SOURCE: “Some Shakespearean Openings: Hamlet, Twelfth Night, The Tempest,” in The Arts of Performance in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama, edited by Murray Biggs et al., pp. 84-95, Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

[In the essay below, Nuttall evaluates the opening scenes of Hamlet, Twelfth Night,and the Tempest in terms of the challenge presented to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists by the absence of a distinct, visual threshold between the playgoers and the actors on stage. He demonstrates how, in the early lines of these three plays, Shakespeare exploits this drawback—even heightens the sense of uncertainty—by creating openings that emphasize the indeterminacy of the dramatic action.]

It is said that those musical works which begin with a high distant call on the French horn are very hard on the performers. Openings are naturally anxious affairs, but horn-playing is peculiarly vulnerable to nervous tension; a catch in the breath issues in a horribly audible false note. Shakespeare knew from working experience that first lines are similarly charged with anxiety for the performers. This area of potential defeat he turned, like several others, into a field of victory. The actor playing Barnardo in the opening scene of Hamlet finds that, in addition to the usual hazards of uttering the first words of the play, he is being supplied by a dramatist who has chosen, as it were, to live dangerously on his behalf: to have him tremble for a fraction of a second on the edge of farce. Hamlet begins, not with the Ghost of Hamlet's father, but with the ghost of a joke:

barnardo Who's there?
francisco Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

A change in the shading—or the lighting—could transform this, swift as it is, into a familiar comic routine. The sentry, issuing his sonorous challenge, is answered not by a stranger but by a fellow sentry whom he has come to relieve. If the comic structure were more emphatic, we could say that Barnardo is first made a fool of and then, with marvellous rapidity, the same treatment is extended to Francisco (for he, absurdly, challenges Barnardo). One might infer that, since Barnardo has not yet formally taken over from Francisco, he is not yet on duty and that his first words are therefore not a sentry's challenge but a civilian's (alarmed) enquiry. Even if this is the case, the words fall into the pattern of the sentry's challenge (Francisco in reply immediately points out that Barnardo has, so to speak, stolen his line); the point is rendered finer still by the fact that Barnardo is a sentry, coming to take up his post.

Directors often complain about the way modern audiences laugh at the conclusion of The White Devil. It is possible that they always did. Webster in the address to the reader prefixed to the published version complains that the first audience failed to understand him. The ‘ignorant asses’ at that dismal performance (at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell?) in 1612 may well have angered the author as much by their laughter as by their unresponsiveness. A fine control of the ‘horrid laughter’ appropriate to revenge tragedy may always have been difficult. William Empson thought that the special mystery of Hamlet arose from an initial technical problem of just this kind: that Shakespeare was asked to write a new version of Kyd's (?) old play, to please an audience which, while it was genuinely enthusiastic, was ‘tickle o’th'sere’ (that is, slightly too ready to laugh); Shakespeare's response was to ‘pipe off’ the laughter in episodes of histrionic pastiche, retaining all the while a power to freeze all those smiles by confronting the audience with something it could not begin to understand.

I have described the opening of Hamlet as if the dramatist has deliberately doubled the anxiety of the actor by tripping him up, on his first entrance. There is a sense, however, in which scripted mistakings relieve the pressure on the actor. As soon as the audience intuits that all this is part of the play, is authorially designed, the faint absurdity becomes not his but that of the character he is playing. The first horn-call of Hamlet is flawed, but the composer has decreed that it should be so. It is hard, indeed, to avoid a sense of theatrical self-reference in Francisco's third speech. ‘You come most carefully upon your hour’ (I.i.6), but, as I have argued elsewhere (Nuttall 1988), Shakespeare has already, in the first two words, mobilised both laughter and laughter-killing fear. By the time the play is over we know that the question, ‘Who's there?’, was in a manner prophetic, for standing behind Francisco, in the darkness, is a dead king, a most potent negation, having the power to undo the social fabric of Elsinore, to involve others in his own un-being. Perhaps since we know from Lodge's Wit's Misery (1596) that the old play of Hamlet contained a ghost (Lodge, 1963, vol. IV, p. 62), Shakespeare could count on thoughts turning in that direction at the very first words of the play. Before he uttered the first words of the drama, did Barnardo glimpse something or someone other than Francisco? Yet, in any case, the answers supplied by the ensuing action are non-answers, for the essence of the Ghost is that he has no essence. We therefore never really move from the interrogative mood of Barnardo's first speech to an indicative resolution. His question remains truer than other people's answers.

