The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Brook’s reiteration of this point brought out something contrarian in me. Was it always true, as Brook had said, that “the quieter [an actor] can be, the closer he can be to himself”? How often did Shakespeare write seeking his words to be spoken quietly?

  Wasn’t it true, I asked Horowitz in the question period, that Shakespeare had written much of what he wrote to be declaimed, to be uttered at a higher pitch of intensity, and yes decibels, than the “natural” quiet language of thought that would be drowned out in most of the theaters he was writing for?

  It may be true that the filmed close-ups are “closer to the actor, closer to himself,” but are they closer to Shakespeare? Might we lose something if all Shakespeare was turned into quiet, thoughtful soliloquized close-ups?

  John Andrews responded by bringing up Hamlet’s advice to the actors in which he advises them not to “split the heavens” with declamation nor “saw the air” in overly declamatory fashion. I countered by pointing to the purple passage Hamlet specially requested from the Players when they first arrived at Elsinore, the soaring declamatory depiction of the death of Priam and the maddened grief of Hecuba, the Pyrrhus speech.

  To which Jeffrey Horowitz replied that he had once heard that very speech done on stage quietly and thoughtfully and with devastating effectiveness.

  Let us accept, for the sake of argument, that all films are adaptations, even translations, into another medium. Shakespeare didn’t write camera directions such as CLOSE-UP or LONG-SHOT, to accompany his playscripts. He wrote for a relatively bare stage. Nonetheless, films can go awry in ways similar to staged Shakespeare when the director’s hand weights too heavily on the delicately counterpoised scale of forces in the text.

  As an instance take Peter Brook’s Lear, which I’ve argued is one of the four essential Shakespeare films that offer experiences that equal or exceed any Shakespearean performance you are likely to see in a lifetime.

  When I first saw it in a big-screen theater I left stunned and shaken. It still gives me a chill watching a videotape on a TV screen, almost as if I had inhabited the icy landscape Brook chose for the film, a vast arctic stage for the bitter exposition of the tragedy.

  Brook shot it in stark black and white with a Cro-Magnon-like costume design that suggested a Stonehenge-era setting, almost as if at the very dawn of human nature.

  Brook brought his own intensity to the filmmaking. He cuts from icy face to icy landscape, and from face to face, with a kind of savage brutality, as with a butcher’s knife. You might see an equal, but to my mind you’ll never see a better Lear than Paul Scofield’s in this film.

  The problem, if it could be said to be a problem and not a “directorial point of view,” is in what Brook chooses to cut from the text and what to play up. As Thomas Pendleton, multifaceted Shakespeare scholar and coeditor of The Shakespeare Newsletter, pointed out in a critique of the Brook film at a Fairleigh Dickinson symposium, Brook’s cuts constitute a kind of polemic: they all tend to omit the often small telling acts of human kindness—the servant who tends to the blinded Gloucester for instance, Edmund’s deathbed attempt to save Cordelia. Moments that, when omitted, Pendleton argues, serve Brook’s intent to recast Shakespeare’s Lear as Beckett’s bleak Endgame.

  Is this “playing fair,” so to speak, or robbing the play of a Shakespearean balance that makes Beckett seem more one-dimensional? But these things Brook did on film are things he just as likely could have done on stage.

  Then there are things films can do—such as flashbacks for instance—that they shouldn’t necessarily do just because they can. Consider Kenneth Branagh’s decision in his often admirable full-length four-hour Hamlet to give us a flashback scene of Hamlet and Ophelia rolling around naked in bed making love. Setting aside the fact that it offers an all-too-confident answer to a question that Shakespeare seems deliberately to have left unresolved in the play—were Hamlet and Ophelia sexually involved?—and setting aside Branagh’s understandable decision to err on the side of rolling around naked with Kate Winslet, who plays Ophelia, it’s not exactly an Originalist device. On the other hand neither is Branagh’s decision to allow us to visualize on film the tragic moment depicted in that Pyrrhus speech that Hamlet called for when the Players arrive.

