented in the history of this festival. In 1992 and the two following years, for example, the productions of the Roman plays, two directed by Peter Stein and one by Deborah Warner, were spectacular, albeit controversially received, Salzburg events.
From the major Viennese and other Austrian theatres the renowned Vienna Burgtheater with its important contributions to theatre history must be singled out. Since the 1960s it has been particularly active in the field of Shakespeare reception. Under Claus Peymann’s direction there were a number of much discussed modern productions at the Burgtheater, such as Peter *Zadek’s Merchant of Venice (1988), in which Shylock’s behaviour was an intentional response to the profiteering Christians who despised him. The great Austrian actor and director Fritz *Kortner had already taken a similar approach in a moving Austro-German TV production in 1968. Klaus Maria Brandauer, who in 1985/6 had played Hamlet over 100 times, directed Hamlet in 2002, and Luc Bondy staged King Lear in 2006 in a perceptive and ‘authentic’ interpretation with only few cuts and with new songs by Peter Handke. Only a small survey of the rich variety of Shakespeare reception by the many other Vienna theatres can be given here. The Vienna Volkstheater surprised its audience with a radically sexist Taming of the Shrew in 2006; Katherine was changed into Caterino, and the sex of the other characters was changed accordingly. In 2009 Peter Sellars and several Hollywood stars presented Othello in ‘Theater Akzent’ as a play about love and jealousy in Obama’s America.
During the last decades, productions tending towards minimalism have become increasingly popular in Austria, and sometimes with good results. In this respect George Tabori may be called a trendsetter with his innovative King Lear at the Bregenz Festspiele in 1988, which used a German version by Erich Fried, Austria’s best known Shakespeare translator. Particularly daring was The Tempest of the Akademietheater (2007) with three actors in a 78-minute performance. Some extraordinary Shakespeare performances were offered by the Vienna fringe theatres. For example, Gernot Plass in his Theater an der Gumpendorfer Strasse staged Hamlet with no more than seven actors in more than 20 roles (2012). This perceptive interpretation was influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd and existentialist and Heideggerian philosophy, and consequently Hamlet studied in Heidegger’s Freiburg rather than in Wittenberg. Plass created a new form and tone for the play, especially through a rhythmic choreography that closely concentrated on ‘words, words, words’, and thus produced a new dramatic ‘language’. John von Düffel presented his play on Shakespeare the man, entitled König Shakespeare oder Alles ist wahr (comparable to Shakespeare in Love), in the Landestheater Salzburg, which told the fictional story of Shakespeare’s writing of Henry VIII and integrated parts from this play. Two important opera receptions of Shakespeare’s plays should also be mentioned: the first performance of the chamber opera Romeo und Julie by the Bohemian composer Georg Anton Benda (Tyrolian Landestheater Innsbruck in 2003), and the world premiere of the Polish composer André Tchaikowsky’s The Merchant of Venice at the Bregenz Festspiele in 2013.
There are interesting Shakespearian echoes in Ingeborg Bachmann’s fine poem ‘Böhmen liegt am Meer’ (‘Bohemia on the Sea’, 1964), and in Thomas Bernhard’s play Minetti (1977). In Gerhard Rühm’s Ophelia und die Wörter (Ophelia and the Words, 1969) her acting ‘partners’ are her own words rather than dramatic persons. Gertrud Fussenegger has written short stories about Ophelia, Jessica, and a fictive sister of Juliet (Shakespeares Töchter (Shakespeare’s Daughters), 1999). Peter Handke (who had translated The Winter’s Tale in 1991), presented his new play in prose, Immer noch Sturm, quoting the famous stage direction ‘storm still’ in King Lear. In it he turns the tragedy upside-down: the poet is an old child of his still very young ancestors. The play, written in 2013, succeeds as a remarkable new example of the continuing vitality of Shakespeare reception in literature.
