r
race. What did ‘race’ mean in Shakespeare’s world? While it has become commonplace for scholars to intone emphatically that the concept did not mean the same thing in the early modern period as it does today, it is not exactly accurate to assume that race has a stable meaning in the 21st century. So what were the assumptions behind the concept and term then, and how do they relate to our assumptions and uses today? As the concept of race was malleable in the early modern period, the term could evoke and invoke lineage, nationality, religion, sexuality, class, and/or skin colour. More often than not, Shakespeare employs ‘race’ to signify familial lineage. Thus, when Suffolk insults Warwick in the second part of Henry VI, he claims that Warwick’s mother must have slept with ‘Some stern untutored churl’ because Warwick has none of his father’s ‘noble race’ (3.2.213, 215). In a similar usage, Marina’s ‘immortal’ talents as a singer, dancer, and sewer attract pupils of a ‘noble race’ in Pericles (5.Cho.9).
Yet, Shakespeare’s use of ‘race’ is less certain in Measure for Measure when Angelo, who is attempting to seduce the chaste Isabella, claims that he can no longer control his desire: ‘I have begun, | And now I give my sensual race the rein’ (2.4.159–160). Here, the term seems to signify Angelo’s masculinity and/or illicit sexual desires, but not his lineage. Interestingly, ‘race’ is also used in connection with an attempted sexual violation in The Tempest. When Miranda disparages Caliban for attempting to ‘violate’ her, she labels him an ‘Abhorred slave’ (1.2.354) and a ‘savage’ (1.2.358) and proclaims that his ‘vile race…had that in’t which good natures | Could not abide to be with’ (1.2.361–363). While ‘race’ in this instance could mean inherent qualities or an inherited nature, the full meaning of the term is dependent on the staging and performance of Caliban. If Caliban’s African roots are emphasized (Prospero reports that his mother, Sycorax, was Algerian), then this use of ‘race’ might very well invoke not only heredity, but also nationality and colour.
So what do we know about the performance of racial difference in Shakespeare’s time? It is now widely assumed that diverse prosthetics were used to convey racial differences in early modern performances: herb-based dyes (usually woad, otherwise known as isatis tinctoria), soot, coal, jet, oil-based ointments, dyed black cloth (masks, gloves, and stockings), exotic costuming, and wigs. The Peacham drawing, or the Longleat manuscript, the only extant drawing of a Shakespearian performance from the time period, appears to depict a scene from a performance of Titus Andronicus. Aaron the Moor, who is figured in the drawing on the far right, is clearly portrayed as having black skin and a curly black Afro. Because the detailing of the drawing is imprecise, it is impossible to discern whether Aaron’s skin colour is a factor of dying or cloth covering. Nonetheless, Aaron’s hair appears to be a wig affixed with a headband tied round his temples.
With regard to blackness, Shakespeare’s plays are filled with metadramatic references to the performance techniques employed. For instance, the sense that white skins can be dyed black is referenced in The Winter’s Tale when Leontes rails against women’s false natures, arguing that they are comparable to the falsity of ‘o’erdyed blacks’, in which the insult hinges on the knowledge that black dyes obscure true skin colours (1.2.168). Of course, the soot technique for blackening is referenced in Othello when Brabantio laments the fact that Desdemona would ‘Run…to the sooty bosom’ of Othello (1.2.89). Coal, too, is frequently aligned with blackening in Shakespeare’s plays. In Titus Andronicus, Aaron the Moor is called ‘coalblack’ (3.2.79) and refers to his child as such twice (4.2.103; 5.1.32). Similarly, when in Love’s Labour’s Lost the King insults Rosaline for being ‘black as ebony’ (4.3.267), Biron claims that ‘native blood’ ‘Paints itself black to imitate her brow’ (4.3.283, 285). Dumaine makes explicit that coal is the technique employed to blacken up, quipping that ‘To look like her are chimney-sweepers black’ (4.3.286).
With regard to religion, it appears that diverse prosthetics were also used to convey a Jewish racial difference: costumes (including turbans), props (including knives), wigs, beards, dyes (both yellow and black), and perhaps prosthetics (large fake noses). Even though many early modern performance traditions changed in the Restoration period (including the more sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters), the performance of Shylock with yellow skin and a large nose was consistent. In The Merchant of Venice, of course, Shylock whets his knife on his shoe during the court scene (4.1).
Shakespeare also includes metadramatic references to the fact that dyes, soot, and coal—as prosthetic racial devices—are prone to smearing. Thus, when Hamlet praises the players for their memorable performance of ‘Priam’s slaughter’ (2.2.473), he recites lines about the ‘rugged Pyrrhus’ who has his ‘black complexion smeared’ (2.2.480). And Henry VIII disparages Buckingham by saying that his rhetorical gifts have ‘become as black | As if besmeared in Hell’ (1.2.140–141). The sense from these metadramatic references, then, is that these racializing techniques were at once thorough (obscuring and hiding whatever lies beneath), impermanent, and transmissible (smearing from one body to another).
Although much has changed over the centuries since Shakespeare’s time, one could argue that performances of race have continued to swing between the twin poles of thorough coverage and impermanence precisely because of the polarized ways we conceptualize race as both essential and performative. Despite the fact that the 18th century saw the birth of ‘scientific’ concepts of race as essential, fixed, and hierarchized (with whites on top, of course), even those theories included the idea that non-white bodies might be able to ‘pass’ for white, thereby short-circuiting the ‘scientific’ system entirely.
In terms of performing Shakespeare’s plays, the vacillation can be seen most clearly in the ways bodies matter onstage. For instance, in the 19th century two seemingly opposite performance trends existed simultaneously: the tawny Moor trend, and the blackface minstrel trend. Kim Hall has labelled the 19th century the great Bronze Age because many white critics and actors believed that Shakespeare’s Othello must be tawny instead of black. It was so inconceivable to them that Desdemona could love a black man that they argued Othello must be a light-skinned character. At the same time, the blackface minstrel tradition, in which white actors performed stereotyped versions of black identity, appropriated Othello as a farce about the follies of interracial coupling. Thus, in one tradition Othello’s race (as tawny) was essential, but in the other Othello’s race (as black) was entirely performative.
In the mid-20th century, the vacillation continued but in different iterations. Actors of colour were hired to play Othello, Shylock, Caliban, Cleopatra, Aaron the Moor, and the Prince of Morocco because it was thought they could bring something authentic to the roles from their essentialized, racialized identities. Thus, Paul Robeson was said to be the most powerful and authentic Othello because of his identity. Writing about his performance in London in 1930, one critic observed that Robeson ‘comes of a race whose characteristic is to keep control of its passions only to a point, and after that point to throw control to the winds’. Shortly thereafter, however, actors of colour were advocating for access to all Shakespeare’s roles through the employment of non-traditional casting (including colour-blind casting). Because Shakespeare was thought to be good for everyone, actors of colour argued that they too should be allowed to play the full range of his characters, regardless of race. It took until 2000, however, when David Oyelowo was cast by the *Royal Shakespeare Company as Henry VI, for a black British actor to be cast to play a British monarch. While ‘race’ now means something distinct from its usages in Shakespeare’s time period, and while ‘race’ is now performed in distinct ways from those in Shakespeare’s time, modern concepts and performances of race are still unstable.
Ayanna Thompson
radio, British. From the earliest days of British broadcasting Shakespeare’s plays have figured as part of the radio drama repertory, as individual full-scale productions, in special seasons, and as selected extracts in more general programmes. Although the American networks CBS and NBC broadcast commercially sponsored, 90-minute abbreviations of Shakespeare plays from the 1930s through the 1950s (featuring celebrities such as Orson *Welles, John *Barrymore, Burgess Meredith, Claude Rains, and Tallulah Bankhead: see United States of America), and although the German national network famously transmitted *Brecht’s adaptations of Hamlet and Macbeth in 1927, the richest tradition of radio Shakespeare has been that of the BBC.
Probably because written for an essentially bare stage and learned as cue parts, Shakespeare’s plays have proved adaptable to radio, with its reliance on expressive language and suggestive sound effects. Scenes are set and characters repeatedly named in Shakespeare’s dialogue while exits, entrances, and significant gestures and expressions are often registered verbally—‘Here comes the Duke…’; ‘But look! amazement on thy mother sits…’ Radio production lacks the visual effects, costume, and audience reaction of theatre, but Shakespeare’s text offers a rich stimulus to the auditory imagination. Radio’s emphasis on words, moreover, chimed with the 20th-century shift away from elaborately realistic staging, act drops, and *intervals promoted by William *Poel and Harley *Granville-Barker.
The first British radio broadcasts of Shakespeare quickly followed the October 1922 formation of the British Broadcasting Company. Speeches from Much Ado About Nothing and All Is True (Henry VIII) and the quarrel scene from Julius Caesar were broadcast on 16 February 1923; on 15 May, extracts from Macbeth; on the 21st, the Hubert and Arthur scene from King John (with Ellen *Terry); on the 23rd, the trial scene from A Merchant of Venice, then, on 28 May, came the first full-scale (although much-cut) BBC *adaptation, with Howard Rose’s production of Twelfth Night. King Lear (1925) and The Tempest (1926) followed. The year 1928 saw Shakespeare thoroughly established in the radio drama repertory with adaptations of Henry V, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (cut to an hour and broadcast ‘for schools’), Hamlet, and King Lear. The BBC Annual (1935) registers eighteen broadcasts of Shakespeare plays between 1930 and 1934. Val Gielgud, head of drama at the BBC from 1929, discussing in his memoirs the demand for high-quality radio plays, identified Shakespeare as ‘the indispensable ballast of respectable output’.
The Dramatic Control Panel, introduced in 1927–8, and extended in 1932, enabled the intercutting of dialogue, sound effects, and music, produced in various studios. A rush of new productions from the late 1960s responded to the introduction of stereophonic effects. Although the earliest productions were broadcast live, the development of recording discs, magnetic tape, and, eventually, digital tape enabled increasingly sophisticated editing of productions. It also allowed storage for the archive and repeat broadcasting.
Radio made Shakespeare in performance available for the first time to many in its massive audience (already a million listeners in 1924). This was particularly the case up to 1939 when there was a single national station. With the 1946 addition to the Light and Home Services of the Third Programme, for more specialist and avant-garde material, this channel increasingly became the home of Shakespeare production, gaining for it greater freedom to experiment, but losing the wider audience. Between 1950 and 1978 there were 81 Shakespeare productions on the Third to 34 on the Home Service and just one on the Light Programme.
Already by 1930, Shakespeare broadcasts, most frequently scheduled for Sunday evenings, were identified with holidays. Regular ‘birthday productions’ followed that of Henry V on 23 April 1928, and broadcast Shakespeare has been in evidence in times of national celebration and emergency, with large-scale series presented as national events. A 1944 ‘Theatre in Wartime’ adaptation of Twelfth Night, with Wendy Hiller as Viola, broadcast first on the Home Service (1 November 1944) and then to the Forces in Africa (8 November 1944) and the Pacific (10 November 1944), was preceded by an announcement that it had previously played ‘to munitions workers all around the country’. Incidents from the history plays featured in the 26-episode Vivat Rex that ran in Elizabeth II’s jubilee year, 1977, and the BBC paid tribute to its own history by celebrating its sixtieth anniversary (2 October 1982) with a new production of its first broadcast Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. To celebrate the Millennium a series of seventeen new productions, to be immediately available on cassette and compact disc, was begun in 1999.
There is overlap between the plays which appear most frequently in the theatrical repertoire and on the radio. The first set of plays in the 1999 ‘Shakespeare for the Millennium’ series were Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, radio has also proved an imaginative host to productions of plays that, until recently, were scarcely seen in the theatre, including, in the 1980s, productions of Pericles, King John, and Cymbeline. There have also been notable productions of Henry VI (1946), Titus Andronicus (1952), and Timon of Athens (1952; 1974). As well as Nahum *Tate’s version of King Lear (7 November 1960), various *apocryphal works, such as The Book of Sir Thomas More (28 August 1951; 25 December 1983), have figured, including, in a ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’ series in 1956, *Edward III, A *Yorkshire Tragedy, and, again, *Sir Thomas More.
Broadcast Shakespeare has sometimes involved direct transfer of successful stage productions but, more often, new adaptations have been commissions. Actors have often been drawn from the BBC Drama Repertory Company, sometimes with the addition of stars from the theatre. Lewis Casson and Sybil *Thorndike were among the earliest. John *Gielgud, Peggy *Ashcroft, Ralph *Richardson, and Alec *Guinness figured frequently as, more recently, have Harriet Walter, Alec McCowen, Michael Maloney, and Juliet Stevenson. The shorter rehearsal periods for radio work (usually between four and six days) and the need to commit to a single recording, instead of a season, have enabled radio producers to attract particular acting combinations that might have proved difficult to achieve in the theatre or to make more widely available celebrated interpretations of a role: radio Lears, for example, have included Donald *Wolfit (26 April 1949), John Gielgud (14 November 1951), Michael *Redgrave (29 December 1953), and Alec Guinness (15 December 1974). Cathleen Nesbitt, who doubled Viola and Sebastian in the 1923 Twelfth Night, was responsible for many of the early adaptations, and producers particularly associated with radio Shakespeare have included Val Gielgud, John Tydeman, and Raymond Raikes.
There have been numerous full-text radio productions (including a notable Cymbeline in 1986) since an Othello seriously overran its allotted spot in a live broadcast of 1932. But most radio versions have involved cutting, those for the Third Programme (later, Radio Three) tending to be longer than those for the Home Service (Radio Four). The norm is two to two and a half hours, with a ten-minute break midway. Adaptations have involved more or less extensive sound and music cues, usually with some increase in naming—‘Signior Fabian’, ‘Sir Toby’—as a new character arrives. In the period up to the Second World War, most productions included an announcement of time and place and many made more extensive use of a narrator to describe the scene, the opening situation, and aspects of the action.
As radio audiences became accustomed to the medium and drama producers came to trust their audiences and the Shakespeare text, debate on the need for narration subsided. Increasingly, producers have let the dialogue and sound signals common to radio drama do this work. Change of location is indicated by swelling or receding volume, by footsteps, the opening or closing of a door, or by brief musical interludes, perhaps a few chords strummed on a lute or guitar. A sudden multiplicity of voices would suggest a court or crowd scene; birdsong, a garden; wind and rain, a heath; waves and seagulls, a seashore. Gesture is signalled by the sound of crackling parchment, the clink of money changing hands, the swish of a sword being drawn. A personal microphone, as used for Cordelia’s asides in the 1951 King Lear, could create a startling intimacy with the audience. Occasional productions have introduced a modern soundtrack—espresso machines, Vespas, and modern dance music enliven the Verona of the Millennium Romeo and Juliet (3 October 1999).
Readings of the narrative poems and selections from the Sonnets have been frequent, in complete programmes (22 April 1956; 21 May 1981) or as part of themed or more general poetry features. The full sonnet sequence was delivered in twelve short programmes (beginning 18 January 1959) and Italian, French, and German versions were read in ‘Shakespeare Translated’ (22 November 1968). Short scenes, speeches, and *songs have figured recurrently in ‘Favourite Characters’ programmes and such features as ‘Shakespeare and his Musicians’ (16 December 1948) or ‘Shakespeare and the Death Penalty’ (25 April 1956) which drew on material from Measure for Measure. In 1977, ‘King Lear through the Ages’ dramatized the performance history of the play from *Tate and *Betterton to *Brook and *Scofield. Fictional accounts of Shakespeare’s life and his relationship with his wife and his fellow actors and dramatists have fuelled plays and features throughout broadcasting history, contributing to the identification of Shakespeare as the National Poet on the National Network.
Jean Chothia
Ragusine (Ragozine) is a pirate whose head is substituted for Claudio’s to present to Angelo (Measure for Measure 4.3.66–78).
Anne Button
Ralegh, Sir Walter (c. 1554–1618), courtier, poet, and writer of prose. Born into a prominent family in Devon, Ralegh fought in France before attending Oxford and the Inns of Court. In 1580 he went to Ireland to serve under Lord Grey. Here he met Edmund *Spenser, who represented him as the squire Timias in The Faerie Queene (1590), and who addressed a famous letter to him describing his plan for the poem. On returning from Ireland he became a favourite of Elizabeth’s at court, and it is to this period that most of his poems are assigned. These include a sardonic reply to Christopher *Marlowe’s poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, published as Shakespeare’s in *The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). He is sometimes identified as the *‘rival poet’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In 1592 he was imprisoned for marrying one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour without permission. After his release he led an expedition to Guiana, a land which he described in seductive terms in one of his finest prose works, The Discovery of…Guiana (1596). With other accounts of New World voyages this had a pervasive influence on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Raleigh returned to royal favour in 1597, but was tried for treason by James I in 1603, and spent the rest of his life in prison, apart from one more disastrous expedition to Guiana. While in prison he wrote his most celebrated work, a monumental—and unfinished—History of the World (1614).
