The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  And even if one sees some superior productions in one’s lifetime, superior to the run of the mill, one could still never have the good fortune to see a single Shakespearean performance that comes close to some of the astonishing work one can watch over and over and over again on film. Not just watch once in its entirety, as in even the best stage performances, but rewind repeatedly, study closely on tape or DVD. Anatomize like a patient etherized on a table? Don’t disparage it until you’ve freeze-framed Welles’s Falstaff.

  Watch every gesture of Olivier until you begin to grasp how thoughtful even his wildest responses can be. Listen to every quaver in Gielgud’s voice (in Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenway’s eccentric version of The Tempest, in which Gielgud speaks all the roles) for their complex emotional resonances. Burton, Scofield, McKellen, Dench, Bloom—watch them all and then watch them frame by frame. Rewind scene by scene, gesture by gesture. See them, study their gestures, examine their departures from the text, their departures from the past, their departures from your expectations. Discover readings expressed with voice and body you hadn’t imagined before, ones that make you think more deeply about the passages—split them open and release infinite energies—ones you might not have noticed without rewinding and rewatching a third time. Do I need to add that even with a great stage performance you can’t do that (unless it’s filmed for posterity)?

  You will know Shakespeare far more deeply watching and rewatching a few select films that have the touch of greatness in them, than catching every touring company that comes through town, no matter what town.

  Believe me, I live in a Shakespeare-saturated city and about half the time I walk out at intermission. I used to think one could learn something even from poor Shakespeare productions and sometimes that’s been true, but the unbearable pain of mediocre Shakespeare has become too much. With few exceptions contemporary stagings of Shakespeare productions fail to measure up to the unbearable pleasures and intensities to be found on the page—and in just a few films.

  I say that as someone whose life was changed by a stage performance, not a film—Brook’s Dream. But also as someone who has come to realize—after a lifetime of hoping to find something that approached that electrifying intensity on stage—very little ever approaches it. Trevor Nunn’s Troilus and Cressida with Roger Allam as Ulysses? Maybe yes in a darker key, in the ecstasy of its irony and anger.

  Moments in other productions, certainly, individual characters in plays, yes, but it is rare to find even those. I don’t think people realize it’s rarely their fault if they don’t “get” Shakespeare. Shakespeare done right is supposed to get you. That is an almost ineluctable element of the Shakespearean experience. It’s likely if you didn’t get it, it’s not your fault; it wasn’t there in the production in the first place. It didn’t happen.

  There’s something tragic about this, about the vast mediocrity of most Shakespeare on stage and the pro forma “elevating” obeisance critics and audiences pay to the experience. There’s something irritating about the snobbish disdain accorded Shakespeare on film by the middle-brow mentality that assumes that stage must always be a higher art than its successor, film. Stage must always be preferable to film, however electrifying the film, because of some vague existential argument stage partisans make that there is something “special” about being “in the same moment” with the actors. A stage performance offers “existential contingency.” This defense of stage superiority may seem to have merit in the abstract but just doesn’t survive a comparison of the experience of seeing Olivier’s theatrically malevolent Richard III on a small-screen tape with, frankly, every Richard III I’ve seen “in the moment” on stage. Who wants to be “in the moment” with mediocrity?

  Or to make another comparison, a tape of an opera sung by one of the great voices of our time seems preferable to being “in the moment” at a performance by lesser voices. Shakespeare is like opera in that way. There are a very few, one, two, sometimes three actors or actresses in a generation who rise to empyrean heights on waves of pentameter and applause. We only remember a few: Burbage, Kean, Macklin, the Booths, Barrymore from past centuries, and we only have written accounts of them. But we can see Burton, see Olivier, Welles, Gielgud, on film. We should not take this good fortune for granted.

  In practice the “existential contingency” of most stage performances means you rarely know from moment to moment how disappointed you’ll be. It becomes less about Shakespeare than it is about how tense and upset you are when it’s done ineptly.

