Shakespeare in Australia: Notes

1. (Newark and London: Delaware UP, 1992). [Back]
2. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). [Back]
3. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). [Back]
4. See such biographical studies as W. J. Lawrence, Life of Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, Tragedian (Belfast: Dunn, 1892), Robert M. Sillard, Barry Sullivan and his Contemporaries (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), Alec Bagot, Coppin the Great :Father of the Australian Theatre (Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1965), Ian Dicker, J. C. W.: A Short Biography of James Cassius Williamson (Sydney: Elizabeth Tudor Press, 1974) or Garry O'Connor's Darlings of the Gods: One Year in the Lives of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984), which chronicles the Old Vic to Australia and New Zealand. See also the Keans' account of their tour in J. M. D. Hardwick's edition of Emigrant in Motley: The Journey of Charles and Ellen Kean (London: Rockliff, 1954); their Australian work has been examined by Helen Duff ('Charles and Ellen Kean in Australia, 1863--64', unpublished BA (Hons) thesis, University of NSW, 1965). Allan Wilkie's company has received special attention from Lisa Warrington ('Allan Wilkie in Australia: the work of a Shakespearean actor-manager', unpublished MA (Hons) thesis, University of Tasmania, 1981), Alan Brissenden ('Shakespeare's Australian travels', in Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle and Stanley Wells (eds), Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions (Newark and London: Delaware UP, 1994)) and, most recently, from Kath Leahy ('Significant acts: low comedians and leading actors on or off the Australian stage', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, NSW, 2001). The Bell Company's work has been examined by Linda Gellard ('Playing Australia: the Bell Shakespeare Company and questions of national identity' (unpublished B A (Hons) thesis, University of NSW, 2000)). There have been many excellent localised studies, for example Eric Irvin's 'Shakespeare in the early Sydney Theatre' (Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 125--33), Dennis Bartholomeusz's 'Shakespeare on the Melbourne stage, 1843--61' (Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 31--41), and Joan Palmer's incomplete typescript, 'Shakespeare in Brisbane' (John Oxley Library, Brisbane). [Back]
5. (Parkville, Vic: Dept. of English, University of Melbourne, 1993). See also Richard Waterhouse's chapter, 'Shakespeare, the opera and the construction of high culture', in his Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture since 1788 (Melbourne: Longman, 1995). [Back]
6. (Sydney: Science Press, 1994, 1995 and 1996). [Back]
7. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), back cover. [Back]
8. In New South Wales, Shakespeare was on the secondary English syllabus in 1911, and was taught earlier in the more elite institutions: in 1896 John Waterhouse, the headmaster of Sydney High School, objected to the teaching of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'as I consider that many of the passages in this [é] textbook are too suggestive' (K.J. Cable, 'Reform, Depression and Revival', in Arch Ferguson (ed.), High: The Centenary History of Sydney High School (Brookvale, NSW: Child & Henry, 1983), p.25. [Back]
9. The Nugent Report re-positions the Bell Shakespeare Company closer to the centre as a 'niche company'. [Back]
10. Katharine Brisbane, 'John Bell', in Companion to Theatre in Australia, ed. by Philip Parsons with Victoria Chance (Sydney: Currency Press/Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p.85. [Back]
11. We borrow the phrase from Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 'Introduction: Shakespeare and the post-colonial question', pp.1--19, p.1. [Back]
12. In her paper, '"The drama in its truest excellence": Hobart Town Shakespeares', at the Sixth Biennial ANZSA Conference, 'Dislocating Shakespeare: Limits, Crossings, Discoveries', Auckland, 7--10 July 2000. The sources do not name the four taken to the theatre, but if it was the same group photographed by H. A. Frith two nights earlier at a ball at Government House, they were William Lanney, Bessy Clark, Mary Ann Arthur and Truganini. There is dispute about how many Tasmanian Aborigines were still living at this time. [Back]
13. Michael Neill interrogates the significance of the Endeavour Shakespeare in 'Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the centre', in Loomba and Orkin (eds), Post-Colonial Shakespeares, pp.164--85, p.171, but he seems unaware that the Shakespeare, if it was indeed aboard, was in the personal library of literary, historical and aesthetic books of the artist Sydney Parkinson (see D. J. Carr, 'The books that sailed with the Endeavour', Endeavour, 7 (1983), pp.194--201, p.196). [Back]
14. It should be noted, however, that the Shakespeare supposedly on board the Endeavour was in Parkinson's private collection, and that in 1864 'the four aborigines', in 'the boxes' with 'their Superintendent, Mr. Dandridge', 'appeared to be particularly amused by the novelty of their situation, and frequently applauded the performers' (Mercury, 29 August 1864). [Back]
15. In 1989, for example, the Malaysian-born director Kai Tai Chan (founder of the One Extra Company in Sydney in 1976) 'explored Australia's colonial history in an adaptation of Othello' (Jacqueline Lo, 'Dis/orientations: contemporary Asian-Australian theatre', Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s ed. by Veronica Kelly (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1998), pp.53--70, p.58. [Back]
16. Helen Gilbert sees an important difference between 'Aboriginalised' productions like Black Swan's, which gave the Aboriginal actors 'equal billing with their non-Aboriginal counterparts', and the casting of Aborigines in 'racially marked roles', like Caliban. ('Reconciliation? Aboriginality and Australian Theatre in the 1990s', in Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s ed. by Veronica Kelly, pp.71--88, p.79 and p.87, n.9) [Back]
17. This production, for the Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 1, was advertised as a 'world first' (SMH, Festival of the Dreaming complete booking guide, 1997, p.10). [Back]
18. Although Shakespeare was the first love of the English-born and -trained Dampier, commercial necessity forced him to put popular demands first, literally: for seasons from the 1880s to 1900 he would run a melodrama for five nights a week and a Shakespeare play on the sixth, a Friday. [Back]
19. Individual plays have received some attention, either in terms of discussion of a specific production (eg John Golder and Richard Madelaine's 'Elsinore at Belvoir St: Neil Armfield talks about his Hamlet', ADS 9April 1995), 54--80), or of a broader performance and practice in the presentation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, 1850--1980' (unpublished BA (Hons) thesis, University of Queensland, 1984) and Coralie Venus's work on Macbeth in Australia (postgraduate work in progress, University of New South Wales) and, in an international context, Alan Brissenden's introduction to his edition of As You Like It (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) and three volumes in the Shakespeare in Production series (Cambridge: Cambridge UP): Richard Madelaine's Antony and Cleopatra (1998), Christine Dymkowski's The Tempest (2000) and James Rigney's Julius Caesar (forthcoming 2002). [Back]
20. Shakespeare societies were strong in Melbourne from the mid 1880s, active at the University of Adelaide and inother capital cities, and even a force in Wagga Wagga from 1895. [Back]
21. See W. Farmer Whyte, William Morris Hughes, His Life and Times (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957), p. 241; in Hughes's own Politics and Potentates (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950), pp47-9, there is a different version in which the victim is a 'Russian Finn' called Ericson. [Back]
22. See O'Malley's speech, 'The Christening of Canberra' (1913), Canberra, ScreenSound Australia (the National Film and Sound Archive), cover no. PNM000434, recording no. 242895. [Back]