From the earliest period of film, Hollywood identified with Shakespeare. In an advertisement in The Moving Picture World, 1920, film is celebrated as the realisation of a Shakespearean dream, a concept that persisted beyond the silent era as can be seen in the marketing of a 40-volt projection arc lamp in 1948: ‘The Strong Mogul’ alongside a picture of Shakespeare under the caption of ‘Builders of the Theatre’. The suggestion in both these advertisements is that film is the new Shakespeare.1 These advertisements, almost thirty years apart, articulate what has become a cliché in popular discussions of Shakespeare: that film is today what Shakespeare was in the early modern period and if the playwright were alive today he would be living in LA and making movies.
In spite of the declared synergies between Shakespeare and Hollywood film, it took Shakespeare a long time to be successfully translated into a Hollywood movie. If we count success as both critical and commercial, it was twenty-four years before a Hollywood Shakespeare film gained both critical and box-office success in the sound era. The ‘straight’ adaptations included British actors in an effort to appease those who believed that the British ‘owned’ Shakespeare and American stars to imply that Hollywood, too, could have a major share in the playwright. In the early era of sound, accents were of particular importance, especially to those who believed that Shakespeare had to be spoken in an English accent.
Swinging from exaggerated claims of fidelity to audacious disrespect for the author, promotions of the films are referred to as ‘exploitation’ and ‘showmanship’, terms that, I suggest, can be recognised as analogous to ‘adaptation’ in the ‘Classical’ Hollywood era, between the 1920s and the 1950s, during which production, distribution and marketing were dominated by the ‘major’ studios. Shakespeare’s place in Hollywood was eagerly sought after, from the beginnings of the sound era (effectively from 1929 onwards), but until the beginning of the 1950s, it remained noticeably uncertain. This chapter considers how the ways in which we talk about the adaptive process owe much to marketing, especially what was termed ‘exploitation’ in the pre-war period and ‘showmanship’ in the post-war era. This is a key element in the way that adaptations were both conceived and received in Classical Hollywood. This chapter will focus on the advertisers of Shakespeare adaptations, who in their eagerness to please everyone reveal some of the underpinning strategies for adapting Shakespeare in Classical Hollywood, invoking synergies between translation, adaptation, commercialisation, exploitation and showmanship.
Rather than looking at the films, I am going to look at the ways in which the film adaptations were talked about, not by their critics or reviewers but by their promoters: voices that we do not often value and whose boasting about the brilliance of the films is at odds with the inferiority complex characteristic of adaptation studies. As Christine Geraghty in Now A Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (2007) boldly looks at film adaptations outside of their source texts,2 I would like to experiment by looking at adaptations through marketing – and by marketing, I am using a concept from the first half of the twentieth century before the Internet, normally about appealing to as many people as possible, often reduced to a notion of appealing to the lowest possible denominator, ‘dumbing down’, making unrealistic promises akin to ‘fake news’. In a short opinion piece for Literature/Film Quarterly, I suggested that it is time to read adaptations historically and take seriously the ‘clapometer’ effect – to coin a term from a British television talent show to denote what is the most popular.3 Rather than looking at what the author intended – which is of course ‘fidelity’, the bane of adaptation studies – we should reflect on what the audience were perceived to want.
Film as the New Shakespeare and Films of Shakespeare
In 1936, Allardyce Nicoll suggested, while acknowledging that the Shakespeare films of the sound era had not fulfilled their potential, that film was the ‘new Shakespeare’ insofar as its conditions were like those of a Shakespeare play, appealing to all levels of audience, commercially driven and restricted by censorship. Shakespeare on film potentially could be more ‘Shakespearean’ than a production in Shakespeare’s own time.4 Hollywood shared this vision; as Russell Jackson observes, after the coming of sound, Shakespeare films were ‘presented as the fulfillment of a dream, either of the medium’s capabilities or even the playwright’s fancies, unfulfilled by his own inadequate theatre’.5
The film critic André Bazin, writing almost twenty years before Roland Barthes’ influential essay, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), accounted for the refusal to regard adaptations as serious films or as serious readings of literary texts due to an unwillingness to let go of the need for an author, an ‘individualist conception’ of the ‘author’ and the ‘work’ that he points out, only became legally defined at the close of the eighteenth century (‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest’ 1948).6 The need to have a single creative genius, especially behind a Shakespeare film, for some time seemed to separate the good from the bad, the serious from the flippant, the highbrow from the lowbrow and the faithful from the blasphemous.
