Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide John R. Ford Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide. By Samuel Crowl. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Pp. xxv + 238. $27.50 (paper). In the last thirty years we have witnessed a proliferation of courses that focus on Shakespeare on film as well as traditional Shakespeare courses that use film. However, as Samuel Crowl argues in his most recent book, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide, that success has not always been accompanied by a parallel advance in the methodologies of teaching such courses. For Crowl, “[w]hat the field has lacked is a comprehensive guide to Shakespeare and film focused specifically on the use of the Shakespeare film in the undergraduate classroom. This book was conceived and written to address that need” (xi). In his remarkable book, Crowl not only reaches his goals but expands their reach. This is an immensely valuable guide for anyone—students, teachers, enthusiasts, or scholars—interested in exploring the rich interanimations linking film and Shakespeare’s playtexts. For these audiences, Crowl’s book provides nothing less than a clear and precise cinematic vocabulary and a tested methodology essential to mapping out how filmed and televised productions of Shakespeare’s plays tell their stories. Crowl’s analysis is both lucid and theoretically grounded, no small achievement in scholarship penned in a postmodern age. His attentive observations clearly thrive on close readings—and at times close watchings—that see into the life of things. He investigates those formal designs, sometimes barely visible or audible, that nonetheless configure film and television versions of Shakespeare’s plays. At the same time, Crowl’s concerns are with the contexts of these films as well as with their “texts.” He is keenly observant of the pressures of cultural forces upon cinematic and televised versions of these plays. Crowl argues, for example, that the relative artistic freedom that followed the death of Stalin allowed Kozintsev to create the political and social critique inherent in the landscapes of his Hamlet and especially his King Lear. In Hamlet it is “a series of visual images of imprisonment, impasse, and implosion that gives Hamlet’s entrapment a Stalinist turn,” while in his film of King Lear Poor Tom’s disguise “is prompted by the Bedlam Beggars he sees wandering the rocky landscape and whose progression he joins,” a sharp political critique of a ruler’s indifference to the social needs of his subjects (49, 51–52). Crowl’s book has a two-part structure: Part I, “A Brief History of Shakespeare on Film,” and Part II, “Analyzing Shakespeare on Film.” After a short introduction to the basic “grammar and rhetoric” of filmmaking—shots, scenes, sequence, editing—to which Crowl will return with more expansive analysis, Part I begins. The first chapter, appropriately titled “Establishing Shot,” offers a brief survey of “[t]he history of Shakespeare on screen” (3). The next four chapters focus on a dozen or so of the most prolific and insightful twentieth- and twenty-first-century directors of filmed and televised Shakespeare. Rather than merely moving chronologically, each chapter focuses on a group or groups of artists who work [End Page 147] as foils for one another. “Close-Up: Major Directors I” examines three filmmakers who share, or partly share, both a vision of Shakespeare’s plays on film and a range of cinematic practices that help shape those visions. “Close-Up: Major Directors II” focuses on the work of Akira Kurosawa, Grigori Kozintsev, and Franco Zeffirelli. For Crowl, these artists, despite differences in cultural and creative backgrounds, nonetheless reflect “parallels with their Anglo-American counterparts . . . Olivier, Welles, and Branagh, in that their individual signatures as auteurs track the evolution of cinematic Shakespeare itself ” (41). Because all but one of these directors have had extensive experience with both film and theatrical Shakespeares, Crowl also explores the possibilities of using “hybrid” conventions that seek to accommodate both theatrical and filmic features. His analysis of these hybrid conventions allows students and others to find connections among differing kinds of cinematic and theatrical modes of storytelling. Crowl discusses such hybrid strategies, whether discovered in the rehearsal room or in the editing room, from longer and...