“Look with thine ears”: The Challenges and Rewards of Audio Shakespeare, Part One

Shakespeare scholars ignored audio performances for decades, even though audio productions far outnumber screen adaptations.[1] Audio was mostly relegated to lists of resources for teachers and occasional reviews in ancient issues of Shakespeare Newsletter, then were forgotten when changing technology made screen productions widely available. Academic interest finally began when Douglas Lanier wrote pioneering articles about radio and phonographic Shakespeare. Susanne Greenhalgh soon wrote more articles, and Olwen Terris and Eve-Marie Oesterlen published their archival research on the Learning On Screen Shakespeare database.[2] I contributed as well. These pioneers, if I may include myself, created awareness of Shakespeare audio,[3] setting the stage for Andrea Smith to be accepted into a PhD program at the University of East Anglia to write a thesis on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio Shakespeares. Something momentous happened right after Smith earned her degree. Audio Shakespeare studies moved into the mainstream when Smith and actor Samuel West presented a five-part BBC Radio 3 series on the history of Shakespeare on BBC radio to celebrate the Corporation’s centennial in 2022.[4]

It is time performance scholars embrace audio Shakespeare. This article helps readers understand audio Shakespeare by exploring its problems and pleasures, looking at obstacles producers have overcome or failed to overcome, then turns to the opportunities that make Shakespeare audio unique. Doing justice to all of these necessitates that this long article be published in two parts. This part introduces the subject and corrects misconceptions about what it means to hear a play, then details problems and solutions generally. Part Two will begin with solutions producers have used in two particularly difficult scenes, then will move on to the many pleasures unique to audio Shakespeare.

 

Hearing a Play?

Many believe that early modern playgoers stressed hearing over seeing plays. This was suggested by John Orrell, and, if true, would align audio productions with early modern expectations.[5] A broad range of documents was studied by Andrew Gurr who found a flux to the way early moderns wrote about playgoing. Often the viewing of plays was more often mentioned, and occasionally the hearing of plays was more often mentioned, at least amongst those who wrote about playgoing in extant documents. Gurr found that writing of hearing plays lasted for relatively short periods, but most often the early moderns wrote of seeing plays, the expression still used today.[6] Gabriel Egan ran a statistical analysis of these documents and found that seeing a play was more often mentioned than hearing a play by a ratio of twelve to one.[7] While Egan’s numbers lack the nuance of Gurr’s analysis, they forcefully show the mistake of asserting that early modern playgoers thought of a play as something to be heard rather than seen. Radio producers as far apart in time as Brewster Morgan in 1937[8] and Martin Jenkins in 1986[9] claimed that early modern English drama transfers easily to radio because neither uses sets or properties to tell stories. Morgan and Jenkins were broadly right about sets (but see the description of a scene from an Arden of Faversham broadcast, below), and as we shall see, they were wrong about properties. One of the challenges of mounting audio Shakespeare is putting across the stories without the necessary visuals.

Many note that some of Shakespeare’s lines seem to have stage directions written into them. One scene that could have been written for audio is Marc Antony shaking hands with Caesar’s assassins in Julius Caesar, naming each in turn: “First, Marcus Brutus, will I shake with you. Next Caius Cassius, do I take your hand. Now Decius Brutus, yours,” and so he names all the assassins (3.1.186-90). Audio directors need do nothing to indicate the identity of the person shaking Antony’s hand. Constance’s questions in King John describing Salisbury’s behavior on stage may seem the same but is actually a different matter.

What dost thou mean by shaking of thy head?
Why dost thou look so sadly on my son?
What means that hand upon that breast of thine?
Why holds thine eye that lamentable rheum,
Like a proud river peering o’er his bounds?
Be these sad signs confirmers of thy words? (2.2.19-24)

This speech is very helpful to audio listeners, but surely Shakespeare expected audiences to look at the miserable Salisbury at this point, something listeners may not do.

