f
F. The bibliographic abbreviation for *folio: hence ‘F1 [title of work]’ means ‘the first folio edition of [that work]’, ‘F2 [title of work]’ means ‘the second folio edition of [that work]’, and so on. In Shakespeare studies ‘F1’ almost invariably means the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 (Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies).
Michael Dobson
Fabian is Olivia’s servant who joins in with the plot against *Malvolio in Twelfth Night.
Anne Button
Fabyan, Robert (d. 1513), clothier and sheriff of London. Fabyan was also an amateur historian who expanded his private diary into The New Chronicles of England and France, published posthumously in 1516. Holinshed, Grafton, and Halle would all turn to this history though it was Fabyan’s anecdotes rather than his analysis of cause and effect that made him popular.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
facsimile editions. Pioneered in 1807, reproductions of the First Folio and the quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays proliterated after the advent of photography in the 19th century. Such facsimile editions are widely used by bibliographers and textual critics, as well as readers who wish to encounter Shakespeare’s texts in their original form. Although it is generally assumed that photographic reprints present a technically exact facsimile of the original, the notoriously unreliable facsimile of the First Folio prepared by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1876 was heavily retouched in pen and ink on nearly every page. Charlton Hinman’s Norton facsimile (1968) is made up of various leaves containing corrected formes from a number of actual copies, thus creating an ‘ideal’ copy that exists only in the facsimile.
Eric Rasmussen
Fair Em. The first quarto edition of this romantic comedy was published anonymously in 1590. It was catalogued as Shakespeare’s in the library of King Charles II, and unconvincingly attributed to *Greene in 1675.
Sonia Massai
Fairholt, Frederick William (1818–66), English genre painter. He produced fictional mises-en-scène from works by English poets, a series of which, entitled Passages from the Poets, included scenes inspired by Shakespearian drama. The works display little artistic accomplishment, but were engraved and published in weekly magazines, serving to broaden the popular appeal of the works they illustrated.
Catherine Tite
fairies are impossible to define accurately, because the term is used for beings who range from the angry or jealous dead of a family to small and benevolent nature-spirits, with many categories in between. Fairy beliefs originate in the ancient world of the Mediterranean, where fairies take the form of childhood demons or nymphs, and by the Renaissance stories about fairies were widespread in the European countryside. Such stories were especially common in Scotland, Ireland, the Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe, and in remote parts of England like the West Country and Romney Marsh, and these stories were often cautionary tales about dangerous beings who could draw those who saw them into illness, madness, or death. Fairies could also heal, however, and many cunning folk relied on them for information about healing and also about prognostication and finding lost or buried treasure. The fairies became increasingly sought after as possible sources of wealth towards the end of the 16th century as part of both elite and popular enthusiasm for conjuration as a means of advancement, and there are numerous accounts of how these beliefs were used by the unscrupulous to rob the unwary, as celebrated in *Jonson’s The Alchemist. Such beliefs often stemmed from Paracelsian doctrines of spirits, through which fairies came to be elected honorary servants to magicians, and that may be how demonologists began identifying them as devils. Another kind of fairy altogether came from the medieval romance, and was transformed by *Spenser’s Faerie Queene into a rather troubled symbol of benevolence; this was a fairy who signified wealth and aristocracy, though even she could not quite escape the connotations of trickery and ambition that clustered around her diminutive relations.
Shakespeare’s fairies were preceded by *Lyly and followed by others. As with his depictions of *witches, Shakespeare knew little and cared less about popular beliefs; he was no folklorist. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his fairies are an amalgam of fragments of Reginald *Scot pasted on to *Ovidian gods and goddesses. *Robin Goodfellow (Puck), for example, is much more like the Ovidian and Anacreontic Cupid than like an English hob. Nevertheless, it was Puck’s speeches about his mischief-making that were influential, producing some imitative poems and prose fictions which are often mistaken for folkloric sources. In fact fairies and fairy lore are supreme instances of Shakespeare’s power to create popular culture; it is because of him, and specifically because of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that fairies become associated with lyrical bucolic idylls, and this notion in turn influences Jonson, Herrick, *Milton, and the numerous poets of the 18th century whose weakly pretty fairy verse gives fairies a bad name. Shakespeare fixed the idea of fairies, consigning some fairies forever to the dustheap and conferring immortality on his own creations. His most important portraits of fairies occur in The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest (if *Ariel is really a fairy, as Trinculo claims, and not a familiar) but there are many other references, most memorably the Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, which exerted an enormous influence over other, later, literary fairies. All Shakespeare’s fairies are associated with jokes, tricks, and disguise; all are linked with the countryside and country life. Apart from a reference to the fairy as a fate (Antony and Cleopatra 4.8.12), which recalls *Holinshed’s use of the term fate for the Weird Sisters, most brief references see fairies as one amongst many vague menaces of the night, with a few more specific allusions to fairies as child-stealers, generally as part of scenes concerning children lost to their parents in pastoral settings (esp. Cymbeline 3.7.14, 2.2.10, 4.2.217, 5.4.133, and Pericles 21.142). After Shakespeare, all fairies in English poetry became more or less funny and kindly, until the *Romantic poets revived the menacing fairy of earlier eras. In so far as his own attitude might be reconstructed, it approximates Horatio’s response to a long harangue about fairies and ghosts: ‘So I have heard, and do in part believe it.’
Diane Purkiss
Fairies, The. David *Garrick’s musical adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was performed anonymously in 1755, and Garrick never printed it under his own name, clearly anxious about the response which an attempt to assimilate Shakespeare to the suspect continental genre of all-sung opera might inspire. The opera, which achieved a respectable eleven performances, omits the mechanicals entirely, and introduces songs from a wide variety of other sources, including the works of Ben *Jonson: its score was by John Smith, a pupil of Handel.
Michael Dobson
Fairy. She talks to *Robin Goodfellow, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.
Anne Button
‘Fair Youth’. Some of the poems numbered 1 to 126 in the usual arrangement of Shakespeare’s Sonnets are addressed to a young man. Under the supposition that he is the same man throughout, he is sometimes referred to as ‘the fair youth’, although the phrase does not occur. A vast amount of commentary has been devoted to attempts to determine the exact nature of the relationship, especially whether it was, or became, sexual (ostensibly denied in 20). Many attempts have been made to identify the youth (or youths) with a real person (or persons). Various words have been interpreted as clues—frequent use of ‘fair’, ‘youth’, ‘beauty’; ‘lovely boy’ (126); incitements to marry (1–17); puns on ‘will’ (135–6), possible pun on ‘hues’ (20), and so on. He has often been supposed to be the dedicatee, *‘Mr W.H.’, described by the publisher as ‘the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’. A favourite candidate in both roles has been Henry Wriothesley, Earl of *Southampton, dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, who was nine years younger than Shakespeare. Another is William Herbert, 3rd Earl of *Pembroke, born in 1580, dedicatee, along with his brother Philip, of the First Folio. But if ‘begetter’ means ‘procurer’ rather than ‘inspirer’, other possibilities open up. The name of Robert Devereux, Earl of *Essex, has often been canvassed, especially by Baconians. Hamnet Shakespeare (who died at the age of 11) has been found behind some of the poems, as has Shakespeare’s brother Edmund. Father Robert Southwell, executed in 1596, the actor Will *Kempe, and Prince Harry (of the history plays) are among the more improbable candidates.
Stanley Wells
Fairy Queen, The. This adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with ‘singing, dancing and machines interwoven, after the manner of an opera’, was first performed at Dorset Garden theatre in London in 1692 and revived, with a revised score, the following year. The script, printed anonymously, was probably prepared by Thomas *Betterton: the score was certainly composed by Henry Purcell, and, though it uses none of the original play’s text, is the closest thing we have to a Purcell setting of Shakespeare. The adaptation cuts the mechanicals entirely, and adds a number of lavish special effects, including a representation of China and a masque in which Juno appears in a chariot drawn by mechanical peacocks. The huge revival of interest in baroque music since the middle of the 20th century has led to Purcell’s score being recorded several times, most notably by John Eliot Gardiner in 1982, and the semi-opera has been revived in its entirety with some success, particularly by the English National Opera.
Michael Dobson
Fairy Tale, A, a two-act adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream hurriedly abbreviated by George Colman the elder at Drury Lane from a full-length version of the play which, prepared in association with David *Garrick, proved a disastrous failure in November 1763. A Fairy Tale opened only three days after the longer version closed, and makes something of a hasty mess of the original’s structure: Theseus, Hippolyta, and the lovers disappear, leaving only the fairies and the mechanicals, who rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe but never get to perform it.
Michael Dobson
Faithorne engraving, attributed to William Faithorne (1616–91), English engraver. In this work, a bust of Shakespeare surmounts a representation of Lucretia and Collatius. The engraving was prefixed to an early edition of The Rape of Lucrece (1655).
Catherine Tite
Falconbridge, Lady. Mother of Robert Falconbridge and the Bastard, she admits the latter’s father was Richard Cœur-de-lion, King John 1.1.253–8.
Anne Button
Falconbridge, Philip. See Bastard, Philip the.
Falconbridge, Robert. He claims his father’s estate on the grounds of his elder brother’s illegitimacy, King John 1.1.
Anne Button
Falstaff, Sir John. See Henry IV Part 1 and Part 2; Merry Wives of Windsor, The; Fastolf, Sir John; Oldcastle, Sir John.
Falstaff’s Wedding (1760), William *Kenrick’s humorous sequel to 2 Henry IV, was dedicated to James *Quin, a particularly popular Falstaff. In a loose political setting, the plot exploits Falstaffian stereotypes: he marries Ursula for her inheritance and fights a duel with Shallow who is vainly pursuing a loan.
Catherine Alexander
Family Shakespeare. The Revd Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) published the 10-volume ‘Family Shakespeare’ in 1818 under his own name, completing the 20-play edition published anonymously by his sister in 1807. His stated object was to remove from the works ‘only those words and expressions which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’. In practice, he (in collaboration with his unmarried sister Henrietta, whose name was kept off the title pages lest her reputation suffer) cut any passage which in his view smacked of obscenity. So, for example, he omitted the Porter scene in Macbeth, and Hamlet’s teasing of Ophelia before the play-within-the-play. Bowdler claimed on the title page of each volume that he added nothing to Shakespeare’s text, but in fact he made changes, as at the end of Measure for Measure, where the last lines are replaced by an invented passage in which the Duke looks forward to reigning with Isabella as his wife, and closes with the ‘royal maxim’, ‘To rule ourselves before we rule mankind’. The edition was attacked in the British Critic in April 1822, and Bowdler responded with a long defence. By 1836 the verb ‘to bowdlerize’ was current, with implications of crass and insensitive censoring.
The first complete edition of ‘The Family Shakespeare’. The enormous assistance Bowdler received from his unmarried sister Henrietta is not acknowledged on the title page, since a public admission that she understood the obscene passages she marked for omission would have harmed her reputation.
R. A. Foakes
Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight, The. See centre section.
Famous Victories of Henry V, The an anonymous play, first performed c.1586 and published in 1598, perhaps used by Shakespeare for 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V. The text we have of the Famous Victories is debased and possibly piratical. The original play may have been a two-part history, concerned with the Prince’s misdeeds and his development into a warrior-king. Similarities between the Famous Victories and Shakespeare’s plays allow for the possibility that Shakespeare knew this debased version but also provide glimpses of what the earlier play, perhaps his main source, was like. The Famous Victories provides the setting of the Eastcheap tavern and prototypes for the characters who gather there: Ned Poins and Gadshill, the reprobate Prince, even *Oldcastle, though as a shadow of his future self. The Famous Victories includes scenes that are central to Henry IV including the robbery at Gadshill, the derision of authority through role play, and the events surrounding the King’s death. Shakespeare may also have caught the saturnalian spirit of the earlier play.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
fanfare. Not a term used by Shakespeare; the various signals indicated in his plays for *trumpets, *drums, etc. May be divided into the military (*alarums, charge, *parley, *retreat) and the ceremonial (*flourish, *sennet, *tucket). The music for these in Shakespeare’s plays does not survive, though an idea of some military signals may be gained from battaglia pieces of the period, such as *Byrd’s The Battell.
Jeremy Barlow
Fang and Snare are two officers who attempt to arrest Falstaff, 2 Henry IV 2.1.
Anne Button
‘Farewell, dear heart, for I must needs be gone’, fragment of a song by Robert *Jones (from The First Book of Songs and Airs, 1600), sung by Sir Toby, with further extracts contributed by Feste and Malvolio, in Twelfth Night 2.3.98.
Jeremy Barlow
Farmer, Richard (1735–97), English classicist and scholar, author of An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (2nd edn. 1767). Farmer’s work responds to earlier critics who claimed that Shakespeare was skilled in both Latin and Greek. He argues instead that Shakespeare relied on contemporary translations of the ancients.
