Movie Genres, Kenneth Branagh, and Hollyworld
"I'm making six movies at once. This one is Die Hard."
Kenneth Branagh
The remarkable 1990s spurt of films based on Shakespearean material and designed for
mass consumption was not unprecedented. After the lackluster box-office performances of
such big-budget studio era star vehicles as the Warner Bros. 1934 A Midsummer Night's Dream
and MGM's 1935 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's challenging Early Modern idiom gained the
reputation of being box-office poison. As the classical studio system itself began to decline,
however, experimental filmmaking became more common, and one such cinematic experiment
proved to be a twenty-year cycle of films beginning in the late 1940s that at times disguised their
origins through free adaptations of Shakespeare's plots in exploring the potentialities of such
popular film genres as the Western, the Sci-fi film, and the musical. What distinguished the
1990s resurgence was its reversal of the 1950s experiment, one characterized instead by a
creative employment of contemporary genres with proven mass appeal to translate Shakespeare's
language together with his plots from the stage to the screen. The pioneer in this approach was
Kenneth Branagh, whose six Shakespeare films all gathered artistic energy by embracing
Hollywood genres as divergent as the War Film and the Movie Musical. In mingling
Shakespeare's high culture status with "low" Hollywood forms, Branagh was soon vigorously
emulated by filmmakers as diverse as Baz Luhnnann, Richard Loncraine, Adrian Noble, and
Michael Hoffman.
Branagh epitomizes the filmmaker who is keenly aware of his predecessors, including
such theatre practitioners as Peter Brook, Peter Sellars, Michael Bogdanov, and Torn Stoppard,
whose work was powerfully influenced by developments in Shakespeare criticism. It is no
coincidence, therefore, that shifts in thought in the world of mass entertainment reflect parallels
in the world of critical practice. Just as the rigorous dictates of the film studios ensured a
uniformity of approach and production, textual scholarship in the 1930s and 1940s was
dominated by the New Criticism, an approach devised initially for the close analysis of the
hermeneutics of poems, but soon applied willy-nilly to all texts without reference to biography,
historical context, or even other works by the same author.
In a sense, it was genre that came to the rescue. Following on some of the pioneering
Soviet Formalist approaches to genre in the 1920s and 1930s, brought to an end by Stalin's
increasing anti-Formalism, Northrop Frye's Anatomy a/Criticism (1958) was the first
profoundly influential work of modem criticism in English to take an anthropological approach
to literary and artistic production and to use the generic basis of structural archetypes to break the
New Criticism's strangle-hold on literary analysis. Eventually, Frye mapped out a great
superstructure--something like a literary romance--associating the seasons (and their roles in
the cycle of social relations) with specific genres: Spring for comedy, Summer for romance,
Autumn for tragedy, and Winter for satire. Consequently, critics in a variety of fields began to
recognize that genres are engines for telling stories, that they serve authors by establishing
certain guidelines for the play of imagination, that they serve readers and audiences by creating
expectations that can be surprised as well as satisfied, and that they serve critics by revealing
deep connections among stories told across a wide range of forms from ancient myths to
contemporary multimedia spectacles.
Genre and the Auteurist Battles for the Ownership of Shakespeare: the Olivier-WellesKurosawa Generation
Timely though his intervention was, Branagh's was not the first generation to recognize
the centrality of questions of genre to film adaptation or, through him, to the debates about genre
in which Shakespeare participated. Indeed, the existing critical literature has paid scant attention
to the fact that the interaction between Shakespeare, film, and popular genres became more
pronounced and interesting in the dazzling international period of auteurist Shakespeare on film
following the end of World War II when directors with distinctive personal styles from England,
America, Japan, Russia, and Italy drew on his plays as the inspiration for their films. Led by
Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, who created the first "mature" sound Shalcespeare films (in
the sense of films that fully accounted for Shakespeare's language), directors of Shakespeare on
film even began flirting with Hollywood's storytelling techniques. For instance, both Olivier (in
Hamlet [1948]) and Welles (in Macbeth [1948] and Othello [1952]) employed elements
associated with the "in" film style of the 1940s, Hollywood noir, in their Shakespeare
films.
