A century-long journey between cinema and theatre,
Europe and America, myth and popular culture.

“More than any other storyteller, there is one who has provided the movies with plays, poetry and songs... Hundreds of actors, writers and directors have worked in films inspired by his magnificent legacy.” With these words, Kenneth Branagh presented a Hollywood tribute to “Shakespeare in the movies” at the 1997 ‘Night of the Oscars’. This is the epiphany of a process of cultural appropriation that runs through the entire evolution of Hollywood in its challenge to theatre for hegemony in modern entertainment. Shakespeare is the most awarded figure in the entire history of the Academy Awards: 86 nominations have led to 30 Oscars for 26 films that are considered Shakespearian in one way or another. This astonishing ‘cult of the ancestor’ has involved, besides the canonical Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh, Hollywood greats such as D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford with Victor Mature, Joseph L. Mankiewicz with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Charlton Heston, Al Pacino and many others...

In the early days, it was common to dress up Shakespeare in the theatre, but by the jubilee of 1769, the myth created around the Bard had made him something greater than ever before: the very foundation of English-speaking peoples’ cultural DNA. In the early 19th century, Jane Austen wrote that Shakespeare was “part of the constitution of every Englishman [...] one becomes intimate with him instinctively.” And as with any genetic inheritance, the son feels as entitled to it as the father, so the fledgling United States appropriated it quite naturally, decisively and creatively – even in the movies. Shakespeare became part of the conquest of the West, ubiquitous in mining towns and frontier saloons: it was only to be expected that he would turn up in a Western like John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. Or in a science fiction film like Forbidden Planet. Or in a New York musical like West Side Story. Or even that he might explicitly serve as a model for a typical gangster story, as in the case of Joe MacBeth.

Arturo Cattaneo teaches English Literature at the Catholic University of Milan. He studied at the Warburg Institute in London and has published books and articles on English Renaissance literature and culture, the eighteenth-century novel, English-language post-colonial literature, and the relationship between literature and law. He is also the author of novels and short stories.

Gianluca Fumagalli is the director of award-winning films at international festivals, documentaries and television series. He graduated in American Literature with a thesis on the film adaptation of the novel Little Caesar. In the United States, where he lived for many years, he developed a format of guided tours of Italian cinema for the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco.

Foreword

The idea for this book came to us while we were team-teaching Shakespeare’s theatre as seen through the cinema at the Catholic University of Milan. Year after year, analysis after analysis of films and plays, we realised that, beyond the many filmed versions of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, an intriguing history of cultural appropriation was emerging from the century of cinema. To paraphrase Kennedy’s famous saying, we realised that we needed to ask not what Hollywood has done for Shakespeare, but what Shakespeare has done for Hollywood.

The first source of our research was the 26 ‘Shakespearian’ films that Hollywood awarded 30 Oscars out of 86 nominations. The list is reproduced here in the chapter Ancestor worship in the History of the Academy (in chronological order) and included in the Index of Shakespearean Films (in alphabetical order). We have been able to watch them again and again: they are available on DVD, sometimes with some valuable additional features, as in the case of Shakespeare in Love. Many other films whose plot or scenes we describe can also be found on DVD.

Arturo Cattaneo and Gianluca Fumagalli