Shakespeare-and-film criticism has historically put the plays first, focusing on a single play’s journey through cinema, and numerous examples could be cited of criticism that restricts itself to a single film, links films in relation to dramatic (rather than cinematic) genre, or focuses on a single director, normally, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Grigori Kozintsev, Franco Zeffirelli and Kenneth Branagh. These approaches all imply a need for a single creative genius behind the productions: either the director or Shakespeare himself.
Douglas Lanier has considered Shakespeare’s presence in advertising and the ‘conviction that advertising’s appropriation of Shakespeare corrupts Shakespeare’s art’ and this ‘is a cultural belief widely shared, borne of a post-Romantic faith in poetry’s transcendent autonomy of the marketplace’,7 but restricts his survey to the use of Shakespeare as a symbolic commodity to promote products other than film. Emma French has written on film marketing from 1989 to the new millennium in Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood, considering how filmed Shakespeare at the end of the twentieth century ‘prompts cultural anxiety about high culture adaptation’ and how ‘a complex hybrid of veneration and irreverence arises out of such anxiety in the marketing of Shakespeare, the balance within which becomes crucial for commercial success’.8 John Madden’s 1998 Shakespeare in Love and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, the most commercially successful Shakespeare films to date, scored highly in the box office, according to French, due to a rhetoric of reverence and irreverence, a combination of fidelity and flippancy. I would also suggest that the films’ popularity is due largely to the ways in which marketing is embedded into the narrative.9 There has been little research into the significance of marketing of Hollywood Shakespeare films in the first half of the twentieth century, film marketing described in E. S. Turner’s The Shocking History of Advertising as the ‘rawest’ of all,10 the tactics of which markedly veered from excessive reverence to extravagant claims regarding the historic significance of the film to what was considered shocking and defiant impertinence. This chapter considers how adaptation studies owes much to the marketing of film adaptations and its paradoxical mixture of the most extreme claims to fidelity with blatant expressions of betrayal.
Marketing Shakespeare in Hollywood
Reading Shakespeare adaptations historically shifts the focus from the play or director to the audience and involves a consideration of the marketing strategies surrounding the films. This requires a reading of what Gérard Genette calls ‘paratexts’, usefully summarised by Robert Stam as ‘all the accessory messages and commentaries which come to surround the text such as posters, trailers, reviews, interviews with the directors, and so forth’.11 An historical approach to Shakespeare adaptations also includes consideration of the frequency of certain types of films over a given period. If we discount Orson Welles’ 1948 Macbeth as outside the mainstream, post-sound Classical Hollywood only managed to produce four full-scale studio feature length treatments of Shakespeare.12 The surprisingly small number suggests that the promotion of these films failed to attract their targeted audiences. The imprint of ‘Shakespeare’s name’ and the consequent insistence upon authenticity persisted; but while the films were both critical and box-office disappointments, the brashness and inventiveness of the marketing of the movies seems to have inspired the more lucrative and numerous Shakespeare offshoots of the period.
