Shakespeare on Screen: "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and: Cinematic Shakespeare (review)

The methods, structure, and focus of these two new works of Shakespearean film criticism differ strikingly. Whereas Shakespeare on Screen: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" presents an almost alarmingly diverse group of essays treating the films of a single play, Michael Anderegg's Cinematic Shakespeare offers the crafted argument of a single critic wrestling with the generic range of Shakespearean films. Together, the books underscore the challenges facing critics of Shakespeare on film as they now work through (re)defining not only the genre but also the implications of the ever-expanding array of Shakespearean media.

The multiple authors of Shakespeare on Screen: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" generally fulfill the editors' promise of "the richness of this domain of research" (10). From Bernice W. Kliman's cogent arguments for using multiple films in pedagogy and Kenneth S. Rothwell's characteristically magisterial analysis of the long history of cinematic Dreams to Kevin De Ornellas's environmentalist critique of the (mis)representation of nature under siege in filmed versions of the play and Richard Burt's provocative analysis of "bardcore" Dreams, this collection ranges over extensive critical ground while addressing—often from several perspectives—a plethora of different film productions. Several of these essays will prove useful for specific approaches to particular Dream films or for nuanced analyses of influences between films, as in Mark Thornton Burnett's polished and intriguing exploration of "intertextual dialogues" between Michael Hoffman's Dream and Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado (179). A few raise more general issues about how we should approach Shakespearean cinema. For example, Sarah Hatchuel offers a number of cinematic modes that could evoke the kinds of metadramatic effects that appear so prominently not only in Dream but throughout the canon, implicitly raising questions about the relationships between "meta-theatre" and "meta-cinema" (161).

One interesting feature of this volume reflects its origins in the two-day international conference of the same name: these writers and their essays address each other. The "Question and Answer" sessions that follow almost every essay give a vivid sense of the conference's energy. In fact, the dialogues work particularly well in concert with the interview between Olivier Stockman, the producer of The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream (2001), and several of the attending critics. Their lively interchange of ideas helps bring different critical perspectives to bear on each other, as Richard Burt usefully keeps attention on the relevance of film's transnational effects and several other critics, including Jay L. Halio, bring up the interplay between stage and film. Because the collection, as a whole, demonstrates a clear commitment to a variety of cinematic representations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, these essays embrace a wide-ranging discussion of the political, artistic, and educational stakes of filming Shakespeare's comedy.

In Cinematic Shakespeare Michael Anderegg acknowledges from the outset that he will focus his analyses in ways that will not include silent film, foreign translation, and linguistically refashioned adaptation. His work "start[s] with the assumption that their relationship to language and to what we may term 'the literary' may be the most notable characteristic of films derived from Shakespeare's plays" (2). As a result, he initially analyzes these films as a specialized subgenre in literary adaptation, one in which the investment in the text's specific language is particularly high. His book then explores the definition of "cinematic Shakespeare" as he examines how Shakespeare's plays have served as star vehicles, how generic borrowings from other cinematic forms have refashioned Shakespearean playtexts, as well as audience expectations, and finally how different modes of production, usefully including television, have reconfigured what might constitute Shakespearean film.

Throughout these analyses, Anderegg denies any special adherence to textual purity or completeness but consistently values the text...