‘Uneasy Lies the Head’: Michael Almereyda’s Halloween Cymbeline

Summary

In his intemperate and inaccurate review of Ralph Fiennes’s film of Coriolanus (2011) – throughout he calls Caius Martius ‘Gaius Marcius’ – Laremy Legel asserts that Jacobean English and present-day settings can never comfortably cohabit: ‘Shakespeare’s language mixed with a “modern” update can’t help but lead to tonal problems, pacing problems, and relevancy problems.’² The bit between his teeth, Legel presses on: ‘modern takes on Shakespeare that leave the original language untouched are just massively out of place in modern cinema’. Such a sweeping and condemnatory generalization would disqualify some of the most creative cinematic re-imaginings of Shakespeare’s work, including Fiennes’s Coriolanus, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Joss Whedon’s Much Ado about Nothing (2013), and – needless to say – would, by implication, suggest that theatrical stagings of Shakespearian works that are not costumed in doublet-and-hose are guilty of similar flaws.