Review

Reviewed Work(s): Shakespeare on Screen: "Macbeth." by Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-

Guerrin and Victoria Bladen; Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The Relationship
between Text and Film by Samuel Crowl
Review by: Keith Jones
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 244-247
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778618
Accessed: 15-10-2022 14:33 UTC

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 244 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

for technology "because we are in such desperate need of the spir

virtue over vengeance, to find other ways to reconcile difference
lence" (215). Vaughan's work synthesizes decades of thoughtful stud
performance, making this volume an especially rich and detailed su

Shakespeare on Screen: "MacbethEdited by Sarah Hatchu

Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and Victoria Bladen. Mont-Saint
Aigan, France: Publications des Universités de Rouen and du
Harve, 2014. Illus. Pp. 539. €27.00 paper.
Screen Adaptations: Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The Relationship between
Text and Film. By Samuel Crowl. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Pp. xviii + 154. $78.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Reviewed by Keith Jones

Like the earlier volume on Hamlet in this series, the breadth of Shakespeare on
Screen: Macbeth makes it a welcome addition not only to the holdings of the insti
tutional library but also to the collection of the individual reader. Much recent
work on Shakespeare and film has considered the implications of global
Shakespeares, and this volume intensifies that approach, providing in-depth explo
rations of established films like Akira Kurosawas Throne of Blood (1957) and of
films gaining critical ground like Alexander Abela's Makibefo (1999). Many of the
volume's twenty-one essays are copiously illustrated with screen shots, which prove
particularly helpful for the more obscure films addressed. Few of the articles focus
solely on film versions of Macbeth in English, and many invoke more than one non
Anglophone production.
Dominique Goy-Blanquet's "Phantom of the Cinema: Macbeth's Ghosts in the
Flesh," for example, studies how six different filmmakers in five different countries
have dealt with the portrayal of Banquo's ghost. Attending to films by Welles,
Kurosawa, Polanski, Nunn, Abela, and Bhardwaj, Goy-Blanquet explores her claim
that "how a filmmaker deals with his ghosts will provide a key to his reading of the
play and his interpretation of the world it is set in" (21). While recognizing that not
all of these productions draw equally from Shakespeare, she argues that they all
contribute to a commentary on the play as well as a reading of their various cultural
contexts.

Several other essays also deal with the supernatural. Essays

Chernaik, Pierre Kapitaniak, Susan Gushee O'Malley, and Victoria B
the subtle ramifications of different portrayals of the witches. For
more prominent the witches, the less control Macbeth has over his f
Polanski tend to emphasize the witches and their power while
Nunn keep them in a more marginalized and less influential positio
traces a move away from the stereotypically ugly and elderly witche
attractive, younger witches, culminating in the witches in Geoffrey
film. O'Malley provides a reading of Rupert Goold's 2011 film versio
that underscores the production's deployment of the conventions of m

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 BOOK REVIEWS 245

films. Bladen considers the spatial loc

their witches, concluding that the limin
an interesting and significant interpla
in the case of Wrights Macbeth, invad
In addition to essays bringing multi
concentrate their efforts on a single
rapt': Externalizing Rapture in Orson
larly adept at demonstrating how We
elatory of his Macbeths intense
Impoverishment in Roman Polanski's
film's settings, its use of crown and cha
animal to argue that Polanski's dark visi
range, and tragic effect" (136). Boika
ines the film's particular indebtedness
instability of the world the film create
other filmmakers, [Goold] has create
iKIo /A rrc in Kot-ontli: PiiKiTOfCiTro -in/-l ( ~\

Adele Seeff's "Shakespeare in Mzansi" (Mzansi is a Zulu word for

lyzes two versions of Macbeth filmed in South Africa: Entabeni an
Queen, both broadcast in 2008. The films "offer a striking cont
Jacobean text can be South Africanized" (175), reflecting on contem
African concerns about gender roles, the supernatural, and issues of
provides a thorough plot summary for each of these films—which, g
culty of tracking them down, is essential—and draws the followin
about the overused terms'global" and"local":"To the extent that these
of art draw on local particularities of political power, issues of gende
of moral responsibility displaced onto the inscrutable spirit world, they
indigeneity. To the extent that they borrow from internationally av
forms in order to render legible their re-visionings in a global en
market, they interpenetrate with the global" (198).
Of particular interest is the way this volume expands available cri
on Makibefo. Essays by Anne-Marie Costantini-Cornède, Goy-B
Bladen devote considerable space to discussing the film in conjuncti
cinematic versions of the play. The articles demonstrate the volumes eff
teract a previous tendency to consider non-Anglophone Shakespear
ized other rather than a valuable contribution to the conversation
Cornède investigates transnational considerations in terms both of
aesthetics. Her conclusion is that the adoption and adaptation of Sh
play by cultures across the globe enables interpretations along a com
uum from local to universal.
The volume also looks beyond the cinematic and, at times, strictl
opposed to derivative) iterations of Shakespeare's play through
addressing works ranging from a filmed performance of Vladi
Macbeth ballet to an episode of the television program Columbo in
playing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth murder a producer. Additionally