The report on Petruchio’s wedding clothes in The Taming of the Shrew seems parallel but reveals a different limitation. Petruchio’s costume seems created for the mind’s eye. The long description begins with,

Why, Petruchio is coming in a new hat and an old jerkin; a pair of old breeches thrice turn’d; a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another lac’d; an old rusty sword ta’en out of the town armory, with a broken hilt, and chapeless; (3.2.43-61)

What more can audio listeners need? Shakespeare later brings Petruchio on stage wearing this costume. This would be dramaturgical malpractice unless the costume in some way tops this report, for there must be a payoff when Petruchio arrives. Audio listeners do not have the opportunity to see the costume payoff. All Shakespeare plays require visuals that dialogue alone cannot convey, which is the reason his plays require costumes, props, and stage actions to be fully realized. Audio Shakespeare is not early modern, but entirely modern with some parallels to the past.

Background

There are two kinds of audio Shakespeare productions: audio recordings and radio broadcasts. Most audio recordings were excerpts of famous speeches until the 1950s when long-playing records (LPs) made the release of full length plays practical and became the norm. For the first time, professional Shakespeare productions could be heard by anybody at any time who owned the LPs and a phonograph.[10] These recordings were broadcast by some US radio stations in the 1950s and 1960s but are essentially different from radio broadcasts, as we shall see.[11] There were two primary markets for these LPs: home use and education. While LPs were available in some record stores, all the original catalogs seen offer these recordings for classroom use.

These early LPs used music and sound effects sparingly, according to Lanier.[12] The stage direction that opens King Lear 5.2 calls for, “Alarum within. Enter with a drummer and colours King Lear, Queen Cordelia, and soldiers over the stage; and exeunt. Enter Edgar disguised as a peasant, guiding the blind Duke of Gloucester.” George Rylands’s Marlowe Dramatic Society recording reduces this to the blowing of two horns preceding the entrance of Gloucester and Edgar. Listeners, obviously, cannot know the French forces crossed the stage or that Edgar and Gloucester entered until they speak, for horns do not convey these actions. Lanier’s statement is a basically true generalization of the Marlowe and Caedmon recordings in the 1950s and 1960s, but the sound patterns on some of these recordings are more fulsome than others. The actors in these productions do small things to help listeners follow the action. In the same Marlowe recording, Gloucester (Donald Beves) gives a strained breath to indicate his exertion when the disguised Edgar (Frank Duncan) says, “Give me your arm. Up” (4.2.64-5). Similarly, Anthony Nichols playing Lafeu in Howard Sackler’s Caedmon All’s Well That Ends Well recording says, “Mine eyes smell onions, I shall weep anon,” and asks Paroles for his handkerchief (5.3.322-3). We cannot see Lafeu use the handkerchief, but we hear Nichols sniff twice to indicate the need for it.

Old Vic Company recordings use sound more dramatically. Frank Hauser’s record of the Vic’s 1952 stage production of Macbeth features the martlet mentioned in 1.6.3-10. It twitters as Banquo praises it. Similar chirping is heard in Fiona Shaw’s Naxos, Clive Brill’s Arkangel, and Robert Richmond’s Folger recordings. Generally, audio books added more sounds as the years passed until the Arkangel Shakespeare recordings of the 1990s. These so overdid bird twitter to indicate outdoor scenes that this sound became predictable and obnoxious. The trend towards more sound culminated, perhaps, in the use of bells, whistles, and other noises, including bird twitter, to help create a commedia dell‘arte world for Brill’s The Comedy of Errors. These sound patterns help put this entire production over, but sound patterns can also help individual scenes, as when Palamon (Jonathan Firth) and Arcite (Nigel Cooke) arm one another in The Two Noble Kinsmen 3.6. Brill adds many clicks as the armor is buckled on, making clear what these characters are doing when we cannot see them during the more than forty lines spoken as they arm. This scene was written by John Fletcher, but great sound patterns equally enrich the audio performances of Shakespeare’s collaborators and other early modern dramatists.

