p
Pacino, Al. See Richard III; United States of America.
Pacorus, son of Orodes I, King of Parthia, invaded Syria unsuccessfully, dying in battle 38 bc. His body is paraded in triumph by Ventidius, Antony and Cleopatra 3.1.
Anne Button
Padua, in the north of Italy, was a famous university town and a centre of art and literature in the Middle Ages. It is the scene of much of The Taming of the Shrew.
Anne Button
Page, Anne. In The Merry Wives of Windsor she elopes with Fenton, but is forgiven by her mother and father, who had intended her for Caius and Slender respectively.
Anne Button
Page, Master (George). Father of Anne and William, he rejects Nim’s information that Falstaff is pursuing his wife, The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1, and advises Ford to do the same.
Anne Button
Page, Mistress Margaret. See Ford, Mistress Alice.
Page, William. Younger brother of Anne Page, his Latin grammar is tested by Sir Hugh Evans, The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.1.
pageants. Professional players were hired to perform in public events celebrating the installation of officials such as the lord mayor of London. On 31 May 1610 the investiture of Prince *Henry as Prince of Wales was celebrated with a sea-pageant on the Thames in which Richard *Burbage and John *Rice performed as tritons. In recompense, Burbage and Rice were allowed to keep their costumes which probably were reused for *Caliban and *Ariel-as-sea-nymph in The Tempest.
Gabriel Egan
pages. (1) Taming of the Shrew. See Bartholomew. (2) In Richard III a page is sent to fetch Tyrrell, 4.2. (3) Love’s Labour’s Lost. See Mote. (4) Mercutio’s Page is sent to fetch a surgeon, Romeo and Juliet 3.1.94. Paris’s Page alerts the watch, Romeo and Juliet 5.3. (5) The Merry Wives of Windsor. See Robin. (6) Falstaff has a page in 2 Henry IV, possibly the same person as Robin and the Boy in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V respectively. (7) Two pages sing *‘It was a lover and his lass’ to Touchstone and Audrey, As You Like It 5.3. (8) A page summons Paroles, All’s Well That Ends Well 1.1.183. (9) A page banters with Apemantus, Timon of Athens 2.2. (10) A page attends Gardiner, All Is True (Henry VIII) 5.1.
Anne Button
Painter. (1) He and a Poet present their work to Timon, Timon of Athens 1.1; they are reviled by him in the woods, 5.1. (2) The Painter, Bazardo, visits Hieronimo to beg for justice for his murdered son in the Fourth Addition to the 1602 text of The Spanish Tragedy, a passage inconclusively attributed to Shakespeare.
Anne Button, rev. Will Sharpe
Painter, William (c. 1540–94), schoolmaster, fraudulent clerk at the Tower of London, translator. Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566–7) is a collection of prose tales, mainly from *Boccaccio, *Bandello, and *Cinthio, in Painter’s own English translations. As a repository of plot material, it may have been a particular favourite of Shakespeare’s: the outlines of The Rape of Lucrece, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Timon of Athens, and All’s Well That Ends Well are all found in these volumes. Painter translated with such conscientiousness that he made few alterations to his sources, though he may have been responsible for the protagonist’s name in Romeo and Juliet being Romeo, not Romeus as in *Brooke.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
painting. Although illustrators had been providing frontispieces to the plays since *Rowe’s edition of 1709, the first depictions on canvas of scenes from Shakespeare belong to the 1730s, when British artists such as *Hogarth identified these as a properly native subject matter at a time of increasing cultural nationalism. As the century progressed the search for sublime and national-historical subjects brought painters repeatedly to the great tragedies, especially King Lear, depicted, for example, in Francis *Hayman’s decorations for Vauxhall Gardens (1741), James *Barry’s Lear Weeping over the Body of the Dead Cordelia (1786–8, now in the Tate Gallery), and the early drawings of William *Blake. *Fuseli, meanwhile, found inspiration in the live theatre (returning repeatedly, for example, to compositions derived from actors’ movements in Macbeth), and in the supernatural characters of the tragedies and comedies alike. Art and politics were again compounded in the opening of *Boydell’s Shakespeare *Gallery in 1789, which appealed to national sentiment as Britain prepared for war with revolutionary France. Paradoxically, it was the collapse of the print trade with France that also contributed to the gallery’s sale in 1803.
Later in the 19th century, scenes from plays by Shakespeare set in Italy and in historically distant eras provided material that met the artistic agenda of the *Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who aspired to pre-industrial standards of artistic production, while less idealistic history painters mined the Roman plays for subjects of classical violence and voluptuousness. The 20th century’s preference for abstraction, however, led to the virtual disappearance of Shakespearian scenes as a subject for major painters, and despite some noteworthy commissioned portraits of actors in Shakespearian roles (such as those held in the *RSC Collection in Stratford) it is hard to imagine the plays being rediscovered as such in the age of Damien Hirst.
Catherine Tite
Palamon, Arcite’s rival for Emilia, is to marry her at the end of The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Anne Button
Palestine. During the two last decades of the 20th century, Palestinian theatre has experienced a modest revival within the *Arab world. In 1994, in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian company Al Kasaba, set up by Georges Ibrahim, played Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The producers were the Israeli Eran Baniel and the Palestinian Fouad Awad. The Capulets were played by *Israelis in Hebrew, and their rivals, the Montagues, by Palestinians in Arabic. The intention behind this original treatment was expressed by Ibrahim himself in 2003 to a French journalist: ‘Pour que Palestiniens et Israéliens puissent se connaître autrement qu’à travers l’armée et l’Intifada’ (‘To enable Palestinians and Israelis to know one another through another way than the army and the Intifada’) (Le Monde, 22 June 1994). During the 2012 *Globe to Globe Festival, the Ashtar Theatre Company, based in the Palestinian town of Ramallah, presented Richard II at the London Globe. The text was an Egyptian word-by-word translation of the Shakespearian play, re-interpreted into modern classical Arabic by the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan. The play is about a malevolent tyrant, overthrown by popular uprising. It opens with a dumb show of a horrible murder followed by the entrance of King Richard II, dressed in a military uniform.
Rafik Darragi
Palladio, Andrea (1508–80), Italian architect, builder of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in 1583. Palladio’s neoclassical designs were based on principles of harmonious proportion derived from mathematical ratios, especially 1:2, 3:4, 2:3, and 3:5. Inigo *Jones’s absorption of Palladian principles is evidenced in his Whitehall Banqueting House of 1622 and the Cockpit-at-Court playhouse conversion of 1629.
Gabriel Egan
Palmer, John, actors: ‘Gentleman’ Palmer (1728–68) made his Drury Lane debut in the 1748–9 season playing Graziano, Lennox, and Cassio. At his illness and death his roles were inherited by ‘Plausible Jack’ Palmer (1744–98, no relation) who, after an indifferent career to that point, became one of the most versatile actors and best comedians of his day with successes as Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch, and Henry VIII.
Catherine Alexander
Pandarus. Owing much more to *Chaucer’s version of the character than *Homer’s Greek hero, he is the uncle of Cressida and intermediary between her and Troilus in Troilus and Cressida.
Anne Button
Pander. Sometimes given the proper name ‘Pandar’, he owns the brothel in Pericles.
Anne Button
Pandolf, Cardinal. He is a papal legate who excommunicates John, King John 3.1, forcing King Philip of France to end his new alliance. (He is ‘Pandolph’ or ‘Pandulpho’ in the *First Folio and ‘Pandulph’ in *Holinshed.)
Anne Button
Panthino. The servant of Antonio, he advises him to send Proteus to the Emperor’s court, The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1.3.
Anne Button
paradox, an expression that is or appears puzzlingly self-contradictory: ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’ (As You Like It 3.3.16–17).
Chris Baldick
parallel texts. Several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet and King Lear, survive in two or more early versions. Editors since the 19th century have often printed the textual versions in parallel columns in order to facilitate study and analysis of their differences.
Eric Rasmussen
‘Pardon, goddess of the night’, sung, probably by a musician or musicians (the text is unclear), in Much Ado About Nothing 5.3.12. The original music is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Paris. One of Priam’s sons in Troilus and Cressida, he is wounded by Menelaus (mentioned 1.1.110), whose wife Helen he has abducted. They fight again, 5.8.
Anne Button
Paris, County. Intended by Capulet for Juliet, he bitterly laments her supposed death, Romeo and Juliet 4.4.68–73. He is slain by Romeo, 5.3.73.
Anne Button
Paris Garden. See animal shows; theatres, Elizabethan and Jacobean.
parison, parallelism of construction in successive clauses or lines:
My manors, rents, revenues, I forgo;
My acts, decrees, and statutes I deny
(Richard II 4.1.212–13)
Chris Baldick
parley, a *trumpet signal indicating a meeting between opposing parties, or a ceasing of hostilities (e.g. 1 Henry IV 4.3.31).
Jeremy Barlow
Parnassus plays, the collective name for three anonymous plays, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, and The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, written between 1598 and 1602 and performed at St John’s College, Cambridge. The theme is several young scholars’ attempts to find occupations, and in the final part two of them try to join the *Chamberlain’s Men. During their audition, William *Kempe disparages university plays and university men, in particular *Jonson, to whom Shakespeare has given ‘a purge that made him beray his credit’, which suggests that Shakespeare too indulged in personal satire. In First Part of the Return from Parnassus are disparaging allusions to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Gabriel Egan
Paroles, a cowardly braggart who falls victim to the conspiracy of his comrades in All’s Well That Ends Well.
Anne Button
Parry, Sir Hubert (1848–1918), English composer. He set a large number of Shakespeare’s songs and sonnets, either as solo songs or as partsongs. Many were published in his twelve-volume collection English Lyrics (1885–1920) or in A Garland of Shakespearian and Other Old Fashioned Songs, Op. 21 (1874).
Irena Cholij
parts. Players of Shakespeare’s time were not given the entire script of a play to rehearse, but only their ‘part’ or ‘side’ written out with cues indicating when to commence a speech (cf. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.92–5). The only extant ‘part’ is for Edward *Alleyn’s title role in Robert *Greene’s Orlando furioso, in the form of a scroll over 17 feet (5 m) long.
Gabriel Egan
Pasco, Richard (1926–2014), British actor. Having won attention as Berowne, Henry V, Angelo, and Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic, he went on to play leading parts for the *Royal Shakespeare Company, notably both Richard II and Bolingbroke (alternating with Ian *Richardson) in 1973 and Timon of Athens in 1980.
Michael Jamieson
passamezzo (passy-measures), a livelier version of the *pavan; also chord sequences, associated originally with the dance, which formed the basis for many popular song and dance tunes throughout Europe from the late 16th century onwards: *‘Greensleeves’ is based on the minor or Dorian mode passamezzo antico. The eight-bar phrase structure may explain Sir Toby (Twelfth Night, 5.1.198) calling the drunk surgeon (whose eyes are set at ‘eight i’th’ morning’) a ‘passy-measures pavan’.
Jeremy Barlow
Passionate Pilgrim, The, a collection, ascribed to Shakespeare, of 20 short poems, mostly amorous, some of them mildly erotic, published in 1599 by William *Jaggard. The first edition survives only in part of one copy; the second followed in the same year. It opens with versions of two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (138 and 144), perhaps in order to capitalize on Francis *Meres’s reference, in the previous year, to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’. The remaining poems include three extracts from Love’s Labour’s Lost along with several other short poems known to be by writers other than Shakespeare: two by Richard *Barnfield, one by Bartholomew Griffin, a version of *Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be my love’, and the last stanza of the reply to that poem attributed to Sir Walter *Ralegh. For no clear reason, the first fourteen poems are followed by a second title page promising ‘Sonnets to Several Notes of Music’. The eleven poems not definitely known to be by writers other than Shakespeare are included in the Oxford edition, with a statement that the ascription is very doubtful.
A third edition, of 1612, adds poems from Thomas *Heywood’s Troia Britannica (1609). In his Apology for Actors, published in the same year, Heywood protested against the ‘manifest injury’ of printing writings by him ‘in a less volume, under the name of another, which may put the world in opinion I might steal them from him’. Acknowledging his lines unworthy of Shakespeare, Heywood declared ‘the author’—i.e. Shakespeare—‘much offended with Master Jaggard that, altogether unknown to him, presumed to make bold with his name’. Probably as a result, the original title page was cancelled and replaced with one that did not mention Shakespeare.
Stanley Wells
passy-measures. See passamezzo.
Pasternak, Boris (1890–1960), Russian novelist, poet, and translator. Unable to publish his own poetry under the tyrant Stalin, he became the official translator of Shakespeare into Russian. His Gamlet (Hamlet) and Korol Lir (King Lear) were used in films by *Kozintsev. A poem linking Hamlet and Christ is the first of the hero’s poems printed at the end of his banned novel Doctor Zhivago (1958).
Tom Matheson
pastoral, a kind of imaginative literature taking its characters and settings from an idealized conception of the unhurried life of shepherds and shepherdesses. In prose or verse, in drama or lyric, it provides an escapist picture of rural tranquillity and idleness in which actual sheep-tending is displaced by amorous conversation and song, and real shepherds by noble exiles from the corruptions of city and court. Paradoxically a sophisticated literary treatment of imagined simplicity, this tradition originated in ancient Greek and Latin poetry—the Idylls of Theocritus, the Eclogues of *Virgil—and was revived in 16th-century Italy, notably by Sannazzaro, Tasso, and Guarini. English pastoral was inaugurated by *Spenser’s verse eclogues in The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and further developed in The Arcadia (1590), a prose romance by *Sidney. Shakespeare’s use of pastoral conventions, which can include an element of apparently ‘anti-pastoral’ realism about country matters, is most evident in As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale, and fainter echoes of them can be felt in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Love’s Labour’s Lost. For these works he drew upon contemporary English pastoral romances, notably *Greene’s Pandosto (1588) and *Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590).
Chris Baldick
Pater, Walter Horatio (1839–94), English academic, influential in the fin de siècle aesthetic movement with Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885). Essays on Measure for Measure (1874), Love’s Labour’s Lost (1878), and Shakespeare’s English Kings were collected in Appreciations (1889).
Tom Matheson
pathetic fallacy, a mild form of poetic personification in which human motives are attributed to inanimate nature or non-human creatures (e.g. ‘the scolding winds’, Julius Caesar 1.3.5). John Ruskin, who coined the term, commended Shakespeare for his sparing use of such metaphors, by comparison with later ‘morbid’ poets.
Chris Baldick
Patience, Katherine’s waiting woman, attends her All Is True (Henry VIII) 4.2.
Anne Button
Paton, Sir (Joseph) Noel (1821–1901), Scottish painter and illustrator. Paton earned recognition for himself and the proliferating genre of *fairy painting with The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, winning a prize in the high-profile 1847 Westminster Hall competition. Characterized by a profusion of minutely observed detail, The Reconciliation and its pendant The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849) teem with encounters between naked fairies—generating sexual undertones absent from his later Oberon and the Mermaid (1883). Paton illustrated Shakespeare’s plays throughout his career: from The Tempest (Chapman & Hall, 1845) through to William Mackenzie’s The National Shakespeare (1888–9).
Kate Newman
Patroclus, based on *Homer’s character of the same name, is killed by the Trojans (his body is produced, Troilus and Cressida 5.5.16), spurring his friend Achilles back into action.
Anne Button
patronage, in a Renaissance literary context, the social convention by which authors (and acting companies (see companies, playing)) would receive protection, support, or subsidy from wealthy individuals, families, or institutions, in return for furthering their reputations, either simply by associating them with their work or by actively praising them in it (in flattering dedications, if nowhere else). More broadly, ‘patronage’ is a term for the entire pyramid-shaped social structure by which a network of mutual favours and obligations extended from the monarch downwards through the aristocracy and beyond.
Until well into the 18th century, most writers seeking to publish works with any literary pretensions at all both needed and sought patronage: Shakespeare was no exception, dedicating his narrative poems to the Earl of *Southampton and later, according to the dedication of the First Folio, attracting the benign attention of the Earls of *Pembroke. The development of the commercial theatre, however, could offer writers an alternative source of income—albeit a meagre and precarious one if, as most did, they remained freelance. Although the Lord *Chamberlain’s Men of course depended collectively on the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare was from the mid-1590s onwards—as a shareholder in the theatre company for which he wrote—more independent of individual patronage than were many of his literary contemporaries.
The Shakespeare canon abounds in depictions of patron–client relations, both artistic—as in Timon’s dealings with the Poet and the Painter in Timon of Athens—and more general—as in the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. As this latter example may suggest, the terms in which a client solicits the favours of a patron, and those by which a patron promises favours, can be close to the language of love, and some have detected an erotic dimension to Shakespeare’s own dealings with Southampton on the strength of the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
Michael Dobson
Paulina, Antigonus’ wife in The Winter’s Tale, defends Hermione in spite of Leontes’ anger in Acts 2 and 3. She reunites them, and, long since bereaved of Antigonus, agrees to marry Camillo, 5.3.
