Films made from Shakespeare's plays exist in a space between conflicting cultural assumptions, rival theories and practices of performance.

Films made from Shakespeare's plays exist at a meeting-point between conflicting cultural assumptions, rival theories and practices of performance, and--at the most basic level--the uneasy and overlapping systems of theatre and cinema. As Manfred Pfister points out in The Theory and Analysis of Drama (1988, pp. 23-5), film partakes of the nature of narrative as well as dramatic texts. Beyond this, the dramatic form of the originals favours metadramatic devices, makes use of techniques akin to (and absorbed in) post-Brechtian 'alienation', and returns theatre to a presentational mode that predates most of the sophisticated literary narratives that cinema emulates. There will always be a conflict of techniques as well as of value systems when these Renaissance plays form the pretext for movies.

The relationship between Shakespearean films aimed at the mass market and the academic study of the plays has always been tense. In the early decades of the century, film-makers anticipated the accusation of desecrating what were routinely treated as secular scriptures. More recently, the interrogation of the cultural functions of the plays themselves and their interpretation has resulted in some directors being taken to task for harnessing one hegemony (Shakespeare as a figurehead of conservative anglocentric culture) to another (international big business). An academic disinclination to celebrate harmonies and resolutions has made the unifying efforts of mainstream cinema suspect and stimulated sympathy for the determinedly avant-garde. To this can be joined the long-established distrust of the cultural politics of mass entertainment films as powerful generators of false consciousness. This suspicion extends in some cases into a fundamental suspicion of the medium itself: Walter Benjamin's indictment of the film as a factor in 'distraction' of the viewer has been particularly influential (discussed in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, Arendt (ed.), 1968). But deconstruction or other forms of refusal to accept complicity are not likely to result in traffic jams in the multiplex car park or substantial underwriting from the producers. Consequently, many commentators have favoured the Shakespearean films of such directors as Derek Jarman (The Tempest, 1979) or Christine Edzard (As You Like It, 1992), who have refused to make commercial success a priority. Orson Welles's problematic relationship with the established formulas of filming and the business practices of the industry has resulted in his being posthumously recruited as an early postmodernist. Kenneth Branagh's whole-hearted participation in the marketplace has probably contributed to a tendency for his films to be discussed in terms of their cultural politics as much as (or rather than) according to any technical or aesthetic measure. Alternative sources of finance, often including government grants (in Europe but not in the USA) or co-production deals with television 'arts' producers, have supported such projects as Prospero's Books (1991) by a director (Peter Greenaway) who professes no interest in the popular cinema. There is also an 'alternative' world of Shakespeare on film beyond even the art-houses, inhabited by what Richard Burt identifies as 'queer' Shakespeare (Unspeakable Shaxxxspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture, 1998).

For better or worse, Shakespearean films continue to appear in the multiplexes and on the shelves of the video stores. Since the early 1980s the revolution in home video has made most (if not all) of the sound-era Shakespeare films widely available, not least to the scholars who used to hunt down showings in film clubs and revival houses, or arrange to watch them in the study rooms of libraries and archives.

	Thinking Point
	How does your own experience of Shakespeare in film inform your understanding of Shakespeare’s work?

It is probably as much of a mistake to ask whether 'film' can do justice to 'Shakespeare' as to reproach 'Shakespeare' with being inappropriate material for 'film'. Neither are stable entities, reducible to a simple set of definitions, but two bundles of techniques and opportunities that may be mixed together with more or less enjoyable and impressive results. We can no more pronounce that Hamlet (for example) essentially means one thing or another, and that a particular film fails to capture this quality, than we can object that Shakespearean drama jeopardises essentially filmic virtues. Nor are 'film' and 'Shakespeare' the same in every 'territory' mapped out by distributors. Moreover, a director, actor or film might be ignored in one country and revered in another, just as a play may have a resonance in (say) Russia, that it lacks elsewhere. On the other hand, we can identify the intentions of writers and directors or the behaviour of larger groups (production companies, their publicists, audiences) by reference to the texts they started from and the congruence of the results with interpretations in circulation when the film was made. The audiences appealed to or implied in the films are an important object of study, but the same arguments turn up in widely different social and political contexts. Few would argue with a director who declares 'If you're making a Shakespeare film for a contemporary audience, you have to make sure that they don't get bored.' Many would have echoed the anxiety of a prospective producer offered a Merchant of Venice project: 'It is impossible to use Shakespeare's exact words in a film that will be two hours long. It is ridiculous and absurd and will at best end up as nothing but a literary experiment. Such experiments are impossible now, when we can make at best only forty-two films a year'. The first of these statements is by Richard Loncraine (quoted in 'Shakespeare in the Cinema: a Directors' Forum', Cinéaste 24.1, 1998, pp. 48-55), co-director of a Richard III set in the context of 1930s fascism, and the second by Dr Josef Goebbels (quoted by David Culbert, World War II. Film and History, J. W. Chambers II and David Culbert (eds.), 1996, pp. 67-83), responding in 1944 to a proposal by the director Veit Harlan.

The producers and directors of Shakespeare films--like any others--gamble on their sense of what the viewing public is used to, and what (all being well) it will find a welcome surprise. This is as true of the varieties of 'alternative' cinema as of the mainstream. There will always be movies that address their audience by saying 'You thought Shakespeare was like this--well, he is and we've captured it on film'. There are also, at the end of cinema's first century, plenty that say 'You didn't think Shakespeare could be like this, did you?'