Robert Maslen
Raleigh, Sir Walter (1861–1922), English academic, author of Shakespeare (1907) in the series ‘English Men of Letters’. Once regarded as one of the most civilized short books on the subject, it is now felt to be too susceptible to biographical myth and too negligent of documentary fact.
Tom Matheson
Rambures, Lord. He banters with the other French commanders before Agincourt, Henry V 3.7 and 4.2, but lies among the slain, 4.8.94.
Anne Button
Ran See Kurosawa, Akira.
‘Rape’ is impersonated by Chiron, Titus Andronicus 5.2.
Anne Button
Rape of Lucrece, The. See centre section.
Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, an anonymous play, first performed c.1582 and published in 1589. Similarities between this work and Shakespeare’s late plays, in particular Cymbeline and The Tempest, have suggested that the Rare Triumphs may have been revived on the Jacobean stage. Its enduring appeal is suggested by its fifteen reprints between 1610 and 1670. Like the Rare Triumphs, Cymbeline features the separation of lovers through banishment and their reconciliation by Jupiter. Bomelio, an exiled courtier turned magician who lives in a cave and whose magic books are stolen, may be a prototype of Prospero.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Ratcliffe, Sir Richard. He is one of Richard’s henchmen in Richard III.
Anne Button
Ratsey, Gamaliel (d. 1605), highwayman, hanged in 1605. In the pamphlet Ratseis Ghoaste (one of several pamphlets and ballads in which he appears), Ratsey advises the leader of an itinerant company of players to perform in London, where his Hamlet will rival Burbage’s, but to return to the provinces with enough money to buy ‘some place of worship’. This may be a topical reference to Shakespeare’s upward social mobility. The pamphlet provides one of the most detailed pictures extant of *provincial actors in Shakespeare’s time.
Cathy Shrank
Ravenscroft, Edward, see Titus Andronicus.
reading and the book trade. The book trade in Shakespeare’s England, sometimes mistakenly assumed to be a primitive cottage craft undertaken in open-air market stalls, was a thriving industry supported by a national infrastructure for distribution and marketing. Early London bookshops were substantial buildings, often four storeys tall, identified by the pictorial signs mentioned on title-page advertisements: ‘to be sold in Paul’s Churchyard at the sign of the Green Dragon’. The centre of the London book trade was Paul’s Cross Churchyard, in which more than 30 bookshops flourished, but bookshops could also be found throughout the city, especially along major thoroughfares and around focal points such as bridges, city gates, and public buildings.
Although the trade in printed plays was a relatively small part of the bookselling business, a contemporary observed that play *quartos were printed in substantial numbers to satisfy the reading audience of the early 17th century: ‘our quarto-playbooks have come forth in such abundance, and found so many customers, that they almost exceed all number, one study being scarce able to hold them, and two years time too little to peruse them all.’ Play quartos would usually be sold without bindings, although readers who had collected a number of dramatic quartos might have them bound as a single volume.
Several of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists apparently felt some discomfort in publishing plays intended for performance as if they were literary texts designed to be read. In an address ‘To the Reader’ that prefaces the first printed edition of The Malcontent (1604), John *Marston apologizes that ‘scenes invented merely to be spoken should be enforcively published to be read’. Marston goes on to characterize the reading text as subordinate to the experience of seeing the play performed: ‘the unhandsome shape which this trifle in reading presents may be pardoned, for the pleasure it once afforded you when it was presented with the soul of lively action’. A letter-writer in 1638 tells her correspondent that reading plays is a lacklustre expedient to be adopted only when one has no access to the London theatre: ‘I could wish myself with you…to see the Alchemist, which I hear this term is revived, and the new play…but for want of these gentle recreations, I must content myself here, with the study of Shakespeare, and the history of women, all my country library’.
Printed plays were clearly regarded by some as ‘light’ reading. In Abraham Cowley’s poem ‘A Poetical Revenge’ (1636), one schoolboy curses another who has offended him: ‘may he | Be by his Father in his study took | At Shakespeare’s plays, instead of my L. Cooke’. In an epistle ‘to the comic play-readers’ of The Roaring Girl (1611), Thomas *Middleton suggests, however, that reading plays might actually prevent one from engaging in more seditious pursuits: ‘you shall find this published comedy good to keep you in an afternoon from dice, at home in your chambers’.
Humphrey *Moseley clearly had the needs of his readers in mind when he decided not to include reprints of plays that had already been published, such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, in his 1647 folio of *Beaumont and *Fletcher’s works: ‘And indeed it would have rendered the book so voluminous that ladies and gentlewomen would have found it scarce manageable, who in works of this nature must first be remembered.’ It has been suggested that with his emphasis on ‘ladies and gentlewomen’, Moseley is envisioning a play-reading audience made up largely of women.
Eric Rasmussen
rebec, a bowed instrument of Arabic origin, with a small pear-shaped body and three strings. During Shakespeare’s life it was being superseded by the violin and decreasing in importance and status.
Jeremy Barlow
recitations and one-person shows. In his London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851, Henry Mayhew described how one youthful reciter delivered Othello’s ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors’ with such force that he felt compelled to explain, ‘When I act Shakespeare I cannot restrain myself, it seems to master my very soul.’ The reciter’s pitch was the Commercial Road and Walworth Road and his best-ever receipts were at a public house near Brick Lane. At the other extreme the actor-manager Charles *Kemble gave his first reading before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace on 24 April 1844, when Cymbeline was selected by the Prince Consort. Thereafter Kemble gave readings of Shakespeare across the country, attracting the likes of the dissenting minister who told him that ‘though I abominate the stage…yet I am a patron of Shakespeare in my social hours’. Kemble’s daughter Fanny continued the tradition, increasingly preferring readings to stage performances, especially when they were by invitation at Eton College. Other notable exponents of the Shakespearian reading were Mr and Mrs German Reed and the Revd J. C. M. Bellew, a friend of Charles *Dickens—himself hugely popular as a reader from his own novels—whose most ambitious reading was the whole of Hamlet with actors whose duty was to suit the action to the word as Bellew recited the play.
It was in education that the differing approaches to readings of Shakespeare were entwined: in the Working Men’s Institutes; the improving ‘entertainments’ which clergymen such as the Revd Julian Young (son of actor Charles Mayne Young, and rector of Ilmington) provided for their parishioners; and the compulsory learning of ‘three hundred lines of good poetry’ (usually Shakespeare) which was required of pupils in elementary schools.
The Shakespearian one-person show—requiring no scenery, and no director—has remained a staple of classical actors between productions: exponents have included John *Gielgud, Ian *McKellen (whose own, which he toured extensively during the late 1980s, featured him as both Romeo and Juliet in the balcony scene), and Claire *Bloom.
Richard Foulkes
recorder. The Renaissance instrument of Shakespeare’s time came in many sizes and had a stronger sound than the later baroque type, familiar as today’s school descant. See Hamlet 3.2.332 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.123.
Jeremy Barlow
recordings. Following demonstrations of the ‘perfected phonograph’ in 1888, Emile Berliner’s gramophone of 1895, and the foundation in 1898 of the London Gramophone Company (subsequently HMV, then EMI), the technology to enable the recording of sound has become increasingly sophisticated. Shakespeare recordings have been in evidence from the earliest days of the wax cylinder, through the short-playing 78 revolutions per minute (rpm) shellac discs of the 1930s and the long-playing 33⅓ rpm vinylite discs (LPs) and reel-to-reel tapes of the 1950s, to the widely available audio-cassettes, compact discs (CDs), videotapes, and digital recordings of the present. The industry of making sound recordings of Shakespeare’s works has flourished most visibly in Britain.
The first recordings were concerned rather with registering the voices of actors than with the Shakespeare text as such. Although sequences of just two, then four, minutes, were possible until well into the 20th century, short monologues by such renowned Shakespearians as Edwin *Booth, Henry *Irving, Beerbohm *Tree, and Ellen *Terry were recorded between 1890 and the First World War. Between the wars, Hamlet’s ‘O! what a rogue and peasant slave…’ and ‘How all occasions do inform…’, and Macbeth’s ‘Is this a dagger…?’ were recorded on 78s by such stars as Henry Ainley and John *Barrymore (HMV) and included with other famous soliloquies and educational intent on Johnston *Forbes-Robertson’s two-disc ‘How to Speak Shakespeare’ (Columbia, 1928). More evidently collectors’ items were *Gielgud’s acclaimed Hamlet on a mammoth set of ten 78s and Orson *Welles and the Mercury Company’s Macbeth on nine (Columbia Masterworks). It was only in the 1950s that abridged versions of whole plays could be preserved on single LPs and full-text versions on sets of two or three discs, while stereo sound, developed in the 1960s, enabled a more convincingly dramatic interaction of voices.
The first substantial LP recording venture was the *British Council’s 1958 commissioning from the Cambridge *Marlowe Society of the entire canon of plays and poems unabridged (Argo). Completed for the 1964 Shakespeare quatercentenary, it was an important cultural event. Although somewhat uneven, the whole became an invaluable resource for language teachers worldwide and stimulated numerous other recording projects. Where the Marlowe used a mixture of student and professional actors, the Shakespeare Recording Company of New York, between 1960 and 1968, cast famous actors in leading roles and exploited new stereo effects in recording some 32 plays (Caedmon).
Numerous other projects in the post-Second World War period presented Shakespeare in a variety of forms. The ‘Living Shakespeare’ series from Odhams (FCM production) offered leading classical actors (Donald *Wolfit in King Lear, Michael *Redgrave in Hamlet, Peggy *Ashcroft in The Merchant of Venice), in 26 plays, each abridged to a single LP, with a narrator providing continuity. Extracts from the soundtrack of *Olivier’s Henry V were reproduced on disc and, on cassette, such BBC work as the 1984 King Lear, with Alec *Guinness, which presented the Folio text with modifications for radio. Significant productions by such companies as the *Old Vic, the *National Theatre, the *RSC, and the Renaissance Theatre Company are also on record: *Zeffirelli’s 1965 National Theatre Much Ado About Nothing (HMV), and the Folio Theatre Players’ Henry VIII with Lewis Casson and Sybil *Thorndike are only two among many. In 2000 there were eight different recordings of Hamlet available in British record shops.
As well as single-play recordings, extracts are widely used in showcase anthologies such as Irene Worth’s Her Infinite Variety. Gielgud included various excerpts on his Seven Ages of Man collection (Columbia). Richard II’s ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground’ is spoken as prologue to the RSC’s The Hollow Crown (Argo, 1962). As well as five distinct recordings of the complete Sonnets, individual songs and sonnets recur in various general recitals and several, orchestrated by Johnny Dankworth, are sung by Cleo Laine on Shakespeare and All that Jazz (Fontana).
With the advent of the personal stereo in the 1980s, recordings, increasingly available on audio-cassette, have been used rather for individual than communal listening and this has led to a marked resurgence of recordings of Shakespeare. All seventeen productions in BBC radio’s ‘Shakespeare for the Millennium’, begun in 1999, and involving such actors as Amanda Root, Timothy West, Juliet Stevenson, and Michael Maloney, are available simultaneously with the broadcasts on CD and cassette, while ‘Audiobooks’—unabridged performances for cassette and CD (Penguin and Naxos)—are already a feature of early 21st-century recording.
Recording has enabled the dissemination of contemporary performance but digital recording, with its capacity to reproduce early recordings, with whistles, scratches, and other interference minimized, also allows better access to the performance styles of earlier generations. Thus, ‘Great Shakespeareans’ (Pavilion Records) includes the voices of Edwin *Booth in 1890 and John Gielgud in 1930, speaking Othello’s ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors’ speech, as well as pre-1914 contributions from Beerbohm Tree, Lewis Waller, and Ben *Greet . A great range of Shakespeare performances, including those directly recorded from stage or broadcast, are now preserved in the sound archives of major theatre companies, the British Library, and the Library of Congress, but are also available as never before, for educational, domestic, and individual listening.
Jean Chothia
Red Bull Inn. See inns.
Red Lion. It is generally accepted that the first purpose-built Elizabethan playhouse was the Red Lion in Stepney, built by John Brayne, James *Burbage’s luckless brother-in-law, in 1567. It was described as being in a court or yard just south of a farm of the same name. It may also have been within the wider grounds of an old estate known as Ashwyes. All we know of it comes from lawsuits between Brayne and his carpenters. The galleries were a single storey and the stage was 40 feet by 30 feet by 5 feet high (12 m × 9 m × 2.7 m) with an attached turret—the purpose of which is unclear—reaching some 30 feet (9 m) above the ground. The entire structure was cheap (under £20 compared to the Theatre’s £700), rested on the ground without foundations, and there is no evidence that it lasted beyond the summer of 1567 when a play Samson was performed. Spurious speculation about ‘lewis’ braces—suggesting a winch at the top of the turret—has arisen from a simple error in transcribing the construction contract.
Gabriel Egan, rev. Julian Bowsher
Redgrave, Sir Michael (1908–85), British stage and film actor. Both his parents were actors. At Cambridge he acted and wrote for literary magazines. At the *Old Vic in London in 1937 he was a tactful Orlando to the Rosalind of the much older Edith *Evans. Next year he was Bolingbroke to the Richard II of John *Gielgud. He became a celebrated film star. He played Macbeth in London and New York, 1947, and in the Old Vic’s London season 1949–50 he was well received as Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost and as Hamlet, which he repeated at Elsinore. In the celebrated history cycle at Stratford in 1951 he was a capricious Richard II and a Northumbrian Hotspur; he also played Prospero. At Stratford in 1953 he played Lear, Shylock, and a towering Antony to the Cleopatra of Peggy *Ashcroft; in 1958 he played Benedick and, at the age of 50, Hamlet—a performance acclaimed in Moscow. In 1963 he was Claudius in the inaugural production by the *National Theatre. By this time Redgrave, who was sometimes viewed as an intellectual actor, was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He has been the subject of a memoir by his son Corin and a therapeutic stage show by his daughter Lynn.
Michael Jamieson
Redgrave, Vanessa (b. 1937). The daughter of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, both actors, she made her name at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1961 when her young and vibrant Rosalind was acclaimed. She also played Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Imogen in Cymbeline. She went on to big parts in London and New York and is an internationally famous film star. She played Cleopatra under the direction of her husband Tony *Richardson in 1973; with Timothy Dalton as Antony in the West End in 1986; and again in London and Texas in 1995. In 2000 she played Prospero at the replica *Globe in London.
Michael Jamieson
Reed, Isaac (1742–1807), English editor. A retiring literary scholar, Reed helped Samuel *Johnson with The Lives of the Poets and edited other works including the Biographica dramatica (1782). He re-edited the Johnson–Steevens edition of Shakespeare and in 1803 published the ‘first *Variorum’ edition of Shakespeare’s works.
Jean Marsden
Reformation. See religion.
regal, a portable reed *organ with a raucous sound; some, known as ‘bible regals’, could be folded to look like a giant book. Indicated in Richard *Edwards’s comedy Damon and Pithias (1564).
Jeremy Barlow
Regan, Lear’s second daughter and the Duke of Cornwall’s wife, is arguably more vicious than her elder sister Goneril, who poisons her, The Tragedy of King Lear 5.3 (History 24).
Anne Button
Rehan, Ada (1860–1916), Irish-born American actress whose forte, though she played Ophelia to *Edwin Booth’s Hamlet (1873), was comedy. This was recognized by Augustin Daly, who made her the centrepiece of his Shakespearian revivals from Mistress Ford in 1886 onwards to Katherine (1887), Helena (1888), Rosalind (1889), Viola and Julia (1893), Beatrice (1896), Miranda (1897), and Portia (1898). As Daly’s operations extended across the Atlantic Ada Rehan’s performances were seen in London as well as New York. Rehan’s most famous role was Katherine, though she paid for her effective, high-pitched entrance by having little in reserve for later climaxes. In contrast her Helena was unimpressive until the quarrel with Hermia, but as Rosalind, though she could not be cautioned for underplaying, she showed a delicacy and spontaneity which disarmed all but the sternest critics, amongst whom *Shaw insisted that ‘Ada Rehan has yet created nothing but Ada Rehan.’
Richard Foulkes
rehearsal. In London theatres of Shakespeare’s time, which gave their performances in the afternoons, the morning was given over to rehearsals. Before meeting for a collective rehearsal each actor studied (that is, memorized) his *part, which was written out on a scroll giving only the lines spoken by a single character and the two or three cue words which end the preceding speech of another character. Snug in A Midsummer Night’s Dream asks to be given the lion’s part as soon as possible ‘for I am slow of study’ (1.2.62). Not until the first—sometimes the only—collective rehearsal would the actors find out what each other’s characters were to say and do.
Gabriel Egan
Reignier, Duke of Anjou. See René, Duke of Anjou, King of Naples.
