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The Comedies on Film1 The Comedies on Film1 MICHAEL HATTAWAY Compared with screen versions of the tragedies and histories, there have been few distinguished films based on the comedies. Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) may be the only film in this genre to be acclaimed for its pioneering cinematography,2 and Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) 3, and Michael Radford’s The Merchant of Venice (2004) are the only three to have achieved popular (if not necessarily critical) success: the first for its use of actors (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) who were the co-supremes of their age, the second for cameo performances by photogenic stars, high spirits, and picturesque settings,4 and the third for fine cinematography and superb performances from Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino. Shakespeare’s comedies create relationships with their theatre audiences for which very few directors have managed to find cinematic equivalents, and it is not surprising that some of the comedies (The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona) have not been filmed in sound and in English for the cinema (although a couple have been the basis of adaptations). The problem plays or ‘dark comedies’ been have not been filmed for the cinema: presumably their sexual politics and toughness of analysis have never been thought likely to appeal to mass audiences, while The Taming of the Shrew, open as it is to both the idealisation and subjugation of women, has received a lot of attention, including versions from D.W. Griffith in 1908, Edward J. Collins in 1923, Sam Taylor in 1929, Paul Nickell in 1950 for American television, Franco Zeffirelli in 1966 – who placed it in the Hollywood genre of the battle-of-the- sexes movie – and, in a considered against-the-grain television version for the BBC and Time-Life Shakespeare Series, from Jonathan Miller in 1980.5 Directors of the other Shakespearean genres found conventions that, comparatively early in the history of filmed Shakespeare, made texts accessible to mass audiences. Spectacular screen adaptations of the history plays, shot on location, have held those vasty fields of France that cannot be represented in the 1 Published as Michael Hattaway, ‘The Comedies on Film’, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87-101. 2 Panofsky, however, called it ‘probably the most unfortunate major film ever produced’ (Erwin Panofsky, ‘Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures’ (1934), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy, (New York, 1992), pp. 233-48; p. 238. 3 For a critique, see Michael Hattaway, ‘“I’ve Processed my Guilt”: Shakespeare, Branagh, and the Movies’, Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, ed. Jonathan Bate, Jill L. Levenson and Dieter Mehl, (Newark Delaware, 1998), pp. 194-214. 4 See Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era, (Athens Ohio, 2003). 5 Diana E. Henderson, ‘A Shrew for the Times’, Shakespeare, the Movie, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, (London and New York, 1997), pp. 148-168; Gil Junger’s 10 Things I hate about You (1999) rewrites the play and sets it in a modern high-school. 2 theatre. Tragedy has been well served by virtue of the fact that film does not merely record spectacle but can document the gaze, project psychological occasions onto the screen. The eye of the camera may register objects as focuses of the attention of the characters rather than as components of nature, and may use, for example, familiar signifiers of the elemental or primitive to serve as landscapes of consciousness. Screen versions of the tragedies have exploited this interiority, have deployed special effects for the supernatural, and have used salient visual images (Iago’s cage in Welles’s Othello, the shadows in Olivier’s Richard III) to conjure portentous themes appropriate to the genre or to create for their characters a distinctive consciousness. Characters in the comedies, on the other hand, tend to the typical rather than the individuated and require settings that are neither wholly exterior nor wholly interiorised. The stories are enacted in distinctive fictional worlds that were designed for representation within the frames of specifically theatrical architecture. In the theatre, frames for the playing space are generally perpetually visible, essential signs of those conventions for game and revelry that govern the action. Indeed, the best films seem to be those that have avoided the use of location shooting throughout and thus evaded the untranslatable solidity of exterior nature. For it is difficult to find cinematic equivalents for Elizabethan theatrical codes of place and space. Although they traded in spectacle, Shakespeare’s playhouses had no mechanism for illusion. Such scenic devices as were used tended to establish genre rather than place – the mossy banks of the sort that may have been used