Bard by the Boxful

It may be time for a Ben Jonson resurgence, or for Christopher Marlowe to change agents. Anything to give the Bard a night off.

How much Shakespeare is too much Shakespeare? With a 400-year breeze at his back and “Shakespeare in Love” now in video stores, the Man From S.T.R.A.T.F.O.R.D. has become as pop-culturally ubiquitous as “Star Wars,” or Starbucks, or the Austin Powers billboards.

Understandably, a theatergoer can feel a little . . . full of it, sometimes. This is not the fault of the playwright, although certain Shakespeare plays--”A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for one--come around often enough to make you wonder whether the federal government shouldn’t step in and ban it for a while.

Such uncharitable impulses often relate to how Shakespeare is done. For some, it’s the so-called nontraditional stagings that drive them crazy, especially if they make hash of the language, or give it short interpretive shrift. For others, there’s an equal or greater hurdle in paying too much attention to elocutionary clarity, and not enough to other matters.

The subject has been on my mind ever since I went back to the Peter Hall staging of “Measure for Measure,” recently at the Ahmanson Theatre. Since opening night the production had stretched out a bit in terms of running time, perhaps five minutes. Five felt like 50. Brian Murray’s Duke of Vienna, once solidly effective, had gone slack and haywire simultaneously. The production’s energy was missing in action; Shakespeare’s fascinatingly conflicted ruler had become a dutiful embodiment of meter above all, da-DUM-dee-DUM-dee-DUM. Some productions, even good ones, remain more taut mid-run than others. The second time I saw and heard this “Measure,” a version I admired still in many ways, it played like “Iamb-zapoppin’,” a dogged tribute to the sound of spoken Shakespeare rather than a full exploration of the characters at hand.

Spoken Shakespeare is the blunt point of Rhino Records’ six-CD boxed set titled “Be Thou Now Persuaded: Living in a Shakespearean World.” The collection boasts some gorgeous stuff; how could it not, with this writer, and the golden throats of so many game Shakespeareans?

But as you plow your way through it, you may find yourself thinking the unthinkable: Thirty-seven channels and nothin’ on.

It’s an all-you-can-hear Shakespeare buffet, Vegas-style, laying out an enormous spread of scenes, soliloquies and two- or three-liners culled from a 37-play canon, plus poems. Two of the six CDs make up a complete “Romeo and Juliet” recorded in 1961, featuring Albert Finney, Claire Bloom and Edith Evans.

Elsewhere, the selections roam freely and free-associatively, showcasing Paul Robeson (Othello), Laurence Olivier (Henry V), John Gielgud (Richard II), Judith Anderson (Lady Macbeth), Peggy Ashcroft (Hermione of “The Winter’s Tale”) and four separate Hamlets--Paul Scofield, John Barrymore, Richard Burton and an edgy, urgent Anton Lesser. The talent roster is immense. Chronologically, Lesser’s 1997 “Hamlet” is the collection’s most recent entry. The earliest, a “Hamlet” dating back to 1928, belongs to Barrymore, who twirls his vowels like little mustaches in “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”

With so many ringers working in so many different performing styles, why isn’t the sum more engaging? Primarily, it’s a matter of textual organization. Compilation co-producer Brenda Johnson-Grau knows and loves her Shakespeare; on paper, her methods appear sound. She groups the excerpts by category. Volume 1, titled “To Be . . . ,” explores “humanity, identity, ambition, love of country, honor, wit, mirth and madness.” Volume 2 (“Love’s Labors”) deals with matters of the heart; “Hot Blood” traffics in betrayal, envy, jealousy, murder and guilt and other contact sports; “. . . Or Not To Be” wraps it up with Shakespeare’s ruminations on the supernatural and the big sleep.

It’s one way to subdivide the soundscape at hand. As you listen, though, the excerpts never inform one another meaningfully. Rather, they turn into a 37-play pileup, with limited gawker payoff. The selections don’t sharpen your perceptions or responses to Shakespeare’s work. (If we heard the four Hamlets in succession, for example, we’d at least be able to enjoy the comparison and the contrast, and get some sense of the role’s oceanic variety.) In and among the longer scenes and soliloquies, absurdly brief excerpts hit you and run, like sound bites from the era of King James I.

Good, hard information wouldn’t hurt, either. The collection’s accompanying 80-page booklet includes essays on Elizabethan drama, descriptions of the plays and poems, transcripts of everything, short and longish, heard on the first four CDs. Yet you hunt in vain for a date or two, or some clue regarding the radio, record, film and television performances supplying this fuzzy greatest-hits effort. “Be Thou Now Persuaded” may be designed for newcomers to Shakespeare, but it’ll probably prove frustrating on some level to all comers.

Then along comes Claire Bloom activating Helena from “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Or Scofield’s Lear. And you’re reminded that beauty, when you hear it, is sometimes more than voice-deep.

The best and bravest interpreters of Shakespeare make sense of the language without genuflecting before it, or chiseling their final Ts at the expense of something more provocative. To answer the original question: No, happily, we can never get enough Shakespeare. But “Be Thou Now Persuaded”? Would that I had been. *

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“Be Thou Now Persuaded: Living in a Shakespearean World,” six-CD/cassette set, Rhino Records, $59.98 (CD), $39.98 (cassette).