On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television PRAISING CAESAR BY MARVIN KITMAN It's not easy to confess that for most of my life, I have secretly hated Shakespeare. It's not nice for an important critic of the most important...
...The project is so awesome that it will take six years to air all Shakespeare's plays (As You Like It played on February 28 and Romeo and Juliet on March 14...
...Hamlet is a detective story...
...As far as this below-average viewer is concerned, Shakespeare's tale of intrigue and assassination set in ancient Rome is more than just the greatest political thriller of all time, it is the Freddy Silverman Story too, the inside dope on every television network...
...But my happiness about that was tempered by the discovery that my children were repeating the sin of their father...
...the language threatened my machoness or something...
...Richard II is in the wings...
...if they went to the theater first to get the gist of, say, The Tempest, or saw it on TV more often, then Shakespeare wouldn't have such a bad reputation...
...It was as a result of the efforts of people like Mr...
...I now realize, however, that the fault lay with my English teachers...
...As soon as I heard "tis" and "prithee," I started to fidget...
...Start the ball rolling and we'll soon be seeing Don Meredith playing Caesar, or Erik Estrada from Chips as Richard III, Donny Osmond as Romeo—with Juliet played by Marie Osmond, or Kristy McNichol from Family, or one of the kids from Eight is Enough...
...My problems with Shakespeare began at Brooklyn Technical High, where they first made me read his plays...
...They can't understand the big themes he deals with...
...If he were alive today, he might want to write for TV...
...So many lines that have become part of my daily language—from "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," to "it was Greek to me" —are in the script, although I had never realized it...
...Everybody can get something out of Julius Caesar...
...We shouldn't complain too much...
...Yon Cassius, played by David Collings, is not lean enough," I soliloquized...
...James Mattimore, who teaches at Suffolk Community College...
...Curious about why this was so, I contacted my favorite Shakespearean scholar, Dr...
...Let's pass a law against the teaching of Shakespeare until college, at the earliest...
...At first, I had the same problems I always had...
...Yes sire, some of the olde-time English teachers really had a gift for persuasion...
...On and on I went slashing right and left with my critic's knife trying to convince myself I really didn't like the production...
...Despite the sharpening of my ear for foreign accents—a dividend of all the British pro-gramming on American Public TV—I still had to pay absolute attention to catch what the actors were saying (unlike our own commercial network shows, where the less attention paid the better...
...Caesar was the first of all 37 Shakespeare plays scheduled to be produced by the BBC, thanks to a boodle of pound sterling and American dollars donated by a variety of business-type cultural freaks...
...I also was impressed by how relevant the story is...
...For a while, I thought it was all my fault that I wasn't as crazy about the Bard as my teachers were, though I rationalized this by blaming Shakespeare...
...thou art fled to brutish beast,/And men have lost their reason...
...One of the best instructors in the department was Pearl "Bubbles" Mayefsky, who was anything but dull and dowdy...
...What a marvelous opportunity—I thought to myself as I turned on the set—to start afresh with Shakespeare, without anybody there to rap my knuckles with a golden ruler...
...Much as I respect Mattimore, I myself have a different view...
...Then I started to become supercritical...
...Really, it seems a little arrogant for us in the "revolting colonies" (as we used to be called) to demand that the BBC have 2.4 American actors per production as a form of repressive tax...
...And mind you, this was before Animal House and television combined to retard literacy...
...Believe me, when it comes to the classics, Laverne and Shirley are bookworms compared to me in my heyday...
...After all, Shakespeare was British, so it makes sense to perform him with an English cast...
...I couldn't hearthe words...
...I wonder if Mark Anthony will have trouble lugging his corpse around...
...Now what kind of way is that to talk...
...That's a fetching little frock worn by Brutus, played by Richard Pasco, but he is too tootie-fruitie to be the noblest Roman of them all...
...Mattimore likes to point out Shakespeare's positive aspects for today's young people: "There is a lot of dressing as woman, which should appeal to Monty Python fans...
...Anyway, I don't like the prospect of having California People act in Shakespearean productions...
...Mattimore tries to convince his own students that Shakespeare is not just another moldy fig...
...Psychoanalysts tell those of us who suffer from Shakespeare Learning Disability (SLD) that it is the melody of Shakespeare that turns us off, the iambic pentameter, or whatever it is called...