Anne Button
pavan, a sedate dance in common time performed by one couple or in procession; it went out of fashion during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Musically it was often succeeded by the livelier *galliard.
Jeremy Barlow
Pavier, Thomas. See quartos.
Payton, John (fl. 1760–1800), a Stratford alderman who lived in Shottery. A street in modern Stratford is named after him. The master bricklayer Joseph Mosely, who found the document known as the Spiritual Last Will and Testament of John *Shakespeare in the *Birthplace in 1757, later gave it to Payton, who around 1789 sent it to *Malone, who printed it in 1790. In the interim John *Jordan had tried unsuccessfully to publish a copy in the Gentleman’s Magazine.
Stanley Wells
Peacham, Henry (?1576–?1643), author and artist. His Truth of our Times (1638) contains an account of *Tarlton playing when Peacham was a London schoolboy; his Complete Gentleman (1622) provides insight into London playgoing. A sketch of Titus Andronicus with an extended quotation (c.1595) is attributed to Peacham: see Longleat manuscript.
Cathy Shrank
Peaseblossom is one of Titania’s fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anne Button
Pedant. He is a travelling schoolmaster whom Tranio persuades to impersonate Vincentio in The Taming of the Shrew 4.2.
Anne Button
Pedro, Don. He arranges the betrothal of Claudio to Hero, but becomes convinced of her infidelity, in Much Ado About Nothing.
Anne Button
Peele, George (1556–96), playwright and poet. After attending Christ Church, Oxford, he wrote a series of plays and entertainments which helped revolutionize the theatrical use of verse. His best-known plays are The Arraignment of Paris (1584) and The Old Wives Tale (1595). The first is a pastoral play—one of the earliest in English—which ends with *Elizabeth I being offered a golden apple by the goddess Diana; the second is a cheerful adaptation of various motifs from folk tale and romance. He also wrote two energetic history plays and a melodious biblical drama, David and Bethsabe (1599), and is now generally accepted as the author of the first act of Titus Andronicus.
Robert Maslen
‘Peg a Ramsay’, the title of a popular dance and ballad tune, quoted by Sir Toby in Twelfth Night 2.3.73.
Jeremy Barlow
Pelican Shakespeare. This paperback edition, designed for an American market, was produced between 1956 and 1967. Shakespeare’s works were separately edited by noted scholars under the general guidance of Alfred Harbage. He emphasized the flow of action in the plays by omitting scene locations and relegating act and scene divisions to the margins. With very brief introductions and light glossing at the foot of the page, the volumes offered attractively presented texts at an initial price, in the USA, of 65c: in many respects they resembled the *Penguin and New Penguin editions. The Pelican series was revived in 1999 under the general editorship of A. L. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel.
R. A. Foakes
Pembroke, Earl of. (1) Edward IV orders Pembroke and Lord Stafford (both mute) to ‘prepare for war’ against Henry, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 4.1.127–8. (2) He vows revenge for Arthur’s death, King John 4.3, and joins the French, but returns to John in time to see him die.
Anne Button
Pembroke, Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of. See Pembroke’s Men.
Pembroke, Mary Herbert, Countess of (1561–1621), third wife to Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, and sister of Philip *Sidney. A patroness of poets, including Ben *Jonson, Herbert initiated courtly interest in *Seneca, translating Garnier’s Marc Antonie (1592), echoes of which occur in Antony and Cleopatra. Dover *Wilson speculates that Herbert commissioned Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets.
Cathy Shrank
Pembroke, Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of (1584–1650), younger son of Henry and Mary Herbert. Possibly called Philip after his uncle Philip *Sidney, he was a munificent patron and lifelong benefactor of the artist Van Dyck and playwright Philip *Massinger. John *Heminges and Henry *Condell, joint editors of Shakespeare’s posthumous *First Folio in 1623, dedicated the work to Philip and his brother William. The dedicatory epistle to this ‘incomparable pair of brethren’ is testimony to an established connection between Shakespeare and the Herberts, and their long-standing generosity towards the playwright, noted in the dedication as their ‘servant Shakespeare’. As Heminges and Condell wrote, ‘your [lordships] have been pleased to think these trifles something heretofore, and have prosecuted both them and their author living, with so much favour [that…] the Volume asked to be yours’.
Philip was known for his hasty temper, and was frequently embroiled in brawls at court, including a quarrel with Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of *Southampton, over a game of tennis in 1610. Despite this, Philip remained a firm favourite of *James I, becoming gentleman of the bedchamber in 1605, and retaining the position until James’s death in 1625—continued favour that owed much to the comeliness of his person, and his passion for *hunting and field sports.
Philip married Susan Vere, daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford, in 1604, and was created Earl of Montgomery in 1605, succeeding his brother William as Earl of Pembroke in 1630.
Cathy Shrank
Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of (1580–1630), eldest son of Henry and Mary Herbert, educated by the poet Samuel *Daniel. Like his brother Philip, co-dedicatee of Shakespeare’s *First Folio (1623), William was an enthusiastic patron of the arts. His beneficiaries included Ben *Jonson, Philip *Massinger, and Inigo *Jones. John *Aubrey remembers William as ‘the greatest Maecenas to learned men of any peer of his time or since’, and according to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, his liberality exceeded both his own considerable fortune, and that of his wife Mary Talbolt.
William was disgraced, and imprisoned briefly in 1601, for an affair with Mary Fitton, believed by some to be Shakespeare’s *Dark Lady. Despite getting Fitton pregnant, William refused to marry her, making her at least the fourth well-born woman he had declined to wed—the previous three being Elizabeth *Carey (1595); Bridget Vere, Lord Burghley’s granddaughter and daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford (1597); and a niece of Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham (1599).
Dover *Wilson conjectures that William’s reluctance to marry induced his mother Mary to commission Shakespeare to write seventeen sonnets advocating marriage to mark William’s 17th birthday in 1597 (Sonnets 1–17). This identification of William Herbert as *‘Mr W.H.’, to whom the publisher Thomas Thorpe dedicated the Sonnets in 1609, was first floated by James Boaden in 1837.
Supporters of William Herbert as ‘W.H.’ find further evidence in Francis Davison’s Poeticall Rhapsody (1602), in which Davison celebrates William’s ‘lovely…shape’. Another suggestive allusion is Thorpe’s reference to himself as ‘the Well-wishing Adventurer’, which may celebrate William’s incorporation as a member of the King’s Virginia Company in 1609. This connection with the Virginia Company may have allowed Shakespeare access to unpublished accounts of the wreck of the Sea-Adventure in 1609, an incident on which he based The Tempest, especially William *Strachey’s Reportary, later published in Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrims (1625).
William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, by Isaac Oliver, certainly an important patron of Shakespeare (and as such a co-dedicatee of the First Folio), and possibly the ‘Mr W.H.’ of the Sonnets.
Cathy Shrank
Pembroke’s Men, an obscure playing company, under the patronage of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (?1534–1601), known mostly from the title pages of their plays. Their The Taming of a Shrew has some relation to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, their Richard Duke of York is a memorial reconstruction of the play printed as 3 Henry VI in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623, and their Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s. It seems likely that Shakespeare was one of Pembroke’s Men before he, and several of the others, joined the *Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. Other Pembroke’s Men were John *Sincler, Gabriel *Spencer, Robert Shaw, and possibly Richard *Burbage. The company probably played at the *Theatre in 1592–3 and broke in 1594, to be reformed in 1597 for a brief season at Langley’s *Swan playhouse before their production of The Isle of Dogs caused that playhouse’s closure. The company survived Ben *Jonson’s murder of Gabriel Spencer in 1598, occupying the *Rose after the Admiral’s Men left it for the Fortune in 1600, only to break forever with the death of their patron on 9 January 1601.
Gabriel Egan
Penguin Shakespeare. Penguin Books began a revolution in publishing with their sixpenny pocket paperbacks, and included in their early lists an edition of Shakespeare. The first six titles appeared in 1937, attractively printed, with a plain text uncluttered by scene locations, a very brief introduction, and some notes and a short glossary at the end. The editor, G. B. Harrison, preferred Folio texts as closer to what he supposed was acted, but included in brackets passages found only in quartos. The series was superseded by the New Penguin Shakespeare (1967– ), which retained the plain text format, but gave individual editors of the various works freedom to determine the text in the light of current scholarship. This new edition also provided much more substantial critical introductions, extensive commentaries, and accounts of textual problems. The general editor, T. J. B. Spencer, soon brought in Stanley Wells as his associate editor. In the plays the scenes are numbered in the margins, so that the stage directions and text seem to run on from one scene to the next. Both series have been very popular, and the New Penguin Shakespeare have been much used by schools, and also by acting companies. From 2005–8 the series was updated under the general editorship of Stanley Wells, largely retaining the texts and commentaries of the previous editions, with new introductory material commissioned from a wide range of contemporary Shakespeare scholars, and added sections on each play in performance for the first time in the series’ history.
R. A. Foakes, rev. Will Sharpe
Pennington, Michael (b. 1943), British actor, renowned for his grace of movement and mellifluous speaking of verse. Having acted at Cambridge, he played Angelo, Berowne, and Hamlet with the *Royal Shakespeare Company, 1974–81. He co-founded with Michael *Bogdanov the *English Shakespeare Company and toured worldwide in their popular seven-play Wars of the Roses (1986–9), later videotaped. He rejoined the RSC in 1999 to play Timon of Athens, directed by Gregory *Doran. The two worked together again on both the RSC’s 2004 marionette production of Venus and Adonis, which Pennington narrated, and the 2013 Richard II, in which he played John of Gaunt to David *Tennant’s Richard. He has authored A User’s Guide titles on Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as a memoir of his 20,000 hours performing, directing, and writing about Shakespeare, Sweet William.
Michael Jamieson
pentameter, a verse line of five feet. Although there are other kinds (such as anapaestic pentameter, occasionally used by Browning), the most important form of pentameter is iambic. In English, iambic pentameter (five predominantly iambic feet) is the standard metre of blank verse, heroic couplets, sonnets, and rhyme royal.
Chris Baldick/George T. Wright
Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703), diarist. He began writing his Diary in 1660 when a civil servant in the Naval Office and continued the record, in cipher and shorthand, until 1669 when his eyesight began to fail. Among much else, it provides a remarkable account of the social experience of theatre-going and of the *Restoration theatre’s innovations (particularly the introduction of actresses, Shakespearian *adaptations, and the development of stage effects), in addition to commenting on performers and performances. For example, he records visits to Macbeth (in *Davenant’s adaptation): ‘From hence to the Duke’s house, and there saw “Macbeth” most excellently acted, and a most excellent play for variety’ (28 December 1666); ‘and thence to the Duke’s house, and saw “Macbeth”, which, though I saw it lately, yet appears a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here, and suitable’ (7 January 1667); ‘So to the playhouse, not much company come, which I impute to the heat of the weather, it being very hot. Here we saw “Macbeth”, which, though I have seen it often, yet is it one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that I ever saw’ (19 April 1667); ‘I was vexed to see Young (who is but a bad actor at best) act Macbeth in the room of Betterton, who, poor man! is sick: but, Lord! What a prejudice it wrought in me against the whole play’ (16 October 1667); ‘Thence to the Duke’s playhouse, and saw “Macbeth.” The King and Court there; and we sat just under them and my Lady Castlemayne, and close to the woman that comes into the pit, a kind of loose gossip, that pretends to be like her’ (21 December 1668). Pepys was nearly as fond of the Davenant–Dryden adaptation of The Tempest, but other Shakespearian comedies pleased him less: he dismissed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, as ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’ (29 September 1662).
Catherine Alexander
Percy, Henry. (1) See Northumberland, Earl of. (2) See Hotspur.
Anne Button
Percy, Lady. *Hotspur’s wife (b. 1371), called ‘Kate’ by him, appears in 1 Henry IV 2.4 and 3.1, and as a widow in 2 Henry IV 2.3.
Anne Button
Percy, Thomas. See Worcester, Earl of.
Perdita is the daughter of Hermione and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. The parallel character is Fawnia in *Greene’s Pandosto, Shakespeare’s chief source.
Anne Button
Perdita; or, The Royal Milkmaid. See burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays.
performance criticism, in Shakespeare studies, a term for the kind of analysis of Shakespeare’s plays which considers them as scripts only fully realized in performance, rather than solely as literary works to be read on the page.
Despite the anti-theatrical perspective of many 18th-century editors, and the dominant *Romantic and 19th-century view of Shakespeare as a poet whose works only happened to take the form of plays, this has always been a strong element in Shakespeare criticism (exemplified, for example, by *Hazlitt, and by professional theatre reviewers from Leigh *Hunt onwards), but it has been newly prominent since the mid-20th century, as the academic study of Shakespearian drama has extended from the library and the classroom and into the theatre. The amount of space which major editions of the plays such as the *Arden devote to considerations of performance (both in Shakespeare’s time and since) has increased immensely since the 1970s, for example, while series such as Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester University Press, 1984– ) and Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge University Press, 1996–, the successor to Plays in Performance, 1981– ) have proliferated.
Much contemporary performance criticism draws on semiotics, and, in reading performance as a social as well as an aesthetic event, incorporates some form of cultural theory. An influential work was Raymond Williams’s chapter on Antony and Cleopatra in his Drama in Performance (1954): since then important exponents of performance criticism have included J. L. Styan, Dennis Kennedy, and Peter Holland.
Michael Dobson
performance times, lengths. Ordinarily at open-air and indoor hall playhouses the performances began at 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. and lasted two to three hours; the elite indoor venues probably had more latitude to run late than did the amphitheatres. At court the performances were always at night, and quite possibly the authorities in towns visited by touring companies were flexible, since an unanticipated performance would draw a larger crowd if it began after the working day was finished. No contemporary reference to performance lengths is shorter than the Romeo and Juliet Prologue’s ‘two-hours’ traffic’ and a few go as high as three hours, which is a variation of +/− 20% around a norm of 2.5 hours. Surviving play-texts, on the other hand, vary by as much as +/− 50% around a norm of about 2,600 lines, with a tendency to longer plays in the later years. Whether plays were routinely cut for performance remains a matter of argument.
Gabriel Egan
periphrasis, a figure of speech in which something is referred to by circumlocution where a more direct expression is available:
As he is but my father’s brother’s son
(Richard II 1.1.117)
Chris Baldick
perspective. Stage scenery can be made to appear three dimensional by illusionistic techniques of painting based upon perspective foreshortening, but this technique was not used in the theatres until the Restoration. Artificial perspective effects require spectators to view from within a predefined focal area and so demand a seated audience all of whose members are looking in approximately the same direction, as in a hall playhouse; open-air playhouse conditions, with spectators all around the stage, are quite unsuited to perspective effects. Sebastiano Serlio’s mid-16th-century work on theatre perspective illusions was absorbed by Inigo *Jones and his assistant-nephew John Webb and emerged in the elaborate *court masques and in the perspective techniques of the Restoration theatres.
Gabriel Egan
Peter (1) Peter is the Nurse’s servant in Romeo and Juliet. (2) See Joseph.
Anne Button
Peter, Friar. See Friar Peter.
Peter of Pomfret is a prophet hanged by John, King John 4.2.
Anne Button
Peter Thump. See Horner, Thomas.
Peto brings news to Prince Harry, 2 Henry IV 2.4.358–63. See also Russell.
Anne Button
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304–74), Italian humanist and poet who combined diplomatic missions abroad with the humanist quest for long-neglected classical works. He translated and published many such works while writing some of his own prose and verse compositions in Latin. Petrarch’s sonnets, dedicated to his beloved Laura, were published in collections called the Canzoniere and Trionfi. Their structure, themes, and conceits established a convention in sonneteering which lasted for more than 200 years, first imitated in England at the court of Henry VIII by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Shakespeare often wrote in the Petrarchan style, most notably in his own Sonnets and in Romeo and Juliet which includes a direct reference to Petrarch (2.3.36–7), but he was also part of a contemporary anti-Petrarchan movement and sometimes ridiculed the pretensions and frustrations of the Petrarchan lover.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Petruccio (Petruchio). See Taming of the Shrew, The.
Phaonius, Marcus. See poets.
Phelps, Samuel (1804–78), English actor-manager, born in Devon. After an eleven-year provincial apprenticeship, which included Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, Phelps made his London debut (for Ben Webster at the Haymarket in 1837) as Shylock, reviewed as judicious and correct rather than striking or remarkable. In the engagements with *Macready which followed Phelps generally found himself cast in subservient roles, or kept idle, though he seized such opportunities as Macduff (1837), Hubert (1842), and, alternating with Macready, Othello and Iago (1839).
