The following brief discussion of Shakespeare in film illustrates the slow but steady decrease in the formality with which the Bard has been treated. Shakespeare on the screen is nothing new: as early as 1906, a five-minute Italian version of Othello was shot, and in 1908, the Vitagraph studio put out a series of silent shorts based on Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and others. Virtually as soon as sound came to the screen, directors began editing the plays' dialogue to better suit the cinematic medium. 
American Film Institute | Four stills taken from the 1912 production of Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King Richard III, the first film to attempt a complete retelling of one of Shakespeare's works and the oldest American feature film known to exist. In this black-and-white, silent film donated to the American Film Institute in 1996, title cards (see upper-left) were used to announce new scenes and several shots were hand-tinted with color washes to give the impression that it was filmed in color. The long play was shortened dramatically for the film, which ran a total of 50 minutes. |
For example, Romeo and Juliet, the most-filmed play ever (Shakespeare or otherwise), received the full Hollywood treatment in 1936 by M-G-M producer Irving Thalberg and director George Cukor. In this version, the youthful lovers were portrayed by Norma Shearer, Thalberg's 35-year-old wife, and Leslie Howard, who was 45. Thalberg ordered lavish production values, intense research and a then-huge $2 million budget. He retained much of the Shakespearean language and maintained an artsy tone. Despite the attention lavished on it, the film failed, as did Warner Brothers' 1935 rendition of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Subsequently, the major studios generally avoided Shakespeare for years.
It was up to the British to revisit their ancestor. In 1944, Laurence Olivier filmed Henry V not, as was then typical, as if recording a staged play, but by using the camera expressively. He made this conceit explicit by setting the opening and closing scenes on the stage of the Globe; in the end, the king and queen morph from screen stars into period theater actors.
 |
| Library of Congress (van 5a52495) |
| Portrait of Laurence Olivier, director of the 1944 production of Henry V. |
Four years later, in Hamlet, Olivier used deep-focus photography and long tracking shots to create a gloomy, tortured universe through which the uncertain Danish prince tramps. Here, the soliloquies are intoned in voice-over monologues--an impossibility on stage--as if illustrating the meanderings of Hamlet's mind. Orson Welles also emerged in the 1940s as an innovative Shakespearean auteur. His 1948 Macbeth remains true to the play's text but presents it with a freestyle visual flair. Already known for controversial stage adaptations, here he brought film-noir conventions of stark lighting, bare sets and a dislikeable protagonist to Macbeth. Although this film was not well received by the public, it and his 1952 Othello are widely considered to have brought Shakespeare back to popular attention. According to one scholar, Welles "was the first stylistic pioneer to open the gates to Shakespeare's universality."
In 1961, when Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim moved the Romeo and Juliet-based Broadway musical West Side Story to the screen, it marked a significant step for Shakespeare. The plot, which is a modern departure from Shakespeare's original play, depicts racial tensions among embittered teenage members of rival gangs on Manhattan's upper West Side, and the love story of Maria, a young Puerto Rican girl, and Bernardo, the leader of a street gang called the Sharks, who come from the two warring factions. With a plot loosely modeled after the Romeo and Juliet story, Shakespeare's text could, for the first time, be successfully separated from the language in a new, thoroughly modern, setting and time period.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection | Leonard Bernstein at rehearsal for West Side Story, 1957. Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, is at his left, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim is playing the piano. The Romeo and Juliet-based Broadway musical moved to the screen in 1961. |
Other modern adaptations were released throughout the decade, as when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton parlayed their turbulent offscreen romance into a late-'60s, box office hit by playing it up in The Taming of the Shrew. On the other side of the Atlantic, director Franco Zeffirelli shot his version of Romeo and Juliet near Rome and mixed Shakespearean dialogue with the neorealism that Italy had popularized. His goal, he said, was to bring Shakespeare back to the masses.
It was in the 1970s, however, that the most radical liberties began to be taken with Shakespeare. In this era of rapid societal change and daringly original films, audiences clamored for movies that stretched boundaries in both form and content. In keeping with this trend, 1971 brought Roman Polanski's Macbeth, a Hugh Hefner-financed, violence- and nudity-splattered rendering that matched, bitterness for bitterness, the mood of the filmmaker, whose young wife had only recently been murdered by Charles Manson's gang. Called "the boldest Shakespeare movie of the era," the production offered up a sordid Scotland seeped in as much murderous intrigue as Polanski's own off-camera life.
