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To look at the performance history of Titus Andronicus is to confront some provocative questions such as why has this play posed severe problems for generations of readers, critics, editors, actors, directors, and playgoers. The book examines twelve major theatrical productions and one film, on the play, that appeared in the years 1989-2009. It begins with Edward Ravenscroft's version that superseded Shakespeare's script. Peter Brook chose to stylise or formalise many moments, and Deborah Warner's production worked with no cutting of the script. Every staging of Titus elicits comments about the daunting nature of the script. The book presents Irving Wardle's reactions on Trevor Nunn's 1972 rendition, and Stanley Wells's review of the Swan production. The densest concentration of such problems and anomalies, as perceived by today's directors, critics, and editors, comes in the final scene. The productions that opened in 1989, directed by Jeannette Lambermont, Daniel Mesguich, and Michael Maggio, cut and rearranged the text liberally, often in an attempt to avoid the laughter. During the period 1989-99, three major European directors, Peter Stein, Silviu Purcarete, and Gregory Doran, focused their attention on the ways in which the play can be made to comment on specific contemporary affairs. Julie Taymor's venture in 1994 combined stylization with the 'visceral reality' as a means to keep spectators off balance and continuously sensitive to the shocking brutality of the play's events. The book ends by discussing the efforts of Yukio Ninagaw, Bill Alexander, Gale Edwards, Richard Rose, and Lucy Bailey.
a eulogy by Stanley Wells and ends with a tribute from Terry Hands), and later we find ourselves in an oak-panelled room at Court Lodge with Paul, Stanley, Paul Prescott and Michael Dobson. 4 Paul Edmondson and I swap impressions of the Globe production (he didn’t care for the doubled Dukes either), and the conversation turns to As You Like It : Paul tells me of a poem by Wendy Cope, pinned up in the
Ralph Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635) is a narrative and allegorical work, which weaves together a complex collection of tales and episodes, featuring knights, ladies, sorcerers, monsters, vertiginous fortresses and deadly battles – a chivalric romp in Spenser's cod medieval style. The poem shadows recent English history, and the major military and political events of the Thirty Years War. But the Supplement is also an ambitiously intertextual poem, weaving together materials from mythic, literary, historical, scientific, theological, and many other kinds of written sources. Its encyclopaedic ambitions combine with Knevet's historical focus to produce an allegorical epic poem of considerable interest and power.
This new edition of Knevet's Supplement, the first scholarly text of the poem ever published, situates it in its literary, historical, biographical, and intellectual contexts. An extensive introduction and copious critical commentary, positioned at the back of the book, will enable students and scholars alike to access Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures, and allusions.
them from the earth? Notes 1 William Shakespeare, Richard II , in The Oxford Shakespeare , edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2005), 3.2.12–20. 2 Aristotle, History of Animals , translated
remedies’ (2.2.153–5), ‘[f]or this enormous state’ can be interpreted as ‘on behalf of England’, 8 according to Stanley Wells. But Cordelia’s army, unlike Bolingbroke’s, is no ‘war machine’ and is beaten by the enemy. Bolingbroke’s re-appropriation of his inheritance cannot be dissociated from reprisal. There are no less than three reasons for him to settle the score: Gloucester’s opaque murder, his unjust
-stage renditions cannot help but expand our understanding of the potential in this script. Stanley Wells argues, moreover, that, after the example set by Deborah Warner, ‘subsequent directors will have far less excuse than before for evading its problems by textual adaptation or by evasive theatricalism’. Progress has been and is being made. Nonetheless, the long tradition of Titus- bashing has left its mark. The jokes and burlesques continue. Few theatrical professionals are willing to emulate Warner and her cast so as
Jonson distinguishes different collaborators: ‘a co-adjutor, / Novice, journeyman or tutor’ ( Volp. , Prologue.17–18). 1 As Stanley Wells puts it: ‘A coadjutor would be an equal collaborator, a novice a kind of apprentice, a journeyman a hack brought in perhaps to supply a comic subplot, and a tutor a master craftsman guiding a novice’ ( 2006 : 26). In the case of
that they have heard. Stanley Wells has written that this is a moment when ‘the audience is made aware of the play as a mimetic representation, in which they are conscious of the play as play, the actor as actor; for the performers they are watching are in fact enacting the “lamentable tale”, and the audience are the hearers who, if the actors succeed, will go “weeping to their
. 4 Candidates for the dark lady have included Mary Fitton, mistress of William Herbert; 5 the Oxford innkeeper Jane Davenant; 6 and most recently ‘Black Luce’ (a.k.a. Lucy Negro), a Bankside prostitute nominated by G. B. Harrison. 7 Surveying the arguments for each of these women, in 2004 Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells concluded