Terry Eagleton began his early book on Shakespeare and Society by quoting from Ulysses' effort to draw Achilles into action in act 3, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida; at Ulysses' urging, Achilles remarked on the notion that we see ourselves only by reflection:

and Ulysses continued,

Eagleton read these words as saying that 'uncommunicated qualities don't have any real existence at all; a man is not simply known to others through communication, he can only know his own experience by putting it in a communicable form' and that 'a man who contracts out of public life is contracting out of reality'.

Looking around for a suitable sub-title for this paper I asked a professor of my acquaintance if he could suggest anything and, given the nature of my own Shakespearian rewrites, he said: 'How about 'Tis Pity I'm a Whore?' I took the liberty of slightly revising that suggestion into the present sub-title. And I don't really think anyone can deny the fact that a good deal of 'harlotry' has insinuated itself into bardolatry. When you have a large, multi-national corporation such as the Shakespeare Industry, it goes without saying that it attracts people of easy virtue, and that's a subject I'll touch on in a moment or two.

As to my credentials, or my lack of them, I have to say that I speak as a professional director - not at all as a scholar or a pedagogue.

A director's relationship to Shakespearian scholarship (Granville-Barker notwithstanding) is very different from an academic's. For the academic, theories, suppositions, and speculations are ends in themselves, and a really solid piece of Shakespearian criticism need only be well argued and well written to join the voluminous tomes of its predecessors. But a director is looking for what in the theatre are called 'playable values' - that is, ideas capable of being translated into concrete dramatic terms.

John Hirsch, Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario from 1981 to 1985, had hoped to stage all four of Shakespeare’s late plays in a single season but felt unable to run the financial risks, and it was left to his successor, John Neville, to take the plunge and base the 1986 season on three of them: Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. It is a pity that Mr Hirsch could not realize his ambition, for his 1982 production of The Tempest there was the only coherent version of the play I have seen, and whatever the virtues of Mr Neville’s season, coherence was not among them. He aimed instead at diversity within unity, engaging three different directors. Each avoided a generalized fairy-tale setting, and located the action within a specific period, but of widely different kinds: Pericles was set in the eighth century Byzantine empire, Cymbeline in the late 1930s, The Winter’s Tale in the nineteenth century.

Representing King Lear on screen, representing almost any Shakespearian play on film or videotape, means broadening the ancient trope of the world as stage to include the world as screen. As the idea of the screen as screen takes its place alongside the idea of the play as play, so 'meta-cinema' inevitably emerges alongside metatheatre. In making the means of representation a subject of representation, film-makers have only mimicked their stage forebears. Like theatre, film may also selfreferentially draw attention to itself through ironic devices, or, alternatively, it may even have sequences that are essentially movieswithin- movies. Oliver's Henry V, by shifting from a documentary mode in the Globe playhouse to a stylized medievalism at the court of France, gives an example of the former; while the Polanski Macbeth, in embedding a silent movie about Ross within the talking picture about Macbeth, illustrates the latter.

In Shakespeare films, 'meta-cinema' may or may not assume the additional burden of apologizing for the film's not being a page in a printed book or a play on the public stage. The history of screened Shakespeare furnishes a special reason for this directorial breastbeating. Ever since those early silents, such as the 1911 'epoch-making picture of Henry VIII, as given by Sir Herbert Tree', or Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson's 1913 Hamlet, for which at enormous expense a castle was constructed in Dorset's Lulworth Cove, film-makers have been guilt-ridden.

Even those sympathetic to source studies may well feel that enough has been said about the sources of The Tempest. More than most of the plays, it seems to be a rich confluence of elements drawn from Shakespeare’s diverse reading, conversation, and theatrical experience. So many things float to the surface here: contemporary excitement over the exploration and colonization of the New World; bits of Italian and Spanish history and fiction involving usurpations, flights, islands, and returns; scenes and techniques from the ongoing human comedy of commedia dell’arte improvisations; some of Montaigne’s reflections on nature and society, anger and restraint; and a fascination with magic, man’s power to influence, and perhaps control, nature outside and inside himself and others, by the power of his ‘art’. Yet no one of these predominates, or presents a sufficiently strong matrix of incident and character to constitute a primary source. Kenneth Muir spoke for many readers, I suspect, when he concluded that, whatever the variety of his materials, ‘it seems . . . likely that for once he [Shakespeare] invented the plot’.

This filmography is a reference list of 'complete', straightforward versions of Shakespeare's plays in film, television and videotape form. It specifically excludes free adaptations; film and television programmes containing insets of recorded performance; educational films based on pedagogic manipulations of Shakespeare's texts; material recording rehearsals, workshops, conversations with actors and directors; and all operatic and balletic adaptations. There is much material in all these categories of great potential interest to researchers; this modest compilation should be regarded as the provision of basic information rather than the establishing of a comprehensive reference source.

