Books in Profile; Marchette Chute

Presenting Books in Profile, another now series of alternate Thursday evening programs. Our host is the noted author, critic and TV personality, Virgilia Peterson. Miss Peterson offers reports on the current literary scene, interviews leading figures in the book publishing field, and evaluates modern literature as a reflection of our changing world. Any suggestions you may have for future books in profile programs will be welcomed. Here now by transcription is Virgilia Peterson. Have you ever tried to tell the story of a Shakespeare play? If you have, you must have found out how difficult it is. But someone has just done it, retold every story of Shakespeare's 36 plays. The book is called Stories from Shakespeare by Marcia Chute. Primarily, of course, Miss Chute wrote it for adolescent readers, to help them disentangle the history and the history plays, the coincidences and mix-ups on which the action of the comedies is built, and in the tragedies the great currents that sweep the characters to their inevitable doom. However, though this book was written with the young in mind,

it turns out to be a book for any and every person devoted to Shakespeare because of the deceivingly simple but actually very wise and subtle way in which it has been done. Marcia Chute alone could have done it. Author, as you well know, of the many times crowned Shakespeare of London, as well as of Geoffrey Chaucer of England, Ben Johnson of Westminster, and several books for children. Miss Chute, president of the P.E.N. Club, official of the National Book Committee, member of various scholarly organizations, is a real highbrow, let's face it. But a highbrow on that seldom attained top level where learning has gone into the bones, where knowledge has been fused with life itself. Here now at the microphone is the patient author of Stories from Shakespeare, Marcia Chute. Miss Chute, how do you stand on that $64,000 question? Who wrote Shakespeare's plays anyway? Well, as far as I know, he did. But I only work with contemporary materials, and of course they thought in his own day he did. And they couldn't have been wrong, I suppose.

It doesn't seem likely, they must have known. You and Charles Lamb, the only people who ever tried to retell the Shakespeare stories? Well, I think there have been short outlines, but I think an attempt to give the full play, a sense of the story in the people, I think, probably. Did Charles Lamb, I forget, did he really give the full story? He gave it as though it, not as a play, but as a story, as though it was a story that Shakespeare used for the play. But design for a fairly youthful level of intelligence, it seems to me, no? Well, it's hard to say. They were pushed to be in my extreme youth. You don't want to say anything about poor Mr. Lam's tales of Shakespeare. I can see that. Where did Shakespeare get most of his stories? Anyway, did he invent them? No, I don't think, I think he may have invented the tempest and love's labor lost, the first and the last. But almost everything in between was either an old play that had been popular, or a something from relatively cheap popular fiction,

or from one of the popular history books, or in the case of Plutarch, a little better than popular, but still very easy to get in. Yeah. Well, things you mean written by contemporaries that were not considered highbrow like kid, and ball-mart, and fletcher, and people like that? No, because ball-mart and fletcher came late. They were younger than Shakespeare. Any, for instance, a collection of popular Italian short stories, or Spanish short stories? Those of you who read them? Very commonly used. Yes, but not with much pleasure. Was there a thing called kid Spanish tragedy? That was a play. That was a very famous, the first of the really great, Elizabethan melodramas, tremendous hit. Well, which of the plays of Shakespeare's that one like? None. None. Oh, I always thought it was the root of one of them. No, but kid is supposed to have written a hamlet that may have been the root. So that's only guesswork. Why do you think people complain that Shakespeare is difficult? Because they come to him without expecting to enjoy him.

And why would that be? All partly because he's taught in the schools. And anything you have to do is never as much fun as something you do on your own. And partly because the every play has its own feel, its own weather. And people unconsciously say, oh, while it's Shakespeare, I can come at it without entering into the feel of that particular play and they can't. No, of course they can't, but I wonder if that is all because of Shakespeare being required reading in early years. No, I don't think it's all. I think for many people it's hard to replace it all. It takes too much visual imagination. They'd rather be the novelist. Or the novelist does it for them. But I don't quite understand why he's always classified as being essentially intellectual. Well, he would have been surprised himself. Aren't you? Yes, I am. He was not in his own day considered anything more than a good commercial playwright. And the critics all through the 17th century fought a losing battle against admitting him

into the ranks of serious writers. In fact, a contemporary of Dryden wrote a whole book pointing out a dreadfully bad play, a fellow who was. Well, on a fellow I have to admit that I've always found it mighty hard to believe that that man would over one day become so jealous of his wife that all the drowsy syrups in the world wouldn't let him sleep by night anymore. How is it that Othello was so unconvincing? Well, he had made a very difficult marriage. A marriage that normally would not have worked anyway. And when the best and closest friend he had, most reluctantly was obliged to tell him that his wife was unfaithful. And he had every reason his heart to believe she could have been. It wasn't surprising he did believe it. But on the stage, Iago, the friend, is played as though he were a monster. And of course, the audience feels that Othello was there for a fool. I think you put your finger on it. I think one always does think of Iago as the wickedest person in any of the plays.

