Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television ed. by Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells (review)

74Rocky Mountain Review ANTHONY DAVIES and STANLEY WELLS, eds. Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 266 p. L/ollectively, the thirteen essays that comprise Shakespeare and the Moving Image provide a useful introduction to the major productions and figures—and problems and controversies—involved in the enterprise of translating Shakespeare's plays into the media of film and television. Rooted, as one of its co-editors, Stanley Wells, notes (xi), in the 1987 Shakespeare Survey 39: Shakespeare on Film and Television, the work included in Shakespeare and the Moving Image has been updated, expanded, and supplemented to take account of such recent cinematic events as Kenneth Branagh's films of Henry V ( 1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Franco Zeffirelli's film ?? Hamlet (1990). Leading off, reflexively , with a broad survey of some of the significant trends and documents in the scholarly reception of Shakespeare on the large and small screens, the volume proceeds to offer close analyses of particular aspects of the Bard on camera, with critiques of the not universally acclaimed BBC production of the Complete Shakespeare (1978-85) and scrutinies of the screen careers of particular groupings of Shakespeare's plays (comedies, 99-120; English histories, 121-45; and Roman plays, 146-62), of particular plays (Hamlet, 180-95; Othello, 196-210; Lear, 50-68 and 211-33; and Macbeth, 250-60), and of particular directors (Zeffirelli, 163-79; and Kurosawa, 234-49). Inserted as well is an almost up-to-date "Selective Filmography"—not quite up-todate enough to catch Branagh's Much Ado (1993) or even Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990), and a bit too scrupulously "selective" to be willing to include "adaptations " of Shakespeare such as Peter Greenaway's sensorily overloaded reverie upon The Tempest, Prospero's Books (1991). The virtues of a collection ofthis sort are, to be sure, the virtues ofthe individual essays, which are considerable. At their best—and here, to take but two examples, one might cite the piece by Michèle Willems on the BBC Shakespeare series as a whole and the essay by Neil Taylor on two of the BBC series directors, Jane Howell and Elijah Moshinsky—the essays in the volume provide a seminar on how to "read" a film on its own terms, and how, more to the point, the camera can translate the language of Shakespeare's theater into the idioms of the photoplay, producing what Willems calls "a pedagogy of the text" (83) comparable in power with the language of the stage or page. And even in those pieces in which the critical methodology is far more exclusively thematic, the interpretations of both film and playtext tend to avoid the danger of simplifying one in order to illuminate the complexities of the other. In sum, if the writers in this volume are at pains to make their readers perceive the complex directorial artistry in Peter Brook's Lear or Olivier's Hamlet and Henry V, they are generally inclined to see that artistry as something symbiotically stimulated and challenged by the complexity of the Shakespearean text. So, too, though the essays do not expressly address each other, there is, as Wells observes in his Preface (xii), an overlapping of subjects and Book Reviews75 convergence of concerns that give one a sense of having had certain issues, works, and figures well and thoroughly treated. Hence, even though at a glance it might seem curious that it is only Kurosawa and Zeffirelli among the film directors who "rate" their own essays, still the sustained and multiple commentaries on the histories, and on Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Macbeth cumulatively provide us with a substantial appreciation of the contributions made to Shakespeare on film by Olivier, Welles, and Kozintsev. More important, though the essays may well seem in their complementarity and rather studiously casual placement like so many ships passing in the night, they reflect, in differing degrees of articulation, a community of concern, even anxiety, about the relationship of Shakespeare and "moving pictures," both as it has so far evolved, and for what that may portend for its future. Most obviously, the record of the seven...