Three of the four mainstream ‘straight’ Shakespeare films were released in the pre-war period. These were marketed as the ‘first’ films of Shakespeare, in spite of their silent predecessors.13 It seems that the early promoters of Shakespeare film required sound, or Shakespeare’s words, for them to be ‘truly’ Shakespearean, and the way that the words were spoken dominated much of the films’ criticism. These films in the early sound era include The Taming of the Shrew (dir. Sam Taylor, 1929), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt, 1935) and Romeo and Juliet (dir. George Cukor, 1936). The plays were chosen to display the stars’ hitherto unknown verbal skills, with some winners and some losers. Among the stars in these prestige productions were Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (The Taming of the Shrew – ‘Hollywood Royalty’ making their first appearance together), James Cagney, Mickey Rooney and Olivia de Havilland (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard (Romeo and Juliet). The Shakespearean roles offered opportunities to show off both the stars’ acting credentials and the studio’s cultural aspirations. Unfortunately, the appeal to too wide an audience (fans of the stars and potential Shakespeare enthusiasts) resulted in poor box-office figures; and while the films flopped and today seem, to many, stilted, stagey and conservative, the marketing of these films is characterised by extreme claims to the historic significance of these movies, the fidelity of the productions and, paradoxically, a joyful irreverence to the language of the text. The marketing of the first talkie, The Taming of the Shrew, claimed that the film would be an improvement on the play. The pressbook (the term for an illustrated guide to marketing for exhibitors of the film) even brings Shakespeare back from the dead, to join ‘Mary and Doug’ for tea, where he gives the movie (described as the ‘first’ film adaptation of his work) the warmest approval, authenticating it as worthy of the author. However, The Taming of the Shrew is greeted in Photoplay as ‘swell entertainment’ with the reassurance that ‘it isn’t Shakespeare’.14
What is striking today in the advertising of these movies is the insistence on Shakespeare’s approval as well as the striking contrast between the seriousness of the films and the irreverence in the promotional materials. The extravagance of the claims promoting the films is shocking to an audience today, such as in the poster for A Midsummer Night’s Dream asserting that the movie is: ‘THE MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCTION EVER DONE IN TALKING PICTURES’. In contrast, Shake Mr Shakespeare (1936, dir. by Roy Mack), a short promotion of the 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream, offers musical renditions of Shakespeare’s plays presented in a dream sequence to a screenwriter who has been charged with adapting all of Shakespeare. For me, this is a minor masterpiece full of ingenious contemporary musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays and much more watchable than the film it promotes. Shakespeare is marketed, for the same film, in Photoplay as a ‘newcomer named Bill Shakespeare’. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is advertised as a film that would ‘have delighted the Bard’.15
A year later, Romeo and Juliet is celebrated for its fidelity and for surpassing all other versions in its ‘sheer physical beauty’. It is regarded as a milestone akin to Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer in its translation of classic art into screen entertainment and as the culmination of Shakespeare’s art. Its director George Cukor claimed that ‘Shakespeare wrote his masterpieces for the screen’.16 The film promotion claims now, ‘after five hundred years [Romeo and Juliet], has for the first time been transformed in all its beauty and breathless excitement to a medium perfected for its reception – the motion picture screen’.17 In the short (or as it refers to itself ‘miniature’) made to accompany Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet, Master Will Shakespeare (1936 dir. Jacques Tourneur), Shakespeare is depicted as an aspiring screenwriter, making his way to London, depicted as the Hollywood of the sixteenth century. The short concludes with Shakespeare reflecting on Romeo and Juliet (which we are informed is his favourite play) with the film’s soundtrack in the background with the not so subtle message that if he were alive today, he would be writing for the movies. In the marketing of these films, Shakespeare is made into a product to be consumed and exploited, and audiences of these movies were cheated with fake news, promises that were not delivered, adaptations that presented themselves as not the real thing, but better.
