Volume 18, Number 8 · May 4, 1972
Shakespeare in the Movies
By Frank Kermode
Antony and Cleopatra (to be released in the United States later this year)
directed by Charlton Heston
Macbeth
directed by Roman Polanski
King Lear
directed by Peter Brook
Piety, as we've all discovered by now, won't get us anywhere. If Shakespeare has a right to attention, that right must be established again and again. The authority that establishes it has itself to be proved by demonstration, not by the old appeal to the dead, the sanctity of what has been accepted always, everywhere, and by everybody. Some of the men who direct his plays on stage or on film are intensely aware of this, and of the fact that their giant, if he is to live at all, must live in change. There was a time, in the history of the movies, when a man might make a version of a Shakespeare play and expect it to last for many years. That time has passed, not only because television can exhaust the movie almost at one shot (as it did Olivier's Richard III) but because the very concept of the 'classic' performance has withered.
Review, 4128 words
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