  But I was grateful that he did it and in doing so gave us John Gielgud’s last Shakespearean moment, playing a mute Priam wielding a futile sword about to be cut down by Pyrrhus in the burning ruins of Troy. A sad, beautiful, silent farewell for Gielgud.

  And yet such choices, good and bad, are not remarkably different in kind from the kinds of choices good and bad that stage directors make. An exception—not really a Hamlet film per se—is the film version of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Which offers in sidelong glances, and overheard moments, some of the best pieces of Hamlet to be found on film.

  THE GREAT DIVIDE

  The deeper argument about film is about the appropriateness, the legitimacy of such an anachronistic medium itself to Shakespeare—and, to my mind, whether in fact it offers a way to illuminate aspects of Shakespeare that give us greater access to the mysterious original power of his work.

  And if there is a single film that divides Shakespeare scholars, amateurs, film historians and film fanatics on this question it is Baz Luhrmann’s idiosyncratically titled William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. (Yes, those of us who defend the film have to live with Luhrmann’s + in the title; it is, so to speak, our cross to bear. We also have to live with gibes about the necessity or justice of calling it William Shakespeare’s.)

  It’s a film which, along with Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and to a lesser extent Richard Loncraine’s more traditional Richard III (with Ian McKellen magnificent in the title role), represents a new and controversial wave of Shakespearean adaptations that emerged in the nineties alongside Kenneth Branagh’s more traditional film versions. Of the three, R+J is the focal point. Because it’s such a radical adaptation, and because it’s so smart about it.

  It’s remarkable how few people are neutral on the question of the Luhrmann adaptation. To my, admittedly partisan, mind it’s a kind of test: those who hate and denounce it do so out of a misplaced reverential gentility: to be truly “Shakespearean” an adaptation must be presented in stately fashion in Received Pronunciation. Those of us—and this includes a number of well-credentialed academics—who admire the film do so not because it is a triumph of RSC-style verse-speaking (it’s not), but because in totality it captures the spirit if not the letter of R&J’s passion, better than many stage versions that give us the letter (if that) but not the spirit. To have both would be ideal; we’re not saying Luhrmann’s R+J is the ne plus ultra adaptation that makes others unnecessary. Let a hundred flowers bloom, but don’t deny this blossom its place.

  Perhaps to understand the dimension of the controversy, it’s useful to place it in the context of the evolution of Shakespeare on film. It’s a genre that ranges from early silent versions, to faithful one-camera recordings of stage performances, to surprising oddities such as Max Reinhardt’s 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream (the one with Mickey Rooney as Puck). A genre that really comes into its own with Laurence Olivier’s 1944 Henry V, and his subsequent Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955), films that Olivier both directed and starred in.

  There’s some truth to the tendency to disparage the rah-rah spirit of Olivier’s rousing wartime Henry V, which eliminates or underplays the countervailing antiwar ironies that Kenneth Branagh played up in his 1990 film version. Although even Branagh has been criticized for lacking the nerve to include the scene in which Henry orders the slaughter of the French prisoners, a war crime (by most standards) that Shakespeare made a point of including.

  But whatever one thinks of its politics, Olivier’s Henry V points the way to a new era of filmed Shakespeare by foregrounding the mechanics of the transition itself.

  He opened his Henry V with a conspicuously anachronistic, simulated aerial shot of a simulated “original
” Globe Theatre in 1600. Then he takes us “inside” this theater by cutting to interiors of the mock Globe’s backstage, where the actors are preparing a production of Henry V. Takes us into the pit where the rowdy groundlings are awaiting it, and finally with a trumpet blast the play begins. Clearly Olivier is having irreverent fun with the anachronistic contradictions of filming a staged stage play, with filming, supposedly, the “original” production of Henry V. The snake swallowing its tail or vice versa.

  Then Olivier makes another metaphysical transition. We start out at the Globe with the Prologue asking for a “Muse of fire.” Then the actual play begins with a comic take on the clerics’ reading of the Salic law, all on stage, along with the court scene featuring the French ambassador’s tennis ball mockery and Henry’s defiance.