Wolfgang Riehle
Austria, Duke of (Limoges). He first supports and then deserts Arthur, and is killed by the Bastard, King John 3.2.
Anne Button
Austringer, Gentleman. He takes a petition from Helen to give to the King of France, All’s Well That Ends Well 5.1. An austringer (sometimes spelt ‘astringer’) is a falconer. See hunting and sports.
Anne Button
authenticity. In the 17th century, the term ‘authenticity’ applied primarily to abstract principles (reasons, rules, doctrines) that were undeniable, approved by all. By the end of the 18th century, the word had come to be applied to concrete terms. Shakespearian scholars, beginning with Edmond *Malone, have since engaged in a Grail quest for Shakespeare’s authentic texts, authentic *signatures, and authentic *portraits.
Eric Rasmussen
Authorship Controversy, a term used to describe the various attempts which have been made to persuade the world that Shakespeare’s works were not written by Shakespeare.
This curious and seemingly unstoppable phenomenon, Shakespearian scholarship’s distorted shadow, dates only from the mid-19th century: it can be glimpsed in Joseph Hart’s little-read The Romance of Yachting (1848, see below), but it becomes fully visible with the publication of Delia *Bacon’s article ‘William Shakespeare and his Plays; an Inquiry Concerning Them’ in Putnam’s Magazine (1856). (A document purporting to be the text of a lecture revealing that the Stratford rector James *Wilmot had believed Bacon to be the true author of the plays as early as the 1780s is now thought to be a 20th-century forgery). Delia Bacon darkly attributes the Shakespeare canon to her namesake Sir Francis, or at least an occult committee of progressive thinkers dominated by him. Since then, other champions have credited the plays to *Bacon alone, to Christopher *Marlowe, to the 5th Earl of *Rutland, to the 6th Earl of *Derby, to the 17th Earl of *Oxford, and even to Queen *Elizabeth I, among many others. The controversy has itself become an object of scholarly attention, as generations of Shakespearian critics have wondered why it should be so much easier to get into print with bizarre untruths about Shakespeare than with anything else on the subject. Many commentators have paid reluctant tribute to the sheer determination and ingenuity which ‘anti-Stratfordian’ writers have displayed—indeed, have invariably had to display, since any theory suggesting that the theatre professional William Shakespeare did not write the Shakespeare canon somehow has to explain why so many of his contemporaries said that he did (from *Heminges, *Condell, *Jonson, and the other contributors to the Folio through Francis *Meres and the Master of the Revels to the parish authorities of *Holy Trinity in Stratford, to name only a few), and why none of the rest said that he did not. Most observers, however, have been more impressed by the anti-Stratfordians’ dogged immunity to documentary evidence, not only that which confirms that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, but that which establishes that several of the alternative candidates were long dead before he had finished doing so. ‘One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort,’ observed one historian of the controversy, Samuel *Schoenbaum, ‘the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics.’ Schoenbaum’s account (which provides a valuable survey of earlier literature) has been supplemented since by more philosophical accounts of the origin and development of the phenomenon.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Authorship Controversy was an accident waiting to happen. In the wake of *Romanticism, especially its German variants, such transcendent, quasi-religious claims were being made for the supreme poetic triumph of the Complete Works that it was becoming well-nigh impossible to imagine how any mere human being could have written them at all. At the same time the popular understanding of what levels of cultural literacy might have been achieved in 16th-century Stratford was still heavily influenced by a British tradition of *bardolatry (best exemplified by David *Garrick’s Shakespeare *Jubilee) which had its own nationalist reasons for representing Shakespeare as an uninstructed son of the English soil, a thoroughly native genius who had out-written the world without any help from foreign or classical literary models. These two notions—that the Shakespeare canon represented the highest achievement of human culture, while William Shakespeare was a completely uneducated rustic—combined to persuade Delia Bacon and her successors that the Folio’s title page and preliminaries could only be part of a fabulously elaborate charade orchestrated by some more elevated personage, and they accordingly misread the distinctive literary traces of Shakespeare’s solid Elizabethan grammar-school *education visible throughout the volume as evidence that the ‘real’ author had attended Oxford or Cambridge. This misapprehension was reinforced by the 19th century’s deepening sense that there was an absolute boundary between Poetry (a disinterested manifestation of high culture) and the live theatre (a mercenary form of vulgar entertainment). At a time when the theatrical dimension of the works was especially ill understood (the plays heavily cut and altered to fit the contemporary stage, and read by critics after Charles *Lamb as sublime poems rather than as practical scripts), it became possible, perversely, for the fact that William Shakespeare had been a known professional actor and man of the theatre to be cited as evidence that he could not have written the plays rather than as corroboration that he did.
