30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (30 page)

Writing of his preparations for his wartime propaganda film of
Henry V
(1944), Laurence Olivier suggested that Shakespeare's work anticipated the possibilities cinema might afford: “In
Henry V
more than any other, Shakespeare moans about the confines of his Globe Theatre … And all those short battle scenes, in a lot of his plays, are frustrated cinema.”
²
In fact it seems clear that the Chorus to
Henry V
speaks in a kind of litotes (the rhetorical figure of praising by understatement): the theater is supremely able to show whatever it wants, but then Olivier does have a film to sell. There are proto-cinematic aspects of Shakespeare's writing, though. Perhaps
Antony and Cleopatra
, with its aging celebrity protagonists and its extended cross-cutting between their two camps to depict the quick pace of military action, comes closest in Shakespeare's work to the kind of editing that constructs cinematic narration.

To be sure, there are difficulties in adapting Shakespeare's intensely verbal texts for a medium in which visual meanings are usually dominant. The Russian film director Grigori Kozintsev has discussed the necessary translation: “The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture itself has to be transformed into a visual poetry.”
³
Kozintsev's own films show how this might work. The opening sequence of his
Hamlet
(1964) shows the Prince, played by Innokenti Smoktunovsky, an actor well known for having been imprisoned in Siberia, riding through the armored gate of the castle, which closes behind him: a visual image of Hamlet's observation that “Denmark's a prison” (2.2.246). Shostakovitch's stirring score counterpoints repeated visual images: billowing cloth, the surface of water, staircases, and low-angle shots, which give the film the poetic coherence that Shakespeare's play achieves through linguistic patterning.
⁴
The text of the play has been cut by around half, but what has been conceded in this verbal realm has been compensated in the visual. Orson Welles's
Othello
(1952) might offer another example: here the self-conscious use of black and white amplifies the play's own interest in racial and moral color binaries, shifting its chromatic emphasis away from the ethnic to the aesthetic. Welles's interest in images of entrapment, from the mesh on Desdemona's veil to the shadows cast by the grille bath-house windows in the attack on Cassio and the cage in which Iago is suspended, gives visual expression to Shakespeare's themes of imprisonment, as if the film is a long graphic exploration of Iago's sinister plan: “So will I turn her [Desdemona's] virtue into pitch, / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (2.3.351–3). Welles, director of
Citizen Kane
, the film that most regularly tops all film-buff polls, is one of the most distinguished cineastes to tackle Shakespeare: his
Macbeth
(1948) splices Shakespeare's play with a depiction of morally ambiguous charismatic authority derived from wartime propaganda and a supernatural idea of voodoo witchcraft, and his reworking of the
Henry IV
plays as
Chimes at Midnight
(1965) reimagines the sequence as an elegiac biography of Falstaff, played by Welles himself.

In some ways the linguistic cuts necessary to create a filmic Shakespeare—Kenneth Branagh's epic, uncut
Hamlet
of 1996 is an industry exception at four hours' length—are relatively easily made. The opening scene of the play
Hamlet
, for example, serves as a kind of verbal “establishing shot,” in which the exchanges between the sentries establish for an audience watching the play in the bright afternoon light of the Globe that this scene takes place on the castle battlements at night. Location shooting can show this in a moment—so is the conversation between Barnardo and Francisco unnecessary? Perhaps: one of the criticisms of Branagh's
Hamlet
was its habit of both showing and telling—accompanying the verbal text of the play with extensive visual prompts seemed tautologous. Or perhaps not: as well as locating the scene in time and space, the opening of
Hamlet
also establishes an important mood of nervousness—and, as director Peter Brook found in a theatrical reworking of the play in 1996 called
Qui va la?
—the play's edgy opening question “Who's there?” (1.1.1) can move from its ostensible and pragmatic context into a more interrogative and synoptic take on the play's questioning of identity.

