The Greatest Shakespeare Film Never Made: Textualities, Authorship, and Archives

Abstract

This article attends to the ongoing exploration of archives—spurred in part by the digital revolution—that have recently given way to a plethora of rediscoveries pertaining to the work of filmmakers who have adapted Shakespeare’s texts. Through an engagement with the intense theoretical controversy brought to bear on the idea of the archive itself, the article uncovers the role of archival holdings—fragmentary and skeleton-like as they are—in revealing the illusory nature of many claims to auterist fidelity to Shakespeare’s authorial intent. Offering an examination of discoveries made concerning the works of auteurs such as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Akira Kurosawa, the article posits the archived screenplay in particular, resistant as it is to categorisation as epitext or peritext and more fittingly described as metatext, as offering a particularly rich insight into the creative processes of those who adapt Shakespeare into film. In attending to such illuminating archival mainstays, central to archive holdings relating to such postwar Shakespearean auteurs as Olivier, Welles, and Kurosawa, the article demonstrates how these artistes liberated Shakespeare’s texts from the scraps they had become (by way of print) precisely through the infusion of their personal styles into screen realizations of the plays. Part of the project of the article, therefore, consists also of the recognition and elaboration of the paradox whereby a wide assortment of bones and scraps, now housed in archives, contributes to our understanding of this liberation.