The videotape, whether it represents a Shakespeare film, a made-for-television production or a transfer of a theatrical version, has become the means by which most academics and students study a Shakespeare play. To anyone interested in performances of Hamlet for instance, the RSC shops and catalogues now offer, alongside the expected videos of Olivier's, Zeffirelli's or Branagh's films, videotapes of live stage performances, from Tony Richardson's 1969 production of the play with Nicol Williamson, to John Gielgud's 1964 New York mise-en-scène with Richard Burton. (A film of this had been shot at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre to be shown at a few cinemas across the USA; it was restored in 1995 'for domestic and home viewing'.) No catalogue of available videos of the play includes a version actually designed for the small screen, since none of the BBC titles are currently licensed for home video distribution, but the would-be viewer can always fall back on the half-hour long cartoons provided by The Animated Tales, a very successful series of videos (complete with study guides), geared to the needs of teenagers confronted with a Shakespeare play on their exam syllabus. This series, which recalls Charles and Mary Lamb's similar enterprise of popularisation of Shakespeare's Tales for a public of readers, has so far been translated into thirty-seven languages.

Even such a rapid survey is sufficient to indicate that Shakespeare multimedia is alive and well. Thanks largely to the vogue of new technologies and of video recordings, it is gradually taking over a good part of the Shakespeare industry, which now rests upon a very active educational market. Back in the 1980s, the production of a complete televised Shakespeare by the BBC was already motivated (and financially supported) by the possibility of providing video-libraries of the Shakespeare canon to universities (particularly in America) supposedly deprived of the real thing in the theatre.

With the publication of Poems in 1842 Alfred Tennyson became not only famous but also Poet Laureate in waiting. One poem in particular, “Locksley Hall” (which he wrote in 1837-38), with its eager readiness to imagine a future bright for “the Federation of the world” (AT 128), endorsed the new industrial age as one of heady promise. “Let the great world,” says his speaker, “spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change” (182). Although, as critics have often pointed out, the image that Tennyson chose to embody this change was inaccurate - train wheels did not run in “grooves” - the ardor with which he looked to the beaconing distance seemed very much of a piece with the spirit of the age. As Thomas Carlyle might well have observed, such ardor was only too plainly - and betrayingly - a “sign of the times.”

Almost half a century later in 1886, the aged Tennyson, who had been Poet Laureate since 1850, decided to write a progress report on that early optimistic vision.

Film historians have tended, naturally enough, to think of movies based on Shakespeare's works as forming a distinct genre. Such films use his words, characters and plots; they are part of performance history of his plays; their rich language stands apart from standard Hollywood dialogue; and they were, at least back in the days of the studio system, perceived as 'prestige' works, distinct from the standard mass-market film product. It has often seemed, in Geoffrey O'Brien's words, as if 'there are regular movies, and then there are Shakespeare movies'.

Recent Shakespeare films have so openly and conspicuously embraced traditional film forms that the distinction has become quite obviously untenable. But even Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, who applaud this development, speak of a past era of ‘direct’ or ‘straight Shakespeare’, a model they associate with the efforts of Olivier and Welles (and whose last gasp they identify as Stuart Burge’s 1970 Julius Caesar), which has been succeeded by a period they celebrate, in which the playwright couples creatively with popular culture.

For literary critics who anticipated or experienced the devastation of the First World War, there was something peculiarly “Victorian” - and peculiarly suspect - about patriotic poetry. By 1910, even Hugh Walker, who had devoted several pages of The Greater Victorian Poets (1895) to praise Alfred Tennyson's patriotic writing, judged Victoria's former Poet Laureate as “too prone to echo back the thoughts of his own time and country” - and thus, suggestively, as an ideological ally of Germany. “Patriotism is good,” wrote Walker, “but it is not a pure good when there goes with it a hard, unsympathetic tone of mind towards other races; and in Tennyson we hear rather too much of 'the blind hysterics of the Celt,' and 'the red fool-fury of the Seine.' He lived under the sway of the Teutonic idea, and already the Teutonic idea is discredited.”

“An Englishman taking himself seriously,” G.K. Chesterton wrote of Tennyson in 1913, was “an awful sight.”Such claims were not entirely tongue-in-cheek, as Virginia Woolf'sTo the Lighthouse (1927) underscores. In Woolf's novel, as Mr. Ramsay begins to declaim Tennyson’s famous “Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) in a voice “between a croak and a song,” what was “ridiculous” suddenly becomes “alarming.” Shouting “Boldly we rode and well” (AT 23), Ramsay charges his guest Lily Briscoe, nearly overturning her easel - and with it, the art that stands at the novel's center.

