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The editors have grouped the essays into four categories: early cinema, avant-garde cinema, countercinema, and radical pedagogy. The arrangement is a deft move to impose patterns on a group of essays that differ from each other significantly in style and critical approach, from Kenneth Rothwell's straightforward and at times even breezy tone in "Hamlet in Silence: Reinventing the Prince on Celluloid" to the Lacanian/Zizekian subtleties negotiated by Alan Walworth in "Cinema Hysterica Passio: Voice and Gaze in Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear." Ostensibly uniting this collection is what the editors term an "escape from Hollywood," which allows for a focus on the "marginal, radical, and experimental uses to which Shakespeare has been put in twentieth century film culture" (14).

Marginal, radical, and experimental are words that certainly apply to a number of the films discussed, in particular Godard's King Lear (1987), Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), and, to a lesser extent, Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991). My Own Private Idaho may seem almost too marginal to be considered a Shakespeare film at all. Kathy M. Howlett, however, in "Utopian Revisioning of Falstaff's Tavern World: Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight and Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho," shows how much Van Sant's film in imbued with both Shakespeare and Welles. Van Sant, Howlett argues, succeeds in recovering the "carnivalesque origins" of the Henry IV plays even as he parodies Welles's nostalgia for a lost paradise, in the process breaking down "the binary opposition between high and low culture to reveal the vitality of the Shakespearean text given an American context" (174 and 168).

Godard's King Lear, too, might be thought to spin off to regions far removed from Shakespeare's tragedy. But Alan Walworth elegantly teases out a Lacanian/ZiZekian reading to reveal some of the ways in which Godard's concerns parallel Shakespeare's. It cannot be said, however, that a reader unfamiliar with Godard's film will be drawn to it by Walworth's analysis. Lacan is a strong presence as well in Hotchkiss's exploration of "The Incorporation of Word as Image in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books." Greenaway's film virtually invites a reading founded on the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Hotchkiss provides a useful guide to the complexities of Greenaway's approach to The Tempest, but one finally wonders whether the Lacanian substructure really adds much to her own quite excellent analytic skills.

Unlike My Own Private Idaho, Godard's Lear, and Prospero's Books, both Peter Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968) and Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971) have usually been treated as fairly straightforward Shakespeare adaptations. The essays by Peter Donaldson and Bryan Reynolds, however, reveal the extent to which both films have affinities to the marginal and experimental. Donaldson skillfully pulls apart the fabric of Hall's film in order to reveal the various distancing devices in this version of Shakespeare's comedy. It is notable, nonetheless, that Hall's Dream ends by positing a "revitalized, 'restored community'" (55) that to a large extent cancels out the film's more radical stylistic impulses.

With Polanski's Macbeth, what is most radical, marginal, and experimental is not so much the film itself as the approach Reynolds takes to it. Reynolds segues from placing Shakespeare's play within the context of the witchcraft craze of the early-seventeenth century to placing Polanski's film in the counter cultural moment of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll associated with the late 1960s. But the genuine and valuable insight Reynolds brings to both play and film is to some extent vitiated rather than complemented by his elaboration of Gilles Deleuz's time-image and crystalline-regime concepts, both of which are employed to argue that Polanski's Macbeth exhibits a more "counter cinematic" style that it actually does: what is perhaps most radical about the film is the extent to which it takes Shakespeare to his word. The playwright needed no lessons from Artaud in developing his "theater of cruelty."

Artaud is evoked in the title of Lisa S. Starks's "Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor's Titus," but the main theoretical touchstones here are the writings of Julia Kristeva on the abject and of Barbara Creed on the "monstrous-feminine." Starks weaves the insights of feminist psychoanalysis into her discussion of how Taymor both "explores the powers of horror--the abject--and thoroughly examines the act of viewing horror as well" (122). But perhaps the most authoritative citations in Starks's essay are to Taymor herself, which points to an intriguing phenomenon of the digital age. Titus (and to a lesser extent Prospero's Books) comes to the critic predigested, surrounded and followed by a parerga of commentary that threatens to make criticism and even scholarship superfluous. Commentary by Taymor and others on the two-disc DVD, in the published screenplay, and on several Web sites tells us nearly all we could want to know about the process by which Titus was constructed and, at the same time, prescribes the attitudes we ought to take toward it.