Following the abolition of the patent theatres’ monopoly in 1843, Phelps set up in management (initially with Mrs Warner) at *Sadler’s Wells theatre in Islington with the professed objective of presenting ‘the first stock drama in the world…[performed by] a Company of acknowledged talent…in a theatre where all can see and hear, and at a price fairly within the habitual means of all’. In the opening production of Macbeth, Phelps as the Thane was acclaimed by experienced critics (who credited him with greater energy and reality than Macready) as well as local audiences. Thenceforward Shakespeare was established as the ‘house dramatist’, with revivals of 32 of his plays during the next eighteen years. These productions were characterized by a (relatively) full text, ensemble acting, and costumes and sets, of which gauzes and dioramas were regular features, which illuminated rather than swamped the play. Although he was indisputably the leading actor Phelps ensured that his performances harmonized with the production as a whole. Thus Henry Morley wrote that Phelps’s Bottom ‘was completely incorporated with the Midsummer Night’s Dream, made an essential part of it, as unsubstantial, as airy and refined as all the rest’.
Following the termination of his management in 1862, Phelps continued to work as an actor in London and the provinces (especially in Manchester with *Calvert), where his Shakespearian performances established a tradition for young actors to follow, notably Johnston *Forbes-Robertson, who played Hal to Phelps’s Henry IV, which the veteran actor doubled with Justice Shallow. The high point came in the Jerusalem chamber encounter between father and son, with Phelps’s broken emphasis on ‘Harry’ (‘Come hither, Harry’) maximizing the pathos of their affectionate reconciliation.
Richard Foulkes
Philemon is Cerimon’s servant, Pericles 12.
Anne Button
Philharmonus. See soothsayers.
Philip, King of France. He supports Arthur’s claim to the English throne in King John.
Anne Button
Phillips, Augustine (d. 1605), actor (Strange’s Men 1593, Chamberlain’s/King’s Men 1598–1605). Phillips is named as taking the role of Sardanapalus in ‘Sloth’ in the plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins which was performed before 1594, possibly by Strange’s Men. A touring licence issued to Strange’s Men by the Privy Council names Phillips, but by 1598 he had joined the Chamberlain’s Men, appearing in the actor lists for *Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour and Every Man out of his Humour, and Sejanus, as printed in the 1616 folio. When the syndicate to run the Globe was formed in 1599 Phillips was a member, and on 18 February 1601 he was called upon to explain to Chief Justice Popham and Justice Fenner why the company had performed Shakespeare’s Richard II, which dramatizes usurpation, at the Globe on the eve of *Essex’s rebellion and at the request of his supporters. Phillips’s name appears in the King’s Men’s patent of 1603 and the actor list of the 1623 Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. The circumstances of Phillips’s marriage are unclear, but Simon *Forman’s notes suggest that he was twice rejected in marriage suits before being accepted by Anne, who survived him. In his will Phillips left money to his fellow actors (including Shakespeare) and costumes, properties, and musical instruments to his apprentice Samuel *Gilburne.
Gabriel Egan
Philo, Antony’s friend in Antony and Cleopatra, only appears in the first scene.
Anne Button
Philostrate, Theseus’ Master of the Revels, appears (mute) in the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (In *quarto editions he also introduces the interlude of the ‘hard-handed men’ in Act 5, but the Folio reassigns these speeches to Egeus).
Anne Button
Philoten, the daughter of Dioniza, is described by Gower, Pericles 15, but does not appear.
Anne Button
Philotus’ Servant. See Hortensius’ Servant.
Phoebe (Phebe in the *Folio), loved by Silvius in As You Like It, herself falls in love with *‘Ganymede’.
Anne Button
‘Phoenix and Turtle, The’, a *lyric poem—also known as ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’—ascribed to Shakespeare when it appeared, untitled, as one of the ‘Poetical Essays’ by various authors, including the playwrights Ben *Jonson, George *Chapman, and John *Marston, in Robert *Chester’s Love’s Martyr; or, Rosalind’s Complaint (1601, repr. 1611). It was later included in John Benson’s 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems.
Chester’s Love’s Martyr is a long poem described as ‘allegorically showing the truth of love in the constant fate of the phoenix and turtle’ (i.e. turtle dove). The ‘poetical essays’ appended to it are called ‘Divers poetical essays on the former subject, viz. the turtle and phoenix, done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular works; never before extant.’ How Shakespeare came to be involved in the enterprise is not known; he appears to have read Chester’s poem before writing his own, a 67-line allegorical elegy which mounts in intensity through its three parts. First it summons a convocation of benevolent birds, with a swan as priest, to celebrate the funeral rites of the phoenix and the turtle dove, who have ‘fled | In a mutual flame from hence’. Then the birds sing an anthem in which the death of the lovers is seen as marking the end of all ‘love and constancy’.
So they loved as love in twain
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, division none.
Number there in love was slain.
Their mutuality was such that ‘Either was the other’s mine’. Finally Love makes a funeral song
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
This threnos—funeral song—is set off by being written in an even more incantatory style than what precedes it; each of its five stanzas has three rhyming lines, and the tone is one of grave simplicity.
The poem, often regarded as one of the most intensely if mysteriously beautiful of Shakespeare’s works, is usually assumed to have been composed not long before publication, though Honigmann (see Chester, Robert) dates it as early as 1586. Its affinities and poetical style seem to lie rather with Shakespeare’s later than his earlier work. In subject matter it appears to have irrecoverable allegorical significance. Various scholars have identified one or other of the phoenix and the turtle with the dedicatee Sir John Salisbury and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, her collective subjects, the Earl of *Essex, Shakespeare himself, and even the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (who died at the stake in 1600). G. Wilson *Knight, one of the poem’s most passionate advocates, supposed that ‘the Turtle signifies the female aspect of the male poet’s soul’.
Stanley Wells
Phoenix theatre. See Beeston, Christopher.
Phrynia and Timandra (Tymandra), both mistresses of Alcibiades, are given gold and verbal abuse by Timon, Timon of Athens 4.3.
Anne Button
Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973), Spanish artist. In 1964 Picasso made a series of twelve drawings on the theme of Shakespeare and Hamlet to commemorate the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, as well as a number of related ‘portrait’ heads of the poet. The Hamlet series was published the following year in Louis Aragon’s Shakespeare (published by Éditions Cercle d’Art, 1965).
Richard Johns
Pimlico, an anonymous pamphlet printed in 1609, refers to a crowd swarming as if at a ‘new-play’ such as ‘Pericles’. Hence Pericles must have existed, and still been relatively new, when Pimlico was registered on 15 April 1609.
Park Honan
Pimlott, Steven (1953–2007), English opera and theatre director. Pimlott started out with the English National Opera in the mid-1970s, moving on to work with several opera companies, including a regional stint at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, where he made his first forays into directing Shakespeare in 1987, helming productions of Twelfth Night and The Winter’s Tale. In the early 1990s he worked with the *RSC under Adrian *Noble, beginning with a production of Julius Caesar in 1991 with Sir Robert *Stephens in the title role, and David *Bradley as Cassius. Between 1994 and 1996 Pimlott mounted three more productions, all of which enjoyed successful London transfers, Measure for Measure starring Alex Jennings as Angelo, a sinisterly comic Richard III led by David Troughton, and an As You Like It starring a then-unknown David *Tennant as Touchstone. Perhaps his most enduringly popular works for the company remain his two ‘white box’ productions: a dazzlingly spare and intimate Richard II in the *Other Place in 2000, and a vast, haunting and lonely Hamlet in the old *Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage-space the following year, with Samuel *West impressing in the title roles of both. Pimlott was awarded the OBE in the 2007 New Year Honours list.
Will Sharpe
Pinch, Dr. He attempts to exorcize the supposedly possessed Antipholus of Ephesus and Dromio of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors 4.4: he derives from ‘Medicus’ in *Plautus’ Menaechmi.
Anne Button
Pindarus. See Cassius, Caius.
pipe, in Shakespearian usage, specifically the three-holed pipe played with the *tabor (see Much Ado About Nothing 2.3.15); also used as a term for wind instruments generally.
Jeremy Barlow
piracy. See reported text.
Pirithous (Perithous), Theseus’ friend and attendant, describes Arcite’s fatal accident, The Two Noble Kinsmen 5.6.48–85.
Anne Button
Pisanio, Posthumus’ servant, is commanded by him to kill Innogen in Cymbeline.
Anne Button
Pistol is at the centre of the tavern brawl in 2 Henry IV 2.4. In 5.3 he announces the death of Henry IV and in 5.4 witnesses Sir John’s rejection by the new King and is taken with Sir John and others to prison. In The Merry Wives of Windsor he refuses to act as Sir John’s go-between and betrays him to Ford (2.1). In Henry V, now married to Mistress Quickly, he joins Harry’s French campaign after Sir John’s death. In France his quarrels with Fluellen culminate when the latter forces him to eat a leek: by now the revelations of his dishonesty and cowardice render him a pathetic as much as a comical figure, completing the picture of the disintegration and decay of Harry’s old set of acquaintances.
Actors have made the most of the flamboyantly bombastic side of the role: most famously, Theophilus *Cibber was nicknamed ‘Pistol’, both for his superlative performance as such and for his alleged offstage resemblance to the character. In modern times, though, the role, with its swaggering mock-Marlovian jargon, has become less easily comprehensible, and directors have often resorted to elaborate comic stage business: in Trevor *Nunn’s 1982 2 Henry IV, for example, Pistol’s eviction from the tavern was accompanied by much chasing up and down the immense set and firing of his gun. Michael *Bogdanov (1986) had him in motorbike leathers bearing the label ‘Hal’s Angels’ and a T-shirt which, alluding to the punk group the Sex Pistols and the title of their collected works, read ‘Never mind the bollocks; Here comes Pistol’.
Anne Button
pit. The area of ground-level seating nearest the stage of an indoor hall playhouse such as the Blackfriars, corresponding in location and relative low cost to the yard in the open-air amphitheatres. A thrust stage projecting into the pit would be surrounded by seats.
Gabriel Egan
Pitt Press Shakespeare. This early *schools edition of the individual plays began to appear in 1893, and was intended by the editor, A. W. Verity, for ‘schoolboys’ aged 14 and up. It offered them a short introduction describing aspects of each play, its characters, and giving an outline of the story. The plain text was followed by extensive notes and a glossary, so no schoolboy could complain of shortage of information.
R. A. Foakes
Place Calling Itself Rome, A (1973), a modernized English version of Coriolanus by John Osborne (1929–94). Given Germany’s turbulent modern history, Bertolt *Brecht (Coriolanus, 1951–3) and Günter Grass (The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 1966) have produced the major 20th-century dramatic reactions to Shakespeare’s republican Rome. However, Caius Martius’ reactionary political opinions, capacity for demotic invective, and mother-fixated sexual nausea make Osborne a powerful apologist in this angry play.
Tom Matheson
plague was unhappily frequent in Shakespeare’s London, but its causation was not known. The disease is transmitted by the bite of an infected rat flea. The flea, though, will only bite humans when it has infected and killed all the local rats. This means that there are no rats around when an epidemic breaks out and their part in the process is not evident. Moreover the rat flea, unlike the human one, cannot hop far, so that people who are just visiting the sick are unlikely to get infected. However the flea can live for weeks without food if the humidity and temperature are right for it. The clothing and bedding of plague victims are particularly dangerous, as are wooden buildings, earthen floors, rubbish heaps, and dunghills. Hence the poor suffered far more in an epidemic than the rich.
Medical opinion never suspected the flea or the rat, and the disease was normally thought to be spread by contagion from the air and from infected sufferers (see medicine). Therefore, when plague struck, one of the first measures taken by the authorities to prevent it spreading was to close the playhouses. This was no light matter for the actors’ companies—for instance between 1603 and 1613 the theatres were closed for a total of 78 months. Even if they managed to get engagements to play outside London it still meant a curtailment of their activities. Indeed it has been suggested, on the plausible assumption that Shakespeare only wrote a play when there was an immediate demand for one, that the gaps in his dramatic creativity and his seemingly early retirement can be largely accounted for by these closings of the theatre.
If so, epidemics of the plague were more important for Shakespeare than for his characters, who neither catch it nor die from it. Plague and pestilence are words more often used in cursing than to describe a real medical event. Once or twice they are used jokingly to refer to falling in love, as when Biron says, ‘They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.422). And there is an even more unexpected, though perfectly logical, use. If bad air helped spread the disease, good air should prevent it. Pomanders were used for this purpose. But one could extend the principle to young and healthy people. ‘The plague is banished by thy breath’, says Venus, dreamingly, of Adonis (Venus and Adonis 510). ‘Methought she purged the air of pestilence’, says Orsino of Olivia (Twelfth Night 1.1.19). It is an attractive thought: one only wishes it could have been true.
Maurice Pope
plague regulations. A large crowd gathering in a confined space, such as a playhouse, was thought to give ideal conditions for transmission of the plague, and the Privy Council closed the playhouses when the weekly death toll exceeded 50 (reduced under James I to 30).
Gabriel Egan
Planché, James Robinson (1796–1880), English playwright and antiquarian, who became Somerset Herald (1866). His prolific and diverse output extended to some 150 theatrical pieces (extravaganzas, pantomimes, and librettos, including Weber’s Oberon, 1826), scholarly works such as his History of British Costume (1834), his Recollections and Reflections (1872), and designs for several Shakespeare plays. His costumes for Charles *Kemble’s King John (1823) broke new ground by setting the play in its historical period, even citing ‘Authorities for the Costumes’ on the playbill. Planché worked on Madame *Vestris’s notable productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ben Webster’s Elizabethan-style The Taming of the Shrew (1844).
Richard Foulkes
Planchon, Roger (1931–2009), French actor, director (Théâtre de la Cité, Villeurbanne, near Lyon) and playwright, who explored the full range of the French repertoire. His Richard III (1966 Avignon Festival, then Villeurbanne) was influenced by post-*Brechtian theories. He played the title roles in Antony and Cleopatra and Pericles (1978) in sets recalling well-known epic films.
Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine
Plantagenet, Edward. See Aumerle, Duke of; York, Duke of.
Plantagenet, Lady Margaret. See Clarence’s Son.
Plantagenet, Richard. (1) Duke of York, see 1 Henry VI; The First Part of the Contention; Richard Duke of York. (2) See Cambridge, Richard, Earl of.
Plants. Plants are ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. It might be presumed that the dramatist was primarily influenced by his native Warwickshire: the vigour of folklore and the variety of colourful local plant names offered a rich source of suggestion, but the language of plants, a common currency of the rural world, was augmented in Shakespeare’s London by ‘green desire’, a new-found passion for plants and gardens. The second half of the 16th century witnessed an unprecedented exploration of the botanic world and an outpouring of related publications which peaked in the 1590s. A network of enthusiasts, the development of markets in seeds and plants and the construction of hugely expensive private gardens all testify to the magnitude of intellectual and financial investment in botanical capital. Plant hunters, researchers, apothecaries, herb-women, physicians, and grandees were caught up in a cooperative enterprise. Just as Marlowe’s eponymous Jew of Malta relishes being at the centre of a global trading and financial nexus (1.1.1–48), these horticulturalists revelled in the commerce of a botanical universe. Responding to this heightened sensibility the dramatist was able to express conceptually and figuratively the ideas and discoveries in the botanical world, confident that the intended resonances would be acknowledged. Plants were freighted with meaning.
The dominant botanical text was the herbal. Initially a guide to plant identification and their medicinal applications, the herbal became an encyclopaedia with detailed descriptions and pictorial representations supported by information on habitat and the various names attaching to each plant. William Turner (c. 1508–68), regarded as the father of English botany, records almost 400 plants in The Names of Herbes (1548). Locating each plant in its natural habitat he was the first to provide detailed descriptions of British native flora. By happy coincidence the final part of England’s first plant book of genuine originality, Turner’s A new herball (1564), was published in the year of Shakespeare’s birth. Gerard’s Herbal of 1597 commandeered the endeavours of a generation of botanical writers—including those of a brilliant group of refugees located in Lime Street. A pictorial and literary cornucopia, referencing around 2,000 plants, it embodies the spirit of the age.
Several plants mentioned by Shakespeare are denoted by two or more names e.g. bay/laurel, blackberry/bramble, clover/honeystalks, cuckoo-flower/lady-smocks, Cupid’s flower/love-in-idleness/pansy. Sometimes one name is applied to two different plants. ‘Bramble’ signifying a blackberry bush can also intimate the wild rose. Many named plants have defied all efforts at identification. Several, such as ‘long purples’ or ‘dead men’s fingers’, ‘cuckoo-buds’, ‘Dian’s bud’, ‘kecksy’, ‘hardock’, ‘hebona’, names first recorded in Shakespeare, give rise to uncertainty and speculation, whereas there is general agreement about other first usages like ‘eringo’ (sea-holly), ‘honeystalks’ (clover) and ‘mary-bud’ (marigold). Some plants, ‘Cupid’s flower’, ‘Arabian tree’, ‘crow-flower’ and ‘cuckoo-bud’, defy definitive identification; ‘chimney sweeper’ and ‘centaury’ pose the question as to whether any plant is alluded to. Potential ambiguities include ‘canker’, which can mean wild rose, or more frequently, the grub that destroys flower buds. ‘Peonied’ (The Tempest 4.1.64) is sometimes glossed as ‘peony’—a well-known flower of the period described by Gerard—but a woven structure supporting the riverbank is a more likely meaning. Problems of identification are particularly frustrating when symbolism is implicated. Notable examples are Ophelia’s carefully allocated flowers and herbs, the plants included in Gertrude’s narration of Ophelia’s drowning, and Lear’s floral crown. Some plant names are used to designate characters (Viola, Fluellen, Cicely, Pimpernel, Dogberry, Costard); Angelica is unique: the appellation may refer to the culinary herb or to a person. There is a discrepancy, therefore, between the number of named plants (almost 200 individual names plus c. 10 generic names) and the number of plants that are present in Shakespeare’s work.
