Maxwell Anderson was a fellow of giant proportions who had a giant reputation in the years preceding World War II. In the literary pecking order, he once was the approximate equal of Eugene O'Neill as a dramatist, and in some quarters, Anderson was ranked first.
Nobel laureate O'Neill is recognized internationally as America's one great American playwright, and Anderson is a fallen giant. He is not quite a joke, and his very name does summon a golden age of American theater. But even Anderson's more respected plays seldom get revived.The dramas he composed in verse signaled his highest fame but now are devalued, especially those steeped in English history. His plays set in "the present" tend to the topical, and nothing becomes more quickly dated.
So why give consideration to Anderson here? There's a reason, and I'll get around to it, but additional orientation is in order for younger folks who may never have heard of him.
Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a frustrated journalist like so many of us, a newspaper reporter and columnist with novels and stories and plays in a trunk. His first theatrical success was a resounding but collaborative effort (with Laurence Stallings) called "What Price Glory?" (1924), America's first significant antiwar play.
With Stallings he delivered several other plays before going on his own. A succession of Broadway hits enabled him to quit his job with the New York World, and the 1930s were his decade: "Elizabeth the Queen" and "Mary of Scotland" were fussed-over poetic costume dramas; "Both Your Houses" told of legislative corruption in Washington and brought Anderson the dramatic Pulitzer; and the New York Drama Critics Circle awarded him its annual "best play" citation back-to-back with "Winterset" and "High Tor."
The Sacco-Vanzetti case was stimulus for "Winterset," and folklore fed the ghostly, fantastic "High Tor." Both were verse dramas by a marginal poet, and today they seem merely pretentious.
In the '40s and '50s, Anderson's reputation waned steadily, although he stayed busy. There were occasional high spots: "Anne of the Thousand Days" was the tragedy of Anne Boleyn, with Henry VIII in favorable light; and "The Bad Seed" was effective melodrama, adapted from William Marchant's novel. But misses outnumbered hits; and a notable Anderson failure - "Key Largo" - was radically changed (and greatly improved) in John Huston's film version.
Now we learn that Anderson in 1955 made another foray into British royal dramatics, again as a revisionist, but apparently was unable to acquire sufficient capital to get "Richard and Anne" on stage. Call it a rebuttal to Shakespeare's "King Richard III," which persuades us that Richard was a treacherous usurper of the crown, a prolific murderer whose roll of victims included two nephews - those little princes slain in the tower.
The Richard III Society believes otherwise and would defend a monarch defamed not by history but by historical dramatic chicanery in the Elizabethan era. Remember, the Tudor dynasty was initiated by Richard's fall. Now, with the society's aid, Anderson's "Richard and Anne" is a new hardcover from the North Carolina-based McFarland Co., and the play certainly merits attention. So does the splendid, full-bodied introduction by Roxane Murph, a Fort Worth woman.
This two-act verse play about Richard III and his wife, Anne Neville, is a theatrical monkeyshine, actually two plays within a play, and may rank with its author's best work. "Richard and Anne" deserves to be read, to be performed, to be seen. Let there be redemption for Richard Plantagenet . . . and for Maxwell Anderson.