Jean Marsden
Farr, David (b. 1969), British theatre director. artistic director of the Gate Theatre, London, 1995–98, joint artistic director of Bristol Old Vic 2002–05, and artistic director of the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith 2005–09, Farr joined the *RSC as an associate director in 2009, beginning by directing Greg *Hicks as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (2009) and as the title role in King Lear (2010). He went on to oversee ‘What Country Friends Is This?’, the RSC’s main entry in the 2012 *World Shakespeare Festival, a trilogy of plays comprising The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest (the latter two directed by Farr), conceived around Shakespeare’s imaginative engagements with exile, asylum, travel, and shipwreck. In 2013 he directed Jonathan *Slinger as Hamlet in a spare, dark production haunted by formative memories, evoked by the empty school hall-cum-fencing-gym in which much of the action was set. His previous successes with the company were an award-winning samurai-era production of Coriolanus, starring Greg *Hicks (2002), and a heavily mediatized Julius Caesar (2004).
Will Sharpe
Fastolf, Sir John. In 1 Henry VI he deserts Talbot before Orléans (1.1.130–4) and again at Rouen (3.5). The outraged Talbot tears Fastolf’s garter from his leg, 4.1.15. The real Sir John Fastolf (d. 1459) had been awarded the Order of the Garter in 1429 but had it taken from him ‘for doubt of misdealing’ (*Holinshed), though he had also deserted Talbot at Orléans. He is thought to have been part of the inspiration for Sir John Falstaff.
Anne Button
Father who has killed his son. See Soldier who has killed his father.
Faucit, Helen (Saville) (1817–98), English actress from a theatrical family. She made her debut in 1836 at Covent Garden, playing Juliet, Katherine, Portia, Desdemona, and Constance in her first season. In 1837 she commenced her professional partnership with *Macready, during which she added Cordelia, Hermione, Rosalind, and Beatrice to her repertoire, performing them in her customary—increasingly dated—idealized style.
Helen Faucit’s marriage to Theodore Martin (knighted in 1880 for his biography of Prince Albert) coincided with Macready’s retirement and thereafter she acted only on special occasions such as the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1879, when she appeared as Beatrice to Barry Sullivan’s Benedick. Later that year in the Calvert Memorial Performance—her age, vocal delivery, and costume notwithstanding—she evoked ‘intense admiration’ as Rosalind. Helen Faucit’s On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (1892) was dedicated ‘by permission’ to Queen Victoria.
Richard Foulkes
Fauré, Gabriel (1845–1924), French composer. In 1889 he composed incidental music for Edmond Haraucourt’s play Shylock (based on The Merchant of Venice), which he revised as a concert suite for tenor soloist and orchestra in 1890. His incidental music for Julius Caesar (Théâtre Antique d’Orange, 1905) is a reworking of music originally written for Caligula (1888).
Irena Cholij
‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, spoken or sung by Guiderius and Arviragus in Cymbeline 4.2.259. Early settings are unknown, but the lyrics became popular with English composers in the 20th century, including Geoffrey Bush, Dankworth, Walford Davies, Finzi, Gardiner, Gardner (two versions), Jacob, Lambert, Parry, Quilter, Vaughan Williams.
Jeremy Barlow
Fechter, Charles Albert (1822–79), actor, born in London, brought up in France where, after studying sculpture, he joined the Théâtre Français. In 1860 Fechter moved to London where he performed his innovatory Hamlet—in English—the next year. Fechter’s Prince was a pale Norseman in a flaxen wig whom he embodied with subtlety and depth, eschewing the traditions of the English stage. In contrast his Othello (also 1861) was a disaster, only partially redeemed by his subsequent Iago. The attempts of the Revd J. C. M. Bellew to secure a prominent place for his protégé in the Shakespeare tercentenary were thwarted; Fechter spent his declining years in the United States.
Richard Foulkes
Feeble, Francis. He is drafted into the army by Shallow and Falstaff, 2 Henry IV 3.2.
Anne Button
Felix and Philiomena. According to Elizabethan Revels accounts, a performance of ‘The history of felix and philiomena’ by the Queen’s Men took place shortly after New Year, 1585. This lost play was probably based on Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana enamorada, and may have served as a source for The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Felton portrait. See Burdett-Coutts portrait.
Feminine ending, the appearance of an additional unstressed syllable at the end of a verse line; thus in pentameter verse an eleventh syllable, as in most lines of Sonnet 87.
Chris Baldick
feminist criticism. Women’s critical engagements with Shakespeare date from Margaret Cavendish’s discussion of his plays in her Sociable Letters (1664), and have taken many forms, embracing fiction and performance as well as literary scholarship and criticism. Such engagements have often been motivated by a desire to defend or praise Shakespeare’s female characters which can be described as broadly feminist. When a feminist perspective on Shakespeare began to emerge within academic literary criticism in the 1970s, it was initially informed by a similar approach. This was counterbalanced, though, by a more challenging critique of Shakespearian constructions of femininity, which argued that by underwriting certain versions of womanhood with the power of the bard, they had a pernicious cultural effect. In subsequent decades, feminist Shakespeare criticism has flourished and diversified. Committed to making connections between the critic’s cultural moment and the Renaissance, feminist criticism of Shakespeare seeks both to intervene in contemporary cultural politics and to recover a fuller sense of the sexual politics of the literary heritage. If its primary effect has been to elicit fresh interpretations of the texts and their original historical location, it is also changing the way that Shakespeare is reproduced and consumed in education and in popular culture.
Kate Chedgzoy
Fencing. See hunting and sports.
Fenton, Geoffrey. See Bandello, Matteo.
Fenton, Master. He is in love with Anne Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Anne Button
Fenton, Richard (1746–1821), English author. He claimed in his anonymous Tour in Quest of Genealogy through Several Parts of Wales to own a manuscript of Shakespeare’s autobiography in Anne Hathaway’s handwriting, from which this work quotes. The quoted passages, however, are hardly to be taken seriously, and the whole section seems to be a satirical allusion to the Shakespearian *forgeries of William Henry Ireland.
Michael Dobson
Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, is separated from his father in the carefully managed shipwreck that opens The Tempest, and is subsequently introduced to Miranda, with all the hoped-for consequences, 1.2.368 ff.
Anne Button
Ferdinand, King of Navarre. See Navarre, Ferdinand, King of.
Feste, Olivia’s jester, scorned as ‘a barren rascal’ (1.5.80) by *Malvolio, plots revenge in Twelfth Night.
Anne Button
fiction. In addition to his many appearances as a fictional character (see Shakespeare as a character) in novels for both adults and children, Shakespeare has been important to novelists and fiction-writers in a number of ways. From very early on in the novel’s development as a genre, it was remarked that Shakespeare had affinities with the novel, not least as himself a plunderer of prose tales. Charlotte *Lennox in her Shakespeare Illustrated (1753–4) was the first to note his debts to the continental novella and to remark on how much clearer characters’ motivations were in the originals. Eighteenth-century novelists, such as William Goodall in his Adventures of Captain Greenland (1752), frequently invoked Shakespeare as a precursor because he was felt to break literary decorums in much the same way as did the new form. Hence certain great novelists have been dubbed ‘Shakespearian’, a term of approval meant to connote a certain large inclusiveness of sympathy and social range—such novelists have included Sir Walter *Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, George Eliot, James *Joyce, and Victor *Hugo, to name the most outstanding.
Since *Richardson published his first novel, Pamela (1740), it has been commonplace to use a liking for Shakespeare as a moral touchstone by which to try heroines—this has been true from Richardson’s Pamela, Clarissa, and Harriet Byron, Francis Burney’s Evelina, and so to Jane *Austen’s Fanny Price. Equally, it has been a common technique to include a staging or reading of a Shakespeare play within the novel upon which characters comment self-revealingly or in which they participate. Perhaps the most famous examples of this would be *Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1), in which, appropriately enough given the novel’s concern with the absent or embarrassing father, Hamlet is performed, or the performance of a spurious Shakespearian medley by the King and the Duke in Mark *Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
More generally, certain novelistic genres have been since their inception especially prone to Shakespearian quotation and allusion, a practice that became particularly widespread in the Romantic period. (See, for example, the references to Coriolanus which structure the discussion of industrial relations throughout Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, 1849). Hence the early *Gothic novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Charles Maturin and the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott are permeated with Shakespearian epigraph, quotation, and allusion. There are several reasons for this: Shakespeare’s plays, themselves regarded as committed to the messy complexities of real life in defiance of literary convention, offered an important model to chroniclers of contemporary alienation for the depiction of extreme states of consciousness, while for novelists more interested in reanimating history the varieties of his characters’ personal languages, and the double-plot mechanism of the history plays themselves, modelled ways of representing the imagined past.
Finally, Shakespeare’s plots have served as the armature for many novels. Measure for Measure is reworked in Matthew *Lewis’s The Monk (1796); As You Like It serves as a reference point for the heroine of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1874–6), Gwendolen Harleth, while Hamlet underscores the irresolution of Eliot’s eponymous hero. In the 20th century Lear underpins Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres and Falstaff haunts Robert *Nye’s novels. The plots of the last plays, most especially The Tempest, have structured romance from Scott’s tales of inheritance reinstated through to the modernities and postmodernities of John Fowles’s The Magus (1966/1977), Iris *Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea (1978), Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), and Isak Dinesen’s short story ‘Tempests’ in Anecdotes of Destiny (1958).
Of all of the plays, Hamlet and Macbeth have undoubtedly been the most influential in this fashion, underlying early Gothic (such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, 1799) and its descendant, classic modern detective fictions, including Michael Innes’s Hamlet Revenge! (1937), Marvin Kaye’s Bullets for Macbeth (1976), and numerous others, not to mention the spoof by James Thurber, The Macbeth Murder Mystery (in itself a mini-essay on why these plays should have proved so tempting to the detective aesthetic). (Detective fiction has also amused itself with discovering, only in the end to destroy, sundry lost Shakespearian manuscripts: the most notable examples are Edmund Crispin’s Love Lies Bleeding, 1948, and Michael Innes’s The Long Farewell, 1958.) More generally, Hamlet underpins mainstream novels as diverse as Laurence *Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Johann Wolfgang von *Goethe’s Werther (1774) and his Wilhelm Meister series (1777–1829), Lillie Wyman’s Gertrude of Denmark (1924), Virginia *Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973), and John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (1999).
The most influential of late 20th-century critical work on Shakespeare and the novel was directed towards examining how women novelists have rethought Shakespeare’s plots within their home genre (hence, in part, a resurgence of interest in Mary Cowden *Clarke’s supplementary short stories The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 1851–2). Here, The Tempest has been overwhelmingly influential, especially among women writing from a consciously postcolonial perspective—not merely American and Canadian (such as Constance Beresford-Howe’s Prospero’s Daughter, 1988, and Sarah Murphy’s The Measure of Miranda, 1987), but also Indian and Caribbean (Suniti Nahijoshi’s work, for example). African-American women writers have also found The Tempest peculiarly hospitable to an exploration of the intersection of race and gender: both Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988) and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981) can be seen as critical readings of Shakespeare’s last romance.
Nicola Watson
fiddler, a broader musical term in Shakespeare’s time than now, applied to players of the *rebec and *lute as well as the violin (then a relatively new instrument in England), or used abusively to imply a professional musician of low status, as in The Taming of the Shrew 2.1.157.
Jeremy Barlow
‘Fidele’ is the name used by Innogen when disguised as a man in Cymbeline.
Anne Button
Field, Nathan (1587–1620), actor (Blackfriars Boys 1600–13, Lady Elizabeth’s Men 1613–15, King’s Men 1615–20) and dramatist. Nathan Field’s father, the Puritan anti-theatricalist John Field, wrote A Godly Exhortation by Occasion of the Late Judgement of God at Parris-garden (1583) which attributed to divine displeasure the Bear Garden’s fatal collapse during a Sunday performance, but he died before Nathan was old enough to be dissuaded from the theatrical life. Nathan Field’s name occurs in the Blackfriars Boys’ cast lists for Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster. In the Sharers Papers of 1635 Cuthbert Burbage described Nathan as one of the ‘boys growing up to be men’ (the others were John Underwood and William Ostler) who joined the King’s Men after the Blackfriars reverted to the Burbages in 1608, but in Field’s case this happened ‘in process of time’, since he appears in the cast list for Jonson’s Epicoene which was first performed in 1609 by the Blackfriars Boys, renamed the Children of the Queen’s Revels, in their new venue the Whitefriars playhouse. In 1613 the Queen’s Revels Children merged with the Lady Elizabeth’s Men and Field stayed with this new company until he joined the King’s Men, apparently in 1615. As an actor Field was at the height of his powers (second only to Burbage and subsequently Taylor in the King’s Men) when he died. Field sole-authored two successful plays, A Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies, before becoming a King’s Man, and he collaborated on six after: Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One with Fletcher; The Honest Man’s Fortune with Fletcher and possibly Massinger; The Jeweller of Amsterdam with Fletcher and Massinger; The Queen of Corinth with Fletcher and possibly Massinger; The Knight of Malta with Fletcher and Massinger; and The Fatal Dowry with Massinger.