  And in fact most people will see very little good Shakespeare on stage in the course of their lives and only rare moments of greatness. This is a tragedy because they will be right to wonder “what the fuss is all about,” as Stephen Booth puts it. But you can find out on film. Think of the hundreds of millions of Anglophone people who have no access to the very best staged Shakespeare: no opportunity to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre Shakespeare, the occasional Lincoln Center and New York Shakespeare Festival triumphs, the Folger Library Theater, the Old Globe, even the widely traveled Shenandoah Shakespeare company, to name a few. Not to say these are the only places that passable Shakespeare can be seen on the stage, but it’s such a hit-or-miss thing even there. And when something is really good anywhere it sells out so rapidly only a tiny percentage who might want to see it get to see it.

  And the difference between great Shakespeare and indifferent or dutiful Shakespeare is not one of degree but of kind. Indifferent or dutiful Shakespeare has questionable qualifications to be called Shakespearean at all, sharing more with the slack tedium of pretenders like the “Funeral Elegy.”

  And yet so many people are not aware of how much important, memorable, compelling Shakespeare is as close as their video store. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me something on the order of “I haven’t read much Shakespeare since high school [or college]. I mean I want to get started again, I feel I’ve missed something, but …” But they don’t want to start out reading and the productions they’ve seen have likely been the mediocrities I’m speaking of, so they lose any sense of urgency about Shakespeare—that sense of urgency you feel watching great Shakespeare. They shut Shakespeare out of their lives, because it seems inaccessible or tolerable only for its cultural capital, when they are so close to greatness, when a few select films are enough to ignite a passion to read that makes the dutiful productions irrelevant.

  What I say to them is something like: Don’t bother to try to start reading it, if it seems in the slightest like a chore. This is the most exciting phenomenon devised by the human imagination. Drop everything, race to your video store and pick up a VHS or a DVD of Olivier’s Richard III. It’s not the only Richard III possible but it’s a breathtaking, charismatic embodiment of the play that explains why it became Shakespeare’s first sensational triumph on stage in 1593 and why Richard remains one of his most powerful creations. It’s amazing to me that so many have not given themselves the gift of this experience.

  If you’re talking about “getting started,” this is how the world got started on Shakespeare—on the malevolent intensity of Richard, who touched some deep chords, evoked some primal fears of the depths to which human nature can plunge. Once you see Olivier’s version you will be compelled to read it, you won’t have “trouble getting started.” And you’ll want more.

  And then for those who have mainly seen mediocre Shakespeare on stage or “can’t get started” reading I’ll ask: Have you seen Richard Burton’s Hamlet? It’s just a videotape of a stage production but perhaps the most exciting Hamlet I’ve ever seen. I’d almost say you haven’t seen Hamlet if you haven’t seen what Burton does with the “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, even on a grainy kinescope of a 1964 Broadway stage performance. And please don’t tell me it’s “not like being there.” You weren’t there, you never will be, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever “be there” for anything that can equal seeing this on your humble screen. />
  And then if my interlocutor hasn’t slipped away from a certain over-intensity I bring to this conversation, I’d ask, ominously, please don’t tell me you haven’t seen Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (his Henry IV conflation), please don’t tell me you haven’t seen Peter Brook’s film of Lear. Because I feel we don’t inhabit the same reality if you haven’t.

  Here are some of the great Shakespearean actors and directors of the century giving you versions of some of the plays that one is likely never to see equaled in a lifetime of theatergoing. Tell me all you want about being in the existential moment in a live production, I won’t quarrel with you. But only tell me that after you’ve seen four stage productions that come within a light-year of the thrilling intensity of just those four tapes, the Olivier Richard III, the Burton Hamlet, the Brook Lear and the Welles Henry IV. One could watch them over and over and get deeper into Shakespeare than one could from seeing all of the stage productions one is likely to see.

  Again I put it down to a snobbery about film, a snobbery the academic profession to its credit has gotten over, with some excellent recent studies of Shakespeare on film from Herbert Coursen, Samuel Crowl, Anthony Davies and Kenneth Rothwell, among others. But still, stage is seen as prima facie a mark of superiority among those who are unfamiliar with just how electrifying, exhilarating, challenging some of these films can be.

