c
Cade, Jack. A rebel leader, Cade is slain by Iden (The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 4.10). Shakespeare largely follows *Holinshed’s account of the rebellion.
Anne Button
‘Cadwal’ is the name given to Arviragus by Belarius in Cymbeline.
Anne Button
Caesar, Julius (102–44 bc), dictator of Rome. See Julius Caesar .
Anne Button
Caesar, Octavius (63 bc–ad 14). In Julius Caesar he becomes one of the triumvirs after the murder of Caesar, and in Antony and Cleopatra after eliminating the other triumvirs he assumes sole leadership of the Roman Empire.
Anne Button
caesura, a pause within a line of verse, often coinciding with a break between clauses or sentences. In English iambic pentameter (unlike classical verse), a caesura or phrasal break may fall after any syllable from the first to the ninth.
Chris Baldick
caesura, epic (feminine). Within an iambic pentameter line, epic caesura is a phrasal break preceded by an extra unstressed syllable. Older (mainly 15th-century) poets used this pattern as a standard variation, but most 16th-century poets avoided it. Shakespeare, too, avoids it in his poems but uses it fairly frequently in his middle and later plays, evidently to vary and complicate the metrical design:
Stealing and giv | ing odour. | Enough, no more
(Twelfth Night, 1.1.7)
George T. Wright
Cahiers élisabéthains, the chief French journal of late medieval and English Renaissance studies, was launched in 1972. It was originally published by the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise (Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France) and is intended as a link between scholars working in its field in France and those working elsewhere in the world. An international editorial board screens submissions. Nearly all texts are written in English: abstracts in both French and English are systematically included. Two numbers are published each year, including articles, notes, and reviews of relevant critical works, theatre performances, and films. In 2014 it partnered with Manchester University Press, which is now responsible for its publication both in print and online.
Jean-Marie Maguin, rev. Erin Sullivan
Caithness, Thane of. He marches against Macbeth, Macbeth Act 5.
Anne Button
Caius is one of Titus’ kinsmen in Titus Andronicus (mute part).
Anne Button
‘Caius’. See Kent, Earl of.
Caius, Dr. He is a French physician in love with Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Anne Button
Caius Cassius. See Cassius, Caius.
Caius Ligarius. See Ligarius, Caius.
Caius Lucius. See Lucius, Caius.
Caius Marius, The History and Fall of. First performed in 1679, Thomas Otway’s play is heavily and explicitly indebted to Romeo and Juliet, transferring its action to the Roman civil wars of Marius and Sylla. Shakespeare’s love story serves as a tragic sub-plot to Otway’s depiction of the struggle between the patricians Metellus and Sylla and the plebeians’ leader Marius: Marius’ son is in love with Metellus’ daughter Lavinia, to whom he was betrothed before Metellus defected to Sylla’s rival faction, and they marry in secret despite their parents’ enmity. (‘O Marius, Marius, wherefore art thou Marius?’, wonders Lavinia). Although Young Marius and Lavinia are more blameless than their Shakespearian counterparts (they fall in love in compliance with their parents’ original wishes, and he kills no Tybalt), they finish up in the tomb just the same, and Otway enhances the pathos of their deaths by having Lavinia awaken before Young Marius has finished dying of the poison so that they can enjoy one last brief and tormented interview. Otway’s play was still being revived at intervals as late as the 1760s, and its final dialogue between the lovers was imitated in acting texts of Romeo and Juliet from its return to the repertory in the 1740s until well into the 19th century.
Michael Dobson
Calchas, father of Cressida, is a Trojan priest who has defected to the Greeks in Troilus and Cressida.
Anne Button
calendar, Shakespeare’s. Protestant countries, including England, still used the Julian calendar (established by Julius Caesar) in Shakespeare’s day, though Catholic countries had accepted the more accurate ‘New Style’ Gregorian calendar in 1582 (named after Pope Gregory XIII). Consequently dates were the subject of debate, particularly the date of Easter, which was five weeks apart for Catholics and Protestants by 1599. Britain and its colonies only converted to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. At the same time New Year’s Day was moved from 25 March (the feast of the Annunciation and Lady Day) to 1 January (a date which had been originally rejected by Christians because it was associated with a celebration of the god Janus). In Shakespeare’s day the date of the year changed in March not January.
The following list gives the dates of festivals and other significant days, many of which are no longer celebrated, mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays.
Twelfth Night—6 January
The last day of the Christmas festival was an opportunity for carnivalesque misrule: carousing, practical jokes, and ribald impersonation of authority figures (elements which appear in Twelfth Night).
St Valentine’s Day—14 February
Valentine’s Day was traditionally associated with the pairing of birds, and is mentioned in this context in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.138 (see also Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls (?1381). In Elizabethan England it was celebrated with games and an atmosphere of sexual opportunity (as expressed in one of Ophelia’s songs, Hamlet 4.5.47). It is probably no coincidence that the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, also a celebration of fertility, was held on the same day or thereabouts. The Luperci would gather in a sacred cave, sacrifice goats, and clothe themselves in the goats’ skins from which they also made straps. They ran down the Palatine Hill striking anyone they met with their straps: being struck was supposed to cure infertility in women. Julius Caesar 1.2 is set during the celebration of Lupercalia.
Ides of March
Instead of using weeks the Romans divided their months in an irregular way originally based on the phases of the moon. Ides, from iduare, ‘to divide’, occurred in the middle of the month, on the 13th or 15th day, according to the length of the month, and originally represented the period during the full moon. Caesar is told to ‘Beware the ides of March’, Julius Caesar 1.2.20.
Dates associated with Easter
As it is today, Easter was a movable feast. In Elizabethan times the first of the dates associated with Easter, Shrove Tuesday, could fall as early as 3 February or as late as 9 March. The earliest possible date for Easter itself was 25 March. Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day, as it is still popularly known, is mentioned in All’s Well That Ends Well 2.2.22–3. Shrovetide, mentioned in 2 Henry IV 5.3.36., is the period of the few days before *Lent, when feasting and sports were customary (including football matches between villages, as at Easter). Ash Wednesday is the day after Shrove Tuesday and the beginning of fasting and abstinence of the 40-day period of Lent (ending on Easter Monday). It is mentioned in The Merchant of Venice 2.5.26. Friday of Easter week, Good Friday, is mentioned as a day of fasting, King John 1.1.235, 1 Henry IV 1.2.114. Ascension Day is the 40th day after Easter: ‘Holy Thursday’. Peter of Pomfret says John must give up his crown ‘ere the next Ascension Day at noon’, King John 4.2.151. The week succeeding the seventh Sunday after Easter, Whitsun, was a time for sports and games (especially morris dancing) and carousing (even in the churchyard itself, hence the term ‘church ale’). Whitsun is mentioned: The Winter’s Tale 4.4.134; Henry V 2.4.25; and is pronounced ‘Wheeson’ by Mistress Quickly in 2 Henry IV 2.1.91.
May Day—1 May
Morris dancing, decorating and dancing round the maypole, the election of a summer King and Queen, and general frolicking in the woods (particularly among young people) were popular May Day activities. May Day morris dancing is mentioned in All’s Well That Ends Well 2.2.23 and dramatized in The Two Noble Kinsmen 3.5; May Day morning is mentioned in All Is True (Henry VIII) 5.3.14.
Midsummer—24 June
The 24th of June was celebrated as the summer solstice (though it was actually 12 June then and 21 June now) and the feast of St John the Baptist. Midsummer is mentioned in As You Like It (4.1.95) and 1 Henry IV (4.1.103), as well as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Olivia says that Malvolio suffers from ‘midsummer madness’, Twelfth Night 3.4.54, referring to the revelry, magic, and atmosphere of disorientation that was associated with the moon at the summer solstice.
Lammas—1 August
Lammas Eve, the day before Lammas, is mentioned as Juliet’s birthday, Romeo and Juliet 1.3.19. Lammastide, the season of Lammas, is mentioned in Romeo and Juliet 1.3.16. Lammas is from the Anglo-Saxon hlaf-maesse, ‘loaf mass’—it was originally a harvest festival, but by Elizabethan times was merely the date on which pastures were opened for common grazing.
St Bartholomew’s Day—24 August
Bartholomew-tide is mentioned in Henry V 5.2.306 as the hottest day of summer.
Holy-rood Day—14 September
It is mentioned in 1 Henry IV 1.1.52 as the day of the battle between Hotspur and Douglas. Holy-rood Day was a festival commemorating the exaltation of Christ’s cross after its recovery from the Persians by Heraclius in ad 628, but by Shakespeare’s day was principally associated with the custom of ‘going a-nutting’—like May Day, an opportunity for young people to meet in the woods.
St Lambert’s Day—17 September
The day is mentioned in Richard II 1.1.199 as the date set by Richard for Bolingbroke and Mowbray’s combat.
Michaelmas—29 September
The festival of St Michael and All Angels is mentioned in 1 Henry IV 2.5.53 as Francis’s birthday; and in The Merry Wives of Windsor 1.1.188 (see also Allhallowmas). It was the day on which the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the law schools and courts of London began their terms. As with Lammas, by the Elizabethan period most of the customs associated with this day had lapsed, though it remained a time for hiring servants, initiating lawsuits, signing contracts, and harvesting and selling crops.
All Hallows Eve—31 October
The eve of All Saints is mentioned in Measure for Measure 2.1.121. In Shakespeare’s day games were organized in order to ward off the spirits of the dead and exploit the magic associated with this night.
Allhallowmas/Hallowmas—1 November
The feast of All Saints. Simple says Allhallowmas falls a fortnight before Michaelmas (29 September), either having confused it with Holy-rood Day (14 September), or having confused Martinmas (11 November) with Michaelmas, The Merry Wives of Windsor 1.1.187. Prince Harry calls *Oldcastle ‘All-hallown summer’, 1 Henry IV 1.2.156, a term referring to a spell of fine weather in late autumn. ‘Hallowmas’ and ‘Hollowmas’ are abbreviated forms of ‘Allhallowmas’, mentioned in Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.1.24; and Measure for Measure 2.1.120. Richard compares Hallowmas to the ‘short’st of day’ Richard II 5.1.80. Because of discrepancies in the Julian calendar the winter solstice was ten days earlier than it is now, consequently this made rather more sense in Shakespeare’s day than it does in ours.
All Souls’ Day—2 November
Catholics offer prayers for the dead on All Souls’ Day, and it is the day of Buckingham’s doom, Richard III 5.1.
St Martin’s Day/Martinmas—11 November
Joan la Pucelle means a spell of unseasonably fine weather when she refers to ‘Saint Martin’s summer’ 1 Henry VI 1.3.110. Martlemas is another term for ‘Martinmas’. Poins calls Falstaff ‘Martlemas’ 2 Henry IV 2.2.95, perhaps alluding to St Martin’s summer (compare Prince Harry’s ‘All-hallown summer’); or to Martinmas beef, fattened for slaughter by that date.
Anne Button
Calhern, Louis (1895–1956), American actor-director who progressed from undistinguished stage work to a high-profile career in film (playing the title role in the 1953 MGM film of Julius Caesar), returning to the theatre occasionally, including King Lear in 1950.
Richard Foulkes
Caliban. Long before the action of The Tempest begins, Prospero arrives on the island to find its sole inhabitant, the son of the deceased witch Sycorax. At first their relationship is harmonious: Caliban loves Prospero and shows him ‘all the qualities o’th’isle’ (1.2.339); and Prospero treats him ‘with human care’ (1.2.348) and teaches him language. However, when Caliban attempts to rape Miranda, Prospero enslaves him. During the course of the play Caliban offers his services to Trinculo and Stefano, who he mistakenly believes will be able to help him vanquish Prospero.
Critics, audiences, writers, and artists have shared a long fascination with Caliban. In the *Dryden/Davenant adaptation the low comedy of Caliban’s situation was given extra impact by the addition of a female version of him, a sister. Later generations have been more interested in the tragedy of his situation: his occasionally beautiful language and miserable situation seem to invite sympathy despite his ugly appearance and violent intentions. In the last two decades of the 20th century criticism and theatre productions have often seen Caliban as a native islander. To be precise, however, he is a second-generation immigrant and the mythologies and psychology of Europeans are just as important as postcolonial perspectives in the debate over his identity.
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Caliban, 1904. Tree played Caliban as a sensitive, potentially noble creature, a tragic missing link.
Anne Button
‘Calin o custure me’, a *ballad tune title, probably Gaelic in origin, quoted by Pistol in Henry V 4.4.4.
Jeremy Barlow
Calpurnia is Caesar’s wife in Julius Caesar. Frightened by a dream and ill portents she tries to persuade him not to go to the Capitol, 2.2.
Anne Button
Calvert, Charles (1828–79), actor, born in London. His early engagements included Southampton (1853–4, Romeo and Laertes with his future wife Adelaide Biddles as Juliet and Ophelia) and the Surrey (1855–6, Hal, Othello), but it was with Hamlet (1859) at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, that Calvert showed his ability to co-ordinate all the arts of the theatre in the service of the play. At the Prince’s theatre, Manchester, between 1864 and 1874, he mounted eleven major Shakespeare revivals, of which Richard III and Henry V were transferred to New York.
A disciple of Charles *Kean, Calvert upheld the principles of pictorial Shakespeare and showed his intelligence and originality as an actor in his sympathetic Shylock and thoughtful Henry V.
Richard Foulkes
Calvert, Louis (1859–1923), English actor-manager who upheld the Shakespearian tradition of his parents Charles and Adelaide Calvert. His career encompassed the diversity of Shakespearian staging on both sides of the Atlantic—and beyond—for half a century. Calvert acted with *Benson and *Tree, assisting the latter with his ambitious revival of Julius Caesar (1898), as he did Richard Flanagan with his sumptuous Shakespearian productions in Manchester where—in contrast—Calvert also staged Richard II (1895) in the Elizabethan style for the Manchester branch of the Independent Theatre. In 1909 Calvert was recruited for the ill-fated New Theatre, New York, where his production of The Winter’s Tale (1910) prefigured *Granville-Barker’s. Calvert remained in America, contributing an Elizabethan-style The Tempest to the Shakespeare tercentenary of 1916, but devoting himself increasingly to training actors in the traditions of Shakespearian acting, about which he wrote in Problems of the Actor (1918).
Richard Foulkes
Cambridge, Richard, Earl of. He is Richard Plantagenet (d. 1415), father of the Duke of York of the Henry VI plays. His plot with Henry le Scrope (3rd Baron of Masham, eldest son of Sir Stephen Scrope) and Sir Thomas Grey is discovered and they are sent to execution, Henry V 2.2.
Anne Button
Cambridge Shakespeare. The Works of William Shakespeare (1863–6), edited by William George Clark, with at first W. Aldis Wright and later John Glover as collaborators, was published in nine volumes by Macmillan, but printed at the University Press, so that it became known as the Cambridge Shakespeare. This important edition was based on a ‘thorough collation of the four Folios and of all the Quarto editions of the separate plays, and of subsequent editions and commentaries’ (preface), so that in textual matters it constitutes a virtual variorum. Prefaces provide accounts of the early textual history of each of the works, and the volumes include the texts of first quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, as well as the quartos relating to Henry V, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), and Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI). Clark and Wright used the Cambridge edition as the basis for the influential one-volume *Globe Shakespeare. Both the Cambridge and the Globe editions were revised in 1891.
R. A. Foakes
Cambridge Shakespeare, New (1984–2012) This edition was a replacement for the *New Shakespeare, completed in 1966. Whereas the New Shakespeare was edited by British scholars, the New Cambridge Shakespeare recruited editors from other countries, especially the United States. The series aimed to reflect ‘current critical interests’ and to be attentive ‘to the realisation of the plays on the stage, and to their social and cultural settings’, according to the first general editor, Philip Brockbank. The volumes are handsomely printed, with notes and collations on the same page as the text. Textual problems are treated in a ‘Textual Analysis’ that follows the text, as in the New Shakespeare. The well-illustrated critical introductions in the first volumes added a separate stage history, but some later introductions have sought to integrate commentary on stage and film performances into critical accounts of the plays. Most of the earlier volumes have been re-issued in recent years with updated introductory material attempting to cover ever-shifting scholarly grounds, a process the series treats as ongoing. Beginning in 1994 with the first quarto of King Lear, it also added several critical editions of the early quartos. The New Cambridge began to appear roughly at the same time as, and in competition with, the *Oxford Shakespeare, with Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the first year, completed in 2012 with the publication of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
R. A. Foakes, rev. Will Sharpe
Cambridge University’s major resource for the study of Shakespeare is the collection at Trinity College presented in 1799 by Edward *Capell of Shakespeare editions used in the preparation of his own edition of 1768 and his Notes and Readings (1774, 1779–83).
Susan Brock
Camden, William (1551–1623), antiquarian, historian, and teacher. Born in London, Camden was a distinguished compiler of British history and a gifted headmaster of Westminster School who won his pupil Ben Jonson’s unreserved praise. Having written Britannia (1586), he drew partly on that work for Remains of a Greater Work Concerning Britain (1605), in which he glances at modern poets. In a list of nine ‘pregnant wits’, Camden merely cites Shakespeare’s name, but on more congenial antiquarian ground, he explores the name’s antecedents and variants: ‘Strong-shield’ or ‘Breake-speare, Shake-Speare, Shotbolt, Wagstaffe’.
Park Honan
Camidius is given command of Antony’s land army, Antony and Cleopatra 3.7.57–9.
Anne Button
Camillo, a lord at Leontes’ court, helps Polixenes escape and is eventually betrothed to Paulina, The Winter’s Tale 5.3.144–7.
Anne Button
Campeius, Cardinal. Sent by the Pope, he, with Wolsey, considers King Henry’s proposed divorce of Katherine, All Is True (Henry VIII) 2.4.
Anne Button
Campion, Thomas (1567–1620). He wrote three masques, and published four Bookes of Ayres (1610–17). Campion’s Lord’s Masque, commissioned by the Howards for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding celebrations (1612–13), contains a moment reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, also performed at Elizabeth’s wedding, when a row of women-statues step alive from their niches.
Cathy Shrank
Canada has most often employed Shakespeare as a bulwark against other traditions or cultures. In English Canada, Shakespeare served as protection against the incursions of American commercialism; in French Canada, against ‘double colonialism’ by the French and the English.
Despite the burden of wholesomeness imposed both by English-Scots Puritanism and French Roman Catholicism, there has been a nearly unbroken tradition of playing Shakespeare since at least the 18th century. The genealogy of Shakespeare productions may be traced back to two significant roots: British soldiers and touring companies. After the Conquest (1763), British soldiers staged plays to relieve the tedium of garrison life. However, most Shakespeare in the 18th century and up to 1914 was supplied by touring companies and by such actors as Edmund *Kean, William Charles *Macready, Ellen *Terry, Tommaso *Salvini, Sarah *Bernhardt, and Edwin *Booth.
In the 1840s, Shakespeare societies sprang up to fill a variety of cultural needs, including self-improvement. Ladies’ clubs admired Shakespeare for his creation of strong female characters; gentlemen lionized Shakespeare, the self-made man. Fuelled by British patriotism and fear of American domination, later societies (such as that founded in Toronto in the 20th century), celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday, organized reading groups and competitive recitations, and occasionally produced his plays.
A wider assimilation of Shakespeare came through provincial regulation of educational institutions, where excerpts, then plays, were used as rhetorical training in schools. By the 1860s in Ontario, and shortly thereafter at all other Canadian universities, Shakespeare was firmly in place as the keystone of the honours English undergraduate programme. Canadian Shakespearian scholarship was launched with Sir Daniel Wilson’s Caliban: The Missing Link (1873), but acquired eminence only with the extensive theoretical, interpretative, and editorial work of Northrop *Frye.
The real explosion of interest in Shakespeare, both in English and French Canada, occurred after 1945 and coincided with the growth of cities, the influx of many immigrant groups, the rapid development of technology, and debates about national identity and culture. Between 1944 and 1955, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation presented over 60 radio adaptations of Shakespeare, including the first ever complete and chronologically arranged performance of Shakespeare’s English history plays (1953–4).
Undoubtedly a major event was the creation of the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario (1953), at the initiative of Tom Patterson, who recruited British director Tyrone *Guthrie and designer Tanya *Moiseiwitsch. Once a tent affair, the Stratford Festival is now the largest classical theatre in North America. Its inaugural production, Richard III with Alec *Guinness, was greeted with wild enthusiasm and set high standards. Michael Langham’s Henry V (1957), in which French-Canadians played the French, suggested that a unique Canadian Shakespeare might be possible. Instead, for many years, the Festival’s British roots often led to a dependency upon ‘hired hands’—British and American directors and actors. Later, the main stage gave way to an increasingly Hollywood-like emphasis on costumes, props, and gimmicks. Although the Festival has produced great actors such as Christopher Plummer and William Hutt, on the whole, the Festival’s international influence has been more architectural rather than theatrical; its thrust stage became the model for, among others, the Olivier auditorium at the National Theatre in London, and the Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex.
While some scholars claim that the distinctiveness of Canadian Shakespeare lies in the ‘conversational vitality’ of its Shakespearian language, said to lack the ‘operatic excesses’ of the English and the ‘harshness’ of the American, others find distinctiveness elsewhere: for example, in Canadians’ preference for Shakespeare paired with a beautiful landscape. Since the 1980s, boisterous summer Shakespeare is found not only a mare usque ad mare (Wolfville, Halifax, St John’s, Montreal, Prescott, Toronto, Saskatoon, Calgary, Victoria, Vancouver, and Ottawa), but also by the sea, in a park, or on a golf course.
In Quebec, ‘Le grand Will’ was historically neither part of the school curriculum nor part of the repertoire of local professional acting companies. Not translated into Québécois (rather than a ‘placeless’ French) until 1978 by Michel Garneau, Shakespeare was, in the next two decades, often confined to being a vehicle, parodic or legitimizing, of cultural nationalism. Shakespeare’s political face may be clearly seen in Robert Gurik’s Hamlet, prince du Québec (1968), an allegory on Quebec politics with Hamlet as Québec, Claudius as l’Anglophonie (the English economic and political power), Gertrude as the Church (in alliance with the political power in Ottawa), and the Ghost as Charles de Gaulle.
