Bigger Than “Ben-Hur”: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences ed. by Barbara Ryan, Milette Shamir (review)

Bigger Than Ben-Hur explores a suite of stage and screen versions of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, while inquiring into Wallace’s own interpretation of the Bible and ancient Rome in crafting his Tale of the Christ. Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir’s collection of essays demonstrates the rich complexity gained in studying a network of adaptations not in terms of their fidelity to an original, but instead as products of and mirrors to cultural trends. (Fortunately the reader does not need to have read the novel or be familiar with the many adaptations to follow the essays’ arguments, thanks to the generous context provided by their authors and the editors.) With Ben-Hur the novel being a best seller and William Wyler’s 1959 movie adaptation netting eleven Oscars and commercial success, there are certainly grounds for investigating this “remarkably fluid text in its capacity to speak to an ever-changing modern audience about contemporary concerns” (xviii), as Neil Sinyard puts it in the book’s foreword. Understandably, not all essays in this collection emphasize audience to the same degree. But they consistently stress the larger cultural sphere into which these works entered and which influenced adaptations, including Wallace’s own “romancing” of the New Testament by placing a Jewish fictional hero, Judah Ben-Hur, against the backdrop of the Gospels. It should be noted, though, that the first four essays of the ten are devoted to Wallace’s book and only one essay, Ina Rae Hark’s “The Erotics of the Galley Slave,” centers on the 1959 film version, though it is treated as a common touchstone in many of the pieces. While the coverage of various versions may be somewhat uneven as a result, Bigger Than Ben-Hur is notable for the attention it gives to how audiences would have responded to Wallace’s book and for its explorations of the long-running touring theatrical adaptation produced by Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger, as well as Fred Niblo’s lesser-known 1925 silent film based on the novel, which succeeded the ill-fated attempt by producer June Mathis (discussed in Thomas J. Slater’s contribution to this volume).

The title of Ryan and Shamir’s collection does not indicate the extent to which two discussions come to dominate many of the essays. Many deal in whole or in part with how religion and religious history are taken up in the versions of Ben-Hur, especially in the coming together of Roman, Jewish, and Christian figures in the narrative. There is also a particular interest in political ideology associated with versions’ depictions of Rome and the characters’ power struggles, which scholars are eager to analyze from the historical and cultural perspective of Wallace and his book’s (largely American) adapters and audiences. The two discussions readily intersect, too, as in Eran Shalev’s account of changing attitudes to the Roman ideal, once admired as a model democracy by American revolutionaries before its decadent late period was questioned by evangelicals after the Civil War. Shalev shows a religious dimension to the political shift: Christian evangelicals came to regard Jesus as a personal savior and a victim of corrupt cultural forces. Hilton Obenzinger, in “Holy Lands, Restoration, and Zionism in Ben-Hur,” makes the case that Wallace endorses American nationalist expansionism by inviting the American reader to sympathize with Judah Ben-Hur’s figurative displacement as a Jew alienated by Roman occupation. Even essays whose titles or opening paragraphs suggest a different focus come to devote a fair amount of attention to these issues—evidence of how unavoidable the triangular relations of Christianity, Jewishness, and Rome are to the interpretation of the work. Hark’s piece investigates the erotics of power in male relationships, ultimately concluding that masculine desire as depicted in the 1959 film, despite its gay subtext, is shown as...