Variety ran a column entitled ‘Exploitation’ in which activities for film promotion are suggested and ‘exploitation’ is significantly a feature of the pressbooks, often featuring several pages under the heading ‘Exploitation’ which offer ideas as to how to promote films to local audiences, involving activities around the movie theatres, installations and images to promote the films. ‘Exploitation’ is a useful term to apply to Hollywood’s approach to adaptation of this period, on the one hand insisting upon the accessibility or the contemporariness of the films and, on the other hand, declaring that the movies would be what Shakespeare would have produced himself. Robert Stam has listed the numerous ways of discussing translations of literary texts with words such as ‘infidelity’, ‘betrayal’, ‘deformation’, ‘violation’, ‘bastardisation’, ‘vulgarisation’ and ‘desecration’18 and the general bad press that adaptation or translation into the new media has received throughout the twentieth century. Implicit in all of these terms of abuse is exploitation – or commercialisation – the attempt to turn the text into a product, an approach which the trade magazines and the pressbooks actively embraced. Rather than ‘loss’, what Stam describes as resulting from ‘the prior valorisation of historical anteriority and seniority’, film exploitation adopts a rhetoric of ‘gain’, wildly insisting upon the triumph of the movie which completes or perfects the source text.19 In the pre-war period, Hollywood tried but failed to exploit Shakespeare in these three prestige productions. By the 1950s ‘exploitation’ had been translated to ‘showmanship’ but with the same commercialising tactics to promote the films to local communities, including tie-in books, bookshop displays, walking books, posters of the stars and fashion accessories, possibly making explicit what was implicit in the films themselves.
In response to the box-office failures of the 1930s, the following decade is dominated by more ‘serious’ renditions of Shakespeare, aloof from the Hollywood pizzazz of their predecessors: Laurence Olivier’s British films Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948) and Orson Welles’ low budget Macbeth (1948). Olivier’s Henry V ushered in a new period of Shakespeare movies with a focus on a single director/star (a surrogate Shakespeare), very much as Welles was to establish himself in America. Rather than marketing Shakespeare as a collaborative product, as in the Hollywood productions, these films succeed through their emphasis on a single creative genius – Olivier and Welles. A poster for Hamlet in Variety (5 January 1949) gives all the credit to Olivier, his name dwarfing that of Shakespeare and with Olivier’s image alone, with sword aloft, promoting the film. In her study of Laurence Olivier, Jennifer Barnes describes how Olivier as actor-director-producer usurps Shakespeare, as in a News Chronicle cartoon in which two American studio executives describe Stratford-upon-Avon as ‘the birthplace of the guy who writes the movies for Larry Olivier’.20 While the previous decade loudly celebrated Shakespeare exploitation or appropriation by Hollywood, the 1940s made no major Hollywood film of Shakespeare with the exception of Orson Welles’s Macbeth which was made by Republic Pictures, on ‘Poverty Row’ in Hollywood, on a limited budget of $700,000.21 While bruised by the failures of the 1930s Shakespeare films, the major studios sneaked Shakespeare into the movies in offshoots such as the war comedy, To Be Or Not To Be (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch at United Artists, starring Jack Benny, John Ford’s western My Darling Clementine (Twentieth Century Fox, 1946) and A Double Life, George Cukor’s film noir drama about an actor who is ‘taken over’ by the role of Othello (Universal, 1947).
Hollywood’s determination not to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s can be seen again in the following decade, with Shakespeare making unheralded appearances in offshoots rather than in explicit cinematic renditions of his works, such as the western, loosely based on King Lear, Broken Lance (1954, dir. Edward Dmytryk for twentieth Century Fox), Macbeth, turned into a gangster movie, Joe MacBeth (1955, dir. Ken Hughes for Columbia Pictures filmed in the UK), Othello as western, Jubal (1956, dir. Delmer Daves for Columbia Pictures), and The Tempest as sci-fi fantasy, Forbidden Planet (1956, dir. Fred McLeod Wilcox for MGM). Three other notable English-speaking films, Welles’ Othello (1951), Renato Castellani’s Romeo and Juliet (1954) and Olivier’s Richard III (1955) were produced outside of the Hollywood system. ‘Straight’ or ‘faithful’ Shakespeare seemed to have no place in Hollywood, but the success of Olivier’s 1944 Henry V and, in particular, the Oscar award winning Hamlet in 1948, revealed that Shakespeare movies had a place elsewhere.
