Page 40 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Winter of Our Discontent / 29

Two centuries later, England would again be ruled by a great
queen, though of a decidedly different order. Victoria emphasized
the repression of evil while advocating the need for Englishmen to
achieve a higher moral plane. Not surprisingly, the key actor of the
nineteenth century offered a totally other Richard, as suited to the
oncoming age of Victorian idealism as Burbage's sexy monster had
been to Elizabethan realpolitik. Edmund Kean created an alternative
that caused audiences, particularly females, to recoil in horror. Ever
since, stage (and in our century, film) actors have wavered between
the two traditions, presenting a terrifyingly charming Jekyll or an
utterly repulsive Hyde.

Early Experiments
William Ranous, the first stage actor to demonstrate any respect for
the emerging film medium, directed and starred in an eight-minute
Richard III for Vitagraph in 1908. Two years later, director Andre
Calmette shot a brief film in France, followed by a British 1911 ver-
sion that opened the story with the ending of King Henry Sixth, Part
III for continuity's sake. Produced by William George Barker,
directed by and starring F. R. Benson, the movie (which ran nearly
thirty minutes) suffered from staginess resulting from indecision as
to whether the camera ought to serve as a recording device for a
stage performance or a storytelling device that conveyed the tale.

The Hazard of the Die
The Life and Death of King Richard the Third
M. P. Dudley Productions, 1912; James Keane

In 1912 a memorable silent Richard was presented while Victorian
morality still held sway, doomed to disappear during the post-World
War I decade of social and sexual revolution. Not surprisingly, then,
The Life and Death of King Richard the Third (five reels, five thou-
sand feet) relied on the Kean conception of Richard as a figure of
repulsion. The film, which was long lost but rediscovered in 1996,
predated D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation by three years and Cecil
B. DeMille's Squaw Man by two ; as such, it stands as the earliest
example of a feature film in terms of epic scope (seventy scenes,
including five large-scale battles), considerable budget (thirty thou-