Skweeker – have you actually seen Welles’s Shakespeare films? I take it you haven’t actually seen any silent Shakespeare? (Neither have I, much to my shame.) Have you read many of his plays? Do you know Macbeth, Othello and Henry IV (the plays Welles adapted)? You refer to Richard III as being based on real events, but even Mel Gibson is more sincere than Shakespeare in his claims of historical accuracy.
Ages ago I saw a great production of Hamlet which violated the text in every conceivable way. At a Q and A session afterwards, some old codger said he didn’t know what language the production was in, but that it certainly wasn’t English. He was wrong in a pretty obvious way – the actors had performed in English, though not always seeming to care whether people could understand them – but the cast were wrong to be as dismissive of him as they were. They’d chosen to do a radical ‘re-interpretation’, and should have tried to justify it. Though your posts are frustratingly high on opinion and low on facts/evidence, you raise interesting questions. Since you've made the effort to articulate your views, I’ll try to address some of the things you’ve said.
skweeker wrote:Pseudo-bowdlerization, that is, bowdlerizing based on taste and convenience for cinematic/theatrical/written presentation, rather than delicacy, yet partakes of the same sin, and ought to draw the same notice.
Not entirely sure what this means, but are you saying that even a theatrical presentation which alters Shakespeare’s text (as it appears on the page) in order to ‘adapt’ it to make it more to the ‘taste’ and ‘convenience’ of the theatre (to use your own terms) is a perversion, a bowdlerisation? Because if you really think that (Tolmides and Adam, you also seem to be saying that ‘Shakespeare is his words’), you have a major problem on your hands. Stage directions in Shakespeare are few and far between, so according to your own rule the actors in a ‘proper’ stage production should do nothing but enter, exit (pursued by a bear – a real one, not ‘a man in a bear suit’ because Shakespeare doesn’t say that) and occasionally kiss or stab each other. As Adam himself points out, some of the texts we have were probably pieced together from memory, by actors – so we’re really not dealing with holy writ here. The texts may already be what you would call ‘adaptations’.
You persist in calling Olivier’s Richard ‘Shakespeare, properly so-called’, and yet even though it’s been years since I saw this film I can remember quite a long processional sequence at the beginning; Edward being crowned, yes? Not in Shakespeare’s play. Olivier’s addition. Therefore, if Welles’s films are not Shakespeare merely because they add some things of their own, neither is Olivier’s. Don’t even get me started on Henry V and Hamlet.
skweeker wrote:There truly is a visual sense embedded in Shakespeare - almost like a series of tableaux. Like a series of tapestries, hanging along the long walls of a hall in a Tudor castle - visual high points in the stories he shows.
There are no visuals in Shakespeare, only words. And I don’t think he ever gives directions as to how to arrange any sort of ‘tableaux’. In fact, I’ve got no idea what you’re referring to. Examples?
skweeker wrote:Welles' words are not Shakespeare's: and Bloom expressly calls these films "adaptations". Why the problem with drawing the distinction between those works which directly use Shakespeare's words, and those which do not - some indeed which do not even use a word from Shakespeare's pen?
It really does sound as though you haven’t seen Welles’s films, but I have no problem with the distinction you draw. In fact I get quite impatient when people say that Throne of Blood or Ran ‘are’ Shakespeare – Kurosawa didn’t say they were, as far as I know – because by the same logic, Bridget Jones’s Diary ‘is’ Pride and Prejudice. Here’s the problem:
skweeker wrote:The distinction, as has been pointed out, really makes no difference as to the aesthetic worth of such works: it rather goes to the attribution of authorship. Shakespeare wrote his words. And Welles and Kurosawa wrote theirs, and presented their works: not Shakespeare's.
As you yourself say, attribution of authorship (like everything we’re discussing) is pretty arbitrary. I guess everyone has to make their own mind up as to what entitles a person to be considered the ‘author’, or what entitles a dramatic work to be considered ‘Shakespeare’. But by your rule, no production of Shakespeare is ever anything other than an ‘adaptation’, unless it consists of some pure representation of ‘the text’, whatever that is. It certainly wouldn’t involve any human beings. Just words.
skweeker wrote:Also, the plays are/were published for use in staging the plays. Like a written musical score. I don't think that Shakespeare's contemporaries read the plays, in preference to attending the performance.