Reinhardt, Max (1873–1943), Austrian director and theatre manager. After early work as an actor, Reinhardt bought the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1906 and soon became internationally famous as a director of great innovation and power. His inclinations were to the spectacular and his productions of Shakespeare often were lavish, as with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Berlin, 1905, the first of twelve versions) which used real trees in the forest, and The Tempest (Berlin, 1915) which relied on a revolving stage to create the illusion of shifting locales. Even at his most spectacular, Reinhardt focused on psychological truth in acting. An eclectic artist, he was influenced by *Craig’s designs and directed some of the first Shakespeare productions to use the modernist methods of simplification, symbol, and abstraction—as in The Winter’s Tale (1904), King Lear (1908), Hamlet (1910), and an expressionist Macbeth (1916), usually on smaller stages in Berlin and Munich. He never lost the showman’s touch, however, and was much sought after for his large-scale work in London and Europe. After the First World War he created the Grosses Schauspielehaus in Berlin and staged massive versions of the classics, including a modern-dress Hamlet in 1920. One of the founders of the Salzburg Festival, he became more active there and in Vienna in the 1920s. Reinhardt was a Jew; with the rise of Hitler his position in Berlin became impossible, so in 1933 he donated the Deutsches Theater to the nation and eventually moved to the USA, working on Broadway and in Hollywood. His film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), which now looks like high kitsch, nonetheless records some of Reinhardt’s flair for Shakespeare, which at the beginning of the century had struck audiences as remarkable.
Dennis Kennedy
relics. See Shakespeariana.
religion. It is a tribute to the predominantly secular outlook of Shakespeare’s works that they have survived so vigorously into an age in which religion, in the West at least, has to a large extent been relegated to the private sphere. In his own times, however, public affairs were dominated by the religious controversies which followed Henry VIII’s quarrels with the papacy. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church of Rome had exercised hegemony over the religious life of Europe. But in the late 14th and 15th centuries the same social forces which inspired the Renaissance—the discovery and translation of ancient texts, printing with movable type, the spread of learning and decline of superstition, and the rise of nationalism—provoked a prolonged conflict over doctrine, ritual, and church governance known as the Reformation.
More than a century before Martin Luther drafted his 95 Theses (1517), an English sect (the Lollards) comprising followers of Oxford philosopher John Wyclif (c. 1330–84) proposed a coherent doctrinal reform. Courtiers who accompanied Anne of Bohemia to England on her marriage to Richard II (1382) transmitted to Prague Lollard tracts which encouraged the first continental reformer, John Huss (c. 1372–1415), and perhaps Luther himself. During the reign of Henry IV, Lollards were martyred under the Suppression of Heresy Act, De haeretico comburendo (1401), including Sir John *Oldcastle, who was burnt by Henry V (Shakespeare fictionalized the relationship between Oldcastle and the prince in 1 and 2 Henry IV). Among other innovations, the Lollards rejected transubstantiation, the 13th-century dogma which held that words spoken by a priest could convert bread and wine into the Real Presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Throughout the Reformation the nature of the Eucharist remained a focus of intense debate. The reformers accepted the *Bible as the sole authority on religion and a complete guide to salvation (scriptura sola), and demanded a reversion to the doctrine and ritual of the primitive Church (ad fontes). They held every baptized person a priest (Luther’s ‘priesthood of all believers’) and, therefore, entitled to access to the Bible in vernacular translation. They believed each soul was predestined for salvation (election) or damnation (reprobation) before the creation of the world (cf. Othello 2.3.88–95), and that God’s saving grace was a free gift (sola gratia) not conditional upon good works (sola fide). The reformers received baptism and communion as the only sacraments (rejecting penance, confirmation, marriage, extreme unction, and ordination). They dismissed as unscriptural Purgatory, the intercession of saints, kneeling to receive the Eucharist, pilgrimages, the adoration of icons, and the sale of indulgences. They demanded the dismantling of the hierarchical structure of the Church, and favoured the calling of ministers by each congregation and its elders. Against the immense wealth and influence of Rome—and the Pope’s fearsome power of excommunication—the reformers advocated the ‘divine right’ of kings (Shakespeare interrogates this precept in Richard II and throughout the Henry VI plays). In 1555 the continental reformers established the principle cuius regio, eius religio (a monarch’s right to define the religion of his subjects). The Vatican’s efforts to suppress reform (the Counter-Reformation) fired political intrigue, warfare, and numerous martyrdoms recorded by John *Foxe in his Acts and Monuments (1563). In the aftermath of the Council of Trent (1545–63) reform suffused the Roman Church. A Catholic New Testament in English and the Gregorian reformed calendar appeared in 1582. As recently as 1999, the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches signed a joint declaration on Luther’s teaching on justification by faith alone (sola gratia).
In 1521 English Catholicism touched its high water mark when Henry VIII put his name to an anti-Lutheran polemic, the Assertio septem sacramentorum. The book included a defence of transubstantiation (‘the altare sacrament’) and earned the King and successors the papal honorific ‘Defender of the Faith’. Henry remained a doctrinal conservative throughout his life; his overhaul of the English Church was a political event with only marginal theological nuances—a ‘schism without heresy’. The challenge to Rome originated in Henry’s pursuit of a divorce (1526–33) from Queen Catherine of Aragon, which Shakespeare examined in All Is True (Henry VIII). But Henry’s campaign against papal supremacy in England gained impetus only after Thomas Cromwell turned the King’s attention to expropriating the Church’s wealth and income. Henry’s depredations culminated in the dissolution of the monasteries during 1536–40 (Shakespeare glances at their ‘ruined choirs’ in Sonnet 73). When the Act for the Conditional Restraint of Annates (1532) threatened to deprive the papacy of the remission of one year’s income by newly appointed incumbents, Clement VII acceded to Henry’s nomination of Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. Though Henry could hardly have foreseen it, the confirmation of Cranmer—who had won the King’s favour by his support of the divorce—would prove decisive for the nation’s theological reformation under Edward VI. The Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) gave English ecclesiastical courts authority in ‘testamentary’ matters (including marriage and divorce) and allowed Cranmer to declare the King’s marriage annulled; this legitimized Henry’s bigamous marriage to Anne Boleyn (1532) and its illegitimate issue, *Elizabeth, while bastardizing Princess Mary (in Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies the legitimacy of royal heirs is a recurring theme). When Pope Paul III threatened excommunication unless Henry reverted to Catherine, the King extracted from his bishops an Abjuration of Papal Supremacy (1534), severing ecclesiastic ties with Rome. Concurrently, the Act of Supremacy declared Henry ‘Supreme Head of the Church in England’ (Shakespeare examines ‘caesaropopism’ in Measure for Measure, its Duke both prince and priest, or at least nominal friar). With their Church independent and their King wooing allies among Lutheran continental principalities, English reformers expected rapid and broad advances. But Henry’s retrogressive Six Articles of 1536—the so-called ‘whip of six strings’—revalidated auricular confession, private masses, vows of chastity, a celibate priesthood, and communion in one kind only, and made the denial of transubstantiation punishable by ‘burning, without any abjuration’. Henry’s death (1547) brought to the throne Edward VI (1537–53), 9-year-old son of Jane Seymour. Cranmer and the boy-king’s protectors pressed for a reform on the continental model. The Edwardian Injunctions (1547) made English the language of the communion service, banned simony and the sale of benefices, ordered the destruction of shrines, and attacked ‘superstitions’ including pilgrimages, rosary beads, and guilds’ private holy days. The Dissolution of Colleges Act suppressed thousands of chantries, and the Sacrament Act restored communion in both kinds. But the nature of the Eucharist continued in dispute. Edwardian reformers rejected both transubstantiation and ‘consubstantiation’, Luther’s mystical belief that the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ coexist in host and chalice after consecration. After years of temporizing, the Act of Uniformity (1552) promulgated a Second Edwardian Prayer Book (largely authored by Cranmer) which adopted the ‘receptionist’ view that the Eucharist was a memorial merely, and the communicant received Christ solely in the heart. On Edward’s death (1553) the throne passed to Henry’s daughter by Catherine, Catholic Mary Tudor. Her parliaments swiftly repealed the Edwardian and Henrican reform legislation and restored the religious status quo of 1529. But Mary and her advisers recognized a permanent Catholic restoration was dependent on the Queen (then 38 years old and unmarried) producing a viable heir. This necessity and Mary’s zeal led to three catastrophic blunders which assured the ascendancy of English reform: Mary married Philip of Spain, prince of England’s historic enemy; she permitted a revival of anti-Lollard statutes and an ‘English Inquisition’ which brought to the stake 300 persons including Archbishop Cranmer, and won for the Queen the sobriquet ‘Bloody Mary’; finally, Mary restored the papal supremacy in England by compelling Parliament to kneel and receive absolution from Cardinal Reginald Pole (1554). These draconian acts painted reform in the colours of patriotism, moderation, and freedom, and drove many reformers into voluntary exile in Germany and Switzerland where their congregations assimilated the advanced ideas of continental Protestants. When Mary and her childhood sweetheart Pole died on 17 November 1558 the Catholic revival in England died with them. At news of Elizabeth’s succession Marian exiles streamed back to England imbued with lofty (and radical) Calvinist ideas for reform. But Queen Elizabeth I advertised her predilection for religious compromise by prescribing both a sung Mass and Gospel readings in English at her coronation. The Queen’s mingling of the old and new religions (the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’) perturbed reformers and conservatives alike. In 1559 Parliament repealed the Marian reversions, published an Act of Supremacy which abolished papal power and declared Elizabeth ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church in England, and issued a new Act of Uniformity reimposing the Second Edwardian Prayer Book (with conservative modifications). The Queen also ordered a revision and expansion of the Edwardian Book of Homilies, and required the reading of excerpts every Sunday. Although Elizabeth subscribed to the 39 Articles (1563, rev. 1571), a series of concise statements of belief designed to resolve the principal doctrinal controversies, the evidence as to her personal faith is contradictory and inconclusive. Notably, her Prayer Book and Articles include a Eucharist formula which admits interpretation under both receptionism and the doctrine of Real Presence. In 1561 an order requiring churchmen to wear the traditional priestly garments ignited the Vestiarian Controversy; and the reformers’ opposition—coupled with their personal austerity and moral exactitude—earned the pejorative puritan (a term which made its first recorded appearance in 1564). In Twelfth Night Shakespeare gibes at both the Puritans (2.3.135–6) and a sub-cult, the Brownists (3.2.30). Though generally united on doctrinal matters, the Puritan party was irreconcilably divided on the religious authority of the monarch and state. The ‘episcopalian’ wing (after episcopus, ‘bishop’) acknowledged monarchical discretion in sacred matters. The ‘presbyterian’ wing called for strict separation of Church and state and the eradication of the episcopacy, and wanted ministers to be at the call of individual congregations, with doctrinal matters subject to determination by a synod of elders (presbyters). (The latter faction triumphed in the Civil War of 1642–9 and an era of mutual toleration commenced only after the Restoration in 1660.) Throughout her reign Elizabeth vigorously defended her authority in religious matters. Archbishop John Whitgift’s Ecclesiastical Commission examined suspected nonconformists under an oath ex officio mero which voided the protections against self-incrimination. In the ensuing Marprelate controversy, anonymous Puritan pamphleteers railed against the ceremony and venality of the episcopacy. In response, the conservatives enlisted the pens of Thomas *Nashe, John *Lyly, and perhaps others among Shakespeare’s early London colleagues. With the death of Elizabeth (1603) and accession of *James VI and I, the Puritans anticipated thoroughgoing church reform. Although James’s mother had been the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, the King was Protestant and his Scottish Church presbyterian. But miscalculations on both sides brought the King and Puritans into collision at the Hampton Court conference (1604). James rejected the Puritans’ proposals for reform and proclaimed his support for episcopacy with the dictum ‘No bishop, no king’. James also lectured his learned audience on the correlation between the apostolic succession and the divine right of kings—a dangerously obsolescent principle which led his Catholic-leaning son, *Charles I, to the block in 1649. James acceded to the Puritans’ request for a new translation of the Bible, the ‘Authorized Version’ (1611), which depends heavily on William Tyndale’s translation (1526). Rebuffed by James, some Puritans took ship for the New World, settling the north-eastern region of what would become the *United States.
Shakespeare’s personal opinions on all this have been the subject of much controversy. In the early 18th century, Richard Davies, chaplain of Corpus Christi College (Oxford), recorded on authority unknown that Shakespeare ‘died a papist’. Like every English person of his time, Shakespeare descended from Catholic antecedents, and like many he numbered recusants among his extended family. His mother’s cousin Edward Arden kept a priest disguised as his gardener; both men were arrested by Sir Thomas *Lucy and (perhaps wrongly) convicted of conspiring with Arden’s erratic son-in-law John Sommerville to murder Queen Elizabeth. Arden was hanged at Tyburn (1583) and his head set up on London Bridge. Though the document is lost, scholars generally accept that Shakespeare’s father John (d. 1601) signed the Catholic ‘Last Will of the Soul’ discovered in 1757 amid the rafters of the Henley Street house where William was born. In 1606, Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna was cited on suspicion of recusancy, but the charge was dropped. Notwithstanding these instances, the tangible facts of Shakespeare’s life—notably his baptism, marriage, and the language of his *will—imply he was born, lived, and died a conforming member of the Anglican Church. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s declaration that Shakespeare ‘was at heart a Catholic’ (1873) reanimated curiosity about the playwright’s religion. Recently, E. A. J. Honigmann and others have developed circumstantial evidence to support a hypothesis that young Shakespeare served as schoolmaster and participated in amateur theatricals in the household of the recusant de Hoghton family of Lancaster (under the name *Shakeshaft) during the period when the Jesuit martyr Fr. Edmund Campion visited the district (1580–1).
If William Shakespeare’s spiritual life is mirrored in his work, then its salient characteristics are a refined knowledge of both the Genevan and Bishops’ bibles (with particular affection for the Epistles of St Paul), and magnanimity toward the adherents of (almost) every religion which he depicts. When a pagan Lear movingly invokes his gods—‘If you do love old men…if you yourselves are old’ (2.2.362–5); when the Jew Shylock rebukes his despicable persecutors, ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (3.1.52–3); when Cleopatra defiantly proclaims, ‘I am again for Cydnus | To meet Mark Antony’ (5.2.224–5)—the stark humanity of these unbaptized souls compels our sympathy and admiration. Unlike his dramatic contemporaries, Shakespeare even extends his grace to Catholicism. Wistfully, he glances at the ruined monasteries dotting the Tudor landscape in Sonnet 73 and in Titus Andronicus (5.1.21). He makes an abbess preside over the joyous conclusion of The Comedy of Errors, a play set in Ephesus, the city where Paul taught and Mary Magdalene was believed to have died. Although Friar Laurence’s stratagem culminates in catastrophe for Juliet and Romeo, Shakespeare draws the Franciscan as a thoughtful, compassionate man. Toward Puritans, Shakespeare displays apparently less forbearance. But each of these instances may have a topical, rather than religious, inspiration. Puritanical Malvolio, target of anti-nonconformist humour (2.3.135–47) and cruel degradation in Twelfth Night, may be a caricature of the Oxford pedant Gabriel *Harvey, literary foe of Shakespeare’s ne’er-do-well chum Tom Nashe. Angelo, surrogate ruler of ‘stricture and firm abstinence’ in Measure for Measure, may be Shakespeare’s response to the Puritan elders of London whose hostility toward the theatres and brothels of the city’s Southwark suburb was a continuing threat to the livelihood of the Globe sharers. In this cautionary tale, the draconian suppression of victimless sexual misconduct in the suburbs of Vienna produces evil consequences, and Angelo’s Puritan-seeming asceticism (1.3.50–3, 1.4.56–60) is revealed as a visor for lasciviousness (2.4.163–4) and a history of faithlessness (3.1.215–32). By contrast, Shakespeare’s portrait of the Lollard martyr Oldcastle is drawn with affection (Shakespeare altered the character’s name to ‘Falstaff’ in deference to the martyr’s heirs), and some 20th-century commentators have found meditations on the Reformation in Hamlet, with its allusions to Wittenberg (a centre of Lutheran learning) and its questions about Purgatory (1.5.9–22). The religious dimension of Cymbeline, too—a play set at the dawn of the Christian era, at the conclusion of which Cymbeline senses that ‘The time of universal peace is near’—has also intrigued some modern commentators. In another late play, All Is True (Henry VIII), a mature Shakespeare and co-author John *Fletcher coolly dissect the Henrican reformation for the political event it was. But the playwright continues his remarkable even-handedness toward both old and new religions: Catholic Katherine is a woman of great dignity; reformer Thomas Cranmer is a man of conscience and humility; the Duke of Buckingham meets the headman with the dying words of William Tyndale on his lips (2.2.41–2); even Cardinal Wolsey experiences a purifying epiphany (3.2.429–58). Until new documentary evidence resolves the question of Shakespeare’s personal religion we might best characterize his outlook as Christian, tolerant, humane.
Steve Sohmer
Renaissance Theatre Company. See Branagh, Kenneth.
René, Duke of Anjou, King of Naples. Defeated by Talbot at Orléans, 1 Henry VI 2.1 (unhistorical), he consents to his daughter *Margaret’s betrothal to Henry, 5.5. (‘René’ appears variously as ‘Reignier’, ‘Reiner’, ‘Reynold’, ‘Reignard’, and ‘Ranard’ in Shakespeare and *Holinshed.)
