Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire: Adaptation and Other Futures of Shakespeare’s Language

265 Pages·2014·2.25 MB·English

by  Simon Ryle (auth.)

Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire
Shakespeare, Cinema and
Desire
Adaptation and Other Futures of
Shakespeare’s Language
Simon Ryle
Assistant Professor in Early Modern Literature, Film, and Critical Theory,
University of Split, Croatia
© Simon Ryle 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-33205-9
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Preface and Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire 2
1 Something from Nothing: King Lear and Film Space 36
2 Body Space: The Sublime Cleopatra 85
3 Ghost Time: Unfolding Hamlet 129
4 Re-nascences: The Tempest and New Media 174
Epilogue: Futures of Shakespeare 212
Notes 220
Bibliography 226
Index 245
v
List of Figures
I.1 Lord Rivers is murdered, Loncraine (1995). 3
1.1 Hidetora emerges from the smoke, Kurosawa (1985). 38
1.2 The soldiers divide, Kurosawa (1985). 38
1.3 Edgar and Gloucester emerge from the mist,
Brook (1971). 45
1.4 Regan kisses Cornwall’s corpse, Kozintsev (1971). 47
1.5 Goneril dresses, Kozintsev (1971). 51
1.6 Regan walks through the castle, Kozintsev (1971). 53
1.7 The blood-stained sheet, Godard (1987). 61
1.8 The landscape of the cliff, Kurosawa (1985). 78
1.9 Lady Kaede decapitated, Kurosawa (1985). 80
1.10 The hole in the wall, Kozintsev (1971). 83
2.l Intimate space, DeMille (1934). 86
2.2 Cleopatra’s hard gaze, DeMille (1934). 87
2.3 The matched eyeline of an unexpected observer,
DeMille (1934). 87
2.4 The carnivalesque space of Cleopatra’s barge,
DeMille (1934). 90
2.5 Photographic space literalizes Shakespeare’s water
‘amorous of their strokes’, Mankiewicz (1963). 108
2.6 Cleopatra behind the veil, Mankiewicz (1963). 109
2.7 Cleopatra revealed, Mankiewicz (1963). 110
2.8 A reverse shot of the veil, Mankiewicz (1963). 110
2.9 The Cleopatra look-alike, Mankiewicz (1963). 116
2.10 Ripping through to the place of desire, Mankiewicz
(1963). 118
2.11 The camera recede from the tomb, Mankiewicz (1963). 120
3.1 Hamlet the filmmaker, Almereyda (2000). 135
3.2 The Ghost in the (Pepsi) machine, Almereyda (2000). 136
vi
Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire vii
3.3 The discovery of Hamlet’s anatomy, Gade (1921). 142
3.4 The puppet Queen, Stoppard (1990). 150
3.5 Fade into the flashback of Yorick, Branagh (1996). 162
3.6 The Ghost as a stain, Olivier (1948). 169
3.7 The absence of the stain from Gertrude’s point-of-view,
Olivier (1948). 170
4.1 The explosion of Altair-4, Wilcox (1956). 176
4.2 Claribel in Tunis, Greenaway (1991). 183
4.3 Claribel reflected, Greenaway (1991). 185
4.4 Susannah’s self-dissection, Greenaway (1991). 198
4.5 Elisabeth Welch sings ‘Stormy Weather’, Jarman (1979). 207
4.6 Flashback shot of Prospero and Miranda prior to
Antonio’s usurpation of Milan, Jarman (1979). 209
4.7 Ariel chained to Sycorax, Jarman (1979). 210
E.1 The blood stains of Fujimaki in the forbidden room
of The North Mansion, Kurosawa (1957). 217
E.2 Asaji with the stain while Washizu murders
Lord Tsuzuki, Kurosawa (1957). 218
Preface and Acknowledgements
Shakespeare reaches ever forward into futures unknown. So frequently
Shakespeare’s verse dreams, like a ‘prophetic soul/ Of the wide world, […]
on things to come’ (Sonnet 107: 1–2). This is one reason why Shakespeare’s
language needs to be read through its heterogeneous intersections with
modernity. Take Cassius’s question, asked with the blood of Caesar still
staining his hands: ‘How many ages hence/ Shall this our lofty scene be
acted over’ ( Julius Caesar 3.1.111–12); or Cleopatra’s vision, at her sui-
cide, of ‘Some squeaking Cleopatra’ who will ‘boy’ her ‘I’th’ posture of
a whore’ (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.219–20). In these affectively poised
moments, Shakespeare foregrounds the performance future. What is
the relation of these dramatic futures written into the plays to the
future eras in which the plays have found (and will find) themselves?
How does this recognition, in the plays, of themselves as the futures of
the sources and histories that they represent prime us to approach cin-
ematic adaptation, and other futures of Shakespeare’s language? How
far do Shakespeare’s futures anticipate the ‘futurity’ in Shelley’s claim
that poets are ‘the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts
upon the present’ (1951, 1055)?
The future in Shakespeare; Shakespeare in the future – these two types
of futurity are linked by questions of desire. As so frequently occurs in
early modern drama, the quest for knowledge, power, revenge, love,
reunion and recognition drives Shakespeare’s plots and characters
onwards. But why do these desires recur, re-staged, re-performed, re-
mediated and re-theorized, in so many diverse historical and global
contexts? What relation is there, if any, between these textual and tran-
stextual desires? How is desire affected by the ever-changing material
and technological contexts of modern and contemporary performance?
In the 1980–1990s, cultural materialism, a field of Shakespearean
studies, investigated the political and institutional mechanisms that
have sustained the pre-eminent position that Shakespeare so consist-
ently occupies. These studies contributed much to our understand-
ing of how colonial practice, academic institutions, entertainment
corporations, national theatres and school curricula have variously
perpetuated the desire for Shakespeare. Yet a certain impoverish-
ing disregard for the text in cultural materialism failed to consider
the specific qualities of Shakespeare’s language that impel ever new
viii
Shakespeare, Cinema and Desire ix
Shakespeares. As Frank Kermode observed, ‘modern critics […] on the
