Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

      

      SHAKESPEARE THE ILLUSIONIST

       SHAKESPEARE THE ILLUSIONIST

      MAGIC, DREAMS, AND THE SUPERNATURAL ON FILM

      NEIL FORSYTH

      OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

      ATHENS

      Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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      © 2019 by Ohio University Press

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       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Forsyth, Neil, 1944- author.

      Title: Shakespeare the illusionist : magic, dreams, and the supernatural on film / Neil Forsyth.

      Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2018045766| ISBN 9780821423363 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446478 (pdf)

      Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Film adaptations. | Dreams in motion pictures. | Illusion in motion pictures. | Supernatural in motion pictures. | Film adaptations--History and criticism.

      Classification: LCC PR3093 .F67 2019 | DDC 791.43/6--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045766

      CONTENTS

       Acknowledgments

       Introduction. From Stage to Screen

       PART ONE: FILM LANGUAGE

       1. Silent Ghosts, Speaking Ghosts: Movies about Movies

       2. Méliès and the Pioneers

       PART TWO: SHAKESPEARE FILMS

       3. “Stay, Illusion”

       4. Supernatural Comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest

       5. “The Most Unfortunate Major Film Ever Produced” Shakespeare and the Talkies

       6. Ghosts and Courts The Openings of Hamlet

       7. Macbeth and the Supernatural

       Conclusion. A New Hybrid: Taymor’s Dream

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      A lot has happened in the “Shakespeare and Film” world since I started writing this book. New films of Macbeth, for one thing, keep appearing, and good books too. I have learned much from the work of friends and colleagues with whom I have tried out ideas or discussed some of the films—I think especially of Pascale Aebischer, Judith Buchanan, Samuel Crowl, Lukas Erne, José Ramón Díaz Fernández, Matthias Heim, Russell Jackson, the late Kenneth Rothwell, Katherine Rowe, and Richard Waswo. Someone—I cannot recall who—happily alerted me to Jenny Sager’s recent book, which covers some of the same ground in film studies and early modern theatre, even though her focus is not on Shakespeare but on Robert Greene. I am grateful to the others who have helped me keep up: friends and colleagues such as Indira Ghose, Elizabeth Kaspar (who carefully read the whole manuscript), Anna Swärdh, Digby Thomas, and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (whose casual remark launched the whole enterprise). These (mostly) kind people have not always agreed with what I claim in this book, and none of them is responsible for the views, heretical or otherwise, expressed. But it is very pleasant to write down their names and think about each one as I do so. I am also grateful to the readers at Ohio University Press whose careful and detailed responses I have tried, where possible, to incorporate into the final draft of this book. Jacqueline Frey and her colleagues at the Centre Informatique in Lausanne labored long to help me cope with what seemed suddenly like an insurmountable computer problem. Christophe Metzger, also at the CI, has always been willing to help.

      Parts of certain chapters were published in the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, in Shakespeare et le cinéma, in the Paris-based Études Anglaises, in a festschrift for a colleague, and in the Wadsworth edition of Macbeth. I am grateful for permission to reuse them, although they have undergone considerable changes since their first appearance.

      INTRODUCTION

       From Stage to Screen

      “IF SHAKESPEARE WERE alive today, he would be writing screenplays.” This remark, or something like it, has often been attributed to Sir Laurence Olivier. Barbara Hodgdon says that her colleague Jim Burnstein credits his teacher, Russell Fraser, but she allows that Olivier was probably the first to remark that if Shakespeare were around now he would be writing new television comedies or soap opera parts for aging actors. Certainly by the late 1960s or early 1970s, the idea that Shakespeare wrote “cinematically” was circulating in academic culture, spawning courses titled Shakespeare on Film or (eventually) Shakespeare and Film.¹

      Julie Taymor’s film of Titus Andronicus opened in December 1999. In the first sentence of his New York Times review, Jonathan Bate offered a slightly different version of the remark but without attribution: “If William Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing and directing movies.”² Indeed, Shakespeare has been called, bizarrely, the most popular screenwriter in Hollywood.³ There are not only film or television versions of all of his works but also multiple versions of many. Numerous spin-offs adapt Shakespeare’s plays, often unrecognizably; these include West Side Story and Warm Bodies (both Romeo and Juliet), Kiss Me Kate and 10 Things I Hate about You (both The Taming of the Shrew), The Lion King (Hamlet), O (Othello), Scotland PA (Macbeth), and She’s the Man (Twelfth Night). There is even The Tale of Arcite and Palamon (1998), a ten-minute Vimeo version of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play Shakespeare cowrote with John Fletcher that had not been filmed before. Adaptations in languages other than English flourish around the globe, such as Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian films of Hamlet (1964) and King Lear