Shakespeare Takes Hollywood

The plays of Shakespeare have been a quirk of the big and small screen for years. Since the early 20th Century and the birth of popular cinema, we’ve been trying to turn his plays into feature films and miniseries with varied but, on the whole, minimal success. In addition to this, popular productions are filmed and screened live into cinemas, Shakespeare’s Globe has a Globe Player where you can rent out old screenings, and the National Theatre shop boasts what is practically a library of DVDs of different filmed productions through the years. We meet Shakespeare more and more through a screen these days. What fascinates me most, however, is how William Shakespeare also gets mixed up in this. The man and the supposed myth and legend has been thrust rather unceremoniously on-screen and no two depictions of the life of the London playwright seem to be the same. 

“ The man and the supposed myth and legend has been thrust rather unceremoniously on-screen and no two depictions of the life of the London playwright seem to be the same. ”

Still from Will (2017).

Recently, William Shakespeare has been portrayed as a hot-tempered, secret catholic in the TNT series Will (2017). In this depiction, Will is a firebrand young writer trying to change the theatrical landscape of London with his best mate (a posh and insufferable Richard Burbage) and girlfriend (Alice Burbage). Christopher Marlowe also makes an appearance in the form of Jamie Campbell Bower who dresses and acts like a gay vampire who plots in shadowy corners and, at one point, tries to kiss Shakespeare in a moment of passion. It’s ludicrous and yet is coloured all over with the idea that for Shakespeare to matter, Shakespeare (the man) has to be interesting. He can’t just be a son of a glove maker who made it big – that would be too simple! The infamous film, Anonymous (2011), takes this to the extreme. The fever dream rolls itself out like this: Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Edward de Vere who hides this fact due to monarchy politics. So far, so Oxfordian authorship theory. This takes a dramatic turn when a man named William Shakespeare takes the credit for the plays and later blackmails Edward and murders Christopher Marlowe. Edward de Vere is also the bastard son of Elizabeth I but had an affair with her, producing a son who becomes none other than Henry Wriothelsely, 3rd Earl of Southampton – a contender for the ‘fair youth’ addressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The general gist of the film is that Shakespeare was never the author of his works, but the plays were produced from some kind of Jacobean tragedy Mad Libs scenario. You imagine the screenplay writer blindly throwing darts at a board with plot points taken straight from Webster and Middleton. The result is almost hypnotically bad. While the film doesn’t quite portray itself as fact it does its part in emboldening the cultural shroud of intrigue around William Shakespeare.

Still from Upstart Crow (2016).

“It’s far more fun to think of Shakespeare as a tortured genius, a con-man, or even a comical middle-aged dad in the vein of Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring.”

However, not all depictions of Shakespeare take on this dreamy or feverish quality. The BBC series Upstart Crow (2016 –) makes a sitcom out of Shakespeare’s life. In this version he’s a grumpy middle-aged dad played by Britcom royalty David Mitchell. He complains about traffic, conflicts with the playwriting establishment, and speaks ‘weird’ poetic lines when everyone just wants him to speak in ‘normal’ English. A few years ago, the original ensemble cast of the CBBC show Horrible Histories pushed Shakespeare onto the comic stage in Bill (2015). Here, Shakespeare is an ardent lute player who strikes out to London like Dick Wittington to find his fortune and gets into scrapes and japes in the capital, including a brush with a Spanish plot to assassinate Elizabeth I. Neither of these shows apologise for ignoring facts about Shakespeare’s life. They relish in the unknown and taunt the built-up myth of Shakespeare as an untouchable national treasure or romantic hero or even fraudulent villain. Shakespeare is brought back down to earth with a comical clunk amongst we mortals. However, these works seem to spring from the same fascination with Shakespeare as a character in the cultural imagination that birthed Will and Anonymous. 

