Page 14 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

INTRODUCTION

Shakespeare would have made a great movie writer.
—Orson Welles, stage and screen director

Shakespeare is no screen writer.
—Peter Hall, stage and screen director

Shakespeare and the Movies

he above quotes, which illustrate the fact that two prominent
Tdirectors of films based on Shakespearean plays can differ so
drastically on the issue of Shakespeare's writing and the movies,
make it clear we are wading into dark waters here. Shakespearean
cinema is the only subgenre of narrative film that remains the center
of an ongoing debate—not only among skeptical literary traditional-
ists but even those cineastes who make the movies—as to whether
it has a right to exist. First, though, to dispose of the traditionalists:
critic John Ottenhoff, reviewing Much Ado About Nothing for
Christian Century in 1993, proclaimed his prejudice outright: "My
complaints about the limits of [Kenneth] Branagh's film indicate
only that no performance can substitute for the richness of reading,
discussing, and meditating upon a text."
With the words no performance, Ottenhoff dismisses stage as well
as screen, expressing a dominant twentieth-century bias toward the
Bard. Although academia has, for the better part of our century, been
populated by like thinkers, it's important to recall that Gentle Will
would strongly disagree. His plays were written to be seen, not
read—at least not by anyone other than the company performing
them. They were never printed in his lifetime, probably according to
his wishes. The plays were meant to be enjoyed in the immediate
sense, not as removed literary works to be studied, like butterflies
mounted by some eager collector who presses out all the lifeblood
and mummifies beauty under glass.
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