Page 16 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Introduction / 5

Shakespeare and his producer-star Richard Burbage mounted plays,
there was no such thing as a director in the modern theatrical or
cinematic sense—and probably few or no rehearsals, which is
unheard of in contemporary theater but the norm with movies.
Burbage and Shakespeare, collaborating with everyone else in their
company, apparently "discovered" the show each night—shortening
or lengthening action, adding or deleting comedy, altering the tone
as they performed before ever-changing audiences, which varied
between respectable, middle-class types one evening and a grotesque
mix of university intellects and uneducated street people the next.
This mix sounds more like audiences at mall multiplexes than
those precious few who attend regional theater and desire to soak
up sophistication. Today Shakespeare's name may be synonymous
with Western culture, but the Bard's own audiences were interested
only in a bloody good time. His plays, filled with murders, sexual
transgressions, ghosts, and witches, have more in common with the
latest blockbusters than anything on the art-house circuit. Critics
of Shakespeare's time scoffed, dismissing him in comparison to the
loftier (and better-educated) Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.
Shakespeare was the bravura crowd pleaser, the Elizabethan prede-
cessor to Cecil B. DeMille and Steven Spielberg, not to William
Wyler or Merchant-Ivory.
Respect for the Bard was a long time coming; support among the
public, on the other hand was immediate. The mob loved Shake-
speare in his time and has continued to feel that way for several cen-
turies. On the American frontier cowboys and miners crowded the
Bird Cage Theater in Tombstone, Arizona, whenever a touring Shake-
speare company hit town, as portrayed in the films My Darling
Clementine (1946) and Tombstone (1993). In the early part of our
century, the first moviemakers, hardly a classy lot, fashioned short
flicks from Shakespeare's plays for declasse immigrants. The Bard
was, at film's dawn, a big draw with the common man ; how his name
shortly became box-office poison will be considered in due time.
As opposed to Peter Hall, Orson Welles seized upon the fact that
traditional plays are written in acts, which are the essential building
block of stage drama. Likewise, the fewer changes of scenery, the
better. Since the 1870s the one-set, two- or three-act play has been
the norm. Turning a play into a film makes as much sense, in the
words of critic Louis Kronenberger, as "cutting up a sofa to make a
chair." Welles agreed: "You can't put a play on the screen. I don't
believe in that." Thus, in addition to original screenplays like Citi-