We have listed international film, and English-language television versions, providing in each case title, date, format and medium; production company (where known); producer (where applicable); director; designer (where known); and a selective cast list. Where the film is currently available for purchase or rental we have supplied the name and address of the distributor, and indicated its whereabouts if stored in an archive. It should be emphasized that specific enquiries to any distributor or archive should be undertaken to establish availability or accessibility of any individual item.

My previous report on the Canadian Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario for Shakespeare Survey covered the 1980 season, the final year of Robin Phillips's regime. The extraordinary series of confusions and intrigues which followed almost wrecked the festival altogether;2 and the first task facing John Hirsch, Artistic Director 1981-5, was to keep the festival going at all. But he did much more than that. He created a young company within the main ensemble to work at the Third Stage, a small-scale replica of the Festival Stage, where promising young actors are trained to cope with the arduous demands of the main theatre; and he offered some striking interpretations of Shakespearian comedy and romance.

John Hirsch is particularly interested in the late plays, and expressed frustration that his dream of staging all four in one season was impossible for box office reasons. After his remarkable production of The Tempest in 1982 I share his frustration, for this was the first coherent version of the play I have seen, the only one to weld the disparate elements of the play into a unity. In the process, it provided solutions to areas of the play which often prove intractable in performance, particularly the masque and the so-called clowns' scenes.

Whatever else it is, Hamlet is a well-made play. The first scene engages our immediate and deep interest. The play then efficiently establishes the central conflict between the prince and Claudius and gives us in act 2 some very enjoyable cat-and-mouse, as strategies beget counter-strategies. After the richly exciting climax sustained through the latter half of act 3, we are given the kind of abatement we expect in Shakespearian fourth acts. Finally, the play sweeps us to the revenge catastrophe in the most splendidly thrilling ending that Shakespeare, or probably any other playwright, has ever given an audience. No wonder, then, that many commentators have over the years expressed admiration for Hamlet as a piece of dramatic craftsmanship, testifying eloquently to the play’s solider Aristotelian virtues. Still, it probably seems perverse to begin with an appreciation of Hamlet’s structural qualities. As we all know, the chief interest of the play is the protagonist, and although we have dutifully learned not to abstract the prince from the play, his fascination for us doesn’t really seem to depend essentially upon the play’s formal excellence. Moreover, this formal excellence itself has not been universally acknowledged: is the play in fact so well made? Johnson can show us our crooked way here, for after praising the play’s variety of incident, diversity of mood, and ‘continual succession’ of new and interesting characters, he feels compelled to qualify: ‘The conduct is perhaps not wholly secure against objections,’ he tells us.

With the recent wave of scholarship on Shakespeare on film there is at least one important line of questioning still to pursue: can the film medium serve as a critical tool for interpreting or reinterpreting Shakespeare's work? Is there something to learn, to rediscover, to see in a new light when, to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase, we have 'the ingenious guidance of the camera' leading us through the text? If, as Benjamin suggests, the camera opens up 'a new field of perception' in this age of mechanical reproduction, how can we apply his notion to the specific instance of a Shakespeare play adapted to the screen?

One film that provides a particularly exciting opportunity for a critical analysis of Shakespeare's work is Orson Welles's Othello. Of Welles's three Shakespeare films - Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1965) - Othello has received the least critical attention and continues to be one of the most rarely seen of all cinematic adaptations of the plays. But careful study of this film illuminates a thematic aspect of the text that leads to a fresh reading of the play as a whole. Through his use of cinematic technique, Welles has produced a work that emerges as a study of time in Shakespeare's Othello. The insights to be gained from the film concerning this element of the play are of considerable importance for, and can contribute significantly to, scholarship on Shakespeare's great tragedy.

‘As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and hony-tonged Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.’ And so may the soul of Francis Meres be thought to live in critics who examine Shakespeare’s debt to his favourite poet; since Ovid’s influence is found largely in the early work it is, by implication, a youthful phase, which Shakespeare grew out of. Yet, as Ovid acknowledged through Pythagoras, ‘All things doo chaunge. But nothing sure dooth perrish. This same spright/ . . . never perrisheth nor never perrish can.’ Just so did the soul of Ovid live in Shakespeare throughout his career, to find its final expression in the four late romances. ‘[T]he most resonant echo of Ovid in the corpus’ occurs not in one of the works noted by Meres, but in The Tempest (as Prospero’s invocation, ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves’ (5.1.33–50), adapts the Latin original and Arthur Golding’s translation of Medea’s speech in Metamorphoses, 7. 197–209 (Golding, II.265-77)), while it is in Cymbeline (2.2) that a copy of the Metamorphoses makes its second appearance in Shakespeare’s works.

