Page 21 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

10 I Shakespeare in the Movies

it's out of date. This forces us to drop what was relevant moments
earlier and move on to the next.
Shakespearean cinema is not immune from this situation. Frank
Kermode, writing in the New York Review, noted: "There was a
time, in the history of the movies, when a man might make a ver-
sion of a Shakespeare play and expect it to last for many years. That
time has passed . . . because the very concept of the 'classic' perfor-
mance has withered." In fact, it began withering during that all-
important transitional period between 1967 and 1973, when the very
notion of permanence (and, with it, an abiding respect for any ongo-
ing tradition) all but disappeared from an ever-changing culture com-
posed of immediately disposable pop artifacts. The classic
performance of yore could be exemplified by Max Reinhardt's
approach to his Midsummer Night's Dream (1935). The story is set
in a never-never land, historically true to no time period but poeti-
cally true for all time.
Modernists travel a different route. Lord Michael Birkett, who col-
laborated with director Peter Hall on A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1968), articulated why star Diana Rigg wore a minidress—a perfect
fashion statement for the moment, though soon passe.
Producers of Shakespeare used to console themselves that even
if their films didn't earn much money at the time, they would
somehow [gradually make the producers] rich in their old age.
Being "classics," these films were bound to be shown some-
where every year and would continue to earn small residuals
forever. Nowadays, it's likely to be only the most recent film
version which is played, and older versions may become out of
date—or rarely shown. . . . The exclusivity a filmmaker used to
have over a Shakespeare subject is a thing of the past.

This explains why two versions of Richard III (Ian McKellen's and Al
Pacino's) appeared almost simultaneously in 1996 and why the Zef-
firelli-Mel Gibson Hamlet (1990) barely had time to become the new
standard before being replaced by Kenneth Branagh's.
This raises another key question: Why the sudden proliferation of
Shakespearean cinema? To answer that, we must first return to the
birth of cinema. Shakespeare was all the rage with the masses who
had just passed through Ellis Island, even as he had been for more
than thirty decades. During this time, academia had little use for
Shakespeare or, for that matter, live theater; poesy remained the
domain of the ivory-tower elite. Some twenty years into the new