Shakespeare, Class, and Scotland, PA
2006; Salisbury University; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoAdapting Shakespeare for film has become in recent years precarious balancing act. On the one hand, filmmakers seem to be invoking Shakespeare to add gravitas to what might otherwise be just another generic exercise-teenage violence in Tim Blake Nelson's Othello-based O (2001), for instance, or teenage dating in Gil Junger's Taming of the Shrew-based Ten Things I Hate about (1999), to name two. On the other hand, the weightiness of Shakespeare as legitmizing agent can also sink picture. As Kenneth Branagh remarked following the 2000 release of his last Shakespeare adaptation. Love's Labor's Lost, You have to fight for the audience every time. As friend once told me, you need only throw stick 12 feet anywhere in the Western world to find dozens of people who think Shakespeare is turgid and boring and meaningless. [...] Mel Gibson, as brilliant as he was in Hamlet, didn't bring his Lethal Weapon audience with him.1 One might say, however, that the problem with the jangling musical Branagh produced in Love's Labor's Lost was that it did not bring Branagh's Hamlet audience with him. Indeed, the problem of audience has affected the marketing of number of Shakespeare adaptations, and Branagh's Love's Labor's Lost was notable in avoiding any mention of Shakespeare in its taglines and video covers (only announcing itself as a new spin on the old song and dance).2 Ironically, it was Love's Labor's Last's failure to reach an audience that effectively ended Branagh's plans for another Shakespeare adaptation-a futuristic Macbeth. When director and screenwriter Billy Morrissette adapted Macbeth year later as Scotland, PA, he did so conscientious of the pitfalls of Shakespearean cinema, and approached the production with an ambivalence characteristic of Shakespeare films in the past decade: I'm very faithful to the play, for the most part, in this movie, he remarks, though elsewhere he acknowledges cutting anything that seemed too Shakespearean.3 The official on-line site for Scotland, PA glosses such bifurcations as part of the cultural divide within cinematic Shakespeare: Some critics and educators seem to think that Shakespeare's social purpose is to morally or culturally shape and the public, that is, to act as kind of social bra. This is the Shakespeare of the social elite, Shakespeare that was most apparent in Olivier's Henry V and, more recently, in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Directors such as Michael Almereyda (Hamlet), Baz Luhrmann (William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet), and Richard Loncrain (Richard III) have approached the plays with what some critics consider less respectful attitudes but which none-the-less still entail fascination with the play and desire to bring perspectives to the original texts. Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA is of this type.4 This statement, cursory and unproblematized as it is (Luhrmann has in fact probably received the lion's share of critical acclaim, while Nunn and Huffman have sparked few studies of any sort), speaks to the slipperiness of audience-targeting strategies.5 Scotland, PA is of the the site suggests, that eschews elitism, that harbors healthy disrespect, that nonetheless is fresh rather than nineteen-forties (leaping over times to Olivier's Henry). It is of the type, one might say, that is rebellious without fault, discursive strategy actually embraced in the play Macbeth itself. All of this is to say that Shakespeare on film has become contested site for reading not only the exaggeration or elision of Shakespeare as cultural marker, but as representation of class divisions as well.6 If Nunn and Hoffman (and presumably Branagh, Taymor, et al.) are currying the elite (apparently an intellectual and political elite, those who wish to shape and uplift the public), who remains to swell the ranks of the less-respectful underclasses? Morrissette's own suggestion is telling: [. …
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