Iago's commentary on the reunion of Othello and Desdemona on the island of Cyprus is more than just a fanciful statement of his intentions. Iago as a character deliberately sets out to destroy the harmony of love, but Shakespeare, the dramatist, presents his words and actions as part of an extensive pattern of musical images and effects. This pattern works integrally as a structural theme. It unites and expands the ideas of the play and provides the essential terms of reference for both aesthetic and moral judgement.

Othello probably makes more use of music than any other Shakespeare tragedy. Iago's two songs and Cassio's wind music are essential to the plot, while the 'willow song' expresses Desdemona's situation and her state of mind with accurate and agonizing economy.

Previous studies have demonstrated that Shakespeare knew and was using well-established musical theory. They show that the play contains passages which spring from such commonplaces as the superiority of string over wind instruments, the existence of 'music that cannot be heard' (the music of the spheres), and the continuing debate as to whether the performance of music was a suitable occupation for anyone who claimed to be a gentleman.

‘Editors engaged in modernisations of texts would be well advised to discuss their difficulties more fully in print for their mutual advantage and the formulation of some working conventions that will do the least damage.’ So wrote Fredson Bowers in 1959. In Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader, Stanley Wells draws on his experience as General Editor of the Oxford Shakespeare to further the open discussion advocated by Bowers a quarter of a century ago and promoted by Wells himself in Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling. At the same time, Wells challenges the view, implicit in Bowers’s phrase ‘the least damage’, that modernized editions are inevitably less scholarly than old-spelling ones, doing greater violence to the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays. Under the chapter heading ‘Old and Modern Spelling’, Wells argues that the disadvantages of modernization have been exaggerated, and shows how specific problems, including several over proper names, may be met by ‘reasoned decisions’.

This year is marked by a new book, Shakespearean Dimensions, from G. Wilson Knight, in his sixtieth (and, sadly, last) year of writing, worthy of welcome. Speaking for himself in a sprightly, brief and candid introduction, Wilson Knight affirms his faith in a Shakespeare saturated in idealism, says that he sees his own natural pursuit to have always been interpretation of Shakespeare, rather than criticism, and recalls a review he wrote of H. A. Mason’s Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love. Mason had there objected that the almost superhuman status accorded to Antony in Antony and Cleopatra had no dramatic basis in what we see him do, and Wilson Knight demurely observes, ‘Even so, is not the attempt somehow justified by its result? We cannot but admire the temerity with which Mr Mason offers clusters of the most mind-ravishing quotations as a logical part of his indictment.’ Wilson Knight has always had the power to communicate to his readers the mind-ravishing quality of Shakespeare’s dramatic language. The title of his book seems to recall Twelfth Night:

but the high point for me is the essay on 'Caliban as a Red Man' which, though previously published elsewhere, feels somewhat different in this new context. The book's first chapter invokes the traditional terms 'soul' and 'spirit', since 'there is such a reality, beyond brain and all logical thought' which 'makes a large and determining part of what we mean by man and his universe' (p. 6).

This was a year of star performances and strong readings. Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Anton Lesser, Irene Worth and Juliet Stevenson played major tragic roles for the two major companies, while Nicky Henson brought unusual distinction to the clowning at Stratford. Directors were equally self-assertive. Twelve years ago John Russell Brown argued, in Free Shakespeare, for a simplified actors’ theatre which resisted ‘one-sided interpretations, however subtle or well-informed’. A feminist Troilus and Cressida, a Jungian As You Like It, and an Ealing Comedy Merry Wives of Windsor in the space of a single season suggested that his ideas had yet to take root.

Distinctive acting and distinctive interpretation did not, however, always coincide. Ian McKellen's Coriolanus at the National Theatre in December 1984 was a bravura performance of the kind which Antony Sher's Richard III had reintroduced to the English stage six months before. Its effect, unfortunately, was rather different and it was so because Peter Hall's Coriolanus, though notionally the same production, was persistently at odds with it.

When in 1916 Hugo Münsterberg claimed that the photoplay overcomes ‘the forms of the outer world . . . by adjusting events to the forms of the inner world’, he perceived the major shift from the theatre stage to the cinema screen as being psychological rather than technological. Any survey of available criticism in the field of Shakespeare and film tends not only to confirm that perception but to suggest that it persists not merely as an aesthetic issue but as an issue affecting the collective critical mind. While theatre remains the legitimate expressive medium for authentic Shakespeare, kept alive by a scattering of theatrical companies playing to audiences for whom theatre is both accessible and familiar, only comparatively recently has it become respectable to concentrate serious discussion on the media of cinema, radio and more especially television. These media have become the most practical means of making Shakespeare’s plays in performance a world heritage rather than a national one passed on through educational systems.

