The ‘tables of memory’: Shakespeare, cinema and the writing desk

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s sketch of an (anonymous) Shakespeare at work captures a cultural preoccupation as familiar now as it was in 1928: the desire to ‘gaze’, like her hero/ine Orlando, on the scene of authorship — which is itself characterized by an enthralling combination of intense glance and rapid motion. Addressing the transference of this scene to the film screen, this chapter explores the ways in which the site of Shakespearean composition has been cinematically conceptualized throughout the twentieth century. Repeatedly configured as an act of mysterious inspiration, the depiction of writing on the film screen has usually obscured the actual conditions of Early Modern authorship increasingly detailed by recent scholars.KeywordsSilent FilmIdiomatic PhrasingFilm FrameCompositional FertilitySentimental VisionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.