With over 120 mentions the rose is the most frequently named plant, followed by the lily, then the violet. Introduced from Turkey in the 1570s the most recently arrived exotic mentioned in Shakespeare is the ‘crown imperial’ (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.126), Flowers are important not only because of their symbolic significance but also for the poetic potential carried in their names—often heightened by the epithets Shakespeare attaches to them: ‘pale primroses’, ‘bold oxlips’, ‘freckled cowslip’, ‘azured harebell’, ‘daisies pied’. The gillyflower is ‘streaked’, violets are ‘dim’ or ‘blue-veined’, the rose is ‘crimson’, ‘vermilion’, ‘blushing’, ‘milk-white’, ‘fragrant’. The visual and atmospheric frequently cohere: ‘daffodils | That come before the swallow dares, and take | The winds of March with beauty’ (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.118–20). The water iris, subject to the sway of the current, is designated ‘a vagabond flag’ (Antony and Cleopatra 1.4.45). At his death Adonis is metamorphosed into a flower (Venus and Adonis 1165–76). Often the focus is on the fruit of a plant. Here again epithets can be significant: the ‘rubied cherry’ and ‘clust’ring filberts’ catch both the eye and the ear. The peach is mentioned only for its colour. Fruits are frequently sources of exoticism and eroticism e.g. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.158–9. The names of the fruits, accentuated by alliteration and assonance, promote a sensual atmosphere. Both ‘apricocks’ and ‘figs’ are sexually suggestive. Prunes are associated with brothels e.g. 2 Henry IV 2.4.140–2; Measure for Measure 2.1.87–104. Trees both native and exotic abound: apricot, Arabian tree (date/palm), ash, aspen, balsamum, bay, beech, cedar, cypress, ebony, elder, elm, holly, myrtle, oak, olive, palm, pine, plane, pomegranate, sycamore, willow. A plant is sometimes mentioned for just one aspect: ginger is specified as a culinary ingredient; ebony is celebrated for its black, lustrous quality. Some plants have generally accepted symbolic significance: the willow is the emblem of forsaken love; the lily represents purity; both cypress and yew are linked to sadness, death, and graveyards; the sycamore signifies sadness or melancholy; the palm is a symbol of victory but also serves to validate a pilgrimage; the oaken garland commemorates triumph. On occasion contrasting, even antithetical meanings are ascribed to some plants. The strawberry can represent abundance, chastity, fertility, humility, modesty, purity and paradise, but can also symbolize sensuality and eroticism. Weeds, besides implying neglect, were imaged as emblematic of the fallen world.
The dramatist uses the natural world as analogy, simile, metaphor, and as a contributor to other rhetorical devices. Chastising Wolsey for burdening the populace with excessive taxation, Henry VIII delivers his economic analysis by way of an arboreal analogy (All Is True 1.2.96–9). Acknowledging his irrevocable loss of power, Cardinal Wolsey expresses his predicament in terms of the growth, blossoming and blighting of plants (3.2.353–9).
Plants and their immediate environment are frequently a source of delicate imagery: Antony’s makeshift ambassador likens himself to ‘the morn-dew on the myrtle leaf’ (Antony and Cleopatra 3.12.9); Lavinia’s ‘lily hands | Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute’ (Titus Andronicus 2.4.44–5); Aufidius claims Coriolanus ‘watered his new plants with dews of flattery’ (Coriolanus 5.6.22); Innogen’s birthmark is ‘cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops | I’th’ bottom of a cowslip’ (Cymbeline 2.2.38–9); later, as the seemingly dead Fidele, Innogen is promised, ‘Thou shalt not lack | The flower that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor | The azured harebell, like thy veins; no, nor | The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander | Outsweetened not thy breath’ (4.2.221–5). The tradition of the cherry symbolizing closeness or twinning, usually feminine, is best captured in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.2.209–12) where ‘two in oneness’ is the conceptual nucleus of the play. Oberon’s evocation of the profusion of plants in the Athenian wood is intoxicating (2.1.249–52); Hamlet reviles the burgeoning corruption of the world: ‘’Tis an unweeded garden | That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature | Possess it merely’ (Hamlet 1.2.135–7). The dramatist generates pressure not only through imagery but also by his orchestration of sound values and the associated potential of plants. Exploiting the assonance and alliteration of two soporifics, Iago savours Othello’s anguish: ‘Not poppy nor mandragora | Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world | Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep | Which thou owedst yesterday’ (Othello 3.3.334–7). Again Iago extracts maximum effect from his deployment of richly resonant sounds when assuring Roderigo that Othello’s passion for Desdemona will be short-lived: ‘The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida’ (1.3.347–9). Luxuriating in assonance, Iago’s contrast between the sweet locust fruit of the Cyprian carob tree and the equally exotic ‘bitter apple’ creates plausibility through verbal alchemy. The single mention of samphire brings into view an entire landscape (King Lear 4.5.11–24).
Plants freighted with meaning frequently resist interpretation: Ophelia’s dispensation of herbs and flowers (Hamlet 4.5.175–84); Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s drowning (4.7.138–55); the garland worn by the Jailer’s Daughter (The Two Noble Kinsmen 4.1.82–90) and Lear’s ‘crown’ of weeds and flowers (King Lear 4.3.1–6). The longest speech embracing the largest number of plants is Burgundy’s representation of the desecration of French agriculture and landscape (‘this best garden of the world’) by the invading army of Henry V (Henry V 5.2.31–55). The garden scene in Richard II (3.4.), emblematic of the body politic, encompasses a dialogue on plant husbandry. Iago provides an extended analogy between the garden and the soul (Othello 1.3.319–32). Mentioned only twice, the potato was viewed as an aphrodisiac. For his assignation with the merry wives Falstaff seeks renewal of his enfeebled sexual prowess: ‘Let the sky rain potatoes’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.18–19). Its role in Troilus and Cressida is more sordid than comic (5.2.55–7).
‘Leaf’ can mean ‘petal’, as instanced by Basset’s reference to the rose and ‘the sanguine colour of the leaves’ (1 Henry VI 4.1.92). ‘Petal’ found its way into English via John Ray in 1682. The generic use of ‘herb’ to cover a range of plants including flowers is apparent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oberon instructs Puck: ‘Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once’ (2.1.169) and uses the word ‘herb’ three more times when alluding to a flower. In Venus and Adonis distinctions are made by the narrator when portraying the response of the natural world to Adonis’ fatal wound: ‘No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed, | But stole his blood, and seemed with him to bleed’ (1055–6). The difference between salad herbs and ‘nose herbs’, valued for their scent, emerges in a dialogue between Lafeu and Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well (4.5.13–19). Rosemary had diverse uses but symbolically it represented remembrance, something made explicit by Ophelia (Hamlet 4.5.175). Less obvious in meaning is its culinary function. Rosemary, as a garnish, was viewed as ostentatious. Hence its figurative application in Pericles where the Bawd derides Marina as ‘my dish of chastity with rosemary and bays’ (19.175–6).
Increasing plant availability stimulated scientific experimentation in both curative medicine and poisons by physicians, apothecaries and the curious. A thriving market-place for herbs, London’s Bucklersbury, alluded to by Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.3.67), was indicative of demand for and a ready supply of these plants for culinary, aromatic, and medicinal uses (referred to as ‘simples’). A division of labour is apparent in Pericles where the skilful physician Cerimon hands a prescription to a servant, ‘Give this to th’ pothecary | And tell me how it works’ (12.8–9). Here is also an indication of empiricism central to the scientific project. The Friar in Romeo and Juliet, fully aware of the duality possessed by plants integral to pharmacopoeia, distinguishes between ‘baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers’, and acknowledges that within a single flower, ‘Poison hath residence and medicine power’ (Romeo and Juliet 2.3.8–24). The impoverished apothecary who provides Romeo with poison is subject to strict legal constraints (5.1.66–7). Laertes acquires his deadly poison from an unlicensed ‘mountebank’ (Hamlet 4.7.114). The Queen in Cymbeline has a predilection to experiment with poisons (1.5.1–44).
The most significant botanical exchange in Shakespeare foregrounds the relationship between art and nature. Perdita’s reluctance to grow ‘carnations and streaked gillyvors | Which some call nature’s bastards’ arises from her understanding that ‘There is an art which in their piedness shares | With great creating nature’. Unconvinced by Polixenes’ assurance that techniques used to enhance plant variety are rational—mankind is not a usurper of nature but a collaborator—she links such artifice with the impropriety of face painting (4.4.79–103). Polixenes was over-estimating the prevailing state of horticultural knowledge or ‘art’. Hybridization was not understood at the time, but the obsession with new forms and varieties led to vigorous though ineffectual efforts to enhance this process by human intervention. Where diversity occurred it was a natural phenomenon. The divergent views of Polixenes and Perdita reverberated throughout the 17th century and became the subject of theological unease for another two centuries. Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Mower, Against Gardens’ is a severe indictment of human arrogance and duplicity: Perdita is clearly visible in Marvell’s mirror.
Vivian Thomas
Platter, Thomas (1574–1682), Swiss traveller. Born in Basle, Platter took his medical baccalaureate at the Université de Montpellier, and later visited England from 18 September to 20 October 1599. Writing in a difficult German dialect, he noted that on 21 September he crossed the Thames and observed a tragedy about Julius Caesar, performed ‘with approximately fifteen characters’, in ‘the straw-thatched house’ (‘steüwine Dachhaus’). He may report on an unknown ‘Caesar’ drama; but it is probable that he saw Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and that he offers the earliest report of any dramatic performance at the newly built *Globe. The most approved modern translation of Platter’s remarks on the play is Ernest Schanzer’s, in ‘Thomas Platter on the Elizabethan Stage’, Notes and Queries, 201 (1956).
Park Honan
Plautus (c. 254–184 bc), Roman comic dramatist who wrote in the tradition of the New Comedy, popular in 4th-century Greece and exemplified by the work of Menander. Of the 130 plays attributed to Plautus in the 1st century bc, 21 survive, more than any other classical playwright and a testament to his contemporary success. Plautus was one of the causes célèbres of Renaissance humanism, admired for his witty and vivacious style and for the intricacy of his comic plots. Henry VIII commanded the performance of two of his plays at court and throughout the 16th century there were numerous continental translations and adaptations of his plays. Stephen Gosson complained that early English drama ‘smelt of Plautus’. The Plautine mode of comedy was based upon stock characters, including the crafty servant or the braggart soldier (miles gloriosus), which often figured in early English comedy. Perhaps most Plautine, however, was the plot of confusion or error based on mistaken identity in which these characters appeared. This could be the deliberate deception practised by the stock character of the trickster or that practised by nature through the phenomenon of twins. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare combined the ‘errors’ of two Plautine comedies, Menaechmi and Amphitruo, to compound the possible confusion. The Comedy of Errors also employs the Plautine convention of a child lost and found, and of a family reunited. The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and All’s Well That Ends Well all contain elements of Plautine comedy. Shakespeare probably read the Menaechmi, and other Plautine plays (Amphitruo, Rudens, and Mostellaria), in Latin.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
playbills, public notices advertising that plays were to be performed, attached to posts in the surrounding district. No playbills have survived from Shakespeare’s time, so we cannot be sure how much detail was given. Richard Vennar’s advertisement for his entertainment England’s Joy at the Swan in 1603 was fraudulent—he planned to steal the receipts without giving a performance—so it cannot be regarded as a typical playbill.
Gabriel Egan
playbook, the official play-text manuscript (or ‘book’), containing the essential licence from the Master of the Revels. From this valuable document—which ordinarily never left the theatre—the bookkeeper would have actors’ parts copied, and he might also annotate the playbook with reminders and additional directions to help him run the performance from offstage. The word promptbook is equivalent, although prompting (in the sense of reminding actors of their lines) does not seem to have happened in Shakespeare’s time.
Gabriel Egan
‘Player King’. See players.
‘Player Queen’. See players.
Players. (1) As part of a lord’s deception of Sly in the Induction, they perform the bulk of The Taming of the Shrew. (2) After much advice from the Prince, they perform the play presented by Hamlet to King Claudius, Hamlet 3.2. The Player King plays Duke Gonzago, and the Player Queen his wife Baptista. Other parts are the Prologue and the poisoner Lucianus.
Anne Button
players’ quartos. See quartos.
Players’ Shakespeare. This rather grand large-paper limited edition, published by Ernest Benn, set out to print Shakespeare’s plays ‘litteratim from the First Folio of 1623’, with line-blocks by various artists, among them Paul Nash, and long introductions by Harley *Granville-Barker. The edition ran out of steam after seven plays had been published between 1923 and 1927. It provided the occasion for Granville-Barker to develop *performance criticism’ in what later became well known as his ‘Prefaces’ to Shakespeare; the first three of these (to Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Love’s Labour’s Lost) were published in a separate volume in 1927.
R. A. Foakes
playhouses. See theatres, Elizabethan and Jacobean.
playing companies. See companies, playing.
Pléiade, French literary movement founded in 1549 by five university students including Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard. Named after the Alexandrian society of the 3rd century bc, the group was inspired by the great writers of Greece and Rome, in particular Pindar and Anacreon, and by contemporary Italian literature. In dismay at the state of French literature, the Pléaide set out to reform it by importing the style, vocabulary, and themes of these classical and contemporary models into French poetry. The Pléiade’s translations and imitations of classical lyric, and its innovations in the sonnet form, influenced English Renaissance poetry.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Pliny (ad 23/24–79), equestrian, rhetorician, and author of many works of history and rhetoric of which only the Naturalis historia survives. This is a study of the physical universe with sections on botany, geography, metallurgy, and human and animal biology. It was translated as Natural History or History of the World by Philemon Holland in 1601. That Shakespeare knew Pliny’s work is suggested by descriptions of exotic lands and peoples in Othello. Features drawn from Pliny include the Anthropophagi, Arabian trees which drop medicinal gum, and a description of the Pontic Sea (1.3.127–44, 5.2.359–60, 3.3.456–63).
Jane Kingsley-Smith
‘plots’. Scene-by-scene outlines of plays written on large sheets of paper and posted in early playhouses. Plots reminded actors when and in what character they were to appear, while alerting backstage personnel when specific properties were required and when music or noises were called for. Seven ‘plots’ or ‘platts’ from the period are extant, including two from the *Admiral’s or Strange’s Men c.1590 and five dating from 1597–1602.
Eric Rasmussen
Plummer, Christopher (b. 1929), Canadian actor. With Broadway experience behind him, he was the first Canadian-born actor to play leading parts in the Stratford Festival, Ontario, 1956–67, beginning with Henry V and going on to Hamlet, Leontes, Mercutio, Macbeth, Aguecheek, and Antony—absenting himself in 1961–2 to play Richard III and Benedick for the *Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and London. In New York he has played Iago in Othello (1982) and the title role in a disastrous production of Macbeth with Glenda Jackson (1988). He also starred in a one-man show Barrymore, based on the life of the self-destructive Shakespearian player.
Michael Jamieson
Plutarch (L.[?] Mestrius Plutarchus) was born in Chaeronea to the west of Delphi in c.ad 46, and he died after ad 120. This makes him a direct contemporary of the great Roman historian Tacitus and, during his younger years, of the Emperors Claudius and Nero.
Plutarch wrote in his native Greek and was a prolific essayist, philosopher, biographer, and historian. He was best known in the Renaissance for his Parallel Lives, of which 23 have survived. In nineteen of them the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are compared.
Plutarch is an accomplished narrator who uses vivid anecdotes and colourful cameos to bring his characters to life. In the ‘Life of Alexander’ he famously noted that, as Sir Thomas North’s translation puts it, ‘The noblest deeds do not always show men’s virtues and vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than the famous battles won.’ For Plutarch history was a stage on which great men shaped the world according to their moral inclinations. It is fitting that the other collection of extant works by this much-travelled writer, who quietly ended his life at Delphi as a priest, should be called the Moralia.
Plutarch’s influence on Shakespeare is hard to overestimate. Shakespeare knew Plutarch’s Lives in the 1579 English version by Sir Thomas North (North in turn translates the French text of Jacques Amyot) and the Moralia in the 1603 translation by Philemon Holland. Plutarch’s writings provided material for Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, and, probably, for the nomenclature of The Winter’s Tale. It is, however, in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus that Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch is most thorough.