By the 1990s, Quebec became more comfortable with Shakespeare and his works are now regularly staged. Best known is director/playwright/actor Robert *Lepage, who turned many times to Shakespeare in his explorations into multimedia, sexuality, and the act of creation itself.
Despite Canada’s diversity, until recently, multicultural and native Shakespeare was rare. A notable early effort was David Gardner’s Inuit-themed King Lear (1961–2). More recently, at the National Arts Centre, Peter Hinton directed an all-aboriginal cast of King Lear (2012) in a production set in 17th-century Canada and emphasizing the first early contacts and conflicts between Europeans and native peoples.
Shakespeare’s influence on Canadian culture, and drama in particular, has been mixed. The more unfortunate aspects of Shakespeare adoration may be seen in such imitative works as Charles Heavysege’s Saul (1857), described by Coventry Patmore in its day but never since as ‘scarcely short of Shakespearean’. Particularly in his status as Canada’s most popular playwright, Shakespeare has also come under increasing attack for impeding the growth of a Canadian drama. Yet Canadians feel impelled to engage his works. A strong, even acerbic, tradition of rewriting Shakespeare to satirize local politics began in the 18th century. Twentieth-century rewritings, of which there are more than 100, span a much wider spectrum of themes and issues and range from the serious to the outrageous: among them are John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1967), a meditation on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29; Ann Marie MacDonald’s Good Night, Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet) (1990), a comic consideration of gender and genre; Norman Chaurette’s Les Reines (1991; The Queens, 1992), Richard III reimagined from the point of view of the women of the play; Cliff Jones’s Kronberg: 1582 (1974), a pop/rock musical based on Hamlet, David Belke’s farcical mystery The Maltese Bodkin (1997); Tibor Egervari’s Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in Auschwitz (1977, 1998; trans. 2009); Vern Thiessen’s Shakespeare’s Will (2002), a one-woman play exploring Anne Hathaway’s ‘reminiscences’; and Yvette Nolan and Cathy MacKinnon’s Death of a Chief (2008), a First Nations’ adaptation of Julius Caesar. Shakespearian adaptations, inspirations, and revisions have found their way into fiction, poetry, music, radio, television, online arcade games, the Internet, and smart phone apps. New theatre companies dedicated to staging Shakespeare continue to pop up, although they are sometimes short-lived. Toronto’s Shakespeare in Action aims at attracting high school students and educators, while Ottawa’s Company of Adventurers produces full-length plays with school-age children. Shakespeare’s Canadian presence has achieved international notoriety with the Sanders portrait. Revealing a puckish, red-haired, and youngish Shakespeare, the 1603 image owned by Lloyd Sullivan has entered the lists as a prime candidate for the only portrait of the Bard painted during his lifetime. Now firmly entrenched in schools, universities, theatres, and the public consciousness, Shakespeare has become a byword for literacy itself: Book Day Canada is celebrated on his birthday, 23 April.
Irena Makaryk
canaries, dance steps including percussive use of feet, or a lively, virtuosic couple dance involving those steps (see Love’s Labour’s Lost 3.1.11 and All’s Well That Ends Well 2.1.73); also a tune associated with the dance. The origin of the name is unknown, despite obvious speculation about the Canary Islands.
Jeremy Barlow
cancel. The technical term for a page that replaces one that has been removed by the printer. The original *title page of the 1609 *quarto of Troilus and Cressida, for instance, which advertised the play ‘As it was acted by the Kings Majesty’s servants at the Globe’, was cancelled during the printing process and replaced with a title page that makes no mention of a company or a theatre.
Eric Rasmussen
canon. The thirty-six plays in the First Folio form the authoritative canon of Shakespeare’s dramatic work. But, like the universe, the Shakespearian canon is ever expanding. Heminges and Condell may have deliberately excluded collaborative plays from their collection. Pericles, for instance, although ascribed to Shakespeare on the title page of the 1609 quarto, was omitted from the First Folio; the play later appeared in the Third and Fourth Folios and in Rowe’s editions, was excluded by Pope, but has been included in most collected editions of Shakespeare since Malone’s Supplement (1780) to Steevens’s edition. The Two Noble Kinsmen, ascribed to John Fletcher and Shakespeare on the title page of the 1634 quarto, appeared in the Beaumont and Fletcher Second Folio (1679) and in all subsequent editions of Beaumont and Fletcher’s works, but it was not until the 20th century that the play began to be included in editions of Shakespeare.
Scholars have explored a variety of forms of internal evidence (including tests of vocabulary, imagery, verbal and structural parallels, metrical evidence, stylometry, and function word tests) in the hopes of establishing the authenticity of other plays that are attributed to Shakespeare in early printed texts, such as The London Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Locrine. While none of these plays in the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ has been admitted to the canon, others—which, with the exception of Double Falsehood, do not name Shakespeare in their earliest textual states—have. The 168 lines that Shakespeare contributed to the manuscript play Sir Thomas More, which was discovered in the British Museum in 1844, are widely accepted as genuine and often included in collected editions. Compelling arguments that Shakespeare was responsible for a few scenes in Edward III (c.1592) have recently propelled that play into some collected editions of Shakespeare’s work, bringing the total number of plays in the canon to 40. In 2010 the Arden *Shakespeare added to the number with Double Falsehood (see Cardenio), and convincing studies have amassed in recent years suggesting Shakespeare’s presence in *Arden of Faversham and in the 1602 revised text of *Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.
Eric Rasmussen, rev. Will Sharpe
Canterbury, Archbishop of. (1) Based on Henry Chicheley (Chichele) (c. 1362–1443), his speech ‘proving’ King Harry’s title to the French Crown (Henry V 1.2) is taken largely from *Holinshed. (2) See Cranmer, Thomas.
Anne Button
Capell, Edward (1713–81), English Shakespearian editor. Capell’s ten-volume edition of Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1768) was the first to be prepared according to recognizably ‘modern’ principles of eclectic editing. By a process of thorough collation Capell established which of the ‘old editions’ would be used as the ‘ground-work’ for the text of each play, and incorporated into this base text readings from the other early editions at points of variance, as his editorial judgement dictated. The 1768 edition was a beautifully printed ‘clean’ text, accompanied by only the briefest textual notes. It was belatedly followed by Capell’s remarkable explanatory apparatus, his Notes and Various Readings (vol. i, 1774; vols. i–iii, 1779–83), which included the School of Shakespeare, a collection of passages from Elizabethan and Jacobean literature chosen as illustrations of particular Shakespearian usages and cruces. The depth and originality of Capell’s textual work and contextualizing scholarship was matched and exceeded only by the great variorum editors *Steevens (who was not above unacknowledged borrowing from Capell) and *Malone.
Marcus Walsh
Caphis is the servant of one of Timon’s creditors in Timon of Athens.
Anne Button
Capilet, Diana. See Diana.
Capilet, Widow. See widows.
capitalization. Capitals were used in the early modern period not only to dignify names and proper nouns, but also to provide emphasis. Capitalization, like spelling, was largely a matter of individual preference. Shakespeare’s three pages in the Sir Thomas More manuscript reveal his characteristic habit of capitalizing initial ‘C’ in mid-sentence verbal forms (‘Come’, ‘Charg’, ‘Cannot’, ‘Cry’, ‘hath Chidd’, ‘Charterd’).
Eric Rasmussen
captains. (1) A captain of a ship condemns Suffolk to death, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 4.1.71–103. (2) A captain announces the arrival of Titus, Titus Andronicus 1.1.64–9. (3) A captain of the Welsh army announces the dispersal of his troops, Richard II 2.4. (4) A captain is sent by Fortinbras to Claudius, Hamlet 4.4. He explains Fortinbras’ expedition to Hamlet in the second *quarto (see Hamlet Additional Passages ‘J’, lines 1–21). (5) A sea captain agrees to help Viola disguise herself as a eunuch, Twelfth Night 1.2. (6) A captain reports on the battle between Macbeth and Macdonald, Macbeth 1.2. (7) A Roman captain gives information to Lucius, Cymbeline 4.2. Two British captains arrest Posthumus, Cymbeline 5.5.92–5.
Anne Button
Capucius. See Caputius, Lord.
Capulet, Juliet’s father in Romeo and Juliet, is the head of the family opposed to the Montagues.
Anne Button
Capulet, Diana. See Diana.
Capulet, Lady. See Capulet’s Wife.
Capulet, Widow. See widows.
Capulet’s Cousin converses with Capulet, Romeo and Juliet 1.5.
Anne Button
Capulet’s Wife supports her husband in the proposed marriage of Juliet to Paris in Romeo and Juliet.
Anne Button
Caputius, Lord. He visits the dying Katherine and takes a letter from her to Henry, All Is True (Henry VIII) 4.2. He is based on the ambassador Eustace Chapuys, mentioned in *Holinshed.
Anne Button
Cardenio. The King’s Men were paid for performing a play referred to as Cardenno or Cardenna at court on 20 May and 9 July 1613, presumably based on the story of Cardenio told in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which had first appeared in English translation in 1612. In September 1653 Humphrey *Moseley entered ‘The History of Cardenio, by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare’ in the Stationers’ Register, but there is no evidence that he ever published it. (Some, however, suspect that the words ‘and Shakespeare’ are a later addition.) While he might have known that *Fletcher had dramatized material from Don Quixote elsewhere, and that he had collaborated with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen (though not when), Moseley is very unlikely to have known that Shakespeare’s company had given performances of a play called Cardenno at court—at exactly the same time, moreover, that Shakespeare and Fletcher were also collaborating on All Is True (Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Although Heminges and Condell, for whatever reason, omitted it from the *folio (just as they excluded Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the mysterious *Love’s Labour’s Won: see canon), it seems likely that Shakespeare co-wrote Cardenio with Fletcher in 1612–13, and that a manuscript of the play was still extant in the 1650s.
Tantalizing glimpses of this otherwise lost play were provided in 1728 by the publication of Double Falsehood; or, The Distressed Lovers, ‘Written Originally by w. shakespeare; and now Revised and Adapted to the Stage by Mr. theobald’. Lewis *Theobald’s preface to this play, which was acted with considerable success at Drury Lane, states that it is an adaptation of an otherwise unknown work by Shakespeare, of which he claims to possess three copies in manuscript. (One of these was said to be in the library of Covent Garden theatre as late as 1770, but the playhouse burned down in 1808). Theobald’s preface, though arguing strenuously for the play’s authenticity, betrays no knowledge of either Moseley’s entry in the Stationers’ Register or the traces of Cardenio’s performances at court, so the otherwise extraordinary coincidence that Double Falsehood is in fact a version of the Cardenio story suggests that whatever Theobald possessed in manuscript must at least have derived from the missing Fletcher–Shakespeare Cardenio.
The catalogue of Shakespeare’s plays from the First Folio (1623). Troilus and Cressida, only included in the volume at the last minute, came too late to be listed; Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the missing Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio were left out entirely.
If this is the case, however, Double Falsehood represents Cardenio only at one or more removes, its language heavily rewritten for a post-Restoration stage which found Fletcher’s style much more congenial than that of Shakespeare’s late romances (as is demonstrated by *Davenant’s version of The Two Noble Kinsmen, *The Rivals, which cuts most of the lines now attributed to Shakespeare). Nonetheless, some commentators have found lingering traces of Shakespearian imagery, and others have been impressed by the way in which Double Falsehood assimilates the Cardenio story to the characteristic patterns of Shakespearian romance. The play was even included in the *Arden 3 edition of Shakespeare’s works in 2010.
Various attempts have been made to ‘reconstruct’ Cardenio for performance, principally with student drama groups: the most notable of these has been Gregory *Doran’s ‘reimagining’ of Cardenio, performed by the *Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011.
Michael Dobson
Cardinal. In Richard III he reluctantly agrees that the Duke of York and his mother Queen Elizabeth should be brought out of the sanctuary (3.1) that he led them to in the previous scene. He is based on Thomas Bourchier (or Bouchier) (c. 1404–1486). In folio editions it is the Archbishop of York who leads them to sanctuary.
Anne Button
Carew, Richard (1555–1620), poet and antiquary. In his epistle The Excellencie of the English Tongue, printed in 1614, Carew cites Shakespeare as the lyric equal of the Roman poet Catullus. He adds, nevertheless, that for prose and verse the ‘miracle of our age’ is Sir Philip *Sidney (whom Carew had met at Oxford).
Park Honan
Carey, Elizabeth (d. 1635). She was the daughter of Elizabeth and Sir George Carey, and god-daughter of Lord Hunsdon, patron of the Chamberlain’s Men, and Elizabeth I. Carey’s marriage to Sir Thomas Berkeley on 19 February 1596 was possibly the occasion on which A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed.
Cathy Shrank
Caribbean. Rarely mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, the Caribbean has been the site of some of the most exciting readings, adaptations, and appropriations of The Tempest.
The connections between The Tempest and the Caribbean have long been recognized, even if their significance has been disputed. One of the play’s accepted sources is William *Strachey’s account of the ‘wreck and redemption’ of a party of English colonists heading for Virginia who were shipwrecked on the islands of the Bermudas in 1609. This is at least a New World and even North Atlantic reference point, if not quite a Caribbean one. More tellingly, Caliban is usually regarded as an anagram of the word ‘can[n]ibal’, which has its root in the same indigenous word that also gives the term ‘Caribbean’. (See travel, trade, and colonialism).
When read from the Caribbean, the relationship between Prospero and Caliban has usually been seen as that between master and slave, the word by which Caliban is described in the play’s ‘Names of the Actors’, and the play therefore read as pertaining to the history of slavery. However, the uncertainty over Caliban’s parentage, provenance, and colour has allowed a considerable variation in the interpretations offered, even by those claiming to speak from Caliban’s position.
The three landmarks of the reading and adaptation of The Tempest from the Caribbean come from three different language traditions, those of Barbados, Martinique, and Cuba: George Lamming’s essay ‘A Monster, A Child, A Slave’, which appeared in his collection The Pleasures of Exile (1960); Aimé Césaire’s play Une tempête (1969); and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s essay ‘Calibán’, first published in the Havana journal Casa de las Américas in 1971.
Lamming refers to his own reading of The Tempest as ‘blasphemous’, conscious as he was both of the sacred status of Shakespeare, even in the twilight of British imperialism, and of the marginal status of a West Indian writer recently arrived in London. Ignored when it was first published, his insertion of the play into the history of the British slave trade, his probing questions about Prospero’s wife, and his openly disrespectful interrogation of Prospero’s psychological state subsequently became staple ingredients of the postcolonial approach to The Tempest. Lamming also insisted that the tide of colonial aftermath washes up on metropolitan shores, as it does with particular force in his novel Water with Berries (1971), in which a version of the Tempest story forms a violent colonial prehistory to the struggles of West Indian immigrants to make lives for themselves in London.
Césaire’s Une tempête offers a serious and complex involvement with the Shakespearian play, an ‘adaptation’ which keeps close enough to its original for the variations to be striking, and which also responds to Ernest Renan’s earlier continuation of the play, Caliban: Suite de ‘La Tempête’ (1878); although Césaire moves ‘back’ to the Caribbean (and back to Shakespeare) and therefore away from Renan’s concern with European politics. The main contexts for Une tempête were third-world and racial issues in the late 1960s: the extended confrontation between the coloured (mixed-race) Ariel and the black Caliban becomes as central to the play as the relationship between Prospero and Caliban.
The intertexts of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s 1970 essay ‘Calibán’ stretch back to the Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), to which ‘Calibán’ is openly responding by placing the Caribbean, in the form of Cuba, at the centre of debates about Latin American cultural identity. Fernández Retamar’s defiant question was ‘what is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?’; a question which has continued to form a crucial part of the cultural-political agenda in Latin America.
Creative engagements with Shakespeare have similarly emphasized The Tempest. The Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite has often responded to the play, as have the Guyanese writers David Dabydeen and Pauline Melville. Marina Warner’s novel Indigo (1992) is largely set in the Caribbean and uses elements of the Tempest story and characters to tell a fictional version of the early history of English settlement in the area. In a striking variation, A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, uses the Brechtian device of a group of Trinidadian actors rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra.
Shakespeare has been performed in the Caribbean at least since the later 17th century, with plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet staged by travelling companies on the major islands. Jamaica, for example, where the best records survive, saw eight Shakespeare plays performed in 1781–2. Othello was not performed in the Caribbean until after Emancipation in 1834.
The end of the 20th century saw two Caribbean productions of Shakespeare visit the United Kingdom. In 1998 the Cuban company Teatro Buendía staged Otra tempestad at the reconstructed Globe (London). Otra tempestad goes further than other adaptations of The Tempest through its introduction of two new sets of characters, several from Shakespeare’s other plays as well as the orishas (Afro-Cuban deities) who double the European parts. Then Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s The Caribbean Tempest, equipped with new Caribbean music and spectacle but otherwise close to Shakespeare’s original, and first performed in Barbados, was staged in the Royal Botanic Gardens as part of the 1999 Edinburgh Festival.
Peter Hulme
Carlisle, Bishop of. One of Richard’s loyal supporters (Thomas Merke, d. 1409), he is spared by King Henry, Richard II 5.6.
Anne Button
Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), Scottish author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841). In his Hero as Poet he presents both Dante and Shakespeare (‘the greatest of Intellects’) struggling heroically to transcend constricting limitations, in Shakespeare’s case almost crushing his great soul to write for the Globe playhouse.
Tom Matheson
‘Carman’s Whistle’, the title of a ribald ballad, quoted by Falstaff in 2 Henry IV, quarto additional passage after 3.2.309; carmen or carters had a reputation for musical and sexual prowess. The ballad tune was set for *virginals by William *Byrd.
Jeremy Barlow
Carriers, two. They converse with each other, and briefly with Gadshill, in an inn yard, 1 Henry IV 2.1.
Anne Button
cartoon Shakespeare. See strip-cartoon Shakespeare.
Casca is the first of the conspirators to stab Caesar (following the account in *Plutarch), Julius Caesar 3.1.76.
Anne Button
cases, large wooden trays divided into compartments used for sorting and storing type. Two cases, positioned one above the other on the *compositor’s frames, were traditionally employed in early English printing-houses. Capitals were placed in the boxes of the upper case, small letters in the boxes of the lower case. Even in the current age of computer-generated type fonts, capitals are still known as ‘upper case’, small letters as ‘lower case’.
A 17th-century type-case. From Joseph Moxon, Mechanical Exercises in the Whole Art of Printing (1683–4).
Eric Rasmussen
Cassandra is a Trojan prophetess and daughter of Priam in Troilus and Cressida (drawn originally from *Homer).
Anne Button
Cassio, Michael. Othello’s lieutenant, unwittingly involved in *Iago’s plot against Othello, he is injured, 5.1, but given governorship of Cyprus, 5.2.341.
Anne Button
Cassius, Caius. Instigator of the plot against Caesar, he commands his slave Pindarus to kill him when faced with military defeat, Julius Caesar 5.3.45.
Anne Button
Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario See Italy; opera.
Castiglione, Baldassare (1478–1529), Italian diplomat and writer whose prose work Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), published in an English translation by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1591, was a seminal text in the definition of Elizabethan chivalry and courtliness. Through a series of debates between various historical figures, Castiglione considered questions such as the ideal qualities of the courtier and his duty to the prince. The influence of the Courtier upon English Renaissance literature was one of both content and style. Not only did it inspire succeeding courtesy books, its witty exchanges may have influenced the courtship of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
cast-off copy. In order to facilitate setting by *formes, a *compositor would attempt to calculate in advance how much of his *copy would be needed to fill each printed page (so that pages 1 and 4 of a *folio, for instance, could be set and sent to the press before pages 2 and 3). Compositors who made errors in their calculations would reach the end of their stints with too little or too much copy and be forced to fill out or contract the page using such expedients as setting *prose as verse or vice versa.
Eric Rasmussen
catch, a simple part-song or round, e.g. *‘Hold thy peace’ in Twelfth Night 2.3.66.
Jeremy Barlow
Catch my Soul. See musicals.
Catesby, Sir William. Drawn largely from *Holinshed, Catesby (d. 1485) is Richard’s ally throughout Richard III.
Anne Button
Catharine and Petruchio. David *Garrick’s three-act abbreviation of The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in 1754 and still in use in the 1880s, softens the play by insisting that Petruchio’s mistreatment of Kate and his servants is only a temporary pretence, but nonetheless reallocates most of her speech of wifely submission to him as a concluding sermon.
Michael Dobson
Catherine. (1) A lady attending the Princess of France, she is wooed by Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost. (2) She is wooed by King Harry, Henry V 5.2, and claimed as his bride as part of the peace treaty with France. She is based on Catherine of Valois, 1401–37, daughter of Charles VI of France, mother of Henry VI, and grandmother of Henry VII.
Anne Button
Catherine the Great (1729–96), Empress of all the Russias from 1762. A fluent and avid reader of Shakespeare, albeit in French translations, Catherine corresponded extensively on Shakespeare with *Voltaire, among others: in 1786 she translated The Merry Wives of Windsor into Russian, and wrote a play of her own, The Spendthrift, based on Timon of Athens. Another of her own plays, The Initial Instruction of Oleg (1791), is a professed imitation of Shakespeare’s style.
Michael Dobson
Catholicism. See religion.
Cato, Young. Son of Marcus Porcius Cato (95–46 bc), the younger Cato becomes Brutus’ ally and dies at Philippi, Julius Caesar 5.4.8.
Anne Button
Cattermole, Charles (1832–1900), English painter and illustrator. Amongst numerous 17th-century figure subjects, Cattermole, like his uncle George Cattermole, produced small-scale watercolours of Shakespearian scenes, with Macbeth a favoured theme of his stage-inspired compositions. He also executed a series of thirteen anecdotal watercolours illustrating Shakespeare’s life from Christening to Last Hours.
Kate Newman
Cawdor, Thane of. This title is given to Macbeth, Macbeth 1.2.63–5.