Thus, even as the actors enter the public arena of the theatre, emerging with creaking of boards and rustling of costumes in broad daylight before a crowd of onlookers, a sense is created that we are somehow able to watch the passing of these same figures from the familiar world into the unintelligible world of death. It is often alleged (though with decreasing confidence) that the Elizabethans had no doubts about life after death. Shakespeare relies in this play on our not knowing what death means; on this radical uncertainty the entire shadow-fabric of the drama is raised. Whereas Lear says, ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’ (IV.vi.182-3), the stage on which the actors arrive at the beginning of Hamlet is the dark obverse of that to which Lear alludes. The audience itself, in a good production, experiences a disembodying fear. The laughter is stillborn.

It may be that the artistic practice of beginning not at the obvious first term of a series but part-way through is a Greek invention. Aristotle had only scorn for the low poet who thought artistic unity could be attained merely by recounting ‘all the things that happened to Theseus’ (Poetics, 1451a), and Horace was never so Greek-minded as when he coined the approving phrase, in medias res (Ars Poetica, 148). After the Greek example even those poets with the strongest drive toward a Hebraic natural origin (Milton, say) have felt obliged to avail themselves of the peculiar dynamic of the in medias res opening. Spenser defers to it completely in the opening of his thoroughly Elizabethan Faerie Queene. Note that I exclude here those Greek tragedies that begin at a point within a known, inherited myth, since in such cases there may well be no disorientation at all. It may be said that the distinction between Homer and Sophocles is a little elusive, since the Iliad begins at a certain point in the Trojan story and Oedipus Rex at a certain point in the Theban story. But no one in antiquity records any sense of surprise at the customary Greek tragic playing off of plot against myth. Individual plays could have disorienting openings. Aeschylus' Agamemnon begins, notoriously, with an apparently empty stage, but then the watchman, lying dog-wise on the roof, is suddenly noticed (Denniston and Page, 1957, p. xxxi). But this is a special theatrical effect. The surprise does not flow simply from the fact that the play begins at a late point in the Trojan story. The most majestically developed English drama of the Middle Ages, the great cycles of mystery plays, exhibit a powerful impulse to begin from the ‘deep’ beginning of all things. Such a beginning must be from that which has no prior beginning. The York Cycle opens with the soliloquy of God, a soliloquy which is also an announcement of self-hood. The playwright has no thought of plunging in medias res. Instead he finds that he must stress not so much the immortality of God as his ‘birthless-ness’:

I am gracyus and grete, God withoutyn begynnyng,
I am maker unmade, al mighte es in me …

(Beadle, 1982, p. 49)

We are here as far as one can well be from the artfully interventionist opening of, say, Othello.

The epic in medias res opening remains, so to speak, the central feat of formal art, against the ordinary logic of a ‘natural beginning’. Meanwhile, however, outside the canonical lineage of epic, other less assertive modes of initial disorientation were developed. Chaucer's Book of the Duchess opens not so much in medias res as in medias sententias; the reader, who seems rather to overhear than to hear, is admitted to a stream of rambling reflections on the horrors of insomnia. It is instantly clear that the reader is not being addressed: rather one senses that this monologue may have been going on for some time. In Shakespearian drama it is fairly common for plays to begin in mid-conversation. When figures enter talking, the presumption is that they were talking before they entered.

Ask an ordinary, educated person how King Lear begins and you will probably receive the answer, ‘The play begins with an old king dividing his kingdom.’ In fact it begins, not with the ceremonial entrance of the king, but with a low-key, gossiping exchange between Kent and Gloucester. One needs to be fairly alert to take in the drift of the first words of the play: ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.’ The actor is given very little in the way of a formal send-off by the dramatist—not even the stiffening tempo of verse. It may be said that the first thirty lines or so of King Lear are mere ‘filler’, designed to occupy the time in which an unruly audience is settling down (corresponding, perhaps, to an orchestral tuning-up). But the lines contain important information, concerning both the political world of the play and the question of Edmund's parentage. The Winter's Tale begins, in a somewhat similar fashion, with gossiping courtiers. All this suggests (after all that we have said about unwanted laughter) a surprisingly docile audience, which will fall silent at the first appearance of the actors—even when those actors (in this contrasting strongly with most late medieval drama) appear strangely negligent of their real-life auditors, to be wholly preoccupied by their own concerns. It may be that the audience was brought to order very simply, by a trumpet-call or the striking of a staff upon the stage. In which case the notable thing is Shakespeare's studious exclusion of the event from the inner texture of his frame. As far as I know, the surviving evidence (for example, Dekker's The Gull's Hornbook) points to an association of trumpets with formal prologue openings but tells us nothing about ‘low-key’ openings. (Chambers, 1923, vol. IV, p. 367; vol. II, p. 542).