What is interesting about these films in a way seldom acknowledged even by
sophisticated film critics is the extent to which they gather energy by incorporating the work of
film movements, styles, and genres such as German Expressionism, "B" Westerns, and
psychological thrillers. Neither Olivier nor Welles intentionally set out to translate their
Shakespearean material into a single popular film genre, but neither could they resist
incorporating cinematic finesse into their directorial imaginations, thus giving Shakespeare's
words visual force. Despite numerous previous discussions of Welles's Macbeth, for instance, it
was only recently that Anthony Guneratne noted that in it Welles infused "Shakespeare's
language into Republic's "B" Westerns and Universal's aesthetized Horror films [and so] caught
critics of the what-can-Hollywood-do-for-Shakespeare?-school unawares."1
On first encounter, a film such as Olivier's Hamlet may appear to bear little
resemblance to the world of film noir, but the film was made when the style was at its
height combining the decay of expressionism into a grim version of film realism. Olivier's use
of chiaroscuro, Hamlet's edgy behavior, the nervous camera exploring Elsinore's twisting
staircases and Gertrude's bedroom as if they were slick urban back alleys, and Hamlet's radical
skepticism (verging on the noir detective's paranoia), attest to such an affinity. The sometimes
stylistic and comical rivalry between Olivier and Welles to serve Shakespeare best in transposing
him to the screen produced two memorable trilogies.
It was neither Welles nor Olivier, but Akira Kurosawa who was to fully realize the
potentialities of embracing film genre in translating Shakespeare, from the stage to screen. The
first of the triumvirate to be lauded at film festivals as an auteur, and yet intensely drawn to John
Ford's Westerns, he seamlessly incorporated elements of Ford into a quintessentially Japanese
narrative and visual style in his treatments of the culturally rich and yet chaotic Edo Period (16031868) in a series jidai-geki. Historical period films (as opposed to gendai-geki, or contemporary
ones),jidai-geki resemble Hollywood historical action adventures more than its "horse operas."
Simultaneously adapting American film genres to other American film genres, and Japanese ones
to other Japanese ones, Kurosawa became the first major film director to graft a diversity of intercultural genre models to each of his three Shakespeare films: Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad
Sleep Well (1960), and Ran (1985).
In Throne of Blood (1957), for instance, Kurosawa transposed Macbeth's Scottish setting
to early medieval Japan, and used a highly-stylized Japanese theatrical form of the period, Noh, in
effecting a daring dramatic synthesis. In so doing he "stresses the excessive, the transgressive,
[and] the flamboyant," exemplifying Stephen Prince's contention that his film style mirrors
Shakespeare in these qualities and in his willingness to appropriate plots, themes, narrative
devices, genre elements, and symbolic landscapes from multiple sources. 2 If Kurosawa
appropriated elements from the Western in the making of his Samurai epics, Hollywood was not
shy in returning the compliment by raiding Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai
(1954) as sources for The Outrage (dir. Martin Ritt, 1964) and The Magnificent Seven (dir. John
Sturges, 1960). The cross-quotations between Kurosawa, Shakespeare, and Hollywood
continues into the 1990s revival. As critics have noted, the opening sequence of Branagh' s Much
Ado About Nothing (1993) has Benedick, Don Pedro, Don John and four of their followers
spread out in a line across the screen galloping home to Messina, in giddy exultation, with their
right fists punched up in the air, bringing Sturges's classic remake thundering back into the
world of Shakespeare on film.
The Arrival of Kenneth Branagh
Branagh and his contemporaries, some of whom had come to film through theater (such
as Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble, and Julie Taymor) and others, who had grown up in a world
saturated by cinema and associated mass entertainment media (such as Luhrmann, Hoffmann,
Almereyda, Richard Loncraine, Oliver Parker, and Michael Radford) were unapologetic about
raiding popular Hollywood genres as models for their Shakespeare films. Parker set out to
transform Othello into an erotic thriller; Loncraine reworked Richard Eyre's National Theatre
stage production of Richard III, set in the 1930s, into a gangster film; Noble found inspiration in
children's movies from Disney to Spielberg in making A Midsummer Night's Dream; Almereyda
had Oliver Stone's Wall Street percolating in the back of his media-saturated corporate
Manhattan setting for his film of Hamlet; Nunn had Mozart's operas and Billy Wilder's
comedies dancing in his imagination as he filmed Twelfth Night; and Luhnnann proudly
confessed that he set his generically diffuse William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet "in the world
of the movies."3
It was Branagh who had legitimated such attenuated borrowings in the service of
Shakespeare's dialogue. His Henry V (1989) launched the Shakespeare on film revival and
linked it, from the beginning, to an interest in merging Shakespeare with established film genres.
