Shakespeare's Golden Age

...Peter Sellars is there as "William Shakespeare Jr...

...But it's there even in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), where Romeo and Juliet are made the victims of the rulers of their world (as university students of the late 1960s saw themselves) rather than as guilty accelerators of their own fateful ending...

...and Lear as a Churchillian figure in full command of himself—even when his wits wander...

...Branagh's Hamlet is not without pratfalls and slip-ups, but it is successful— simply because he lets the play be, cutting little (the film lasts over four hours) and playing it straight, without any particular reading of the "essence" of Hamlet's character...

...BY MARGARET BOERNER Within a hundred years of his death in 1616, Shakespeare's "bardola-tors" were already celebrating him as the Swan of Avon...

...You may want to rent them before seeing Richard III, so that you can follow the story...

...Because that uniform is the least Fascist-looking...

...Taymor has made a picture whose tone is perfect from start to finish and whose look is exotic, imaginative, and beautiful...

...For the same reason, Branagh uses a number of American actors...

...It was for such commercial reasons that the first film of Shakespeare was made...

...But Shakespeare's greatest era is now...

...Our sense of the filmic possibilities of Shakespeare coincides with the reconstruction of his Globe Theatre, more or less as he might have known it...

...Brode's breezily semiliterate book is a kind of expanded movie guide, complete with solecisms and mixed-up clichés, and Rothwell's is not without jargon and Hollywood speak...

...This is seen especially in Peter Hall's 1969 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the setting is cold and mechanical...

...After World War II, before the last decade or so, it was rare for Shakespeare to be played straight...

...We all quote him, knowingly or not, and some of his characters are better known than many historical figures: Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, in particular...

...Kenneth Branagh wants to make the plays "popular entertainment...

...It is certainly true Shakespeare has been institutionalized...

...Richard III as a lisping "freak of nature...

...In 1899 William Dickson, a collaborator of Thomas Edison, enlisted the actor and director Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree to help record excerpts from King John, then playing on stage in London...

...One remembers the Duke and the Dauphin's mangled pastiche in Huckleberry Finn...

...We are in the Golden Age of Shakespeare...

...Godard's outré approach is not unknown...

...But there have been seventy-seven of these Shakespearean movies in theaters and on television in the last fifteen years...

...Eliot's notion that Hamlet's suffering lacks an "objective correlative" is ignored, as is the notion that Hamlet is ensnared by an Oedipus complex...

...Henry V as a heroic preserver of England from destruction (by the Nazis...

...He is already aware of the ironies in a given situation and of the meaning of what is unspoken...

...Loncraine's Richard III is said to be "like an Oliver Stone movie, only classier...

...Even many new productions of Shakespeare still look like stage versions, with close-ups...

...Interestingly, the least corrupt characters in the play are dressed in Royal Air Force uniforms...

...intended for the enjoyment of ordinary people rather than as elitist escapism...

...His 1996 Oscar nomination for Hamlet, however, went to Branagh instead...

...The RSC pretends to be confused by Loncraine's view of the plot: "We finally attributed our confusion to the fact that we had missed the first two movies in the trilogy—Richard I and Richard II...

...The movie has long ago lived down the "indignation meetings" in London over the casting of vulgar American actors in filming Shakespeare...

...Shakespeare's plays have strong plots with plenty of dramatic action— disguises, stabbings, drownings, battles, shipwrecks, murders, suicides, sleepwalking, ulterior motives, pomp and circumstance, and a multitude of foreign settings...

...In 1999, we had A Midsummer Night's Dream, an adaptation with teenagers of The Taming of the Shrew, a Hamlet, two more versions of Macbeth, and two of Titus Andronicus...

...We are living when it has never been easier to see his plays, study them, and argue about them...

...And the effect of this astonishing mishmash has been to rescue Shakespeare from his position as our leading dead white male and bring his plays back to the position they held in his own age: popular entertainment...

...Now, directors have largely come to let Shakespeare be Shakespeare...

...All the theories about what his plays mean seem to have canceled each other out...

...free of any actory mannerisms and the baggage of strutting and bellowing that accompanies the least effective Shakespearean performances____We wanted audiences to react to the story as if it were in the here and now and important to them...

...In fact, the most amazing thing about Shakespeare is how he continues to speak to later ages...

...Only in the patriotic Henry V, combined with William Walton's splendid music, does the static presentation work—perhaps because the play is all pageantry anyway...

...Stanley Tucci is a grown up and virile Puck, Michelle Pfeiffer makes a predictably enchanting Titania, the actors playing Hyppolyta and Theseus are dignified, Kevin Kline is both funny and touching as Bottom, and Calista Flockhart's Ally McBeal character comes into her own as Helena...

...You can see the advantages of such "straight" productions when you watch Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987) in a script by Norman Mailer, which "deconstructs" Lear (Burgess Meredith) into a Las Vegas casino boss...

...Besides Lemmon and Heston, Branagh uses in Hamlet Gérard Depardieu, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams—leading to a Cecil B. DeMille type of big casting of a "movie-movie...

