b
Babion. The ‘He-babion’ and ‘She-babion’ (sometimes spelled ‘bavian’: baboon) are among the rustic dancers who perform in The Two Noble Kinsmen 3.5.
Anne Button
Bach, Carl Philip Emanuel (1714–88), German composer, the most famous son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Although he did not set any Shakespeare texts himself, the sixth sonata of his Achtzehn Probestücke in sechs Sonaten (W63/6) was adapted by Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg in 1767 as a song with the words ‘To be or not to be’. Consequently it became known as Bach’s ‘Hamlet’ Fantasia.
Irena Cholij
Bacon, Delia (1811–59), American writer and conspiracy theorist, who became convinced in the late 1840s that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by Sir Francis *Bacon. With some encouragement from *Emerson she sailed to England in 1853, and with his help published ‘William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them’ in Putnam’s Magazine in 1856, the article credited (if that is the word) with initiating the *Authorship Controversy. The well-nigh incomprehensible (and largely unread) The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (which never mentions Bacon by name) followed in 1857. After an aborted attempt to dig up Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford Bacon became wholly mad, and died in an institution in 1859.
Michael Dobson
Bacon, Francis (1561–1627), the greatest English philosopher of early modern times. Some people (not many) think him to have written the works of Shakespeare (see Bacon, Delia; Baconian theory). The son of an eminent statesman, Bacon began his career as an ambitious young lawyer, using every available means to get government office and often in debt. He was involved in the prosecution of the Earl of *Essex after his abortive rebellion (1601), and his Declaration of the Practices and Treasons …; Committed by…Essex (1601) refers to the production of Shakespeare’s Richard II staged on the day before the rising. His fortunes improved after 1606, when he married a rich man’s daughter. He eventually rose to become Lord Chancellor (1618), but was dismissed from office three years later for taking bribes, and died as he began, in debt. In the 1590s he contributed speeches to entertainments at the Inns of Court; later he wrote a History of Henry VII (1622) and an account of an imaginary intellectual society (The New Atlantis, 1627). But his chief literary achievement was the Essays, first published in 1597, and revised and expanded in two later editions (1612 and 1625). These offer shiftily sophisticated commentaries on ideas (Truth, Revenge, Love, Superstition), institutions (Marriage, Kingdoms, Ceremonies), activities, and people, involved, for the most part, in what preoccupied Bacon obsessively: the struggle for wealth and power. His great project as a philosopher was to write a complete account of the state of knowledge in his time, which he called the Instauratio magna (The Great Renewal). One part of this he finished was the introduction, Of the Advancement of Learning (1605), which was mainly concerned with the problem of getting it done.
Robert Maslen
Bacon, Mathias See Blackfriars Gatehouse.
Baconian theory, a term for the notion that Shakespeare’s works were really written by Sir Francis *Bacon, the first phase of the *Authorship Controversy. This idea was first espoused in print by Delia *Bacon in 1856, and she was closely and more comprehensibly followed in 1857 by Dr William Henry Smith, author of Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry Touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth. Smith claimed that Shakespeare’s works were too refined to have been written by a mere actor from Warwickshire, and on the basis of alleged verbal parallels between the Shakespeare canon and the published writings of Bacon (such as the supposed resemblance between ‘Nor are those empty hearted, whose low sound | Reverbs no hollowness’ and ‘For the sound will be greater or less, as the barrel is more empty or more full’) he attributed them to Sir Francis, who had elaborately concealed his authorship due to the social stigma attached to writing for the stage.
This hypothesis found particular favour among readers keener to find occult Neoplatonic allegory than drama in the plays, such as the American judge Nathaniel Holmes (who published The Authorship of Shakespeare in 1866), and it was later offered dubious support by the American spiritualist Ignatius Donnelly, whose The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888) purports to find clues to Bacon’s authorship concealed in the Folio in a complex (and wholly inconsistent) mathematical code. Later Baconians elaborated even on Donnelly’s version of the theory: Dr Orville Ward Owen, for example, devised a vast ‘decoding’ machine, by which, according to the five volumes of Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (1893–5), he was able to discover that the Shakespeare canon contained Bacon’s autobiography and revealed that he was really the son of Elizabeth I by the Earl of Leicester.
Baconianism had its heyday in the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th (enlisting Mark *Twain among its disciples, whose erratic and intemperate Is Shakespeare Dead? appeared in 1909), but although there is still a Bacon Society (founded in 1886) it has since lost ground among Shakespearian conspiracy theorists, most of whom now prefer to attribute the canon to other aristocrats, or to Elizabeth herself.
Michael Dobson
Baddeley, Sophia (?1745–86), a fashionable and popular English actress, who played Ophelia, Cordelia, and Imogen early in her career at Drury Lane and was later successful as Olivia. She sang in Judith (Arne) at the 1769 Stratford *Jubilee and in Garrick’s subsequent Drury Lane show. An engraving of her as Joan la Pucelle accompanies 1 Henry VI in *Bell’s Shakespeare (1776).
Catherine Alexander
Badel, Alan (1923–82), British actor. A player of great flair, he appeared in 1950 at Stratford-upon-Avon as Claudio in Measure for Measure and as Lear’s Fool. He vividly proved his versatility the next season as Ariel and as a doddering Justice Shallow. At the *Old Vic he was Romeo to Claire *Bloom’s Juliet. He returned to Stratford in 1956 to play Berowne, Lucio in Measure for Measure, and a mercurial Hamlet. In 1970 he acted Othello at Oxford.
Michael Jamieson
‘bad’ quartos. See quartos.
Bagehot, Walter (1826–77), English economist and constitutional theorist. His essay ‘Shakespeare’ (Prospective Review, 1853), revised as ‘Shakespeare: The Individual’ and retitled as ‘Shakespeare the Man’ in Hutton’s 1879 edition, displays limited biographical knowledge, but derives a sympathetic and sentimental picture of Shakespeare’s character from a reading of the plays.
Tom Matheson
Bagley, Edward (fl. 1647–75), citizen and pewterer of London, kinsman, executor, and residuary legatee of Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Bernard (Hall). He acquired property that had belonged to Shakespeare, including *New Place, which he sold to Sir Edward Walker in 1675. He sold the *Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1667 to Sir Heneage Fetherston, having bought it probably in 1647.
Stanley Wells
Bagot, one of Richard’s supporters, accuses Aumerle of Gloucester’s death before Bolingbroke, Richard II 4.1.
Anne Button
bagpipe, found throughout much of England as well as in Scotland during Shakespeare’s time (e.g. the ‘Lincolnshire bagpipe’ in 1 Henry IV 1.2.76). Its status had been higher in medieval England.
Jeremy Barlow
Bailey, Lucy (b. 1960), British theatre director. Began her career in experimental theatre and opera, founding the Gogmagogs chamber-music group in 1995, a company combining virtuosic string playing with highly physicalized performance. In 2006 she directed a visceral and bloody Titus Andronicus at the Globe (see Globe Theatre reconstructions) in which processions, public addresses, and much of the action carved through the standing audience to heighten the sense of immediacy and threat. It became notorious for the fainting it provoked among patrons, a pattern that repeated itself during its 2014 revival. Bailey also directed acclaimed productions of Timon of Athens (2008) and Macbeth (2010) for the company, making her *RSC debut with Julius Caesar in 2009, followed by The Taming of the Shrew (2011) and The Winter’s Tale (2012).
Will Sharpe
Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1890–1984), American scholar of copious and exhaustive learning. His Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearian Company (1927), William Shakespeare’s Five-Act Structure (1947), and Smalle Latine and Lesse Greeke (2 vols., 1947) are important works of research and scholarship, revealing Shakespeare’s complex inheritance from classical and Elizabethan culture.
Tom Matheson
Bales, Peter (1547–?1610), a calligraphist, who was employed in connection with state service and intercepted letters. Bale’s The Writing Schoolmaster (1590) contains a section on shorthand, expanded in 1597 and published as The Art of Brachygraphy. However, the system seems too cumbersome to have been much use recording plays in performance.
Cathy Shrank
ballad, a narrative strophic song, often traditional. Shakespeare frequently quotes from, or alludes to, ballads and *broadside ballads, e.g. *‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’.
Jeremy Barlow
ballet. Dancing contributes essentially to at least twelve of Shakespeare’s plays, but late 17th-century semi-operas like The Fairy Queen (1692), which translated A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a spectacle with dances, set a pattern for versions of certain plays which persisted into the 20th century. The earliest complete Shakespearian ballets, however, derived from the tragedies—Eusebio Luzzi’s Romeo and Juliet (Venice, 1785), Charles Le Picq’s Macbeth (London, 1785), Francesco Clerico’s Hamlet (Venice, 1788), Salvatore Viganò’s Coriolanus (Milan, 1804) and Othello (1818), and Vincenzo Galeotti’s Romeo and Juliet (Copenhagen, 1811). Louis Henry’s Hamlet (Paris, 1816) had a happy ending.
The Romantic movement, the development of dancing on pointe in the early 19th century, and the consequent domination of the ballerina did not favour Shakespearian ballets, although the greatest Romantic ballet, Giselle (Paris, 1841), has been likened to Hamlet in its histrionic demands. Not until Marius Petipa’s one-act A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Mendelssohn’s overture (St Petersburg, 1876) was a significant dancework based on one of the comedies. The letter scenes in Twelfth Night gave Antony Tudor the basis for his first ballet, Cross-Garter’d (London, 1931); Andrée Howard set a one-act Twelfth Night to Grieg (Liverpool, 1942); Boris Eifman used Donizetti for his near-farcical version (Leningrad, 1984). Vladimir Bourmeister’s full-length Merry Wives of Windsor (Moscow, 1942) followed its source closely. The Taming of the Shrew has been choreographed by Maurice Béjart (Paris, 1954), Kai Tai Chan (Sydney, 1986), who set the story in China and Australia, and pre-eminently by John Cranko, whose 1969 version for the Stuttgart Ballet quickly entered the international repertoire. John Neumeier turned, unusually, to As You Like It for his Mozart und Theme aus ‘Wie es euch gefällt’ (Salzburg, 1988), but The Tempest inspired Glen Tetley (Schwetzingen, 1979) and Rudolf Nureyev (London, 1982) among others. Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale for the Royal Ballet (London, 2014) was greeted with much acclaim.
The overwhelmingly favourite comedy for choreographers is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mikhail Fokine revised Petipa (St Petersburg, 1906), George Balanchine chose it for his first wholly original full-length ballet (New York, 1962), and Frederick Ashton created a one-act masterpiece, The Dream, for the Royal Ballet’s Shakespeare quatercentenary programme (London, 1964). Swiss choreographer Heinz Spoerli developed four related versions (1976–94). Others using the play include Neumeier (Hamburg, 1977), Pierre Lacotte (Rome, 1988), László Seregi (Budapest, 1989), Harold Collins (Brisbane, 1990), Bruce Wells (Detroit, 1993), Veronica Paeper (Cape Town, 1993), Christopher Wheeldon (Colorado, 1997), Mauro Bigonzetti (Bologna, 2000), with music by the contemporary rock composer Elvis Costello, Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo (Vienna, 2000), Chrissie Parrott, who introduced a cast of flittering digital fairies (Perth, Australia, 2006), and François Klaus (Brisbane, 2008).
The tragedies have attracted choreographers since the 18th century, and José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane (New London, Conn., 1949), an elegant interpretation of Othello for four dancers, was probably the most performed Shakespearian ballet of the 20th century. Other notable Othello ballets are those by Erika Hanka (Vienna, 1955), Tatjana Gsovsky (Berlin, 1956), Jiri Nemecek (Prague, 1959), Vakhtang Chaboukian (Tbilisi 1957), Garth Welch (Sydney, 1968), Neumeier (Hamburg, 1985), Dmitri Bryantsev (Moscow, 1994), Lar Lubovitch (New York, 1997), and Kirk Peterson (Calgary, 2007). The Kerala Kalamandalam Dance Troupe’s Kathakali King Lear (Kerala, 1989) and the ever-imaginative Béjart’s King Lear-Prospero (Lausanne, 1994) are two of very few King Lear ballets. The influential modernist Pina Bausch worked on a Macbeth project (1979, 1985), one of several, particularly Central European, choreographers to draw on the Scottish play. The most significant Hamlet ballet remains Robert *Helpmann’s one-act representation of images in the dying prince’s mind (London, 1942); Bronislava Nijinska’s version with herself as the hero (Paris, 1934) failed, but those of later choreographers including Victor Gsovsky (Munich, 1950), Konstantin Sergeyev (Leningrad, 1970), Chaboukiani (Tbilisi, 1971), Neumeier (New York, 1976), Jonathan Taylor (Dunedin, 1992), Barry Moreland (Perth, W. Australia, 1993), and Oksana Titova (Riga, 2008) won praise.
Of all the plays, Romeo and Juliet has inspired by far the most ballets. Most have used Sergei Prokofiev’s score, commissioned for Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 1935 but rejected as ‘undanceable’; the first ballet to Prokofiev was by Czechoslovakian Ivo Vana-Psota (Brno, 1938). The first Russian version was Leonid Lavrovsky’s (Leningrad, 1940). Others using the same music include Ashton (Copenhagen, 1955), Cranko (Venice, 1958), Kenneth Macmillan (London, 1965), Nureyev (London, 1977), and Seregi (Budapest, 1985). Antony Tudor took music by Delius (New York, 1943), Béjart (Brussels, 1966) and others *Berlioz, a few *Tchaikovsky. Jerome Robbins’s integral choreography for his and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (New York, 1957) profoundly influenced dance in musical theatre, and deconstructionist Angelin Preljocaj (Lyon, 1990) set the story in a modern police state. In 2006, the American musicologist Simon Morrison discovered in Moscow Prokofiev’s score for the happy ending to the ballet which the composer and his librettist Sergei Radlov had intended for their version of the ballet, but were prevented from presenting. Choreographed by Mark Morris, the premiere of the ballet with its unShakespearian conclusion was given on 4 July 2008 (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY). Most present-day ballet companies, large or small, have in their repertoire a Romeo and Juliet production, from a pas de deux to a full-length work.
The marriage of Romeo and Juliet: the Bolshoi Ballet, 1946, dancing to the Prokofiev score they had earlier rejected as ‘undanceable’. Alexei Bulgakov as Friar Laurence, Galina Ulanova as Juliet, Mikhail Gabovich as Romeo.
Alan Brissenden
Balthasar. (1) Invited to the house of Antipholus of Ephesus, he advises him against breaking in, The Comedy of Errors 3.1. (2) He is Romeo’s servant in Romeo and Juliet. (3) He is one of Portia’s servants in The Merchant of Venice. (4) Don Pedro’s attendant, he sings *‘Sigh no more’ in Much Ado About Nothing 2.3.
Anne Button
‘Balthasar’. See Portia.
Bandello, Matteo (?1480–1562), Italian courtier, priest, soldier, and writer. Between 1554 and 1573 Bandello published his Novelle, a collection of 214 prose romances. Through this edition and the translations that followed, notably the Histoires tragiques (1559–1582) by Boiastuau and Belleforest, and Certain Tragical Discourses (1567) by Geoffrey Fenton, the Novelle became a popular resource for English dramatists. The stories of Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night are all found here. Although it is doubtful that Shakespeare used the Italian original, a few minor details in Much Ado and Twelfth Night allow for this possibility.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
banditti (thieves) are ‘charmed’ from their profession by Timon, Timon of Athens 4.3.
Anne Button
Bankside, an area of land, now located within the London Borough of Southwark, which takes its name from the medieval embankment built along the front of the River Thames. Bankside extends from the Thames in the north to Park Street in the south and from Bankend in the east to Paris Garden in the west. The land was situated within the Liberty of the Clink, in the manor of the bishops of Winchester, although the bishops had alienated most of the land by the 15th century. After the 16th-century Henrician dissolution, monastic land remained at Liberty outside of the jurisdiction of city authorities, although two of Bankside’s attractions (*prostitution and commercial fishponds) had already become established by the 14th century. The district also became known as ‘the Stews’, from the stewponds (fishponds) and stewhouses (brothels): the word apparently derives from the French estui, meaning a case or sheath or a tub for keeping fish in a boat.
Topographically, Bankside is a low-lying area which was subject to flooding by the Thames. The nature of the ground meant not only that fishponds were easy to establish but also that the Surrey and Kent Sewer Commissioners maintained a vigilant watch on the sewers and ditches in the area. The records of the Sewer Commissioners often provide valuable evidence about property ownership on Bankside.
Proximity to the Thames meant that Bankside was within easy access for inhabitants of the city who could cross the river either by foot on London Bridge or by using transport provided by the Thames watermen. Close to the city, but outside the jurisdiction of the city authorities and the Surrey justices, Bankside developed as an area of ill-regarded activities, with the construction of animal-baiting pits and playhouses. However, indirect attempts to regulate activities on Bankside included an edict from the city which banned boatmen from taking anybody to Bankside between sunset and sunrise and forbade them from tying up within 20 fathoms (36 m) of the shore.
Simon Blatherwick
Banquo, Macbeth’s comrade-in-arms, hailed by the witches as the founder of a line of kings. Killed by his colleague’s three murderers, 3.3, his *ghost terrifies Macbeth at a feast, Macbeth 3.4.
Anne Button
‘Baptista’. See players.
Baptista Minola, the father of Katherine and Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew.
Anne Button
Barber, Samuel. See opera.
Barbican. Named after a former fortress on London’s city wall, and briefly the location of a theatre for apprentice actors in the late 17th century, this is now the site of the Barbican Centre, opened in 1982, which was the London home of the *Royal Shakespeare Company from 1982 to 2002, and remains that of the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Guildhall drama school, as well as supplying the chief British headquarters of *Cheek by Jowl. The area where this ambitious but little-loved development now stands was heavily damaged by bombing in the Second World War, although Shakespeare’s sometime lodgings with the *Mountjoy family in nearby Silver Street had vanished long before. Surviving within the Barbican complex is the church of St Giles Cripplegate, built c. 1545–50, which holds monuments to John Speed and John *Milton.
Simon Blatherwick
Barbican theatre. See Barbican; Royal Shakespeare Company.
Bard, sometimes extended to ‘the Bard of Avon’, a widespread nickname for Shakespeare, once reverent but now usually used at least half-facetiously. Identifying Shakespeare as the chronicler of his tribe’s golden age—implicitly, an English *Homer, and a counterpart of the defiant Welsh poet celebrated in Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1757)—the term was first commonly applied to Shakespeare around the time of David *Garrick, one of whose songs at the *Jubilee in 1769 proclaimed that ‘The bard of all bards was a Warwickshire bard.’
Michael Dobson
bardolatry, a term for the uncritical, quasi-religious worship of Shakespeare’s genius, particularly in its *Romantic and 19th-century variants. The term was first coined by the agnostic George Bernard *Shaw in 1901, and owes something to Ben *Jonson’s remark that he loved Shakespeare and honoured his memory ‘on this side idolatry, as much as any’ (in Discoveries, c.1630). David *Garrick made no such qualification in 1769, when he adapted a phrase from Romeo and Juliet in his *Jubilee ode—‘’Tis he, ’tis he, | “The god of our idolatry!” ’—and Shaw’s distaste for this attitude to Shakespeare is anticipated by William Cowper’s attack on Garrick’s whole festival as blasphemous in his poem The Task (1785).
