Abstract
The status of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen as literary celebrities and cultural icons is strikingly apparent in biopics, which are deeply inflected with intersecting notions of gender, sexuality and literary genius. Shakespeare biopics (Will Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Love and A Waste of Shame) react to issues of masculinity and sexual anxiety, which are bound up with myths of authorship, by either disavowing or displacing queer sexuality from the icon himself in what I term ‘Queer Lite’ Shakespeare biopics. On the other hand, Austen biographical films and adaptations (Mansfield Park, Becoming Jane, Miss Austen Regrets) resist, reject or conform to the inherited, misconceived reputation of Jane as a sexually frustrated, kindly, maiden aunt who penned romance novels. In so doing, they reinscribe or resist conventions of the female biopic, thereby engaging with feminist issues through representations of the woman writer in relation to cultural norms of gender and sexuality. Given their iconic subject matter, both Will and Jane biopics deal in complex ways with the assumptions underlying the film genre and the cultural myths of literary genius they reaffirm.
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Notes
- 1.
Belén Vidal, Introduction to The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Edited by Tom Brown and Belén Vidal (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3.
- 2.
Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 10.
- 3.
Janine Barchas and Kristina Straub, ‘Curating Will and Jane’, Chap. 16 of this volume.
- 4.
See Brown and Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, 3.
- 5.
Brown and Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, 17.
- 6.
Márta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia, Introduction to Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic. Edited by Márta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia (London: Routledge, 2014), 1–31.
- 7.
Deborah Cartmell, Screen Adaptations: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A Close Study of the Relationship between Text and Film (London: Methuen Drama, 2010), 122.
- 8.
See George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 75; and Julian North, ‘Jane Austen’s Life on Page and Screen’, in Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives, eds. Gillian Dow and C. Hanson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 102.
- 9.
Bingham , Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, 10.
- 10.
Bronwyn Polaschek, Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2–59.
- 11.
The sonnets figure most prominently because the sonnet form involves a persona drawn from both poetic convention and biography, in varying degrees depending on the poet. Focusing on the interior life of the speaker, Shakespeare’s sonnets are particularly introspective yet simultaneously ambiguous in their specific biographical references, so they are both revealing and elusive. Because the sonnets deal with personal longing, as well as homoerotic and extramarital heterosexual affairs, they have provided material for speculation on Shakespeare’s personal life, and hence have been extensively mined in Shakespeare biopics.
- 12.
I am using the term ‘heteronormative’ to denote the fulfilment of cultural norms concerning gender and sexuality that legitimize only heterosexual marriage and childrearing, and I am referring to these films and television shows as ‘queer lite’ Shakespeare biopics, for lack of a better term (‘post-queer’ is problematic for a variety of reasons).
- 13.
Will Shakespeare , written by John Mortimer; directed by Peter Wood, Mark Cullingham and Robert Knights (1978, BBC Television; A&E Television Networks, 2008), DVD.
- 14.
Shakespeare in Love, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard; directed by John Madden (1998, Miramax; Lionsgate, 2014), DVD.
- 15.
A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, written by William Boyd; directed by John McKay (2005, BBC Television; BFS Entertainment, 2013), DVD.
- 16.
Deborah Cartmell, ‘Becoming Jane in Screen Adaptations of Austen’s Fiction’, in The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship, ed. Judith Buchanan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 155.
- 17.
Elizabeth Klett, ‘Shakespeare in Love and the End(s) of History’, in Retrovision: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction, ed. Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, and Imelda Whelehan (London; Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 33.
- 18.
Klett, ‘Shakespeare in Love and the End(s) of History’, 26.
- 19.
McAdam, ‘Fiction and Projection: The Construction of Early Modern Sexuality in “Elizabeth” and “Shakespeare in Love”’, Pacific Coast Philology 35, no. 1 (2000): 57. See Tom Stoppard and John Madden, Commentary, Shakespeare in Love DVD. McAdam also notes the absence of Marlowe–Everett: see ‘Fiction and Projection’, 56–7.
- 20.
McAdam, ‘Fiction and Projection’, Pacific Coast Philology 35, no. 1 (2000): 56.
- 21.
Paul J. C. M. Franssen also discusses disease in the film in ‘Shakespeare’s Life on Film and Television: Shakespeare in Love and a Waste of Shame’, in Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic, 107.
