The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Mankiewicz cast James Mason as Brutus, as good a Brutus as any I’ve seen on stage, in a part that Stephen Booth calls a “Kamikaze role” for actors, in that so many self-destruct in attempting to resolve its contradictions. One of the achievements of the film is to give the Cassius-Brutus relationship the weight it deserves in a play that is as much or more about them than about the title character.

  And then there’s Brando. Well, two Brandos. There’s the Brando who delivers the famous funeral oration over Caesar’s body (“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”), the one who turns the fickle Roman crowd from sympathy with Brutus and the assassins of Caesar into a frenzy of remorse and rage against them.

  Brando delivers the oration itself in a fairly formal style, almost as if to say, “I’m quite capable of doing this in a traditional way if that’s what you want.” It is reported that he took careful advice from John Gielgud about doing that speech and he did it without tripping on his tongue. But it had no magic, little charisma, there was no Muse of fire at work in his words, not to my mind.

  But then Brando surveys the vast assemblage, filled with extras in togas making mindless riot; in response he turns and faces the camera and Mankiewicz gives us a close-up moment in which Brando’s face fills two thirds of the screen. A moment that delivers what Peter Brook said Shakespearean acting should aspire to, what film alone, the film close-up alone, can supply at times: a representation of the language of thought, of thought itself.

  For one silent moment we see thought, or rather conflicting thoughts, conflicting aspects of the thinker play upon the stage of Brando’s brow, almost like watching riptides crisscross each other in the aftermath of a retreating wave. It is certainly true that a soliloquy on stage isolates our attention on the (usually) distant actor. But in a film close-up we are as close to an actor as if he or she were looking in a mirror.

  And when I say we “see thought,” I mean we see mirrored in Brando’s enigmatic smile and expressive brow the different ways of construing Mark Antony—loyal impassioned friend of Caesar, or cynical political opportunist, or both contending—and the different ways Mark Antony construes himself and what he’s wrought. I can (and do) run and rerun this moment and still find it hard to fathom the drama the conflicting Antonys are playing out on Brando’s brow. He gives us the irresolution of the conflict as well as the conflict in a half-bemused, half-cynical half-smile. Amazing the power film close-up can endow even a silence with.

  But then there is something else film can do that—used wisely (not always the case)—stage cannot: the long shot. Consider the long long shot that Orson Welles chose as a prologue of sorts to Chimes at Midnight.

  What we see as the film opens is a vast snowy landscape, and deep, deep in the deep-focus shot, two virtual specks resolve themselves into human figures, one fat, one thin, picking their way through the snow, obscured in the distance by the twisted limbs of an ancient tree in the foreground.

  It’s Falstaff and Justice Shallow in that lovely, melancholy scene from the second part of Henry IV where Falstaff has come to extract a loan of a thousand pounds from his old schoolmate, Shallow, on the strength of his prospects should his partner in crime, Prince Hal, take the throne. The doddering Justice Shallow insists on reminiscing to Falstaff about their allegedly wild and lecherous youth together, looking like and reminding Falstaff of a bony death’s head—Shallow is the skull beneath Falstaff’s skin.

  Welles may have chosen this scene as a prologue because it contains the line that became the title for his compression of the two Henry IV plays—Chimes at Midnight. Whatever the reason, it represents the melancholy, emotional heart of the film. That snowy field they emerge from is, in some way, the wilderness of chilly age they both find themselves lost in. As they pick their way toward us through the snow out of the long, long shot we hear their dialogue in voice-over. It’s a moment I’ll never forget ever since I first saw it as a youth; it’s a moment that grows more powerful the more I watch it, the longer I live.

  Welles has edited and compressed and slightly altered it: he inserts Shallow’s first name here. And one has to hear Justice Shallow’s (Alan Webb) high-pitched, enfeebled but excited voice contrasted with Welles’s rumbling basso to appreciate it, but here it is:

  SHALLOW: Do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill [an inn/ brothel] in Saint George’s Field?

  FALSTAFF: No more of that, Master Shallow.