Such a style of opening is the reverse of rhetorical: though Shakespeare, the master-rhetorician, knows very well that people can be made to listen with a different sort of attentiveness to words which they conceive to be addressed, not to them but to someone else. The queer false privacy of proscenium arch theatre is already well developed, on the projecting stage of Shakespeare's Globe. In like manner, it is surely a mistake to think that the scripted ‘improvisations’ of the figures labelled A and B in the text of Fulgens and Lucrece, or the irruption of Ralph from the audience in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, are a simple continuation of the sort of improvisation achieved by the young Thomas More. William Roper tells how ‘at Christmas-tyde the boy More would sodenly sometimes steppe in among the players, and never studyeng for the matter, make a parte of his owne there presently among them, which made the lookers-on more sporte than all the plaiers beside’ (Roper, 1935, p. 5). The behaviour of this brilliant, loved and applauded little boy contrasts strongly with that of the children in More's own Utopia, written years later: they are required to stand at table, keeping absolutely quiet, waiting to be given food by the adults (More, 1965, p. 142). One may guess, moreover, that the actors, perhaps, did not feel so warmly about little Thomas. Scripted pseudo-improvisation, meanwhile, presupposes a high degree of docility in both actors and audience. But such audiences (as we know today) can still laugh in the wrong places.

It will be evident that Hamlet does not conform exactly to what we have described as the in medias sententias mode. Instead of an overheard continuity we have a pivotal movement (one sentinel replacing another), crisis replacing stasis at the very inception of the drama. Nevertheless, we enter the world of the play after the first two appearances of the Ghost, though before its crucial encounter with the Prince. The further development whereby ordinary disorientation is suddenly extended into absolute mystery (life appropriated by death) might be supposed something essentially tragic. Yet there is a curious equivalent in comedy.

Twelfth Night opens, indeed, with a major chord, struck by the fantastical Duke in melancholic soliloquy, but at I.ii the play has what might be called a secondary opening:

viola
What country, friends, is this?
captain
This is Illyria, lady.
viola
And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother, he is in Elysium.

Barbara Everett has said of this exactly what needs to be said: ‘Illyria is a name and a place that from the first maintains its own mocking half-echo of Elysium, a place of death as well as of immortality’ (1985, p. 295). ‘Illyria’ may draw on other remoter echoes—‘idyll’, ‘delirium’ (both words extant in English in Shakespeare's time, neither used by him), but Elysium is the word he planted in our minds. Viola, as she makes her first entrance on the stage, is half-bewildered by a strange thought: that she ought to be—perhaps is—dead. Barnardo in his opening, nerve-stretching speech, was instantly wrong-footed on a point of personal identity. Viola is similarly wrong-footed but this time even more fleetingly, on a question of context, which in its turn throws into question her own identity as distinct from her brother's. In Hamlet we have a lurking emissary from beyond the grave; Viola wonders conversely why she has not followed her drowned brother, and then, with the echoic word ‘Elysium’, the dramatist plants the further, fainter thought that Viola may herself be a new arrival in a place of (strangely happy) death. In both plays our responses are quickened by a sense of death as an alternative world, eerily coinciding with the palpable unreality of dramatic performance (creaking boards, Illyrians). Yet what I earlier called the fictional ‘lighting’ of the scene is indeed quite different. Hamlet begins in an imagined darkness, Twelfth Night, I.ii, in strange brightness. It is noteworthy that so complex a feat of emotional overlapping can be accomplished with such simple language, yet it is so. ‘Illyria’, while it echoes ‘Elysium’, also figures as its living antithesis, so that the dominant character of the situation for her is its incongruity.

