M.A. Thesis

MAKE HIM ACCESSIBLE:

COMPLETING THE TEXT USING CONTEMPORARY PLACE IN

TWO AMERICAN FILMIC ADAPTATIONS

OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (2010-2015).

BY

DAVID W. FOULDS

INTRODUCTION

ON ‘DEADLY’ SHAKESPEARE

In the film Looking For Richard (1996), Al Pacino sets out to make Shakespeare ‘accessible’ to the contemporary American public.[1] He talks to people on the street about how they feel about Shakespeare. A teenaged girl responds: ‘I saw Hamlet. It sucked’. Even actor Kevin Kline, who played Hamlet in the 1990 Great Performances PBS version, states that when he saw his first Shakespeare play he thought the ‘Shakespearean acting’ was so overdone that he ‘just sort of tuned out’.[2] Kenneth Branagh says that the traditional[l1]  approach to Shakespeare leaves him with ‘no connection’ to the material.[3] This argument for the failure of Shakespeare to connect to audiences is made blatant in Peter Brook’s The Empty Space. In the first section titled ‘The Deadly Theatre’ he writes, 

nowhere does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare… We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like their proper way – they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring – and in our hearts we blame Shakespeare, or theatre as such, or even ourselves.[4]

Brook and Philip Auslander believe that many who attend a Shakespeare play are doing so in order to gain cultural capital[5] or as an academic exercise rather than for enjoyment or an Aristotelian catharsis[l2] .[6]

When we excessively admire Shakespeare and his works, much as Harold Bloom does in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, we place our priorities on Shakespeare as an idol, we engage in bardolotry, instead of focusing on the act and meaning of performance.[7] There is much to be gained by the study of Shakespeare’s life and acting techniques in Elizabethan[l3]  England, but perhaps, as Brook argues, this is more intellectual than emotional in focus. When an actor wishes to act like Richard Burbage and a director wants to discover Shakespeare’s true intention, he is on an intellectual pursuit, one which is futile as it is impossible to recapture this moment in time. We understand the world through our cultural and temporal lenses. What we think of as authentic Shakespeare is highly questionable[l4] . As Marjorie Garber states in Shakespeare in Modern Culture, ‘Shakespeare is already not only modern but postmodern: a simulacrum, a replicant, a montage, a bricolage’.[8] There is no single, original performance, nor one single, original text. We cannot find les propres paroles d’un auteur, nor can we locate a single true performance. To engage in this pursuit is not only futile, but it neglects the true purpose of performance.

INTERPRETATION AND COMPLETION

Performance, according to Victor Turner, is ‘reciprocal and reflexive’. It is ‘a critique, direct or veiled, of the social life it grows out of’.[9] Performance is thus most effective for an audience when it states something about their culture. Making Shakespeare accessible, then, is largely a matter of making the work speak to the current concerns and motivations of the audience, making it congruent with perceptions of their sociocultural sphere. More than simple comprehension, it is resonance. If we insist on taking Harold Bloom’s rather than Peter Brook’s approach to the material, we are intent on learning more about Shakespeare’s world than our own[l5] . Gina Bloom, in an interview with author Jane Smiley, states that when Smiley sets the story of King Lear in contemporary Iowa in her novel A Thousand Acres (1991) and brings forward the daughter’s stories in a feminist context she is reinvigorating the text, allowing it to become more accessible. If we focus on ideas of fidelity, she says, the text becomes stagnant and ceases to resonate. She believes it is because Shakespeare has been updated to reflect our lives and sensibilities that his work remains in our consciousness, not because we have somehow been able to exhume his original intention and production style. Smiley, in turn, observes that ‘any production of a play is an interpretation’ so ‘you might as well walk [down that path] with conviction’.[10] W.B. Worthen criticizes the dominance of the author in the creation of a performance, stating ‘surely actors have a clearer sense of their own creation, and would be unwilling to see themselves haunted by the ghostly presence of the author’.[11] Actors are a required part of completing the play text in performance. Their interpretation is key to this completion; at the level of production, the author’s intention should be left behind[l6] .

Indeed, the reading of any narrative text is an act of interpretation. As per Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics, when we read, we complete the text. It is this dialogic approach to text or a ‘fusion of horizons’ which completes the hermeneutic circle.[12] The author’s intention, to Gadamer, is largely irrelevant. The words on the page are only a start, the reader creates meaning when he fuses his life experience with the text to create a unified whole. A narrative text is only a blueprint which is used to build a ‘performance’ in the readers mind. The reader of the play script is not unlike the reader of any text; he fills the gaps of the text in order to complete it. The difference, of course, is that the play script is created primarily to be performed on stage, not just in the reader’s mind. The play is thus an act of interpretation by the director and by the actors, each contributing their vision of the text to the performance by completing it with their own sociocultural perceptions. Wolfgang Iser writes,

no tale can ever be told in its entirety. Indeed, it is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamism. Thus whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in an unexpected direction, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections - for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.[13]

The play script contains less description of place and movement than most other narrative texts, thus creating a greater gap which needs to be filled. This gap is left large in order for the director and players to use their own experience to complete the text[l7] . The play text is not finished until it is performed, just as a novel is not complete until it is read. The hermeneutic circle must be complete for meaning to emerge.