I see Adam has also made this argument. Neither of you seem to have any real evidence for this assumption, and I’m certainly not an expert myself; you may be completely right. But the question as to whether the plays were written at least partly in order to be read is one that is hotly, or at least warmly, debated by scholars. Some people think Troilus and Cressida, a notoriously tough one to stage, was meant to be read. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that Seneca’s plays were not written to be performed, and he was a great model for Renaissance writers; in any case, learned men read and respected his tragedies, so why is it so strange to think that Shakespeare might have wanted to be treated with the same respect? It’s true that this would have been a fairly radical idea at the time. When Ben Jonson published his complete works, including plays as well as poems, in (I think) 1616, this was seen as a very presumptuous act. What nerve for a playwright to assume that his dramatic works should be considered on the same literary plane as his poems!
The truth is, we don’t know what Shakespeare thought about this, and never will. But his bestselling work, in his own lifetime, was Venus and Adonis, a narrative poem which he wrote in 1592, when the theatres were closed due to an outbreak of plague. It was written to be read, not performed (also debatable; apparently the RSC’s puppet show was great), and if you ask me, or most people, it reads a good deal less well than the plays. If people liked reading poetry, why not drama as well? Make up your own mind about this one, but much as I love going to the theatre or cinema, and although I’ve seen many good (and some great) productions, I’ve never seen one which ‘did justice’ to Shakespeare as he appears on the page. Chimes at Midnight comes very close. So, in short, I really disagree with you on the ‘essential aurality’ of Shakespeare. No human voice, or sound, can do justice to those words. Just my opinion on the matter.
skweeker wrote:As to reading rather than hearing Shakespeare: Without the spoken words, the iambic pentameter disappears. Not all hear voices in their heads while reading.
Read these lines in your head: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question. / Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…’ I think they were intended to be pronounced as iambic pentameters, with an extra unstressed syllable at the end of each line (to suggest the character’s halting, uncertain state of mind, etc), but I have never heard them pronounced as such. I can’t imagine any actor getting away with it today. Everyone would think it sounded weird. Does Olivier really say, ‘Now IS the WINter OF our DISconTENT’? Maybe he does and I’ve forgotten.
Anyway, Shakespeare’s metre really isn’t all that regular. Try reading the plays, and you’ll see. Compare him with something like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, which tends to be regular as clockwork. Literally
everyone disagrees about poetic metre. Some major scholars argue that Paradise Lost isn’t written in iambic pentameter, even though it seems to me pretty clear that it is. We can only make educated guesses as to what Shakespeare’s dialogue ‘sounded like’ in his own day. There are a million different ways to pronounce and inflect each line; one of the great things about this writer.
skweeker wrote:PS Did Welles really put up an "Additional Dialogue by Orson Welles" card in the credits?
The credit on Chimes says ‘Adapted from plays by William Shakespeare’; the film contains material from five of them, in fact, plus occasional tiny insertions by Welles in order to smooth over some transitions (mostly people calling each other’s names, etc). So yes, an adaptation, and the closest thing to a ‘faithful’ representation of Shakespeare’s genius that I’ve ever seen. I should also say that it’s quite common, even for the RSC, to re-write bits slightly, especially puns; a recent production of Henry IV altered the ‘effect of gravy’ joke so that the audience would get it. According to you, that production was not Shakespeare. Your distinction between ‘editing’ and ‘re-ordering’ the words is also pretty shaky, but this post is already too long.
A man can stand on a stage for two minutes banging his head with a stick and call it ‘Shakespeare’, and some would defend his claim (I wouldn’t). The same man could stand on the same stage for six hours mumbling the text of Hamlet into his hat, and by your own account even this would be truer to Shakespeare than a silent Richard III or Chimes at Midnight, even though in a very real sense, like many ‘faithful’ productions of Shakespeare, it would be an utter betrayal and travesty of this great author. At the extreme end of either argument, madness lies, and each of us has our own views on where to locate the balance. But your own stated principles on this subject are hopelessly limiting and self-defeating.
