Shakespeare on Film: Such Things as Dreams are Made Of (review)

Wallflower Press, which specializes in film and media studies, has for the past eight years published a series of books it calls "Short Cuts." These books are designed to provide undergraduates and non-academics with accessible introductions to a wide range of film-studies topics. Typically, they are written by academics and include brief historical sections, filmographies, and case studies of particular films and issues. Fifty titles are planned and the thirty-sixth is Carolyn Jess-Cooke's Shakespeare on Film. Jess-Cooke is a lecturer in the Department of Media, Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland, and she has published numerous reviews, articles, and chapters on Shakespeare and film, specializing in remakes and adaptations.

The book opens with a brief biography of Shakespeare that, through a discussion of his plays' "malleability" or "latent refusal to stay in one setting, genre, language, nation, character-position or historical juncture" hints at the questions of popularization and adaptation that occupy later chapters (4). The book's four chapters each follow a similar structure, addressing an element of film grammar, providing a brief discussion of it, and concluding with one or more case studies that illustrate and extend the concept.

The first chapter, "Performance," addresses performance in terms of mimetic elements, star power, subjectivity, and reception. It sees performance not just as the development of character and narrative, but also as the focal point of a range of approaches to understanding the Shakespeare film. Performance functions as a link between audience and text, between elements of film, and, via character analysis, between the text and culture. The balance of the chapter compares four film Hamlets (Laurence Olivier's [1948] Innokenti Smoktunovsky's [1964], Mel Gibson's [1990], and Kenneth Branagh's [1996]) and to a lesser extent their accompanying Ophelias. The examination of Olivier considers the relationship the film establishes between the sets and the performers and how, pace Freud, the two aspects emphasize Hamlet at the expense of the other characters, the women in particular. Smoktunovsky's Hamlet is regarded in the context of its production and seen as embodying an (eventually thwarted) expression of freedom. Like Olivier's Hamlet, Gibson's occupies the center of the film but as a populist masculine prince rather than a brooding Oedipal one. Branagh's Hamlet is epic, self-aware, and finally inconsistent in his expression of emotion. The variety of approaches to Hamlet these four actors demonstrate reminds us of the text's always malleable meaning which renders it the ultimate foundation for any performance.

Chapter 2, "Adaptation," begins with a description of a scene from Georges Méliès' lost 1907 film Le Rêve de Shakespeare (Shakespeare Writing Julius Caesar) in which Shakespeare, struggling to begin the play, has a vision of Caesar's murder fully acted out and proceeds simply to write it down. This construction of an inspired composition serves as a counter example against which the chapter establishes its own postmodern, collaborative, adaptive notion of authorship. The chapter makes three points related to understanding Shakespeare films. First, conditions of production can often influence the final product and reception of a Shakespeare adaptation. Second, transposition from page to screen can be mutually constitutive, producing films, but also DVD extras, scripts, and scholarly work, much of which is aimed at a literate film audience. Last, Shakespeare's plays were texts originally intended for neither the page nor the screen but the stage. In developing this last point, the chapter delves into textual studies and unfortunately introduces the "bad non-authorial quarto" vs. "good authorial Folio" binary that has lost much of its credence in the past few decades. This is especially disappointing in light of the earlier statement that "the Shakespearean text is a permeable chain of voices, signifiers and cultural networks, available for constant re-collaboration and reiteration" (6). For its case studies of adaptation, the chapter examines Prospero's Books (1991) and...