Representing King Lear on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘Meta-cinema’

Summary

The advantage of the cinema over the theatre is not that you can even have horses, but that you can stare closer into a man's eyes; otherwise it is pointless to set up a cine camera for Shakespeare . ..

Grigori Kozintsev

Representing King Lear on screen, representing almost any Shakespearian play on film or videotape, means broadening the ancient trope of the world as stage to include the world as screen. As the idea of the screen as screen takes its place alongside the idea of the play as play, so 'meta-cinema' inevitably emerges alongside metatheatre. In making the means of representation a subject of representation, film-makers have only mimicked their stage forebears. Like theatre, film may also selfreferentially draw attention to itself through ironic devices, or, alternatively, it may even have sequences that are essentially movieswithin- movies. Oliver's Henry V, by shifting from a documentary mode in the Globe playhouse to a stylized medievalism at the court of France, gives an example of the former; while the Polanski Macbeth, in embedding a silent movie about Ross within the talking picture about Macbeth, illustrates the latter.

In Shakespeare films, 'meta-cinema' may or may not assume the additional burden of apologizing for the film's not being a page in a printed book or a play on the public stage. The history of screened Shakespeare furnishes a special reason for this directorial breastbeating. Ever since those early silents, such as the 1911 'epoch-making picture of Henry VIII, as given by Sir Herbert Tree', or Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's 1913 Hamlet, for which at enormous expense a castle was constructed in Dorset's Lulworth Cove, film-makers have been guilt-ridden.