By Michael
Anderegg
Hollywood has always had an
on again, off again love affair with Shakespeare. Virtually from its beginnings, the motion picture industry has
made repeated attempts to adopt Shakespeare into its fund of narrative options.
But why should the movies have been interested in Shakespeare? In the very earliest days of film, one might
argue, Shakespeare was still positioned at a cultural crossroads, or at least
could still be claimed as disputed territory, no longer truly popular as he
seems to have been in the nineteenth century, but not quite yet fully co-opted
for high brow culture.
At the turn of
the century, Shakespeare may have been far more accessible to a diverse
spectrum of viewers than may be apparent from a late twentieth century
perspective. Furthermore, Shakespeare's
plays could be reduced easily enough to the relatively simple tales and brief
narratives from which many of them had been initially drawn: stripped of most
of its language, a Shakespeare adaptation frequently reverts, intentionally or
not, to an adaptation of Shakespeare's source.
A one-reel
(approximately twelve minute) or two-reel version of a Shakespeare play is thus
perhaps not as ludicrous as it sounds.
Indeed, such a film would naturally be congruent with the "key
phrase, key scene, key image approach to Shakespeare" that seems to have
been popular during the early part of the century.
In addition to these
cultural and narrative considerations, filmmakers may have believed that
Shakespeare's plays are in some essential way "cinematic." Unlike the
modern drama Shakespeare builds up his actions in brief scenes, and organizes
both time and space in an extremely fluid fashion: Antony and Cleopatra,
for one notable instance, has over forty scenes and its action covers some ten
years. Shakespeare is thus naturally
suited to the cinema.
But this analogy is not
really valid, for it emphasizes what are in fact only incidental properties of
both Shakespeare and the film medium.
Besides, many of Shakespeare's plays involve very few locations and take
place in a quite short period of time: Twelfth Night, Othello, and The
Tempest, for instance. More to the
point, Shakespeare's plays actually unfold in no specific place at all, at
least in no place that needs to be specified or particularized. Antony and Cleopatra can move
from Egypt to Rome and back quite easily because those places are defined
metaphorically rather than materially.
Shakespeare's plays are set, literally and figuratively, on an
essentially bare, abstract performing area, far removed from the concrete,
detailed "realism" the cinema very early on discovered to be one of
its major resources and attractions.
The analogy between
Shakespeare and film also lacks conviction when considered from the film end as
well. Although it is a popularly held
conviction that film depends on rapid movement from place to place together
with a unique ability to expand, compress, or in a variety of ways distort
time, neither of these factors is essential to film. All that can truly be said to be essential to the cinema is its
mechanism: the camera, lights, projector, celluloid, and all of the other
paraphernalia required to produce that which we finally see projected in front
of us. The supposed affinity between
Shakespeare and film simply does not hold up, which may at least help us to
understand why Shakespearean films have always fallen short of the theory that
would make such a film inevitably successful.
Another reason for
Hollywood's interest in Shakespeare is the desire for cultural respectability
for a medium under increasing attack from censors and moral arbiters of various
stripes. The Warner Brothers A
Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)--the first major Shakespeare film of the
sound era--can be seen, at least in part, as a response to the controversies
leading to the establishment of the Production Code Administration (see chapter
VIII in this MANUAL), whose edicts were formulated in 1930 but did not become
enforceable until 1934.
The casting
strategies of the film--Mickey Rooney as Puck, James Cagney as Bottom, Joe E.
Brown as Flute, Dick Powell as Lysander, together with Mendelshohn's music and
Vera Zorina's choreography, as well as the two credited directors, Max
Reinhardt and William Deiterle, suggests that Shakespeare was still seen as somehow
balanced between popularity and propriety, or perhaps the filmmakers believed
themselves to be reproducing what they thought to be the original conditions of
Shakespeare's audience: something for the groundlings and something for the
"better sort." The film was,
in any case, promoted as a "class act" at the same time that Warners
undoubtedly hoped for a popular success.
With MGM's Romeo and
Juliet, the following year, "class" seems to have taken over
almost entirely, the casting of Andy Devine as the Nurse's servant, Peter,
being one of the few remnants of the Warners approach. Shakespeare, after a long dry spell on the
American stage, was once again box office, at least in New York, as Orson
Welles's productions of Macbeth (1936) and Julius Caesar (1937)
would demonstrate. Fully conscious of
the cultural significance of its production, MGM sponsored an elaborate and attractive
tie-in book to accompany the film's release.
In spite of the publicity--much of it free--both A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet generated, however, neither film enjoyed the kind of commercial success that would encourage further experiments along the same line, and Hollywood pretty much ignored Shakespeare for the next decade or so. It wasn't really until the success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in the eighties that Shakespeare once again became a favorite movie script-writer. Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet is part of a long tradition, and probably ranks as one of the most successful of all Shakespeare films.