whole seem to have little time for his language’ (2001, vii). Cultural
materialism missed a haunting sense of absence, and an embrace of the
future in the words that Shakespeare gives to his characters and poetic
voices, that both acknowledges and impels performance and critical
re- inscription. Focusing on institutional desires, it missed the desire
inbuilt in Shakespeare’s language.
More recently, various forms of historicism have made significant
advances in our understanding of the objectivity of texts – exploring
textual materiality, the historically situated practice of literary writing,
and even composing biographies of material objects. And yet histori-
cism has rarely recognized the materiality of the letter as vocal utter-
ance, inscribed trace or gramme, as Derrida terms the material basis for
logos. Like cultural materialism, historicist criticism has turned away
from language to focus on material artefacts and institutions, but has
struggled to perceive the materiality of language. It has abandoned
theory for matter, but has moved forward without a theory of mate-
riality. Until recently, Shakespearean scholarship also largely failed to
consider questions of writing technology. As Shakespeare’s language
is so frequently aware, it is as a materially inscribed trace that writing
survives into future contexts. The speaker of Sonnet 65 claims: ‘in black
ink my love may still shine bright’ (65: 14). In Sonnet 55, the speaker
finds: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive
this powerful rhyme’ (55: 1–2). However, too frequently Shakespeare
scholars have disregarded the relationship that Shakespeare’s language
foregrounds, between the poetic awareness of the future-to-come into
which the gramme reaches forward, and the forms of inscription in
which this anticipated futurity finds its material re-expression.
Take the ‘immortal longings’ (5.2.279) that come to Cleopatra at her
suicide. At this most decisive of dramatic moments, the Egyptian queen
desires a future beyond the failures of her own life. In her poignant
incorporation of grandeur, fear, bravado and vanity, Shakespeare exam-
ines the futurity of literary language, and the refusal of literary desire
to be entirely bounded by its historical context. Attired for her death
scene in her robe and crown, Cleopatra imagines the separation of her
essence from her material existence, calling out: ‘I am fire and air; my
other elements/ I give to baser life’ (5.2.287–8). Her earlier image of
the ‘squeaking Cleopatra’ who will ‘boy’ her ‘I’th’ posture of a whore’
positions the material fact of performance as something like the ‘baser
life’ from which she anticipates she will separate at death. In a typically
Shakespearean gesture, the play audaciously locates an image of its own
x Preface and Acknowledgements
mimetic limits at the most vital moment of its narrative. However, as
the site in which Cleopatra’s ‘immortal longings’ will outlive her his-
torical existence, something of the performance future is also figured in
her image of her essence as ‘fire and air’.
Theoretical criticism has been receptive to the multivalent desires and
temporalities of literary language. Lacan writes: ‘The relation of the art-
ist to the time in which he appears is always a contradictory one’ (1992,
144). Lacan’s ‘contradictory’ relation asks that criticism recognize the het-
erogeneous discursive potentiality of artworks, which Cleopatra’s longing
so viscerally encapsulates. For Adorno, ‘art is an entity that is non-
identical with its empiria’ (2004, 426). The seriousness of art for Adorno
and Horkheimer comes of this non-identical relation; art ‘posits its own,
self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane exist-
ence’ (2010, 19). The greatest literature is of its time, materially bound to
the moment of writing, but also in excess of its own present. It condenses
a multi-valence of expression that will speak with the future, and help to
define the direction of the evolution of culture. As Hillis Miller has it, lit-
erature ‘was, is now, and always will be untimely’ (2000, 560). Cleopatra’s
‘immortal longings’ stage literature’s untimeliness as desire.
Untimeliness also suggests one reason why adaptation studies have
been so maligned in the broader field of film studies. The marginalized
position that adaptation takes in film studies is perhaps due to its nego-
tiation of diverse historical periods, which problematizes or complicates
the prevalent need to contextualize. The prevailing historicism of film
studies is expressed by Janet Staiger: ‘I believe that contextual factors,
more than textual ones, account for the experiences that spectators
have watching film and television’ (2000, 1). In a remarkable disregard
for the aesthetic object, Staiger is uninterested in exploring the complex
and unique material qualities and depths of the film text as aesthetic
system. In contrast, like Adorno and Horkheimer I believe that we need
to take aesthetic questions seriously (as with the melancholic wit of
Jacques or Hamlet, the playful potential of seriousness, and the serious-
ness of play, should not be forgotten). By yoking together texts from
diverse historical periods, Shakespeare films ask us to consider tran-
shistorical cultural relations, and to think beyond historically limited
contexts and ‘experiences’. Cinematic adaptation offers an insight into
the way aesthetic forms negotiate cultural inheritance through con-
temporary media technology. By foregrounding a relationship between
modernity and the Renaissance, Shakespeare film explores, and makes
explicit, an untimeliness at the heart of all cultural practice. However,
academic studies have rarely drawn out the full significance of these