Claiming to have little desire to work in Hollywood, he sought to attract Hollywood money and
marketing to popularizing Shakespeare. As the iconic American film actor, Al Pacino, has
remarked: "Branagh opened it all up with Henry V. Now you say Shakespeare on Film in
Hollywood and people listen."4 Branagh's Henry V was a cunning mixture of the tone and
atmosphere of the anti-heroic Vietnam War Film like Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket
(1987) foregrounding a gritty national hero willing to dismount and join his men in a brutal,
muddy version of Agincourt that owed less to Olivier's version than to Welles's Shrewsbury
battle sequence in his Chimes at Midnight (1966). Branagh's Henry V was a blunt British
bulldog, rather than Olivier's sleek greyhound, well deserving of the movie-insider's sobriquet:
"Dirty Harry." 5 Shakespeare's text is famously divided about its hero and Branagh's decision to
lift elements from the dystopian war film genre allowed him to fashion a new kind of war hero
(untested, imperfect, stained but not cynical) and in the process to allude to the cinematic
landscape of the Good War Film associated with the unambiguously victorious World War II,
and best represented in its revivals by Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the
Spielberg/Hanks television mini-series Band of Brothers (2001). Henry V, made on a shoestring
budget of six million dollars, had a modest success at the box office but won critical accolades,
receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director.
When, several years later, Branagh turned again to making a Shakespeare film, he made a
choice in some ways as perverse as Henry V where he, as an unknown, was directly challenging
one of the universally acknowledged great Shakespeare films and its maker, the legendary Sir
Laurence Olivier. Now Branagh selected Much Ado about Nothing from the
romantic comedy genre--a genre that had yet to produce a successful Shakespeare film. In this
instance he combined two film genres: the Chiantishire idyll where a group of otherwise
repressed Brits or Americans lose their inhibitions and loosen their corsets under the speIl of the
Tuscan sun and the HoIlywood screwball comedy of the 1930s with its verbal play and sparkling
wit. The mingling of Anglo-American elements was also reflected in a cast trained in two
radically different traditions. "Different accents, different looks ... [we wanted] to produce a
Shakespeare film which would belong to the world," he insisted. 6 Hence, American film actors
with commercial appeal (Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton and Robert Sean Leonard) played
alongside seasoned Shakespeare veterans from his Renaissance Company like Brian Blessed and
Richard Briers.
Branagh's festive film is anchored in the dynamic relationship between Beatrice and
Benedick which allows for its high-flying cinematic exuberance. Emma Thompson shares the
sharp, angular features of Katherine Hepburn, the formidable screwball arch-heroine of the 30s
and 40s, and Branagh daringly makes his Benedick more the class clown than Mr. Cool. In a
film where screwball roles and models are brilliantly illuminated and sometimes mocked, it is
ironically appropriate that when Cary Grant (Hepburn's frequent comic partner) is imitated it is
to emphasize the disparity between his screen persona and Branagh's. Branagh's Benedick tries
to arrange himself by the fountain when Beatrice comes to caIl him into dinner as though he
were Tony Curtis trying to imitate Grant's fey mannerisms in Some Like It Hot: a neat layering
of screwball films and male stars from different eras. Branagh's successful blend of Chiantishire
lushness and Tinseltown patter produced the first commerciaIly successful Shakespearean
comedy, its box-office returns more than tripling its production cost.
"To hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature": Branagh's Hamlets and their Antecedents
Branagh next turned his attention to filming Hamlet, the Shakespearean text with which
he most identified, by making two films at opposite ends of the genre spectrum: In the Bleak
Midwinter (1994) and Hamlet (1996). In the Bleak Midwinter (retitled as the less forbidding
A Midwinter's Tale for its American release) is an affectionate tribute to the Ealing Studio
comedies of the 1940s and 50s. Ealing comedies were darkly humorous, low budget English
films made under the guidance of the studio head, Michael Balcon. They eventually gained a
wider audience because of their caustic wit and the brilliant performances of such actors as Alec
Guinness, who starred in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951),
The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and The Lady Killers (1955). Branagh borrowed the Ealing
formula's black and white cinematography, simple camera set-ups, and company cast, combined
it with the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland-style American back-stage musical, and added a touch
of auteurist self-reference by making Hamlet the show his comically neurotic cast produces.
