The Earnest Equivocator: Columbo Undoes Macbeth

Abstract

The academic commonplace that functioned in his own time as culture is just that, purely academic: despite a myriad of texts which attest to the breadth of Shakespeare's contemporaneous audience,1 for the majority of modern Americans, the canon remains high culture. While movie-theater audiences have been invited to become consumers of through such recent vehicles as in Love, Ten Things I Hate about You (a loose adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew), and A Midsummer Night's Dream, all released in 1999, the most popular of American audiences2 (because television remains the most ubiquitous of mass media technologies) resists consuming as regular fare. So it is with great pleasure that I will examine a cultural moment when becomes culture again: the moment when Columbo undoes in a madefor-television film entitled Dagger of the Mind? In this essay I will explore the ways in which the Columbo film's appropriation of succeeds in satisfying the expectations of the fans of the rumpled detective, at the same time as it offers what Robert Willson terms fresh Shakespeare (34); significantly, the pleasure in this text is heightened for the discerning viewer by the way in which Dagger both pays tribute to, and distorts, Shakespeare's text. Finally, Dagger offers viewers an image of Columbo as the Ugly American who threatens the hegemony of the British system within the detective genre, and within the plot. While the British Broadcasting Company may have popularized the Bard for British television audiences, his presence on American television has always been confined to the Public Broadcasting Service, or, more recently, to premium cable stations, as was the case with the Home Box Office channel's animated plays. Since crime drama is a prevalent narrative form in culture, the nexus of and television crime drama offers a rare instance of American culture becoming Bardolized in spite of itself. The escapades of Lieutenant Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department were first viewed as part of the NBC Mystery Movie series, which aired from 1971 to 1978, and from 1989 to 1991, with additional specials in 1992, '93, '96, '97, and '98; a new audience was realized from the syndication of the series. Today Columbo entraps criminals and regales audiences on two cable stations, the Family Channel, and (ironically) the Arts and Entertainment Network. Fans of the disorderly detective may also share insights, trade pirated episodes, play at playwright, and adapt Columbo's strategies for parlor games on a multitude of Internet sites.4 As is the case with the entire series, Columbo's charms its TV audience with gentle humor. The familiar presence of the brilliant-but-bumbling Lieutenant Columbo, who succeeds in exasperating the and Lady figures as he painstakingly proves their guilt, offers American audiences numerous opportunities for conspiratorial laughter at the expense of the snobbish Brits. In addition, the role of the Banquo-figure, the butler, is played by Wilfrid Hyde-White, a familiar face to American TV audiences: that he is ruthlessly murdered by Macbeth assures the viewers' alliance with the forces of justice. Initially, the movie rewards the affections of Columbo's loyal fans. Our first glimpse sets him in conflict with uptight British airport police; having lost his suitcase, he annoys another passenger by attempting to determine if her bag, identical to his perennially-absent wife's, is his. When he unsuccessfully attempts to pacify the irritated passenger (clumsily dumping the contents of her suitcase), the responding functionaries treat Columbo patronizingly until a representative of Scotland Yard identifies him as the visiting dignitary for whom they have been waiting. Columbo's diffident emendations of the Yard's facile assumptions begin soon after he meets Detective Chief Superintendent Dirk (Bernard Fox), who is engaged in the investigation of the death of Sir Roger Havisham, the financier of a production of Macbeth, just opening at the Royal Court. …