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  This enterprise came to partial fruition over the course of the 1960s, as Grove issued a variety of Brecht’s plays as part of the Grove Press edition of the Works of Bertolt Brecht, under Bentley’s general editorship. Most of these plays were published as massmarket paperbacks under Grove’s Black Cat imprint, reflecting an aspiration toward a popular audience appropriate to Brecht’s political vision.71 The proliferation of cheap paperback editions of his plays—pocket parables, as it were—alongside their frequent production by college and university drama departments over the course of the 1960s, illustrates the degree to which Bentley’s domestication of Brecht for an Englishspeaking public was based in a dialectical interplay between reading and spectatorship.

  In his introduction to Seven Plays, Bentley calls “epic theatre” a “misnomer” for Brecht’s work, partly because he thought the term diminished appreciation of Brecht’s “lyric” talents but also because Brecht had failed to find a public adequate to his aspirations.72 A few years later, Grove published a play by a much younger German playwright who, according to Brecht’s mentor Erwin Piscator, fulfilled both the formal and political objectives of a modern epic theater. Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy, a lengthy free-verse moral melodrama indicting Pope Pius XII for his silence on the Holocaust, generated a firestorm of controversy from its debut in West Berlin on February 23, 1963. Since it was too long to be feasibly performed in a single evening, its German publisher issued the print edition on the same day as its debut. From its initial appearance, The Deputy was a play that demanded to be read.

  The German debut of The Deputy was directed by Piscator, whom Brecht had earlier credited with “the most radical attempt to endow the theatre with an instructive character.”73 In his introduction to the print edition, Piscator called The Deputy “an epic play, epic-scientific, epic-documentary; a play for epic, ‘political’ theater, for which I have fought more than thirty years; a ‘total’ play for a ‘total’ theater.”74 This impassioned introduction appears as the first chapter in Eric Bentley’s edited volume for Grove, The Storm over “The Deputy,” the foreword to which bombastically claims that the controversy over this play “is almost certainly the largest storm ever raised by a play in the whole history of the drama.”75 Bentley goes on to explicitly compare this response to the relatively restricted audience for Brecht’s plays: “Who more than [Brecht] wished to speak to the whole modern world on burning issues that concern everyone? Yet the most one can say for the audience of Mother Courage, even where the play has been received most enthusiastically, is that it interests a rather considerable minority group.”76

  Grove did its best to exploit the controversy that accompanied this play across Europe when it hosted Hochhuth’s visit to the United States for its American premiere (in an abridged version) at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in February 1964. Grove arranged for a press conference in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, where Hochhuth appeared with Fred Jordan at his side, as well as for a television interview with Hannah Arendt. The play ran for 316 performances, and the hardcover, released simultaneously with the premiere, was prominently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and Bookweek. At 352 pages, including Hochhuth’s 65-page appended “Sidelights on History” documenting the veracity of his portrayals, The Deputy is almost as long as Seven Plays, dictating that it would rarely be performed in full.77 Thus, while its very length contributed to its claims to “epic” scale, it also determined that this scale could be fully appreciated only by reading it. In its ads, Grove specified that “this is not an acting version, but Rolf Hochhuth’s complete historical drama, which would take about eight hours to perform entirely, and from which every stage version has been adopted. Only by reading THE DEPUTY in this form can you realize the full depth and power of one of the most significant works to come out of postwar Europe.”78 This substitution of “work” for “play” indicated the difficulty in classifying this text. As the flyleaf affirms, The Deputy is “ostensibly a play, but transcend[s] the framework of the stage.” This “transcendence” is immediately evident in the opening stage directions, which include such editorial interjections as “it would seem that anyone who holds a responsible post for any length of time under an autocrat … surrenders his own personality” or “it seems to be established, therefore, that photographs are totally useless for the interpretation of character.”79 The lengthy text that follows looks like a cross between a George Bernard Shaw play and an epic poem. Set with minimal white space, the text fills every page, with stage directions frequently extending over five or six pages.

