74
PARTISAN REVIEW
Bellow writes one or Bernard Malamud writes one or Andre Malraux
writes one, and what it means to produce, let's say, "Charlie's
Angels" or "Gunsmoke" or something for television. You have to
run an endless gauntlet, you have to examine an endless number of
Nielsen ratings, you have
to
have pilot projects, everything has to be
tailored. Every television writer knows that he's doing something
different from what Shakespeare or other writers in the past did. I
would suggest that historical facts are part of the idea of history.
DAVID THORBURN: I respect what you're saying, but I think that the
failure of history in this case is yours, not mine. Of course a poem by
John Donne is not the same thing as "Charlie's Angels," but that's
not what I suggested. What I suggested was that the structures and
arrangement of the Elizabethan theater bear a very sharp resem–
blance to certain kinds of arrangements that existed in Holl ywood in
the era of the great studios and that obtain now in the television
industry.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: Are there more differences or more similarities
between
Hamlet
and "Charlie's Angels"?
DAVID THORBURN: Suppose instead of talking about
Hamlet
and
"Charlie's Angels" we talk about
A Woman Killed with Kindness
and "The Rockford Files," for example. Now
A Woman Killed with
Kindness
was one of the most popular plays on that stage, and of
course there were many far inferior to that.
Hamlet
is one of the great
pinnacles of that stage and it seems to me that if we actually talk
about the historical-
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: "Charlie's Angels" is one of the pinnacles of
television?
DAVID THORBURN: What I'm really suggesting is that a genuinely
historical perspective will recognize the extent
to
which our senti–
mentality about the originality of the artist and the idea of the artist
speaking in a kind of absolute freedom is exactly that, a kind of
sentimentality. I think we should recognize that Dickens went out in
the street and did a form of audience research and had no delusions
about it, especially early in his career. And that the profession of
dramatist in Shakespeare's day was held in at least as Iowan esteem
as the profession of television writer is today. What we need to do is
to
stop categorizing things and saying, "Oh yes, there's this stuff in
the university curriculum and there's this stuff that's gobbled up by
the masses," because in fact that's what the London Puritans said
when they forced the Elizabethan theaters to move outside the city
limits. They said about the Elizabethan theater exactly what many
high-brows say today about television. What we need to do, I think,