It is the actor’s job to become the character, however, this act of becoming is not done tabula rasa. Each actor uses his or her own experience to interpret the role, to make it seem true and authentic. There is no way for the actor to completely lose himself in the role. Instead, the role and he become incorporated into a unified whole[l8] . It is this unified whole which we see on stage, and this is why each actor who embodies a role creates it in different ways. Konstantin Stanislavski encourages actors to focus on their first impression of a role, their first reading. He writes,

the attraction you feel on first getting to knowing a role is the first moment when the actor merges with the individual passages in a role. This merging is especially valuable as it is direct, intuitive, natural. Who can define why some moments are lodged in an actor’s emotion and other kinds of memory for his whole life? Perhaps…there is a natural affinity and a biological link between the actor and those particular passages.[14]

As contemporary actors and directors are, as James C. Bulman notes, ‘bound by the perspectives of [their] own time and place’, their memories and emotions are generated in a contemporary field.[15] Since so much of the work of performance comes from filling the gaps in the text with contemporary memories and feelings, the actor is doing a disservice to the audience and to the character when he attempts to perform Hamlet as Burbage did, for to do so is really to play Burbage playing Hamlet, and the actor’s identity is lost. The actor instead must merge his own reality directly with the reality afforded to the character[l9]  by the textual or performative guidelines in order to connect to the audience. Moreover, as Ralf Hertell points out in Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play, when we re-enact the staging and costumes of an Elizabethan production of a Shakespeare play, we ‘don Elizabethan rather than historically correct costumes’.[16] Hamlet, lest we forget, is actually set in the late middle-ages in Denmark, and King Lear is set in the 8^th century BCE. So, again, this desire to re-enact the plays as Shakespeare intended is really an historical desire to re-enact the days of The Rose and The Globe, rather than present a clear, meaningful presentation of the plays and characters themselves. Laurence Olivier even questions that Shakespeare would ask that we somehow remain faithful to his limitations of staging: ‘nothing that we know of Shakespeare suggests that he actually enjoyed being “cabin’d, cribbed, confin’d” by the rudimentary conditions of the stage for which he wrote’.[17]

VISUAL PRIMACY

A common complaint from contemporary audiences is that Shakespeare’s written dialogue is not ‘natural[l10] ’. Indeed Iambic Pentameter, even though it is the poetic meter which most closely approximates quotidian speech in rhythm, feels foreign. Moreover, as pointed out in Pacino’s film, Shakespeare uses poetry, metaphor, to convey meaning. The general audience is no longer attuned to listening to poetry, particularly for 2 to 3[l11]  hour stretches. We have become far more visual since the birth of the printing press as Marshall McLuhan has stated in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and of course now in the post-televisual age, we think largely in terms of image.[18] We define our space visually; indeed when we understand something we ‘see’. Yi-Fu Tuan writes,

In English, "I see" means "I understand." Seeing, it has long been recognized, is not the simple recording of light stimuli; it is a selective and creative process in which environmental stimuli are organized into flowing structures that provide signs meaningful to the purposive organism.[19]

Shakespeare’s audiences were then more attuned to the voice than the eye. Gina Bloom writes, ‘early moderns considered the spoken and heard voice, on and off the stage, to be a substance with economic, theatrical, and mechanical dimensions’.[20] The early moderns even seemed to see words as actual material matter; they ‘were imagined to be things rather than just refer to things’.[21] Medical texts of the time described the voice as ‘crafted air’.[22] In The Actor and His Text, Cicely Berry writes, ‘in Elizabethan times… because the majority of people were not literate they relied much more on verbal communication: stories, communication, whole histories of families were passed on by word of mouth’.[23] Living in this auditory field allowed these audiences to concentrate on the subtleties of speech in ways most contemporary Americans are not accustomed to do[l12] . As primarily visual learners and interpreters, contemporary audiences need more visual signs and signifiers than Elizabethan/Jacobean audiences.