Michael Dobson
Bardolph, a tapster (barman) in The Merry Wives of Windsor and one of Falstaff’s companions in 2 Henry IV (and in most editions of 1 Henry IV, see Harvey), becomes a soldier in Henry V, and is condemned to hang for theft, 3.6.
Anne Button
Bardolph, Lord. One of the rebels against Henry, he is mentioned as having been defeated, 2 Henry IV 4.3.97–9.
Anne Button
Baring, Maurice (1874–1945), English novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright, credited with helping to introduce Chekhov into Britain. His Unreliable History (1934) includes travesties of, among others, Shakespeare with a rehearsal of Macbeth at the Globe theatre and a letter from Goneril to her sister Regan: ‘I have writ my sister’.
Tom Matheson
Barksted, William (c. 1590–1616), actor and playwright. Barksted was called a ‘fine Comedian’ for his performances with the Children of the Queen’s Revels and other Jacobean troupes. In his poem Myrra, the Mother of Adonis (1607), he urges that Shakespeare’s ‘art and wit’ deserve the ‘laurel’, significant praise from a rival actor.
Park Honan
Barnadine, a murderer who comically refuses to be executed and is ultimately pardoned by Duke Vincentio, Measure for Measure 5.1.479–84.
Anne Button
Barnardo (Bernardo), a sentinel, describes the *ghost of Hamlet’s father to Horatio, Hamlet 1.1.33–7.
Anne Button
Barnes, Barnabe (1571–1609), sonneteer. He was famous as a braggart and composer of flamboyant and often intensely erotic verse, and is one of several candidates for the role of the rival poet mentioned in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Born the son of the Bishop of Nottingham, he first went to Oxford, then accompanied the Earl of Essex on his expedition to Normandy in 1591. His brief military career formed the basis of his bragging, according to Thomas *Nashe. In 1593 he published a celebrated collection of poems, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, which proclaims its debt to *Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). The collection begins as a sequence of sonnets interspersed with madrigals, followed by a variety of experiments in different verse forms: sestinas, elegies, odes, pastoral lyrics, and others. The sonnets are characterized by their vigorous articulation of male sexual fantasies, frustrations, and emotional crises—what Barnes aptly calls his ‘sorrow’s outrage’. In one notorious sonnet Barnes wishes to become the wine his mistress drinks so that he may ‘pass by Pleasure’s part’ when she urinates; in another he castigates his thighs for failing to become vines encircling the elms of his mistress’s legs. The sequence closes with an elaborate erotic wish-fulfilment fantasy involving Parthenophil, Parthenophe, and an obliging goat. The poems also parade Barnes’s learning, particularly in the fields of law and astronomy. Shakespeare’s sonnets echo them often. Barnes published A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets in 1595, as if in atonement for his earlier collection. But this does not seem to have marked a transformation in his personality: in 1598 he was accused of trying to murder a man with a poisoned lemon.
Robert Maslen
Barnfield, Richard (1574–1627), poet. He published homoerotic verse in two collections, The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) and Cynthia (1595), the second of which may have provided hints for both the structure and the content of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. His Lady Pecunia (1598) contained the first printed tribute to Shakespeare in verse.
Robert Maslen
Barrault, Jean-Louis (1910–94), French actor-director of great fame. Starting in 1942 he played Hamlet in a series of memorable productions, some of which he directed. His versions of Henry VI and Richard III drew upon post-war absurdism, and Julius Caesar in 1960 was icily beautiful, designed by Balthus after the paintings of Andrea Mantegna.
Dennis Kennedy
Barrett, Lawrence (1838–91), American actor, whose association with Edwin Booth stretched (with breaks) from 1863 to 1891 and included alternating Othello and Iago and playing his acclaimed Cassius to Booth’s Brutus. His Hamlet was said to be imitative of Booth’s; he was admired as Shylock and Leontes. He toured with his own company across America.
Richard Foulkes
Barry, Ann (1734–1801), sensitive English tragedian, who began her career in York, coming to prominence in Dublin playing Cordelia to Spranger Barry’s Lear. She accompanied him to London in 1767, married him, and scored particular success as Juliet to his Romeo, Desdemona, and later as Rosalind, Beatrice, and Viola.
Catherine Alexander
Barry, Elizabeth (c. 1658–1713), usually credited as the first great English actress. She worked with Davenant, played opposite Betterton, including Cordelia, for the Duke’s Company, and was particularly successful in history and tragedy (although not as Lady Macbeth). The frontispiece of Rowe’s 1709 Shakespeare shows her as Gertrude.
Catherine Alexander
Barry, James (1741–1808), Irish history painter, active in England. Propelled to fame for his decoration of the Great Room at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, and Manufacture, Barry held ambitious views on history painting which he put forward in a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstacles to the Acquisition of the Arts in England, of 1775. The paintings for the Great Room, however, failed to bring the artist financial success. The artist executed three works for the *Shakespeare Gallery; his King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786–8, Tate Gallery), exhibited at the opening show held by the Gallery in 1789, was noted as a work which displayed cerebral intensity. John Williams (writing under the pseudonym Anthony Pasquin) criticized Barry’s work, claiming, ‘Mr Barry is intellectually superior to his Brethren,…however, he is not practically so—he appears to me, like Caesar’s mother, to conceive too powerfully for the ordinary methods of deliverance.’ Williams’s comment reflects the artist’s reception in the popular press generally.
Catherine Tite
Barry, Spranger (?1717–1777), actor and manager, who came to prominence as Othello in Dublin and then in his 1746 Drury Lane, London, debut. As famed for his looks as his technique, the alternate playing of Hamlet and Macbeth with *Garrick developed into professional rivalry culminating in the 1750 ‘Battle of the Romeos’ when Barry moved to Covent Garden.
Catherine Alexander
Barrymore family. The founding parents of what has become known as America’s theatrical ‘royal family’ were Georgiana Drew (1856–93), daughter of John and Louisa Lane-Drew, and Maurice Barrymore (1847–1905), who had begun his career at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in 1872. Maurice Barrymore was blessed with the natural talents of physique, voice, charm, intelligence, and magnetism which all aspiring actors crave, but dissipated them apparently almost wilfully. His most successful role was Orlando opposite the exacting Helena Modjeska. All three of the Barrymores’ children pursued acting careers: Lionel (1878–1954), Ethel (1879–1959), and John (1882–1942). Following the failure of his Macbeth in 1921, Lionel devoted himself to films as he had done in the early years of his career. In contrast Ethel was—until her mid-sixties—a stage actress, dominating Broadway for 40 years, principally in contemporary plays, though she triumphed when she applied her natural beauty, grace, and intelligence to Shakespearian roles (Juliet, 1922; Ophelia and Portia, both 1925).
For much of his career (until 1925) John Barrymore combined stage and film work, achieving acclaim in the two Shakespearian roles which he essayed: Richard III (New York, 1920) and Hamlet (New York 1922, tour 1923–4, London 1925). Inspiration for his Richard III came from a red tarantula—with a grey bald spot on its back—which Barrymore saw in the Bronx zoo. As Richard, Barrymore glided swiftly across the stage like some unearthly arachnid. His preparations were intense. He corresponded voluminously with the British Museum about his sword and armour, making 40 trips to an elderly German armourer in Newark for fittings. For six weeks he worked on his voice with his coach Mrs Carrington, who suggested that he throw the ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ speech right out into the auditorium. Barrymore’s efforts were rewarded as he transformed himself into Shakespeare’s ‘Crookback’.
Hamlet did not necessitate such a thorough physical transformation, but Barrymore worked as hard to create his sane and human Prince, whose strangeness he made plausible. He disregarded tradition and convention, notably in the closet scene which he invested heavily with Freudian/Oedipal emotion. Barrymore achieved 101 consecutive Broadway performances—one more than Edwin Booth—but following his well-received appearance in London he forsook the stage for the screen. In 1933 he began tests for a film of Hamlet in Technicolor, but his memory kept failing him and the project was abandoned. He appeared as Mercutio in MGM’s film Romeo and Juliet (1936). Subsequent generations have upheld the Barrymore acting (if not Shakespearian) tradition, most recently Drew Barrymore (b. 1975).
Richard Foulkes
Bartholomew, a page, acts as Sly’s wife in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew.
Anne Button
Bartlett, John (1820–1905), American publisher, author of A New and Complete Concordance or Verbal Index to Words, Phrases, and Passages in the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare with a Supplementary Concordance to the Poems (1894). ‘Bartlett’ was an essential tool of reference until the appearance of computer-based concordances in the 1960s.
Tom Matheson
Barton, Anne (1933–2013), American-English Shakespeare scholar. Born in New York, Barton was an alumna of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, going on to undertake doctoral research at Girton College, Cambridge. The work she produced there was published in 1962 as Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (under her previous name of Righter). After joining the Faculty of English at Girton, she married John *Barton in 1969, an alliance which was to shape profoundly the academic leaning of John’s directorial work for the *RSC throughout the 1970s and 80s. Anne’s seminal essay on Hamlet, preserved as the Introduction to the 1980 *Penguin Shakespeare edition, loomed large over her husband’s production of the play for the RSC that year. Considered an extremely elegant writer and thinker, a selection of her many articles was published in 1994 as the classic collection Essays, Mainly Shakespearean. She is also the author of the important biographical study Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984), and was influential in getting two major productions of Jonson’s plays, The New Inn (1987) and Sejanus (2005), staged at the RSC. She became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1984 and lived in the city for the remainder of her life. At the time of her death her long-time study of forests and parks in Renaissance drama remained unfinished.
Will Sharpe
Barton, John (b. 1928), British director, whose career has been almost entirely with the *Royal Shakespeare Company. Joining Peter *Hall at Stratford in 1960, he contributed much to philosophy and style in the early years, particularly in the realms of verse-speaking, vocal training, and directorial interpretation. Chiefly interested in making Shakespeare understandable for contemporary audiences, Barton has never been a purist: he adapted the English histories into a seven-part cycle called The Wars of the Roses, directed by Hall in 1963–4, slashing large sections of text of the Henry VI plays and adding some 1,000 lines of pseudo-Elizabethan verse to fill the gaps. He also wrote a successful platform piece for RSC actors, The Hollow Crown (1961). His own directing has been consistently intelligent and accessible. Troilus and Cressida (1968) made the Trojan War into an erotic experience; Twelfth Night (1969) stressed melancholy and fear; Richard II (1973) underlined the doubled identity of Richard and Bolingbroke by placing two huge escalators on stage and alternating the actors Richard Pasco and Ian Richardson in the roles. Barton was the only member of the original team still closely associated with the RSC in the early 21st century, 50 years after its founding. A great teacher, his TV series Playing Shakespeare (published as a book in 1984) summarized his approach and had a large influence on a new generation of actors.
Dennis Kennedy
Barton-on-the-Heath, a village 15 miles (24 km) south of Stratford, home of Edmund *Lambert, who married Shakespeare’s aunt Joan (Arden) in or before 1550. Shakespeare may allude to it in The Taming of the Shrew when Christopher Sly describes himself as ‘old Sly’s son of Burton Heath’ (Induction 2.17).
Stanley Wells
Bassanio borrows money from Shylock on Antonio’s security in order to finance his courtship of Portia in The Merchant of Venice.
Anne Button
Basse, William (c. 1583–c. 1653), poet. Basse’s elegiac sonnet ‘On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare’ circulated extensively in manuscript and was first printed in 1633; Ben Jonson replies to it in his own elegy on Shakespeare (1623). Basse assigns Shakespeare to one grave’s ‘bed’ with Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont. Jonson pointedly divides him from those three (he is ‘without a tomb’).
Park Honan
Basset, a Lancastrian, is challenged to a duel by Vernon (a Yorkist), 1 Henry VI 3.8. The King refuses to let them fight, 4.1. The incident is not recorded by *Holinshed.
Anne Button
Bassianus, Saturninus’ brother, betrothed to Lavinia, is murdered by Tamora’s sons in Titus Andronicus 2.3.
Anne Button
Bassus, Publius Ventidius. See Ventidius.
Bastard. See Margareton.
Bastard, Philip the. He disclaims his right to the Falconbridge inheritance and is knighted ‘Sir Richard and Plantagenet’, King John 1.1: he goes on to give commentaries on the events of the play.
Anne Button
Bastard of Orléans. One of Talbot’s French adversaries, he presents Joan la Pucelle to Charles the Dauphin, 1 Henry VI 1.3.
Anne Button
Bates, John. A soldier in Henry V, Bates talks to the disguised King Harry, 4.1.
Anne Button
Battey, George M. See Defoe theory.
Bawd. Wife of a pander, she presents Marina to Lysimachus in a brothel, Pericles 19.
Anne Button
Baylis, Lilian (1874–1937), British theatre manager. The legendary Lady of the *Old Vic on the Waterloo Road was the niece of the philanthropist Emma Cons, who in 1880 transformed a run-down playhouse in the slums of Lambeth into the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall which offered edifying temperance entertainment to the locals. Lilian, largely uneducated but with some training as a singer and a deep Christian faith, took over in 1912. Under her dynamic, frugal management the Shakespeare seasons began in 1914 and by the time of Baylis’s death in 1937 the Vic had become the leading British theatre for Shakespeare (with opera and ballet established at Sadler’s Wells). Baylis, who at first nights proudly wore her robes as an honorary MA of Oxford, was created a Companion of Honour in 1929.
Michael Jamieson
BBC. See radio, British; television.
BBC Shakespeare. See television.
Beadle. He whips the supposed ‘cripple’ Simpcox to make him jump over a stool, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 2.1.155.
Anne Button
beadles. They arrest Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, 2 Henry IV 5.4.
Anne Button
Bear. It chases Antigonus off the stage, The Winter’s Tale 3.3.57, giving rise to Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’ The clown describes in comic terms the bear’s slaughter of Antigonus, 3.3.92–9.
Anne Button
bear-baiting. See animal shows.
Beargarden. See animal shows; flags; Henslowe, Philip.
bear gardens. See animal shows.
Beatrice. See Much Ado About Nothing.
Beauchamp, Richard. See Warwick, Earl of.
Beaufort, Cardinal. In 1 Henry VI (called the Bishop of Winchester) he is accused by Gloucester of having murdered Henry V (1.4.34); he crowns Henry VI in Paris (4.1); and first appears as a cardinal in 5.1. In The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) he helps to secure the disgrace of the Duchess of Gloucester and Gloucester’s arrest and murder, but dies himself, guilt-stricken, 3.3. He is based on Henry Beaufort (d. 1447).
Anne Button
Beaufort, Edmund. See Somerset, Duke of.
Beaufort, Henry. See Beaufort, Cardinal; Somerset, Duke of.
Beaufort, John. See Somerset, Duke of.
Beaufort, Thomas. See Exeter, Duke of.
Beaumont, Francis (c. 1585–1616), poet and playwright. With John Fletcher he formed the most celebrated play-writing partnership in English theatrical history. A member of the landed gentry, he entered the Inner Temple in 1600 to study law, but started writing plays instead in the mid-1600s. His erotic narrative poem Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602), modelled on Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), takes its satirical tone from the poetry of John Marston, especially in the passage where Jupiter becomes entangled with the corrupt Olympian legal system. Marston also influenced his first play, a city comedy called The Woman Hater (1607). The other play he wrote as sole author, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (acted 1607; pub. 1613), is an outstanding example of early modern metatheatre—theatre that comments on theatrical practices. In it a grocer and his wife step out of the audience to hijack the performance of a comedy, installing their apprentice Rafe as the hero of the dramatized chivalric romance they would rather see, and thereby poking fun at the social ambitions of the Jacobean mercantile classes. After teaming up with Fletcher in about 1607, Beaumont wrote many more serious adaptations of romance for the stage, which both fed upon and fed into the late works of Shakespeare. His fine verse epistle to Ben Jonson, published in Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (1647), celebrates Shakespeare’s natural talent in terms that anticipate Jonson’s famous tribute to Shakespeare in the First Folio (1623). He retired from writing for the stage in 1613 after marrying an heiress.
Robert Maslen
Beckett, Samuel (1906–89), Irish writer whose poems, prose, plays, and even films are permeated with literary reference, sometimes ironic or parodistic, to the work of his classical predecessors. Beckett the minimalist found in Shakespeare’s prodigality a vividness of stage and verbal imagery; a bleak and unrelenting tragic vision; and an associative richness and precision of language that is repeatedly drawn upon in poems such as Echo’s Bones (1935); prose fictions, including Murphy (1937), Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983); the plays Endgame (1958) and Come and Go (1967); and even the film Ghost Trio (1976).
Tom Matheson
Bedford, Duke of. See John of Lancaster, Lord.
Beerbohm, Sir Max (1872–1956), English satirical writer and artist. A cartoon (‘William Shakespeare, his method of work’ in Poets’ Corner, 1904) shows Shakespeare as complicit plagiarist. Stanley Wells discusses his theatre reviews in Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), while Craig Brown (Daily Telegraph, 12 June 1999) complains of their absence from print.
Tom Matheson
Beeston, Christopher (c. 1580–c. 1639), actor (Chamberlain’s Men 1598, Worcester’s/Queen Anne’s Men 1602–19, Prince Charles’s Men 1619–22, Lady Elizabeth’s Men 1622–5, Queen Henrietta’s Men 1625–37) and theatre entrepreneur. Beeston first enters the theatrical record in the cast list (contained in the 1616 Folio) for performances in 1598 of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour. By 1602 he was with Worcester’s Men, who became Queen Anne’s Men in the new reign, and in 1605 Augustine Phillips described Beeston as ‘my servant’ in his will. As a member of Queen Anne’s Men Beeston formed a lifelong friendship with Thomas Heywood to whose Apology for Actors (1612) he contributed verses. Beeston took over as manager of the Queen’s Men from Thomas Greene when the latter died in 1612 and in 1617 he built the Cockpit in Drury Lane, possibly designed by Inigo Jones as an adaptation of an existing circular auditorium. Beeston’s plan to move the Queen’s Men from their home, the open-air Red Bull, to the new expensive (and hence exclusive) playhouse was thwarted when city apprentices attacked the Cockpit during their common Shrove Tuesday rioting. Beeston repaired the Cockpit and, appropriately, renamed it the Phoenix.
After he built the Cockpit/Phoenix, Beeston was always a member of the playing company which occupied it: Queen Anne’s (1617–19), Prince Charles’s (1619–22), Lady Elizabeth’s (1622–5), Queen Henrietta’s (1625–37), and finally Beeston’s Boys (1637–9). However, his role appears to have become solely managerial and he was repeatedly criticized for sharp business practices. On 10 August 1639 Beeston’s son William is described as ‘governor’ of Beeston’s Boys at the Cockpit, which must mean he had died. His will indicates large debts owed by him and to him ‘which no-one but my wife understands, where or how to receive pay or take in’, for which reason he made her executrix.
