Viewing Shakespeare on Film

At the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th centuries, when William Shakespeare was becoming an academic institution, so to speak—a subject for serious scholarly study—a revolutionary search began in the world outside the universities for the means to present his great dramas in the new medium of film. Pioneer French filmmakers had begun to produce primitive actualités (i.e., brief film clips of parading soldiers and umbrella dancers), which were screened between the live acts in vaudeville houses in London and New York City. Among these early films was a remarkable production of 1899 (still available) by the London studio of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company: a scene from Shakespeare’s King John—then on the boards at Her Majesty’s Theatre and featuring Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree—recorded on 68-mm film. Of four excerpts shot and later exhibited at London’s Palace Theatre to promote the stage production, only the death scene (Act V, scene 2), long thought lost, resurfaced in 1990 in an Amsterdam film archive. Like all silent films, the scene from King John might well have been accompanied by some variation of live music, sound effects, phonograph records, intertitles, recitations, or supplementary lectures, as filmmakers sought to compensate for a silenced Shakespeare.

Cineasts in France, the United States, Italy, and Germany soon began making other Shakespeare movies. In 1900 Sarah Bernhardt appeared on-screen at the Paris Exposition in the duel scene from Hamlet, and in 1907 Georges Méliès attempted to make a coherent one-reel Hamlet that distilled the essence of the story. Emulating the high culture of the Comédie-Française, French filmmakers organized a Film d’Art movement that cast high-profile actors in adaptations of famous plays, a movement that was limited by its deference to the theater.

By 1913, however, in one of the last Film d’Art releases, Shylock (a version of The Merchant of Venice), the actors had successfully adapted their stage talents to film. In Italy Giovanni Pastrone, whose monumental Cabiria (1914) later inspired D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), brought the sense of grand opera spectacle to his Giulio Cesare (1909; Julius Caesar). Italian audiences in 1910 saw Il mercante di Venezia (The Merchant of Venice), directed by Gerolamo Lo Savio, and in 1913 they saw Una tragedia alla corte di Sicilia (“A Tragedy of the Court of Sicily”; a version of The Winter’s Tale), directed by Baldassare Negroni.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, New York, the Vitagraph production company had moved the camera off the stage and into the city parks. Brooklyn’s Prospect Park served as one location for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1909), and Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain doubled as a Veronese street in Romeo and Juliet (1908).

The Americans, like their European counterparts, began making longer movies for the grander “palace” movie houses that were putting the old nickelodeons and penny gaffs out of business. One of the earliest feature-length movies surviving in North America is a Shakespeare movie, James Keane (Keene) and M.B. Dudley’s Richard III (1912), also rediscovered in the late 20th century. A veteran Shakespearean actor and lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit, Frederick Warde, played the film’s Richard. He toured with the movie, providing appropriate recitations and commentary.

Many film directors had difficulty moving beyond filmed stage performances. Sir Frank Benson’s Richard III (1911), filmed at the Stratford Theatre, even revealed the front line of the floorboards. Other directors, however, were more creative; E. Hay Plumb, for example, took the cast of the London Drury Lane Company to the Dorset coast to film the castle scenes in a Hamlet (1913) that featured the 60-year-old Johnston Forbes-Robertson as the gloomy prince. Directors Svend Gade and Heinz Schall came up with a gender-bending Hamlet (1920), which starred the famous actress Asta Nielsen as a cross-dressed prince. The internationally known actor Emil Jannings played the title role in Othello (1922) to Werner Krauss’s Iago. Krauss also portrayed Shylock in a free adaptation of The Merchant of Venice (1923; Der Kaufmann von Venedig).

