Making its debut with Romeo and Juliet on 3 December 1978, and concluding nearly seven years later with Titus Andronicus on 27 April 1985, the BBC Television Shakespeare project was the single most ambitious attempt at bringing the Bard of Avon to the small screen, both at the time and to date.
Producer Cedric Messina was already an experienced producer of one-off television Shakespeare presentations, and was thus ideally qualified to present the BBC with a daunting but nonetheless enticingly simple proposition: a series of adaptations, staged specifically for television, of all 36 First Folio plays, plus Pericles (The Two Noble Kinsmen was considered primarily John Fletcher's work, and the legitimacy of Edward III was still being debated).
The scale of Messina's proposal, far greater than that of previous multi-part Shakespeare series such as An Age of Kings (BBC, 1960) and Spread of the Eagle (BBC, 1963), required an American partner in order to guarantee access to the US market, deemed essential for the series to recoup its costs. Time-Life Television agreed to participate, but under certain controversial conditions - that the productions be traditional interpretations of the plays in appropriately Shakespearean period costumes and sets, designed to fit a two-and-a-half-hour time slot.
The running-time requirement was swiftly jettisoned when it became clear that the major tragedies in particular would have suffered severely, but other artistic restrictions remained largely in place throughout. Although later productions under Messina's successors Jonathan Miller and Shaun Sutton would be more experimental, Miller was unable to persuade first-choice directors such as Peter Brook and Ingmar Bergman to take part, and Michael Bogdanov resigned from Timon of Athens (eventually tx, 4/16/1981, with Miller himself directing) after his modern-dress interpretation was considered too radical a departure.
This gave the BBC Television Shakespeare cycle the reputation of being overly staid and conventional, which was not always deserved. Though Messina's own productions (1978-80) were largely conservative, Jonathan Miller (1980-82) revamped things both visually (thanks to a design policy of sourcing sets and costumes from great paintings of the era in which the play was set) and in terms of direction and casting, in some cases using popular actors with little or no Shakespeare experience (John Cleese as Petruchio, Bob Hoskins as Iago) to attract new and younger audiences.
Under Miller, directors such as Jack Gold, Jane Howell and Elijah Moshinsky were encouraged to be more adventurous, with Howell in particular adopting such a stylised approach for The Winter's Tale (tx. 8/2/1981) and the Henry VI/Richard III cycle (tx. 2-23/1/1983) that they pushed the definition of "traditional" to the limit, but also garnered the series some of its best reviews. Miller's aesthetic policies continued under Shaun Sutton (1982-85), who brought the project to a belated close.
Whatever its artistic reputation, there was no doubt that the BBC Television Shakespeare was a commercial triumph, breaking even financially by 1982 (ahead of expectations) and fully justifying Messina's gamble. Its success was helped by the rapid growth of video recorders in schools, creating a secondary market that was much bigger than initially predicted - though the initial decision to sell the plays only as a complete set provoked complaints from people who baulked at paying the substantial asking price because they were after a smaller selection or individual titles. The BBC eventually released some of the more popular titles separately, but it was not until late in 2005 that the entire series was available individually on DVD at a competitive price.
Although the BBC Television Shakespeare project as a whole met with a mixed reception, it had several positive virtues. Chief among them was the fact that its completist remit meant that several of the more obscure plays received their first television adaptation, and in most cases the BBC version remains the only one. Happily, such productions as Henry VIII (tx. 25/2/1979), Cymbeline (tx. 10/7/1983), Pericles (tx. 11/6/1984) and Titus Andronicus were considered amongst the cycle's most impressive achievements, with Henry VIII subsequently voted the best production of all by the Shakespeare Association of America.
A complete list of BBC Television Shakespeare productions is as follows:
Series One (producer: Cedric Messina): Romeo and Juliet (tx. 3/12/1978), Richard II (tx. 10/12/1978), As You Like It (tx. 17/12/1978), Julius Caesar (tx. 11/2/1979), Measure For Measure (tx. 18/2/1979), Henry VIII (tx. 25/2/1979)
Series Two (p. Cedric Messina): Henry IV Part One (tx. 9/12/1979), Henry IV Part Two (tx. 16/12/1979), Henry V (tx.23/12/1979), Twelfth Night (tx. 6/1/1980), The Tempest (tx. 27/2/1980), Hamlet (tx. 25/5/1980).
