Ukraine. In the development of Ukrainian Shakespeare discourse there are three major periods; each has its own peculiarity that is strongly determined by political and ideological contexts. The initial reception developed in the geopolitical landscape of the two empires (Russian and Austro-Hungarian) and hence demonstrates the powerful influence of foreign appropriations of the Bard. The first productions of Shakespeare in Ukrainian lands date back to the 1760s–1810s. They were performed by itinerant *Austrian (Gettersdorf) and *Polish (Boguslawski, Kaminski, Żmijewski) companies mostly in the western part of Ukraine. However, at the beginning of the 19th century in Kharkiv and Kiev there appeared stagings based on *Russian translations by M. Hnedich (King Lear), I. Veliaminov (Othello), and M. Vronchenko (Hamlet).
Owing to the favourable reception of these productions, the concept of Shakespeare as an eternal genius, elaborated in European Romanticism, was adopted by the Ukrainians. This stimulated the process of translating Shakespeare into Ukrainian which was viewed as an attempt to avoid cultural isolation and an efficient mechanism of overcoming ethno-cultural inferiority that occurred due to the colonial status of Ukraine (e.g. in accordance with Valuev Circular (1863) and Ems Ukaz (1876) it was prohibited to print books and stage plays in Ukrainian). The first translations made by Kosovtsev, Sventsytskiy, Starytskiy, Fedkovych, and Kulish proved that the Ukrainian language was capable of reproducing all the colours and shades of Shakespeare’s verbal palette. Created for reading rather than for theatre, these versions inspired fruitful intertextuality in Ukrainian literature of this time (including works by Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Olha Kobylianska, and Panteleimon Kulish).
The second period of Ukrainian Shakespeare (1920s–1991) is marked by dominating totalitarian and colonial tendencies. Nevertheless, there are two antinomic trends of appropriating Shakespeare. The first one was determined by the intent of the Soviet system to exploit the highest authority of the Bard for ideological purposes. As a result there appeared a specific myth of ‘Our Shakespeare’, the keystone of which was the concept of Shakespeare as a realistic playwright whose humanistic views were close to those of the working people. This led to a domestication of Shakespeare on the Ukrainian stage (the so-called ‘coryphée’s theatre’ of Pavlo Saksahanskiy) and to emphasizing ideologically marked aspects in Shakespearian literary criticism (see the writings of Borschahovski, Rodzevych, Modestova, Levada, and others). Ukrainian poet Mykola Bazhan proclaimed the idea that only Soviet people are able to comprehend Great Shakespeare in the correct way in the poem ‘In Stratford-upon-Avon’ (1948).
The juxtaposing trend of Shakespeare reception in Ukraine of this period was maintained by those representatives of the intellectual elite who aimed at discovering the shared value of Shakespeare as universal genius. This trend was manifested on the stage (Macbeth by Les Kurbas, Hamlet by Iosyp Hirniak, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mykola Makarenko, Hamlet by Boris Nord, Hamlet by Boris Tiahno) as well as in literary criticism (Biletski, Shapovalova, Zatonski, Nalyvaiko, Zhluktenko, Sokolianski, Alexeenko). Ukrainian translators of that period demonstrated the ability to penetrate deeply into the essence of Shakespeare’s concepts, resulting in the so-called ‘golden fund’ of Shakespeare in Ukrainian (Hrebinka, Ten, Rylski, Kochur, Klen, Osmachka, Rudnitski, Ver, Hablevych, Mysyk, Palamarchuk, and others). Allusions to Shakespeare can be found in the poetry of Zerov, Rylski, Holovanivski, Krasivski, Pervomaiski, Stus, Drach, Pavlychko, and Kostenko. The majority of those who refused to vulgarize Shakespeare in accordance with the ideological demands of the regime were either repressed by the Soviet totalitarian machine as Ukrainian nationalists (Kurbas, Zerov, Pluzhnyk, Krasivski, Palamarchuk, Kochur, Stus) or forced into exile (Osmachka, Klen, Kostetski, Barka, Slavutych). Thanks to the fruitful creative activity and civic courage of the above mentioned figures, the Ukrainian nation was still able to enrich the European tradition of Shakespeare reception. This period was crowned with the publication of the six-volume edition of the complete works of Shakespeare in Ukrainian (1984–6).
