Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (review)

This collection, a sequel or companion to the editors' Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle (2000), describes a Shakespeare who not only is "a magnet for negotiations about style, value and cultural identity" but who also is "made understandable via an intertextual apparatus . . . always-already mediatised [and] put into the service of discussions about . . . place, locale and class in a range of contexts" (7-8). This introductory statement marks an eclectic array of critical practices that plays out in the essays comprising this volume. Whereas some contributions focus primarily on detailing the stylistic or aesthetic signatures and representational politics of particular film or television texts, others measure the contextual terrains of present-day Shakespearean simulacra. Yet all are resolutely postmodern, postmillennial, postcolonial, postmulticultural, postfeminist-but definitely not posttheory.

Appropriately, the volume opens with an originary moment, Richard Dutton's irreverent analysis of how Michael Wood's television documentary, In Search of Shakespeare (2003), offers, in the manner of an elaborate show-and-tell exercise indebted to television's History Detectives, "a serious and considered Shakespeare for the beginning of the twenty-first century" (14). In presentist fashion, Wood bridges past and present while avoiding historical reconstruction and computer simulations; his mantra, "If I'm right," covers his somewhat indulgent stretches of truth (such as identifying the Sonnets' "fair youth" as William Herbert and the "dark lady" as Aemilia Lanyer). Dutton's perspective on Wood's interpretive seizures also faults the recurrent presence of Royal Shakespeare Company actors, whose functions have not been thought through; the use of scholars to summarize key points or to gesture toward authenticity; and the unscripted quality of the series (26-28). Dutton's essay might profit from contextualizing Wood's project through documentary film theory, as does Sarah Hatchuel's intriguing exploration of how Peter Babakitis's postmillennial docudrama of Henry V (2004) raises questions about the truth value of history itself. But his essay offers sound advice, at a high moment of Shakespeare biofiction, on what might be called the Anxiety of Evidence.

Two contributors are broadly concerned with the pressures of history on the present and with time, space, and geography. Burnett maps the spatial and scopic economies of surveillance in two Hamlets-Campbell Scott's and Eric Simonson's made-for-television films (both from 2000) and Michael Almereyda's postmodern art-house film-prefatory to an extensive discussion of Stephen Cavanagh's 2005 Derry Film Initiative "screen reading" (32) of the play. Cavanagh's film interweaves Hamlet's history (recalled, edited, introduced, and concluded by Horatio) with that of Northern Ireland's split between Protestant and Catholic constituencies to explore the fractures between Derry and Londonderry: even the film's Hamlet figure is a plural, as well as a singular, being, representing the individual at local and national levels. Just as Burnett tracks the meanings of Londonderry's sites in Cavanagh's Hamlet project, Courtney Lehmann's densely written, theoretically engaged riff on Don Boyd's My Kingdom (2001) marks how Liverpool's city spaces make connections to characters and, in particular, to the monarchical role of Sandeman, the Lear character, a rugged individualist attuned to the history of a city with its own sense of sovereignty (75). One of the strongest essays in the collection, Lehmann's contribution draws on the observations of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri to theorize the global city as a place in which "social law mirrors the whims of the commodity form" (77); given the race-, class-, and gender-specific violence with which the film culminates, My Kingdom emerges as a cautionary tale about the growing collusion between space and capital which, under the auspices of urban renewal, may in time materialize as an insidious form of population control.

Reading Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty (2004) as a response to John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998) and as an...