Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

(1960, Hamlet), and Ran (1985, King Lear); and even Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’hiver (1992, The Winter’s Tale), in the course of which the heroine sees a representation of Shakespeare’s play and changes her life.

      Anticipating the success of their Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), Warner Brothers made an eccentric twenty-minute promotional film in which a screenwriter falls asleep and visions appear. Hamlet, for example, performs a jazzy dance sequence backed by a group of Hamlettes. Finally Shakespeare himself appears, asking, “Is it for this that I spilled so much magic ink?” and Hamlet concludes, “Today the screenplay is the thing.”⁴ Variations on the theme of updating Shakespeare are endless. In an amusing essay for the New Statesman, Ed Smith, a former cricketer turned critic, wrote, “I remember my parents’ friends telling me that if Shakespeare had been alive in the 1960s, he’d have been a pop star. Now, it’s more likely he would be writing television dramas for HBO.”⁵ In contrast, Stan Hayward, writer of short films like Small Talk and When I’m Rich and of the television cartoon series Henry’s Cat, made the following deliberately contrarian statement:

      For certain Shakespeare would not have gone into TV. Writing for TV is not very creative, and is bogged down in all sorts of conditions about budgets, deadlines, legal issues, screen slots, and global distribution, apart from the fact that TV is often written by teams, and for certain will have much altered by the time it reaches the screen. Very few authors become screenwriters, though they may sometimes be consultants. Though Shakespeare’s work is well suited to Box Office movies, he would probably find the theater and radio more satisfying.⁶

      Another critic, Aljaž Krivec, writes on the same website, “Maybe he wouldn’t even be an artist. Perhaps he would seek his potential in venture capitalism, since he was kind of a businessman too, or maybe he would be the head of the BBC?”

      The aim of this book is not to offer another answer to the question of whether Shakespeare would have written for the screen if he were alive today (though I think he would) or even whether he would have become the head of BBC drama but rather to assess what various filmmakers and television directors have in fact made of his plays—at least, of those that contain major ingredients of the supernatural such as ghosts, witches, and fairies. That is a very different question from what Shakespeare himself would have done, though his presence obviously haunts all these films, even those that try the hardest to leave him behind.

      The ways in which each text was trimmed and restructured offer important clues to how each director approached his or her Shakespearean material. Length is an important film convention: most films are between 90 and 130 minutes long. Most screenplays for Shakespeare films therefore provide at best only some 50 percent of the original plays (the famous line in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet about “the two hours’ traffic of our stage” is probably not an accurate measure “in an age of sandglasses, sundials and inaccurate clockwork”).⁷ Exceptions are Peter Hall’s 1968 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 four-hour Hamlet (whereas in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet of 2000, only 35 percent survives). Olivier’s screenplay for his 1948 Hamlet (cowritten with Alan Dent) is a classic instance of the radical trimming that is normal in film adaptations.⁸ Olivier eliminated all the minor characters: not only Fortinbras, Voltemand, Reynaldo, and the English ambassador but even the Second Gravedigger and Hamlet’s “excellent good friends” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.⁹ Perhaps this final exclusion is what, some sixteen years later, provoked Sir Tom Stoppard to start writing what became his now-classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,¹⁰ successfully revived in London’s West End in 2017 with Daniel Radcliffe as the less intellectually curious of the two “friends” of Hamlet. Some film versions of Hamlet, as we shall see, even cut the Ghost, at least from what is visible on-screen. That poses a serious problem because film is primarily a visual medium. Olivier was famously dissatisfied with the Ghost and ended up voicing the part himself, though at a slower speed.

      The editor of Olivier’s film was Helga Cranston; her papers have recently been analyzed by Samuel Crowl.¹¹ When she first went to Denham studios to start work, she found that Olivier had blackened his face and stuck a lightbulb in his mouth. His idea was apparently to make the Ghost appear like a negative photographic image. She told him she had recently been to Paris and had seen Jean Louis Barrault’s stage production of the play (Barrault is best known now for his performance of the mime Baptiste in Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis [Children of Paradise], 1945). In Paris the Ghost was barely visible but was given a powerful stage presence by an amplified heartbeat. Olivier seized on the idea and made his Ghost a shadowy figure but with a muffled voice and a heartbeat that announces his arrival, both on the battlements and later in Gertrude’s closet.

      MAGIC

      Shakespeare seems to have always been fascinated with stage devices for presenting magic or the supernatural. Early in his career, in 1 Henry VI, he has Joan la Pucelle talk to fiends who (in the Folio stage directions) “walk and speak not,” “hang their heads,” “shake their heads,” and eventually “depart.” The Duchess of Gloucester and Margery Jourdain summon spirits that appear onstage and utter prophecies that come true in 2 Henry VI. And in his last plays, Cerimon in Pericles resurrects Thaïsa with the help of spells, napkins, and fire, while in Henry VIII there is (in Folio 4.2) “The Vision,” in which a sleeping Queen Katherine is visited by six white-robed figures wearing golden vizards; these masked visitors bow, dance, and hold a garland over her head. In the later plays, especially the romances, which could use the new (1610–11) indoor artificially lighted Blackfriars Theatre as well as the Globe, he exploited the contemporary popularity of magic for the miracles of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest and used masque effects for the supernatural, as in the harpies’ intervention to remove the banquet and in the descent of Jupiter on an eagle in Cymbeline.

      These examples suggest, as does the presence of both high and low culture in his plays, that Shakespeare might have been happy to learn from the tradition of trucage (trickery), even from horror movies or melodrama, just as Orson Welles and Kurosawa did in their versions of Macbeth and as occurs in some filmic versions of Dream and The Tempest. In the latter, Prospero, who also alludes to Ovid’s witch Medea (5.1.33–50), would then be Shakespeare’s final version not only of the Renaissance magus in all his ambivalence but also of the playwright as illusionist.¹² The play begins with a storm that soon turns out to be faked.

      Prospero-Shakespeare is often compared with the famous Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer and magician. He was a highly ambivalent figure, both medieval and modern, using pure mathematics but often for superstitious or occult purposes. He had trouble with the authorities at various times, but Dee first came under suspicion not for some egregious use of alchemical magic or even for using incomprehensible mathematical symbols but for his role in a student play. At Cambridge, as a budding magician would, he invented a special effect, a giant flying beetle, for a student production of Aristophanes’s Peace.¹³ Whether the authorities regarded Dee’s trick as physically or spiritually threatening is unclear, but they apparently arrested him, and not for the last time. Elizabeth, however, had such trust in Dee that she had asked him to choose the date for her coronation. Add to this composite and interestingly subversive image of the Elizabethan magus those “jugglers” of the street corner and popular stage admired by Reginald Scot in his Discovery of Witchcraft but denounced by Ben Jonson in the Induction to Bartholemew Fair,¹⁴ and we can begin to imagine how the Shakespeare who invented Prospero the masque-maker and Autolycus the trickster might have enjoyed making movies.

      ILLUSION

      There are so many good books in print about films of Shakespeare’s plays that yet another must have an angle of its own. The thread that ties the following chapters together is the capacious concept of illusion. I use the term largely for the ways in which the art of making movies has exploited the special kinds of trickery, or trucage, that are peculiar to film and allow it to assert its difference from live theatre. The independence of movies from theatre is especially obvious in the ways these films represent the supernatural—fairies,