  SHALLOW: Ha, ha, ha, ’twas a merry night.

  FALSTAFF: [Silence as they approach and enter a barnlike structure and warm themselves in front of a rusty metal brazier pockmarked with holes flickering with light and smoke from the glowing coals within.]

  SHALLOW: Is Jane Nightwork [some wench from their student debauchery days] alive?

  FALSTAFF: She lives, Master Shallow.

  By now the two of them are seated on a bench before the brazier, Welles’s Falstaff wearing an antic death’s-head smile that seems to combine mimed hilarity and frozen horror at age and death, a horror that Shallow seems obliviously intent on exacerbating.

  SHALLOW: Does she [Jane Nightwork] hold her own well?

  FALSTAFF: Old, Master Shallow, old.

  SHALLOW: Certain she’s old. Nay, she must be old. She cannot choose but be old.

  FALSTAFF: [Close-up: Welles’s painfully frozen grinning silence]

  SHALLOW: Jesu, the days that we have seen. Ay, Sir John, said I well?

  FALSTAFF: We have heard the chimes of midnight, Master Robert Shallow.

  SHALLOW: That we have. That we have, Sir John. In faith we have.

  FALSTAFF: [Close-up: silence]

  SHALLOW: Jesu, the days that we have seen.

  And then for a beautiful moment before the opening credits roll there is a lingering close-up of Falstaff and Shallow side by side, the firelight flickering on Welles’s face illuminating the strangest grin poised on the knife edge of horror and laughter, flickering back and forth between him and Shallow’s blissfully oblivious grin, both reflecting the dying fire.

  There is something unspeakably, unbearably lovely and sad about that moment. It’s there in the words and it’s there written on Welles’s face in close-up. This is part of the power of Shakespeare on film: the ability to emerge from a long, long shot and then focus at such close range upon the faces of great Shakespeareans.

  I’ll never forget seeing Chimes at Midnight for the first time, during its brief first run in Manhattan. (The Times’ reviewer Bosley Crowther disliked it, although Pauline Kael gave it one of her signature rhapsodic raves in The New Yorker, which propelled me down from New Haven to see it.) I was still in college but somehow watching it, watching that scene in particular, I felt I’d learned something about age that would stay with me forever.

  Watching it again, watching it over and over preparing for the Shakespeare Society program where I would show it, staring at the flickering shadows from the fire and thinking about the “Muse of fire” that Shakespeare’s Prologue had called for in Henry V, I suddenly thought: Fire, flickering light: film.

  O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

  The brightest heaven of invention!

  Was film in some sense the “invention” that Shakespeare had been calling for? The one he was asking his audiences to create with the silent power of thought? Did film play that role: a medium able to join with the “imaginary forces” of his audience to project the “swelling scene,” to raise “flat unraised spirits” to larger-than-life dimensions, in the grand illusion of cinema?

  One can get carried away. The close-up for instance: one gains a lot from looking more deeply into a man’s eyes as Kozintsev said, but on the other hand one loses something, as well. One loses the presence of the other characters excluded from view during the close-up moment (unless it’s a soliloquy), the other characters always present or at least visible on stage, ones that can give context and reaction to whatever it is going on deep within the eyes one is focusing on. Who can say for sure this is so
mething Shakespeare would have wanted, this isolation?

  But on the other, other hand, with film one can cut back and forth from close-up to wide shot, one has more alternatives, more perspectives at one’s command. Individual and individual-in-context can be shown in counterpoint. “Command” may be a key word: film reverses the power relationship between the play and the audience. In a stage production the audience can choose on whom to focus, where to look, no matter who’s speaking. Film chooses for you, most of the time exercises command over what you see.

  On the other, other, other hand, a VCR or DVD turns the tables again and puts the film, to a limited extent anyway, its pace, its direction and momentum, in the viewer’s command. I will get more deeply into the arguments against film or the ways in which film can go wrong. But even in some overenthusiastic construals of the relationship between Shakespeare and film there are some intriguing connections to be made between the playwright and the medium that developed three centuries after his death.