Anne Button
Caxton, William (1421–91), translator and the first English printer. Caxton worked in the Low Countries as an agent for silk merchants and came upon printing during a business trip to Cologne. On his return to England, he set up his own press and printed the first book in English, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, in 1475. He went on to print over 70 books including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Shakespeare referred to The Recuyell, Caxton’s own translation of a French history by Le Fevre, in the writing of Troilus and Cressida.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Cayatte, André (1909–89). He produced the colour film Les Amants de Vérone based on Romeo and Juliet in 1949 (script by the poet Jacques Prévert, music by Joseph Kosma). The highly talented cast plays the beautiful love story as a timeless adventure. The carefully chosen settings of Verona create an atmosphere of mystical painting.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Cecil, Robert (1563–1612), and his father William (1520–98), the most powerful ministers of their age. Comparisons between the Cecils and politic counsellors Nestor and Ulysses, who appear in Troilus and Cressida, were familiar from 1594. Secretary of State 1596–1608, Robert was one target of *Essex’s 1601 rebellion, to which Richard II is linked. Robert’s position as Sir William Brooke’s son-in-law may have induced William Cecil (Baron Burghley from 1571) to oblige Shakespeare to change Oldcastle’s name to Falstaff in 1 Henry IV. William B. Long suggests Burghley commissioned Sir Thomas More to tackle anti-alien sentiment.
Cathy Shrank
Celia, daughter of Duke Frederick and cousin of Rosalind in As You Like It, disguises herself as ‘Aliena’ (like Alinda in *Lodge’s Rosalynde) and marries Oliver.
Anne Button
censorship. The official government censor of drama in Shakespeare’s time was the Master of the Revels, to whom a playing company had to submit each playbook together with a fee. The censor’s remit was never precisely defined, but successive postholders took their responsibility to be the excision of material offensive to the Church and state, broadly interpreted to include not only sedition and personal satire but also foul language and excessive sexuality. If the Master of the Revels allowed the play, he would attach his licence (a signed statement of his approval) at the end of the manuscript. Often the licence would state conditions such as ‘may with the reformations [i.e. changes] be acted’ or ‘[with] all the oaths left out’. The office of the Master of the Revels was originally established to select plays for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth, but in 1581 Edmund Tilney was given a new patent which required ‘all and every player or players…to present and recite before our said servant’ any new work. The volume of new plays made recitation by the actors impractical and Tilney was content to read the drama by himself. Tilney was succeeded by George *Buc (who was not, as formerly thought, his nephew) in 1610, and Buc was succeeded by John Astley in 1622, who was himself succeeded by Henry Herbert in 1623. Herbert kept the job until the closure of 1642 and managed to resume some of the same functions when the playhouses opened again in the Restoration. Herbert’s office book was extant until the 19th century and it provides most of what we know about the detailed operation of the censor, although it is rather later than Shakespeare’s working life. If the Master of the Revels was sufficiently unhappy about a play he might refuse even a conditional licence, but we have only one record of Herbert exacting the extreme penalty: ‘Received of Mr Kirke for a new play which I burnt for the ribaldry that was in it…£2.’
Not infrequently a play in performance at one of the London playhouses caused offence to an important person and the players were held to account. Thomas *Nashe and Ben *Jonson’s The Isle of Dogs (now lost) was highly critical of the government and its performance at the Swan resulted in a temporary closure of all the London playhouses. Presumably the Master of the Revels could have been held responsible if such a play had been licensed, and in 1633 the players tried to blame Herbert’s negligence for the offence caused by Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady, although the Court of Commission exonerated him. An entirely separate system of censorship governed the publication of plays. Getting ‘authority’ or ‘allowance’ was a prerequisite demanded of a stationer by a Star Chamber decree of 1586, and until 1606 the authority for playbook publication was in the hands of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who governed publication generally. Unlike the performance licence which was a strict necessity, failure to secure authority for printing seems to have been casually ignored unless someone was actually offended by the work. From 1606 George Buc, later to become Master of the Revels, took over the licensing of play publication. The ‘authority’ needed for publication should not be confused with licence for printing given by the *Stationers’ Company, the guild association for the printing trade. The Stationers’ Company regulations were designed to protect the individual interests of stationers, and in particular to prevent conflicts where more than one stationer wanted to print a given text, but in deciding whether or not to give the licence the company officers would also take into consideration whether the book had authority and whether it was likely to give offence. If they were unhappy, they might license the book on condition that it not be printed until ‘further’, ‘better’, or ‘lawful’ authority had been obtained.
On 27 May 1606 an *‘Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’ was passed which made it an offence to ‘jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghost or of the Trinity’ in a stage play, on penalty of a £10 fine. As well as effectively censoring new works, this Act also required old plays to be expurgated if they were to be revived for the stage. The Act did not cover printing, however, and the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare contains a mixture of expurgated and unexpurgated plays according to the provenance of the manuscript underlying each of them. In many cases what looks like censorship of printed plays might be something else. The first, second, and third quartos of Shakespeare’s Richard II do not have the deposition scene which is present in the fourth and fifth quartos, and it is often assumed that the first three editions represent censorship of the potentially offensive scene. Much clearer evidence of censorship is the response of the lords *Cobham to what they perceived as satire of their ancestor Sir John *Oldcastle in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. Shakespeare was forced to give Sir John a new surname, and he chose Falstaff for 2 Henry IV.
Scholars are not in agreement about how, or indeed whether, to undo changes apparently forced onto unwilling dramatists, and modern socio-cultural studies of the entire system of relations between the theatre industry, the monarchy, and the Parliament (such as Richard Dutton’s) find the Master of the Revels ‘as much a friend of the actors as their overlord’. For the opposite interpretation, summarized in her book’s title, see Janet Clare.
Gabriel Egan
Central Park. See United States of America.
ceramics. Amongst the spate of Shakespeare representations produced around the *Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 were fanciful figurines of the dramatist and John *Milton made by the Derby factory c. 1765–70. Similar groups including Milton and Shakespeare were later produced in Chelsea and Bow porcelain. The production of Shakespeare ceramics increased in quantity, although not necessarily in quality, throughout the 19th century, when likenesses of the poet based on the two principal *portrait types appeared on items such as memorial plates, toby jugs, and the tops of walking sticks. The 19th century also gave rise to the growth of curious compounds involving Shakespeare portraits, such as Staffordshire figurines of c.1850, founded on *Scheemakers’s celebrated statue, but bearing the facial features and ermine cloak of Albert, Prince Consort. The production of Shakespeare-inspired ceramics declined during the 20th century. (See Shakespeariana).
Catherine Tite
‘Ceres’, the goddess of agriculture, is a part played by a spirit in The Tempest’s *masque of 4.1.
Anne Button
Cerimon, a physician of Ephesus, restores the apparently dead Thaisa, Pericles 12.
Anne Button
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de (1547–1616), Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet. His patriotic career included fighting at the battle of Lepanto (1571), and service as a government agent, before he turned to writing plays and romances. The first part of Don Quixote was published to immediate Spanish acclaim in 1605, though Cervantes also made many powerful enemies among those who feared Quixote was a lampoon of themselves. Part 2 was published in 1615. In the following year Cervantes died, within days of Shakespeare. Available in Thomas Shelton’s translation of 1612, Don Quixote also proved popular in England particularly with the dramatist John Fletcher. In 1625 Fletcher adapted Cervantes’ story La Señora Cornelia into the comedy The Chances. His reading of Don Quixote, particularly the inset story of Cardenio and Lucinda, may have inspired *Cardenio, a lost play, thought to have been a collaboration between Fletcher and Shakespeare.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Césaire, Aimé (1913–2008), Martinican poet, playwright, and political leader; founder of the black French-language négritude movement. Une tempête (1969; A Tempest, 1986) is a postcolonial critique of Prospero’s brave new world as a sinister dictatorship, with Caliban as a black slave stirring revolt.
Tom Matheson
‘Cesario’ is the name used by Viola when disguised as a eunuch in Twelfth Night.
Michael Dobson
Challis Shakespeare. This paperback edition of individual plays began to appear in 1980 as the first designed specifically for the ‘student or non-specialist reader in Australia’. It offers a modernized text with brief notes and introductions. It was named after John Henry Challis, who died in 1880, and whose bequest made possible the foundation of a number of professorships at Sydney University.
R. A. Foakes
Chalmers, Alexander (1759–1834), a prolific editor and biographer, who produced a glossary to Shakespeare in 1797 and an attractive nine-volume edition of Shakespeare in 1805, illustrated by *Fuseli. Based on Steevens’s text it reprinted prefatory material by Pope, Johnson, and Malone, and included Chalmers’s own biography of Shakespeare.
Catherine Alexander
Chalmers, George (1742–1825), a Scottish historian and antiquarian who believed in the authenticity of William Henry Ireland’s forged Shakespeare-Papers (1795). On Ireland’s confession Chalmers first wrote an Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers and subsequently justified his initial belief in the Supplementary Apology (1799). (See forgery).
Catherine Alexander
Chamber Accounts. The accounting records of the Treasurer of the Chamber who paid out for court entertainments. This is a major source of our knowledge concerning the professional players’ court performances.
Gabriel Egan
Chamberlain. He tells Gadshill that some wealthy travellers are about to set out, 1 Henry IV 2.1.
Anne Button
Chamberlain, John (1553–1627), scholar and letter-writer. After fire destroyed Shakespeare’s Globe in June 1613, the theatre was rebuilt. A letter which Chamberlain, a Londoner, sent to Alice Carleton establishes that the ‘new’ Globe, the ‘fairest’ playhouse ‘that ever was in England’, had opened its doors by 30 June 1614.
Park Honan
Chamberlain, Lord. See Lord Chamberlain.
Chamberlain’s Men/King’s Men. In May 1594 two privy counsellors, Henry Carey (the Lord Chamberlain) and Charles Howard (the Lord Admiral), established two acting companies, the Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men, and gave them exclusive rights to perform in London at the Theatre and the Rose respectively. Shakespeare appears to have been one of the new Chamberlain’s Men from the company’s inception and his plays came with him, whether in his own possession or in the hands of fellow actors who performed in them for other companies we do not know.
The difficulty of distinguishing different plays on the same theme (there appears to have been more than one ‘Hamlet’ play in the 1590s) and of identifying single plays which might be known by more than one name (as might be the case with ‘The Taming of a/the Shrew’) makes the precise limits of the early Shakespeare canon uncertain. The nucleus of the company was composed of the actor-sharers George *Bryan, Richard *Burbage, John *Heminges, Will *Kemp, Augustine *Phillips, Thomas *Pope, William Shakespeare, and William *Sly. The distinctive John Sincler was not a sharer but his career can be traced through a number of Shakespeare’s ‘thin man’ roles including Nym and Slender in 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. In 1598 Francis *Meres praised Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Titus Andronicus, and Romeo and Juliet. Together with Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and The Taming of the Shrew this makes an impressive body of work and it is hardly surprising that the Chamberlain’s Men, with such a repertory and with a state-enforced monopoly on playing on the north side of the Thames, were hugely successful. On 22 July 1596 the company’s patron, Henry Carey the Lord Chamberlain, died and Lord Cobham was made Lord Chamberlain in his place. The patronage of the company passed to Henry Carey’s son George, so for a while the company was officially Lord Hunsdon’s Men, but in early 1597 Lord Cobham also died and George Carey received the chamberlainship, thus restoring the more impressive name to his players. Also early in 1597 died James Burbage, owner of the Theatre and the Blackfriars and father to the Chamberlain’s Men’s leading actor Richard Burbage. The lease on the land underneath the Theatre expired on 13 April 1597 and sometime before September 1598 the company must have started using another venue, presumably the nearby Curtain whose owner, Henry Lanham, made a profit-sharing deal with James Burbage in 1585. Unable to settle the dispute over the site of the Theatre and unable to move into the Blackfriars playhouse built by James Burbage in 1596, the Chamberlain’s Men dismantled the timbers of the Theatre and reassembled them on a new site on Bankside to form the Globe, which opened some time between June and September 1599. James Burbage’s sons Richard and Cuthbert inherited his Theatre and Blackfriars venues but had insufficient cash to finance the Globe project alone and so they formed a syndicate to bring in John Heminges, William Kemp, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and William Shakespeare. These actors became not only sharers in the playing company but also ‘housekeepers’ owning their own venue and this alignment of interests proved to be a powerful stabilizing force in the company’s fortunes. William Sly stayed out of the deal initially but took up Pope’s share after the latter’s death in 1603. Some time after 1596 one of the original Chamberlain’s Men sharers, George Bryan, dropped out and was probably replaced by Henry Condell, who became a ‘housekeeper’ too after Phillips died in 1605.
While the Globe was being erected in 1599 the clown William Kemp left the company and was replaced by Robert Armin, whose subtler style of humour seems to be reflected in Shakespeare’s subsequent creation of reflective intellectual ‘fools’. On 25 March 1603 Queen Elizabeth died and was succeeded by the King of Scotland, James VI, who became James I of England. The new monarch showed greater interest in drama than his predecessor and on 19 May 1603 he became the company’s patron, changing their name to the King’s Men. The following winter James demanded eight performances at court from his players, more than they had ever been asked for by Elizabeth. The company also began to tour more frequently and more widely under James’s patronage, which might indicate that the new King saw his playing company as a travelling advertisement for the new reign.
In 1608 the children’s company at Blackfriars disbanded temporarily after performing a play which offended James, and their manager Henry Evans surrendered his lease on the Blackfriars back to Richard Burbage. Now with royal patronage, the King’s Men were able to occupy the playhouse James Burbage had built just before his death. The shareholding arrangement at the Globe had apparently proved successful for the players because they now made the same arrangement to run the Blackfriars. The new syndicate formed on 9 August 1608 was comprised of Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, John Heminges, William Shakespeare, William Sly, Henry Condell, and an outsider named Thomas Evans. Plague closure probably prevented the company using the Blackfriars until late in 1609 and, assuming that they opened it with a new play by their resident dramatist, the first performance in their new home was either Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale or his Cymbeline. With two playhouses at their disposal, the King’s Men were able to use the Globe from May to September and, when the weather began to make outdoor performances uncomfortable, to move to the indoor Blackfriars for the winter. Outdoor performances had traditionally used no intervals but the tradition at the Blackfriars was to have a short break, a musical interlude, after each act. The King’s Men normalized their practices by introducing act-intervals at the Globe and by moving its music room from an unseen position inside the tiring house to the balcony in the back wall of the stage. The practicalities of staging differed in the company’s indoor and outdoor venues. Woodwind instruments are suitable indoors, brass outdoors, but more pressingly the small stage of the Blackfriars made swordfighting difficult. Despite this, and presumably because they had the ingrained touring habit of accommodating to whatever space is available, the company did not immediately develop different repertories for each playhouse.
Although the Blackfriars attracted an elite audience paying high prices, the Globe’s importance to the company is attested by their decision to rebuild it ‘in far fairer manner than before’, as Edmond Howes put it, after it burned down in 1613. Shakespeare retired around this time and was replaced by the partnership of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Richard Burbage died in 1619 and was replaced by Joseph Taylor. A new patent was issued to the company on 27 March 1619, but only Heminges and Condell remained from the first patent of 1603. Heminges was by this time primarily an administrator for the company, and Condell seems to have stopped acting by the end of the 1610s. It was these two men who organized the publication of the first collected works of Shakespeare, the Folio of 1623. Playing the established masterpieces of Shakespeare and the new works of Beaumont and Fletcher, the King’s Men survived intact until the general theatrical closure of 1642.
Gabriel Egan
Chambers, Sir Edmund Kerchever (1866–1953), English civil servant and scholar. His thoroughly researched and documented Medieval Stage (2 vols., 1903), Elizabethan Stage (4 vols., 1923), and William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols., 1930) are still unsurpassed as reference works, although necessarily supplemented by later investigations, including G. E. Bentley’s continuation and development of The Elizabethan Stage into the Jacobean and Caroline era, and Samuel *Schoenbaum’s documentary life of Shakespeare. After *Malone, in the 18th century, Chambers is the greatest modern researcher into original, official documents relating to dramatic history and biography, such as the records in the Patent Rolls, the Privy Council Register, the Lansdowne Manuscripts, and the Remembrancia of the City of London. Schoenbaum, his chief successor in biographical study, regarded Chambers’s article on Shakespeare for the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the most authoritative distillation of information about Shakespeare for the next 50 years, and claimed that his British Academy lecture on The Disintegration of Shakespeare (1924) effectively disposed for a generation of attempts to reassign passages and sometimes whole works by Shakespeare. The fact that Chambers’s logical precision and clarity of mind probably exceeded his critical sensibility cannot be regarded as a serious limitation.
Tom Matheson
Chancellor, Lord. See Lord Chancellor.
Chandos portrait, oil on canvas, 552×438 mm, National Portrait Gallery. This celebrated portrait, dated c.1610, is the only likeness of Shakespeare thought to have been executed before his death. Traditionally attributed to John Taylor, the complex attribution history of this portrait includes George Vertue’s claim that the work was painted by Richard Burbage, a celebrated actor and friend of the poet and dramatist. Vertue later made a modified notebook entry (see British Library Add. MSS, 21, 111) in which he names John Taylor as the producer of the work, information its owner (then Mr Robert Keck of the Temple, London) had gleaned from the actor Thomas Betterton, who had sold him the portrait. John Taylor (first recorded 1623, d. 1651) was identified by Mary Edmond as a Renter Warden of the Painter-Stainers’ Company. Taylor is recorded in the Court Minute Books of the company several times. The Chandos portrait was bequeathed to the collection which later became the National Portrait Gallery in 1856.
The Chandos portrait (formerly a possession of the Dukes of Chandos), the most convincing of all the paintings which have been identified as contemporary likenesses of Shakespeare. It was given to the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, where it is still catalogued as item number 1.
Catherine Tite
Changeling Boy. He is the cause of the quarrel between *Oberon and *Titania, described in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.18–31.
Anne Button
Chapel Lane Cottage. In 1602 Shakespeare acquired a copyhold from Walter Getley in a cottage with a garden of about a quarter of an acre (0.1 ha) in Chapel Lane, Stratford, across the road from New Place garden. On his death it passed to his daughter Susanna.
Stanley Wells
Chapel Royal, a part of the London royal household which existed to provide a children’s choir, and later an acting troupe, for court entertainments. There was also a Windsor Chapel with which the Chapel Royal appears to have merged in 1576 when Richard Farrant, in association with the Chapel Royal Master William Hunnis, installed the Chapel Children in the first Blackfriars playhouse.
Gabriel Egan
Chaplain. See Rutland’s Tutor.
Chapman, George (c. 1559–1634), poet and dramatist, now famous as the first translator of Homer into English, but in his time a highly successful playwright and a passionate advocate in verse of the dignity of the poet’s profession. His first poems, published as The Shadow of Night (1594), recommend the cultivation of obscurity in poetry (making it comprehensible only to select readers), and the establishment of an intellectual meritocracy capable of competing with the Elizabethan social order. For some scholars, this book identifies him as a member of an exclusive group of intellectuals who surrounded Sir Walter *Ralegh. In 1592 the group was dubbed the ‘school of atheism’ by a querulous pamphleteer. One theory, now discredited, holds that Love’s Labour’s Lost (c.1594) is an attack on the Ralegh circle, and that Shakespeare alludes to this ‘school of atheism’ as the ‘school of night’ (4.3.251), with The Shadow of Night as its poetic manifesto. This theory also proposes that Chapman was the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Chapman’s second book, Ovid’s Banquet of Senses (1595), burlesques the genre of the erotic narrative poem popularized by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). Its obscurity makes it less approachable than his second contribution to the genre, a pensive continuation of *Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander (1598). Chapman’s translation of Seven Books of Homer’s Iliad (1598) transformed Homer’s heroes into Elizabethan soldiers and politicians, and helped Shakespeare do the same in Troilus and Cressida (1601–2). His best-known comedy is All Fools (1599), his most celebrated tragedy the extravagant Bussy D’Ambois (1604). Shakespeare may have modelled his late tragic heroes on the heroes of Chapman’s tragedies.
Robert Maslen
Chapuys, Eustace. See Caputius, Lord.
Charlecote. See Lucy, Sir Thomas.
Charles, Duke Frederick’s servant, is defeated in a wrestling match by Orlando, As You Like It 1.2.204.
Anne Button
Charles, Dauphin of France. He agrees to be viceroy of his dominions subject to King Henry VI after having been captured by the English, 1 Henry VI 5.7.
Anne Button
Charles I (1600–49), King of England (reigned 1625–49). In his youth he was in the shadow of his outgoing and charismatic elder brother *Henry, whose unexpected death in 1612 placed him in a position he was poorly equipped by either nature or training to fill. His father made no secret of his disappointment in his second son, and publicly declared his preference for the favourite Buckingham. Nevertheless, and despite numerous quarrels, Buckingham became Charles’s closest adviser. Together they travelled to Spain in 1623 to negotiate—unsuccessfully—a Spanish match, and his subsequent marriage in 1625, shortly after his father’s death, to the French Catholic princess Henrietta *Maria, fulfilled James’s great hope of an ecumenical alliance.
Charles was a quiet and intellectual man, shy to the point of prudishness, and instituted radical reforms in the court, the most visible having to do with decorum and his own privacy. He was a passionate connoisseur of all the arts, and amassed one of the greatest collections of paintings in Europe. Both he and his wife loved theatre, and Charles took an active interest in the management of the public stage, in 1634 even overruling Sir Henry Herbert on a question of censoring oaths in *Davenant’s The Wits. During the 1630s, the decade of prerogative rule when Charles undertook to reinvent both the nation and the monarchy, the masque and drama too underwent significant developments through royal patronage. Inigo Jones’s stage machinery was greatly refined and elaborated for productions at Whitehall, and perspective settings were for the first time regularly employed for drama. Few of the plays at the Caroline court were by Shakespeare; but among all the Shirley, *Beaumont and *Fletcher, *Massinger, Brome, Strode, Davenant, Townshend, and Suckling the King and Queen saw Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Charles’s copy of the Second Folio, now at Windsor Castle, includes annotations in his own handwriting, one of them retitling Much Ado About Nothing as ‘Beatrice and Benedict’.
