THE STAGE: To Man From Mankind's Heart

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City's famed Astor Place riot, in which 22 people were killed. But in the U.S., too, touring companies were beset by moralizers, and as they played the Bard in gold-rush camps and over billiard rooms, the actors placated indignant religious sectarians by billing Othello as "a moral dialogue depicting the evil effects of jealousy."

The New Players. Except for the lambently poignant Ellen Terry, England suffered an early 20th century eclipse of great Shakespearean acting—performers had their minds on the theater of social significance, and considered Shakespeare the kiss of death.

The turning point came with the emergence of the contrasting twin giants: John Gielgud, whose melodious, grief-numbed Hamlet was this generation's finest, and Laurence Olivier, whose body English makes him Shakespeare's Angry Young Man, forever Hotspur, whether he is a sinuously satanic Richard III, a black-as-thunder Macbeth, or a plangent patriot King, Henry V. Not far behind these triumphs are Maurice Evans' sterling-silver-tongued Richard II, Ralph Richardson's roguishly intelligent Falstaff and Michael Redgrave's mettlesome, love-ravished Antony. They are the leaders of today's functional Shakespeare, in which action flows naturally along the firm riverbed of the verse—making clearer than ever that, while the play's the thing, to prove it the player must be the real thing.

Compared to such models, the American Shakespearean actor is short on breath, long on Method and nil on tradition, despite the dimly remembered glories of Booth and Barrymore. Too many U.S. actors either singsong like walking metronomes or chop up the lines and speak blank prose. As for acting, Method-mad U.S. actors swallow a character like medicine and then release him through their pores in involuntary shudders. They are nonetheless eager to try the roles that all agree are the touchstones of an actor's skill and imagination. What is needed is the continuity of acting tradition that comes mainly through repertory groups such as England's Old Vic; Director Tyrone Guthrie has just received a $400,000 foundation grant to start such a group in Minneapolis.

The New Bard. All the actors, British and American, like their predecessors, are involved in the attempts of their age to press Shakespeare into a contemporary mold. Orson Welles dressed his Caesar in quasi-Fascist uniform, and Olivier's mother-possessed, mob-envenomed Coriolanus ended hanging head downward, like the dead, degraded Mussolini. Moscow has staged Hamlet as an army plot against the King, with Ophelia a court whore who played the mad scene drunk. In Manhattan a group of feminists staged an all-female Lear, and a Polish actor played Shylock as a fat, wisecracking Broadway type. At Stratford, Ont., Tyrone Guthrie mounted a brilliant, modern-dress All's Well That Ends Well in which the almost Ibsenite heroine became a waifish debutante and the play's "Florentine widow" turned into a wonderful old madam catering to occupation troops.

Some of the gimmick productions are offensive, but they do not necessarily violate the author's spirit. They are possible only because Shakespeare is timeless. He says everything. Protestants, Catholics and agnostics claim him. So do aristocrats and egalitarians, optimists and pessimists. He is loved by the pure in heart, and