Shakespeare Survey: Beginnings and Continuities

Summary

'We are approaching the mid-year of our century, and it is time for us to take stock, to inquire what in fact we have accomplished in study and on stage, and, by considering what yet remains to be done, to direct our path for the future.' This rather Baconian sentence comes from Allardyce Nicoll's Preface to the first number of Shakespeare Survey in 1948. One of the main features of the early numbers was a 'Retrospect' on what the first fifty years of the century had contributed to some one branch of Shakespeare studies. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, after fifty years of publication, here is a brief, personal retrospect on Shakespeare Survey itself.

In the autumn of 1945 Allardyce Nicoll returned to England from his years in the United States as Professor of Drama at Yale and, during the war, working for the British Embassy in Washington. He took up his post as Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Birmingham with very clear plans, and he carried them all out within three years. He wanted to found a Shakespeare study-centre at Stratford-upon-Avon, just over twenty miles from Birmingham, and hold there an annual international Shakespeare conference, and he wanted to found a new Shakespeare yearbook, something like but not too like the Shakespeare Jahrbuch.