Gabriel Egan
Field, Richard. See ‘Dark Lady’; printing and publishing; Sonnets.
Fiends. Joan la Pucelle invokes them in vain, 1 Henry VI 5.3 (they are mute).
Anne Button
Fiennes, James. See Saye, Lord.
Fiennes, Joseph (b. 1970), British theatre and film actor. Most notable among Shakespearian circles for his performance as Shakespeare in John Madden’s 1998 film *Shakespeare in Love, scripted by Marc Norman and Sir Tom *Stoppard, for which Fiennes was nominated for a Best Actor in a Leading Role BAFTA. He also played Troilus at the RSC in 1996–7, Edward II in Michael *Grandage’s 2001 production of *Marlowe’s play at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, and Berowne in Trevor *Nunn’s Love’s Labour’s Lost at the *National (2003).
Will Sharpe
Fiennes, Ralph (b. 1962), English actor. After training at RADA, Fiennes first worked in Shakespeare at the *Open-Air Theatre in Regent’s Park in the mid-1980s, where his roles included Cobweb, but after playing Romeo there under the direction of Declan Donnellan he was signed to the *Royal Shakespeare Company. Here his roles included Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing (1988), Henry VI (in Adrian Noble’s redaction of the first tetralogy The Plantagenets, 1988–9), the Dauphin (in Deborah Warner’s production of King John, 1989), Edgar, Berowne, and a fine Troilus (for Sam Mendes, 1990). He played Hamlet at the Hackney Empire in 1995, and the title roles in back-to-back productions of Richard II and Coriolanus at Gainsborough Studios, Shoreditch, in 2000. Despite increasing film commitments he has returned periodically to Shakespeare since, playing Prospero for Trevor *Nunn at the Haymarket in 2011 and combining cinema and Shakespeare with his own film version of Coriolanus, with himself in the title role, released in 2011.
Michael Dobson
‘Fie on sinful fantasy’, dance song performed by the fairies in The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.92; the original music is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
fife, a small transverse *flute for military use, played with *drum (separately, unlike the one-person *tabor and *pipe combination); see Much Ado About Nothing 2.3.14–15.
Jeremy Barlow
Fife, Thane of. See Macduff.
Filario (Philario) is present when Posthumus and *Giacomo set the wager on Innogen’s fidelity in Cymbeline 1.4.
Anne Button
‘Fill the cup and let it come’, song fragment quoted by Silence in 2 Henry IV 5.3.54; the original music is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
film. See silent films; Shakespeare on sound film.
Finland. Finland was introduced to Shakespeare through travelling groups of players, mainly from Sweden but also from Germany and Russia. In 1768 a troupe led by Carl Gottfried Seuerling (1727–95) performed Romeo and Juliet, which is likely to have been the first production in Swedish. Other prominent troupes were led by Pierre Deland (1805–62) and C. W. Westerlund (1809–79). In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the vernacular languages, Finnish and Finnish-Swedish, were thought unsuitable for the stage, so performances were usually in Swedish or German.
In the mid-19th century, after Finland had been ceded from Sweden to Russia, members of the educated elite such as J. V. Snellman (1806-81) began considering the role the translation of Shakespeare and other classics might play in promoting a Finnish national identity based on Finnish as a language of education and culture. The first ‘translation’ of Shakespeare into Finnish was by Jaakko Fredrik Lagervall (1787–1865), entitled Ruunulinna (1824). Very loosely based on Macbeth, it is set in Finland and written in rollicking trochaic tetrameter couplets.
In the 1870s, Finnish-language Shakespeare took a great leap forward. The Finnish Literature Society, working in close cooperation with the newly formed Finnish Theatre (later Finnish National Theatre), embarked upon the first complete works translation project, with the poet Paavo Cajander (1846–1913) as translator. Cajander began with Hamlet in 1879 and continued at the rate of one or two plays per year until 1912, when he had translated 36 plays. In addition to the English, Cajander consulted the Schlegel-Tieck German translation and Karl August Hagberg’s Swedish translation. When Aleksander III was crowned in Moscow in 1883, Finnish celebrations included a performance of Cajander’s translation of The Merchant of Venice.
By the early 20th century Shakespeare was well established in Finland, though not always the biggest box office draw. One significant landmark came in 1913, when Elli Tompuri played Hamlet, arguing that women should get to play intelligent roles (another female Hamlet was Leea Klemola in 1995). In 1916, Eino Leino, Finland’s leading poet at the time, published a tribute to Shakespeare that ended in a call for Finnish freedom (censored in its initial printing, the poem was later published in full after independence in 1917). The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote incidental music for The Tempest in 1925, and for Sibelius’s 80th birthday in 1946, Maggie Gripenberg choreographed a one-act ballet to this music.
Cajander’s translations were performed for decades, though later directors began wishing for a more flexible and modern language that was truer to the native rhythms of Finnish. Yrjö Jylhä (1903–56) translated seven Shakespeare plays (as well as John Milton’s Paradise Lost), mainly in the 1930s. Another prominent Shakespeare translator was the poet Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–95), who translated seven plays in the 1960s–80s, and whose translations are still valued today for their exquisite poetic qualities. In 2002 the publishing company WSOY embarked upon a second complete works translation project, now including 38 plays, which finished in 2013. Sixteen of the translations were done by Matti Rossi, whose early translations in the 1960s helped transform Finnish Shakespeare.
Rossi worked closely with the influential director Kalle Holmberg, whose productions of Richard III (1968, 1997), King Lear (1972), Macbeth (1989), and Henry IV (1991) brought a new ruggedness to Shakespearian production and took influences from Jan Kott and Peter Brook. In 1988 Ritva Siikala directed an all-female production of the Henry VI plays, with 34 actresses alternating between roles. Romeo and Juliet continues to be popular, and has also inspired a number of experiments, such as Otso Kautto’s all-male production (Teatteri Pieni Suomi, 1992) and Hilda Hellwig’s bilingual production at Lilla Teatern (1999), where the Capulets spoke Finnish and the Montagues Swedish. The most well-known Finnish Shakespeare film is Aki Kaurismäki’s Hamlet Goes Business (1987); another noteworthy production is Jotaarkka Pennanen’s eerie Hamlet (1992), with Heikki Kinnunen in the lead role.
In a small nation of just over five million people, famously able to be silent in two languages, Shakespeare translation and performance have by contrast proved rather voluble, playing a small but significant role in the development of literary Finnish and Finnish theatre.
Nely Keinänen
Finney, Albert (b. 1936), English actor. He proved his worth as Henry V at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre before playing lesser parts at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959 during which he triumphantly took over from an indisposed Laurence *Olivier in Coriolanus. He worked in plays by John Osborne and others and in neo-realist British cinema and became an international star. He played Hamlet in the production which opened the National Theatre building on the South Bank in 1976; he also played Macbeth there in 1978. He evoked the spirit of the great Shakespearian actor-manager Donald *Wolfit in the film of The Dresser (1983).
Michael Jamieson
Finsbury. Fenland immediately north of the City, the manor of Finsbury was acquired by lease, by the city of London, from the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s in 1514. Golden Lane which runs through the manor was the location of the Fortune theatre, built by Philip *Henslowe in 1600.
Simon Blatherwick
fires in Stratford-upon-Avon. There were three great fires in Stratford during Shakespeare’s life, in 1594, 1595, and 1614. The first two, said to have broken out on a Sunday, were popularly ascribed to sabbath-breaking. The third, which started on Saturday, 9 July, destroyed 54 houses and much other property.
Stanley Wells
First Folio. See folios.
First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, The. See centre section.
Fisher, Thomas. See printing and publishing.
Fishermen, three. They take pity on the shipwrecked Pericles, Pericles 5.
Anne Button
Fiske, Minnie Maddern (1865–1932), American actress, who, although she made early appearances as the Duke of York in Richard III (1868) and Prince Arthur in King John (1874), showed little interest in Shakespeare, her only adult role being Mistress Page (1928).
Richard Foulkes
Fitton, Mary. See ‘Dark Lady’; Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of; Tyler, Thomas.
Fitzwalter (Fitz-walter, Fitzwater), Lord. He challenges Aumerle and is himself challenged by the Duke of Surrey, Richard II 4.1. He announces the execution of two traitors, 5.6.13–16.
Anne Button
flags were flown over the theatres on days when performances were to be given. The de Witt drawing clearly shows one at the *Swan, the ‘Utrecht’ engraving shows flags over the Theatre and the Curtain, John Norden’s engraved panorama Civitas Londini shows flags over the Globe, the Rose, the Swan, and the Beargarden, and Wenzel Hollar’s Long View of London shows a particularly tall flagpole at the Hope, but none at the second Globe. It is possible that the colour of the flag indicated the genre of the play but more likely that, as with an inn sign, the flag told the illiterate the name of the venue. De Witt shows the Swan’s flag bearing a swan, and an inset in Norden’s Civitas Londini mislabels the Rose ‘The Star’, which is easily a misreading of a flag emblem.
Gabriel Egan
Flaminius is a loyal servant of Timon in Timon of Athens.
Anne Button
Flanders. See Dutch wars; Low Countries.
flats/shutters. Before the Restoration the theatres used little or no scenery, but thereafter it became usual to paint a realistic background onto canvas stretched over wooden frames (flats), often using the principle of perspective foreshortening. A shutter was two flats, each holding half the background, which could be run on grooves cut in the stage floor in order to meet on the stage. Before the Civil War masques and, less often, plays performed at court used this technology and John Webb, nephew and assistant to Inigo *Jones, brought it to the Restoration stage in his designs for William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes in 1661.
Gabriel Egan
Flavius. (1) The two tribunes Flavius and Murellus (spelled ‘Marullus’ by *Theobald and later editors), hostile to Caesar, expostulate with the commoners, Julius Caesar 1.1. (2) Also in Julius Caesar, Flavius is a follower of Brutus (mute, appearing 5.3 (under the name Flavio) and 5.4). (3) He is Timon’s steward, acknowledged by Timon as the ‘One honest man’, Timon of Athens 4.3.498.
Anne Button
Fleance, son of Banquo, escapes when his father is murdered, Macbeth 3.3. (Fleance is an invention of Horace Boece, on whose Scotorum historiae (1527) *Holinshed based the Scottish part of his Chronicles, a source for Macbeth.)
Anne Button
Fleay, Frederick Gard (1831–1909), English Shakespeare scholar associated with the Victorian ‘disintegrators’ of the New Shakespeare Society (1873–94). Fleay championed versification analysis as an application of positivist scientific methods to literary scholarship and as the key to solving questions of chronology and authorship in the Shakespeare canon, which his analysis led him to conclude contained the work of a number of playwrights besides Shakespeare.
Hugh Grady
Fleetwood, Charles (d. 1747), controversial English manager whose period at Drury Lane 1734–44 was significant for the appointments of *Macklin as artistic manager and *Garrick as a senior player.
Catherine Alexander
Fletcher, John (1579–1625), dramatist. Like his collaborator Francis *Beaumont, Fletcher was born into a well-connected family, but was driven to writing for the stage by financial need. Again like Beaumont, he did badly at first. His first play, an experiment in pastoral tragicomedy called The Faithful Shepherdess (1609), was a box-office failure, although it was admired by poets such as Ben *Jonson and George *Chapman, who contributed commendatory verses to the first edition, and later John *Milton, who echoed it in Comus. He preceded the printed version with a preface ‘To the Reader’, which defines tragicomedy for the benefit of the uncomprehending Jacobean public: ‘A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned; so that a god is as lawful in this as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy’. This definition fits many of Shakespeare’s comedies as well as his late plays: in Twelfth Night, for instance, Viola’s life is threatened by Duke Orsino, while Measure for Measure is heavy with the fear of death. Accordingly, the first successful tragicomedy written by Beaumont and Fletcher together, Philaster (1620), features a woman disguised as a page who is sent, like Viola, to woo another woman for the man she loves, and is later stabbed by him in a fit of jealousy, as if to fulfil Orsino’s threats. The man, Philaster, is one of a series of tormented heroes in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, a fusion of Hamlet and Othello, always balancing on a knife-edge between hysteria and madness. Philaster has much in common with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline—both were written in about 1609—but it is not clear which came first: both Shakespeare and Fletcher had already written tragicomedies to which these plays were natural successors. It would seem that tragicomedy was simply the new genre of the moment, and that Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Beaumont sparked each other off in their efforts to develop that genre to its full potential.
