Reduced Shakespeare: Bard bits & Bard books

Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP 1999. 352pp. $59.95.

Robert F. Willson, Jr., Shakespeare in Hollywood, 1929-1956. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000 190pp. $36.50.

Douglas Brode. Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 257pp. $25.00.

Silent Shakespeare, 1899-1911. British Film Institute, 1999. B&W, Tinted, and Original Hand-stenciled Color. Digitally Mastered from Original 35mm Nitrate Materials by the British Film Institute's National Film & Television Archive. Available from Milestone Film & Video (800-603-1104, E-mail: WMileFilms@aol.com), 88 minutes.

Kenneth Rothwell's A History of Shakespeare on Screen was uttered in 1999, marking the first century of Shakespeare film production, but the first Shakespeare film ever made was not much to look at, a mere three-minute glimpse of the actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree portraying King John, squirming uncomfortably on his throne in his death scene from Act V. Wm. K. L. Dickson filmed this brief scene from King John on 20 September 1899, the same day that Beerbohm Tree's stage production opened at Her Majesty's Theatre, London. Four scenes were shot, but the other three are lost. Intended to promote the stage production, the film is more an advertisement than an adaptation, to be shown in variety theatres and also released as a Mutascope "peepshow" presentation.

The BFI Silent Shakespeare compilation video produced from rare restored footage includes six early Shakespeare films made between 1899 and 1911. The second offering is The Tempest (1908), directed by Percy Stow for the Clarendon Film Company based in Croyden. The unidentified cast sketches the action of Shakespeare's final play through vignettes showing Prospero's arrival at the island where he is exiled, Miranda in arms and books in hand, the release of the spirit Ariel from a tree (not exactly a "cloven pine"), the discovery and taming of Caliban, and so forth, but it does follow the play's action. So does A Midsummer Night's Dream (1909), produced by J. Stuart Blacktop and Charles Kent, though the action is somewhat changed and simplified. Astonishingly, Oberon the Fairy King is absent, replaced by an invented character named Penelope, who works Oberon's magic in this short film.

The tendency of these early attempts to film Shakespeare is to reduce the plays into skits. That is certainly true of the Italian King Lear (1910), which dispenses with the Edgar/ Edmund/Gloucester echo plot and even the famous storm scene. TheLear footage is wonderfully hand-colored, however, so that the characters move in colorful costumes against a black-and-white background. Other short films on this 88-minute video are Twelfth Night (USA, 1910), The Merchant of Venice (Italy, 1910), and Richard 111 (Great Britain, 1911). The video compilation provides a service to any scholars interested in early Shakespeare production on film, but it is merely a sampling of the early Shakespeare, as Kenneth Rothwell makes clear in his first chapter.Rothwell's History is ambitious in that it combines the earlier research of Robert Hamilton Ball's Shakespeare on Silent Film and Jack Jorgens's Shakespeare on Film, the first scholarly books to consider the filmed Shakespeare and goes right to the end of the century to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (which he calls Romeo & Juliet, despite the fussy essay by W.B. Worthen on "Drama, Performativity [sic], and Performance" that appeared in PMLA 13:5 [1998] and argued mightily for the "plus") and Branagh's overpacked Hamlet (1996). But given the further excrescences of the so-called ``Bard Boom" of the 1990s and beyond, it was impossible to make the book entirely up to date. Julie Taymor's Titus was released late in 1999, for example, and will be followed by the Ethan Hawke Hamlet in modern dress and the wedding of Shakespeare with Cole Porter in the Kenneth Branagh Love's Labours Lost, scheduled for release during the summer of 2000. Robert F. Willson, Jr. takes a more tidy approach in his book Shakespeare in Hollywood, a little book that seems equally interested in Hollywood and Shakespeare. It is little: even with large font type and generously spaced leading it falls short of 200 pages, and if one subtracts the Filmography and Index, it runs only to 166 pages of text. By starting with the Douglas Fairbanks/Mary Pickford Taming of the Shrew (1929), Willson avoids the "Strange, Eventful History" covered by Robert Hamilton Ball. (Ken Rothwell should have been so lucky!) Chapters are given to the Warner Brothers Midsummer Night's Dream ( 1935), the MGM Romeo and Juliet ( 1936), the Orson Welles Macbeth (1948), and the HousemanMankiewicz Julius Caesar ( 1953).

The kicker comes in Chapter 4, entitled "Selected Off-Shoots" ("selected" suggests that the author has rejected some possible candidates?), where, with amusing logic, Willson makes cases for not only Forbidden Planet ( 1956) as an adaptation of The Tempest (neither a new nor astonishing assertion) and Joe MacBeth (a "gangster" version of guess what play), but also Delmer Daves's Jubal (1956) as a "Western Othello" and Broken Lance (1954) as a "King Lear on Horseback"(Bernice Kliman to the contrary, though, in fairness, Willson does not push that thesis too far). Another shoot-em-up "offshoot" is John Ford's classic My Darling Clementine (1946). Well, Victor Matures Doc Holliday does recite the "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy, but John Ford is not William Shakespeare, and, besides, Jack Benny did it better in To Be or Not To Be ( 1942), Shakespeare "touched" by Lubitsch, who uses tragedy for comic purposes in his film and comedy for tragic purposes, when he has a Jewish actor in Nazi-occupied Poland recite Shylock's "Hath not a Jew Eyes?" defense.