The modern phase of Ukrainian Shakespeare began just after the formation of the independent Ukraine (1991) and is characterized by a strong aspiration towards overcoming post-colonial and post-totalitarian syndromes. It has led to the creation of new translations of the Bard’s works (Pavlychko, Hablevych, Andruchovych, Hriaznov, Pylypenko, Selezinka, Marach, Butuk, Vyzhenko, Dudyn, and others) and numerous stage productions (Zholdak, Troitski, Ladenko, Malakhov, Lastivka, Lisovets, Fortus, Danchenko, Kvashlykov, and others). Shakespeare allusions are widely employed in modern Ukrainian literature (Zabuzhko, Drach, Izdryk, Podereviansky, Pavlychko, Andrukhovych, Zhadan, Deresh, and others).
The Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, which was founded in 2009 in Zaporizhzhia by Professor Nataliya Torkut (Classic Private University), is stimulating all kinds of Shakespeare-related activity in the country. Its priorities include editing the annual journal Shakespeare Discourse, initiating research projects, and organizing Shakespeare-oriented events, as well as popularizing the Bard’s heritage among Ukrainians. The Centre maintains a website entitled the ‘Ukrainian Shakespeare Portal’ (http://www.shakespeare.zp.ua).
Yuri Cherniak
Ulrici, Hermann (1806–84), German academic. Shakespeares dramatische Kunst (1839; Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art, 1876) is an attempt, leading later to the work of Edward *Dowden, to trace the growth and development of Shakespeare’s dramatic art. He accepts James Boaden’s 1837 identification of *‘Mr W.H.’ as William Herbert, 3rd Earl of *Pembroke.
Tom Matheson
Ulysses is one of the Greek commanders in Troilus and Cressida, based on the character of the same name from *Homeric legend.
Anne Button
Underhill, William (1555–97), recusant. He inherited *New Place in 1570 and sold it to Shakespeare in 1597. His son Fulke was executed at Warwick in 1598–9 for poisoning him. His second son Hercules (b. 1581) confirmed Shakespeare’s ownership of New Place.
Stanley Wells
‘Under the greenwood tree’, sung by Amiens in As You Like It 2.5.1. The earliest surviving setting is by Thomas *Arne (1741). Among many 20th-century settings are those by Coates, Gurney, Howells, Jacob, Moeran, Parry, and Quilter. The ‘greenwood song’ had been a genre in English verse long before Shakespeare; examples survive from the late Middle Ages.
Jeremy Barlow
Underwood, John (c. 1588–1624), actor (Blackfriars Boys 1601–8, King’s Men 1608–24). Underwood first appears in the Blackfriars Boys cast lists for *Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster and he was one of the ‘boys growing up to be men’ (the others were William *Ostler and Nathan *Field) who joined the King’s Men when the Blackfriars reverted to the Burbages in 1608. Underwood’s name occurs in 22 King’s Men’s cast lists (including the 1623 Folio), although his only known roles are as Delio in *Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Dapper in Jonson’s The Alchemist, and Bonario in Jonson’s Volpone. His will indicates that he owned shares in the *Curtain, *Globe, and *Blackfriars playhouses.