Each of the three important directors – Welles, Polanski, and Kurosawa – who attempted to recreate Macbeth on the screen has had to come to terms with the play’s reverence for monarchy. Despite idolatrous claims that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time, the royal play of Macbeth unabashedly celebrates a semi-divine monarch in terms specific to the first years of Stuart absolutism. King Duncan is thoroughly paternal, compassionate, and regal. Of him even devilish Macbeth testifies that he ‘hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been / So clear in his great office, that his virtues / Will plead like angels, trumpettongu’d, against / The deep damnation of his taking-off’ (7.17–20). Macbeth’s politics are cyclical, and the play cannot conclude until the pure and untainted Malcolm, Duncan’s son and the usurper’s successor, invites home ‘our exil’d friends abroad / That fled the snares of watchful tyranny’ (5.9.32–3), and, invoking the ‘grace of Grace’, sets out to be invested at Scone. The play’s satisfaction with the traditional order, though severely tested by the reign of the tyrant, is confirmed when a second exemplary monarch succeeds his father.

The 1965 issue of Shakespeare Survey, entitled 'Shakespeare Then Till Now', included a short article by Laurence Kitchin which must have broken new ground at the time since it dealt with 'Shakespeare on the Screen'. Writing incidentally about what he called television's 'inevitable recourse to Shakespeare', the author remarked ruefully: 'We must learn to live with the results', and concluded that 'as a trendsetter, the screen is potentially a menace. It has given Shakespeare its biggest audience. Up to a point it can lead that audience, but it is a mass audience which demands concessions.'

Twenty years later, with the BBC Television Shakespeare completed, not only have we learnt to live with the results but we are learning to teach with them; and we can no longer be content with dealing at one go with 'Shakespeare on the screen'; we must learn to distinguish between Shakespeare on film and Shakespeare on television. Yet, although the last twenty years have accustomed us to an ever-increasing presence of Shakespeare on the small screen, culminating in what the BBC itself describes as 'the most ambitious and expensive project in the history of television', they have not brought us anything equivalent to the full-scale studies of Shakespeare on the big screen provided by Roger Manvell or Jack J. Jorgens.

The student who sets out to examine the influence of Shakespeare on a living playwright can study texts, read the critics, and follow the biography of the living playwright. He can develop theories and postulate possibilities, but his surest guide is the acknowledgement by the living writer of his debts. For such an acknowledgement a student will travel miles, and it was in the hope of such an acknowledgement that I travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon in August 1981 to hear Wole Soyinka talk about 'Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist'.

Soyinka is an artist who works in several traditions and who has defined himself in relation to those traditions. Among his poems are those which are composed 'after' James Simmons, Thomas Blackburn, John Cowper Powys or Wilfred Owen; he has written adaptations of plays by Euripides and Bertolt Brecht; he has incorporated masquerade dances, Agemo rites and a New Yam Festival into his plays. He is allusive and eclectic; he borrows, commandeers, steals or requisitions as suits his purpose. He knows that there is a limit to originality and that the way material is used is more important than its source. However, those, like the present writer, who listened to Soyinka on 'Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist', hoping for an autobiographical account or for comments which would make plain the complexities of his own plays, were, initially at least, disappointed.

Most of the best Shakespeare films have a stage production in their background. Examples come readily to mind: Olivier had performed on stage all the plays he made into films; Kozintsev had directed both Hamlet and King Lear for the theatre before he made films of them. Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet put the same accent on youth as had his Old Vic production; the Peter Brook/Paul Scofield film of King Lear was a revised edition of their stage version. Yet this theatrical lineage of the films has received remarkably little comment. In general, film commentators have tended to play down the ties between film and theatre (they are more inclined to see parallels with narrative literature) precisely because the two are so close, theatre came first, and the commentators are concerned to maintain the integrity of film as an independent art-form. That it is. Yet much can be learned from exploring the relations between the two forms of drama, as indeed Allardyce Nicoll, André Bazin, and Roger Manvell have already shown. They, however, have considered the subject in general terms and have not focused on particular films and the stage productions to which they were related, whether the plays were by Shakespeare or other playwrights. Admittedly, a prior stage production may not always be an asset for a film. Most critics have felt that, on film, Olivier’s portrayal of Othello would have been better if it had not so directly reflected his stage performance; what was bravura classic acting on the stage seems stagey on the screen.