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246 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

on Screen: Macbeth boasts essays with a specific scope of interest,

tion on the French television genre of the dramatique and its infl
translations and productions of Macbeth, an essay on female direc
and a study of directors' handling of Fleance. Finally, the collect
essay dealing with the Macbeth that never was: the drafts of Lau
screenplay for a film version of Macbeth proposed after his 1955
with Vivian Leigh as Lady Macbeth.
The last item in the book is José Ramön Diaz Fernandez's
"Annotated Filmo-Bibliography"—a work so valuable that it makes
of an index. The material is first divided into seven numbered cat
Film Adaptations, Television Adaptations, Filmed Stage Performa
Versions, Derivatives and Selected Citations, and Documentary an
Films. With the exception of the first, each category has number
arranged chronologically, with country of origin listed. For exam
Adaptations," one finds "2.12. Throne of Blood. Dir. Akira Kurosaw
(449). Moreover, many of the subcategories have lists of critical
alone boasts a seven-item bibliography.
Whereas Shakespeare on Screen: Macbeth offers an expansive and
of essays for the specialist in Shakespeare and media studies, Scr
Shakespeare's "Hamlet" is ideal for the undergraduate course in S
film. Written by a respected scholar and divided into three main
Contexts," "From Text to Screen," and "Critical Responses and the A
and Film"—Shakespeare's "Hamlet" follows the model of the othe
Bloomsbury series. The volume provides an extensive treatm
Oliviers (1948) and Kenneth Branagh's (1996) respective film vers
addressing more briefly six other film versions of the play: Gri
(1964), Tony Richardson (1969), Franco Zeffirelli (1990), Mich
(2000), Campbell Scott (2001), and Sherwood Hu's Prince of t
f2006L Of these, onlv the last is a derivative version.

"Literary Contexts" offers a useful review of many of the primary and often
addressed themes of Hamlet, including a particularly good section on Hamlet as
a revenge tragedy that allows readers to see how Shakespeare transcends that
genre. A brief section titled "Hamlet as Intellectual Hero" guides readers toward
the variety of philosophical questions Hamlet contemplates. After a section on
Hamlet and Freud—eminently necessary for a book that will deal with Oliviers
Hamlet so extensively—the text provides a brief but informative review of the
play's modern stage history in which Crowl demonstrates the interaction
between the age and the Hamlets that come from it and speak to it. Other sec
tions within this heading, however, suffer from errors or lapses. For example, the
section covering the first printed texts of Hamlet is not as clear or as subtle as the
complicated relationships between Ql, Q2, and the First Folio warrant, and it
contains confusing or misleading information. A wayward footnote defining
"memorial reconstruction" is inserted at a point in which the running text argues
that Ql is "a version used when Shakespeare's company toured the provinces or
Europe when the plague closed the theatres in London" (5). These moments

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 BOOK REVIEWS 247

detract somewhat from the book's auth

stronger and less confusing.
With the two long sections on the
Olivier respectively, the volume com
providing thoughtful and satisfying re
tion to cinematography and score
Shakespeare films—to make a case fo
drama. In his account of the camera w
larly in his exploration of how Freu
Hamlet makes its way into the cinem
into Oliviers use of cinematographic
employment of voice-over in filmin
from voice-over to speech when pow
spoken word; he moves from speech
attention. Crowl also provides a caref
director shows his viewers images co
text. This allows Crowl to read the f
painting of the drowning Ophelia as
Ophelia and Gertrude from the play
shortened Hamlet to emphasize th
extended Hamlet to emphasize its pol
flashcuts and flashbacks as Olivier d
finds that these are superseded by Br
of the film. For Crowl, the differen
oranaghs political Hamlet can be sum
focus; Branagh the wide angle" (88).
Crowl offers his readers sensible ad
Shakespeare plays: "The delicate cr
plished when confronting a film ada
conversation going on between the pl
without unintentionally committing or
source text over the screen adaptatio
prone to evaluating films solely on thei
on their own merits; framing the exp
between source text and film is a usef
film's active engagement with rather

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