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The Albatross and the Swan: Two Productions at Stratford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Extract

Has the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford become an expensive irrelevance – actually hindering what should be the real work of the parent company, which has to expend so much of its cash and its energy in running it? Certainly, some were tempted to suggest so when the RSC's most exciting Shakespeare productions of the ‘seventies seemed to be emerging from the spartan environment of The Other Place. Now, Graham Holderness, through a detailed comparison of last season's main-house revival of The Taming of the Shrew and the Swan production of Titus Andronicus, argues that the creation of the Swan – a theatre space specifically but not ‘archeologically’ designed for Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – heightens the sense of a ‘contradictory relationship’ between the RSC's two ‘classical’ houses in Stratford. Graham Holderness, author of several studies in the fields of Renaissance drama and the modern novel, is presently Head of Drama at Roehampton Institute.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

Notes and References

1. I am naturally indebted to Holland's, PeterStyle at the Swan’, Essays in Criticism, XXXVI, No. 3 (07 1986)Google Scholar.

2. Miller, Jonathan, interviewed by Graham Holderness, in Holderness, Graham, ed., The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 201Google Scholar.

3. Belsey, Catherine, ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’, in Drakakis, John, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (Methuen, 1986), p. 190Google Scholar.

4. Dusinberre, Juliet, Shakespeare and the Nature of Woman (Macmillan, 1975), p. 104Google Scholar.

5. Brecht, Bertolt, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. Willett, John (Eyre Methuen, 1965), p. 63–4Google Scholar.

6. Peter Holland, op. cit., p. 194–5.

7. Ibid. p. 202.