Shakespeare in the Silent Era
In 1888, Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson undertook a project to develop “an instrument which does for the Eye what the Phonograph has done for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion” (Walters). Beginning as early as 1891, the motion picture had begun to be utilized as a form of entertainment, and it was not long until film was used as a medium to tell theatrical stories. Actors and actresses like Buster Keaton and Molly Malone, and directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock made names for themselves during this era, and though these early pictures were without sound, ingenuity allowed for the actions of actors and the use of props, settings and on-screen text to get things across to the audience. Until the first commercially successful talkies began to appear around 1927, stories were told without the aid of spoken dialogue.
It is not terribly surprising that some of these early films were adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Dating back as far as 1899, these short reels could be seen as attempts to “immortalize the classics,” elevating fledgling films above their “lowbrow” medium (Silent). And yet these films are faced with the challenge of adapting Shakespeare without any of Shakespeare’s dialogue – arguably the most important aspect of his plays – attempting to tell the fundamental stories while lacking sound, and maintain as much as possible the essence of the source material. Some of these films are only a few minutes long, and what makes them interesting to examine is to see not just what sacrifices were made to make up for both runtime and sound, but also what thematic and aesthetic choices the directors made to make up for the technical barriers and convey ideas and moods; in other words, breaking down the play to its metaphorical heart, its fundamental parts, without the aid of language to back it up.
The 1910 Italian production of King Lear, for example, deviates quite widely from the plot in some places, and yet nevertheless maintains the core storyline of Shakespeare’s play. Through brief summaries presented by title cards and the actions of the characters, the film offers a fairly straightforward, albeit condensed, presentation of Lear. The film chooses to keep Lear the primary focus, the tragedy of an old man slowly succumbing to madness and grief, and for the most part makes it work, though it is debatable how well it executes the profound tragedy of the source material.
The opening scene, Act 1 scene 1, is played fairly straight with Lear dividing his kingdom among his daughters, disowning Cordelia and banishing Kent. It is told through the over-exaggerated movements and facial expressions of the actors, particularly Lear, whose rage and wounded pride come off as more flabbergasted than profoundly hurt. Likewise, Lear’s madness is almost silly in its portrayal, his movement and wild gestures akin to drunkenness. Perhaps not intentionally played for laughs, his presence is not unlike the antics of early slapstick comedy, and even his death can be seen as overacted and graceless. Yet this lack of subtlety has its potential strengths: when Goneril orders Lear to leave her home, Lear makes a great show of gestures around his daughter, his pantomime implying his curse where he beseeches Nature, “into her womb convey sterility” (1.4.292), or barring that, to make Goneril have “a child of spleen” (1.4.296). And later, when a now-mad Lear visually compares his daughters’ hearts to a stone, it harkens to a similar line in the play: “see what breeds about her heart. Is there any case in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.80-82)
Similarly, the selection of plots and subplots to include and exclude give a sense of the film’s priorities. Most notably absent from this version are Edmund, Edgar and Gloucester; no one has their eyes plucked out, nor forced to smell their way to Dover. It is highly likely that these three may not have been included for sake of time and the complexity of explanation, and while the disregard for these characters and their importance to the play’s narrative initially seems a detriment, the film attempts to fill in these gaps; for instance, the title card before the final scene attributes Cordelia’s death to the order of her sisters rather than Edmund, making Goneril and Regen more the primary evildoers though there is never an adequate reason given to order their sister’s death, and the two are never seen again after Lear goes mad.
Cordelia’s role is not subtracted much in the film, her acting the most subtle of the characters in the film. Kent is given some fair attention, his conflict with Oswald foreshadowed when he helps Lear strike him in an earlier scene. His fight with Oswald and subsequent stint in the stocks remain important in this version to steer Lear toward confrontation with Goneril and Regen. Furthemore, making him present at Lear’s reunion with Cordelia cements him as the noble friend. Even the Fool is in a few scenes himself, usually in close contact with the King and at his side when they are in the wilderness, shivering exaggeratedly.
