"An excellent short cut to Shakespeare on film".

Carolyn Jess-Cooke. Shakespeare on Film: Such Things as Dreams Are Made Of. London and New York: Wallflower Press. 2007. 125 pp. $20.00 paperback.

So here's the task--cover a hundred years of Shakespeare films, introduce the critical issues, do justice to important examples, try to offer something interesting and new--and, by the way, keep it to just over one-hundred pages. Amazingly, Carolyn Jess-Cooke accomplishes every bit of that in Shakespeare on Film: Such Things as Dreams are Made Of, recently published in the Wallflower Press series "Short Cuts," itself an impressive array of carefully focused books on a wide variety of film topics presented in a way that is suitable for students but not limited to their needs. In fact, those who know Shakespeare films and theory will marvel at this wonderfully intelligent, concise, and helpful book, while those who are beginning will be drawn in by its clarity and its abundant insights. In spite of its brevity, Shakespeare on Film is neither a simple overview nor a handbook. It is a critically well informed and very thoughtful discussion of several films that "represent and illuminate" (8) the critical contexts of performance, adaptation, film style, and popularization.

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Explaining her approach, Jess-Cooke, in effect, takes Kenneth S. Rothwell's "but is it Shakespeare?" (which he calls the "nagging interrogation" of the Twentieth Century's approach to Shakespeare on film) (1) and restates it as, "What, in short, makes a film suitable for the cultural paradigm that is Shakespeare?" (4). Though it may seem too couched in the language of theory for some tastes, the difference is important, because it allows her to consider how a film contributes to forming that paradigm, rather than how it measures up to a more absolute "Shakespeare." With the understanding that the "performative identity" of the plays (like that of their author) "is fluid and unfixed" (3), she argues that "progressive, unfaithful Shakespeare films have resulted in emergent adaptational strategies and discourses" and that "productions which unmoor Shakespeare from his linguistic and cultural posts often articulate cultural identities and anxieties, or contextually highlight problems that are pertinent to a particular social or ethnic group" (4). What this really means is that the book's interesting connections and juxtapositions should appeal to newcomers more familiar with recent films, though viewers who formed their tastes through older films might find it occasionally unsettling.

Her discussion of performance, for example, examines versions of Hamlet by Olivier (1948), Kozintsev (1964), Zeffirelli (1990), and Branagh (1996) to demonstrate how a performance might "impose meaning on the narrative" and create a variety of "perspectives through which to reconsider the Shakespeare text" (11), but may also "illuminate not so much Shakespeare's text, but the ideological force behind the film as a whole" (14). To illustrate, she explains how one critical perspective investigates "the imprint of Olivier's own subconscious upon the production, particularly the film's preoccupation with stairs" (18). Another considers how Kozintsev's "portrait of Denmark's turbulent sea, broken crosses (which resemble axes), downtrodden peasantry and close-ups of the jaw-like portcullis of Elsinore's drawbridge closing around its inhabitants and the film's spectators" may be read in light of the repression under Stalin, who famously condemned the play as "incompatible with the new Soviet spirit of optimism, fortitude, and clarity" (21). From a third perspective, Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) shows us Mel Gibson as "a garishly explicit depiction of masculine aggressivity that stems not from a repressed subconscious, but from a repressed libido" (24). Finally, Branagh's Hamlet (1996) in the mirrored halls of his Elsinore, "self-consciously explores the 'doubling' effect that occurs in re-making Hamlet by gesturing toward previous performances and performers" and explores the idea of Claudius as "Hamlet's reflection" (29).