While the chronological spread of Plutarchan material across the canon suggests that Shakespeare was steeped in Plutarch from the start and drew on him for each one of his dramatic genres, these three Roman plays dramatize material from Plutarch’s Lives and, in the case of Antony and Cleopatra, the Moralia as well. Shakespeare repeatedly telescopes his source materials from the Lives, and his uses range from direct verbal echoes between text and source to artful rewritings of Plutarch. At times, as in the case of Enobarbus’ tribute to Cleopatra’s magic at Cydnus, the intertextual play between the source and the drama is so intimate that Shakespeare must have worked with a copy of North’s Plutarch at his elbow, as he did with *Holinshed in Henry V and a handful of other *sources such as, for example, *Greene’s Pandosto (for The Winter’s Tale) and *Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet. Shakespeare generally transcends Plutarch’s moral homilies by attributing them to particular characters in his plays.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), American poet and story-writer. Comments on Shakespeare occur in ‘Letter to B—’, from the preface to Poems (1831) and in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), where he contrasts the ‘hideous and unwieldy’ spirit of Samuel *Johnson with the ‘airy and fairy-like’ creations of the ‘immortal Shakespeare!’
Tom Matheson
Poel, William (1852–1934), English actor and director who dedicated his life to reforming Shakespearian performance. An antiquarian at heart and always a bit of a crank, Poel was caught between a zealous study of the Elizabethan stage and a fanatical hatred of the Victorian theatre. He began by directing (and taking the main role in) the ‘bad’ quarto of Hamlet at St George’s Hall in London in 1881 in Elizabethan dress. After the publication of the de Witt sketch of the *Swan theatre in 1888, Poel set about to discover how stage practice in Shakespeare’s time resided in Shakespeare’s texts. Believing that the plays had been buried under the silt of subsequent production styles, he insisted that only by taking them out of the proscenium theatre and discovering Elizabethan performance methods could they be adequately understood. For Measure for Measure in 1893 (in which he played Angelo) he built what he considered to be a replica of the Fortune theatre as a portable structure and placed it on the stage of the Royalty theatre, jutting out partly into the auditorium, adding ladies and gentlemen as ‘spectators’ in Elizabethan costume matching that of the actors. He founded the Elizabethan Stage Society in 1895 and until 1905 directed a number of its productions, starting with Twelfth Night and continuing with Richard II (1899, with Harley *Granville-Barker in the title role), Everyman (1901), Romeo and Juliet (1905), and lesser-known plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. In the 1920s he directed *Fratricide Punished, *Arden of Faversham, Sejanus, and plays by *Rowley and *Chapman. He refused a knighthood in 1929 because he would not be allied with other theatrical knights whose work he abhorred. Though his productions were usually marred by idiosyncratic notions of vocal tone and delivery, and though his understanding of Elizabethan acting was seriously flawed, he had great influence on the general 20th-century project of invigorating Shakespeare by simple and open staging. His inheritors include Granville-Barker and Tyrone *Guthrie, who succeeded in part because they followed Poel’s ideal rather than his practice.
Dennis Kennedy
poems on Shakespeare. The *First Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1623) included five commemorative verses in its introductory material, two by Ben *Jonson, one by Hugh *Holland, one by Leonard *Digges, and one, by I. *M., for whom a number of authors have been proposed. The Second Folio (1632) added three more; the anonymous ‘Upon the Effigies of my Worthy Friend’, *Milton’s epitaph ‘What need my Shakespeare for his honoured bones …’, and ‘On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems’ by I. M. S. The most influential of these pieces has been Jonson’s ‘To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr William Shakespeare: And What He Hath Left Us’, which was reprinted in all the major 18th-century collected works and has adorned many more complete editions since. It has been read biographically, ‘—thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek’; has articulated Shakespeare’s ‘immortality’, ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’; it described, presciently, his status as an international figure and a source of national pride, ‘Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, | To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe’; and contributed the enduring descriptor ‘Sweet swan of Avon’.
These points were developed by many subsequent poets, building on Jonson and developing Milton’s metaphors for Shakespeare’s instinctive imaginative power—‘fancy’s child’ who ‘warble[d] his native woodnotes wild’ (‘L’Allegro’, c.1631)—and shifting from epitaphic commemoration to a celebration of skill and pride in national achievement. Thomas *Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1751–4) supplied Shakespeare with an appropriate literary pedigree and made an implicit comparison with the classics as the Nine Muses forsook Parnassus and sought out Albion where, ‘Far from the sun and summer-gale, | In thy green lap was Nature’s Darling laid, | What time, where lucid Avon stray’d.’
Such sentiments, often exploited for commercial or political reasons and frequently using snatches of quotation, were made explicitly chauvinistic in theatrical prologues and epilogues, and rapidly became part of a standard language of *bardolatry. A good example is provided by Philip Frowde’s 1727 prologue to Lewis *Theobald’s Double Falsehood:Such Shakespeare’s genius was…let Britons boast
The glorious birth, and, eager, strive who most
Shall celebrate his verse; for while we raise
Trophies of fame to him, ourselves we praise:
Display the talents of a British mind,
Where all is great, free, open, unconfined.
Catherine Alexander
‘Poetomachia’. See ‘War of the Theatres’.
poetry, dramatic. See dramatic poetry.
poetry, lyric. See lyric poetry, Shakespeare’s.
poets. (1) A poet interrupts the discourse of Cassius and Brutus, Julius Caesar 4.2. The incident is based on *Plutarch’s account of the poet Marcus Phaonius who supposedly ended the quarrel by making Cassius laugh. (2) See Painter.
Anne Button
Poins, Edward (Ned). He is a companion of Prince Harry and practical joker in 1 and 2 Henry IV.
Anne Button
Poland is mentioned in several of Shakespeare’s plays, but nowhere, with one exception, is the country’s presence more than incidental. The exception is Hamlet, where Poland plays an important role, providing, along with Norway, the background of international politics. Shakespeare’s Poland, however, is both confused and confusing. Old Hamlet ‘smote the sledded Polacks on the ice’ (1.1.66), though it took *Malone to restore the sense of ‘Poles’ from Q2’s and F’s ‘Pollax’—an Elizabethan spelling of pole-axe. The context, however, confirms his emendation, since Poland has always been in the eyes of the English a northern country (‘Poland winter’ is mentioned in The Comedy of Errors), and the image of people, or troops, travelling on sleds stirs the imagination and gives local colour to the Baltic wars. A contemporary writer, John Barclay, mentions Polanders in his Icon animorum or the mirror of minds (written in 1614, but published in English in London, 1633): ‘but in winter when the waters are frozen, they haue Sleds, in which they passe with speed vpon the yce’. It is further confirmed by another allusion to Poland, the name of the garrulous courtier known in the first quarto as ‘Corambis’: ‘Polonius’ is simply the Latin for ‘Polish’. The name seems slightly ironic: as the Lord Chamberlain (?) of the Danish court, dealing with international politics, Polonius is responsible for the permission given to the Norwegian army to march against Poland. Polonius further reveals the play’s confusion about Poland when he uses the word ‘Danskers’ in his conversation with Reynaldo (‘Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris’, 2.1.7). The context implies that this means Danes, but in usual Elizabethan and Jacobean usage the word meant a citizen of Dansk, or Danzig (in German) or Gdańsk (in Polish). Shakespeare appears to have confused dansk (Danish), Danske (Danes) with Dansk (Danzig or rather Gdańsk) and Dansker (a citizen of Dansk or Gdańsk), the only writer of the period to do so. The linguistic affinity probably led the poet to think that Denmark bordered with Poland, where Dansk was the major city and harbour: hence his apparent ignorance of the fact that in order to reach Poland from Denmark by land, Fortinbras’ army would have to pass through three other countries, namely, Holstein, Mecklenburg, and Pomerania. All Danish or Swedish invasions of Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries were sea invasions; military clashes with Norway are not recorded.
Shakespeare may have heard about Gdańsk (and Elsinore) from his fellow actors, many of whom in the late 1590s ventured tours on the Continent, where shortly Gdańsk was to become one of the centres of their activity. During Shakespeare’s own lifetime his plays were performed there. And in around 1610 a public theatre was built in that city, which accommodated c.3,000 spectators and which was reminiscent of the Fortune playhouse in Shakespeare’s London (a reconstruction project of the Gdańsk theatre was completed in 2014). Also, from around 1617, the kings of Poland kept English players at their courts, and in fact Poland was the only country in Europe where the activity of English actors continued uninterrupted during the Thirty Years War. One of the best-known English comedians, Robert Reynolds, who gained fame under the stage name ‘Pickleherring’, died in Warsaw in or shortly before 1642 and his wife was given a pension by King Vladislaus IV, perhaps the first known example of an actors’ pension scheme in Poland.
In the 17th century Shakespeare was performed in German prose translations. The first Polish translations (free adaptations rather, based on German renditions) and productions of Shakespeare appeared towards the end of the 18th century, and were the creations of Wojciech Bogusławski. His 1797 production of Romeo and Juliet in Lwów is considered the first Polish performance of Shakespeare; this was soon followed by Hamlet (1798), Othello (1801), King Lear (1805), and Macbeth (1809), which became permanent pieces in theatre repertories. After the failure of the November Uprising in 1831, in the Russian sector of partitioned Poland, Shakespeare disappeared from the stage for over 30 years: the Tsarist censors did not approve the frequent conspiracies against rulers and government in general presented in the plays. Shakespearian productions continued in the other parts of divided Poland, especially under Austrian rule (with two important cultural centres, Lwów and Kraków). These early productions were always abridged, adapted, and altered to suit the taste of the period, and it was not until around the middle of the 19th century that Shakespeare appeared unamended on the Polish stage. It was Stanisław Koźmian, the theatre manager and director in Kraków, who introduced nearly 20 new productions of Shakespeare in the last quarter of the 19th century, including Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It—all in new translations from the original. Around this time, following a relative relaxation of censorship, Shakespeare enjoyed a comeback in Warsaw, and some of Poland’s leading actors and actresses, such as Helena Modrzejewska (who gained international fame as *Modjeska) and, later, Ludwik Solski and Karol Adwentowicz became Shakespeare’s great promoters.
In the period between the wars, in the reborn Poland, perhaps the greatest productions of Shakespeare were those directed by Leon Schiller, and the memorable Shakespearian roles were played, among others, by Aleksander Zelwerowicz, Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski, and Stefan Jaracz along with Stanisława Wysocka (the first Polish actress to play Hamlet, with Teresa Budzisz-Krzyẓanowska being the most recent example). In the post-war period the greatest Shakespearian productions were directed by Willam Horzyca, Konrad Swinarski, Jerzy Jarocki, Adam Hanuszkiewicz, and Andrzej Wajda; best remembered are the roles of Jacek Woszczerowicz, Gustaw Holoubek, Zofia Kucówna and Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak, to mention just a few. Despite its fuzziness about Poland’s geography, Hamlet has featured prominently in recent Polish theatrical history, and in one respect has generally done so in an unusually full text. The scene in which Hamlet converses with a captain of the Norwegian army that is marching against Poland (4.4.9–29), often cut from productions elsewhere, has generally been retained in Poland, where this depiction of a foreign military threat has often been crucial for political interpretations of the play (as in Andrzej Wajda’s production of 1981). On average there are about a dozen new Shakespearian productions in Polish theatres every season, and some Polish television productions of Shakespeare are equally notable for their artistic and intellectual quality. In 1993 an annual international Shakespeare Festival was started in Gdańsk.
Several translations of the complete plays have appeared (the last one was completed in the 1970s by Maciej Słomczyński), whereas the most recent attempt, undertaken by Stanisław Barańczak, is still in progress. Individual plays have enjoyed varying popularity both on the stage and in translation (Hamlet is the leader with 23 translations). As far as Shakespeare criticism goes, Jan *Kott’s Shakespeare our Contemporary has won international acclaim and has influenced theatre directors around the world, including such prominent figures as Peter *Brook. There is a Shakespeare Association of Poland, and recent Shakespeare scholarship is represented by the work of Przemysław Mroczkowski, Henryk Zbierski, Marta Gibińska, and Małgorzata Grzegorzewska.
Jerzy Limon
Pole, William de la. See Suffolk, Earl of.
Polixenes is the King of Bohemia and father of Florizel in The Winter’s Tale. The corresponding character in Shakespeare’s source, *Greene’s Pandosto, is Egistus.
Anne Button
Pollard, Alfred William (1859–1944), English bibliographer. With W. W. Greg and R. B. McKerrow, initially through the Bibliographical Society’s journal The Library, Pollard revolutionized not only the bibliographical and textual study of all early English printed books, but specifically that of Shakespeare, mainly by the careful investigation and analysis of all the earliest printed copies, in both quarto and folio. His main publications are: Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909); Shakespeare’s Fight with the Pirates (1917); and The Foundations of Shakespeare’s Text (1923). Some of the information at his disposal has been supplemented or superseded, but not the intellectual rigour of his approach.
Tom Matheson
Polonius, father of *Ophelia and Laertes in Hamlet, is killed by Hamlet, 3.4.23. He is called Corambis in the first *quarto.
Anne Button
‘Polydore’ is the name given to Guiderius by Belarius in Cymbeline.
Anne Button
Pompey. Mistress Overdone’s servant, he is interrogated by Elbow and Escalus, Measure for Measure, giving his full name as Pompey Bum (2.1.205–7). He later becomes Abhorson’s assistant (4.2.14–17).
Anne Button
‘Pompey’. Costard takes the part of Pompey the Great (Cn. Pompeius Magnus, 106–48 bc) in the performance of ‘The Nine Worthies’, Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2.
Anne Button
Pompey, Sextus (Sextus Pompeius) (75–35 bc). Son of Pompey the Great, he makes a short-lived treaty with the triumvirs, Antony and Cleopatra 2.6. His defeat by Caesar is announced, 3.5.
Anne Button
‘poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree, The’. See Willow song.
pop music. Although those conspicuous ‘New Elizabethans’ the Beatles were prevailed upon to act out ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a TV special in the year of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday, 1964 (with Ringo as Lion), and used an extract from a *radio production of King Lear in the fade-out to ‘I am the Walrus’ (1968), the influence of Shakespeare on anglophone pop music has predominantly been in the quotation of single lines of text, often simply as titles, such as B. A. Robertson’s ‘To be or not to be’, David Essex’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’, and Dire Straits’ love ballad ‘Romeo and Juliet’. A more abstract Shakespearian influence can be seen in Elvis Costello’s ‘The Juliet Letters’ (written in collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet), and the Smiths’ song ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’. Bands adopting Shakespeare-inspired names include ‘Shakespear’s [sic] Sister’ and ‘Romeo’s Daughter’. Two notable rock-based musical versions of Shakespeare’s plays are Drei Herren aus Verona (Nuremberg, 1972) and *Return to the Forbidden Planet (London, 1989), a sci-fi version of The Tempest loosely based on the 1956 film *Forbidden Planet. Perhaps surprisingly, translated Shakespeare has been used frequently as a source for pop lyrics in Eastern Europe.
Irena Cholij
Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), poet and Shakespearian editor. Pope’s six-volume edition of Shakespeare’s Works (1725) was the product of a poet rather than a specialized philologist or dedicated Shakespearian scholar. Though Pope carried out some textual collation, and made innovative use of the Shakespearian *quartos, he was less concerned to explain difficulties and resolve variance on rational or critical grounds than to mediate his author for what were perceived to be more cultivated contemporary tastes. Pope’s text is in part constructed and presented according to aesthetic criteria. The ‘most shining passages’ are pointed out by marginal quotation marks, or preceded by an asterisk. Some lines which Pope thought ‘excessively bad’, on the basis of their verbal quibbles or *conceits, he ‘degraded’ from the text itself to the foot of the page. Pope’s preface is an important document of early 18th-century English criticism, characterizing Shakespeare, despite his ‘great defects’, as an original genius, the great poet of nature, and famously comparing the Shakespearian drama, in its strength and irregularity, to ‘an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture’.
Marcus Walsh
Pope, Elizabeth, née Young, (c. 1740–97), a leading actress with a broad range. She made her debut as Imogen for *Garrick at *Drury Lane in 1768. She specialized in young innocents—Perdita, Juliet, Miranda—and played Cordelia to Garrick’s Lear at the end of his career. She joined *Covent Garden in 1779 where her more mature roles, some performed with her husband, Alexander, included Queen Katherine, Lady Macbeth, and Mrs Ford.
Catherine Alexander
Pope, Thomas (d. 1603), actor (Strange’s Men 1593, Chamberlain’s Men 1597–1603). First mentioned among the players at Elsinore in 1586 (the others were George *Bryan and William *Kempe), Pope’s name occurs in the role of Arbactus in ‘Sloth’ in the *plot of 2 Seven Deadly Sins (performed before 1594, possibly by Strange’s Men). Strange’s Men’s licence to tour, issued on 6 May 1593, names Pope but by 27 November 1597 he was with the Chamberlain’s Men and received, with John *Heminges, the payment for court performances. His name appears in the actor lists for *Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour and Every Man in his Humour in Jonson’s 1616 folio, and in the actor list in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623. In 1599 he was one of the original *Globe housekeepers, but he is not mentioned in the King’s Men’s patent of 19 May 1603. His will indicates that he also had a share in the Curtain playhouse.