Audio books seldom alter the language of the plays. Listeners can read along with the actors, and should to know who is at the microphone when a new scene begins. Caedmon even included a playtext with its LPs for several years, and Roger Hill’s and Orson Welles’s earlier and abridged Everybody’s Shakespeare texts were packaged with Welles’s Mercury Text Records. Everybody’s Shakespeare texts even indicate when the record should be changed.

However, listeners can seldom read along during a radio broadcast, in fact the announcer of Marion Nancarrow’s stripped down, two-part, 2003 BBC Romeo and Juliet advised against it in the on-air introduction. A radio producer / director, usually the same person in England, mediates texts by promoting narrative clarity over textual fidelity. Radio producers routinely add lines such as, “Here comes the King,” to indicate that a new person has entered the scene and is about to speak. Most broadcasts cut Shakespeare’s texts as predictably as modern stage productions, and scenes are sometimes transposed. Mood music is far more common on radio than in audio books, and so are sound effects such as creaking doors, the thud of a falling body, and the clang of swords during a fight. A quieter example is the rustling of paper when Claudius (Ian Thorne) reads Hamlet’s letter (4.7.42-6), in Gerald Newman’s 1961 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) production. Older audio recordings can be minimalist while radio producers tell stories more dramatically.

These sound effects can be fun. In John Tydeman’s 2004 broadcast of Arden of Faversham, Black Will (Anthony Jackson) and George Shakesbag (Matthew Morgan) enter looking for Arden with murder on their minds. The merchant Prentise is described closing his shop with this stage direction, “Then lettes he down his window, and it breaks Black Wils head” (at 2.1.54). The BBC gave this sound pattern several seconds of crashing and yelping that entirely justified the stage direction and the exclamation by Black Will that follows, “I am almost kild” (55).

These techniques developed over time. The BBC had to figure out how to broadcast Shakespeare in 1923 when the plays were produced by the team of Cathleen Nesbitt and Cecil A. Lewis. Early programs of scenes from multiple plays were considered a success, but could what the BBC called “full-length plays,” meaning the story was basically intact despite some editing, work on the radio? A test case was made of Twelfth Night to see if a play with twins, one disguised as a man for most of the action, could work in a non-visual medium. Would listeners understand that Malvolio could not hear the many comments made by Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Fabian during his 2.5 gulling? Would listeners see Malvolio’s yellow cross-gartered stockings in their mind’s eye? Success would depend on the cuts made to focus the action and narration added to cement the cracks and suggest visuals. The problems were solved, and full-length plays became the BBC’s broadcast norm.

This Twelfth Night was such a milestone that the BBC commissioned a radio play to celebrate the broadcast’s 75th anniversary. An Epiphanous Use of the Microphone by David Pownall braids two timelines. In the first, Lewis, Nesbitt, and others navigate ways to make the Twelfth Night story understandable to an audience that cannot see the actors. In the other, the windows are open at the Inns of Court during the first performance of Shakespeare’s play when a gust of wind extinguishes the candles. The play continues in the dark. Some actors double parts in the two timelines: Viola and Maria are both played by the same male actor, Rory Campbell, while Sir Toby Belch is played by different actors in the two timelines, Crawford Logan in the Inns of Court scenes and Iwan Thomas in the 1923 timeline. Pownall created challenges for himself, director Martin Jenkins, and the cast at least as knotty as those presented by broadcasting Shakespeare’s play in 1923, and Epiphanous is itself a heady and demanding work of art that should be studied by those working on Shakespeare’s afterlives. Shakespeare may not have had audio plays in mind when Lear told Gloucester to “look with thine ears,” but audio producers have invited listeners to do this for decades.

All Shakespeare performances are mediations. Stage and screen meditations include the director’s vision, design, lighting, costuming, casting, performance choices by the actors, music, the editing of the text, blocking, and on film camera placement, film editing, and much else. Radio Shakespeare has fewer mediations between the text and the listener but still has a director’s vision, though this seldom overwhelms in audio, casting, performance choices by the actors, music, and editing of the text in radio productions.. There is less guiding a listener to a predetermined interpretation than in the theatre or cinema. Listener engagement with the text is even less mediated for audio books which are usually uncut, and so do not alter the emphasis of the story as cuts tend to do.

