Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception Helen M. Whall Shakespeare Films in the Making: Vision, Production and Reception. By Russell Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 280. $106.00 (cloth). Russell Jackson's newest book, Shakespeare Films in the Making, carries weight from its title shot to its closing credits. Here, the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film not only displays his encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare on film, but also he establishes "Shakespeare films" as a genre unto themselves. He proves with energy, lucidity, and interpretive subtlety not only that there is such a genre (like the Western or the Murder Mystery) but also that assessing Shakespeare films requires a thorough understanding both of the history and the processes of film making. This, then, is not a book for Shakespeareans who do not watch movies. Or films. Or cinema. It is a crucial book for those who see in film a popular medium as worthy of serious study as the quartos, folios, and editions which bring us Shakespeare. And it most certainly is a book that will aid all who use movies in their teaching of Shakespeare or who analyze Shakespearean texts as interpreted by film. Jackson makes immediately clear that his readers will not here find "detailed accounts of the films' treatment of their original text" (11). He will provide generous references to those who have thus written, though he also advises that the scope of his work has restricted him from assessing the "stimulating and varied discussion of them in the past three decades" (11). What Jackson does deliver are pages of insightful, carefully researched, sometimes acerbic notes on the "vision, production, and making" of five Shakespeare films: Max Reinhardt's 1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Laurence Olivier's 1935 Henry V and three [End Page 269] versions of Romeo and Juliet: that which he archly labels MGM's 1936 version, followed by Renato Castellani's 1954 Giulietta e Romeo, and Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet. These essays—this book, for it is a unified book rather than a collection of essays—will prove hugely important to this decade's stimulating and varied discussions of Shakespeare on film. Jackson's only serious misreading may well be of his own book. The book's subtitle is "Vision, Production, and Reception." Those words quite accurately predict what follows. Yet at the outset, Jackson insists on blurring the words "vision" and "dream," even though each is repeatedly used in a shiftingly metaphoric fashion. That decision seems oddly sentimental in a book that seldom indulges in flights of fancy. But such miscuing begins at the frontispiece where he juxtaposes a long passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, with Prospero's "revels" speech from The Tempest.The Fitzgerald quotation ends with a description of Monroe Stahr's "miniature theater," a projection room where "Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed—to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded." Such lines could serve as any good historian's quiet acknowledgement that what he cuts and what he keeps, as well as how others will receive or ignore his text lies beyond an author's control. That possible intention evaporates, however, into the next quotation, ending with Prospero's observation that "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on." Shakespeare's lines are then partially echoed as the title to Jackson's Introduction, "Such stuff as dreams are made on." Throughout the book, but largely as a leitmotif rather than elaborated theory, Jackson tries to suggest an almost existential connection between the visions and revisions, fantasies and dreams of writers, directors, reviewers, and audiences. The conceit misleads. Nor is it necessary as the unifying principle of a book that launches and sustains its own compelling argument. In the introduction Jackson writes an eloquent and provocative short essay on the relationship of film and dream, vision and illusion. But the true organizing principle of this study arises from the author's thorough grasp of cinema's history and the ways in which his selected film texts illustrate...