Page 23 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

12 I Shakespeare in the Movies

were now secondary at best. The public responded by reembracing
the Bard, his plays, and, for the past century, films fashioned from
them. Academia's loss is the public's gain. As ordinary people inhab-
iting the real world rediscovered the eternal beauty and ongoing
wisdom to be found in these works, the Bard and the bijou became
more inseparable than ever before.

Toward an Aesthetic

The vision of Shakespeare's individual plays, like the more serious-
minded motion pictures of today, results from two elements: the per-
sonality of the artist himself and the overriding worldview of the
period during which his work was created. This meeting of man and
moment culminates in an oeuvre, a body of work that, perceived
from an overview, expresses a consistent, if gradually changing,
"take" on life. Though there are basic themes to all his plays, we can
also note a progression from young swain in love with the possibili-
ties of life to mature middle-aged man to embittered bourgeois to for-
giving elder statesman at last understanding and accepting his place
in the universe.
We know that after arriving in London at a tender age to begin a
life in the theater, Will carried considerable psychological baggage
along with him. It is apparent from his writings that Shakespeare
rejected extreme notions of a simple choice between good and evil in
favor of a darker, more complex view of man: each of us torn by
forces of brightness and darkness coexisting in a single shell, no one
among us entirely pure, and redemption through purgative action
always possible. That's what his greatest heroes achieve; in this
regard, Shakespeare is the predecessor of our century's Alfred Hitch-
cock, who likewise explored the dual nature of man.
As a boy, he had probably been warned by parents and preachers
of the need to reject natural impulses. Despite evidence that, on the
whole, Will was a model youth, he slipped once—and once was
enough. Anne Hathaway, eight years Shakespeare's senior, became
pregnant, perhaps during an afternoon's dalliance with the lad. A
hasty marriage was followed, six months later, by the couple's first
child. Then rumors spread that the child might not be Will's; Anne
might have been pregnant by another when she met and seduced
him. If so, such shame may be what drove Will from Stratford to
London—and, in good time, fame, fortune, and immortality. His loss
in life was our gain, resulting in the greatest body of literary work
ever produced.