The romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) wittily puts the dramatist into the world of show business. Shakespeare's relationship with the theatre manager, Henslowe--and through him with 'the money'--is the occasion for a multitude of jokes referring to the entertainment industry of late sixteenth-century London in terms of its equivalent four hundred years later. In one moment of crisis Henslowe is even on the point of giving birth to a great cliché. 'The show must...' he starts, and Shakespeare completes the phrase by urging him impatiently to 'Go on'. The moment passes, unnoticed by either of them. The tension between the artist and the marketplace has always been a good source of humour in drama and fiction and on film, and the story is usually told in terms of the crassness of the producers and the crushed idealism of the 'creative' department. This is true to the experience of many artists, not least those writers and directors who worked in Hollywood at the height of the studios' powers. Writers and directors have often given accounts of their dealings with the 'front office' in which the latter's functionaries figure as craven, sentimental and reactionary, a characterisation many in the industry would of course dispute.

On a less personal and anecdotal level, analysts of culture are reluctant to allow that commercial films can be effectively radical. In his study of the cultural politics of Shakespearean interpretation, Big-Time Shakespeare (1996, p. 101), Michael Bristol ruefully observes that 'the cultural authority of corporate Shakespeare has nothing to do with ideas of any description'. Perhaps one might argue that if 'ideas' are defined less restrictively, the tension between 'Shakespeare', ideas and big business has yielded an engaging variety of cinematic results.

A clip from a 1912 silent film version of Richard III, showing how poetic drama was adapted for the screen. Courtesy of the American Film Institute.

In fact the number of films made from Shakespeare's plays is relatively small, although the 'Shakespeare factor' in cinema has been enhanced by the numerous 'offshoots'--films, like Shakespeare in Love, that draw on Shakespearean material without claiming to perform any one of the plays. In the first century of moving pictures, Shakespeare's plays played an honourable but hardly dominant role in the development of the medium. Some forty sound films have been made of Shakespearean plays to date, but it has been estimated that during the 'silent' era--before synchronised dialogue complicated the business of adapting poetic drama for the screen--there were more than 400 films on Shakespearean subjects. These took their place in an international market unrestricted by considerations of language and (consequently) untroubled by the relatively archaic dialogue of the originals. Like the films of other 'classics', they conferred respectability on their makers and distributors, while providing an easily transportable rival to the pictorial, melodramatic mode of popular theatre. As a working definition of the 'classic' in this context, it is hard to better that provided by an American trade paper, the Nickelodeon, in 1911:

'Classic' is here used in a rather loose and unrestricted sense, as it generally is used by adherents of the photoplay, meaning vaguely a kind of piece that is laid in a bygone era and one which aims to evoke some kind of poetic and idealistic illusion differing from that illusion of mere reality with which photoplays are ordinarily concerned. 'Costume play', 'historical piece', 'poetic drama', variously convey a similar idea.

A clip from a 1912 silent film version of Richard III. Such films emulated theatrical values. Courtesy of the American Film Institute.

The story will be familiar and drawn from fiction, poetry, drama, history or the Bible, and such 'photoplays' will be costly, requiring 'an expensive outlay of costumes and scenic effects' and 'deep and careful research into the manners and customs of the era depicted'. Above all they call for a 'producer' with 'the eye of an artist and the mind of a poet' (William Ulricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture, the Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films, 1993, p. 50). When this was written Shakespeare was more firmly embedded in popular culture than he is some nine decades later. The plays (or at least a few of them), heavily adapted to accommodate lavish realistic staging and show off the star actors' performances in leading roles, were a staple of actor-managers' theatre. Painters in the persistently popular narrative mode could confidently exhibit and sell works based on favourite characters, scenes and situations, and illustrated editions of the Works had their place on family bookshelves. At the same time a more earnest, less richly upholstered Shakespearean experience could be found in the touring activities of idealistic companies such as those of F. R. Benson and Ben Greet, or in the many annotated and more or less scholastic editions marketed for the general reader and the schoolroom. Many silent Shakespeare films claim either to replicate or at least represent stage performances: such are the fragment showing Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree in King John and the 1911 film of F. R. Benson's company on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon in scenes from Richard III. Some films either emulate theatrical values while offering more convincing (or at least more portable) equivalents of stage productions, or combine both aims with a more sensitive use of the new medium: subtler acting and the use of locations in the 1913 British Hamlet, with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, offer a case in point. Perhaps the decisive moment in the development of Shakespeare films is reached when film-makers cease to rely on the audience's prior knowledge of plays (or even specific performances) or such extra-filmic devices as a narrator or lecturer. Luke McKernan suggests 1916 as a watershed year, citing the production of a King Lear (produced by Edwin Thanhouser) and a lost Macbeth, both made in the USA (Luke McKernan and Olwen Terris, eds., Walking Shadows. Shakespeare in the National Film and Television Archive, 1994, p. 5). This increased confidence may also be reflected in the greater freedoms taken by a group of German-produced films which combine Shakespearean material with elements not to be found in the plays: Svend Gade's remarkable Hamlet of 1920, Dmitri Buchowetski's Othello (1922) with Emil Jannings and Werner Krauss and Peter Paul Felner's version of The Merchant of Venice (1923).

Nevertheless, Shakespearean films and other 'classics' were hardly a staple of the new and burgeoning cinema business: it was comedy, melodrama, the Western and the exotic historical romance that were regarded as bankable.