  In the midst of writing this chapter for instance I came across a provocative remark by Norman Mailer in a rambling essay about modes of dramatic writing in The New Yorker. Mailer is recalling an anecdote about Chekhov and Tolstoy in which the younger Chekhov visits the elder Tolstoy at his estate, and according to Mailer’s version of the anecdote, Tolstoy concluded the evening by saying, “Chekhov, you are a very good writer [of short stories] … but Chekhov, I must tell you, you are a terrible playwright. You are awful! You are even worse than Shakespeare.”

  According to Mailer, Chekhov goes off into the night ecstatic that he’s even been compared to Shakespeare, even by a notorious Shakespeare-hater (well, skeptic) such as Tolstoy.

  But Mailer has his own theory of Tolstoy’s dissent. He asks, “Why did Tolstoy dislike Shakespeare so?” He speculates, “The answer is that Tolstoy was always searching for subtle but precise moral judgment. That required a detailed sense of the sequence of events that could produce a dramatic or tragic event. You had to know how to assess blame. For that you needed to know exactly when and why things happen.

  “But there, very much in the way, was Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer there ever existed—centuries before cinema had a silver screen.”

  What does Mailer mean by “Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer there ever existed”? Shakespeare, Mailer says, “was not interested in making careful connections with his characters. Shakespeare was looking to get the most dynamic actors together under any circumstances available, no matter how contrived. He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy lived for the sobriety of moral judgment. So he considered Shakespeare a monster who paid attention to causality only when it was useful to him. Will’s people do incredible things, fall in love and/or murder usually with a minimum of preparation—Hamlet—and then deliver exceptional speeches that sear an audience’s consciousness. To Tolstoy this was monstrous.”

  I would disagree with some of Mailer’s characterizations of Shakespeare (“not interested in making careful connections with his characters” should read “not always interested in making explicit and obvious the links between characters,” if you ask me). But there is a germ of truth in the way Mailer links Shakespeare’s lack of preoccupation with the “sobriety” of moral judgment (this should read “disdain for a single perspective for judging his characters,” if you ask me) and his being “the greatest movie writer there ever existed.” There is something cinematic in his ability to cast light upon his characters from all possible POV’s, as they say in scriptese. To do psychologically what a film camera can do physically: see a character from 360 different angles and degrees of perspective. As opposed to stage Shakespeare where in most cases the spectator stares straight ahead from one fixed, usually frontal point of view. In film, connections are elided, causality established often by cutting rather than explanation, understood in shifting close-ups, in exchanged glances. In cinema we can see one character through another’s eyes, and then the other through the other’s eyes. And then see them both from outside.

  WHEN SHAKESPEARE ON FILM GOES WRONG

  To some this can be esthetic tyranny, the tyranny over the gaze, but in invoking the Tolstoyan fullness of causality as opposed to film’s sly cutting elision, Mailer suggests the sort of thing that filmed Shakespeare probably should not do, or goes wrong when it does: transform Shakespearean drama, written for the stage, into novelistic film. Make it try to imitate Tolstoy in novelistic fullness and sobriety, rather than give us flashes of illumination in the darkness that Shakespeare’s scenes suggest.

  An unfortunate example of where film can go wrong in this fashion is Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night, which I saw shortly before seeing the Shenandoah Shakespeare company’s staged version of Twelfth Night at the Folger Library Theater, and after Nicholas Hytner’s Chekhovian staging at Lincoln Center.

  I expected so much from Trevor Nunn’s film since as a Shakespearean director he’s given me almost as many peak experiences on stage as Peter Brook himself. It was, you may recall, Trevor Nunn’s Hamlet that played back-to-back with Peter Brook’s Dream that weekend in Stratford that changed my life. It was a Hamlet still not surpassed by any I’ve seen live on stage (although nothing is likely to surpass the electrifying Richard Burton “Electrono-vision” taped-from-stage-performance Hamlet). And Trevor Nunn’s 1999 Troilus and Cressida was perhaps the most powerful stage Shakespeare I’d seen in the past decade.