Making the Bard accessible
Today's reverence of Shakespeare by Hollywood began in 1989 with Henry V, the first of Kenneth Branagh's brilliantly accessible interpretations. With his attractive, coherent, financially successful adaptations, Branagh has proved that filmmakers do not need to strip the plays of all their Elizabethan trappings to make them palatable. The director-actor stays extremely faithful to the original texts and yet modernizes them; in Henry V, Branagh's Prince Hal is more ambivalent and vulnerable than Olivier's larger-than-life 1945 leader, and therefore easier to identify with.
Cinema scholar Douglas Brode asserts that Branagh was the first director truly to mine Shakespeare's commercial potentials, by realizing that today's multiplex theater--with its ability to mix audiences of all classes and juxtapose "high" and "low" art--mirrors the Bard's playhouse. In 1993's Much Ado About Nothing, Branagh brought American movie stars to Shakespeare, with mixed results. The diverse, matinee-idol cast did indeed attract a new audience to the classic story, but it also saw stars such as Keanu Reeves struggling to render Elizabethan poetry comprehensible. More successful in Much Ado was Branagh's blend of traditional language with a modern sensibility that played up the story's sensuality and lushness. The film is unapologetically cinematic, from its Magnificent Seven-cribbed opening shot of the soldiers galloping back to town to its sweeping panoramic camera views. It opens with black-and-white title cards and a voiceover narration, two specifically filmic conventions that immediately announce that this will not be a stagebound reproduction of a play. Instead, it is a lively spectacle, overflowing with whip-smart flirtations, bouncing-ball singalongs and skinny-dipping. In addition to the joyful cinematic spectacle, however, Branagh retains the play's conservative themes, which caution lovers to marry, villains to be punished and citizens to trust their government.
Not-so-radical departures
Branagh's contribution has been to make Shakespeare accessible to a popular audience. By doing this, he opened the door to even more liberal translations of the plays, in which often the text is abandoned, the settings modernized and the themes altered. This trend infuriates many purists (as will become clear in the upcoming discussion of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet), who feel that tampering with the text dilutes Shakespeare's poetry and deletes his intent.
While the former charge is certainly true--even if a modern-day form of poetry, such as rap, replaces the Shakespearean measure--the latter one is debatable. Most Shakespeare scholars agree that Shakespeare himself regularly revised his plays while staging them and meant for his wordy scripts to be edited. Because he needed to compensate for staging inadequacies, the plays explained in words much that couldn't be shown on stage. These days, many directors see fit to excise what are essentially long stage directions, describing, for example, a lengthy back story that can be shown in a few quick onscreen images.
In addition, the style--flowery, meandering language--is easy to distill to its essence, because Shakespeare's plots are very concise and active. In the Elizabethan era, the play would be read quickly, to delight the knowing audience in its puns and wordplay. Today, with the language less familiar to spectators, filmmakers are forced to use fewer words, allowing the viewer to absorb more of them.
In the mid-1990s, Richard Loncraine's Richard III (starring Ian McKellan) shocked audiences with its wildly creative approach, which Rothwell refers to as "enhanced but ironic realism." The time period was reset to 1936, in a pre-World War II British society that comments on the duke's fascist nature. Although lines are taken directly from the original, complex play, they are often re-ordered and edited for greater clarity; for example, the duke recites his opening soliloquy as he travels from the ballroom to the bathroom. Critics had mixed reactions to the sometimes over-the-top line readings, rapid editing pace and what Brode calls "high-camp histrionics," but the film was a success and marked the ascendancy of actor McKellen into popular consciousness.
Loncraine paved the way for the next step in radicalizing Shakespeare: the teen adaptation. Here, the modernizations are even more extreme and the alterations more marketing-savvy. The next session will explore how Baz Luhrmann revisited Romeo and Juliet with an eye to the jaded, pop-culture savvy teen generation.