With the closing of the theatres in 1642, court theatre also ended, and the subsequent defeat of the Royalist cause found Charles reading Shakespeare in prison rather than watching it performed at his palace, a practice duly noted by contemporaries. One defence of his death sentence remarked that it would never have been necessary had the King ‘but studied Scripture half so much as Ben Jonson or Shakespeare’, while Andrew Marvell construed Charles at his execution, on a stage erected outside Inigo Jones’s Whitehall Banqueting House, as a ‘royal actor’ on a ‘tragic scaffold’ (Horatian Ode, ll. 53–4). *Milton, in Eikonoklastes, deliberately used one of Charles’s favourite authors against him when he likened his alleged tyranny and feigned piety to those of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Stephen Orgel
Charles VI, King of France, accedes to the treaty in which his daughter Catherine marries King Harry (the Treaty of Troyes described by *Holinshed), Henry V 5.2. Historically, Charles VI (1368–1422) was insane, a state of affairs which destabilized the French governing elite and made Henry V’s conquest much easier, though Shakespere suppresses this fact.
Anne Button
Charmian is Cleopatra’s attendant, dying with her, Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.
Anne Button
Chatham, Clerk of. See Clerk of Chatham.
Châtillon is the ambassador from France in King John.
Anne Button
Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340–1400), poet who played a seminal role in the development of English vernacular poetry. Chaucer’s reputation in the Elizabethan age was considerable: he was heralded as the father of English poetry and as ‘our English Homer’ though he was also increasingly criticized for bawdiness, for the roughness of his verse, and for the obscurity of his language, with some critics confessing that they could not always understand him. The extent of Chaucer’s direct influence upon Elizabethan and Jacobean literature is often difficult to gauge for he was rarely quoted and maxims that we might recognize from Chaucer were often conventional. Similarly, his plots were often available from another source.
Troilus and Criseyde was the most popular of Chaucer’s works in the 16th century. Shakespeare’s play follows exactly the order of events of Chaucer’s poem (though in a considerably shorter time frame) from which it derives all its main characters. Perhaps the major difference is in tone. Where Chaucer felt obvious sympathy for Criseyde, Shakespeare’s heroine is far more ambiguous, perhaps reflecting her degraded status in contemporary versions such as Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid. Moreover, Shakespeare places the love story within a cynical account of the Trojan War, so that it becomes contaminated by its context and the two plots run increasingly parallel to one another. Shakespeare’s earlier use of the poem in Romeo and Juliet was perhaps more in sympathy with Chaucer’s conception of love tragedy. Not only verbal parallels, but the emphasis upon a malign Fortune working against the comparatively innocent lovers, suggest Romeo and Juliet’s indebtness to Chaucer’s poem.
Perhaps Chaucer’s second most popular work at this time was the Knight’s Tale. Again, its popularity was signalled by a number of poetic and dramatic adaptations, including two plays now lost called Palamon and Arcite that were apparently performed in 1566 and 1594. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare used the Knight’s Tale for some details of the courtship of Theseus and Hippolyta. But at the end of his career, Shakespeare returned to Chaucer’s tale and made it the foundation of The Two Noble Kinsmen, written in collaboration with Fletcher. The dramatists openly acknowledged their debt in the prologue which cites ‘Chaucer, of all admired’ as the one who has immortalized the story that is to be performed. Again the tone of Shakespeare’s writing in this play differs from that of Chaucer. Here, by contrast, Shakespeare takes the story more seriously than Chaucer, leaving Fletcher to add touches of levity.
Shakespeare’s reading of Chaucer was clearly wide-ranging. The Legend of Good Women, The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, the Man of Law’s Tale, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale are other works to which an influence can be traced. That the poet’s work made a lasting impression on Shakespeare is suggested by the fact that he returned to some of these poems again and again.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Cheek by Jowl. Founded in 1981 by the director Declan Donnellan and the designer Nick Ormerod, this radical, innovative group presents classical texts in lucid productions which can readily be adapted to different playing spaces. About half its output has been Shakespearian. Its celebrated all-male As You Like It in 1991–2 and 1994–5 went on British and worldwide tours to international acclaim. The partners have staged plays at the National and Royal Shakespeare Theatres as well as The Winter’s Tale in Russian at the Maly theatre, St Petersburg (1997); in the 21st century a partnership with the Chekhov International Theatre Festival has produced a number of further Russian-language Cheek by Jowl touring productions, including a striking Tempest (2011). Productions of Cymbeline (2007) and Troilus and Cressida (2008) emphasized the strong emotional core of what have often been considered problem, or at least problematic, plays, with both interpretations relying on spare sets, modern costuming, and forceful acting to make clear the human longings driving the dramas. The company’s London base is now the *Barbican theatre, formerly the metropolitan headquarters of the *Royal Shakespeare Company, and Donnellan and Ormerod also occasionally produce work beyond the company, such as their UK premiere of Angels in America for the National Theatre in 1992–3 and their very successful West End stage production of Shakespeare in Love in 2014.
Rosalind (Adrian Lester, with headscarf) dances with Celia (Simon Coates) in Cheek by Jowl’s internationally acclaimed touring production of As You Like It (1991–5).
Michael Jamieson, rev. Erin Sullivan
Chekhov, Anton (1860–1904), Russian playwright and short-story writer. Chekhov repeatedly draws on the play and character of Hamlet: for the hero of Ivanov (1887); for the failed intellectual of ‘In Moscow’ (1891) declaring ‘I am a Moscow Hamlet’; and for The Seagull (1895), with its crucial relationships between a powerful mother, her lover, a sensitive, artistic son, and a victimized heroine—explicitly using Hamlet as a form of reference.
Tom Matheson
Chéreau, Patrice (1944–2013), French actor-director. Chéreau’s career pursued a remarkably wide-ranging trajectory, beginning with his own student theatre company in the 1960s, and subsequently extending to radical perspectives on French classical drama, notable collaborations with living artists (the scenographer Peduzzi, the playwright Koltès, the composer Boulez, the actor Desarthes), and the production of films. He played the title role of Richard II (1970, Marseille, then *Odéon) as a carefree clown and pleasure-seeker in an elaborate setting dominated by complex machinery. In his Hamlet (1988, Avignon Festival, then Nanterre), the hooves of the *Ghost’s black horse resounded over an uneven wooden floor which represented an inverted fortress. He was awarded the Europe Theatre Prize in 2008, his work in Shakespeare acknowledged as part of the reason for that success.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine, rev. Will Sharpe
Chester, Robert (fl. 1601). He wrote the poem Love’s Martyr (1601), to which Shakespeare appended his most cryptic verses, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. Chester was a long-term employee of Sir John Salusbury of Denbighshire, Wales. He contributed verses to a manuscript belonging to Salusbury, in which he shows an intimate knowledge of Sir John’s affairs: they are full of obscure allusions to the women Sir John admired, and seem to mimic his master’s poems, which are also full of obscure private allusions. It is thought that most of Love’s Martyr was written to celebrate the marriage of Sir John Salusbury and Ursula Stanley in 1586. Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ derives its subject matter and cryptic tone from an allegory developed in Chester’s poem. E. A. J. Honigmann argues—not altogether convincingly—that it, too, was written at the time of the marriage, and that this furnishes support for his theory that Shakespeare was already a member of Lord Strange’s company of players by the mid-1580s. Lord Strange was Ursula Stanley’s brother, and he and his company could have visited the Salusburys to take part in the wedding celebrations. But if Chester’s and Shakespeare’s allegories were written in 1586, why were they published in 1601? The answer may be—and here Honigmann’s argument is persuasive—that the volume was issued in response to a period of crisis in Salusbury’s career. In 1601 he was in financial difficulties, involved in an expensive lawsuit, and standing for election to Parliament against a powerful local rival. Love’s Martyr may have been published in a bid to drum up support for him in London. Chester’s allegory contains what seems to be a flattering character-sketch of Sir John, and a set of patriotic verses on King Arthur, doubtless intended to link Salusbury, as a Welshman, with the dominant Tudor myth. A number of prominent poets were invited to add poetic postscripts to Chester’s text: they included Ben *Jonson, George *Chapman, and John *Marston, as well as Shakespeare. If it was intended to help improve Sir John’s fortunes, it failed. He died in debt.
Robert Maslen
Chettle, Henry (c. 1560–c. 1607), printer, pamphleteer, and playwright. He started life as a stationer’s apprentice, then went into partnership with the printer John Danter in the 1590s. In 1592 he transcribed, from a manuscript written by the dying Robert *Greene, the last of Greene’s prose works, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, which Danter published. The pamphlet attacked Christopher *Marlowe as a devious atheist and Shakespeare as a plagiarist and hack. It would seem from the preface to Chettle’s prose satire Kindheart’s Dream (1592) that Marlowe and Shakespeare thought he had written Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit himself, though he denied it vigorously. Modern critical opinion tends to share their suspicions. Chettle may also have rewritten sections of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for the pirated edition printed by Danter in 1597. He went into more legitimate partnership with Shakespeare when they worked together, perhaps in the mid-1590s, on revisions to the play Sir Thomas More, which Chettle originally co-wrote (it is thought) with Anthony *Munday. He wrote a huge number of other plays—mostly in collaboration—but very few survive.
Robert Maslen
Chetwood, William Rufus (d. 1766), bookseller, dramatist, and long-serving prompter at Drury Lane and Smock Alley, Dublin (where his pupils included Barry and Macklin), whose General History of the Stage (1749) is a source for the story that Davenant was Shakespeare’s son. His British Theatre (1750), written during a period of imprisonment for debt and viewed with contempt, includes a list of Shakespeare quartos of which many are spurious.
Catherine Alexander
chiasmus, a figure of speech in which two terms are repeated in reverse order:
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
(Richard II, 5.5.49)
Chris Baldick
Chichele (Chicheley), Henry See Canterbury, Archbishop of.
Chichester Festival Theatre. It opened in 1962 as a summer enterprise in emulation of Tyrone *Guthrie’s theatre at Stratford, Ontario. Its hexagonal auditorium and thrust stage make it ideal for Elizabethan plays, but although there have been occasional productions of Shakespeare, its middle-class audiences seem happy with starry revivals of Wilde and Coward.
Michael Jamieson
Child, Blackamoor. See Blackamoor Child.
childbirth and child-rearing. Shakespeare’s plays repeatedly testify to early modern society’s enormous material and psychic investments in the bearing and raising of children. Ellen *Terry lamented Shakespeare’s tendency to depict parent–child relationships only as father–daughter and mother–son dyads: small children are nearly always boys (Arthur in King John, Young Martius in Coriolanus); daughters more often figure as young adults, testing the limits of paternal authority or simultaneously liberated and imperilled by a father’s death (Desdemona in Othello, Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well). The plays explore maternity and paternity primarily from the point of view of anxious parents. They are as interested in testing the fiction of paternity (and exploring the tensions that arise from its ultimate unknowability, in an age before genetic testing) as in representing motherhood.
In Shakespeare’s time childbirth and child-rearing constituted a realm shared by adult women and small children, whose gender was not fully differentiated until the age of about 7. Yet, with a few exceptions (Titania and the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermione and Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale), Shakespeare is less concerned to depict this realm than to explore the dramatic resonance of anxious male fantasies about it, and to use the danger and risk that childbirth entailed for both mother and infant as tropes that convey the male experience of vulnerability (King Lear, Pericles, The Tempest).
Kate Chedgzoy
Children of Paul’s. See children’s companies.
Children of the Chapel. See children’s companies.
Children of the King’s Revels. See children’s companies.
Children of Windsor. See children’s companies.
children’s companies. Rosencrantz’s speech about ‘an eyrie of children, little eyases’ (Hamlet 2.2.340) was probably written in 1606–8 and refers to the Blackfriars Boys company whose success—and the politically dangerous drama it was based upon—threatened the King’s Men. Venues for performances by all-boy playing companies were built in St Paul’s cathedral in 1575 (used by Paul’s Boys) and in the Old Buttery of the Blackfriars building in 1576 (used by the Chapel Children). The boys who performed in these companies were drawn from the choirs of St Paul’s and the Chapel Royal in Windsor and their managers maintained the legal fiction that they were merely continuing their education by acting. Songs and dances were a major part of the performance in the plays performed by these early companies, and the subject matter seems to have been largely classical. When John *Lyly began writing for an amalgamation of Paul’s Boys and the Chapel Children the drama became more sophisticated and introduced a number of innovations (especially themes of cross-dressing and mistaken identity) which influenced Shakespeare. In 1584 the first Blackfriars playhouse was closed by its landlord, but the Paul’s continued until 1590 when, in circumstances still mysterious (probably related to Lyly’s involvement in the Martin Marprelate controversy), it too closed.
In 1599 the Paul’s playhouse reopened in another part of the same building and in 1600 Richard Burbage leased the second Blackfriars playhouse to the same Henry Evans who had managed the first Blackfriars, and all-boy performances resumed. The drama of this revival was markedly different from the earlier phase: strong sexual innuendo predominated in plays such as Jonson, Marston, and Chapman’s Eastward Ho and Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan for the Blackfriars Boys and surprising violence in Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge for the Paul’s Boys. The Paul’s and Blackfriars playhouses ceased in 1608, the former apparently after being denounced by puritan William Crashawe and the latter because a production of Chapman’s Conspiracy of Byron enraged the French ambassador. The Blackfriars Boys continued at the Whitefriars playhouse. Another company of children, Beeston’s Boys, flourished at the Cockpit, Drury Lane, from 1637 to 1642.
Gabriel Egan
‘Child Rowland to the dark tower came’, fragment of an old Scottish ballad quoted by Edgar in The Tragedy of King Lear 3.4.170. Child Rowland was a son of King Arthur.
Jeremy Barlow
Chimes at Midnight. See Welles, Orson.
China has been a member in the world Shakespeare community for over a century. Being one of a small, select number of Western literary figures whose work was introduced into China at the beginning of the 20th century, Shakespeare has won unusual popularity with over a billion Chinese people and has been regarded as one of the few world-famous literary giants who have given people insights into themselves and enriched their barren lives, and in whose work people have found wisdom, happiness, and entertainment. In the first issue of Shakespeare Studies published in 1983 by the *Shakespeare Society of China, officially founded a year later, Shakespeare is said to have attained the same prestige as Karl *Marx, the great teacher of ideology to the Chinese in the 20th century, and this is the most enthusiastic praise the Chinese have ever given to a man of letters outside China.
From the very beginning, Shakespeare translation has been the chief means of introducing Shakespeare to Chinese readers and also the basis for staging Shakespeare’s plays and for Shakespeare criticism in China. In 1903, the works of Shakespeare became known for the first time in China through the *translation of 10 stories from Charles and Mary *Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare by an unknown translator into classical Chinese, and a better known edition by Lin Shu of the same source followed the next year, which included all of the 20 stories. In 1922, Tian Han, a noted playwright himself, published his rendering of Hamlet, which was the first attempt to translate a Shakespeare play into modern Chinese. Since then, all of Shakespeare’s plays have been rendered into Chinese and some have appeared in over a dozen different versions by various hands. Two of the complete translations deserve special credit: Zhu *Shenghao (1947, 1978) and Liang *Shiqiu (1967). In 2014, a new Complete Works of Shakespeare was published with Fang Ping as the chief compiler and main translator. The new edition attempts to recapture the original style of Shakespeare’s plays through attempts at prose-for-prose and verse-for-verse translation. It also introduces The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, and ‘A Funeral Elegy’, of controversial authorship, into the canon. In addition, there are a number of translations of Shakespeare’s complete sonnets with or without other poems.
Records show that the staging of Shakespeare in China began in 1913–15, but the first professional theatrical performance of a Shakespeare play was that of The Merchant of Venice in Shanghai in 1930. In 1964, Nanjing University held China’s first-ever campus Shakespeare festival when the professors together with students of the English faculty performed scenes from four of Shakespeare’s plays. Since the 1980s, stage performances of Shakespeare’s plays have reached a wide audience in China. The performance of The Merchant of Venice by Beijing Youth Art Theatre, which held about 200 shows between 1980 and 1982, offers an impressive, but not isolated, example of the reception of his plays on the Chinese stage. In 1986, a Shakespeare festival was jointly held in Beijing and Shanghai, and 1994 witnessed another one in the two cities, both festivals being organized by the Shakespeare Society of China. Currently, many colleges around China have their own Shakespeare drama clubs and hold regular campus Shakespeare performances. Since 2005, the Chinese University of Hong Kong has been hosting its Shakespeare Festival, an annual Shakespeare performance competition between a dozen finalist teams from colleges and universities all over China.
In addition to huaju, which bears a close resemblance to a Western drama and is the normal means of staging Shakespeare’s plays, there have been continuous and numerous experiments to adapt Shakespeare’s plays to Peking opera and other Chinese local dramatic forms.
Shakespeare found his way into Chinese classrooms in the 1930s, and an excerpt of the court trial scene from The Merchant of Venice is included in China’s senior high school Chinese textbooks for compulsory reading. Now seminars on Shakespeare are usually offered to English majors at the graduate level in Chinese universities and colleges, while translated versions of Shakespeare’s plays are often included in the reading list for students majoring in Chinese literature or foreign literature.
Shakespeare criticism in China did not commence until after 1949, although the first Chinese critical essay on Shakespeare appeared in 1918. Since mainland China remained, from 1949 to the late 1970s, rather isolated, the glorious cultural heritage of the Chinese people and traditional Chinese thinking surprisingly did not seem to bear a significant influence on the interpretation of Shakespeare by early Chinese scholars and critics. On the contrary, a political and ideological approach was the dominant mode in Shakespeare criticism in mainland China up to the early 1980s. The basic principles followed in the criticism of modern Chinese literature—chiefly ‘socialist realism’—were adopted by the majority of early Chinese critics of Shakespeare. For those critics, the ‘purpose’ of writing was profoundly important for their discussion of Shakespeare. They believed that Shakespeare was moulding and guiding public opinion for the rising bourgeois class, a conclusion drawn chiefly from their analyses of the age the dramatist lived in, of his life, and of the tone of his plays. In most of the critical essays published before the late 1980s, discussion of Shakespearian ‘themes’ usually took up the most space and, according to those critics, there was always a fundamental thesis in every one of Shakespeare’s plays, often a political and ideological one, which reflects the playwright’s bourgeois standpoint and his belief in humanism. The rigid limitations of this political and ideological approach to Shakespeare had hindered greatly Chinese critics and had often resulted in rather biased interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays.
A change began to appear in criticism published in mainland China in the late 1980s and especially in the 1990s, when China opened its door more and more to Western technology and economic structures and Chinese writers and critics obtained easier access to world Shakespeare scholarship. The founding of the Shakespeare Society of China in 1984 and the 1986 and the 1994 Shakespeare festivals further stimulated Shakespeare studies both in literary and dramatic circles in China. Chinese critics have since increased their interest in some much discussed subjects in Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet’s indecision, the theme of forgiveness, and Shakespeare’s emphasis on human interests and values. There has been among Chinese critics more tolerance for the aesthetic concepts of the West and fewer scornful attacks on Western Shakespearian scholarship than was the case in the 1950s and early 1960s. A group of younger scholars and critics, obviously aware of the political and ideological approach to Shakespeare, has proposed to re-evaluate the early criticism published in China, to treat Shakespeare’s plays as dramatic art, to absorb the essence of world Shakespearian scholarship in the last several hundred years, and to develop a Chinese interpretation of the plays on the basis of a Chinese sensibility.
The 21st century has seen new developments in China’s Shakespeare criticism, with increasing interaction between Chinese and world Shakespeare scholars and events. In addition to widening the scope of Shakespeare studies from various theoretical lens, recent achievements have also included medium- to large-sized Shakespeare dictionaries, monographs on Chinese and filmic adaptations of Shakespeare, and histories and collections of Chinese Shakespeare criticism.
Qixin He, rev. Chong Zhang
Chiron is the younger of Tamora’s two surviving villainous sons in Titus Andronicus.
Anne Button
Cholmeley, Richard, company patron, dates of birth and death unknown. A group of recusant players under Cholmeley’s patronage toured in Yorkshire from 1606 to at least 1616 using only printed play-texts for their repertory. When tried for sedition these players insisted (falsely, it turned out) that they had not strayed from the printed texts, apparently thinking that this gave them a kind of surrogate licence from the Master of the Revels who had licensed the original manuscripts underlying the printing. One of the actors reported that at Candlemas 1609–10 they performed ‘Perocles prince of Tire’, which was undoubtedly the work of Shakespeare and Wilkins, and ‘Kinge Lere’, which might have been Shakespeare’s (his quarto was the most recent) but equally might have been the old chronicle history of King Leir printed in 1605.
Gabriel Egan
chorus, the speaker and the part spoken by an extra-dramatic character who supplies background information and commentary in the drama. In Shakespeare’s Henry V and Pericles a chorus provides a series of links within the drama, but usually the role is more limited: in Romeo and Juliet the chorus precedes Acts 1 and 2 only, and in The Winter’s Tale ‘Time, the Chorus’ bridges the sixteen-year gap between Acts 3 and 4. Inductions (such as Rumour’s at the start of 2 Henry IV) and prologues (as before Troilus and Cressida) fulfil the choric scene-setting function, but those which exhort the audience to attend carefully (such as before All Is True (Henry VIII) and The Two Noble Kinsmen) may have been used only on the first performance.
Gabriel Egan
Christian criticism has several aspects. First, in identifying specifically Christian references, applications, and meanings in Shakespeare’s works. Living within an official though turbulent Christian culture, Shakespeare was certainly thoroughly familiar with the Bible, probably in its Bishops’ Bible translation (1568). One play title (Measure for Measure) is directly adapted from the Gospel of St Matthew (see Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge, 1935). Second, in exploring the highly charged theological questions of good and evil, salvation and damnation, sin and expiation which are central to the tragedies, while the so-called Romances resonate with the words ‘grace’ and ‘faith’ (see R. Mushat Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine, 1963). Third, in demonstrating Shakespeare’s personal sectarian allegiance, supposedly Catholic, established during a putative stay in Lancashire in the 1580s. Many critics respond to Shakespeare’s sceptical humanism, but Peter Milward’s various books, including Shakespeare’s Religious Background (1973), plead the alternative case. See also religion.
Tom Matheson
Christopher, Sir. He is a priest who takes a message from Lord Stanley to Richmond, Richard III 4.5 (based on Christopher Urswick (d. 1521).
