This has been a lively but uneven year for the English Shakespearian stage. It is not often, for example, that one can report not merely on exciting performances but also on two separate proposals to build scholarly reconstructions of Jacobean theatres. But the making of stages, as well as the playing upon them, has in 1983-4 involved an odd mixture of gratified hopes and worrying disappointments.

On 5 September 1984 the Royal Shakespeare Company announced that an anonymous benefactor had given all the money needed to build a third auditorium in Stratford. To be called the Swan, this 430-seat theatre will have a large apron stage surrounded on three sides by three tiers of galleries. First planned in the late 1970s, and long since despaired of for lack of finance, this approximation of a Jacobean indoor playhouse will be open from the summer of 1986.

Just three weeks after this exhilarating news came a rather different announcement. For fifteen years Sam Wanamaker had been fighting to build a replica of the Globe close to its original site on Bankside. Much, though not all, of the money had been raised. An impressive list of rich and royal patrons had been gathered to the colours. Scholars and architects had collaborated on a design for a building in which Shakespeare's plays could be rendered in something very close to their original conditions. The Globe Trust reached an agreement with Southwark Council and the developers Derno whereby the cost of the site for the theatre would be financed by the construction of an adjacent office block.