The flowering of Shakespeare films that was inaugurated by Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and that is only now beginning to abate has produced a new generation of Shakespeare and film scholars and critics who are extremely skilled in using the tools of structuralist, poststructuralist, and postmodern theory, which has perhaps had more influence on the study of film than on the study of Shakespeare. Though some contributors to The Reel Shakespeare cannot avoid lapsing into over-ingenious readings and occasional obscurities, the volume as a whole exemplifies how fresh viewpoints informed by sophisticated theoretical paradigms can illuminate both Shakespeare and film in unexpected and frequently rewarding ways.

--Michael Anderegg,Shakespeare Quarterly

A companion to Lisa Starks and Courtney Lehmann's 2002 Spectacular Shakespeare: Critical Theory and Popular Cinema, Reel Shakespeare shifts its gaze to avant-garde Shakespeare film, in order to "escape from Hollywood" and the restricted range of meanings it brings to the phenomenon of Shakespearean adaptation, examining instead the marginal, radical, and experimental uses to which Shakespeare has been put in twentieth-century film culture" (14). The title's play on "reel" and "real" provides the frame to explore anxieties around the photographic image in the age of mass media; the justification of film as a commercially viable art form; film's engagement with counterculture in artistic, political, and religious realms and the significance of these issues for the teaching of Shakespeare using a radical, student-centered pedagogy.

What comprises the real?

In their "Introduction: Images of the 'Reel': Shakespeare and the Art of Cinema," Starks and Lehmann begin their problematizing of "real" Shakespeare by framing the historical and artistic contexts of film's coming into being. For Starks and Lehmann, Shakespeare's life on film has been haunted by the ontological questions central to filmic representation voiced by Benjamin, Baudrillard, and others: "How could mere reflection of 'real'" images constitute 'art'? Does a reflection or a simulacrum possess an 'essence' How could the motion picture even be isolated as an object, when it was infinitely reproducible and comprised of fleeting time--images projected on a screen? What happens to the 'work of art' when it is subject to mechanical and, therefore, infinite reproduction? What exactly gives art its value as 'art' in the age of the image" (11). Early in film's history some thought that photography and film could rectify the artificiality of the stage, making us "believe that we see actual living nature" (10), as Charles Frohman wrote in 1896. Yet photography and film were also feared to be "dead," film a series of flickering shadows" (10). Shakespearean narrative was embraced by some early filmmakers to "raise the cultural and aesthetic stakes of cinema"? (11) and to establish film as an independent art form. Yet these Shakespearean films can continue to elude stable meaning or even value. Kenneth Rothwell's essay "Hamlet in Silence: Reinventing the Prince in Celluloid" illustrates the failed project of representing a singular idea of Hamlet in the play?s early screen history. Because of its supersaturated cultural weight, Shakespeare on film becomes and ideal focus for explorations into the changing status of the aesthetic in mass media. For Starks and Lehmann and others in this collection, anxieties around representation and the real have become the subject and substance of Shakespeare avant-garde film.

Lia Hotchkiss' essay, "The Incorporation of Word as Image in Peter Greenways's Prospero's Books" further complicates this crisis of representation by linking theater and the written word to the mourning and remembrance that drive visual and specifically cinematic representation. According to Hotchkiss, loss in Prospero's Books might be understood on the level of dramatic content (Prospero's loss of his art, his daughter, and authority on the island), on the level of authorial production (Greenway's recovery of the traditional link between Prospero and Shakespeare [100] as well as on the level of the cinematic sign [the encyclopedic "books" ambivalently compensating for cinematic lack and theatrical loss]).

What comprises the reel?

