Abstract
In the period following the Second World War, described by Samuel Crowl as the ‘great international phase’ of ‘Shakespeare’s absorption into film by directors as diverse as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev and Franco Zeffirelli’, there often obtained a relatively conservative relationship between theatre and film.1 Screen realizations of the plays tended to emerge from or base themselves on previous productions, translating into film a theatrically-oriented methodology. In the wake of mediatization and globalization, and alongside corresponding changes in the performance event, however, the Shakespearean filmic-theatrical relationship has taken on a greater complexity. The last twenty years bear witness not only to an unravelling of the filmic-theatrical connection but also, intriguingly, to the emergence of filmic representations whose narratives prioritize theatrical shows and stagings of Shakespearean texts. Films as different in date and provenance as Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989), which concludes with a school version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Roysten Abel’s In Othello (2003), which explores a Delhi-based English theatre company’s fractured relationship with Shakespeare’s play, typify the tendency and form, and join other works which take as a central premise the mechanics and the processes of Shakespearean performance.
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Notes
Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 1.
Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, 12.1 (2000), p. 37.
Caridad Svich, Theatre in Crisis? Living Memory in an Unstable Time’, in Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich, eds, Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestoes for a New Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 18.
Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 5.
Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 116; Kershaw, Radical, pp. 5, 32.
Caridad Svich, The Dynamics of Fractals: Legacies for a New Tomorrow’, in Caridad Svich, ed., Tratis-global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 2.
Robert Shaughnessy, The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 9.
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 36.
See Anthony B. Dawson, ‘International Shakespeare’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 182; Shaughnessy, Shakespeare Effect, p. 188; W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 157
Kathy M. Flowlett, Framing Shakespeare on Film (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 190.
Russell Jackson, ‘Actor-Managers and the Spectacular’, in Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds, Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 124.
Kenneth Branagh, In the Bleak Midwinter (London: Nick Hern, 1995), p. 5. All further references appear in the text.
See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 146–9.
Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and the Global Spectator’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 131 (1995), p. 50.
Courtney Lehmann, ‘Shakespeare the Saviour or Phantom Menace? Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale and the Critique of Cynical Reason’, Colby Quarterly, 37.1 (2001), p. 65.
Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant and Jim Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary (London: Arnold, 2001), p. 73.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London and Henley: Routledge&Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 111.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), IV.i. 144. Unless otherwise stated, all further references to the plays appear in the text.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 318.
Philip Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 411.
Get Over It offers a sexually nuanced variation on the idea of a performance that facilitates self-discovery by playing out the thesis that A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Bruce Thomas Boehrer puts it, ‘is patently about’ bestiality and buggery. See Bruce Thomas Boehrer, ‘Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in David Lee Miller, Sharon O’ Dair and Harold Weber, eds, The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 123.
In draft screenplays for Michael Hoffman’s film version of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (1999), for instance, Bottom is punished for his performative excesses in a public square by two ‘errant boys’ who scoop ‘donkey shit’ into a bag, tipping its ‘contents out’ upon him and scoring ‘a direct hit’. See Michael Hoffman, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 14, 16; Twentieth-Century Fox Film Archive, Los Angeles, A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by William Shakespeare, 1st draft (1997), pp. 15–16.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), p. 25.
Douglas Lanier, ‘“Art thou base, common, and popular?” The Cultural Politics of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet’, in Courtney Lehmann and Lisa S. Starks, eds, Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema (Madison and Teaneck, WT. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 155.
Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 40–1.
Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy, ‘Our Shakespeares: British Television and the Strains of Multiculturalism’, in Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray, eds, Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 107.
Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 56.
Pat Bucker, The “Hope” Hamlet: Kenneth Branagh’s Comic Use of Shakespeare’s Tragedy in, 4 Midwinter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Yearbook, 8 (1997), p. 290; Lanier, ‘“Art thou base, common and popular?”’, p. 155.
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 56, 310.
Michael T. Gilmore, Differences in the Dark: American Movies and English Theatre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 8.
John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and the Theatrical Event (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 151.
Here, Beginner’s Luck may be self-consciously recalling the ironic placing of the song, ‘Stormy Weather’, as performed by ‘veteran black singer Elisabeth Welch’, in Derek Jarman’s 1979 art-house film meditation on The Tempest. For a trenchant discussion of the implications of this moment, see Kate Chedgzoy, Shakespeare’s Queer Children: Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 204–5.
Roland Robertson, Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 155.
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 229.
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 92.
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© 2007 Mark Thornton Burnett
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Burnett, M.T. (2007). Screening the Stage. In: Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800809_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800809_2
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