A sketch of The Swan theatre in 1596 by Johannes de Witt, and drawn by Arend van Buchell [figure 1] evinces a rather bare, thrust stage (proscaenium). A backdrop (mimorium aedes) with Lord’s room above and a roof (the heavens) is held up by two pillars on either side of the stage. From the mimorium aedes there are two doors, equidistant apart. There is no curtain, no proscenium, and the audience views the production either from the arena or from a three-tiered gallery (orchestra, sedilia, porticus) covered by a roof. The arena is open air and the same natural light is used throughout, both on stage and in the audience. From Shakespeare’s stage directions, we know that some props were used (Desdemona’s bed, for example), but there was minimal use of stage dressing and props. Overall, there were very few, if any, visual cues to place. Instead, Shakespeare’s words created the visual field. When a filmmaker chooses a contemporary setting for his Shakespeare adaptation, as have the two filmmakers I will discuss in this essay[l13] ,

Figure 1: Sketch of the Swan Theatre by Arend van Buchell after the sketch sent

to him by Johannes de Witt (1596). University of Utrect library, ms.842.f.132r.

he provides audiences with familiar visual codes. Since the text itself, which is mostly dialogue, presents an obstacle to a highly visual audience, providing a space which is familiar creates an additional layer of meaning, a ‘second order sign relationship’ as posited by Keir Elam.[24] ‘The theatrical stage’, he says ‘inevitably acquires secondary meanings for the audience, relating it to the social, moral and ideological values operative in the community of which performers and spectators are part’.[25] The ‘theatrical stage’ here implies the visual indexical cues created by production designers to create a familiar space on stage, unlike the relatively bare stage of Elizabethan/Jacobean England[l14] . By using visual ‘sign vehicles’ that are readily understood to have these second order meanings, the filmmaker allows the contemporary viewer to decode otherwise difficult passages of Shakespeare’s language. He augments or supplants Shakespeare’s words with language more familiar to us, visual language, to create meaning. Further, a contemporary mise-en-scene comments on the state of our own society, thus better fulfilling the purpose of performance as posited by Turner, Susan Bennett and Martin Esslin.

Bennett writes, ‘cultural assumptions affect performances, and performances rewrite cultural assumptions’.[26] Our understanding of our culture affects how we understand a given performance, and in turn, performances comment on our culture. In An Anatomy of Drama, Esslin writes, ‘[theatre] in very practical terms teaches [the audience], or reminds them of, its codes of conduct, its rules of social coexistence. All drama is therefore a political event’.[27] Victor Turner connects Arnold van Gennep’s idea of liminal space to play. Play and performance, Turner says, take place in a space separated from quotidian life, in a liminal space, where the rules of society are allowed to come into question.[28] Performance is a liminal event. It is a place of catalysis for cultural change. By creating a familiar space, but a space outside of quotidian life, contemporary directors can use Shakespeare to play with cultural norms. The viewer is able to not only decipher the language of Shakespeare by connecting logos to site-specific image, but the creation of this liminal space allows the director to apply Shakespeare to problems that are highly relevant to the contemporary viewer. He creates a true[l15]  space of play.

AMERICAN IDENTITY AND PLACE

While it is easy to conflate England and America because of the shared language and depth of shared history, it is important to realize that Shakespeare performed in America is actually a cultural translation. As Alden T. Vaughn states in Shakespeare in America, ‘having fun with Shakespeare is a traditional American pastime’.[29] From the beginning, Americans have adapted Shakespeare to resonate with their own culture. They took a ‘utilitarian function’ to Shakespeare’s works, using them to convey principles of morality.[30] In order for Americans to relate to these works, they do what any other outside culture does when approaching the production of a foreign work: make it their own. It is perhaps more obvious when we look at an adaptation such as Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) that there has been an act of cultural translation than when we look at most American adaptations. However, in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), set in contemporary (and fictional) Verona Beach and positioned as a gang war between the Montagues and the Capulets, and Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000) set in corporate Manhattan about the takeover of the CEO of Denmark Corporation by Claudius, it is apparent that this transposition in space is also a cultural translation. These films gain accessibility to the American audience because instead of the difficulties of kings, queens and knights there are powerful corporations and street fighting gangs, elements familiar on every newscast and in everyday discussions about America’s sociopolitical world[l16] .

Place is important to contemporary identity for the very reason that we are less grounded and more mobile. In his book Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity and Modern Life in Modern America, Wilfred M. McClay writes, ‘In a frenetically mobile and ever more porous and inexorably globalizing world, we stand powerfully in need of such stable and coherent places in our lives—to ground us and orient us, and mark off a finite arena, rich with memory’.[31] McClay goes on to discuss how America is undergoing a sort of reversal: from place to space[l17] . To understand this idea, first it is important to understand the difference between place and space. Yi Fu Tuan writes:

‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place’. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value… The ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa...[32]

Place is familiar, it is known, it is safe. Space is undifferentiated, unknown, dangerous. As we become more globalized we are less rooted, less connected to place then ever before. Yet we crave this familiarity; we crave ‘home’. McClay continues, ‘sometimes it seems as if we are living like plants without roots, drawing our sustenance not from the earth beneath our feet but from the satellites that encircle us and the computer clouds that feed and absorb our energies’.[33] This loss of place creates a loss of identity, and thus a craving for this missing sense of self and home. Russell Jacoby writes, ‘a loss of identity in a globalized world can be countered by a secure sense of where one belongs and fits’.[34] As this sense of place is being dismantled, Americans find that they require a connection to the familiar.