Gabriel Egan
Popilius Laena (Popillius Laena) (Popilius Lena) (historically ‘Laenas’), a senator who alarms Cassius by wishing him well and then speaking to Caesar just before the assassination, Julius Caesar 3.1.
Anne Button
popular culture. It is an accident of history that Shakespeare and popular culture seem to modern audiences an odd couple. For many previous generations, Shakespeare and popular culture would have seemed an obvious match. The public theatre for which he wrote occupied the bottom rung of early modern literary institutions, its questionable reputation shaped by its commercialism, its consciously broad appeal, and its predilection for sensationalism and low humour, qualities we have come to associate with popular culture rather than the high art with which Shakespeare is now routinely identified. Shakespeare’s transformation from popular playwright to highbrow icon, largely a 20th-century phenomenon, is the result of several developments. Most important of these were the displacement of stage performance by *film, *radio, and *television, and the institutionalization of English as an academic discipline. Professionalized study of Shakespeare established canons of authenticity that tended to treat popular appropriations of Shakespeare as degraded versions of the ‘legitimate’ Shakespeare found in the historical researches of scholars and in performances by professional theatrical companies. However, many have begun to reassess the function of Shakespeare in popular culture. Taking their cue from *cultural materialist criticism, *performance criticism, and cultural studies, scholars have analysed how Shakespeare’s works and cultural authority have been used and reinvented, particularly in popular culture. If, scholars argue, Shakespeare exists not in a single authoritative form but in multiple performances, pop Shakespeare ought to be included within the newly broadened continuum of Shakespearian ‘performance’. Many have recognized that audiences encounter Shakespeare through the mediation of cultural institutions of which the mass media is a powerful and, for many, a primary source of ideas about Shakespeare. Most important to this sea-change, however, has been the revived ideal of a popular Shakespeare fostered throughout the 1990s, prompted largely by the box-office success of Shakespeare film. Since popular culture’s interest in Shakespeare tends to be cyclical, a response to a perceived ‘trend’, Shakespeare has become a newly insistent point of reference in the mass media, particularly in film, television, and genre fiction. Current interest in pop Shakespeare belatedly acknowledges that for modern audiences it is Shakespeare’s appearance in the mass media, and not in the work of the academy, that lends his work cultural legitimacy.
The ubiquity of Shakespeare in popular culture hardly needs demonstration. Shakespeare’s likeness is perhaps one of the most recognizable images in the world, functioning something like a trademark in the popular imagination. Shakespeare himself regularly appears as a character in popular *fiction, ranging from cameos—as in ‘The Bard’, an episode of the TV show The Twilight Zone (1963)—to full-blown fictional biography—as in Neil Gaiman’s series on Shakespeare for the Sandman comics (1991) or Erica Jong’s bestseller Shylock’s Daughter (1995). Allusions to his works abound in *advertisements, sermons, political speeches, self-help books, radio and television shows, movies, popular drama, rock and *pop music, comic books, erotica, and genre fiction, in addition to being the subject matter of mass-produced collectibles such as *ceramics, dolls, toys, games, *statuary, prints, stamps, and cards (see Shakespeariana).
Shakespearian plots and characters have provided the basic armature for popular works in many genres, including westerns, science fiction, detective fiction, *Gothic romances, X-rated films, cartoons, and, most recently, teen movies. Some of these adaptations remain relatively faithful to their Shakespearian originals—Men of Respect (1991), a modernized film noir rendition of Macbeth, provides a good example. More typical, however, are popular works which might best be characterized as ‘free variations’ on Shakespearian motifs, works that negotiate between Shakespeare’s works and the conventions, thematics, and iconography of popular culture. Where popular works depend upon recognition of the Shakespearian subtext or allusion, they tend to refer to those plays most widely taught or to lines, plots, or characters that have passed into common parlance—the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, ‘To be or not to be’, Hamlet’s discoursing to the skull of Yorick, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Conversely, ‘proper’ Shakespearian productions are increasingly shaped by conventions and allusions taken from popular culture—*Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and *Welles’s Othello (1952) both borrow themes and motifs from 1940s film noir. In many cases, the variation is so ‘free’ that the relationship to Shakespeare is not immediately recognizable and thus a matter of some debate. To what extent do stories of young lovers blocked by their families—a favourite of adolescent fiction and romance novels—owe specifically to Romeo and Juliet? Need the typical reader perceive the parallels between Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day (1988) or the science-fiction film *Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Tempest to appreciate the works? Such problems open larger theoretical questions: to what end is Shakespeare being used if the use is not perceived by a popular audience? Do such parallels testify to Shakespeare’s status as a persistent master narrative, to certain archetypes of which Shakespeare and contemporary popular works are both exemplars, or to the interpretative ingenuity of *bardolaters anxious to project Shakespeare into every nook and cranny of cultural production?
Just as popular culture appropriates Shakespeare in a dizzying variety of forms and modes, so too works of popular culture display a complex—and contradictory—range of attitudes towards Shakespeare. Central to those attitudes is an awareness of Shakespeare’s prestige, what Pierre Bourdieu has dubbed ‘cultural capital’, and of the tension in the cultural market place between highbrow and lowbrow. Frequently Shakespeare serves as a metonym for ideologically charged concepts—literature, classical theatre, highbrow culture, intellectualism—against which popular culture defines itself. Even so, popular conceptions of Shakespeare are hardly monolithic. Shakespeare is often treated as a repository of ‘universal’ truths, invoked to underwrite a particular claim—as in political speeches or advertisements—or to elevate the cultural register of the work—as in the case of book or movie titles. In the science-fiction film The Postman (1997), for example, the protagonist’s concern with preserving a cultural legacy in a post-apocalyptic America takes the form of reciting Shakespeare. Shakespeare has also served to confer an aura of artistic authenticity on culture industries, particularly at moments of crisis. Early in the century *silent film adopted Shakespeare to counter claims that the movies were a corrupting influence, a process repeated in different ways in the mid-1930s with the talkies and in the 1950s and 1960s with early television. Even the sex industry has fought off threats of censorship by grafting Shakespeare onto erotica. This gloss of artistic legitimacy extends to the individual Shakespearian actor, as Paul Rudnick chronicles in his play I Hate Hamlet (1994). Just as often, however, legitimization operates in the opposite direction: Shakespearian performances by film or TV stars and productions of Shakespeare on film, TV, and radio confer the imprimatur of stardom on Shakespeare and remove the taint of elitism and antiquarianism. Indeed, many cases of popular Shakespearian appropriation partake of what might be called reciprocal legitimization, through which Shakespeare and popular media exchange different types of cultural prestige.
Other popular adaptations remain ambivalent or sceptical about Shakespeare’s cultural authority, making it and its agents subjects of critique. Since mass culture typically establishes itself as ‘popular’ by demonizing the highbrow, Shakespeare has served as a symbolic target or, occasionally, as an unlikely ally. The vicissitudes of reading Shakespeare for class or performing Shakespeare in a school production are staples of TV and film partly because they are part of the audience’s shared experience, but also because they provide opportunities for taking issue with ‘proper’ Shakespeare. Comedy groups such as the Reduced Shakespeare Company or Shakespeare Skum target the class-coded canons of stylistic decorum that underlie ‘authentic’ Shakespeare. Such canons of taste are closely linked for modern audiences to the quaint, quasi-scriptural ring of Shakespearian language, another favourite target for satirists. But critique can extend far beyond stylistic decorum to those institutions that use Shakespeare to purvey a notion of ‘proper’ culture and thereby protect their own class privilege. Indeed, popular culture often situates Shakespeare in those cultural institutions that reproduce and regulate his high-cultural status. Such is the case with the campy horror film Theatre of Blood (1973), in which disgruntled actor Edward Lionheart makes Shakespearian murder scenes the gruesome instruments of his revenge against those critics who have rejected his performances. Theatre of Blood makes explicit what is implicit in pop renderings of Shakespeare: a contest between cultural constituencies for authority, a struggle that makes Shakespeare the cultural icon both weapon and prize. In the 1990s, a number of works have made the contestatory ideal of a popular Shakespeare a central concern, among them the films Looking for Richard (1995), A Midwinter’s Tale (1995), and Shakespeare in Love (1998). The sheer variety of popular Shakespeariana testifies that Shakespeare remains a powerful resource in popular culture, even as the media with which he has long been associated, the page and the stage, have been dethroned by the screen and the ’zine. (See also United States of America.)
Douglas Lanier
Porter, Cole (1891–1964), American composer. His masterpiece is the *musical Kiss Me Kate, based on The Taming of the Shrew, first performed in Philadelphia and New York in 1948. Many of its individual songs gained independent popularity, notably ‘Brush up your Shakespeare’. A film adaptation was made in 1953.
Irena Cholij
Porter, Eric (1928–95), British actor. He played a range of parts in repertory at Birmingham and Bristol and at the *Old Vic in London, notably Jaques and Bolingbroke. Between 1960 and 1965 he was a pillar of the *Royal Shakespeare Company, excelling as Malvolio, Leontes, Ulysses, Macbeth, Shylock, and Bolingbroke. He returned in 1968 to play an impressive King Lear. He became a household name for playing Soames in the BBC television Forsyte Saga (1967) and won major awards for stage performances, but never quite achieved the recognition he deserved.
Michael Jamieson
Porter, Henry (d. 1599), a playwright who wrote for the Admiral’s Men between 1596 and 1599. His one surviving play, The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (printed in 1599), was successful enough to spawn two sequels. This bawdy farce ties itself in complicated knots around the feud between the two angry women of the title and the efforts of their husbands and children to reconcile them. Much of it is set at night, and it has affinities with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Porter may have been killed by his fellow playwright John Day in 1599.
Robert Maslen
porters. (1) A porter attends the Countess of Auvergne, 1 Henry VI 2.3. (2) A porter tells Lord Bardolph where to find Northumberland, 2 Henry IV 1.1. (3) A porter admits Macduff and Lennox to Macbeth’s castle, Macbeth 2.3. (4) A porter and his man try to contain the crowds eager to see *Elizabeth I’s christening, All Is True (Henry VIII) 5.3.
Anne Button
Porter’s Hall. When Philip Rosseter’s lease on the Whitefriars playhouse expired he obtained a royal patent (dated 3 June 1615) to build a playhouse in Porter’s Hall in Blackfriars. The Porter’s Hall playhouse was not long open when the Privy Council, under pressure from the London Corporation and presumably also the local residents, closed the playhouse by exploiting a flaw in the patent: since 1608 Blackfriars had not been ‘in the suburbs’ as the patent had stated, but within the City.
Gabriel Egan
Portia. (1) She is a rich heiress of Belmont who according to her father’s will must accept the suitor who chooses the right casket of three in The Merchant of Venice. The Princes of Morocco and Aragon choose incorrectly, but Bassanio, whom Portia favours, is successful (3.2). Hearing of Antonio’s plight she disguises herself as ‘Balthasar’, ‘a young doctor of Rome’; saves Antonio with a legal quibble at the Venetian court; and humbles Shylock (4.1). Ellen *Terry’s overt (by Victorian standards) advances to Bassanio and crucial use of feminine intuition in the trial scene were the result of the actress’s developing proto-feminism. Since the Second World War, directorial attempts to integrate the Belmont romantic comedy with the Venetian tragedy have resulted in some interesting if less attractive Portias: notably Joan Plowright, whose calculating, mature Portia was very much a reflection of the Machiavellian world of Venetian business politics in Jonathan *Miller’s 1970 production; and Deborah Findlay’s smugly racist Portia in Bill Alexander’s daring 1987 production. (2) She is Brutus’ wife, who entreats him to confide in her, Julius Caesar 2.1. Her death is announced, 4.2.201.
Anne Button
portraits The only two portraits of Shakespeare with any claims to date from his lifetime are the *Cobbe and the *Chandos. Absence of incontrovertible lifetime portraits has provided an opportune space for the scholarly, fantastic, and political projections of art historians, private collectors, *advertisers, comedians, journalists, and even publicans. Shakespeare’s likeness has been avidly sought out, copied, forged, appropriated, invented, and capitalized upon. The two iconic representations at the heart of this cultural phenomenon are the *Droeshout engraving of 1623 and John Taylor’s oil portrait of c.1610, known as the Chandos portrait. These images were used as sources by artists commissioned to produce early portraits of Shakespeare, such as Michael Van der Gucht, who produced a design for a derivative of the Chandos portrait with allegorical figures in 1709. Throughout the 18th century, the principal appropriations of Shakespeare portraiture were, however, commercial in function. The London publisher Jacob Tonson incorporated the Chandos portrait into his shop sign and trademark, and the same portrait was engraved for Paul Rapin-Thoyras’s highly successful History of England (1725), which went into eight editions between 1725 and 1789.
The 19th century witnessed a spate of ‘rediscovered’ originals allegedly used by Martin Droeshout in engraving the First Folio portrait. These images included the *Ely Palace, *Flower, and *Ashbourne portraits. This trend—intimately linked to the growth of *bardolatry—was exemplified by the appearance, in 1814, of an image in the style of a late 16th- or early 17th-century Dutch portrait, identified as Shakespeare’s likeness, which came into the possession of Dunford, a prosperous publisher. The painting was later identified as a forgery.
Original portraits of Shakespeare continued to be produced during the 19th century, and most frequently appeared as engraved frontispieces to new editions of the plays. Depicting the sitter alongside attributes serving both to identify and elevate him has been one of the principal conventions of portraiture since the 16th century. It is, therefore, common to find Shakespeare not only shown with pen and scroll in hand, as in the statue by Louis François *Roubiliac commissioned by *Garrick (1758, now at the British Library), but portrayed alongside characters from the plays. The frontispiece to Knight’s Pictorial Shakespeare (1838), for example, was executed by the Dalziel Brothers and depicts the dramatist alongside his characters, forging a link between creator and creations worthy of Old Testament narratives.
In the wake of the successful construction of Shakespeare as a national hero (ratified, in 1847, by the purchase of the dramatist’s *birthplace and its transformation into a national shrine) the spurious ‘identification’ of portraits with obviously non-authentic provenances became especially frequent during periods of national crisis. In the period preceding the explosion of hostilities in 1914, one such ‘discovery’ was announced in Llandudno, Wales, and a portrait of ‘Shakespeare’ signed by ‘Jo Taylor’ was later exhibited at Earl’s Court, London. Another mis-identification of a 17th-century Dutch portrait, likely to have represented an Old Testament prophet, and incorrectly attributed to Frans Hals, was made in the Reynolds News on 5 November 1944.
Renewed momentum was given to the identification of Shakespeare portraits by the institutionalization of Art History as an academic discipline. A celebrated instance of this phase of portrait identification is that relating to a portrait miniature of a young man by Nicholas *Hilliard. In 1977, Leslie *Hotson argued that the sitter was indeed Shakespeare, and wrote a detailed iconological account of the piece. Hotson claimed that Shakespeare was represented as Mercury (the amethyst-coloured hat supposedly referring to the god) and that the youthful hand grasped by the sitter was that of Apollo. Hotson’s view of the portrait, however, was not shared by other scholars, and Sir Roy Strong later identified the sitter as Lord Thomas Howard, later 1st Earl of Suffolk.
The use of Shakespeare portraiture for purposes other than commemoration of the dramatist himself shows no sign of abating. The Droeshout engraving appeared on the initial screen of the British Library’s computer catalogue until 1999, above the institution’s claim to world-class status as ‘the leading resource for research, innovation and scholarship’. Seemingly endowed with boundless authority and powers of historical and scholarly validation, yet executed in a style that was anachronistic in its own day, the Droeshout portrait testifies to the value still placed upon Shakespeare’s authorial presence.
Catherine Tite, rev. Stanley Wells
Portugal was, apparently, of limited interest to Shakespeare: England’s oldest ally is mentioned in his writings only twice, once as one of several foreign countries in which banished xenophobic rioters would themselves be foreign (Sir Thomas More, Add.II.D., 141–5), and once solely for its proximity to the depths of the Bay of Biscay (‘My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal’, As You Like It 4.1.197–8). Reciprocally, Portugal’s interest in Shakespeare was slow to develop. An 18th-century Hamlet opera (Francisco Luis Ameno’s Ambleto em Dania, c.1755) was based on an Italian or Spanish version of the story rather than directly on Shakespeare’s play, and a manuscript translation of Othello (apparently dating from the 1770s) by Simão de Melo Brandão, possibly the first Portuguese translator of Shakespeare, shows debts to Jean-François Ducis’s French version that make it a characteristic example of the indirectness proper to most of these early appropriations.