  Critics were divided on the aesthetic value of this text, which, with the exception of one character, a Jesuit priest who voluntarily commits himself to Auschwitz (where the last act takes place) after he is unable to convince the pope to publicly condemn the Final Solution, is highly documentary in character, hewing closely to historical persons and events. As such, The Deputy depicts in stark immediacy events that precipitated the theater of the absurd but that are rarely directly referenced in it. More specifically, in attacking the pope, The Deputy directly engages the challenge that the Holocaust posed for the moral and institutional power of Christianity. Thus, The Deputy penetrated directly into the mainstream, in contrast to the “considerable minority” that discussed Beckett or Brecht, explicitly challenging the beliefs and allegiances of millions of people in a popularly accessible form and format (the massmarket edition, distributed by Dell, sold more than two hundred thousand copies). It is little surprise that the bibliography appended to Bentley’s edited volume runs to almost twenty pages, with many entries from Catholic and Jewish dailies.

  Though none of Brecht’s plays generated the scale and scope of immediate controversy that followed the performance and publication of The Deputy, the “considerable minority” that read them ultimately ensured their longevity, whereas Hochhuth’s incendiary drama, and the “storm” over it, has vanished into relative obscurity—surely because it never entered into the college curriculum. This symptomatic division between drama as a direct intervention in current events—indeed, as an “event” in and of itself—and drama as a literary genre studied in the classroom is elegantly illustrated in the contrasting legacies of two plays Grove published in Black Cat editions in the late 1960s.

  In August 1965, student activist Barbara Garson, speaking at an antiwar rally in Berkeley, accidentally called the president’s wife “Lady MacBird Johnson.” Inspired by her felicitous slip of the tongue, Garson over the next few years penned a full-length Shakespearean parody of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, based on Macbeth but making ample use of other of Shakespeare’s plays. In 1966, a draft of Macbird! was printed by the Independent Socialist Club of Berkeley and began circulating among Movement intellectuals on both coasts, generating considerable buzz in countercultural circles. Given that the borrowed plot dictated that the title character successfully plan the assassination of his predecessor, John Ken O’Dunc, Garson had difficulty interesting mainstream publishers in Macbird!, so her husband founded the Grassy Knoll Press explicitly for the purpose of issuing the play. By January 1967, the play had gone through five printings of more than 105,000 copies.

  The play debuted at the Village Gate Theater on January 19, 1967, featuring Stacy Keach in the title role. Showcard, the company that produced off-Broadway playbills, refused to print one for the performance. Grove, which had already obtained publishing rights from Grassy Knoll, stepped into the breach. Later that year, Rosset bought Showcard, and for the rest of the 1960s Grove became the principal producer of playbills for off-Broadway performances, further enhancing its connections in the downtown scene and its reputation as a publisher and promoter of radical theater. The play generated considerable controversy and critical accolades, including gushing endorsements from Dwight McDonald, Richard Brustein, Eric Bentley, and Jack Newfield.

  Macbird! was meant to intervene in its moment, and it paralleled current events so closely that
Garson had to continue revising as new developments arose. The opening scene in a hotel corridor of the Democratic National Convention refigures the three witches as “a student demonstrator, beatnik stereotype,” a “Negro with impeccable grooming and attire” (played by Cleavon Little), and “an old leftist, wearing worker’s cap and overalls.”80 The opening lines, spoken in turn by the three witches—“When shall we three meet again? In riot! Strike! / Or stopping train?”—indicate the political immediacy of the action that follows. While that action tracks the structure of Macbeth, many of the most memorable lines, as well as the conclusion, in which Robert Ken O’Dunc (played by William Devane) arranges for the three witches to perform a play revealing Macbird’s guilt, are cribbed from Hamlet.