The Challenges of Audio Shakespeare

Audio Shakespeare has many challenges, for it presents plays written to be seen on stage in purely auditory mediums, and it is here that we refute the oft repeated claim that Shakespeare is first and last about language. If this were true, there would be no challenges for audio producers to solve, and there are many.

Some challenges are easy to solve with a little ingenuity. How do you convey the presence of a crowd that cannot be seen? One of audio’s strengths is that a few loud voices seem more fulsome than a few loud people on the stage, especially if assisted with other sounds. For the BBC’s 1983 contemporarily set Sir Thomas More, director Martin Jenkins had the ensemble playing the crowd in Scene 6 raise their voices and added the sounds of clashing metal and sirens as More (Ian McKellen) spoke some of the lines written by Shakespeare for this play. The crowd in Anthony Munday’s next scene seems just as fulsome, but less violent, since it was created by voices alone. A trickier problem is a crowd that enters in the middle of a scene, as happens in Henry VI, Part 2 when townspeople come to proclaim that Simpcox’s blindness is cured, though his lameness remains (2.1.70). The Arkangel recording portrays the entrance of the crowd with the clanging of a bell accompanied by the murmur of voices and shuffling feet; the stage direction calls for music. These sounds multiply over the next few lines to indicate that more people arrive. The dialogue makes details about this crowd clear with lines such as, “Here comes the townsmen on procession” (71).

Howard Sackler easily solved the problem of the maiming of Titus, who asks Aaron to cut off his hand in, and when the deed is done says, “Good Aaron give his majesty my hand” (3.1.186-88). The action is clear enough in the dialogue, but how can listeners know the maiming moment? The tense tone, groan, and heavy breathing of Michael Hordern as Titus make it obvious in this Caedmon recording. In The Winter’s Tale, the pickpocket Autolycus tells us that he “littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” so we know that he is a thief (4.3.25-83), but listeners cannot see him pick the Clown’s pocket, most likely between ll. 75 and 76 (there is no stage direction for this); nevertheless, his “You ha’ done me a charitable office” confirms the theft. Nicholas Grace, playing the Clown in Eoin O’Callaghan 1997 BBC broadcast, elongates the word “softly” in l. 75 to indicate that he is reaching into the Clown’s pocket.

How do you differentiate the factions in a war play? In 1999, Trevor Nunn directed a National Theatre stage production of Troilus and Cressida with black actors playing the Trojans and white actors playing the Greeks. Those unfamiliar with the play may have trouble differentiating the many characters, but this casting choice made instantly clear which characters were Trojan and which Greek. The idea may not seem to translate to audio since the ethnicity of the actors cannot be seen, but Marc Beeby’s 2005 BBC broadcast solved this problem by having the black actors playing the Trojans speak in African accents. These distinctive accents lacked the visual cue of Nunn’s production but were nevertheless effective in instantly identifying the Trojan speakers.[13]

Contrast this success with the effect of accents in audio productions of The Merchant of Venice. Actors often use an accent to indicate Morocco’s foreignness, but seeing his dark skin has a greater impact when Portia says, “Let all of his complexion choose me so” (2.7.79) than the lesser impact of merely hearing his accent, and that is a disadvantage for audio. Seeing Morocco better reinforces Shylock’s frequent allusions to the character and bigotry of the Christians in this play.