Shakespeare Arrives in Hollywood
Two Hollywood films were released by MGM in 1953, Kiss Me Kate and Julius Caesar, the latter identified by Robert F. Willson Jr. as the best of the Hollywood Shakespeare movies and the last Shakespeare film of the Classical Hollywood period (156). The films represent the opposite ends of the adaptation spectrum, the ‘so-called’ ‘loose’ and ‘straight’ adaptation. Kiss Me Kate recalls the Hollywoodisation of Shakespeare in the early 1930s in the irreverent marketing of the playwright. Julius Caesar draws on the tradition of reverence, recalling both Olivier’s Henry V in its political and theatrical representations and Hamlet in the black-and-white depth of focus and statuesque mise en scène. The film was shot in black-and-white to remind audiences of the wartime newsreels of mass Fascist rallies,22 seeming to emulate Olivier’s chorus in Henry V whose commentary on the action emulated the newsreels shown in picture houses during the war and also the depth of focus of his black-and-white Hamlet. The only other films explicitly referred to in the 1954 British Julius Caesar pressbook are Olivier’s Henry V and Hamlet,23 inviting viewers to forget the earlier Hollywood attempts at Shakespeare and compare the American movie with its successful British predecessors. Julius Caesar and Kiss Me Kate represent two Hollywood approaches to Shakespeare film – exploiting both a tradition of irreverence and reverence. Both films look backward to Shakespeare’s previous Hollywood representations, drawing on the explicit attempts to Hollywoodise Shakespeare (Kiss Me Kate) and to prove that Hollywood could produce serious Shakespeare (Julius Caesar).
Kiss Me Kate (dir. George Sidney), based on the 1948 Broadway musical by Samuel and Bella Spewack with music by Cole Porter, seems to pay tribute to the 1930s marketing of Shakespeare by Hollywoodising The Taming of the Shrew in its blatant commercialism and exploitation of Shakespearean language. The film owes much to the early Shakespearean spoof adaptations, especially Norma Shearer and John Gilbert’s hamming up of Shakespeare in MGM’s Hollywood Revue of 1929 and the all-dancing and singing, 1936 Shake Mr Shakespeare, as well as harking back to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s 1929 Taming of the Shrew in which fans would be voyeuristically watching the breakdown of a famous Hollywood marriage. As Taylor’s Taming implicitly combined two stories – that of the real life story of the married actors, Fairbanks and Pickford, playing together for the first time and that of Petruchio and Katherine, Kiss Me Kate parallels a divorced couple playing the roles of their Shakespearean counterparts. Shakespeare’s name is absent from the trailer and the opening credits. Rather than Shakespeare, the pressbook, unrelentingly focuses on Kate being spanked by Petruchio – ‘A SPANKING SPECTACULAR NEW MUSICAL!’ – and on the film’s technical innovations (colour and 3D).
Hollywood in the 1930s displayed a certain nervousness in the casting of Shakespeare films in the translation of Shakespeare into American vernacular and played safe in using both American and British actors. Audiences in the 1930s, as Allardyce Nicoll demonstrates, still referred to these films as ‘talkies’ and would be alert to the voices of the actors, expecting British actors to inhabit the parts. The Shakespeare films would be the first time some in the audience had seen Shakespeare or had seen Shakespeare radically cut, the first time some would have heard a British or American actor speaking Shakespeare. The novelty of sound had yet to disappear and a speaking film was still something to marvel at. Julius Caesar, while addressing an audience more acclimatised to different accents and fully accustomed to sound, likewise, mixes British and American actors in the tradition of Hollywood Shakespeare. But by the 1950s, the British accent had become firmly associated with deviance and villainy, probably initiated by Charles Laughton’s performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933), followed by his type-casting as the villain in his later Hollywood films, establishing a pattern for the casting of male British actors to follow.