It is easy to ‘hear’ in ‘What should I do in Illyria?’ an echo of Et in Arcadia ego. Erwin Panofsky in his famous essay on the phrase (1955) did not succeed in tracing it back before Guercino's pastoral death's head, which may belong to 1623, the year of the Shakespeare First Folio. Panofsky argued that, by the rules of Latin syntax, the phrase properly means, not ‘I too have lived in Arcadia’, but ‘Even in Arcadia, I (death) am’ (p. 296). Anne Barton (1972, p. 164) cited the Latin phrase, and the two great Poussin paintings in which it occurs, with reference to the momentarily disorienting intrusion of the idea of death towards the end of As You Like It. Yet it is in the early, marvelling sequence in Twelfth Night, in which Viola finds herself new-lighted in Illyria, like the sea-stained Odysseus in Phaeacia, that Shakespeare comes closest to the cadence of the Latin phrase.

It may seem that my argument has doubled back and consumed itself, the transcendent world of the dead now cancelled by a bright land of happy, living persons. But we must not allow the proper ambiguity of the scene to be lost. Elysium, like the Christian Heaven, is itself ambiguous: a place of dead people; a place where people find, to their joy, that they never died. Thus Viola's marvelling at the incongruous brightness of her surroundings does not automatically or unequivocally enforce the ‘corrective’ answer, ‘She never died at all.’ In a student production of Twelfth Night directed by Edward Kemp in Oxford in 1987, Viola entered Illyria at the beginning of I.ii by appearing over a wall and descending a ladder into the world of the play. Although we can be reasonably certain that the original Elizabethan actor did no such thing, the device caught very exactly and economically the ‘liminal’ feeling of the scene. With her first words Viola crosses some magic threshold.

Shakespeare has found a way to turn the nervousness of the actors and the uncertainty of the audience to account. His method is to involve both parties in far larger uncertainties. Performances, qua performances, are real physical events, making clamorously importunate demands upon our senses, yet at the same time the events displayed are not real events. This paradox of absence-in-presence is so familiar as to be normally almost unnoticeable. But Shakespeare reactivates the latent oddity by associating it with other antitheses: life/art, waking/dream, being/unbeing, life/death. These in their turn can release further paradoxes: art may be more vivid than that quotidian existence, the undiscovered country may be lit by a brighter sun than shines on us. That is why, instead of employing some dramatic equivalent of the in medias res opening of classical epic, he finds his way, via various versions of what I have called the in medias sententias opening, to an entry not so much into the midst of (known) things as between things, or between whole orders of things. The ordinary indeterminacy of Elizabethan and Jacobean staging, with its rudimentary scenery and correlatively high demands upon the imagination of the audience, is made the vehicle of an ontological indeterminacy.

With Twelfth Night we allowed the notion of an opening to extend as far as I.ii. With The Tempest we must allow it to extend still further into the play. We begin fortissimo, with a crashing of chords. We are plunged in the centre of the storm which gives the play its name. The over-riding voice is that of the tempest itself, not of the human agents. There is here no difficulty over the securing of audience attention since, according to the Folio stage direction, the first thing we hear is thunder. I suspect that the force of this particular audacious opening has been paradoxically diminished by the rise of electronic wizardry in the twentieth century. In some present-day productions of The Tempest the sound effects are so overwhelming as to turn the actors into twittering, almost inaudible ghosts of themselves; the original coup de théâtre is intolerably coarsened.

