Reading Shakespeare in the Movies

Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning

Eric S. Mallin

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030288983
• Thema: Literatur
• Thema: Moderne Literaturkritik

Reading Shakespeare in the Movies: Non-Adaptations and Their Meaning analyzes the unacknowledged, covert presence of Shakespearean themes, structures, characters, and symbolism in selected films. Writers and directors who forge an unconscious, unintentional connection to Shakespeare's work create non-adaptations, cinema that is unexpectedly similar to certain Shakespeare plays while remaining independent as art. These films can illuminate core semantic issues in those plays in ways that direct adaptations cannot. Eric S. Mallin explores how Shakespeare illuminates these movies, analyzing the ways that The Godfather, Memento, Titanic, Birdman, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre take on new life in dialogue with the famous playwright. In addition to challenging our ideas about adaptation, Mallin works to inspire new awareness of the meanings of Shakespearean stories in the contemporary world.

© The Author(s) 2019

E. S. MallinReading Shakespeare in the MoviesReproducing Shakespearehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28898-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Shakespeare in the Movies: Meaning-Making in the Non-Adaptation

Eric S. Mallin¹

(1)

The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Eric S. Mallin

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

—Emily Dickinson

End Abstract

I

This book is about the unacknowledged and unclaimed presence of Shakespearean themes, structures, characters, and symbolic inclinations in selected movies. For the purposes of shorthand, I have sometimes described the work as a study about movies that do not know they are Shakespeare plays. Films are not plays, and they do not know things in any traditional way; but I intend to show something new about the way movies can absorb and reconfigure meaning from, and share significances with, one particularly charged vector in culture. Specifically, I am interested in cinema that has a connection to Shakespeare’s work but that lacks any apparent, conscious intention to adapt that work. Or, to approach this interest from the other direction: I examine plays that are absorbed into cinematic culture unexpectedly, unconsciously, or unpredictably. The films take up Shakespearean thematic elements; they perform narrative variations on and from the plays that illuminate their core semantic issues and which they in turn brighten. And they pay no overt homage to Shakespeare.¹

I reject the idea of calling films that do not refer to or quote Shakespeare, nor claim any alliance to or inheritance from his work, “adaptations,” no matter the precedent adjective we use. They do not qualify as adaptations of a play in the traditional sense nor even, I would say, as that other capacious category, the “offshoot.”² These movies do not look to disclose or seek to understand their discovered relationship to Shakespearean plots and figures. Unlike standard adaptations, they cannot be tallied; we cannot know how many of these films exist, as they are produced by the intentionality of the interpreter, not that of the writer, director, or studio.

These are analogies, not remakes.³ I name such films “non-adaptations”; it may be problematic, taxonomically speaking, to identify something by negation, as for example it would be strange to call Shakespeare works “non-Jonson plays,” or a bicycle a “non-car.” (The problem with naming by negation presents itself at once: Shakespeare plays are also “non-cars.”) If “non-adaptation” seems at first an unhelpful categorical term, I mean it to have the effect of a word such as “nonvoter” or “nonresident”: something summoned by reason of its negation or its potentiality, its proximate status. A forgetful, unregistered, or indifferent citizen could be a nonvoter; an out-of-towner or an occasional occupant can equally have the status of nonresident. So a non-adaptation is then like a traditional form of cinematic production in that it summons a relationship between (in this case) a Shakespeare play and a movie that can be read through or in that play. But such a film lacks the discursive or extra-textual features of the adaptation: a known, implied, or readily deduced derivation from a prior text. What I assert throughout is the fortuitous, often uncanny, sometimes inevitable ways in which Shakespeare’s plays embed their presence in films, and in which Shakespearean meanings flower in the cinema when we least expect to see them.

However, even if these films are not adaptations, I read them as if they were—which is to say, as if their liveliest acts of significance occur in a dialogue with other works, not in soliloquy. Because of the fundamentally relational (or intertextual) and variegated character of this kind of cinema, I adduce several other designations for non-adaptations: I shall, throughout the book, call them interchangeably “slant,” “circuit,” and “bias” productions. The first terms, “slant” and “circuit,” stand in homage to Emily Dickinson’s epigraph; along with the third label, “bias,” I wish to imply that these films get to a truth about Shakespeare plays that can best be approached in indirect or roundabout representational ways.⁴ Shakespeare himself deploys “bias” to refer to the curve or parabola on which a ball in the game of bowls must travel to find its target. Bias texts, then, swerve twice: from originary language, character, and setting as their structures of meaning bend toward a Shakespearean similitude. Something about those metaphors and images, however, does not quite scan: they suggest that these films actually have a target in the prior text, or an axis off which they purposively slant and so forth, but that is not my contention. Rather, the non-adaptation forms something entirely new that pays no heed to the determinate, reproductive responsibilities of adaptation.

