Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors

Peter S. Donaldson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135048266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Originally published in 1990, this book brought a new rigor and subtlety to the interpretation of film adaptations of Shakespeare. Drawing on traditional literary analysis, psychoanalysis, and current film theory about gender and subjectivity, the author combines close readings of seven films with historical and biographical studies of the directors who made them.

Offering substantial readings of Jean-Luc Godard's controversial deconstructed King Lear and of Liz White's independent African-American Othello, Donaldson also applies his provocative and contemporary point of view to more familiar films. He reads Olivier's Henry V in relation to its treatment of sexual difference; Olivier's Hamlet in part as an expression of the director's childhood sexual trauma; Kurosawa's Throne of Blood as an allegory of the relationship between Western and Japanese cinema; and Zeffirelli's immensely popular Romeo and Juliet in the light of its powerful homoerotic subtext.

With striking perspectives on Shakespeare, on the movies as an expressive medium, and on the complex processes of cultural change, this is timeless useful reading for teachers and students of film and literature.

1

“Claiming from the Female:” Gender and Representation in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V

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All of the essays in this book treat Shakespeare films as the work of individual filmmakers tracing, in visual image and style, the interplay between psychologically resonant source texts and the recurring themes and concerns of directors’ artistic and personal lives. At the same time, each chapter tries to specify key aspects of the work of cultural and artistic mediation through which each filmmaker engages the text and makes the transition from the conventions of the Elizabethan theater to those of the contemporary cinema.

The present chapter examines two aspects of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V: its treatment of gender and its recasting, in cinematic terms, of Shakespeare’s posing of the problem of representation. These are closely related: the transition from the practices of the Elizabethan stage, dramatized in the opening scenes of the film, to those of contemporary cinema involves, as one of its most significant features, a shift from the use of boys in women’s parts to the use of actresses. This shift is central to Olivier’s representational strategy and to his attempt to make good the ambitions of Elizabethan theater by cinematic means. It is also central to understanding the place of this Shakespearean adaptation in the director’s artistic biography. Olivier himself had acted women’s parts in Shakespeare as a child, and the film in some scenes recapitulates the role these performances played in the resolution of his own early conflicts about gender.

The prologue of Shakespeare’s Henry V apologizes famously for the shortcomings of the Elizabethan theater, demanding “a kingdom for a stage.” The public playhouse is a “cockpit,” an “unworthy scaffold” too small to hold the “vasty fields of France,” and too disreputable to present the heroic deeds of a godlike king. By calling attention to the disparity between theatrical representation and the historical reality it stands for, the play does not merely lament its limitations, however, but also initiates a double perspective on the action. The prologue of Henry V signals a discrepancy between self and role that guides our perception of the king’s performative and self-divided character; it authorizes the “imaginations” of the spectators, who must complete what the stage cannot present; and it creates possibilities for alternative political readings of the play’s ideological premises. The ill-repute of the theater—its manipulative, even tawdry devices—and the vacuity or emptiness that haunt the project of theatrical representation can become metaphors for the play’s epic subject, calling in question the glory of the war and the methods and motives of the king. Henry V’s reflection on the inadequacy of the stage can be read, that is, not as the humble apology it pretends to be, but as a vehicle for the current of doubt and subversion so many recent critics have detected beneath the play’s celebratory surface.¹

Laurence Olivier’s film version of the play, completed in 1944, aligns itself with the affirmative, heroic energies of Henry V and, in doing so, gives the metatheatrical reflections of the prologue a very different function from the disjunctive or critical one I have just described. For Olivier the disclaimers were to be taken literally (“In Henry V more than in any other play, Shakespeare bemoans the confines of his Globe Theatre”),² and provided a mandate for the representational amplification film could provide. Reading certain scenes as “frustrated cinema,”³ Olivier’s conception of his role as adaptor was shaped by patriotic fervor and sanctioned by what he describes as an almost mystic or dyadic identification with Shakespeare: “I had a mission.… My country was at war; I felt Shakespeare within me, I felt the cinema within him. I knew what I wanted to do, what he would have done.”⁴

