Damned spots
Christopher Hawtree
Shakespeare: Macbeth, Henry IV Part One John Mahoney and Stewart Martin (Penguin cassettes £5.95 each)
pity the poor book-reviewer. Long used to reading by the fire with his feet up and a cup of tea at one side, he now has to perch amid a tangle of wires which connect a tape-recorder and transformer, peer at a flickering screen and follow its commands by tapping at an elaborate keyboard. John Mahoney and Stewart Martin have recently left Kent's education department in order to prepare at least 20 of these guides to Shakespeare's plays for Penguin's new 'study software' series. For anyone to aban- don a safe job and risk all on some literary criticism would seem foolhardy; however, this series, despite having to compete with an edition from Hutchinson that boasts a translation on the facing page, will no doubt prove as lucrative as the cartoon ver- sions without which few publishers' lists are now complete.
The authors — as, for convenience's sake, they shall be known — have been at some pains to point out that their system is in a class apart from many study aids; unlike such publications as Penguin's Passnotes, edited by the compiler of the notorious Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, this computer-based guide cannot, from sheer bulk, be read independently of the text. How does one use 'the first truly revolutionary breakthrough in the study of literature since the invention of printing'?
With a ZX Spectrum apparatus provided by Sinclair's helpful publicity department, one 'loads' the 48K cassette (versions suitable for the BBC and Commodore machines will follow presently); this process is the modern equivalent of waiting for the valves to glow. Eventually the flashing lines on the screen evolve into the Penguin logo and a pastiche of Paul Hogarth's design for the Macbeth cover in the admirable series of texts issued by Penguin some 20 years ago and with which these cassettes are link- ed; the creaking noises from the loudspeaker become a mere hum, and one is ready to begin. A chart, separated into the headings of character, theme and Act, is now displayed. This is known as the 'key menu'; further pressing of buttons reveals that several characters are off; and the choice of themes — blood, water, sickness, and so on — unadventurous (the authors have said that some teachers were surprised by the inclusion of 'clothing', but the im- portance of this has surely been apparent from Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery, if not before). None the less, one can begin to experiment with the 3/4 million possible cross-references which, as a bibliographical curiosity, are claimed on some issues of the publicity leaflet.
One soon overcomes the Remove-like temptation to find out what the device has to say about Duncan and Act V CI have found nothing! Perhaps you are searching for combinations which will not help your understanding of the play'). More oddly, seeking to study the witches, animals and Act IV yields the same result; one might have thought that a chant which involves the parts of 17 beasts — 'cool it with a ba- boon's blood' — would be worthy of com- ment; wonder about the outcome in Act V of Lady Macbeth's ambitions is similarly left unanswered. Time and again one is brought up in one's tracks — Banquo and the banquet have to be reached by other means, for example — and the end of more successful investigations is marked by a score-card in one corner which numbers the allusions in each Act. The sophistication of such machinery cannot disguise the fact that somebody has to write the brief cap- tions (irritatingly puctuated by dashes) in the first place, and the tedium that these in themselves — whatever the permutations might be — soon engender is caused by the authors' admitted need to bear in mind 'the things the examination boards are looking for'.
However much a reader might be made aware of the complex imagery of the play by this system's cross-references and sug- gested parallels, he risks being left with the impression that Macbeth is merely a kind of gigantic crossword puzzle waiting to be fill- ed in or detective story to be solved. Nothing of the spirit of the work is con- veyed by this fragmentary approach, something that is perhaps even more ap- parent in the dreary breakdown of Falstaff's ebullient character in the Henry IV cassette.
This need not be particularly depressing, for Shakespeare has survived Tate, Polan- ski, Marowitz and all those tenure-seeking American academics. More alarming is the thought that all study in schools before long could be reduced to such snippets of 'information' on a screen. That 'more will mean worse' has never seemed as true as it has in recent years. While scientists might well benefit from ready access to facts by such a method, it is difficult to see how all the much-trumpeted 'new technology' cables, satellites and so on — can be of use to anybody else. As Peacock's Dr Opimian remarked, 'science is one thing and wisdom another'; the schoolboy who has been taught to read Homer in the original is bet- ter prepared for a lifetime's enjoyment of literature than the one who can only sum- mon up the superfluous matter that has been programmed by somebody else. The ability to concoct sentences that can accom- modate complex ideas in a readable way is surely in danger of being submerged by electronic gobbets whose only rhythm is that of the bleeping noises which so often accompany them.
Whether it is caused by looking at the sections of unconnected prose or at a flickering screen, one's head certainly aches after five hours' use of these cassettes. Put- ting them back in their cases, the television in the cupboard and the Sinclair pieces in their box, one returns to the fireside and reaches out with relief for the latest addi- tions — Julius Caesar and Titus An- dronicus — to the excellent Oxford Shakespeare, which is also beginning to ap- pear in paperback; how it will compare with the forthcoming Cambridge edition remains to be seen, but both will be of greater use to the reader, whether or not he is concerned with the needs of examination boards, than will any combination possible on this 'soft- ware'. With considerable nostalgia one recalls the time when Penguin preferred to have in print those black volumes of Johnson, Coleridge and Shaw on Shakespeare.
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