Cleopatra gives us perhaps the most extreme version of this consciousness of theatrical gender. At the end of Antony and Cleopatra she imagines the shame that will befall her if she is captured by Caesar in strikingly self-reflexive terms:
The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I'th'posture of a whore'
(5.2.212–17)
The fear of inadequate impersonation by a “boy” is a daring allusion to the artifice of theatrical representation: in the Jacobean theater, Cleopatra is already represented by a boy. That the performance can sustain this demystificatory moment so close to Cleopatra's final tragedy suggests something of the nuance and control Shakespeare could expect from the young actors playing women's roles.
Shakespeare, then, wrote the female roles in his plays for young male actors to inhabit. But when the theaters reopened after the hiatus of Cromwellian rule (1642–60), and women acted publicly for the first time, it was Shakespeare's roles for women, and in particular the so-called “breeches” or cross-dressed roles which allowed women to display their legs on stage, that were a major factor in the plays' revival: the first of the comedies to be put on was Twelfth Night. But it is a sign of Shakespeare's reiterability that for centuries his female roles have been taken by women actors who have inhabited them with the grace, action, and gesture of real women. Harriet Walter, who counts Cleopatra, Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), Lady Macbeth, Viola, and Innogen (Cymbeline) among her Shakespearean roles, observes that “Shakespeare's verse is as dense and as beautiful, the emotional depth as great, the wit even more brilliant, the psychology as complex in the female characters as in the male,” although she adds: “I find it curious to think as a modern actress my opportunities in the Shakespearean repertoire have been determined by the limitations or excellences of two or three generations of Elizabethan boy players.”10
Notes
1 John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, p. 172.
2 A full text of Coryate's Crudities is available at www.archive.org
3 Quoted by Marvin Rosenberg in his “The Myth of Shakespeare's Squeaking Boy Actor—or Who Played Cleopatra?”, Shakespeare Bulletin, 19 (2001), p. 5.
4 David Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), pp. 220–46 (p. 221).
5 Tanya Pollard, Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 226.
6 The Problems of Aristotle (1595), quoted in Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, p. 222.
7 Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, pp. 224–5.
8 Stanley Wells, “Boys Should Be Girls: Shakespeare's Female Roles and the Boy Players,” New Theatre Quarterly, 25 (2009), pp. 172–7 (p. 175).
9 Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect; or, Why Did the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys for Women?”, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), pp. 7–29.
10 Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. xxiv.
Myth 26
Shakespeare's plays don't work as movies
Despite the parallels between the early modern theater and Hollywood (see Myth 19), it's often asserted that the plays cannot be translated into film. In some ways the film industry's own judgments reinforce this notion: the only Shakespeare film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), and a perhaps apocryphal story about its movie magnate backer J. Arthur Rank being reassured that that the finished film was “wonderful: you wouldn't know it was Shakespeare” attests to the ambivalence of the relationship between Shakespeare and cinema.1 Shakespeare has only once been nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay category (for Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet in 1996: it lost out to Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade). By Oscar standards, the only Shakespeare film to really succeed is not a play at all but the comic biography Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998): it won seven Oscars, including for the screenplay.
Writing of his preparations for his wartime propaganda film of Henry V (1944), Laurence Olivier suggested that Shakespeare's work anticipated the possibilities cinema might afford: “In Henry V more than any other, Shakespeare moans about the confines of his Globe Theatre … And all those short battle scenes, in a lot of his plays, are frustrated cinema.”2 In fact it seems clear that the Chorus to Henry V speaks in a kind of litotes (the rhetorical figure of praising by understatement): the theater is supremely able to show whatever it wants, but then Olivier does have a film to sell. There are proto-cinematic aspects of Shakespeare's writing, though. Perhaps Antony and Cleopatra, with its aging celebrity protagonists and its extended cross-cutting between their two camps to depict the quick pace of military action, comes closest in Shakespeare's work to the kind of editing that constructs cinematic narration.
To be sure, there are difficulties in adapting Shakespeare's intensely verbal texts for a medium in which visual meanings are usually dominant. The Russian film director Grigori Kozintsev has discussed the necessary translation: “The aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture itself has to be transformed into a visual poetry.”3 Kozintsev's own films show how this might work. The opening sequence of his Hamlet (1964) shows the Prince, played by Innokenti Smoktunovsky, an actor well known for having been imprisoned in Siberia, riding through the armored gate of the castle, which closes behind him: a visual image of Hamlet's observation that “Denmark's a prison” (2.2.246). Shostakovitch's stirring score counterpoints repeated visual images: billowing cloth, the surface of water, staircases, and low-angle shots, which give the film the poetic coherence that Shakespeare's play achieves through linguistic patterning.4 The text of the play has been cut by around half, but what has been conceded in this verbal realm has been compensated in the visual. Orson Welles's Othello (1952) might offer another example: here the self-conscious use of black and white amplifies the play's own interest in racial and moral color binaries, shifting its chromatic emphasis away from the ethnic to the aesthetic. Welles's interest in images of entrapment, from the mesh on Desdemona's veil to the shadows cast by the grille bath-house windows in the attack on Cassio and the cage in which Iago is suspended, gives visual expression to Shakespeare's themes of imprisonment, as if the film is a long graphic exploration of Iago's sinister plan: “So will I turn her [Desdemona's] virtue into pitch, / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (2.3.351–3). Welles, director of Citizen Kane, the film that most regularly tops all film-buff polls, is one of the most distinguished cineastes to tackle Shakespeare: his Macbeth (1948) splices Shakespeare's play with a depiction of morally ambiguous charismatic authority derived from wartime propaganda and a supernatural idea of voodoo witchcraft, and his reworking of the Henry IV plays as Chimes at Midnight (1965) reimagines the sequence as an elegiac biography of Falstaff, played by Welles himself.