As this factor and the privileged birth of the principal claimants suggest, the Authorship Controversy, consciously or not, is very largely about class. The social assumptions behind Bacon’s view that the plays are too lofty to have been written by a middle-class Warwickshire thespian are shared, for example, by Colonel Joseph C. Hart, who anticipated the controversy proper in his The Romance of Yachting (1848). Apparently ignorant of any editions prior to 1709, Hart claimed that Nicholas *Rowe and Thomas *Betterton had cynically misattributed the plays, really written by teams of unnamed ‘university men’, to Shakespeare, who had in fact contributed only their more obscene passages. These are often just the passages which Alexander *Pope’s edition had identified a century earlier as vulgar un-Shakespearian interpolations by ‘the players’, and Hart is typical of many anti-Stratfordians since in hereby unselfconsciously reproducing the snobbish and anachronistic judgements of *neoclassical criticism, only with Shakespeare himself placed outside the pale of respectable authorship rather than just certain unacceptably ‘low’ aspects of his writings.
It is worth noting that the controversy also has a national dimension: both Hart and Delia Bacon were Americans, and blue-blooded candidates for the authorship continue to find some of their most eager (and munificent) supporters in the United States—a country whose citizens, long emancipated from the British monarchy and aristocracy, apparently find it easier to entertain romantic fantasies about their unacknowledged talents than do the British themselves. Members of other nationalities, too, have enjoyed the sense that they know the ‘real’ Shakespeare better than do his compatriots: during the early 20th century German conspiracy theorists particularly favoured the Earl of Rutland, for example, though their French counterparts preferred the Earl of Derby, and in Austria Sigmund *Freud, in a classic instance of the fantasies about secret aristocratic origins which he had identified in children, placed his faith in the Earl of Oxford. The German director Roland Emmerich followed suit in 2011 with his film Anonymous, which fittingly adopts the most lurid and B-movie like variant of the Oxfordian theory. According to this scenario, which some Oxfordians profess to believe, the Complete Works, especially Hamlet, encode the story of how Oxford was not only the secret author of the Shakespeare canon but was secretly both the son and subsequently the lover of Elizabeth I, and was thereby secretly the father of the Earl of Southampton and the unacknowledged rightful heir to the throne of England into the bargain.
Michael Dobson
Autolycus, a singing pedlar, deceives and robs the rustics in Acts 4 and 5 of The Winter’s Tale.
Anne Button
Auvergne, Countess of. She attempts to take Talbot prisoner but has to beg forgiveness when his soldiers arrive, 1 Henry VI 2.4.
Anne Button
Ayrer, Jakob (1543–1605), popular German playwright who worked in Nuremberg, writing carnival plays and musical dramas. The latter were influenced by the English companies who toured Germany in the 1590s. Two of his plays are thought to share their sources with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest.
Robert Maslen
Ayscough, Samuel (1745–1804), an assistant librarian at the British Museum, whose Index to the Remarkable Passages and Words Made Use of by Shakespeare (1790) was the first *concordance, listing words alphabetically and locating them by play, act, scene, page, column, and line number, keyed to his own edition of Shakespeare.
Catherine Alexander