In 1844, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wanted to write “a poem of a new class,” one that included “[c]onversations & events” and “philosophical dreaming & digression.” She also wanted to purify George Gordon Byron's sexually contentious poetry, to write “a Don Juan, without the mockery & impurity.”But this moral aim, while acknowledging her wish to elude the precedents created by Byron, was less important than her larger formal purpose. This desire to compose a new poetic form, one that would adapt established styles to contemporary needs, and particularly one that would combine narrative and speculative commentary with the requirements of aesthetic unity, typifies many Victorian poets. It led to widespread poetic play that transgressed boundaries between the three classical genres identified by the Greeks - epic (or narrative), drama, and lyric. And in the twentieth century it led in turn to standard critical discussions of Victorian experiments with form.

Established accounts of experimentation tend to work within a critical legacy that associates experimental writing with internal features of structure and style. More recent critical practice, however, directs our attention to broader cultural contexts and particularly to the potential for cultural critique. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, for instance, distinguish two types of critique: institutional critique, which aims to expose the conditions and principles which govern existing institutions and cultural practices, and transformative critique, which aims not only to question the conditions which sustain existing institutions but to change cultural practice.

In the 1802 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth states that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”In other words, he presents poetry as an informing principle: a “breath” or “spirit” that gives contingent physical attributes, the discrete facts of science, an identifiable face. Although many Continental scientists of the time - notably the German Naturphilosophen - shared this Romantic metaphysic, the strong tradition of British empiricism was far less receptive to it. The economic and technological successes of the Industrial Revolution vindicated the type of empiricist research based upon sensory experience and practical experiment that Francis Bacon had theorized in the early seventeenth century. Doctrines of positivism, which maintain that the information which science extracts from sense-perception is the only nonanalytic knowledge possible, exercised a powerful influence over British intellectual life from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. They led science to break its traditional ties to philosophy and religion and to emerge as the paradigmatic form of knowledge. Poetry enters the Victorian era endowed by Romanticism with a metaphysical and cultural authority that it struggles to preserve in the face of such scientism. The present chapter explores the ways in which a range of poems reify, reinflect, or reject both this familiar narrative of combat and contrasting fortunes, and its ideological underpinning: namely, the hierarchical distinction between poetry and science that Wordsworth asserts in his “Preface.”

Franco Zeffirelli's contribution to the Shakespeare on screen canon continues to receive considerable commentary even though his last film of Shakespeare, Hamlet, was made as long ago as 1990. Zeffirelli has made three films of Shakespeare's plays: The Taming of the Shrew (1966), Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Hamlet (1990). While each film clearly appropriates a particular cultural moment, they are stylistically similar in so far as they share an unmistakable operatic conception; it has been repeatedly observed that they make as much use of colour, movement and music as they do of Shakespeare's lines. Opera, for Zeffirelli, is the complete form: it combines dance, drama, poetry, music and the visual arts. His films of Shakespeare, similarly, unashamedly aim to appeal to all the senses. Their appeal is largely sensual rather than cerebral and in this the director achieves his ambition, in defiance of his critics, to make Shakespeare, as he says, even more popular.

In many respects, Zeffirelli’s screen interpretations of Shakespeare owe as much to travelogues as they do to the playtexts. Zeffirelli has no qualms about imposing his own tastes on to Shakespeare’s texts. Shakespeare is, for Zeffirelli, ‘a frustrated traveller’ with a desire to take his audience on a sight-seeing tour of Italy; and his union of Shakespeare with Italian Renaissance culture earned him the nickname, ‘Shakespirelli’. This ‘Italianisation’ of Shakespeare is precisely what happens in the films of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, where the attention to visual detail often detracts from the spoken word.

Olivier made his three Shakespeare films as the result of multiple promptings. Despite uneasiness about his own Orlando in the As You Like It film directed by Paul Czinner in 1936, he became interested in exploring the potential of the cinema for the presentation of Shakespeare's plays and he managed never to abandon the theatricality implicit in the plays in the films he directed. He was conscious, too, of the different and wider cinema audience to which he would be bringing Shakespeare, and which in the 1940s still retained 'its slight preponderance of women, its heavy working class bias and its very strong “youth” bias'. In the case of his first film, Henry V, there was, of course, also the persuasive power of the wartime Ministry of Information, anxious to promote a film which would boost national morale. This chapter will approach the films in the first instance through the diverse opinions of critics, in particular those of their first reviewers.

All Olivier’s films are remarkable for their constant oscillation between the cinematic and the theatrical, and their fusion of the two distinctly different dramatic languages. Not only does this arise from the unconscious instincts of Olivier the film maker, an indication of his claim to be an auteur, but there is, too, a conscious shifting between the elements of the two media. Some argue that this oscillation is less a distinguishing feature than a flaw. ‘Try as he would to be cinematic in his directing and acting’, Robert Hapgood has written, ‘Olivier often fell between the two stools of theatre and film . . . One must acknowledge that as a film director his blocking now seems static and stage-bound.’

