Review: Shakespeare Into Film

Review: Shakespeare Into Film

Shakespeare Into Film. Ed. James M. Welsh, Richard Vela, John C. Tibbetts. New York: Facts on File, 2002.

A first-rate critique of the renaissance of Shakespearean film, Shakespeare Into Film is an authoritative prelude to the second century of filmic appropriation. The book is divided into five sections, including a preface by Kenneth S. Rothwell, an introduction by James M. Welsh, an alphabetized index of (major) films with commentary on each of the plays and their various incarnations, an assortment of essays selected from Literature/Film Quarterly volumes dating between 1973 and 2002, and finally an interesting study by John C. Tibbetts on seven productions that capture a Shakespearean text as a veritable "mousetrap," films that "do not adapt plays so much as they assimilate them into their primary texts" (Tibbetts 207). Touching upon one of the most recent (and, arguably, most radical) approaches to Shakespeare on film, Dogme 95's The King is Alive (dir. Kristian Levring, 2000), Tibbetts's appendix traces one of the many generic "sub-texts" that have begun to preoccupy Shakespearean incarnations. Though productions that appropriate the Bard in a similar manner, such as Get Over It (dir. Tommy O'Haver, 2001) and Macbeth in Manhattan (dir. Greg Lombardo, 1999) are not mentioned, the ideology delineated here is a possibly fitting departure point for further critical engagement.

Driven largely by the thesis (or question) "Is It Shakespeare?" the collection of essays covers a broad spectrum of appropriations from Orson Welles's Macbeth (1948) to Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost (2000) while evaluating debates that have informed recent decades. The culmination of Welsh's lifetime ambition, the book aims to be "encyclope-dic," but admittedly "cannot be utterly comprehensive" (Welsh xxix), indicating further works that compliment the collection with a more far-reaching analysis. Nevertheless, the essays here endeavor to engage with various strands of Shakespearean productions, such as those that are merely "Shakespeare-influenced," filmic derivatives, and "recontextualizations" (Welsh xxix), among others, which are investigated with the intent to detect if they are indeed "Shakespeare."

Some films that are ignored throughout the essays are analyzed at length in the alphabetical index, and the gamut of scholarship devoted to Shakespeare on film is examined in the light of obvious temporal and cultural transitions. To this list of engagements can be added the timely commentaries on ideological shifts within the Shakespeare on film canon. Yong Li Lan's essay, "Returning to Naples: seeing the End in Shakespeare Film Adaptation," is informed by fin de siecle discourses, departing from Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray's edited volume Shakespeare, Film, Fin de Siecle in order to assess similar concepts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By bringing attention to forms of narrative closure as deployed by a variety of incarnations, Lan's essay anticipates the number of films that have been released since its publication that seek ways to create "new beginning[sl" (Lan 186) for Shakespeare's texts. Further contextual issues are delineated in a most timely manner. In one of the collection's strongest essays (despite several discrepancies in the cited works), "Shakespearean Authorship in Popular British Cinema," Jane E. KingsleySmith pits early modern concepts of authorship against their current articulations, (re)raising the authorship debate amidst a deluge of turn-of-the-century concerns over the impending "Shakespeare apocalypse" (Burt 227). Lucy Hamilton delves once more into Baz Luhrmann's provocative William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) to consider tensions between screen and stage productions, as well as the opposition against (to use Jack Jorgens's term) filmic translations that uproot the Bard from his prescribed textual (and theatrical) bedrock (Jorgens 7). Several essays tend to privilege "definitive" film versions, yet those comparisons drawn by Christopher Andrews between two appropriations of Richard IH and between two versions of Macbeth in Normand Berlin's essay helpfully demonstrate that the history of Bardic appropriation is explicitly multifaceted.

Beginning with "some warm, fuzzy assumptions" (Welsh xxiii) Welsh illuminates some crucial moments in the history of Shakespearean appropriation left unexcavated by Rothwell's preface. Examining Hollywood's manipulation and blatant exploitation of the Bard throughout key moments in cinema history, Welsh's introduction is effectively the "encyclopedic account," I believe, toward which the volume strives. Welsh's critique of important approaches toward the plays underlines the malleability and mobility of the Shakespearean text, an area of inquiry that is rapidly expanding.

Sweeping across the previous century of Shakespeare films, Rothwell's preface manages the near impossible task of recounting cinematic Shakespeare from its silent film origins to Lloyd Kaufman's Tromeo and Juliet (1996), signaling Shakespeare's dichotomous absorption within the mainstream cinema and academic vein. Chronicling the textual architecture of the field of Shakespeare on film in its entirety, Rothwell maps significant studies with invaluable insights provided into the notable exchange between film production and academic reception. As uniform and thesis-driven as the book may be, however, those issues that are concomitant with the appropriation debate (which may well be articulated as "to derive or not to derive") are prevalent here but are not indexed, though the appendix purposefully lists issues of theatricality and derivation in recent productions. While Rothwell's 1990 Shakespeare on Screen still serves as the authoritative filmography of twentieth-century adaptations, what Shakespeare Into Film aspires to is indeed an encyclopedic account of themes and discourses underlining Shakespearean film, a notion that, interestingly enough, is becoming increasingly apparent in studies since this volume's publication.