Anne Button
Renoldes, William (b. ?1556), soldier. Renoldes, an observant but unstable Londoner who thought that the Privy Council were using printed books to convey the Queen’s secret love for him in code, indicates in a letter that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis was in print by 21 September 1593. Later Renoldes maintained that in Ireland the Earl of *Southampton (Shakespeare’s patron) would kiss, hug, and fondle a brother officer, Piers Edmondes.
Park Honan
repertory system. In the London theatres of Shakespeare’s time, each playing company would present a different play every day, selecting from a repertory of between 20 and 40 plays (in a typical company of the 1590s) for which they owned the playbooks. The London audience’s demand for new plays—largely attributable to the frequency with which the same people visited relatively few theatres—forced a successful young company such as the *Admiral’s Men in the 1590s, who had relatively few revivable old plays, to add a new play to the repertory every two weeks. A new play which did badly on first performance might never be repeated, but a typical run would be about eight to twelve performances over four to six months.
Gabriel Egan
reported text. In their preface to the First Folio, Heminges and Condell assert that some of the earlier printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays derived from ‘stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them’. The textual scholars associated with the New Bibliography, especially W. W. *Greg and A. W. Pollard, proposed that these ‘stolen and surreptitious copies’ were certain *Shakespearian quartos, pejoratively labelled ‘bad quartos’, that had no direct link to authorial manuscripts but were instead reconstructed from memory by an actor or a group of actors. Although it used to be supposed that a traitor actor would sell his reconstruction of a play to a pirate printer, a more likely scenario is that a company of actors playing in the provinces, having left the official playbooks back in London, might occasionally need to reconstruct a play from memory in order to perform it, and that this reconstructed text might eventually find its way to a printer.
Eight early quarto texts are widely viewed as memorial reconstructions, including the first editions of The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) (1594), Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) (1595), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Richard III (1597), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Hamlet (1603), and Pericles (1609). Editors are generally wary of the texts created through memorial reconstruction, but they sometimes make use of them as textual witnesses to early performances of Shakespeare’s plays. In Q1 of Hamlet, for instance, the Ghost appears in Gertrude’s closet ‘in his night gown’ and the mad Ophelia enters ‘playing on a lute, and her hair down singing’. Such stage directions are often incorporated into edited texts.
The theory of ‘memorial reconstruction’ has been characterized as one of the triumphs of Shakespearian textual study in the 20th century, but it has recently come under fresh scrutiny. Paul Werstine has pointed out that since there is no external evidence to support the claim that the so-called ‘bad quartos’ represent versions of the plays reconstructed for touring, their seemingly privileged relation to early performance is entirely inferential. Recent scholarship does not reject memorial reconstruction as a viable explanation of textual origin, but it has radically narrowed the field. Laurie Maguire’s extensive study of Shakespearean Suspect Texts (1996) concludes that a strong case for memorial reconstruction can be made with respect to The Merry Wives of Windsor, and a weaker case with respect to Hamlet and Pericles, but that The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI), Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and Henry V are definitely not memorial reconstructions. As ever in the surprisingly contentious field of textual criticism, however, these conclusions are not universally accepted.
Eric Rasmussen
Restoration and eighteenth-century Shakespearian production. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the consequent reopening of the playhouses, theatre-going became a fashionable, social experience and the two companies granted royal patents competed to entertain and retain their audiences. Each included Shakespeare in its repertoire, not least because of the dearth of new plays. The King’s Company led by Thomas *Killigrew acquired those plays that had been performed by the old King’s Men before 1642, and the Duke’s Company under Sir William *Davenant obtained exclusive rights to some of the remainder including King Lear and The Tempest. Both adapted the texts and the playing style to accommodate shifts in taste, stage technology, and audience expectation. The reputation of adaptations, once dismissed as risible, trivial aberrations, has risen in recent years and they are now regarded as integral to the stage survival of the bulk of the canon and significant to the development of Shakespeare’s status as the national poet.
John *Dryden, acknowledging Davenant’s help, explained the desire and intended effect of his symmetrical adaptation of The Tempest in 1667 through the creation of ‘the Counterpart to Shakespeare’s Plot, namely that of a Man who had never seen a Woman, that by this means those two characters of Innocence and Love might the more illustrate and commend each other’. His Prologue to the same work praised Shakespeare, justified the need to adapt his plays, and appealed for audience support:As when a Tree’s cut down the secret root
Lives underground, and thence new Branches shoot;
So, from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day
Springs up and buds a new reviving Play
……
And he then writ, as people then believ’d.
……
But, if for Shakespear we your grace implore,
We for our Theatre shall want it more.
If then this Heap of Flow’rs shall chance to wear
Fresh Beauty in the Order they now bear,
Ev’n this is Shakespear’s Praise; each Rustick knows
’Mongst plenteous Flow’rs a Garland to Compose,
Which strung by his coarse Hand may fairer show,
But ’twas a Pow’r Divine first made ’em Grow.
The stage and auditorium were lighted, doubtless contributing to some of the excessive and flamboyant audience behaviour, and it was Garrick again, working with *Philip de Loutherbourg, who introduced sophisticated lighting effects, including pyrotechnics, and developed the use of stage machinery. Yet despite such simple staging, from the Restoration on, it was the visual experience that was emphasized whether in the singing and dancing episodes that were popular additions to *Davenant’s Macbeth (1664), the 1674 operatic version of The Tempest, or the spectacle that was achieved through crowd scenes and lavish tableaux and processions. The ‘Order of the Ovation’ in the 1754 adaptation *Coriolanus; or, The Roman Matron has 162 named parts, and the ‘Additional Scene Representing the Funeral Procession to the Monument of the Capulets’ was extensively puffed on the playbills of Garrick’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1748).
Many of these adaptations were significantly shorter than their originals, reduced to three acts with sub-plots removed, and were performed as part of double bills which offered variety to the audience and allowed actors to show off their range. At the *Covent Garden benefit for Thomas *Arne (17 April 1752) Mrs *Cibber appeared as *Desdemona, and then as Cinthia in her own play The Oracle. In 1753 at *Drury Lane Garrick’s adaptations Florizel and Perdita, ‘with proper Music, Songs, Dances and Decorations’, and Catharine and Petruchio were performed together, both featuring Henry *Woodward and Richard Yates. Variety was also achieved through a rapidly changing repertoire and it was common for a production to play for no more than three consecutive nights. Mary *Robinson records playing ten Shakespearian roles during the winter season of 1777–8, including Ophelia, Perdita, Imogen, and Lady Macbeth, in a list of 22 parts that concludes ‘&c &c’.
Perhaps the most significant development of the period, indeed, was the introduction of actresses in 1660, marking the end of the transvestite tradition other than in comic roles such as the witches in Davenant’s Macbeth and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Elizabeth Howe has argued that the introduction of gratuitous scenes of sex, violence, and voyeurism in some adaptations—*Durfey’s Cymbeline for example—and affecting speeches in others—*Cibber’s Richard III—was the exploitative outcome of the innovation. Certainly actresses contributed to the social experience of theatre-going and while for some women (like Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and Dorothea *Jordan, a popular Viola, who both became royal mistresses) scandal remained associated with the profession, for others, particularly those who became involved in theatre management such as Anne *Bracegirdle and Elizabeth *Barry, the stage offered financial independence and social advancement.
Both men and women performed in what would now be regarded as a declamatory style, holding a pose with an appropriate gesture to deliver a speech and adopting an attitude and facial expression that reflected works on deportment and studies of physiognomy. (Something resembling this style of acting survived in *opera until the age of the close-up.) *Zoffany’s portrait of David Ross as Hamlet (1757–67) shows the pose of an 18th-century gentleman gesturing asymmetrically with his feet planted at the approved 90-degree angle. As was customary in almost all Shakespeare of the period he is wearing contemporary dress—frock-coat, breeches, waistcoat, stock, and wig—and Hamlet’s mental anguish is conveyed through a slight wrinkling of his left stocking. Contemporary fashion allowed women more extravagant outfits; Mary Robinson described her costume for her 1776 Drury Lane debut as Juliet: ‘My dress was pale silver; my head was ornamented with white feathers, and my monumental suit, for the last scene, was white satin and completely plain; excepting that I wore a veil of the most transparent gauze, which fell quite to my feet from the back of my head, and a string of beads round my waist, to which was suspended a cross appropriately fashioned.’ Garrick is credited with introducing a more naturalistic style of acting, yet it remained highly mannered, and his skill and reputation probably reflects a larger repertoire of attitudes that gave him greater variety as an actor. He exploited special effects, using a device to raise his hair when, as Hamlet, he encountered his father’s ghost, and the dramatic start with which, as Richard III, he woke from his dream before the battle of Bosworth was one of the most popular moments on the 18th-century stage. It was the subject of a *Hogarth portrait, becoming a best-selling print, and it is undoubtedly such theatrical portraits that helped disseminate knowledge and popularity of Shakespearian productions, enhanced the reputation of actors in and out of role, and provide valuable evidence for the modern scholar.
Catherine Alexander
retreat, a *trumpet signal for a military retreat, as in 1 Henry IV 5.4.156. See fanfare.
Jeremy Barlow
Return to the Forbidden Planet, a popular English musical (1981) by Bob Carlton, inspired by The Tempest and by the 1956 American sci-fi film *Forbidden Planet (and heavily influenced by The Rocky Horror Show). Captain Tempest visits Planet D’Illyria, where he meets dastardly Doctor Prospero, his beautiful daughter Miranda, and the roller-skating robot Ariel. It was marketed for its 1999 revival as ‘Shakespeare’s rock and roll masterpiece’, with songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, the Animals, the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, and others.
Tom Matheson
Revels Office and accounts. The Office of the Revels, overseen by its Master, was formed to organize court entertainments at Christmas and Easter, but with the growth of the London theatre industry in the 1580s the players were increasingly able to manage their own productions and the office’s role was changed to licensing and censoring. The accounts of the Revels Office illuminate court theatre but unfortunately are extant only for the periods 1571–89, 1604–5, and 1611–12.
Two pages from the Revels accounts for the Christmas season of 1604–5. Out of eleven performances by the King’s Men, seven were of plays by Shakespeare (or ‘Shaxberd’)—Othello (‘The Moor of Venis’), The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Henry V, and The Merchant of Venice, the last repeated at King James’s own insistence.
Gabriel Egan
‘Revenge’ is impersonated by Tamora, Titus Andronicus 5.2.
Anne Button
revenge tragedy. ‘Revenge’, Francis *Bacon explained in 1597, ‘is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to it, the more ought the law to weed it out.’ Far from being synonymous with justice, revenge was regarded by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as morally ambiguous and inherently tragic, as it implied a clash between the revenger’s pursuit of personal justice and the legal system which had failed him.
The moral ambiguity of revenge is central to Thomas *Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (c.1587?), the first and most influential English revenge tragedy. Kyd imitated *Senecan tragedy, a classical dramatic form characterized by bloody excesses, the appearance of a ghost demanding revenge, and the revenger’s madness. Thereafter revenge tragedy flourished on the Elizabethan and the Jacobean stage. Shakespeare himself wrote two revenge tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, although the revenge motif plays an important part in other plays, such as Othello and The Tempest. The moral ambiguity of revenge increases in Shakespeare. In Titus Andronicus, Tamora describes Titus’ sacrificial murder of one of her sons as ‘irreligious pity’, as a ‘barbaric’ custom in ‘civilized’ Rome, which prompts revenge from both parties. In Hamlet, Shakespeare explores the theme of revenge even further, by focusing on the protagonist’s delay in avenging his father’s death and his resistance against action, violence, and blind retaliation.
Sonia Massai
revision, the practice of making small- or large-scale changes to a play during or after its composition by the original author(s) or after its composition by others. Revision includes alterations, additions, insertions, deletions, cuts, amendments, augmentations, and stop-press variants made in manuscript or printed copies of plays. Revision differs from *adaptation in that it does not involve overhauling a play (usually to modernize or regularize a text only to suit later taste, convention, or theatre conditions) but instead maintains the existing form, structure, and artistic vision of the original text.
In authorial revision, dramatists cut, add to, or otherwise alter their play either in the act of composition, that is, during the process of writing out their first draft, or *‘foul papers’, or sometime after composition due to external demands such as *censorship by the official censor, the *Master of the Revels, or theatre or acting company changes (such as a change of venue or personnel), or for their personal artistic reasons. A dramatist could make these later, post-foul paper revisions before the first performance while preparing a second draft, or ‘fair copy’, of the play, or during or after the first or subsequent performances, at which time the revisions were written into the company’s licensed promptbook (known as the ‘book’) of the play.
Shakespeare made both small- and large-scale revisions in many of his plays, including Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Julius Caesar, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Troilus and Cressida, Richard II, and numerous history plays such as 1 and 2 Henry IV, at a variety of times for a variety of reasons. For example, the early printed texts of the first three plays mentioned above show currente calamo revisions, that is, second-thought changes in the act of composition, made in Shakespeare’s foul papers or in the fair copies he made from them and before the plays’ first performances. At some point after the first performances of the Henry IV plays he was forced by the censor to alter his original name for the character of the clownish knight from Sir John *Oldcastle to Sir John Falstaff because of complaints from Oldcastle’s relatives. Shakespeare (or his acting company) also appears to have been censored into cutting the deposition scene, 3.3, in Richard II from the early printed quartos of the play, although it may not have been censored in performance.
Other authorial alterations were not due to censorship but to changes in time, space, or other conditions of performance. For example, after the death of Queen *Elizabeth in 1603, Shakespeare altered his allusions to that monarch in The Merry Wives of Windsor to suit her successor, *King James I, and music and other stage effects were added to plays when they moved from private to public or from public to private playhouses. When making required changes to update or revive an old play, Shakespeare also made other alterations for his own artistic reasons. Thus when revising these and other plays to suit some external demand, Shakespeare used the opportunity to review his work and to revise other parts of the plays, demonstrating that he considered the plays, although the official property of his acting company, as his own works in progress which he could reclaim and rewrite.
Shakespeare significantly rewrote at least Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear through small- and large-scale revision some years after their original composition in order to reshape these plays largely for his own artistic reasons. In revision he cut major speeches or entire scenes, including Hamlet’s speech ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ in 4.4 in Hamlet and all of 4.3 in King Lear, as well as altering single words elsewhere (as in the speeches of Cordelia in King Lear, for example). These changes show a dramatist who is extremely concerned about maintaining the coherence and continuity of all of the formal elements of his plays, including plot, setting, and character, even to the most minute degree, when in the act of revising.
In non-authorial revision, dramatists, printers, and theatre company personnel such as scribes, promptbook keepers, and actors altered existing plays by other authors to suit changed performance or printing conditions, such as the expurgation of oaths after 1606. These revisions tended to be slight and seamless, as opposed to changes by adaptors who tended to overhaul an existing play into their own creation. Philip *Henslowe, who recorded his financial dealings with the Lord Admiral’s Men, the chief rival to Shakespeare’s acting company, the *Chamberlain’s (later the King’s) Men, paid professional dramatists such as Ben *Jonson, as well as hack or part-time writers, for their ‘adicians’ to and ‘alterynge’ and ‘mending’ of existing plays for revival. Much of this type of work constituted minor revision rather than adaptation; Hamlet himself serves as a non-authorial reviser rather than an adaptor in Hamlet when he inserts some ‘dozen or sixteen lines’ (2.2.543) into a speech in ‘The Mousetrap’. Non-authorial revisions were usually made to the company’s existing promptbook, sometimes requiring the reviser or a scribe to make a new transcription of it. Revised plays had to be relicensed by the censor, but this requirement seems to have been ignored by most acting companies. Shakespeare may have begun his career by rewriting or adapting the plays of others, including his collaborators, but he appears to have made the bulk of the revisions to his own plays himself throughout his career, although revisers or adapters in the King’s Men may have made other changes after his retirement or death.
Although none of Shakespeare’s manuscripts survives, with the exception of a few pages of additions possibly in his hand in the collaborative manuscript of the play *Sir Thomas More, we can supplement the evidence of the different early editions of his plays by studying the extant manuscripts of his contemporary dramatists which show overwhelming evidence of the types and patterns of authorial and/or non-authorial revision normal in the Shakespearian theatre. These include the manuscripts of Anthony *Munday’s John a Kent & John a Cumber, Thomas *Heywood’s The Captives, Thomas *Dekker’s The Welsh Ambassador, Ben *Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Thomas *Middleton’s A Game at Chess. These manuscripts show revisions and additions made interlinearly or marginally (in the left, right, top, or bottom margins), and/or in inserted sheets of paper. Cuts were frequently marked with a simple vertical line, often overlooked by later printers, in the left margin rather than with crossed-out passages within the text. In addition to internal evidence in manuscripts, dramatists commented on the extent of their authorial revision in their letters, memoirs, or prefaces to printed plays, demonstrating that it was a standard and acceptable practice for professional dramatists in this age to revise their plays.
