SHAKESPEARE IN PRODUCTION

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

This edition is the first to offer a detailed account of the theatrical treatment of Troilus and Cressida on the British and North American stages from its first revivals at the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The illustrated introduction also briefly traces the play from its earliest printings and adaptation in the seventeenth century through its period of theatrical neglect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and notes some important Continental productions. Frances A. Shirley gives an overview of the conceptions behind the important revivals, and responses to those revivals, as well as noting the critical trends that helped shape a great variety of more recent theatrical approaches.

 The authoritative New Cambridge Shakespeare text, edited by Anthony B. Dawson, is accompanied by detailed commentary on stage business, actors’ interpretations, specific use of settings and properties, and substantial textual alterations. The introduction also shows the close ties between theatre and the political, social and cultural contexts of productions. This edition will be useful to students of Shakespeare in performance and to those intrigued by the rise in popularity and change in reputation of what is still considered one of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays.

FRANCES A. SHIRLEY is Professor of English Emerita, Wheaton College, Norton, MA. Her publications include Shakespeare’s Use of Off-Stage Sounds, Swearing and Perjury in Shakespeare’s Plays, an edition of Webster’s The Devil’s Law-Case and a collection of critical essays on King John and Henry Ⅷ.

SHAKESPEARE IN PRODUCTION

SERIES EDITORS: J. S. BRATTON AND JULIE HANKEY

This series offers students and researchers the fullest possible stage histories of individual Shakespearean texts. In each volume a substantial introduction presents a conceptual overview of the play, marking out the major stages of its representation and reception. The commentary, presented alongside the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the text itself, offers detailed, line-by-line evidence for the overview presented in the introduction, making the volume a flexible tool for further research. The editors have selected interesting and vivid evocations of settings, acting and stage presentation, and range widely in time and space.

ALREADY PUBLISHED
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Trevor R. Griffiths
Much Ado About Nothing, edited by John F. Cox
Antony and Cleopatra, edited by Richard Madelaine
Hamlet, edited by Robert Hapgood
The Tempest, edited by Christine Dymkowski
King Henry V, edited by Emma Smith
The Merchant of Venice, edited by Charles Edelman
Romeo and Juliet, edited by James N. Loehlin
Macbeth, edited by John Wilders
The Taming of the Shrew, edited by Elizabeth Schafer
As You Like It, edited by Cynthia Marshall
Othello, edited by Julie Hankey

FORTHCOMING VOLUMES
Twelfth Night, edited by Elizabeth Schafer

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

EDITED BY
FRANCES A. SHIRLEY

Professor Emerita,
Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, USA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521796842

© Cambridge University Press 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-79255-4 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-79255-X hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-79684-2 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-79684-9 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

It is no longer necessary to stress that the text of a play is only its starting-point, and that only in production is its potential realized and capable of being appreciated fully. Since the coming-of-age of Theatre Studies as an academic discipline, we now understand that even Shakespeare is only one collaborator in the creation and infinite recreation of his play upon the stage. And just as we now agree that no play is complete until it is produced, so we have become interested in the way in which plays often produced – and pre-eminently the plays of the national Bard, William Shakespeare – acquire a life history of their own, after they leave the hands of their first maker.

 Since the eighteenth century Shakespeare has become a cultural construct: sometimes the guarantor of nationhood, heritage, and the status quo, sometimes seized and transformed to be its critic and antidote. This latter role has been particularly evident in countries where Shakespeare has to be translated. The irony is that while his status as national icon grows in the English-speaking world, his language is both lost and renewed, so that for good or ill, Shakespeare can be made to seem more urgently ‘relevant’ than in England or America, and may become the one dissenting voice that the censors mistake as harmless.

 ‘Shakespeare in Production’ gives the reader, the student and the scholar a comprehensive dossier of materials – eye-witness accounts, contemporary criticism, promptbook marginalia, stage business, cuts, additions, and rewritings – from which to construct an understanding of the many meanings that the plays have carried down the ages and across the world. These materials are organized alongside the New Cambridge Shakespeare text of the play, line by line and scene by scene, while a substantial introduction in each volume offers a guide to their interpretation. One may trace an argument about, for example, the many ways of playing Queen Gertrude, or the political transmutations of the text of Henry Ⅴ; or take a scene, an act, or a whole play, and work out how it has succeeded or failed in presentation over four hundred years.