in As You Like It presumably signalled not ‘forest’ but ‘pastoral’.6 And yet, for cinema, illusionism is the traditional – if not the essential – mode, and directors have found it hard to escape from its claims or the demands of their producers for immediacy or the picturesque. What could be worryingly improbable or outlandish can be naturalised or authenticated by a ‘real’ setting: a shot of a gondola legitimates the antique fable of a Venetian Jew. Reinhardt intended to authenticate his Midsummer Night’s Dream with a shot near its opening of the ‘“original Shakespearian folio” with the “authentic signature” of the author on its cover’.7 (In implicit response, Baz Luhrmann’s 1997 translation of a Shakespearean text into the present was wittily entitled William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.) Period settings in reconstructed Renaissance cityscapes may also derive from Hollywood’s veneration for European antiquity, indeed from a conservatizing ideology: Shakespeare is commonly held to be the guardian of timeless moral and civil values. Indeed, as William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson showed, defusing ‘perceived threats to the social order through the construction of consensual cultural values’8 was one of the objects of some of the earliest Shakespearean film ventures, the Vitagraph Quality Films. Film, in contrast to theatre, does not deploy frames but uses masks: the screen functions as a window onto a ‘real’ world that we deem to extend beyond 6 R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert, eds, Henslowe’s Diary, (Cambridge, 1961), p. 320. 7 Russell Jackson, ‘A Shooting Script for the Reinhardt-Dieterle Dream; The War with the Amazons, Bottom’s Wife, and other “Missing” Scenes’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 16.4 (1998), 39-41. 8 William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films, (Princeton, 1993), p. 7. 3 its edges. What Fabian in Twelfth Night terms the ‘improbable fictions’ of comic texts are therefore difficult to render. Moreover, using a camera to shoot a theatrical set, in the manner of the earliest directors, just will not do: as Erwin Panofsky put it, ‘To prestylize reality prior to tackling it amounts to dodging the problem. The problem is to manipulate and shoot unstylized reality in such a way that the result has style.’9 Sometimes directors have chosen a very painterly mode of mise en scène: in 1955 Y. Fried’s Russian version of Twelfth Night used shots that recalled the themes, patterns, and lighting of Renaissance paintings, but offered a first view by Viola of ‘the coast of Illyria’ that looked like a symbolist painting. Jonathan Miller’s television productions for the BBC/Time- Life series were often not only painterly – using settings that recalled the style of interiors used by European masters, often from periods other than the age of Shakespeare – but architectural in that the director often used rooms to ‘make entrances’ for his players to use. They could then appear, as onto a theatrical set, through the on-screen frame of an arch or doorway rather than just materialising on shot or emerging from the edge of the screen’s mask.10 Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night of 1996, some of which was shot at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, created a successful ‘prestylised reality’ within a natural landscape that verged on the abstract or symbolic and used a restrained and iconic autumnal palette.11 Similarly in 2000 Kenneth Branagh offered a Love’s Labour’s Lost set in the 1930’s in a stylised Oxford bathed in golden sepia, sprinkled with autumn leaves. (It has become a commonplace on stage and screen to underscore the melancholy in what were once called the ‘happy comedies’.12) It picked up the on Broadway exuberance as well as the jollity of the British stage musical Salad Days (1954) and, with the help of the composer Patrick Doyle, interspersed dance routines and songs by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter into the play’s verse – in the film’s titles it was billed as a ‘Romantic Musical Comedy’. Other directors have introduced the comic worlds by using the equivalents of early modern theatrical inductions to institute narrative frames as surrogates for the theatre’s visual frame. Some directors create establishing or ‘translation’ sequences to mark the journey into inset worlds, filming what is described as part of an exposition in Shakespeare’s text. Sometimes, as in Lucentio’s approach towards Padua in Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew and in the shipboard and wreck sequence of Nunn’s Twelfth Night, this ‘induction’ takes the form of a pre-title sequence. In the latter, in which the twins took the part of onboard entertainers, they came to Illyria immediately after a near-death experience (struggling for air under stormy waves) that endowed the action of the play with a visionary quality.
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