Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (review)

Having already established her credentials in the field with Shakespeare on Film,¹ a well-researched, circumspect summation of cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare (and their voluminous attendant literature), Judith Buchanan has recycled a chapter subtitle, craftily purloined from The Tempest, into the subtitle of this book, the richest, and in some ways most satisfying, of her contributions to the field. Both title and subtitle are notable for their provocations. “Shakespeare on Silent Film” appropriates the appellation Robert Hamilton Ball attached to his own classic contribution to the field, while the subtitle appears to grant what has thus far been deplorably lacking in discussions of “silent” Shakespeare adaptations, a film-conversant approach that is a corrective to a long tradition of denigrating one of the medium’s singular achievements in a presumed defense of Shakespeare’s dialogue.

In fleshing out her title, Buchanan succeeds grandly, if for me disappointingly, for in spite of her disclaimers she proves Ball decidedly out of date; her success is more equivocal when fulfilling the demands of her subtitle, but constitutes the more original achievement in illustrating many facets of the excellence of the “dumb discourse” she explicates. Ball’s scholarly endeavors, preserved down to preliminary materials in the Folger Library, remain one of the monumental achievements of film research; in sifting through reviews, interviews, and trade literature and of hunting down surviving prints of films and the participants in them, he anticipated by a generation the methods used by historiographers of early cinema in the celebrated 1980s revival of interest in the period. His approach has never been superseded, and he has yet to receive the recognition he merits, but he bore the burden of every precursor in not witnessing later rediscoveries, ones Buchanan discusses with obvious relish. Her introduction contains a brief description of one of the more celebrated rediscoveries, the 1912–13 Richard III crafted to the talents of actor-lecturer Frederick Warde. Her second chapter treats a remnant of King John, the Archaeopteryx of Shakespeare films, of which Ball gave a number of fanciful accounts in a rare departure from his usual rigor. The fourth chapter dwells on an assortment of films, highlighting the Vitagraph Company’s 1908 Julius Caesar and Thanhouser’s 1910 Winter’s Tale, films unknown to Ball.

If her revision of Ball seems ungallant, there is still much to commend. Considering the enormous number of films she treats, mercifully concentrating exclusively on adaptations made in the United States and Western Europe before 1927 (of which she claims to consider in excess of three hundred items), the organization of her work into an approximate chronology giving priority to national industries reinvigorates the conventional periodization by posing probing questions. Curiously, the outstanding first chapter, the only one to contain material entirely new to the field, stems from a misconception. She quotes A. Nicholas Vardac to the effect that the motion picture “‘finally made its appearance in response to the insistence of social pressure for a greater pictorial realism in the theatre’” (56), taking this early, casual overstatement as indicative of the tenor of his book. In fact, Vardac points out a variety of media that influenced both theatrical and cinematic realism.² But her correction would have won Ingmar Bergman’s heart, for she shows that magic-lantern presentations of Shakespeare plays had at least as much to do with later cinematic versions as did the evolution of stagecraft and pantomime.

Additional chapters treat the significant transitional period in cinema (1907–13) with two early case studies of British and Italian films, rival Italian and British versions of Hamlet in the succeeding period, an ill-assorted quartet from a rash of films that coincided with the 1916 tercentenary commemorations of Shakespeare’s death (including two much-sought-after lost versions of Romeo and Juliet), and examples of the celebrated Expressionist period of Weimar German cinema, during which a star system flourished. Embedded in these chapters are...