Several of the collection's essays demystify the processes of distribution, the pressures of production, and the machinery of filmmaking as both collaborative and profit-driven. For example, in his essay "Cinema Hysterica Passio: Voice and Gaze in Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear" Alan Walworth discusses the pressures on Godard to produce an avant-garde film that was also commercially viable. Such struggles also plagued Orson Welles in his making of Chimes at Midnight, according to Kathy M. Howlett's essay "Utopian Revisioning of Falstaff's Tavern World: Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight and Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho? (166). According to Howlett, in contrast to Welles's film, Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho assumes a parodic relation with its own production and with past Shakespeare film auteurs, especially Welles. Howlett suggests that this leads audiences to question their own nostalgic relationships with the past--something that Shakespeare himself attempted to do in his history plays (172). Ultimately, Reel Shakespeare's interest is not only in non-Hollywood adaptations but also in deconstructing the ways that Hollywood works as an inescapable aspect of mass media at large.

"Real" life contexts, applications, and pedagogy?

Essays in Brian Reynolds and Douglas Green ask, "How do particular spaces of production and consumption produce their own viewing relations" Reynolds, in his witty essay "Untimely Ripped: Mediating Witchcraft in Polanski and Shakespeare," uses the Deleuzian concept of the crystal image to conceptualize the reverberations in Polanski's film between fears of witchcraft in sixteenth-century England and public responses to the Charles Manson murders in 1970s California. In "Shakespeare, Branagh, and the 'Queer Traitor': Close Encounters in the Shakespearean Classroom," Green explores the function of reading and teaching Branagh's Shakespeare films with a queer eye in the context of a small Lutheran liberal arts college in Minneapolis.

Is the reel "real" Shakespeare?

Finally, this volume continuously asks us to reevaluate what is "real" Shakespeare studies. What new forms of expertise beyond expertise in the Shakespeare canon are needed as we expand the field? These essays, like the films that they discuss, are complex--and justifiably so. Postmodern theory is not window dressing but important scaffolding for the essays here. Their approaches collectively engage with Benjamin's concept of the aura, Lacanian formulations of mourning and lack, Baudrillard?s concept of simulacrum, Deleuze?s crystal image, Jameson's notion of materiality, and Foucault's understanding of the author function. This leads to one noteworthy absence in the volume: an address of racial issues in Shakespeare and film. For many postmodern critics (including this one), the social construction of race and the larger rubric of multiculturalism are necessary aspects of poststructuralist interrogations of ideology, power, and the production of culture. Perhaps this absence reflects the ways that "identity politics," which some critics make analogous to "race," often get pitted against postmodern theory. Or is this instead a reflection of a perceived absence of issues of race in non-Hollywood Shakespeare Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), with its apocalyptic take on multicultural tensions, and Liz White's all-black independent Othello are two films among many that could be fruitful sites for future inquiries on race. Jose Fernandez's rich critical bibliography at the end of the volume provides a good starting point. It includes pertinent essays on these films and others, including international films, Shakespeare adaptations, and derivatives.

By thoughtfully engaging with avant-garde Shakespeare films in cinematic terms, rather than merely as adaptations of "original" Shakespeare texts, Reel Shakespeare successfully combats two outcomes of the proliferation of commercial Shakespeare films in the classroom and in the marketplace: the dumbing down of Shakespeare and the continued reification of the Shakespeare icon as an unassailable sign of high culture. The collection's cinematic scope, beginning with Hamlet's history on silent film and including Peter Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968), Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987), Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991), Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), Roman Polanski's Macbeth 1971, Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1966), Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, Samuel Taylor's Taming of the Shrew (1929), as well as more commercially driven works by Zefferelli and Branagh, is sure to change the way that Shakespeare on film is taught and marketed. Yet these films, even en masse, leave us with a ghostly, haunted feeling. If, as stark and Lehmann write, "at each juncture in the history of the cinematic image, it is Shakespeare who is brought in to test the limits of representation and to address questions of art, value, and meaning," it is also true that Shakespeare remains "the very ghost that the moving picture technology was predicted to resurrect" (14).

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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl c 2001