In some ways the linguistic cuts necessary to create a filmic Shakespeare—Kenneth Branagh's epic, uncut Hamlet of 1996 is an industry exception at four hours' length—are relatively easily made. The opening scene of the play Hamlet, for example, serves as a kind of verbal “establishing shot,” in which the exchanges between the sentries establish for an audience watching the play in the bright afternoon light of the Globe that this scene takes place on the castle battlements at night. Location shooting can show this in a moment—so is the conversation between Barnardo and Francisco unnecessary? Perhaps: one of the criticisms of Branagh's Hamlet was its habit of both showing and telling—accompanying the verbal text of the play with extensive visual prompts seemed tautologous. Or perhaps not: as well as locating the scene in time and space, the opening of Hamlet also establishes an important mood of nervousness—and, as director Peter Broo
k found in a theatrical reworking of the play in 1996 called Qui va la?—the play's edgy opening question “Who's there?” (1.1.1) can move from its ostensible and pragmatic context into a more interrogative and synoptic take on the play's questioning of identity.
The extent of the reduction of the Shakespearean text in cinematic versions may seem problematic: Olivier's Hamlet cut half the lines, excising wholesale the characters of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras; Zeffirelli's Hamlet had less than 40 percent of Shakespeare's text, and the majority of films of Shakespeare plays prune the lines to a similar degree. Our prevalent language of the “faithful” adaptation suggests that the closer a film is to the play, the better. In fact this is almost never the case. Instead, there is almost an inverse correlation between the “Shakespeare-ness” of a film and its cinematic value: Shakespeare works in the movies when the newer medium has the confidence to really rework the old. For many critics, the Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), a version of Macbeth, is the most successful film ever made of a Shakespeare play. Is this praise despite, or because, it has not a word of Shakespeare's text, translates the film into the context of samurai feudalism, and recreates the witches as a single spinning figure of destiny? The most successful filmic Shakespeares tend to have been those in which filmmakers have had the conviction radically to recast and to reimagine the plays as new creative artifacts; conversely, the least successful can be statically trapped in the conventions of theater (some of the studio-set BBC television Shakespeare series of the 1970s and 1980s fall into this category), even as these are more “faithful” to their originals.
There's a moment in Cymbeline when the god Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting on an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt (stage direction, 5.5.186). Twenty-one lines later he's winched up again: not really necessary to the plot, we might argue, but done because they could. Shakespeare is here using the special effects newly available to him as theater technology developed, and perhaps those effects are driving the narrative The same is sometimes true in Shakespeare films. Just because Roman Polanski can show us a floating dagger for Jon Finch to apostrophize in “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand?” (Macbeth 2.1.33–4) doesn't mean he should. The clunky visualization in his 1971 film spoils Macbeth's own delicate vacillation over whether the dagger is there or not, as well as being an effect whose technical execution quickly dates the film—nothing moves so quickly as special effects.
