Shakespeare’s Golden Age

Since World War II — some three hundred and fifty years after the playwright’s death — more people have seen his plays on screen than on stage. Many have seen him only on screen. The modern filmings of Shakespeare are sometimes vulgar, silly, and mangled. They are often wrongheaded — taking an unlikely interpretation and beating the play to death with it. But there have been seventy-seven of these Shakespearean movies in theaters and on television in the last fifteen years. Just in 1998, we had The Tempest, Shakespeare in Love, Twelfth Night, and two versions of Macbeth. In 1999, we had A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an adaptation with teenagers of The Taming of the Shrew, a Hamlet, two more versions of Macbeth, and two of Titus Andronicus. Already scheduled for 2000 are an Othello called O, another Hamlet, and Love’s Labour’s Lost. And the effect of this astonishing mishmash has been to rescue Shakespeare from his position as our leading dead white male and bring his plays back to the position they held in his own age: popular entertainment.

The Elizabethan stage was a fluid medium, and Shakespeare did not need to tie himself to any particular locale and time (as did, say, Ibsen and Beckett, for whose “well-made” plays time and the physical setting are integral). In later ages, this became a problem, as theaters adapted the modern stage under a proscenium arch. A famous staging of Antony and Cleopatra with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the 1950s solved the problem of Shakespeare’s more than thirty scene changes by using a gigantic rotating set in which the buildings of Rome could be seen peeking up at the back of Egypt.

By breaking the proscenium arch, however, film can return us to something analogous to the Elizabethan stage. Shakespeare’s plays have strong plots with plenty of dramatic action — disguises, stabbings, drownings, battles, shipwrecks, murders, suicides, sleep-walking, ulterior motives, pomp and circumstance, and a multitude of foreign settings. Modern film stock, lenses, and Steadicams can render that fast action in real settings — putting us where Shakespeare sends our imaginations. From Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989), Much Ado about Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996) to Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995) to Julie Taymor’s Titus Andronicus (1999) to Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999), we are seeing a new, old Shakespeare on film. In a certain sense, Shakespeare was writing scripts that had to wait almost four hundred years for the means of their production. (His 1996 Oscar nomination for Hamlet, however, went to Branagh instead.)

A pair of new books tell the story of Shakespeare on film: Douglas Brode’s Shakespeare in the Movies and Kenneth Rothwell’s A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Brode’s method of proceeding play by play requires him to restart with each entry, while Rothwell’s chronological discussion better coincides with our sense of progress in film-making. Brode’s breezily semiliterate book is a kind of expanded movie guide, complete with solecisms and mixed-up cliches, and Rothwell’s is not without jargon and Hollywood speak. Nonetheless, each author knows the world of film well, and their volumes are worth having for the wealth of information they contain.

Both Brode and Rothwell point out that Shakespeare’s plays — or at least scenes from them — have always been popular with the working classes in America. Traveling players recited speeches and soliloquies with more or less skill and fidelity. (One remembers the Duke and the Dauphin’s mangled pastiche in Huckleberry Finn.) Following this tradition, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays were filmed as early as there were moving pictures and were shown at fairgrounds and music halls as entertainment alongside Punch and Judy and freak shows. The bourgeoisie were shocked (as was Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray) “at the idea of seeing Shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place” as a music hall.

It was for such commercial reasons that the first film of Shakespeare was made. In 1899 William Dickson, a collaborator of Thomas Edison, enlisted the actor and director Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree to help record excerpts from King John, then playing on stage in London. For a long time — with notable exceptions — Shakespeare continued to be filmed as though still on stage. The struggle of early movies, Rothwell argues, “was to break out of the prison house of the proscenium stage on nearby Broadway and make a film that did not look as if it had been photographed with a camera nailed to the floor in the sixth-row orchestra.” Even many new productions of Shakespeare still look like stage versions, with close-ups.

The “best major Hollywood Shakespeare movie” was an early exception. Max Reinhardt directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1935 with such panache and feeling for it as a movie, that it is still enormously enjoyable. Its cast included a number of Hollywood stars and soon-to-be stars: Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown, James Cagney (as Bottom!), Dick Powell, and Anita Louise. The movie has long ago lived down the “indignation meetings” in London over the casting of vulgar American actors in filming Shakespeare.

But the generically static filming of Shakespeare prevailed for many decades, even in pretty good films like George Cukor’s 1936 Romeo and Juliet and Joseph Mankiewicz and John Houseman’s 1953 Julius Caesar (with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony). Even Orson Welles didn’t succeed with his 1965 rendering of Falstaff’s story, Chimes at Midnight.