Gabriel Egan
Beeston, William (c. 1606–1682), an actor and manager who supplied *Aubrey with material for his Brief Life of Shakespeare (‘in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’), possibly gleaned from his father Christopher *Beeston who acted with Shakespeare in Every Man in his Humour for the Chamberlain’s Men.
Catherine Alexander
Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827), German composer. His Piano Sonatas Op. 31 No. 2 (‘Tempest’) and Op. 57 (‘Appassionata’) were both inspired by The Tempest, while his String Quartet Op. 18 No. 2 was apparently inspired by the vault scene in Romeo and Juliet. His Coriolan Overture, Op.62, however, was written for H. J. von Collin’s tragedy Coriolan and not Shakespeare’s play.
Irena Cholij
Behn, Aphra (?1640–1689), a writer and dramatist who used Shakespeare to defend herself against charges of being uneducated (‘Epistle to the Reader’ of The Dutch Lover), and who defended Shakespeare’s use of ‘obscene’ language in Othello (preface to The Lucky Chance). Othello is considered influential in the creation of her noble African hero Oroonoko (1688).
Catherine Alexander
Belarius, banished by Cymbeline, has kidnapped his sons and brought them up in a Welsh cave, having taken the name ‘Morgan’ (Cymbeline 3.3.106). He reveals his identity and restores the princes, 5.6.
Anne Button
Belch, Sir Toby. Olivia’s kinsman, he marries Maria in ‘recompense’ for helping him deceive Malvolio, Twelfth Night 5.1.361.
Anne Button
Belgium. See Low Countries.
Bell, John (1745–1831), English publisher. In 1773–4, Bell published the first ‘acting edition’ of Shakespeare’s works, ‘As they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London. Regulated from the Prompt Books of each House.’ Dedicated to David *Garrick, the edition provides a record of Shakespeare’s plays as staged in the later 18th century, including adaptations such as Nahum *Tate’s King Lear, with its notorious happy ending, and Garrick’s Romeo and Juliet with its addition of a scene between Romeo and Juliet in the tomb. The edition also contains an introduction and notes ‘both critical and illustrative’ by Francis *Gentleman. Along with omitting the lines cut from performances, the edition strove, as Gentleman notes in his introduction, to remove ‘glaring indecencies’ from Shakespeare’s text and thus to make it more acceptable to a refined audience. Gentleman’s notes refer both to the plays themselves and to contemporary productions, in particular to Garrick’s performances. Known for hiring some of the best artists of the day to illustrate his publications, Bell provided each volume with fine engravings, including frontispieces of contemporary actors and actresses. He later published additional multi-volume sets such as ‘Bell’s British Theatre’, an acting edition of non-Shakespearian drama, and ‘Bell’s British Poets’.
Jean Marsden
Belleforest, François de (1530–83), French poet, translator, and historiographer. Belleforest succeeded Pierre Boiastuau as author of the Histoires tragiques. Published in seven volumes from 1559 to 1582, this collection of prose tales was repeatedly plundered by English dramatists. Here, Shakespeare may have found the plots for Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, and Hamlet. The Histoires was based on Bandello’s Novelle but included tales from other sources, notably the legend of Amleth. Belleforest translated this well-known story from the Danish history of Saxo Grammaticus. His translation was probably the main source for Shakespeare’s tragedy and may have suggested Hamlet’s excessive melancholy.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Bell Savage Inn. See inns.
Bell Shakespeare, *Australia’s foremost theatre company for Shakespearian performance. Founded in 1990 by the actor and director John Bell, the company stages two to three modern-dress Shakespearian productions a year. Known for its populism, Bell Shakespeare regularly tours to theatres across the country (especially in the southern states), and places particular emphasis on accessibility in its production styles and performance aesthetics.
Erin Sullivan
Belott–Mountjoy suit. In spring 1612, Shakespeare gave evidence in a lawsuit brought by Stephen Belott against Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of tires, or tiaras—jewelled headdresses for ladies. Belott, his former apprentice, had married Mountjoy’s daughter Mary on 19 November 1604. Some years later Belott quarrelled with his father-in-law and brought the lawsuit alleging that Mountjoy had broken promises to pay a marriage portion of £60 and to leave his daughter £200 in his will. A former servant testified that Mountjoy had asked ‘one Mr Shakespeare that lay in the house’ to act as a go-between in the marriage negotiations, and Shakespeare was required to testify. His depositions, though not specially revealing, are the most substantial and accurate reports of words that he actually spoke (see also Greene, John and Thomas).
On 11 May 1612 he is described as ‘William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon…of the age of 48 years or thereabouts’. He testified that he had known Mountjoy and Belott ‘for the space of ten years or thereabouts’. If accurate, this means that he had lodged in the house (not necessarily continuously) for at least two years before the marriage. He had known Belott ‘when he was servant’ to Mountjoy, and regarded him as ‘a very good and industrious servant’. Mountjoy had shown Belott ‘great good will and affection’ and had ‘made a motion’ to him of marriage with his daughter. Mrs Mountjoy ‘did solicit and entreat’ Shakespeare to ‘move and persuade’ Belott ‘to effect the said marriage’, and Shakespeare had complied. Mountjoy had promised to give Belott a ‘portion’, but Shakespeare could not remember exactly what, nor when it was to be paid, nor did he know that Mountjoy had promised to leave Belott £200. But he affirmed that Belott had been living in the house and that they ‘had amongst themselves many conferences [conversations] about their marriage which afterwards was consummated and solemnized’. He knew nothing about ‘what implements and necessaries of household stuff’ Mountjoy gave Belott on his marriage. Other witnesses confirmed that the Mountjoys had asked Shakespeare to persuade Belott to marry their daughter, and one of them said Shakespeare had told him that Mountjoy had promised ‘about the sum of fifty pounds in money and certain household stuff’. There appears to have been an intention to call Shakespeare at a second hearing, in June, but no deposition is known. The case was referred to the overseers and elders of the French Church in London; they awarded Belott 20 nobles which Mountjoy, who appears to have been leading a dissolute life, had not paid a year later.
Shakespeare’s inability to remember the financial settlement has been used as evidence that he was suffering from a general failure of memory; but he had had much to think about in the meantime.
Stanley Wells
Belvedere; or, The Garden of the Muses, a dictionary of quotations, published, like *England’s Helicon, under the auspices of John Bodenham, and edited by ‘A.M.’ (probably Anthony Munday). It contains over 200 extracts from Shakespeare including at least 92 from Lucrece, 47 from Richard II, and 35 from Venus and Adonis.
Stanley Wells
‘Be merry, be merry, my wife has all’, Shrovetide carol fragment sung by Silence in 2 Henry IV 5.3.33; the original tune is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Benedick. See Much Ado About Nothing.
Benfield, Robert (c. 1583–1649), actor (Lady Elizabeth’s Men c.1613, King’s Men c. 1615–42). When William Ostler died in 1614 his part as Antonio in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi appears to have been taken by Robert Benfield, who came to the King’s Men from Lady Elizabeth’s Men. On 23 April 1615 Benfield married Mary Bugge, probably a relative of the Dr John Bugges to whom Richard Benfield (kinsman to ‘Robert Benefeild’) left £15 in his will. Robert Benfield is named in the actor lists of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb and The Honest Man’s Fortune for performances probably by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men in 1613, as recorded in the 1679 folio of their plays, and he is named as an actor in the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The 1679 Beaumont and Fletcher folio also lists Benfield as a player in The Mad Lover, The Knight of Malta, The Humorous Lieutenant, The Custom of the Country, The Island Princess, Women Pleased, The Little French Lawyer, The False One, The Double Marriage, The Pilgrim, The Prophetess, The Spanish Curate, The Maid in the Mill, The Lovers’ Progress, and A Wife for a Month, all performed by the King’s Men between 1616 and 1624. In 1619 the renewed patent of the King’s Men names Benfield as a sharer. As a result of the sharers’ dispute of 1635 he, along with Eliard Swanston and Thomas Pollard, became a housekeeper in the Globe and the Blackfriars.
Gabriel Egan
Benson, Sir Frank (1858–1939), English actor who helped to found the Oxford University Dramatic Society. He showed an early disposition towards management and Shakespeare by mounting Romeo and Juliet at the Imperial theatre in 1882. Having played Paris with *Irving at the Lyceum, in 1883 he acquired control of a touring company which he expanded to fulfil his mission of taking Shakespeare’s plays across the country and beyond.
Though he acknowledged his debt to the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s Shakespeare productions—the influence was particularly evident in the forum scene of Julius Caesar—the prevailing style of Benson’s productions was captured by Max *Beerbohm, who likened his Henry V (Lyceum, 1900) to ‘a branch of university cricket’. In the title role Benson was forthrightly heroic, but he achieved greater subtlety as the ‘poet-king’ Richard II.
Benson, loyally supported by his wife Constance, had up to four companies touring at once and also performed overseas, but his spiritual home was Stratford-upon-Avon, where he ran the annual festival(s) from 1886 to 1919. In 1916 he was knighted on the stage of Drury Lane at the conclusion of a special, tercentenary performance of Julius Caesar. Of his four ventures in filming Shakespeare only Richard III survives and is included in the BFI video Silent Shakespeare (1999).
Richard Foulkes
Benson, John. See Sonnets; ‘Phoenix and Turtle, The’.
Benthall, Michael (1917–78), British director. The lifelong partner of the dancer-actor Robert *Helpmann (with whom he devised a *ballet Hamlet in 1942), he won admiration in the austere post-war years for his visually opulent Shakespearian productions in collaboration with painterly designers like Leslie Hurry and Loudon Sainthill. His Stratford successes (some starring Helpmann) included a Victorian Hamlet and a baroque Tempest. He was director of the *Old Vic from 1953 to 1962 where within five years all the First Folio plays were staged with performers of great achievement or extraordinary promise. By the 1960s his approach had come to seem old-fashioned and his achievement has been much underrated.
Michael Jamieson
Bentley, Gerald Eades (1901–94), American academic, author of The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (7 vols., 1941–68), an indispensable reference guide to the authors, plays, actors, and theatres of Shakespeare’s later career, his contemporaries, and successors; see also Shakespeare and Jonson (2 vols., 1945, 1965); and Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (1961).
Tom Matheson
Benvolio is Montague’s nephew and Romeo’s friend in Romeo and Juliet.
Anne Button
Bergman, Ingmar (1918–2007), Swedish director. Renowned as a film-maker, Bergman reserved Shakespeare for his stage work, though Hamlet is intertextually woven into Fanny and Alexander (1982). After directing Macbeth twice in the 1940s, he returned to Shakespeare late in his career at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, focusing (as in his films) on psycho-sexual and familial relationships, isolating Cordelia in King Lear (1984) and Ophelia in Hamlet (1986) as silent, ever-present observers. His Winter’s Tale (1994), framed as a play-within-the-play, became a parable about the theatre and the death and resurrection of love.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
bergomask (bergamasca), a dance, perhaps originating in Bergamo (Italy). Its context in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.355, together with the simple chord sequence and tune found in musical examples, suggests a rustic, comic character. People from Bergamo were stereotyped as idiotic and clownish by Italians.
Jeremy Barlow
Berkeley, Lord. At the behest of York he asks Bolingbroke why he has returned to England, Richard II 2.3.74–80.
Anne Button
Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire is mentioned in Richard II: the Duke of York orders his men to be mustered there, 2.2.118–19. Hotspur has trouble recalling it as the place where he first gave allegiance to Bolingbroke, 1 Henry IV 1.3.242–6.
Anne Button
Berliner Ensemble. See Brecht, Bertolt.
Berlioz, Hector (1803–69), French composer. The ‘first thunderbolt’ (as he described it) in Berlioz’s compositional career was the simultaneous discovery of Shakespeare and the English actress Harriet Smithson (whom he later married), who played Ophelia to Charles Kemble’s Hamlet (Odéon theatre, Paris, 11 September 1827). (The ‘second thunderbolt’ was the discovery of Beethoven in 1828.) Thereafter Berlioz read Shakespeare avidly and Shakespeare’s influence is felt in many of his works.
Berlioz’s only Shakespearian opera as such is Béatrice et Bénédict (1860–2), a two-act opéra comique based on Much Ado About Nothing, written for the Stadttheater in Baden-Baden. However, his operatic masterpiece Les Troyens (1856–8) not only includes a love duet taken from the Merchant of Venice (5.1.1–24) but was described by the composer as ‘Virgil Shakespearianized’. Berlioz also considered writing operas on Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, though none came to fruition. Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s plays are at the heart of his dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette (1839), the Roi Lear overture (1831), and his fantasy on The Tempest (1830). This last work was included in Lélio, ou Le Retour à la vie (original title Le Retour à la vie), a lyric monodrama in six sections (composed as a sequel to his Symphonie fantastique) whose text contains many references to Shakespeare and Shakespearian characters. Berlioz was particularly inspired by Hamlet: he apparently identified Lélio (in the aforementioned work) with Hamlet; he composed a Marche funèbre pour la dernière scène d’Hamlet and the song La Mort d’Ophélie (both c.1848); and his autograph score of Huit Scènes de Faust (1828–9) contains quotations from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
Irena Cholij
Bernard, Elizabeth. See Bagley, Edward; Shakespeare, William.
Bernard (Barnard), Sir John (Sir John Barnard) (1605–74), second husband of Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth *Hall, whom he married on 3 June 1649, after the death of her first husband Thomas Nash on 4 April 1647. He was then a widower with eight children, owner of Abington Manor, near Northampton. A Royalist, he was knighted by Charles II in 1661, and died in 1674.
Stanley Wells
Bernhardt, Sarah (1844–1923), French actress who, prior to her controversial departure from the Comédie-Française in 1880, had played Cordelia and Desdemona. In 1888 she brought her Macbeth to Edinburgh and London, but her Delilah-like Lady Macbeth did not impress. Neither did her reprise as Ophelia (1886). The attractions of Cléopâtre (1890, Sardou and Moreau) and La Mort de Cléopâtre (1914, Maurice Bernhardt and Cain) were only derivatively Shakespearian, but as a strikingly youthful Hamlet, in Marcel Schwob’s adaptation (1899), Bernhardt had many admirers.
Sarah Bernhardt in her greatest Shakespearian role, Hamlet, in 1904.
Richard Foulkes
Berri, Duke of. Present at Charles VI’s council of war, Henry V 2.4 (mute).
Anne Button
Bertram marries Helen reluctantly at the King’s command, All’s Well That Ends Well 2.3, but refuses to accept her as his wife until she can obtain his ring and become pregnant by him without his help.
Anne Button
Bestrafte Bruder-mord, Der. This German play was published in 1781 (from a now-lost manuscript dated 1710) as Tragoedia der bestrafte Bruder-mord oder: Prinz Hamlet aus Dännemark (translated as Fratricide Punished). It appears to derive from Hamlet as performed by English actors in *Germany in the early 17th century, and various details—such as the use of the name Corambis for Polonius—show that they were using the first, ‘bad’ quarto as a *Promptbook. The play, however, includes material not found there—notably an allegorical prologue and several episodes of slapstick—and has been scrutinized obsessively (but probably in vain) for echoes of the lost *ur-Hamlet.
Michael Dobson
Betterton, Mary (née Saunderson) (c. 1637–1712), one of six actresses recruited by *Davenant for the public stage at the Restoration in 1660. She played Ophelia to Betterton’s Hamlet in 1661, married him the following year, and while renowned for playing virtuous roles was praised by Cibber as an outstanding Lady Macbeth.
Catherine Alexander
Betterton, Thomas (1635–1710), the greatest actor of the Restoration period, and frequently compared in skill to *Burbage and *Garrick. He began his working life apprenticed to the bookseller John Holden, a friend of Davenant and father of one of the first English actresses. Betterton’s under-apprentice was Edward Kynaston. By January 1661 he had joined Davenant’s Duke’s Company, having performed briefly with John Rhodes’s Company and with Killigrew, and had early success—recorded by *Pepys—as Hamlet. In 1662 he married the actress Mary Saunderson. In 1663 he played Sir Toby Belch, and in Davenant’s versions was the definitive Henry VIII and, the following year, Macbeth. On Davenant’s death in 1668 he became manager of acting (a teaching role he maintained until the end of his career in conjunction with his wife) and co-manager of the company which moved into the new theatre in Dorset Garden in 1671. In 1682 he became leader of the combined Duke’s and King’s Companies—the United Company—and in 1695 was one of a group of senior actors, including Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, who moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields following poor treatment by Rich. His company later moved to the new Queen’s theatre in the Haymarket and subsequently to Drury Lane.
He was closely associated with Shakespeare in the public mind, taking the title roles in Shadwell’s version of Timon of Athens, Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida (1678), Tate’s King Lear (1680), Falstaff in his own adaptation of Henry IV, Angelo in Gildon’s version of Measure for Measure (1700), and Othello, as well as promoting and defending Shakespeare in numerous prologues. He travelled to France at least three times for theatre research and is credited with the introduction in England of a semi-operatic style of playing, frequently in association with Henry Purcell, which may have influenced Shadwell’s version of The Tempest.
Catherine Alexander
Betty, William Henry West (1791–1874), English child star known as Master Betty and The Infant Roscius, declared at the age of 10, after seeing Sarah *Siddons perform, that he would expire if he did not become an actor. After playing leading roles including Hamlet—which he is said to have memorized in three hours—outside London, he was engaged at Covent Garden and Drury Lane late in 1803 for high fees; his sensational success led to the phenomenon known as Bettymania. William Pitt even suspended Parliament so that members could see him as Hamlet. In 1805, still only 14, he added Richard III and Macbeth to his Shakespearian repertoire. He had little success as an adult actor, but was able to retire at the age of 33 with a large fortune.
Stanley Wells
Bevington Shakespeare (1973, 1997). The updated, fourth one-volume edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington, was issued in 1997 by Longman in New York. It is more ‘complete’ than its predecessors by the addition of The Two Noble Kinsmen and ‘A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter’. This American edition originated in a revision, published in 1973, of that prepared by Hardin Craig. The 1973 revision was in turn followed by a further revision incorporating material from the Bantam edition of individual works published in 1988. The latest update retains the grouping of plays by genre, and the format of the fourth edition. A few pages are added in the general introduction to alert users to recent developments in criticism, but the straightforward introductions to individual plays, focused closely on themes and structure, are unchanged. The impression given is of an edition that avoids jargon and fashionable critical topics, and aims rather to provide for college students a clear and simple presentation of the works. Its best feature may be the excellent glosses at the foot of each double-column page of text.
R. A. Foakes
Bevis, George, and John Holland. These ‘characters’ have emerged as the result of editorial misreadings of stage directions in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) (they were the names of actors in Shakespeare’s day). In the Oxford edition, Bevis and Holland’s supposed lines are given to the first and second rebels in 4.2. A rebel called ‘John’ appears in 4.7, but the line 4.7.81, generally given to Bevis, is assigned to an anonymous rebel.
