ABSTRACTThis article discusses the Australian artist Loudon Sainthill’s stage and costume designs for Michael Benthall’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production of The Tempest (1951, 1952). Calling upon a variety of performance documents, it considers what Sainthill’s work reveals about the hierarchical cultural relationship between Britain and its former colony at the time. At first glance, the acclaimed designer appears the ultimate cultural insider, a gifted cosmopolitan artist who successfully navigated his way from Tasmania to the summit of the British theatre industry. On closer examination, however, there is evidence that despite his apparently conciliatory approach, Sainthill’s complex visual style expressed the anxieties of Britain’s post-war transition from Empire to Commonwealth. Sainthill’s early career in the UK was shaped by theatrical-imperial networks intent on strengthening Commonwealth ties, and his fantasy-inflected settler-modernist style transplanted to Britain especially well during a period when the metropolis sought to imagine new post-imperial futures for itself. The surreal quality of Sainthill’s “antipodean” vision corresponded with increasingly ambivalent attitudes towards Britain’s imperial status, complicating its intended celebration of Britain’s post-war cultural renewal during the significant commemorative event of the Festival of Britain.

Thomas Cartelli’s provocative and erudite new book is a wide-ranging study of the diverse media objects that exist as what he terms the Shakespearean aftermath. In addition to what we might more co...

ABSTRACT From 1898, the year of the foundation of the theatre company Intimate Theatre, to his work at the New Company of Catalan Theatre around the 1910s, to his last stagings as head of the Catalan School of Drama in the early 1930s, Adrià Gual is recognized as a pioneer of Spanish and Catalan theatre direction. In this period of over thirty years, Gual produced dozens of shows that ranged from the classical plays of Greek theatre to the latest texts from European, Spanish and Catalan playwrights. And among these, strategically translated into Catalan, a few of Shakespeare’s dramas helped Gual to develop his project to renovate the Barcelona stage and provide a theatrical model that would encourage the development of Catalan culture. This article analyses the way Gual’s Shakespearean productions were intimately connected at the local level with the educated Catalan elites and the establishment of their cultural identity while, connected to a larger continental perspective, Shakespeare’s plays functioned within Intimate Theatre, New Company of Catalan Theatre and the Catalan School of Drama as an instrument to renovate theatrical practice by resorting to the models provided by European stage directors.

Terra Nova Productions is a professional theatre company based in East Belfast, characterized by the importance attached to placing interculturalism at the core of its work.1 Their Midsummer Night’...

The Denbigh-born antiquary, Humphrey Llwyd, 1527–68, was a servant of the 12th Earl of Arundel; he was a fairly obscure MP in the Parliaments of 1559 and 1563–67; and his printed legacy is not huge...

ABSTRACTAccording to his Lancastrian opponents, the historical Richard II lost his crown primarily due to his excessive youthfulness. This view shaped subsequent accounts of his reign, including Shakespeare’s controversial play about him. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second repeatedly addresses the question of the king’s age as perceived by, and in relation to, his subjects and political opponents. As my article demonstrates in detail, Shakespeare’s characters do not speak of age merely sporadically and in politically neutral ways. Instead, they regularly invoke it as a site of rhetorical contestation, informed by an early modern consensus that defined age largely in practical and social terms, was markedly gerontocratic, and made mature adulthood an important prerequisite to successful governance. Read in this context, i.e., with a focus on the intersection between age and rank as conceptualized by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the various age-related passages in the play reveal both Richard’s failure and Bolingbroke’s success with regard to their age-political self-fashioning.

ABSTRACTIn the “How all occasions … ” soliloquy Hamlet expresses his own failure to understand why he has not fulfilled his promise to kill Claudius notwithstanding that he has the “cause, will, strength, and means to do't”. The passage, occupying two and a half lines which begin and end with caesurae, consists entirely of 27–29 monosyllabic words, thus emphasizing its importance. This short essay analyses the speech in terms of the philosophical notion that action is the inevitable consequence of stimulus, intention, ability, and lack of hindrance, and, relying on the conventions applicable to soliloquies, argues that it reveals that Hamlet's inaction is the result of his fear of post-mortem torment.

Prospero claims responsibility for Caliban at the end of The Tempest, and he enjoins the creature: “Go, sirrah, to my cell. / Take with you your companions. As you look / To have my pardon, trim it...

ABSTRACTIt has been widely noted that The Two Noble Kinsmen dramatises the erasure of same-sex desire as tragic, and that the play’s structural drive toward a comic ending is accompanied by a poignant sense of loss. Building on previous queer readings of The Two Noble Kinsmen, this paper examines the apparent equality and even similarity of the play’s potential same-sex lovers, for whom looking at each other is like looking in a mirror. I argue, however, that the playwrights are not participating uncritically in what Valerie Traub has identified as the early modern discourse of “erotic similitude”, whereby homoerotic desire is attributed to Narcissus-like attraction to sameness. Rather, despite various characters’ and critics’ insistence on the kinsmen’s indistinguishability, I demonstrate that from the beginning Palamon and Arcite are animated by distinct drives – toward individualism on Palamon’s part, and toward imitation on Arcite’s. By examining Shakespeare and Fletcher’s direct and indirect use of the Ovidian Narcissus myth, moreover, I highlight the ways in which Kinsmen both invokes and undermines early modern tropes and images associated with erotic similitude, thus staging an alternative paradigm of same-sex desire, one founded on difference rather than sameness.

“Have you not made an universal shout” (1.1.44): if Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar begins with the tribunes, Flavius and Murellus, berating the commoners for over-celebrating and ordering them to get ...