How long does it take to create an adequate critical context for the study of a modern poet? About 50 years, to judge from the case of Louis MacNeice. MacNeice died in 1963, but it is only in recent years that full materials to allow informed study of the poet have become available. A new Collected Poems (ed. P. MacDonald) appeared in 2007, on the centenary of MacNeice's birth: an authoritative publication, long awaited as a replacement for the edition that E.R. Dodds, of all people, fumbled in 1966. The Letters of Louis MacNeice (ed. J. Allison) were published in 2010, fifteen years after the appearance of a substantial biography by J. Stallworthy. Monographs, scholarly collections and articles have gathered pace in publication alongside. This is the time for appearance of those pieces that MacNeice never considered for formal publication: only now do we have the apparatus that will allow us to make sense of them.
Classicists, then, will welcome the appearance of eleven of MacNeice's BBC radio scripts on ancient Greek and Roman subjects, in an excellent edition produced by W. and H. Only one script has been published before (Enter Caesar, 1946). MacNeice served as lecturer in Classics in the 1930s at the University of Birmingham and Bedford College, but seemed to colleagues less than completely absorbed in his job. The depth of engagement with classical texts from Homer to Apuleius evident in these dramas gives the lie to that assessment. It was contemporary methods of teaching the subject that disappointed him. (The original idea behind the 1946 radio drama Enemy of Cant – a medley of scenes from Aristophanic comedies – was ‘to have a crack at the teaching of classics … in this country’, with its grinding emphasis on grammar at school and textual criticism at university.) The volume, in effect, provides a welcome centre of gravity for all MacNeice's classical output and interests. The plays in this volume will pull into their orbit MacNeice's version of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1936), his translations of and reflections on Horace across a lifetime of poetry, and the running engagement with the Classics evident from his first poem published by Faber (‘An Eclogue for Christmas’ [1935]) to ‘Charon’ in his last collection (The Burning Perch [1963]).
W. and H. have edited the plays after the model provided by MacNeice in his own 1947 collection, the Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts (1947), with a general introduction, introductory note for each play and information on the original broadcast. Each element is usefully expanded beyond MacNeice's laconic model, with full advantage taken of the modern critical apparatus (the Letters prove their worth). W.’s general introduction is densely researched and sensitively written. Useful, but never intrusive, annotations to the plays are added by the editors throughout. The introductions to each play give fascinating details of BBC market research into immediate reactions by contemporary audiences.
Inevitably, some plays read off the page better than others. Two early wartime pieces (The March of the 10,000 [1941]; The Glory that was Greece [1941]), written to boost morale during the Axis invasion and then occupation of Greece, are largely of historical interest. Rather better, paradoxically, are those plays which proved relatively unpopular with their original broadcast audiences: A Roman Holiday (1945: a play set at the Saturnalia, meant for broadcast at Christmas); Enter Caesar (1946: a drama to mark the bimillennium of Caesar's invasion of Britain); and Carpe Diem (1956: a retrospective on a modern life lived under the sign of Horace). Readers may particularly enjoy the vigour of MacNeice's poetic version of Book 11 of the Odyssey (1960), written as part of a twelve-week series that covered the story of the poem. (In week 6 of the original series, Ted Hughes and Peter Green offered versions of the ‘The Storm’ and ‘Nausicaa’.)
The editors end the volume with a list of scripts written by MacNeice for the BBC in the years 1941–63. There are over 160 extant. Surely material for further volumes.