  But there’s another even more radical level to the argument about film I’d like to make. That in some cases film techniques allow us access to a vision of Shakespeare that is closer to the original than most stage productions allow us to get, despite—precisely because of—the differences in the medium. This is, of course, not true of all films or even many. But the few …

  It’s a case I’d begun to feel strongly enough about to make it the focus of a public forum on film and staged Shakespeare I moderated.

  IT’S NOT THE HORSES

  In the summer of 2001 New York’s Shakespeare Society, which had put on some distinguished programs at the Hunter College Theater featuring actors, directors and scholars including Claire Bloom, Derek Jacobi, Harold Bloom and the like, asked me to put together a program and panel on the question “Shakespeare: Stage vs. Film.” While I had some reservations about the premise (why either/or instead of both/and?) and didn’t consider myself a credentialed expert on Shakespeare on film or stage, or “performance studies” as it’s called, obviously I did have some strong feelings about the subject. And a paradoxical Originalist thesis about filmed Shakespeare I wanted to test out.

  Preparing the program was the test. One could fill a small library with the growing number of academic works on filmed Shakespeare, but what I wanted to test out is one narrowly focused aspect of the subject, one way into the question, one of the most controversial, counterintuitive, anachronistic ways into the question: the notion that in some ways film, a medium invented three centuries after Shakespeare wrote, could bring us closer to something, or some things, “Shakespearean” that the stage can’t do or rarely does. That there are ways in which film can take us deeper into the language, the thought, sometimes the spirit if not the letter of original Shakespeare. And that, on the other hand, there are ways in which filmed Shakespeare can go dreadfully wrong in attempting to be too “original.”

  What started me thinking about film as an Originalist medium was the remark Peter Hall made about one of the advantages offered by the original conditions of Shakespeare’s playing: bare stage, virtually without scenery, certainly no cumbersome movable sets to lower down or roll off. It was this, Hall believed, that allowed Shakespeare to write drama with lightning-like cuts that moved at the speed of thought from Rome to Egypt, England to France. It was Sir Peter who used the phrase “cinematic cutting” to describe the way Shakespeare is best played with no pronounced scenic breaks.

  So there’s cinematic cutting and then there’s the great innovation of performance on film: the close-up. It’s hard to overstate what the filmed close-up has brought to Shakespeare, although Peter Brook came close to overstating it with his calm, measured, but utterly radical and astonishing remarks in Looking for Richard (the Al Pacino film about not making a film of Richard III that featured some important directors and scholars). Brook spoke about the effect of the filmed Shakespeare close-up on the closeness we can get to Shakespeare’s language:

  “This language,” Shakespeare’s language, Brook said, “is the language of thought. In a theater to do this right you have to speak loud [to reach the back rows] and still be truthful. That’s the actor’s problem: every actor knows the quieter he can be, the closer he can be to himself.

  “And when you play Shakespeare in close-up, in film, and have a mike and can really speak the verse as quietly as this [as quietly and meditatively as he was speaking then], you’re not going against the nature of verse, but going in the right direction. Because you’re really allowing the verse to be a man speaking his inner world.”

  This is—like most Peter Brook statements—a quietly astonishing, slow-burning fuse. It is a critique in some respects of his own theatrical past, a critique in some respects of all stage acting, not excluding, one must suppose, even the stage acting by Shakespeare’s own company, performed in Shakespeare’s presence, often acted by Shakespeare. You could say that Brook is making an argument that the filmed close-up allows us to become more truly original than the original, than Shakespeare himself, if that is conceivable.

  It’s an argument that raises many questions and potential objections: Is the actor’s goal to be “closer to himself” or closer to Shakespeare? Do the two goals always coincide? It is possible to argue that Shakespeare wrote language meant to be “projected.”