Anne Button
Beyer, Sille (1803–61), Danish translator and adapter of plays. Her versions of five Shakespeare comedies, bowdlerized and adapted in the mode of Scribe’s comédies-vaudevilles, were popular in Danish and Norwegian theatres in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
Bianca. (1) Younger daughter of Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, she marries Lucentio. (2) She is Cassio’s mistress in Othello. Without her knowledge *Iago uses her in his plot against Othello.
Anne Button
Bian Zhilin (b. 1910), poet and leading Chinese critic of Shakespeare in the 1950s. His most influential work includes his *translation of and critical essays on Shakespeare’s four major tragedies.
Qixin He
Bible. The Bible was a fundamental source in 16th-century England, a repository not only of religious ‘truth’, but of ancient history, moral philosophy, romance, and poetry. As such it was quoted in many different ways, through representation in literary and pictorial art to references in general conversation. Indeed, so much of the Bible had passed into common currency that it is often difficult to be sure what is and is not a biblical quotation or allusion. At the beginning of the 16th century there were only two complete English bibles but in the course of that century appeared famous translations by Tyndale, Coverdale, Cranmer, and Thomson as well as the Geneva Bible of 1560 and the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. Shakespeare’s poetry and drama are full of biblical references, from direct quotations and allusions to a named character or parable, to vaguer structural and linguistic echoes.
Shakespeare’s familiarity with the Bible may be accounted for in various ways. Learning psalms by rote was part of the grammar-school education. Attending church, Shakespeare would have heard Scripture read directly from the Bible, probably the Bishops’ text, but also from the Book of Common Prayer and from the prescribed sermons in the Book of Homilies. Nevertheless, the very specific quotations that appear in Shakespeare’s work suggest that he must have read the Bible himself and can also suggest the translation he used. The Geneva Bible is his primary text, referred to throughout his career. The Bishops’ Bible provides a source for the earlier plays. But there is also evidence that Shakespeare drew upon other translations and, indeed, that he was aware of contemporary disagreements over how the Bible should be translated. The contemporary debate over the translation of a word appearing in Corinthians and elsewhere as ‘charity’ or ‘love’ surfaces in Titus Andronicus (4.2.43) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.3.340–1).
Of the 42 books of the Bible that Shakespeare drew upon, Ecclesiasticus and Job seem to have been his favourites. From the former he took the text decrying excessive grief deployed in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and elsewhere. From Job, we have the theme of the unfortunate abandoned by friends as in Timon of Athens, and the idea of the guilty shunning the light which inspires the King’s description of Bolingbroke in Richard II 3. 2. Job has also been suggested as a source for King Lear. The dramatic effect of Shakespeare’s biblical quotations varies enormously. Reference to the Bible is a linguistic habit of almost every Shakespearian character and often says little about them. But it is notable that, of the two characters in Shakespeare who quote the Bible most frequently, one is the renowned devout Henry VI, and the other Richard III. Biblical quotation/allusion often appears in an ironic context, through the character of the speaker or the nature of the action. In Titus Andronicus, Demetrius and Chiron congratulate themselves on rape and murder with a quotation from Romans 13: 9–10 on loving one’s neighbour (4.2.43). In Othello, the drunken Cassio discourses on the salvation of souls and his own hopes to be saved (2.3.95–100).
Jane Kingsley-Smith
bibliography, the study of books as material objects and of the production and reproduction of texts. ‘Enumerative’ bibliography refers to a listing of books and their locations in libraries and private book collections, such as Sidney Lee’s ‘Census of Extant Copies of the Shakespeare First Folio’ (1902). ‘Analytical’ bibliography, the technical study of all stages of the printing process, emerged from the New Bibliography movement in the 20th century as a consciously ‘scientific’ reaction to the more enumerative ‘book-collectors’ bibliography’ that had dominated bibliographical study in the 19th century.
Eric Rasmussen
Bidford. See crabtree, Shakespeare’s.
Bigot, Lord. He is one of the noblemen who discover Arthur’s body and accuse Hubert, King John 4.3.
Anne Button
Billington, Michael (b. 1939), English journalist, broadcaster, author, and theatre critic. After a six-year stint as arts critic under Irving Wardle at The Times, Billington moved to The Guardian in 1971 to cover theatre, a post he still holds, informally distinguishing him as Britain’s longest serving theatre critic. A veteran Shakespeare reviewer, Billington’s style is broadly characterized as lucid, textually informed, and politically sensitive. He is occasionally accused of conservatism in his predilection for Shakespearian performance to display fidelity to the more traditional principles of clear verse-speaking and grandeur and naturalism both in acting and design, though is nonetheless viewed as a sensible, self-aware and non-reactionary critic with a strong academic leaning. He frequently contributes to scholarly journals and edited collections, holding teaching and visiting fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and King’s College, London. He has written biographies of Dame Peggy *Ashcroft and Harold Pinter, and authored the acclaimed history of 20th-century British theatre, State of the Nation (2007). Billington was awarded an OBE in 2013 for services to theatre.
Will Sharpe
biographies of Shakespeare. Attempts to garner information about Shakespeare’s life and career were made more or less haphazardly during the 17th century by, for instance, John *Ward, John *Dowdall, Gerard *Langbaine, Thomas Jordan, and Thomas *Fuller, but the first biographical account of consequence is Nicholas *Rowe’s, published with his edition in 1709 and based in part on information gathered for him by Thomas *Betterton. Inaccurate and inadequate though it is, it was reprinted, with variations, in many subsequent editions (though not in *Johnson’s and *Capell’s). *Malone undertook the most thorough research to date, establishing a chronology which was long regarded as standard, and printing much new material in his edition of 1790. No less important was his exposure of the Ireland *forgeries. His incomplete attempt at a full biography appeared posthumously in the Third *Variorum (1821).
During the 19th century, contributions to biographical study came from antiquarians such as R. B. Wheler who, while providing new information, also plagiarized Rowe, and, pre-eminently, *Halliwell-Phillipps, whose voluminous, dispersed, and amazingly thorough studies have been of abiding influence and value. They reached their summation in his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare which grew from 192 pages in its first edition (1881) to 848 in the two outsize volumes of the seventh (1887). *Collier’s forgeries had muddied the waters in the 1830s and later, though he also made some genuine finds.
Edward *Dowden’s eloquent and long-lasting Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875), which does not add to the documentary record, is nevertheless original in its attempt ‘to connect the study of Shakspere’s works with an inquiry after the personality of the author, and to observe, as far as is possible, in its several stages the growth of his intellect and character from youth to full maturity’. Also influential at this period was Sidney *Lee’s Life of William Shakespeare (1898, greatly expanded from his article of 1897 in the Dictionary of National Biography and revised in later editions), long regarded as the standard life.
New information continued to come from researchers who did not write biographies, especially C. W. and H. A. *Wallace, who discovered the *Belott–Mountjoy suit in the Public Record Office in 1905. The Wallaces were American, as was Joseph Quincy *Adams, whose Life of William Shakespeare (1923), especially strong on Shakespeare’s theatrical background, offered serious rivalry to Lee.
In 1930 appeared Sir E. K. *Chambers’s monumental and still indispensable two-volume William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Making no attempt at either consecutive narrative or readability, Chambers provides an extraordinarily thorough and scholarly synthesis and appraisal of the current state of knowledge concerning every aspect of Shakespeare’s life and career. In the meantime E. I. *Fripp pursued investigations into Shakespeare’s Stratford affiliations culminating in the two posthumously published volumes of Shakespeare: Man and Artist (1938), fanciful but packed with picturesque detail about the local environment. Leslie *Hotson’s enthusiastic researches in public archives concentrated rather on the London scene. Like Fripp’s, his books, such as Shakespeare versus Shallow (1931), I, William Shakespeare (1937), and Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated (1949), are valuable rather for incidental details than for their overall theses. Far more disciplined is Mark Eccles’s austere but useful Shakespeare in Warwickshire (1961). Also specialized in its investigations is E. A. J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The Lost Years (1985), a study at once scholarly and speculative of the putative Lancashire connection.
The classic study of Shakespearian biography is S. *Schoenbaum ’s masterly Shakespeare’s Lives (1970, rev. and updated 1991), intended as a preliminary study for a biography which he did not live to compose. It was followed by a continuation of Chambers’s work, though in a far more accessible and humane vein, the comprehensive and superbly illustrated William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975, revised with fewer illustrations as A Compact Documentary Life, 1977), and its companion volume, William Shakespeare: Records and Images (1981).
As archival research becomes less fruitful—though discoveries continue to be made—biographers have tended to concentrate on interpretation of Shakespeare’s life either through the society of his times or through the works. At the same time, books have sought a popular rather than, or as well as, a scholarly market, and many more or less ephemeral, sometimes fictionalized, often lavishly illustrated volumes have appeared. A. L. *Rowse’s opinionated William Shakespeare (1963) is valued mainly for its setting of the historical scene. Anthony *Burgess’s Shakespeare (1970) is written with all the flair of a successful novelist, and Garry O’Connor’s intelligent if overheated William Shakespeare: A Life (1991) appears at times to be psychically inspired; Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Ungentle Shakespeare (2001, revised 2010) has Shakespeare dying of syphilis. Calmer interpretations of life and career have come from M. M. Reese in Shakespeare: His World and his Work (1953, rev. 1980), Russell Fraser in his imaginatively written Young Shakespeare (1988) and The Life and Times of William Shakespeare: The Later Years (1992), Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life (1998), James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), Stephen Greenblatt’s Will In The World (2005), Rene Weis’s speculative Shakespeare Revealed (2007), and Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2008).
The known facts of Shakespeare’s life offer great scope for interpretation and variant contextualization. The oft-told tale will continue to be retold, fluctuating according to the knowledge, aspirations, and personality of the tellers.
Stanley Wells
Biondello, Lucentio’s servant, is beaten by Lucentio’s father Vincentio, The Taming of the Shrew 5.1.50.
Anne Button
Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Founded by Sir Barry *Jackson in 1913 in a small custom-built theatre near the main railway station, it offered a wide range of plays including all of Shakespeare’s, some in pioneering *modern dress. In 1971 the big new theatre opened in the civic centre. A Shakespearian or Jacobean play is staged each year.
Michael Jamieson
Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial Library (from 1968 renamed the Birmingham Shakespeare Library), founded by the local Shakespeare Club in April 1864 to mark the tercentenary and opened in 1868, housed in the Central Library. Destroyed by fire in January 1879, the collection was restored by voluntary subscription and was part of Birmingham Central Library’s collections. From 2010 to 2013 the Library of Birmingham was built on the city’s Centenary Square to replace the old Central Library, and the collection is now housed there, as is the Victorian Shakespeare Memorial Room, which was taken down panel-by-panel and resituated at the top level of the new building,
Susan Brock, rev. Will Sharpe
Biron (Berowne) (his name taken from an adviser to the historical King of Navarre, the Duc de Biron) is a lord attending the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost. In love with Rosaline, his witty conversation and mixed success in courtship of her anticipates the characterization of Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.
Anne Button
birthday celebrations. The earliest evidence of the formal marking of Shakespeare’s anniversary is a poem published in the London Magazine, 24 (1755), ‘On the annual meeting of some Gentlemen to celebrate shakespear’s birthday.’ Stratford-upon-Avon only got involved later: David *Garrick’s *Jubilee, though intended for the playwright’s 200th birthday in 1764, was held up until 1769 and took place in August rather than April so as not to clash with the London theatrical season. Nonetheless, Garrick’s festival—with its public orations, and its street procession of Shakespearian characters—has exerted an immense influence on subsequent celebrations of the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death, notably the 1864 and 1916 tercentenaries. The current annual event follows the pattern of the 1916 festivities quite closely, and retains a distinctly Edwardian atmosphere. On the morning of the Saturday closest to 23 April the mayor and corporation of Stratford meet with invited ambassadors, academics, and others at the town hall, all wearing sprigs of rosemary (for remembrance), and in company with students and members of local amateur dramatic societies dressed as characters from the plays (in costumes borrowed from the RSC) they process (to the strains of a military band) through the town, its streets adorned with banners representing each of Shakespeare’s works (unfurled, along with national and other flags, to a fanfare of trumpets, at 11 a.m.). The route traces Shakespeare’s own earthly pilgrimage by passing from the Birthplace to his grave at Holy Trinity, where each member of the procession lays a floral tribute. An official lunch takes place in a marquee nearby, and includes toasts to Shakespeare’s memory and (in recent years) the presentation of an award to a noted performer or writer in recognition of a lifetime’s service to his works. The invited guests attend an RSC performance in the evening, and at a special Shakespeare Service the following day actors read from both Shakespeare and the Bible and an invited guest preaches a Shakespeare Sermon. The occasion has been variously likened to Hellenic hero-cults and to the ceremonies associated in Catholic countries with local saints’ days, but in keeping with its coincidence with St George’s Day it remains quintessentially English, right down to the mandatory morris dancers.
Michael Dobson
Birth of Merlin, The. The *title page of the first *quarto edition (1662) of this Jacobean play ascribes it to ‘William Shakespear and William Rowley’. Although *Rowley’s authorship has been confirmed, the internal evidence suggesting a possible collaboration with Shakespeare is inconclusive, though a portion of Henry *Herbert’s papers, not discovered until 1994, suggest the play was written in 1622, which would rule Shakespeare out. Thomas *Middleton was indicated as a possible collaborator towards the end of the 19th century, though recent scholarship argues against both him and Fletcher. The Birth of Merlin draws from history, *romance, and the *pastoral tradition, by combining chronicle accounts of the Anglo-Saxon wars prior to the advent of King Arthur and Merlin’s miraculous birth and prophecies. Particularly interesting are Donobert’s stubborn daughters, who give up marriage and embrace celibacy against their father’s and their suitors’ wishes.
Sonia Massai, rev. Will Sharpe
Birthplace, the name given to the half-timbered house in Henley Street, Stratford-upon- Avon, acquired, with extensive ground to the rear, by Shakespeare’s father John, and where his son William is believed to have been born. The earliest evidence of John’s connection with Henley Street is a fine he incurred in 1552 for creating an unauthorized muckheap there. This was likely to have been in front of a property he occupied, probably as a tenant, which may have been the house he is known to have purchased four years later in 1556. From later evidence, it is clear that this stood on the site of the south-eastern part of the present Birthplace site. In 1575, he acquired further property in the town. Its precise location is not known but, given that by 1590 his ownership of Henley Street property is known to have extended over the whole of the present Birthplace site, it is reasonable to assume that it was indeed in 1575 that this additional Henley Street property was acquired.
The house now known simply as ‘The Birthplace’ on Henley Street, Stratford-upon Avon: in 1552 the site of an unauthorized muckheap, now a destination of international pilgrimage.
In plan, the present building began life as a simple rectangular structure of three bays, with close-set studding on the ground floor and square panelling above. The centre bay was the hall with a massive open hearth, between, on the north-west, the parlour, also with a fireplace, and, on the south-east, beyond a cross passage, an unheated chamber which may have served as John Shakespeare’s workshop (he was a glove-maker and wool-dealer). This arrangement was matched on the first floor by three chambers reached by a staircase from the hall, probably where the present stairs are sited. Later, but before William Shakespeare’s death, a separate single-bay house, now known as Joan Hart’s Cottage, was built onto the north-west end of the house. The present kitchen, with chamber over, was also added at the rear at about this time.
On John Shakespeare’s death in 1601, the ownership of the premises passed to his son William. By that date, Shakespeare was also the owner of New Place and had no need for the Henley Street premises as a home either for himself or for his immediate family. The main house was therefore leased out to Lewis Hiccox, who converted it into an inn, known as the Maidenhead (later the Swan and Maidenhead). The small, one-bay house to the north-west, probably added around this time, was put to residential use. By the time of Shakespeare’s death, it was occupied by his recently widowed sister Joan Hart. Under the terms of Shakespeare’s will, the ownership of the whole property (the inn and Joan Hart’s Cottage) passed to his elder daughter Susanna; and then, on her death in 1649, to her only child Elizabeth Nash. Elizabeth died in 1670, bequeathing it to Thomas Hart, the descendant of Shakespeare’s sister Joan, whose family had continued as tenants of the smaller house after her death in 1646. The Harts remained owners of the whole property until 1806, when it was sold to a butcher, Thomas Court.
Around 1700, the Harts divided the property on different lines: the Swan and Maidenhead was reduced in size (to occupy the two south-easterly bays only). The Harts took up residence in the remaining bay of the original house and let their former cottage to tenants. These divisions survived the purchase of the whole premises by Court in 1806 and remained unchanged until 1847, when, after the death of Court’s widow, the premises were again put up for sale. On this occasion, they were purchased for the nation by a body of trustees, whose successors, incorporated by private Act of Parliament, manage the property today.
The Birthplace acquired increasing importance as a literary shrine as a result of the Garrick *Jubilee of September 1769. An article on the Birthplace, complete with the earliest known drawing of the building by Richard Greene, had appeared in the July edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine. During the Jubilee itself, the building was highlighted by a transparency hung across its windows and one of the rooms was occupied by a book and programme seller, Thomas Beckett. However, an account of a visit to the Birthplace in 1762 makes it clear that the property had been known for its Shakespearian associations for some time before then: indeed, they were mentioned by George Vertue on a visit in 1737. In these early years, it was only the part of the house occupied by the Harts which was shown to visitors and this probably accounts for the tradition that the chamber on the first floor of this section was the birthroom itself. At first it was the Harts who conducted visitors around this part of the house but in the 1790s, after they had moved away from the town, it was let to a butcher, Thomas Hornby. It was his wife Mary who achieved lasting notoriety as the custodian, immortalized by Washington *Irving as the ‘garrulous old lady in a frosty red face’. Hornby died in 1817, and in 1820 Mary was eventually evicted.
Photographs taken in the mid-19th century reveal a dilapidated property, forming part of a terrace. Following the purchase of 1847, the trustees, over the next fifteen years or so, restored the property, using the earliest known drawing of the Birthplace (by Richard Greene, in 1769) as a model, but also drawing on architectural evidence as the work proceeded. From the street, the most noticeable alteration was the removal of a brick skin, built across the front of the Swan and Maidenhead early in the 19th century, and the reinstatement of three gables shown on the early drawing. There was a certain amount of replacement of decayed timbers but generally speaking the work was honestly done. Houses on either side, mostly later in date, were also demolished, leaving the Birthplace isolated from neighbouring properties.
When the refurbished premises opened to the public, the earlier division of the property was reflected in the decision to house a library and museum in the former Swan and Maidenhead part of the building, and to confine the presentation of the Birthplace proper to the traditional area. Over the years, a custom had arisen of allowing visitors to write their names on the walls of the birthroom itself. By the mid-1940s, the cumulative effect of this had become so unsightly that the decision was made, as part of a careful re-presentation of the house, to make a full photographic record of these signatures and then to paint over them.
Robert Bearman
Birtwistle, Sir Harrison (b. 1934), English composer. As music director then associate director at the National Theatre in London he composed incidental music for Hamlet (1975), Julius Caesar (1977), As You Like It (1979), and Coriolanus (1984). He also wrote the concert work For O, for O, the Hobby-Horse is Forgot (1976), whose title derives from Hamlet, Fanfare for Will (1987), and an Epilogue based on ‘Full fathom five’ (1972).