...I liked the way producer Cedric Messina and director Herbert Wise shot the film in the streets of ancient Rome (actually a cleverly disguised London...
...the Prince tries to find clues to his father's murder—an introspective sort of Columbo...
...Even then many are not mature enough to handle him...
...But part way through I stopped spinning the broken record of my youth, and admitted the truth...
...No, his Reading Plan consisted of putting your hand in a metaphorical vise, and if you didn't read Julius Caesar when assigned, he'd break your fingers one by one...
...American public TV is just going along with the BBC on an almost free ride...
...Further, I admired how faithfully the Caesar script kept to the original text...
...Boy, was he overrated...
...Julius Caesar blew me out of the ballpark...
...I was a forerunner, or at least a fore-jogger, of the coming-anti-intellectual-ism...
...I want my Cassius to be positively starving, almost a cadaver...
...In fact, the first time I saw Julius Caesar on stage in later life, I could not hear the words—they went in one ear and out the other...
...Should the Nigerians demand that their favorite son play Hamlet...
...A lot of those interior monologues were retained, something rarely done on TV —except for CBS' The Dukes of Hazard...
...They insist that since our funds are being used to underwrite these shows, and the shows run on our television system, our actors should get work in them...
...You might as well force little Tommy to watch Greek tragedies on Sesame Street...
...If Suzanne Somers does Portia, I'll watch, but I'm quite happy with these English actors...
...Waring that I developed my loathing of Shakespeare...
...One doesn't want them doing Shakespeare...
...Maybe because I knew I wouldn't have to write a book report about it, I was able to just sit there and marvel at the thing...
...I guess that's why its been around so long...
...These memories were wrenched out of me as I prepared to watch Julius Caesar on Public TV the night of February 14...
...We should also face the fact that this series is basically for British TV viewers, people who really appreciate the Bard...
...Finally, I enjoyed the great performances, even though none of the British actors were household names (not in my New Jersey house, at least...
...The players in the shows I've seen so far seem to fit together like the fingers of a glove...
...O judgment...
...In fact, he wrote for the mass media of his time—theater...
...Julius Caesar, in short, cured me of my Shakespeare problem...
...Unfortunately, I didn't have Bubbles for Freshman English...
...closing, I would like to comment on the controversy about the casting of the BBC Shakespeare...
...Richard Chamberlain would stick out like a sore thumb...
...Lust...
...Well, my case of SLD is really hopeless...
...I also laughed at the actor's dresses...
...Besides, Shakespeare's plays are going to be on Japanese, Australian, Nigerian, and other TV systems...
...He always included something bawdy in his plays, some sex and violence...
...Nevertheless, it's true...
...This BBC video version should be around a long time as well...
...When I saw the sheets they wore, I had to stifle a desire to chant "Toga, toga...
...The Bard didn't write for academics," he says, "he wrote for the common man, for a wide audience...
...Even Joe Six-Pack can relate to it...
...Remember, they don't call California the hot comb state for nothing...
...If he took a whack at it, he'd be a big success, writing about life, drinking, prostitutes, homosexuals...
...The American theatrical unions have made a very loud fuss about the lack of American actors in the series...
...Knew you not Pompeii...
...It's not nice for an important critic of the most important communications art since the invention of paper to admit that he has drawn absolutely naught from the greatest playwright in the language...
...I couldn't get into them...
...What do such subjects mean to a kid...
...Who needed Playboy when you had the original jiggler herself...
...Macbeth is the story of a very ruthless and ambitious man—a Mr...
...Charles Gray's Caesar is too heavy for a great warrior...
...Power...
...The source of the trouble for today's generation," he said, "is that too many children are introduced to the Bard via the written word...
...Maybe Shakespeare's plays should not be read at all by the young...
...It is the story of every union, every corporation, every co-op apartment house, every Hadassah—every place, in other words, where there is power and someone wants it...
...Kids raised on the electric medium can't deal with just words...
...I had Joe Waring, who made Joe Stalin look like Howdy Doody...
...Small in the syndicate who wants to be a Mr...
...Old Joe never said, "Try As You Like It, you'U like it...
...This argument strikes me as missing the point...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 7
