EDITIONS

The programme note is an undervalued genre. Although the programmes sold in the lobbies at major Shakespearian productions often include superbly incisive accounts of the play and its reception history, usually written by a prominent figure in the profession, they are virtually never cited in scholarly discourse. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to find programme notes given pride of place in Roger Warren’s new Oxford edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Warren begins his introductory essay by quoting at length from Hilary Spurling’s description of the world of the play in her programme note for a 1970 RSC production. The next section of the introduction similarly opens by citing Anne Barton’s programme note for her husband’s 1981 production, in which she defines the central topic of the play as ‘how to bring love and friendship into a constructive and mutually enhancing relationship’.

Warren’s unconventional use of programme notes is one of the features that distinguishes this edition as the work of a man of the theatre. Whereas the ‘stage history’ in many editions can be a tired distillation of previous reviewers’ accounts,Warren’s descriptions of productions over the last forty-odd years draw extensively on his firsthand experience. Warren does not suffer bad acting gladly. He witheringly characterizes the BBC Television version of the play as a ‘vilely spoken’ production in which ‘few of the actors know how to speak verse – the main fault is to stress personal pronouns when the text doesn’t’. When Warren’s recollection of a given production differs from that in a published review, he attempts to adjudicate the discrepancy by tracking down the original players. In reviewing Robin Phillips’s 1970 production of the play, Robert Smallwood reported seeing ‘a little enigmatic flicker of a smile’ on the face of the actor playing Proteus, Finbar Lynch, before he began to speak his crucial lines in the final scene. Warren, however, ‘recalled a clenching of the mouth that spoke of inner tension, even resentment’, and so asked Lynch ‘to cast his mind back fifteen years to that moment’. Lynch reported that ‘both he and his director believed that Proteus’ repentance was genuine’.