Gabriel Egan
United States of America. There is no record of any performance of Shakespeare’s work in the early American colonies—understandably, given their Puritan leanings—nor do his works appear to have been widely read in North America during this period. In 1752 a production of Richard III was mounted in New York by Thomas Kean and Walter Murray, probably the first full-scale production of any play by Shakespeare to be performed in what eventually became the United States of America. Shakespeare’s works were well known to the founding fathers. George Washington owned a one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works, though he makes no significant reference to any of the plays in his extensive writings and personal papers. He also regularly attended the theatre and undoubtedly saw a number of Shakespeare’s plays performed (including the *Davenant–Dryden adaptation of The Tempest, performed in Philadelphia during the 1784 discussions of the constitution). John *Adams quoted extensively from Shakespeare’s works, often in a context of political reflection on the institutions of government. In the Discourses on Davila (1790–1) he used passages from Troilus and Cressida to support arguments for class distinctions based on true merit within the social structure of the new American democracy. Abigail Adams attended plays with her husband, and frequently quoted from Shakespeare’s works in her private correspondence. There are numerous quotations from Shakespeare in the commonplace books of Thomas Jefferson, who thought the plays valuable as moral instruction. In 1786 Adams and Jefferson made a visit to Shakespeare’s *birthplace in *Stratford-upon-Avon. In a diary entry for that day, Adams laments the apparent indiffierence of Stratford residents to the historical importance and the originality of Shakespeare’s achievement.
The great theorist of Shakespeare’s originality is Ralph Waldo *Emerson, who provides a fully elaborated account of the poet in Representative Men (1850). Emerson maintains that ‘the great Shakespeare’ was unknown to the men and women of Elizabethan England. The originality of his work is a ‘discovery’ of modern culture. Although he acknowledges that other countries have a certain capacity for appreciating the bard—he nominates Shakespeare the ‘father of German literature’ through translations by *Wieland and *Schlegel—Emerson maintains that the ‘wisdom of life’ revealed in Shakespeare’s work can be most powerfully felt in the United States: ‘He wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America.’ Shakespeare’s works are a powerful medium of tuition for the autonomous or self-governing citizen of democracy. For this reason Shakespeare and America have a strong elective affinity, for it is in America, according to Emerson, that the social aims of individuality and self-reliance will be most fully realized.
Emerson’s idealization of Shakespeare was not universally accepted by his contemporaries, including his occasional tenant Henry David Thoreau, who admired the ‘wildness’ he found in Hamlet, but in general felt that America had no genuine need for the bookishness of European literature, Shakespeare included. Walt Whitman, though he respected Shakespeare’s talents as a poet, felt the works were ‘poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy’. Mark *Twain had a much more radically sceptical view of Shakespeare’s writings, especially vis-à-vis their relationship to their author. In one of his last books, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), he maintains that William Shakespeare is not in fact the author of the works that bear his name. Twain originally became interested in the question of Shakespeare’s authorship with the publication of Delia *Bacon’s Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded in 1857. This interest was fuelled by the publication of works such as Nathaniel Holmes’s Authorship of the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare (1866) and Ignatius Donnelly’s The Great Cryptogram (1888). Twain’s own scepticism about Shakespeare’s authorship was prompted by his observation that the technical discourse of seamanship and other trades in the plays was unconvincing. He found evidence, however, of expert handling of the vocabulary of the law courts. The real Shakespeare, therefore, must have been a lawyer. William Shakespeare of Stratford is a ‘false claimant’ who could not have been the author of ‘Shakespeare’s’ works.
Twain’s brilliant pastiche of quotations from Hamlet and Macbeth in Huckleberry Finn (1885) suggests the various ways Shakespearian drama was democratized in the United States during the 19th century through its close and familiar engagement with American popular cultural forms. Audiences who preferred their Shakespeare ‘straight’ could enjoy the work of touring companies, both English and home-grown, that performed the plays in cities and towns from east to west during the 19th century. Edwin *Booth, son of the British actor Junius Brutus *Booth, managed the Winter Garden theatre in New York where many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed. Edwin’s brother John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, was himself a well-known actor of Shakespearian roles. The first of the great American-born actor-managers was Edwin *Forrest, who was especially popular for his renditions of Othello and King Lear. But Shakespeare was also performed by many itinerant companies on the American frontier, where the plays were often combined with circus acts and other forms of popular entertainment. There is also a large body of Shakespeare parody, *burlesque, *adaptation, and other derivative forms extant from this period. At times the plays were extensively adapted with a view to making them more immediately topical. Public tensions between traditional and more populist approaches to Shakespearian performance eventually broke out in a bloody riot in May 1849 at the Astor Place Opera House in New York City. The provocation for this incident arose from antagonism between the American actor Edwin Forrest and his British rival William Charles *Macready. Macready was disliked for his affiliation with the wealthier and more privileged theatre-goers. He was driven from the stage by a crowd of working men who supported Forrest, both for his acting style and for his strongly nativist approach to Shakespearian drama.
