Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth
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been common on the stage as well as on street corners. Opinion was divided about their value: Ben Jonson despised their vulgarity in the “Induction” to Bartholomew Fair; some denounced them as witchcraft; and others, like Samuel Rid in The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, felt that “if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God’s holy name, then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural.”19
Nevertheless one soon notices a certain unease about spectacle and illusion in the style of Shakespeare films and in the discussion of them. There are several reasons for this. One is no doubt the long-standing suspicion of theatre in Anglo-Saxon, Puritan-based culture, connected with suspicions about dressing up, pretending to be someone else, and sexual license, as well as, in its more extreme forms, the denunciation of theatre as a tool of the devil. In the case of the Shakespearean tradition, there is a further ingredient: the late Victorian and Edwardian theatres had fully developed the tendency that began in the Restoration theatres toward pictorial representation within the frame of grandiose West End proscenium arches, but the influential William Poel had begun a countertrend to get away from the splendid spectacles and to reconstruct a supposedly pure and unscenic theatre such as Shakespeare was imagined to have worked in.20 Many modern Shakespeareans, influenced by Poel and what he stood for, would have wanted anything but a return to complex stage “devices” and the discredited elaboration of costume and spectacle, even in the new medium of film.21 This discomfort with pictorial illusion also has something to do with the fact that film art grew up with modernism, in which high and low art forms were fiercely separated, so that “special effects” are for children or certain subgenres, such as horror and sci-fi, not the serious mainstream.
All this suspicion makes the filmmaker’s task especially difficult when what is being presented cannot but be supernatural, like the ghost of Hamlet senior. In Tony Richardson’s 1969 film of Hamlet, for example, Nicol Williamson has a strong light shining in his face whenever the Ghost is “present.” But we see nothing. The voice we hear is actually also Williamson’s, and so the film comes close to implying that the Ghost is a hallucination. Olivier, who in his 1948 Hamlet managed well the midnight darkness for the battlement scenes that the afternoon Globe could not aspire to, was famously dissatisfied with his misty, dry-ice ghost, to the point that he dubbed in the voice himself (though it is slightly slowed). The voice is amplified, a technique he learned about from the editor of the film, Helga Cranston (who had seen it done in Paris), yet the figure is shadowy. We experience the power of the Ghost mostly by seeing how its appearance knocks Hamlet out, both on the battlements and in Gertrude’s closet. And he makes much of Horatio’s rational skepticism. As the Ghost leaves at the sudden cockcrow, we cut back to the watching soldiers in a long shot and way below, as if the camera is now where the Ghost was, looking back down as it floats off up into the cloud. Then Horatio guarantees the truth of the experience by calling it “the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes”22—a line that in this context refers to the cinematic experience, to the magical vision. The motif of the skeptic convinced guarantees not simply the reality of the Ghost but the authenticity of what might otherwise seem to the audience, and certainly to Olivier, like a hokey ghostie film, not high classic art. Franco Zeffirelli (1990) has his own kind of trouble with the ghost: when Paul Scofield as Claudius, an anxious father in a classy suit, comes back to try to heal the ruined family, he interrupts a passionate and almost desperate kiss between Gertrude (Glenn Close) and Hamlet (Mel Gibson) and seems not to grasp the import of what he sees.23 Or perhaps he simply refuses to understand.
When we read Shakespeare films according to how they exploit the various illusions they depend on, we discover that each reveals a good deal about its context and the underlying intentions of its directors and producers. If the filming of ghosts in Hamlet can be seen to reveal a general uneasiness about spectacle and illusion in a Puritan-based, highbrow culture, Kozintsev’s film makes deliberate use of the magical tradition, and for other purposes than simply to “amaze.” In Kozintsev’s view, “the aural has to be made visual. The poetic texture itself has to be transformed into visual poetry, into the dynamic organization of film imagery.”24 In films of Macbeth, by contrast, the ghost of Banquo is often fully integrated and frequently marvelously horrifying: both Orson Welles and Roman Polanski borrowed directly from horror genres, while Kurosawa had his own perfectly adapted cultural tradition for the forest spirit who replaces those Western witches. Even in the 1908 Macbeth, the first of a run of Shakespeare films produced by the American Vitagraph Company, the film lays claim to being an autonomous work of cinema rather then a respectful record of a stage production. It contains specifically cinematic scenes, including double exposure for the airy “dagger I see before me” and for Banquo’s ghost.25 The film was a success, and the company soon followed it up with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also containing magical conjurations using trick photography; A Midsummer Night’s Dream was released for the Christmas market on December 25, 1909.26
The success of many Macbeth films is due partly to the ambivalence of the supernatural visitations, built into the play itself, and partly to the different roles they play from the apparitions of the ghost of Hamlet senior. As Nicholas Brooke argues in his excellent Oxford edition, Macbeth is all about illusion of various kinds, and so the transfer to screen from stage illusion can simply heighten what ought to be the focus of the play-as-film. Welles was the one to most fully exploit the tradition of magic for his witches, adding the voodoo doll from his original stage production (in a theatre given over to Haitian representations), and at one point allowing the camera to stand in the place of Banquo’s ghost to look back at Macbeth, a powerful reminder that film is itself merely a ghost, light passing through a strip of celluloid and projected onto our present from some distant past when the shooting took place.
The actor is present before us on the theatre stage, but in films the actors are ghosts, merely celluloid images of what once was. Indeed, film-as-ghost is occasionally used in stage productions. The opening scene of one Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet (1997), for example, had Alex Jennings silently scattering his father’s ashes to the backdrop of a flickering home-movie showing father and small son playing in the snow. Colorful staging set off and framed this quiet and old-fashioned black-and-white film-as-ghost. The film of Hamlet’s past in fact was the ghost.
Shakespeare’s fascination with stage devices in the later plays, especially the romances written for the indoor artificially lighted Blackfriars Theatre, as well as the popularity of magic of various kinds in his own time,27 whether for stage conjuring or for more Faustian concerns, suggests that Shakespeare might have been happy to learn from the tradition of horror movies, even from melodrama, just as Orson Welles was to do.
4
SUPERNATURAL COMEDIES
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest
THE BLURB ON the British Film Institute’s DVD collection called Silent Shakespeare, first issued on video in May 1999, makes the uncontroversial claim that in the early years of the twentieth century the film industry sought to elevate its lowbrow status by imitating the theatre. While cinemas decked themselves out like theatres, filmmakers signed up stage stars and turned to the classics. Shakespeare provided the greatest challenge.
The early Shakespeare films do indeed use many devices of theatre: the static camera clearly shows the continuity of proscenium-arch theatre and early cinema, and the actors come on and off and do their piece in front of the camera but without closeup individual shots, reverse action shots, or montage—techniques still to come in the development of film. One result is that some of these films, or parts of them at least, now seem to resemble records of stage performances, and perhaps even aspire to be so, as the blurb suggests. In one important respect, though, the continuity with nineteenth-century theatre styles was broken; some of the films delight in being films and celebrate the new techniques of cinema.
THE EARLY FILMS
At certain points in its history, film has responded in different ways to the supernatural