The Shakespeare Revolution: Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

“Young man, how dare you meddle with Our Shakespeare!” Thus threatened an anonymous lady, shaking her fist in the face of the designer for Nigel Playfair’s futurist As You Like It. By the end of Professor Styan’s The Shakespeare Revolution, such dinosaurs have been reduced to geophysical irrelevance, and “the real Shakespeare” authentically discovered. This is the record (substantively, from the Victorian era to 1970) of a triumphal historic progress, the change in our perception of Shakespeare in the theatre and in the study. Its heroes are William Poel, Harley Granville-Barker, Tyrone Guthrie, and Peter Brook. Its symbolic villains are Beerbohm Tree, A.C. Bradley (“Bradley’s great book may in time be seen as a disaster”), and, most sinister, closet Shakespeare. (“Closet Shakespeare was soon to receive a shattering blow.”) The dual theme here is the evolution of superior methods in the theatre, and the rapprochement between theatre and scholarship. Its conclusion is a serene accord between stage and study based on equal status and a shared assumption, “the perception of the plays as blueprints for performance.” All this is set down with a deft and wide-ranging touch. Cambridge, be it said, have done well to produce a book with so much text and 18 plates for so modest a price (albeit the proofreading is not impeccable), and this book deserves to be on the shelf of every Shakespearean, of whichever tribe. It is an authoritative statement of a ruling orthodoxy.

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