Discussion of Shakespeare’s plays frequently took place in organized clubs. Shakespeariana (1883–93) was a magazine created in response to the burgeoning American interest in Shakespeare. Its content ranged from debate over textual cruces to the latest developments in *Baconian theory, and it took a particular interest in Shakespeare clubs. In 1888, the magazine published a list of about 100 Shakespeare societies unearthed by the editorial department. The smallest, ‘the club of two’, carried on its proceedings entirely by correspondence. One of the most prestigious, the *Shakespeare Society of New York, had a library which comprised 2,000–3,000 volumes. Through these clubs, members acquired speaking, organization, and leadership skills that enabled them to develop and express their ideas in a public forum. Shakespeare societies cultivated self-reliance in forming opinions along with behaviours promoting civil group interaction. Willingness to consider alternative positions and to develop effiective means of resolving conflicts were elements critical to the successful function of the public sphere. Engagement with the works of Shakespeare proved particularly useful to this end. Because of the dramatic nature of the material, members were often encouraged to assume roles during club readings, a practice that helped to enrich empathetic identification with alien viewpoints. Shakespeare societies were both gender-specific and mixed, and generally had between twelve and 30 members. They were instrumental in training women for public life in an atmosphere of public debate which, in the first half of the 19th century at least, consisted primarily of boisterous, white, male voices. Although clubs diffiered in areas of interest and levels of sophistication, proceedings were generally characterized quite seriously as ‘work’. The Philadelphia Shakespeare society, formed in 1851 by four young lawyers, was initially more of a lark than a serious endeavour. ‘Chance or fancy at the meeting’ determined the play to be read, according to founding member Garrick Mallery. By the sixth year the membership had swelled to fifteen and at the meetings there was ‘an infinity of good eating and drinking, but an infinitesimal amount of Shaksper, discussed. Indeed, on one occasion, the Society was disgraced by the omission to read or even quote a single line of the Poet.’ By the following year, however, a more systematic study had begun, including plans for a library. When Horace Howard *Furness joined in 1860, members had agreed to prepare papers for each meeting.
Horace Howard Furness and his associates in the Philadelphia Shakespeare Society worked from the *Variorum edition of 1821, supplemented by an extensive reference library of commentary and philological scholarship. In order to eliminate this cumbersome physical apparatus Furness conceived the idea of a *new Variorum edition, the first volume of which was published in 1871. Furness was later instrumental in founding the first English department at the University of Pennsylvania. His extensive personal collection of early editions and other Shakespeariana forms the basis for the Furness collection at that university. An even more ambitious collection of rare books and manuscripts was assembled at around the same time by Henry Clay Folger, President of the Standard Oil Company. Folger’s initial interest in Shakespeare was stimulated by a lecture given by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Amherst College, when Folger was an undergraduate. Folger’s wife Emily Clara Jordan studied English literature at Vassar College and wrote her Master’s thesis on Shakespeare’s First Folio. Together the Folgers built up a massive collection of early *quartos, along with some 80 copies of the *First Folio. The site for the *Folger Library was chosen carefully so that the study of Shakespeare would dovetail neatly with existing American institutions. The library was built along the extension of a line joining the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the US Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the Supreme Court. The Folger Library is now one of the world’s major institutional and archival resources for the study of Shakespeare’s plays.