It should be played as a very good man. Trustworthy, a very anxious, disturbed friend. The audience knows he's not. He's told them so. But no one on stage knows so. And it isn't played that way. You really know, curiously enough. The same thing is too rich of the third. Who also should appear as a very trustworthy, reliable, virtuous, and religious man as far as the cast is concerned. There's been quite a row about the character Richard III lately. Oh, but that's the real Richard. That's not Shakespeare's. Oh, that's the real one. Yes. Have you a definite picture in your mind of how these things look when they were played by Shakespeare's company? Well, it isn't much the question of looking as a question of the audience, not having a chance to catch his breath. Those were played very quickly and continuously with no break. And the, using a lot of levels of stage action. So that the emphasis on the story in a play like Macbeth, for instance,

it should be wound up very tight. And the audience should never be left a moment to get back to reality. Well, I don't think the audience or ever to be left to get back to reality. But if you have a Macbeth stage on a rather heavy staging and you have to stop off and change your sets, you audience will catch his breath. Well, what did you mean by many levels? You mean physical, actual levels on the stage? Something going on up high. For instance, you take the, and hand me the fourth. There's a scene where the Hotspur and his wife in their bedroom would be played on one of the balconies. And then that would immediately be picked up from downstairs with a horse on the street level, with no pause in the action. And you get a much higher degree, both a fluid action and speed, and an emotional strength. Well, are the movies of Shakespeare now more nearly what it should be than are play productions of it? They would be if they trusted the lines, but most movies do not trust the lines. They put too much on top of it.

The great thing that Shakespeare had to trust was the audience's imagination. I think of all the movies, the one that came nearest to it was Henry V. That was my favorite imagination. And such beautiful color. Yes, it was splendid. And that sense, the excitement of the trumpets and the sense of patriotism and youth and all that. Of course, they've got an advantage in Shakespeare didn't have. They have a lot of advantages, but it's like having words unless you can use them. What about Olivier's hammer? Well, I thought that was overstaged. So much have gone into the... I mean, Elson O. He was too fancy. Well, the... In vital, the fundamental thing is, Quartan Craig was always pointing out in Shakespeare as the people. You must know why they're doing it, and have a sense of their reality. And any stage production movie that doesn't get that is a failure for Shakespeare. The thing that struck me in that production was in the scene where Hamlet says to his mother, look here upon this picture and on this.

It was the most incestuous and curiously Freudian scene that I could have possibly imagined. It wasn't the way I had ever read it. Well, you could read Hamlet almost any way you like, and that's one of the fascinations of that particular play. And that is the one play of all Shakespeare's. That in every country of the world is at home. That every country interprets it in its own fashion. But isn't Macbeth just as good in any country? No. It hasn't translated half as well into, for instance, India. In India, they played Hamlet for 40 years, one actor. Hamlet for 40 years in India? It's not curious. In Japan, measure for measures, one of the most popular. Now, I've forgotten, or read it, although I've just read these stories of yours, what measure for measure was about? Which one of them? The problem of chastity. Oh, yes. Well, that would interest the Japanese. Yes, it is. But do they play Hamlet too? Once in a while, but isn't this popular in other countries? Well, what about King Lear? Wouldn't that rise above national boundaries? No.

I don't think that is one of the most popular. It's a very hard play to act. It takes a magnificent actor. A sort of Chaliyapin doesn't sing. Yes. Yes. I should think. What do you think of the changes in our time in the manner of delivery of Shakespeare's lines? I'm not going to insult you, but you are old enough as I am to remember a very different and far more bombastic of production of lines in our youth than there is now. I think we are better off now. I think the trouble with our youth in general was that Shakespeare was made up of set pieces and star parts. And I think now the emphasis is much more strongly on the storyline and the atmosphere and the sense of the reasons for that particular story moving. Do you remember Southern and Mala? Yes, I do. You did see them. Well, I will never forget Mala was Porsche in a huge pink velvet nightgown like a tent. She was by then quite elderly. And I remember her saying,

my little body is a weary of this great world and then plunking down on a chair or 180 pounds. And I was rather young and horribly put out by the size of Miss Mala. You see, that's pure opera. All of a sudden opera. They played it that way. It didn't matter that they didn't look what they were supposed to. No, because they had mutilated the plot in most cases. Chopped out half the lines and half the motivation. It didn't matter. Yes, curiously, you'll survive even there. But I wonder if her noted voice and diction would still be considered so superior today. Do you remember how far that little candle throws? It's beam so shines. A good deed in an allty world. I will never forget because I hadn't heard that kind of thing before. That ranting, you know, that you, well, I'd heard it in the puppet, sure. That's right. The Bible is often read that way. Yes. And I think mistakenly in both cases. There was a man, I think his name was Louis King, who was a friend of my parents, who came up to tea once,

