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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. 1 Juliet – A Role in Four Movies Anthony Leo Quinn 1 2 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis ‘Juliet – A Role in Four Movies’, is entirely my own work. Any quotations or references are noted in the ‘Works Cited’ section and attributed to the original publication/source. This work has not been submitted previously for any degree or other professional qualification. Signature......................................................................... Date. 2 3 Contents Acknowledgements 4 List of Abbreviations 5 Introduction 6 Chapter One. 1936 - Juliet in the Modern Age 29 Chapter Two. 1954 - The Forgotten Juliet, 94 Chapter Three. 1968 - Juliet Conquers the World 165 Chapter Four. 1996 - Romeo + Juliet 237 Conclusion 307 Illustrations 314 Works Cited 334 3 4 Acknowledgements I have a great many people to thank for their contributions, help, advice and encouragement in the completion of this thesis. Firstly, to my wife Sharon, to whom I owe the most for her patience, support and understanding from beginning to end in this matter. I owe my family the same. To Professor James Loxley of Edinburgh University for his supervision and unlimited patience throughout, for without him this would still be nothing more than an idea germinating in the back of my mind. To Edinburgh University in general for the patience and understanding shown when I suffered serious illness. To my in-laws, May and Sydney Dawson for their encouragement and financial support. I owe a great deal to the family of Susan Shentall for allowing me unprecedented access to her personal papers and allowing me to use them in this work. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Office of the Secretariat of State in the Vatican for assistance in confirming historical details of the habits worn by certain religious orders. I would like to thank Sean O’Connor, author of Juliet and Her Romeo (2009) for his time and patience in answering my many questions. Similarly, I would like to thank the distinguished actress Sian Phillips for her views and insight in playing the role of Juliet in the same production. To these and many others I owe a debt of thanks. 4 5 List of Abbreviations Used MGM - Metro Goldwyn Mayer MPPC – Motion Picture Production Code aka The Hays Code MPPDA – Motion Pictures Producers and Distributers of America NIDA - National Institute for Dramatic Arts PCA - Production Code Administration PR – Public Relations 5 6 Introduction Over a period of sixty years, between 1936 and 1996, there were numerous filmed versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but four in particular were made for and obtained a worldwide commercial release. George Cukor’s lavish production of 1936 with Norma Shearer as Juliet was the first feature length, big budget, ‘talkie’ of Shakespeare’s play to be made by a major studio and aimed at the cinema going public. Shearer remains, to this day, the only actress of the modern age who was a major film star when cast in the role of Juliet. In direct contrast to this, Renato Castellani’s Anglo Italian neo-realist, retrospective 1954 adaptation featured an unknown Susan Shentall, who had never acted before filming and, on completion of the film, retired and never acted again. Franco Zeffirrelli’s sweeping 1968 production with Olivia Hussey as Juliet was a worldwide commercial success and is still revered by many as being the authoritative film experience of the play. Baz Luhrmann’s1996 version, with Claire Danes playing opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, was initially decried as an affront to Shakespeare’s masterpiece and the director was accused of sacrificing the text for a highly stylised and bombastic shallow content. It is only recently that this film has been viewed by critics and academics alike in a more sympathetic and positive manner. These films, taken individually, present to us a particular performance of the ‘Juliet’ of Shakespeare’s text; but in addition to this they allow us a comparative study of the portrayal of Juliet as a celluloid reflection of the idealised woman shaped by the progressive demands of the contemporary phallocentric society in the western world. Patricia White examined this reflection theory in Feminism and Film and, in turn, referred to the studies of Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen in the early 1970s, and quoted them on the basis that film ‘reflects social reality, that 6 7 depictions of women in film mirror how society treats women, that these depictions are distortions of how women ‘“really are” and what they “really want” ’(White 118). The theory explores the supposition that women are repeatedly and systematically portrayed in a catalogue of images that compels the viewer to see and accept them in a typology of roles which, according to White, reinforces the phallocentric ideology of women as an array of ‘virgins, vamps, victims, suffering mothers, child women and sex kittens’(White 118). A question that therefore arises and which is central to this thesis is how, specifically, has Juliet been portrayed in film? Has the Juliet of the screen been nothing more than an object of visual stimulation, an object of the scopophilic gaze and male sexual fantasy? If this is the case, how does this vary in each of the filmed versions listed? We must also consider how Juliet exists in relation to other characters in the play beyond her direct involvement with Romeo. Juliet’s role is pivotal within the play even though she does not have the most lines.1 She has a direct influence on Mercutio and his relationship to Romeo, even though Juliet and Mercutio fail to exchange a single line of dialogue in the entire play. Juliet’s relationship with Romeo is altered dramatically in the aftermath of Mercutio’s death. Juliet’s life is also influenced by her relationships with others such as the Nurse and Friar Laurence, each of whom will abandon her at some point in the play. How are these relationships played and interpreted in each of the films in question? One cannot write extensively of Juliet if one limits oneself to writing exclusively of her. Each of these characters and how they are portrayed needs also to be examined. So too must the directors, all male, be examined in some detail. How much do they alter the Juliet of Shakespeare’s text and for what purpose? 1 Juliet has approx. eighteen percent of all the lines in the play, compared to Romeo who has just over twenty percent 7 8 Dympna Callaghan, in the introduction to A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, writes how Shakespeare’s plays ‘may reflect real women as well as how they help produce and reproduce ideas about women that then shape, perpetuate, or even disturb prevailing conditions of femininity’(Callaghan, introduction, xii). In order to examine this we must consider how Juliet was portrayed long before the evolution of Hollywood and indeed, long before the emergence of feminist film theory; which, although in existence previously, came to the fore of academic thinking in the latter half of the 20th Century. As Callaghan observed “‘woman” is never an already accomplished, cold, hard, self-evident fact or category, but always a malleable cultural idea as well as a lived reality that, to use a Derridean formulation, always already has a history’ (Callaghan, introduction, xii). Such is the case with Juliet, a role so universally known in both world cinema and on the stage that over-familiarity leads to an acceptance of a cultural reflection of the idealised woman at the time of the portrayal. This is not to say that any of these portrayals has been ‘wrong’. The Sourcebooks Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet, a book collating various aspects of the origin and development of Romeo and Juliet, quotes director Peter Brook on the importance of updating Shakespeare and the question of what is ‘right’, and what is ‘wrong’: If a play is revived, changes must be made...When Garrick played Romeo and Juliet in knee-breeches, he was right; when Keane staged The Winter’s Tale with a hundred Persian pot carriers, he was right; when Tree staged Shakespeare with all the resources of His Majesty’s, he was right...Each was justified in its own time, each would be outrageous out of it. A production is only correct at the moment of its correctness, and only good at the moment of 8 9 its success. In its beginning is its beginning, and in its end is its end (Bevington “et al” 9). This may well be the case but each of these ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’ is locked in the past, making analyses difficult and conclusion, to a certain extent, speculative. There is no doubt that a degree of relativism is needed when discussing previous incarnations of the play. We must attempt to see beyond our own contemporaneity, for although we can read of specific performances of the play and analyse them accordingly, we cannot experience the time of the performance itself, or the social reality in which it existed.