The Public Arts: Drama's Electronic Renaissance: Part II continued

LP's CAN HELP

The chances are greatest for students seeing these plays, and seeing the play is the thing. What about the drama of other times, other places? This is where a combination of printed text and full-length recordings comes to our support. Consider what vicarious theatre the following LP's, produced during the past year, can provide your best students.

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the William Butler Yeats translation, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, starring Douglas Campbell and the Stratford, Ont., Shakespeare Festival Players (Caedmon TC 2012, 2-12" LP's). One who has seen the splendid color film of this highly stylized (perhaps "ritualized" is a better term) production cannot abstract his powerfully touched visual memory from the recorded performance to know how much the LP misses the evocative masks of Tanya Moiseiwitch (the splendid golden mask of Oedipus makes a striking album cover) and the wonderfully appropriate movements of the chorus.

One suspects a great deal is lost, and perhaps the LP will develop sufficient interest in the film so that it too will soon be released for school use. But the LP does faithfully reproduce the soaring readings of the tragic lines and the curious and weird sing-songy intonation of the chorus. And while one regrets the lost dimensions of the film, still the case for an LP is well put in the good, but too brief liner notes: "The difference between this Stratford production of Oedipus Rex and our own imaginings is exactly the difference between the whiteness of Greek architecture as we see it today and the Oriental polychrome glitter of 2500 years ago."

The Yeats translation is available in Dudley Fitts, ed., Greek Plays in Modern Translation (Dryden Press, 1947), but one wonders why it isn't included in the album unless reprinting Yeats would be prohibitively expensive. One would also like to see at least black and white closeups of the splendid masks. But these are minor quibbles, and if enough schools add such albums to their basic theatre libraries, we could begin to expect and ask for similar fringe benefits.

There are other translations available: J. T. Sheppard's in Eight Great Tragedies (Mentor, 500), a fine new paperback that includes work by Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare (Lear), Ibsen, Strindberg, Yeats, and O'Neill, and essays on the form by Aristotle, Hume, Emerson, Tillyard, I. A. Richards, Joseph Wood Krutch, and a note on the Greek theater by the college professors who edited the volume; Theodore Howard Banks' new translation of the Three Theban Plays (Oxford University Press, $1.25), and E. F. Watling's translation of the three (Penguin, 500).

Useful background material: The Reader's Companion to World Literature (Mentor, 500); Walter Agard's The Greek Mind (Anvil Books, Van Nostrand, $1.25), half intellectual history, half anthology; and Francis Fergusson's critical essay on the play in The Critical Performance: American and British Literary Criticism of Our Century (Vintage, 950).

Everyman: A Moral Play, starring Burgess Meredith, is volume two in Monuments of Early English Drama (Caedmon TC 1031, 1-12" LP). A text of the play makes this believable performance even more useful in the high school classroom. The director of the performance, Howard O. Sackler, has chosen voices that aptly embody the various allegorized virtues and vices, and the illusion carries, even to the near-comic anemia of Good Deeds, enfeebled by Everyman's lack of grace. Frederick B. Artz's excellent essay on "The Origins of Modern Drama," in The World of History (Mentor, 350), will supply important background. The Portable Medieval Reader, ed. by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (Viking, $1.25), is a rich source of insight into the social context.

The fifteenth-century woodcut from the English Convent of Syon reproduced on the cover of the album is a reminder to teachers of the importance of the visual arts in recreating a total cultural milieu. Medieval Vista, an album with text of twenty-four color illuminations illustrative of all phases of life in the Middle Ages, is excellent material for the opaque projector. (Book of the Month Club, $1.25.)

The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Dramatized Version by Nevill Coghill, as broadcast over the BBC, is the first album of The Spoken Word, Inc. (10 E. 39th Street, New York 16), a new firm directed by Seymour Siegel, imaginative broadcasting statesman of WNYC, New York's municipal station. Although the four 12" LP's cost $20.00, the content and the elegant binding (reproducing woodcuts from a 1498 edition of the Tales in the British Museum) justify the prices. And since the word "dramatized" can be taken today to mean "hokked up," it should be pointed out that the dramatization and narration merely consist in having quotations within a tale presented by another actor instead of by the narrator.

Selections include the "Prologue" (with passages in Middle English by Nevill Coghill), "The Monk's Tale," "The Nun's Priest's Tale," "The Reeve's Tale," "The Manciple's Tale," and "The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale." The monk's delightfully lugubrious recitation of tragedies (or stories of those who have fallen from high estate), somewhat abbreviated from the original seventeen, should go well in the classroom.

The tale of Chanticleer's hubris of course appears in many anthologies. The almost hilariously complicated fortunes of Constance, daughter of the King of Rome, is a medieval "Perils of Pauline" that will give modern teen-agers an amusing image of earlier pieties. The reeve's attempt to get even, story for story, with the miller is a good bit too strong for the high school classroom.

The same reservation probably applies to the manciple's tale out of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I think a good case could be made for letting mature students use the adult sides if their reading in the Nevill Coghill translation (Penguin Classics, 950) interests them enough to ask. I have in mind the kind of student who needs to know that literature has a robust and virile dimension.

A further interest in the Coghill translation, i.e., besides its intrinsic freshness, is that he has made many variations in the broadcast version, in effect giving students a chance to see a translator at work. The record's value is further enhanced by illuminating spoken introductions to the readings. The Spoken Word, Inc. has made a very creditable debut; their catalog will undoubtedly become another rich resource for the English profession.