Shakespeare is often praised for his ability to speak of the concerns of eras very different from his own. He is, in the often-quoted words of Ben Jonson, not of an age, but for all time. This kind of connection does not usually occur on a visceral level, however, without some effort on the part of the production. We often find Shakespeare on film most approachable when a work is presented in the style of a genre with which we are already familiar – such a romantic comedy or a horror movie. (This can also happen in stage productions, as when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet seemed to bring the play close to being a political thriller.)
Stage to Screen
Shakespeare wrote plays, not films, so putting any of his works on the big screen involves transferring it from one medium to another. Even though the conventions of modern theatre are quite different from those of the Elizabethan stage, the assumptions and lexicon of film are even further away. Many directors choose to use the genres which cinema has developed in order to mould their films, to tap into the generic expectations which their audience will possess from seeing previous non-Shakespearean films.
When Benny Met Betty
An obvious example is the Kenneth Branagh film of Much Ado About Nothing, which draws on the conventions of romantic comedy. All the lines Branagh uses are in the original play, but he deliberately creates a sunny, playful atmosphere and casts a couple of stars as Benedick and Beatrice. What in another director’s hands could have been a rather darker investigation about how we can trust those we love, or what men expect of women, becomes a light-hearted movie whose dominant plot is about a group of friends who trick an unlikely couple into falling in love.
Keepin it Reel
Likewise when Baz Lurhman made Romeo + Juliet, the guns, open shirts, machismo and heavy soundtrack didn’t spring from nowhere. He drew on the conventions of gang movies by directors such as John Singleton and Spike Lee to provide a context within which Shakespeare’s lines would be understood slightly differently. The influence here is slightly circular, since it could be argued the genre Singleton and Lee were producing had been influenced by West Side Story, itself an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but nonetheless Luhrman’s movie relies on the previous works to be comprehensible.
Stage to Scream...?
Though these versions might be seen as limited, since they involve “tying down” the text to the conventions of another genre, they’re an interesting and effective way of reproducing Shakespeare. They have an advantage over simply “resetting” Shakespeare plays in unexpected locations – such as the Richard III in Nazi Germany or The Merchant of Venice in the East End of London – since film genres provide more than novel costumes, they offer a whole set of plot structures and character expectations with which to interpret the plays. How about Macbeth as a horror flick? That has to be worth ninety minutes of anyone’s celluloid.