Anne Button
chronology. The chronological ordering of the plays in the Shakespeare canon is based on various strands of interconnecting evidence: references in datable sources such as Francis Meres’s list of twelve of Shakespeare’s plays in Palladis Tamia (1598), records of court performances, Henslowe’s records of performances at the Rose playhouse, entries in the Stationers’ Register, dates on the title pages, and topical allusions in the plays themselves (such as the double eclipse of sun and moon in 1605 alluded to in King Lear). Since Shakespeare’s habits of writing appear to have changed over time, scholars have brought different types of internal evidence—changes in verse, metrics, imagery, vocabulary—to bear on chronological problems with varying degrees of success. Edmond *Malone, for instance, was the first to observe that Shakespeare used more rhymed verse in his early plays than in his later works, but subsequent scholars have pointed out that while Malone’s dictum is generally true, Shakespeare’s earliest plays actually contain very little rhymed verse.
Although there is general scholarly consensus about which plays fall into Shakespeare’s early, middle, and late periods, there is substantial disagreement about the precise dates for individual plays. In a classic study of ‘The Problem of Chronology’ (1930), E. K. Chambers argued that Shakespeare’s first two plays, dating from 1590–1, were The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) and Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), and that The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew were written several years later, in 1593–5. The editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare (1986), having undertaken a major reassessment of the evidence for chronological placement, agree with Chambers that Shakespeare’s earliest plays were indeed written in 1590–1 but conclude that his first two efforts were The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew.
The list below gives the plays and poems in the order of composition proposed by the Oxford Shakespeare (with the proviso that most of the dates are necessarily provisional rather than definitive):
| 1590–1 | The Two Gentlemen of Verona |
| 1590–1 | The Taming of the Shrew |
| 1591 | The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) |
| 1591 | Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) |
| 1592 | 1 Henry VI |
| 1592–3 | Titus Andronicus |
| 1592–3 | Richard III |
| 1592–3 | Venus and Adonis |
| 1593–4 | The Rape of Lucrece |
| 1594 | The Comedy of Errors |
| 1594–5 | Love’s Labour’s Lost |
| 1595 | Richard II |
| 1595 | Romeo and Juliet |
| 1595 | A Midsummer Night’s Dream |
| 1596 | King John |
| 1596–7 | The Merchant of Venice |
| 1596–7 | 1 Henry IV |
| 1597–8 | The Merry Wives of Windsor |
| 1597–8 | 2 Henry IV |
| 1598 | Much Ado About Nothing |
| 1598–9 | Henry V |
| 1599 | Julius Caesar |
| 1599–1600 | As You Like It |
| 1600–1 | Hamlet |
| 1601 | Twelfth Night |
| 1602 | Troilus and Cressida |
| 1603–4 | Sir Thomas More |
| 1603 | Measure for Measure |
| 1603–4 | Othello |
| 1604–5 | All’s Well That Ends Well |
| 1605 | Timon of Athens |
| 1605–6 | The History of King Lear |
| 1606 | Macbeth |
| 1606 | Antony and Cleopatra |
| 1607 | Pericles |
| 1608 | Coriolanus |
| 1609 | The Winter’s Tale |
| 1610 | Cymbeline |
| 1611 | The Tempest |
| 1613 | All Is True (Henry VIII) |
Eric Rasmussen
Cibber, Colley (1671–1757), a successful actor, manager, and dramatist who began his theatrical career playing small parts for the United Company at Drury Lane. He achieved prominence in the lead role of his own *adaptation of Richard III (1699), and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1730. Endlessly involved in feuds and theatre politics, his Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740) is a valuable source of stage history. He played Gloucester, Iago, Edmund, and Wolsey but, best suited to comedy, Shallow was considered his finest role. His final appearance was as Pandulph in his adaptation of King John, Papal Tyranny.
Catherine Alexander
Cibber, Susannah Maria (1714–55), an actress, who was the sister of Thomas Arne and briefly, scandalously, the second wife of Theophilus Cibber. She began her stage career as a singer and became a fine dramatic actress, famed for conveying tenderness, whose roles included Desdemona, Isabella, Lady Anne, and a particularly affecting Constance. Her performances for *Garrick at Drury Lane, including playing opposite him as Ophelia, Cordelia, and Perdita, were considered her best Shakespearian work, although her Juliet to Spranger *Barry’s Romeo at Covent Garden was well received.
Catherine Alexander
Cibber, Theophilus (1703–58), actor, manager, and writer whose career, which began in 1720 when he joined the Drury Lane company co-managed by his father, was often driven by expediency and overshadowed by an outrageous private life and theatre politics. An early role was Prince Edward in his own adaptation of Henry VI (1723), and a style best suited to comic playing (Lucio, Slender, Pistol) did not preclude him attempting Romeo to his 14-year-old daughter Jenny’s Juliet (in his version published in 1748) or Othello to her Desdemona. He drowned in a shipwreck travelling to perform in Dublin.
Catherine Alexander
Cicero is a senator in Julius Caesar (not included in the conspiracy). Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc) was a philosopher, orator, and statesman.
Anne Button
Cimber, Metellus. See Metellus Cimber.
cinema. See Shakespeare on sound film; silent films.
Cinna is one of the conspirators in Julius Caesar (L. Cornelius Cinna the younger).
Anne Button
Cinna the poet, a friend of Caesar’s, is mistaken for Cinna the conspirator and killed by the plebeians, Julius Caesar 3.3.
Anne Button
cinquepace (sinkapace), one of a family of couple dances imported from France and Italy, including the *galliard, tourdion, and *la volta; also an alternative name for the galliard. The unit of five steps implied by the name fits to a six-beat bar: four springing kicks on the first four beats, with a jump through the fifth beat, timed so as to land on the sixth beat.
Jeremy Barlow
Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi) (1504–73), Italian dramatist and professor of rhetoric. Cinthio wrote a number of Senecan-style tragedies and some dramatic criticism but was best known in England as the author of the Hecatommithi (1565?), a collection of prose tales narrated by travellers on board a ship. Cinthio’s work may have inspired Shakespeare to write two plays back to back using tales from the Hecatommithi. The tragi-comic ‘Disdemona and the Moor’ served as the main source for Othello. The story of Epitia provided the framework for Measure for Measure. Verbal similarities between the Italian ‘Disdemona’ and Shakespeare’s tragedy, and the fact that no English translation seems to have existed, suggest that Shakespeare read the Hecatommithi in Italian. Measure for Measure is more obviously indebted to an English adaptation of Cinthio’s tale, George Whetstone’s play Promos and Cassandra, published in 1578.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Citizen of Angers. He refuses the feuding kings in King John entrance to the town, but suggests the marriage of Louis the Dauphin to Blanche as a basis for peace, 2.1.
Anne Button
Citizen of Antium. He directs the disguised Coriolanus to Aufidius’ house, Coriolanus 4.4.6–11.
Michael Dobson
citizens of the watch appear in Romeo and Juliet 3.1 at the murders of *Mercutio and Tybalt.
Anne Button
cittern, a wire-strung instrument played with a plectrum, associated with popular music. It might have a grotesque carved head, hence the reference in Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.604.
Jeremy Barlow
City. The historic core of London, the City is the administrative and financial centre of the capital, also known as the Square Mile. The modern boundaries of the City reflect those imposed by the Roman and medieval walls which protected early London. In Shakespeare’s day the City’s opposition to theatrical performances within its jurisdiction, from the 1570s onwards, led to the exile of the playhouses to outlying districts such as Shoreditch and *Bankside.
Simon Blatherwick
city comedy, a kind of satirical drama prominent in the early 17th century, of which Ben *Jonson was the chief exponent. It exposes the follies and vices of London life, as in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass (1614, 1616), or Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605).
Chris Baldick
Ciulei, Liviu (1923–2011), Romanian director-designer who has staged Shakespeare internationally. In English his Hamlet (Washington, 1978) was notable, as were The Tempest, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream during his tenure as artistic director at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in the 1980s.
Dennis Kennedy
Clarence, Duke of. (1) George, Duke of Clarence (1449–78), deserts his elder brother Edward (who later becomes King Edward IV) in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 2.6 but they are reunited, 5.1. In Richard III Edward has him imprisoned, and he is stabbed by two murderers employed by his younger brother Richard (who becomes Richard III), 1.4.263. (2) Thomas Duke of Clarence (c. 1388–1421), younger brother of Henry V, appears briefly in 2 Henry IV and Henry V.
Anne Button
Clarence’s Daughter. See Clarence’s son.
Clarence’s Son (Edward, Earl of Warwick, 1475–99), with his sister (Margaret Plantagenet, 1473–1541), laments his father’s death, Richard III 2.2.
Anne Button
Claribel, Alonso’s daughter, is married to the King of Tunis in the elaborate pre-history of The Tempest. She is absent from the play itself.
Anne Button
Clark, Jaime (1844–75), translator of Shakespeare into Spanish, of British origin. He and Guillermo *Macpherson were the first to render Shakespeare’s blank verse systematically into Spanish verse (normally hendecasyllabic lines, as well as the rhymed lines as such). By his untimely death at the age of 31, Clark’s unfinished Obras de Shakespeare in five volumes (1872–76?) contained three tragedies and seven comedies.
A. Luis Pujante
Clark, William George (1821–78), English academic, one of three editors (with W. Aldis Wright and John Glover) of the first *Cambridge edition of Shakespeare (9 vols., 1863–6), including variant readings from all early and some later editions. Its one-volume version, the Globe (1864), created a reference standard for almost a century.
Tom Matheson
Clarke, Charles Cowden (1787–1877), English writer, friend of John Keats and partner with wife Mary in a series of enthusiastic studies of Shakespeare, including his own lectures on Shakespeare’s Characters, Chiefly those Subordinate (1863); their joint edition of Shakespeare (1868); and their Shakespeare Key, Unlocking the Treasures of his Style (1879).
Tom Matheson
Clarke, Mary Cowden (1809–98), partner of husband Charles in several Shakespeare studies, including her long superseded Complete Concordance (1845), and Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (3 vols., 1850–2), often mocked for its attempt to recreate a prehistory for Shakespeare’s female characters, but nevertheless an early manifestation of feminine if not feminist concerns.
Tom Matheson
Claudio. (1) He jilts Hero at the altar (Much Ado About Nothing 4.1) but marries her in the end. (2) See Varrus. (3) Isabella’s brother is sentenced to death for impregnating Juliet in Measure for Measure.
Anne Button
Claudius in Julius Caesar. See Varrus.
Claudius, King, the King of Denmark who has murdered his brother and married his brother’s wife Gertrude (Hamlet’s parents). He is called Fengo in the Historiae Danicae of Saxo *Grammaticus.
Anne Button
Clayton, John. In March 1600 a William Shakespeare successfully sued John Clayton, a ‘yeoman’ of Wellington, Bedfordshire, for a debt of £7 apparently incurred in 1592. *Chambers, like Sidney *Lee, sees no reason for identifying this Shakespeare with the dramatist, but gives no cogent reasons for not doing so.
Stanley Wells
Clemen, Wolfgang (1909–90), German academic, influential as founder of the Shakespeare library in Munich, and through works on imagery and soliloquy translated into English: The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (1951, expanded from Shakespeares Bilder, 1936), English Tragedy before Shakespeare (1961), A Commentary on Shakespeare’s Richard III (1968), Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art (1974), and Shakespeare’s Soliloquies (1987).
Tom Matheson
Cleomenes is a Sicilian lord who with another lord, Dion, is sent by Leontes to seek the oracle to ascertain the truth about Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.
Anne Button
Cleon is the husband of Dioniza and Governor of Tarsus, where Pericles relieves a famine, Pericles 4.
Anne Button
Cleopatra. See Antony and Cleopatra.
Anne Button
Clerk of Chatham. He is executed by Cade, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 4.2.109. He says his name is Emmanuel, 4.2.98.
Anne Button
Clifford, John. See Clifford, Young.
Clifford, Old Lord. One of King Henry’s supporters, he successfully appeals to Cade’s rebels in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 4.7, but dies in combat with York, 5.3. Thomas Clifford (1414–55) was the 12th Baron.
Anne Button
Clifford, Thomas. See Clifford, Old Lord.
Clifford, Young (Lord). Young Clifford vows vengeance on the House of York for the death of his father, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) 5.3. Now called Lord Clifford he stabs the Earl of Rutland in Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 1.3; with Queen Margaret kills the captured York, 1.4; but dies taunted by his enemies, 2.6. John Clifford (c. 1435–61) was the 13th Baron.
Anne Button
Clifford Chambers, a village about a mile and a half (2.5 km) south of Stratford, home of Lord and Lady Henry Rainsford, close friends of the poet Michael *Drayton (1563–1631), who was probably a friend of Shakespeare.
Stanley Wells
Clink. The Liberty of the Clink, within which Shakespeare lived from at least 1596 to 1597, was the name given to the manor of the Bishop of Winchester on *Bankside, with its first usage being recorded in 1473. The name is thought to emanate from the prison in the manor, although the earliest use of Clink for the bishops’ prison is in 1486. By Shakespeare’s day the name usually referred to the prison—the nearest to the Bankside theatres—which was particularly associated with debtors.
Simon Blatherwick
Clive, Catherine (1711–85), an actress universally known as Kitty, who was most admired for her work in comedy. She played Catherine (1755–6) in *Garrick’s adaptation Catherine and Petruchio. Earlier roles included Bianca, Ariel, and an ill-received Portia to *Macklin’s Shylock in his restoration of the unadapted The Merchant of Venice.
Catherine Alexander
Clopton family, a prominent Stratford family. Hugh (d. c.1496), lord mayor of London in 1491 (but not known to have been knighted), built *New Place, which Shakespeare bought in 1597; Sir William (1538–92) owned property in Hampton Lucy where John Shakespeare was a tenant. Clopton Manor, just outside Stratford, became the family home early in the 15th century; it was used by the conspirators in the *Gunpowder Plot (1605). In the later part of the 17th century New Place came back into the family’s possession. In 1702 Sir John Clopton replaced it with a new house.
Stanley Wells
Cloten, the son of Cymbeline’s Queen, is beheaded by Guiderius, Cymbeline 4.2.
Anne Button
clowns. (1) The Two Gentlemen of Verona. See Lance and Speed. (2) A clown takes a message from Titus to Saturninus, Titus Andronicus 4.3; Saturninus orders his execution, 4.4. (3) Love’s Labour’s Lost. See Costard. (4) The Gravedigger and his companion are described as ‘two clowns’, Hamlet 5.1. One of them quibbles with Hamlet. (5) The Merchant of Venice. See Lancelot. (6) Twelfth Night. See Feste. (7) Measure for Measure. See Pompey. (8) Othello’s clown dismisses Cassio’s musicians Othello 3.1 and quibbles with Desdemona 3.4. (9) All’s Well That Ends Well. See Lavatch. (10) The ‘Rural fellow’ (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.229) who brings the asp to Cleopatra, 5.2, is a clown. (11) The Old Shepherd’s son who witnesses Antigonus’ demise, The Winter’s Tale 3.3, and becomes Autolycus’s dupe, 4.3, 4.4, and 5.2, is a clown. See also fools; Trinculo (The Tempest); Yorick (Hamlet).
Anne Button
Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare A Jacobean oil painting on panel by an unknown artist which came to public attention in 2009. It has descended for centuries in the Cobbe family and hung since the 18th century in their Irish home, Newbridge, Co. Dublin, without being identified as Shakespeare. Many copies are known, several of near-contemporary date. Its authenticity has been disputed, but three of the early copies have traditions as portraits of Shakespeare. After scientific investigation, including tree-ring dating, X-ray imaging, infra-red reflectography and tracings carried out by independent experts, it was established that the Cobbe is the original of the group and that the panel is the correct age for a painting of c.1610. The earliest copy is owned by the *Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; one is in private hands; a third, known as the ‘Janssen’ and held by the *Folger Shakespeare Library, bears the date 1610 and had long been accepted as a genuine portrait of Shakespeare until the 1940s, when it fell from grace because of an alteration to the hair line. This was supposed to have been effected in the 18th century in order to make it look more like the *Droeshout engraving. It is now known that this alteration must have been carried out during the 17th century, since its altered appearance is recorded in another 17th-century copy (private collection). All the later copies follow the altered appearance.
The Cobbe portrait may have belonged to Henry *Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of *Southampton, since it descended together with a portrait of the youthful Earl himself, almost certainly inherited by the Cobbes from the Earl’s childless great-granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Norton, née Noel, who married a cousin of Charles Cobbe (1686–1765), later Archbishop of Dublin. The portrait of the Earl was long believed to depict a woman member of the family, Lady Norton, but was definitively identified in 2002 as a portrait of the androgynous-looking Earl around the age of 19. He was a patron of painters as well as of writers, and this raises the additional possibility that he may have commissioned the Cobbe portrait. Though the painting differs in some respects from the Droeshout engraving, its overall composition shows a striking similarity with it. Droeshout may have used one of the versions of the portrait as his source while modifying it in the interests of economy. The original painting bears an inscription ‘Principum Amicitias!’—referring to the dangers of alliances between princes or great men—which is a quotation from an ode by the Roman poet Horace addressed to a playwright. It currently hangs at Hatchlands, Surrey, a National Trust property.
Stanley Wells
Cobbler of Preston, The. The playwright Charles Johnson began work on a short, anti-Jacobite satire derived from the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew early in 1716: before it had even opened at Drury Lane, however, another such play with the same title and source had already been written by Christopher Bullock, rehearsed and premièred at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Michael Dobson
Cobham, Dame Eleanor. See Gloucester, Duchess of.
Cobham, Lord. See Oldcastle, Sir John.
Cobham, William Brooke, 7th Lord (d. 1597), Lord Chamberlain (August 1596–March 1597), a descendant of Sir John Oldcastle, Lollard martyr, and model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff. The Brooke family’s Puritanical leanings lent added gall to this defamatory use of Oldcastle’s name, which was changed to Falstaff after their objections.
Cathy Shrank
Cobweb is one of *Titania’s fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anne Button
Cockpit theatre. See audiences; Beeston, Christopher; children’s companies; companies, playing; Davenant, Sir William; theatres, Elizabethan and Jacobean.
Cockpit-at-Court. See court performances; Globe reconstructions; Palladio, Andrea.
Cognitive poetics, a branch of literary criticism focusing on the imaginative and even neural effects poetry has on the mind and brain. With its emphasis on close reading and literary form, cognitive poetics bears similarities to reader-response theory and the *New Criticism, though its frequent and often sustained engagement with the science of the brain simultaneously sets it apart. Influenced in large part by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphor, or the idea that metaphor is not ‘simply’ a rhetorical device, but rather a deep structure of human meaning-making embedded in almost all forms of speech, scholars of cognitive poetics often focus on how the brain makes sense of complex language patterns and in turn how poets manipulate those patterns to create powerful aesthetic and emotional effects. In Shakespeare studies, such scholars have focused on how Shakespeare’s linguistic coinages and atypical use of language (turning a noun into a verb, for instance) upend reader expectation and stimulate new forms of meaning in the mind and brain. Some scholars have also considered such issues in relation to early modern rhetoric and poetics, as well as contemporary understandings of the mind-body relationship.
Erin Sullivan
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772–1834), English poet and critic. Coleridge’s thoughts and writings on Shakespeare were never collected or collated in any systematic manner, being scattered over several notebooks, mentioned in letters, written in the margin of play-texts, or reported at second hand from conversations and lectures. Editors, including H. N. Coleridge (in Literary Remains, 1836–9), T. M. Raysor (Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols., 1930), and Terence Hawkes (Coleridge’s Writings on Shakespeare, 1959; repr. as Coleridge on Shakespeare, 1969), have variously attempted to achieve textual accuracy, the imposition of order, selection and emphasis, and accessibility. It is likely that Coleridge had composed nearly all of his own poetry before expressing the full range of his admiration for Shakespeare. A letter of 6 December 1800 refers to the ‘divinity of Shakespeare’, and thereafter his tone is almost uniformly ardent and celebratory, matching and possibly emulating the enthusiasm of his German contemporary August Wilhelm *Schlegel, who had begun his classic translation of Shakespeare into German in 1796 (Coleridge himself visited Germany from September 1798 to July 1799). The original plan of his first course of lectures was to devote five to ‘the genius and writings of Shakespeare’, in comparison with his contemporaries. In practice, the aesthetic and ethical elements (taste, imagination, fancy, passion) predominated over the historical and comparative, Coleridge arguing that Shakespeare was not only a natural dramatist and creator of character (as the 18th century was fully aware), but also a great poet, his works growing organically from the power of language itself.
Tom Matheson
Coleville, Sir John, ‘a famous rebel’ (4.2.61) arrested by Falstaff, 2 Henry IV 4.2.
Anne Button
Colicos, John (1928–2000), Canadian actor. Having understudied at the *Old Vic in London and acted in the States he joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre in his native *Canada, where from 1961 his roles included Aufidius to the Coriolanus of Paul *Scofield, Caliban, and an admired King Lear. He was Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Timon of Athens when the Canadian company visited *Chichester.
Michael Jamieson
collaboration. Nearly half of the plays written for the public theatres during the early modern period were products of joint authorship. External evidence indicates that Shakespeare collaborated with John *Fletcher on at least two plays: both the Stationers’ Register and the title page of the first *quarto (1634) of The Two Noble Kinsmen attribute the play to ‘William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’, and the entry for the lost play Cardenio lists the authors as ‘Mr Fletcher & Shakespeare’. Stylistic evidence strongly suggests that Fletcher and Shakespeare worked together on All Is True (Henry VIII). Similar internal evidence derived from vocabulary tests, image clusters, verbal and structural parallels, metrical tests, stylometry, and function word analysis reveals that Shakespeare may have collaborated with a number of other dramatists throughout his career: with Thomas *Middleton on Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure (although Middleton is more likely to have acted as reviser after Shakespeare’s death rather than collaborator on the latter two); with George Peele on Titus Andronicus; with Henry *Chettle, Thomas *Dekker, and Thomas *Heywood on Sir Thomas More; with George *Wilkins on Pericles; possibly with an unknown playwright or playwrights on 1 Henry VI and Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI). There is a growing consensus that Christopher Marlowe’s hand might be present in the Jack Cade scenes of The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), and Shakespeare also probably contributed at least a scene to each of the anonymous plays *Edward III and *Arden of Faversham. The absence of Pericles, Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen from the *First Folio has suggested to some that *Heminges and *Condell intentionally excluded these late collaborative romances.