Cinema subsumes and transcends the past, including its own theatrical past, effacing differences. Its power to do so is linked in this passage to a particularly intimate version of the fantasy of Shakespeare as mentor. The relation of adaptation to source thus parallels one pattern of male identification with fathers and elders. The paternal inheritance descends from King Henry V to Laurence Olivier as heroic spirit and from Shakespeare to Olivier as representational ambition. As in the play, coming into this inheritance will depend, in the film, on a kind of “claiming from the female,” an outward appropriation of the female image that balances the director’s internal possession of Shakespeare.

In Shakespeare’s Henry V the historical action itself is framed partly in gendered terms. Henry’s relation to his “mighty ancestors” depends on making a legal claim to France through the female line; in appealing to his troops he asks them to “dishonor not your mothers” and to show they are their fathers’ sons through their bravery. The conquest of France is complete when, as “chief article” of the treaty, Princess Katherine is betrothed to King Henry. The play’s meditation on its representational practices is also gendered: the limits of the stage are tested by the task of representing a legendary male warrior, and at the end the peace between England and France is made to depend on the success of a representational illusion, the “perspectival” substitution of the virgin princess for the “maiden walls” of French cities (5.2.301–23).⁵ The representational plot moves from hyerbolic inflation (how can the actors or the soldiers “assume the port of Mars”) to anamorphic compression, from war to peace, from male to female through figures that are incipiently sexual at the outset and more explicitly and violently so in the course of the action. The “swelling scene” imagined in the prologue anticipates the stretched bodies, bent up spirits, and stiffened sinews of Henry’s advice to the troops at the seige of Harfleur; the “cramming” of the fields of France into the little “O” of the playhouse⁶ prefigures the literal defloration with which the king threatens the virgins of the town, as well as the peaceful forcing of sexual acquiescence from Katherine in the last scene. These tropes themselves are forced and uncomfortable; their strain is a reminder of the potential violence that underlies the marital conclusion and the brief unstable peace.

But although the representational tropes of Henry V frequently invoke sexual difference, Shakespeare does not exploit the most distinctive gender convention of his theater, the playing of all female roles by boys. In this respect Henry V differs from the comedies, most notably Twelfth Night and As You Like It, in which the underlying male gender of the women in the play complicates the contrast between actor and role. Perhaps the greater decorum expected of history plays explains this difference, but the representational problem posed by the “boy actress” may have been awkward for Shakespeare for another reason: the Salic Law (“No woman shall succeed in Salic land”) barring King Henry’s claim to France was also the law of the English stage, where no woman could appear. The play ignores—perhaps suppresses—the analogy between the gendered basis of the historical action and the gender exclusions of its own medium. For Olivier the cross-dressing of the Elizabethan stage is emphasized, and its improvement by filmic means is central to his attempt to correct or complete Shakespearean practice. Like the king, who must pursue a matrilineal claim and secure his conquest through a dynastic marriage, the boy player can succeed only by “claiming from the female” (1.2.92), appropriating women’s dress and manner, assimilating “feminine” traits to male performance. Film makes this possible in a unique way.

The film Henry V begins in the playhouse, with a historical recreation of late-sixteenth-century Bankside and the Globe Theater, where a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V begins, attended by a noisy Elizabethan audience. In the course of the “play” the camera moves closer to the stage, and we gradually lose awareness of the theatrical and historical ambience. Through a series of inward tracking movements, set changes, musical cues, and shifts in makeup and acting style (which becomes less gestural, oratorical, and interactive), the bare stage of the playhouse gives way to increasingly illusionist sets and finally to the unbounded outdoor spaces of cinematic epic, complete with the armies and horses whose absence Shakespeare’s chorus laments. At the end this process is reversed, and the film ends, as it began, on the stage of the “Globe.”⁷