Visually, the film has a romantic quality to it, the costumes and sets evoking a Renaissance feel. Most of the scenes are shot on outdoor, pastoral sets, with the only interior scene taking place in Goneril’s house. Oddly, the French camp is a setting in the film, yet no reference is ever made to the French invasion of England. Painted by hand, many of the scenes in this film have a surprising amount of surreal color, evidenced most strongly by the opening scene, where Lear’s court is dressed in royal attire. The only scenes that lack this effect are near the end: midway through Lear’s reuniting with Cordelia, a sepia filter is applied, and the film’s final scene is rendered pink.
It may be that King Lear was intended for an audience that knew the source material, for there are many places in the film that are left ambiguous that one familiar with the material would understand, and even there the film appears to falls just short. It is a difficult task to pack something as dense as Shakespeare’s Lear into a few minutes of silent film and expect it to have the same impact. Perhaps it is simply more difficult to bring the depth of a classic tragedy to the silent screen.
Comedy, on the other hand, can be adapted a bit more easily. Being more reliant on visual gags and absurd situations (such as women dressing as men) to tell a story, the 1910 American adaptation of Twelfth Night, in a way, doesn’t have to try as hard to be a silent comedy and maintain the spirit of the original text. Though it faces the same challenges of silence and time as King Lear, Twelfth Night manages to avoid some of the problems of condensing the narrative that Lear has.
The film centers its attentions chiefly on Viola and Malvolio, the former establishing her presence early on and maintaining it throughout the film. The film stays with her as she becomes Cesario and enters the service of Orsino, inadvertently winning Olivia’s affections. She makes her own affection for Orsino evident in her acting, with sad glances and sighs when his attention is elsewhere; playing the role of Cesario, she is gallant and polite, in one instance laughing when she realizes what a bizarre situation she’s in, in another quietly creeping away from a fight Sir Toby Belch is trying to incite between her and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Malvolio, meanwhile, is played for laughs. Throughout the film he struts about with a stiff and proper gait, comically making sweeping gestures and smug expressions, waving a staff around with lordly pomp. He is appropriately oblivious when he discovers the false letter, the film demonstrating his gullibility by having Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria toss water on him their hiding place in the bushes, Malvolio casting a bewildered eye toward the sky in response. When he comes cross-gartered and smiling later in the film it is fittingly bizarre, his manner and gait still rigid even with the humorous adjustments to his outfit. A significant change comes in that Malvolio is not locked away, no one accusing him of madness (though his behavior is enough to drive Olivia away). This removes a measure of the sympathy for his character, keeping him the pompous clown to the end. Yet his performance is strong and carries the essence of Malvolio’s character.
Despite being a shortened version, the film follows the plot of its source material fairly closely. In condensing the narrative, the Fool and Antonio are largely left out of the film, the Fool appearing in cameo on occasion and Antonio only briefly, seen pulling Sebastian from the sea. Orsino only appears near the beginning and the end, and Sebastian at the conclusion to put everything right. Yet the remaining characters have significant roles in the film, which diverts some plot elements to mainly look at Viloa’s misadventure disguised as Cesario and the prank played on Malvolio. In terms of scene, the film makes good use of setting, from a rocky coastline with an impressive shipwreck in the distance, to the garden pond where Olivia’s courtiers gather. The costumes are Elizabethan in style, with Cersario donning an Oriental outfit, complete with fez, perhaps to make “him” seem more exotic. Of note is the use of the story’s letters to provide title cards of exposition, the letter to Malvolio using the one of the play’s most famous lines: “Some are born great, others achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em” (2.5.149-50).
These are just two of the many early films produced based on the work of the Bard, each facing the task of breaking a 5-act play down to ten or fifteen minutes of time. Whether they succeeded or failed in their task is largely up to the viewer, and yet a look deeper can reveal the steps that had to be taken in such an endeavor, and how these early films first attempted to bring Shakespeare’s work to a new entertainment medium.
Works Cited
Bennet, Carl. Silent Era: The Silent Film Website. Silent Era Co., 1999. Web. 9 May 2012.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Print.
---. Twelfth Night. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Print.
Silent Shakespeare. Various. BFI, 2000. DVD.
Walters, Jonathan. EarlyCinema.Com: And Introduction to Early Cinema. N.p., Mar. 2002. Web. 9 May 2012.