In the Bleak Midwinter is Branagh's first feature in which he directed but did not star in,
but Michael Maloney plays an obvious stand-in who is responsible for producing, directing, and
acting in a charity production of Hamlet. Like Maloney the majority of the cast is drawn from
Branagh's Renaissance Company and some of them: Richard Briers (Polonius), Michael Maloney
(Laertes) and Nicholas Farrell (Horatio) would go on to appear in Branagh's film of Hamlet.
Midwinter is a comedy about putting on a tragedy; it is a bitter-sweet lament for what Branagh's
career paradoxically models: the decline of the stage in English cultural life as it is superseded by
film and television. While everyone in Hamlet may die or disintegrate, everyone in the production
of the play bonds triumphantly against the odds. The film, as Douglas Lanier indicates, is
Branagh' s most explicit cinematic statement about the importance of community in his aesthetic
and ethos. 7
If In the Bleak Midwinter is tightly focused, intimate, and sentimental, Branagh's Hamlet
is expansive, epic, and cold. Branagh's genre model here is the character-driven epic associated
with the films of David Lean, Sergei Bondarchuk, and Kurosawa's King Lear adaptation Ran
(1985). Of Bondarchukian length, running some 248 minutes, it is the longest commercial
Shakespeare film since Joseph Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (1964), and the first film to be shot in
70mm since Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1972). Other debts to Lean include the casting
of Julie Christie (Lean's Lara in Doctor Zhivago [1965]) as Gertrude, and the use of Alex
Thompson, once a cameraman's assistant on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as his cinematographer.
Branagh further underscored his epic ambitions by shooting the film's exteriors at Blenheim
Palace, an imposing architectural relic of the age of British Imperial power. The huge Great Hall
of Mirrors built at Shepperton Studios for most of the film's interiors was designed by Tim
Harvey to suggest a synthesis of mirrored corridors of Versailles and the marbled interiors of the
Winter Place, "far removed from the rugged medieval gloom one usually associates with the
play".8
Olivier's Elsinore was gloomy and empty: a castle of the mind. Branagh's is a busy court
packed with servants, bureaucratic functionaries, hosts of young Danes undergoing military
training inside and out, a munitions factory, a working train, and even a French pimp and his
prostitute. The surface dazzle of this world is reflected in Elsinore's Great Hall lined with
mirrored doors trimmed in white and gold. Branagh places a series of star-actor epic heroes at
the margins of this world (his father's ghost, the First Player, and Fortinbras), while his soldier
Hamlet and Derek Jacobi's gentlemanly Claudius conduct a civil war to command its center. If
as Kenneth Rothwell argues, "Epic requires space, tragedy, intimacy," then Branagh creates
precisely this effect through the use of expansive crane shots (as in his extravagant treatment of
the "How all occasions do inform against me" soliloquy), and intimate close-ups in the hidden
nooks and corridors of the palace. 9
Branagh's notorious closing montage evokes yet another genre, the big-budget
Hollywood action film fantasia (hence Branagh's joking remark evoking Die Hard quoted in the
epigraph), featuring the Hamlet and Laertes duel; the storming of the Winter Palace by
Fortinbras's troops, and a near quotation of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood when Hamlet hurls a
rapier into Claudius's back and then releases a chandelier that crushes Claudius against his
throne as he swings down on a rope. Even a final tender exchange with Laertes and Horatio
before he expires and his coffin is carried past the courtyard where Fortinbras's arruy topples the
vast bronze statue of Hamlet's father is an obvious nod to the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet
Empire. Branagh's Hamlet fails with Marx's epic grandeur, unlike Olivier's who succumbs to
Freud's neuroses.