...Pacino and a cast of fine actors take a much-performed war horse and make it interesting and comprehensible to the audience, as well as illustrating how to listen to Shakespeare in general and how to think about acting Shakespeare...

...The Elizabethan stage was a fluid medium, and Shakespeare did not need to tie himself to any particular locale and time (as did, say, Ibsen and Beckett, for whose "well-made" plays time and the physical setting are integral...

...A pair of new books tell the story of Shakespeare on film: Douglas Brode's Shakespeare in the Movies and Kenneth Rothwell's A History of Shakespeare on Screen...

...Even Orson Welles didn't succeed with his 1965 rendering of Falstaff's story, Chimes at Midnight...

...Telling the story of a series of bloody revenges that culminate in the villains' being served one of their family members baked in a pie at a banquet in their honor, Titus can easily escape the director and end up as farce...

...Not surprisingly, the tone of Shakespeare plays changed according to the era in which they were filmed...

...But the Bardo-clasts have been unable to make lasting headway against Shakespeare...

...Since World War II—some three hundred and fifty years after the playwright's death—more people have seen his plays on screen than on stage...

...When Olivier's films of Shakespeare's plays were pretty much all we had, there was a constant call that he do more of them...

...We did not want them to feel they were in some cultural church...

...The full-blooded abandon...

...The Reduced Shakespeare Company, a comedy group that specializes in doing "all thirty-six plays in two hours, including intermission" on the London stage, parodies critics of recent Shakespeare filming...

...She makes Titus Andronicus what it probably was to Shakespeare's audience, a cautionary tale of the wheel of fortune...

...Loncraine's Richard III is set in the 1930s of fast cars, jazzy music, jackboots, and perplexed hereditary royals, with a sardonic Ian McKellen acting the part of Richard as he had just done on the London stage...

...For all of Richard's analysis of his own motives, he is a standard villain—descended straight from the medieval Vice—and the plot of the rise and fall of a villain dominates Lon-craine's version...

...Scholarly critics have been harder to ignore, but at this point Shakespeare at the movies is unbeatable...

...The modern filmings of Shakespeare are sometimes vulgar, silly, and mangled...

...In the 1960s and 1970s—eras of anxiety and irony, influenced by the Vietnam War and Jan Kott's book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964)—Shakespeare was filmed as a master of irony...

...Brode's method of proceeding play by play requires him to restart with each entry, while Rothwell's chronological discussion better coincides with our sense of progress in filmmaking...

...Dick Powell, and Anita Louise...

...Nonetheless, each author knows the world of film well, and their volumes are worth having for the wealth of information they contain...

...Alien," a film editor we see at the end...

...Seeing them in modern dress—in the uniforms of generals, bishops, admirals, princes, queens—makes the corruption of society seem less remote...

...I always like the ballsiness of American film acting," he says...

...Shakespeare would almost certainly not have achieved or retained the dominance he now enjoys," claims Gary Taylor in Reinventing Shakespeare, were it not that his eminence was "the fruit not of his genius but of the virility of British imperialism, which propagated the English language on every continent...

...Another contemporary, Michael Hoffman (known for his work on Restoration) directed A Midsummer Night's Dream...

...Both Brode and Rothwell point out that Shakespeare's plays—or at least scenes from them—have always been popular with the working classes in America...

...Its great popularity in London is testimony to the attractiveness of the fluid Elizabethan stage and to Shakespeare's continued appeal as popular entertainment...

...Meyer Lansky and Richard Nixon feature prominently...

...But Branagh's approach represents the triumph of Shakespeare the film writer...

...Follow that with Lon-craine's Fascist Richard III, and one has had a lively, intelligent, and spiritually satisfying Shakespeare experience...

...For a long time—with notable exceptions—Shakespeare continued to be filmed as though still on stage...

...Looking for Richard, Al Pacino's film about Richard III, is a good introduction to Shakespeare on screen (and on stage for that matter...

...There have been complaints about its setting in an imaginary Fascist England, but the setting brings out the complex relations among the characters nicely...

...Thus the difficulty of filmed staging—the actors declaiming in set poses the words while the camera looks straight at them—turns out to be solved, and the "ancient" words prove not to be a problem for the audience...

...Molly Ringwald deadpans Cordelia, reciting her lines by rote...

...They are often wrongheaded—taking an Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...

...The more successful of recent directors have been less willing to impose on the plays a strict interpretation...

...The bourgeoisie were shocked (as was Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray) "at the idea of seeing Shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place" as a music hall...

...And some of the Americans do seem put there only to make Branagh's films saleable—Michael Keaton stupidly overacts Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and Jack Lemmon looks positively frightened as the watch in Hamlet...

...But Charlton Heston is a perfect Player King in Hamlet, and Denzel Washington makes a noble and generous Duke in Much Ado About Nothing...

...Just in 1998, we had The Tempest, Shakespeare in Love, Twelfth Night, and two versions of Macbeth...