The extent of the reduction of the Shakespearean text in cinematic versions may seem problematic: Olivier's
Hamlet
cut half the lines, excising wholesale the characters of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras; Zeffirelli's
Hamlet
had less than 40 percent of Shakespeare's text, and the majority of films of Shakespeare plays prune the lines to a similar degree. Our prevalent language of the “faithful” adaptation suggests that the closer a film is to the play, the better. In fact this is almost never the case. Instead, there is almost an inverse correlation between the “Shakespeare-ness” of a film and its cinematic value: Shakespeare works in the movies when the newer medium has the confidence to really rework the old. For many critics, the Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa's
Throne of Blood
(1957), a version of
Macbeth
, is the most successful film ever made of a Shakespeare play. Is this praise despite, or because, it has not a word of Shakespeare's text, translates the film into the context of samurai feudalism, and recreates the witches as a single spinning figure of destiny? The most successful filmic Shakespeares tend to have been those in which filmmakers have had the conviction radically to recast and to reimagine the plays as new creative artifacts; conversely, the least successful can be statically trapped in the conventions of theater (some of the studio-set BBC television Shakespeare series of the 1970s and 1980s fall into this category), even as these are more “faithful” to their originals.

There's a moment in
Cymbeline
when the god Jupiter
descends in thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt
(stage direction, 5.5.186). Twenty-one lines later he's winched up again: not really necessary to the plot, we might argue, but done because they could. Shakespeare is here using the special effects newly available to him as theater technology developed, and perhaps those effects are driving the narrative The same is sometimes true in Shakespeare films. Just because Roman Polanski
can
show us a floating dagger for Jon Finch to apostrophize in “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (
Macbeth
2.1.33–4) doesn't mean he
should
. The clunky visualization in his 1971 film spoils Macbeth's own delicate vacillation over whether the dagger is there or not, as well as being an effect whose technical execution quickly dates the film—nothing moves so quickly as special effects.

But many of the opportunities of Shakespeare in the cinema do come specifically from the interplay of Shakespeare with the technology, language, and grammar of film. The echoes of
Star Wars
(George Lucas, 1977) and
Platoon
(Oliver Stone, 1986) in Kenneth Branagh's
Henry V
(1989) situate the young hero king in a context of contemporary heroism. Lady Macbeth in Welles's
Macbeth
occupies the
femme fatale
role from the popular genre of
film noir
which also influenced Olivier's
Hamlet
. Zeffirelli's
Hamlet
(1990) casts Mel Gibson as an unusually active Prince (“more macho than melancholy,” as the video advertising put it), whose character draws on Gibson's previous role in the
Lethal Weapon
cop series (Richard Donner, 1987), just as his co-star Glenn Close as Gertrude is sexualized from the beginning because of her history in erotic thrillers such as
Fatal Attraction
(Adrian Lyne, 1987). These are associations which work in the cinema when the film is being understood in relation to other films, rather than in relation to the Shakespearean text. Sometimes these associations are deliberately played up in the marketing of Shakespeare films, with a corresponding under-emphasis on “Shakespeare.” For example, the trailer for Trevor Nunn's
Twelfth Night
(1996), advertised as “in the tradition of
Some Like It Hot
,
Tootsie
, and
Priscilla Queen of the Desert
comes the classic romantic comedy that proves that sometimes clothes really do make the man”; promotional taglines for Richard Loncraine's
Richard III
(1995)—“what is worth dying for … is worth killing for”—or Oliver Parker's
Othello
(1995)—“envy, greed, jealousy, and love”—seem deliberately to avoid the potentially off-putting associations of Shakespeare.
⁵
A similar interchange is seen in theater, as in 1994 when the poster for the Royal Shakespeare Company's
Coriolanus
advertised the hero as “A natural born killer,” drawing on the title of Oliver Stone's 1994 film. The most successful Shakespearean film, in box-office terms, is Baz Luhrmann's
Romeo + Juliet
(1996)—and here the full title,
William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
, flaunts rather than hides those associations. During the 1990s, more than twenty films of Shakespeare were released, building on the success of Kenneth Branagh's
Henry V
; a further twenty titles in which Shakespearean plots provide a substantial element of the narrative—such as the high-school retelling of
The Taming of the Shrew
as
10 Things I Hate About You
(Gil Langer, 1999)—made this the most prolific decade ever in Shakespearean film production. But Luhrmann's was the only film version of a Shakespeare play to be a real commercial hit. It is successful because its teenage audience is directly addressed by its pop-video style of editing, its youth soundtrack, and its stars Claire Danes and, in particular, Leonardo di Caprio. Luhrmann updates the story from Renaissance Verona to “Verona Beach,” a modern cityscape dominated by the corporate headquarters of the two family businesses and a huge statue of Christ—the film's incorporation of a kitsch Catholicism of morbidity, shrines, and tattoo art is part of its inventive visual palette. An arresting opening sees a television screen crackle into life as a newscaster reads Shakespeare's prologue: “Two households, both alike in dignity” (Prologue, 1) as a deadpan report of another urban clash between Montague and Capulet youth, with “Captain Prince,” the chief of police, trying to keep the peace. Title cards naming the film's characters, soap-opera-style, are intercut with the spoken and written words of the play's Prologue, as the film's characteristically rapid pace crosscuts with images from the narrative. As Samuel Crowl identifies, “Luhrmann is clearly creating a version of
Romeo and Juliet
for the MTV generation and he speaks their cinematic language.”
⁶
This play about the high emotional timbre of adolescence, where “violent delights have violent ends” (2.5.9) is translated into a fast-living and unchecked contemporary setting, counterpointed by the fatalistic lyrics of pop culture and the material decadence and emotional chill of modern wealth. Luhrmann's film therefore manages to appeal to its audience without patronizing them, even as it, like all the best critical or theatrical readings of
Romeo and Juliet
, provides a thoughtful interpretation of the play. In details it is particularly enjoyable: the fancy-dress party at the Capulets, for example, sees Juliet dressed as an angel and Romeo as a knight, signifying the fairy-tale quality of their relationship. Paris's costume as a spaceman happily conveys his insulation from what is really going on, as he beams benignly from behind the visor in his clumsy helmet; Capulet is dressed as a depraved Roman emperor; Mercutio is in drag. The Friar's letter to Romeo, in exile in a Mantuan trailer park, goes astray because there is no one home to take the courier's delivery. A moody Romeo hangs about the beachfront snooker halls and bars dreaming of Rosaline. The film's ending constructs an operatic
Liebestod
from the confusion of Shakespeare's tomb, with Romeo and Juliet united alone together in the chapel amid a profusion of candles, visualizing the play's suggestions that their death is the ultimate marriage.

