Shakespearean Projections

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film edited by Russell Jackson 2000: Cambridge University Press

Framing Shakespeare on Film by Kathy M. Howlett 2000: Ohio University Press

"The best in this kind are but shadows," says Theseus as he watches a play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but Shakespeare, visionary though he was, could not have foreseen how topical and debatable that thought would become. Shadows, black or tinted, are the material of film, and few subjects in the Shakespeare field generate more heat than the advantages and disadvantages of putting his plays in film form.

Here are two new books on this much-discussed subject, and the issues are so rife with dissension that before discussing these books, it seems fit that the reviewer state his position. In more than forty years of film criticism, I have often said that Shakespeare cannot be filmed, not if it is truly to be Shakespeare and just as truly to be film. Shakespeare is text. The words. Almost every theater production of one of the plays makes minor cuts, in consonance with contemporary audience sensibility and conditioning, but that cutting never--well, almost never--controverts the belief that what keeps Shakespeare immediate is the language. All the action derives from and leads back to the language. If it were otherwise, Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare would suffice to keep these plays with us.

In film, whose aesthetics I have been exploring through those decades, language is generally much more compressed than in the theater. This is not nearly so rigid a rule as some believe--think of Uncle Jack's farewell in The Magnificent Ambersons or the professor's address to the faltering strikers in The Organizer--but, to put it basically, few films have been made primarily because of the language in them. Yet no other prime purpose seems valid in a production of Shakespeare in any medium, and that priority is forsaken in a Shakespeare film. An important exception will follow below, but as a matter of artistic aptness, long stretches of language, particularly in diction of the past, are usually uncomfortable in film. With tolerable reduction, we can say that Shakespeare is language and film is not.

No critic can possibly approach any topic, let alone this fraught one, with a completely open mind. (How can a critic's mind be completely open if the critic really cares for the art?) Thus, with one figurative eyebrow raised, this critic approaches these books.

Note first that there is a relevant chronology in Shakespeare films, ordained by the history of film itself. Shakespeare plays were being filmed long before speech was possible. Very soon after Thomas Edison and the Skladanowsky brothers and the Lumière brothers presented the film medium to the world--without sound--the production maw of the screen began to gulp down Shakespeare. Odd as it may seem now, there were hundreds of silent Shakespeare films. Many of them greatly condensed the plots or consisted only of selected scenes, but the species proliferated. (In 1968 Robert Hamilton Ball published an account of them, Shakespeare on Silent Film, and subtitled it, with neat quotation, A Strange Eventful History.)

The fact that all these films were forced to be silent resulted, willy-nilly, in a divorce. Action was separated from text. Bits of the text were frequently inserted as intertitles, but they often seemed mere obeisance. These pictures were only Shakespeare stories. Admittedly, some of those silents served a poignant purpose. In the 1970s I saw the scenes of Hamlet that Johnston Forbes-Robertson had filmed in 1913. It was hardly the performance that in 1897 Bernard Shaw had called "a true classical Hamlet" with "continuous charm, interest, and variety," but still I was glad of the chance to see Forbes-Robertson in motion. There are many similar opportunities.

The arrival of action before language meant that when sound came along, the text was an addition to the Shakespeare film, not its first cause. (The earliest "talkie" was The Taming of...