When a few Shakespeare plays began to appear in Portuguese (and subsequently *Brazilian) theatres in the later 18th and 19th centuries they too had been heavily adapted from translations into other languages (Rebello da Silva’s Othello, 1856, for example, is a sentimental prose adaptation of *de Vigny’s French translation). It took a monarch to initiate a tradition of translating Shakespeare directly from English into Portuguese, Louis I, who published versions of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, and Othello anonymously from 1877 to 1885. His notable successors included Bulhão Pato and Antonio Petronillo Lamarão, as well as Jorge de Sena, Sophia de Mello Breyner and Vasco Graça Moura.
The Portuguese reception of Shakespeare throughout most of the 20th century reflected the country’s political predicament. The dictatorship of 1926–74 practised a brutal censorship of publications and public performances. Artists and cultural agents opted for indirect forms of expression, often through the translation of foreign canonical texts including Shakespeare’s. During this time the universities were an important environment for the cultural processing of Shakespeare, but they also became targets for political repression. Between the 1940-60s, many students at the University of Coimbra, supervised by Paulo Quintela, wrote dissertations on Shakespeare that often included translations. Quintela was also the founder of a students’ theatre, and student productions became a prime channel for political protest mediated by Shakespeare. Since the end of the dictatorship in 1974, the Portuguese academic environment has enjoyed the freedom to participate actively in global projects that prominently include the Shakespeare industry, and it has regularly hosted international conferences in the field.
Shakespeare has regularly been staged in Portugal in recent decades, both at the National Theatre (with venues both in Lisbon and Oporto) and by independent theatre companies. These have often proposed challenging theatrical interpretations that show affinity with the major trends in continental *European theatre culture. A case in point is the professional trajectory of Cornucópia, a Lisbon-based group centred on the influence of the charismatic actor and director Luís Miguel Cintra, who has often led projects that involve placing Shakespeare in close connection with recent work by contemporary dramatists.
Many Portuguese translations of Shakespeare are available for the best-known plays in the canon, but others have been rendered into European Portuguese only once, as part of the single complete translation published in Portugal to date, under the imprint of Lello & Irmão. Since the early 2000s, a team of scholars from the University of Oporto has been publishing a new complete Shakespeare in Portuguese, which is expected to be completed by 2016.
Michael Dobson, rev. Rui Carvalho Homem
Postcolonialism, a critical approach in literary studies that examines the cultural and political implications of the long history of global imperialism. In Shakespeare studies postcolonial criticism has understandably focused primarily on the former British Empire and its colonial activities in *India, *Africa, the *Caribbean, and several other parts of the world. Bearing in mind the fact that at the start of the 20th century the British Empire Shakespeare Society claimed as its motto a startling line from 1 Henry VI— ‘Using no other weapon but his name’—postcolonial scholars have often explored Shakespeare’s historical role in the justification and perpetuation of British colonial rule, and in particular the enforced use of the English language. Within the academy postcolonial criticism rose to prominence in the second half of the 20th century and continues to exert a strong presence in Shakespeare studies, which in recent decades has become increasingly attentive to the translation, adaptation, and appropriation of Shakespeare worldwide. See also Global Shakespeare.
Erin Sullivan
Posthumus Leonatus, banished when his marriage to Innogen is discovered, makes a wager with Giacomo that he will not be able to seduce her in Cymbeline.
Anne Button
postmodernism. (1) The aesthetic and literary period following 20th-century modernism, variously said to have begun in 1945, 1965, or 1980 and marked by an aesthetics of disunity, anti-hierarchy, flatness, ironyless irony, and decentred subjectivity. Many critics see its impact on Shakespeare after about 1980 in avant-garde (or merely eclectic) theatrical productions and in poststructuralist literary criticism. (2) According to French social theorist François Lyotard, postmodernism (or postmodernity) is the intellectual problematic arising from the collapse of central assumptions of long-term modernity (seen as having begun in the Enlightenment). In this view modernity or (long-term) modernism had been marked by teleological narratives of progress and increasing rationality which are now revealed as ideological. ‘Postmodernist’ in this connection denotes those theories and theorists which share Lyotard’s diagnosis, usually including Nietzsche, Foucault, and other poststructuralists, and hence this term is sometimes used in Shakespeare studies to designate poststructuralist critiques of rationality and teleology. At other times the term is used in a conflated sense, combining meanings (1) and (2).
Hugh Grady
poststructuralism. See structuralism and poststructuralism.
Powell, William (?1735–69), English actor. He was trained by *Garrick, and covered many roles during his absences abroad. Success in London was followed by summer seasons at Bristol, where he became a popular actor-manager. In 1767 he acquired a part-share in *Covent Garden theatre, where he played major Shakespearian roles including Hamlet.
Catherine Alexander
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a society formed in 1848 by the English artists William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with four friends. The Pre-Raphaelites identified in Shakespeare an ideal they could harness to their attempt to revitalize British art with noble ideas and fidelity to nature: in 1848 Rossetti and Hunt prepared ‘a list of Immortals, forming our creed’, wherein the ‘first class’ comprised Jesus and Shakespeare. Hunt chose episodes dramatizing moral conflict in Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1851) and Claudio and Isabella (1850–3). Millais’s luminous Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849) enlivened popular *fairy painting with an innovative realism which also characterizes his Ophelia (1852). Like the latter, Rossetti’s sketches Hamlet and Ophelia (c. 1854–9) and The Death of Lady Macbeth (c.1876), and his painting of the pining Mariana (1868–70), all explore tragic Shakespearian women—a theme popular with followers of the movement after 1853, when the formal Brotherhood ceased.
John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852), the most enduringly popular of all Pre-Raphaelite paintings, in common with Victorian producers such as Charles Kean, Millais chose to show a scene which Shakespeare only describes.
Kate Newman
Presentism. A philosophical and critical movement seeking to illustrate that our reading and understanding of the past and its literature must inescapably be grounded in, filtered through, and informed by the present in which we live. For its influence on Shakespeare studies in particular see Hawkes, Terence.
Will Sharpe
Priam is King of Troy and father of Hector, Deiphobus, Helenus, Paris, Troilus, and Margareton in Troilus and Cressida. (According to Homeric legend, and the joke Pandarus recounts at 1.2.156–8, he had 50 sons.)
Anne Button
priests. (1) A priest greets Hastings, Richard III 3.2, who whispers something to him. He is named ‘Sir John’ at line 105. (2) A priest tells Laertes that *Ophelia’s ‘death was doubtful’, Hamlet 5.1.221. (3) A priest testifies that Olivia and Sebastian have married, Twelfth Night 5.1.154–61.
Anne Button
Prince of Verona. See Escalus, Prince of Verona.
princes, five. See knights, five.
Princes in the Tower. See Edward, Prince.
Princess’s theatre. See Kean, Charles.
printing and publishing. In Shakespeare’s time the printer of a book owned the type and the press. The publisher acquired the manuscript, paid for copies of it to be printed, and sold them wholesale. The imprint on a Shakespearian *quarto usually identifies the printer (often only by his initials, perhaps to emphasize the greater importance of the publisher), the publisher, and the bookshop (usually the publisher’s own) in which copies of the book could be purchased wholesale: ‘Printed at London by P. S. for Thomas Millington, and are to be sold at his shop under Saint Peter’s Church.’
The publisher would acquire a manuscript that he deemed publishable, register it in the *Stationers’ Register, and obtain approval of the text by the ecclesiastical authorities (or by others to whom this task had been delegated, such as the *Master of the Revels). The publisher would select a master printer and the two would then decide on the format, type size and design, paper quality, and the number of copies likely to be sold. The publisher would supply the printer with the manuscript to be printed and a sufficient amount of paper for the print run.
The master printer would decide whether the text would be set into type by a single *compositor or by a number working simultaneously, in which case the copy would have to be cast off. The compositor would set individual lines of type in a composing stick, transfer these to a *galley which made up a page, and then transfer his galleys to the imposing stone where they would be positioned to make up a *forme. When the forme was completed, it would be tightly wedged into an iron frame and delivered to the pressman, who would place it on the bed of the press. While one pressman inked the type in the forme, another placed a sheet of slightly dampened paper on a hinged frame covered with parchment, the ‘tympan’. The tympan was then folded over the type and rolled under the upper plate of the press, the ‘platen’. The pressman pulled on the bar, causing the platen to press the tympan on the inked type and taking the impression. A proof sheet would be pulled, and read against the manuscript. Any necessary corrections would then be made in the metal type.
A single press could print about 250 sheets per hour. If an edition consisted of 800 copies, it would be possible to print all copies of one forme in approximately three hours. This rate of speed would enable the pressmen to print one side of a sheet in the morning, and then print the other in the afternoon while the pages were still wet. At the rate of one sheet per day, an average-sized play quarto of twelve sheets would take two weeks to machine in a shop with a single press. If time was of the essence, the job might be shared by two or more printing-houses.
When all sheets of the book had been printed and dried, they were ready to be folded and collated for binding. Generally, however, only a few books were bound, usually to be used as display copies. The remainder were warehoused as sheets to be distributed to retail booksellers. Any bookseller who belonged to the Stationers’ Company could purchase books published in London at controlled wholesale prices from other company members.
Peter Blayney has estimated that a publisher’s total costs for producing a run of 800 copies of a play quarto (including the price of acquiring the manuscript, the costs of licence and registration, and the amount paid to the printer) would average 2.7d. per copy. The publisher would therefore set the wholesale price at 4d. and the unbound play quarto would then retail at approximately 6d. a copy. The only recorded prices paid for Shakespeare’s plays before 1623 are 5d. for the 1600 quarto of 2 Henry IV and 8d. for the 1595 octavo of Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI). Publishers might hope to realize substantial profits if demand merited a second edition, in which case the publisher’s only outlay would be the costs of printing.
Shakespeare’s first printed works, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), came from the printing-house of Richard Field (1561–1624), a native of Stratford who later printed Love’s Martyr (1601), a collection of verse that included Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’. The popularity of the narrative poems in Shakespeare’s lifetime is well attested: Venus and Adonis appeared in nine editions and The Rape of Lucrece in five. The history plays also sold well. The three plays published by Andrew Wise in the years 1597–8—Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV—turned out to be Shakespeare’s best-selling plays, each appearing in five quarto editions before the publication of the First Folio in 1623.
Certain printers seem to have specialized in play quartos. Thomas Creede (fl. 1578–1617) printed the first quartos of The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pericles, and the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet, as well as the second, third, fourth, and fifth quarto reprints of Richard III. The premier printer of play texts, George Eld (fl. 1603–24), was responsible for 34 play quartos, including Troilus and Cressida (1609), as well as Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). Even as small a printing job as a play quarto might occasionally be shared by two shops: for the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet (1597), sheets A–D were printed by John Danter while sheets E–K were printed by Edward Allde. Peter Short and Valentine Simmes shared the printing of Richard III (1597). The printing of the quarto of Pericles was shared by William White and Thomas Creede.
The list below provides the printers, publishers, and distributors (in those cases in which the publisher did not serve as his own distributor) of the first editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems:
A London printing-house of Shakespeare’s day, from Stephen Batman’s The Doom Warning All Men to Judgement (1581). One pressman (right) is removing the sheet which has just been printed from the tympan, while another inks the type-bed in readiness for the next pull. At the rear a compositor (right) is sitting at a case of type, setting from the copy held before his eyes is a copy-holder, while his colleague may be making print corrections.
Eric Rasmussen
Pritchard, Hannah (1709–68), English actress and singer. She began her career playing light comic roles in ballad opera and pantomime and became one of the most versatile performers of her day. At *Drury Lane from 1735 she played the Duchess of York, Lady Anne, Lady Macduff, Anna Bullen, and Desdemona, and scored her first major success as Rosalind in the 1740 revival of As You Like It with song settings by *Arne. She first appeared with *Garrick in 1742, playing Gertrude to his Hamlet and Queen Elizabeth to his Richard III, a professional relationship which strengthened when she joined his company in 1747 and played Gertrude, Viola, and Emilia. She triumphed as Lady Macbeth the following year, her passionate intensity becoming the definitive model for the role and proving a perfect foil for Garrick’s Macbeth. In 1749 she played Beatrice to his Benedick, in 1754 was Catherine in the première of his adaptation Catherine and Petruchio, and in 1755 played Hermione in his Florizel and Perdita. Renowned for her natural playing style, good voice, and charm, her achievements are recorded on a memorial tablet next to Shakespeare’s monument in *Westminster Abbey.
Catherine Alexander
private theatres. See theatres, Elizabethan and Jacobean.
Privy Council, a group of about ten advisers to the monarch which met daily to decide matters of policy and of law. Many regulations concerning the theatre industry emerged directly from the Privy Council and countered anti-theatrical orders from the London corporation. Lord *Hunsdon, the *Chamberlain’s Men’s patron, was a privy counsellor.
Gabriel Egan
‘problem plays’ (sometimes ‘problem comedies’ or ‘dark comedies’), a term coined by F. S. *Boas for Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well, which, according to W. W. Lawrence, ‘clearly do not fall into the category of tragedy, and yet are too serious and analytic to fit the commonly accepted conception of comedy’. This grouping of early Jacobean plays has sometimes been extended by the inclusion of Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, and even Hamlet and Othello. Although mainly concerned with genre, the term ‘problem play’ also recalls the Ibsenite drama of the 1890s, implying a play with an intellectual interest in a particular social issue. It has fallen into comparative disfavour in more recent criticism, which has pointed out that few of Shakespeare’s other plays fit the simple generic categories of comedy and tragedy any more comfortably.
Michael Dobson
Proculeius. He is sent with a message from Caesar to Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra 5.1. He captures her, 5.2.
Anne Button
profanity. See Act to Restrain Abuses of Players.
Prokofiev, Sergei (1891–1953), Russian composer. In 1933 he composed incidental music for a play based partly on Antony and Cleopatra (from which he derived an orchestral suite, Egypatin Nights, Op. 61), and in 1938 he wrote music for a production of Hamlet (Op. 77) in Leningrad. His most famous Shakespearian music, however, is his splendidly evocative *ballet music for Romeo and Juliet (Op. 64) which, initially rejected in Moscow, was first staged in Brno in 1938.
Irena Cholij
prolepsis, a figure of speech in which something is described prematurely in terms that are not yet applicable: ‘I am dead, Horatio’ (Hamlet 5.2.285).
Chris Baldick
prologue, a preliminary speech announcing the subject or setting of a play, usually spoken in verse by a single chorus figure. Seven of Shakespeare’s plays use this device. More substantially dramatic introductions—such as the introductory monologue by Rumour in 2 Henry IV, and the frame-story of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew—are called inductions.
Chris Baldick
Promos and Cassandra. See Whetstone, George.
Promptbook. See playbook.
pronunciation. It is often said, usually by Americans, that the spoken English of Shakespeare’s day was closer in sound to present-day American English than it was to current British ‘received pronunciation’. There is some truth in this with regard to certain vowel sounds: most 16th-century English dialects, for example, even at court, were still rhotic, i.e. they pronounced the ‘r’ in ‘hard’, as do many present-day English dialects in rural areas and almost all American ones outside Harvard. At the same time, for Shakespeare as for his present-day compatriots ‘clerk’ rhymed with ‘bark’, and when it came to consonants he and his contemporaries seem to have pronounced theirs with a force and distinctness long vanished from most American usage: for many the ‘k’ and ‘g’ in ‘knight’ and ‘gnaw’ were still enunciated, while the pronunciation of words like ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ as disyllables with a soft medial ‘sh’ or ‘zh’ sound had only begun to supplant an older and more strenuous sounding of ‘mis-yon’ or ‘viz-yon’. But as this last example may suggest, the most important fact about Elizabethan pronunciation was that it was in a process of change, with all sorts of different phonetic usages still contending for dominance, so that generalizations comparing an imaginary Shakespearian ‘norm’ with any notional present-day one are innately suspect.
Self-conscious about their pronunciation for the first time—as about their *spelling, and the extent to which it should be phonetic—the English produced a number of books on the subject in Shakespeare’s period (among them John Hart’s An Orthography, 1569, and Richard *Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementary, 1582), which together with the evidence of rhyme, puns, and metre supply a good deal of information about how their speech must have sounded. Some sounds were always different from their standard modern equivalents, on either side of the Atlantic. The ‘ea’ vowel in ‘feat’, for instance, was never the same as the ‘ee’ in ‘feet’, but instead was closer to the long ‘a’ of ‘fate’: ‘beat’, ‘bait’, and ‘bate’ thus sounded more or less alike (as they still do in many northern English dialects), and so did ‘mead’, ‘maid’, and ‘made’. It is clear, however, that in other instances different pronunciations existed side by side, and that Shakespeare, when not supplying characters with particular *dialects, felt perfectly free to use different variants interchangeably according to the demands of rhyme or scansion rather than as markers of class or region. ‘Toil’, for example, might sound either as in present-day standard English or like a rhyme for ‘pile’ (as in 19th-century Cockney, and hence modern Australian). Shakespeare and his contemporaries were at their freest when stressing polysyllables: long words recently coined from Latin could be made to fit the stress-patterns of verse pretty much as the occasion required. This sometimes leaves modern actors—when faced with a line which asks them to say ‘corrosive’ or ‘demonstrate’ or ‘sepulchre’—with a choice between sounding metrical but affected or comprehensible but unrhythmic.