Sheer Cheek: Branagh's Later Genre Experiments
Branagh's next Shakespeare film, Love's Labour's Lost (1999), was his most obvious
attempt to use Hollywood's most classical, if now almost extinct, film genre---the American
movie musical--as a vehicle for reimagining a Shakespearean festive comedy in a movie
landscape. The film sets the play in the long summer of 1939 leading up to Hitler's invasion of
Poland and the start of World War II. Shakespeare's play has a patterned elegance in language
and style that easily invokes music and dance. In fact, dance is an implied metaphor underlying
much of the interactions between the four romantic couples in Love's Labour's Lost. Branagh
recognized that Shakespeare's lovers break into sonnet as naturally as the romantic leads in
musical comedy break into song and dance. As he observed, the play makes "many references to
music and dancing [and its] elegance, style, and wit ... seemed to me to sit well in a context not
unlike the Hollywood musical of the thirties and forties."10 Finding equivalences for the flights
of poetic fancy expressed by Berowne, the King, Dumaine, and LongaviIle in the lyrics of Cole
Porter, Irving Berlin, and the Gershwins, Branagh boldly dispensed with Shakespeare's lines
wherever "I get a Kick Out of You," "Cheek to Cheek," "Let's Face the Music and Dance,"
"There's No Business Like Show Business," and "They Can't Take That Away From Me" Could
take their place. The film was Branagh's most thoroughly conceived attempt to popularize one
of Shakespeare's least performed comedies by grafting its superstructure into a modern film
idiom. Almost inevitably, the generation of spectators familiar with Porter's songs and the
Astaire-Rogers dance routines found Branagh and his company overly amateurish, and the youth
(Hollywood's main audience demographic) found Berlin's accents no closer to their ken than his
Stratfordian predecessor's.11
The commercial failures of both Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost hastened the end of
the decade-long revival of Shakespeare on film and cut Branagh off from future Hollywood
funding for his Shakespeare projects. When, five years later, he convinced HBO Films to back
his feature of As You Like It he remained undeterred in turning again to a major film genre as a
key component in his conception. This time he set his film in Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912)
during which the country hastened to assimilate Western influences, turning to the version of
Kurosawa's jidai-geki in its reincarnations as contemporary Japanese films and television serials.
This genre is itself a combination of the Hong King action film, Chinese martial arts films, and
the inherited elements that include plots in which aristocrats disguise themselves as high-ranking
samurai (or hatamotos) to gather intelligence. Instead of his literal translation of Love's Labour's
Lost into a musical comedy, Branagh plays more lightly with the parallels between the plot
elements of As You Like It and the genre conventions of these modified jidai-geki, seeking what
he called "an impression of Japan" in which the roar of modern life exists side by side with a
simpler pastoral past in cities like Kyoto where one finds serene, otherworldly temples "through
a small door in a hugely busy street filled with traffic, that opens into a magical space."12
Although the "impression" was filmed in an English oriental garden, Branagh exploits
the sharp contrasts characteristic of the revivified genre. When the film opens Duke Senior and
his court are enjoying a Kabuki dance performance, while the Duke's evil brother Frederick
leads his pack of ninja fighters into the palace in a silent coup. In exile in the woods the court
party discovers the gentler, ethereal version of Japan: a rock garden, a tranquil pond, a farmer's
hut, a simple forest path. Jaques assumes the lotus position at the center of the rock garden, while
Rosalind sheds her kimono for Ganymede's beige coat and britches to lead Orlando by way of a
snaking wooden bridge on a witty exploration of the loves of men and women. Corin, conceived
as a nativized Christian missionary, finds himself at home and at peace in the farmer's hut. Here
genre for Branagh has become a mechanism to underline the social maliciousness and power-lust
that opens Shakespeare's play against its contrasting, bucolic vision of studied tranquility that
enables the compassionate graciousness of the exiled community.
Genre in the Work of Branagh's Contemporaries
Branagh's contemporaries followed his lead in using a wide-ranging mix of genres to
enliven their adaptations of Shakespeare. Three variations on the theme are especially
noteworthy. As Barbara Hodgdon points out, for example, Baz Luhrmann's William
Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet draws its restless energy through a form of eclectic raiding of
earlier films and stylistic trademarks, from Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to John
Woo action adventures.13 Rather than exploiting a single film genre, Luhrmann structures his
teen star-driven film as a generic collage, effected through rapid montage, a roving camera, and a
resonant use of music and sound effects to draw a parallel between Zeffirelli' s 1960s youth film
and the emergent box office phenomenon of the 'teen pic. In the process, he in turn pioneered the
Shakespeare teen pic as developed in such films as 10 Things I Hate About You
(1999),0 (2001), She's the Man (2006), Were the World Mine (2008), and Hamlet 2 (2008).