 For, despite our insistence that the plays are endlessly made and remade by history, Shakespeare is not a blank, scribbled upon by the age. Theatre history charts changes, but also registers something in spite of those changes. Some productions work and others do not. Two interpretations may be entirely different, and yet both will bring the play to life. Why? Without setting out to give absolute answers, the history of a play in the theatre can often show where the energy and shape of it lie, what has made it tick, through many permutations. In this way theatre history can find common ground with literary criticism. Both will find suggestive directions in the introductions to these volumes, while the commentaries provide raw material for readers to recreate the living experience of theatre, and become their own eye-witness.

J. S. Bratton
Julie Hankey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this edition has been made possible by generous help from the librarians and staffs of many institutions, including the British Library, the Westminster Reference Library, The Library of Congress, Harvard’s Houghton Library, The Boston Public Library, The Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, and the Wheaton College Library. I have been assisted in innumerable ways by Georgianna Ziegler and her staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library; Niky Rathbone and her staff at the Birmingham Central Library (The Birmingham Shakespeare Library); Annette Fern and Kathleen Coleman at the Harvard Theatre Collection; Marion Pringle, Karen Brown, Helen Hargest and the staff of the Shakespeare Centre Library; Janet Birkett and others at the British Theatre Museum; Sarah Cuthill, Keeper, University of Bristol Theatre Collection; Richard Mangan, Administrator of the Raymond Mander and Joe Michensen Theatre Collection; and Louise Ray, Archivist of the Royal National Theatre. Theatres and their publicity departments have also provided information about promptbooks and production photographs. They include The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, The Royal National Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company, Amy Richard at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Ellen Charendoff at The Stratford Festival Canada. Edward Brubaker has furnished many insights on productions of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Jill Levenson, Robert Ormsby and especially M. J. Kidnie have made accessible details and opinions about the 2003 Stratford Canada production that I did not have a chance to visit. Sister Agnes Fleck provided notes and a tape of a Terry Hands discussion. During the whole process, I have been grateful to the series editors, J. S. Bratton and Julie Hankey, for their guidance and patience, and to Sarah Stanton of the Cambridge University Press for her continuing assistance.

 Finally, I am most appreciative of the permissions given by the copyright owners of the illustrations.

EDITOR’S NOTE

I have silently corrected occasional misprints in quotations from newspaper articles, especially some reprinted on the Internet. Where details of costumes, sets and stage business have come from three or more reviews, a promptbook or production videotape, or, in the case of many Stratford, London and North American revivals I have seen since 1956, the sort of notes Arthur Colby Sprague taught me to keep, I have not footnoted extensively, but merely mentioned the company and date, especially in the commentary to the text.

 The play text used is The New Cambridge Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida, edited by Anthony B. Dawson, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

ABBREVIATIONS

Note
Journal references appear in an abbreviated form in the text, but can be found in full in the bibliography. References to newspaper and periodical reviews are found only in footnotes and the commentary.

PRODUCTIONS

The following is a selective chronological list of productions of Troilus and Cressida in English. Where amateur or semi-professional productions are noted, they were either pioneering or considered important enough for substantive reviews in major newspapers. All productions between 1679 and 1733 are of the Dryden adaptation. The first name after the title of the company is the producer or director (early producers were the equivalent of today’s directors). Where principal actors are listed, ‘T’ stands for Troilus, ‘C’ for Cressida, ‘P’ for Pandarus, ‘U’ for Ulysses, ‘TH’ for Thersites, ‘A’ for Achilles, and ‘H’ for Hector. SMT represents The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and its company. It became the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1961, and RST stands for their main Stratford theatre. All locations are in Great Britain, most often in London, unless otherwise indicated by company name or the notation of a city.

 A chronology that includes many Continental revivals, but omits some of the British and American productions listed below, can be found on the Theatre for a New Audience web site http://www.tfana.org/2001/troilus/ chronprt.htm as of this writing.

Theatrical productions

Radio, television and recordings