...All this may sound as though Loncraine were forcing a single interpretation upon the play, but in fact, Richard III is not a play much concerned with the psychology of its characters...

...But they have not worn well...

...A famous staging of Antony and Cleopatra with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in the 1950s solved the problem of Shakespeare's more than thirty scene changes by using a gigantic rotating set in which the buildings of Rome could be seen peeking up at the back of Egypt...

...It has enchanting sets, and the director knows how to make the plot amusing rather than solemn...

...Another Fascist setting for Shakespeare is Taymor's Titus Andronicus (1999) set in Italy in an empire-building Rome, mostly in Mussolini's "square coliseum...

...Some twenty years ago, the deconstructionists delighted in pointing out the lacunae in all writing, including Shakespeare's...

...She is the director who staged The Lion King on Broadway, to great acclaim, and has a profound visual intelligence...

...The struggle of early movies, Rothwell argues, "was to break out of the prison house of the proscenium stage on nearby Broadway and make a film that did not look as if it had been photographed with a camera nailed to the floor in the sixth-row orchestra...

...The "best major Hollywood Shakespeare movie" was an early exception...

...This has always been a mug's game anyway...

...Othello as a black-faced vaudevillian...

...Godard evidently sees Lear as an allegory of corrupt American capitalism, and the play is so totally deconstructed that it is shattered into pieces...

...Because the RAF saved Britain from the Germans...

...He beats them at their own game...

...The semantic vacuum was taken up by the race-class-and-gender crowd, who sought to make Shakespeare just another writer caught in the contradictions of his age...

...Lowbrow stunts in the film have alienated the more refined type of moviegoer—Hamlet swings on a chandelier to kill off Laertes, and a statue of Hamlet's father loses its head...

...When the setting and the characters are made coherent by classy production values, we follow Shakespeare easily...

...Modern film stock, lenses, and Steadicams can render that fast action in real settings—putting us where Shakespeare sends our imaginations...

...Incidentally, this is another reason why Hollywood is so hot on Shakespeare: the Bard loved sequels...

...The British have always been less insecure than Americans about movies of Shakespeare's plays but even more unwilling to experiment...

...unlikely interpretation and beating the play to death with it...

...Woody Allen plays the Fool, but stormed off the set so early that his part was made into that of "Mr...

...By breaking the proscenium arch, however, film can return us to something analogous to the Elizabethan stage...

...Following this tradition, scenes from Shakespeare's plays were filmed as early as there were moving pictures and were shown at fairgrounds and music halls as entertainment alongside Punch and Judy and freak shows...

...he already knows the self-betrayals and lacunae with which we justify ourselves to ourselves...

...This will come as a surprise to Americans, who would have said the British win any acting contests hands down...

...Olivier plays Hamlet as Freudian man, fixated on his mother...

...All of the films starring Laurence Olivier— which stretch from Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948) to The Merchant of Venice (1973) and King Lear (1984)—show the actors moving in a small space, making speeches at each other, in spite of "filmic" costuming and sets...

...But the generically static filming of Shakespeare prevailed for many decades, even in pretty good films like George Cukor's 1936 Romeo and Juliet and Joseph Mankiewicz and John Houseman's 1953 Julius Caesar (with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony...

...From Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), Much Ado about Nothing (1993), and Hamlet (1996) to Richard Lon-craine's Richard III (1995) to Julie Tay-mor's Titus Andronicus (1999) to Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), we are seeing a new, old Shakespeare on film...

...In a certain sense, Shakespeare was writing scripts that had to wait almost four hundred years for the means of their production...

...Shylock as a medieval caricature of a Jew...

...The fact that Shakespeare scholarship has been essentially completed has something to do with it, as does the easy availability of cheap editions, the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre in London, and the mounting of popular Shakespeare festivals everywhere from Stratford, Ontario, to Sante Fe, New Mexico...

...This is Shakespeare's first play and his most violent (although Lear runs a close second...

...Its cast included a number of Hollywood stars and soon-to-be stars: Olivia de Havilland, Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown, James Cagney (as Bottom...

...Max Reinhardt directed A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935 with such panache and feeling for it as a movie, that it is still enormously enjoyable...

...Eschewing solemn posturing, the actors move in the Renaissance towns and rooms of Italy—wearing late Victorian shirtwaists and trousers...

...In later ages, this became a problem, as theaters adapted the modern stage under a proscenium arch...

...The single most important cause of Shakespeare's contemporary glory, however, is film...

...This latest filming is more awkward than the classic Reinhardt version of 1935, but it has the technical advances since 1935 to help make its setting convincing...

...The making of "movie-movies" out of Shakespeare has not gone down well with traditionalists, who see it as a kind of American plot to take over his plays...

...Already scheduled for 2000 are an Othello called O, another Hamlet, and Love's Labour's Lost...

...Many have seen him only on screen...

...Traveling players recited speeches and soliloquies with more or less skill and fidelity...