Abstract
The empathy that pervades the latest addition to the excellent Shakespeare on Screen series is at times overwhelming. The volume is dedicated ‘to all the unaccommodated women and men of the world at present’ (p. vii); Courtney Lehmann’s essay pays tribute to the murdered British MP Jo Cox (172); Diana E Henderson devotes the last two paragraphs of her essay to the early-career scholars who inspired her (p. 136); and Lois Leveen pays tribute to the actor William Hutt, whose legendary performances as King Lear survive only in their metadramatic reference in Slings and Arrows (p. 95). King Lear on screen, in the multifaceted work captured in this important new collection, inspires memorialisation, acknowledgement and kindness.
SOS: King Lear (an acronym that captures something of the volume’s iterated investment in helping those who are suffering) is a long overdue volume for a play whose history on screen is more than usually fragmented. Douglas M Lanier points out that almost all American Lear adaptations are themselves based on adaptations (often novels), and even the three ‘canonical’ cinematic Lear renditions – the films of Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev, and Akira Kurosawa – are in languages other than English and/or radically reframe the play’s text. Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin recognise this and structure the volume to move from those adaptations that are most recognisably Lear to those whose allusions to the play may only be glancing, but developing coherence around the central concerns of dispossession (noting that ‘dislocate’ is a word unique to Lear within the Shakespeare canon, 2), generational divides and the relationship between humans and their environment.
The canonical Lears have benefitted from a great deal of scholarly attention. Samuel Crowl and Sarah Hatchuel read horizontally for particular issues across several adaptations, with Crowl offering thick descriptions of how the Fool figure in Brook, Kozintsev, and Kurosawa’s films acts as a talisman of each director’s approach, and Hatchuel focusing on the Dover Cliffs scene on film and television. Hatchuel’s piece is particularly rewarding in its theorisation of how Gloucester’s ‘fall’ depends on the complex paradoxes of the bare stage, and how screen conventions challenge those paradoxes. While the scene is often cut, Hatchuel singles out the films of Brook and Brian Blessed for their skill in deluding the audience to embrace ‘the spatial complexity and fluid emotions raised by this “dramedic” moment’ (p. 74). Melissa Croteau, meanwhile, delivers a tour-de-force reading of Ran. For Croteau, emphasis on Kurosawa’s ‘humanism’ can elide the way in which his philosophy is posthuman, showing interest in how humans survive in the conditions of modern society. Showing how Kurosawa insists on the utility of action in negating suffering in this existence, she concludes beautifully: ‘Ran, in all its beauty and horror, tells us that we have the power not to turn away from suffering’ (p. 58).
Croteau’s essay is nicely paralleled by Courtney Lehmann’s outstanding contribution towards the volume’s close. Choosing three films in which ‘the predatory instincts of late capitalism have been globalized’ (p. 171) – The King is Alive, My Kingdom and King of Texas – Lehmann shows how all three films interpolate scenes of violence against women in a structural way, arguing that they ‘draw particular attention to the female body-in-pain as a vehicle for expressing the “new racism of the developed world”’ (p. 180). Lehmann’s essay, like Croteau’s, understands the potential of the play to develop informed critiques of the relationship between humans and their environment, and Lehmann’s essay is both effective and affecting as it diagnoses these early 21st century films as anticipating the ‘Trump effect’ and a new ‘negation of the humanity of the dispossessed’ (p. 181), in which sexual and racial violence is wielded as emblem and enactment of economic and structural power. In forceful work such as this, the importance of Lear to the current moment becomes terrifyingly clear.
The formal fragmentation of Lear is a recurrent concern of the book. Peter Holland’s afterword proposes Jean-Luc Godard’s film as a metafilmic analogy for the whole corpus of Lear riffs, ‘an aggregation of competing fragments of wildly various strands of event-sequences’ (p. 221). He suggests that the influence of live broadcasts is swinging attention back to both the materiality of filming and to more direct remediatizations of the play, and Rachael Nicholas’s excellent chapter begins this work. Nicholas’s chapter first explores the ways in which different filming strategies of Gloucester’s blinding scene have served to distance the audience or deny complicity in this powerfully affective moment, and then turns to fringe companies who have used online streaming of stage productions as a form of radical distribution, building in audience participation and political activism from the stage (p. 85). Lois Leveen, meanwhile, shows how the serial television format serves to fragment and disperse King Lear in the final season of Slings and Arrows. The season both disperses William Hutt’s central performance into speeches and isolated sequences, and also interrogates the very technology of the theatre that threatens to overwhelm the ‘truth’ of Lear, stretching the identity and interrogation of Lear across several episodes. Victoria Bladen’s discussion of The Eye of the Storm (2011) is a more theoretical piece, unpacking the film’s allusive treatment of Lear with attention to adaptation theory to offer a model for tracing Lear’s fragmentary resonances.
Leveen sensitively notes the ways in which Slings and Arrow’s call to truly radical action – that might even involve leaving Shakespeare behind – clashes with the series’ own marginalisation of non-white people, and ties in with an ambivalence elsewhere in the volume about the effectiveness of Lear adaptations, especially in new genres. Henderson’s beautifully written chapter puts Hobson’s Choice – a film rarely acknowledged in studies of Lear – into conversation with Life Goes On (2009), a film set in the London Bengali community, and gives an eloquent reading of the ways in which the films both uphold a British neoliberal consensus and yet still act to subvert and advance nonviolent change (p. 135). Lanier’s essay focuses on Harry and Tonto (1974), an attempt to recast the play as an American road movie, which both downplays the political potential of the genre’s counter-cultural tradition and makes what is irresolvable in Shakespeare more psychologically ‘easy’ or ‘palatable’ here (p. 150). Jacek Fabiszak’s short treatment of The Yiddish King Lear (1934) notes how the financial limitations of the production and its amalgamation of many traditions resulted in a melodrama without formal innovation, and Pierre Kapitaniak considers how King of Texas slips into generic evocations of the Western rather than maximising the potential of its very specific historical setting (p. 118). A joint essay by Sylvaine Bataille and Anaïs Pauchet returns to serial drama in its consideration of Boss and Empire, looking at how the prestige form of the ‘post-TV’ movement also serves to emphasise themes of structural power, patriarchal violence and masculinised society. The essay had its genesis before HBO’s Succession (2018–) premiered, but many of Bataille and Pauchet’s observations would apply to that series as well.
In the spirit of the fragmentation of Lear, the volume exceeds its own material form. The book’s sales page features supplements including Peter J Smith’s invigorating close reading of Richard Eyre’s 2018 television film as an attack on the British establishment that has shored up its own wealth while pursuing the shameful project of Brexit; Janice Valls-Russell’s reading of Harry Cleven’s Les Héritières (2008) within the conventions and priorities of French television; and Alexa Alice Joubin’s pedagogical essay on the opportunities afforded by video-based electronic learning platforms. This last both offers an extended study of Wu Ksing-Huo’s Lear is Here (2001) and acts to put into practical terms the fragmentation that has pervaded the volume, finding pedagogical value in the juxtaposition and re-editing of fragments of Lear on screen. With José Ramón Díaz Fernández’s extensive film-bibliography of Lear on screen as an indispensable guide and reference point, this volume provides a perfect foundation from which to disperse and dislocate Lear’s screen presence ever further.