Irena Cholij
Bishop, Sir Henry Rowley (1786–1855), English composer. As the musical director at Covent Garden theatre (1810–24) Bishop was responsible for arranging and composing music for numerous musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. He borrowed heavily from other composers, while many of the lyrics in these adaptations were interpolated from other works.
Irena Cholij
Bishop, William (1626–1700), a resident of Bridgetown in Stratford and the source of the story told by John Roberts in 1729, and subsequently dismissed as false, that two chests of Shakespeare’s manuscripts were destroyed by fire (presumably at Warwick in 1694).
Catherine Alexander
Bishops’ Bible. See Bible.
Bjoernson, Bjoernstjerne (1832–1910), Norwegian dramatist, novelist, and poet. As director of the Christiania theatre (Oslo), 1865–7, he initiated a Norwegian Shakespeare tradition, with productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, Othello, Macbeth, and Henry IV.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
Blackamoor Child. He is the son of Aaron and Tamora, introduced in Titus Andronicus 4.2.
Anne Button
Blackfriars. In 1576, the year that James Burbage built the Theatre in Shoreditch, Richard Farrant leased from Sir William More the Upper Frater of an old Dominican monastery in the Blackfriars district of north London and used it for theatrical performances by boy players. Since the 14th century the building had served on occasion as parliament chamber of the realm and there was no official sanction for its use as a playhouse, but by pretending that the boys were merely rehearsing and by keeping the audience small and elite, Farrant and his partner William Hunnis, and later John Newman and Henry Evans, were able to run what was effectively an indoor theatre for eight years until legal wrangles between the partners brought the project to a end. In 1596 James Burbage paid £600 for this property and began converting it to become an indoor home for the Chamberlain’s Men, the company whose leading actor was his son Richard and who were expecting to leave the Theatre when that playhouse’s ground lease expired in 1597. A petition from important local residents objecting to the traffic and disturbance that a playhouse would bring to the Blackfriars area caused the privy council to forbid the building’s use. James Burbage died in February 1597 and his sons decided to relocate the timbers of the Theatre to Bankside to create the Globe as the Chamberlain’s Men’s new permanent home, and to recover the lost expense by leasing the Blackfriars playhouse to a company of boy players led by the same Henry Evans who had used it 20 years earlier. Presumably discreet performances by boy players were again tolerable where performances by famous adult players were not. Evans’s boys changed names and managements several times during their residency at the Blackfriars. In March of 1608 they gave a performance of George Chapman’s Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron which offended King James and the company was disbanded, leaving the Blackfriars playhouse vacant.
Richard Burbage’s playing company was now under royal patronage as the King’s Men, and he had reason to suppose that he might now be allowed to use his indoor playhouse. In August 1608 Burbage formed a seven-man syndicate—himself, John Heminges, William Shakespeare, Cuthbert Burbage, Henry Condell, William Sly, and Thomas Evans—to run the Blackfriars along the same lines as the syndicate formed to run the Globe in 1599. Plague closure prevented use of the building until late 1609, but thereafter the King’s men used the open-air Globe in the summer and the indoor Blackfriars in the winter. The first of the King’s Men’s plays to be written specially for the Blackfriars was either Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or his Cymbeline, although both probably also played at the Globe as did Shakespeare’s later plays The Tempest, All Is True (Henry VIII), and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Blackfriars was closed with all the other playhouses in 1642 and was pulled down in 1655.
The room which housed the playing space was a rectangle 66 feet by 46 feet (20 m×14 m) and the stage ran across the full width of one of the short sides, although its usable width would have been reduced to something less than 30 feet (9 m) by the presence of spectators’ boxes at the sides. The main body of the audience sat in the space immediately in front of the stage (roughly what would be the yard in an open-air theatre) and in galleries which ran around three walls of the room, formed into a U shape by the cutting off of two corners. The economic disposition of the audience was an inversion of the open-air arrangements: those nearest the stage at an indoor playhouse paid most. The practices and facilities of the Blackfriars can be inferred from the plays written specially for the boy players between 1600 and 1608. Spectators were allowed to sit on the stage, as they were in the public theatres from the mid-1590s. Performances were divided into five acts separated by intervals during which music was played. The audience was entirely seated, so the stage was probably not as high as stages in the public theatres, but it would need to be high enough to allow an actor to rise from underneath for the opening direction of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1602): ‘[Enter] envy. Arising in the midst of the stage.’ It is not certain whether actors ascended through the trap via a ladder or were raised by a mechanically operated platform, but if the latter the lack of space under the low stage would have required cutting a hole in the massive floor and fitting the machine against the ceiling of the room beneath. Descents by flight machine, with musical accompaniment, are made in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge and in George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears, and music plays as the actor descends. In the public theatres music was typically provided by brass instruments but for the enclosed space of the Blackfriars woodwind instruments were preferred. Operation of the flight machine in open-air playhouses was usually masked by the simulation of thunder, and the use of music alone in Cupid’s Revenge and The Widow’s Tears might indicate that the solid roof of the Upper Frater effectively deadened the noise of the Blackfriars flight machine.
The Blackfriars playhouse was famous for the quality of its musicians who provided entertainment before the performance as well as music during the four act intervals. When the King’s Men took over the theatre they appear to have adapted their open-air practices to conform with those of the Blackfriars: thereafter they used more music in all their plays and used intervals in all performances. Absolute conformity was not possible however: as well as quieter instruments the smaller indoor theatre suited a more restrained style of vocal delivery and less movement about the stage.
Gabriel Egan
Blackfriars Gatehouse, a property in the Blackfriars district of London, not far from the Blackfriars theatre, which Shakespeare bought from Henry *Walker, ‘citizen and minstrel of London’, for £140 on 10 March 1613. It had belonged to Mathias Bacon from 1590 until Walker bought it in 1604, and had frequently been suspected as a centre of Catholic intrigue. Part of it was built over ‘a great gate’. In 1586 a Blackfriars resident, Richard Frith, had reported that ‘It hath sundry back doors and bye-ways, and many secret vaults and corners. It hath been in time past suspected and searched for papists but no good done for want of good knowledge of the back doors and bye-ways and of the dark corners.’ For some unknown reason, Shakespeare had as co-purchasers William Johnson, plausibly identified as landlord of the *Mermaid Tavern, John Jackson, possibly a shipping magnate of Hull married to the sister-in-law of Elias *James, and John *Heminges. But Shakespeare put up the money, and the others acted as his trustees. A payment of £80 in cash was made; on the day after the deed had been sealed, Shakespeare mortgaged the property back to Walker for the remaining £60, to be paid on 27 September following; this was presumably intended to allow Shakespeare time to raise the money. The trusteeship would have the effect of barring Shakespeare’s widow from rights to the property, but was not necessarily entered into with this purpose. Of the extant Shakespeare *signatures, one is on the purchase deed, the other on the mortgage.
There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever lived in the house; according to his will it was let to a John Robinson, probably not the person of the same name who witnessed his will. In the spring of 1615 Shakespeare joined with several other property owners in the neighbourhood in a petition to permit Mathias Bacon, whose mother had recently died, to surrender the title deeds of the Lodging of the Prior of Blackfriars, the estate of which the gatehouse was a part. The house appears to have been demolished in the late 18th century.
Stanley Wells
Blake, William (1757–1827), English artist, poet, and philosopher, who produced during the early 1770s representations of characters from plays by Shakespeare which display the linear treatment of the human figure for which Blake is celebrated, such as Titiana and Oberon (pen, ink, and wash, Tate Gallery). Blake was commissioned by William Hayley to produce a series of portrait busts for a library at Felpham. These included a depiction of Shakespeare. The completed work, William Shakespeare (c.1800, Manchester City Art Gallery), employed a derivative of the *Droeshout engraving, wreathed in laurels. Blake executed numerous ‘commercial’ works, including engravings after *Fuseli, such as Katharine, Griffiths and Patience (F. & C. Rivington, London, 1804).
Catherine Tite
Blanche, Lady, of Spain. She is betrothed to Louis the Dauphin, King John 2.1.
Anne Button
Blanco White, José (1775–1841). After leaving Spain and exiling himself in England, he became an Anglican priest and later a Unitarian. He collaborated in English periodicals, wrote poetry in English—his sonnet ‘Night and Death’ was highly regarded by Coleridge—and occupied himself with Shakespeare, on whom he published essays in The Christian Teacher, the journal of the English Unitarians, in the 1830s. These essays confirm Blanco’s development from his early neoclassical education to a progressively idealistic Romanticism: in his study on A Midsummer Night’s Dream he defended a new conception of the sublime, explained the poetical importance of the imagination, valued the symbolic use of language in literature, and presented Shakespeare as a conscious and organic poet, capable of creating concord out of discord.
A. Luis Pujante
blank verse, verse written in unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. First employed in English by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1540s, it rapidly developed in the hands of Marlowe and others into the standard medium of dramatic verse. Benefiting both from the metrical flexibility of the English pentameter and from the syntactical scope permitted by enjambment, it became in Shakespeare’s hands a remarkably versatile instrument capable equally of colloquial vigour and of oratorical grandeur.
Chris Baldick
blazon, a listing of the beloved’s admirable physical features (coral lips, rosy cheeks, etc.) in a love poem; famously mocked in Sonnet 130.
Chris Baldick
Bloch, Ernest. See opera.
blocking entry. A. W. Pollard suggested that certain entries for Shakespeare’s plays in the *Stationers’ Register, such as those made by James Roberts for As You Like It, Henry V, and Much Ado About Nothing in 1600, were intended to block publication of these texts, and thereby keep the scripts out of the hands of rival acting companies, until their theatrical runs with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were successfully concluded. Although there is clear evidence that early English booksellers would sometimes attempt to forestall rival booksellers by entering in the Stationers’ Register projected books for which no text yet existed, it is less certain that booksellers employed such blocking entries purely in the interest of acting companies.
Eric Rasmussen
Bloom, Claire (b. 1931). British stage and film actress. At 17 she captivated playgoers with her dark, fragile Ophelia at Stratford. Four years later she triumphed as Juliet at the *Old Vic, by which time she had starred in Charles Chaplin’s film Limelight. She was Ophelia to Richard *Burton’s Hamlet and toured as Cordelia to John *Gielgud’s King Lear. In Laurence *Olivier’s film Richard III she played Lady Anne. Her performances as Shakespeare’s maturer women (Gertrude in Hamlet, Constance in King John) were given on television, and as parts of a touring one-woman show. She has written two thoughtful volumes of autobiography.
Michael Jamieson
Blount, Edward. See colophon; copyright; folios; printing and publishing.
‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’, sung by Amiens in As You Like It 2.7.175; the earliest surviving setting is by Thomas Arne, published c.1765. More recent composers include Bridge, Parry, and Quilter.
Jeremy Barlow
Blunt, Sir James. He is given messages from Richmond to the Earl of Pembroke and Lord Stanley, Richard III 5.4.
Anne Button
Blunt, Sir John. He is falsely reported slain, 2 Henry IV 1.1.16 (appearing 4.3.22, mute).
Anne Button
Blunt, Sir Walter. He excuses *Hotspur to the King, 1 Henry IV 1.3.69–75, and is a messenger, 3.3.163–9 and in 4.3. He is slain, 5.3, disguised as the King.
Anne Button
Boaden, James (1762–1839), English playwright, novelist, biographer, and scholar. Boaden confesses to being first a partisan and then an opponent of W. H. Ireland’s forged Shakespeare Papers (1796). His Inquiry into the Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints (1824) is an important early attempt to discriminate among the multiplying images of Shakespeare after the only fully authenticated portraits, the *Janssen bust and the *Droeshout engraving. A life of John Philip Kemble (2 vols., 1825) was followed by biographies of actresses Sarah Siddons (1827) and Dorothea Jordan (1831). In On the Sonnets of Shakespeare (1837) he reasonably claims to be the first to identify William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, as the ‘man right fair’, and Samuel Daniel as the rival poet.
Tom Matheson
Boar’s Head. See Curtain theatre; Henry IV Part 1; Holst, Gustav; Inns; Kempe, William; Langley, Francis.
Boas, Frederick Samuel (1862–1957), British academic and editor, author of Shakspere and his Predecessors (1896), which first applied the term ‘problem plays’ to Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure, on the analogy of Ibsen’s modern plays dealing with social and sexual issues.
Tom Matheson
Boatswain. He rebukes the courtiers for interfering with his attempts to save his ship, The Tempest 1.1.
Anne Button
Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75), Italian humanist and writer, author of the Decameron (1353), a collection of 100 tales told by ten people over a period of ten days during quarantine in Florence. This narrative device, whereby each member of the group must tell a story to pass the time, had provided the structure of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and some of the stories told by Chaucer’s pilgrims derive from the Decameron. The English poet was also inspired by Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato to write his Troilus and Criseyde. But Boccaccio’s influence upon 16th-century English literature was not dependent upon Chaucer. His De casibus virorum et feminarum illustrium (Concerning the Falls of Illustrious Men and Women, 1355–60) was translated into English by John Lydgate as The Fall of Princes (1431–8), which in turn inspired A Mirror for Magistrates, an important source of Elizabethan history plays. But it was the Decameron, translated in part into English by William Painter in 1566, for which Boccaccio was best known. In Montaigne’s essay ‘On Books’, he complains about the tendency of comic dramatists to ‘crowd into a single play five or six tales by Boccaccio’. Many English dramatists also turned to this repository of stories. It was from the Decameron, probably in Painter’s translation, that Shakespeare took the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well and the wager plot of Cymbeline.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Bodleian Library, of the University of Oxford, formally opened in 1602. Its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley, excluded plays as ‘idle bookes, & riffe raffes’ but it has since become the second most important Shakespeare collection in the UK. In 1821 it acquired the library of Edmond Malone including a unique copy of Venus and Adonis (1593).
Susan Brock
Bodmer Library, established in 1951 by the private collector Martin Bodmer (1899–1971) in Cologny, near Geneva in Switzerland. It is the most important collection of early Shakespeare editions in Europe. It includes the only uncut copy of any of Shakespeare’s plays printed in his lifetime and a First Folio claimed to be the finest in existence.
Susan Brock
Bogdanov, Michael (b. 1938), British director. At Stratford-upon-Avon his productions included a radical Taming of the Shrew (1979) and a dashingly up-to-date Romeo and Juliet (1986). An internationalist and a populist, he has frequently worked abroad and has sought ways of appealing to new audiences. From 1986 he was director of the *English Shakespeare Company, with whom he devised a popular staging of history plays; it grew between 1986 and 1989 into a seven-play cycle The Wars of the Roses which toured Britain and worldwide, was televised, and won awards. The company had a permanent base in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Bogdanov’s archives are in the collections of The *Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Michael Jamieson, rev. Stanley Wells
Bohemia and the former Czechoslovakia. In Shakespeare’s time, the kingdom of Bohemia (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia) was a part of the Holy Roman Empire ruled by the Austrian line of the Habsburgs. Their seat was Prague, the capital of Bohemia, from 1583 until 1612 when Emperor Rudolf II was succeeded by Matthias who moved the court back to Vienna. The Catholic and German-speaking Habsburgs were growing increasingly unpopular with the mostly Slavonic (Czech-speaking) and Protestant Czechs and Moravians who refused the Habsburg succession and invited the Protestant leader Frederick of Palatine as their king, thus starting the Thirty Years War (1618–48).
Frederick was married to *Elizabeth, daughter of James I; during their betrothal and marriage celebrations in London in 1613, a number of plays had been performed, almost half of them by Shakespeare. (These included The Winter’s Tale, but that play’s maritime Bohemia derives from its literary source, Robert *Greene’s Pandosto, rather than from the country’s real history or geography.) They also invited English strolling actors to Prague to celebrate their coronation in 1619. After the defeat of the Protestant army near Prague in 1620, the couple had to take flight, and Bohemia was exposed to long-lasting Catholicization and Germanization.
Only towards the end of the 18th century were the first translations of Shakespeare from German into Czech made and produced in Prague, among the predominant German productions. The Czech musician Jiří Benda, who was with many of his compatriots in the service of German aristocratic patrons, composed Romeo and Juliet (1776), one of the earliest examples of a new musical genre called Singspiel, a type of light opera with spoken dialogues. Benda used a German libretto which provided Shakespeare’s tragedy with a happy reunion of the young lovers.
During the national revival of the 19th century, all of Shakespeare’s plays were translated into Czech from English editions and most of them produced in Prague. The composer Bedřich *Smetana was a lifelong admirer of Shakespeare (though his operatic version of Twelfth Night remained unfinished). His colleague Antonín Dvořák composed a highly dramatic concert overture Othello (1892). In the last three decades of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century Josef Václav Sládek was the leading Shakespeare translator.
The tercentenary celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth in 1864 and commemoration of his death in 1916 gave the Czechs the opportunity to demonstrate their striving for cultural and political independence which was reached after the end of the First World War in 1918 by the declaration of the Czechoslovak Republic. Accordingly, Shakespearian criticism and translation thrived in the pre-war republic, but this tradition was tragically severed by the Second World War, during which some of the country’s best Shakespeare actors died in Nazi concentration camps, and the director E. F. Burian, similarly incarcerated, was lucky to survive. An encouraging event of this cruel period was the publication of the extensive, two-volume critical study of Shakespeare by František Chudoba.
The revival of Czech Shakespeare after the war was appropriately signalled by Burian’s Romeo and Juliet (Prague, 1945), in which the love scenes appeared to be the dream of a dishevelled prisoner in a camp, and by a Macbeth (1949) in which the protagonist wore a costume deliberately suggestive of an SS uniform. The first stirrings of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 were visible in Otomar Krejča’s youth-led Romeo and Juliet (1963–4), designed by Josef Svoboda: both Krejča and Svoboda, symptomatically, were driven increasingly to work abroad after 1968. Important, sometimes subversive, productions of Shakespeare continued, however, notably a 1981 version of the ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet produced at the Balustrade theatre (home territory of dramatist and future president Vaclav Havel), which provided the corpses of Act 5 with a chilling, military mass grave.
It is perhaps appropriate that the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1989 coincided with a growing interest in Shakespeare’s comedies, and that the first major Czech production since should have been Jan Kačer’s The Winter’s Tale (1992). The efforts of numerous translators after the Second World War (Erik A. Saudek, Zdeněk Urbánek, Milan Lukeš, Břetislav Hodek, Jiří Josek) culminated in Martin Hilský’s translation of the complete works (2011). A major reaffirmation of the Czech Republic’s commitment to and engagement with Shakespeare was provided by the 2011 World Shakespeare Congress, held in Prague.
Zdeněk Stříbrný
Bohun, Edmund. Shakespeare follows *Holinshed in calling Buckingham ‘Edmund Bohun’, All Is True (Henry VIII) 2.1.104. Historically his name was Edward Stafford: but both Edmund and Bohun were family names, and use of the name ‘Bohun’, if not ‘Edmund’ may have been deliberate.