Important 19th-century editions of Shakespeare were compiled by Henry *Hudson (1880–1), Richard Grant White (1857–66), and Joseph Crosby. E. E. Willoughby completed his Printing of the First Folio in 1932. Since its opening in 1932, the Folger Collection has been used by American editors of Shakespeare, most notably Charlton *Hinman, who began the laborious work of collating the various extant copies of the First Folio. Other important American editors of Shakespeare’s works have included J. G. *McManaway, Fredson *Bowers, W. A. Neilson (1906), George Lyman *Kittredge (1936), Hardin Craig (1951), and David *Bevington (1973). American scholars such as Hardin Craig, Alfred *Harbage, and Louis B. Wright pioneered the critical exegesis of Shakespeare’s plays read in their historical context. A number of gifted women scholars, including Lily Bess Campbell, Madeleine Doran, and Rosalie Colie, contributed significantly to this research programme. From about 1980 a major renovation of historical scholarship has developed, taking its inspiration from the work of Stephen Greenblatt. The vernacular tradition of Shakespeare criticism that traces its origins back to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson continues in the voluminous writings on Shakespeare by Harold Bloom.
Shakespeare continues to figure prominently in American mass culture at the beginning of the 21st century. Max *Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) established Shakespeare’s commercial and artistic viability in mass media. In the late summer of 1938, the CBS and NBC networks produced competing cycles of Shakespearian works for the *radio. CBS used a number of contemporary film stars, such as Humphrey Bogart (Hotspur) and Edward G. Robinson (Petruchio), while NBC leaned almost exclusively on the then-fading talent of John *Barrymore. Orson *Welles, who played Sir Toby Belch for CBS, also produced, directed, and starred in notable film versions of Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952). American film-makers have also adapted Shakespeare’s works extensively by grouping large, recognizable fragments of works by Shakespeare into new, often contrasting, stories. Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) is a comprehensive reworking of Shakespeare’s Lancastrian tetralogy told from the point of view of Falstaff. There is a large group of works in which the production of one or more plays by Shakespeare provides the background for a story about the ‘real life’ of one or more actors. These works are often preoccupied with the interpenetration of artistic representation and ordinary reality. In George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947), Ronald Colman appears as an actor whose performance in Othello provokes him to murder his own wife. Pastiche has become increasingly important in contemporary films such as Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), which includes extensive quotation and paraphrase of the two parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Looking for Richard (1996) is filmed as a ‘documentary’ that follows the efforts of a group of well-known American actors, led by Al Pacino, to make a film version of Richard III. Part of the point of this film is to demonstrate the effectiveness of American speech rhythms and intonation in speaking Shakespearian blank verse.
Cole *Porter’s Kiss Me Kate (1951), and Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein’s *West Side Story (1957) are durable favourites as *musicals on the stage, as well as in their cinematic iterations. Shakespeare’s familiarity is perhaps most vividly apparent in Shakespearean Spinach, a 1940 animated cartoon version of Romeo and Juliet with Popeye and Olive Oyl in the lead roles. A Witch’s Tangled Hare, a 1959 Warner Brothers cartoon, offiers Bugs Bunny and Witch Hazel in a pastiche of selections from Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. Shakespearian parody has been featured in episodes of Happy Days, Gilligan’s Island, The Andy Griffith Show, and Moonlighting. In the early 1950s comic-book (see strip-cartoon Shakespeare) versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were published by Classics Illustrated (a series later revived). Each of these condensed texts concludes with the following suggestion: ‘Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or public library.’ The contemporary vitality of Shakespeare’s role in American *popular culture is perhaps most dramatically manifested in a series of comic-books ‘suggested for mature readers’ by the British author Neil Gaiman, published by DC comics. In this series, Shakespeare’s genius as a poet is closely tied to his ordinariness as a man. His art records the various fragments of his own day-to-day experience, ranging from his feelings for his daughter Judith to his encounter in a local inn with two drunken sailors. These and similar incidents provide materials for The Tempest. In The Sandman comics, the story of Shakespeare’s life is articulated as a modern myth of self-realization. According to this highly American, democratic vision, Shakespeare’s genius is nothing more than the ability to feel more keenly and to record one’s own experience more vividly than other people do.