The British have always been less insecure than Americans about movies of Shakespeare’s plays but even more unwilling to experiment. All of the films starring Laurence Olivier — which stretch from Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948) to The Merchant of Venice (1973) and King Lear (1984) — show the actors moving in a small space, making speeches at each other, in spite of “filmic” costuming and sets. Only in the patriotic Henry V, combined with William Walton’s splendid music, does the static presentation work — perhaps because the play is all pageantry anyway.

Not surprisingly, the tone of Shakespeare plays changed according to the era in which they were filmed. In the 1960s and 1970s — eras of anxiety and irony, influenced by the Vietnam War and Jan Kott’s book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964) — Shakespeare was filmed as a master of irony. This is seen especially in Peter Hall’s 1969 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the setting is cold and mechanical. But it’s there even in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), where Romeo and Juliet are made the victims of the rulers of their world (as university students of the late 1960s saw themselves) rather than as guilty accelerators of their own fateful ending.

The more successful of recent directors have been less willing to impose on the plays a strict interpretation. This has always been a mug’s game anyway. Now, directors have largely come to let Shakespeare be Shakespeare. Kenneth Branagh wants to make the plays “popular entertainment . . . intended for the enjoyment of ordinary people rather than as elitist escapism.” For the same reason, Branagh uses a number of American actors. “I always like the ballsiness of American film acting,” he says.

The full-blooded abandon . . . free of any actory mannerisms and the baggage of strutting and bellowing that accompanies the least effective Shakespearean performances. . . . We wanted audiences to react to the story as if it were in the here and now and important to them. We did not want them to feel they were in some cultural church.

This will come as a surprise to Americans, who would have said the British win any acting contests hands down. And some of the Americans do seem put there only to make Branagh’s films saleable — Michael Keaton stupidly overacts Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and Jack Lemmon looks positively frightened as the watch in Hamlet. But Charlton Heston is a perfect Player King in Hamlet, and Denzel Washington makes a noble and generous Duke in Much Ado About Nothing. Besides Lemmon and Heston, Branagh uses in Hamlet Gerard Depardieu, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams — leading to a Cecil B. DeMille type of big casting of a “movie-movie.”

Branagh’s Hamlet is not without pratfalls and slip-ups, but it is successful — simply because he lets the play be, cutting little (the film lasts over four hours) and playing it straight, without any particular reading of the “essence” of Hamlet’s character. T. S. Eliot’s notion that Hamlet’s suffering lacks an “objective correlative” is ignored, as is the notion that Hamlet is ensnared by an Oedipus complex. Lowbrow stunts in the film have alienated the more refined type of moviegoer — Hamlet swings on a chandelier to kill off Laertes, and a statue of Hamlet’s father loses its head. But Branagh’s approach represents the triumph of Shakespeare the film writer.

Another contemporary, Michael Hoffman (known for his work on Restoration) directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It has enchanting sets, and the director knows how to make the plot amusing rather than solemn. This latest filming is more awkward than the classic Reinhardt version of 1935, but it has the technical advances since 1935 to help make its setting convincing. Eschewing solemn posturing, the actors move in the Renaissance towns and rooms of Italy — wearing late Victorian shirtwaists and trousers. Stanley Tucci is a grown up and virile Puck, Michelle Pfeiffer makes a predictably enchanting Titania, the actors playing Hyppolyta and Theseus are dignified, Kevin Kline is both funny and touching as Bottom, and Calista Flockhart’s Ally McBeal character comes into her own as Helena.

You can see the advantages of such “straight” productions when you watch Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (1987) in a script by Norman Mailer, which “deconstructs” Lear (Burgess Meredith) into a Las Vegas casino boss. Molly Ringwald deadpans Cordelia, reciting her lines by rote. Peter Sellers is there as “William Shakespeare Jr.” Woody Allen plays the Fool, but stormed off the set so early that his part was made into that of “Mr. Alien,” a film editor we see at the end. Meyer Lansky and Richard Nixon feature prominently. Godard evidently sees Lear as an allegory of corrupt American capitalism, and the play is so totally deconstructed that it is shattered into pieces.

Godard’s outre approach is not unknown. After World War II, before the last decade or so, it was rare for Shakespeare to be played straight. Olivier plays Hamlet as Freudian man, fixated on his mother; Richard III as a lisping “freak of nature”; Henry V as a heroic preserver of England from destruction (by the Nazis); Shylock as a medieval caricature of a Jew; Othello as a black-faced vaudevillian; and Lear as a Churchillian figure in full command of himself — even when his wits wander. When Olivier’s films of Shakespeare’s plays were pretty much all we had, there was a constant call that he do more of them. But they have not worn well.

