The  Living World  of Shakespeare:  A  Playgoer's  Guide

Author:  John Wain
Published by HacMillan
1978
Price:  R7.30 (soft cover);  R16.55 (Hard cover)

Reviewed by Tony Parr

This book first appeared in 1964, and is now reissued as something of a popu-
lar classic amongst modern interpretations of Shakespeare, one that has in-
fluenced production of the plays over the past fifteen  years and probably
helped to mould their audiences'  appreciation of them as well.  Wain himself
says in his new Preface:

"Not only play-goers, but play-producers, have found it useful.  More
than one stage-director has told me that he looks up my book before
going to work  ... The book is out there, doing  its work in the world  ..."
(p.x).

It is firmly subtitled A Playgoer's Guide, and is a practical criticism con-
cerned with the experience of the plays in the theatre.  As such,  it was on
first publication the  only modern criticism of its kind devoted to Shakes-
peare (if we except the pages on Antony and Cleopatra in Raymond Williams'
Drama in Performance).  Other books with a theatrical emphasis (see, eg,
David (1978) and Jonas (1971)) rather more substantial  than Wain's, have
subsequently appeared;  but I tnink this book continues to fulfil  a useful
introductory function.

As the prefatory remark quoted implies, Wain's book is contemporary with the
renaissance of Shakespearean production that we associate with Stratford,
England in the sixties and seventies:  the emergence of directors like Brook,
John Barton and Terry Hands capable of realising the plays on stage as arti-
culate vehicles of ideas as well as supreme embodiments of style.  The disse-
mination of the Stratford example, through influence within the theatre, edu-
cation, television, and the kind of writing represented in this book, has
meant that Shakespeare's radical  intelligence has been disclosed to a wider
audience, perhaps, than at any time since the 17th century.  (I would main-
tain this claim, I think, in the face of evidence that the Victorians  'knew
their Shakespeare'  rather better than contemporary readers and playgoers,
because 'their'  Shakespeare was one largely mediated by the excesses of the
actor-managers and the more pious assumptions of the age.)  In this process
Wain's popular writing has probably been just as important as that of the
major academic critics, and rather more valuable than the coffee-table pro-
ducts of modern publishing dedicated to the Bard like Schoenbaum's A Docu-
mentary I if P.

Wain's book is not written for students - although many of them would benefit
from it as an antidote to the more ponderous products of the Shakespeare in-
dustry,  it is intended (ideally) to reach the ordinary consumer of Western
culture.  Underlying his commentary on the plays  is an embryonic thesis about
that culture and Shakespeare's potential  place within it.  Wain begins, con-

74

ventionally enough, with the plaint about the contemporary poverty of language
and  imaginative activity:

"(Modern)  children have grown up  in a world that uses language only for
the most limited of purposes:  to convey information.  The entire ima-
ginative side of life has been handed over to  the visual  media of cinema
and television.  Instead of reading prose narrative and supplying the
pictures and sounds  inside their heads,  the young now have pictures and
sound supplied mechanically."  (p.4)

But:

"  ...  these young are separated only by a thin wall  from the riches  that
could be theirs.  Living in an age where everything is expressed con-
cretely in images, and nothing abstractly in words,  they are actually
very close to the world of Shakespearean drama.  Because the essence
of the poetic language  ...  is that it is concrete.  ...  It flashes
image after image, without pausing to reduce these images to discourse,
in the way these children have learnt to expect from film and TV."  (p.5)

This is a complex issue, and its cultural  implications are beyond the scope
of this review.  But they need to be thought about,  in relation to our situ-
ation in this country.  White culture in South Africa is moribund, and has
found in television, in the short space of five years, a simultaneous confir-
mation of and temporary solution to its own bankruptcy:  the  images  imported
from America flatter,  console and are imitated.  Meanwhile, there is virtually
no white theatre worth the name, and one of the best indicators of its dead-
liness, usually,  is a performance of Shakespeare.  To complete the picture,
education in this country uses Shakespeare as an ideological  tool, a potent
means  of reinforcing dominant cultural  myths  (the  importance of hierarchy
and political  order, suffering as a moral good, the educator as a paternal-
istic Prospero-figure, and so on).  But is it possible to envisage a diffe-
rent grouping of television,  theatre - a grouping within which Shakespeare's
plays could be a powerful  instrument of cultural  analysis  and communal  self-
awareness? -

It seems unlikely,  although one's doubts are occasioned more by the present
realities  of apartheid society than by any sense of the essential  remoteness
of Shakespeare from our lives.  African society has long been fascinated by
Shakespeare's work, with its roots in oral  tradition;  and for colonial
Europeans Shakespeare is an unavoidable inheritance.  The educators and cul-
tural  movers of the future will  have to make up their minds about him and
there will  be a great deal  of demystifying and reorientation to be done.  I
think that in this process Wain's book could be useful, because it is a tho-
roughly practical  criticism of the plays and as such  is readily available to
teachers, actors and producers (and the ordinary playgoer)  in ways that stan-
dard academic criticism is not.  It is highly readable, couched in a collo-
quial  but authoritative style,  it is sensible in its handling of historical
and theatrical  background and it constantly gives  the impression of judge-
ments and valuations formed in the theatre.  (At certain points this dates
the book:  it is unlikely that Wain could now so confidently assert the in-
effectiveness of Measure for Measure on the stage in the light of some re-
cent productions (see Warren, 1979).

At a number of points, though, Wain's argument requires a stronger framework:
his energetic response to the plays needs disciplining by an awareness, a
critical  scrutiny, of his own norms and expectations, and of how the  'ideal
audience-member'  - the role Wain fulfils admirably much of the time - is of
necessity a conditioned animal.  His analysis of Othello suffers  in this  re-
gard, with statements like:

75