Drama's Electronic Renaissance: III

Christopher Marlowe

This series on new possibilities for teaching drama began with the conviction that much instruction in the genre of drama had been ritualistic and ineffective simply because a printed text is no substitute for living theatre. Now, less vicariously than before, through TV, movies, LP recordings, and inexpensive paperback texts, our students can learn more emphatically than ever that the play's the thing. The LP repertory particularly deserves our attention, and some notice has already been taken in this department of material available from Greek times through the English Middle Ages.

Christopher Marlowe's The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, with Frank Silvera in the title role (Caedmon TC 1033, 1-12" LP), is Volume IV in that firm's Moments of Early English Drama. Particularly impressive beyond the strong reading of Marlowe's "mighty line" are the weirdly appropriate music in the magic scenes and the effective use of sound effects to create the illusion of physical action. This short version deserves inclusion in a school library because the play reveals the conflict between medieval and Renaissance values. Also, as the Shakespeare repertory grows, it is reasonable to add recordings like this one to give students a fuller sense of the richness and diversity of Elizabethan theatre.

The Old Vic's Romeo and Juliet (RCA-Victor LVT-3001, 3-12" LP's) is now available for those whose appetites were whetted (?) by last season's truncated TV version. Unluckily Paul Rogers' TV Mercutio is missing, but the performance is a useful one, in spite of Claire Bloom's quavery-voiced Juliet. It is hard, however, to understand why RCA-Victor failed to include the text of the play in the album. Such unreasonable skimping (given the regal price-tag for the three-record set) is tolerable so long as Appleton-Century-Crofts keeps its inexpensive paper-covered edition in print. And it is easy to be in a forgiving mood to RCA-Victor now that George Marek of that company has announced plans for a complete Hamlet, with John Gielgud, in the fall.

The Hallmark TV productions of Macbeth and Richard II are available free from Associated Films, 347 Madison Avenue, New York 17. Teachers who have shied away from the Richard kinescope for lack of texts will now find the Pelican edition cheap and durable enough. The Macbeth volume can be taken as typical of the series, since the editor of this play is also general editor. His prefatory essays on "Shakespeare and His Stage" and "The Text of the Plays" precede a special essay on Macbeth. It is useful for information on both sources and allusions, but one wishes there were more specific analyses of imagery (such as his helpful comments on the apparitions) and fewer metaphysical speculations about the nature of evil.

It would help work-a-day teachers to have a first-rate explication of the "fair is foul, foul is fair" theme that runs through the play, or to have an explanation of how the themes of the play are supported by the imagery of blood, death, and sleep. On the other hand, while one desires the insights of the "New Criticism," still one cannot denigrate the importance of scholarly knowledge: e.g., the information that the "cat i' th' adage" wanted fish but didn't want to get its paws wet (I, vii, 44, p. 43). But isn't it possible now to have the benefits of both aesthetic and historical approaches to literature in the same discussion? That these complementary modes of enriching literary awareness are not incompatible is brilliantly argued in Lionel Trilling's "The Farmer and the Cowboy Make Friends," The Griffin (Fall 1956, Reader's Subscription, 1140 Broadway, New York 1).

Penguin Books would put us even more in debt if they asked their editors to prepare critical comments and study suggestions for teachers on the film translations of Shakespeare now available to schools, e.g., MGM's Julius Caesar, Hallmark's Macbeth and Richard II, and Olivier's Hamlet and Henry V. Meanwhile we look forward with eagerness to the completion of their splendid new series.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (Angel 3542, 3-12" LP's) belongs in every basic library of English drama. From the very first line when Lady Sneerwell asks Snake, the (literal, not figurative) scandal-monger, if her spiteful paragraphs have been planted in the papers, to Snake's final telling the truth (for twice the price of telling a lie), Sheridan etches a schoolful of acidly scandalous portraits: foppish, unpublished poet Sir Benjamin Backbite; hen-pecked Sir Peter Teazle; and his ambitious, too-young (for Sir Teazle) country wife; the brothers Surface; and gossipy Mrs. Candour. A handsome, sixteen-page folio pamphlet prints excerpts of the text (what's wrong with the entire text! ! !), Alan Dent's informative history of the play, and profiles of the actors. The play is reprinted along with others by Sheridan in Louis Kronenberger's Dramabook ($1.45: Hill Wang, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York 11).

Penguin has a text of Shaw's Saint Joan to use with the Siobhan McKenna version (RCA-Victor LOC 6133, 3-12" LP's). This is a recording of the famous Phoenix Theatre production. It is really extraordinary to be able to recreate in any classroom in America the performance that made Miss McKenna the sensation of London, Dublin, Boston, and New York. Now that the Shaw canon is finally finding its way into the anthologies, let us hope that Saint loan will soon become a standard piece.

Perhaps the most important tactical use of the recording is to counteract the bad effects of the Otto Preminger film, which has been almost universally condemned as a monument to bad taste. Preminger's gross and vulgar strategies of promotion (his screening 18,000 possible Joans to come up with his own creation) ought not pass by unnoticed and uncriticized.

The fact that commercial films and TV go in cycles, some of which are not useful to English teachers, should not make us despair. At the present time, it seems that paperbacks and recordings are the most useful media. Let us use them all the more while we sit out a slack TV season or two. The paperback-recording combination affords teachers an unusually effective tandem aid for stretching the horizons of the best students. We can bring them closer to the classics now than ever before.