Abstract
The conjunction of Shakespeare and film is about as old as the medium itself. That said, the questions that might be asked about the conjunction depend upon the historical moment being considered. Uricchio and Pearson have suggested that early cinema positioned Shakespeare as a central figure of Anglo-Saxon patrimony for non-Anglophone immigrants deemed in need of enrollment in the national imaginary; in this, cinema’s work is not so different from that undertaken contemporaneously, albeit in a significantly different register, by the College Board.1 As I’ve suggested in the preceding chapter, the College Board has bequeathed us a Shakespeare who is an inalienable part of the educational apparatus, one whose subsequent presence pervades ever-lower levels of schooling: hence my argument that Shakespeare is now a part of American public culture. But even if the specter of the pedagogical continues, at times, to attach to Shakespeare on film, it stands to reason that a century or so after the medium and the playwright first came together, the discourse about both demands repositioning for what it reveals about the mutations of the cultural field in which we might place Shakespeare, since the emergence of mass culture as such and as the other of elite culture.
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Notes
William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Quoted in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 53.
Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002), 153. It should be noted that Hawkes’s account does not quite make the point for which I use his title. Rather, he argues against textual essentialism (with meaning as the “product” sold by its supreme author) in favor of understanding specific instantiations dialectically.
Carol Innerst, “The Bard Draws a Pass to Pop Culture on Campus: Many Colleges Are Skipping Shakespeare,” Washington Times, December 17, 2007. Innerst is reporting on a survey of “70 leading colleges and universities” conducted by the National Alumni Forum in light of the Georgetown controversy. For information about and documentation of events at Georgetown, I am grateful to Kim Hall and Henry Schwartz.
For suggestive analyses of Kurosawa’s versions of Shakespeare, see John Collick, Shakespeare, Cinema and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 150–187.
Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004), 97–120.
Michael Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19.
See, for example, Linda Boose and Richard Burt, eds., Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video (London: Routledge, 1997).
Hamlet, directed by Kenneth Branagh (1996; Warner Brothers International DVD, 2007) and William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann (1996; Fox DVD, 1997). In light of Peter Donaldson’s wonderfully persuasive reading of the plus sign in Luhrmann’s title, I have corrected my own representation of it; see Donaldson, “’In fair Verona’: Media, Spectacle, and Performance in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 59–82.
See Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, and John McMurria, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI Publishing, 2005).
See, for instance, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, eds., Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988)
Anthony Davies and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare and the Moving Image: The Plays on Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Theodor Adorno, “The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression in Listening,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991), 29–60.
Kenneth Branagh, Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Screenplay, Introduction, and Film Diary (New York: Norton, 1996).
See also Ramona Wray and Mark Thornton Burnett, “From the Horse’s Mouth: Branagh on the Bard,” in Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siècle, ed. Mark Thorton Burnett and Ramona Wray (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 165–178.
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), 401.
Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 41–42.
See Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams (London: Verso, 1997).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 12.
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© 2010 Denise Albanese
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Albanese, D. (2010). The Shakespeare Film, the Market, and the Americanization of Culture. In: Extramural Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112940_5
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