CRITIC TOUCHES OFF CONTROVERSY

. eriticised . .

Did Shakespeare write his play,
Twelfth Nighi, as potboiler ?

A RECENT remark I made
(in the London Daily Worker)
that Shakespeare wrote
Twelfth Night as a potboiler
has drawn a storm of protest.

My critics, however, have
fallen into pitfalls, bound up
with the magic name of
Shakespeare. .

First, they imagine that
Shakespeare was incapable of
writing a potboiler, because
the word has become tainted

by its modern connotation of
a man writing without consci-
ence for money.

Second, it is assumed that a
_potboiler must be a bad. work.
Yet the history of lfterature
shows that many of the works
‘we praise most highly were
written “to earn a living.”

Dickens, desperately com-
posing Oliver Twist, David
Copperfield, Pickwick Papers
and others, to meet the de-
mands of editors who were pre-
pared to pay him high wordage
rates; Ibsen’s early plays; Du-
mas and Scott; even Bernard
Shaw—to list a few—thought
it no crime to keep them-
selves alive in the only way
open to them; selling the crea-
tions of their brain to please
their audiences.

We do not blame these men.
They had to live while they
were making their names and
reaching the peak of their
artistic genius. Nor do we com-
plain of them of doing “mere-
ly” to earn a living the best
work they were capable of at
the time.

Nor was Shakespeare im-
mune from this need to earn a
living. The evidence, though
scanty, all points the other
way.

e

Shakespeare had his own
company. He had actors cal-
ling for good parts in plays
that would draw the crowds
and keep the company alive.

If Shakespeare had failed
them he would soon have been
out of a job.

This, of course, still begs the
‘question: was Twelfth Night a
potboiler? Perhaps the best
answer comes from one of my
critics.

She writes: “It was the last
of Shakespeare’s great roman-
tic comedies, basic recipe; a
love story with sympathetic
characters and a farcical un-
der-plot . . . existing social ar-
rangements are not seriously
. Shakespeare had
a particular genius for lovable
individuals of both sexes. Not
only his charming heroes and

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heroines, but his low comics
are priceless human beings
whom we don’t like to see
hurt.

“But when this human in-
terest is applied to a villain,
the wicked Shylock, we get a
cold draught of moral discom-

fort that doesn’t really belong
to comedy.”

Twelfth Night’s absence of
social criticism, its farcical sub-
plot, the absence of moralising

.

BOOKS

are evidence that Shakespeare
was aiming .to please the pub-
lic, while at the same time giv-
ing them the best work he
could in the type of play he
was writing.

The most striking thing
about Shakespeare’s great
plays — the plays he wrote to
please himself — King Lear,
Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello,
the one exception is The
Tempest — is the absence of
plot.

_° In these plays, plot gives
way to character. Shakespeare
does not have to manufacture
artificial situations; his people
make the plays “go” because |
they are that sort of people.

One other hallmark stamps
the potboiler; the absence of
anything that puzzles or be-
wilders. Shakespeare’s great
plays, even 300 years after-
wards, bring forth a spate of
books “explaining” their mean-
ing.

But not Twelfth Night. There
is nothing to puzzle us here.

It was written to please. the
public. It may even have
pleased Shakespeare, since it
was a good job, well done. But
it remains a potboiler and,
therefore, ranks one step down
below the mightiest works of
his eternal genius.

: —DONALD DOUGLAS.

'

Chain smoking machine

The Institute of Industrial Medicine in New York is using this
machine — it chain smokes 15 cartons of cigarettes a day — in its
experiments to determine whether or not there is a cancer-producing
agent in tobacco smoke. The experiments were undertaken follow- .
ing reports, supported by a substantial body of medical opinion, that
heavy cigarette smoking is a factor in the increasing incidence of

lung cancer.

»

Why there's every reason for optimism

WE ALL know how dreary a
pessimist can be and we usually
tell him: “Things can’t be as bad
as all that.”

In everyday life we realise that
pessimism arises from a one-sided
view of things. But pessimism on
a grand scale is not eats so well
understood.

