A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (review)

A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. By Kenneth S. Rothwell. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 352. Illus. $85.00 cloth.

Students of Shakespeare on film and video, familiar with Kenneth Rothwell's magisterial Shakespeare on Screen: An International Filmography and Videography--a heavily annotated research guide, written with the help of Annabelle Henkin Melzer (1990)--have long appreciated Rothwell's ability to gather and sift through the massive data on screened Shakespeare. The History of Shakespeare on Screennot only includes and expands on much of this material but casts an even wider research net, at the same time revealing Rothwell's talents as one of our foremost film historians. In ten deftly crafted essays, Rothwell offers a concise history of screened Shakespeare, with critical and contextual analyses of major works in each chapter. Given his command of both less accessible and recently discovered materials in screen history, his engagement with some of the most incisive criticism, his close attention to cinematic and televisual language, and a vigorous prose style that carries the reader along, the book is a delight to read.

Following the general organization of Roger Manvell's classic Shakespeare and the Film (1971), the vast amount of material here is clearly set out, and occasional chapters devoted to a fuller study of the work of auteurs or media constellations continue the historical line. One can always find material to question, as in his omission of the charge of bribery for permits in explaining the 1908 New York theater closings, and devaluation of the influence on Shakespeare films of such government related organizations as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and of diplomatic relations, trade pacts, and treaties--from the late silents and first wave of American Shakespeare talkies on through the influx of foreign Shakespeare films in the 1950s. Yet such an approach would take Rothwell too far afield from his topic and limit his more international scope. It is far more impressive that Rothwell so often addresses the oddly ignored relations of the history of screened Shakespeare to the history of film and television.

Despite the fact that the volume includes material written over two decades, Rothwell's approach is surprisingly even-handed. If there is a bias, it is--for this reader-- a welcome preference for those Shakespeare films, however loosely adapted, which succeed as cinema. Rothwell's polemic against the more text-centered film directors emerges in a rich chapter on Renato Castellani and Franco Zeffirelli, where he defends the ways in which Castellani's "visual lyricism stands in for Shakespeare's verbal lyricism" (126) and points out that "Too much has been written about what Zeffirelli's Shrew loses from Shakespeare's play and not enough about what it adds" (130). As one of the pioneers of Shakespeare and film studies, he is here still fighting the phantom purists--although he knows, and even states, that they are phantoms: "The history of Shakespeare in the movies has, after all, been the search for the best available means to replace the verbal with the visual imagination, an inevitable development deplored by some but interpreted by others as not so much a limitation on, as an extension of, Shakespeare's genius into uncharted seas" (5). Whether or not "replacement" is the right term here, the problem of doing justice to Shakespeare's verse within a primarily visual medium has plagued most directors of screened Shakespeare, and the various means by which this has been attempted offers an interesting historical through-line.

Typically, the chapters reconstruct the rich historical background of a particular work and contextualize it within screen history while attending to the materiality of the medium at the same time. Whether summarizing a little-known Shakespeare silent or a foreign film, Rothwell often will include the function and effect of the number, variety, and...