Beaumont and Fletcher had good professional reasons for drawing on situations and characters from Shakespeare’s work. They began by writing for children’s companies, including the Children of the Queen’s Revels, who were based at the Blackfriars theatre. When Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, took over the Blackfriars in 1608, Beaumont and Fletcher began to write for them, producing three of their finest plays between 1609 and 1611: Philaster, A King and No King (published 1619), and The Maid’s Tragedy (also published 1619). After this Fletcher seems to have been groomed to succeed Shakespeare as principal dramatist for the company. He wrote three plays in collaboration with Shakespeare—the lost Cardenio (c. 1612–13), All Is True (Henry VIII) (1623), and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634)—before Shakespeare gave up writing for the stage. Beaumont stopped writing at about the same time as Shakespeare, and Fletcher went on to write many more plays—tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies—both alone and with others (his chief partner after Fletcher was Philip Massinger). But when his dramatic works were published in 1647, they bore the title Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and it is as Beaumont’s collaborator that he has entered the mythology of the theatre.
The extraordinary unity of Beaumont and Fletcher’s work together provoked endless speculation about the nature of their relationship. John *Aubrey wrote: ‘They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the Playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloak, etc., between them.’ After Shakespeare’s retirement their plays rapidly outstripped his in popularity, and remained the most popular and influential works of the Jacobean theatre for most of the 17th century. They deserve to be better known.
Robert Maslen
Florence, the capital of Tuscany, figures in All’s Well That Ends Well (Florence is the setting of 3.5 and successive scenes). Florence is also mentioned in The Taming of the Shrew (1.1.14 and 4.2.91) and ‘Florentines’ (people from Florence) in Much Ado About Nothing (1.1.10) and Othello (1.1.19 and 3.1.39).
Anne Button
Florence, Duke of. He appoints Bertram ‘general of our horse’ in All’s Well That Ends Well 3.3.1.
Anne Button
Florio, Giovanni (John) (?1554–?1625), translator. The English-born son of an Italian Protestant refugee, Florio graduated from Oxford University and began to translate Italian texts into English. He produced two grammars, Florio his First Fruits (1578) and Second Fruits (1591), and an Italian–English dictionary (1598), works that Shakespeare probably knew if, as seems likely, he studied Italian himself. But Florio was most renowned for his translation of Montaigne’s Essais, published in 1603. In a copy of Volpone that he gave to Florio, Ben Jonson acknowledged his debt to the translator and called him a friend to the theatre. He was certainly a friend to Shakespeare’s drama and possibly to the man himself. Shakespeare and Florio may have been acquainted with one another through their shared patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of *Southampton. Hence, Shakespeare may have had access to Florio’s famous library, and the Italianate aspects of his plays may have been inspired by the literature he found there. Florio’s own book, his translation of *Montaigne, is the most obvious connection between them. Passages in The Tempest suggest Shakespeare’s use of Florio’s translation, in particular Gonzalo’s speech on his ideal commonwealth. King Lear features more than 100 words, new to Shakespeare’s work, that could have been found in Florio’s Montaigne. In 2013 Saul Frampton published a lengthy article in the Guardian, arguing, ahead of a book-length study on the subject, that Florio edited the First Folio of Shakespeare, introducing many lexical items aimed at correction and improvement in the process.
Jane Kingsley-Smith, rev. Will Sharpe
Florizel, the son of Polixenes, woos Perdita (who he thinks is a shepherdess) disguised as ‘Doricles’, a shepherd, in The Winter’s Tale 4.4.
Anne Button
Florizel and Perdita. See Winter’s Tale, The; Garrick, David.
Flourish, a call on *trumpets or *cornets, perhaps extemporized, usually heralding a processional entrance; see The Two Noble Kinsmen 2.5 opening (‘short flourish’), and also Richard II 1.3.122 (‘long flourish’).
Jeremy Barlow
‘Flout ’em and cout ’em’, fragment sung by Stefano and Trinculo in The Tempest 3.2.123; the original music is unknown; Caliban tells the pair that their tune is wrong; they are corrected by Ariel on *tabor and *pipe.
Jeremy Barlow
Flower family. See Flower portrait; Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; Shakespeare tercentenary of 1864.
Flower portrait, half-length, oil on panel, dated 1609, inscribed ‘W. Shakespeare’. Now in the *RSC collection in Stratford, the portrait is named after its former owner Mrs Charles Flower, of the Stratford brewing dynasty. Following a late 19th-century trend for identifying likely originals for Martin *Droeshout’s engraved portrait, the Flower portrait was described as an original for the First Folio engraving by M. H. Speilmann in 1906. Recent scientific examination has shown that it makes use of pigment that was not available until the early 18th century.
The ‘Flower’ portrait of Shakespeare, now in the RSC Collection in Stratford. The painting probably derives from Martin Droeshout’s title-page engraving for the First Folio rather than being, as some have claimed, the original on which the engraving is based.
Catherine Tite
Fluchère, Henri (1898–1987), French scholar. Fluchère gave a decisive impulse to Elizabethan studies in France after the Second World War with his Shakespeare, dramaturge élisabéthain (1948). He edited and prefaced Shakespeare’s works for the Pléiade two-volume Shakespeare (1959). Many books followed including a prose translation of and introduction to Coriolan (1980). In 1946 he created and directed the Maison Française d’Oxford College, and in 1968 was elected Dean of the Arts Faculty at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence. In 1977, with other scholars specializing in 16th-century English literature, he launched the Société Française Shakespeare, a branch of the International Shakespeare Association, and chaired it for the first term.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Fluellen, Captain. A Welshman in Henry V, he quarrels with Macmorris (3.3), Williams (4.8), and *Pistol (5.1).
Anne Button
flute, in Shakespeare’s time a plain wooden tube with six finger holes; it came in various sizes, the most usual being the middle-sized instrument in D. The term ‘flute’ then might also indicate *recorder.
Jeremy Barlow
Flute, Francis. A bellows-mender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he plays Thisbe in the play-within-the-play of 5.1.
Anne Button
flying. In the drama a supernatural character (for example a classical god) might best enter by being lowered from the ‘heavens’ over the stage, suggesting flight. The actor sat in a carriage attached by ropes to a winch in the stage cover, and the first playhouse to have a full stage cover was the Rose. In 1595 *Henslowe paid carpenters for ‘making the throne in the heavens’, which was the first known descent machine for flying. The Globe seems not to have been fitted with a flight machine until around 1608–9 when the King’s Men brought it into conformity with their other playhouse, the Blackfriars, which had one. Shakespeare’s pre-1608 supernatural characters—Hymen in As You Like It and Diana in Pericles—walk rather than fly onto the stage. Sound effects (for example thunder) or celestial music added to the impact of a supernatural descent and also helped drown the creaking of the winch.
Gabriel Egan
Foakes, R.A. (Reginald Anthony Foakes) (1923–2013), British Shakespeare scholar. One of the most eminent and influential Shakespeare scholars of the second half of the 20th century, and the first decade of the 21st, Foakes was one of the founding fellows under Allardyce Nicoll of the *Shakespeare Institute, an institution that has greatly advanced international postgraduate research in many areas of the English Renaissance, and been the training ground for a number of notable academics. He went on to teach at Durham, and then Kent, where he founded the department of English and served as Dean of Humanities. His later career was spent at UCLA, where he moved in 1982 as Professor Emeritus, enjoying a period of enormous productivity in his semi-retirement. Foakes’ great scholarly range and bequests to Shakespeare studies cover the archival and editorial in his editions of Philip *Henslowe’s Diary (1961, repr. 2002) and King Lear for the Arden Shakespeare (1997); the historical, in Illustrations of the English Stage: 1580–1642 (1985); practical, humane, and precise literary criticism most famously manifested in his great study Hamlet Versus Lear (1993), as well as a more thematic and theoretical approach as seen in Shakespeare and Violence (2002).
Will Sharpe
Foersom, Peter (1777–1817), Danish actor and translator. The first to translate Shakespeare into Danish verse, he acted Hamlet in the first ever Shakespeare production at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, 1813. His translations of ten of the tragedies and histories (1807–18) have remained influential.
Inga-Stina Ewbank
Folger Collection. See Folger Shakespeare Library.
Folger Shakespeare. This pocket paperback edition of individual plays issued in Washington and New York between 1957 and 1964 was edited by the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Louis B. Wright, with Virginia A. Lamar. It was aimed at ‘the general reader’, and proved, with its brief and simple notes on pages facing the text, and illustrations drawn from old documents and books in the Folger Library, to be very popular for use in schools. Using the same basic format, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine are re-editing the series in the light of current thinking about Shakespeare’s texts.
R. A. Foakes
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. It houses the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, including 82 copies of the First Folio and 204 quartos, among them a unique copy of Titus Andronicus (1594). The collection also comprises an estimated 27,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, and prints representing or associated with Shakespeare, including the *Ashbourne (Kingston) portrait. The collection was amassed and then given to the nation in 1928 by Henry Clay Folger (1857–1930) and his wife.
Susan Brock
folios. A book in which the printed sheet is folded in half, making two leaves or four pages, is known as a folio. The prestigious folio format was used for works by the leading theologians, philosophers, and historians of the day: Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), Richard Hooker’s Laws (1611), Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614), and William Camden’s Annals (1615). The groundbreaking edition of Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616) marked the first time that the œuvre of a playwright had ever been published in folio. But the Jonson folio had included prose and poetry as well as dramatic texts. A folio devoted entirely to plays was unprecedented before the publication in 1623 of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, the First Folio.
We know very little about the planning stages of the First Folio. It may be that Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors in the King’s Men—chief among them John Heminges and Henry Condell—were planning an authorized collection of his plays when they got wind of Thomas Pavier’s plans to bring out an unauthorized collection in 1619, or perhaps they got the idea from Pavier.
In their epistle ‘To the great Variety of Readers’, Heminges and Condell describe their task: ‘It has been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends, the office of their care, and pain, to have collected and published them.’
A syndicate of publishers was at some point formed to underwrite the venture. The colophon on the last page of the Folio is unusual in that it emphasizes the financial costs of the undertaking: ‘Printed at the Charges of W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, 1623’. Jaggard’s association with Pavier’s project no doubt involved the accumulation of rights to plays that had been printed earlier, a vital component for the production of the Folio. John Smethwick was probably invited to join the cartel because he held the copy rights to Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew. Similarly, William Aspley held the rights to 2 Henry IV and Much Ado About Nothing.
The imprint claims that the book was ‘printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount’. However, Blount was only a publisher; the printing of the Folio was done entirely in the shop of William Jaggard and his son Isaac. Charlton Hinman, in his reconstruction of the events in the Jaggard printing-house, demonstrated that the printing of the 907-page Folio began early in 1622 and took nearly two years to complete, during which time as many as nine compositors worked on the project. Hinman established that the Folio was set by formes (not seriatim, as had been previously thought) and identified the pairs of type-cases used by the compositors. Apparently the copy was cast off so that two compositors could work simultaneously on the same forme, thereby speeding up composition in relation to presswork. In setting the text of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for instance, Compositor C set page 30 (signature C3v) while Compositor A simultaneously set page 31 (signature C4r).
The title page of the First Folio, 1623. This presentation copy from the publisher William Jaggard is now, along with more than 70 other copies, in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
The title page advertises the plays within as ‘published according to the true original copies’ and Heminges and Condell distinguish their authoritative texts from some of the previously published quarto editions: ‘before you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them; even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs; and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.’ The publishers apparently commissioned the professional scribe Ralph *Crane to prepare transcripts of the original manuscripts to be used as printer’s copy for The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and possibly Cymbeline. These were among the first plays to be printed, so it appears that Crane had an association with the Folio enterprise only in its early stages. In addition to Crane’s transcripts, the Folio compositors had access to a wide variety of copy. Of the 36 plays in the Folio, twelve appear to have been set up from earlier printed quartos that had been annotated from a manuscript playbook: Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and The Tragedy of King Lear; the playbooks themselves were apparently used as copy for only three plays in the Folio: Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Macbeth; another nine were set from Shakespeare’s foul papers: The Taming of the Shrew, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), 1 Henry VI, The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, All’s Well That Ends Well, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra; and six from transcripts made by unidentified scribes: King John, 2 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Othello, Coriolanus, and All Is True (Henry VIII).
Heminges and Condell divided the plays into the generic categories of the volume’s title—Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies—and apparently exercised some care in ordering the plays so that each section begins and ends with plays that had not previously appeared in quarto. The only exception to this rule is Troilus and Cressida, the first page of which was initially printed on the verso of the last page of Romeo and Juliet, in the middle of the tragedies section; the text was then reset and re-placed to come first among the tragedies—or last among the histories; the table of contents for the Folio omits the play and thus does not make it clear to which category it belongs. Heminges and Condell seem to have made a conscious decision not to include Shakespeare’s poems in the collection, and they may have intentionally omitted some of the late collaborative plays as well (Pericles, Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen).