Casting is seldom a problem. Directors rarely cast two actors with similar voices for listeners must easily identify a speaker, though Gerald Newman failed to do this when he directed Hamlet for the CBC in 1961. Hamlet (Peter Howarth) and Laertes (David Allen) sound enough alike that listeners might think that Hamlet is still speaking when 1.3 begins.[14] The latter Oregon Shakespeare Festival radio broadcasts often had this problem. These event broadcasts in the 1970s and 1980s presented the opening nights of the three plays in the Festival’s Elizabethan Theater.[15] The Festival, quite rightly, cast actors to act on stage regardless of similarities in their voices, so identifying the speaker is difficult in many of these broadcasts. The similarity of voices of both sets of twins in Julian Lopez-Morillas’s 1982 production of The Comedy of Errors is a disaster since listeners could not see the distinguishing features of the actors to know which Dromio and Antipholus were from Syracuse or Ephesus. There are other problems with this show, such as a dozen incidents of audience laughter sometimes lasting a minute or more. The many visual gags in this production were a hit on stage but are bad radio.

Physical comedy is always a challenge. The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.3 and 4.2 get big laughs on stage. In 3.3, one laugh comes when a huge volume of laundry is thrown over Sir John Falstaff hiding in a buck-basket. The difficulty the servants have lifting the basket is another big laugh, and sometimes in his next scene another laugh is earned by Falstaff’s filthy costume when he complains about the stench after returning from his drenching in the Thames, which was noted for its stench at the time (3.5.3-17). Falstaff refuses to return to the buck-basket in 4.2, but more laughs are earned when the jealous Ford, believing Falstaff is within, throws laundry all over the stage looking for him. Falstaff is instead disguised as the old woman of Brentford, an in-law hated by Ford, so Ford beats the disguised Falstaff. These slapstick scenes get big laughs in the theater, but all these gags are visual. Listeners may be amused by the energy of the acting but are unlikely to actually laugh.

Some scenes have no dialogue to make the action clear. It is impossible for listeners to know the content of Falstaff’s holster in Henry IV, Part One (5.3.50-55). Prince Hal enters unarmed and asks to borrow Falstaff’s sword. Falstaff refuses but offers Hal his pistol. The stage direction is, “The Prince draws it out, and finds it to be a bottle of sack.” Hal’s next line, “What, is it time to jest and dally now?” indicates that the content of the holster was not a pistol, but the bottle is not indicated in the dialogue. None of the audio productions heard attempt to indicate that the Prince found sack in the holster, nor the next stage direction: “He throws the bottle at him.” This bit of business is over in a moment, however, and listener attention is redirected to Falstaff’s plan to claim the honor for killing Hotspur.

Spectacles such as pageants, masques, dances, and dumb shows are particularly challenging since all involve visuals. I have seen Henry VIII on stage three times. The two that really worked were the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production in 1996 and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s in 2009. Both presented the spectacle spectacularly. Audio productions may try to compensate with music and other sounds, but you simply cannot see the King astride a horse, the glittering colors of the costumes and props, or the John Fletcher written dance in 1.4 during which Henry becomes fascinated by Anne Boleyn. Nobody knows the length of this dance on the Globe stage, but if it was a complete dance it must have been longer than the twenty-six seconds given it in Clive Brill’s Arkangel recording. The same recording attempts to relate some of the spectacles to listeners starting when Sean Baker reads the stage directions that begin 2.4: “Trumpets, sennet. The cornets. Enter two vergers with short silver wands; next them two Scribes in the habit of doctors; after them the Archbishop of Canterbury alone,” and so it goes for another 140 words and the entrance of 18 more specific characters plus unspecified numbers of scribes, lords, and attendants. The 4.1 and 5.4 spectacle stage directions are also read by Baker in their places. Reading these stage directions informs listeners of what they do not see, but they still do not see it. What audio productions of Henry VIII lose in spectacle they gain in the intimacy of this play’s multiple plots. The intimacy of audio performances will be more fully explored in Part Two.

Animals that appear on stage are a similar problem for audio. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and A Midsummer Night’s Dream call for dogs, while other plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Othello mention dogs belonging to its characters, and the original stagings may have featured dogs. There is nothing quite like seeing a dog on stage, as the “Aww” voiced by audiences indicates. Even films lack this canine immediacy, and audio plays certainly do. Human voices approximating dog sounds are usually the best audio can muster, but  an actor’s bark sounds phony to my ear. There is also the famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear” in The Winter’s Tale (3.3.57). Some scholars believe an actual bear did the pursuing. Real bear or actor in a bear costume, the impact for audio listeners is always diminished.

