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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.
2. Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History, trans. Conley, Tom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 14Google Scholar.
3. Shakespeare, William, King Lear, ed. Muir, Kenneth (London: Methuen, 1972), Act 1, scene 1Google Scholar.
4. As well as Bristol's, Big Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar, an important study is Hawkes's, TerenceMeaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Taylor's, GaryReinventing Shakespeare (London: Hogarth Press, 1990Google Scholar) is also germane. To understand the global impact of meaning by Shakespeare, Viswanathan's, GauriMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989Google Scholar) is an important text.
5. “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport: Shakespeare and the cultural debate about moving pictures” Screen 31 (1990), 246Google Scholar.
6. Ibid., 247. In this connection, it was even claimed that the actors in the Vitagraph Julius Caesar were wearing costumes previously worn in theatrical productions. More generally, the tradition of Shakespearean production in the United States of America was considered a legitimate source of credibility for the emergent film product. (Rather ironically, early Shakespeare-on-film relied heavily on the theatrical product from which film in general was to steal much of its audience.)
7. Ibid., 248.
8. Ibid., 249.
9. “Text, Eyes, and Videotape: Screening Shakespeare Scripts” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.2 (Summer 1995), 237Google Scholar.
10. Big Time Shakespeare, 49.
11. Ibid., 90.
12. “The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet and the Lady in the Dark” in Shakespeare Reread: The Text in New Contexts, ed McDonald, Russ (Ithaca and London: Comell University Press, 1994), 285–286Google Scholar.
13. Ibid., 286.
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20. Review of Godard's, King Lear, Time, 1 February 1988, 71Google Scholar. Stam, Robert has argued in Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985Google Scholar) that the cameo appearances by authors are a feature of all self-reflexive fictions and that they function as devices whereby the self-conscious author can realize “comic epiphanies in the created universe” (185–86). Godard's Professor Pluggy, King Lear's Fool recast, would seem to offer a very ironic and disgusted version of such an epiphanic moment.
21. Jameson, Fredric, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 162Google Scholar.
22. “The Cultural Ecology of Waste,” Plenary Address to the Canadian Association for American Studies conference, Vancouver, October 1995.
23. Alisa Solomon comments by way of reference of Jan Kott's description of King Lear as a play with no characters where tragedy has been replaced by the grotesque: “Perhaps that's why, in the disjunctive late 1980s, film and theater directors as varied as Tadashi Suzuki, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Wilson had decided it was time to do Lear” (Re-dressing the Canon, 135).
24. Window Shopping, 179. I have also borrowed the term “subjective timelessness” from Friedberg While she invokes the phrase as part of a more abstract discussion (ibid., 177), it conveys perfectly what Cannon must have seen in the pairing of Godard with Shakespeare—the Shakespeare/modernist quality of timelessness wrought by the subjective avant-garde auteur director.
25. May 1988, 301.
26. Hoberman, J., rev. of Godard's King Lear, Village Voice, 26 January 1988, 53Google Scholar.
27. “In Search of Nothing: Mapping King Lear” in Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video (London: Routledge, 1997), 144Google Scholar.
28. Fried, , The Rise and Fall of the American Gangster (New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1980), ixGoogle Scholar. As Rothwell notes, Don Learo is here quoting the words of gangster/folk hero Meyer Lansky cited in Fried'S text (see Rothwell, “In Search of Nothing,” 144, for a detailed discussion of Godard's use of Fried).
29. Image, Music, Text, trans. Heath, Stephen (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977), 65Google Scholar. The emphases are in the original.
30. “Resurrected Images: Godard's King Lear,” Performing Arts Journal 11.1/3 (1988), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31. Robinson continues: “As though impatient with the easy talk of those who profess concern for cultural health, Godard does the manual labor any act of restoration entails. He transforms his film into a vessel for storage—one anxiously positioned between property and loss” (20). While I think Robinson is absolutely right in naming the anxiety cathected on to the film as object, it would seem more accurate to see the film as invested in the costs involved in the manual labor rather than the labor itself.
32. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1990), xivGoogle Scholar.
33. Conn MacCabe, “Preface” to Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, xiii.
34. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 131Google Scholar.
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37. “Matter and Memory” Scope Magazine: European Magazine for Electronic Audio-Visual Creation (November 1992/January 1993), 18.
38. “Text, Eyes, and Videotape,” 244.
39. This last section abbreviates my argument outlined in Performing Nostalgia, 67 ff.
40. “In Search of Nothing,” 143.
41. “Preface” to The Geopolitical Aesthetic, xii.
42. The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 163.
43. Ibid., 163.
44. Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 67Google Scholar.
45. The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 163.
46. Big Time Shakespeare, 90.
47. Ibid., 90–91. I agree with Bristol's reason for Shakespeare retaining currency; the same, I would suggest, is true for Godard. Once again, this demonstrates the extraordinary appeal of this project for Cannon.