The dialogue is as informal, as lacking in overt rhetorical address, as the low-key gossiping openings we have already noticed, but here the human agents, for all their shouting, are further reduced, to mere confused panic. At line 62 comes the cry, ‘We split, we split, we split!’, and the audience knows that the ship is wrecked. Can we say that at the beginning of the play we see the ship wrecked? The question is of some interest because it turns out later (V.i.224) that the ship is perfectly all right (whether because magically reconstituted or because the wreck was some sort of illusion, James, 1967, p. 30). It is virtually certain that the King's Men did not contrive to overturn the stage at this point. The trap was too small to have been of any use. Instead we may suppose that they relied on the auditory sense. In this they could be reasonably secure: in drama of the period the authority of the ear is higher than that of the eye. Irwin Smith writes that when a nocturnal scene was presented at the candle-lit Blackfriars theatre, all the artificial illumination was unchanged, though the character (night-shirted, carrying his own candle), would speak of darkness (1964, pp. 302-3). Audiences were educated to respond to verbal indications of action or situation (which is why the ‘Dover Cliff’ episode in King Lear is so disorienting—Edgar's vertiginous speech compels, as it were, an excess of assent). ‘We split!’ will therefore be believed. Moreover the words may well have been accompanied by some sound as of rending timber. The slightly odd Folio stage direction a couple of lines before, A confused noise within, has usually been taken, since Capell's commentary, to refer to the quick-fire exclamatory speeches which immediately follow, but it is just possible that it points to some non-human sound effect—say, a creaking. At IV.i.138, the masquing spirits heavily vanish To a strange, hollow and confused noise. There the noise is almost certainly inhuman. It must be weird and a little alarming—a piece of Jacobean avant-garde theatre. Further, the moment at which the spirits ‘heavily vanish’ may place some strain on our earlier confidence that the stage itself did not move. After all, we are dealing with a play which post-dates the leasing in 1608 of the second Blackfriars theatre (candle-lit performances, ‘transformation scenes’). What if, both in I.i and IV.i, Shakespeare once more succeeded in exploiting a technical problem—this time the presence of some over-ingenious mechanism—either by deliberately throwing away the oil-can or by ‘covering’ with some louder noise, to induce yet another species of disorientation? In I.i, however, the sailors are all, manifestly, still in place after the confused noise has been heard. It may also be salutary to recall G. F. Reynolds (1940, p. 43) on the scene in The Two Noble Ladies (1619-23) in which two soldiers crossing a river are drowned in full view of the audience; we could easily have inferred from the text some minor miracle of illusionism but we happen to know how it was done: two Tritons entered and dragged the soldiers away.

With the beginning of I.ii we pass into the alternative shock of a strange tranquillity, from the wreck to the unhurried conversation of father and daughter. The contrast of ‘volume’ is so marked as to make us doubt momentarily the reality of what we just ‘witnessed’. This intuition is reinforced as Miranda tells us, in her first speech, that the whole episode may have been an effect of (Prospero's) art. All this, to be sure, operates at the subordinate level only; the dominant impression is that Miranda has witnessed, as we have witnessed, a shipwreck.

Yet a certain ‘ecphrastic colouring’ persists in the speech—a sense, that is, that we are listening to the description of a work of art rather than a reaction to a real disaster. ‘O I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer’ (I.ii.5-6) somehow suggests what we in the twentieth century have learned to call ‘audience-empathy’. The disaster with ‘no harm done’ (I.ii.14) succeeds in anticipating various psychological explanations of the pleasure of theatrical tragedy. The way Miranda gazed at ‘the brave vessel, / (Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her)’ (I.ii.6-7), and the way she gasped at the fate of the ‘poor souls’ (1. 9), seems not wholly unlike the way Leontes' soul is pierced by what he takes to be a statue of Hermione ( Winter's Tale, V.iii.34). We may think also of the speech of the third servant on the painting of Daphne, in The Taming of the Shrew:

Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds,
And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep,
So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn

(Induction, ii, 56-9).

The special oxymoron of ‘weep’ and ‘workmanly’ is absent from Miranda's speech, but ‘by your art’ is only a few lines away.

Meanwhile the sense we found in Twelfth Night of passing through death by water to another world recurs here. The life of the Island is not our life. When in II.i the castaways enter, as Viola entered in I.ii, amazed to find their bodies and their clothes intact, they see the Island differently: one sees lush greenery while another sees a barren landscape (II.i.54-6). Once more, Shakespeare exploits the visual indeterminacy of Jacobean scenery. There is a line in Virgil which is commonly assumed to describe the condition of the dead:

Clausae tenebris et carcere caeco
(Shut up in darkness and a blind prison.)

(Aeneid VI.734)

In fact it is uttered by one of the inhabitants of Elysium (which has a larger sky than ours, VI.640) to describe the inhabitants of our world. When Prospero invites Miranda to cast her mind back to ‘the time before’ (I.ii.39), to the real, living world of Milan, the image is not, as we might have expected, of a far-off, brilliantly illuminated picture, watched from the shadows by exiled spirits. Instead we have the line that haunted Keats:

What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?

(I.ii.49-50)

The dream-island is brighter than the political reality.