In the United States Mary Pickford played a saucy Kate in The Taming of the Shrew (1929), the first feature-length sound movie of Shakespeare. With her sly wink to Bianca during the “submission” speech to Petruchio, she showed how film could subvert the Shakespearean text. Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), directed by émigrés Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, revealed the influence of Weimar Expressionism, but it combined the incidental music of Felix Mendelssohn with the presence of contract actors James Cagney and Mickey Rooney, who played Bottom and Puck, respectively. Almost immediately thereafter, producer Irving Thalberg and director George Cukor offered a reverential Romeo and Juliet (1936), with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard and a supporting cast of actors from the Hollywood expatriate British colony. Joseph L. Mankiewicz and John Houseman produced a spectacular “newsreel” style Julius Caesar (1953) that may have been a covert attack on McCarthyism. Marlon Brando was formidable as the film’s Mark Antony.

In Laurence Olivier’s landmark Henry V (1944), the camera participated in the action rather than merely recording it. Olivier began with the gritty “actualities” of an opening scene at the boisterous Globe playhouse, moved from there to a realistic 19th-century stage set for the Boar’s Head Inn, and then soared off into a mythical France as portrayed in the 1490 manuscript Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. In Hamlet (1948) Olivier used a probing, interrogating camera and deep-focus photography to ferret out every nook and cranny of Elsinore. His brilliant performance as the title character in a filmed and subsequently televised Richard III (1955) identified him to millions of viewers as “that bottled spider…this poisonous bunch-back’d toad” (Act I, scene 3, line 245).

The American Orson Welles rivaled Olivier in the production of Shakespeare films. Despite its crudities, Welles’s Macbeth (1948) captures the essence of the play’s wild imaginings. In Chimes at Midnight (1966), based on the Henriad, Falstaff becomes self-referentially Welles himself, a misunderstood genius. Welles’s cinematic masterpiece is Othello (1952; restored 1992). Its skewed camera angles and film noir texture mirror Othello’s agony.

In France two loose adaptations, André Cayatte’s Les Amants de Vérone (1949; “The Lovers of Verona”) and Claude Chabrol’s Ophélia (1962), captured essences of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

In the late 1960s a golden age for Shakespeare movies emerged, beginning with Franco Zeffirelli’s exuberant The Taming of the Shrew (1966), featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Soon thereafter Zeffirelli offered a hugely popular Romeo and Juliet (1968) that reinvented the young lovers (played for once by actors of an age appropriate to their roles) as alienated youth in rebellion against intransigent parents; they behave much like the feuding street gangs in West Side Story (1961), the Robert Wise–Jerome Robbins musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.

During the same period, the Russian director Grigory Kozintsev directed a production of Hamlet titled Gamlet (1964) and one of King Lear titled Karol Lear (1970), which employed grim charcoal textures. Another bleak King Lear of 1970, which featured Paul Scofield as the aged king, was filmed by British director Peter Brook in frozen Jutland. Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971) displayed raw filmic energy and bravura. The voracious eye of Polanski’s camera roams over the barnyard details of a 10th-century Scottish castle that in its squalor mirrors the inner psyches of the Macbeths. The Japanese director Kurosawa Akira presented his own version of Macbeth in Kumonosu-jo (1957; Throne of Blood), a translation of the play into stylized Noh drama. As Washizu Taketori (Macbeth) rides in circles, the swirling forest mist becomes a metaphor for the intricate web of fate that drives his destiny, while the demureness of Asaji (Lady Macbeth) masks a terrifying savagery. Ran (1985; also known as Chaos), Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear, sets the action in pre-Tokugawa Japan, where the aging warlord Ichimonji Hidetora divides his wealth between two of his ambitious sons; the third son is banished for pointing out his father’s foolishness. The film’s formality and epic sweep serve beautifully to underline the Shakespearean tragedy.

In the 1970s and ’80s young British artists angered by “the Establishment” made transgressive Shakespeare movies. Derek Jarman’s The Tempest (1979) filtered the play through the lens of a camp-gay sensibility that, in depicting Prospero’s impossible struggle to govern benevolently in a malevolent world, shared the attitudes of Polish critic Jan Kott’s influential book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1966). Jarman’s Tempest was outdone by the avant-garde antics of Celestino Coronado’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1984). At the same time, in other circles, orthodoxy prevailed in Stuart Burge’s waxworks Julius Caesar (1970), with Charlton Heston as Mark Antony. Two years later Heston’s own ambitious Antony and Cleopatra proved a better “toga epic.”

