Early Modern Drama on Screen: A Jarman Anniversary Issue

Abstract

Early Modern Drama on Screen:A Jarman Anniversary Issue Pascale Aebischer Two thousand eleven, if Alex Cox's apocalyptic Revengers Tragedy (2002) is to be believed, marks the annihilation of what survives of Great Britain by the impact of a comet. What remains of the reign of Elizabeth II—Beefeaters, judges on life support and all—is engulfed in a cloud of dust while the disembodied voice of Gloriana is heard, shrieking "Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!" from across the historical gulf separating the early modern from the postmodern Elizabeth. Cox's apocalyptic vision for the ending of Revengers sees the past impacting on the present, creating an explosive blend of early modern tragedy and political critique of present-day cultural and military imperialism at a time when Western powers "had just embarked on an open-ended war of revenge" (Cox 269; see Wray in this issue). From the vantage point of a film that went into post-production in September 2001, then, 2011 was the date set for the collision of the past and the present. The date Cox pinpointed for the triumph of his Jacobean revenger coincides with the twentieth anniversary of Derek Jarman's final Renaissance film, Edward II, which was released in 1991. Twenty years later, Jarman's film has not lost any of its beauty, energy, and intelligence. Its significance has, if anything, grown. Its use of Marlowe's play as a means of expressing disenchantment with the repressive politics of the present has left its mark on subsequent filmmakers. Edward II has come to stand for Jarman's battle against homophobic legislation, his fight against AIDS, his final word on how "the Elizabethan past," instead of being "used to castrate our vibrant present," ought to be used to "out the present" (Queer Edward 112, Dedication). [End Page 495] The twentieth anniversary of Edward II invites a reflection upon the extent to which this first major British feature film adaptation of a play by a contemporary of Shakespeare marks a point of departure from earlier ventures such as the infelicitous Doctor Faustus directed by Nevill Coghill and Richard Burton in 1967. Is Edward II responsible for the evolution of a coherent corpus of films defined by their engagement with an early modern theatre that is not over-determined by the presence of Shakespeare? Can Jarman's blend of present-day sexual and class politics, camp, counter-culture, trademark anachronisms, and deep investment in early modern thought and literature be credited with creating a distinctive style of adaptation for early modern tragedy in the same way that Kenneth Branagh—whom Jarman described as "not [having] had an original theatrical thought" (Modern Nature 147)—has been credited with initiating the "Kenneth Branagh era" (Crowl)? Edward II was the culmination of Jarman's longstanding fascination with the Renaissance as a period which enabled an engagement with the past that was both radical, in its ability to challenge the received wisdoms and absurdities of the present, and conservative ("with a small 'c,'" as Jarman insisted in his conversation with Simon Field), in its preservation of aspects of cultural heritage marginalized by mainstream culture. It is telling that, having dedicated a large part of his film career to the historical figures of Caravaggio, Elizabeth I and Doctor John Dee and having produced seminal counter-cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare's works (The Tempest [1978] and The Angelic Conversation [1985]), Jarman, for his most direct attack on Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and its homophobic legislation, moved from Shakespeare to Marlowe, from The Sonnets to Edward II. When discussing his films with Simon Field in 1989, Jarman still thought of Shakespeare as "radical." By the time he was working on Edward II, however, Jarman had moved from that position towards an implicit, if not explicit, agreement with A. L. Rowse's assessment of Shakespeare as "a conservative" and of Marlowe as "much more radical" (quoted in Queer Edward 112). Rebelling against the Shakespeare-on-screen industry, which he identified in his Queer Edward II screenplay with the "vulgarity" of costume drama adaptations initiated by Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), Jarman rejected such "a delusion based on a collective amnesia, ignorance and furnishing fabrics...