Abstract
The logo of Francis Ford Coppola’s massively successful 1972 American mob film The Godfather depicts a disembodied hand holding the strings of a marionette (Illustration 9).1 The Godfather offers a grim meditation on the transition of power from father to son. Refusing, like his father before him, ‘to be a fool, dancing on a string held by all those big shots’, Michael Corleone demonstrates a ruthless autonomy as the film’s master-puppeteer. The film’s title carries crucial significance; being the Godfather is about playing God. This association is made all the more explicit in Mario Puzo’s novel, where Vito assumes a God-like omnipotence:
My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. […] That’s what makes him great. The great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes.2
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Notes
The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972); Jon Lewis, The Godfather (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill (eds.), Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
Cited in John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 64.
For further discussion of the analogy between the ‘overreaching Machiavellian anti-hero’ and the archetypal gangster, see James N. Loehlin, ‘“Top of the World, Ma”: Richard III and Cinematic Convention’, in Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (eds.), Shakespeare the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 75.
Andrew Calabrese, ‘Sending a Message: Violence as Political Communication’, International Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 6 (2010), pp. 109–14.
Kenneth Muir, ‘Who Wrote Selimus?’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society: Literary and Historical Section, 6 (1949), pp. 373–4.
G. M. Pinciss, ‘Thomas Creede and the Repertory of the Queen’s Men 1583–1592’, Modern Philology, 67 (1970), p. 321.
Paulina Kewes, ‘The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. II: The Histories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 175–6.
Daniel J. Vitkus (ed.), Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk and The Renegado (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
The screenplay of The Godfather, co-written by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, cited in Peter Bondanella, Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 245.
Emma Smith, ‘Performing Relevance/Relevant Performances: Shakespeare, Jonson, Hitchcock’, in Sarah Werner (ed.), New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 158.
Gene D. Phillips, The Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), p. 189.
Margaret Ellen Owens, Dismemberment and Decapitation on the English Renaissance Stage: Towards a Cultural Semiotics of Violent Spectacle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), p. 144.
Albert H. Tricomi, ‘The Aesthetics of Mutilation in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Survey, 27 (1972), p. 12.
Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 4.
Michael Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 167–203
Gillian Murray Kendall, ‘“Lend me thy hand”: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), pp. 299–316
Kathryn L. Lynch, ‘“What hands are here?”: The Hand as Generative Symbol in Macbeth’, Review of English Studies, 39 (1988), pp. 29–38
Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Malcolm Kelsall, Christopher Marlowe (Leiden: Brill, 1981), p. 97
David Bevington, From “Mankind” to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)
Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester, 1986)
Peter Berek, ‘Locrine Revised, Selimus, and Early Responses to Tamburlaine’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 23 (1980), pp. 33–54
Peter Berek, ‘Tamburlaine’s Weak Sons: Imitation as Interpretation Before 1593’, Renaissance Drama, 13 (1982), pp. 55–82.
Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)
Herbert Sussman and Gerhard Joseph, ‘Prefiguring the Posthuman: Dickens and Prosthesis’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 32 (2004), pp. 617–29.
Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 24–63.
David McCandless, ‘A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor’s Vision on Stage and Screen’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 53 (2002), pp. 486–512.
R. A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 291–4.
Elsie Walker, ‘“Now is a time to storm”: Julie Taymor’s Titus (2000)’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 30 (2002), pp. 194–208
Richard Schechner, ‘Julie Taymor: From Jacques Lecoq to The Lion King’, The Drama Review, 43.3 (1999), pp. 36–55.
All quotations are derived from Leah S. Marcus (ed.), The Duchess of Malfi (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2009).
MS. of the Marquis of Bath at Longleat (Wilts), vol. II, pp. 52–3; Jean Jacquot, ‘Ralegh’s Hellish Verses and The Tragicall Raigne of Selimus’, The Modern Language Review, 48 (1953), pp. 1–9.
Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 130.
Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 14.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 136.
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© 2013 Jenny Sager
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Sager, J. (2013). The Aesthetics of Violence in Selimus. In: The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332400_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332400_7
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