Shakespeare the Illusionist. Neil Forsyth

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      SUPERNATURAL COMEDIES

      A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest

      THE BLURB ON the British Film Institute’s DVD collection called Silent Shakespeare, first issued on video in May 1999, makes the uncontroversial claim that in the early years of the twentieth century the film industry sought to elevate its lowbrow status by imitating the theatre. While cinemas decked themselves out like theatres, filmmakers signed up stage stars and turned to the classics. Shakespeare provided the greatest challenge.

      The early Shakespeare films do indeed use many devices of theatre: the static camera clearly shows the continuity of proscenium-arch theatre and early cinema, and the actors come on and off and do their piece in front of the camera but without closeup individual shots, reverse action shots, or montage—techniques still to come in the development of film. One result is that some of these films, or parts of them at least, now seem to resemble records of stage performances, and perhaps even aspire to be so, as the blurb suggests. In one important respect, though, the continuity with nineteenth-century theatre styles was broken; some of the films delight in being films and celebrate the new techniques of cinema.

      THE EARLY FILMS

      At certain points in its history, film has responded in different ways to the supernatural elements in plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. In the nineteenth century these two plays were considered to be the most revealing of Shakespeare’s imagination. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the great German translator, thought Shakespeare’s treatment of the spirit world to be the most obvious sign of his genius.¹ In both plays, for somewhat different reasons, Shakespeare explores various related parallels between magic and theatre: in The Tempest Prospero’s magic power is explicitly theatrical in the masque he conjures up; in Dream the clowns are frightened of the effect of disguise and illusion on the gentle audience of the play they are rehearsing, and part of the fun consists of the contrast of this attitude with the power of illusion they have experienced in the forest; and both plays have an epilogue that asks the audience to notice and respond to the relationship of magic and theatre. These two plays, taken together, show that Shakespeare inherited, and worked within, at least two competing traditions of how to represent magic: one was the hucksterish trickery of early Italian comedy deriving ultimately from classical New Comedy (as, most notably, in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist); the other was the somewhat later convention deriving from Italian pastoral tragicomedy that presented magic as something for the audience to accept as “real.” In the one case the audience knows as much as or more than the gulls who fall for the trickster’s supposed “magic”: in the other the audience is in thrall to the magician and his skill apparently acquired after long study. Shakespeare experimented in his radical way with both forms in the various new dramatic genres he evolved, as, for example, in the fusion of comic intrigue and tragicomic “real” magic in Dream.

      Filmmakers have confronted this experimentation with varying degrees of awareness. Early filmmakers who turned these plays into film relished the chance to exploit the new filmic possibilities of illusion, but subsequent filmmakers, as we shall see, have often been more diffident about the supernatural or have a different agenda than simply that early celebration of the new medium in the silent era.

      Percy Stow’s splendid 1908 Tempest (from the British Clarendon Film Company), reproduced on the Silent Shakespeare DVD, has several magic scenes.² Many of them do not appear on stage in Shakespeare’s text but are simply part of the background story to a play that, uniquely among Shakespeare’s works, confines the stage action to the last few hours and tells everything else in reminiscence. The film ignores the strict unity of stage time, which binds the play tightly together. Instead it retells the story in chronological order from the arrival on the island of Prospero and Miranda, and thus we see, for example, Prospero letting Ariel out of the cloven pine in which he had been confined by “the foul witch Sycorax.” There could be no clearer demonstration of the difference between stage time and screen time: the film, though telling virtually the whole story of Shakespeare’s play (without the comic subplot and the attempt to kill Alonso), still lasts only some twelve minutes.

      Most shots of the magic scenes in the Stow Tempest are those in which Ariel appears. Played by a child actress whose name, like the rest of the cast’s, has been lost, s/he protects Miranda from the lascivious attentions of Caliban and suddenly turns into a monkey in the process. Caliban himself, however, performs no tricks. He is subject to, but not a manifestation of, Prospero’s magic. Like a stage conjurer, Prospero produces birds out of nowhere and creates the storm, in a scene eerily preminiscent of Peter Greenaway, framed not by computer graphics but by rocks and the onstage watchers, Prospero and Ariel. The storm becomes a film within a film, watched through a theatrical proscenium arch. The scene is very much like Méliès-style stage magic and clearly shows his influence. Lightning is suggested by scratches on the celluloid, and a real sea is superimposed. Then comes a sudden switch to Lumière-style filmic realism as Ferdinand staggers ashore alone. But soon Ariel is leading him around, prancing across an open field toward the camera, appearing and disappearing—both to Ferdinand and to us—and clearly delighting in being a filmic spirit and in mystifying Ferdinand. The audience, though, is not mystified, merely enchanted by the pleasure Ariel and the filmmaker obviously take in the trucage. Prospero as director may be behind it all, but his special-effects man is getting out of hand.

      If anything, the contrast at the heart of the play between Ariel and Caliban is enhanced by some aspects of the Stow film. Whereas Caliban is an unkempt local with shaggy hair and an apish gait—inspired, as Judith Buchanan suggests, by Beerbohm Tree’s elaborate stage version of three years earlier—squatting to pull up grass and eat it, the child actor playing Ariel relishes the freedom to dance and skip in front of the camera.³ The scene in which Ariel tantalizes Ferdinand by being alternately visible and invisible is cut in with another subjective point of view, Miranda’s, for whom the spirit is not there on-screen and who thus watches Ferdinand idiotically lunging at empty air. Near the end of the film we see Caliban pleading to be taken on board but rudely refused, first by Antonio and then by an imperious Prospero. The final surviving shot shows him from the rear, arms outstretched, left alone on his island. The Silent Shakespeare version of Midsummer Night’s Dream⁴ also mixes stagy acting and Méliès-style tricks. The opening scenes of the court and the mechanicals are merely theatrical melodrama, but when the action moves to the forest, filmed realistically in New York’s Prospect Park near the studios in Flatbush, we are treated to fairies flying in on invisible ropes as in a stage production, and then come the stop-action tricks. Puck especially almost has Méliès as his signature tune. The transformation scene, for example, develops relatively slowly, with no magic during the rehearsal until Puck suddenly appears from nowhere and Bottom is wearing an ass’s head. The trick is the standard Méliès one of stop-action, as is clear if you slow the film and see it shot by shot. Then Titania brings on the fairies, as if СКАЧАТЬ