Influenced by Orson Welles’s modern dress version of the play, referencing Mussolini’s rising fascism (which was produced by John Houseman, also producer of the MGM movie), Julius Caesar attracted actors at a quarter of their usual salaries. With little confidence in its commercial success, the budget of the film was confined to $2,070,000.24 The choice of Julius Caesar, as stressed in the pressbook, was due to its relevance, described as Shakespeare’s ‘most modern play’: ‘Dictatorship versus free society, power politics, much action, totalitarian purges – these are forces all too familiar in the world today.’25 Made at the time of the Hollywood blacklist, motivated by anti-communist sentiment, the film boldly addresses the topical issue of free speech. Elia Kazan, who directed Marlon Brando in his breakthrough role in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), had just released names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to the shock of those who knew him, including Brando. Choosing such an overtly political play was daring enough, but the most notable and boldest decision was the casting of Marlon Brando as Mark Antony.
There were several reasons for the choice of Brando: his contemporary appeal, his reputation as an actor who breaks the usual mould and his American identity, clinched in his extraordinary performance two years earlier in A Streetcar Named Desire. The decision to cast Brando (originally it was to be offered to emerging British actor Paul Scofield), in fact, dominated the film’s publicity and reception to such an extent that it became identified as Brando’s Julius Caesar, much in the same way of Olivier’s ‘ownership’ of Henry V and Hamlet. It is a film that does not belong to the writer/screenwriter/director, but to the star.
Brando’s identification with the uncultured American seems to be key to the vision of the movie. The director Joseph L. Mankiewicz allegedly stopped Brando trying to imitate British Shakespearean performances: ‘You’re trying to copy the goddamn Limeys! Let’s work on this together goddamn it.’26 The choice of Gielgud was equally strategic. The pressbook includes an article entitled ‘OUR GREATEST SHAKESPEAREAN ACTOR: John Gielgud as Cassius’, in which we are informed why Gielgud finally chose to act in a Hollywood film. Referred to as ‘our foremost Shakespearean interpreter’, he is claimed to explain why he changed his mind about going to Hollywood and filming Shakespeare:
‘Among all Shakespeare’s plays “Julius Caesar” is probably the best suited for filming. It’s a play of action, with a minimum of soliloquizing. Mankiewicz assured me the film version would be faithful to Shakespeare, emphasizing character rather than spectacle’, Gielgud related, ‘and I had faith in him’.
The presence of Gielgud ‘authenticates’ the film as a Shakespearean vehicle. Finally, the choice as Brutus of James Mason, who was regarded as one of the most popular stars in Britain before he made his way to the USA, serves as foil to Brando in both physical stature and in the oratory competition at the heart of the film, a contest in which Brando unequivocally wins. The American Brando, as in the poster promoting the movie, towers over the British Mason.
Unlike Kiss Me Kate, Julius Caesar pronounces its Shakespearean credentials: the opening credits of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film announce ‘William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’ (no other writer’s name was to be included in the screen credits),27 placing Shakespeare in the forefront for the first time in Hollywood after seventeen years of suppression. The pressbook reveals how the play required a minimum of cutting ‘and not a single word of “additional dialogue”’. This recalled the credits allegedly attached to Sam Taylor’s 1929 Taming of the Shrew, in order to emphasise ‘the vast strides made by Hollywood in the past few years’ with the suggestion that this film is ‘pure Shakespeare’.28 A review in the pressbook surveys the cast, director, producer, cameraman and culminates with ‘The screen play is by a certain gentleman of Stratford – William Shakespeare himself. Nothing has been added to the play’s original dialogue.’ Master Will Shakespeare, used in conjunction with the last Hollywood mainstream film, the 1936 Romeo and Juliet, was revived to promote the film, perhaps in recognising the brilliant audacity of the short and alluding again to Shakespeare’s conquest of Hollywood. The poster for the film reflects the overall marketing strategy, a strategy that draws on the lessons learnt from the previous Hollywood feature films of Shakespeare’s plays: a statuesque Brando towering over the other characters played by James Mason, John Gielgud, Louis Calhern, Edmond O’Brien, Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr. It also suggests the dominance of an American/Hollywood culture – as epitomised by Brando, quintessential American heart-throb and seemingly uncultured bad boy – over those British pretenders, Mason, Gielgud, Garson and Kerr.