Examination and collation of the early printed quarto and folio texts of Shakespeare’s plays (some of which were printed from foul papers) show the same types and patterns of authorial revision as seen in the manuscripts of these dramatists, many of whom served as Shakespeare’s colleagues throughout his career and as collaborators at the beginning or end of his career. Dramatists such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton worked within a *repertory system in which a play was performed occasionally and often subjected to revision for revival over a period of many years. Shakespeare and his colleagues clearly considered the later versions of their authorially revised plays not as improved or final but as alternative versions of their original texts; in fact they sometimes preferred early texts to later ones but considered all of them part of their creative output. This fact is amply demonstrated by Jonson’s insistence on preserving the three variant texts of The Gypsies Metamorphosed and by Middleton’s personal circulation of numerous, and variant, early and later texts of A Game at Chess without distinguishing amongst them. The revised plays of Shakespeare also reveal that later revised texts are not ‘better’ than but different from the originals and that no play which is still in the repertory can be considered to have a final form. These writers often objected to non-authorial revision and adaptation, preferring instead that the audience recognize the plays as they themselves wrote and rewrote them. As Hamlet instructs the actors in 3.2 in Hamlet in his defence of an author’s text, ‘Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.’
Grace Ioppolo
Reynaldo. (1) Polonius’ servant, he is sent to spy on Laertes in Paris, Hamlet 2.1. (2) He is the Countess of Roussillon’s steward in All’s Well That Ends Well (‘Rynaldo’ or ‘Rynardo’ in the Folio, his name is sometimes spelled ‘Rinaldo’ in modern editions).
Anne Button
Reynolds, Frederick (1764–1841), prolific English minor playwright, who specialized in turning Shakespeare’s comedies into *musicals, adapting, with the composer Henry *Bishop, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1816), The Comedy of Errors (1819), Twelfth Night (1820), The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest (1821), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1824), and The Taming of the Shrew (1828). These shows, ‘with alterations, additions, songs, duets, glees, and chorusses’, helped convince the English *Romantics that Shakespeare was too good for the stage.
Michael Dobson
Reynolds, William (1575–1632/3) a Stratford landowner to whom Shakespeare left 26s. 8d. to buy a mourning ring.
Stanley Wells
rhetoric, the art of persuasion in speech or writing. Cultivated in antiquity as an essential skill for those entitled to participate in public life, rhetoric was also codified into a long-lived body of theory, embodied notably in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and later in Cicero’s De inventione and Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria. In this tradition, the art of making successful public speeches is often divided into five components: invention (finding the right arguments), disposition (orderly arrangement), style (appropriate language and turns of phrase), memorizing, and delivery (oratorical performance). Of these, ‘style’, which included the exploitation of figures of speech, came to be the most prominent. In the Middle Ages, rhetoric assumed an important place alongside logic and grammar in the basic *educational curriculum known as the trivium, and it provided the basis of poetics or literary theory, understood as a branch of eloquence. As an academic pursuit in the *grammar schools of the 16th century, rhetoric usually took the form of memorizing dozens of figures of speech as categorized in classical writings such as the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium or recent English adaptations such as *Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589).
It may be assumed, then, that Shakespeare and the educated section of his audience shared a highly codified knowledge of figurative language and of its persuasive uses. Rhetorical theory commonly distinguishes the major ‘tropes’ or figures of thought that extend the meanings of the words used (e.g. *metaphor, *simile, *metonymy, *irony, *paradox, *hyperbole, *prosopopoeia), from the lesser ‘schemes’ or figures of speech that exploit special arrangements of words (e.g. *anaphora, *antithesis, *anadiplosis, *chiasmus, *parison), and from figures of sound such as *onomatopoeia and *alliteration. Shakespeare’s own conscious exploitation of the range of such devices is evident not only in set-piece examples of dramatic oratory such as John of Gaunt’s speech on England (Richard II 2.1.31–68) or Mark Antony’s funeral oration (Julius Caesar 3.2.74–245), but throughout his work. Awareness of the formal rhetorical tradition in which Shakespeare’s figurative language is grounded may assist our understanding of the full resources of his *prose and verse style, and of its development: compare for example the rather rigid attachment to figures of repetition (anaphora, parison) in an early play such as Richard III, with the more flexibly metaphorical style of the later works.
Chris Baldick
rhyme, similarity of sound between syllables, usually at the ends of verse lines. The last stressed vowel in the line, with all sounds following it, usually comprises the rhyming element. If this be monosyllabic (e.g. deface/place—Sonnet 6), the rhyme is ‘masculine’; if it has two syllables (e.g. viewest/renewest—Sonnet 3), it is ‘feminine’. Rarer forms departing from ‘full rhyme’ include ‘half-rhyme’, in which the vowels do not match (dumb/tomb—Sonnet 101); ‘eye rhyme’, in which spellings match but sounds do not (care/are—Sonnet 112); and ‘rime riche’, in which the preceding consonants also match (press/express—Sonnet 140).
Chris Baldick
rhyme royal, a stanza form comprising seven iambic pentameters rhyming ababbcc. First used by *Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde and other works, it was adopted by Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece.
Chris Baldick
Rice, John (c. 1593–after 1630), actor (King’s Men 1607–11, Lady Elizabeth’s Men 1611–12/14, King’s Men 1612/14–25). Rice was John *Heminges’s apprentice and appeared with Richard *Burbage in a sea-pageant to honour *Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales in 1610; this sea-pageant apparently provided the King’s Men with costumes for Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Rice disappears from the theatrical record after 1625 and John Heminges calls him a ‘clerk’ in his will of 1630, indicating that Rice had entered the priesthood.
Gabriel Egan
Rich, Barnabe (?1540–1617), author and soldier. After fighting in the Low Countries and Ireland, Riche returned to England and, in 1581, published Riche his Farewell to Military Profession. Of all his writings, which include a number of pamphlets and a two-part romance, Riche was best known for this Farewell, a collection of eight prose stories including ‘Of Apolonius and Silla’. This rendering of the familiar story of Silla’s shipwreck, her disguise as a man, and the confusion with her twin brother was the primary source for Twelfth Night. Another story in the Farewell may have suggested the treatment of Malvolio’s ‘lunacy’. Further evidence of Shakespeare’s familiarity with Riche’s work may be found in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Rich, John (?1692–1761), manager, who inherited the patent of Lincoln’s Inn Fields from his father, Christopher, in 1714 and made the theatre the rival of *Drury Lane through its pantomime playing style. In 1732 he moved to the new theatre in *Covent Garden where the infamous Battle of the Romeos in 1750 was the most visible indication of his competition with *Garrick.
Catherine Alexander
Richard II (1367–1400), King of England (reigned 1377–99). See Richard II.
Richard II. See centre section.
Richard III (1452–85), King of England (reigned 1483–5). He appears as Crookback *Richard in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI) and subsequently becomes *Earl of Gloucester in Richard, Duke of York (3 Henry VI) before enjoying his finest hour in Richard III. An entire association, the Richard III Society, is devoted to pointing out (with considerable justification) that he was innocent of most of the crimes which *Holinshed’s chronicles and thence Shakespeare attribute to him.
Anne Button
Richard III. See centre section.
Richard, Crookback. Later becoming Duke of Gloucester and then Richard III, he first appears in The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI). He kills Somerset at the battle of St Albans (5.2) (unhistorical: at the time Richard was 3).
Anne Button
Richard, Duke of Gloucester. See Richard, Crookback; Richard Duke Of York; Richard III.
Richard, Duke of York. (1) (1411–60). See 1 Henry VI; The First Part of the Contention; Richard Duke of York. (2) (1472–83). See Edward, Prince.
Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI). See centre section.
Richardes, Griffin. See Griffith.
Richardson, Ian (1934–2007), British actor. Trained in Scotland, he played Hamlet at the Birmingham Rep and from 1960 until 1975 was a leading light at the *Royal Shakespeare Theatre, noted for his resilient verse-speaking and incisive characterization. His wide range included Oberon, Angelo, Iachimo, Coriolanus, and an acclaimed doubling of Richard II and Bolingbroke in alternation with Richard *Pasco.
Michael Jamieson
Richardson, Nicholas (fl. c. 1614–25), fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. In a sermon delivered at St Mary’s church in 1620 and 1621, Richardson quoted Romeo and Juliet (2.1.221–6) to illustrate the theme of God’s love for his saints even when they are ‘hurt’ by sin or adversity.
Park Honan
Richardson, Sir Ralph (1902–83), British actor. A magnetic, increasingly eccentric player, he had made his name at the *Birmingham Repertory Theatre and played a range of parts at the *Old Vic when Katharine Cornell invited him to play Mercutio to her Juliet in New York in 1935. He returned to the Vic under Tyrone *Guthrie where he triumphed as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was Othello to Laurence *Olivier’s suppressed homosexual Iago. After war service he co-directed with Olivier four fabled repertory seasons by the Old Vic Company in the West End: his great Shakespearian creation was Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV. By the time he led the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford, however, in 1962, his verse-speaking had become so mannered that his Macbeth and Prospero seemed like sleepwalkers. For the Shakespeare quatercentary in 1964 he toured abroad as Bottom and Shylock, repeating the latter in the West End. Although he was Buckingham in Olivier’s film Richard III, his old partner did not engage him at the *National Theatre. He never played the role that might have accommodated his hieratic late style, King Lear.
Michael Jamieson
Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761), English novelist. Richardson claimed Shakespearian tragedy as the model for his monumental novel Clarissa (1747–9), citing the original conclusion to King Lear as more truly religious than *Tate’s then popular happy ending. In Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) he guarantees the suitability of his heroine Harriet Byron by her liking for Shakespeare: her rival Clementina, taught Hamlet by Sir Charles, goes mad in the manner of Ophelia.
Nicola Watson
Richardson, Tony (1928–91), British director. A pioneer of new drama and of British neo-realist cinema, he directed a visually exciting Pericles at Stratford in 1958, returning for the Memorial Theatre’s 100th season to stage a busy, swirling Othello with Paul *Robeson. A brilliant The Changeling at the *Royal Court reclaimed that Jacobean masterpiece for the stage. Increasingly an international film-maker, he mounted in 1969 an innovative, unromantic Hamlet with Nicol *Williamson at the Roundhouse, London, and on Broadway as well as in 1973 an economical Antony and Cleopatra (starring his wife Vanessa *Redgrave) in a tent on London’s Bankside. His last Shakespearian production was As You Like It (1979) in Los Angeles with Stockard Channing as Rosalind.
Michael Jamieson
Richardson, William (1743–1814), Scottish intellectual and professor at Glasgow University. Richardson published several very popular books on Shakespeare’s characters which centre on the concept of a ruling passion. Characters examined include Macbeth, Hamlet, ‘the Melancholy Jacques’, Imogen, Richard III, King Lear, and Timon of Athens.
Jean Marsden
Richmond, Henry, Earl of. He becomes Henry VII after defeating Richard at *Bosworth in Richard III. Richmond calls Stanley his father-in-law (5.5.34), meaning stepfather, his mother’s second husband. His mother was Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond; his father Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond.
Anne Button
Rigg, Dame Diana (b. 1938), British actress. At the *Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959 she played many parts including Cordelia and Viola. At the *National Theatre her one Shakespearian role was Lady Macbeth. She played Cleopatra at *Chichester in 1985.
Michael Jamieson
Ristori, Adelaide (1822–1906), Italian actress who established an international reputation in a relatively small repertoire in which Shakespeare was represented by Lady Macbeth. Naturally gifted with an expressive face, a graceful figure, and a musical voice, Ristori studied her roles thoroughly and projected her psychological insights with great power. She first acted Lady Macbeth in an indifferent Italian translation in 1856; she performed the sleepwalking scene in English in 1873 and the entire role in English in 1882, when, though she was ‘clear and distinct in utterance’, it was—according to Era, 8 July 1882—her ‘eloquence of gesture’ that commanded most attention.
Richard Foulkes
rival poet. Shakespeare’s Sonnets 78–80 and 82–6, along perhaps with others, allude cryptically to one or more other poets who strive to please the friend, either as patron or in a more intimately personal relationship. The rival wields ‘a worthier pen’ (Sonnet 79, l. 6) and is ‘a better spirit’ to whom the poet is ‘inferior far’ (Sonnet 80, ll. 2, 7). Sonnet 86 speaks of ‘the proud full sail’ of his ‘great verse’, and conjectures that ‘his spirit’ was ‘by spirits taught to write | Above a mortal pitch’. He has an ‘affable familiar ghost | Which nightly gulls him with intelligence’. And what really makes the poet (or Shakespeare) ‘sick’ is that the beloved’s ‘countenance filled up his line’, depriving the Poet of ‘matter’.
Commentators with a taste for proving the unprovable have brought forward evidence that virtually every poet of Shakespeare’s time—and even of other times, such as Dante and Tasso—aroused Shakespeare’s envy. Latching on to Shakespeare’s apparent, if reluctant, admiration for the rival poet, some have proposed candidates who might deserve the compliment. So for example *Malone thought it might well be Edmund *Spenser. The characterization of the ‘proud full sail’ of the rival’s ‘great verse’ has pointed others in the direction of writers of a grandiloquent style, especially *Marlowe (requiring an early dating of the Sonnets, since he died in 1593), and George *Chapman, translator of Homer. Others have used biographical evidence, arguing in circular fashion from their identification of other figures in the sequence; so for instance *Boaden, convinced that the Friend was Pembroke, proposed Samuel *Daniel on the grounds that he was brought up at the Pembrokes’ home, Wilton House. And Sidney Lee’s candidate, Barnabe *Barnes—one of the most despised of English versifiers—is dependent on a link with *Southampton. Robert Gittings, in his book Shakespeare’s Rival (1960), proposed another member of the Southampton circle, Gervase *Markham, and Ben *Jonson has his supporters.
Stanley Wells
Rivals, The. Sir William *Davenant’s 1664 adaptation of The Two Noble Kinsmen shows a characteristically Restoration preference for *Fletcher’s sections of the play, and compassionately supplies a happy ending, keeping its Arcite alive to marry Emilia and allowing the Jailer’s Daughter to marry Palamon.
Michael Dobson
Rivers, Earl. Lady Gray’s brother, he flees with her after the capture of Edward IV, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 4.5. He becomes one of Richard’s victims, Richard III 3.3, and his ghost appears at *Bosworth. He is based on Anthony Woodville, Baron Scales and 2nd Earl of Rivers, son of the Woodville of 1 Henry VI.
Anne Button
Riverside Shakespeare. First issued in 1974, this edition of Shakespeare’s works set a new standard for a well-illustrated, carefully edited, one-volume presentation of the collected works. Introductory sections deal with the historical background to Shakespeare, illustrated with colour plates, his language and style, the text, and the chronology and sources. The plays are printed roughly in the Folio order, comedies first, followed by histories, tragedies, and the late romances. The texts are carefully edited by G. Blakemore Evans, and each is followed by comprehensive textual notes. The poems are grouped after the plays, and appendices include an essay on stage history from 1660, documentary records relating to Shakespeare and his works, and a chronology of events and publications from 1552 to 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death.
Substantial critical introductions to the individual plays were supplied by a distinguished team, including Anne Barton and Frank Kermode. The edition immediately gained in importance when it was adopted as the basis for references in the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare, compiled by Marvin Spevack (1973; see concordances). A second edition of the Riverside, published in 1997, retains most features of the first edition, adding the texts of *Edward III and ‘A *Funeral Elegy’, works of disputed authorship. The new edition also includes an incisive essay by Heather Dubrow on 20th-century criticism of Shakespeare. The introductions to individual works now seem rather dated, and the quirkiness of the textual editor’s decision to retain some Elizabethan forms such as ‘studient’ for ‘student’ and ‘inbark’d’ for ‘embarked’ remains an irritant for many users. But the edition continues to be a strong contender in a crowded market, competing with the likes of the *Arden, *Bevington, *Norton, and *Oxford.
R. A. Foakes
Roberts, James (fl. 1564–1608). London printer who published several of Shakespeare’s plays in quarto. Roberts held the exclusive right to print playbills and appears to have had a close relationship with the Lord *Chamberlain’s Men, for whom he may have made blocking entries in the Stationers’ Register in order to prevent unauthorized publication of some of their plays.
Eric Rasmussen
Robeson, Paul (1898–1976), American actor. The son of a runaway slave, he became an all-American athlete, and a singer whose bass-baritone voice made him a household name. He played Othello in London in 1930 at the Savoy theatre, adjoining the hotel to which he had recently been refused admission. He first acted Othello in New York in 1943 at the age of 45; the production ran for 296 performances and then toured 46 North American cities. He was later ostracized for his political and racial views and had his passport withdrawn. Following a letter to The Times from J. Dover *Wilson, he returned to Britain, where in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon he played Othello with great dignity but without his old power.
Michael Jamieson
Robin, Falstaff’s page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is possibly the same person as the *Page in 2 Henry IV and the *Boy in Henry V.