Renaissance playwrights who worked together on a play generally worked apart. Instead of a line-by-line collaboration, they often chose a strict division of labour, with each author assuming responsibility for particular acts or scenes. There is general scholarly agreement that Fletcher wrote the prologue, 2.2–2.6, 3.3–5.1, and 5.4 of The Two Noble Kinsmen, while Shakespeare was responsible for 1.1–2.1, 3.1–3.2, 5.2–5.3, and 5.5–5.6. Writing in relative isolation, one collaborator would often not know exactly what the other was doing. Shakespeare, for instance, was using a different source for his share of The Two Noble Kinsmen from the one Fletcher was using for his: the two dramatists apparently derived the name of the character *Pirithous from different sources. In Shakespeare’s share of the play, the name is trisyllabic and spelled ‘Pirithous’ (the spelling in North’s *Plutarch); in Fletcher’s share, it has four syllables and is spelled ‘Perithous’ (the spelling in *Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale). In Shakespeare’s additional scene for Sir Thomas More, he seems unaware of the details of the original version and of the revisions made by his collaborators. Similarly, in the text of Timon of Athens, the interview arranged between *Flavius and *Ventidius in a passage written by Middleton never materializes in Shakespeare’s share of the play.
Two noble kinsmen dramatized by two memorable worthies: the first quarto of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1634.
Eric Rasmussen, rev. Will Sharpe
Collatine. See Rape of Lucrece, The.
Collier, Jeremy (1650–1726), clergyman most famous for his diatribe against the theatre, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). While Collier vents most of his wrath on his contemporaries, he attacks Shakespeare’s representation of Ophelia while praising the rejection and subsequent death of Falstaff, which he sees as a just punishment.
Jean Marsden
Collier, John Payne. See forgery.
Collins, Francis (d. 1617), a lawyer who worked in Stratford from at least 1600 and seems to have moved to Warwick around 1612. He drew up the indentures for Shakespeare’s purchase of tithes in 1605, and in 1616 acted as overseer, witness, and possibly scribe of *Shakespeare’s will, by which he received a legacy of £13 6s. 8d.
Stanley Wells
Colman, George, the elder (1732–94), a successful manager of Covent Garden who promoted the career of William Powell as a Shakespearian performer (Richard III, Othello, Romeo, Macbeth) and reworked Tate’s King Lear for him, removing the Edgar and Cordelia love plot but retaining the happy ending. He rivalled Garrick’s Jubilee by presenting his own Covent Garden entertainment, Man and Wife; or, The Shakespeare Jubilee, which included an impressive procession, and was responsible for barring the ageing *Macklin from the stage after his tartan-clad Macbeth was hissed in 1773.
Catherine Alexander
colonialism. See travel, trade, and colonialism.
Colophon. In early printing, the *imprint providing the name of the printer or publisher along with the date and place of publication did not appear on the *title page but in a colophon at the end of the book. With the adoption of title pages in the 16th century colophons became less common, but they can still be found in some 17th-century books. The *First Folio concludes with the colophon: Printed at the Charges of W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623.
Eric Rasmussen
Combe family, a wealthy Protestant family in Stratford with whom Shakespeare had many links. John (b. before 1561, d. 1614) was a landowner and moneylender, frequently mentioned in Stratford lawsuits instituted to recover debts. On 1 May 1602 he and his uncle William sold Shakespeare 107 acres (44 ha) of open land in the area known as *Old Stratford to the north and east of the town for £320. The two halves of the indenture, preserved in the Records Office of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, show that Shakespeare was represented by his brother Gilbert. The Combe family had bought the land in 1593. According to a detailed survey made around 1625, first published in 1994, Shakespeare gave it to Susanna as a marriage settlement in 1607; in fact he bequeathed it to her in 1616, but may have retained a life interest.
John, who was unmarried, made many charitable, family, and other bequests, including £5 to Shakespeare and £60 for a tomb which may be seen in Holy Trinity church. According to Dugdale the sculpture was by Geerhart *Janssen, who also carved Shakespeare’s monument. Around 1618 Richard Brathwaite, in an addition to a book called Remains after Death, printed ‘An Epitaph upon one John Combe of Stratford-upon-Avon, a notable usurer, fastened upon a tomb that he had caused to be built in his life time’. It reads:
Ten in the hundred here lies engraved;
A hundred to ten his soul is not saved.
If anyone asks who lies in this tomb,
‘O ho!’ quoth the devil, ‘’tis my John-a-Combe’.
In 1634, a Lieutenant Hammond, after visiting Stratford, said that Shakespeare had written ‘some witty and facetious verses’ on ‘Mr Combe’; this story is repeated in association with the epitaph in various forms by *Aubrey, *Rowe, and other writers, one of whom states that Shakespeare wrote the epitaph at Combe’s request during his lifetime. Robert Dobyns, visiting Stratford in 1673, transcribed both this and Shakespeare’s epitaph, later stating that since his visit Combe’s had been erased by his heirs.
Epitaphs on an unnamed usurer resembling the first couplet appeared in print in 1608 and 1614. Possibly Shakespeare elaborated a traditional quip, with a characteristic pun in ‘engraved’. A 17th-century Bodleian manuscript records more charitable lines, headed ‘Another Epitaph on John Combe: He being dead, and making the poor his heirs, William Shakespeare after writes this for his epitaph’. They read:
Howe’er he livèd judge not,
John Combe shall never be forgot
While poor hath memory, for he did gather
To make the poor his issue; he, their father,
As record of his tilth and seed
Did crown him in his latter deed.
John’s brother Thomas lived in a property known as the College, near the church, probably the largest house in the town. He held a share in the Stratford tithes equal to Shakespeare’s. His son William (1586–1667), educated at Oxford and the Middle Temple, was partly responsible for the attempted enclosure of common land at Welcombe in 1614. Shakespeare left his sword to Thomas’s other son, also Thomas (1589–1657), a lawyer and a Protestant who died a bachelor.
Stanley Wells
‘Come, thou monarch of the vine’, drinking song, sung by a Boy in Antony and Cleopatra 2.7.110; the earliest surviving setting is by Thomas Chilcot, published c.1750. Nineteenth-century composers include Bishop and Schubert.
Jeremy Barlow
‘Come away, come away, death’, sung by Feste in Twelfth Night 2.4.50. The earliest known setting is one of two versions by Thomas Arne; the first was published in 1741 and the second in 1786. More recent composers include Brahms, Chausson, Cornelius (four versions), Stanford in the 19th century, and Dankworth, Finzi, Holst, Korngold, Moeran, Quilter, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams from the 20th century.
Jeremy Barlow
Comédie-Française, founded in 1680 in Molière’s theatre three years after his death by Louis XIV to unite the two rival companies (Guénégaud and Bourgogne), granting royal patronage and the exclusivity of the French repertoire. Once the monopoly was abolished (1791), some actors followed Talma to the newly built Salle Richelieu (the present-day theatre); the other actors joined them when Napoleon signed a unification agreement (1802–12). Unique in the world, it is still operating as a shareholding company of actors participating in its artistic policy. The first Shakespeare play staged was Ducis’s verse *adaptation of King Lear (1783) with Talma, who later played Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, all in Ducis’s adaptations, as individualistic romantic heroes. Sarah *Bernhardt as Hamlet created a legendary stir, Piachaud’s biased version of Coriolanus degenerated into fascist riots (1933), Vincent’s Macbeth (1985) faithfully followed the original, and Mesguish’s flamboyant and controversial Tempest (1998) incorporated Richard III’s seduction of *Lady Anne. The former administrator Muriel Mayotte staged an experimental Winter’s Tale (2004) for 29 actors and a debatable Dream (2013).
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
comedy. Both classical and Renaissance apologists of the theatre regarded comedy as an inferior dramatic form, its pedagogical function being its only redeeming feature. Sir Philip *Sidney, for example, praised comedy because ‘nothing’, he explained, ‘can more open [our] eyes than to find [our] own actions contemptibly set forth’ (Apology for Poetry, pub. 1595). A few years later, Ben Jonson rephrased a famous Horatian maxim by declaring that his ‘true scope’ in writing Volpone (1607) was to ‘mix profit with … pleasure’. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Shakespeare’s comedies are never overtly didactic. On the contrary, in them intellectual and psychological curiosity prevails over prescriptive norms as often as wonder outweighs the local and the familiar.
Shakespeare drew extensively from earlier models. From Greek Old Comedy he borrowed the saturnalian pattern of release from restraint through recognition and clarification. From Greek New Comedy he derived a variety of dramatic elements, ranging from the Tranio–Lucentio–Bianca sub-plot in The Taming of the Shrew to the stock character of the senex iratus, which he used as a model for Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing. *Lyly’s courtship romance inspired Shakespeare’s earliest comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona, whereas folklore and the native popular tradition provided the raw material for the *Fairy world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Italian novelistic tradition was another popular source of plot devices and story-lines: the story of Bertram and Helen in All’s Well That Ends Well and the main plot of The Merchant of Venice come from two collections of Italian tales, *Boccaccio’s Decameron and Il pecorone, attributed to Ser Giovanni of Florence.
Despite the undeniable influence of earlier models, Shakespearian comedy represents a distinctive dramatic category. Its main conventions include: exotic locations (with the obvious exception of The Merry Wives of Windsor); cases of mistaken identity in connection with bed-tricks, identical sets of twins, disguise, and cross-dressing; the Clown, an anticipation of the Fool in King Lear, similarly associated with caustic wit, ironic detachment, and a subversive penchant for puns and wordplay; a sustained attempt to test the limits of representation and theatrical illusion; and the ‘green-world’, a partly pastoral, partly utopian dimension, such as the wood outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the forest of Arden/Ardenne in As You Like It, where the law, parental control, and social conventions are temporarily suspended.
Romantic and festive elements in Shakespeare’s comedies, along with the conventional comic resolution, which is in itself suggestive of a ritual pattern of death and rebirth leading to self-discovery, harmony, and reconciliation, are often undermined by disruptive forces, ethical blind spots, and unresolved conflicts of class and gender, which are more pronounced in the late comedies, such as Measure for Measure or All’s Well That Ends Well.
Sonia Massai
Comedy of Errors, The See centre section.
‘Come o’er the bourn, Bessy, to me’, snatch of song, sung by Edgar in The History of King Lear 13.21. The complete text and two original tunes are given by Sternfeld (1964).
Jeremy Barlow
Come unto these yellow sands, sung by Ariel in The Tempest 1.2.377. The earliest setting to survive is by John Banister (published 1675) for the *Dryden and *Davenant adaptation of the play; a setting published in the early 18th century has been attributed to Purcell, and it was also set by Arne c.1740. Twentieth-century composers include Arnold, Honneger, Martin, Quilter, Tippett.
Jeremy Barlow
Comical Gallant, The; or, The Amours of Sir John Falstaff. John Dennis’s tidily neoclassical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor flopped at Drury Lane in 1702: its printed text is vengefully prefaced by his essay ‘A Large Account of the Taste in Poetry, and the Causes of the Degeneracy of it’.
Michael Dobson
Cominius is a Roman general and Coriolanus’ ally. His pleas for Coriolanus to spare *Rome from attack are disregarded (described Coriolanus 5.1).
Anne Button
commedia dell’arte, a type of improvisational comedy originating in Italy in the Middle Ages. Each performance was based upon the same stock characters, for example the lovers, the comic servant, the braggart, and the pedant, within some preconceived plot which yet allowed for improvisation. This form of comedy reached the height of its popularity and influence in 16th-century Europe. It may have become known in England through the presence of Italian players in London or the travels of Englishmen in Italy. Although there is no evidence that Shakespeare saw it, a number of his plays reflect the traditions of the commedia, in particular Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Tempest.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
companies, playing. Before the emergence of the professional theatre industry in the second half of the 16th century, companies of travelling players made their livings from performances throughout the kingdom. The forces that shaped these troupes into the enormously successful companies of Shakespeare’s time were political and economic. The provincial town authorities began to demand that players have some kind of certification (in practice, a patron) and in 1550 the London aldermen issued a decree banning ‘common’ players (those without a patron) from performing in the city without licence. The informal collections of players were squeezed out. In a proclamation of 16 May 1559 Elizabeth restated the responsibility of lords lieutenant and sheriffs to ensure that players were licensed and did not perform anything ‘wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the common weal shall be handled or treated’. Licensing the burgeoning theatre industry was a means of censoring it. That Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, took trouble to write to the Earl of Shrewsbury in June 1559 requesting that his players be allowed to perform in Yorkshire indicates that Elizabeth’s demand for licensing was being heeded, and that Dudley felt the free travel of his players was important. The licensed players had such an advantage over the remaining unlicensed players that we may rely on the principle of natural selection to explain the disappearance of the latter; aggressive entrepreneurial instincts were needed to survive in the new, harsher, climate.
The first nationally prominent company emerged directly from Dudley’s players when the government again moved to curtail, and so control, the acting industry. In 1583 privy counsellors Walsingham and Leicester put together an all-star troupe of players picked mostly from Leicester’s Men to tour the country under the patronage of Elizabeth herself in the interests of national unity. The Queen’s Men specialized in a new dramatic genre, the English history play, which was particularly suited to the Puritan sensibilities of the counsellors. The leading players of this new company were John Adams and Richard Tarlton, and throughout the 1580s the Queen’s Men toured extensively and enjoyed an effective monopoly of playing in London. But the settlement of 1594 gave two new companies, the Admiral’s Men at the Rose and the Chamberlain’s Men at the Theatre, an effective London duopoly and the Queen’s Men were forced to concentrate on touring. Staying put in particular London playhouses gave the Admiral’s and Chamberlain’s Men advantages which outweighed the burden of having to maintain a high turnover of new material. (Touring players can of course repeat the same play in each new town). Because audiences knew where to see the new Admiral’s or Chamberlain’s play—where to see Alleyn’s or Burbage’s newest role—a loyal base of supporters could develop amongst the London theatre-going public. Companies with a permanent base could also benefit from their accumulated capital by investing in lavish costume collections which would have been impossibly cumbersome for travelling players, even if they could afford them. The extreme effect of these two principles—expensive costuming and high turnover of new plays—can be discerned from two facts derived from Henslowe’s account book: the costume collection of a company might easily be worth more than the playhouse, and a dozen different plays might be performed in one month.
The next important development to promote the theatrical company stability upon which Shakespeare’s greatest work was predicated happened by chance. Denied use of the Blackfriars playhouse, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage brought their fellow playing company sharers into a syndicate to finance the Globe playhouse, and the commonality of interest within this nucleus of sharer/housekeepers made the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men considerably more economically stable than their competitors. At the Blackfriars a succession of companies of child actors performed outrageous satires with strong, and to modern sensibilities quite disturbing, sexual content. Although these ceased after 1608, the incorporation of two of the Blackfriars conventions, act intervals and sophisticated music, into amphitheatre playing indicates the leading companies’ ability to adapt themselves to changing tastes. The new King, James, took a much greater interest in the drama than his predecessor and the leading players could expect to be summoned to play at court more often.
The history of playing from 1610 to the closure of 1642 is one of gradual bifurcation into two traditions centred on two types of venue: the open-air amphitheatres and the indoor hall playhouses. The latter were more profitable but did not see off the former, perhaps because nostalgia for the populist and robust mode of outdoor entertainment persisted amongst the players. More pragmatically, the apprentices’ riot which followed the transference of Queen Anne’s men from the Red Bull to the Cockpit in Drury Lane signalled the tension between the two traditions which made persistence of both a practical necessity. Specialization by social class began to emerge in the drama with the indoor plays increasingly distancing themselves from the noisy spectacle available at the amphitheatres. By the end of the period the status of the playing profession was immeasurably higher—at least for the rich sharers in the most successful companies—than it had been at the beginning. Edward Alleyn’s founding of the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich and Shakespeare’s retirement in affluent middle age were possible only because a highly successful urban theatre industry emerged in London with extraordinary rapidity; less than half a century separates the construction of the Theatre from the publication of the Shakespeare First Folio. See also provincial companies, tours.
Gabriel Egan
Complete Works Festival. From April 2006 to April 2007 the *Royal Shakespeare Company staged Shakespeare’s entire output, poems and all, at its three theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Festival, conceived by then-artistic director Michael *Boyd and produced by Deborah Shaw, featured dozens of productions by the RSC itself as well as visiting productions from across the UK and around the world. Highlights included Boyd’s revival of his epic 2000–1 Histories cycle, an intimate and glittering Antony and Cleopatra directed by Gregory *Doran and starring Patrick *Stewart and Harriet *Walter, and Yukio *Ninagawa’s stylized but no less emotionally riveting Titus Andronicus. The Courtyard Theatre was built on the site of the Other Place for the Festival and allowed the RSC to trial ideas for its redesign of the *Royal Shakespeare Theatre main stage, which closed for three years of major refurbishment at the end of the Festival.
Erin Sullivan
compositors. The typesetters in the printing shop were the agents directly responsible for setting Shakespeare’s manuscripts into type; they were also among the earliest interpreters and editors of these texts. Compositors often introduced changes in *spelling and punctuation, and sometimes made substantive emendations as well. According to Joseph Moxon’s 17th-century treatise on the art of printing, the compositor could be expected to ‘read his copy with consideration; so that he may get himself into the meaning of the author’. Thus enlightened, the compositor would be able to ‘discern…where the author has been deficient’ and ‘amend’ his copy accordingly.
Charlton Hinman’s monumental analysis of The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (1963) identified five compositors at work on that text (Compositors A, B, C, D, and E) by their individual spelling preferences; subsequent investigators have refined Hinman’s findings and detected the presence of at least four more workmen (Compositors F, H, I, and J). Once particular compositors have been identified and their individual stints have been established, textual scholars are able to characterize each compositor’s working habits. Compositor E, for instance, appears to have been an inexperienced workman prone to errors such as ‘terrible woer’ for ‘treble woe’ in *Hamlet 5.1.243. Compositor B, on the other hand, seems to have made intentional changes when his copy did not make sense to him, such as the alteration of the life-rendering ‘Pelican’ to ‘Politician’ in Hamlet 4.5.146.
Eric Rasmussen
computers. See digital shakespeare.
conceit, an unusually elaborate metaphor or simile that is developed ingeniously, often as the basis of a sonnet or other lyric; but also found in dramatic speeches.
Chris Baldick
concordances and dictionaries. Editions of Shakespeare from the 18th century to the present have attempted to elucidate Shakespeare by incorporating commentary and glosses, but as the need became greater, separately printed and specialized works have appeared. The synchronic aim of semantic glossaries is exemplified in the title of Robert Nares’s popular Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, etc. Which Have Been Thought to Require Illustration, in the Works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare, and his Contemporaries (1822); their diachronic orientation is stressed in the selection by C. T. Onions’s Shakespeare Glossary (1911; rev. Robert Eagleson, 1986): ‘words or sense of words now obsolete or surviving only in provincial or archaic use’. Specialized glossaries, employing a variety of names, could be encyclopedic, dealing with such topics as topography and history, customs and characters; or linguistic, dealing with pronunciation and wordplay, grammar and slang; or stylistic, dealing with imagery and structure, rhetoric and allusion. The one authoritative dictionary remains Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare-Lexicon (1874–5), which is comprehensive in presenting the entire vocabulary and attempting semantic description and detailed grammatical description.
Concordances were a parallel development. Their principal function was to alphabetize Shakespeare’s text, laying bare otherwise inaccessible qualities and quantities. Andrew Becket, compiler in 1787 of the first Shakespeare concordance, followed Dr Johnson’s suggestions in selecting ‘practical axioms and domestic wisdom’. Francis Twiss’s Complete Verbal Index of 1805 was the first attempt at listing all the main word-classes and proper nouns. Samuel Ayscough’s Index (1821) was ‘calculated to point out the different meanings to which the words are applied’.
Nineteenth-century concordances, such as those by Mary Cowden *Clarke, Mrs H. H. *Furness, and J. O. *Halliwell-Phillipps, often appeared in conjunction with editions. John *Bartlett, best known for his Familiar Quotations (1855), expanded his Shakespeare Phrase Book of 1882 to form his 1894 concordance (still in print), based on the *Globe edition. In the 20th century Oxford produced computer-generated concordances to the early texts of individual plays under the supervision of T. Howard-Hill. Marvin Spevack’s nine-volume Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (1968–80), keyed to the *Riverside edition, was the first to present truly complete access to the vocabulary of the plays and poems individually and collectively (the latter as well in his one-volume Harvard Concordance, 1973), and to the vocabulary of each character, as well as to stage directions and speech-prefixes, the ‘bad’ quartos, and substantive variants, each entry accompanied by statistical information. The development of online concordances in recent years has changed the way many people access such material, the best of which being David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words (2008). Functioning as both concordance and glossary, it reproduces all of the plays using the *Penguin texts, which are tagged with links to the glossed lexical items and to the concordance search results.
Marvin Spevack, rev. Will Sharpe
Condell, Henry (1576–1627), actor (Chamberlain’s/King’s Men 1598–1627) and originator with John Heminges of the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s works. Shakespeare’s friend and fellow actor, Henry Condell married Elizabeth Smart on 24 October 1596 and, according to the 1616 Folio cast list, he performed in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour in 1598. Condell remained in the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men his entire career and is named in their royal patent of 1603. He appears as himself, an actor, in the metadramatic Induction to Marston’s The Malcontent (performed at the Globe in 1604) and acted Mosca to Richard Burbage’s Volpone in Jonson’s Volpone and Surly to Burbage’s Subtle in Jonson’s The Alchemist. In 1613 Condell’s name appeared in verses on the burning of the Globe and in 1616 Shakespeare left money in his will for Condell to buy a commemorative ring. Condell appears to have stopped acting in 1619 but maintained his business connection with the King’s Men. Condell was not an original housekeeper of the Globe but acquired a joint interest with John Heminges by 1612; in 1608 Condell was one of the syndicate formed to run the Blackfriars. Although not a star actor, Condell’s high status within his profession is attested by the responsibilities laid on him in fellow actors’ wills: trustee in Alexander Cooke’s (1614), executor in Nicholas Tooley’s (1623), and executor in John Underwood’s (1625).
