Shakespeare in Contemporary Movies Essay -- William Shakespeare Films

Shakespeare in Contemporary Movies In the middle of Looking for Richard, Al Pacino's documentary about making Richard III and bringing Shakespeare to the people, there is a moment which illuminates the relationship of scholarship, Shakespeare and popular culture. The director is ranting at Pacino for offering (threatening?) to bring a Shakespearean scholar into the film: You said you were going to find a scholar to speak directly into the camera and explain what really went down and I'm telling you that is ridiculous, that you know more about Richard III than any fucking scholar at Columbia or Harvard. Pacino tries to calm his friend down by pointing out that everyone, even a scholar, is entitled to an opinion about Shakespeare and that is the point of the film, to collect all opinions. In response, the director, intensely frustrated, explodes, "but why does he get to speak directly to the camera!?" If Shakespeare has become a secular bible for contemporary America, then the scholars, at Harvard, Columbia, or anywhere else, are the priests who interpret the holy writ for the uneducated masses. When academics insist that Shakespeare be read without "translation" into modern English, they do so because they believe that a great part of the value lies in the language. But America is a (largely) Protestant country and the masses have long since rebelled against the authority of priests and their interpretations of sacred texts. Shakespeare is respected not just as literature but as a repository of great truths; at the same time, people often mistrust and reject him as too "upper-class." Pacino does eventually allow a scholar to speak directly to the camera, but this serves only to undercut his autho... ...est. In each case (and especially in Renaissance Man), what those who use Shakespeare gain is just a way to fit into the world more comfortably. And in Dead Poets Society, Shakespeare is seen as creating a split too wide to be healed, leading to suicide. But even in other cases, the fragmented text is a way into the world of power and privilege, not a radical reordering of that world. Instead, popular culture’s freeing of Shakespeare results only in the individual readers agreeing to take over the task of policing socially acceptable readings and uses of the secular bible. Works cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, 1972. Burt, Richard. "The Love that Dare Not Speak Shakespeare’s Name: New Shakesqueer Cinema" in Shakespeare the Movie. Ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 240-268.