This larger pessimism jis that
of writers, politicians and other
leaders of the contemporary West-
ern world. Such people think of
the present and the future in
terms of doom or insecurity.

Even Winston Churchill, wha

has not usually been regarded as
unduly pessimistic, could speak
on the present century as a cent-
ury of “storm and tumult and ter-
rible wars.’

Why are such pessimists pes- ~

simistic?

Maurice Cornforth gives the
answer in Historical Materialism,
the second volume of his Dialecti-
cal Materialism (obtainable in
Vancouver at the People’s Coop-

erative Bookstore, 337 West Pen- ~

der Street, price $1.75). He says:
“Thinkers with the most div-
erse views — atheists and- de-

vout Christians, Social Demo-
crats and. Conservatives — are
all impellled to express one and
the same points of view, namely,
that man is ignorant of his fate
and is at the mercy of mysteri-
ous forces which he cannot com-
prehend.

“What is this but the point of
view of the ruling capitalist
class in the throes of its final
crisis?”

For the members of the present
ruling class, society is fixed in its
present form. They see the end
of capitalism as the end of the

AFFAIR LAUNCHES NEW FRONTIERS CAMPAIGN

Wallace reads poem ‘written
in Rockies’ for city audience

J. S. WALLACE, Giitstandine
Canadian poet, delighted a Van-
couver audience at Orchid Hall
last Friday by reading a new
poem—‘“I wrote it while I was
coming through the Rockies,” he
explained. One verse is:

Let’s turn our hands to useful-

ness
And make this land we prize,
Using our sinews and our skills, -
A people’s paradise
Where all may ‘have and all may
hew
In factories and farms.
Comrades, it’s time to raise our
hearts
And time to drop our arms.

The affair, sponsored by New

= Frontiers, the cultural magazine
= of which Wallace is an associate
= editor, also launched the maga-
= zine’s sustaining fund and sub-

scription campaign. An appeal

fe Hal Griffin, chairman, brought
16 new subscriptions towards the
100 the Vancouver committee has
undertaken to get.

The program included two sohgs
adapted from Wallace’s poems,
the well known “Oh Lovely Land”
and “Making Hay,” set to music
by Mitch Sago of Winnipeg.
‘Making Hay,” it was revealed,
has also been: set to music by
Searle Friedman, a Vancouver
composer.

Members of the audience bought
21 autographed copies of Wal-
lace’s new collection of poems,
All My Brothers, following a
dramatic reading of the title
poem.

Wallace, now in Vancouver in
the course of a national tour, has
also spoken to audiences in North
‘Vancouver and Ladner and to a
students’ meeting at University of
British Columbia.

J. MALEACE

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — FEBRUARY 12, 1954 — PAGE 8 | :

be
tad

world. They cannot and dare not
face the alternative — rule by the
working class.

That is why the United States
rulers rely upon the atom bomb
and the hydrogen bomb to main-
tain domination of their world.
“After us the deluge” has been

changed to: “After us the hell-
fire.”

Cornforth’s book gives the op-
posite side of the picture, too. He
shows us the common people have
every right to be optimistic. For
they possess the alternative to in-
efficient, brutalising and war-rid-
den capitalism. They can end the
storm and tumult and the terrible
wars. Cornforth also explains

why this is‘so.

: Cornforth expounds the work-
ing-class alternative: socialism
from which grows comrhunism.
He shows that socialism and com-
munism mean a free, full life for
all — —in all senses of the term:
more and better food and clothes
and homes, and cultural, and so-
cial equality.

Most apposite ats ‘the moment is
his point that: “It is in its power
to increase the total social wealth
that socialism proves its superi-
ority over capitalism.” :

_ This, of course, in the long run
is the solution of troubles about
wages and the cost of living. But
to recognize this, as Cornforth
insists, is no substitute for strug-
gle for higher real wages and
peace to enjoy them now.

The book is plainly written,

with a minimum of technical

phrases — and those carefully ex-
plained. Although it is one of
three volumes (there is another

_ to come) it stands complete on

its own. It should be in the
library of every working-class
student. —MICHAEL MacALPIN.

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