  He does suggest that a few great stage actors have solved “the actor’s problem” of expressing thought without seeming to rant to the rafter seats, but even then it is felt as a problem.

  This is the language of thought, Brook said. Certainly one could describe the soliloquies that way, and one of the great breakthroughs in filmed Shakespeare, one of the moments that most strikingly posed the question of whether film in some way was an Originalist medium, was Laurence Olivier’s treatment of the soliloquies in his 1948 film of Hamlet when he did “To be or not to be” as pure unuttered thought.* Unuttered in the sense that Olivier filled the screen with a close-up of his silent countenance—just his head—as we heard, as a voiceover on the soundtrack, Olivier doing the soliloquy. As if we were not just “close-up” but rather inside his head overhearing his unspoken thoughts. Soliloquy as internal monologue. Meanwhile allowing us to watch the play of emotions across his troubled brow as the conflicted thoughts roiled and eddied up from inside, like the surging tide far below.

  About a week before my Shakespeare Society presentation and panel discussion (we had enlisted critic John Simon, noted Shakespearean stage director Michael Kahn, the actor Liev Schreiber, who had played a creditable Hamlet on stage, and director Michael Almereyda, who made the controversial film that’s come to be known as “the Ethan Hawke Hamlet,” although that doesn’t do justice to Almereyda’s wit and daring), I happened to hear a remarkable quotation which adds to the Peter Brook argument. The highly regarded historian of filmed Shakespeare Kenneth Rothwell (author of the Cambridge University Press History of Shakespeare on Film) tossed it off at a talk he gave at a conference on the subject at Fairleigh Dickinson University. It was a line from the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev, who’d made a Russian-language Hamlet widely admired by film and Shakespeare scholars.

  What Kozintsev said was that the advantage of doing Shakespeare on film is “not that you can use horses, but that you can look deeper into a man’s eyes.”

  BRANDO’S BROW

  It’s deceptively simple—“you can look deeper into a man’s eyes”—until you think about how much one is missing from great stage acting because, even from the best seats, one can’t gaze as closely into the eyes of a Paul Scofield, an Olivier, a Welles, a Richard Burton, a Claire Bloom, an Irene W
orth, as one can when one is watching them on film, in close-up, even at home on a TV, a VCR or DVD.

  And when Kozintsev spoke of looking more deeply into a man’s eyes it was assuredly a synecdoche for looking more deeply into a man’s soul, glimpsing what Patsy Rodenburg, the famous Shakespearean voice teacher, calls “the pentameter of the soul” through which the pentameter of the language is filtered.

  And then there is that line from Marlon Brando (anyway one attributed to Brando) that goes: the difference between stage and film acting is that “in stage acting you have to show what you feel. In film acting you just have to feel it.” All because of the close-up!

  I opened my Shakespeare Society presentation by showing clips from three extraordinary sets of eyes: Paul Scofield’s in the opening of Peter Brook’s electrifying and chilling 1972 film of King Lear; Orson Welles’s as Falstaff, in the remarkable Welles-directed version of the Henry IV plays, Chimes at Midnight (1966); and Brando himself from the underrated Joseph L. Mankiewicz–directed Julius Caesar in which Brando plays Mark Antony.

  A film which I proposed to the Shakespeare Society audience as a kind of test case for film versus stage Shakespeare.

  I’d said that the Joseph L. Mankiewicz Julius Caesar was underrated perhaps because it featured Brando playing Mark Antony. It was released in 1953, a year before On the Waterfront, when Brando was still known mainly for Streetcar and The Wild One and contemporaries did not give him credit for Shakespearean gravitas. But the cast featured John Gielgud as Cassius, a role that Stephen Booth, another hard-to-please critic, thought was Gielgud’s great Shakespearean achievement on film, and one of the rare preserved Shakespearean appearances by Gielgud (if you don’t count the Ghost in Burton’s Hamlet, a silent Priam in Branagh’s Hamlet and of course his naked-in-the-bath narrator and player of The Tempest in Peter Greenway’s production Prospero’s Books).