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Meager Lead and Joyous Consequences: RSC Triumphs Among Shakespeare's Minor Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

William P. Shaw
William P. Shaw
Affiliation:
Professor of English atLe Moyne College
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Extract

Bassanio's words, as he chooses the correct casket to win Portia as his wife, might offer an insight to the production history of the Royal Shakespeare Company:

An impressive number of the RSC's greatest theatrical triumphs have been stagings of Shakespeare's “meager lead,” his lesser or minor plays. To seek the common element in these surprising coups, I will examine four productions of such plays, one from each of the conventional generic categores, and spanning four decades in the history of the RSC: Brook's Love's Labor's Lost (1946) and Titus Andronicus (1955), Hall's and Barton's Troilus and Cressida (1960), Hands' Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1977).

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 27 , Issue 1-2 , November 1986 , pp. 37 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1986

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References

NOTES

1 The Merchant of Venice, III. ii. 104–07, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 3rd ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1980), pp. 276–77. Although “Royal Shakespeare Company” was not an official title until 1960, it is used as a title of convenience in this paper (as it was used for Sally Beauman's book) and because the directors mentioned worked through the date when the title changed and thus helped shape the RSC.

2 Manchester Guardian, 29 April 1946. Notices from this and the other productions I will be discussing (unless otherwise stated) come from the scrapbook collections of press cuttings housed in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library, where the fuller bibliographical information of volume number, page number, etc. are not indicated for each review.

3 “The Theatre,” The Tatler, 8 May 1946.

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