Luhrmann reinvents Shakespeare's best-known play, the teenage romance of
Romeo and Juliet
for late twentieth-century cinema audiences—just as Zeffirelli had done with his version three decades previously. But there are successful filmed Shakespeares which address much less familiar texts. Julie Taymor's
Titus
(1999), based on the early, bloody tragedy
Titus Andronicus
, creates a film which visualizes the play's verbal stylization in a range of non-naturalistic cinematic techniques. Beginning with a prologue in which a young boy plays increasingly violent games with toy soldiers and ketchup-blood, the film pans out to a balletic march of muddied Roman legionaries, returning with their war dead. It is the first of a memorable series of images by which Taymor translates, but does not attempt to regularize, the play's own tone, a “tightrope,” as one stage actor put it, “of absurdity between comedy and tragedy.”
⁷
Anthony Hopkins as Titus draws on his sinisterly violent persona in
Silence of the Lambs
(Jonathan Demme, 1991), as well as his pedigree as a classical actor on stage and film. Taymor uses collage sequences to interrupt naturalistic representation and depict the subjective perspectives of her characters, brings on the young Lucius as a witness and mute chorus to the play's atrocities, and, at the end, has him carry Aaron's baby on a long, slow walk out of the ruined Coliseum into a pink dawn. The film sequence in which the fresh pies baked from Tamora's sons cool appetizingly as muslin curtains waft in the breeze against a jaunty Italian song soundtrack epitomizes its assured and unsettling clash of tones. We already knew that Shakespeare's romantic comedies could work in the movies—the Italianate holiday-villa
Much Ado About Nothing
(Kenneth Branagh, 1993)—and all those
Hamlet
s and
Romeo and Juliet
s indicate some of the ways tragedy might work on the silver screen. What Taymor achieved with
Titus
, however, was a film that does not simplify or explain the play, nor make it suitable for the classroom, nor shy away from its difficulties: a film, in short, that meets the challenge of Shakespeare head on.