Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations (review)

Musical adaptations of Shakespeare have for some time been the poorer relation of the family in terms of receiving only limited attention from Shakespearean scholarship and even fewer focused publications. But with a number of cross-disciplinary interests in adaptation now fuelling interest in the 'Shakespearean brand', a number of more sustained academic responses to musical adaptations of Shakespeare's work are emerging in print. Kendra Preston Leonard's new study is a welcome contribution to the field, combining as it does an interest in film score, Shakespeare on screen, and the specific filter, as she determines it, of the representation of madness.

In a helpful introductory chapter on 'Shakespeare, Madness, and Music', Leonard introduces her readers to the particular interest in madness that can be registered on the early modern stage as well as the 'wider canvas' to which madness referred when invoked by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She makes cogent use of important studies by Carol Neely and others on this specific Early Modern dramatic context, and notes music's long association with madness and, in particular, with women characters in a state of mental breakdown. Noting that 'most cases of madness on the Early Modern stage involve women' (3), she considers the way in which recognisable popular tunes and folk songs were deployed by Shakespeare and others in association with these portrayals, harnessing familiarity as part of the reception process. In the process, she invokes David Lindley's important research in this area in his 2005 critical companion, Shakespeare and Music.

Leonard credits silent film with severing the clear link between Ophelia's scenes of madness and the ballad tradition in productions of Hamlet. She then considers the mixed inheritance of sound films when directors such as Laurence Oliver turned to the Shakespearean repertoire in the 1940s. According to Leonard, Olivier's 1948 Hamlet is a watershed production as it marks the first time that 'Shakespearean madness' is 'accorded a fully symphonic treatment' (5). Although she examines this film in detail in later chapters (on Hamlet and Ophelia), it is here invoked as a working example of the accretive nature of Shakespearean adaptation, demonstrating how Shakespearean film adaptations in particular are 'laden with additional meaning and interpretation lacquered on by centuries of use and reuse' (5).

The lens of madness proves a very apposite prism through which to view the work of the diverse grouping of composers who produced scores for those twentieth-century films that are subjected to close reading in this volume (the most recent work discussed is Billy Morrissette's Scotland PA from 2001). Chapter 2 on 'Hamlet' provides some fresh discussion of what might have seemed the by-now-familiar territory of film versions of Hamlet by Olivier, Grigori Kosintsev, Kenneth Branagh, Franco Zeffirelli, and Michael Almereyda. In a template that is repeated in each of the five case-study chapters of the volume, films are discussed in turn, usually in date order, framed by a more over-arching commentary on the history of the particular character in focus. In this chapter, for example, the performance legacies of Burbage and Garrick as the melancholic Danish prince are examined as shaping influences on twentieth-century interpretations. Leonard has an acute ear for historical transition, in music as much as in film and performance, and her structuring template works well enough. The detailed analysis of the functioning of the score through a whole film allows for genuine depth in the study of the musical dynamics of each, and their synergy, or otherwise, with the screen events and images - although by the later chapters on King Lear the structure has become somewhat repetitive. The final two entries, on Lear and Edgar respectively, project a sense of the author running out of steam somewhat, which is a shame as there is genuine excellence in the early chapters on Hamlet and Ophelia. Towards the close, even the material starts to stretch its own categories as television adaptations enter the frame. I do...