To sum up the challenges discussed so far: most are solvable or pass by quickly and are forgotten, but the more visual a scene, the more is lost when it is presented in audio. Part two of this article looks at Macbeth 3.4, the banquet scene solved by only a few audio producers, and Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.2, a culminating scene nobody has made work. These are followed by an examination of some of the considerable pleasures of audio Shakespeare.

Works Cited and Further Reading, Part One

Arden of Faversham. In The Shakespeare Apocrypha, C. F. Tucker Brooke, ed. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1918.

Clare, Janet. “Theatre of the Air: A Checklist of Radio Productions of Renaissance Drama 1922-1986 with an Appendix of Television Productions (excluding Shakespeare),” Renaissance Drama Newsletter Supplement Six, The Graduate School of Renaissance Studies, University of Warwick, Summer 1986.

Egan, Gabriel, “Hearing or seeing a play?: Evidence of early modern theatrical terminology,” http://gabrielegan.com/publications/Egan2001k.htm

Greenhalgh, Susanne. “Listening to Shakespeare,” Shakespeare and Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide, Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen, and Luke McKernan, eds. London: British University Film and Video Council, 2009, 74-93.

—. “Shakespeare and Radio,” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 541-557.

—. “Shakespeare Overheard: Performances, Adaptations and Citations on Radio,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Robert Shaughnessy, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 175-198.

—. “’A Stage of the Mind’: Hamlet on Post-War British Radio,” Shakespeare Survey 64, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 133-44.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2e. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Jensen, Michael P. The Battle of the Bard: Shakespeare on U.S. Radio in 1937, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.

—. “Henry V,” and “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare and Film, Television and Radio: The Researcher’s Guide, Olwen Terris, Eve-Marie Oesterlen, and Luke McKernan, eds. London: British University Film and Video Council, 2009, 160-1 and 163-4.

—. “’Lend Me Your Ears’: Sampling BBC Radio Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 61, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 170-180.

—. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Radio: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Radio Series,” Shakespeare Survey 65, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 121-37.

—. “The Noble Romans: When Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra Were Made Sequels,” Shakespeare Survey 69, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 79-91.

—. “Olivier’s Richard III on Radio,” Shakespeare Newsletter, 54:4, Winter 2004-5, 101-2.

_____. “’Prithee Listen Well’: The Case for Audio Shakespeare,” The Shakespearean World, Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby, eds. London: Routledge, 2017, 405-417.

—. “Radio: Entries Play by Play,” Shakespeares after Shakespeare: An Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture, Volume Two, Richard Burt, ed., Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007, 508-84.

Joseph, Patterson. Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play. London: Methuen, 2018.

Lanier, Douglas. “Shakespeare on the Record,” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen, eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007, 415-36.

—. “WSHX: Shakespeare and American Radio,” Shakespeare After Mass Media, Richard Burt, ed., Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002, 195-219.

Morgan, Brewster. “The World’s a Stage: Brewster Morgan Tells How Shakespeare Is Adapted and Broadcast,” New York Times, 8 August 1937, 10.

Orrell, John. The Quest for Shakespeare’s Globe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Pownall, David. “An Epiphanous Use of the Microphone,” Radio Plays. London: Oberon Books, 1998, 19-62.

Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2e, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, General Eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Smith, Andrea. “‘More Fair Than Black’: Othellos On British Radio,” Shakespeare Survey 75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, 49-59.

—. “Noise, Narration and Nose-Pegs: Adapting Shakespeare for Radio,” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media Volume 19, April 2021, 41-58.

Audiography, Part One

Beeby, Marc. Troilus and Cressida, BBC Radio 3, 30 October 2005. Radio.

Brill, Clive. Comedy of Errors, Arkangel, 1998. Audio.

—. Henry VI, part two, Arkangel, 2003. Audio.