  But then at the opening of the Olivier film’s second act, when the chorus reappears to proclaim a change of scene (“the scene/Is now transported, gentles, to Southampton …”), suddenly we are out of the Globe into the “world,” into a realm without a stage and an audience—the seemingly unbounded realm of film (or film sets) in full. Occasionally to reinforce the defamiliarizing effect of film, Olivier will return to the Globe, to the stage and the backstage hubbub, and then take us back to the open landscape of France. In a way these shifts may have reflected Olivier’s own internal division over whether Shakespeare should be represented in an anachronistic medium such as film—and the division within himself between the stage and the film actor.

  By the time of his 1948 Hamlet, however, Olivier had abandoned all inhibitions about film, the camera’s mobility and the illusion of reality it offered. Indeed in that Hamlet he made the camera a character, no, a stalker who virtually chased Hamlet up the winding stone stairs to the parapets of Elsinore castle, then peered down with him at the boiling sea far below, reflecting in its wild surge the wild surging emotions in Hamlet’s head. And then the camera seems as if it has entered his head and looks out from within Hamlet’s eyes, while overhearing his very thoughts.

  By 1955, in his Richard III, Olivier has turned the tables and is spending half his time as Richard looking into the camera, stalking the camera, unctuously, familiarly, leeringly, almost too familiarly invading our own space with his insinuating invasive probing of our reaction to his outrages.

  It was Henry Goodman who pointed out something important about Olivier’s Richard III that the film medium exploits. Goodman argues that Richard is the only play of Shakespeare’s that opens with the main character addressing the audience directly (with “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious …”).

  In doing so Richard establishes, seduces us into a “bond of complicity” in what becomes a series of ever more repellent acts of betrayal and murder. The subtextual drama then becomes our relationship to Richard—at what point will we realize our guilt and complicity in Richard’s crimes and refuse his charming but insidious importunings? Speaking to us directly through the close-up camera lens initiates, intensifies this tension, in which we find ourselves seduced, tempted, even though we know he’s evil, or (as the line from Milton has it) “surpriz’d by sin.”

  All of which is to say that, while Olivier’s films represent the first widely distributed mainstream film adaptations, and they may seem, in some ways, antiquated to us, he was in fact from the very beginning doing very sophisticated things with the medium.

  But in the Originalist sense, another thing Olivier did was bring us closer to what might be called the Great Actor aspect of Shakespeare, the way so many of his plays were written to throw the spotlight on stars and star-turns. Indeed, in his Henry V, in the scenes supposedly set in a sixteenth-century production of the play at the Globe, Olivier is playing Richard Burbage playing Henry V. He’s inhabiting the role not just of Henry but of Shakespeare’s original star.

  Critics such as Anthony Davies have done much to elucidate the sophistication of this film, arguing for instance that while Godard’s 1968 Weekend is often credited with the first use of “double diagesis,” Olivier used it first in his 1944 Henry. (Diagesis is the manipulation of conflicting time frames in the same film.)

  But to me the wittiest diagesis, if that’s what we’re calling it, occurs when we get that glimpse of “Shakespeare” playing prompter in the 1600 stage play (in Elizabethan dress, but wearing a pair of twentieth-century-looking eyeglasses). It is Olivier’s sly way of proposing that he’s giving us the text as Shakespeare himself would have seen it through twentieth-century lenses, which of course are the lenses of the motion picture camera.

  ROMEO AND JULIET VS. ROMEO + JULIET

  Following the Olivier age, the sixties and seventies saw three landmarks in Shakespearean film that pointed in three different directions. There was Peter Brook’s Lear with Paul Scofield as the old king. There was Orson Welles’s less widely distributed Chimes at Midnight, and there was Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, a huge popular success.

  The first two offer the cinematic pleasures of great actors and actresses in close-up, and the remarkable use of expressive landscape and interiors (Brook’s bleak snowy realm in Lear is soul chilling; and in Chimes the warm-blooded interior of Falstaff’s inn throws into sharp relief the frosty, cold-blooded exterior realm of power politics captured in the visible cloud of condensed breath John Gielgud exhales in Henry IV’s chill throne room).

