As You Like It, and: King Richard III, and: The Merchant of Venice, and: Romeo and Juliet, and: The Winter's Tale (review)

In March of 2003 a debate over the value of Arden's Shakespeare at Stratford series raged on SHAKSPER: the Global Electronic Shakespeare Conference.¹ Two charges were lodged against the series: first, that it does a disservice to performance history by ignoring landmark productions mounted by companies other than the RSC, and, second, that the authors waste their readers' time by devoting space to mediocre productions instead of concentrating solely on superior ones. After carefully examining the first five volumes in the series, I can state that, while these charges contain a grain of truth, the editorial decision to restrict focus to the RSC and to include significant treatment of all post-WWII Stratford productions does not compromise the volumes' overall scholarly merit. Each book does attempt to place productions inside the wider theatrical history of the play, both within and beyond the confines of Stratford. Moreover, the authors avoid giving the impression that all RSC productions are equally praiseworthy. Because a less-than-stellar performance can be just as illuminating as a superlative one, scrutiny of all productions is critically warranted. By helping to make the contents of the theater archive at Stratford's Shakespeare Centre Library more available to performance scholars, this series justifies its Stratford focus and performs an invaluable service to stage historians of Shakespeare's plays.

All of the volumes in this series share certain features. An introductory chapter provides a contextual stage history, a description of the archive materials consulted, and some helpful caveats about the reliability of this evidence. Gathering information from reviews, promptbooks, programs, videotapes, stage-manager reports, and other production records, the authors supplement their archival research with interviews of RSC actors and their own recollections of performances (most have seen about half of the productions they cover). Each volume then surveys performances at all three Stratford venues (the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Swan, and the Other Place) beginning in 1946, the year that Barry Jackson took over as artistic director and introduced sweeping changes in the company's operations. The material is arranged in a fashion designed to reveal trends and countertrends in performance choices. These choices are amply illustrated by photographs (at least forty per volume) carefully selected to document multiple details from the productions. Each volume concludes with three appendices that record production credits and cast lists, reviews cited, and abbreviations, followed by a critical bibliography and index.

The entries differ from each other primarily in overall organization. While some authors move through the play chronologically, others approach the material through chapters devoted to specific characters, groups of characters, locations, key scenes, or some combination of the above. Patricia E. Tatspaugh's volume on The Winter's Tale is divided into five chapters, one for each act of the play, with a short interlude between chapters three and four dedicated to the figure of Time. Russell Jackson's Romeo and Juliet entry offers chapters that follow characters such as the Nurse, the Friar, Mercutio, and the star-cross'd lovers up to the final catastrophe, which receives separate treatment in the work's concluding section. The volume on Richard III is the most unusual in this regard. Gillian Day elects to divide her work into three main conceptions of Richard: the political, the psychosocial, and the metatheatrical, with each chapter subdivided into sections that treat specific productions exemplifying these approaches. Day's...