—. Henry VIII, Arkangel, 2003. Audio.

—. Macbeth, Arkangel, 1998. Audio.

—. Two Noble Kinsmen, Arkangel, 2003. Audio.

Hauser, Frank. Macbeth, The Old Vic Company and NBC, 1953. Radio.

Hitchinson, David. Othello, BBC World Service, Play of the Week, 23 October 2004. Radio.

Jenkins, Martin. An Epiphanous Use of the Microphone, BBC Radio 4, 15 May 1998. Radio.

—. Sir Thomas More, BBC Radio 3, 25 December 1983. Radio.

Lopez-Morillas, Julian (stage director) and Ronald Kramer (radio director). The Comedy of Errors, National Public Radio, 15 June 1982. Radio.

Nesbitt, Catherine. Twelfth Night, BBC, 28 May 1923. Radio.

Nancarrow, Marion. Romeo and Juliet, BBC World Service, 19 and 26 July 2003. Radio.

Newman, Gerald. Hamlet, CBC Trans-Canada Network, 1961. Radio.

O’Callaghan, Eoin. Julius Caesar, BBC Radio 3, 1999. Radio.

Richmond, Robert. Macbeth, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2013. Audio.

Rylands, George. King Lear, Marlowe Dramatic Society, 1961. Audio.

Sackler, Howard. All’s Well That Ends Well, Caedmon, 1965. Audio.

—. Titus Andronicus, Caedmon, 1966. Audio.

Shaw, Fiona. Macbeth, Naxos, 1998. Audio.

Tydeman, John. Arden of Faversham, BBC Radio 3, 6 June 2004. Radio.

Wood, Peter. Measure for Measure, Caedmo, 1961. Audio.

Notes

[1] The Learning on Screen Shakespeare database lists thirteen audio adaptations of All’s Well That Ends Well compared with three screen versions and forty-two audio productions of Hamlet compared with thirty-one on screen, and so it goes throughout the canon.

[2] http://bufvc.ac.uk/shakespeare/.

[3] Making additional if modest contributions are Janet Clare, whose MA thesis was published as “Theatre of the Air: A Checklist of Radio Productions of Renaissance Drama, 1922-1986,” a supplement to the Renaissance Drama Newsletter published in 1986 by the Graduate School of Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick. There are so many errors that everything must be verified by other sources. John Drakakis contributed a fine introduction on early BBC drama, including a few paragraphs on Shakespeare, for his edited book British Radio Drama published by Cambridge University Press in 1981. Robert Sawyer included material on using phonographs to teach Shakespeare in the early twentieth century and Orson Welles’s Shakespeare broadcasts are addressed in Broadcast Your Shakespeare: Continuity and Change Across Media published by Bloomsbury in 2018. One occasionally finds other small references, though, like Sawyer’s chapter, these bring in audio as adjunct to the subjects under discussion.

[4] Here is a link to the first episode: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001d68d.

[5] See Orrell.

[6] My thanks to Laury Magnus and Walter Cannon for suggesting I look at Andrew Gurr’s  Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London.

[7] See Egan.

[8] Anonymous, “The World’s a Stage: Brewster Morgan Tells How Shakespeare Is Adapted and Broadcast,” The New York Times, 8 August 1937, p. 10.

[9] Quoted in Clare.

[10] A nod must be made to the full length 78 RPM recording of Othello released by Columbia Records in 1948. The set was a bit unwieldly at eighteen records.

[11] Selected transcribed BBC radio productions also received stateside broadcasts in the mid-sixties on National Education Radio, a precursor to National Public Radio.

[12] Lanier, Douglas, “Shakespeare on the Record,” 426-8.

[13] Joseph, Patterson, Julius Caesar and Me, 53. Joseph played Troilus and wrote about his affected Tanzanian accent.

[14] My thanks to Charles Weinstein for supplying David Allen’s name.

[15] The first opening was broadcast live but the other two plays were recorded for later broadcasts. The openings were on consecutive nights, but the broadcasts were presented once a week.