Shakespeare's Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context (review)

Most modern Shakespeare dictionaries try to produce range—in both subject and definition. Early modern dictionaries and word glosses, on the other hand, were written by one person and unabashedly represented the character, opinions, and concerns of their author. So John Rider defining the word "Pope" in his Riders Dictionarie (1606) frankly expressed his belief that the man was "Sathans chiefe vicar on earth" (sig. T6^v).¹ Reading Hugh Richmond's Shakespeare's Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context is like reading Rider's Dictionarie: it is similarly idiosyncratic, opinionated, touchingly personal, and relentlessly single focused. For Richmond's book is an account, in dictionary form, of its author's lifetime of thinking about Shakespeare: it covers the books he read and by which he was influenced, the productions he saw in Berkeley or at the "restored" Globe, and the themes around which he constructed his own articles. All this information is presented in alphabetical order, with word choice as quirky as everything else, so that "sharers" is followed by "shirt," "short lines," and "Mrs Sarah Siddons."

When the dictionary functions as a Shakespeare glossary, it is clear and useful; explanations for such words as "hobby-horse" and "rack" are well-written and precise. Moreover, the book provides the reader with plenty of opportunities for the serendipitous discovery of forgotten (or never-known) words or definitions: that the Cockney "wotcher" is a corruption of "what cheer?" (98), or that "thrum" in "Cut thread and thrum" (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.286),² has a precise meaning ("the tuft ending a warp where it is attached to the frame of a weaving machine") (460).

When the dictionary offers to be a guide to the actors, theaters, or critics of Shakespeare, however, the extent (and limitation) of its range of references becomes an issue. The names Richmond chooses are at once one of the book's pleasures and one of its chief irritations. So a relatively obscure eighteenth-century scholar such as Maurice Morgann, the Baconian, is given a section (302–3), as is the nineteenth-century Baconian James Spedding (432–33), while there are no entries for important and influential Shakespearean critics of the same period—Edmund Malone, Samuel Johnson, or even John Payne Collier. The same strangeness governs the choice of historical actors. "The Principal Actors" mentioned in the Folio all have separate submissions—but the only eighteenth-century player with one is Sarah Siddons (to whom frequent reference is made throughout the book, largely because of her triumph as Queen Katherine in Richmond's favorite play, Henry VIII). Betterton, meanwhile, is not referred to even in passing, and Garrick and Irving do not merit individual entries. Modern actors, who never feature among the "headwords," are sometimes mentioned in the context of recent productions—with the result that John Gielgud is entirely absent from the text, but Toby Cockerell, who played Princess Katherine in the Globe's Henry V, is thrice referred to and his performance said to provide "practical data" for the idea that boy-players in Shakespeare's theater were not viewed homoerotically (79, 230, 504). Film actors are not covered, because film itself barely receives a mention. This, one might argue, is hardly surprising in a book on theater—but then suddenly there will be the unexpected and oddly random allusion, as when Olivier's film of Richard III is featured under "crown" as, in the film, "the crown becomes a dominant visual symbol . . . of royal power" (129).

Richmond's lifetime of theater visits is very important to the book. Many of the fascinating entries said to give proof of particular insights are based on productions to which most readers had no access—like the 1996 California Shakespeare Festival Cardenio that, according to Richmond, confirmed "the negative verdict" about the play (87; the entry leaves it unclear whether this was in fact a performance of Theobald's Double...