Categories Of Shakespeare Essay Research Paper Categories

Categories Of Shakespeare Essay, Research Paper

Categories of Shakespeare

When dealing with text of Jacobean writers such as

Shakespeare, one has a great deal of freedom in interpreting

it. His words are full of not only meaning, but entendres,

alliterations, and metaphors that allows a great deal of

artistic freedom when actualizing it into performance.

Perhaps that is why his plays have been a longtime favorite

standard performance material, and more recently ( the past

100 years), have become very popular to produce and present

in the film medium.

What allows for Shakespeare to be presented so easily

on film, despite the fact they were written hundreds of

years ago when the very idea of film was nonexistent, is the

utter portability of his works. By portability I mean there

is so much in his plays that can be transposed and realized

so beautifully in the movies. The works give a lot of

visual freedom to the director, as Shakespeare writes few

stage directions. The concept of visual also plays a huge

part in any film, as Peter Holland recognizes in his article

.Two dimensional Shakespeare: .King Lear on Film.. when he

states that .Film is primarily a visual medium, a form in

which language accompanies sight but cannot dominate it

(Davies and Wells, pg.59).. Therefore, film provides a

landscape for the enactment of Shakespeare drama.s and allow

them to be realizes in greater proportions than the

restrictions of stage allow.

However, presenting Shakespeare on film, which is a

medium other than which his works are originally intended,

seems to warrant more debate and criticism than ordinary

theatrical presentations. Additionally, because of the

large amount of film versions of each play, it becomes

quickly necessary for a means of categorizing the films of

Shakespeare as an agency to compare, contrast, critique, and

most importantly, understand not only the work itself, but

the value of the work artistically, textually, and in its

materialization as a work as a whole. To solve these

dilemma, .In 1977 Jack Jorgens offered three categories

into which Shakespeare films can be usefully divided,

categories which mark different and increasing distances

from the forms of theater… He suggested three modes:

theatrical, realist, cinematic (Davies and Wells, pg.50)..

These three modes are very useful at looking at Shakespeare

films and there presentation on film.

Theatrical mode of presentation most generally means a

production that is presented in the same style as would an

actual live theater performance of Shakespeare, and

generally tend to be just that: a filmed performance of his

work. This type of film is characterized by elements of

theater, theatrical lighting, costuming, acting, and most

specifically, tends to have more medium and long range shots

than the realist and filmic modes.

The second category Jorgens determined is the realist

mode. The realist mode is an intermediate ground between

the theatrical and filmic: that is, its intention is for

film, but still desires to stay true to the intentions of

Shakespeare, taking into consideration the time period the

play is written in, and tries not to modify the text too

much. The realist mode is a way of taking a Shakespearean

work and presenting it in an manner that is trying , mostly

to merely represent the works of Shakespeare yet at the same

time enhancing it by making .use of the full range of

established film techniques (Davies and Wells, pg. 53)..

Grigori Kozintsev.s King Lear falls under this mode of

presentation. The 1970 Russian translation of the work

includes sprawling landscapes in black ad white, whose

presence often seems to rival that of the actors, a danger

Holland realizes when he says .At times, of course, the

background can take too much precedence over the foreground

(Davies and Wells, pg. 53).. The work also falls into

another danger of cinematic realism and Shakespeare that

Holland says .is tightly bound up with a traditional

liberal- humanist ideology. It makes assumptions about the

essential truth of the humanism of a tragedy (Davies and

Wells, pg. 55).. Kozintsev.s King Lear is based upon his

definition of reality being emptiness. He demonstrates this

emptiness through his demonstration of the film in a

.Movement of the play from fiction into realism (Davies and

Wells, pg.55). and a process for Kozintsev that Holland

describes .as a stripping away of the social mask, the mask

of power, to reveal the .essential. self beneath (Davies and

Wells, pg.55).. In this, we can see how his production

largely embodies the Marxism statement that Kozintsev was

trying to make, a dangerous move in the corrupt and

Com

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