The best is silence: why Shakespeare in early film is worth celebrating
As a new DVD shows, in rare and innovative early adaptations of the Bard on film – even when condensed – you don’t need to hear the words to feel the quality
The
thought of silent Shakespeare can cause confusion, and occasional sniggers. If
your memory of Shakespeare from school revolves around quotations, verse form
and antiquated vocabulary, then silent adaptations of his plays might seem
perverse.
The
truth, in fact, is that Shakespeare films were hugely important and popular in
the early silent period. What’s more, these films can help us trace the
evolution of narrative cinema, and show us something about Shakespeare
too.
“Early
films of Shakespeare’s plays captured his poetry in images rather than words,”
runs the opening caption in the BFI’s new anthology, Play On! And that process
was simpler than it sounds.
Many early Shakespeare films, such as the
earliest surviving “adaptation”, a King John from 1899, were recordings of
scenes from staged versions of the plays. So in that film, Herbert Beerbohm
Tree reprises the death scenes from his West End production in a studio on the
roof of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s office
on the Embankment in London. It’s not an attempt to tell the story of King
John, but to give the cinema audience a glimpse of a great Shakespearean in
action.
Elsewhere on the disc, you can see John Gielgud as a queasy Romeo in 1924 in a
similar style. A 23-minute condensation of Richard III in 1911 gives a taster
of FR Benson’s skills as both actor and director.
And in 1916, the Broadwest Film Company went to the trouble of transporting
stage legend Matheson Lang to Italy, to play Shylock with an
authentically Venetian backdrop.
Silent
Shakespeare films also drew on a visual tradition that had already rendered key
scenes from the plays as wordless images, whether static or in motion. From
detailed narrative paintings of the 18th and 19th century that represented
Shakespearean characters and locations based on the evidence of the verse to
moving magic lantern slides that animated ghostly
apparitions or gruesome murders, the plays had already been boiled down into
visual gobbets.
The
influence of this tradition is most clearly seen in some of the “trick”
sequences in the silent Shakespeare films, which use early special effects to
bring the playwright’s more far-fetched and lyrical imagery to life. For
example, you can see a cheery Puck in the US company Vitagraph’s
1909 A Midsummer Night’s Dream “put a girdle round about the Earth”.
Layers of superimposition in a British version
of The Tempest from 1908, directed by Percy Stow,
position the crucial storm and shipwreck in a very Shakespearean “discovery
space” at the centre of the frame.
Elsewhere in that delightful and accomplished
adaptation, trick photography makes simple work of Caliban and Ariel’s magic in
sunny pastoral locations. Any adaptation of Hamlet, silent or with sound (or painted in oils by John Everett Millais),
continues this tradition if it shows us the death of Ophelia, for example,
performing visually what Shakespeare leaves to our imagination, via Gertrude’s
spoken description. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook …”
The
1899 King John is truly an outlier;
the first real rush of Shakespeare adaptations came towards the end of the
1900s and in the early 1910s. That’s what we’d call the end of the early film
period, before longer features, with fluid narratives, started to become the
norm. The timing is important – it begins to explain why these films were made,
and how they were intended to be seen. This was a time when the film industry
was attempting to shift gear. While film-makers undoubtedly wanted to
experiment with longer and more complex projects, the studio executives and
film exhibitors were also looking to find ways to make more money.
Showing
short, simple films to lower-class audiences in poky shopfront venues in
inner-city areas was never going to bring big financial rewards. The industry
wanted to target a more well-heeled demographic, tempting them with “prestige
pictures” worthy of being shown in smarter, purpose-built venues, with rows and
rows of comfortable seats. That way, cinema owners could charge higher ticket
prices, and hope for greater municipal support from city officials who felt the
“moving pictures” were an insalubrious form of entertainment.
Bible stories and literary adaptations, it was
felt, could secure a better future for the cinema. It might seem ludicrous now
to attempt to dramatise Macbeth or King Lear in just a couple of reels, but at
the time, it was a chance worth taking.
So
the film-makers got creative with their stagings, cutting out subplots and
scenes to allow a streamlined version of Shakespeare. This way, they learned
how to tell stories on film, and how to adapt from literary sources, on a small
scale first. And they also relied on the visual tradition, which meant
Shakespeare’s scenes were instantly recognisable to their audience. There is
also evidence that cinemas would make use of “film explainers” reading text
from the plays, or specially prepared quotation-heavy commentaries, distributed
in the trade press, while the movie was being projected. Look carefully at some
of the scenes in these silent Shakespeares, and despite the absence of sound,
the actors are clearly acting out soliloquies line by line. The words, in these
silent films, are never entirely missing.
The
Play On! disc, with a gorgeous score by the musicians of Shakespeare’s Globe,
offers a smooth entry into these films, which were for a long time neglected
and underappreciated. It takes an anthology approach, compiling clips under
thematic headings with captions explaining techniques and trends.
For those who want to get stuck into an entire
Shakespeare-in-miniature (even the longest film on this disc represents a
vastly condensed text) there are two complete adaptations, newly digitised, and
the Silent Shakespeare package of films
previously released by the BFI, with music by Laura Rossi and
commentary by Judith Buchanan. A leading expert on early Shakespeare films,
Buchanan also features on an explanatory documentary on the discs, with BFI
silent film curator Bryony Dixon.
Now
these intriguing and often spectacular films are being given the respect they
deserve, it’s a rewarding pastime to explore them more fully than this sampler
allows. It’s well worth catching one of Buchanan’s live Shakespeare events in
the UK under the Silents
Now banner, which combine screenings of these films with live
performances and audience participation.
Precious few of them are available on disc,
but do seek out the German adaptation of Hamlet
from 1920, which is. It stars the famous diva Asta Nielsen in the
lead role, playing a Prince Hamlet who is secretly a princess,
which adds a delicious sexual frisson to her performance. It’s remarkable to see
how Shakespeare’s words create powerful imagery and moving performances, even
when you can’t hear them spoken out loud.
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Play On! Shakespeare on Silent Film is out now on in a dual format Blu-ray and
DVD from the BFI.
