Andrew Gurr

The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford edition

Instructors and students worldwide welcomed the fresh scholarship, lively and accessible introductions, helpful marginal glosses and notes, readable single-column format, all designed in support of the goal of the Oxford text: to bring the modern reader closer than before possible to Shakespeares plays as they were first acted. Now, under Stephen Greenblatts direction, the editors have considered afresh each introduction and all of the apparatus to make the Second Edition an even better teaching tool.

The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria In The Winter's Tale

THE BEAR AND THE STATUE ARE PRECISELY matching counterparts in the two halves of The Winters Tale. The bear brings the tragic half to an abrupt conclusion using the same theatrical device, the double-take, that Hermiones statue provides when it comes to life to conclude the plays second half. The two figures, if put together, set up enough teasing interactions between art and nature to complicate intriguingly the ostensible opposition between the two contraries laid out so emphatically by Perdita and Polixenes in their debate in IV. iv.

The Rose Theatre, London: the state of knowledge and what we still need to know

The Rose theatre – the place in Elizabethan London where one could see Shakespeare and Marlowe performed – may have started life as a bear-baiting arena. This is one of the deductions drawn from this new study of the archive from the excavations of 1989. The authors also present a new model for the theatre’s evolution, offer a fresh reconstruction of the building in its heyday and put in a powerful plea for more archaeological investigation on the ground.

Shakespeare's factory: archaeological evaluations on the site of the Globe Theatre at 1/15 Anchor Terrace, Southwark Bridge Road, Southwark

The physical form of the Elizabethan theatre, as shown by contemporary prints and engravings, has long been an important field of study for Shakespeare scholars. The discoveries in the late 1980s on Bankside of first the 16th-century Rose theatre and then the Globe have provided material remains of these structures, but at the same time posed new questions relating to design and construction, as this account of the excavation of part of the Globe site in 1989 and 1991 graphically demonstrates.

The playhouses: Archaeology and after

Archaeology has given a great deal to theatre history in recent years. We have the entire footprint of the Rose, and fragments from two other theatres, plus evidence about bear-baiting houses and other Elizabethan structures. They quite literally make a more tangible contribution to our knowledge than anything that has survived on paper. What they can tell us is also rather more reliable than anything else, such as the De Witt drawing. But many problems remain, not least in creating the most plausible interpretations of the signs that the archaeologists have given us. The best of what has been found is now available in a book (Bowsher and Miller) which gives us precise measurements and photographs of the multitude of pieces from the Rose and the Globe sites. They also make a beginning on what is likely to prove a complex and in many aspects unrewarding analysis of what they can tell us. That beginning displays its own flaws, and should warn us about how fragmentary so much of the evidence still is, and how much remains to be done with it. Identifying at least some of what remains to be done is the aim of this article.

2. "Blue Mountains and Strange Forms"

In 2002 when Rudy Wiebe is 68 and gets Canada its first Nobel Prize for Literature, The Blue Mountains of China will probably be hailed as the first major novel of his early maturity. That won’t be quite right, since it has few of the orthodox properties of the novel, and has indeed a form unique to its own peculiar properties. The Blue Mountains has been called a saga and a chronicle, both of them terms which imply an episodic narrative.’ It is truly neither episodic nor a narrative, and can’t be fitted into or even closely related to any existing category. Its form is unique, with some elements of the short story and some elements of the &dquo;whole-book&dquo; story sequence, together with an architectonic structure which offers no more than a minimal justification for its being presented to the struggling reader as

A Black Reversal

Othello was in part Shakespeares reaction to Peeles Battle of Alcazar. In a revival in 1601 Alleyn played the chief villain in blackface. This stereotype Shakespeare reversed in his subsequent play. This raises the question what other stage figures might have worn blackface.

2. JCL and the Implied Reader

the first issue should be brought out to coincide with the Commonwealth Arts Festival in September 1965. By March edited copy of everything except two of the bibliographies was with the publishers. Galley proofs arrived simultaneously with my first batch of university examination scripts in June, page proofs followed me on the family holiday in August. The first copies of No. 1 were delivered on 15 September 1965, the very day on which ProfessorJeffares convened in Leeds a small meeting of writers and scholars from most Commonwealth countries for the purpose of establishing the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Some things should have been better managed. Nobody should ever