The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.032 Friday, 23 January 2015
From: Hardy Cook <
Date: January 22, 2015 at 9:18:44 PM EST
Subject: From TLS: Shakespeare on Screen
[Editor’s Note: The following appeared in the most recent TLS. I will provide excepts here; and if anyone wishes the entire article and does not have access to TLS, please contact me at
Shakespeare on screen
By Emma Smith
SHAKESPEARE AND THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING CINEMA
By Russell Jackson
208pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £14.99.
978 0 19 965946 3
Russell Jackson has his own entry on the Internet Movie Database in the “miscellaneous crew” category: his work as text consultant on a slate of British Shakespeare films from Henry V (1989) to Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) gives him an insider view of the renaissance of that genre under the charismatic leadership of Kenneth Branagh. One conspicuous strength of his new book in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series is his astute appreciation of something it has been easy for academics to denigrate or ignore: that particular kind of intelligent, populist costume drama that placed Much Ado About Nothing in a sunny Tuscan villa (Branagh, 1993), washed Viola up on a Cornish beach (Trevor Nunn, 1996), and depicted Desdemona’s elopement to the arms of her soldier lover by moonlit gondola (Oliver Parker, 1995).
Jackson’s canon is inclusive and unpatronizing, traversing a century of cinema from early silents to Joss Whedon’s Much Ado (2012). He is not uncritical – wondering how the edgier gender politics of directors such as Sally Potter or Derek Jarman might have transformed a lacklustre As You Like It, for instance – nor does he patronize, writing persuasively about ungarlanded films such as Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) or Stuart Burge’s Julius Caesar (1970).
Jackson’s analysis avoids the mire of adaptation taxonomies that often clog up scholarship on Shakespeare on film. His decision to use the word “original” as “a convenient synonym for ‘the play this film starts from’”, like the “freer kinds of adaptation” he reserves for his final chapter, “Beyond Shakespeare”, is refreshingly untroubled. His method is broadly and illuminatingly comparative: placing the neutered 1936 Romeo and Juliet (George Cukor), alongside Franco Zeffirelli (1968) and then Baz Luhrmann (1996) traces an arc of representations of masculinity from bulging tights to ironic fancy dress. It also implies that the films are lineally related to their shared textual progenitor, rather than laterally to the cinematic products of, say, the same aesthetic mode, director, or period. If this organizational decision maps pragmatically onto general approaches to Shakespeare on film in the seminar room, it also necessarily prioritizes “Shakespeare” over “English-speaking cinema”.
[ . . . ]
Jackson writes throughout with clarity, wit and elegance. The dozen or so stills from the films that are reproduced in the book are less dramatically visual than his own prose. Lady Macbeth’s “acidulous” tones amid the dodgy accents of Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948), the eroticism of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III wooing Lady Anne (1955), the gothic setting of Jarman’s The Tempest (1980): these episodes receive crisply appreciative commentary.
At the end of his book, however, this urbane confidence gives way to momentary anxiety: a section entitled “Please rewind” worries that not enough scholarly work has been referenced and that limitations on space may have distorted the topic. These doubts are understandable. Shakespeare and the English-Speaking Cinema does not have an argumentative through-line. It does not engage with the terminological and conceptual fretfulness that characterizes this field, nor is it in sustained conversation with criticism of the films or their “originals”. There is no attempt to make the category of “the English-speaking cinema” into anything much more than a practical self-denying ordinance. But Jackson knows what he is doing. His final injunction to his readers recalls Heminge and Condell: “watch the films again – and again”. This generous and intelligent book will certainly help them to do just that.