In The Tempest the threshold between sleep and waking is exploited to the same end, becoming indeed a place of transit where we may feel the dream could cross. The wakings in the play all lay stress on the equivocal character of perception at such moments: we may think here of Gonzalo and others at II.i (the arrival in this strangely transposed Elysium), and the sailors in V.i. Miranda compares her dim memory image of the ladies who attended her with a dream (I.ii.45), and Prospero, in the play's most famous speech, finally links the ideas of sleep and death (‘our little life / Is rounded with a sleep’, IV.i.157-8). The effect is rather of a cycling movement than of a linear imaginative drive to an unequivocal resurrection. Caliban, after all, having woken, cried to dream again. At the end of The Tempest the pastoral pattern, whereby a golden world, having been applauded, is at last eagerly exchanged for a return to court, is followed.

This essay discerns no single ‘law’ or ‘deep structure’ in Shakespearean openings, though it has been concerned with a certain pattern of affinity, by which even plays as generically opposite to one another as Hamlet and Twelfth Night may be linked. Shakespeare who endlessly recycles his imaginative intuitions rarely if ever repeats himself. The drift of this essay has been to find a strange equivalence between the world of the dead and various versions of Fairy Land. One may think of the medieval poem, Sir Orfeo, in which the ancient story of Eurydice undergoes a Celtic transformation, so that she is carried off to the world of the dead by a band of fairies. In Shakespeare, none of it will, so to speak, keep still. If the eye is allowed to wander, it will notice that in A Midsummer Night's Dream my notion of ‘lighting’, whereby an initially tragic conception is altered by a simple increase in illumination, is entirely overthrown, since in the Dream the silvan pastoral is made nocturnal. Shakespeare is not even thrifty enough to confine his openings to the beginnings of his plays. In The Merchant of Venice there is a secondary opening, at the end of the play, into the ‘old money’ lovers' Paradise of Belmont, once again nocturnal but now lifted high in the air, above the sordid traffic of Venice, a little nearer the ever-singing stars. I have pursued my reason not to a conclusion but to a bardolatrous O altitudo! Meanwhile, it all has its funny side:

sir andrew
Begin fool. It begins ‘Hold thy peace.’
feste
I shall never begin if I hold my peace.
sir andrew
Good, i’faith. Come, begin.

(Twelfth Night II.iii.66-8)

References

All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

Aeschylus (1957) Agamemnon, ed. J. D. Denniston and D. Page, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Aristotle (1972) Poetics, introduction, commentary and appendices by D. W. Lucas (the corrected reprint of the edn. of 1962), Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Barton, Anne (1972) ‘As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending’, in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (eds.), Shakespearean Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 14, London: Edward Arnold, pp. 160-80.

Beadle, Richard (1981) ed., The York Plays, London: Edward Arnold.

Chambers, E. K. (1923) The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Empson, William (1980) ‘Hamlet’, in his Essays on Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 79-136. This essay is a revised version of ‘Hamlet When New’, Sewanee Review, 61 (1953), pp. 15-42, 182-205.

Everett, Barbara (1985) ‘Or What You Will’, Essays in Criticism, 35, pp. 294-314.

Horace (1901) Q. Horati Flacci Opera, ed. E. C. Wickham, rev. H. W. Garrod, Oxford: Clarendon Press (no page nos.).

James, D. G. (1967) The Dream of Prospero, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lodge, Thomas (1963) The Works of Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. (a re-issue of the Hunterian Club edition, Glasgow, 1883), New York: Russell & Russell.

More, Thomas (1965) Utopia: The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. IV, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, New Haven: Yale University Press. This edition, begun in 1963, is still incomplete.

Nuttall, A. D. (1988) ‘Hamlet: Conversations with the Dead’, Annual Shakespeare Lecture to the British Academy, Proceedings of the British Academy, 74, pp. 53-69.

Panofsky, Erwin (1955) ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, Meaning and the Visual Arts, New York: Doubleday, pp. 295-320. This is a revised version of ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau’, Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, eds. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931, pp. 223-54.

Reynolds, G. F. (1940) The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater, 1605-1625, Modern Language Association of America, General Series, no. 9, London: Oxford University Press.

Roper, William (1935) The Lyfe of Sir Thomas More, knyghte, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, no. 197, London: Oxford University Press. This work was written about 1556 and first printed in 1626.

Smith, Irwin (1964) Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Design, London: Peter Owen.

Virgil (1969) P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford: Clarendon Press.