Page 26 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

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AN AUSPICIOUS OPENING

The Taming of the Shrew

Prologue: Three Early Comedies

hakespeare started his playwrighting career with a trio of history
Splays (King Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III); he next turned to the
popular genre of comedy. In quick succession, Will knocked off three
agreeable minor works that still find their way into the stage reper-
toire: The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Two
Gentlemen of Verona. Our youthful playwright emulated the Roman
comedies of Plautus, adapting that master's classical plots of mis-
taken identity and frustrated love to his English idiom. Despite the
ongoing appeal of the plays, there have been no major Hollywood or
European attempts to film any of them.
Two films borrowed elements from The Comedy of Errors, but
neither can be called Shakespeare's. Vitagraph's silent 1908 version
of Errors reproduced little from the Bard but his title. Audiences had
to wait until 1940 when The Boys from Syracuse, Universal Pictures'
mounting of the George Abbott-Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart stage
show, premiered. The film starred Allan Jones and Joe Penner as
master and servant who, like the Bard's Antipholus and Dromio, dis-
cover each has a double. Also starring were Martha Raye, Rosemary
Lane, and Irene Hervey as the female leads. The musical is as appeal-
ingly stilted as its Broadway predecessor and, for that matter, Shake-
speare's own agreeably forced farce, yet it is only loosely derived
from the Bard's work.

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