Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth
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HAVE BEEN many ways for cineastes to cope with Shakespeare’s evident interest in the supernatural world. And many of those ways raise basic questions about the nature of film as an art (le septième art, as it is called in French) and as an industry. In the hundred years and more that Shakespeare films have been made, the technical possibilities have increased enormously, but arguably they may be traced back to some of the earliest kinds of tricks, especially those of Georges Méliès. Thus, in one of the earliest full-length Shakespeare films, the director Edwin Thanhouser opens his King Lear (1916) with a shot of the acclaimed Shakespeare actor Frederick B. Warde, “cigar smoke curling around him,”1 reading a book. He is sitting in a wing-backed armchair in the privacy of his study. A close-up then shows the book to be King Lear, at which point, via a common camera trick, Warde dissolves into the white-bearded Lear “and the narrative proper begins.”2 At the end, the ravaged king “falls out of the frame and out of the world,”3 to be replaced once again by the actor reading. The film was made in order to capitalize on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, which was being widely commemorated that year (as was the quadricentenary in 2016).
Three years earlier, Baldassare Negroni’s Una tragedia alla corte di Sicilia had similarly begun with “Shakespeare” sitting at a table and reading A Winter’s Tale to the family and friends gathered about him. From there the film eases into a dramatization of the action being read.4 In both cases the film is introduced through a tribute to the power of Shakespeare’s words to conjure a sequence of pictures in the imagination. In both cases the text of the book is transformed from a verbal to a visual sequence. In both cases also the newly established film industry was borrowing from the older tradition of telling a story via a sequence of magic-lantern images but introducing transitions peculiar to film—a dissolve and a fade.5
Even earlier, Georges Méliès had used a similar idea but with a characteristic twist: in La Mort de Jules César (1907), also known as Le Rêve de Shakespeare, Shakespeare is played by Méliès himself. Suffering from writer’s block, he makes several attempts to write the assassination scene. Eventually he falls asleep and his characters appear to him in full Roman garb and setting. The screen shows both the writer and the scene at the same time by means of a double-exposure sequence. Shakespeare then wakes up, delighted to have solved his writing problem, and even stabs a loaf of bread, imitating what he has just seen in his dream.6 For the anglophone audience the film was labelled, appropriately enough, Shakespeare Writing Julius Caesar, and was so registered for U. S. copyright on October 25, 1907. But whereas in the Thanhouser and Negroni films an actor plays Shakespeare, here the director takes over the role of the writer and so further asserts the primacy of film over theatre. The writer’s imagination is shown to be fundamentally visual rather than verbal.
Earlier in the same year Méliès had produced a Hamlet, with himself in the title role (this film is presumed to have been lost). In Shakespeare on Silent Film, Robert Hamilton Ball reproduces a still from the film along with the entire shot-by-shot description in the Star Films catalogue.7 Ball argues that rather than merely filming scenes as they were performed onstage, Méliès for the first time used truly cinematic language for a Shakespeare play. Characteristically the film reorganized the plot and emphasized the apparitions of various shades as more suitable for film’s special effects.8 In Ball’s reproduction, Hamlet-Méliès cradles Yorick’s skull in his outstretched left hand. The shades that assail the prince include those of his father’s ghost enjoining him to vengeance and Ophelia beckoning him with offerings of flowers. The duel and denouement follow, and the source of the fatal apparitions—upon whom Hamlet gazes above and beyond the frame—must be their “author,” but that author, “Shakespeare,” must also be the Méliès who gives the apparitions their cues.9
There have been many films that imagine Shakespeare as author since Méliès’s. The most elaborate probably came in 1991 with Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. The central conceit is that John Gielgud, playing the scholar-playwright, is writing himself into The Tempest. Greenaway borrows from Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study, a painting in the National Gallery in London, to represent Prospero/Shakespeare in his cell as a kind of Renaissance doge. The film is a meditation on the status of Shakespeare in an electronic age. In a much less exhausting and more popular form, Joseph Fiennes plays the writer in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), which won seven Academy Awards, including one for best picture. Stricken with writer’s block, “Shakespeare” visits a sixteenth-century psychoanalyst but then is cured by meeting, and soon losing, the girl-boy of his dreams. She is Viola de Lesseps, disguised as Thomas Kent, and as him she plays Juliet. Thus the film has some fun with the genders of Elizabethan actors, and two of Shakespeare’s heroines overlap in the role, for which Gwyneth Paltrow won an Oscar for best actress. The film dramatizes the writing of Romeo and Juliet: in one key scene Fiennes signs his name repeatedly, each time with one of many spellings of “Shakespeare,” and then crumples the pieces of paper and throws them away. They land in each case next to a Shakespearean prop—a skull that will do famous duty in Hamlet or a chest that recalls The Merchant of Venice. So once again, and this time with the characteristic wit of Tom Stoppard, who worked over Marc Norman’s draft of the screenplay, writing is converted to a visual, filmic event.10
Such films have made many people nowadays familiar with filmic representations of Shakespeare writing.11 In both those films of the nineties, the writer’s words on the page are, in metacinematic comment, overwhelmed by rather than subsumed in the visual images they conjure up. Even in the Méliès film, we would find (if only the film had not been lost!) the first use of what came to be called “special effects”—in this case double exposure—to exploit the specific properties of the new art. Writing itself now seems outmoded because it has been visually surpassed. Although this was to be Méliès’s last effort to put Shakespeare on-screen, his inventions were to have an enormous impact. Many filmmakers return to them lovingly again and again.
In film history, and even more so in television, the shift toward realism has become more and more pronounced. That is the aspect of film tradition that, as the story is usually told, derives from the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, whose background in photography led them to attempt to reproduce what they saw. The inventive, imaginative, and unexpected dimension of what movies can do we owe to Méliès.12 Shakespeare films can, I propose, be read according to how they exploit the informing doubleness of film, and in particular how they use the Méliès aspect of film, the magic and the trucage, to represent the Shakespearean supernatural—fiends, fairies, ghosts, and witches. Shakespeare’s interest in the topic is clear enough: he it was who made the fairies of Dream small, even tiny, and (mostly) benevolent. Robin Goodfellow he inherited but updated into the complex Puck, both the country prankster who misleads night wanderers, as described by the fairy in act 1, and the obedient servant of King Oberon.13 Similarly, in Shakespeare’s source story in Holinshed’s Chronicles, Richard III is said to have had a terrible dream of “images like terrible devils” on the night before the battle, but there is no mention of ghosts. The parade of the dead come back to life that haunts him, and encourages his enemy Richmond, is entirely Shakespeare’s creation.14 Plutarch tells in his Life of Brutus of a “spirit” that appears on the eve of the battle of Philippi, but in Shakespeare this becomes the stage direction “Enter the Ghost of Caesar,” the man whom Brutus has helped to kill.15
Thus, at least some of the film trickery develops what Shakespeare built into the plays. He shows himself in several plays to have been self-conscious about the relation of illusion and theatre.16 The potential parallel between Shakespeare’s theatre and Méliès’s films will be clear if we recall some of the Elizabethan discourse about the theatre. In The Discovery of Witchcraft,17 Reginald Scot’s important and skeptical 1584 treatise, there is a section titled “To cut off one’s head, and lay it in a platter, &c, which the jugglers call the decollation of John the Baptist.”18 Scot explains how the Elizabethan playhouses worked this conjuring trick by means of a stage device that looked like a pillory and showed one actor’s head as if it belonged to another body. Other