and a mother asked him to do a Shakespeare speech and all of a sudden he got down on the floor and raised his hand and let out a wild, O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth! I was absolutely overwhelmed. I couldn't hardly keep my face straight. On the other hand, the very casual grey kind of delivery is almost no better because it is poetry. You mean to be or not to be that is the question. You have to have a very high degree of voice control of tremendous reserves, almost operatic reserves, and then not use them. The banked fire. Yes. Well, you have to have that in everything. It was particularly hard in Shakespeare. I suppose it is. Well, Olivia did the Hamlet lines pretty marvelously, didn't he? Yes, I think so. But of course in the movie you don't have the continual string you do on the stage. No. He's a very good actor. I think the thing I like to live your best in the whole lot that was just a shallow. I didn't see that. It was a very small part in the fourth part, too. It was like anybody's made an aunt.

It was most extraordinary piece of character produced. Oh, I can't imagine him as anything. A long man with a great panache. You know, you would think that it snapped in a high wind. Fast name piece of character. He also played Hotspur in the first part of it. And that would be in the true Elizabethan manner because they're constantly. They had small companies. And every actor was playing a enormous variety of parts. What is that thing out of this metal danger? Out of this, we pluck the flower safety. That's wonderful, isn't it? There are some things, the way you do this is so good. The way you tell these stories because you put quotations in, but you don't put them in like raisins and a bun. They come right out of the way you're telling the story and they are such absolutely, fantastically good quotations. Well, they would be big Shakespeare's. Well, they would, yes. But you might have just stuck them in to show off a little bit. Well, there are people speaking. There are people speaking for a reason and a special point in their lives.

They're not set speeches. They never intend to be. There's one like that. Well, in all's well, it ends well. That old French Lord, I copied it down because I didn't remember all's well, it ends well. I don't suppose I've read it since I was at college. When the old French Lord says, they say miracles have passed and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors in sconce-ing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. I'm even sure now that I'm here. How I would like to see that all over the place because that is the answer to the uplifters and the panacea seekers and the cure seekers who want to deny the unknown fear and the mystery. Well, I think the uplift is fine, but I think the humility is also good. They have to go together. But we don't have it. Well, perhaps we do more than it shows. I think I didn't realize all's well, it ends well.

I suppose every play of Shakespeare's has an absolute fountain of interminable wisdom about mankind, if you'd... I think it almost must have been one of the wisest men that ever lived. I'm constantly surprised. How did you ever come to fall so closely in line with him? How did you ever decide to take him up? Because that's quite a thing after all the people that have written about Shakespeare's, isn't it? Well, you know that thing about fools rushing in. Yes, I know, but that's absolutely no sense at all in this case. It did, because I didn't know anything about the subject when I started it. I didn't know all the difficulties. That's why I blindly went ahead. Chronologically, I was just working my way up from Chaucer. Did you meet terrible difficulties? Oh, yes. For about two years of research, I was sure I couldn't write a book. Did you have Shakespeare of London, the biography? Did you have to read all the various forms, the varieties, like the folio edition and this edition and that edition? Oh, yes. And all of arguments about whether it was like this or like that. Oh, yes.

Isn't there a standing argument about that death speech of false staffs? Whether it was that he knew he was dying and not when his finger, when the woman says that he's plucking up the covers of the blanket over him. I've not read somewhere an argument about that speech. I don't think there's a line in Shakespeare that hasn't got at least one argument behind it. It's one of the great happy-hunting grounds of the arguments. But one thing this book certainly did for me was the comedies. It made me realize that after all they're very good stories. I must say I'd always thought they could all be called a comedy of errors for all of me, except for 12th night. I thought that that interminable series of coincidences in those women dressed up by mistake as young men and those people who fall in love because of some little juice being laid on their eyelids and the arbitrariness of their loves and their changing and the way they were finally neatly tied together in proper packages at the end always seemed to me foolish enough as a foolish young person that I was that I didn't see the essential psychological truth in the characters

until I read your stories. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I'm afraid it's not all a compliment to you or some of it is an estimate of my own stupidity. Well, a lot of people feel that way about the comedies and partly because the rather golden light that's over them. Unless you start with that, there's a certain amount of unreason. Well, there's a golden light over mid-summer nights dream. That would be a silver light. That would be a silver light. But I saw that not too long ago. Was it the old Vic that brought it over? Yes, wasn't that rather heavy-staging gold? I thought that was awfully overstaged so that it was almost lost between the fancy wonderful king and queen of the fairies coming in on chords up high over the stage. All the fancy business was really... I don't think such a tenuous thread can stand it and it's the language that you want to listen to it for. I think a college company against a few green trees can do it just about as well.

