SOURCE: “‘Beginners, Please’; or, First Start Your Play,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1993, pp. 72-84.

In this essay, first delivered as a lecture in Vienna in April 1992, Smallwood describes a series of Royal Shakespeare Company productions in which directors prefaced the first lines of text with various devices designed to promote specific interpretations, create atmosphere, or lead the audience into the world of the play. The critic points out that each of these techniques evokes the same question: where does a play begin?

I want to begin in Vienna.¹ In one sense it is 1991, in another it is 1604, but it looks late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century, and it sounds it too, with a Strauss waltz rather wheezily rendered on an inadequate band with too much brass about it, and couples dancing in a half-lit café before dispersing, a little mechanically, apparently in search of more intimate surroundings. The episode has...