Series Three (p. Jonathan Miller): The Taming of the Shrew (tx. 23/10/1980), The Merchant of Venice (tx. 17/12/1980), All's Well That Ends Well (tx. 4/1/1981), The Winter's Tale (tx. 8/2/1981), Timon of Athens (tx. 16/4/1981), Antony and Cleopatra (tx. 8/5/1981)
Series Four (p. Jonathan Miller): Othello (tx. 4/10/1981), Troilus and Cressida (tx. 7/10/1981), A Midsummer Night's Dream (tx. 13/12/1981)
Series Five (p. Jonathan Miller, Shaun Sutton): King Lear (tx. 19/9/1982), The Merry Wives of Windsor (tx. 28/12/1982), Henry VI Part One (tx. 2/1/1983), Henry VI Part Two (tx. 9/1/1983), Henry VI Part Three (tx. 16/1/1983), Richard III (tx. 23/1/1983), Cymbeline (tx. 10/7/1983)
Series Six (p. Shaun Sutton): Macbeth (tx. 17/10/1983), The Comedy of Errors (tx. 24/12/1983), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (tx. 27/12/1983), Coriolanus (tx. 21/4/1984), Pericles (tx. 11/6/1984)
Series Seven (p. Shaun Sutton): King John (tx. 24/11/1984), Much Ado About Nothing (tx. 30/11/1984), Love's Labour's Lost (tx. 5/1/1985), Titus Andronicus (tx. 27/4/1985)
The BBC also produced Shakespeare in Perspective, an accompanying series of 25-minute personal introductions to individual plays by an eclectic range of presenters from the literary (Anthony Burgess, Dennis Potter, Jilly Cooper) to the scholarly (Germaine Greer, Frank Kermode, Michael Wood) to the celebrity (Roy Hudd, George Melly, Barry Took). These usually took the form of straight-to-camera addresses from assorted locations with some connection to the play, which were intercut with extracts from the accompanying BBC Shakespeare production, usually screened later that evening.
Michael Brooke
For the BBC Television Shakespeare, tx. 8/2/1981, colour, 185 mins
Director Jane Howell
Production Companies BBC Television, Time-Life Television
Producer Jonathan Miller
Script Editor David Snodin
Designer Don Homfray
Music Dudley Simpson
Cast: Jeremy Kemp (Leontes); Robert Stephens (Polixenes); Anna Calder-Marshall (Hermione); Margaret Tyzack (Paulina); David Burke (Camillo); John Welsh (Archidamus); Cyril Luckham (Antigonus); Rikki Fulton (Autolycus)
The production which established the most decisive break between the self-consciously 'realistic' approach of the first two series of the BBC Television Shakespeare cycle (1978-80, produced by Cedric Messina) and the more intellectualised approach of Jonathan Miller, Jane Howell's The Winter's Tale (tx. 8/2/1981) was one of the most daringly stylised productions of the entire project, its stripped-down approach to design and staging working particularly well on television.
Production designer Don Homfray (who had already moved towards a minimalist approach with Rodney Bennett's production of Hamlet the previous year) reduced the sets to a couple of cones, a tree (which Howell said was a deliberate homage to Samuel Beckett's similarly Spartan Waiting for Godot) and a plain wedge-shaped background with a passage cut through the centre, and the changing seasons were conveyed by shifts in the colour of the sets and lighting (stark white for winter, green and fertile for spring). Although the costumes are broadly in line with the Elizabethan/Jacobean era, no specific period is suggested, thus emphasising the play's universality.
Jeremy Kemp's imposing Leontes, dressed in black and with a temper as fiery as his russet beard, his festering jealousy and its associated paranoia make Othello seem reasonable by comparison, and his wanton victimisation of his wholly innocent wife Hermione (Anna Calder-Marshall, who would later play one of Shakespeare's most notorious victims for Howell in the BBC cycle's Titus Andronicus, 1985) dominates the play's first half, with Robert Stephens' jovial Polixenes and Margaret Tyzack's morally self-righteous Paulina quite unable to get him to see sense. Welcome relief is provided in second half, both by the joyously bucolic celebration of spring, and a delicious cameo by Scottish comedian Rikki Fulton, whose roguish Autolycus frequently involves the audience in his conspiratorial asides as he plots to relieve yet another hapless victim of his possessions.
Howell is largely faithful to the original text, which has undergone just five cuts, only the removal of Act IV's Dance of the Twelve Satyrs being especially substantial. The production retains Shakespeare's most famous stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear", though Howell wisely gets this over with as quickly as possible after having had to resort to special effects fakery when a real bear proved impossible to obtain.
Michael Brooke
http://rapidshare.com/files/113373971/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113374456/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part02.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113374971/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part03.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113375579/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part04.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/113378280/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part09.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113378807/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part10.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113379323/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part11.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113379888/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part12.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/113380023/THE_WINTER_S_TALE_BBC.part13.rar
no pass
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