VERSIONS OF SHAKESPEARE
Mary McCarthy
T
HE
American theater, unable to produce a renaissance of its
own, has imported an old one. With the withering away of the
American playwright the Elizabethan playwright has been called in
. to understudy. During the nineteen twenties, the most energetic years
of the American theater, a few old stagers with repertory companies
of confirmed Shakespearean hams were, as if by common consent,
appointed official caretakers of the Bard, and an occasional revival
of
Hamlet
or
Romeo and Juliet
on the part of a recognized star was
no more than a duty call paid to the grave of an honored but distant
relative. Today the best and liveliest young talent has been turned
full blast on Shakespeare and his colleagues. The last two seasons have
seen nine high-powered Elizabethan revivals, with three more pro-
mised before the season's end. Since both American and British acting
seem to be temporarily in crescendo, and the Elizabethan plays are
admittedly good, the result has been two quite stimulating theatrical
seasons.
The current phenomenon of a theater without playwrights sug-
gests that classic plays have an additional function beyond those
generally assigned to them. Classics, in general, are supposed (a) to
please readers and (b) to instruct writers. The present Elizabethan
facade of Broadway makes one think that classics, by their very
nature, are also meant to fill a cultural interregnum, to tide over an
art medium which, without them, would collapse.
In
a literal sense,
this can only be true of the interpretative arts, music, stage production
and criticism, and, obviously, such use of the classics is most ob-
servable in these fields. I am totally ignorant of music, so of that I
cannot speak, but it is painfully clear that in American literary critic-
ism the tendency is to re-examine the great works of the past, since
practically no creative literary work is being done in the present.
However, in a more obscure and less explicable manner, the classics
can, it seems to me, act as a life-line to the primary arts themselves.
This is because the relationship betwcen the primary and the inter-
pretative arts is not one-sided but reciprocal, and the classics, by
keeping the interpretative arts alive and perhaps even fermenting
them a little, can vicariously succor the primary arts. Thus the interest
in problems of acting and production which this regime of revivals has
imposed upon theater people can hardly fail, if properly handled, to
introduce new techniques, which will evoke new playwrights who
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