An unprecedented number of expensively produced Shakespeare movies were released in the 1990s. After decades, Franco Zeffirelli returned to filming Shakespeare, but for Hamlet (1990) he abandoned his Italianate settings in favor of medieval English castles. In it Mel Gibson proved an action-oriented prince. The following year Peter Greenaway’s beautiful but obscure Prospero’s Books, starring an octogenarian John Gielgud, pioneered not only in bringing computer-based imagery into the Shakespeare movie but also in establishing ideological and artistic independence from the classic Hollywood film.

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With his Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Kenneth Branagh rapidly assumed the mantle left by Olivier. In contrast to Olivier’s phlegmatic warrior figure, Branagh created a Prince Hal who was Hamlet-like in his introspection. His Much Ado, featuring such popular American actors as Denzel Washington and Michael Keaton, privileged the play’s sentimental side over its ironic side. Branagh’s four-hour “uncut” Hamlet (1996) combined the 1623 First Folio version with passages from the 1605 quarto. The film was spectacularly photographed, with exterior scenes shot at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Branagh used flashbacks and fades, as he did in Henry V, to “explain” what is left unexplained in Shakespeare’s play, showing a torrid affair between Ophelia and Hamlet. The hall of mirrors in the grand palace (filmed in the studio) underscores the tension between the worlds of illusion and reality at the heart of the play: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems,’” says Hamlet to his mother (Act I, scene 2, line 76). A later offering is Branagh’s amusing musical comedy version of Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), in which he played Berowne and comic actor Nathan Lane played Costard.

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Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) paired a Black actor, Laurence Fishburne, as a dynamic Othello, with Irène Jacob as a plucky Desdemona, but the film as a whole—despite Branagh’s menacing Iago—was disappointingly stagy. Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1995) presented Ian McKellen as the evil Richard in a 1930s London teetering on the edge of fascism. Shakespeare’s language works well with the suave cultural codes of high society before World War II, while the whiff of decadence in the palace ballroom makes a perfect setting for the hoggish schemes of the master manipulator.

The line between “high” and “low” culture became increasingly blurred with director Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. The young lovers inhabit a world of drugs, cars, MTV, and violence. The high mimetic language of the play belies the ironic mise-en-scène. This melding of “high” and “low” continued not so much in the full-scale adaptations of Shakespeare as in the many derivative movies that displaced plots or snippets or echoes from Shakespeare into surprising contexts. Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) updated the Henriad’s court/tavern dualities by locating the film in Portland, Oregon, where the mayor’s prodigal son falls in with dissolute street people. Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard (1996) is a witty film essay about the history of Shakespeare’s Richard III. An earlier Branagh film, In the Bleak Midwinter (1995; U.S. title, A Midwinter’s Tale), explores Hamlet as it is rehearsed in an abandoned church by a band of struggling actors. Other derivative movies include the cerebral Last Action Hero (1993), which is Pirandello-like in its interplay between Hamlet and the film’s hero (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger); 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), based on The Taming of the Shrew; and The King Is Alive (2000), in which tourists stranded in a desert perform King Lear.

The early 1990s witnessed a spate of interest in Shakespeare’s comedies, not generally favored by filmmakers. Christine Edzard’s As You Like It (1992) displayed a gritty realism. Whereas Paul Czinner’s 1936 version, starring Olivier and Elisabeth Bergner, gloried in the “poetic realism” of designer Lazare Meerson, Edzard used a daring ploy in transforming Shakespeare’s forest of Arden into a hobo jungle in East London.

Trevor Nunn followed his notable television achievements—with Janet Suzman in Antony and Cleopatra (first broadcast in 1974) and Judi Dench and McKellen in Macbeth (first broadcast in 1979)—with a splendid Twelfth Night (1996). Shot in Cornwall, it enfolds the fragile world of Illyria within the nostalgic atmosphere of a Chekhovian comedy.