Gabriel Egan
Conejero, Manuel Ángel (b. 1943), Former Spanish professor of English, founder of the Valencia Instituto Shakespeare, and supervisor of their translations. He has published on Shakespeare (e.g. Eros adolescente, 1980) and the theatrical translation of his plays, organized diverse Shakespearian activities, taught drama and acting, and written various plays, in which he has acted himself.
A. Luis Pujante
Conrad encourages Don John and Borachio to perpetrate their crimes in Much Ado About Nothing.
Anne Button
Conspiracy Discovered, The. This short, anonymous playlet based on the Scroop–Masham–Grey scene from Henry V was performed in 1746. Its staging was designed to coincide with the execution of those found guilty of treason during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6.
Michael Dobson
conspirators with Aufidius. They take part in Coriolanus’ murder, Coriolanus 5.6.
Anne Button
Constable of France. Unwisely confident of victory at Agincourt (Henry V 4.2.15–37), he lies among the slain, 4.8.92. He is based on Charles Delabreth, or Charles d’Albret (d. 1415), the illegitimate son of Charles le Mauvais, King of Navarre.
Anne Button
Constance, Lady. She claims the throne for her son Arthur, and dies after his capture, King John 4.2.122.
Anne Button
Cooke, Alexander (d. 1614), actor (King’s Men 1603–14). Sometimes assumed to be the man named Sander who appears in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins (which was performed before 1594, possibly by Strange’s Men), Cooke enters the theatrical record with certainty in the actor lists for Jonson’s Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline, as reproduced in the 1616 Folio, and for Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Captain. For Sejanus, Volpone, and The Captain his name appears last in the list of actors, which might mean that he played women’s roles in these plays. His will indicates that he was a company sharer and that he had been apprenticed to John Heminges.
Gabriel Egan
Cooke, Dominic (b. 1966), British theatre director. Began work as an assistant director for the *Royal Skakespeare Company in the early 1990s, leaving in 1996 to work at the Royal Court, before returning to Stratford in 2003 to direct Cymbeline with Anton *Lesser in the role of Giacomo. Cooke stayed on to helm productions of Macbeth (2004), As You Like It (2005), and two promenade productions of The Winter’s Tale and Pericles in the *Swan Theatre as part of RSC’s Complete Works Festival in 2006, removing all lower-level seating and integrating a by turns standing, sitting, and shifting audience into the narratives in an immersive theatrical experiment of stark emotional immediacy. His 2011 production of The Comedy of Errors for the *National Theatre was broadcast in 2012 as part of the NT Live series. He has been the Artistic Director of the Royal Court theatre since 2006.
Will Sharpe
Cooke, George Frederick (1756–1812), British actor, who, after 20 undistinguished years in the provinces, made an electrifying London debut in 1800 as Richard III, which he followed with portrayals of various gradations of villainy—Iago, Shylock, Macbeth, Falstaff—whilst sinking deeper into personal dissipation. In 1810 he left for America where in his largely Shakespearian repertoire he was the prototype visiting star.
Richard Foulkes
Cope, Sir Walter (d. 1614), politician. Cope, then MP for Westminster, wrote to Lord Cranbrooke in 1604 of the difficulty of finding a play which the Queen Consort had not seen. However, the actors ‘have revived an old one called Love’s Labour’s Lost, which for wit and mirth’, as Cope has heard, ‘will please her exceedingly’.
Park Honan
Copeau, Jacques (1879–1949), actor, director, playwright, fine translator of Shakespeare’s Tragédies (with Suzanne Bing, 1939), and promoter of a serious but popular theatre. He deeply influenced the modern stage. Favouring text above all, he advocated stages devoid of cumbersome sets and machinery, the ‘tréteau nu’, referring to the bare, movable stage of travelling companies: few props, well-chosen sets of curtains, sober costumes, and a focus on the actors. He stressed the physical and mental training of his closely knit community of actors, the ‘Copiaus’ (1924–9) who, in turn, like *Vilar, promoted the open-to-all theatre after the Second World War. An admirer of *Granville-Barker’s Twelfth Night, he staged his own version in 1914 with Jouvet as Aguecheek in his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier founded the year before, and again in 1920. As You Like It (1924) was a shortened version and Much Ado About Nothing (1936) an adaptation by Sarment.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
copy, the manuscript or printed text that the compositor followed as he set type. Title pages often advertised the authenticity of their copy: the Shakespeare First Folio asserts that the text within was ‘Published according to the True Originall Copies’ and Q2 Hamlet (1604/5) claims to have been printed ‘according to the true and perfect Coppie’. The term ‘original’ apparently meant the authoritative copy used in the theatre, the ‘book’ of the play. The term ‘perfect’ referred to copy that had been perfected, or made whole, by reference to the playwright’s original foul paper manuscript. Early English printers had a marked preference for printed over manuscript copy, even when the printed copy was heavily annotated and corrected. Of the 36 plays in the Shakespeare First Folio, a third were set up from printed quartos that had been annotated by reference to a manuscript; another third were set up from manuscript playbooks and Shakespeare’s original foul papers; and a final third were set up from transcripts made by Ralph Crane and other unidentified scribes.
Eric Rasmussen
copyright. By entering the title of a text into the *Stationers’ Register, early modern publishers or printers could establish their ownership of the *‘copy’ (both the physical manuscript and the text more generally) and their exclusive right to reproduce it. When Jaggard and Blount published the *First Folio, they apparently purchased sixteen of the previously unprinted plays from the King’s Men and negotiated with the owners of the remaining 20 who had registered titles. John Smethwick and William Aspley, who between them held the rights to Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, 2 Henry IV, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, appear to have joined the Folio syndicate. It has been suggested that the difficulties in obtaining the rights to Troilus and Cressida from Henry Walley almost resulted in the play being left out of the collection altogether.
Following the publication of the First Folio, the rights were assigned to subsequent syndicates with each of the three folio reprintings. By 1709, Jacob Tonson had purchased the rights to 25 of the plays. Tonson and his successors maintained a nearly perpetual copyright in Shakespeare until 1767. (In fact, the earliest recorded use of the term ‘copyright’ is Tonson’s reference to ‘the Proprietors of the Copy-Right’ in an advertisement in his 1734 edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor.)
Eric Rasmussen
Coranto, a lively and newly fashionable dance in the early part of Shakespeare’s career; see Sir Toby Belch’s comparison between the coranto and *galliard in Twelfth Night 1.3.123.
Jeremy Barlow
Corbet, Richard (1582–1635), bishop and poet. Written around 1619, Corbet’s holiday poem ‘Iter Boreale’ mentions a performance of Richard III. Corbet’s words, ‘A horse! A horse!—he, Burbidge, cried’, confirm other evidence that King Richard’s part had been acted by Shakespeare’s prime tragedian, Richard Burbage.
Park Honan
Cordelia. In the first scene of King Lear Lear disinherits his youngest daughter because she is unwilling to compete with her sisters’ protestations of unbounded love for him. The King of France agrees to marry her despite Lear’s displeasure. In Act 4 she appears with a French army at *Dover and is reunited with Lear. Her forces defeated by the English in Act 5, she is imprisoned and hanged, a reprieve arriving too late. At the close of the play Lear carries her dead body on stage and begs her to speak to him again before dying himself.
Many 17th- and 18th-century readers of the play shared Samuel *Johnson’s view that her death ran ‘contrary to the natural ideas of justice’ (1765). Audiences were spared the tragedy altogether by Nahum *Tate’s 1681 version, which has her survive to marry Edgar, and which held the stage until the 19th century. The critic Lily B. Campbell saw Cordelia as a Christ figure (1952) and indeed Lear’s suffering has often been seen in terms of Christian redemption. In the last half of the 20th century, however, more secular and tormented stage and film versions of the play have tended to depict Cordelia’s death without sentiment.
Anne Button
Corin is an old shepherd in As You Like It.
Anne Button
Coriolanus. See centre section.
Coriolanus, Caius. See Coriolanus.
Cornelius. (1) See Valtemand. (2) The Queen’s doctor in Cymbeline, he is rightly suspicious of her request for poison, 1.5.
Anne Button
cornet, cornett a wind instrument fingered similarly to the *recorder, but blown like a *trumpet, with a considerable expressive and dynamic range. Used by Shakespeare and other dramatists for processional entrances and exits, or to indicate rank lower than royalty. It also became a substitute for the trumpet in the indoor theatre, and was often played in ensemble with *sackbuts.
Jeremy Barlow
Cornwall, Barry (Bryan Waller Procter) (1787–1874), English poet and biographer, said to have introduced Hazlitt to Elizabethan drama. His works include Dramatic Scenes (1819), praised by Charles Lamb as ‘Elizabethan’; a biography of the actor Edmund Kean (1835); and a woodcut-illustrated edition of Shakespeare (3 vols., 1839–43), with Memoir and Essay.
Tom Matheson
Cornwall, Duke of. Regan’s husband, he is stabbed by his servant as he blinds Gloucester, The Tragedy of King Lear 3.7 and The History of King Lear 15.
Anne Button
Coryat, Thomas (c. 1577–1617), travel-writer. His idiosyncratic accounts of his journeys through Europe and Asia (such as Coryat’s Crudities, 1611) were addressed to a group of intellectuals, among them Ben Jonson and John Donne, who met regularly at the Mermaid Tavern in London. The group is traditionally thought to have included Shakespeare.
Robert Maslen
Costard, a clown who muddles Armado’s letter for Jaquenetta with Biron’s for Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Anne Button
costume. Actors’ costumes were their most expensive possessions, a company’s wardrobe often being more valuable than its theatre. *Henslowe’s accounts show that a doublet might cost £3 and a gown between £2 and £7, amounts which can be scaled by comparison with the £20 annual income of the master of the Stratford grammar school. Expensive costumes were a vital part of the visual appeal of theatre, and characters of high social rank were represented by appropriately luxurious clothing. Outside the playhouse, the wearing of such costumes by commoners was criminalized by the Sumptuary Laws, not repealed until 1604. Thomas Platter, a Swiss visitor to London, described one way the actors got their costumes: ‘when men of rank or knights die they give and bequeath almost their finest apparel to their servants, who, since it does not befit them, do not wear such garments, but afterwards let the play-actors buy them for a few pence’. Historical accuracy in costuming was not important, and plays set in the ancient world were performed in Elizabethan dress with small additions to represent distant times and places: a curved sword to connote the Middle East, a sash to connote the Roman toga. The *Peacham drawing of what appears to be a performance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus bears out this costuming principle, but it might in fact show a performance of a German play on the same theme.
Gabriel Egan
Cotes, Thomas. See folios.
Cotgrave, Randle (d. 1634?), lexicographer. He wrote A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611), which was often reprinted throughout the 17th century. It is of great use to historians of the two languages, and hence to Shakespeare’s editors.
Robert Maslen
Cottom (Cottam), John Master of Stratford grammar school from 28 September 1579, he may have been Shakespeare’s last teacher there. He had graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1566, the same year as his Stratford predecessor, Thomas *Jenkins, and had a younger brother Thomas who became a Catholic priest and was arrested in 1580, arraigned with Edmund Campion in November 1580, and executed in 1582. These events may have influenced John’s resignation from his Stratford post some time after Michaelmas 1581 and before 31 January 1582, when a new teacher (probably Alexander *Aspinall) was licensed. Around 1582 Cottom, now head of the family, went to the family home at Tarnacre, in Lancashire, where he lived until his death. Tarnacre is not far from Lea, home of the Roman Catholic Alexander Hoghton whose will, in 1581, mentioned a *‘William Shakeshaft’ who has been identified with the playwright. Honigmann suggests that Cottom recommended his pupil Shakespeare to Hoghton as player and teacher.
Stanley Wells
Counter. A prison on the site of the former church of St Margaret, the Southwark Counter (or Compter), was established around 1551. Originally a lock-up, the Counter was enlarged in 1608, destroyed by fire in 1676, and rebuilt in 1685. It housed debtors (Shakespeare’s references to it always consider it as a debtor’s prison), as well as felons and petty offenders of both sexes.
Simon Blatherwick
countrymen, six. See Gerald.
Couplet, a pair of rhyming verse lines, usually of the same metre and length. Shakespeare uses them to round off his sonnets and many dramatic scenes.
Chris Baldick
Court, Alexander. He is one of the soldiers who speaks to the disguised King Harry, Henry V 4.1.
Anne Button
court performances. The official reason for the existence of playing companies was to provide entertainment for the monarch in the traditional festive seasons of Christmas and Easter, and prior public performance was supposed to test and refine plays before they were taken to court. The Revels Office was initially responsible for making the costumes, properties, and sets for court performances, but from the 1580s the London theatre industry was strong enough to provide its own production materials and the Revels Office was reduced to licensing the commercial theatre and selecting from its best offerings.
Because the court moved between palaces in and around London, the players performed in a variety of rooms temporarily converted into theatres. Being called to court was lucrative and, more importantly, was a mark of royal favour which lent respectability to the leading players. *James I was more keen on theatre than his predecessor and his patronage of Shakespeare’s company gave them court appearances more frequent and of longer duration than they had enjoyed under Elizabeth. The court Cockpit (a bird-fighting arena), which had been occasionally used for performance, was converted into a permanent court theatre in 1629 by James’s successor Charles, under whom royal patronage of dramatic art reached its peak.
Gabriel Egan
Covell, William (d. 1614), divine. Covell jotted around 1595 when he was a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, ‘Lucrecia Sweet Shakspeare’ and ‘Wanton Adonis. Watsons Heire’. He implies that Shakespeare is the poetic heir of Thomas Watson (d. 1592), whose love lyrics, as in the eighteen-line ‘sonnets’ of The Hecatompathia (1582), had been thought ‘sweet’ or mellifluous and supple.
Park Honan
Coveney, Michael (b. 1948), British theatre critic. Known for a more gossipy and irreverent tone than his fellow critic Michael *Billington, Coveney started as a script reader for the Royal Court in 1971 before taking the job of theatre critic for the Financial Times, where he remained throughout the 1980s. In 1990 he went on to write for The Observer, and then on to The Daily Mail from 1997 to 2004. He is currently the chief critic of the influential theatre website Whatsonstage.com. His 1994 book on a year in the life of British theatre, The Aisle is Full of Noises, punned in its title on Caliban’s great speech from The Tempest, though was pulled from the shelves after accusations of libel from Milton Shulman, by which time most copies had been sold.
Will Sharpe
Covent Garden theatre was designed by James Shepherd and was opened by John Rich, its first manager and holder of one of the two royal patents, in 1732. Much enlarged and restructured by Henry Holland in 1792, it was completely rebuilt after the fire of 1808, and again (the present Royal Opera House) after a second conflagration in 1856. The early playing company, led by James *Quin, competed with Drury Lane, in a rivalry that intensified from 1750 when Spranger *Barry joined Covent Garden. *Garrick’s dominance at Drury Lane, however, secured the Shakespearian staging contest, with Covent Garden innovations such as *Macklin’s ill-received Scottish staging of Macbeth (1773) doing little to redress the balance.
Covent Garden painted by Henry Andrews (d.1868) in 1831. In the trial scene of All Is True (Henry VIII), Charles Young’s Wolsey attempts to placate Fanny Kemble’s Queen Katherine, while Charles Kemble’s King Henry looks on.
Catherine Alexander
Coventry, Mayor of. See Mayor of Coventry.
Cowley, Richard (c. 1568–1619), actor (Strange’s Men 1590–3, Chamberlain’s/King’s Men 1598–1619). The plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins (performed before 1594, possibly by Strange’s Men) names Cowley as a lieutenant in the Induction, a soldier and a lord in ‘Envy’, Giraldus and a musician in ‘Sloth’, and a lord in ‘Lechery’. Letters between Edward and Joan Alleyn in 1593 indicate that Cowley was touring with Strange’s Men. It appears that in 1597 Cowley’s wife Elizabeth had an affair with the astrologer Simon *Forman while consulting him professionally. By 1598 Cowley was with the Chamberlain’s Men and his name is recorded in the speech prefixes of the 1600 quarto of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing where we should expect Verges’s name, indicating that he took this role. Cowley is named as a sharer in the 1603 patent to the King’s Men and as an actor in the 1623. In his will of 1605 Augustine *Phillips called Cowley ‘my fellow’ and left him 20s. in gold and Cowley’s brief orally declared will of 13 January 1618 was witnessed by John *Heminges, Cuthbert *Burbage, John Shank, and Thomas Ravenscroft.
Gabriel Egan
Cox, Robert (?1604–?1655), actor and writer of *drolls. No direct records exist of Cox acting before the closing of the theatres, but later commentaries assert that he achieved some fame before the Commonwealth period. In 1653 Cox was arrested apparently for a performance at the Red Bull which crossed the line between the permitted entertainments of show-dancing and the prohibited entertainment of acting. Francis Kirkman called ‘the incomparable Robert Cox’ the author, compiler, and performer of the drolls collected as The Wits (first published 1662, Kirkman’s enlarged edition 1672–3) and named the Red Bull as the venue. A book called Actaeon and Diana, containing two plays, a jig, and a prose farce, was printed ‘for the use of the Author Robert Cox’ some time before 1 September 1656, the day George Thomason purchased a copy.
Gabriel Egan
Crab is Lance’s incontinent *dog, Two Gentlemen of Verona 4.4.1–38.
Anne Button
‘Crabbed Age and Youth’, a twelve-line lyric printed as the twelfth poem in *The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). A fine lyric, but almost certainly not by Shakespeare, it is also the first stanza of a longer poem called ‘A Maiden’s Choice’ twixt Age and Youth’ printed in Thomas *Deloney’s Garland of Good Will. Not all the poems in this book are by Deloney. Though no edition survives before 1628, Thomas *Nashe refers to it in 1596.
Stanley Wells
crabtree, Shakespeare’s. In 1762 the British Magazine published an anonymous ‘Letter from the Place of Shakespeare’s Nativity’ written from the White Lion Inn in Stratford-upon-Avon. The correspondent claimed that his ‘chearful landlord’ had taken him first to the Birthplace, and then to visit ‘two young women, lineal descendants of our great dramatic poet’ (clearly impostors) who kept ‘a little ale-house, some small distance from Stratford. On the road thither, at a place called Bidford’ which is on the River Avon, some 8 miles (13 km) west of Stratford, the landlord ‘showed me, in the hedge, a crab-tree, called Shakespeare’s canopy, because under it our poet slept one night; for he, as well as Ben Jonson, loved a glass for the pleasure of society; and he having heard much of the men of that village as deep drinkers and merry fellows, one day went over to Bidford, to take a cup with them. He enquired of a shepherd for the Bidford drinkers; who replied, they were absent; but the Bidford sippers were at home; and “I suppose”, continued the sheep-keeper, “they will be sufficient for you”: and so indeed they were. He was forced to take up his lodging under that tree for some hours.’
The story grew. About 1770 John *Jordan provided a sequel, claiming that on the following morning Shakespeare’s companions roused him and invited him to continue the contest, but that he refused, saying that he had drunk with
Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston
Haunted Hillborough, Hungry Grafton,
Dadgeing Exhall, Papist Wicksford,
Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford.
In 1795 Samuel *Ireland swallowed the story, writing, ‘it is certain that the Crab Tree is known all round the country by the name of Shakespeare’s Crab; and that the villages to which the allusion is made, all bear the epithets here given them: the people of Pebworth are still famed for their skill on the pipe and tabor: Hillborough is now called Haunted Hillborough; and Grafton is notorious for the poverty of its soil’.
Stanley Wells
Craig, Edward Gordon (1892–1966), British designer, director, and theorist. Though he directed few productions, Craig was highly influential in 20th-century Shakespeare performance. Starting with Much Ado About Nothing for Ellen *Terry (his mother) in 1903, he initiated a series of practical and theoretical reforms that were seized upon by later modernists. Craig’s basic idea was aesthetic rather than social: he insisted that a single artist-designer-director take absolute charge of all elements of theatrical production, elevating the significance of the visual and reducing the individuality of the actors, whom he called Übermarionetten (super-puppets) under the director’s control. His designs for Shakespeare, mostly unrealized, suggest simple symbolic solutions instead of localized or realist settings, often relying on monumental, monolithic structures to convey mood and idea. His production of Hamlet with *Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre (1912), though far from satisfactory to Craig, managed to suggest the fluidity and suppleness of his conception through the use of movable screens that changed configuration for each scene. His many books (e.g. On the Art of the Theatre, 1911; Scene, 1923) and his journal The Mask had a huge effect on subsequent practice.
Dennis Kennedy
Craiova, See Romanian international Shakespeare Festival
Crane, Ralph (fl. 1555–1632). A professional scrivener who seems to have had a close association with the King’s Men. In the preface to his Works of Mercy (1621), Crane writes that ‘some employment hath my useful pen had ’mongst those civil, well-deserving men that grace the stage with honour and delight, of whose true honesties I much could write, but will comprise it (as in a cask of gold) under the kingly services they do hold’. Crane probably prepared the transcripts that served as printer’s copy for the Folio texts of The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline.
Although Crane’s transcriptions of Shakespearian texts have not survived, eight of his manuscripts of work by other dramatists are extant, including Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), Fletcher and Massinger’s Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619), Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) and The Witch (1624–5), and Fletcher’s Demetrius and Enanthe (1625). Through a detailed study of these surviving manuscripts, T. H. Howard-Hill identified Crane’s characteristic habits of spelling and punctuation in order to explore the possibility that certain idiosyncratic features of the first five comedies in the Folio, such as the liberal use of colons, parentheses, hyphens, and apostrophes, may be due to Crane’s influence.
The much-discussed massed entrances in three Folio texts thought to have been set up from Crane transcripts—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Winter’s Tale—which list all of the characters who appear in a scene in a single opening direction regardless of whether they enter at the beginning or later, may be compared with similar directions in Crane’s manuscript of A Game at Chess (Bodleian MS). It has been suggested that by employing this neoclassical procedure Crane intended to invest his dramatic transcripts with the trappings of antiquity, as he did in the invariably Latinate formulae he used for act and scene headings, ‘Incipit Actus Quartus’ and ‘Finis Actus Secundij’.