  Thus, Polonius’s advice is twice parodied in speeches by the old leftist, who in the second scene recommends, “Neither a burrower from within nor a leader be, / But stone by stone construct a conscious cadre. And this above all—to thine own class be true And it must follow, as the very next depression, Thou canst not be false to revolution”;81 in the last act he revises his advice: “But this above all: to thine own cause be true. Set sentiment aside and organize. It is the cause. It is the cause …”82 Hamlet’s soliloquy is wonderfully satirized in a speech by Adlai Stevenson’s character, the Egg of Head, who wonders, “To see, or not to see? That is the question. Whether ’tis wiser as a statesman to ignore The gross deception of outrageous liars, Or to speak out against a reign of evil And by so doing, end there for all time The chance and hope to work within for change.”83 Not surprisingly, he opts for the former.

  The play’s resolution is also borrowed from Hamlet, with Robert Ken O’Dunc conceding that he is “no Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be,” encouraging the three witches to perform a play in Macbird’s convention hotel room that reveals his guilt. The witches agree to perform but refuse to follow his script, as the second witch avers, “Man, we write our own lines. Screw your script.”84 In the next scene, he performs a minstrel show with the chorus: “Ober de nation Hear dat mournful sound Chickens coming home and roosting / Massa’s in the cold cold ground.”85 The play ends with Washington in flames and the Ken O’Dunc monarchy restored. Grove’s Black Cat paperback sold more than 250,000 copies in 1967.

  If Macbird! appropriates Shakespeare toward immediate political ends, Tom Stoppard’s award-winning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, originally performed in 1966 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then issued as a Black Cat paperback by Grove in 1967, had more long-term literary and philosophical objectives, making it more appropriate to the college curriculum. Realizing this potential, Grove’s education department issued a free study guide to accompany the play. The guide opens with a number of promotional blurbs, the first of which, from Clive Barnes’s review for the New York Times, is also featured on the play’s back cover. The last line—“Mr. Stoppard is not only paraphrasing Hamlet, but also throwing in a paraphrase of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for good measure”—succinctly sums up the guide’s strategy, which reveals the degree to which the formal and thematic experimentation associated with the theater of the absurd had, over the course of the 1960s, been assimilated by the sensibilities of the paperback generation. Following the blurbs, the guide presents a letter from a Macalester College English professor attesting to the success of a paper assignment on Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. After three pages of excerpts from papers this professor received, Grove announces an essay contest on the same topic, to be judged by its editorial board. Grove promoted the contest aggressively, announcing in a press release: “ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD ADOPTED FOR CLASSROOM USE FROM COAST TO COAST; GROVE SPONSORS ESSAY CONTEST FOR STUDENTS.”86 The promotion was a success, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead exceeding 150,000 copies in sales to educational institutions in 1968.

  First prize in the contest was awarded to a seventeen-page research paper entitled “Hamlet and the Player” by a student at Vassar College. Echoing Grove’s study guide, which notes that “the Player is the richest role in R & G Are Dead,”87 the paper opens with the claim that “the player is just as much the hero as the title characters.”88 The paper’s second paragraph effectively reveals how thoroughly the formal and philosophical challenges of experimental theater had been domesticated into standard literary critical tropes:

  Tom Stoppard has done what many college undergraduates now aspire to do in their papers; he has responded to a work of art not just critically but artistically as well. This, I think, is the highest compliment one can pay another artist. Stoppard has fashioned a play (whose central figure is the Artist, the player) based on a play (whose concern, in a great many respects, is Art). He has not just affirmed Shakespeare by choosing Shakespeare’s characters to make a story, or by balancing the “existential” mentality with Renaissance melancholy or the heroic death of Hamlet with the silent offstage deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; he has affirmed Shakespeare simply by making a selfconscious play, one that has no other meaning than itself. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is finally “about” only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.89

  What follows is a lengthy development of the revealing analogue between the undergraduate essay and the work of art that comfortably recuperates existential angst into glib irony.

