1 Shakespeare and Film

Shakespeare and Film: A Bibliographic Index (from Film to Book) Jordi Sala-Lleal University of Girona [email protected] Research into film adaptation has increased very considerably over recent decades, a development that coincides with postmodern interest in cultural cross-overs, artistic hybrids or heterogeneous discourses about our world. Film adaptation of Shakespearian drama is at the forefront of this research: there are numerous general works and partial studies on the cinema that have grown out of the works of William Shakespeare. Many of these are very valuable and of great interest and, in effect, form a body of work that is hybrid and heterogeneous. It seems important, therefore, to be able to consult a detailed and extensive bibliography in this field, and this is the contribution that we offer here. This work aims to be of help to all researchers into Shakespearian film by providing a useful tool for ordering and clarifying the field. It is in the form of an index that relates the bibliographic items with the films of the Shakespearian corpus, going from the film to each of the citations and works that study it. Researchers in this field should find this of particular use since they will be able to see immediately where to find information on every one of the films relating to Shakespeare. Though this is the most important aspect, this work can be of use in other ways since it includes an ordered list of the most important contributions to research on the subject, and a second, extensive, list of films related to Shakespeare in order of their links to the various works of the canon. With regard to the contributions to this field of research, this work only includes studies published in book form and leaves aside articles appearing in journals and other publications. To attempt to produce an extensive bibliography that would include articles would be such a mammoth undertaking that it would be almost impossible to complete, and would be impracticable for the purposes of publication here. In any case, the majority of the information and advances made on this subject has appeared in books or volumes, which may justify my option. 1 This is therefore an index which relates all the films of the Shakespearian canon with the books on the subject. In total, the bibliography is composed of eighty books of which a few are collections of chapters written by various authors. The majority of these eighty books are specialized works in the field of Shakespeare on film, although there are some of a more general character (e.g. Cartmell, Hunter and Whelehan 2001 or Olivier 1986) that have been included for their important contributions in certain sections or as regards specific films. However, studies limited to the cinema of a particular director have been excluded. This would apply particularly to the bibliography generated by the cinema of Orson Welles, where, naturally, there are references to his Shakespearian films but the inclusion of which would overflow the limits and upset the balance of this work. The time-span of this bibliographical index goes from the decade of the 1970s, when Charles W. Eckert and Jack Jorgens published the first books on the subject (now absolute classics), up to the latest studies. The dates of the publications – two from the seventies, four from the eighties, eighteen from the nineties and fifty-six from this century – clearly demonstrate the extraordinary vitality of this field of research over the last twenty years, a vitality which is on the increase and would seem to be endless as long as numerous films based on the Shakespearian canon continue to be produced and shown. The language of almost all these books is English, even in cases where the work was published in a non-English-speaking country. The exceptions are two works in French — Dorval 1998 and Pilard 2000 — and one in Spanish (González Campos 2006), which have been included in this list as they are examples of the scarce contributions to the subject in languages other than English and, as such, should not be disdained. As regards the films, the list is considerable, being composed of about 350 titles. It only includes films produced for distribution in cinemas and therefore films created for television do not figure here in spite of the fact that some of these may be important in the history of cinema related to Shakespeare. In fact, television adaptations may well deserve to have their own bibliographical index. The problem with compiling a list lies, of course, in distinguishing between what is an adaptation of a Shakespearian work and what is not, a difficulty that is particularly acute in creating an index such as this. The inclusion of one title or the exclusion of another may be a subject of debate but the decision was taken to include in this list both films which are unquestionably part of the canon of Shakespearian cinema because the Bard’s text plays an important part in them (for example, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet or Welles’s Chimes at Midnight) and those often called ‘derivatives’ (or ‘spin-offs’) which owe a great deal to the works of Shakespeare. In general, the criterion for including a film as a ‘derivative’ has been to be as extensive as possible, with the result that the list includes films that are apparently very distant from 2 Shakespeare’s works, but that are often emblematic, such as To Be Or Not To Be by Lubitsch or the 1939 production of Tower of London, along with films that may only be of interest to a minority (to mention one among many, Stephen Cavanagh’s Hamlet). Only when these two characteristics coincide – the distance from Shakespeare’s work and secondary importance – has my option been to exclude them. In some cases, the special weight of the director (such as Brian de Palma, Rohmer, Visconti, Loach or Bergman) has swayed the balance in favour of the inclusion of very questionable Shakespearian derivatives, although, in certain cases, not even the status of a film such as The Godfather nor the fact that a film may be considered to be a Shakespearian derivative in the opinion of some writers — such as Griggs 2009, 126-33, in the case of Coppola’s film — has convinced me to include it. On the other hand, the arguments of some researchers in favour of considering certain films to be Shakespearian derivatives has propitiated their inclusion in the list: this is the case of Buchanan’s defense (2005) of La iguana by Monte Hellman as a derivative of The Tempest and that of González Campos (2006) of Kieslowski’s Rouge as a derivative of the same Shakespeare play. Lastly, it must be mentioned that at the end of the list of films that derive from a particular work (or, at least, derive mainly from a particular work), I have included under the heading Other a few films that cannot be listed under any Shakespeare title but deserve to appear in the list in spite of this. In order to comply with its objective of being a help to the researcher, the index is structured as simply as possible. The titles of Shakespeare’s works are in alphabetical order and under each of these titles the films are ordered according to the date of showing, from the earliest to the most recent. Especially if a film is old, it may appear in the specialized bibliography with different dates and in these cases I have opted for the date that is more generally accepted. In fact, there are even discrepancies as to the name of the director of a film or its nationality, especially in films from the first two decades of the history of the cinema, and here I have opted for what appears to be most plausible. In the case of films shown in the same year, they appear in alphabetical order of the title, and if the titles are identical, in alphabetical order of the director’s surname. In addition to the date of showing, the country or countries where the film was produced also appear. These references should suffice for each film to be clearly identified. The titles of the films appear in their original language and, if they are not in English, these are followed by the titles (in parentheses) that the productions were given for their showing or commercialization in the United States or in Great Britain when such a title exists, for example, Coriolano: eroe senza patria (Thunder of Battle). However, for some films we do not have an English title, and in these cases only the original title appears, for example, Do Dooni Char or Los gemelos alborotados. 3 The bibliographic references appear under each film title in alphabetical order. In the case of two works by the same author, these are ordered from the earlier to the later. When it is a case of a collection of work by various authors, in the citation index the surname of the author appears in square brackets after the relevant page number, so that at times, in addition to the name of the editor of the volume there are the names of two or three — or more — partial authors. So, for example, with reference to the film Kannaki, the citation appears as Burt 2007, 81 [Lehmann], 142 [Lanier], Burt being the editor of the volume and Lehmann and Lanier the authors who deal with this particular film. In the list of references, the titles of the chapters of a collective work appear with their page numbers and the names of their authors.

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