OTD in early British television: 25 February 1932
John Wyver writes: Today is the 93rd anniversary of the earliest Shakespeare performance on British television that I can identify. In the morning of Thursday 25 February 1932, producer Harold Bradly in the Baird studio in Covent Garden’s Long Acre, marshalled Colleen Clifford and Willard Stoker to play two ‘proposal’ scenes, one modern, by a writer called Jerome Leslie, and one ‘ancient’, from Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Although the Programme-as-Broadcast record offers no further details, the scene must be act 5 scene 2, in which the young king, victor against the French at Agincourt, woos the Valois princess Katherine. Shakespeare has a great deal of fun with franglais and one or two suggestively sexual jokes, although it is unlikely that the broadcast stressed the latter.
King Henry is nothing if not persuasive:
A good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it shines bright and never changes, but keeps his course truly. If thou would have such a one, take me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier, take a king. And what sayest thou then to my love? speak, my fair, and fairly, I pray thee.
We know nothing of how Colleen Clifford and Willard Stoker played the scene – there are no reviews that I can find and no photographs – but that a fragment of Shakespeare was done this early is striking in itself. Both actors had remarkably varied careers, and it’s worth following the links to leqrn more about them.
And as for how it can be done, here’s Robert Hardy and Judi Dench giving part of the scene, gloriously, from the 1960 adaptation in the BBC’s The Age of Kings series:
Yep, doing Shakespeare always does it for the Brits. Cf Beerbohn Tree in King John for Bioscope, Will Barker’s 1910 stunt film – all copies burned after six weeks, etc. But there must be more of the Bard from Ally Pally?
Yes, more Shakespeare from AP certainly, although perhaps not quite as much as might be expected.
A series of Scenes from… starting in 1937; an hour-long Othello that year too; Dallas Bower’s 1938 modern-dress production of Julius Caesar set in a mid-European fascist state; The Tempest, also mounted by Bower the following year; and a live OB of Twelfth Night from the West End.
Might I recommend Wyver (2016), ‘An Intimate and Intermedial Form: Early Television Shakespeare from the BBC, 1937-39’, in: Shakespeare Survey 69: Shakespeare and Rome, Cambridge University Press. pp. 347-360.