The first preliminary page of the First Folio consists of a verse by Ben Jonson on the *Droeshout portrait, which appears on the facing title page:
This figure, that thou here seest put
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Graver had a strife
With Nature, to out-do the life:
O, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he hath hit
His face; the Print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.
But, since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.
B. J.
Then follows the dedication to William Herbert, 3rd Earl of *Pembroke, and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery. The next item is Heminges and Condell’s epistle ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, two commendatory poems by Ben Jonson and Hugh Holland, the ‘Catalogue of the several Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies contained in this Volume’, two more commendatory verses, and finally a list of the ‘Principal Actors’ in the plays.
The First Folio was expected to be on the market by mid-1622; it was included in the Frankfurt book fair’s catalogue as one of the books printed between April 1622 and October 1622. In the event, however, the Folio did not actually appear until very late in 1623. On 8 November 1623, Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered in the Stationers’ Register their copy rights to the plays that had not been previously published:
Mr William Shakspeers Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedies soe manie of the said Copies as are not formerly entred to other men. vizt. Comedyes. The Tempest. The two gentlemen of Verona. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errors. As you Like it. All’s well that ends well. Twelft night. The winters tale. Histories. The thirde parte of Henry the sixt. Henry the eight. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens. Julius Caesar. Tragedies. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline.
The printing of the Folio was probably completed shortly thereafter—a copy at the Bodleian Library in Oxford was sent for binding on 17 February 1624—and the book was then available in bookshops for the princely sum of £1 (40 times the cost of an individual quarto).
The volume was so successful and demand apparently so great that a second edition was required within less than a decade. In 1632, Thomas Cotes, who had taken over the Jaggard shop following Isaac’s death in 1627, printed the Second Folio for a syndicate of publishers that again included Smethwick and Aspley. The Second Folio was a carefully corrected page-for-page reprint of the first that made hundreds of minor changes in the text, the majority of which have been accepted by modern editors. The preliminaries of the Second Folio include John Milton’s first published poem, ‘An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet W. Shakespeare’. The elegant paper stock used for the Second Folio occasioned William Prynne to lament in Histrio-mastix (1633) that ‘playbooks are grown from quarto into folio’ and that ‘Shakespeare’s plays are printed in the best crown paper, far better than most Bibles.’
The Third Folio appeared in 1663, with a second issue in 1664 that added Pericles and six apocryphal plays: The London Prodigal, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Locrine. The Fourth Folio was published in 1685; 70 pages of this edition were reprinted c.1700 to make up a shortage and may be considered a Fifth Folio printing. There are 233 copies of the First Folio known to survive, the *Folger Shakespeare Library housing the largest single collection. New copies surface very infrequently, but one was discovered in the library of Saint-Omer in 2014.
Eric Rasmussen
Folio Society Shakespeare. The 37 volumes of this handsomely printed edition were issued between 1950 and 1976, using the text of the New Temple Shakespeare. They are chiefly notable for the introductions, of varying interest, written mainly by well-known actors and directors, among them Laurence *Olivier, Paul *Scofield, Richard *Burton, Peter *Brook, and Peter *Hall. The texts are illustrated with reproductions of costume and stage designs from the period. Thirty-five of the introductions were published as a separate book in 1978. The Folio Society has since reprinted the *Oxford edition twice and also offers each work in a boxed set in a fine, letterpress edition which reprints the text of the Oxford multi-volume edition along with a reprint of the full version of that edition.
Shakespeare’s greatest glutton, Sir John Falstaff: a popular engraving published by Bowles and Carver, c.1790, loosely based on earlier depictions of the actor James Quin in what became his best-loved role.
R. A. Foakes, rev. Stanley Wells
food and drink. The Elizabethan year (see calendar) fell into feast and fast periods: both Wednesdays and Fridays were fish-eating days until 1585 and the six weeks of Lent were equally meatless except in the case of pregnant women, children, and invalids. At such times the poor ate saltfish (such as the ‘poor-john’ Caliban is said to smell like, The Tempest 2.2.25–7), while the rich might eat sprats or herrings, fresh, dried, smoked, or salted. Christmas feasting, during which open house was kept by big households, ran from 1 November right through to Twelfth Night (6 January): its special dishes included boar brawn, mince pies (still made with spiced meat), and the ‘flapdragon’ mentioned in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.1.42). Other feasts would include funerals (cf. Hamlet on the reuse of leftovers, 1.2.179–80), weddings (cf. Taming of the Shrew 3.3), sheep-shearing (as in The Winter’s Tale, at which the shepherds plan to eat ‘warden pie’, a pear pie coloured with saffron and spiced with mace, nutmegs, ginger, prunes, and sultanas, 4.3.44–8), and harvest-home.
The richer ate three meals a day, the poorer more like two. Breakfast, served generally between 6 and 8 a.m., varied widely from the big hunting breakfasts recorded as being given for Elizabeth to private collations: the food ranged from ale, beer, or wine, boiled beef or mutton, and bread, to eggs, milk, and butter. In Antony and Cleopatra there is admiring talk of ‘eight wild-boars roasted whole at a breakfast’ (2.2.186–7). The poor would be more likely to eat some sort of cereal made into a pottage.
The main meal of the day, dinner, was served at 11 a.m. for the gentry, the middling sort eating at noon. It was laid with great ceremony on a long table, with the wine, wine cups, and basin and ewer for washing on the ‘court-cupboard’ (not unlike a modern sideboard; cf. Romeo and Juliet 1.5.6–7). The guests would for the most part be seated on joint-stools in order of social rank—hence the dramatic social solecism of Lady Macbeth’s hasty command to her guests to ‘stand not upon the order of your going’ (Macbeth 3.4.118). The meal might last two, three, or four hours, and would consist of two courses, laid in prescribed patterns on the table for the diners to help themselves. The first course would consist of ‘gross meats’ or the equivalent on fish-days, perhaps buttered and spiced fish pies of sturgeon or salmon; the second of poultry, raised pies in ‘coffiins’ of pastry (cf. Titus’s cannibal version, Titus Andronicus 5.2.185–90), puddings, ‘kickshaws’, or ‘made dishes’ (e.g. fricasses, carbonadoes, hashes, collops), and salads of cooked, pickled, or raw vegetables, herbs, and flowers. The third course was the ‘banquet’ course. Whereas the first two courses would have been eaten in either the hall (now steadily shrinking in size) or the newly fashionable private dining parlour, the banquet ‘to close our stomachs up | After our great good cheer’ (Taming of the Shrew 5.2.9–10) would be taken in another location entirely—another room (such as the ‘privy chamber’ to which Wolsey’s most privileged guests withdraw for their banquet, All Is True (Henry VIII) 1.3.101–2), an outside summer house, temporary or permanent, or perhaps a gazebo on the roof. There guests would be regaled on expensive sweetmeats skilfully prepared by the lady of the house—sweet biscuits and tarts, a marchpane, wet and dry ‘suckets’ (preserved fruits), and fresh fruit, all preceded by a ‘conceited’ dish of sugar sculpture made to represent a bird, animal, fish, or even, on one occasion, a castle made of sugar firing tiny guns with real gunpowder at its besiegers. The witty, whimsical, and luxurious nature of this food is reflected in Benedick’s description of Claudio’s affected language in Much Ado About Nothing as a ‘fantastical banquet’ (2.3.15). All told, there might be of the order of thirty different dishes for a humblish feast, though more like five or six for the country gentleman not expecting guests (compare Justice Shallow’s menu in 2 Henry IV 5.1.22–4). While the main courses were eaten on wooden, pewter, or silver trenchers depending on the wealth of the household, the banquet was served on glass plates (often hired) and eaten off wafer-thin wooden or sugar plate trenchers often decorated on the underside with a verse or epigram called a ‘roundel’ and read out at the end of the meal. Food was carved with a knife (often worn at the man’s belt) but eaten with the fingers—forks were still a novel luxury item. Fingers were washed at the end of every course in bowls of rose-water. In between courses there might be entertainment laid on, music, a masque, or dancing—hence the appositeness of the masquing Ariel at the magic banquet in The Tempest (3.3.52ff.).
Supper, by contrast, was usually very much an afterthought. Gentry supped between 5 and 6 p.m., farmers and merchants not before 7 or 8 p.m., and labourers at dusk. The meal was light—perhaps eggs and a posset (hot milk fortified with sugar, spices, eggs, and wine, brandy, or ale, and on one notable occasion with additional soporifics by Lady Macbeth, Macbeth 2.2.6–8).
Elizabethan England was full of the excitement of new food imports, and Shakespeare’s plays reflect this. New fruits and vegetables from the Americas made their appearance: tomatoes, and potatoes both sweet and common. With Dutch refugees came asparagus, cardoons, globe artichokes, and cauliflowers, and from southern Europe the apricot, quince, fig, and melon (the real Richard II’s garden would not have featured the ‘dangling apricot’ of 3.4.30). The more expensive or exotic the food, the more likely it was to be regarded as an aphrodisiac—hence Falstaff’s excited invocation of potatoes, eringoes (the candied root of sea-holly), and kissing-comfits in The Merry Wives of Windsor (5.5.18–21).
In drinks, too, Falstaff proves to have expensive tastes. The generality drank ale or beer, but large quantities of claret, malmsey, madeira, and sack (a dry Spanish wine not unlike sherry), sometimes ‘burnt’, that is to say, heated (see Twelfth Night 2.3.184), were shipped in from France, Crete, Madeira, and Spain respectively. Households also produced flower and fruit wines, often for medicinal use.
Food as a source of Shakespeare’s imagery was well studied by *Spurgeon, in particular bread and candy. Feasts and interrupted feasts feature importantly; see in particular The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, and The Tempest. But delight in food and drink in Shakespeare is synonymous with Falstaff, whose tastes provide such a sharp profile of fashionable gluttony.
Nicola Watson
fools. In Shakespeare’s time, fools or jesters were retained as providers of entertainment to both the royal court and well-to-do households like those of Olivia in Twelfth Night and Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing. They were usually male, and would often wear a distinctive costume of ‘motley’ (parti-coloured cloth), wear a coxcomb on their head (not the belled hood of later tradition but a removable cap), and carry a ‘bauble’ or carved stick, which was often a focus for phallic humour. Some were professional comedians who adopted a façade of folly, others mentally handicapped individuals, known as ‘naturals’, whose innocent antics were considered humorous. Their remarks could also be sharply satirical: both types of fool would be granted much greater latitude in speaking than would ordinary courtiers, although King Lear’s fool is threatened with whipping when he goes too far.
Shakespeare began to use fools as stage characters with Touchstone in As You Like It. Scholars have postulated that he may have been responding to an innovation in a lost play by George Chapman for a rival acting company, or to the arrival in his own company of a new principal comic actor, Robert *Armin. Most of these figures, including Feste in Twelfth Night and Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well, are professionals who are consciously wiser than the jesting roles they adopt, though the Fool in King Lear may be a ‘natural’. All of them see and describe the plays’ events in meaningful ways that are not available in normal social discourse.
Martin Wiggins
fools. (1) Servant of a prostitute, a fool appears briefly in Timon of Athens 2.2. (2) In The Tragedy of King Lear a fool accompanies Lear into the storm, but does not appear after 3.6 (History of King Lear 13).
Anne Button
foot, a patterned metrical unit (iambic, trochaic, pyrrhic, spondaic, anapaestic). See metre.
George T. Wright
Foote, Samuel (1721–77), controversial English actor and writer. He was trained by *Macklin and first appeared as Othello to his mentor’s Iago. Best known as a satirist (and from 1767 as owner of the Haymarket), he was particularly scornful of the *Stratford Jubilee but was himself the subject of ridicule—and some dreadful puns on his name—following the amputation of a leg.
Catherine Alexander
Forbes-Robertson, Sir Johnston (1853–1937), English actor, who at the outset of his career (1874) came under the influence of the veteran Shakespearian actor Samuel Phelps and thereafter sought to uphold his ‘histrionic pedigree’. Described by Shaw as ‘essentially a classical actor’, Forbes-Robertson put his natural gifts and personality to the service of his roles. In juvenile parts (Hal to Phelps’s Henry IV in Manchester, 1874; Claudio with Irving and Terry at the Lyceum, 1882; and Romeo between 1880 and 1895 to a succession of Juliets, including in 1895 Mrs Patrick Campbell who also partnered him in Macbeth in 1898) he was judged by some to be rather insipid, but coming to Hamlet (rather late at 44 in 1897) he captured the grace, intellect and melancholy of the Dane in what for many was the definitive performance of its day. In 1913 (aged 60) he committed his legendary Hamlet to—silent—film.
Richard Foulkes
Forbidden Planet, 1956, American science-fiction film, inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Fred M. Wilcox. The film is set in ad 2200. On the planet Altair Four a Prospero-like Dr Morbius (with his Miranda-like daughter Altaira) unleashes uncontrollable monstrous forces, apparently from his own id. The rock musical Return to the Forbidden Planet (1981) develops this.
