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DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Steven Marc Weiss, B.F.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1994 Dissertation Committee: Approved by S. Constantinidis J. Reilly divise:Adviser A. Woods Department of Theatre ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express sincere gratitude to Dr. Stratos Constantinidis for his guidance and encouragement as well as for his supportiveness and his seemingly limitless patience. Appreciation is also extended to the other members of my advisory committee. Dr. Joy Reilly and Dr. Alan Woods, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The staff of The Billy Rose Collection at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts is acknowledged for its helpfulness; I am particularly grateful to research librarian Christine Karatnytsky for demonstrating her personal interest in my research. Finally, I offer my sincere appreciation to family members and friends for maintaining faith in my ability to persevere, and especial thanks to JBL for his conscientious prodding whenever I wanted to be doing something else. ij. VITA January 17, 1950 ........... Born - Brooklyn, New York 1973 ........................ B.F.A., School of Fine and Applied Arts, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 1987 ........................ M.A., State University of New York, University Center at Binghamton, Binghamton, New York 1993-Present ............... Lecturer in Theatre, The Ohio State University, Marion Campus, Marion, Ohio FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: Theatre 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................... ii VITA .................................................. iii INTRODUCTION ......................................... 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. EARLY 20TH-CENTURY BROADWAY SHAKESPEAREAN PRODUCTION ............................ 20 II. DAVID BELASCO: SHAKESPEARE AND NATURALISM . 44 III. ARTHUR HOPKINS; SHAKESPEARE AND THE NEW STAGECRAFT ............................ 82 IV. ORSON WELLES: SHAKESPEARE AND FORMALISM . 147 V. GUTHRIE MCCLINTIC: SHAKESPEARE AND THE (STAR-VEHICLE) ENSEMBLE .................... 218 VI. MARGARET WEBSTER: SHAKESPEARE POPULARIZED . 279 CONCLUSION ........................................... 361 LIST OF REFERENCES ................................... 381 IV INTRODUCTION The staging of plays has become a focal subject during the final quarter of the twentieth century, in which performance analysis has gained ground at the expense of the analysis of dramatic literature in departments of theatre. The shift in critical focus away from "dramatic" literature and toward "theatrical" performance is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the area of Shakespearean criticism. The "revolution" in Shakespearean criticism, as J. L. Styan has labelled it, was kindled nearly a century ago in the critical writings and staging experiments of both William Poel (1852-1934) and Harley Granvi1le-Barker (1877- 1946).! The twentieth-century movement toward a more production-centered Shakespearean criticism parallels a comparable revolution in Shakespearean production itself. Styan submits that the two are linked. The change in emphasis to "a line of scholarship . directly related to the practical business of staging a play," he holds ^ J. L. Styan, The Shakespeare Revolution; Criticism and Performance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977) 6. 2 accountable for the century's most significant advances in Shakespearean study.^ The English critic and Shakespeare scholar Ralph Berry has also noted a correlation between innovations in Shakespearean production and criticism, which he expresses in terms of cause and effect; in the last half-generation the réévaluation of Shakespeare has been led by the stage. The most interesting and influential reappraisals of certain plays have been launched by performance— and this in spite of the evidence one could accumulate that a given production owed something to an argument published in the scholarly press.^ Berry posits that changes in interpretations of Shakespeare's plays reflect changes in the overall context in which the plays are both read and produced: In choosing one of his dramas, a director reanimates it with the spirit of his own society and day. In addition to his personal vision, he will identify some current social assumptions and preoccupations in his production. He has no choice. So the history of Shakespearean productions is always a guide of sorts to the times.'* Acknowledging the influence of the socio-historical context on interpretation. Berry's unspoken assumption is that Shakespearean study can serve as a model for non- Shakespearean theatrical study as well. ^ Styan 4. ^ Ralph Berry, Changing Stvle in Shakespeare (London: Allen, 1981) 5. '* Berry, Changing Stvles 1. 3 This view is supported by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, editors of the anthology Directors on Directing, the 1963 revised edition of which contains a section entitled "Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current Problems and Opinions." The survey— added as a supplement to the contents of the original book, published in 1953 as Directing the Plav— includes excerpts from the writings of a dozen European and American directors of the twentieth- century known at least in part for their work in Shakespearean production. Its inclusion a decade later was justified by editors Cole and Chinoy as both practical (since the intervening period had witnessed something of a Shakespeare "boom") and, more importantly, paradigmatic of the evolving notions of theatre in general: How Shakespeare is staged has produced an important index to theatrical values from the Restoration on. His plays are the raw material used by successive generations to define and redefine what theatre means to them.^ In The Emptv Space. British director Peter Brook has suggested reasons why Shakespeare's theatre can wield so much influence on theatre artists and spectators alike. Brook suggests that Shakespeare's appeal derives from the impossibility of reconciling its multi-faceted human contradictions. The plays exhibit all aspects of human character simultaneously, presumably much the same as a ® Preface, Directors on Directing. Revised Edition, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1963) ix. 4 cubist painting displays objects as viewed simultaneously from various perspectives. Brook has found in Shakespeare's multi-faceted vision a correlation with those of two highly disparate twentieth- century playwrights, Brecht and Beckett: A primitive situation disturbs us in our subconscious, our intelligence watches, comments, philosophizes. We identify emotionally, subjectively— and yet at one and the same time we evaluate politically, objectively in relation to society.® Brook further asserts that no one before or since Shakespeare succeeded as well as he in writing plays "that pass through many stages of consciousness. According to Charles Marowitz, classic works of art (among which he numbers the plays of Shakespeare) survive because they successfully communicate to succeeding generations of perceivers some of the "moods, emotions and relationships they know intimately from their own lives and times;" in Shakespeare, he suggests, audiences identify readily with "certain patterns of behaviour, feelings and motives" that transcend the period in which they were written.® Shakespeare's dramas, Marowitz contends, exist on a "plateau" that must be scaled by its interpreters ® Peter Brook, The Emptv Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968) 87. ^ Brook 88. ® Charles Marowitz, Recvclina Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1991) 116. 5 before "the full weight of their artistic baggage" can be delivered; and what makes the plays