Shakespeare in Another Form

I am not a purist when it comes to film adaptations of Shakespeare.  I love Orson Welles’ truncated versions of plays; I love Akira Kurosawa’s loose adaptations of Macbeth and Lear; and I cannot recommend highly enough the dark comedy of Scotland, PA (four words: Christopher Walken as Macduff).  I’ve written before about my use of the president’s speech in Independence Day and Peter Sellers’ Richard III speaking “Hard Day’s Night.”  I think that it’s important to share some of these films with students – not just for the experience of seeing the work of great filmmakers, but also for the opportunity to discuss Shakespeare’s central role in much of our culture.

The last time I taught my Shakespeare course, I developed a movie night assignment for my students.  I offered six movie nights over the course of the semester, and students were required to attend one movie and write a commentary on it.  (They could earn extra credit for an additional movie – and several of the students enjoyed the films so much that they attended all of the screenings, which were also open to the whole student body.)

On the assignment sheet, I explained that the assignment had three primary objectives:

1.  to encourage students to consider the implications of viewing a Shakespearean play, rather than reading it
2. to encourage students to consider the assumptions underlying directors’ interpretations of plays, either through a fairly straightforward rendering of the text or a radical reinterpretation of the text
3. to encourage students to appreciate that at the core of the study of drama is the need to recognize the role that performance plays in our interpretation of a play as an audience

After the students attended, they wrote the review considering these questions:

1. How does the movie diverge from the text as written?
2. What are the implications of that divergence on your understanding of the play itself? On your understanding of the nature of drama as a whole?
3. How does the film version of the movie challenge your assumptions about the play?

I showed students some films that were fairly straightforward, with Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night probably being the most faithful to its corresponding play.  What made for much more interesting commentary from the students – both in their written responses and in the classroom discussion the next day – were the films that strayed far from the text, like Throne of Blood and Scotland, PA.  One of the students who attended Throne of Blood wrote in her review of the film that she almost left when she realized the film was in black and white and had subtitles, but that she stayed and was thrilled to have done so (a success for my objective on aesthetics).

The day after each film, we opened class with a discussion of what we’d seen the night before, and students who had attended summarized and explained what happened in the film to the students who did not attend.  We were then able to discuss the importance of the director and the actors, as well as what sort of effect their choices had on our understanding of the film.

I think, because they were the most popular and the most strange, Scotland, PA and Throne of Blood had a significant impact on our discussion of Macbeth, and particularly on the characterization of the title character and his wife.  Kurosawa’s Macbeth (Washizu) is relentlessly ambitious and violent, but falls victim to his own paranoia that’s continually stoked by his vicious wife. Joe “Mac” McBeth of the other film is a foolish bumbler, whose primary victories occur based on the goading of his greedy and lustful wife.  They’re two very different versions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but the play itself provides suggestions that any of those descriptions might be present for the characters as Shakespeare envisioned them: lust, ambition, paranoia.  Even the idea that the warrior might be a bit out of his element (like Joe McBeth) can be found in the play.

Having discussed these things, next time I’d like to put some further work into having students explore, for each film, the question of why the play is adaptable in this way. The film adaptations are not completely without basis in the plays, of course.  Kurosawa saw something in the play; Billy Morissette saw something else.  Alexander McCall Smith saw something entirely different in the play – and saw a similarity to the social relationships between baboons, which he then spun into his recent opera, The Okavango Macbeth.  My students can see those things, and talking about them has helped us open up the door not only to understanding Shakespeare thematically, but also to appreciating that Shakespeare is fun.

I’m planning on trying this again with my Shakespeare students this fall.  I’ll have to find some new films, since I’m using a different theme this time (last time: Shakespeare’s women; this time: Shakespeare’s villains).  Some of the plays will be the same (Macbeth, Lear, Titus), but I’m going to include Othello, The Tempest, and Richard III this time around.

I’m casting about for a wide variety of films to use (both this fall and in future Shakespeare courses), so I’d like to ask readers for suggestions.  What films should I know about?  What are your favorite adaptations of Shakespearean plays?