Shakespeare and World Cinema by Mark Thornton Burnett, and: Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace by Mark Thornton Burnett (review)

It would be hard to find two better-paired volumes than Mark Thornton Burnett’s recently-republished Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (Palgrave 2007 and 2012) and his new Shakespeare and World Cinema (Cambridge 2012). While the former explores Anglophonic Shakespeare films through the lens of global market forces, the latter offers highly localized readings of non-Anglophonic adaptations. In fact, Shakespeare and World Cinema seems almost to “talk back” to its earlier counterpart, critiquing the “general relegation or bypassing of the non-Anglophone Shakespeare film” by offering “an account that eschews the domination of Hollywood—and the English language—[a]s a political obligation” (3). Both books are essential contributions to the field, but Shakespeare and World Cinema is unrivaled with respect to rigor, information, and ingenuity. Demonstrating compelling, deeply situated knowledge of seventy-three films in regions ranging from Southeast Asia to Africa, Latin America to Lapland, Burnett’s most recent work resonates with an unusual sense of urgency, demanding attention to and critical engagement with films that have never had the benefit of commercial circulation.

The importance of Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace lies in the fact that it is one of a mere handful of books that acknowledges and investigates the economic exigencies and market-based energies that drive the production, distribution, and reception of contemporary Shakespeare films. Organized around a series of wide-ranging themes—including theatricality, sequelization, localization, racial and religious politics, spirituality, and post-millennial parody—Burnett’s book presents a longitudinal analysis of the commercial paratexts that trouble our understanding of both canonical and distinctly “minor” cinematic adaptations released between 1993 and 2007.

Chapter one examines the ways in which the dynamic forces of globalization have led to the primacy of cinema—and Hollywood in particular—over theatre, a communal crisis staged in spinoffs such as In the Bleak Midwinter (Kenneth Branagh 1995), Beginner’s Luck (James Callis, Nick Cohen 2001), Get Over it (Tommy O’Haver 2001), and Indian Dream (Roger Golby 2003). Unable to completely escape the centrifugal forces of the global economy, these films “fragment Shakespeare at the same time as they try to unite the shards of his cultural memory, urgently reflecting on the means whereby theatre, and Shakespeare’s relation to it, might still be manageable and meaningful” (26). Chapter two focuses on the production of meaning from a different perspective by exploring the ways in which “Shakespeare is distributed in a sequelized global age” (46). Beginning with the bold assertion that Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) is actually derived from, and thus serves as a “sequel” to, Kenneth Branagh’s landmark comedy Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Burnett contends that the relationship between “original” and “copy” in this case is largely vampiric. “[T]aking energy from the charisma of its model,” he explains, Hoffman’s adaptation “extends, expands and amplifies in the interests of confronting and providing a Shakespeare that enjoys a cross-cultural appeal” (29). As “cross cultural” becomes shorthand for profitable, both films remain unabashedly imbricated in the contentious spirit of international commerce, insuring that even “Shakespeare is obliged to contend with himself, with proliferating manifestations of his own narratives in a variety of styles and genres” (33).

A refreshing point of departure within this chapter is the analysis of the gender conversation embedded in Much Ado and Dream. If, according to Burnett, Beatrice serves as the former’s “internal auteur,” then in the latter film, it is the bicycle that assumes this directorial function, driving the narrative expression of women’s sexual and socioeconomic mobility (38-39). As a broader application of this theme, these films capitalize on the cultural mobility of Shakespeare as a means of engaging the “transatlantic aspirations” of their directors (35). Despite the inevitable tensions...