The quest for ‘authenticity’ in the staging of Elizabethan drama exemplified by the work of William *Poel and the builders of the reconstructed *Globe has rarely extended from performing on Elizabethan-style stages in Elizabethan costumes to performing in Elizabethan dialects. Some contemporary directors, however, notably John *Barton, still wax lyrical about the superior physicality of 16th-century pronunciation (which Barton discusses, and memorably attempts to simulate, in his Playing Shakespeare television series), and Barry Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company conscientiously shun received pronunciation, instead speaking Shakespeare’s lines as though all his characters came from working-class Yorkshire in a bid to provide a comprehensible modern equivalent for the imagined lost vernacular hardness of Elizabethan usage.
Michael Dobson
proofreading. A trial print of a sheet was generally made before printing began; this ‘proof’ was then read against copy by a ‘corrector’ who marked errors on the proof and returned it to the *compositor for correction in the metal type. The first sheets of a print run might be provided to reassure the corrector that the changes had indeed been implemented; these would often be checked as the rest were being printed, resulting in books that were made up of sheets in different states of correction.
Eric Rasmussen
properties. Among the items in Philip *Henslowe’s inventory of ‘all the properties for my Lord Admiral’s men’ (taken on 10 March 1598) are a ‘rock’, a ‘tomb’, and a ‘hell mouth’, which presumably were lifelike, and others such as ‘the city of Rome’ and a ‘rainbow’ which must have been representative. The ‘dragon for fostes’ (*Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) and the ‘cauldron for the Jewe’ (Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta) were obviously kept for particular plays and the small number of other general-purpose items accords with the sparsity of directions requiring properties in the drama. Curtained beds are commonly needed and the Admiral’s Men had a ‘bedstead’ and a ‘wooden canopy’, the latter presumably being a multi-use booth structure. The most numerous handheld items are eight ‘vizards’, eight lances, and six crowns (sorted into imperial and plain). Anything not worn or carried by an actor would have to be transported by stagehands in full view of the audience and this potential disruption—together with the exigencies of touring—would encourage dramatists to minimize use of larger properties.
Gabriel Egan
proportion, in music, the note value ratios within a particular time signature and the tempo relationships between different time signatures (see Richard II 5.5.43). The term is also applied to the frequency ratios of pitches.
Jeremy Barlow
proscenium, a Renaissance word for the stage and so used as a label in de Witt’s drawing of the *Swan, but subsequently used to refer to the arrangement in post-Restoration theatres (and some Stuart *masques) where the acting space is recessed behind an arch. Another term for this arrangement is the ‘picture frame’ stage.
Gabriel Egan
prose. With a few notable exceptions (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night), Shakespeare’s plays rely more on verse than on prose. Shakespeare’s use of prose is therefore marked, and often triggered by, an identifiable context: comedy (including the comic scenes of histories and tragedies); speech between lower-class characters; sub-plots; madness; letters and proclamations. Because comedy favours prose, the proportion of prose to verse found in Shakespeare’s plays rises steadily from the early to the mid-period, as Shakespeare switches from histories to comedies, and then falls away again with the late tragedies.
The contexts favouring prose are mostly informal ones, but prose can be formal (Brutus’ funeral speech in Julius Caesar can be contrasted with Antony’s emotional verse reply) and even pompous (Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost). There are also instances of characters slipping in and out of verse and prose in the same scene, apparently marking transient emotional states (Troilus and Cressida 3.2). Prose provided Shakespeare with a useful stylistic resource, and it is notable that after four prose-free early histories (1 Henry VI, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), King John, Richard II), he never wrote another play entirely in verse.
Linguistic approaches to Shakespeare’s prose, such as those pursued by Vivian Salmon, have looked to it as evidence for Elizabethan spoken English, and these studies can now be compared with findings from non-literary texts such as court depositions (as in the work of Wright). Many prose passages in Shakespeare do indeed show the grammatical features we associate with speech. In the following exchange, note the use of simple clauses and sentence fragments joined by syndetic or asyndetic co-ordination; repetition; ellipsis; and the apposition of noun phrases or use of relative clauses to provide elaborated information:
prince harry.… tell me, Jack, whose fellows are these that come after?
sir john. Mine, Hal, mine.
prince harry. I did never see such pitiful rascals.
sir john. Tut, tut, good enough to toss, food for powder, food for powder. They’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.
westmorland. Ay, but Sir John, methinks they are exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly.
(1 Henry IV 4.2.61–9)
Literary-stylistic approaches to Shakespeare’s prose (such as those of Jonas Barish and Brian Vickers) have stressed the rhetorical tradition, which provided Elizabethan writers with various models for prose style. The two most influential models are usually termed ‘Ciceronian’ and ‘Senecan’—though the use of these terms should not necessarily be taken as implying direct influence of Latin models (and there is considerable variation within, and even sharing of features between, the styles).
‘Ciceronian’ is applied to prose styles which favour long sentences containing many subordinate clauses, often embedded within each other, and using many rhetorical figures, especially those involving balanced elements and parallelism. The ‘periodic sentences’ thus produced often have a highly Latinate vocabulary. This style is formal, favouring noun clauses as subjects and objects, and often postponing the main verb, or distancing it from the subject. Word order is frequently disrupted, producing a formal effect, and the impression of control and prior planning. This style was brought to a notorious extreme in the 16th century by John *Lyly in his novel Euphues (1578), and in 1 Henry IV, when Sir John pretends to be King Henry rebuking Hal for his dissolute life, he adopts a mock-euphuistic style, laden with balanced clauses, antithetical structures, and elaborate comparisons:
sir john. Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied. For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears. That thou art my son I have partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point. Why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries?—A question not to be asked. Shall the son of England prove a thief, and take purses?—A question to be asked. There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile. So doth the company thou keepest. For Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also.
(1 Henry IV 2.5.402–20)
prince harry. Why, thou owest God a death.
Exit
In contrast to the highly subordinated (or hypotactic) Ciceronian style, the ‘Senecan’ model uses co-ordination and juxtaposition (or parataxis) to give the impression of thought as it happens. Simple clauses are laid next to each other. Subjects are plain noun phrases. Effects are achieved over short, rather than long, distances. While seeking the appearance of being unplanned, this style is nonetheless often highly rhetorical. Sir John has a tendency towards the Ciceronian even when speaking in his own person, but his catechism on ‘honour’ displays many of the features of this type of prose: the sense of thoughts being sparked from one clause to the next; short clauses, and sentence fragments; rhetorical figures based on the repetition of individual words rather than phrases:
sir john. ’Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set-to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
(1 Henry IV 5.1.126–40)
Jonathan Hope
prosopopoeia, an important poetical figure of speech in which something or someone incapable of speech or hearing (because inanimate, dead, absent, or imaginary) is spoken to or heard from; more broadly translated as ‘personification’:
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand
(Richard II 3.2.6)
Chris Baldick
Prospero. See Tempest, The.
Prospero’s Books. See Tempest, The.
prostitution in the London of Shakespeare’s time was transacted largely, though not exclusively, in the variant-quality brothels of *Bankside, the location, too, of many theatres. Ambulant prostitutes often sought business in the playhouses, bear gardens, and taverns. Some worked part-time as seamstresses, as Nell Quickly’s comments in Henry V (2.1.31–4) imply. Though most of Shakespeare’s plays mention it, only five depict prostitution: The Comedy of Errors (if one regards the Courtesan as a professional), 2 Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, and Pericles. Othello’s Bianca has traditionally been regarded as a whore, because called such in the play, but so, unjustly, are both of the other female characters. No partner for Bianca other than Cassio is mentioned, nor are financial transactions. Doll Tearsheet of 2 Henry IV is Shakespeare’s only character to call herself a ‘whore’ without disowning the term. Her whipping by beadles, who scapegoat her and Quickly for Pistol’s violence, is realistic, as is Quickly’s death, mentioned in Henry V, from venereal disease, a fate of many from unhygienic conditions and incompetent treatments. Mistress Overdone’s care for Kate Keepdown’s illegitimate child in Measure for Measure seems unusually kind, as pregnant women were generally ejected from brothels. The Church long profited from prostitution through licensing and the leasing of land and buildings. In 1 Henry VI, Gloucester chastises Cardinal Winchester’s granting of indulgences for prostitution (1.3); ‘Winchester geese’ was one of many early modern slang terms for prostitutes (cf. Pandarus’ epilogue to Troilus and Cressida). Most brothel prostitutes endured conditions like those discussed in Pericles.
Kay Stanton
protection of players. On 27 December 1624 the *Master of the Revels, Sir Henry *Herbert, signed a document protecting 22 men from arrest without the prior authorization of himself or the Lord Chamberlain. These men were described as ‘employed by the King’s majesty’s servants in their quality of playing as musicians and other necessary attendants’ and as many as half were musicians, perhaps the beginnings of a theatre orchestra.
Gabriel Egan
Proteus, in love with Julia, forswears her for Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. His name is that of the old man of the sea from Greek mythology who constantly changes shape. The parallel character in *Montemayor’s Diana is called Felix.
Anne Button
provincial companies, tours. In Shakespeare’s time the majority of playing companies seldom or never performed in London but rather followed established touring routes across the countryside, stopping for a few days in each town to play in the town hall or a large inn. Because they were not settled, information about the companies resides in provincial records, and the overall picture of non-London drama is only now beginning to emerge from the Records of Early English Drama project. All companies were essentially provincial touring companies until, in 1594, the *Chamberlain’s Men and the *Admiral’s Men were granted a duopoly in London.
Gabriel Egan
Provost. He superintends the prison in Measure for Measure, helping ‘Friar Lodowick’ (Duke Vincentio) to undermine the severity of Angelo’s sentences.
Anne Button
psychoanalytic criticism is the application of Sigmund *Freud ’s theories of the unconscious to the interpretation of literature. It was initiated by Freud himself in an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a manifestation of Oedipal conflict. Freud’s ideas were subsequently developed by his disciple Ernest *Jones in the classic Hamlet and Oedipus (1949), and by numerous other amateur and professional critics. Psychoanalytic criticism has a long 20th-century history marked by competing developments of Freud’s theory. In Shakespeare studies Norman Holland combined American ego psychoanalysis and *formalism when psychoanalysis was in disfavour in an academic world dominated by *New Criticism and historicism. After the demise of New Criticism around 1970, psychoanalytic approaches became more prominent in Shakespeare criticism, through the work of critics like C. L. Barber, Richard Wheeler, and Coppélia Kahn. The theories of object-relations psychoanalysts D. W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein have influenced American *feminist critics like Janet Adelman while French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s complex synthesis of Freud, *structuralism, and poststructuralism has become prominent in recent years, often in combination with feminism and/or *Marxism.
Hugh Grady
Publius. (1) Marcus Andronicus’ son, he helps bind and gag Chiron and Demetrius, Titus Andronicus 5.2.162. (2) A senator in Julius Caesar, he is ‘quite confounded with this mutiny’ (the assassination of Caesar), 3.1.86.
Anne Button
Pucelle, Joan la. See Joan la Pucelle.
Puck. See Robin Goodfellow.
Pudsey, Edward (fl. 1596–1602), compiler of a commonplace book containing quotations from various plays performed around 1600, including Ben *Jonson’s plays, John *Marston’s Antonio plays, and The Merchant of Venice. The inaccuracy of most citations suggests they were noted down during or soon after performance, not taken from a printed text.
Cathy Shrank
Pujante, Ángel-Luis (b. 1944), Spanish Professor of English and translator of Shakespeare. He has published widely on Shakespeare, especially on his Spanish and European reception. He contributed to the creation of ESRA (*European Shakespeare Research Association), and in 2000 he initiated the research project ‘Shakespeare in Spain within the framework of his European Reception’, now directed by Keith Gregor. His translations attempt to be faithful to Shakespeare’s poetic expressiveness and to the dramatic nature of his works. Having started in 1986, by 2014 he had edited Shakespeare’s complete plays (Espasa, Madrid), of which 26 translations are his own, four are by Salvador *Oliva, a further four are by Alfredo Michel *Modenessi, and the collaborative plays are by Pujante and Oliva. In 1998 he was awarded the National Prize of Literary Translation for his rendering of The Tempest.
A. Luis Pujante
Punchdrunk, a site-specific, immersive theatre company especially known for its sell-out New York production of Sleep No More (2011– ), which is loosely based on Macbeth. Founded in 2000 in England, Punchdrunk typically applies a multi-sensory, noir-aesthetic to its interactive retellings of classical drama, dance, music, and film, with its popular appeal prompting Felix Barrett of The Guardian to dub it ‘the Banksy of the theatre world’. In addition to Sleep No More, Punchdrunk productions drawing on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have included The Tempest (2001), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2002), The Firebird Ball (2005) (inspired by Romeo and Juliet and Stravinsky’s The Firebird), Faust (2006/7), and The Duchess of Malfi (2010).
Erin Sullivan
punctuation. A coherent system of punctuation, which did not exist in the classical or medieval periods, was probably first mandated by Renaissance printers. Given the almost complete absence of punctuation in Shakespeare’s contribution to the *Sir Thomas More manuscript, some scholars have concluded that punctuation marks in the printed texts of his plays are probably the compositors’ rather than Shakespeare’s. And yet, the humour of Peter Quince’s prologue in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.108–17) depends upon its deliberate mispunctuation: as Theseus observes, ‘This fellow doth not stand upon points’ (5.1.118).
Eric Rasmussen
puns, jokes, subtle or coarse, that exploit either the possibilities of homophones (i.e. words that sound the same but have different meanings: son/sun, sole/soul) or different senses of the same verbal form, e.g. in polite and in slang uses (‘Will’: testament/wish/William/penis). Shakespeare’s notorious devotion to punning gives rise both to unprompted double meanings such as the ‘son of York’ who shines away wintry discontent (Richard III 1.1.2) and to his characteristically dramatic punning in which one character wrests a different sense from a word just used by another, e.g. the Cobbler’s jokes in Julius Caesar 1.1.
Chris Baldick
Purcell, Henry (1658–95), English composer. Purcell is often wrongly credited with some splendid, early 18th-century music for the Restoration operatic version of The Tempest (published by the Purcell Society but now thought to be mostly by John Weldon), although he did write one song for Dorinda, ‘Dear pretty youth’ (1695). He composed incidental music for Thomas Shadwell’s adaptation of Timon of Athens (1694) and his opera Dido and Aeneas was cleverly incorporated into Charles *Gildon’s adaptation of Measure for Measure (1700). His most substantial Shakespeare contribution was for the Restoration adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream entitled The *Fairy Queen (1692, rev. 1693). Purcell’s contribution is a set of self-contained *masques within each of the acts of the play. The masques, which include not a word of Shakespeare, are additional entertainments bringing in new and somewhat exotic characters, such as a Drunken Poet, Night, Mystery, Secrecy, and a Chinese man and woman.
Irena Cholij
Puritan, The, a satirical play published in 1607, more similar in style to Jonsonian than Shakespearian comedy. Attributed to Shakespeare in a bookseller’s catalogue of 1656, this member of the *apocrypha was most probably written by *Middleton.
Sonia Massai
Puritanism. See anti-theatrical polemic; religion.
Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich (1799–1837), national poet of *Russia. In 1605 an anonymous writer compared Hamlet to events at the court of the Russian Tsar Boris Godunov. In 1825 Pushkin based his tragedy Boris Godunov on the popular Shakespearian model, preferring it to French classical exemplars. Pushkin deliberately turned to Shakespeare from *Byron, reading the works in *Letourneur’s 1821 French translation, and studying, at the same time, A. W. *Schlegel on dramatic art. In an 1830 draft preface to Godunov he confessed, ‘I imitated Shakespeare’s free and broad portrayal of characters, and his casual and simple delineation of types.’ Elsewhere, Pushkin repeatedly praises Shakespeare’s blank verse, boldness of invention, lifelike speeches, and many-sided characters—of whom Hamlet and Falstaff are representative.
Tom Matheson
Puttenham, George (1529–90) and Richard (?1520–?1601), nephews of Sir Thomas *Elyot, both contenders for the authorship of The Art of English Poesy, a highly influential work of Elizabethan literary criticism, published anonymously in 1589 but later attributed to one ‘Master Puttenham’. George had published a collection of poetry a few years earlier, making him the more likely author. The Art of English Poesy probably contributed to Shakespeare’s knowledge of rhetorical figures and to the debate on art and nature in The Winter’s Tale.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
‘Pyramus’. See Bottom, Nick.
‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, the play-within-the-play rehearsed and performed by the artisans in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Bottom and Flute in the title roles.
Anne Button
Pyrrhic foot, a metrical unit consisting of two unstressed syllables; in English, a device of metrical variation only. ‘And in | his mantle muffling up his face’ (Julius Caesar 3.2.187).
Chris Baldick/George T. Wright