Amongst my late father’s collection of Shakespearian related publications
are two volumes of ‘Shakespeare Survey’ numbers 33 and 35.
These were annual publications, published by Cambridge University Press,
which I believe started in the late 1940’s and are probably still being
published each year and contain studies and essays on Shakespeare works
by eminent scholars.
Numbers 33 and 35 were published in 1980 and 1982 respectively. Although
all the contents of these is fascinating, Volume 35 has an article ‘Shakespeare
on the Melbourne Stage 1843-1961’.
This contribution covers many pages, but it starts with the following
account which I found fascinating.
Barely ten years after John Batman, one of the first settlers in
Victoria, had made a treaty with the aborigines which the central government a
few years later decided to ignore, Othello
was played in Melbourne.
It was the first Shakespearean play to be staged in the colony, on 4
September 1843, under the management of Conrad Knowles, in a wooden shed in
Bourke Street which seated 500 and was called the Pavillion.
The article continues:
It was astonishing that Shakespeare was produced at all, for instead of
the ‘fashionable’ house that The Port
Phillip Gazette anticipated, Knowles had to contend with wild unruly
audiences.
This was the Yahoo period of Australian stage history when barbarism
reigned triumphant. When he played Shylock in September ‘certain parties’ were
refused admission to the dress circle.
These volumes also contain some photographs of stage plays including
David Suchet as Shylock and Archilles (Troilus and Cressida) and Donald Sinden
as Lear, and Patrick Stewart as Titus.
Footnote: I (Satima, your
trusty blog mistress) chased up this publication’s history. Apparently it
started in 1948, and the 2017 edition is now available. You can see for yourselves at https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/collections/shakespeare-survey
Doesn’t this sound fascinating? I hope Peter will bring the magazines along to
a club meeting for a ‘show and tell’!
