Verbal-Visual, Verbal-Pictorial or Textual-Televisual? Reflections on the BBC Shakespeare Series

Summary

The 1965 issue of Shakespeare Survey, entitled 'Shakespeare Then Till Now', included a short article by Laurence Kitchin which must have broken new ground at the time since it dealt with 'Shakespeare on the Screen'. Writing incidentally about what he called television's 'inevitable recourse to Shakespeare', the author remarked ruefully: 'We must learn to live with the results', and concluded that 'as a trendsetter, the screen is potentially a menace. It has given Shakespeare its biggest audience. Up to a point it can lead that audience, but it is a mass audience which demands concessions.'

Twenty years later, with the BBC Television Shakespeare completed, not only have we learnt to live with the results but we are learning to teach with them; and we can no longer be content with dealing at one go with 'Shakespeare on the screen'; we must learn to distinguish between Shakespeare on film and Shakespeare on television. Yet, although the last twenty years have accustomed us to an ever-increasing presence of Shakespeare on the small screen, culminating in what the BBC itself describes as 'the most ambitious and expensive project in the history of television', they have not brought us anything equivalent to the full-scale studies of Shakespeare on the big screen provided by Roger Manvell or Jack J. Jorgens.