Shakespeare USA: The BBC Plays and American Education

B ORN IN THE BICENTENNIAL FERVOR OF 1976, it was to be a grand AngloAmerican enterprise, the cultural equivalent of the Normandy landing, the Lend-Lease Act, and the Marshall Plan all rolled into one. The British Broadcasting Corporation and Time-Life Television would produce all the plays in special made-for-television productions tailored to general audiences. Designed to be enduring and easily understood, the productions would deliberately adhere to a plain style: "William Shakespeare wrote his plays to please an audience that was neither very sophisticated nor literary," said Shaun Sutton, head of the BBC's television drama group, and "we hope to bring back these plays on the same plain terms to a mass audience that would have astounded Shakespeare. Undoubtedly, the project will have a wide educational future; but primarily, the plays will be presented as they were first conceived-as entertainment."I Underwriters for the $13.6 million venture were to be three corporate giants: Exxon Corporation, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would supply funding for ancillary educational activities, including special programs on National Public Radio. And WNET/Thirteen in New York would coordinate the broadcasts and educational outreach in the United States. Pointing out that American funding came to only $100,000 a play, WNET President John Jay Iselin accurately summed up the high hopes with which the series began, calling it "the great Anglo-American alliance of the twentieth century." Iselin predicted that it would bring about "a Shakespeare Renaissance and a special educational experience for a generation of Americans. "2 Such were the high spirits that inspired the unusual collaboration of television