‘Making meanings: Shakespeare’s poetry for the theatre’

The article reviews some current approaches to Shakespeare and takes issue with a recently fashionable idea that Shakespeare wrote to be published in print. It argues instead that he wrote to be performed but, more than that, he wrote with a view to the rehearsal conditions in the Elizabethan theatre, i.e. the quality of that writing needs to be analysed with an understanding of the ways in which early modern actors read their parts and rehearsed. Too often the signals that are of infinite value to performing readers are smoothed out of modern editions.