Abstract
When it comes to Shakespeare outside the walls of academia, film will inevitably be an object of discussion. Even as new forms of media generate new modalities of interaction and splinter the heretofore dominant notion of a collective audience, it is fair to say that the twentieth century has been dominated by mass-cultural forms such as film, and thus by the mass public, whether material or fantasmatic, to whom they are addressed. When Shakespeare takes mass-cultural form, therefore, it cannot but be significant; hence the proliferation of Shakespearean films in the late 1990s, which might constitute an imaginary resolution to the long-standing dilemma caused by opposing high and low cultural forms and occurring even as that bifurcated model of culture falls into abeyance.
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Notes
Looking for Richard (1996), directed by Al Pacino. Twentieth Century Fox. Available as a digital download from Amazon.com or iTunes.
For an analysis of Pacino’s body in relation to Method acting, see Barbara Hodgson, “Replicating Richard: Body Doubles, Body Politics,” Theatre Journal 50, no. 2 (1998): 207–205; for an elegantly condensed argument about Pacino and performance that has several points in common with the present chapter (particularly in its attention to the movement from Old World to New)
see Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe, “Shakespeare and the Street: Looking for Richard,” in New Wave Shakespeare on Screen (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 98–102.
See Thomas Cartelli, “Shakespeare and the Street: Pacino’s Looking for Richard, Bedford’s Street King, and the Common Understanding,” in Shakespeare, the Movie, LL: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD, ed. Richard Burt and Lynda Boose (London: Routledge, 2003), 186–199.
See W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 95–150.
See also Denise Albanese, “Black and White, and Dread All Over: The ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 226–247.
John Simon, John Simon On Theater: Criticism 1974–2003 (New York: Applause Books, 2005), 140–142; the quoted passage appears on 140.
Marjorie Garber, “Shakespeare as Fetish.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 242–250.
Tyler Cowen has suggested that an expanded cultural marketplace has benefits for all, but as befits the school of rational choice economics to which he belongs, questions of moral value are strictly bracketed out: see In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
See, for instance, Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989)
Barbara Hodgdon, “The Critic, the Poor Player, Prince Hamlet, and the Lady in the Dark” in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 259–293.
SparkNotes, The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, contributors Susannah Mandel, Adam Stewart, Brian Phillips, Patrick Flanagan, John Crowther, and Justin Kestler (New York: Spark Publishing, 2002), 17–18.
William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For Olivier, see Denise Albanese, “School for Scandal?: New Media Hamlet, Olivier, and Camp Connoisseurship,” Renaissance Drama 34, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Wendy Wall, and W. B. Worthen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 185–208; for the BBC/Time-Life Shakespeare, see J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, eds., Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology
of Essays and Reviews (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1988), especially Graham Holderness, “Boxing the Bard,” 14–18.
This is not to say that their attitude has not been shaped or reinforced elsewhere: mass entertainment, for instance, has a long history of burlesquing Shakespeare for his unapproachability and incomprehensibility, which Douglas Lanier has usefully detailed in Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 119–133.
Jason Zinoman, “First Thing We Do, Let’s Seat All the Lawyers,” New York Times, July 11, 2004.
Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke offer a series of nuanced and astute observations on the relations between art, politics, and state- and market-sponsored institutions in Free Exchange (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
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© 2010 Denise Albanese
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Albanese, D. (2010). Pacino’s Cliffs Notes: Looking for Richard’s “Public” Shakespeare. In: Extramural Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112940_3
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