But some of the plays were done that fashion, the tenuous, for instance. That would have been staged on the jacket being staged with a great deal of apparatus. Very complicated. But they did it better in general than we do. They had more practice. Did you ever play in a Shakespeare play yourself at college at school? Yes, I don't think anyone. I think I was a failure. You were a failure? It wasn't the best scene. I never was allowed to go mad. Can you guess the only part I ever had? I'd like to know. Sandra Aguichique. That's a very good acting part. I thought it was a terrible insult. I was burned up and having to be Sandra Aguichique. I was a tribute to your acting, though. No, I was not. I was a tribute to my thin legs. You remember, he had to have scrawny legs. He wasn't the one with yellow goddess. No, that was Mavolio Croscardo. That was me. He was more sinister. Aguichique was just a simp. Well, Aguichique was handicapped. He loved the hair when he couldn't have her. Has anyone ever lived who could be compared to Shakespeare?

No, not in that precise fashion. Because the range is so great. The range is fine. Great for cheating is one thing. A great master of comedy is another. No, not quite. And a greater nationalist than Shakespeare could hardly be found and yet never a chauvinist. So naturally characteristic of England. At a period where so many things are combined for just a few years to make it possible. And on love, how good he is, is anybody better on love? I don't mean the falling in love because I don't believe in his descriptions of falling in love. But when they are in love, the language about love is fantastic. My favorite one is that make me a willow cabin at your gate and call upon my soul within the house. I think that is a fantastic statement of love. Just fantastic. Of course, if the girl hadn't been called Olivia, maybe it wouldn't be so perfect. But when it ends and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out Olivia,

Olivia is such a wonderful name for that. The whole sound of the thing. The whole sound of the thing. What's your favorite or haven't you and he couldn't you have passage? No, I haven't, truly. Are there any that you say when you're miserable? Oh, I should think that once. To yourself. Lastly. Probably. Tomorrow and tomorrow. Is it good to exist? As a sample of a thorough. That was the one that so many novels have, The First World War, chose for their titles. I was brought up on apt quotations seemingly apt to my mother, like how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child. Blow, blow, thou winter wine, thou art not so unkind, kind as man's in gratitude. And then, of course, always the friends thou hast in their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel. I never liked Polonius, but that's awfully good advice. Well, of course, he was a great, he was a great picker of trifles too. He remembered things. He'd learn them in his youth. He was mostly quoting Polonius. Well, when they're clichés, but they don't seem to be clichés. When Polonius, a really

good writer can actually handle the utmost banality and make it a new thing that you've never heard before. And maybe, perhaps, some of these things only seem clichés because we've heard them from Shakespeare. That's very true. Full of quotations about it is. It's a hard idea. Well, and maybe he formulated certain things so perfectly that you can't try to say them any other way again. They'd all been said before he was over and over again. They hadn't been said before him, but not that the way he said them. But they had been said, you think he simply transcended the usual way of saying them and put in something very special. Could you possibly say which is the best of his tragedies? No, because I don't know. Well, I would like to end this discussion of a book which I am going to hold by forever more with some of your more unforgettable descriptions of certain of the

plays. Romeo and Juliet is golden with the light of mourning and heavy with the death of all bright things. Anthony and Cleopatra tells the story of a love so gigantic and so tempestuous that it dragged armies and navies after it like little toys. Macbeth and his wife were violent human beings who took a wrong turning. Their deaths were not a tragedy, but their lives were. And Lear is mad, but he knows more than he once did. He knows now on what a frail and reasonless basis the world punishes and how little right those in authority have to be the punishers. If the criminal and the judge should change places, no one would know which was which. And then what you say about Hamlet. Hamlet is one of the saddest since the hero is not destroyed by any evil in his nature, but by a kind of misplaced good. In the violence of his own death has no power over him. It is only the separation at last of the flesh and spirit, and they have fought each other so long that it is almost better to have them both at peace.

This evening, Virginia Peterson's guest on Books and Profile was Marschette Shoot, author of Stories from Shakespeare. We are interested in your reactions to tonight's program or to any of the programs in this series. Address your cards and letters to Virginia Peterson, WNYC, New York 7. That's Virginia Peterson, WNYC, New York 7. And join us again two weeks from tonight when Miss Peterson returns to bring us another Books and Profiles program. Join us next Thursday evening at this time for a literary comment with Harding Lemay. This has been a transcribed presentation of your city station.