Ted V. McAllister in his essay ‘Making American Places’, states that while Americans are known for their love of space, of ‘the awesome beauty of trackless wilderness, the adventure of the frontiersman untethered to place… American history is as much the tale of place-making as of seeking space’.[35] While much discussion of early America focuses on the new frontier, the goal of this searching was indeed to create settlements, to turn space into place. Americans are quite attached to place, as Edmund Burke has stated:

to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of all public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.[36]

American nationalism is rooted, for the individual, in their own particular sense of place: their own state, town, neighborhood and home. J.E. Malpas states that ‘human life [is] essentially a life of location, of self-identity as a matter of identity found in place, and of places themselves as somehow suffused with the “human”’.[37]  We think of ourselves as from somewhere; our identities are inextricably bound to place. Place forms our conception of ourselves, it shapes us. By using specific, American places, then, American directors can tap into this connection between self and place and use it to then connect Shakespeare to contemporary audiences.

APPLICATION

I will now analyze two filmic adaptations of Shakespeare’s works: Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2012) and Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline (2014) and discuss how these adaptations have used contemporary American place to make Shakespeare accessible. I will look at how these filmmakers have used Shakespeare’s texts integrated with ideas of space, place and identity to perform a significant cultural function by using play to question cultural assumptions[l18] . I will discuss how character’s[l19]  identities are transformed in contemporary space and how these performances are in sync with their sense of place. While I will use some aspects of film aesthetics in my discussion, the focus here will be on the films as productions on-site, and how specific location and visual semiotics affects our understanding of the characters and story and in turn, how these performances comment on American society in the years 2010-2015.

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CASE STUDIES

WHEDON’S MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Shakespeare’s setting for Much Ado About Nothing is Sicily. The men are returning from military actions wherein Don John has been defeated by Don Pedro. All return to be guests in Leonato’s house, the governor of Messina. The story is itself an adaptation of a tale that has been told many times before: by Ariosto in Orlando Furioso (1516), by Matteo Bandello in Novelle (1554), by George Whetstone in The Rock of Regard (1576), by Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene, Book 2, canto 4 (1590) and by Anthony Munday in Fedele and Fortunio (1583).[38] To claim originary[l20]  status with Shakespeare’s work is thus clearly problematic. In each case, the story conveyed meaning by adapting to the cultural codes of the intended audience: Bandello’s was in Italian prose, Spenser’s in English verse and Whetsone’s in English prose. Shakespeare’s version, while set in Sicily, is clearly not concerned with the effects this should have on the characters[l21]  identities. The characters are quintessentially English, particularly those of Dogberry, Verges and the Watchmen, as Wells[l22]  points out in his introduction to the play.[39] As Shakespeare made his Italian characters relatable to the English audience by making them English, why then should we not make the characters relatable to an American audience by making them American? If we are primarily visual learners and thinkers, why not add visual codes in order to adapt to the needs of contemporary audiences?

By providing familiar settings, specific place instead of the empty space of the traditional stage[l23] , contemporary filmmakers are able to [l24] connect to the American audience. Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing (2012) takes this familiarity quite seriously: it is filmed in the director’s Santa Monica home. That the film was shot as a party at the filmmaker’s own residence is of primary importance to how we read the film. The audience gets to see Whedon’s world through Shakespeare. The actors/characters arrive in limousines, everyone is dressed in the latest Beverly Hills fashions, and we get to watch the celebrities play with the roles. The characters are doubled with the actors and the space is doubled as both Messina and Whedon’s house in Santa Monica.

The house is thus both Whedon’s home and is Leonato’s home. Both places exist in synchrony. As the party forms, we are not exactly sure who is throwing it: Whedon or Leonato. Indeed it is both. Whedon is throwing a party and filming it, and during this party the visitors play ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. The house, then, becomes a liminal space, a safe space for the actors to comment on Whedon’s world of Hollywood and on American society and values through the adapted play written by Shakespeare[l25] . Shakespeare’s words take on new meaning within the space of the house. Being Americans dressed in nice suits and expensive dresses, attending a formal party at a rather nice house in Santa Monica, the ‘wars’ they return from are indeed the wars of Hollywood and this is a filmed respite from such conflict. Because Whedon’s film is a low-budget, black and white, independent, one-location film, particularly one with lower box office potential as Shakespeare films tend to be[l26] , the film itself can be thought of as a return from the wars of Hollywood, as a liminal space where actors can re-connect with Shakespeare’s drama. In an interview with Whedon’s wife, Kai Cole, about the production, she states that she and Whedon wanted to make a very anti-Hollywood film. ‘Let’s not listen to anybody,’ they decided. ‘Let’s not hear the naysayers and not doubt ourselves. Let’s do it and not go through the whole Hollywood process’. She states that she and Whedon didn’t want to hear, ‘You can’t cast that person’, or ‘You can’t do it in black and white’.[40] The filmmakers and actors, then, are indeed coming from the wars of Hollywood, and so these identities blend with the characters, as posited by Stanislavski[l27] .

