Page 22 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

Introduction I 11

century, academic liberals urged acceptance of plays and novels as
valid literature worthy of study. By 1927, the same year sound was
introduced to motion pictures, university students were studying
the Bard; Shakespeare became the darling of academics, who imme-
diately set out to tell the public at large that Will, as a literary giant,
was beyond their comprehension.
Sadly, even tragically, the people listened, agreed, and turned away
in droves. For the bulk of the following century, Shakespeare
remained a hard sell to that very common man for whom the plays
had been written. Part of the problem was that people were now
forced to read him in junior high school and, suffering through the
all-but-unintelligible Elizabethan English, recoiled at the thought of
ever choosing to see Shakespeare in production. Ironically, that's just
where the words would have been rendered clear by the body lan-
guage and vocal inflection of actors.

Deconstructing Will
How, then, does one explain today's teenagers, hardly more informed
than their predecessors, lining up to see a hip-hop .Romeo and Juliet
while producers rush one Shakespearean feature into production
after another? Not surprisingly, resurgent popularity with ordinary
people occurred even as the academic pendulum swung back. The
new order of academia sniffed that Shakespeare was politically incor-
rect. His plays are filled with gay-bashing gags, and he believes in
the institution of marriage. As critic Jack Kroll noted in Newsweek:
"This is an age apparently determined to debard the Bard, who has
.
been called names like a black hole . . a verbocrat' by scholars
burying him under a lava flow of deconstructionism, new histori-
cism, neo-Marxism, genderism and other ismatic attacks."
English departments at major universities, where Shakespeare had
been the essential core, changed their titles to things like Textual
Studies. Will was scoffed at as nothing more than another of those
dead white males whose work had too long dominated the literary
canon. Shakespeare would still be studied, but in a radically different
context. A course examining feminist issues might include Taming
of the Shrew or Macbeth as "texts," reduced to objects worthy only
of scornful analysis as reactionary artifacts, revealing the conserva-
tive male's outmoded, offensive approach to women.
The perfection of the poetry, superb story structure, and well-
rounded characterizations, once the basis of the academic approach,