Wooden O's in Plastic Boxes: Shakespeare and Television

Abstract

Royal jealousy: accused queen dies; schoolboy prince felled by psychosomatic illness. Princess abandoned in diapers as chief of mission is eaten in animal encounter. But younger generation heals all wounds as king repents and maternal statue walks off pedestal. Whatis unmistakable in this parody is not so much the plot of The Winter's Tale as the style of TV GUIDE. The television ambience—even its flack—is saturated in the television style: vividness through disconnection; 'relevance' no matter how irrelevant; diction that leapfrogs fact and logic to land with a thump on cliché and pizzazz. The style is enveloping, as our instant recognition shows. In contrast, there is no pervasive 'theatrical' style. We rarely experience a staged play by Shakespeare in the context of other plays. Only reviewers attend the theatre night after night, so for most of us the foil and context of stage performance is the daily round. But the foil and context of Shakespeare on television is other television. All's Well and Macbeth are time-slots between Whatever and the Eleven O'Clock News, items in the weekly line-up—of which the general viewer watches enough hours a day to constitute something like a university teaching load. I am, however, less concerned about the possible contamination of Titus Andronicus by Kojak or about the operation of Gresham's Law of Show Biz than about some consequent differences between the situations of the theatre and the television audiences.