Whedon’s film opens with a shot of clothes on the floor. We see Benedick’s (Alexis Denisof) bare legs in the background as he dons his pants. He approaches the trousers in the foreground and dresses himself. Whedon then cuts to a wide shot of Benedick sitting in a chair, a sleeping woman in bed beside him, and empty wine bottles from the night before in the foreground. Benedick is in contemplation, rubbing his hands together. He is trying to decide if he should stay or go. In the next shot he is on his way out the door but stops and looks down at Beatrice (Amy Acker), whose eyes are open, facing us. She shuts her eyes so he cannot see that she is awake and knows he is sneaking out. This is obviously an addition to the text: it takes place prior to the events of Shakespeare’s play and is a silent, MOS[l28]  scene. What is hinted at in Shakespeare’s text when Beatrice says ‘I know you of old’ (1.1.138) and ‘he lent it me awhile and he gave me use for it, a double heart for his single one’ (2.1.160), is here made explicit.[41] Using these verbal hints as take-off points for exploration is certainly not a new concept to Shakespearean cinema or filmic adaptation in general[l29] . Branagh inserts scenes of sexual intimacy between Hamlet and Ophelia in his 1996 Hamlet and there are quite vivid sexual scenes between Othello and Desdemona in Oliver Parker’s 2003 Othello, for example. By setting this scene of the morning after a sexual tryst, Whedon establishes not only their sexual past, but because of the location of the scene, Beatrice’s bedroom, it seems that promises have been made by Benedick. The space is filled with wine bottles: they had been drinking wine together the night before. Benedick was invited over for a romantic evening. It seems unlikely that this was a spontaneous decision. Benedick had second thoughts in the morning and decided to sneak out before she wakes. These actions are consistent with his character as being a womanizer, but a womanizer who is actually afraid of commitment. This situation is a common trope of contemporary romantic comedy[l30] , as in One Fine Day (1996), No Strings Attached (2011), Date Night (2010), and Picture Perfect (1996). By adding the location of Beatrice’s bedroom, we feel that he has entered her private space but violated the agreed contract by slipping out in the morning. The bedroom, like Gertrude’s veiled canopy bed in Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), becomes the vaginal orifice which has been violated when the promise of love is rescinded. This opening stages the dichotomy seen throughout the film: values in regards to sex are widely conflicting. On the one hand, sex is everywhere. Beatrice sleeps with Benedick when they clearly have no established relationship. It appears very much to be a one-night stand. Conrade and Don John have a purely sexual relationship. The party is full of flirting and sexual overtones. However, the relationship between Hero and Claudio is supposed to be absolutely pure. As in the original text, Claudio refuses to marry her because he thinks she is not a virgin. This dichotomy is found in American life[l31] : puritan mores on the one hand and sex obsession on the other, as embodied by Hester Prynne.

Later, in 2.1, as Beatrice and Benedick are arguing, we get another flashback of their one-night stand. They are drinking and making love. She is on top of him and smiling, then a cut to them in bed together, he on top of her, naked. This flashback is placed right before Claudio and Hero are finally united. Don Pedro states that he has ‘wooed (Hero) in (Claudio’s) name’ and ‘won’ Hero for him. He continues, saying, ‘Name the day of marriage, and God give thee joy!’ (2.1.280-282). By adding the clips of Benedick and Beatrice having sex just before this innocent wooing of Hero wherein Claudio is engaged to her before they even kiss emphasizes this American dichotomy of love and sex. The purity of this couple contrasts greatly with the lustful embrace just seen between Beatrice and Benedick. It would seem at this juncture that puritanism wins the war of love: sex before marriage will end in failure, love should be pure. Love and sex must be kept separate until the wedding bed.