Many readers will find her approach in the chapter on adaptation somewhat surprising. She begins by discussing a 1907 Melies film, Shakespeare Writing Julius Caesar, then turns to Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) and Kristian Levring's The King is Alive (2000), three films that at first glance seem unlikely subjects for this issue. She explains, however, that the question in adaptation is not only the "degrees of distance" (35) between author and filmmaker; it must also include the questions of "textual transportation," production, spectatorship, and, in the case of Shakespeare, the problem of a reliable text, along with the fact that the originals were written to be performed rather than read. Prospero's Books juxtaposes "three authorial sources" and "posits originality as a reframing of existing material, and authorship as involving the creation of new texts using old ones" (41). For Jess-Cooke, the film makes it clear that the process is more than just intertextuality, and that adaptation becomes "an endless 'mural' of narratives, aesthetics and interpretive possibilities that are constantly in movement and conflict" (45). In The King is Alive, tourists stranded in a desert perform Lear as rewritten, in effect, "from the memory of one of the tourists, who is a former stage actor" (49). Recreating the authorship problem of the "bad quartos," the film at the same time demonstrates how "the performance of the play affects the reality of the tourists until each of them face the same fate as their characters," and the actor who both recalls the play and acts Lear "assumes Lear's woeful fate" (49). She argues that "adaptations do not merely return to the original play, but negotiate 'prior conceptions' of the play across various historical periods and media" (54), a process that is made more complicated by the emergence of hypertext, metatext, and paratexts and the attendant issues of how to read a text.

Her next chapter, on film style, takes up exactly this issue of reading the film text. After outlining the divisions between formalism and realism, she notes that factors to be considered here include technology, directorial style, and the "impact of industrial or economic restrictions" (57). She includes a variety of films to discuss individual issues. For mise-en-scene, she compares Welles's Othello (1952) with Michael Almereyda's Hamlet and Julie Taymor's Titus Andronicus. Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet provides examples for cinematography. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is her focus for editing, while a shot-by-shot analysis of the "dumb-show" in Almereyda's Hamlet (72-75) is the basis for analyzing montage. Her discussion of sound centers on Richard Loncrain's Richard III and Almereyda's Hamlet. Her close analysis of these examples illuminates the effect of technology in creating the language of a film. She concludes the chapter with the observation that, while "Film style covers a broad terrain of aesthetic elements which continue to increase with the advent of many new technologies, trends and evolving industrial conditions," studying film style allows us "to comprehend ways in which the Shakespearean text is transposed and, more exactly, how it can facilitate particular aesthetic innovations" (80), a point she illustrates with Oliver Parker's Othello (1995).

For her final chapter, on popularization, Jess-Cooke returns to Rothwell's original formulation, "is it Shakespeare?" to explore the "transposition from high to popular (or 'low') culture" (84). Her discussion ranges from David Garrick's 1769 Shakespeare "Jubilee" in Stratford-Upon-Avon, to some notable sit-com Shakespeares, a Calvin and Hobbes Hamlet, and then Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001) and Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA (2001). Her approach is inclusive enough to raise the issues of British national identity, the "dumbing down" of Shakespeare, and the ways that a variety of issues may be "vocalized through the Bardic text" (88). In Scotland, PA, for example, "the juxtaposition of Shakespeare and the fast-food' industry points up the importance of marketing and manufacturing Shakespeare's 'meaning,' at the same time as the logic of the logo figures in this film to underscore Shakespeare's usage as a corporate marker" (90). The film O, on the other hand, draws on "the genre codes of the teen movie," including "the film's portraits of basketball culture, peer pressure, father/son and father/daughter relationships and high school violence" (98), a point underscored by the fact that it was originally scheduled for release in 1999, but had to be delayed because of the Columbine shootings. She concludes the chapter with a sentence that perhaps describes the current state of things but also predicts something about the scope of Shakespeare adaptation when she writes that "Shakespeare's commodified presence across a spectrum of products and environments provides a unifying framework within which to communicate cross-cultural dynamics to a global audience" (102). All in all, this work is considerably more than one might expect to find in such a small book. It is an engaging, sometimes even surprising, discussion of Shakespeare, theory, film, and adaptation in a fresh and interesting way.

Richard Vela 

University of North Carolina at Pembroke 

Note

(1) Rothwell, Kenneth S. "How the Twentieth Century Saw the Shakespeare Film: 'Is it Shakespeare?'" Literature/Film Quarterly 29:2 (2001): 82-95.