- 22.
Brown and Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, 171.
- 23.
Mansfield Park, written and directed by Patricia Rozema (1999, Miramax; Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD.
- 24.
Becoming Jane , written by Sarah Williams and Kevin Hood; directed by Julian Jarrold (2007, Miramax; Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD.
- 25.
Miss Austen Regrets , written by Gwyneth Hughes; directed by Jeremy Lovering (2007, BBC Television; BBC 2 entertain Video, in Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility 2-disc set, 2008), DVD.
- 26.
As I explain above, Polaschek argues that these films respond to current debates on gender by either incorporating a ‘backlash’ against feminist views; a ‘double-entanglement’, wherein feminist views are coupled with those that neutralize them; or a full ‘epistemological break’ from the normative ideological positions embedded in the traditional female biopic. (See Polaschek, Postfeminist Biopic, 2–59.)
- 27.
Patricia Rozema, Audio Commentary, Mansfield Park, DVD.
- 28.
In the DVD commentary, Rozema discusses her treatment of Austen material in the film. See Rozema, Audio Commentary, Mansfield Park, DVD.
- 29.
See North, ‘Jane Austen’s Life on Page and Screen’, 104.
- 30.
See Rozema, Audio Commentary, Mansfield Park, DVD; and Claudia L. Johnson, Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 94–120.
- 31.
Rozema, Audio Commentary, Mansfield Park, DVD.
- 32.
Marina Cano and Rosa García-Periago, ‘Becoming Shakespeare and Jane Austen in Love: An Intertextual Dialogue between Two Biopics’, Persuasions On-line 29. 1 (2008), np: http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol29no1/cano-garcia.html.
- 33.
See Polaschek, Postfeminist Biopic, 127–48. Also see Rebecca White, ‘Shall I Be Stared at Like a Wild Beast in a Zoo?’ Images of Austen in Becoming Jane and Miss Austen Regrets’, in Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen, ed. Gabrielle Malcolm (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books, 2015), 88.
- 34.
Julian Jarrold, Kevin Hood and Robert Bernstein, Audio Commentary, Becoming Jane, DVD.
- 35.
On this point, see Margarida Esteves Pereira, ‘Austenmania, or the Female Biopic as Literary Heritage’, in Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic, 122–3.
- 36.
White notes that Jane is filmed by a low-angle shot in this scene, so that ‘Jane and (and the viewer) look up at him [Tom], as he gazes down at her’ (‘Shall I Be Stared at Like a Wild Beast in a Zoo?’, 89).
- 37.
White, ‘Shall I Be Stared at Like a Wild Beast in a Zoo?’, 91.
- 38.
Pereira, ‘Austenmania, or the Female Biopic as Literary Heritage’, 125.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
On the film’s demythologizing strategies, White explains that Jane is often ‘presented only partially in shot’, so that Miss Austen Regrets ‘resists its own propensity to mythologize and commodify Austen by pointing visually to its inability to capture her fully on screen’ (‘Shall I Be Stared at Like a Wild Beast in a Zoo?’, 90).
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———. Screen Adaptations: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A Close Study of the Relationship between Text and Film. London: Methuen Drama, 2010.
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Polaschek, Bronwyn. Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf And Austen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Rozema, Patrizia, dir. Mansfield Park. Miramax; Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD.
Vidal, Belén. ‘Introduction’. In The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Edited by Tom Brown and Belén Vidal. New York: Routledge, 2014, 1–32.
White, Rebecca. ‘“Shall I be stared at Like a Wild Beast in a Zoo?”: Images of Austen in Becoming Jane and Miss Austen Regrets’. In Fan Phenomena: Jane Austen. Edited by Gabrielle Malcolm. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books, 2015, 84-93.
McKay, John, dir. A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets. BBC Television; BFS Entertainment, 2005. DVD.
Wood, Peter, Mark Cullingham and Robert Knights, dir. Will Shakespeare. BBC Television; A&E Television Networks, 1978. DVD.
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Starks, L.S. (2019). Screening Will and Jane: Sexuality and the Gendered Author in Shakespeare and Austen Biopics. In: Cano, M., García-Periago, R. (eds) Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25689-0_13
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