Abstract
A cursory glance at the drama section of used bookstores throughout England will often lead the curious browser to a slim, black volume with simple white lettering down the spine. If slipped from the shelf, the square tome reveals a logo and cover art that proudly associate the text with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre, thus marking it as one of the Swan Theatre Plays, a series of programme/play-texts offered to audiences during the theatre’s early years. A look at the back cover reveals the specific purpose of a theatre: ‘dedicated to the discovery and rediscovery of Shakespeare’s context: plays by his contemporaries, plays that influenced him, plays that he influenced and plays he was rumoured to have had a hand in writing.’1 The cover goes on to indicate that the Swan Theatre Plays series formed an integral part of the theatre’s mission insofar as it was ‘designed both to accompany the productions at the Swan and to preserve in print a record of the plays presented there’.2 In doing so, Swan editions provided — and continue to provide — easy, inexpensive, and in some cases nearly unique access to the relatively neglected works that formed the core of the theatre’s early repertoire. Yet despite the importance of the Swan Theatre Plays in making rare dramatic works available to a broad public and as the only multi-season, coordinated performance edition published by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), no study exists of the editions in whole or in part, nor has any academic addressed their impact upon audiences who were likely encountering the scripts for the first time on the page and/or the stage. This study hopes to fill that void by exploring the Swan Theatre editions in general and by demonstrating how the RSC used these volumes to manage responses to plays by Shakespeare’s rival playwrights.
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Notes
Quoted from the back cover of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Programme. Dir. Barry Kyle, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan Theatre Plays Series (London: Methuen, 1986). With minor variations in wording, this information appears on the back cover of all plays in the series.
Ibid.
Ibid., 6. Trevor Nunn’s essay, ‘A Plan for the Swan’, appears in all four of the plays published to accompany the plays in the Swan’s inaugural season.
Charles H. Shattuck, The Shakespeare Promptbooks: A Descriptive Catalogue (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 5.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Quoted in Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116.
William Shakespeare, The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Production of Henry V for the Centenary Season at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, ed. Sally Beauman (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1976).
David Selbourne, The Making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: An Eyewitness Account of Peter Brook’s Production from First Rehearsal to First Night, ed. Simon Trussler (London: Methuen, 1982).
Michael Dobson, ed., Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
The case of Hyde Park and The New Inn could be explained within the ‘For Further Reading’ sections in the introductions to each play, where commentator Simon Trussler explains the lack of modern scholarly editions of Hyde Park and tells readers that the ‘single modern critical edition of The New Inn has been edited by Michael Hattaway for the “Revels Plays” series’ by Manchester University Press. Although one may be able to deduce the origins of the RSC’s copy text from these comments, the case is far from conclusive. Simon Trussler, ‘For Further Reading’, in James Shirley’s Hyde Park, Proramme. Dir. Barry Kyle, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan Theatre Plays Series (London: Methuen, 1987), xxi. Simon Trussler, ‘For Further Reading’, in Ben Jonson’s The New Inn, Programme. Dir. John Caird, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan Theatre Plays Series (London: Methuen, 1987), xxii.
Trevor Nunn, ‘From Conference Hall to Theatre’, in This Golden Round, ed. Ronnie Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Stratford-upon-Avon: Mulryne & Shewring, 1989), 7.
Fish’s notion of interpretive communities, like the Kuhnian ‘paradigms’ that preceded it, has been subject to a variety of critiques, particularly relating to the theory’s reliance on relativism that, in Gerald Graff’s words, ‘releases readers from responsibility to the text’ and to the near impossibility of determining the constitution of a community. Fish’s work is summarized in his own Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980) and interrogated, by Gerald Graff and others, in Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise, ed. Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). Worthen draws upon Fish’s work in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), while Hodgdon utilizes Fish in essays in The Shakespeare Trade (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
Quoted in Ben Jonson, The Silent Woman, or Epicoene, Programme. Dir. Danny Boyle, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan Theatre Plays Series (London: Methuen, 1989), ix. With minor variations in wording, this information appears in eight of the plays in the series, beginning with 1987’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and including The New Inn, The Constant Couple, The Plain Dealer, The Man of Mode, Romeo and Juliet, Doctor Faustus, and The Silent Woman, or Epicoene. Trussler did not prepare introductions for Titus Andronicus or Restoration, and his biography is not included in any of the volumes from the first season, nor the first two volumes of the second.
Simon Trussler, ‘The Jew of Malta: A Critical Commentary’, in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Programme. Dir. Barry Kyle, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan Theatre Plays Series (London: Methuen, 1987), xvi.
Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: 1890–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 268–71.
Lindsay Cook, ‘Fast-lane philosophy’, Yorkshire Post (Leeds), 29 March 1988. Jeremy Kingston, ‘The Jew of Malta’, The Times, 25 March 1988. Michael Billington, ‘Revenge of a tireless rogue’, Guardian, 16 July 1987.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. James R. Siemon, 2nd edn. New Mermaids. (London: A & C Black, 1997) 3.4.44. R. V. Holdsworth, ‘Farcically final’, Times Literary Supplement, 31 July 1987. Michael Billington, ‘This is the Jew that Marlowe drew’, Guardian, 25 March 1988.
Edward Phillips, ‘Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum’, in Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588–1896, ed. Millar MacLure (London: Routledge, 1979), 51–2.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Christopher Marlowe’, in Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Leech, Twentieth Century Views (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1964), 16.
James L. Smith, ‘The Jew of Malta in the Theatre’, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris, Mermaid Critical Commentaries (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 11.
Ibid., 14.
Francis Meres, ‘Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth’, in Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588–1896, ed. Millar MacLure (London: Routledge, 1979), 46. Trussler, ‘The Jew of Malta’, xx–xxi.
David Lamont Cook, ‘Double dealings’, Sunday Sun (Newcastle-upon-Tyne), 21 February 1988. ‘Fun evening…’, North Shields News Guardian and Wallsend Guardian (Whitley Bay), 25 February 1988.
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© 2013 Laura Grace Godwin
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Godwin, L.G. (2013). Fishing at the Swan: Swan Theatre Plays and the Shaping of an Interpretive Community. In: Brown, S.A., Lublin, R.I., McCulloch, L. (eds) Reinventing the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137319401_19
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