  The author dwells explicitly on the relation between text and performance in his analysis of the exchange between Guildenstern and the Player during the rehearsal scene when, in response to Guildenstern’s question, “Who decides?,” the Player responds, “Decides? It is written.” As the author notes, “The word ‘written’ can have two meanings; first it is the ‘written’ text of the play which the players must follow … Secondly, ‘written’ suggests a fate which has been predetermined.” And he further elaborates that “the two meanings of ‘written’ can, of course, be one if we understand that the function of the dramatist, the artist, is to show fate operating in life, that is, to center his dramas and his art around the fact of death.” This assimilation of death into art, which will predictably lead to a conclusion about the immortality of art, forms the familiar argument of this paper, but the author is refreshingly aware of the degree to which the urgency of existentialism’s philosophical challenge gets lost when it is rendered as a problem for literary analysis. Thus, in commenting on Guildenstern’s resistance to the Player’s assertion, he claims, “He is not unlike many of us who write essays on the existential hero and Camus’s words in The Myth of Sisyphus about ‘the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation’ and then go on to worry about getting an ‘A.’ We are still looking for the consolation.”90

  In its confident selfconsciousness, this essay illustrates how completely the initial controversy over a play like Waiting for Godot, the paperback version of which had sold more than a quarter of a million copies by 1968, had been accommodated to the American classroom. The student is effortlessly comfortable with both the formal and philosophical difficulties of the avantgarde, even to the point of indicating the ironies of this easiness. In its emphasis on the literariness of these difficulties—the author ranges across the modern canon from Twain to Eliot to Hemingway to Yeats—the essay also reveals how essential the print versions of these plays were to this process. The author can console himself with the “immortality” of art only by assimilating the drama to its scripted form; performances, after all, are ephemeral.

  Grove had chosen a topic, a comparison of Shakespeare and Stoppard, which in and of itself was calculated to subordinate performance to print. As Worthen affirms, the “New Bibliography,” which determined the print format of Shakespeare’s plays during this era (and Shakespeare was far and away the most-assigned Englishlanguage playwright across the educational spectrum), “tended to see the impact of theatre … as a distraction from, and corruption of, the proper transmission of the author’s writing,” thus envisioning “an author writing for posterity in print, producing an ideal and complete dramatic script that h
e knew could not be fully realized on stage.”91 By asking students to compare Stoppard (and, implicitly, Beckett) to the author whose work had effectively established the standard format for the play in print, Grove was affirming its remarkable success in marketing avantgarde theater as an explicitly literary genre whose authors were comparable to the most revered playwright in the canon.

  The End of Obscenity

  The reputation Grove established over the second half of the 1950s for publishing quality literature was crucial to its success in the battles over obscenity and freedom of expression that took up much of Rosset’s time, energy, and money in the first half of the 1960s. Starting with Grove v. Christenberry (1959), the Post Office case over Lady Chatterley’s Lover that inaugurated the rapid dismantling of the Comstock Act; reaching a frenzied peak with the multiple trials and tribulations of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer across the country; and concluding with the exoneration of William Burroughs’s wildly explicit Naked Lunch in Massachusetts in 1966, Grove Press was central to the process that its lawyer Charles Rembar called the “end of obscenity” in his 1968 account of the trials. Rembar concludes his story with the lines, “So far as writers are concerned, there is no longer a law of obscenity,” and indeed censorship of the printed word in the United States essentially ended in the 1960s.1

  Rosset planned his decade-long battle against censorship with both deliberation and determination; in one unpublished autobiographical fragment, he calls it “a carefully planned campaign, much like a military campaign.”2 Throughout this campaign Rosset and his lawyers—in addition to Rembar he worked with Edward de Grazia, Elmer Gertz, Ephraim London, and many others—emphasized Grove’s reputation as a publisher with literary credentials. In his affidavit for Grove v. Christenberry, Rosset affirmed that Grove publishes “works of a serious literary and artistic nature.”3 And for the many cases involving Tropic of Cancer, Rosset and his lawyers fashioned a boilerplate affidavit specifying that most of Grove’s titles “are in what is called the ‘quality paperback’ field” and that many of them “are in use in colleges and universities throughout the country, having been specifically adopted in various courses by departments and by individual instructors and teachers.”4 In turn, Rosset and his lawyers solicited the expert testimony of these academics to attest to the literary value of the texts charged with obscenity.