Robert Weimann has described the interplay of levels of representation on the Elizabethan stage as a tension between the platea, or performative function, and the locus, or representational function, as these had been inherited from medieval practice and adapted to the public playhouse. The platea was, roughly, the downstage portion of the large platform stage; there performers could interact with the audience and move freely in and out of role. The platea was where most of the “low” and unscripted clowning Hamlet complains of took place, and where the actors could be seen for the lowly, even disreputable urban artisans they were. On the upstage, or locus portion of the stage, impersonation took precedence over performance, greater decorum prevailed, and the doubleness of actor and role was less emphasized. This was the narrative or historical “place,” and it retained traces of the sanctity or high seriousness of the biblical locations of the medieval mystery plays from which it derived. The subversive potential of the stage is linked to this distinction: kings may be no better than the ragged players who represent them. Unruly and carnivalesque, the disreputable platea deflates and critiques official ideology.⁸

Olivier’s presentation of the Elizabethan stage, which predates Weimann, observes in broad terms such a distinction between downstage and upstage, partly exploiting its antiauthoritarian potential: the undignified clowning of the Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of Canterbury in setting forth the Salic Law takes place downstage,⁹ as does the insulting gift of tennis balls to the king, while the rear is reserved for the throne and is treated with more dignity and a more complete identification of performer with historical role. More important, however, Olivier maps the difference between locus and platea onto the relation between the Elizabethan playhouse as a whole and the more realistically conceived historical and cinematic space that replaces it. Just as in the relation of platea to locus a movement inward, to the rear of the image, is used to announce that the historical subject matter is being presented with proper reverence, rather than as material for burlesque, and to signal the dropping away of the actors’ personalities and the decisive emergence of the historical characters. Even more emphatically than the rear of the represented Globe stage, the cinematic locus is a decorous, almost santified space.

In the film, as in Elizabethan practice, the contrast between platea and locus is closely related to the presentation of gender. The shift from “playhouse” to cinematic space is prominently marked by the replacement of boys by women, and the return to the theater is effected by a complex filmic transition in which, by means of a hidden cut, the adult performer who plays Princess Katherine “becomes” the boy actor who is her counterpoint in the frame narrative, unsettling audience perceptions of gender and imparting to the final image of the “boy actress” an effect of the real beyond the range of the transvestite theater. Like “real” battles, “real” women serve to mark or index the superseding of the bare platform stage by the representational plenitude of epic filmmaking.

The boy actors are first introduced, briefly and incompletely, in the rapid survey of the tiring house in the film’s opening minutes. Two boys are seen shaving, helping each other to dress and wig for their female roles. The presentation emphasizes their friendly professionalism. When one of the boys tries to stuff oranges in his bosom and then abandons the attempt, opting for a flat chest, we see what he does as a technical problem of the theater, perhaps suggesting a degree of improvisation and individual discretion in how boy actors approached the details of female impersonation (photos 1.1, 1.2). The camera moves away from the boys quickly, before they are fully dressed. This contrasts with the treatment of the king, who enters backstage, fully robed, rouged, and crowned at our first sight of him. In the case of the female roles, the moment at which the boy performers appear in character is deferred, so that the presentation on stage of this aspect of Elizabethan theater most different from modern practice will be a surprise. One of the boys returns fairly soon afterward as Mistress Quickly; the other appears as Princess Katherine only at the very end of the film...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “Claiming from the Female:” Gender and Representation in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V
• 2 Olivier, Hamlet, and Freud
• 3 Surface and Depth: Throne of Blood as Cinematic Allegory
• 4 Mirrors and M/Others: The Welles Othello
• 5 “Haply for I Am Black”: Liz White’s Othello
• 6 “Let Lips Do What Hands Do”: Male Bonding, Eros, and Loss in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet
• 7 Disseminating Shakespeare: Paternity and Text in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear
• Filmography
• About the Author
• Index