Anne Button
Robin Goodfellow, so-called in most stage directions and speech prefixes in *quarto and *Folio editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a ‘puck’ (a generic name for a little devil, pixie or hobgoblin) and has often been called simply ‘Puck’. He was a popular figure in 16th- and 17th-century folklore, though Shakespeare was the first to put him on stage. He acts as *Oberon’s assistant in enchanting *Titania, *Bottom, and the lovers, and enjoys the confusion he causes when he accidentally enchants Lysander instead of Demetrius. (See also fairies.)
In the 19th century it was a woman’s part (sometimes a girl’s—Ellen *Terry took the role aged 8), often hampered by attempts at rendering magic and flying through cumbersome machinery. In the 20th century the part has been played more often by men since *Granville-Barker’s 1914 production (in which Puck was played by Donald Calthrop). A notable exception was Angela Laurier, the French contortionist, who took the part in Robert *Lepage’s 1992 production. Male Pucks have tended to be more animalistic and malicious than their youthful, mischievous, female counterparts. Puck was dressed as a bird with claws in George *Devine’s 1954 staging (alluding at once to *Ariel’s disguise as a harpy and to Papageno in *Mozart’s The Magic Flute), while in Elijah Moshinsky’s 1981 BBC production Phil Daniels’s more Calibanesque Puck wore an Elizabethan ruff but had wolfish fangs and lapped water from a pool.
Robin Goodfellow as priapic satyr: the title-page illustration to this 1939 jest-book reveals a great deal about the folkloric character Shakespeare harnessed as the agent of erotic mischief in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anne Button
Robinson, Mary ‘Perdita’ (1758–1800), English actress. She worked with *Garrick at Drury Lane from 1776 where success in The Winter’s Tale and an affair with the Prince of Wales (later George IV) led to her sobriquet: His Highness was nicknamed ‘Florizel’. Retiring from the stage when he abandoned her, she is best remembered as the subject of portraits by *Romney, Gainsborough, and Reynolds.
Catherine Alexander
Robinson, Richard (c. 1595–1648), actor (King’s Men 1611–42). Apparently an accomplished female impersonator (mentioned in Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass 2.8), Robinson was a sharer by 1619 and on 31 October 1622 he married Winifred Burbage, Richard *Burbage’s widow.
Gabriel Egan
Robson, Dame Flora (1902–84), British actress. A witty, versatile, and accomplished actress, Robson, never cut out for orthodox young heroines, played comparatively few Shakespearian roles but chose them well: they included Queen Katherine in Tyrone *Guthrie’s All Is True (Henry VIII), 1933, Lady Macbeth (1933, repeated in New York in 1948), and a superb Paulina in Peter *Brook’s The Winter’s Tale (1951).
Michael Dobson
Roche, Walter (fl. 1569–82), a Lancashire man, fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford (1559), rector of Droitwich (1569), master of the Stratford grammar school from Christmas 1569 to Michaelmas 1571. The young Shakespeare was probably taught by an usher in the same schoolroom. Roche was rector of *Clifford Chambers, close to Stratford, 1574–8. He witnessed deeds by John *Shakespeare in 1573 and 1575, and is recorded as living in Chapel Street in 1574 and 1582.
Stanley Wells
Rochfort Smith, Teena. See Smith, Teena Rochfort.
Roderigo, in love with Desdemona, is used in Iago’s plots and eventually murdered by him, Othello 5.1.63.
Anne Button
Rogers, Philip (fl. c. 1600–?10), an apothecary and dealer in tobacco, pipes, and ale who was Shakespeare’s neighbour in Stratford. Between March and May of 1604 he bought 20 bushels of malt for £1 19s. 10d. from members of Shakespeare’s household, and on 25 June borrowed 2s. As he paid only 6s. of what was owed for the malt and the debt, Shakespeare sued him in the court of record at some unspecified date, employing William Tatherton as his solicitor.
Stanley Wells
Rolfe’s Shakespeare. William J. Rolfe, formerly head of the High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, edited Shakespeare’s plays in separate volumes beginning in 1872. He aimed to present them in ‘essentially the same way as Greek and Latin classics are edited for educational purposes’, but he omitted lines he considered ‘indelicate’. In conceiving an early version of what would now be called a ‘school’ edition, he also helped to foster the idea of Shakespeare as a ‘classical’ author.
R. A. Foakes
romance. The category of Shakespearian romance includes Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. Despite similarities in chronology and concerns, The Two Noble Kinsmen is often excluded from this category, partly because of its collaborative authorship and partly because it has more in common with Fletcherian romance than with Shakespeare’s ‘canonical’ romances. Edward *Dowden (1843–1913) first applied the term ‘romance’ to Shakespeare’s late plays, which are alternatively referred to as *tragicomedies. Neither term, however, was used in the First Folio. The most prominent features of Shakespearian romance include sea journeys and shipwrecks, forced separations and improbable reunions, which were also prominent structural elements in earlier plays, such as Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors. The romances also share a recurrent concern with the father–daughter relationship, and complex staging, which was probably prompted by the fact that the King’s Men started to use their indoor theatre at *Blackfriars in 1608.
Ben *Jonson anticipated later critics when he famously described Pericles as a ‘mouldy tale’. Since then the romances have often been read as a celebration of the powers of the imagination, but also (from Lytton Strachey onwards) as a progressive decline from the artistic achievements of the mature tragedies. The almost undivided attention traditionally paid to the restorative quality of these plays’ providential endings substantiated a familiar view according to which Shakespeare’s *last plays represent a politically conservative attempt to legitimize Jacobean absolutism. Shakespeare’s romances are now being reconsidered in relation to their specific historical context, including contemporary attitudes to *marriage and royal succession (Pericles and The Winter’s Tale), the emergence of *English nationalism and Jacobean colonialist discourse (Cymbeline and The Tempest), the tension between homoerotic desire and patriarchy (The Two Noble Kinsmen), and ambivalent attitudes towards the Reformation (All Is True (Henry VIII).
Sonia Massai
Romania. Shakespeare’s plays first arrived in Romania in German translation, in the repertory of late 18th-century Viennese and Hungarian touring companies, and it was a German company which first staged a Shakespeare play in Romanian (Othello, Bucharest, 1816). During the revolutionary Romantic years which followed, however, translations were more often derived from French versions of the plays: such, for example, were the first Romanian translations of Shakespeare to be staged by Romanian companies, The Merchant of Venice (Moldavia, 1851) and Romeo and Juliet (Walachia, 1852). By the end of the century nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays had been translated, increasingly from English editions (a tendency initiated, with Macbeth, 1864, and Othello, 1868, by P. P. Carp of the Junimea (Youth) group), and they exerted a growing influence on native literature. The greatest of Romanian poets, Mihai Eminescu (1850–89), engaged with Shakespeare throughout his career, and Shakespeare’s influence is equally felt in the national, historical drama by which Romania expressed its aspirations towards independence from the Ottoman Empire. Romanian Shakespeare criticism begins at around the same time, in the work of the playwright I. L. Caragiale (author of a notable essay on Falstaff) and that of the pioneering Marxist Dobrogeanu-Gherea.
Since the inception of modern universities, Romanian Shakespeare criticism has been divided between the work of English literature specialists and the work of intellectuals more generally, the latter (such as George Calinescu, Tudor Vianu, and Ion Zamfirescu) often taking a more comparativist, pan-European perspective. In the 20th century, the plays were repeatedly translated by academics and poets alike, and staged with increasing frequency (with Hamlet a particular favourite in pre-war Bucharest, as discussed by the novelist Liviu Rebreanu). As elsewhere, the post-war period saw directors given increasing prominence (Ion Sava’s 1946 Macbeth, influenced by the expressionist Yvan Goll, was a notable landmark), but under communism the pursuit of artistic individuality could be controversial: gifted directors such as Liviu *Ciulei, David Esrig, and Radu Penciulescu all defected to the West. Aptly, the collapse of Ceauçescu’s regime in 1989 was heralded by a subversively topical Hamlet, directed by Alexandru Tocilescu, and since then a number of exiles returned—Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban among them—to a vigorous Romanian Shakespearian theatre.
Odette Blumenfeld
Romanian International Shakespeare Festival Founded by Emil Boroghina in 1994, it took place every three years until 2006, since when it has been biennial. Located in Craiova and Bucharest, it offers a wide range of performances by international companies as well as a diverse academic and cultural programme.
Stanley Wells
Romano, Giulio. See Giulio Romano.
Romanoff and Juliet, English play (1956) and film (1961), written, produced, and directed by Sir Peter Ustinov (1921–2004). Perhaps prompted by his Russian ancestry, Ustinov provides a Cold War comedy in which the children of the American and Russian ambassadors to ‘Concordia’ fall in love: it is a modernized version of the Romeo and Juliet story, without its tragic poetry.
Tom Matheson
Romanticism. The artistic movement that swept literary Europe across the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th is conventionally thought of as a reaction against *neoclassicism, particularly in its French variants. Romantic texts, glorifying the imagination over the claims of literary form, commonly focus on an isolated individual consciousness, often engaged in transgressions against human and divine law, and often set against great natural landscapes.
In Britain, the Romantics’ intense interest in Shakespeare was prompted by their apprehension of Shakespeare as a nature-taught outsider and a flouter of all inherited literary conventions, and, above all, as a poet of large sympathies and protean identity, the very reverse of the other figure that loomed largest in the English literary past, John *Milton. His romantic (and by now archaic) subject matter also seemed hospitable to poets who, on the one hand, were interested in depicting individual subjectivity and, on the other, wished to distinguish their work from the kinds of contemporary realism which had been adopted by the novel. He was accordingly taken as mentor by a number of poets, most notably *Keats, while his plays, especially Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest, provided models for the *Gothic and Romantic fantasies of Horace Walpole, Mrs Radcliffe, Thomas *De Quincey, and Charles Maturin, to name only a few.
On the Continent, the spread of Romanticism was both a cause and a result of the *translation of the plays into other European languages: for many German and French readers, most familiar with the versions of *Tieck, *Schlegel, *Hugo, and others, Shakespeare remains an honorary Romantic writer. Encouraged by *Goethe, *Schiller took him as the governing spirit for his own national-historical plays. Shakespeare was also the spirit invoked to justify the period’s investment, in Britain no less than abroad, in closet verse drama. Indeed, it is arguable that in this period Shakespeare’s plays were more highly valued as poems than as theatrical scripts; the *Lambs’ work is symptomatic of this, though it would be possible to identify the work of some contemporary actors, notably Edmund *Kean, as itself ‘Romantic’ in sensibility. One result of the period’s decisive installation of Shakespeare at the centre of anglophone literary history was the growth of a substantial body of formidable European-wide criticism by the likes of *Coleridge, *Hazlitt, and Schlegel, which continues to exert a pervasive influence.
Nicola Watson
Rome is the scene of much of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, some of Antony and Cleopatra, and nearly all of Titus Andronicus, collectively ‘the Roman plays’. The Rape of Lucrece also has a Roman setting, while Cymbeline depicts the relations between Rome and ancient Britain. In the histories, ‘Rome’ is usually synonymous with the Catholic Church.
Anne Button
Romeo and Juliet. See centre section.
Romney, George (1734–1802), English painter. He contributed to the *Shakespeare Gallery, where he displayed a depiction of Lear in the Tempest, 1798. The sincerity of Romney’s aspirations to history painting cannot be doubted, but portraits constituted the majority of his output. Allegedly, Romney lacked sufficient patronage to develop his work on Shakespearian themes, but the artist was also noted for his lack of erudition by contemporaries, such as Lord Thurlow, who told the artist, ‘before you paint Shakespeare, I advise you to read him’. Romney is frequently associated with Shakespeare through a series of portraits depicting Lady Emma Hamilton ‘in character’, such as Lady Hamilton as Miranda (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Hamilton’s likeness became a recurrent theme in Romney’s œuvre, and appears in several works exhibited at the Shakespeare Gallery. The appearance of a Hamilton ‘type’ in Romney’s depiction of The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions was noted by the celebrated art historian Edgar Wind in 1930.
Catherine Tite
Ronsard, Pierre de (1524–85), French poet, perhaps the central figure in the *Pléiade movement. Ronsard was the author of almost 700 sonnets, some of them published in the collections Amours (1552) and Œuvres (1578). His influence may be detected in the imagery and themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets and possibly in Venus and Adonis.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Rosalind. See As You Like It.
Rosaline. (1) She is doted on by Romeo before he meets Juliet: although on the guest-list for the Capulets’ ball she does not appear in the play. (2) One of the Princess of France’s ladies, she is wooed by *Biron in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Anne Button
Rosencrantz, with his companion Guildenstern, is asked by Claudius to find the cause of Hamlet’s melancholy (2.2.271–95), but Hamlet mistrusts them and ultimately sends them to their deaths (5.2.13–63).
Anne Button
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. See burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. See Stoppard, Sir Tom.
‘Roses, their sharp spines being gone’, sung by a boy at the beginning of The Two Noble Kinsmen; the original music is unknown. As a song for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding, it has sometimes been transplanted into productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Jeremy Barlow
Rose theatre. Philip *Henslowe, in partnership with one John Cholmley, built the first open-air amphitheatre playhouse on *Bankside, the Rose, in 1587, and more is known about it than any other playhouse of the period. Excavation of the site has revealed that the Rose was a regular 14-sided polygon approximately 74 feet (22 m) across with a main entrance fronting Maiden Lane to the south, and a small, shallow, tapered stage built against the five northernmost bays of the polygon. It was considerably smaller than the *Swan and the *Globe which were later erected in the same district. Henslowe enlarged the Rose in 1592 but not by much and the main increase was in yard space. Prior to the Rose excavation it was generally assumed that Elizabethan theatrical amphitheatres were regular polygons and that their stages were rectangular and extended into the middle of the yard. A partnership document of January 1587 gives some details of the construction of the building under the direction of John Grigge, carpenter. Recorded payments in January 1592, though probably for work undertaken six months earlier, totalling £108 on unspecified building work was shown by the excavations to refer to a complete remodelling of the northern (stage) end of the building. This can only have been an attempt at catering for new staging practices. In 1595 Henslowe paid for the installation of a ‘throne in the heavens’, presumably a device for lowering an actor to the stage from the stage cover. The layering of the foundations on the site indicates that the stage cover and its attendant stage posts were built no earlier than the alterations of 1592. A rainwater erosion line in the yard of the Rose, and Henslowe’s payments to thatchers, indicate that the roof of the Rose was thatched.
The survival of Henslowe’s papers, unique amongst theatre management of the day, means there are records of a great number of plays performed at the Rose, most of which are lost to us, as well as the purchase of costumes, playbooks, building work and sundry other details. Because a play might appear under more than one name, and more than one play might exist on the theme of, say, Henry V’s life, identification of plays from Henslowe’s records is not certain. However, Henslowe’s ‘tittus & ondronicus’ was almost certainly Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and quite possibly ‘harey the vj’ was his 1 Henry VI, indicating that these plays were performed at the Rose. Amongst other famous plays, Henslowe’s record refers to Rose performances of *Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Dr Faustus, and of *Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Scott McMillin’s analysis of the staging requirement of known Rose plays showed that if an ‘enclosure’ or ‘discovery’ were needed, the same play usually also called for playing ‘aloft’. From this coincidence—both ‘enclosure/discovery’ and ‘aloft’ are needed, or neither is—McMillin concluded that a large stage booth served both functions which the permanent fixtures of the playhouse could not fulfil. Henslowe’s attention focused on his new Fortune playhouse after 1600, and by 1606 the Rose had been pulled down.
Gabriel Egan, rev. Julian Bowsher
Ross, Lord. He is one of Bolingbroke’s followers in Richard II. William de Ros was the 7th Baron Ros (d. 1414).
Anne Button
Ross (Rosse), Thane of. He bids farewell to Lady Macduff, Macbeth 4.2, and has to break the news to Macduff that she and her children have been murdered, 4.3.
Anne Button
Rossi, Ernesto (1827–96), Italian actor who spent most of his career touring the world with his own company in a repertoire which included several Shakespearian roles. In 1876 he appeared at Drury Lane—in Italian—as Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and Romeo. In Joseph Knight’s opinion Rossi was ‘great as an executant rather than an interpreter’; his concept of a character was unintelligible or alien or both, but it was redeemed by a brilliant display of technical proficiency. His experiment of playing Lear in Italian with the rest of the cast acting in English (New York 1881, London 1882) was not a success.
Richard Foulkes
Rossini, Gioachino Antonio. See opera.
Rothe, Hans (1894–1977), German dramatist, whose translation of Shakespeare’s complete plays (1922 ff., rev. 1963–4) into a modern idiom and with textual rearrangements, though effective on the stage, was controversial (and banned during the Third Reich). In Shakespeare als Provokation (1961) Rothe justified it on the basis of *disintegrationist theories.
Werner Habicht
Rotherham, Thomas. Archbishop of York in Richard III, his lines (in 2.4) are given to the Cardinal in the Oxford edition. He is based on Thomas Rotherham (or Rotheram, sometimes known as Thomas Scot) (1423–1500), created Archbishop of York in 1480.