Anne Button
Bois, Jaques de. See Jaques.
Boleyn, Anne (alternative form, indicating pronunciation: Anne Bullen). In All Is True (Henry VIII) she dances with Henry VIII, 1.4; pities Katherine and is made Marchioness of Pembroke, 2.3; and appears in her coronation procession, 4.1. The historical Anne (c. 1507–36) was beheaded for alleged adultery less than three years after the christening of her daughter Elizabeth with which Shakespeare’s play closes: audiences’ knowledge of this fact has often been exploited by producers of the play, who have sometimes supplied business in which Henry ominously caresses her neck.
Anne Button
Bolingbroke, Harry. See Richard II; Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.
Bolingbroke, Roger. A conjurer (i.e. exorcist or sorcerer) in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), he raises the spirit Asnath for the Duchess of Gloucester with the help of the witch Margery Jordan, 1.4.
Anne Button
Bolton, Edmund (c. 1575–c. 1633), historian and poet. Often in trouble for Catholic practices, Bolton around 1616, in a draft paragraph for his Hypercritica on historical writing, referred to Shakespeare as a model of ‘the most warrantable English’. Not published until 1722, Bolton’s text in print omits Shakespeare’s name.
Park Honan
Bona, Lady. Edward IV proposes to her (by proxy) but she immediately hears he has already married Lady Gray, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 3.3.
Anne Button
Bond, Edward (b. 1934), dramatist. One of the most important British playwrights of the post-war period (and a key theorist of post-Brechtian political theatre), Edward Bond has made repeated and extensive use of Shakespeare in his dramaturgy, discursive writings, and practical work with actors. His major works include Lear (1971), an epic reworking of King Lear, and the speculative biographical drama Bingo (1973); The Sea (1973) contains echoes of The Tempest.
Robert Shaughnessy
Bonian, Richard. See printing and publishing.
Bonnefoy, Yves (b. 1923), famous French poet and translator of Shakespeare. His plays are introduced by outstanding essays, and his sonnets are full of poetic licence.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
‘book’, the prompt copy of a play used by the book-holder in Shakespeare’s theatre. The term survives on the vellum wrappers of the *manuscript plays ‘The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore’ and ‘The Book of Iohn A kent & Iohn a Cumber’, and in some entries in the *Stationers’ Register: ‘A booke called the booke of the m’chant of Venyce.’
Eric Rasmussen
bookkeeper. An official play-text manuscript (or ‘book’) contained the essential licence from the Master of the Revels, the obtaining of which was the first task of the bookkeeper after receiving the work from the dramatist. Additionally, the bookkeeper (sometimes called a prompter or book-holder) oversaw the preparation of the individual parts (the lines of each character, written out on separate rolls), supervised the casting of roles (possibly employing a ‘plat’ or ‘plot’), annotated the ‘book’ with the necessary additional directions and reminders, and remained backstage during performance to ensure that actors and properties were ready on time. Prompting, in the modern sense of jogging an actor’s memory by speaking the next line, was not undertaken.
Gabriel Egan
‘Book of Sir Thomas More, The’. See Sir Thomas More.
Booth, Barton (?1679–1733), actor. A schoolfriend of Nicholas *Rowe, he began his acting career as *Betterton’s protégé playing middle-sized Shakespearian roles at Queen’s theatre and Drury Lane. His reputation as an intelligent tragedian, effective in conveying the passions, developed as his roles expanded at the reopening of Drury Lane in 1709–10 (he played Brutus, Othello, Horatio, for example) and when he became a partner in its management in 1713.
Catherine Alexander
Booth, Edwin (1833–93), American actor who established an international reputation based largely on his Shakespearian performances. He undertook many Shakespearian roles (including Cassio, Laertes, Edgar, and Iago) across America before making his mark as Richard III in Boston and New York in 1857. In 1861 he made his first bid for the endorsement of London critics (cool) and audiences (somewhat warmer) as Shylock. During the 1860s and 1870s Booth added to his laurels in America, achieving his hundredth night as Hamlet—painstakingly prepared spontaneity—in 1865 under his own management, which was characterized by the high production values of its Shakespearian revivals (including Julius Caesar and Othello). Abandoning management after the loss (1873) of the New York theatre which bore his name, Booth concentrated on acting, returning to London in 1881–2 where he alternated Othello and Iago with *Irving. In 1883 he visited Berlin and Vienna where he was fêted in an entirely Shakespearian repertoire (Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear) playing with a German-speaking company. Back in America, he continued to perform his Shakespeare roles, making his last appearance—a mature and old-fashioned Hamlet—on 4 April 1891. In William Winter, Booth had an assiduous chronicler of his achievements.
Richard Foulkes
Booth, Junius Brutus (1796–1852), English-born actor who achieved considerable success (Richard III, 1817) in London, but was routed when he played Iago to Edmund *Kean’s Othello (1818), subsequently pursuing his career in America. Resembling, if not imitating, Kean, Booth’s passionately demonic Richard III thrilled audiences across America, but it was as Richmond in 1855 that his son John Wilkes Booth (1839–65) began the career that was to end in his assassination of President Lincoln (14 April 1865). Of Junius Brutus Booth’s ten children by his second wife, Junius Brutus Booth, jr. (1821–83), though he had his admirers as King John and Cassius, enjoyed limited success as an actor and it fell to his brother Edwin *Booth to scale the Shakespearian heights.
Richard Foulkes
Borachio, sponsored by Don John, schemes to make Hero appear unfaithful to Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing.
Anne Button
Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), Argentine novelist and critic. His wide-ranging admiration for English literature includes a typically compressed part-biographical, part-dreamlike, part-analytical account of Shakespeare’s imagination ‘Everything and Nothing’ in Dreamtigers (1964, translated from El hacedor, 1960). In the magical fantasy ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ (1985) the narrator describes as his ‘destiny’ the inheritance and obligation to pass on Shakespeare’s actual memory.
Tom Matheson
Boswell, James, Jr. (1778–1822), third son of James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer. He collaborated with Edmond *Malone and completed his unfinished edition of Shakespeare, the so-called Third Variorum or ‘Boswell’s Malone’ of 1821 (21 vols.), significant for its size and its exhaustive and systematic coverage of all current Shakespearian facts and problems.
Tom Matheson
Bosworth Field in Leicestershire is the scene of much of Act 5 of Richard III. Richard III was killed there and the Earl of Richmond crowned Henry VII in the final battle of the Wars of the Roses (22 August 1485).
Anne Button
Bottom, Nick, the Weaver. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he takes his name from the term for an empty reel or spool used in weaving, though it obviously has additional comic implications. He is given the part of Pyramus in Quince’s play, though he vaingloriously longs to play all the parts, and it is his idiocy during their rehearsal in 3.1 that inspires *Robin Goodfellow to give him an ‘ass-head’. Separated from his fellow actors he encounters *Titania, who conceives a passion for him. Having been released from his enchantment and believing his adventures with the fairies are a dream (4.1), he is reunited with his companions (4.2) and in the last act they perform their play at Theseus’ court.
Until the 19th century A Midsummer Night’s Dream tended to appear as adaptations of the Bottom episodes rather than full-scale productions (the earliest known example The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver was printed 1661). Samuel *Phelps first established the role for a star actor-manager in 1853, and it remained in his repertory for 20 years. Ralph *Richardson, in 1929, was one of the first actors to rid himself of the cumbersome fully built-up head of previous ass-Bottoms, leaving him free to develop a more subtle and expressive acting style. Perhaps one of the most unusual ‘translations’ of Bottom into an ass was that of Timothy Spall in *Lepage’s 1992 production: the French contortionist Angel Laurier, playing Puck, entwined herself around him in such a way as to make her feet ass’s ears.
Anne Button
Bottom the Weaver, The Merry Conceited Humours of. Robert *Cox’s highly actable *droll, probably prepared in the 1640s, abbreviates A Midsummer Night’s Dream solely to the scenes in which *Bottom appears. Its cast list provides the earliest recommendation for the doubling of the other artisans with Titania’s fairies and that of Oberon with Theseus and Titania with Hippolyta.
Michael Dobson
Bouchier (Bourchier), Thomas. See Cardinal.
Boult, a pander’s servant, eventually agrees to help Marina escape prostitution, Pericles 19.
Anne Button
Bouncing Knight, The. This short ‘Falstaff sketch’, a compilation of the highway robbery scenes from 1 Henry IV, was published with several other such *‘drolls’ in Francis Kirkman’s The Wits; or, Sport upon Sport in 1672–3: it was probably compiled by the actor Robert Cox for clandestine performance during the Puritan Interregnum.
Michael Dobson
Bourbon, Duke of. He is a bellicose French nobleman, mentioned as having been taken prisoner, Henry V 4.8.77.
Anne Button
Bourbon, Lord. The French High Admiral appears in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 3.3 (mute).
Anne Button
Bowdler, Thomas and Henrietta. See Family Shakespeare.
Bowers, Fredson Thayer (1905–91), American academic bibliographer, significant for his radical theoretical and practical contributions to the detailed study of Elizabethan printing processes, in editions (of Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher) favouring the preservation of original spellings and variants. Author of On Editing Shakespeare and Other Elizabethan Dramatists (1955) and Textual Study and Literary Criticism (1959).
Tom Matheson
Bowman, John (?1651–1739), actor and singer, whose long career began as a court musician performing material written for him by Purcell. In the public theatre he graduated via fops and dandies to Shakespearian character parts at Drury Lane and Queen’s. William Oldys cited him as a source of information on Shakespeare.
Catherine Alexander
boy actors. The early acting industry had no guild structure to regulate apprenticeship, but nonetheless boys were taken into theatrical companies and trained. Without guild regulation the system was ad hoc and if formal arrangements were made the boy was usually officially apprenticed to his master’s secondary trade. Prepubescent boys had the stature and unbroken voices for female impersonation and Samuel Pepys called Edward Kynaston ‘the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life—only her voice not very good’. Where a boy actor’s name appears in a stage direction it is often by reference to the master’s name (‘Enter John: Skanks Boy’). The relationships could be warm on both sides: Augustine Phillips’s will left gifts to his apprentices and the wills of Alexander Cooke and Nicholas Tooley refer affectionately to their masters John Heminges and Richard Burbage respectively. Heminges left 20s. to his former apprentice John Rice (who had since quit the stage) and made him an overseer with Burbage for his estate, and apprentice John Pyk (or Pig) wrote a charmingly affectionate letter to the wife of his master Edward Alleyn.
An average company probably contained between two and five boy actors, aged between about 14 and 18 years. The relative scarcity of actors capable of taking female roles is the main reason that male roles dominate the drama. Frequently young female characters dress as young men in order to enter into the service of older men and the obvious homoerotic frisson which is generated indicates that the underlying maleness and youth of the female impersonator is important. Literary and historical scholarship is beginning to make sense of this phenomenon in relation to Elizabethan notions of sexuality and service.
Gabriel Egan
Boyce, William (1711–79), English composer. Active at Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres (often rivalling Thomas Arne), Boyce composed dirges for Cymbeline (1746) and Romeo and Juliet (1750), set the masque in The Tempest (1757), wrote music for animating the statue and one song in The Winter’s Tale (1756), and composed an Ode to Shakespeare (1759).
Irena Cholij
Boyd, Sir Michael (b.1955), British director. Boyd trained in Moscow, and directed in Glasgow, Sheffield, Coventry, and elsewhere before joining the *Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1990s, where his imaginative, haunted productions have included a controversially sexy Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), and the entire first *tetralogy of histories (2001). During his tenure as the RSC’s artistic director from 2002 to 2012, he continued to mount large-scale projects, directing the second tetralogy of histories alongside a revival of the first as part of a Complete Works Festival in 2006–7, and overseeing the remodelling of the *Royal Shakespeare Theatre (2011) in time for the World Shakespeare Festival that accompanied the 2012 Olympics. He stood down from the artistic directorship in late summer 2012 and was succeeded by Greg *Doran.
Michael Dobson, rev. Will Sharpe
Boydell, John (1719–1804), English print-seller and engraver. From mean beginnings as an engraver’s apprentice, Boydell established a profitable practice as a seller and exporter of prints after English artists, which he commissioned himself. Commercial success bestowed public importance on Boydell, who was made alderman of Cheapward, sheriff, and lord mayor of London in 1782, 1785, and 1791 respectively. In 1786, Boydell’s house and shop at Cheapside was first employed to exhibit original paintings and by 1789 the *Shakespeare Gallery was officially launched. While Boydell often stated his desire to promote artistic production, the nature of the alderman’s aspirations for British painting is difficult to ascertain. The liaison between art and commerce on which his business rested often limited Boydell’s patronage of promising history painters. Boydell turned down several paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby and George Romney, believing their treatment of the Shakespearian themes to lack popular appeal. During the 1790s Boydell and his gallery were lampooned in the popular press and upon Boydell’s death all 22,000 lottery tickets issued to finance the gallery were sold, and it was auctioned the following year.
Epic ambitions: Michael Boyd’s superb history cycle, of which the Henry VI plays were the highlight, is widely considered the high water mark of his work for the RSC. Here Henry VI (Chuk Iwuji) contemplates the nation’s fate, flanked by York (Clive Wood), with Patrice Naiambana’s Warwick looking on.
Catherine Tite
Boyet, a lord attending the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Anne Button
boys. (1) 1 Henry VI, see Master Gunner of Orléans (2) A boy is sent on an errand by Benedick, Much Ado About Nothing 2.3. (3) In Henry V, formerly Falstaff’s page, now working for Bardolph, Pistol, and Nim, he appears briefly in Acts 2, 3, and 4. Left to guard baggage he is slain by the French, 4.7. (4) A boy sings at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, The Two Noble Kinsmen 1.1. See also Robin.
Anne Button
Boys, Jaques de. See Jaques.
Boys from Syracuse, The, exuberant Broadway play (1938) and Hollywood film (1940), adapted ‘after a play by Shakespeare’ (The Comedy of Errors) by George Abbott, with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, the most enduring of which have been ‘This can’t be love’ and ‘Falling in love with love’.
Tom Matheson
Brabanzio (Brabantio) accuses Othello of having bewitched his daughter Desdemona before the Duke of Venice, Othello 1.3.
Anne Button
Bracciano, Orsini, Duke of (b. 1572), Elizabeth I’s guest of honour at Twelfth Night celebrations in 1601, where (as he wrote to his wife) he enjoyed ‘a mingled comedy, with pieces of music and dances’. Leslie Hotson conjectures the play was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. See Orsino.
Cathy Shrank
Bracegirdle, Anne (c. 1663–1748), actress whose earliest roles included Desdemona and Lady Anne. One of the highest earning and most charismatic actresses of the age, she managed Lincoln’s Inn Fields with Betterton and Elizabeth Barry from 1695 and played Cordelia in Tate’s Lear, Ophelia, and Portia (Julius Caesar) before her retirement in 1707.
Catherine Alexander
Brackenbury, Sir Robert. Lieutenant of the Tower of London, he leaves Clarence to his murderers, 1.4.88–94, and refuses to let Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, Lady Anne, and their companions see the Princes in the Tower, Richard III 4.1.
Anne Button
Bradbrook, Muriel Clara (1909–93), English critic, notable for wide-ranging, poetically sensitive, and theatrically informed accounts of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (1951), and The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (1955). Shakespeare the Craftsman (1969), and Shakespeare the Poet in his World (1978) emphasize her awareness of both history and dramatic form.
Tom Matheson
Bradley, A(ndrew) C(ecil) (1851–1935), English critic, best known for Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and his Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909). The first is probably the most influential book of Shakespeare criticism ever published, with its detailed discussion of four plays: Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth. More general, preliminary lectures consider ‘The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy’ and ‘Construction in Shakespeare’s Tragedies’. The great merit of Bradley’s work is his scrupulous attention to the speech and action of the plays and the reflective clarity of his commentary upon them. Bradley has subsequently been accused of paying too little attention to the plays in performance, in effect of treating them as discursive, almost novelistic, works of literature. Others have felt that he invests the characters with a life off as well as on stage. To many modern critics, this is a philosophical or theoretical weakness, an inability to consider the plays as ultimately linguistic constructs. But Bradley’s directness, common sense, sometimes monosyllabic simplicity of style, and determination to take the plays seriously are precisely what continues to recommend him to subsequent generations, fully justifying his dedication of Shakespearean Tragedy to ‘my students’.
Tom Matheson
Bradley, David (b. 1942), English stage and film actor. Although a household name through his association with the role of Argus Filch in the Harry Potter film franchise, Bradley has been a doyen of the Shakespearian stage, and the RSC’s in particular, over several decades. His extraordinary range has seen him elude typecasting and excel in broad comedy and intense tragedy alike, taking on such roles as Dr Caius, Cymbeline, Cassius, Titus Andronicus, Justice Shallow, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, and a strong sideline in Jonsonian comic leads, playing Morose in Danny Boyle’s 1989 production of Epicoene or The Silent Woman, and Subtle in Sam *Mendes’ The Alchemist two years later. Perhaps the play with which he is most associated is King Lear. Having played Albany in the early 1980s, he won an Olivier Award in 1991 for his portrayal of the Fool at the National, and distinguished himself as a Gloucester of haunting pathos alongside the late Sir Robert Stephens, in his final stage role as Lear in 1993. It is always a sensitive issue discussing when one is ‘ready’ to play Lear, though it is much lamented among fans of Bradley’s undoubted power and presence on stage that he has still yet to do so.
Will Sharpe
Bradock, Richard. See printing and publishing.
Branagh, Sir Kenneth (b. 1960), British actor and director. Born in Belfast and trained in London, he modelled his stage and screen career on that of Laurence *Olivier. After West End success, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for the 1984–5 season; he played Laertes in Hamlet, the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and an admired Henry V. Impatient with directorial dominance at the RSC, he founded his own company, Renaissance, and persuaded actors like Judi *Dench and Derek *Jacobi to direct. He played Hamlet, Benedick, Touchstone, and Coriolanus as well as directing Twelfth Night (later televised). He was happy to return to the RSC in 1992 under Adrian Noble’s direction to play Hamlet in a very full text.
Challenged by the Olivier legend, he in 1989 adapted, directed, and starred in his own very different film of Henry V. His popular Much Ado About Nothing, filmed in Tuscany, followed in 1993. He once more challenged comparison with Olivier in his Hamlet (1997) set in a 19th-century court. He was Iago in Oliver Parker’s film Othello. He played Berowne in his film musical Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), but stayed behind the camera for As You Like It (2006). He has made only two—much-lauded—returns to the Shakespearian stage over the last 15 years, as the title roles in Richard III, at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre (2002), and Macbeth, performed in a reclaimed church space as part of the Manchester International Festival (2013), with an accompanying NT Live broadcast. In 2012, dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he spoke Caliban’s ‘isle is full of noises’ speech to inaugurate the eclectic and rather marvellously eccentric ‘Isles of Wonder’ Olympic Opening Ceremony, designed by Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce.