But many of the opportunities of Shakespeare in the cinema do come specifically from the interplay of Shakespeare with the technology, language, and grammar of film. The echoes of Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986) in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989) situate the young hero king in a context of contemporary heroism. Lady Macbeth in Welles's Macbeth occupies the femme fatale role from the popular genre of film noir which also influenced Olivier's Hamlet. Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) casts Mel Gibson as an unusually active Prince (“more macho than melancholy,” as the video advertising put it), whose character draws on Gibson's previous role in the Lethal Weapon cop series (Richard Donner, 1987), just as his co-star Glenn Close as Gertrude is sexualized from the beginning because of her history in erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987). These are associations which work in the cinema when the film is being understood in relation to other films, rather than in relation to the Shakespearean text. Sometimes these associations are deliberately played up in the marketing of Shakespeare films, with a corresponding under-emphasis on “Shakespeare.” For example, the trailer for Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996), advertised as “in the tradition of Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert comes the classic romantic comedy that proves that sometimes clothes really do make the man”; promotional taglines for Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995)—“what is worth dying for … is worth killing for”—or Oliver Parker's Othello (1995)—“envy, greed, jealousy, and love”—seem deliberately to avoid the potentially off-putting associations of Shakespeare.5 A similar interchange is seen in theater, as in 1994 when the poster for the Royal Shakespeare Company's Coriolanus advertised the hero as “A natural born killer,” drawing on the title of Oliver Stone's 1994 film. The most successful Shakespearean film, in box-office terms, is Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996)—and here the full title, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, flaunts rather than hides those associations. During the 1990s, more than twenty films of Shakespeare were released, building on the success of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V; a further twenty titles in which Shakespearean plots provide a substantial element of the narrative—such as the high-school retelling of The Taming of the Shrew as 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Langer, 1999)—made this the most prolific decade ever in Shakespearean film production. But Luhrmann's was the only film version of a Shakespeare play to be a real commercial hit. It is successful because its teenage audience is directly addressed by its pop-video style of editing, its youth soundtrack, and its stars Claire Danes and, in particular, Leonardo di Caprio. Luhrmann updates the story from Renaissance Verona to “Verona Beach,” a modern cityscape dominated by the corporate headquarters of the two family businesses and a huge statue of Christ—the film's incorporation of a kitsch Catholicism of morbidity, shrines, and tattoo art is part of its inventive visual palette. An arresting opening sees a television screen crackle into life as a newscaster reads Shakespeare's prologue: “Two households, both alike in dignity” (Prologue, 1) as a deadpan report of another urban clash between Montague and Capulet youth, with “Captain Prince,” the chief of police, trying to keep the peace. Title cards naming the film's characters, soap-opera-style, are intercut with the spoken and written words of the play's Prologue, as the film's characteristically rapid pace crosscuts with images from the narrative. As Samuel Crowl identifies, “Luhrmann is clearly creating a version of Romeo and Juliet for the MTV generation and he speaks their cinematic language.”6 This play about the high emotional timbre of adolescence, where “violent delights have violent ends” (2.5.9) is translated into a fast-living and unchecked contemporary setting, counterpointed by the fatalistic lyrics of pop culture and the material decadence and emotional chill of modern wealth. Luhrmann's film therefore manages to appeal to its audience without patronizing them, even as it, like all the best critical or theatrical readings of Romeo and Juliet, provides a thoughtful interpretation of the play. In details it is particularly enjoyable: the fancy-dress party at the Capulets, for example, sees Juliet dressed as an angel and Romeo as a knight, signifying the fairy-tale quality of their relationship. Paris's costume as a spaceman happily conveys his insulation from what is really going on, as he beams benignly from behind the visor in his clumsy helmet; Capulet is dressed as a depraved Roman emperor; Mercutio is in drag. The Friar's letter to Romeo, in exile in a Mantuan trailer park, goes astray because there is no one home to take the courier's delivery. A moody Romeo hangs about the beachfront snooker halls and bars dreaming of Rosaline. The film's ending constructs an operatic Liebestod from the confusion of Shakespeare's tomb, with Romeo and Juliet united alone together in the chapel amid a profusion of candles, visualizing the play's suggestions that their death is the ultimate marriage.
Luhrmann reinvents Shakespeare's best-known play, the teenage romance of Romeo and Juliet for late twentieth-century cinema audiences—just as Zeffirelli had done with his version three decades previously. But there are successful filmed Shakespeares which address much less familiar texts. Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), based on the early, bloody tragedy Titus Andronicus, creates a film which visualizes the play's verbal stylization in a range of non-naturalistic cinematic techniques. Beginning with a prologue in which a young boy plays increasingly violent games with toy soldiers and ketchup-blood, the film pans out to a balletic march of muddied Roman legionaries, returning with their war dead. It is the first of a memorable series of images by which Taymor translates, but does not attempt to regularize, the play's own tone,
a “tightrope,” as one stage actor put it, “of absurdity between comedy and tragedy.”7 Anthony Hopkins as Titus draws on his sinisterly violent persona in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), as well as his pedigree as a classical actor on stage and film. Taymor uses collage sequences to interrupt naturalistic representation and depict the subjective perspectives of her characters, brings on the young Lucius as a witness and mute chorus to the play's atrocities, and, at the end, has him carry Aaron's baby on a long, slow walk out of the ruined Coliseum into a pink dawn. The film sequence in which the fresh pies baked from Tamora's sons cool appetizingly as muslin curtains waft in the breeze against a jaunty Italian song soundtrack epitomizes its assured and unsettling clash of tones. We already knew that Shakespeare's romantic comedies could work in the movies—the Italianate holiday-villa Much Ado About Nothing (Kenneth Branagh, 1993)—and all those Hamlets and Romeo and Juliets indicate some of the ways tragedy might work on the silver screen. What Taymor achieved with Titus, however, was a film that does not simplify or explain the play, nor make it suitable for the classroom, nor shy away from its difficulties: a film, in short, that meets the challenge of Shakespeare head on.
30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Page 22