Anne Button
Roubiliac, Louis François (1705–62), French sculptor. In 1758 he was commissioned by David *Garrick to execute a free-standing statue of Shakespeare for a ‘Temple’ dedicated to the poet and dramatist on Garrick’s estate at Hampton, Middlesex. The completed statue is an example of Roubiliac’s mature baroque workmanship, in which both gesture and dress are infused with motion, bestowing grandeur upon the subject. The statue was bequeathed to the British Museum by Garrick in 1779 and now stands in the entrance lobby to the *British Library.
Catherine Tite
round (dance) See roundel.
roundel, a round dance; a common formation in country dancing and *brawls. Shakespeare associates the round dance with *fairies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.140, 2.2.1, 3.1.101; The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.61) and *witches (Macbeth 1.3.30–2).
Jeremy Barlow
Roussillon, Dowager Countess of. She is Bertram’s mother and Helen’s guardian in All’s Well That Ends Well.
Anne Button
Rowe, Nicholas (1674–1718), poet, playwright, and later Poet Laureate. The most successful dramatist of his age, Rowe was also the first editor of Shakespeare. His six-volume edition, published in 1709 by Jacob Tonson, was based largely on the 1685 *Fourth Folio. Rowe’s edition focuses on issues related to performance of the plays rather than on textual problems. He modernized spelling and punctuation and divided the plays into acts and scenes which he numbered. His edition also regularized the entrances and exits of characters and attached a dramatis personae to each play for the first time. The edition included a preface, ‘Some Account of the Life, &c of Mr. William Shakespeare’, the first attempt at a biography of Shakespeare. Rowe later wrote The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), one of his most popular plays, ‘in imitation of Shakespeare’s style’, a claim which his contemporaries ridiculed.
Jean Marsden
Rowington, a village some 12 miles (19 km) north of Stratford from which Shakespeare’s family may have originated; ‘More Shakespeares lived in Rowington in the sixteenth century than in any other Warwickshire parish’ (Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 1961).
Stanley Wells
Rowley, Samuel (?1575–?1624), actor and dramatist with the Admiral’s Men, possibly the brother of William, also a dramatist. Samuel revised Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1601–2) and may have written the comic scenes. His most famous work, a history play about Henry VIII called When You See Me, You Know Me, was published in 1605 and reprinted in 1613. Shakespeare may have been inspired to ‘correct’ Rowley’s view of Henry VIII (which took many liberties with chronicle history) through his own play, All Is True, first performed in 1613. Where Rowley’s play featured much clowning, the prologue to All Is True warns the audience that it will not see ‘a merry bawdy play’. Only a few details of Henry VIII’s character suggest any further connection between the two plays.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Rowley, William (c. 1585–1626), comic actor and playwright. Rowley collaborated with many leading Jacobean playwrights, most notably Thomas *Middleton: he wrote the sub-plot for Middleton’s masterpiece The Changeling (1653). The *Birth of Merlin (1622) was published as by Shakespeare and Rowley, and some think Rowley had a hand in Shakespeare’s Pericles.
Robert Maslen
Rowse, A(lfred) L(eslie) (1903–97), Cornish historian, literary scholar, and autobiographer. Rowse’s prodigious gifts are seen in a series of vivid historical and literary studies, many focusing upon the social, biographical, and personal aspects of Shakespeare’s career, such as William Shakespeare (1963) and Shakespeare’s Southampton (1965). In 1973 (in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Shakespeare the Man) he conjecturally (but dogmatically) identified Emilia *Bassano-Lanier as the *Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets. Rowse was prolific, popularizing, and polemical; his blazon might well have figured a historian rampant above a venal, supine, and sentimental literary establishment.
Tom Matheson
Roxana title page. An engraved vignette on the title page of the second edition of William Alabaster’s play Roxana (1632) shows a small, tapered stage backed by curtains and fronted by a rail. This has been thought a useful representation of an indoor playhouse, but the engraver, John Payne, is now known to have merely copied parts of other pictures and hence the engraving is of little direct value to theatre history.
Gabriel Egan
Royal Shakespeare Company. What is now undoubtedly the most productive and significant Shakespeare theatre company in the world was created in 1961 by *Peter (now Sir Peter) Hall from the former *Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Hall’s principal innovations were to acquire public (Arts Council) funding and a London base (the Aldwych theatre) for what had previously been only a Stratford summer festival company, thus allowing actors to be offered longer contracts and the company’s work to be seen in the capital.
From that initial two-base, two-theatre operation, the RSC’s pattern of work has fluctuated, involving different numbers of playing spaces and locations at different times. In 1974 a studio theatre, the Other Place, opened in Stratford in a large shed that had formerly been a rehearsal room; initially largely for experimental productions, it soon became a central part of the company’s work, presenting innovative interpretations of Shakespeare as well as productions of new plays; a transfer theatre in London, the Warehouse, soon followed. In 1982 the company moved into a purpose-built London home, the *Barbican theatre, with a main auditorium to take productions from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Pit to take work from the Other Place. In 1986 a third theatre opened in Stratford, the Swan, created from what remained of the original 1879 Memorial Theatre after the fire of 1926, and offering a thrust-stage playing space in a 430-seat auditorium; in 1991 the original Other Place was replaced by a slightly larger, purpose-built studio auditorium of the same name.
During the controversial later stages of Adrian Noble’s artistic directorship, the RSC ceased to use the Barbican (in 2002), and it has since then transferred productions to hired London venues on an ad hoc basis. The company has continued, however, to develop residencies beyond Stratford and London, taking shows regularly to Newcastle since 1977 and to Plymouth since 1997; it has also regularly toured to New York, Ann Arbor, and other venues in the United States. Since the 1970s the company has also sent out annual regional tours to play locations without permanent seating (taking seats as well as sets with them).
The length and range of the main repertoire season has varied across time. After steady increases in the scale of the company’s operations, the RSC was by the 1990s playing a 10-month repertory season in Stratford (involving some 80 actors in ten or eleven productions, each actor playing at least two roles), which would then move to Newcastle and then to London, where the company maintained a presence throughout the year; actors’ contracts were typically for eighteen or twenty months. Financial problems, and difficulties in persuading some leading actors to stay away from film and television studios for such long periods, led from 1996 to a scaling-down of the Stratford season to seven months and the London season to six. The company’s abandoning of the Barbican in 2002 coincided with a switch to sequential, stand-alone productions in place of a rotating repertory season. Albeit to a limited extent, the company’s commitments to ensemble work and to playing extensively in London have been reaffirmed: in 2008, for instance, Michael *Boyd’s productions of both tetralogies of histories, performed by a single group of actors, were brought for a season to the Roundhouse in Camden. To date Boyd has not restored the range of playing spaces enjoyed by the company at the end of the 20th century: his project to remodel the interior of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on a thrust-stage plan (completed in 2011) involved closing the Other Place and using it as the foyer to a temporary thrust-stage auditorium, the Courtyard, which meant that during the World Shakespeare Festival in 2011 the RSC was operating in Stratford in three thrust-stage theatres (the RST, the Swan, and the Courtyard) rather than a proscenium-arch theatre, a thrust-stage theatre and a studio theatre.
Most RSC productions are directed by freelance visiting directors, though beyond its artistic director the company has normally retained a small number of associate directors. Directors enjoy a high degree of autonomy, controlling their own production budgets and appointing their own designers, composers, lighting designers, fight directors, and any other specialists they may require; casting, however, normally requires some degree of collaboration with other directors.
Although a number of the RSC’s distinguished former actors are listed as ‘Associate Artists’, this is an honorific title: there is no permanent company of the kind that one finds in some other European theatres, however much that may have been part of Hall’s initial concept. Its longest contracts (for the Stratford/London season) are for eighteen months, and the fact that the beginning of one season overlaps by several months the end of its predecessor means that continuous employment with the company is impossible. Nevertheless, many actors return, often frequently, as do directors and designers, so that a loose, long-term continuity has developed. The RSC is the highest employer of actors in Britain and the fact that nearly all the sets, costumes, and properties for its large annual tally of productions are made in-house means that it also maintains a large staff of other theatre professionals.
The RSC is controlled by its artistic director who reports to a board of governors. Artistic directors since the creation of the company have been Peter Hall (1960–8), Trevor *Nunn (1968–78), Trevor Nunn and Terry *Hands (1978–86), Terry Hands (1986–91), Adrian *Noble (1991–2003), Michael *Boyd (2003–12), and Gregory *Doran (2012– ). Apart from its own box office (and it normally plays to something like 80% capacity in Stratford), the company is financed by a major annual grant from the Arts Council and, increasingly, from business sponsorship, whence it has achieved substantial recent funding agreements.
From a near 40-year history productions of major artistic significance are too numerous to list. They range from small-scale studio work such as Trevor Nunn’s Other Place Macbeth in 1976, to epic main-stage productions of the history cycles, including Peter Hall’s and John *Barton’s seven-play version (the three parts of Henry VI reduced to two) in 1963–4 and Michael Boyd’s enterprise of staging all 8 plays in 2007. This was the centrepiece of an extraordinary Complete Works Festival in Stratford, when between April 2006 and April 2007 the RSC mounted or hosted productions of every single work in the canon. Beyond Shakespeare there have been major achievements with other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights (notably Ben *Jonson at the Swan), with Chekhov, with *Ibsen, with adaptations from other genres (such as Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables), and with new writing. But the company’s ultimate commitment is to the exploration, and re-exploration, of Shakespeare.
Robert Smallwood
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, still sometimes known as the *Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. A 1,300-seat proscenium-arch theatre (designed by Elisabeth Scott) opened in 1932 (replacing the 1879 Memorial Theatre, gutted by fire in 1926), and remained—despite perennial grumblings about acoustics and the gulf that separated the upper balcony from the stage—the home venue of the Royal Shakespeare Company until 2007. In that year it was closed for a comprehensive internal remodelling, reopening in 2011 as a 1,000-seat thrust-stage auditorium. The alterations included the building of a tower alongside the theatre, from which patrons can admire views of Stratford and the Cotswolds.
Michael Dobson
RSC Collection and Gallery, Stratford-upon-Avon. A gallery containing portraits of celebrated performers and directors of Shakespearian drama, portraits of Shakespeare, and art depicting Shakespearian themes was opened in 1881. It included the *Flower portrait. The collection was intended as the companion to the first *Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, opened in 1879: it survived the fire which gutted the theatre in 1926. No gallery is included in the reconstructed theatre of 2011.
Catherine Tite
RSC Shakespeare. Prepared under the general editorship of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, the RSC Shakespeare’s single volume William Shakespeare: Complete Works was published in 2007 by Palgrave Macmillan. Its major editorial principle was to use the First Folio (see folios) as copy text, adopting the Folio’s order of plays and retaining its readings wherever possible. The text was presented in single-column format with explanatory glosses at the foot of the page, and ‘directorial’ stage directions presented in the right margin in a different typeface. Introductory essays to each play were supplied by Bate, as was the General Introduction, and each play came supplied with a ‘Key Facts’ box describing plot, date, sources, text, proportion of verse and prose, and percentage of lines for all major parts. The major change to the Folio canon was that Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen were added to the back of the volume, as was the Hand D section from Sir Thomas More. Single volume editions of all the plays were released between 2008 and 2012, with added editorial material, stage histories, as well as interviews with creative personnel (chiefly directors) involved in notable RSC productions. Exceptions were Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens and King John and Henry VIII, which were paired together in single volumes, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was not released in a single edition. In 2013 the companion volume, William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, was published, containing ten plays traditionally associated with the Shakespeare *apocrypha, presenting arguments for Shakespeare’s part authorship of five of them (Arden of Faversham, Edward III, the 1602 revised text of The Spanish Tragedy, Sir Thomas More, and Double Falsehood).
Will Sharpe
Rugby, John. He is Caius’ servant in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Anne Button
Ruggiero (Rogero). The second gentleman who has news of ‘Nothing but bonfires’ in The Winter’s Tale is named Ruggiero, 5.2.21.
Anne Button
Rumour speaks the Induction to 2 Henry IV.
Anne Button
Russell (Rossill) is one of *Oldcastle’s companions in 1 Henry IV. His name seems to have been changed to Peto at the same time as Oldcastle’s name was changed to Falstaff, and Harvey’s to Bardolph, probably for fear of offending the earls of Bedford, whose surname was Russell, and Sir William Harvey, who was about to marry the dowager Countess of Southampton.
Anne Button
Russell, Thomas (1570–1634), landowner. Shakespeare appointed him overseer of his *will, and left him £5. A prosperous man, he was the son of Sir Thomas, a Warwickshire member of Parliament, from whom he inherited property in the Stratford area; he studied at Queen’s College, Oxford. He married as his second wife Anne Digges, widow of an eminent mathematician, one of whose sons, Leonard *Digges, was to write poems in praise of Shakespeare.
Stanley Wells
Russell Beale, Simon (b.1961), British stage actor known especially for his Shakespearian performances under the direction of Sam *Mendes. After studying English at Cambridge and both music and drama at the Guildhall School, he rose to prominence in the late 1980s while performing in Scotland. In the early 1990s he appeared in Mendes’s *Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Troilus and Cressida (as Thersites), Richard III (as Richard), and The Tempest (as Ariel). His bitter Ariel took on an unusually large role in the latter production, famously spitting in Prospero’s face when his freedom was finally granted. For Mendes, whom he has described as his ‘professional soul mate’, he has also played Malvolio, Leontes, Iago, and King Lear, and for other prominent directors he has played Cassius, Benedick, Timon, Falstaff, Macbeth, and Hamlet—making him one of the most prolific, not to mention most lauded, Shakespearian actors of recent decades.
Erin Sullivan
Russia and the former Soviet Union. Preceded by many other English writers, Shakespeare arrived late in Russia, giving little indication of the vast ocean of future commentary. His popularity and reputation in the Russian empire and its heir, the USSR, depended as much on politics and ideology as on literary fashion, and derived primarily from Shakespeare as tragedian. Often tamed, at times silenced, at others loudly appreciated, Shakespeare offers a window onto Russian culture and its love–hate relationship with the West.
Elizabeth I entertained numerous envoys from Ivan the Terrible, who, although still married to his seventh wife, pursued matrimonial, as well as commercial, alliances at the English court. Shakespeare’s mockery of the Muscovites in Love’s Labour’s Lost may have glanced at Ivan’s erratic and sometimes inept diplomacy. Practically minded, the Tsar and his immediate successors evinced little interest in English theatre or culture.
Aleksander Sumarokov, the first translator of the ‘inspired barbarian’, is also notably the ‘father’ of Russian drama, suggesting a link between the creation of a native Russian theatre and interest in Shakespeare. Initiating a two-centuries-long tradition of working from French or German rather than English sources, Sumarokov followed P. A. de La Place, ‘regularizing’ and transforming Hamlet into moralistic discourses, and making Polonius the arch-villain who murders King Hamlet, and plots to kill Gertrude and marry Claudius to Ophelia (1748). The German-born and educated Catherine *II, a correspondent of Diderot and *Voltaire, adapted The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff becomes ‘Polkadov’—a Frenchified Russian entirely innocent of the rhetorical acrobatics of his Shakespearian ancestor—and remade Timon of Athens into the moralized Spendthrift (1786). Her support for Shakespeare did not extend to Nikolai Karamzin’s Julius Caesar (1787), which she confiscated and banned; the play was not performed until 1897. Karamzin, Shakespeare’s only champion in the 18th century, followed French dramatic practice and criticism but used ‘the poet of nature’ to argue for a break from their literary strictures. Particularly fond of Shakespeare’s ‘sweet melancholy’ and of his knowledge of the human heart, Karamzin detested the comedies.
Although derivative in nature, 18th- and early 19th-century Russian periodicals were central to dissemination of knowledge about Shakespeare. The most frequently cited British journal was the Spectator (translated from the German, itself translated from the French) and, later, the Edinburgh Review. However, neither these periodicals nor the visit of an English company of actors (1772) dispelled still-widespread ignorance of Shakespeare. Thus, one translator hazarded that Hamlet or ‘Othellon’ was the name of a Latin writer.
The early 19th century, still taken with *neoclassicism and sentimentality, did not find Shakespeare congenial. Translation in this period included the work of Ivan Veliaminov (Othello, 1808) and Nikolai Gnedich (King Lear, 1838), both indebted to Jean-François Ducis, the most influential playwright in Russia. An admirer of the English ‘Graveyard School’, Stepan Viskovatov presented his versified Hamlet as a frequenter of tombs and ruins (1810). Although the first more-or-less faithful translation appeared in 1828 (Mikhail Vronchenko’s Hamlet), the common practice of working from adaptations and translations prevailed, as indicated by the title page of Aleksander Rotchev’s Macbeth: A Tragedy of Shakespeare from the Works of Schiller (1830).