In 1888, Thomas Edison and W.K.L. Dickson undertook a project to develop “an instrument which does for the Eye what the Phonograph has done for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion” (Walters). Beginning as early as 1891, the motion picture had begun to be utilized as a form of entertainment, and it was not long until film was used as a medium to tell theatrical stories. Actors and actresses like Buster Keaton and Molly Malone, and directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock made names for themselves during this era, and though these early pictures were without sound, ingenuity allowed for the actions of actors and the use of props, settings and on-screen text to get things across to the audience. Until the first commercially successful talkies began to appear around 1927, stories were told without the aid of spoken dialogue.
It is not terribly surprising that some of these early films were adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Dating back as far as 1899, these short reels could be seen as attempts to “immortalize the classics,” elevating fledgling films above their “lowbrow” medium (Silent). And yet these films are faced with the challenge of adapting Shakespeare without any of Shakespeare’s dialogue – arguably the most important aspect of his plays – attempting to tell the fundamental stories while lacking sound, and maintain as much as possible the essence of the source material. Some of these films are only a few minutes long, and what makes them interesting to examine is to see not just what sacrifices were made to make up for both runtime and sound, but also what thematic and aesthetic choices the directors made to make up for the technical barriers and convey ideas and moods; in other words, breaking down the play to its metaphorical heart, its fundamental parts, without the aid of language to back it up.
The 1910 Italian production of King Lear, for example, deviates quite widely from the plot in some places, and yet nevertheless maintains the core storyline of Shakespeare’s play. Through brief summaries presented by title cards and the actions of the characters, the film offers a fairly straightforward, albeit condensed, presentation of Lear. The film chooses to keep Lear the primary focus, the tragedy of an old man slowly succumbing to madness and grief, and for the most part makes it work, though it is debatable how well it executes the profound tragedy of the source material.
The opening scene, Act 1 scene 1, is played fairly straight with Lear dividing his kingdom among his daughters, disowning Cordelia and banishing Kent. It is told through the over-exaggerated movements and facial expressions of the actors, particularly Lear, whose rage and wounded pride come off as more flabbergasted than profoundly hurt. Likewise, Lear’s madness is almost silly in its portrayal, his movement and wild gestures akin to drunkenness. Perhaps not intentionally played for laughs, his presence is not unlike the antics of early slapstick comedy, and even his death can be seen as overacted and graceless. Yet this lack of subtlety has its potential strengths: when Goneril orders Lear to leave her home, Lear makes a great show of gestures around his daughter, his pantomime implying his curse where he beseeches Nature, “into her womb convey sterility” (1.4.292), or barring that, to make Goneril have “a child of spleen” (1.4.296). And later, when a now-mad Lear visually compares his daughters’ hearts to a stone, it harkens to a similar line in the play: “see what breeds about her heart. Is there any case in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.80-82)
Similarly, the selection of plots and subplots to include and exclude give a sense of the film’s priorities. Most notably absent from this version are Edmund, Edgar and Gloucester; no one has their eyes plucked out, nor forced to smell their way to Dover. It is highly likely that these three may not have been included for sake of time and the complexity of explanation, and while the disregard for these characters and their importance to the play’s narrative initially seems a detriment, the film attempts to fill in these gaps; for instance, the title card before the final scene attributes Cordelia’s death to the order of her sisters rather than Edmund, making Goneril and Regen more the primary evildoers though there is never an adequate reason given to order their sister’s death, and the two are never seen again after Lear goes mad.
Cordelia’s role is not subtracted much in the film, her acting the most subtle of the characters in the film. Kent is given some fair attention, his conflict with Oswald foreshadowed when he helps Lear strike him in an earlier scene. His fight with Oswald and subsequent stint in the stocks remain important in this version to steer Lear toward confrontation with Goneril and Regen. Furthemore, making him present at Lear’s reunion with Cordelia cements him as the noble friend. Even the Fool is in a few scenes himself, usually in close contact with the King and at his side when they are in the wilderness, shivering exaggeratedly.