  If I had to find a single word to sum up what went wrong with Nunn’s Twelfth Night it would be landscape. Nunn made the decision to “open up” the play, to give it the look and feel of a film of a Thomas Hardy novel, all grassy moors and wild seacoasts. He fills in all the intervening space between the courts of Orsino and Olivia with landscape, he gives us long heroic vistas of the page Cesario (Viola in disguise) spurring his/her horse across the landscape. He “opens it up” as they say to represent “real” space and extension as opposed to theatrical space—different locations in the same staged space. He gives us not a stage but a world, not a Globe but a globe, and in doing so somehow the comedy is lost in the vistas.

  All the world’s a stage, but the stage is not meant to be the world. Comedy, we suddenly realize, is more dependent than we imagined on the confinement of the characters on a stage, on the “esthetic microcosm” as the scholar Anthony Davies put it, the closed-off cloud chamber of the stage where vectors of emotion like charged particles bounce off the boundaries and collide. Where the comic mathematics of doubling and cross-dressing and subterfuge and deceit work upon each other, where they can, in effect, bounce off the fourth wall. The confines of the stage are like the confines of Peter Hall’s pause-enclosed “line structure.”

  By removing all the walls, in effect, Nunn’s film version removes, slackens, empties out all the tension of confinement, the confinement that is the subtext of Twelfth Night itself, the confinement of sexual roles, of sexually signifying clothes, the confinement of Malvolio’s “cross-gartering,” the final cruel confinement of the maddened Malvolio in the “dark house.” A madhouse needs walls, not open landscape. One understands Peter Hall’s insistence on enclosure when one sees what results from its removal.

  Perhaps that’s why, of the two staged Twelfth Nights I saw nearly simultaneously—the bare-stage, bare-bones, natural light–lit Twelfth Night by the Shenandoah Shakespeare company at the Folger (codirected by Stephen Booth and Ralph Alan Cohen), and the lush Lincoln Center Twelfth Night by RSC alumnus Nicholas Hytner—I felt the cubicle of the Folger Library Theater far more effective in representing the vectored mathematics of the comedy than the spacious set at Lincoln Center (which featured its own little real-water “seashore” on stage).

  Seeing them made the case that Shakespeare contained the cosmos in the “esthetic microcosm”—and that opening the microcosm to the cosmos loses the kind of esthetic closure that, for instance, Peter Hall seeks in line structure.
One feels lack of closure too often in Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado—the young stud soldiers galloping home from the wars, then washing the sweat off their naked bodies. One doesn’t feel that in Julie Taymor’s film version of Titus Andronicus, which was made with an intensity so breathtaking one forgets the rest of the world.

  Stage structure, like line structure, is not inconsiderable both in its power—with a few cinematic exceptions—and in its loss. The exceptions being, in fact, not when film opens up the stage, but sometimes when it closes in and confines it even more, in the full-frame close-up.

  So I am not unaware of the limitations of Shakespeare on film. I’ve even had some second thoughts on thought. Recall Peter Brook in Looking for Richard: Shakespeare’s language “is the language of thought. In a theater to do this right you have to speak loud and still be truthful.… Every actor knows the quieter he can be, the closer he can be to himself.”

  I was moved to rethink this question while attending a Shakespeare Guild dialogue featuring Guild founder John Andrews, the unmodernized-spelling advocate, and Jeffrey Horowitz, the artistic director of the Theater for a New Audience who was present at my table-thumping dinner with Sir Peter Hall.

  Jeff Horowitz had recently been invited to bring his company’s production of Cymbeline to the United Kingdom under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where it received an enthusiastic reception. During the run he participated in a panel on the state of Shakespearean theater to which Peter Brook had been invited. Brook couldn’t make it, Horowitz said, but “he sent a letter in which he said, ‘The next revolution in verse-speaking will be a return to the original grammar that released the energy of the language. The next revolution may learn from film; we’ve all been influenced by film and seeing thought, the natural rhythms of thought.’ ”