One of the aspects of the academic profession that I have always found peculiarly difficult is that we are expected to produce a title and often an abstract for our talks, conference papers and book chapters long, long before we have begun to think through properly what on earth the eventuating product might be about. The result is often that one produces, as I did for this article when it began life as a lecture,1 something that is really rather too mysterious to tell our audiences much. If I had thought early enough about a subtitle it would have been something like ‘On Adapting and Not Adapting King Lear on Film’. Or perhaps something like ‘When Is an Adaptation of King Lear Not an Adaptation of King Lear?’ But each of these is probably just as mysterious as my first stab at the title was.

The author’s remembrance of actors speaking in Shakespearean plays is one of loss but also of delight. Memory, as Virgil put it (‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’), may bring pleasure or benefit or help, depending on how iuvabit is translated. For Virgil, memory may be therapeutic and/or affective, as Shakespeare knew as he reworked Virgil’s phrase. But the pleasure of remembering Shakespeare is palpable in the voices of the people interviewed in Cecilia Rubino’s documentary film, Remembering Shakespeare (2016), and in the laughter memory generates in Thomas Tomkis’s play Lingua (1607), the records of what Simon Forman wanted to remember of performances he had seen and in the diary comments on plays seen by Samuel Pepys.

I am Peter Holland, and I have, for nearly ten years now, served as Associate Dean for the Arts in the College of Arts and Letters here at Notre Dame. And why, you might well be wondering, is the Associate Dean for the Arts the person who is welcoming you here today? There are two reasons, as far as I can see—though, given the penetrating intellects of Bill Donahue and Steffen Kaupp, it would not surprise me to learn later that they had other motives in mind. The first is purely technical: the office of the Dean in Arts and Letters has three divisional associate deans, one each for Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; since Humanities has by far the largest number of departments, three of those report to me, and one of those three is the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. So that makes me a straightforward choice as an administrative rep for this pleasurable task.

The second needs a little more explicating. Those of you—and I am sure there are quite a few—who attended the Fifth Biennial Workshop here at Notre Dame in 2017 (if I have got the numbering of the workshops correct) would have heard John McGreevy, then Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, speaking on “Jewish Studies at a Catholic University.” John kindly sent me his talk, and, since it is a perfect example of his rich scholarship as a historian of American Catholicism, I did think for a moment about simply ventriloquizing his paper. He even said I was welcome to do so, generous soul that he is. He pinpointed both the general shift in the Church's relationship to other faiths, including the Jews, embodied in the document Nostra aetate proclaimed by Pope Paul VI in 1965 as part of the Second Vatican Council. And he also identified the disturbing earlier twentieth-century continuation of antisemitism within the Church, from its vocal exponent Fr. Coughlin in the 1930s to the identification of Jews as “killers of Christ” in textbooks used in Catholic schools as late as the 1950s.

No-one has yet quite agreed what to call it: livecast, live from, simulcast, alternative content, cinecast, cinemacast, streamed transmission, outside broadcast, digital broadcast cinema, ‘live’ theatre broadcast, captured live broadcast, event cinema, theatrofilm. But the phenomenon of cinema broadcasts, live, delayed and encore, is a new and striking area for the experience of Shakespeare theatre productions. Their various forms of transmission and consumption mark out crucial questions about the distribution and audiences for the event-object, whatever name we give it. The chapter looks at the techniques for filming live performance and the ways it makes meaning. It then examines examples from the National Theatre in London or from other theatres whose Shakespeare productions it distributes (under the label National Theatre Live), as well as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Godard’s extraordinary, demanding and unremittingly brilliant film, largely mocked and reviled, too often ignored, increasingly inaccessible can act as a kind of metafilmic analogy for the activity in the rest of this volume: its status not as a film of King Lear but as a film about the fragmentary possibility of making – or perhaps more accurately, not making – a film of King Lear, creating for itself a remarkably complex status as critical commentary on the materiality of what it is itself in the process of (not) creating. The chapter offers some brief comments on its commenting as a way to begin to think back over, as well as forward and beyond, the accomplishments of this volume.