Michael Bristol
university performances. Dramatic performance and rhetoric were taught at Oxford and Cambridge as part of a classical humanist *education and from the mid-16th century plays in English were performed by the academic amateurs alongside plays in Latin. By the early 17th century the London theatre industry’s effect was being felt. The *Parnassus plays written between 1598 and 1602 and performed at St John’s College, Cambridge, made direct reference to the *Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare, and *Jonson, and The Tragedy of Caesar and Pompey, ‘Privately acted by the Students of Trinity Colledge in Oxford’ according to the 1607 title page, was clearly influenced by the professional theatre’s output. The universities could also be ahead of the industry: in 1605 *James I was entertained at Christ Church, Oxford, by Latin plays performed on a stage designed by Inigo *Jones using Sebastiano Serlio’s principles of perspective foreshortening, a precursor of post-Restoration staging.
Gabriel Egan
‘University Wits’, a group of university-educated playwrights who are often credited with transforming English drama in the 1580s from the form it had taken for much of the 16th century—the didactic allegorical *interlude, written in monotonous, metrically clumsy verse—into the richly various forms it assumed in the 1590s, full of action and versatile poetry. This is not, perhaps, quite fair to the earlier English drama, which is sometimes clever and entertaining—nor to the many writers of the 1580s who did not attend university, such as Thomas *Kyd—but there is no denying the extraordinary theatrical metamorphosis that took place between 1580 and 1590, nor the University Wits’ involvement in it. They were Thomas *Lodge, John *Lyly, and George *Peele from Oxford, and Robert *Greene, Christopher *Marlowe, and Thomas *Nashe from Cambridge. One striking thing about these writers is the sheer diversity of their achievements: with the exception of Marlowe and Peele, they all wrote prose as well as poetry and plays, and their influence on Shakespeare and his contemporaries was equally powerful in all three literary modes. Their learning, their ambition, and the pleasure they took in displaying their skills are evident in nearly everything they wrote.
Robert Maslen
‘Upon the King’, a four-line poem printed, anonymously and without title, beneath the engraving of King *James I on the frontispiece of the King’s Works, edited by James Mountague, Bishop of Winchester, and published in 1616. It is ascribed to Shakespeare in two early manuscripts now in the *Folger Library.
Stanley Wells
ur-Hamlet, the name given to a play now lost, of unknown authorship, which may have been the main source for Shakespeare’s *Hamlet. The earliest reference to such a play is found in Thomas *Nashe’s preface to Menaphon by Robert *Greene (1589) wherein he condemns those writers who plunder *Seneca for ‘whole Hamlets—I should say handfuls—of tragicall speeches’. In 1594 a play called Hamlet, apparently old, was performed at Newington Butts. It may have been this play that Thomas *Lodge saw, inspiring the comparison in Wit’s Misery and the World’s Madness (1596) between a devil and ‘the ghost, which cried so miserably at the Theatre, “Hamlet, revenge”’. The most likely author of the ur-Hamlet is *Kyd, whose name is punningly associated with the play in Nashe’s preface. This would also explain the similarities between The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet. Something about the nature of the ur-Hamlet may be glimpsed in the differences between the first and second quartos of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Q1 (1603), probably a memorial reconstruction, gives Gertrude a greater part in the action and refers to Hamlet actually landing on English soil. In producing his text of Shakespeare’s play, the author might have deliberately or accidentally borrowed these features from the ur-Hamlet.
Jane Kingsley-Smith
‘Urns and odours, bring away’, sung by an unspecified person or persons at the entrance of the three queens, with attendants, in The Two Noble Kinsmen 1.5.1. The original music is unknown.
Jeremy Barlow
Ursula is one of Hero’s waiting-gentlewomen in Much Ado About Nothing.
Anne Button