Another approach to the Hollywood genre-inflected films of the 1990s is Richard
Loncraine's Richard III. Faced with the extraordinary challenge of adapting Richard Eyre's
celebrated stage version (and obliged to preserve the chillingly aristocratic performance of its
star and his, Ian McKellen within its 1930s ambience), Loncraine found a single ideal genre, the
1930s gangster film, that allowed for a series of equivalences and parallels. Eyre had set the
production in the England of the 1930s where several British aristocrats, most notoriously Sir
Oswald Mosely, openly proclaimed their support for Hitler, and Loncraine's translation further
emphasized that while princes and monarchs come and go, genres are forever. Celebrating the
rise and fall of ruthless bootleggers and other denizens inhabiting a world seemingly beyond the
reach of common restraints and the law, the lead character of the Depression era gangster film
needed no adjustment when adapted to the rise and fall pattern of Richard's career or his
complicated psychological relationships with women; and the genre only underscored the cheeky
irony of Shakespeare's text and the mixtnre of murderous real politik and Grand Guignol humor
in Eyre's stage production. At the end of the film Richard is cornered by Richmond on a steel
roof beam of the derelict Battersea Power Station (the equivalent of Bosworth Field). As
Richmond tracks him down, McKellen's defiant Richard throws himself off the girder and in slow
motion drifts down into the blazing inferno below as Al Jolson's voice is heard on the soundtrack
singing "I'm Sitting on Top of the World." Thus the film's final image quotes a moment in
White Heat (1949) when Jimmy Cagney meets a similar fiery fate while calling out: "Look, Ma
I'm on top of the world." As James Loehlin remarks after an extended analysis of the gangster
movie parallels: "Shakespeare's play bears some correspondence to this pattern, [but]
Loncraine's film follows it almost exactly." 14
Michael Radford takes yet another approach in his 2004 version of The Merchant of
Venice, in which he revives the spirit of an older, star-driven Hollywood Shakespeare film like
Joseph Mankiewicz's 1953 Julius Caesar which placed seasoned British stage actors like John
Gielgud and James Mason, and American Marlon Brando in a "neo-realistic" historical version
of Rome. Likewise, Radford surrounded an established American film star, Al Pacino, with
British stage and film actors like Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes, locating them in a Venice of
1596 that is at once opulent and squalid. The movie even begins with the old film device of a
scrolled text appearing on the screen establishing the social and political conditions governing
the community of Jews in Venice. Eschewing Zeffirelli' s lyrical use of space, or the genteel calm
of the heritage film, Radford's literal realism suggests a visual match for Antonio's treatment of
Shylock and for Shylock's unflinching desire for revenge.
Perhaps Redford's melancholy Merchant was a signal that the Shakespeare film's
infatuation with popular film genres that had so distinguished the films of the 1990s had run its
course. The Branagh model could not be sustained as films like Julie Taymor's Titus and The
Tempest moved away from the Hollywood genre models that had energized earlier films in the
decade. While the Shakespeare films of the 1990s turned to old Hollywood models for
inspiration they were also creating, as Peter S. Donaldson has pointed out, a new twist in the
genre: what Donaldson calls "a media allegory." 15 The most ambitious Shakespeare film to
appear since the turn of the new century is the just released Coriolanus directed by Ralph Fiennes
and with a screenplay by John Logan. The film might be said to be conjured by Donaldson's work
as it is the apotheosis of a media allegory. We watch the film as if we were viewing the evening
news moving from protest politics, to scenes in and around the Roman Senate, to street by street
fighting in Corioles as if it were Bosnia or Tripoli or Homs being brought to us on the small
rather than large screen. The film marries the hand-held camera tightly framed in close-up and
two shot style that distinguished The Hurt Locker with a media fascination that transcends its use
in films like Loncraine's Richard III and Almereyda's Hamlet. The newest Shakespeare film is
delivered to us as fully embedded in the post-modern media universe.
Samuel Crowl
Ohio University
Endnotes
1. Guneratne 180.
2. Prince 11.
3. Quoted in Loehlin, "Baz Luhrmann's Millenial Shakespeare" 134.
4. Quoted Rosenthal 215.
5. See Hedrick (45-66) for a contrasting viewpoint.
6. Branagh Much Ado: Screenplay 47.
7. See Lanier "Art thou base?" 154-55.
8. Quoted in Hatchuel29.
9. Rothwell 55.
10. See p. 2 in "About the Production," the Miramax Press Packet for Love's Labour's Lost
(2000).
11. The genre is experiencing something of a renaissance in television with the Disney High
School Musical films (2006 and 2007) and the Fox television series, Glee (2009 and
2010).
12. Crowl 168
13. Hodgdon "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" 88-98.
14. Loehlin, "'Top of the World" 74.
15. Donaldson, "Shakespeare and Media Allegory," 223
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------------------------- ed. Shakespeare and Genre. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2011.
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