Eric Rasmussen
Cranmer, Thomas (1489–1556). He secures the King’s divorce from Katherine; is made Archbishop of Canterbury; crowns Anne Boleyn; and survives the charge of heresy made by Gardiner and others in All Is True (Henry VIII).
Anne Button
Creede, Thomas. See printing and publishing.
Creizenach, Wilhelm (1851–1919), German critic and historian of theatre, a professor at Cracow. The fourth volume of his Geschichte des neueren Dramas was translated as The English Drama of the Age of Shakespeare (1916), making many connections not only between English contemporaries of Shakespeare, but with European literature and drama.
Tom Matheson
Cressida. See Troilus and Cressida.
crime and punishment. During the 1580s, poaching was punishable with both a fine and three months’ imprisonment. It should not be surprising, then, that we have no certain knowledge whether Shakespeare actually risked that penalty by his alleged activities at Charlecote. It is always easier to write the history of punishment than that of crime, because crime prefers to keep itself hidden, whereas punishment is a matter of public record. This was all the more true in Shakespeare’s time, when punishment, as an instrument of authority used to control disorder, dissent, and deviance, was a regular and highly visible fact of life: boys were publicly beaten at school, prostitutes and vagrants whipped through the city streets, and petty offenders exposed to shame and pelting in the stocks or pillory, while crowds of both sexes would gather to witness felons and traitors meeting their end on the gallows.
During Shakespeare’s adult life, public opinion became increasingly aware of the causal link between poverty and crime: in The Winter’s Tale, Autolycus has become a confidence trickster because he has lost his job as a courtier, and in 2 Henry IV the new King grants pensions to Falstaff and his cronies expressly so that they will not be ‘forced to evils’ by their ‘lack of means’ (5.5.67). In practice, however, there was little mitigation of the penal regime. English law classified crimes on three levels according to the severity of the prescribed penalty. Lesser crimes, such as sedition, riot, libel, and perjury, were misdemeanours and attracted a range of non-capital penalties from fines to floggings. At the opposite end of the scale was treason, which could be either ‘high’ or ‘petty’, signifying respectively crimes against the state (such as the assassination of a public official, adultery committed by a queen, counterfeiting the coin of the realm, or even imagining the monarch’s death) and against the order of society (such as the murder of a husband by his wife or a master by his servant). Whatever its altitude, treason was punished by an aggravated form of the death penalty. Much of what we today think of as serious crime, including murder, rape, and the various forms of theft, belonged in the middle band, felony, and was punishable by death; *witchcraft was also felonious.
There was no court of appeal in this period: a legal loophole allowed the literate to evade the death sentence in some cases, but once passed it could only be overturned by royal decree. The convict would be taken to a place of execution (usually Tyburn or Tower Hill in London) where, on the ladder of the gallows with hands tied and the noose around his neck, he would make a public speech, usually a confession, and sing a final hymn; then the hangman would push him off. At Tyburn there were about 140 such executions every year, taking place in grisly clusters during the four law terms when the courts were sitting. Felons were left to strangle under their own weight (kindly onlookers might shorten their suffering by pulling their legs), but traitors were cut down and disembowelled alive, before being cut in quarters, which were then treated with pitch and displayed around the city. (Noblemen had the privilege of being beheaded instead.) Crowds did not necessarily witness such spectacles with sadistic pleasure: some wept with humane pity for the victim, and the public hangman was the most reviled of offices, grudgingly considered the lowest possible kind of honest work. (This is why, in Measure for Measure, it is a step up for Pompey the bawd to be appointed temporary assistant executioner.) Accounts of the crime and execution would often appear soon afterwards as topical pamphlets and ballads.
At other times, most people’s contact with criminals was probably fairly limited. Those who visited London’s suburban playhouses would have travelled through districts where prostitutes operated, and the theatres themselves were often thought to be a haunt of cutpurses. However, even in cities the actual risk of becoming a victim of crime was relatively small. Accordingly, there was a strong element of fantasy in the way the period’s fiction represented criminals. In part, it materialized respectable fears in the notion that the night was full of footpads and murderers who might assault a man who, like Banquo in Macbeth, ‘walked too late’ (3.6.5). But there was also a more specific conception of the underworld as a complex, highly integrated society with its own language, professional hierarchies, and codes of conduct, which Oldcastle (later Falstaff) appeals to in 1 Henry IV when he expects thieves to be ‘true to one another’ (2.2.28). It is this romantic fascination which informs much of Elizabethan rogue literature, as well as Shakespeare’s characterization of Falstaff, Autolycus, and the outlaws in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Martin Wiggins
critical history. Although criticism is strictly the attempt to explain and evaluate works of art in terms other than their own, G. Wilson *Knight, in The Wheel of Fire (1930), differentiates between ‘criticism’ (involving comparison and evaluation) and ‘interpretation’ (which seeks to understand a work on its own terms). In Shakespeare studies, criticism as such is often inextricable from editorial, textual, biographical, historical, linguistic, and/or purely scholarly investigation. The distinction is just as difficult now that the once informal activity of criticism has been professionalized in universities, and accompanied by a renewed codification of literary and critical theory. Because of the central place Shakespeare has come to occupy in academic education at every level, his works are now a site for contesting modes of interpretation, appropriation, and signification. In addition, there persists a broad division between literary criticism (reflecting a central canon of literature in English) and theatrical criticism (responding to the historically conditioning characteristics of live performance).
Informal criticism of Shakespeare probably begins with schoolmaster Francis *Meres’s Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (1598), in which he patriotically proposes equivalents in modern English literature for the great classical authors: Shakespeare matching Plautus for comedy and Seneca for tragedy; Ovid for love poetry; and Horace or Catullus for lyric poetry.
Classical conventions are also reflected in the presentation of the First Folio of 1623, where 36 plays are collected, in a few cases misleadingly, into genres of comedy, history, and tragedy (of which only national ‘history’ might properly be regarded as an Elizabethan invention); while the partial and imperfect division of individual plays into acts and scenes (with Latin designations) also reminds the reader of their classical antecedents.
The prefatory dedications and commendatory verses also raise matters which continue to occupy criticism. Shakespeare’s actor-executors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, refer to the universality, popularity, and accessibility of the works; their dual status, as plays to be performed live on stage, and as texts to be read; the textual authority of the early printed editions, despite their author’s inability to monitor many of them; Shakespeare’s mysterious ease of composition and access to so-called ‘Nature’, exemplifying his spontaneous genius.
Ben Jonson, extravagantly calling the author ‘my beloved’, compares his achievement not only to his English predecessors and contemporaries (Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Kyd, and Marlowe) but also to the great classical dramatists (Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Terence, and Plautus), apparently taking for granted Shakespeare’s own familiarity with their works, despite his relatively ‘small Latin, and less Greek’. Jonson too draws attention to the paradox of the intrinsic theatrical impermanence of Shakespeare’s plays and their literary potential to transcend any limitations of time and place. While acknowledging Shakespeare’s natural gifts, Jonson is also careful to justify both the art and the effort (‘sweat…and strike the second heat’) involved in such prodigious poetic expression.
These First Folio encomia set the critical agenda for centuries to come. But note the absence of biographical or personal information. They concentrate on art and achievement. There is mention of the Stratford monument; the rivers Avon and Thames; the Globe, Blackfriars, and Cockpit theatres; the professional friends and aristocratic patrons. Shakespeare’s appearance is commemorated in the Droeshout engraved portrait; but of family and personal life, those subjects which have so obsessed later speculators, there is nothing. Nor, on the other hand, is there the slightest doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon actually did write the plays attributed to him.
Criticism in the 17th and 18th centuries partly flourishes as an adjunct to the scholarly accumulation (often in successive editions and their accompanying biographies, from Nicholas *Rowe in 1709 onwards) of facts about Shakespeare, his theatre, and his times; and partly as an antidote to the theatrical practice of adaptation and revision. But it also represents a direct challenge and sometimes confrontation between succeeding generations of modern authors and their illustrious predecessor. In John *Dryden’s Essay on the Dramatique Poetry of the Last Age (1672), Preface to Troilus and Cressida (1679), and Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1688), the leading author of the Restoration not only pays tribute to the ‘largest and most comprehensive soul’ of all modern and most ancient poets, but attributes Shakespeare’s numerous defects of taste and judgement to the barbarous age in which he lived. This weighing of merits and defects seems to us unproductive, but it represents an attempt to establish permanent criteria for the assessment of value in literature against the anarchic flux of temporary fashion.
The ‘enlightened’ apportionment of praise and blame continues in the work of both Alexander *Pope and Samuel *Johnson. Pope’s criticism, contained in the Preface to his 1725 edition, has been described as uninspired and conventional, although he does acknowledge the absurdity and irrelevance of applying Aristotelian prescriptions to Shakespeare. Johnson’s own notable contribution to criticism also comes in the Preface to his edition, of 1765, in which paradoxically he appeals to both ‘nature’ and ‘delusion’ (or dramatic illusion) in defence of Shakespeare’s distinctly unregulated and unclassical imagination. Johnson’s praise for Shakespeare’s ‘just representations of general nature’ and his dramatic realization of ‘the genuine progeny of common humanity’ reflect the importance he attached to the agreed verdict of generations of readers and spectators.
Several 18th-century essayists seem to anticipate concerns central to later criticism. Maurice *Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) begins an enduring fashion for isolating individual characters for analysis. Similarly, Walter *Whiter’s Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare (1794), in drawing attention to the association in Shakespeare’s mind of certain clusters of ideas and images, begins another process, only systematically exploited in the 20th century, of attention to the function of specific details of diction and imagery.
This period also marks the beginning of important contributions to the study and reputation of Shakespeare by distinguished European authors, including both *Voltaire’s rationalist detraction and *Goethe’s Romantic devotion. Although England’s major *Romantic critic of Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor *Coleridge, in seeking to place Shakespeare’s ‘judgement’ on a level with his ‘genius’, seems to discount any debt to German Romantic criticism, particularly that of A. W. *Schlegel, the coincidence of ideas is clear and only the precedence uncertain. The often fragmentary sources for Coleridge’s own criticism (notebooks, letters, conversations, reported lectures, etc.) do define two important alternative streams of Shakespearian criticism: the ‘poetic’ (focusing on organic form in language) and the ‘psychological’ (focusing on character)—De Quincey too calls his 1823 essay ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ a ‘specimen of psychological criticism’.
William *Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), including ‘doubtful plays’ as well as the accepted plays, poems, and Sonnets, also emulates the romantic enthusiasm of Schlegel, in reaction to the classical reservations of Dr Johnson. Hazlitt’s own insight into poetry and character is matched by his response to live performance, both in the Characters and in some of the companion pieces in The Round Table (also 1817), particularly his vivid essay ‘On Mr. Kean’s Iago’. John *Keats’s continuous allusions to Shakespeare in his letters, particularly his identification of Shakespeare’s ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, represent another aspect of Romantic impressionism, with its elevation of Shakespeare’s poetic and imaginative capacity over his intellectual judgement.
Perhaps in reaction to this, much 19th-century criticism is conducted precisely in a context of such ‘irritable reaching after fact’, the accumulation through documentary research of information about Shakespeare’s life and times being typified by the activity and output of the *Shakespeare Society (founded 1840) and the New Shakspere Society (founded 1873). Passionate enthusiasm persists, reflected in the writings of Charles *Dickens, Herman Melville, or Fyodor *Dostoevsky; while a few sceptical detractors (notably Leo *Tolstoy) remained unimpressed by the rising cultural tide of almost universal approbation.
The New Shakspere Society attempted to use metrical and phraseological tests to establish the order in which Shakespeare wrote the plays; and, using that order, to study ‘the progress and meaning of Shakspere’s mind’. Much influential criticism in the 19th century reflects that speculation, both in Britain and Europe: Edward Dowden’s Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1875), responding to the German psycho-biography of *Gervinus (1849–50, translated as Shakespeare Commentaries in 1863). Dowden’s inference of distinct periods in the growth of Shakespeare’s intellect and character, while frequently scorned as unscholarly, nevertheless informed general and specialized studies of Shakespeare’s ‘happy’ comedies, ‘dark’ comedies, ‘great’ tragedies, and ‘romances’ for nearly a century; and found further expression in the Danish Georg *Brandes’s William Shakespeare (1896), which influenced writers such as Ibsen, James *Joyce, and Bernard Shaw, as well as academics such as A. C. *Bradley, in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), whose detailed analysis of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth is probably still the most widely consulted critical work on Shakespeare ever published, despite repeated attempts (by E. E. *Stoll, F. R. *Leavis, L. C. *Knights, and many others) to discredit its premisses.
Other early 20th-century approaches to Shakespeare were mainly characterized by comparative literary and dramatic studies; increasing attention to language and style; and a renewed recognition of the importance of stage history.
In the later 20th century the tradition of exceptional individual critics (often creative writers themselves) bringing their own literary gifts to the exposition of Shakespeare has partly been supplanted by ideologically influenced ‘schools’ and theories, often collaboratively and collectively reflecting the relatively new academic disciplines of politics, psychology, sociology, and cultural and women’s studies. Of course, there continue to be many notable exceptions (including perhaps T. S. *Eliot, Dover *Wilson, Wilson *Knight, Muriel *Bradbrook, William *Empson, and, more recently, writers such as Harold Bloom and Ted *Hughes), in whom individual perception and even personality seem to play almost as large a part in their criticism as specialized knowledge and systematic methodology. In many respects these, and others, seem to represent what was in the later 20th century characterized and caricatured as an eclectic tradition of ‘liberal humanism’, bearing connotations both positive (in its elevation of individual perceptions and values) and negative (as neglecting social, historical, and political factors). A philosophical division has even revived between those who accept the mimetic status of art in reflecting some kind of external reality, and those for whom the only reality is subjective and perceptual.
In the contested area of ideology, the socio-economic theories of Karl *Marx and the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund *Freud have been widely applied. Carl *Jung’s formulation of a ‘collective unconscious’, occupied by universally recognized ‘symbolic archetypes’, has also found adherents.
In the past 25 years, traditional modes of exposition have continued to exist alongside sometimes mutually exclusive competing theories. Among these have flourished *structuralism; deconstruction; *cultural materialism; *new historicism; and *feminism. All have received wide professional endorsement, but probably only feminist criticism has achieved the full assent of a general non-academic audience. In the early 21st century, the ‘religious turn’ discernible in so many other areas of post-9/11 culture manifested itself in a renewed attention to questions of Shakespearean spirituality.
Tom Matheson
The critical tradition
Newer approaches
Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952), Italian philosopher and literary critic. Croce, shifting discussion away from the artist’s personality and mind to the work itself, with its own self-sufficient laws, represents a reaction against 19th-century criticism. Shakespeare (1943), extracted and translated from Ariosto, Shakespeare, e Corneille (1920), offers just such an analysis.
Tom Matheson
Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), Lord Protector. He is often wrongly accused of closing the theatres in 1650. In fact, he was fighting the Scots at the time. Theatres reopened at the Restoration in 1660.
Cathy Shrank
Cromwell, Thomas (1485–1540, executed for treason), secretary to Cardinal Wolsey and later Henry VIII’s chief minister. He defends Cranmer from Gardiner, All Is True (Henry VIII) 5.2.
Anne Button
Cross, Samuel (1568–before 1595), actor (probably Chamberlain’s Men around 1594). Samuel Cross is named as a principal actor in the 1623 Folio but nowhere else in records of the company. In An Apology for Actors Thomas Heywood named a ‘Crosse’ as one of the famous actors before his time, which suggests that Cross died before Heywood came to London around 1594.
Gabriel Egan
Cross Keys Inn. See inns.
Crowne, John (c. 1649–1703), a dramatist who amalgamated the last two acts of The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) with Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) to create The Misery of the Civil War (1680), directed against the Whigs. Lady Elianor Butler, the mistress he introduced for Henry’s son Edward, pursued him to the battlefield ‘in man’s habit’. Crowne later wrote a further political adaptation of the first three acts of The First Part of the Contention.
Catherine Alexander
Cruickshank, George (1792–1878), English painter, illustrator, and cartoonist. Twenty years after illustrating Dickens, Cruickshank designed plates for Robert Brough’s The Life of Sir John Falstaff (1857–8). This recurring interest in Falstaff is conflated with the popular genre of *Fairy painting in ‘The Last Scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor’ (exhibited at the British Institution, 1857)—a genre with which Cruickshank also engaged to depict A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His allegorical ‘All the World’s a Stage’ (1863–5) presents Shakespeare’s birth at the Globe, on a stage flanked by the figures of Comedy and Tragedy and populated by Shakespearian characters.
Kate Newman
Cruz, Ramón de la (1731–94), Spanish playwright. He has been credited with the translation of J. F. *Ducis’s neoclassical adaptation of Hamlet for the theatre, which was the first ‘Shakespearian’ play to be staged in Spain. It was entitled Hamleto, rey [king] of Dinamarca: tragedia inglesa and was treated merely as a tragedy of intrigue. Performances ran for five days and there was a two-day revival later in the year (Madrid, 4–8 October and 16–17 December 1772).
A. Luis Pujante
cultural materialism. A phrase originally coined by English critic Raymond Williams (Marxism and Literature, 1977) to describe his own unique contribution to *Marxist cultural theory. The meaning of the term was subsequently extended in the 1980s in Shakespeare (and more broadly cultural) studies to include not only Williams’s work but newer currents of Althusserian Marxism, French poststructuralism, and aspects of feminist and postcolonialist theory. Cultural materialism has developed particularly as an explicitly leftist reaction to the ‘old’ historicism of E. M. W. *Tillyard and to Tillyard’s more social-minded ‘humanist’ nemesis F. R. *Leavis and his numerous disciples.
The term is most often identified in Shakespeare studies with Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, editors of the influential 1985 Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism—the work most responsible for disseminating the term in Shakespeare studies. But it has been applied to a broad range of (mostly British) Marxist and poststructuralist-influenced critics such as Catherine Belsey, Francis Barker, Terence Hawkes, Lisa Jardine, and John Drakakis. Cultural materialism is closely allied to the ‘cultural poetics’ or *‘new historicism’ developed contemporaneously in the USA by Stephen Greenblatt and allied critics but has tended to be more explicitly Marxist and politically optimistic than its American variant.
Hugh Grady
Cumberland, Richard (1732–1811), prolific playwright. He adapted Timon of Athens for Drury Lane in 1771. He wrote an anonymous defence (1776) of his patron *Garrick whose adaptation of Hamlet was attacked by Arthur Murphy.
Catherine Alexander
Cunningham, Peter (1816–69), Scottish scholar and biographer who published Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court (1842), including for the years 1604–5 and 1611–12, the only ones extant for the Jacobean period (although sometimes questioned). He was treasurer of the London and Stratford committees that bought the *Birthplace in 1847.
Tom Matheson
‘Cupid’. ‘One as Cupid’ (the Roman god of love) introduces the masque of Amazons, Timon of Athens 1.2.
Anne Button
Curan is one of Gloucester’s retainers, The Tragedy of King Lear 2.1.1–13 and The History of King Lear 6.1–13.
Anne Button
Cure for a Scold, A. James Worsdale attempted to cash in on the vogue for ‘ballad opera’ initiated by John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera with this 1735 ‘Ballad Farce of Two Acts’, a hybrid of The Taming of the Shrew and John Lacy’s adaptation Sauny the Scot.
Michael Dobson
Curio is one of Orsino’s attendants in Twelfth Night.
Anne Button
Curtain theatre. The Curtain took its name from the parcel of land upon which it was built in Holywell in 1577, about one year later than the Theatre—with which its history is closely related—and just to the south of it. In 1585 the Curtain’s owner, Henry Lanman, entered into an obscure deal with James Burbage and John Brayne, the Theatre’s owners, which involved them ‘taking the Curten as an Esore to their playe housse’. The modern word closest to ‘Esore’ is ‘easer’, but it is hard to see how one playhouse could ‘ease’ another, although William Ingram made plausible sense of the deal as a means of selling the Curtain to Burbage and Brayne for the equivalent of seven years’ income, about £1,400. The Theatre appears to have stood empty for some time before being removed to form the Globe, and during this time the Chamberlain’s Men were presumably using the Curtain until their new home was ready on Bankside.
The three-tiered playhouse clearly represented in the ‘Utrecht’ engraving owned by Abram Booth has been variously identified as either the Curtain or the Theatre. Leslie Hotson identified it as the Curtain, but this was subsequently challenged, and the identity of the playhouse in the engraving is still disputed. A flag that can just be made out emerging from behind an intervening roof to the right may be that of the other playhouse, whichever of the two is actually depicted. Chambers thought that the venue for an unnamed play seen by Thomas Platter must have been the Curtain, but recent discoveries by Herbert Berry make the Boar’s Head a likelier venue. Limited archaeological excavations in 2011 and 2014 have uncovered Tudor brick foundations of a building that may well be the playhouse, of a similar size to the Theatre. It might have been a converted building such as that known as Curtain Close or a brand new playhouse. Nevertheless, it was described as ‘built of timber and thatched’ in 1611.
Gabriel Egan, rev. Julian Bowsher
Curtis is one of Petruccio’s servants in The Taming of the Shrew.
Anne Button
Cushman, Charlotte Saunders (1816–76), American actress who, after a false start in opera, inaugurated her distinguished career as Lady Macbeth in New Orleans (1836). Having honed her performance she impressed the normally critical *Macready whom she partnered during his 1843–4 tour of America, as a result of which she adopted some of his methods and took his advice to act in England. Physically mannish, Cushman shared Macready’s intellectual acuity and powerful stage presence, carrying all before her as Emilia, Queen Katherine, and—crossing the gender barrier—Romeo, often to her sister Susan’s Juliet. Her Hamlet and Cardinal Wolsey were less successful. The equal of *Forrest and *Booth (both of whom she partnered), Cushman was the first American actress of international stature.
Richard Foulkes
Cymbeline, King of Britain. See centre section.
Cymbeline: A Tragedy, Altered from Shakespeare. William *Hawkins’s adaptation of Cymbeline, performed at Covent Garden in 1759, attempts the astounding feat of making Shakespeare’s most wayward romance conform to the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action, as well as turning Cloten (who pays Giacomo to slander Innogen) into a traitor in the pay of the Romans.
Michael Dobson