Herbert R. Coursen

In this content-stuffed, open-access world, I sometimes become cynical, feeling that I've discovered everything that actually causes me excitement. This book is a reminder that things can still excite me more than they should (and evidence that I should remain at the university where I work, and can spend days wandering the library's shelves!).

This is a nicely thorough archive of essays and reviews covering the entire period from 1937-1987 of Shakespearean TV productions in the US and UK. show more Perhaps because of the subject matter, the essays are never tiredly academic or tawdrily esoteric in their approach. This is real stuff, exploring what it meant to transfer the Bard from theatres mostly for the few to a mass medium that wasn't quite ready for three-and-a-half hour complete versions yet. (In that sense, of course, this is a research archive now; almost none of the issues from a technical standpoint matter anymore, nor is there any chance of a Shakespeare production reaching millions of people on terrestrial television ever again.)

Naturally much of the text is taken up with the BBC Shakespeare series that ran from 1978-1985, which is the reason I'm using it for research so that's great. Perhaps it would've been nice to have more on the filmed theatre productions, like those of Trevor Nunn's, but those are less 'televisual' in their intent. The last section of the book is a wonderful treasury of review excerpts covering every production, including all of the BBC Shakespeare productions. It's a wealth of information with good excerpts. Inevitably two things show: a bias, of course, and the inevitable lack of access to as much content as we do. Some notable publications are rarely used or entirely missing - for example both the television reviews of The Spectator and New Statesman, which often examined the BBC series are missing. This is probably because as US authors they had less access to UK newspapers (and it shows).

Similarly, the book plays into the overall narrative about the BBC series that it was often 'panned' by critics and academics for being too conservative. While that is certainly true, my more thorough research is showing that almost every production yielded numerous rave reviews in major publications, and quite a few critics believed that the more 'straightforward' approach was of great value for the audience the series was aiming at. Narratives build about things in our history, but it can become dangerous if we don't have a full view. While the book perhaps could have done more to offset this, it is a worthy archive for anyone studying, or just enjoying, this era of the Bard on telly. A volume I'll be returning to again and again. show less

I love Shakespeare. I love television. I love literary criticism. So why wouldn't I be interested in reading literary criticism of Shakespeare on television? This anthology was published shortly after BBC Shakespeare series of the 1980s had come to its conclusion, and most of the essays in the book deal with its productions. As in any anthology, the essays here run the gamut from the insightful and interesting to the banal and tedious. Particularly aggravating at times is the insistence of show more some of the writers that Shakespeare just doesn't work on television thanks to some innate property the medium apparently has. Oftentimes these folks would also insist that the best televisual performances were those that closely mimicked stage conventions, which I find baffling, having suffered through the McKellen/Dench Macbeth. On the other hand, there was also the occasional essay of intelligence and insight, especially into the behind-the-scenes of the BBC Shakespeare series, as well as the essays where the authors actually explained what effect something had, not simply telling me that it did (or did not) work. I really must see Jane Howell's adaptations of the first history tetralogy and Titus Andronicus now. The book also contains a very useful complete (as of 1985) listing of televised Shakespeare productions, which include credits, transmission details, and (quite interestingly) contemporary reviews from newspapers and such. show less