When I described the subject of my book to a colleague, he asked a wise question that I wish to address, even if an answer is elusive. Typically my précis of the project draws the response: Which movies don’t know they are Shakespeare plays? But with both frankness and incisiveness, my colleague, Zachary Hines, wanted to know instead: “What’s a Shakespeare play?”⁵

This has become, for numerous reasons, an unexpectedly difficult question to answer, and it lurks on the margins of my readings. As the editors of the recent and relevant Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare collection have recognized, a Shakespeare play might manifest as a “corollary” in the form of another play, show, story, material object; but more importantly, this appearance

can be a matter of perception rather than authorial intention (audiences may detect Shakespeare where the author disclaims him or may have difficulty finding him where he is named); it may equally be a product of intertextual and intermedial relations, processes that work on the level of semiotics and material substrate, apart from more overt processes of influence and reception.⁶

For the purposes of this book, a Shakespeare play is a well-known, usually illustrious object of literary thought and feeling, attached to that familiar name which confers a degree of prestige and a set of expectations. It represents or promises (for a receptive audience) a theatrical, linguistically imaginative, entertaining, and educational experience, ideally all at once or in rapid succession. The difficulty with knowing what a Shakespeare play may be lies not only in the complexity of an infinite range of readers’ perceptions, but more broadly in the omnipresence and the multiple manifestations of the name “Shakespeare,” its centuries of presence and influence. Therefore a play that bears that name is always much more than a single identifiable artifact. A “Shakespeare play” may be the thing you think you know and do not; it amounts to an idea and an experience waiting to be alienated from familiarity.

I am counting on a modicum of alienation. Hamlet is this book’s paradigm of “a Shakespeare play,” owning that stature as a result of its vast cultural and narrative familiarity, achieved through centuries of theatrical and now cinematic performance.⁷ Yet it also offers a useful caution about definitional questions and identifications, because the play itself scarcely presents a stable or selfsame work. In its first print appearances Hamlet splits between (perhaps) performance and reading versions, either of which may be authorial or questionable—the first quarto of Hamlet (Q1, 1603) is a little more than half the length of the second quarto (Q2, 1604). The vivid differences between the texts extend beyond line count; they comprise character name and motive, poetic form, symbolic language, and other crucial elements.⁸ Both of these early Hamlets are, as well, already multilayered adaptations. They remake strains of near-contemporary revenge drama (a legendary “Ur-Hamlet” and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy); a German source (Der Bestrafte Brudermord); a Danish legend (Saxo Grammaticus’s story of Amleth); and political, theatrical, and philosophical currents of the time (early Stuart history, wars of the theaters, family biography, countless influences from the humanist past and present).⁹ Shakespeare was always a restless, seemingly desultory adapter, and his Hamlets bear the imprints of many other texts and traditions, effectively perplexing our sense not only of “Shakespeare,” but the probable ontology of a Shakespeare play. Even one play seems several.

At the same time, I’m counting in my readings not only on alienation, but recognition. Against the odds these non-adaptations maintain a kind of continuity with the plays across time and across media, which is what enables me to bring film and drama into analogical relationship. In his assessment of the most famous Western play and renowned European painting, Graham Holderness speaks of the “identity” of the work in a way hospitable to my study:

…[D]espite the ontological distinction between their respective modes of existence as text, both Hamlet and the Mona Lisa exist in exactly the same universal way, in the form of millions of copies distributed around the globe.…

But do not Hamlet and the Mona Lisa also exist in a different way, one much more difficult to define, as the visible or invisible source of their own copies? Somewhere there is a heart of silence, a blank space, that is uniquely Hamlet, that is incommensurably the Mona Lisa…¹⁰

These gaps and blanks are hard to read, but they are productive. I endorse Holderness’s notion that in spite of the efflorescence of copies, versions, performances, parodies, adulterations, adaptations, “something endures, something alters yet remains itself” (71). The unique and incommensurable nature of the Shakespearean work can then give it intelligibility in divergent contexts and forms over many years. The films under discussion in this book have their own identities entirely separable from Shakespeare, which makes recognition of that Shakespearean presence contestable. But not only do they speak to some of Shakespeare’s most intense meanings, they replicate the playwright’s own frequent adaptational (compositional) processes, which often tilt his plays on the bias from nearby and far-flung predecessor texts.¹¹ His plays bring creative complications of and surprising semantic departures from the prior texts he deploys. In this way, several of the works in his canon turn out to be in my terms non-adaptations: stories that stray substantially from hard-to-recognize predecessors. In some sense, then, the slant or bias form is more a norm than an anomaly; as Thomas Leitch mentions, “all texts ...