Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace (review)

In Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace, Mark Thornton Burnett employs a wide range of critical perspectives to examine the manifold connections between Shakespeare films and the world economy. Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace is dense and thoughtful, with analyses drawn from a broad theoretical framework that includes relevant work from across disciplinary boundaries. This breadth provides a strong foundation for Burnett's sophisticated study of "global flows, media technologies and questions of difference as they play out in the screen constructions that are 'Shakespeare'" (3)—with a particular emphasis on Shakespeare in "issues of national and religious affiliation" and "impersonation and performance" (3) as generated by connections with the world economy. In this ambitious undertaking, Burnett explores how these films recreate Shakespearean meanings and authority through the imperatives of consumerism and the demands of a global marketplace.

In seven chapters—"Screening the Stage," "Sequelizing Shakespeare," "The Local and the Global," "Racial Identities, Global Economies," "Remembrance, Holocaust, Globalization," "Spirituality/Meaning/Shakespeare," "Post-Millennial Parody"—and an epilogue, Burnett shows the complex ways in which recent Shakespeare films respond to globalization. For Burnett,

The films investigated in this book perform more than one task, initiating and sequelizing, authenticating and demythologizing, looking outwards and inwards, and emptying out the regional as they restore the local within a grammar of the global. They straddle the spectrum of informed observation and ideological avoidance, fresh felicities and old truths, inimical realities and longed for utopias, thereby clarifying the global Shakespearean marketplace as a resolutely contemporary if unpredictably postmodern experience.

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In each chapter, Burnett foregrounds particular tasks from those cited above, illustrating key films within larger trends. The early chapters are informative and interesting about the relationship between Shakespeare films and criticism; but the concluding sections go further, opening up lines of inquiry that are even more far-reaching and significant, providing fresh insight beyond the impact of the specific films discussed.

Chapter 1, "Screening the Stage," centers on post–World War II films that explore the intersections between Shakespeare, film, stage, and globalization. While these films attempt to reinstate Shakespeare as an icon of "enduring values" (8) transmitted theatrically, they indicate an opposition between an inherited notion of the theater as permanent and communal versus one of the world economy as elusive and fluctuating. In depicting this dichotomy, these films question the uses of a theatrical Shakespeare and the status of his iconic authority. Burnett continues to address questions of authority in chapter 2, "Sequelizing Shakespeare," in which he studies the mimetic strategies of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Michael Hoffman's William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1999). Using the latter as an example, Burnett employs a postmodern definition of "sequel" as a film that "extends, expands and amplifies" (29) its model (in this case, Branagh's Much Ado) in a "non-chronological development of a pre-existing narrative" that derives its "authority" and its interpretive meaning from an "intertextual investment in sequelization" (29). Hoffman's Midsummer does not merely copy but rather alters as it mimes Branagh's Much Ado, thereby commenting on the various associations spawned by Shakespeare in our time and reflecting on "past, present and future relationships between Shakespeare as a cultural 'original' and the commercial demands of the Hollywood initiative" (45).

The discussion of how films treat Shakespeare as icon is continued in "The Local and the Global," in which Burnett examines the relationship between the cinematic notion of a universal, timeless bard and the opposing idea posited by Shakespearean criticism over the past few decades. For Burnett, both film and criticism gloss over the importance of a local Shakespeare, and both can be reductive in characterizing the complicated role that Shakespeare plays in the world marketplace (48). Interceding between cinema and criticism, films of Hamlet and Macbeth since the 1990s often provide a vision of the local confronting the global and Shakespeare inhabiting both spheres at once (48). As...