Comparative Drama Fall 1984 [antikvár]

C OMPAE ATIYE drama Volume 18 Fali 1984 Number 3 The Player's Eye: Shakespeare on Television William B. Worthen For the past several years I have looked forward to autumn with mixed feelings, knowing that I will be committed to an-other season of the BBC-TV Shakespeare Plays, an anxiety compounded this past year by the addition of the Mobil Show-case King Lear. I'm not being entirely facetious. The series has been, with somé striking exceptions, competently directed, well acted, and lavishly produced, but in generál I have found my evenings of television Shakespeare to be tame at best, to offer a rather remote and at times frustrating experience of the plays. The entire project, of course, raises intriguing questions about the sociology of performance and of Shakespeare in contem-porary life. But the series alsó brings a narrower, specifically histrionic question into focus: how does television altér our response to the means of dramatic performance—acting? A dramatic production designs a performance for both actors and audiences. It directs the actor to undertake a series of activities onstage; it alsó invites us to see those activities in a particular way, situates us as spectators of the actor's and of his character's performance. Although both stage and television are acting arenas, they confront the spectator through different means, WILLIAM B. WORTHEN, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance which will be published by Princeton University Press this fali.