Tom Matheson
‘For Bonny sweet Robin is all my joy’, snatch of a ballad sung by Ophelia in Hamlet 4.5.185. The tune, under a variety of titles with the word ‘Robin’, survives in many arrangements from the period.
Jeremy Barlow
Ford, Master Frank. He tests his wife by bribing Falstaff to woo her (having taken the name Brooke (Broome in the *First Folio) to conceal his identity) in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Anne Button
Ford, Mistress Alice. With Mistress Page she devises a punishment for Falstaff, after they find he has sent them identical love letters, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Anne Button
Fordham, John. See Ely, Bishop of.
foreign words. The renaissance of learning in 16th-century England led to the enrichment of the English vocabulary with foreign words largely introduced from classical sources (often in Anglicized form) via translations from Latin and French literary and scientific texts. Because of the association of Latin with scholarship, unusual Latin loans became known as ‘inkhorn’ terms, whose introduction was strongly supported by some, like Sir Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), and opposed by others, like Sir John Cheke (1514–57). Shakespeare employed their misuse by lower-class speakers, like Dogberry, and their excessive use by courtly speakers, like Osric, as sources of humour and satire.
Vivian Salmon
forestage, another name for an apron stage, or an extension to an apron stage.
Gabriel Egan
forgery, the practice of counterfeiting an author’s personal documents or works; specifically in the case of Shakespeare, counterfeiting his signature, manuscripts of his plays and poems, annotations in printed copies of his works, and historical and theatrical documents pertaining to his career.
The forgery of Shakespeare documents has a long and extensive history, beginning in his own lifetime, judging from the number of spurious plays published under his name or initials, and continuing to the present day, as manuscript experts at major auction houses and book-dealers can attest. However, the two most notorious and influential Shakespeare forgers were William Henry Ireland (1777–1835) and John Payne Collier (1789–1883).
William Ireland, the son of Samuel Ireland, a successful London book-dealer, began his forging career as a teenager by tracing over published facsimiles of Shakespeare’s signatures and by acquiring old paper and mixing old formulas for ink. His forgeries included poems, personal letters (including a flattering letter sent by Queen Elizabeth I), a ‘profession of faith’, playhouse documents, property and mortgage deeds, promissory notes, and receipts, all purportedly signed by or involving Shakespeare. Ireland then progressed to forging partial or whole manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear and produced partial copies of what he claimed were original manuscripts of the hitherto unknown Shakespeare plays Vortigern and Rowena (staged once unsuccessfully in 1796 by Richard Brinsley Sheridan at Drury Lane Theatre), Henry II, and William the Conqueror.
Samuel Ireland published some of his son’s documents in 1795, convinced that they were genuine. In the next year, the editor and literary critic Edmond *Malone denounced the papers as forgeries produced under the direction of the elder Ireland in his book Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and in another pamphlet which was answered by Samuel Ireland, opening a contentious debate among the literary community. In the same year William Ireland finally admitted in his Authentic Account that he had forged the documents without his father’s knowledge or assistance. Nevertheless, his attackers continued to claim his father had been complicit. In 1805 he published his Confessions and began trying to restore his literary reputation by claiming the unknown Shakespeare plays as his own and in writing other original plays, poems, and novels. However, after his death he and his father were again attacked, this time by C. M. Ingleby, who succeeded, incorrectly, in convincing the literary community that Samuel Ireland had indeed been the mastermind of the Ireland forgeries.
John Payne Collier was already a respected literary critic and Shakespearian editor when he claimed in 1852 to have purchased a copy of a 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works owned by Thomas Perkins, alleged to have been a relative of a member of Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men. Collier published numerous descriptions of the annotations written in Renaissance hand that he claimed to have discovered throughout the text of the ‘Perkins Folio’, arguing that they were taken from early Shakespearian performances. The Folio was accepted as genuine by many until subjected in 1859 to forensic examination, when it was discovered that the annotations had originally been written out in pencil and traced over in ink, and thus were modern forgeries. Many of Collier’s numerous other purported Renaissance literary and theatrical finds, including Shakespeare’s signature on a letter, and references to Shakespeare added to genuine theatrical documents, were then also discovered to be forgeries. In fact, the same man who had reopened the Ireland forgery case, C. M. Ingleby, exposed many of Collier’s forgeries.
Yet Collier continued to work as a critic and editor, even insisting that the apocryphal play Edward III be assigned to Shakespeare. Collier maintained his innocence until his death. The sale of his library afterwards, however, more disastrously sealed his reputation as a forger when many of the documents in it were examined for the first time and found to be fake. Collier’s most lasting legacy is that all of the numerous public and private libraries, including the important collections of the Dulwich College, Heber, and Bridgewater libraries, to which he had unsupervised access early in his career still come under suspicion of containing material that he doctored or forged.
Material exposed as Shakespearian forgeries still commands interest and attention, and today is collected in its own right. For instance, one collection of forgeries by William Ireland was auctioned at Sotheby’s, London, in 1982 for £12,000 (and has since increased in value), and other items by him and Collier still find eager buyers.
‘The Oaken Chest or the Gold Mines of Ireland, A Farce’, a satire on the Ireland forgery affair, 1796. Among the documents in the foreground are stock-market quotations on the going rate for Shakespeare scripts.
Grace Ioppolo
formalism is a term used to describe any critical approach which emphasizes a work’s literary language and aesthetic form as opposed to its historical and cultural content. More specifically it refers to two separate trends in 20th-century literary criticism, both of which emphasized the importance of language to literary art like Shakespeare’s.
The Russian Formalists (Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eikhenbaum) attempted in the 1910s and 1920s to define the specificity of literary language and forms, especially their capacity to ‘defamiliarize’ our perceptions of normal reality. Their work was continued in the 1970s and 1980s by structuralist and poststructuralist critics.
‘American formalism’ is a term sometimes applied to the American New Criticism developed by John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, which championed literature from the 1940s to the 1960s as a special kind of value-laden language best studied through attention to ‘the texts themselves’ outside any historical context.
Hugh Grady
Forman, Simon (1552–1611), astrologer and physician. Though sometimes imprisoned for illegal medical practices, Forman had a fashionable clientele of Londoners by the 1590s, and Lord Hunsdon’s mistress Emilia Lanier as well as Shakespeare’s acquaintances Jane Davenant and Marie Mountjoy consulted him. Friends, no doubt, helped him to get the MD degree in 1603, and yet he had keen interests in prophetic cures, the occult, and the theatre. Forman wrote the first existing accounts of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline, along with notes on another dramatist’s play, about King Richard II, which he saw at the Globe on 30 April 1611. These four reports appear in The Book of Plays and Notes Thereof per Forman, S., for Common Policy (that is, affording useful lessons for the common affairs of life), the authenticity of which has been questioned, but the manuscript has been reasonably established to be Forman’s own. He makes errors, and may describe a drama a week or two after attending a performance. Having seen Macbeth at the Globe on Saturday, 20 April 1611, he mixes his report with memories of Holinshed’s narrative about fairies or nymphs who stopped Macbeth and Banquo as they came ‘riding through a wood’; the Globe actors were surely not on horseback. Forman recalls no cauldron scene and errs in supposing that Macbeth was made Prince of Northumberland, but he remembers vividly that at the banquet ‘the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind’ the usurper. By and large, the report on Macbeth is an eyewitness account. Forman’s entry on The Winter’s Tale at the Globe establishes that this drama existed by the time he saw it on 15 May 1611. He was impressed by Leontes who was ‘overcome with jealousy of his wife’, and by the plan to have a ‘cup bearer’ poison Polixenes, but Forman makes no mention of Hermione’s survival. Nor does he note that a bear crossed the stage in pursuit of Antigonus, though he emphasizes a wily Autolycus, in whom he typically finds a moral lesson: ‘beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows.’ He does not say when or where he saw Cymbeline; he fails to mention the Queen, calls the heroine ‘Innogen’ (perhaps accurately), and recounts her adventure in ‘man’s apparel’, but neglects Cymbeline’s denouement. He probably watched that drama in the same year as the other plays, but not later than the summer. Having predicted the date of his death, Forman, by design or mishap, died when being conveyed across the Thames on 8 September 1611.
Park Honan
forme. Books were printed on large sheets of paper with a number of pages on each side, which were then folded and cut at the edges. The pages that fill either side of one sheet constitute one forme. The pages that will lie on the inside of the sheet when it is folded are the inner forme; those on the outside, the outer forme.
Eric Rasmussen
Forrest, Edwin (1806–72), American actor, endowed with a powerful voice and physique, which required toning down in the Shakespearian repertoire. Richard III was an early success as was Iago, and in his maturity his Othello, Macbeth, and Lear were judged to have improved following his exposure to English actors and audiences in 1836. Although Forrest won further plaudits for his Macbeth and Lear during his return to London in 1845, he also became embroiled in the disastrous rivalry with *Macready which culminated in the Astor Place riot in 1849. Though his international reputation relied heavily on Shakespeare, as a patriotic democrat Forrest had an ambivalent attitude towards British culture.
Richard Foulkes
Fortinbras. Nephew to the King of Norway, he is encouraged to march through Denmark to attack Poland, instead of claiming land in Denmark lost by his father (the previous King of Norway, also called Fortinbras). At the end of Hamlet he takes the Danish throne, with Hamlet’s support.
Anne Button
‘Fortune my foe’, one of the most frequently used ballad tunes, especially for *broadside ballads reporting death and disaster. Many settings for lute or keyboard survive from Shakespeare’s time, including variations by William *Byrd. The title first appears in a ballad licence of 1589; it is misquoted by Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.3.60. The original ballad text survives in various 17th-century broadsides; see Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (1966).
Jeremy Barlow
Fortune theatre. See Henslowe, Philip; theatres, Elizabethan and Jacobean.
Foul case, a type-case that had pieces of type in the wrong boxes. Since *compositors did not look at the faces of the letters as they picked them up, a foul *case inevitably led to errors. If a case was carelessly overfilled, it was easy for type to spill over from one box to another, such as from the ‘a’ box into the adjacent ‘r’ box, which would account for errors such as ‘faiendship’ for ‘friendship’.
Eric Rasmussen
foul papers. A playwright’s rough draft manuscript was known in the period by the descriptive term ‘foul papers’. Presumably, Shakespeare’s original foul papers would have been transcribed to make the official *‘book’ for use in the playhouse, and the foul papers thus superseded might be released by the company to a publisher. The printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays that appear to derive from foul paper copy provide a unique glimpse of the playwright in the act of composition: *stage directions are frequently open-ended (‘Enter King, and two or three’, ‘Enter Rosencraus and all the rest’) suggesting that when he began to write a scene, Shakespeare was undecided about (or uninterested in?) the precise number of characters who would enter; false starts reveal lines and passages deleted and revised currente calamo; the extraordinary variability of speech-headings (those for Lady Capulet include *Capulet’s Wife, Wife, Old Lady, Lady, and Mother) suggests that Shakespeare often conceived of characters by their relation to others onstage rather than as autonomous individuals.
Eric Rasmussen
Foxe, John (1516–87), English Protestant writer, exiled during Mary I’s reign. His most celebrated work was the Acts and Monuments or The Book of Martyrs, published in 1563, an exhaustive history of Protestant martyrdom in England, particularly under Henry VIII and Mary I. During Elizabeth’s reign this book was not only celebrated but became required reading. It was placed in churches and reprinted in shorter editions so that many households possessed a copy. Its popularity was based not only upon Foxe’s dramatic style, reinforced visually in a series of woodcuts, but upon its nationalist agenda. Foxe described England as chosen by God to overthrow papacy. Among the martyrs celebrated were Sir John Oldcastle and Thomas Cranmer, figures whom Shakespeare would later represent in 1 and 2 Henry IV and All Is True (Henry VIII).
Jane Kingsley-Smith
France. Although the character of Falstaff left its mark when English players performed at the court of Henri IV in 1605, an interest in Shakespeare developed fairly late in France. There are decisive historical reasons for this: the lack of interest in the bard even in England, the recurrent conflicts between the two countries, and the inherent dislike of the English language by the French. The great discrepancy in theatrical aesthetics between England and France should not be overlooked as Aristotle’s slightly perverted rule of the three unities (time, place, and action) prevailed on the French stage, and decency excluded verbal or corporal violence, as well as any form of vulgarity, and the principle of verisimilitude was strictly observed. So the Shakespearian corpus was altogether discarded. But as progress in the arts was currently believed to be necessary and because French tragedy had reached an impasse, some renewal was essential. So during the Age of Enlightenment the most advanced thinkers finally turned to Shakespeare, the strongest proponent being *Voltaire (François Marie Arouet, 1694–1778). As he was exiled to England on account of his free thinking between 1726 and 1729, he read the plays in the original, saw them performed (often in adapted versions) at Drury Lane, and later wrote a few far-fetched imitations in regular, heroic twelve-foot alexandrines such as Zaïre (1732) inspired by Othello but set during the Crusades, which met with great success, La Mort de César, and Sémiramis, after Hamlet. In his Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire acknowledged Shakespeare’s genius in his ‘monstrous farces’ ‘full of force and ferocity, of naturalness and the Sublime’. Pleading for a return to the text and a mixing of the genres in which the whole human condition was depicted, he wanted Shakespeare to rank among the classic playwrights alongside Corneille, Racine, and Molière. He even translated some fragments of Hamlet twice, first as a French piece, then keeping closer to the original. However, his early admiration then turned to an equally fierce condemnation of the bard as ‘barbarous’.