The *Romantic movement and the growth of a native Russian theatre (1830s–1840s) mark a high period of Anglomania and the zenith of Shakespeare’s popularity in tragedy. Nikolai Polevoi’s Hamlet (1838) with Pavel Mochalov as the Prince resulted in the first stage successes. Polevoi followed *Goethe’s view of the Prince, changing and adding lines to make him appear weaker; hence his most famous line, ‘Afraid, I am afraid of man!’ Polevoi–Mochalov’s emotional, melancholy Hamlet set the trend for subsequent Hamlets. Othello and King Lear, played as romantic melodramas, also entered the Russian repertoire; Macbeth, because of its regicide, was banned, while Shakespeare’s comedies, in spite of the efforts of the great comic actor Mikhail Shchepkin, remained unappreciated.
Throughout the 1840s many more translations appeared, including Nikolai Ketcher’s grand project, the complete plays in prose, sparking a continuing debate about prose/verse translations. The fashion for Shakespeare was manifested both in published excerpts from the criticism of *Pope, *Johnson, *Hazlitt, and Mrs *Jameson, and in the ardour of amateur companies. In 1847, at the strict theological seminar in St Petersburg, Hamlet was secretly performed at midnight in costumes constructed from notebooks. Touring companies took Shakespeare to the ‘provinces’, penetrating even Siberia. Serfs presented simplified versions of Hamlet for their masters, and the Prince entered popular speech as a coward in the phrase ‘quaking Hamlet’.
The first poet to be deeply influenced by Shakespeare’s style was Aleksander (Alexander) *Pushkin (1799–1837). Impressed by his individualized characters, psychological insight, and the diversity of his dramatic invention, Pushkin referred to Shakespeare as Russia’s ‘father’, yet also believed in a ‘natural’ Bard who wrote Hamlet without any dramatic theory. Pushkin’s historical dramas, Boris Godunov in particular, for the first time infused Russian drama with a Shakespearian spirit. Other 19th-century writers influenced by Shakespeare or who drew on Shakespearian subject matter included Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Aleksander Ostrovsky, Afanasii Fet, and Nikolai Leskov. ‘Enslaved by the drama of Shakespeare’, the unrivalled ‘tsar of poets’, the influential literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1812–48) frequently referred to Shakespeare in his essays, the most famous of which, on Hamlet, was inspired by Mochalov’s performance. Echoing Goethe’s Romantic interpretation and adulation, Belinsky’s Bard ‘understood heaven, earth, and hell’ but was, nonetheless, an ‘ignoramus’, nescient of the meaning of his own plays. In the second half of the century, thanks especially to Ivan *Turgenev, Hamlet was transformed into an introspective, ‘superfluous man’. Confirming his assertion that Shakespeare was ‘engrafted’ into Russian ‘flesh and blood’, Turgenev wrote prose tales on Shakespearian themes (‘A Hamlet of Shchigrov District’, ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’, ‘A King Lear of the Steppes’). In his essay ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ (1860), he proposed that these characters embodied human nature’s basic peculiarities: the first, a useless egoist; the second, an idealist. Although challenged by Ivan Goncharov, Turgenev’s view held. In Dostoevsky, Hamlet is associated with ‘rodent types’, while in Chekhov ‘hamletism’ is a mere pose.
With the turn to realism, Shakespeare lost his prominence except for touring foreign actors. The black American Ira *Aldridge travelled widely throughout the empire. Later significant visitors included Ernesto *Rossi, Eleanore Duse, Sarah *Bernhardt, and Tommaso *Salvini.
Amid the 1860s–1870s’ heated polemics between ‘Slavophiles’ and ‘Westernizers’, translations were compiled into the first collected works (Nikolai Nekrasov and Nikolai Gerbel). Shakespearian subjects began to animate music (M. A. Balakirev, Pyotr *Tchaikovsky) and visual art (I. Repnin, T. Shevchenko, I. N. Kramskyi, M. Antokolsky). The first staging of The Taming of the Shrew succeeded so well that it became a staple of the Russian comic repertoire. In the 1870s, Nikolai Storozhenko delivered the first university lectures on Shakespeare. King Lear, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale were reworked for children; the Russian Shakespeare Society (1873) and the first Shakespearian literary circles were founded (1875). By 1880, when Gerbel translated the Sonnets and narrative poems, all of Shakespeare was available. During this period of harsh censorship, interest in Shakespeare seriously declined but did not disappear, remaining even in odd places, such as Sunday school groups, and readings given to prisoners in Siberia. By the 1890s, in comparison with the modern Sardou, Shakespeare was dismissed by some as ‘antique’ and a ‘fetish of scholars and lovers of the exotic’.
Political Shakespeare was not unknown, especially in the ‘provinces’. In Ukraine, all performances and translations of Shakespeare into Ukrainian were banned by strict ukases (1863, 1876, 1881), thus turning Shakespeare into samizdat literature well before the Soviet period. At the turn of the century, after tumultuous applause greeted the assassination of Julius Caesar in a Russian production in Kiev, speakers in the Duma pressed for a repertoire which showed how to die for the Tsar, not how to kill him.
The most famous of Shakespeare’s detractors was Lev (Leo) *Tolstoy. His ‘Shakespeare and the Drama’ (1906), with its roots in Belinsky and Voltaire, reviled Shakespeare for the immorality of his tolerance; his inability to create characters; the uniformity and pomposity of his language; his scorn of the common people; and the arbitrariness of his plots.
At century’s end, Aleksander Lensky staged The Tempest and Konstantin *Stanislavsky, inspired by *Salvini, Othello. The most famous production, Hamlet (1912), was the result of Stanislavsky’s respectful but difficult partnership with Gordon *Craig. Disappointed with its realistic incursions, and especially with the too-‘Tolstoyan’ Kachalov (Hamlet), Craig was also shocked that no one thought to consult an English text.
Although eclipsed during the First World War, revolutions, and civil war, Shakespeare’s reputation was nonetheless well established before the creation of the USSR (1922). His characters and themes inspired writers as varied as the Russians Aleksander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and the Ukrainians Lesia Ukrainka and Maxim Rylsky. However, throughout the 1920s, the place of the classics in the new Soviet order became much debated. When great Soviet playwrights failed to appear, Shakespeare was pressed into service. The absence of strict censorship coupled with a pluralism of artistic approaches created few, but nonetheless some of the most interesting, productions of the whole Soviet period. Among these is Soviet Ukrainian Les (Oleksandr) Kurbas’s Macbeth (1924, Kharkiv), an austere cubist-expressionist production with elements of Grand Guignol and pre-Brechtian alienation techniques.
As official control grew, so did the focus on class issues. The struggle between the declining aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie was found even in As You Like It, while (long before the view became a cliché of *new historicism) The Tempest was regarded as a blueprint for racial colonial domination. Low characters became spokesmen for the proletariat, and masses were indiscriminately added, including even to the tomb scene of Romeo and Juliet. Echoing Tolstoy, Vladimir Friche argued that Shakespeare’s dislike of the common people meant that he was really the aristocratic Earl of *Rutland.
With Stalin’s rise to power, academic theatres resumed their pre-revolutionary repertoire and methods. In 1934, the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers codified socialist realism as the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism, and ensured the continuity of an ethical-social approach to literature. Frequently referred to before and necessarily after 1934, *Marx and Engels, originators of the notion of Shakespeare as humanist and realist, became the touchstone of all Soviet criticism. Particular currency was given to Marx’s analysis of capital in Timon of Athens, and to his letter to Ferdinand Lassalle (1859), urging him to ‘Shakespearize’ to individualize characters and provide them with a ‘Falstaffian background’—a wide social panorama. Engels’s preference for The Merry Wives of Windsor, ‘worth a hundred German comedies’, led to its special place in the Soviet repertoire.
No longer possible were productions such as Nikolai Akimov’s zany Hamlet (music by Shostakovich, 1932), in which Ophelia was a drunken society girl and Hamlet a throne-grabber who pretends to be a ghost; or Les Kurbas/Sergei Radlov’s moving King Lear (1934) at the State Jewish Theatre, starring Solomon Mikhoels. Unrelenting emphasis on realism created difficulties for an appreciation of some aspects of Shakespeare’s work. Après Lytton Strachey, Aleksander Smirnov attacked the ‘feeble’ romances, but otherwise argued that the humanist Shakespeare wrote classless, universal dramas.
Although marked by constant tension between communist ideology, imposed from above, and the actual interpretation of Shakespeare, many scholars and theatre artists kept a Russian Shakespeare alive, some through creative manipulation, others through capitulation. Aleksei Popov harnessed love to the progress of socialism (The Taming of the Shrew, 1938), while Sergei Radlov produced Stalin’s favourite play, Othello (1935), in his preferred style: grandiose sets, folk songs, ballet-divertissements, and, at the centre, a hero who reminded Stalin of himself: rude of speech, an outsider, soldier, and erstwhile nomad.
On the eve of the Second World War, harsh criticism of the West reached a high pitch. Oleksandr Biletsky attacked Freudian Shakespeare, while others (conveniently forgetting Friche) reprimanded Western anti-Stratfordian heretics. Stalin’s offhand remark questioning the appropriateness of Hamlet at the Moscow Arts Theatre (1941) was enough to take it off the boards indefinitely. During the war, Shakespeare was, with some exceptions, squeezed out by nationalistic-propagandist Russian plays.
Some, like Boris *Pasternak, escaped into the spiritual sustenance of translation. Regarding Shakespeare as a ‘child of nature’, Pasternak approached translation like his forebears, as an ‘original piece of dramatic writing’. His Hamlet, a self-sacrificing hero with little mockery, irony, or cynicism, speaks idiomatic, poetic Russian (1941). Introduced to the world by way of Grigori *Kozintsev’s 1964 film, Pasternak’s became the preferred stage version. His translation of two, and Samuil Marshak’s complete, Sonnets finally brought Shakespeare the poet to Russian attention and appreciation.
After the war, Stalin purged many Western sympathizers and mobilized writers to propagate ideas of Soviet supremacy. Shakespeare was tentatively offered as a friendly link between Russia and the West by the eminent and prolific scholar Mikhail Morozov, but virulent attacks on his ‘primitive formalism’ and his ‘imitation’ of Anglo-American methodology forced him into all-out attack on the West: although the Americans used Shakespeare as a ‘subterfuge’ to justify the ‘subjugation of other people’, the ‘democratic’ Shakespeare, finding his ‘second fatherland’ in the USSR, would awaken the masses from their sleep and liberate them from capitalism.
Stalin’s death (1953) initiated the ‘Thaw’ in literary policy and sparked Hamlet fever. The Prince, a ‘titan of conscience’, now became a ‘brother-in-arms’ in efforts to liquidate vestiges of Stalinism. Aleksandr Anikst and Israil Vertsman attacked the uncertain logic of violence and exposed the ordinariness of evil in the play. Aleksander Parfenov argued that Shakespeare, a symbol of human culture, needed to be defended from the dictates of uncultured men in power. The state explicitly appropriated the Bard at the fourth centenary of his birth, permitting a plethora of books, articles, and festivities, and calling scholars and writers to the grand task of mastering the Shakespearian heritage and bringing it to the masses.
The late 1970s and 1980s drifted towards literary détente. Six issues were published of the Russian Shakespeare journal, and all-Union festivals continued in Yerevan (Armenia). Emboldened, some directors probed danger zones. A rock version of Romeo and Juliet was produced outside Moscow, while at the small Taganka theatre in the city, Yuri Liubimov staged Hamlet in a metaphorical gulag starring poet/singer/songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky.
What was possible in Moscow, however, was political in the satellite republics. The Georgian Mitsishvili’s fears, already voiced at the 1934 Congress, about the danger of minor literatures becoming only a pale copy of Russian, proved—with few exceptions—to be prophetic. Despite the skill and efforts of such actors as the Georgian Veriko Andjaparidze or Akakyi Khorava, palsied banality descended on many of the republics’ national theatres. Translated into 28 languages of the USSR, Shakespeare became a symbol of cross-cultural interests and a unifying—but also homogenizing—element of a vast Soviet readership: directives for the dominant style of production, translation, and interpretation came from Moscow. Still, the republics produced notable poets and prose writers, who drew on Shakespearian themes, characters, and situations, taking inspiration and comfort from them. Thus, the Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko’s ‘only answer’ to Soviet reality was ‘to be!’
The fall of the USSR in 1991 did not alter the state of affairs. Shakespeare continued to maintain a robust presence in the Russian theatrical repertoire, as well as in the national imaginary. St. Petersburg’s Lev Dodin directed a youngish, dishevelled, and hung-over Lear at the Theatre of Europe (2006). In Moscow, Kirill Serebrennikov presented an introspective, violent, even hellish examination of gender relations in his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Paring down the same play to its Pyramus and Thisbe episode, Dmitry Krymov produced a surprisingly lyrical and affecting production using the unlikely combination of gigantic puppets, an opera singer, a dog, and acrobats, which played at the *Royal Shakespeare Theatre during the *World Shakespeare Festival (2012). The long-standing Russian love of Shakespeare was acknowledged by the declaration of The UK-Russia Year of Culture (2014).
Beyond Russia, the former satellite republics have gone their own way in confirming Shakespeare’s importance. Thus, for example, the Belarus Free Theatre’s production of King Lear at the *Globe to Globe Festival (2012) emphasized Shakespeare’s continuing role as a political writer as well as a diplomatic intermediary. In Ukraine, a spate of Macbeth productions in the early 1990s, immediately after its declaration of independence, seemed to speak eloquently of the previous 70 years of the country’s history, while the creation of its Inter-university Shakespeare Research Centre (2009) signalled a desire both to carve out its own distinctive path in scholarship as well as to bring a Ukrainian Shakespeare to a broader audience. In Georgia, theatre director Robert Sturua, perhaps best known for his Richard III, established an international reputation for the Rustaveli Theatre (Tbilisi) by staging 17 of Shakespeare’s plays. Appropriated by various sides of the ideological and aesthetic spectrum over the last 200 years, Shakespeare remains an inexhaustible, malleable source of creative activity, from theatre, opera, ballet, film, musical compositions, to poetic reinterpretation.
Irena Makaryk
Rutland, Earl of. Third son of Richard Duke of York, he is slain by Clifford, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 1.3, despite the young man’s pleading. He is based on Edmund, Earl of Rutland (1443–60).
Anne Button
Rutland, Francis Manners, 6th Earl of (1578–1632). See impresa.
Rutland’s Tutor. Unable to save his charge he is dragged away, Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI) 1.3.
Anne Button
Rutland theory, a minor sub-heresy of the *Authorship Controversy which claims that Shakespeare’s works were really composed by Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (d. 1612). The theory was first expounded by Peter Alvor in Germany in 1906, and attracted a few adherents on the Continent thereafter, but was most memorably developed by the American Claud W. Sykes in Alias William Shakespeare? (1947), in which Rutland is exposed as the real author by Sherlock Holmes. Less eccentric detectives have been deterred from this conclusion by the absence of evidence that Rutland composed anything whatsoever.
Michael Dobson
Rylance, Mark (b.1960), British actor, director, and playwright. He is best known for his work at Shakespeare’s Globe in London (see Globe theatre reconstructions), where he was the theatre’s first artistic director (1995–2005) and where he played a number of celebrated roles including Richard II, Cleopatra, and Olivia (in 2013 he revived the latter role for the Globe and then the West End and Broadway, where it received rave reviews from New York critics). Prior to his work at the Globe he was a frequent actor at the *Royal Shakespeare Company, and he has subsequently caused controversy in the world of Shakespeare studies due to his anti-Stratfordian views and his participation in the Shakespeare *authorship controversy. With Derek *Jacobi he produced in 2007 a *Declaration of Reasonable Doubt concerning Shakespeare’s authorship, which proposes Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or Mary Sidney as the author of the plays.
Erin Sullivan
Rylands, George (Dadie) (1902–99). Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. An advocate of clear verse speaking, he exerted an immense influence as teacher, actor, producer, and director with the university’s *Marlowe Society, through which he brought Love’s Labour’s Lost, Troilus and Cressida, and the Henry VI plays to new prominence. He directed Gielgud and Ashcroft in Hamlet (1944), compiled the anthology The Ages of Man, and directed the first audio *recording of the entire canon. He inspired many leading theatre practitioners including John Barton, Trevor *Nunn, Derek *Jacobi, and Ian McKellen.
Paul Edmondson
Rymer, Thomas (1641–1713), a historian and failed dramatist who wrote two treatises condemning English tragedy. In A Short View of Tragedy (1693), he famously attacks Othello as a ‘bloody Farce’, and suggests it should be retitled ‘the Tragedy of the Handkerchief’. Rymer was subsequently vilified for his comments.
Jean Marsden
Rysbrack, John Michael (1694–1770), English sculptor of Dutch origin, who worked with *Scheemakers on the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe (which includes a bust of Shakespeare) in the 1730s. In 1758 he was commissioned by James West to produce an independent bust of Shakespeare: also called the ‘Davenant’ bust (now in Birmingham City Art Gallery), this much-reproduced piece of baroque statuary was executed in marble and depicts the subject in anachronistic Van Dyck dress.
Catherine Tite