What we truly know about the man named William Shakespeare who was born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon and worked in London for a substantial portion of his adult life could probably be written down on two sides of A4 paper. This would contain a few lines of legal documents pertaining to mortgage and court proceedings, church records, facts about his life and death in Stratford-upon-Avon, and brief words on his character from contemporaries such as Ben Jonson (nice) and Robert Greene (nasty). Frankly, it’s not much to go on. It’s far more fun to think of Shakespeare as a tortured genius, a con-man, or even a comical middle-aged dad in the vein of Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring. That’s where Shakespeare in Love (1998) comes in. It is undoubtable, in my mind at least, that all roads lead to this one film. Whether they rail against it, or use it as a springboard, for their own quirky take on the life of Bill/Will/William Shakespeare, all depictions of Shakespeare’s life since 1998 owe a debt to this seminal work in the niche of Shakespeare-on-screen. 

Still from Shakespeare in Love (1998).

Shakespeare in Love was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and won 7 of them, including Best Picture, Screenplay, and both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress (the latter was won by Judi Dench for her role of Elizabeth I despite being on-screen for roughly 8 minutes). In her “Oscar Bait”: A History video, YouTuber Lindsay Ellis mentions the way Harvey Weinstein, then a celebrated film producer, and co-founder of Miramax, would set up lavish, drawn-out consideration campaigns for his studio’s potential awards nominees. This is really the main reason why this silly, camp-y movie was nominated for and won a ludicrous amount of awards. Shakespeare had also just been made sexy, cool, and (let’s face it) money-making at the box office with Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). What did the world need next? A sexy, cool, money-making film of Shakespeare’s ‘life.’.  

“This is where Shakespeare (the man) became just as intriguing to wider audiences as his leading men and that was achieved by entirely dismissing his reality and creating a fresher, sexier one.”

Under the pen of Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love’s Will becomes a lovesick genius riddled with writer’s block. Never mind his wife and four children, he’s living through his own Romeo and Juliet as he falls out of love with a Rosalind and in love with a woman he can’t have: Viola de Lesseps. We get a masked ball, a balcony scene, and the one sort-of-faked death. Cross-dressing Gwyneth Paltrow so that Viola can act on The Rose stage also helps the writers around the issue of Shakespeare’s sexuality by making Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ – about a ‘fair youth’ in the sense that it’s about a girl dressed as a boy. At the film’s climax Lord Wessex (a goatee-d, villainous Colin Firth) is humiliated by Queen Elizabeth who reveals herself to be a member of the audience in The Rose theatre and resolves the plot for us. Bittersweetly, Viola and Shakespeare are parted with the latter to immortalise his love in Twelfth Night. The traces of history and fact are really only present in the sense that the names of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are right. However, like all of the film and television I’ve mentioned before, this film doesn’t claim to be portraying Shakespeare’s real life, it’s a patchwork of places and names knitted together by a Hollywood script about as realistic as aliens landing mid-film and taking Phillip Henslowe as a hostage. But this is where Shakespeare (the man) became just as intriguing to wider audiences as his leading men and that was achieved by entirely dismissing his reality and creating a fresher, sexier one.

Does it really matter that we re-invent Shakespeare and give him a new personality every few years? I think it does. Our cultural imagination positively runs wild when confronted with the most famous playwright on earth and next to nothing telling us about his life. He’s a blank space to write on, and write we do. The authors of all of the above screenplays work with the same source material and produce outrageously different Shakespeares. How can you watch Shakespeare in Love’s smouldering, lovesick Shakespeare and think he’s based on the same man who in Upstart Crow deals with stroppy teenage children and long carriage rides between London and his family home? The point is: you can’t. As long as William Shakespeare and the details of his life remain a mystery to us, his character will be fair game to anyone who wants to poke fun, whip up conspiracy theories, or gaze into Joseph Fiennes’ eyes as he recites lines of verse. We really do see Shakespeare on our screens more and more, but it’s never quite the same one. 

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Eliza Campbell is Culture Editor at the Attic on Eighth. When she’s not reading, writing, or in a rehearsal room she loves to sit in galleries, libraries, and coffee shops listening to period drama soundtracks and watching the world go by.