This year (and in fact this month) marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.
It officially occurs on April 23rd (which also would have been Will’s 452nd birthday) and there will be worldwide observances. In accordance with that, this seems the ideal time to talk about some of the cinematic interpretations of Shakespeare.
The oldest Shakespeare film adaptation goes all the way back to 1899! It’s a 5 minute clip of 19th century actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree (Oliver Reed’s grandfather) doing the death scene from King John. There were a surprising number of short, silent Shakespearean films from several different countries. These have been collected on a DVD called, appropriately, Silent Shakespeare.
Move forward to the 1930s and you get the American versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and Romeo & Juliet (1936) with a hopelessly old Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer as R & J. England gave us As You Like It (1936) with a young Laurence Olivier. The failure of these at the box office kept Shakespeare off the screen until the 1940s.
Fittingly it was Olivier who revived Shakespeare with a 1944 version of Henry V that was intended as WW II propaganda but it was a first class adaptation that Olivier also directed. Three years later came one of the most famous Shakespeare adaptations, Olivier’s version of Hamlet which remains essential viewing.
1953 gave us the famous Joseph L. Manciewicz Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony and James Mason as Brutus. Not to be outdone, Olivier directed and played Richard III (1955) in another celebrated interpretation that was an essential in high school and college courses during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Also in 1955 Laurence Harvey and Susan Stendahl were Romeo & Juliet in a version shot on location in Verona.
Olivier returned in 1965 with the now politically incorrect Othello (he plays it in dark make-up and kinky wig) which launched the career of Maggie Smith (as Desdemona) and featuring my favorite on screen Iago, Frank Finlay. This version seemed to open the floodgates and there were a number of quality adaptations made in the late 60s and early 1970s.
Before I get to those I don’t want to forget Orson Welles. Welles made a low budget version of Macbeth in German expressionist fashion but it was heavily altered by its studio and all but disappeared for many years. 1952 saw the release of Othello which was shot piecemeal over a period of three years in several different countries. Finally there was Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff) in 1965 which was a conflation of Henry IV and V that focused on the fat knight. None of these were successful.
Back to the mainstream and 1967 when Franco Zefferelli directed a very successful version of The Taming of the Shrew with Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor (Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford had done a forgotten version way back in 1929). However it was his Romeo & Juliet the following year that became a worldwide hit and made film adaptations of Shakespeare fashionable for awhile.
In 1968 Peter Brook did a contemporary version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a dream cast consisting of Ian Richardson, Ian Holm, Judi Dench, David Warner, Diana Rigg, and Helen Mirren. Director Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) did a stripped down version of Hamlet shot in a railway roundhouse with a riveting performance from Nicol Williamson that was released in 1969.
1970 saw Paul Scofield as a towering King Lear while Roman Polanski made his controversial version of Macbeth with its bloody violence, filthy witches, and a nude, sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. While both of these were excellent movie adaptations, the depressing nature of the material and the intensity of the performances resulted in box office failures for both and Shakespeare on screen then disappeared for almost 20 years.
It was Irish born actor Kenneth Branagh who brought Shakespeare back in a big way with his 1989 adaptation of Henry V that, like Olivier before him, he starred in and directed. The film was a critical and commercial success and was the first of six Branagh adaptations including a delightful Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and a four hour adaptation of Hamlet (1996) that proved to be too much of a good thing.
The 1990s also saw radical reinterpretations of the Bard with Peter Greenaway’s incomprehensible Prospero’s Books (after The Tempest) starring John Gielgud (1991), a clever transfer of Richard III to the 1930s with a beguiling Ian McKellan (1995), Baz Luhrmann’s updated Romeo & Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes (1996) and Julie Taymor’s outrageous but highly effective Titus (after Titus Andronicus) with Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange (1999).
So far the 21st century has brought us a classic version of The Merchant of Venice featuring Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons (2004), updated versions of Coriolanus (2011) with Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler, Josh Whedon’s minimalist Much Ado About Nothing (2012) and most recently a well intentioned but misguided Macbeth (2015) with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.
These aren’t all of the Shakespearean adaptations out there but they are most of the major ones. To close out the article I would like to mention two films that I consider worthwhile that feature Shakespeare as a character. The first is the multi-award winning Shakespeare in Love from 1998 and 2011’s Anonymous. While both are historically rubbish (Love means to be), they both convey Elizabethan London perfectly and are superbly theatrical.