Visually, the film has a romantic quality to it, the costumes and sets evoking a Renaissance feel. Most of the scenes are shot on outdoor, pastoral sets, with the only interior scene taking place in Goneril’s house. Oddly, the French camp is a setting in the film, yet no reference is ever made to the French invasion of England. Painted by hand, many of the scenes in this film have a surprising amount of surreal color, evidenced most strongly by the opening scene, where Lear’s court is dressed in royal attire. The only scenes that lack this effect are near the end: midway through Lear’s reuniting with Cordelia, a sepia filter is applied, and the film’s final scene is rendered pink.
It may be that King Lear was intended for an audience that knew the source material, for there are many places in the film that are left ambiguous that one familiar with the material would understand, and even there the film appears to falls just short. It is a difficult task to pack something as dense as Shakespeare’s Lear into a few minutes of silent film and expect it to have the same impact. Perhaps it is simply more difficult to bring the depth of a classic tragedy to the silent screen.
Comedy, on the other hand, can be adapted a bit more easily. Being more reliant on visual gags and absurd situations (such as women dressing as men) to tell a story, the 1910 American adaptation of Twelfth Night, in a way, doesn’t have to try as hard to be a silent comedy and maintain the spirit of the original text. Though it faces the same challenges of silence and time as King Lear, Twelfth Night manages to avoid some of the problems of condensing the narrative that Lear has.
The film centers its attentions chiefly on Viola and Malvolio, the former establishing her presence early on and maintaining it throughout the film. The film stays with her as she becomes Cesario and enters the service of Orsino, inadvertently winning Olivia’s affections. She makes her own affection for Orsino evident in her acting, with sad glances and sighs when his attention is elsewhere; playing the role of Cesario, she is gallant and polite, in one instance laughing when she realizes what a bizarre situation she’s in, in another quietly creeping away from a fight Sir Toby Belch is trying to incite between her and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Malvolio, meanwhile, is played for laughs. Throughout the film he struts about with a stiff and proper gait, comically making sweeping gestures and smug expressions, waving a staff around with lordly pomp. He is appropriately oblivious when he discovers the false letter, the film demonstrating his gullibility by having Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria toss water on him their hiding place in the bushes, Malvolio casting a bewildered eye toward the sky in response. When he comes cross-gartered and smiling later in the film it is fittingly bizarre, his manner and gait still rigid even with the humorous adjustments to his outfit. A significant change comes in that Malvolio is not locked away, no one accusing him of madness (though his behavior is enough to drive Olivia away). This removes a measure of the sympathy for his character, keeping him the pompous clown to the end. Yet his performance is strong and carries the essence of Malvolio’s character.
Despite being a shortened version, the film follows the plot of its source material fairly closely. In condensing the narrative, the Fool and Antonio are largely left out of the film, the Fool appearing in cameo on occasion and Antonio only briefly, seen pulling Sebastian from the sea. Orsino only appears near the beginning and the end, and Sebastian at the conclusion to put everything right. Yet the remaining characters have significant roles in the film, which diverts some plot elements to mainly look at Viloa’s misadventure disguised as Cesario and the prank played on Malvolio. In terms of scene, the film makes good use of setting, from a rocky coastline with an impressive shipwreck in the distance, to the garden pond where Olivia’s courtiers gather. The costumes are Elizabethan in style, with Cersario donning an Oriental outfit, complete with fez, perhaps to make “him” seem more exotic. Of note is the use of the story’s letters to provide title cards of exposition, the letter to Malvolio using the one of the play’s most famous lines: “Some are born great, others achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em” (2.5.149-50).
These are just two of the many early films produced based on the work of the Bard, each facing the task of breaking a 5-act play down to ten or fifteen minutes of time. Whether they succeeded or failed in their task is largely up to the viewer, and yet a look deeper can reveal the steps that had to be taken in such an endeavor, and how these early films first attempted to bring Shakespeare’s work to a new entertainment medium.
Works Cited
Bennet, Carl. Silent Era: The Silent Film Website. Silent Era Co., 1999. Web. 9 May 2012.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Print.
---. Twelfth Night. Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Print.
Silent Shakespeare. Various. BFI, 2000. DVD.
Walters, Jonathan. EarlyCinema.Com: And Introduction to Early Cinema. N.p., Mar. 2002. Web. 9 May 2012.