Michael Jamieson, rev. Will Sharpe
Brandes, Georg (1842–1927), Danish writer and critic. Seen as responsible for the ‘Modern Breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature, he also influenced contemporary perception of the works of Shakespeare as fundamentally autobiographical. His massive study William Shakespeare (1895–6; English translation 1898) was widely read.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
Brandon. He arrests Buckingham and Abergavenny, All Is True (Henry VIII) 1.1.
Anne Button
Brandon, Charles. See Suffolk, Duke of.
Brandon, Sir William. One of Richmond’s supporters (mute part, see Richard III 5.4.4).
Anne Button
Braunschweig, Stéphane (b. 1964), French philosopher and Germanist trained with *Vitez and influenced by *Brecht. He challenges traditional scenography: a slanted, white rectangle for The Winter’s Tale (1994), mobile wooden panelling for The Merchant of Venice (1999) (both in Déprats’s translation), a gigantic circular wooden structure in Measure for Measure (with English actors, 1997 Edinburgh Festival and Nanterre).
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
brawl (branle), a dance of French origin (see Love’s Labour’s Lost 3.1.7–8), in which several couples hold hands in a line or circle (see roundel) and characteristically dance a sequence of steps sideways to left and right, but with more travel to the left. Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchesography (1589) gives regional versions, and also branles with miming and irregular rhythms.
Jeremy Barlow
Brayne, John (d. before 10 August 1586), co-builder with his brother-in-law James Burbage of the Red Lion (1567) and the Theatre (1576).
Gabriel Egan
Brazil. In the theatre, Shakespearian plays were first produced in Brazil early in the 19th century (just before independence, 1822), after King John VI had the São João Royal Theatre built in Rio de Janeiro in the 1810s. They were performed, however, in versions derived from French adaptations, translated by Portuguese artists such as Ludovina Soares da Costa, who worked with Brazilian actor João Caetano dos Santos, interpreter of Macbeth (1843), Hamlet (1843–4), and Othello (1837–60). This French influence is unsurprising: French theatrical aesthetics also shaped Brazilian comedy and the vaudeville in the 1800s, particularly in the splendid theatres that were built in the capitals of several states, such as Belém, Manaus, Recife and São Luís, from the 1840s through the 1910s. The translations of Shakespeare available in Brazil during the 19th century were generally written in *Portugal from French sources, as is the case with Othelo (Lisbon, 1882) and Hamlet (Lisbon, 1887) by José Antônio de Freitas. *Victor Hugo’s biography William Shakespeare: Life and Works (1864), which was translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Alvaro Gonçalves, added to this French bias in reception.
Translators in the 20th century, however, started using modern editions in English, among them Tristão da Cunha (Hamlet, 1933, from a Macmillan 1904 version ed. William Aldis Wright). Transmission increased in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo with the work of Berenice Xavier (The Taming of the Shrew, 1936, and The Merchant of Venice, 1937), Artur de Sales (Macbeth, 1948), and J. Costa Neves (King Lear, 1948). Oliveira Ribeiro Neto’s Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth (1948), in one volume, was reprinted several times (1951, 1954, 1960). Equally important were Onestaldo de Pennafort (Romeo and Juliet, 1940, and Othelo, 1956), Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos (Hamlet, 1955, and 33 Sonnets, 1953, both in bilingual editions), Newton Belleza (The Taming of the Shrew, 1960), Carlos Lacerda (Julius Caesar, c.1966), and Manuel Bandeira (Macbeth, 1961). As these versions went out of print, Carlos Alberto Nunes’s translations of the entire canon, in print since the 1950s, became the most popular means of reception. Barbara Heliodora (1923-2015) translated all of the plays and published with Nova Fronteira, Lacerda, and Nova Aguilar Presses along her prestigious career since the 1960s.
Embellished and/or lofty styles were found in the majority of 1960s versions, but a new generation of translators such as Sérgio Flaksman, Jorge Wanderley, Beatriz Viegas-Faría, and José Roberto O’Shea emerged and expanded the scope of transmission in different ways after the late 1980s and 1990s. This field was ultimately sorted out in a database with 178 items (as of 2014), after the extensive comparative research conducted by Marcia do Amaral Peixoto Martins, who has offered precious information on translation choices and sources (available at http://www.dbd.puc-rio.br/shakespeare/database/). The metre, rhyme, and stress patterns have indeed challenged the various translators who have recreated the verse, and so have the extensive variations found in *quarto and *folio texts. Margarida G. Rauen launched a book (1998) about the subject of textual and theatrical transformation, and José Roberto O’Shea published the first translation of a quarto Hamlet into Portuguese (Shakespeare, 2010), but the variation in multiple-text plays remains an obscure topic.
Brazilian stage Shakespeare comes of age after the Second World War, in the work of Pascoal Carlos Magno, who offered naturalistic stagings of Hamlet (1948), Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1949). Actor and adaptor Sérgio Cardoso’s work in the 1960s, and Paulo Autran’s succession of Shakespearian productions since the 1950s, including Lear (1996), are also remarkable. Approaches to Shakespeare during the 20th century imply a reactionary, rather than a radical point of view, but the ‘Teatro Experimental do Negro’ (Experimental Black Theatre of Rio de Janeiro) was an important exception in its 1946 Othello, featuring acclaimed actress Cacilda Becker as Desdemona. As state-sanctioned high culture, Shakespeare even served official purposes after the 1964 military coup, which in part displayed its own consolidation through officially sponsored celebrations of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday, among them several hundred events, press publications, and stagings throughout the country.
Augusto Boal (exiled in 1971, returned 1986) criticized Shakespeare’s official welcome in Brazil as a form of self-imposed cultural colonialism; his parody of The Tempest (1979) mocks European aesthetics and exposes various aspects and contradictions of popular culture. While productions have been numerous, especially in venues that are associated with the large Curitiba and Porto Alegre Theatre festivals since the 1990s, playwrights, directors, and actors have often adapted or updated plays, stressing their timelessness and universality (e.g. Celso Nunes, Amir Haddad, Cacá Rosset, Ariano Suassuna, Marcelo Marchioro, Raul Cortez, Clowns de Shakespeare, Tiago Lacerda). Gabriel Vilella’s transposition of Romeo and Juliet (1992) to Brazilian culture gained worldwide fame, even having been featured at Shakespeare’s Globe (London, 2012). The star-crossed lovers also became popular on television in Afonso Grisolli’s mini-series (1980) and a Globo TV soap opera (1992). The 2005 comic movie O Casamento de Romeu e Julieta (Romeo and Juliet’s Wedding) by director Bruno Barreto transposed the Montagues and Capulets to feuding soccer teams. Antunes Filho and Ulysses Cruz directed radical updatings in the 1990s, and there was the notable emergence of the female director Patricia Fagundes and her Companhia Rústica with a Macbeth (2004) and a Midsummer’s Night Dream that was set in a carnivalesque cabaret, winning her four prestigious prizes during its 2006 season in Porto Alegre.
Liana de Camargo Leão’s ongoing website project ‘Shakespeare Brasil’ currently offers representative videos of production trends (available at http://www.shakespearedigitalbrasil.com.br/category/montagens/). Counter-discursive dramaturgy and stagings that might unsettle easy universalizing have not been consistently attempted, although some have been discussed in the anthology by Bernice Kliman and Rick Santos (2005).
Brazilian Shakespeare criticism per se was very scant and limited to master’s and doctorate programmes in English and comparative literature until the 1990s. Theatre reception, on the other hand, was both rare and affected by censorship. Since the founding of the Brazilian Centre of Shakespearian Studies (CESh) in 1991, scholars such as Aimara da Cunha Resende (2002), Marlene Soares dos Santos and Liana de Camargo Leão (2008), and Anna Stegh Camati (2013) have also published books and articles that allow for a comprehensive perspective of Shakespeare’s reception and transmission in Brazil.
Margarida Gandara Rauen
Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956), German dramatist, poet, theorist, director, and founder of the Berliner Ensemble. Brecht drew on Elizabethan drama in the 1930s in creating the style he called epic theatre, and adapted (‘appropriated’, he said) the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries for political purpose, showing the need for progressive social change. His version of Coriolanus (first performed in 1964) resolves Shakespeare’s ambiguity over the protagonist by concluding that the world can no longer afford heroes. The Berliner Ensemble’s performances of Brecht’s plays in London in 1956 greatly affected Peter *Hall, who drew on the company’s organization and social commitment when he formed the RSC a few years later. The non-illusionist ‘Brechtian’ style heavily influenced Shakespeare acting and production in the 1960s around the globe.
Dennis Kennedy
Bretchgirdle, John (d. 1565). Appointed vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1561, he probably baptized Shakespeare. He had taken his BA at Oxford in 1545 and was buried in Stratford church, leaving as bequests many learned books, Greek as well as Latin. His copy of the Latin–English dictionary Bibliotheca Eliotae went ‘to the common use’ of the scholars of Stratford school.
Stanley Wells
Bridges-Adams, William (1889–1965), British director. Having played Leontes and Prospero as an undergraduate at Oxford, he was influenced by William *Poel and *Granville-Barker. In 1919 he became director of the summer Shakespeare festivals at Stratford. In 1926 the old Memorial Theatre burned down so that in addition to staging seasons at the local cinema he was involved in planning the new theatre which opened in 1932. He directed 29 of the 36 plays in the canon, often designing them, and in his early days had to rehearse six plays in five weeks. Himself self-effacing, he occasionally invited more flamboyant people as guest directors. His resignation in 1934 reflected his frustration with the theatre’s governors. He later worked for the British Council and wrote The Irresistible Theatre (1957).
Michael Jamieson
British Council, inaugurated in 1935 to promote British culture and language internationally. It sponsored the Marlowe Society recordings of Shakespeare plays under the direction of George *Rylands, as well as the biennial International Shakespeare Conference and *Shakespeare Survey from 1948.
Susan Brock
British Empire Shakespeare Society, founded in 1901 by Greta Morritt to promote Shakespeare’s works throughout the Empire by co-ordinating reading circles, dramatic readings, and costume recitals. It published an official gazette 1915–39.
Susan Brock
British Library, created in 1973 from the Departments of Manuscripts and Printed Books of the British Museum established in 1753. In April 2014 its catalogue listed 18,740 books by or about Shakespeare, the most important collection of Shakespeariana in the UK, including many early editions, the manuscript of The Book of Sir Thomas More, and the mortgage of the *Blackfriars Gatehouse, one of only six documents bearing Shakespeare’s *signature.
Susan Brock
British Shakespeare Association. The founding of a British national Shakespeare association, remarkably, had to wait until the 21st century. The BSA holds a biennial conference and has published the journal Shakespeare since 2005.
Michael Dobson
Britten, Benjamin (Lord) (1913–76), English composer. Britten wrote incidental music for Timon of Athens (Westminster Theatre, London, 1935), while his chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946) derives partly from Shakespeare’s poem. His best-known Shakespearian work is his musically diverse opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), for which he and Peter Pears reduced Shakespeare’s text by about half.
Irena Cholij
broadside ballad, a *ballad printed on a single sheet, then sung and sold by a ballad-seller, or pedlar (such as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale). Topics included murders, executions, and strange happenings, as well as moral admonishment and love stories (e.g. *‘Greensleeves’); ballads from oral tradition were also printed. The name of the tune for each ballad is usually included, but the music is not printed; tunes may sometimes be found in instrumental arrangements from the 16th and 17th centuries. For detailed information on matching tunes to texts see Simpson (1966).
Jeremy Barlow
brokenbacked line, a line of iambic verse that is missing an unstressed syllable before a midline phrasal break. This formation can sometimes seem to imply a peremptory tone or a degree of hurry from one kind of syntax to another: ’Enough to fetch him in. | See | it done (Antony and Cleopatra 4.1.14).
George T. Wright
broken music (broken consort). Two meanings were possible: disordered music, or music with *divisions. Shakespeare plays with the expression in Henry V 5.2.241 and Troilus and Cressida 3.1.49. The later term ‘broken consort’ (not found until well after Shakespeare’s death) indicates an ensemble of mixed instruments; a standard mixed grouping in Shakespeare’s time, unique to England, consisted of violin, *flute, bass *viol, *lute, *cittern, bandora (a wire-strung plucked instrument, larger than the cittern). *Morley set his Consort Lessons (1599, 1611) for this combination. See music.
Jeremy Barlow
Brook, Peter (b. 1925), British director and designer, perhaps the most influential theatrical interpreter of Shakespeare in the second half of the 20th century. Barry *Jackson brought Brook, fresh out of Oxford, to the Birmingham Rep to stage King John in 1945, then took him to Stratford the next year, where he directed a brilliant Love’s Labour’s Lost in a wistful mood inspired by Watteau. Romeo and Juliet followed in 1947, a dark version of Measure for Measure with John *Gielgud in 1950, and The Winter’s Tale, also with Gielgud, in London in 1951. By the age of 25 Brook had established himself as a major director particularly attracted to lesser-known plays, whose approach involved ‘making a new set of images’ to recapture the surprise and danger of Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus at Stratford in 1955 did this forcefully; his production prompted a reversal of opinion about a play frequently called too bad to be Shakespeare’s. Brook distanced spectators from its exaggerated violence through musique concrète and an abstract design—he was responsible for both—while Laurence *Olivier revealed an unsuspected tragic dimension to the title character. To the Warsaw critic Jan *Kott the performance clarified notions about the innate cruelty in the plays which, along with Polish performances, led to Kott’s Shakespeare our Contemporary. Discussions between them influenced in turn one of Brook’s greatest productions, a harsh and unyielding version of King Lear at the newly formed RSC in 1962, with Paul *Scofield in the title role, that brought the play close to the world of Samuel Beckett. (A film version directed by Brook appeared in 1970.) Still intrigued by Kott’s absurdist reading of Shakespeare, Brook was back in Stratford for a remarkable Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970, his most widely seen and admired work, which emphasized the bestiality of Titania’s love for Bottom-as-ass but was filled with athletic acting, trapezes, circus tricks, and a joyous celebration of the idea of performance. Brook’s career away from Shakespeare has been equally arresting. His search for spiritual transcendence and theatrical essence led him to create the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris in 1970, where he gathered a troupe of actors from around the globe to investigate the nature of performance, work that took them to remote villages in Africa and to paring down the means and style of production. His nine-hour version of The Mahabharata (1985), while criticized for its cultural insensitivity to the Indian religious epic, was an international triumph. For the Centre Brook directed three Shakespeare plays in French: Timon of Athens (1974), which drew on the OPEC oil crisis; an austere Measure for Measure (1978), which suggested a society in ruins; and what he said would be his last Shakespeare production, The Tempest (1990). Brook had directed the play three times before in English, but this version used a multiracial cast and borrowed the style and methods of The Mahabharata. He directed Hamlet in 2000, and in 2009 a mini-drama based around the Sonnets entitled Love Is My Sin, which has continued to tour.
Peter Brook’s legendary ‘white box’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (RSC, 1970): Alan Howard as Oberon applies a love potion to Sara Kestelman as the sleeping Titania; John Kane as Puck looks on mischievously.
Dennis Kennedy, rev. Will Sharpe
‘Brooke’. See Ford, Master Frank.
Brooke, Arthur (d. 1563), English poet and translator, drowned young while voyaging to New Haven to serve in the army overseas. His poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, over 3,000 lines long, published in 1562, adapts a French version of Bandello’s narrative. Shakespeare derived elements of The Two Gentlemen of Verona from it, and used it extensively for the plot, local detail, and even imagery of Romeo and Juliet. Compressing the narrative from nine months to four or five days, he also freed it from Brooke’s moralizing and expanded upon half-formed, peripheral characters to create Tybalt and Paris, Mercutio and the Nurse.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Brooke, C. F. Tucker (1883–1946), American academic and editor, author of The Tudor Drama (1911), Shakespeare of Stratford (1926), and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1936). His edition of The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908) consisted of plays attributed to Shakespeare but not printed in the First Folio, including seven plays added to F3 (1664).
Tom Matheson
‘Broome’. See Ford, Master Frank.
Brough brothers. See burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays.
Brutus, Decius. See Decius Brutus.
Brutus, Junius. (1) One of the Romans who vows to avenge Lucrece in The Rape of Lucrece. (2) The tribunes Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus goad Martius in the first three acts of Coriolanus but are dismayed when they hear he fights for the Volsces, 4.6.
Anne Button
Brutus, Marcus Junius. See Julius Caesar.
Bryan, George (d. 1612), actor (Strange’s Men 1593, Chamberlain’s Men 1596). First mentioned among the players at Elsinore in 1586 (the others were Thomas Pope and William Kempe), Bryan’s name occurs in the roles of Warwick in the Induction and Damascus in ‘Envy’ in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins (performed before 1594, possibly by Strange’s Men). Strange’s Men’s licence to tour, issued on 6 May 1593, names Bryan but by 21 December 1596 he was with the Chamberlain’s Men and received, with John Heminges, the payment for court performances. Although identified as an actor in the 1623 Shakespeare Folio, his name is conspicuously absent from the actor lists in the Jonson folio of 1613 for plays performed in the late 1590s and early 1600s and from the company patent of 1603. Possibly he gave up acting: a George Bryan was paid as Groom of the Chamber in 1603 and in 1611–13, but the latter date extends beyond the actor’s death, casting doubt on the assignment.
Gabriel Egan
Buck (Buc), Sir George (d. 1623). He acted as deputy to Edmund Tilney, first regular Master of Revels, from about 1606, succeeding to Tilney’s position in 1610. As Revels Master, Buck licensed plays, playhouses, and companies; censored plays; and enforced regulations against playing during Lent and plague periods. Buck was discharged in 1622 due to mental instability.
Cathy Shrank
Buckingham, Duke of. (1) In The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) he helps disgrace the Duchess of Gloucester, 1.4, and then the Duke of Gloucester, 3.1. He persuades the followers of Cade to disperse, 4.8, and supports Henry VI against York in the Wars of the Roses. He is based on Humphrey Stafford (1402–60), 1st Duke of Buckingham, not to be confused with Sir Humphrey Stafford in the same play. (2) He abets Richard in his ambitions in Richard III, deserts him, 4.2, is led to execution, 5.1, and appears to Richard as one of the ghosts at *Bosworth, 5.5. He is based on Henry Stafford (c. 1451–83), 2nd Duke of Buckingham. (3) He is arrested for treason, All Is True (Henry VIII) 1.1, but proclaims his innocence on his way to execution 2.1. He is based on Edward Stafford (1478–1521), 3rd Duke of Buckingham. See also Bohun, Edmund.
Anne Button
Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of (1592–1628), James I’s favourite from 1614, and a keen theatre-goer. Lois Potter suggests the role of Theseus’ favourite Pirithous in The Two Noble Kinsmen (which originally referred to James’s previous favourite Robert Carr) was cut after 1613 because of Buckingham’s unpopularity. In 1628, shortly before he was assassinated, he saw All Is True (Henry VIII) twice, on each occasion leaving after Buckingham’s final speeches.
