Dialogue in Shakespearean Offshoots
2006; Salisbury University; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoThe question that haunted so much early criticism of Shakespeare on film, Is it Shakespeare? now seems irrelevant, according to Kenneth Rothwell in his 2001 survey, How Twentieth-Century Saw Shakespeare Film. The text-centered preoccupation with literal translation of Shakespeare's into film language no longer interests critics (82-83). In a parallel development, several 1990s create radical disjunctions between Shakespearean and filmic images. Adopting a postmodern aesthetic of parody and pastiche, these films juxtapose fragments of contemporary media culture against Shakespeare's archaic poetry. Simultaneously, Shakespearean offshoot has become a popular film genre that dispenses with plays' altogether, while radically recontextualizing character, setting, and action.1 As Shakespeare's dense poetic has become irrelevant to film critics, it may be disappearing from, or be drowned out in, contemporary Shakespeare-based films. But maybe not. I find in many Shakespearean offshoots kind of dialogues with their source texts that recent adaptations, like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1997) and Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995), deliberately reject. Mercutio as a black, drug-pushing diva in drag, Tybalt as a Hispanic gang leader wearing a Sacred Heart of Jesus vest, Nurse as a Cuban nanny, and Lady Capulet as a Southern belle-these shifting images reminiscent of MTV have made Luhrmann's adaptation of Romeo + Juliet touchstone for defining postmodern Shakespeare (Burt 169-72). Likewise, vaguely Nazi uniforms for Richard of Gloucester, constant haze of cigarette smoke, an ever-present glass of whiskey characterizing up-start queen's brother as an American playboy, and action-movie sequence that recreates Battle of Bosworth Field-these glossy images from Hollywood war movies have earned Loncraine's adaptation of Richard III label camp Shakespeare (Buhler 40-57). Whereas in Chimes at Midnight ( 1966) Orson Welles famously created a visual language, in stark black and white film, to translate Hal's emergence from base contagious clouds into light of kingship (1 Henry IV 1.2.190-91 ), Luhrmann and Loncraine deliberately interpolate images that jar against Shakespeare's language. The message sent to exiled Romeo arrives late by Post Haste mail service. Similarly, Richard shouts his famous line, My kingdom for a horse! (Richard III 5.4.7), because his jeep has broken down on battlefield. As both tragic protagonists approach death, we are encouraged to laugh. These disjunctions between word and image situate viewer's emotions at an ironic distance from tragedy. Such films have prompted Richard Burt to claim that relationship between Shakespeare and popular culture film has become post-hermeneutic-meaning that there is no dialectical or dialogic relationship between source play and shifting surfaces of media images in current films. Shakespeare's language, argues Burt, is drowned out by noise, by the nonsynchronization of high and low cultural registers (Bun 162). Unlike Burt, who labels these contemporary adaptations unspeakable Shaxxxpeares. Courtney Lehmann finds in them Shakespeare's remaines, which were bequeathed to posterity by Heminge and Condell in The First Folio. Is Shakespearean text always already postmodern? she asks. After all, Shakespeare himself engaged in same kind of cannibalization and pastiche of past styles and authorities as postmodern filmmaker (15-16, 159). I agree with Lehmann that Shakespeare's remaines do survive in contemporary film-oddly enough in offshoots that seem to dispense with his language. Offshoots, I will argue, not only mimic Shakespeare's own transformative recycling of plots and archetypes, but not infrequently, they engage an intense dialogue with of their source texts. …
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