This conflict between women being seen as either virginal and pure or lusty, debased objects is known as the ‘Madonna-whore’ complex. Brian Redmond writes:

Sigmund Freud developed a theory to explain men’s anxiety towards women’s sexuality, suggesting that men cast women into one of two categories to allay the uncomfortable dichotomy of fear and desire: the Madonna (women he admires and respects) and the whore (women he is attracted to and therefore disrespects). The Madonna-whore complex views women’s desirability/licentiousness and purity/maternal goodness as mutually exclusive traits. Love is seen as clean and virginal whereas sex is viewed as dirty and shameful.[42]

In the scene between Don John (Sean Maher) and Conrade (Riki Lindhome) in 1.3, we see the ‘dirty and shameful’ aspect of this dichotomy, as was Benedick and Beatrice’s one night stand. Whedon has changed Conrade into a female, adding a strong sexual element to their relationship. Indeed, they[l32]  are pure sex, and of course the antagonists of the play and film. Whedon thus ties sexuality with criminality. Don John says, ‘I cannot hide what I am’, and he shows us that he is a carouser and a libertine. Conrade lies on the bed and Don John pulls her legs apart, climbs between them into the position of coitus and begins to unbutton her top. He speaks of ‘rob(bing) love from any’ (1.3.25) as he puts his face between her breasts and kisses. She moans with pleasure as he proclaims that he is a ‘plain dealing villain’ (1.3.30). When he says ‘if I had my mouth… I would bite’ (1.3.32) he kisses her passionately. Smooth jazz plays on the soundtrack and Conrade’s legs wrap around his back in close-up as she moans again. When Borachio enters, Don John slides his hand up Conrade’s leg and pleasures her under the covers while they continue talking about how ‘the most exquisite Claudio’ (1.3.46) and ‘Hero, the daughter and heir of Leonato’ (1.3.51) are in love. He and Conrade are all sex, and their bedroom sexuality is diametrically opposed to the love-based relationship that is forming between Claudio and Hero. He vows to break them up, to ‘cross him any way’ (1.3.62) for love and lust are enemies of one another. Borachio here becomes a voyeur, much as the audience is during the scene[l33] . We continue to look, but this looking does not stop Don John’s lust, instead it encourages it. This scopophilia is also seen later in the party scene in 2.1 and will be discussed further there. The next shot shows Conrade and Don John kissing passionately through a barred window, thus completing the melding of sex and criminal behavior. The bars thrust up and down the screen marking them off as offenders, placing them visually in jail, and yet we are compelled toward them because of their overwhelming lust. This final shot again evidences this dichotomy of puritan mores with sexual obsession so prevalent in American society. We are to cage our lusts behind bars because it is dangerous. It is against the family. It is against love. Love is innocent and pure and about family and responsibility and chastity. The characters in the film are in a double space[l34] ; home is family but home is also where sex takes place.

Whedon uses his home essentially as-is: there were few changes made prior to shooting. In 1.1, when Claudio and Benedick are shown to their room, it is a little girl’s room. Benedick pauses at the threshold noting the discontinuity between the space and his character. He is speaking about love, playfully chastising Claudio about his love for Hero, but the space undermines his masculine authority. Notably, as he crosses the threshold into the space he is saying ‘as being a professed tyrant to their sex’ (1.1.161), hanging on the word ‘sex’ as it deflates on his lips as if suddenly made impotent. Behind him a silk butterfly rests on the wall, teasing him with its innocence. A small bed covered with stuffed animals and a frilly bedcover undermines his sexual prowess. This is clearly Whedon’s daughter’s room, but it is also Leonato’s daughter’s room, and yet Leonato does not actually have a young daughter. So whose room is it? The choice to shoot in this room even though there are no young children in the story is made in order to further this dichotomy [l35] between sex and innocence. The innocence of the young virginal beds contrasts with the bearded, tie wearing virile man who is currently unpacking on top of it, and presumably will need to sleep in it ‘at least a month’ (1.1.141). Sex would clearly be inappropriate here: and yet the result of sex, having a child, is revealed by this space. The frilly adornments, butterfly and stuffed animals are highly feminine and childlike; Benedick is one-night stands and testosterone. Indeed, it is only Benedick who is noticeably uncomfortable here; it seems perfectly okay with Claudio,[l36]  who is all innocence, hand kissing, virginity and puritanism.

Benedick sits on a small chair in the corner after he asks Claudio, ‘But I hope you have no intent to turn husband, have you?’ and Claudio replies ‘I would scarce trust myself though I had sworn the contrary if Hero would be my wife’ (1.1.183-185). Benedick is now in a two-shot with the top floor of a dollhouse, two dolls sitting beside him, his eye-line matching theirs as he says, defeated, ‘Is’t come to this?’ (1.1.186). This is a reminder [l37] of the hovel scene in King Lear when Lear in his madness holds a trial with Goneril and Reagan, but the women in Lear are represented by empty chairs. Here the dolls both further undermine Benedick’s masculinity by mocking him with their size and femininity and serve as a foreshadowing device: Benedick will succumb, he will turn from womanizer to ‘Benedick the married man’ (1.1.212). Whedon then pulls back to a medium shot and we see Benedick’s full body in the small chair next to the dollhouse. The dollhouse seems to have the power to shrink him to its size, to pull him into its world, the space of little girls.