Two major versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first directed by Adrian Noble and the second by Michael Hoffman, were released in 1996 and 1999. In Noble’s flawed film, the audience experiences the action through the eyes of a small boy who dreams about the play. This trope dates at least to Jane Howell’s BBC televised production of Titus Andronicus (1985), and it persists in Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999). Despite some sublime visual moments, Noble’s movie is unsatisfying—neither transgressive enough in its homoerotic innuendos nor regressive enough to suit those who prefer a more innocent approach.

Hoffman’s version removed the play from Shakespeare’s Athens to a fin-de-siècle setting in northern Italy. The film’s musical score begins conventionally enough with the incidental music by Mendelssohn but yields to an anachronistic yet delightful medley of airs from Italian grand opera. Like a true New Woman of the 1890s, feisty Helena rides a bicycle, as do other characters. The effervescent music for the ballroom scene in Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata enlivens the townspeople’s afternoon promenade in the village square. Hoffman’s lovely movie is also a lesson in art history; the film’s designer, Luciana Arrighi, drew inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculptures, Etruscan relics, and Greek mythology.

At the turn of the 21st century, John Madden’s costume movie Shakespeare in Love (1998) presented a heavily fictionalized version of Shakespeare’s life and times. Its witty screenplay, by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, portrays Will Shakespeare (played by Joseph Fiennes) as a starving young hack with a terrible case of writer’s block, struggling to write an absurd play called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. The farcical plot, however, conceals a substrata of learned in-jokes playing on such matters as Shakespeare’s literary debt to Christopher Marlowe and, through the young playwright’s doodling, the various signatures that are attributed to him. A vicious adolescent who enjoys feeding mice to cats turns out to be the macabre Jacobean playwright John Webster. When Shakespeare’s love, Viola De Lesseps (played by Gwyneth Paltrow), cross-dressed as a male actor, auditions before the playwright at the Rose Theatre, she uses verses from Two Gentlemen of Verona (“What light is light, if Sylvia be not seen?” [Act III, scene 1, line 174]) and for a few numinous moments reasserts the supremacy of word over image.

Two versions of Shakespeare’s most violent play, Titus Andronicus, appeared in 1999 as if to affirm that apocalypse would attend the turn of the century. The first of these, directed by Christopher Dunne, was described by its marketers as “a savage epic of brutal revenge.” The film is a Götterdämmerung marked by beheading, amputation, and stabbing, but Shakespeare’s language has been kept meticulously intact.

The second version, Titus, was offered by the theatrical director Taymor, who had staged the play Off-Broadway in 1994. She collaborated with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli and others to make brilliant Fellini-like images out of Shakespeare’s lurid melodrama. In the film Taymor’s haikulike montages blur the line between illusion and reality, making the savagery aesthetically bearable. Anthony Hopkins played Titus, Jessica Lange a passionate Tamora, and Alan Cumming the decadent and utterly villainous Saturninus.

Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), starring Ethan Hawke, replaced the Danish court with the Denmark Corporation in Manhattan. Elsinore is a nearby luxury hotel. Hawke played a surly Prince Hamlet disgusted by his stepfather’s greed and his mother’s veneer of innocence. An amateur filmmaker, Hamlet lives in a world of television and cinema, delivering the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in the Action aisle of a video store. In one of several whimsical touches, while jetting to England Hamlet discovers Claudius’s orders for his execution on the hard drive of a laptop stored in the luggage bin over the sleeping Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

When all is said and done, this flourishing body of work is a singular testament to Shakespeare’s universality and humanity. More than 400 years have passed since he put quill to paper, yet, centuries after he first brought them to life on the small outdoor stage near the River Thames, Shakespeare’s scenes, characters, and poetry continue to fuel a rich industry for film, literary, and music scholars and critics. Ultimately, of course, Shakespeare’s commercial value rests on his immeasurable ability, then and now, to captivate readers, music and theater lovers, filmmakers, and moviegoers alike in his own “strong toil of grace.” (See the selected filmography.)