Cathy Shrank
Bulgaria. Shakespeare appeared on the Bulgarian cultural scene in the middle of the 19th century as part of the revival which preceded the country’s liberation from Ottoman domination (1878). First mention of his name in the press was in 1858. Typically, his reputation as poet and dramatist travelled before his actual work. The first undocumented amateur performance was Romeo and Juliet in 1868.
Performance history proper began in the 1880s with the establishment of the first professional troupes and, in 1904, of the National Theatre. On its stage, the tragedies, especially Othello and Hamlet, were performed to great acclaim, as were The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice followed by Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and 1 Henry IV during the 1920s and 30s. In 1931, amid rising European totalitarianism, Coriolanus joined the political debate; a radical adaptation of The Merchant of Venice with a tragic Jew was put on in 1938.
During the communist period (1944–89), performance developed in technique, style, and political suggestion. Important achievements were Hamlet (1956), Richard II (1964), Romeo and Juliet (1966), Titus Andronicus (1975), Richard III (1979), and Hamlet (1982), directed by Vili Tsankov (1924–2007). A 1964 Brechtian Hamlet, directed by Leon Daniel (1927–2008), featured a neurotic hero in an oppressive world. In contrast to the mandatory upbeat treatment of the comedies, his Love’s Labour’s Lost (1975) had an emphatically dark ending. Other productions focused on the plight of the outsider, or stigmatized individual, as in Othello (1974) and Romeo and Juliet (1974, 1982), directed by Luben Grois (1934–82).
The post-totalitarian 1990s were defined by textually fragmented, physically expressive adaptations such as Stefan Moskov’s Romeo and Juliet (1990), Alexander Morfov’s The Tempest (1991), Hamlet (1993), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1995), and Lilia Abadjieva’s Romeo and Juliet (2001) and Othello (2005). Javor Gardev’s King Lear (2006) and Hamlet (2012) returned to the textual coherence of the plays and positioned their moral and emotional collisions in modern worlds. Both trends are visible in the new millennium, along with cutting-edge theatrical experimentation and the appearance of local spin-offs, like Wittenberg Revisited (2012) by Georgi Tenev and Ivan Dobchev, which testify to Shakespeare’s permeation in Bulgarian culture.
The earliest translations of Shakespeare in Bulgarian (Julius Caesar and Cymbeline) were published in 1881. In 1884 Macbeth and Hamlet were included in the Reader for schools, thus embedding Shakespeare in the National Curriculum. By 1964, 24 of the plays had had 160 editions, including several with multiple variants: Macbeth (18), Hamlet (14), King Lear (9), Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello (8 each). During the 1970s and 1980s the entire canon was translated by Valery Petrov. Translation has blossomed since the 1990s. Alexander Shurbanov’s Hamlet (2006), Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth (2012) are the latest academically and theatrically solid translations.
The Sonnets were first rendered in 1956 by Vladimir Svintila (1926–98), followed by Valery Petrov (1991), Boris Marholev (2001), and Evgenia Pancheva (2006). During the 1990s Pancheva translated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, thus completing the Bulgarian canon.
Boika Sokolova
bull-baiting. See animal shows.
Bullcalf, Peter. He is recruited to fight by Falstaff, 2 Henry IV 3.2, but buys himself out.
Anne Button
Bullen, Anne. See Boleyn, Anne.
Bullough, Geoffrey (1901–82), English academic, whose collection of the Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 vols., 1957–75) includes complete texts and excerpts from sources, as well as numerous analogues—all given in English—for every play. Bullough’s meticulous scholarship, critical judgement, and expressive clarity make it an indispensable work.
Tom Matheson
Bum, Pompey. See Pompey.
Bunbury, Henry William (1750–1811), English draughtsman. Bunbury executed several works in pencil and crayon during a Grand Tour in the late 1760s. In 1792, Bunbury was commissioned by Thomas Macklin to illustrate a Shakespeare Gallery, in competition to John *Boydell’s. The gallery ran for four years, closing in 1796 in response to shifts in public taste.
Catherine Tite
Burbage, Cuthbert (1565–1636), non-playing company sharer and housekeeper (Theatre, Globe, Blackfriars), son of James Burbage, brother of Richard Burbage. As well as his familial link, Cuthbert’s theatrical connections are shown by his being mentioned in the wills of William Sly, Richard Cowley, Nicholas Tooley (who died in his house), John Heminges, and Henry Condell.
Gabriel Egan
Burbage, James (c. 1531–97), actor (Leicester’s Men 1572–6), builder of the Theatre and the second Blackfriars, possibly part-owner of the Curtain, father to Richard and Cuthbert Burbage. When Burbage married Ellen Brayne on 23 April 1559 he was described as a joiner, or a worker in small wooden structures such as furniture, an occupation distinct from a carpenter who made buildings. In 1567 Ellen’s brother John Brayne paid for construction of a makeshift playhouse on the Red Lion farm in Stepney and in 1576 Burbage and Brayne embarked on the altogether more substantial Theatre project. A letter he wrote to the Earl of Leicester in 1572 makes it clear that Burbage was already one of his players, and Burbage is named in the company’s patent of 1574, but from 1576 running the Theatre occupied all his time. Relations between Burbage and Brayne rapidly deteriorated, apparently because the former cheated his partner, and the ensuing lawsuits outlived Brayne and his widow. A deal with Henry Lanman made the Curtain playhouse ‘an Esore’ to the Theatre, possibly a means of selling the Curtain to Burbage and Brayne. Burbage died shortly after the frustration of his plan to move the Chamberlain’s Men—led by his son Richard—into his new Blackfriars playhouse.
Gabriel Egan
Burbage, Richard (1568–1619), the leading actor of Shakespeare’s company, son of playhouse builder James Burbage, and younger brother to Cuthbert Burbage. Richard and Cuthbert held shares in the playhouses built by their father, but only Richard followed his father in becoming an actor. Richard’s acting career began in the mid-1580s but around 1590 he was still playing minor parts, if the entrance for ‘Burbage a messenger’ in the ‘plot’ of The Dead Man’s Fortune refers to him. The more important roles of Gorboduc and Tereus are assigned to Richard Burbage in the ‘plot’ of 2 Seven Deadly Sins, but this is difficult to date. With the settlement of the Chamberlain’s Men at the Theatre, his father’s playhouse, in 1594 his fame rapidly increased. On 15 March 1595 Shakespeare, William Kempe, and Richard Burbage were paid for Chamberlain’s Men performances given at court the previous December. Ben Jonson recorded Richard Burbage as an actor in his 1616 folio texts of Every Man out of his Humour (1600) and Every Man in his Humour (1601) which were first performed in 1598–9. When his fellow King’s Man Augustine Phillips made a will on 4 May 1605, Richard Burbage was appointed as an executor, and in Shakespeare’s will, written on 25 March 1616, Richard Burbage, John Heminges, and Henry Condell were each left 26s. 8d. to buy a ring.
Allusions to Richard Burbage’s acting talent continued long after his death in 1619. A funeral elegy exists in a number of manuscript versions from shortly after his death, which despite some differences generally agree upon these lines:The roles named here are presumably from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello (‘the grieved Moor’), and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c.1592), in which Hieronimo revenges his son’s murder. The title page of the first edition of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623) gives Richard Burbage the part of Ferdinand, and the third printing of John Marston’s The Malcontent (1604) has a comic induction during which Richard Burbage is identified as the actor playing Malevole. These are the only roles of which we can be certain, but the plenitude of commendations of his talent, and his seniority within the Chamberlain-King’s Men makes it likely that he took leading roles in all of Shakespeare’s plays from the opening of the Globe in 1599 until his retirement in the mid-1610s.
No more young Hamlett, ould Heironymoe.
Kind Leer, the greued Moore, and more beside.
That liued in him, haue now for ever dy’de.
Oft haue I seene him leap into the graue,
Suiting the person which he seem’d to haue
Of a sadd louer with soe true an eye,
Thar theer I would haue sworne, he meant to dye.
Some time before 7 October 1601 Richard Burbage married his wife Winifred, for on that day she consulted the quack doctor and astrologer Simon Forman. In his will of 3 June 1623 Nicholas Tooley referred to Richard Burbage as ‘my late M[aste]r’, which indicates that Tooley was Burbage’s apprentice. As well as being an actor, Richard Burbage was an accomplished painter and for the Earl of Rutland’s participation in the King’s Accession Day tilt in 1613, Burbage painted a commemorative impresa to which Shakespeare added the motto, and for which each of them received 44s.
Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s leading actor: this painting, now at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, is thought to be a self-portrait.
Gabriel Egan
Burby, Cuthbert. See printing and publishing.
Burdett-Coutts portrait, half-length, oil, named after its early 20th-century owner Burdett-Coutts. Also known as the Felton portrait after its 19th-century owner, this representation was discovered in 1792 and was (dubiously) claimed to be an original for *Droeshout’s engraving by M. H. Spielmann in 1906.
Catherine Tite
Burgess, Anthony (John Burgess Wilson) (1917–93), English writer, who fancied descent from the Jack Wilson reported as singing in Much Ado About Nothing. Nothing Like the Sun (1964) fictionally recreates Shakespeare’s sex life, seeming to attribute his genius to the inflammatory inspiration of syphilis. His biography of Shakespeare appeared in 1970. In Enderby’s Dark Lady (1984), the eponymous hero prepares a libretto for a Shakespeare musical. In a climactic scene, the *Droeshout portrait comes to life, a ‘talking woodcut’.
Tom Matheson
Burgh, Hubert de. See Hubert.
Burgundy, Duke of. (1) He abandons his suit to marry *Cordelia after she has lost her dowry in the first scene of King Lear.
(2) He arranges the Treaty of Troyes in Henry V 5.2. In 1 Henry VI he allies with Talbot, 2.1, but is won round by Joan la Pucelle to the French side, 3.7.
Anne Button
burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays. Lines from Shakespeare were parodied in his own time, but the first full-scale travesty is Thomas *Duffett’s The Mock-Tempest; or, The Enchanted Castle, of 1674, in which Prospero’s island becomes a brothel. Vigorous, amusing, and obscene, it burlesques a current production of Thomas Shadwell’s operatic version of the Dryden–Davenant adaptation. Individual passages were frequently parodied during the 18th century, as in Arthur Murphy’s Life of Hamlet with Alterations (1772), based on the ghost scenes, in which Shakespeare appears to complain of Garrick’s alterations, but the heyday of burlesques employing the full framework of a play—and of theatrical burlesque in general—came in the 19th century. Travesties of Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet had appeared in Vienna around the turn of the century, and in 1810 John Poole’s Hamlet Travestie, with ‘Burlesque Annotations, after the manner of Dr Johnson and Geo. Steevens Esq., and the various Commentators’, was published in London. Frequently reprinted and performed, it was used for satire of *Irving as late as 1874. Poole parodies and paraphrases the play in rhymed couplets, including songs set to popular airs. Imitations include Richard Gurney’s Romeo and Juliet Travestie (1812), the anonymous Macbeth, printed in Accepted Addresses, and Othello Travestie (both 1813), and an unpublished Richard III (1815), the first burlesque known to have been written directly for the theatre, which ends with a chorus and dance of ghosts. Other versions of the same play followed, in 1816 and 1823.
Charles Selby’s Othello, the Moor of Fleet Street (1833) inaugurated a new phase of theatrical burlesques, many of them never published. Maurice Dowling’s deplorable Othello Travestie (Liverpool, 1834) was so popular when given at the Strand in London that it helped to establish that theatre as a home of burlesque. The merry finale of his Romeo and Juliet (1837), based on Garrick’s version, imitates that of Rossini’s opera La Cenerentola. Other versions of the tragedies followed; Edward Blanchard’s unpublished Merchant of Venice (1842) is the first to be based on a comedy. Charles Selby’s Kinge Richard ye Third (1845), successful in America as well as England, includes a ‘Gigantic Equestrian Pageant’; at the end Richard comes to life and begs the audience’s favour in a finale set to ‘Yankee Doodle’.
Burlesques during this period included many theatrical and other topical allusions, and around this time the pun, beloved of Victorian humorists, becomes a dominant source of comic effect. In Francis Talfourd’s undergraduate jape Macbeth Travestie (1847) Macbeth and Banquo enter under an umbrella to be greeted by the witches with ‘Hail! Hail! Hail!’ Asking, ‘What mean these salutations, noble thane?’, Macbeth is told, ‘These showers of “Hail” anticipate your “reign”.’ In London performances Macbeth was played by Frederick Robson, finest of burlesque actors, who scored his greatest success in Talfourd’s Shylock; or, The Merchant of Venice Preserved (1849). Queen Victoria attended a performance in 1860, and the piece succeeded in America.
The Enchanted Isle (1848), by William and Robert Brough, treats The Tempest with new freedom, creating an extravaganza rather than a line-by-line travesty. William Brough’s skilful and charming Perdita; or, The Royal Milkmaid (1856), a direct send-up of Charles *Kean’s production of The Winter’s Tale, includes a ‘Grand Ballet’ that achieved independent fame. Andrew Halliday’s Romeo and Juliet Travestie; or, The Cup of Cold Poison (1859) starred Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), the most admired female burlesque performer of the century. The Nurse is conflated with *Dickens’s Mrs Gamp, the Apothecary has a drunk scene, and in the balcony scene the lovers catch cold—‘Swear not by the boon—the inconstant boon.’
Later burlesques slacken still further the relationship with the original play, and are increasingly written for amateurs, like the anonymous Hamlet! The Ravin’ Prince of Denmark!! or, The Baltic Swell!!! and the Diving Belle!!!! (1866), heavily indebted to Poole, and full of theatrical allusions, some entirely serious. F. C. Burnand, author of Antony and Cleopatra, or, His-tory and Her-story in a Modern Nilo-metre (1866), edited Punch from 1880 to 1906; in his subsequent The Rise and Fall of Richard!!!; or, A New Front to an Old Dicky (1868) the pun is predictably rampant. The Duchess of York travesties Macbeth with ‘Hang up my bonnet in the outer hall!’, and Catesby and Tyrrell fall over a coal scuttle to provoke the comment ‘Oh! they’re more shinned against than shinning.’
This is the last major burlesque of the professional Victorian theatre. W. S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern originally appeared in the magazine Fun, stimulated by Henry *Irving’s sensational success in the role at the Lyceum. It contains little direct parody. Ophelia, loved by Rosencrantz, describes Hamlet in lines that glance at the oddities of actors and the disagreements of scholars:
Some men hold
That he’s the sanest, far, of all sane men—
Some that he’s really sane, but shamming mad—
Some that he’s really mad, but shamming sane—
Some that he will be mad—some that he was—
Some that he couldn’t be. But on the whole,
(As far as I can make out what they mean)
The favourite theory’s somewhat like this:
Hamlet is idiotically sane
With lucid intervals of lunacy.
Hamlet is finally consigned to the Lyceum. Gilbert’s play, reprinted in 1890, was acted in 1891 and again, in revised form, in 1892, when Beerbohm Tree was the special object of satire. It has been successfully revived.
Late 19th-century specimens, mostly written for amateurs and unpublished, are of decreasing interest. On the English professional stage, burlesque and extravaganza yielded to musical comedy, of which they are a forerunner. They lasted a little longer in America. Burlesques written specifically for performance by ‘negro minstrels’—usually white men in black face—were popular in both continents during the middle years of the century. John Brougham’s Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice (1868) abounds in local and topical allusions, and also contains serious social comment. The New Version of Shakespeare’s Masterpiece of ‘Hamlet’ (1870) burlesqued Edwin Booth’s famous performances. Later American burlesques include Charles Soule’s New Travesty on Romeo and Juliet (1877), performed by the University Club of St Louis, and his Hamlet Revamped (1879), announced as ‘A Travesty without a Pun’. More original is John Kendrick Bangs’s Katherine (1888), the longest of the travesties and the only one of The Taming of the Shrew, notable mainly for lyrics imitative of W. S. Gilbert: ‘For he’s going to marry the shrew, hoo-hoo’, ‘Two little dudes from Pisa we’, and so on. It was given a sumptuous charity performance at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, when the young soldiers for whom it was written were assisted by a church choir of 75 voices. A critic objected that ‘our young men are growing up in a sufficiently light-voiced and effeminate groove without the factitious aid of corsets, crinoline and lingerie’.
Stanley Wells
Burton, Richard (1925–84), British actor. Born Richard Jenkins in a Welsh mining village he took the surname of the teacher and broadcaster who became his surrogate father. As an undergraduate in wartime Oxford he played Angelo in Measure for Measure and in 1951 excited Stratford audiences as Prince Hal and Henry V in the Shakespearian tetralogy. Between 1953 and 1956 at the *Old Vic he was hailed as the leading young classical actor of his generation, playing Hamlet, the Bastard in King John, Sir Toby Belch, Coriolanus, Caliban, and Henry V as well as alternating with John Neville as Iago and Othello. He subsequently became one of the highest-paid international film stars, marrying, divorcing, and remarrying Elizabeth Taylor and gaining a reputation for drinking and wildness. In 1964 on Broadway he played Hamlet in a production by John *Gielgud which is preserved on film. He made over 50 movies including The Taming of the Shrew (1967) directed by Franco *Zeffirelli and co-starring Elizabeth Taylor.
Michael Jamieson
Busby, John. See printing and publishing.
Butcher, Dick the. He is a sceptical but bloodthirsty follower of Cade in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI).
Anne Button
‘But shall I go mourn for that’, sung by Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale 4.3.15. The earliest known setting is by J. F. Lampe, published c.1745.
Jeremy Barlow
Butter, Nathaniel. See imprint; printing and publishing.
Butts, Dr. He draws Henry’s attention to Cranmer who has been refused entry to the council chamber, All Is True (Henry VIII) 5.2.
Anne Button
Byam Shaw, Glen (1904–86), British director and administrator. A successful actor and teacher of acting who had never much enjoyed being on stage, he returned from war service to work at the short-lived but influential Old Vic Theatre School and with a company aiming at new audiences, the Young Vic, for which he directed his first wintry As You Like It. From 1952 he was co-director with Anthony *Quayle of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford and sole director 1956–9. He continued Quayle’s policy of engaging accomplished players. His own productions were strong on narrative. They were never showy but always centred on the actors—Peggy *Ashcroft as Rosalind and Cleopatra, Michael *Redgrave as Antony. He also encouraged young directors like Peter *Hall, his chosen successor. People recall his old-fashioned courtesy. He made a rare appearance as the colonel regretting the loss of empire in the film Look Back in Anger (1959).
Michael Jamieson
Byrd, William (1543–1623), composer. The dominating musical figure in England during much of Shakespeare’s life; he seems to have composed little after his last publication in 1611.
Jeremy Barlow
Byron, George Gordon, Lord (1788–1824), English poet. Byron’s explicit rejection of Shakespeare as a dramatic model (‘the worst of models—though the most extraordinary of writers’) belies the saturation of Shakespearian phrasing in his dramas, and his characteristically *Romantic investment in an overreaching Macbeth and a reflective, volatile Hamlet, most visibly reworked in Manfred (1817) and Don Juan (1819–24).
Nicola Watson