Shakespeare Rewound

Summary

This paper proposes to argue that certain relatively little-known screen adaptations of Shakespeare's plays can be shown to exemplify and embody constructive explorations of certain key issues widely recognized as central to the problems of contemporary Shakespeare interpretation. The film-texts in question are marginal to the point of invisibility, either because of their institutional origin and technological medium, or because normative criticism has yet to find a means of reconciling their 'alternative' character with the apparatus of critical analysis and interpretation. The formative context of this argument is shaped by the conviction that there now exists a canonical apparatus of 'Shakespeare on film', authorized by a legitimating body of criticism and scholarship.

The 'Shakespeare-on-film' canon could already be seen in the process of construction in those critical studies which still at present constitute the standard literature in the field: the late Roger Manvell's Shakespeare and the Film (1971, revised 1979), Charles Eckert's edited collection Focus on Shakespearean Films (1972) and Jack Jorgens's Shakespeare on Film (1977). Ground-breaking, pioneering, vitally necessary and perennially useful studies, these books together conspire to privilege a particular canon of great films of great plays by great directors — Olivier, Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Brook; with a supporting team of somewhat lesser but notable directors in Reinhardt, Mankiewicz, Zeffirelli, Polanski; and a substitute bench of praiseworthy parvenues such as Tony Richardson, Peter Hall, Stuart Burge, Renato Castellani.