The ‘SHOWMANSHIP’ section of the British pressbook, the new version of the ‘Exploitation’ section of earlier pressbooks, reveals that ‘GIANT BOOKS’ of the ‘novel’ are available: ‘a pretty girl could hold a copy in such a way that the title is plainly seen and tour town, get into bus queues, “wait” outside factories during the lunch hour, etc.’ Compared to earlier pressbooks, the ‘showmanship’ feature is relatively restrained, but the British pressbook does include ‘The “JULIUS CAESAR HAIR STYLES’ originally featured in The Hairdressers’ Weekly Journal which pictures women modelling ‘the Mark Antony’, ‘the Cassius’, ‘the Brutus’ and ‘the Casca’, juxtaposing the models with the newly styled hair against their counterparts in the film.
For some this Hollywood conquest of Shakespeare worked. According to the review in The New York Times, it surpassed Olivier’s Hamlet ushering in the coming of age of Tinseltown and almost lived up to the press book’s hyperbolic marketing: ‘M-G-M’s JULIUS CAESAR is acknowledged as the greatest box-office attraction ever created from a Shakespeare play’.29 While credit was given to the rest of the cast, Brando received the lion’s share and was nominated for his third Academy Award. Shakespeare in Hollywood seemed to have arrived, if somewhat late. Kenneth S. Rothwell, writing almost fifty years later, concurred: ‘The likes of this remarkable performance will rarely be seen again’.30
For the first time in Hollywood’s Classical Period, the marketing and targeting of the film seems to have paid off and for the moment, at least, Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar was ‘the new Shakespeare’ and Shakespeare had finally arrived in Hollywood. But Julius Caesar’s success is in no small measure due to its borrowings from previous advertisements of Shakespeare films in persuading a doubting public of its worthiness, focusing on authenticity, irreverence and relevance while assigning its success to a single creative genius. And this time, the creative genius behind the production who sells Shakespeare to Hollywood was neither the director nor Shakespeare, but the star. The key ingredients in Hollywood exploitation and showmanship can be summed up by foregrounding contemporary relevance, authenticity and paradoxically its opposite, irreverence, having a controlling/creative presence dominate the film, and implying that the film triumphs over both Shakespeare and British culture in general.
Conclusion: Shakespeare, Film, Exploitation and Marketing
Perhaps we should not discount the ‘clapometer’ effect, but embrace exploitation, showmanship or commercialisation as something to be recognised in adaptation studies, an approach that focuses on the consumer rather that the author, the adaptation not as interpretation but as product, not as something to be admired but as something to be sold. The epigraph of Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon’s article, ‘On the Origins of Adaptation’, from the 2002 film Adaptation, sums up the notion of adaptation as exploitation: ‘Adaptation is a profound process, which means you try and figure out how to thrive in the world’.31 I have tried to follow a lineage of descent from the 1929 Taming of the Shrew, the first full-length Shakespearean ‘talkie’, to the 1953 Julius Caesar, hailed as the ‘greatest ever production of Shakespeare’. Through trial and error, the Hollywood studios increasingly commodified Shakespeare by trying to figure out the key selling points of a successful adaptation.
It is worth remembering that ‘adaptation’ is also a term in marketing to describe ‘the process and practice of adapting otherwise standard products and services to meet the needs of varying customer types, either individually or customer groupings’.32 In Classical Hollywood – and beyond – to adapt Shakespeare is to commodify his works, to exploit unique selling points of previous adaptations and to ultimately prove that film is the new Shakespeare.