As late as 130 years after Shakespeare’s death, in 1746, Pierre-Antoine de La Place (1707–83) had Le Théâtre anglois published (volumes i to v devoted to Shakespeare) along with ‘Discours sur le théâtre anglais’, a remarkably coherent theorization to justify his approach. Like many translators of his time, he did not translate literally, but instead worked hard to adapt this unfamiliar kind of drama to French taste. The plays were reorganized into scenes whenever characters appeared on stage, alexandrines were reserved for speeches pertaining to the ‘Beautiful’ or the ‘Sublime’, while other verse passages were in prose, and further parts only summarized (Henry V was dismissed in five pages) excluding any comic or vulgar transgression of the tragic genre. Pierre Le Tourneur (1737–88) took a different stand. He completed a thorough, faithful translation in 20 volumes (1776–82) which was highly praised. But it should be made clear that the first contact the French had with Shakespeare was on the page rather than on the stage. It was not until 153 years after Shakespeare’s death that the plays were at last seen in France, and then exclusively under the sole name of the adaptor. The main author, Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816), wrote six tragedies after La Place, in heroic alexandrines with much altered plot and cast, allowing for long asides by confidants recalling the neoclassical style: Hamlet in 1769, Roméo et Juliette and Le Roi Lear in 1783, Macbeth in 1784, Jean-sans-terre; ou La Mort d’Arthur in 1791, and Othello in 1792, all performed at the *Comédie-Française then transferred for a time to the Odéon with great, lasting success. Very much centred on the eponymous heroes, these tragedies explore the individual destiny of exceptional characters which the famous actor François-Joseph Talma played in memorable performances until his death in 1826 (he even performed the role of Shakespeare himself in a one-act prose comedy by Alexandre Duval entitled Shakespeare amoureux in 1804!). With his intonation based on that of English actors, he gave life to the Shakespearian repertoire and paved the way for Romantic audiences. Shakespeare was now fashionable on stage. The interest in Shakespeare increased after the performances by English actors who were booed in Othello in 1822 (anti-English feeling being at its peak after the Napoleonic defeats) but highly praised in 1826–8. The players were Edmund *Kean, Charles *Kemble, and Harriet Smithson as Ophelia—whom Hector *Berlioz eventually married, mistaking theatrical illusion for reality. And so the Shakespearian myth was born. Great Romantic adaptations followed, starting with Le More de Venise by Alfred de *Vigny (1829) in sumptuous settings representing accurate views of Venice, Cyprus, and palace interiors and Hamlet by Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice (1847), which strayed from the original (the ghost only appears at the end as a representative of divine justice, condemning Hamlet to live and expiate his sin for having killed more characters than the evil Claudius), performed at the Comédie-Française until 1886 with Mounet-Sully (and Sarah *Bernhardt as Ophélia) in massive settings with heavy machinery, imposing long, awkward interruptions. Hamlet is the archetypal hero of the period. The stage interpretations followed the lithography by Eugène *Delacroix (from the performances he saw in London). The myth was transposed to the *opera by Ambroise Thomas (1868). Indeed music provided an outlet for the Romantic disposition as in Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette Symphony (1839), and the opera by Charles Gounod (1867). The cult devoted to the Shakespearian hero in black was far removed from the original, especially when performed by the great actress Sarah Bernhardt in her own Théâtre de la Renaissance in 1899. Shakespeare had then become a recurrent reference in French literature and the arts with increasing numbers of translations and adaptations. Among them was a remarkable rewriting of Le Tourneur’s text in thirteen volumes by a famous historian and politician, François Guizot, who considered the dramas in a wider perspective encompassing the complete spectrum of society. But the main event was the prose translation of François-Victor *Hugo (1828–73) in fifteen volumes written during the family’s exile to Guernsey between 1859 and 1865. It was introduced by his father’s William Shakespeare commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, in which he discussed Shakespeare briefly among the geniuses of humanity, himself included. Mostly based on the Folio but including some apocryphal work such as Edward III, and two versions of Hamlet (the 1603 and 1604 quartos), this collection however does not respect the Folio classifications but groups the plays according to character types, such as ‘tyrants’, including Macbeth, Le Roi Jean, Richard III, ‘jealous characters’, ‘tragic lovers’, ‘friends’, and according to social categories ‘family’ (Coriolan, Le Roi Lear), ‘society’, and ‘country’. This edition was to become the literary reference up to the present day but never found its way to the stage.
Towards the late 19th century Shakespearian theatre started to allow for completely antagonistic creations. The symbolist movement turned to magical drama (Le Songe, Macbeth in the ruined Gothic cathedral of Saint Wandrille in Normandy) translated by the Belgian French poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Many short-lived companies of players were set up including Camille de Sainte Croix’s Compagnie Française du Théâtre Shakespeare founded in 1909. A series of lectures preceded the plays which staged junior players acting against plainly painted curtains so as not to divert the attention from the plot or the text.
As a reaction against heavy machinery, rich settings and also the cult of the hero, Aurélien Lugné-Poë (1869–1940) promoted ‘Shakespeare without setting’ in an article after visiting William Poel’s Shakespeare Stage Society. In a memorable one-night experiment at the Cirque d’Été in Paris, he directed a debatable Mesure pour mesure in 1898 on a reproduction of the bare Elizabethan stage with some innovative acting in the auditorium. His success was recognized in 1913 with a version of Hamlet by Georges Duval ‘in complete conformity with the English text’ in a fixed set (a Norman arch backstage) with only a few movable painted curtains. His wife Suzanne Després was an athletic Hamlet and himself a sober Polonius.
Directors paid increasing attention to the text they chose, individual plays were translated by writers (Marcel Schwob) or poets (Pierre-Jean Jouve), and some directors even took part in the writing themselves (Jacques *Copeau for instance). In his stagings, the naturalist director André *Antoine (1858–1943) offered a meticulous reconstitution of the historical setting which was used as a great fresco in large cast productions portraying sumptuous crowd scenes: elaborate Norman arches for Le Roi Lear in 1905 (integral version by Pierre Loti), a complex evocation of Rome for Jules César in 1907, and Coriolan in 1910 in which the fixed set (Roman buildings covered with vines) could be partly hidden behind movable painted curtains figuring the inside of a house or a further perspective, allowing for an uninterrupted performance. During the First World War Firmin Gémier (1869–1933) staged Le Marchand de Venise (1917) and Antoine et Cléopâtre (1918) in the form of a popular theatre with massive human tableaux praising the beauty and sensuality of the body at a time when soldiers were being killed and maimed by the thousands. After the war he turned to comedies such as La Mégère apprivoisée and Le Songe d’une nuit d’été in abridged versions. Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) had a completely different approach, advocating a bare stage and minimal setting. La Nuit des Rois (text by Lascaris much revised by Copeau) at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, 1914, is a landmark in modern theatre with its stylized setting: light grey curtains on three sides of a proscenium, a single set, and a touch of melancholy in the interpretation of Sir Andrew (after Granville-Barker’s interpretation). He furthered his staging renovation (abstract architecture with a backstage gallery) in Le Conte d’hiver (1920). Charles Dullin (1885–1949) preferred adaptations (Richard III by André Obey, Jules César and Le Roi Lear by Simone Jollivet) to translations, which allowed a quicker, efficient performance. In his own portrayal of Richard III (1933), which was the main role of his long career, he played a grinning, devious, deformed villain, lurching stealthily from the darkened openings of the circular setting. A few months later in February 1934 a highly political version of Coriolan by René-Louis Piachaud, with impressive crowds all giving the, sadly, then fashionable Roman salute, led to right-wing riots in the streets of Paris and the resignation of Emile *Fabre, the Comédie-Française administrator.
Since the Second World War the interest in Shakespearian theatre has never failed. The plays are conceived for large audiences such as the open-air Avignon Festival where Jean *Vilar (1912–71) premièred Richard II at the 1947 opening season and staged a hieratic Macbeth in 1953, Roger *Planchon (1931–2009) gave a post-Brechtian Richard III in 1966, Georges Lavaudant produced his flamboyant version in 1984, Jean-Louis Benoît staged yet another French creation, Henry V, as a tribute to *Sir Laurence Olivier’s film, and Denis Podalydes portrayed a controversial, burlesque Richard II in Jean-Baptiste Sastre’s 2010 Comédie-Française production. Other historical villages provide natural settings for performances: La Luzège for Paul Golub’s Songe d’une nuit d’été (1995) and Macbeth (1997), Grignan for Adel Hakim’s Mesure pour mesure (2007).
In the cultural centres based in suburbs which were created after the war, directors have developed various perspectives: Jean Dasté (1904–94) in Saint-Étienne emphasized the role of the actors (Mesure pour mesure was meant for transformable spaces), while Gabriel Garran in Aubervilliers (Henry VIII, Coriolan) and Bernard Sobel in Gennevilliers (Hamlet, Le Roi Jean, Coriolan), or Roger Planchon in Villeurbanne, near Lyons, under Brechtian influence, aimed at political awakening. Large audience stagings range from Robert Hossein’s superproduction of Jules César (the actors speaking through portable microphones from the audience) to Ariane *Mnouchkine’s most impressive cycle of plays transposing the masculine warlike code of honour of medieval England into Kabuki for Richard II and Henry IV, and the feminine fluidity of La Nuit des Rois into Kathakali, on a bare stage in which the only props were multicoloured silks of great beauty. In 2014 for the 50th anniversary of Le Théâtre du Soleil, Mnouchkine staged a modern dress Macbeth stressing cruelty, violence, and the witches’ Sabbath.
Under the influence of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre of Cruelty, Peter *Brook advocated a more intimate, empty space left only to the actors and the text (Jean-Claude Carrière’s prose adaptations): Timon d’Athènes, Mesure pour mesure, La Tempête, and a double ‘concentrated’ version of Hamlet in French and in English (2000-2), all with a multi-ethnic cast created an intense experience. Stuart Seide who translates the plays himself gave a shortened two-evening rendering of the three parts of Henry VI illustrating the blindness of sheer violence and false alliances; his Roméo et Juliette, in an immense sculptural setting, showed the lack of responsibility undermining society.
Some directors punctuate their careers with outstanding full-version texts: Stéphane *Braunschweig staged Conte d’hiver, Measure for Measure with an English cast (both invited to the Edinburgh Festival), and Le Marchand de Venise; Laurent Pelly directed a very witty Peine d’amour perdue, and a severe Roi Jean in modern dress. On the other hand many rewritings explore a single aspect of a tragic theme, such as the ascent of a tyrant like Richard III, Gloucester-Materiau Shakespeare by Matthias Langhoff or Cacodémon-Roi and Richard III de Shakespeare…, both by Bernard Chartreux.
Some plays, such as Hamlet, are great favourites and have been staged by very different directors. Antoine Vitez directed an austere six-hour performance with a white set opening onto a long perspective; in his 1977 psychoanalytical approach Daniel Mesguich had several actors playing Hamlet in surroundings entirely made of mirrors, including the floor; and in his 1986 version he took on the title role as a theatre director which he played from the side of the stage; in 1988 Patrice Chéreau (1944–2013), in Yves Bonnefoy’s version, explored the mental instability of the hero, the ghost taking the spectators by surprise as he appeared on horseback from the darkened auditorium, galloping onto the floorboards representing the walls of Elsinore.
A disciple of Vilar aiming at ‘quality theatre for all’, Christian Schiaretti staged a powerful Coriolanus (2006) followed by a moving King Lear (2014). A Macbeth was even played on horseback (Compagnie du Centaure, Camille and Manolo, 2002). Jean-Claude Fall explored the theme of failed fatherhood in a diptych, Richard III and Le Roi Lear (2009), with the same cast.
Young companies sometimes prefer rare plays, Troilus et Cressida by L’Emballage Théâtre conceived as a cartoon in a bare white set, the three parts of Henry VI staged by Thomas Jolly and his Piccola Familia as a fifteen-hour production of sheer theatrical entertainment (Avignon, 2014), while amateur companies favour comedies especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some directors such as Jean-Pierre Vincent (Macbeth, Tout est bien qui finit bien) say they return to the Shakespearian repertoire for a lesson in perfect theatre which will regenerate their creativity.
