Donald Wolfit's Shakespeare on Broadway 1947: The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The British actor/manager Donald Wolfit brought his repertoire to 1700-seat New Century Theatre on 7th Avenue and West 58th Street for three-week season from 18 February to 6 March 1947. Following successful Canadian tour, his producer Hall Shelton hoped reaction might similar on Broadway. Both he and Wolfit were sadly disappointed as New York reviewers unanimously condemned productions for lack of quality. The season commenced with King Lear, Wolfit's biggest box-office draw in his recent London season at Winter Garden Theatre. Brooks Atkinson of New York Times felt Wolfit was wholly lacking in nobility of character might give this tragedy stature, in revival was but tussle (The New Play). (1) George Jean Nathan described company as grossly incompetent, while Ernst Stem's sets looked as if they had been fished of suburban warehouse (Nathan). John Beaufort of Christian Science Monitor asked: If classics are going to done in such way, would it perhaps better not to do them at all? (Beaufort). As You Like It, staple of Wolfit's repertoire over previous decade, fared little better: Robert Garland of New York Journal-American believed cast could not put over Shakespeare's speeches in way that you--or I--could admire or understand it.... It was fair neither to them or Shakespeare (Garland). William Hawkins of World-Telegram described revival as a jabbering race. You are likely to wish not so much they would cut play, as cut it out (Hawkins). The Merchant of Venice, pillar of Wolfit's repertoire, received slightly more favourable notices, but managed to upset Lee Shubert, controller of more than half of all Broadway theatres, on anti-Semitic grounds. Edgar Price of Brooklyn Citizen deemed Wolfit's staging especially insensitive at time when the Brotherhood of Man is being preached from one end of country to another (Donald Wolfit and his Company). The fourth and last revival in five-play season (the final being Ben Jonson's Volpone) was Hamlet, which Wolfit had first essayed at Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, as long ago as 1936. The anonymous Variety reviewer considered possessed none of litheness, nor few of accepted emotions of prince of Denmark, while his rendering of To or not to be soliloquy was no better than of a provincial stock actor (Hamlet). Rowland Field (Newark Evening News) claimed cast had struck a new low for their New York engagement with their crude treatment of majestic work (Field). Faced with such reviews, it came as no surprise to find Wolfit writing in his account-book in New York: Anti-British feeling [was] high ... Bevin attacked Truman. Anger from Jews over M. of Venice and threats to close us up (qtd. in Harwood 202). (2) His productions were certainly old-fashioned, constructed around leading actor's personality with little attention paid to supporting cast, scenery or costumes. By late Forties British reviewers regularly condemned his shoddy standards--even if he was undertaking valuable cultural by playing in provincial cities, he could at least bear in mind audiences expected more in return for price of admission. For example, humourist Stephen Potter felt Wolfit deliberately underproduces and undercasts rest of his company in order to stand by contrast ... [yet] most in need of production, naturally, is Mr. Wolfit himself. Just because his status is of leading actor, his intemperance needs stricter hand (Potter). Writing in News Chronicle Alan Dent disliked stage-business introduced into Wolfit's productions, to give supporting cast something to do: We do not applaud [it] (Dent). Despite Wolfit's allegations, New York reviewers were not by nature anti-British--as this article will explain, their reactions not only depended on lack of quality of Wolfit's repertoire, but were significantly determined by social and theatrical context in which he performed. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".