Looking for Richard, Al Pacino’s film about Richard III, is a good introduction to Shakespeare on screen (and on stage for that matter). Pacino and a cast of fine actors take a much-performed war horse and make it interesting and comprehensible to the audience, as well as illustrating how to listen to Shakespeare in general and how to think about acting Shakespeare. Follow that with Loncraine’s Fascist Richard III, and one has had a lively, intelligent, and spiritually satisfying Shakespeare experience.

Loncraine’s Richard III is set in the 1930s of fast cars, jazzy music, jackboots, and perplexed hereditary royals, with a sardonic Ian McKellen acting the part of Richard as he had just done on the London stage. There have been complaints about its setting in an imaginary Fascist England, but the setting brings out the complex relations among the characters nicely. Seeing them in modern dress — in the uniforms of generals, bishops, admirals, princes, queens — makes the corruption of society seem less remote. (Interestingly, the least corrupt characters in the play are dressed in Royal Air Force uniforms. Because that uniform is the least Fascist-looking? Because the RAF saved Britain from the Germans?) All this may sound as though Loncraine were forcing a single interpretation upon the play, but in fact, Richard III is not a play much concerned with the psychology of its characters. For all of Richard’s analysis of his own motives, he is a standard villain — descended straight from the medieval Vice — and the plot of the rise and fall of a villain dominates Loncraine’s version.

Another Fascist setting for Shakespeare is Taymor’s Titus Andronicus (1999) set in Italy in an empire-building Rome, mostly in Mussolini’s “square coliseum.” This is Shakespeare’s first play and his most violent (although Lear runs a close second). Telling the story of a series of bloody revenges that culminate in the villains’ being served one of their family members baked in a pie at a banquet in their honor, Titus can easily escape the director and end up as farce. Taymor has made a picture whose tone is perfect from start to finish and whose look is exotic, imaginative, and beautiful. (She is the director who staged The Lion King on Broadway, to great acclaim, and has a profound visual intelligence.) She makes Titus Andronicus what it probably was to Shakespeare’s audience, a cautionary tale of the wheel of fortune.

The making of “movie-movies” out of Shakespeare has not gone down well with traditionalists, who see it as a kind of American plot to take over his plays. The Reduced Shakespeare Company, a comedy group that specializes in doing “all thirty-six plays in two hours, including intermission” on the London stage, parodies critics of recent Shakespeare filming. Loncraine’s Richard III is said to be “like an Oliver Stone movie, only classier.” The RSC pretends to be confused by Loncraine’s view of the plot: “We finally attributed our confusion to the fact that we had missed the first two movies in the trilogy — Richard I and Richard II. You may want to rent them before seeing Richard III, so that you can follow the story. Incidentally, this is another reason why Hollywood is so hot on Shakespeare: the Bard loved sequels.”

Scholarly critics have been harder to ignore, but at this point Shakespeare at the movies is unbeatable. All the theories about what his plays mean seem to have canceled each other out. Some twenty years ago, the deconstructionists delighted in pointing out the lacunae in all writing, including Shakespeare’s. The semantic vacuum was taken up by the race-class-and-gender crowd, who sought to make Shakespeare just another writer caught in the contradictions of his age. “Shakespeare would almost certainly not have achieved or retained the dominance he now enjoys,” claims Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare, were it not that his eminence was “the fruit not of his genius but of the virility of British imperialism, which propagated the English language on every continent.”

It is certainly true Shakespeare has been institutionalized. We all quote him, knowingly or not, and some of his characters are better known than many historical figures: Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, in particular. But the Bardoclasts have been unable to make lasting headway against Shakespeare. He beats them at their own game. He is already aware of the ironies in a given situation and of the meaning of what is unspoken; he already knows the self-betrayals and lacunae with which we justify ourselves to ourselves.

Our sense of the filmic possibilities of Shakespeare coincides with the reconstruction of his Globe Theatre, more or less as he might have known it. Its great popularity in London is testimony to the attractiveness of the fluid Elizabethan stage and to Shakespeare’s continued appeal as popular entertainment. In fact, the most amazing thing about Shakespeare is how he continues to speak to later ages. When the setting and the characters are made coherent by classy production values, we follow Shakespeare easily. Thus the difficulty of filmed staging — the actors declaiming in set poses the words while the camera looks straight at them — turns out to be solved, and the “ancient” words prove not to be a problem for the audience. We are in the Golden Age of Shakespeare.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.