As we mark the close of the first century of Shakespeare films, we might also mark out new directions for their study. Chief among them is an approach to Shakespeare films in the context of a rigorous historicising and politicising of media configurations, and a theoretical model capable of generating new approaches based upon them. The model suggested here would not be new to historians: to explore the effects upon Shakespearean actors and productions of critical junctures in media history, when the use of emerging, competing and dormant technologies reflects situations of crisis, defence, reciprocal influence, commercial interdependency and realignments among various branches of the entertainment industry. Such an approach, based on the assumption that no Shakespeare film can be studied apart from changes in other media, opens up research into productions and performances that were caught on the cusp of what we typically refer to as technological change. The phrase 'critical junctures' here replaces 'technological change' both to avoid implications of technological autonomy or determinism and to emphasise the reintroduction of technologies as a strategic and competitive practice, inseparable from specific political, economic and social interests. For the sake of brevity, these media con- figurations will be approached through the experiences of Shakespearean actors and directors as they succeeded or failed to adapt to them.

In fashioning their theatrical raw material into screenplays the makers of Shakespearean films have adopted strategies as diverse as the impulses behind their various projects. The wish to convey faithfully some of the perceived qualities of the chosen play has led to the adoption or rejection in varying degrees of the original's dramatic structure, language and character relationships. The Introduction to this Companion has already suggested some ways in which commercial considerations might not only influence the way a Shakespeare film is promoted, but stipulate outlines to which characterisation and narrative may conform. The example, for better or worse, of what has already been sold successfully is reflected in the affinities with film genre that Harry Keyishian discusses below (chapter 4). As Geoffrey O'Brien observed in February 1997 - when another flurry of new Shakespeare films had just been released - 'singular opportunities have been created, not to recapitulate, but to invent'.

In the study of film techniques a broad distinction can be made between films in which story-telling is effected by the montage of images, and which foreground the means by which this is done; and others which conceal the art which places dramatic scenes before the camera with an illusion of unobstructed and privileged access for the audience. Identified in particular with Hollywood before the 1960s, this latter style of ‘continuity editing’ came to be accepted as a norm of mainstream cinema. However, audiences quickly become habituated to innovation, and since the 1960s films perceived as mainstream have tended to combine both approaches.

Introduction

The standard story about the critical fortunes of Victorian poetry in the twentieth century goes like this. During the early part of the century, particularly after 1914, modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf defined themselves against the Victorians, whom they saw as old-fashioned, somewhat hypocritical, and not particularly good writers. Eliot compared Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning unfavorably to the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, arguing that the former “are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought... as immediately as the odor of a rose ... A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.”In A Room of One's Own (1929), Woolf quoted love lyrics from Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to invoke “some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps),” and believed this poetry was inspired by an “illusion.” “Why,” she asked, “not praise the catastrophe . . . that destroyed the illusion and put truth in its place?” “The Angel in the House,”the title of Coventry Patmore's famous mid- Victorian poem, became for Woolf the name for an oppressive Victorian model of femininity that modernist women writers needed to discard in order to write freely.

The celluloid fortunes of Shakespeare's tragedies of love mirror their stage history. Most popular of the three tragedies, Romeo and Juliet has the richest stage history. Shakespeare's earliest tragedy of love invites an exploration of social issues, survives transpositions of time and place, accommodates multicultural casting and, of course, dramatises the timeless conflict between generations. Although there are numerous important productions of Othello - and memorable portrayals of Othello and his adversary, the script presents greater challenges than does Romeo and Juliet. Contemporary audiences expect, for example, a black actor in the title role and find the racist and sexist language offensive. In the late twentieth century Shakespeare's study of jealousy in The Winter's Tale was staged more often than Othello. Least popular of the three tragedies of love, Antony and Cleopatra is also the most demanding to stage or film.

Film directors, like their theatrical counterparts, face the challenge of translating English Renaissance play-scripts to a new medium and for a contemporary audience. A particular challenge of the tragedies of love is the limited number of crowd-pulling scenes of bliss and fulfilment, or as in the case of Shakespeare’s mature Othello and Desdemona and to a lesser extent with the adulterous Antony and Cleopatra, face-to-face confrontation and conflict. One focus of this study will be an examination of ways in which film directors open out the plays to provide scenes for the tragic lovers, who would otherwise spend little time with each other.

