Lamb Diss Dew&O

UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cinema: Shakespeare's Comedies in Film and Television Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4j05b2rk Author Lamb, Wendy Nicole Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cinema Shakespeare’s Comedies in Film and Television A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Wendy Nicole Lamb December 2010 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson Dr. John M. Ganim Dr. Heidi Brayman-Hackel Copyright by Wendy Nicole Lamb 2010 The Dissertation of Wendy Nicole Lamb is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements One does not write a dissertation in a vacuum and I owe many people a great debt of gratitude for their conversation, encouragement, exhortation, and labor that have propelled me to the end of this process. Tina Feldmann kept me on track and fixed all my technical mishaps. Dr. Deborah Willis, my committee chair, read and re-read every chapter, continually providing suggestions that have always been right. Dr. John Ganim is the great encourager. Dr. Heidi Brayman-Hackel pushed me out of my academic comfort zone. I would never have been able to write this dissertation if I had not had English mentors along the way, especially Dr. Ann Appleton, La Sierra High School; Dr. Stanley Stewart, UC Riverside (the first time); Drs. Marcia Savage, DawnEllen Jacobs, and Stan Orr, California Baptist University; Dr. Ann Astell, Purdue University; and, along with Drs. Willis and Ganim, Dr. Susan Zieger, UC Riverside. My Facebook community—friends, my cohorts from both Purdue and UC Riverside, and my extended family—has sustained me through the isolated writing days. My specific gratitude goes to Kristin Noone with whom I discussed fantasy theory, Rebecca Lohman for real and virtual writing dates, and the Rev. Dr. Sandra R. Tice whose encouragement and concern helped immeasurably in the final push to finish. My parents have supported me continually, including in the very practical way of watching my children so I could write. Kevin, my husband, has supported me without fail. My children remind me every day that the dissertation and degree are pretty nifty, but they are not the only aspects of my life. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cinema Shakespeare’s Comedies in Film and Television by Wendy Nicole Lamb Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2010 Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson This project examines Shakespeare’s comedy plays and the ways they have been used as source material for twentieth and twenty-first century films. Three main questions guide the project: What was comedy in Shakespeare’s time? How do modern and postmodern film adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies draw upon and transform early modern comic forms and conventions? What do these films—along with their marketing and reception—reveal about today’s cultural values and identities such as gender, race, religion, and status? Genre theory and cultural studies form the theoretical foundation for the answers to these questions as each chapter examines one or more sets of films based on the comedies. v The BBC Shakespeare Television series views the plays as early modern artifacts and makes traditional, but not entirely successful, versions of them. The Taming of the Shrew has found its way onto film multiple times. Usually the farce is turned into a “battle-of-the-sexes” style romantic comedy as the filmmakers attempt to bring to Katherine some sort of subjectivity. The supernatural elements of A Midsummer Night’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream take over on film as filmmakers show off their technology by creating fantasy pieces. The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, while comedies in early modern categorization, become more serious. In a post-Holocaust world, the character of Shylock becomes problematic and The Merchant of Venice becomes his tragedy. The Tempest, on the other hand, seems to be a treat for film directors as they concentrate on a solemn Prospero and the way he directs the action of the film. Finally, what was originally tragic can be fodder for comedy as adaptations and appropriations of Hamlet demonstrate. Whether it is a lion, a female brewery owner, or an action star, the audience recognizes the character and laughs at the incongruity of the comedy. All of these films negotiate how to present early modern concepts and characters in a way that will be palatable to a contemporary audience, and sometimes the ones that free themselves from the restrictions of their source best honor the spirit of the Bard. vi Table of Contents Introduction........................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Shakespeare by the Book: The BBC Adaptations.................….....................19 Chapter 2: Shakespeare and the Battle of the Sexes: The Taming of the Shrew.. ...........57 Chapter 3: Fantasy Shakespeare: The Filmmaker’s Dream........................... .................98 Chapter 4: One Century’s Comedy is Another Century’s Drama: The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest on Film.................................................................135 Chapter 5: Hamlet, the Comedy.....................................................................................201 Endnotes.................................................................................................................…......238 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................238 vii Introduction In my dissertation, I examine Shakespeare’s comedies and the ways they have been used as source material for twentieth and twenty-first century films. Three main questions guide my work: 1) What was comedy in Shakespeare’s time? 2) How do modern and postmodern film adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies draw upon and transform early modern comic forms and conventions? 3) What do these films—along with their marketing and reception—reveal about today’s cultural values and identities such as gender, race, religion, and cultural status. For the first question I examine early modern comic conventions, elements the comedies have in common, plots that lend themselves to comedy, and how characters and situations might have been played for laughs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As I move into the world of film and television in my second question, I am very interested in seeing which comic elements retain their essence in contemporary society and what filmmakers change to appeal to a world 400 years later. One of the keys to this query is to ascertain which plays are even made into film. Why do we have multiple versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Taming of the Shrew, and The Tempest but almost none of Two Gentlemen of Verona or Measure for Measure? How do the films negotiate the space between Shakespeare and the 20th/21st centuries? This leads to the question of values and identities. How do contemporary versions of The Taming of the Shrew deal with feminism? Do films of A Midsummer Night's Dream include the class strata inherent in the original? How do filmmakers and actors choose to portray characters such as The Merchant of Venice's Shylock or The Tempest's Caliban in a world that cannot accept them as merely comic 1 types? Filmmakers seem to prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies as source material; however, there are a number of comedies they turn to repeatedly. I examine why these particular comedies are prominent in our culture of film and television and what they reveal about this culture. I begin by examining the plays as artifacts of early modern drama, juxtaposing them with one approach to adaptation that attempts to work closely with the plays’ early modern origins—i.e. the BBC Shakespeare TV series. From these foundations I examine film treatments of two plays that have garnered more attention from filmmakers than other comedies: The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Finally, I explore the way films have shifted Shakespearean genres. Hollywood has made comedies into dramas and turned tragedies into comedies. In the first case, I specifically contend with versions of The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, two plays that seem to have completely shifted genres and are no longer accepted as comedies. I would like to understand what, generically, these plays have become, why the shift happened, what this says about modern and postmodern culture, and how well they work as dramatic films. In the latter instance, I am interested in how the great tragedy, Hamlet, becomes funny, what kind of comedy it is, and what purpose that comedy serves. In exploring the evolution of Shakespeare’s comedies on film, I look at how they use their Shakespearean source material, but also attempt to understand how they fit into the genres of twentieth and twenty-first century comic films and what they say about contemporary culture. Each set of films seems to fit within a film genre: romantic comedy, fantasy, or heritage drama. Much of my discussion centers on how 2 contemporary filmmakers work with the material to fulfill generic expectations. In addition,

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