He then flings himself up from the chair, resisting the power of the dollhouse, a life of children and family, grabs Claudio and wrestles with him, reasserting his masculinity, pushes Claudio down on the little child’s bed, grappling him by the throat in a half-Nelson while exclaiming ‘Go to i’ faith, an thou wilt needs thrust thy neck into a yoke…’ (1.1.189). By pushing Claudio onto the bed and climbing on top of him, he reasserts his sexual energy over the space, turning the tiny bed into a place of violence and sex. Claudio overthrows him, climbing back on top of him, and tries to muffle his words to Don Pedro, but cannot maintain control and is pushed back onto the other bed. He accidentally hits a music box on the table which starts playing an innocent child’s song just as Benedick manages to tell Don Pedro ‘On my allegiance, he (Claudio) is in love’ with Hero, ‘Leonato’s short daughter’ (1.1.201). The music box reasserts the power of the room, of children and family, of love over lust[l38] .

However, Benedick’s relationship with the room later changes. Indeed, it is almost as if the power of the room has changed him. In 3.2, after he is in love with Beatrice, he is very comfortable in the children’s room, lying on the bed on his stomach with his feet in the air like a teenaged girl [figure 2]. A bank of stuffed animals is arranged in a ladder by his side but instead of mocking his masculinity they visually symbolize his new-found family orientation. The room has

Figure 2: Scene 3.2, Benedick in symbiosis with little girl’s bedroom.

Still from Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Joss Whedon), Lionsgate, 2012.

transformed in his eyes, and ours. This cannot possibly be the same man that entered the room in scene 1.1. He is now clean-shaven, happy, joyous, and in symbiosis with the room. He is a family man.

The suburban location of the film also buttresses this dichotomous approach to American sexual mores. The American suburbs are known as a place of family values, yet behind the fascade[l39]  of white picket fences lies the bedroom, the place where sex takes place. Notably, we only see sexuality in the film when it is outside of a relationship. Don John and Conrade are not in love; Don John is clear [l40] that he does not believe in it. We only see Benedick and Beatrice having sex when they are not in love. Claudio’s and Hero’s burgeoning relationship evinces no sexuality on screen, nor do we see Beatrice and Benedick together after they are in love. 

As mentioned above, the scopophilia we saw in 1.3 is also present in 2.1. Here, it is a carnival atmosphere. The outdoor setting, the flowing alcohol, exquisite dress and swimming pool echo the decadence of The Great Gatsby (1925). The atmosphere is one of play, of experimentation, about breaking the social mores with disguise. This is the moment the film has led up to; they are here for carnival. Mikhail Bahktin writes in Rabelais and his World,

While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants.... The tradition of the Saturnalias remained unbroken and alive in the medieval carnival, which expressed this universal renewal and was vividly felt as an escape from the usual official way of life.[43]

Whedon uses Shakespeare’s carnival space and fills it visually with contemporary American ideas about sexuality and dating. Two female acrobats in skimpy attire swing on a trapeze, arms around one another. This, obviously, is not in the original text. Their act is sensual, a performance which tells the story of two women lovers. The women take each other by the waist and smile, looking into each other’s eyes, twisting their hips to the music. Their bodies contort into a singular mass. They

Figure 3: Scene 2.1, to-be-looked-at acrobats.

Still from Much Ado About Nothing (dir. Joss Whedon), Lionsgate, 2012.

mirror each other, their legs spread. They are the circus, but they are also the strip tease. They are both innocence and raw sensuality. Most importantly, they are

there for the male gaze. In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey writes about how scopophilia is a key element of the cinema[l41] :

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.[44]

Whedon has clearly placed these women in a position of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. They serve as a sign to be extended onto all the women of the party[l42] : as object. However, while they are sensual, while they are object, they are also play and innocence: the circus. By placing these women acrobats as a central focal point at the party, the film opens up the discussion of love and sexuality so central to Shakespeare’s plot and places it in a specifically American context. Here, he[l43]  goes further than the Madonna-whore complex, he creates a discursive space for homosexuality as well.