Compared with screen versions of the tragedies and histories, there have been few distinguished films made of the comedies. Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) may be the only film in this genre to be acclaimed for its pioneering cinematography, and Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1966) and Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993) are the only two to have achieved popular (if not necessarily critical) success - the former for its use of star actors, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who were the cosupremes of their age, and the latter for cameo performances by photogenic stars, high spirits and picturesque settings. Shakespeare's comedies create relationships with their theatre audiences for which very few directors have managed to find cinematic equivalents, and it is not surprising that some of the comedies (The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Two Gentlemen of Verona) have not been filmed in sound and in English for the cinema (although a couple have been the basis of adaptations). The problem plays or 'dark comedies' have not been filmed for the cinema: presumably their sexual politics and toughness of analysis have never been thought likely to appeal to mass audiences, while The Taming of the Shrew, open as it is to both the idealisation and subjugation of women, has received a lot of attention, including versions from D.W. Griffith in 1908, Edward J. Collins in 1923, Sam Taylor in 1929, Paul Nickell in 1950 for American television, Franco Zeffirelli in 1966 - who placed it in the Hollywood genre of the battle-of-the-sexes movie - and, in a considered againstthe- grain version for the BBC and Time-Life Shakespeare series, from Jonathan Miller in 1980.

When John Morley sharply criticized Algernon Charles Swinburne for “gloating” with “hot lustfulness” over “quivering flanks,” “splendid supple thighs,” “hot sweet throats,” and “hotter hands than fire” throughout the first series of Poems and Ballads (1866), the poet defended himself by asserting new criteria for art. Swinburne declared that he was not writing lyrics that expressed his own feelings or opinions. His work, he insisted, comprised dramatic monologues whose speakers should not be confused with himself: “the book is dramatic, many-faced, multifarious; and no utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be assumed as the assertion of its author's personal feeling or faith.”While some scholars have dismissed this defense as a marvelous ruse - one that allows Swinburne to deflect moral responsibility from his work by suggesting, “I'm not sick - it's those crazy characters of mine” - many Victorian readers reacted to this response by observing that the kind of mind that conceived of such personae could only be diseased. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one, condemned Swinburne as a “perfect leper and a mere sodomite.”) The polemic ignited by Swinburne’s early poetry points to a crucial paradigm shift in how Victorian culture thought about literature. His defense involved a radical divergence from Matthew Arnold’s influential demand that the best literary works should uphold a high moral seriousness that could both act as a modern substitute for religion and provide the basis of an improving education. “More and more mankind,” Arnold writes in “The Study of Poetry” (1880), “will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”Indeed, according to Arnold, “the matter and substance of the best poetry” embodies the “superior character of truth and seriousness.”

This tribute “To a Poetess” may seem a perverse note on which to begin this chapter, not least because the poem was most probably written by a member of the Langham Place group: the first identifiably feminist organization to promote women's rights in England. Why would a feminist writer praise the figure of the poetess? After all, the very word poetess has for most of the twentieth century sounded unequivocally patronizing. As the feminized form of poet (a word that can sound gender-neutral), poetess suggests not the difference in degree implied by a modifier like “woman” but the absolute difference in kind implied by separate nouns. Despite the negative connotations that the term eventually acquired, it is worth remembering that it would be hard for Victorians to grasp the extent to which “poetess” sounds unnecessarily gendered to us. As Isobel Armstrong asserts: “It is probably no exaggeration to say that an account of women's writing as occupying a particular sphere of influence, and as working inside defined moral and religious conventions, helped to make women's poetry and the 'poetess' . . . respected in the nineteenth century as they never have been since.”

Historians of nineteenth-century British writing sometimes claim that the Victorian period properly begins some five years before Her Majesty the Queen ascended the throne. There are good reasons to justify why 1832, rather than 1837, should open the Victorian age. To be sure, the obligation within the discipline of English literature to compartmentalize historical periods often imposes barriers that can obscure important continuities between what precedes and follows a supposedly defining moment. Delimiting fields of study according to hard-and-fast distinctions looks all the more incoherent when we consider that some epochs such as the Romantic characterize a dynamic intellectual movement, while others like the Victorian remain subject to the presiding authority of a monarch. But whatever disputes we may have with the peculiar manner in which we find ourselves dividing one period from the next, 1832 designates a decisive turn of events.

The year 1832 witnessed the passing of the Great Reform Bill. This parliamentary act acknowledged a massive transformation that the nation had been undergoing for almost two decades - one whose repercussions would resonate long after Her Majesty expired in 1901. Once the Battle of Waterloo terminated the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Tory-governed Britain moved into a phase of political unrest. In this respect, the most famous conflict occurred at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, in 1819 when some 80,000 people demonstrated for annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the lifting of the Corn Laws (which made bread, the staple diet of the poor, costly).