If Delacroix, in the early days of Romanticism, illustrated moments of performances and Paul Delaroche (1797–1856) concentrated on Les Enfants d’Edouard in his single painting (1831, Le Louvre), now, Edouard Lekston takes his inspiration directly from the texts in his cartoon-like sketches (http://lekston-shakespeare.blogspot.fr).
It is true that French cinema does not include many Shakespearian films, although a number use Shakespeare obliquely in their scenarios; but Shakespeare proves a safe bet on stage with a profusion of extremely diversified performances aimed at audiences ranging from critical scholars to teenagers who might thus have their first theatrical experience in an otherwise virtual environment.
As a further testimony to Shakespeare’s lasting popularity, many translations are published, especially the third La Pléiade edition, a bilingual text in five volumes edited by Gisèle Venet and Jean-Michel Déprats.
Shakespearian studies received a dramatic impetus from eminent scholars with the creation of the *Société Française Shakespeare by Henri Fluchère (1898–1987) in 1977, successively chaired by Jean Fuzier (1926–95), Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (1920–2006), Richard Marienstras (1928–2011), Jean-Marie Maguin, Yves Peyré, Jean-Michel Déprats, and Dominique Goy-Blanquet.
Voltaire’s early appeal has been answered: Shakespeare is thriving in French culture.
The great French tragedian Jean Vilar (1912–71] as Macbeth, with Maria Casarès as Lady Macbeth, 1953.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
France, King of. (1) He grants Helen’s request for Bertram as her husband, All’s Well That Ends Well. (2) He claims the disinherited *Cordelia as his Queen in the first scene of King Lear. See also Charles VI, King of France; Philip, King of France; Louis, King.
Anne Button
France, Princess of. She and her ladies are courted by the King of Navarre and his lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Anne Button
Francesca (Francisca) is a nun of ‘the votarists of Saint Clare’, Measure for Measure 1.4.
Anne Button
Francis, a drawer (barman) in 1 Henry IV, is teased by Prince Harry and Poins, 2.5.
Anne Button
Francis, Friar. See Friar Francis.
Francisco. (1) He is a soldier relieved at his post by Barnardo, Hamlet 1.1. (2) He is a lord shipwrecked with Alonso on Prospero’s island in The Tempest.
Anne Button
Fratricide Punished. See Bestrafte Bruder-mord, Der.
Frederick, Duke. He is the father of Celia and usurping Duke in As You Like It.
Anne Button
Freeman, Thomas (b. c.1590), poet. Having taken his BA at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1607, Freeman published chiefly epigrammatic verse. In his sonnet ‘To Master W. Shakespeare’ (1614), he praises the dramatist’s wit, and implies that ‘needy new-composers’ borrow as much as they can from Shakespeare’s plays.
Park Honan
freemen’s songs. See three-man songs.
Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian psychoanalyst. Freud’s theories of the human psyche, so pervasive in the literature and criticism of the 20th century, were themselves partly derived from the evidence provided by mythology, literature, and art, particularly Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, that most human mental activity is unconscious, and that the primary source of psychic energy, even in childhood, is sexual: ‘The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious.’ He began reading Shakespeare aged 8, and was always impressed by his powers of expression and extraordinary insight into the human mind. His knowledge of English was good, although his numerous references and quotations are mainly from the Schlegel–Tieck German translation. Commentary upon the plays is widely dispersed throughout his collected works, sometimes focused on ‘exceptional’ characters such as Richard III and Lady Macbeth (‘Some Character-types met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’, 1915); sometimes on patterns of myth and dream as revealed in plays such as The Merchant of Venice and King Lear (‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, 1913); sometimes on the disabling neuroses and complexes of parent–child relationships, as in his comparison of the characters of Oedipus and Hamlet (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, 1914; see also Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, 1949). Late in life, Freud, always susceptible to the idea of ‘family romance’ (the discovery of a secret, noble ancestry), became convinced by J. T. Looney’s 1920 argument for Edward de Vere, Earl of *Oxford, as the ‘true’ author of Shakespeare’s plays. However uncertain his current scientific status, Freud remains a major force in modern literature and criticism.
Tom Matheson
Friar Francis officiates at both the weddings of Much Ado About Nothing, 4.1 and 5.4.
Anne Button
Friar John tells Friar Laurence that he has not delivered his letter to Romeo, Romeo and Juliet 5.2.
Anne Button
Friar Laurence. In Romeo and Juliet his attempts to help the young couple ultimately contribute to the circumstances which cause their deaths.
Anne Button
‘Friar Lodowick’. See Vincentio.
Friar Peter aids the schemes of the disguised Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure.
Anne Button
Friar Thomas. In some editions the friar who appears in Measure for Measure 1.3 is given this name. *Johnson first suggested that he is identical with Friar Peter.
Anne Button
Fried, Erich (1921–88), Austrian poet and translator. Fried lived in London after his emigration during the Nazi regime and is best known for his politically committed poetry in the post-war period. His German translations of 27 Shakespeare plays, begun in the early 1960s and published collectively in three volumes in 1989, de-romanticized the ‘classic’ Schlegel–Tieck versions. He also translated the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and others.
Werner Habicht
Fripp, Edgar Innes (1861–1931), English antiquarian and cleric, specializing in Stratford archives, history, and associations. Products of his local enthusiasm included Master Richard Quyny (1924), Shakespeare’s Stratford (1928), Shakespeare’s Haunts Near Stratford (1929), and Shakespeare Studies Biographical and Literary (1930). Shakespeare: Man and Artist (2 vols., 1938) was published posthumously.
Tom Matheson
Froissart, Jean (?1333–?1400), French historian and poet who travelled extensively in England. His Chroniques, a four-volume history of the Hundred Years War, included a sympathetic account of the deposition of Richard II, partly based on Froissart’s observations at the time. Translated into English by Lord Berners and published 1523–5, the Chroniques was probably one of Shakespeare’s sources for Richard II.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Froth, a foolish gentleman, is arrested with Pompey by Elbow in Measure for Measure.
Anne Button
Frye, Northrop (1912–91), Canadian academic and critic, influential, in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), for confronting the contradictions of literary criticism with the methodological discipline of science. Frye’s invigorating command of ‘archetypes’ in literature also informs his best Shakespearian criticism: A Natural Perspective (1965) and The Myth of Deliverance (1983). See also Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986).
Tom Matheson
Fukuda, Tsuneari (1912–94), Japanese writer. Fukuda majored in English at the University of Tokyo, and in the 1950s emerged as a highly intelligent playwright. In 1956 he translated and directed Hamlet, which captivated audiences with its speed and energy. His translations of Shakespeare are noted for the attention to the dynamism of Shakespearian language.
Tetsuo Kishi
Fulbrook, a former royal park between Stratford and Warwick associated in the 18th century with the legend that in his youth Shakespeare poached deer.
Stanley Wells
Fuller, Thomas (1608–61), divine. Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662) includes the first printed biographical account of Shakespeare, who is described as a man of ‘very little learning’. More colourfully, Fuller imagines wit-combats in which Shakespeare was ‘the English man of War’, and Ben Jonson a slower ‘Spanish great Galleon’.
Park Honan
‘Full fathom five’, sung by Ariel in The Tempest 1.2.399; it is one of the very few Shakespeare songs to have music surviving (by Robert *Johnson) which is likely to have been used in a production during his life, even though Johnson’s setting was not published until 1660 (see Wilson, John). Another 17th-century setting is that by Banister (1675); more recent composers include Arnold, Honegger, Howells, Ireland, Martin, Parry, Stravinsky, Sullivan, Tippett, Vaughan Williams.
Jeremy Barlow
‘Funeral Elegy, A’, a poem of 578 lines published independently in 1612 as ‘A Funeral Elegy: in memory of the late virtuous Master William Peter of Whipton near Exeter’. The title page states that it is ‘By W. S.’, and the same initials appear at the end of the dedication, to William Peter’s brother John. William Peter, a Devon gentleman of independent means, was born in 1582 and educated at Oxford, where he appears to have lived on and off from 1599 to 1608. He married a Devon woman, daughter of wealthy parents, in January 1609; they had two daughters. On 15 January 1612 he was stabbed to death near Exeter in a dispute over a horse after a hard day’s drinking. The memorial poem was registered for publication nineteen days later by Thomas Thorpe, publisher in 1609 of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. No bookseller is named on the title page. Only two copies are known, both in Oxford.
Written in alternately rhyming iambic pentameters interspersed occasionally with couplets, the poem harps insistently on the dead man’s virtues in competent but laboured verse while providing little substantiation of its eulogy. It was largely ignored until the appearance in 1989 of the book Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution by Donald Foster. Here, Foster concluded that the author was either William *Strachey or Shakespeare; in 1996, he came out firmly in favour of Shakespeare, with support from a number of fellow American scholars. The poet writes cryptically of some shame that he has endured; supporters of Shakespeare’s authorship have tried to link this with that fact that Shakespeare’s Sonnets show consciousness of some ‘vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow’ (Sonnet 112), but the allusions are unspecific. It is puzzling that although at the time he died William Peter had been married for three years, the poet refers to the woman ‘who these nine of years | Lived fellow to his counsels and his bed’, raising suspicion that in spite of claims of intimacy the two men were not actually well acquainted. Conceivably the poem was written at the request of the victim’s relatives, perhaps in the attempt to redeem a reputation sullied by the manner of his death.
Even those who support the poem’s attribution to Shakespeare admit that it has little merit. It bears few if any obvious resemblances to the way Shakespeare was writing at the end of his career. Among other obstacles to belief in his authorship are the poet’s two references to himself as young: Shakespeare was 47 at the time of composition. The poem is not printed in the Oxford edition, but was added in the Norton and to the revised Riverside and Bevington editions of 1997.
Stanley Wells
Furness, Horace Howard (1833–1912), American scholar and editor. His New Variorum edition of Shakespeare began in 1871 with Romeo and Juliet. Furness had published eighteen volumes of his New Variorum when he died in 1912, and the work was continued by H. H. Furness, Jr., J. Q. Adams, and H. E. Rollins. After 1936 it was issued under the auspices of the Modern Language Association of America. The comprehensiveness of the volumes is indisputable, although in the nature of things each passing year produces an exponential growth in the amount of annotation to be included, inevitably slowing down the rate of completion.
Tom Matheson
furniture. See stage furniture.
Furnivall, Frederick James (1825–1910), English literary scholar and editor with a wide range of interests. Furnivall founded and headed the New Shakespeare Society (1873–94) in an attempt to organize and modernize what was then a largely amateur English Shakespeare scholarship. The Society became embroiled in a vituperative debate over the propriety of the verse analysis and theories of disintegration it propagated in this project and disbanded as a result. Furnivall founded a number of other literary societies, was active in Christian Socialism, and was an early participant in what became the Oxford English Dictionary project.
Hugh Grady
Fuseli, Henry (1741–1825), English artist of Swiss origin. Born Johann Heinrich Fussli, the artist received a broad and scholarly education on the Continent, aligning himself with the Anglophile scholar Johann Jacob Breitinger at an early stage. While his father and extended family were well known as accomplished artists, Fuseli, a self-styled intellectual, became preoccupied with the canonical and mythological literatures of northern Europe—from Shakespeare to the Nibelungenlied. Two early drawings, executed during Fuseli’s sojourn in Berlin, depict scenes from King Lear and Macbeth. Fuseli’s exposure to London’s established artistic community and the visual wealth of the metropolis from 1764 encouraged him to divert his energies from philosophy and literature to painting. The artist’s decision to leave for Rome in 1770 indicated the seriousness of his artistic intentions, which were later displayed in his submissions to Royal Academy exhibitions and the *Shakespeare Gallery. Boydell’s gallery offered an opportunity to unite Fuseli’s early preoccupations with atavistic elements in northern literature and his artistic talent. Works such as The Witches in Macbeth (1783, *RSC Collection and Gallery) and Titania and Bottom (1790, Tate Gallery) display the artist’s aptitude for mythic narrative and his idiosyncratic approach to human physiognomy. Fuseli’s treatment of the human figure was heavily criticized in the popular press, who slandered many of Fuseli’s exhibits as the works of a madman. On 20 April 1785, the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser wrote of Fuseli’s Mandrake, ‘here is genius run mad, and however strange his witches, their daughters seem more fashionable beings’.
The artist ceased to produce paintings for the Shakespeare Gallery after 1790, considering his patron Boydell to be keenly pursuing the project for lucrative ends.
Henry Fuseli’s characteristically vigorous and idiosyncratic painting of Puck (Robin Goodfellow), engraved by James Parker, 1799. Fuseli shared with his Romantic contemporaries a passionate interest in Shakespeare’s depictions of the supernatural.
Catherine Tite