Shakespeare at Antioch

Abstract

NTIOCH has finished Shakespeare-or, at any rate, has produced thirty-six Shakespearian plays, one of which was a tele4 ^ scoping of the three parts of Henry VI. In its fifth season' under the direction of Arthur Lithgow, the Shakespeare Festival at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, has offered All's Well That Ends Well, Love's Labour's Lost, Comedy of Errors, Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and King Lear. More remarkable than the curiosity of a production of all of Shakespeare is the fact that a large public has been convinced that Shakespeare, from beginning to end, makes a good show. The ambitious project, which creaked uncertainly in I952 with the Chronicle Plays, has been a practical success. This year the Festival expanded to two companies, dividing the plays between them, and performed them tandem fashion on alternate weeks on the multi-level, wide-ramp outdoor stage at the College and on a similar stage in the Toledo Zoological Gardens amphitheatre. Audiences have come. The plays have an immediacy which more recent and less modern attempts at entertainment fail to provide. The euphuism and topicality of Love's Labour's Lost make it a delight for the connoisseur-but only in professional production can one see how astonishingly well it holds together as a play. This company attacked the frothy waves of satire with energy and buoyant gaiety. The four pairs of lovers twinkled through a fandango of swollen sentiments and language, not quite kidding themselves, while the curate (a fine portrayal by Jack Bittner) and the schoolmaster croaked their Latin from the swamp. Armado and Moth (Kelton Garwood -and Helen Fox) exhausted all wittiness. But it was Costard, the clown, who emerged as a kind of central figure: a peasant reminder of some rational center in a fashionmad world. Ralph Drischell, a veteran with the company and a rapidly developing comedian, played the part with wise illiteracy. In the song at the end, certainly one of Shakespeare's richest lyrics, the earthy theme dominates, bringing the play laughingly back to reality, where milk freezes in the pail and spring brings not Petrarchanism but cuckoos. All's Well, another puzzling and difficult play, comes through as a surprisingly quick-paced yarn. Bertram, a bloodless and perverse snob, is, like Prince Hal, in the clutches of a miles gloriosus. But the theme which is benevolently treated in Henry IV is more bitterly realized in All's Well. Parolles (also played by Drischell) is at first only coarsely amusing, but he shows himself clearly a corrupter of youth when he encourages Bertram to desert his unbedded