  Which brings us to the Zeffirelli R&J. What’s been surprising over the years is the growing scholarly and academic appreciation for Zeffirelli’s film, a work originally not taken very seriously because of its lush Technicolor costume-drama ambiance, and its literal teen romance which dared to cast a Juliet virtually as young as she was in the play (not yet fourteen when she dies).

  I know that for many years I myself didn’t give it the respect it deserved because I’d felt it too personally at the time: it affected me in what I recalled as perhaps a too emotional or sentimental way the first time I saw it. Maybe, I now realize, that was the point: Zeffirelli had designed his film to go for the gut, evoke a kind of visceral romantic-tragic impact that according to contemporaneous commentators made the play such a sensation from the beginning, gave it such an enduring power.

  A useful contrast is with the BBC-TV version of R&J circa 1985. The eighties were the era of BBC-TV Shakespeare, an era when all the best Shakespearean talent—actors and directors—were drawn into the vast, worthy, uneven but invaluable BBC enterprise of producing serious versions of the entire Shakespeare canon for television. An enterprise that virtually shut down Shakespeare on film. And for the most part offered televised versions of staged plays.

  But while I’ve found many of the BBC-TV Shakespeare productions powerful and evocative—the Tempest, the Lear, the Troilus (and the Love’s Labor’s Lost, a revelation, the best I’ve seen)—the R&J was just too refined and cold. It was a pious homage whose sober, somber seriousness conjures up its comic antithesis: the travestied version of R&J put on by the Crummles Theatrical Troupe in Trevor Nunn’s RSC production of Nicholas Nickleby.

  Which is why one has to admire the boldness with which Baz Luhrmann walks the line between tragedy and travesty in his R+J. Doesn’t walk it, races madly across a tightrope, seemingly heedless of risk, capturing in his film’s mad rush the mad rush of first love at first sight.

  Luhrmann captures the spirit rather than the letter, but there’s more than that. He finds a way of translating Shakespeare’s verbal wit into visual terms, captures the dizzying, breathtaking madness of it all.

  The prologue, for instance. It’s surprising how often Shakespeare’s prologues reveal the unexpected, in themselves and in the way directors and actors play them. Luhrmann’s film opens with a TV set suspended in space, a set that first bursts briefly into buzzing static electricity then dissolves to a TV anchor in a CNN-type setting. Then in perfect anchorwoman mode she recites the prologue as one thing it is: news, or the simulacrum of news, the entire play compressed into fourteen lines—a broadcast sonnet:

  Two hou
seholds, both alike in dignity,

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

  From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

  Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

  From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

  A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;

  Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows

  Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

  The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,

  And the continuance of their parents’ rage,

  Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,

  Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;

  The which if you with patient ears attend,

  What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

  When you think about it, it’s a breathtaking compression of the story which practically mates in two-word phrases the beginning—the “fatal loins” of the parents—with the end (the “death-mark’d love” that leads to their children’s end). It’s a hectic compression that, once unlocked, Luhrmann virtually explodes by doing the prologue not once but twice. First the CNN anchoress, then suddenly we are in “fair Verona” for a visual recapitulation (with the prologue voice-over) done like late Scorsese to a soundtrack of operatic ecstatic chants and subtitled cameo shots which introduce the main characters and then give way to angry hip-hop and the opening quarrel scene. Which takes place at a gas station where the warring Capulet and Montague gangs of “Verona Beach” brandish their “Sword 9mm” guns and set the fuel on fire.

  Don’t dismiss it for its sheer (or mere) ingenuity. I’ve seen this opening quarrel scene done on film, I’ve seen it done on stage. It’s usually done in a strained, clownish manner, as if the players are embarrassed by the puns. Rarely with the menacing, fiery explosiveness of Luhrmann’s amazing opening (post-prologue) scene. What is often treated as a perfunctory preliminary to the advent of the lovers becomes the murderous, mad violence of clashing male vanity which puts its brand on the entire drama to follow. Suddenly the pretty teenage romance which R&J has devolved into in the popular imagination becomes an expression of something malign and deep-rooted and dangerous. Not just two star-crossed lovers but star-blighted, destructively inflamed human nature.