In the most playful scenes in the film (2.3 and 3.1), and indeed in the original play, Benedick and Beatrice are lured into the trap of love. First, in 2.3, Leonato, Don Pedro and Claudio set up Benedick, saying that Beatrice loves him. Benedick rolls across the lawn, as shot through a large pane of glass doors. The scheming men are on the inside in suits, and Benedick is outside in his sweats. He had been running up and down the stairs, visually representing his interior conflict of love vs.[l44]  bachelorhood while performing his soliloquy (2.3.6-2.3.35). As he now listens to the men scheme, he is visually separated by only the large panel of glass. He is like a beast, sweaty and unkempt, while those performing the deception are well-groomed: ideals of culture and beauty, but also deception. Whedon uses this space of outside/inside, nature/culture, to illustrate the verbal manipulation. Benedick is in a position of inferiority, walled off visually from those in control, crawling on the ground like an animal or a child. He later stands in a two-shot with an invisible wife at the alter being set up for Claudio and Hero. When he finally exclaims at 2.3.223 that ‘I will be horribly in love with her (Beatrice)’ there is a meager echo as he gestures into the trees surrounding the house. The weak echo of his voice, unlike Branagh’s grand exclamation in his Much Ado (1993) as he pumps his fists in the air, here dissipates when it tries to escape the centripetal world of the house.[l45]  It is almost as if the world outside doesn’t exist. We are truly in liminal space where even a shout is attenuated and impotent lest outside ears hear it. Contrasted to Benedick’s masculine workout in the garden, Beatrice is doing domestic chores (her laundry) and her scene (3.1) takes place in the kitchen. It is no coincidence [l46] that Whedon decides that Beatrice is carrying laundry and Benedick is outside working out. These are quite traditional male/female roles and the film is centered around these roles. When Beatrice hears Ursula say ‘Are you sure Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely?’ (3.1.37) Beatrice drops her laundry and flies down the stairs in true slapstick fashion. She crawls on her knees, her long white heels and skirt prevalent in the frame. She is both sexuality and domesticity here but primarily the Madonna, a domestic goddess, a mother and a wife. Her pratfall is reminiscent of Lucille Ball, an American housewife icon.

The[l47]  first scene with Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen, 3.3, is set in a security guard station. The room is cramped; there are no windows. The only view to outside is through the monitors. The incompetence of Dogberry and his men is put into context: security officers are thought of as ‘rent-a-cops’ in America and commonly joked as being those who were too fat, weak or dumb to make it into the police academy. This attitude toward security guards is seen in the film Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) starring Kevin James. By using this cultural connection, Whedon provides the viewer with a clear reason why the patrol should be so completely incompetent. Dogberry (Nathan Fillion) is immediately recognizable by any Joss Whedon fan as the man who played commander Malcolm Reynolds in Whedon’s short-lived TV series Firefly. The doubling of Dogberry and Reynolds is inevitable. Fillion and Whedon fans are thrilled [l48] to see Fillion as Dogberry, as he is quite the opposite character to Reynolds, who was a strong, independent leader and commander. Dogberry is of course completely incompetent. His incompetence plays off of Reynolds, which is furthered by the fact that Fillion has now become older and heavier[l49] .

At the wedding, it seems particularly unbelievable that an American in 2014 [l50] would demand that his wife be a virgin. Yet, there is a movement which does believe this to be true, and that indeed society asks that women somehow be both chaste and a whore. From this point in the film, puritan mores win the day. Carnival has ended and it is now time to conform back to society’s mores. When liminal play has ended, it is time to return to mundane life. Victor Turner writes,

Rituals separated specified members of a group from everyday life, placed them in a limbo that was not any place they were in before and not yet any place they would be in, then returned them, changed in some way, to mundane life.[45]

The characters participate in carnival, and they are returned transformed. Wild sexuality is connected to criminality; love should be pure. The actors too have been allowed to play in the space of Whedon’s home, but as the film concludes they must return to the world of Hollywood.

Set in contemporary Santa Monica, the characters and the action have new meaning to the viewer. Joss Whedon’s/Leonato’s home becomes both a place of family and a place of sin. It is both Hollywood and anti-Hollywood: it is filled with Hollywood actors yet they perform a very non-Hollywood piece. The home shapes the characters and their actions; Beatrice is a modern independent woman who has been betrayed by the man she loved, and finds forgiveness and they re-unite. She is both sexy and maternal, family and lover. Benedick is a cad, a womanizer who is truly afraid of being hurt. Like in other contemporary romantic comedies, he becomes convinced that his life is empty without a partner and he transforms into a perfect catch. The home, in the end, becomes a place of domestic bliss. Don John, Borachio and Conrade are arrested and taken away. The contemporary setting makes the characters familiar, gives the audience a connection to them, thus adding a visual layer of meaning onto Shakespeare’s words.

Contrast the use of place in Whedon’s film with the 2012 version directed by Jeremy Herrin filmed at The Globe starring Eve Best as Beatrice and Charles Edwards as Benedick. While this is a dynamic and fascinating performance [l51] on its own, for the American audience it lacks these visual cultural signifiers and signs that flush out Whedon’s version. The lack of visual interest is likely to bore [l52] the casual viewer, or be, in the words of Peter Brook, ‘deadly’. In a culture used to a dynamic visual field, this production is rather lacking. We are taken to The Globe, and see the play more as it was perhaps seen [l53] in Elizabethan England, and certainly that has value. But it is a viewing of a foreign performance, both in space and time. We learn less about contemporary values and lives, and are thus perhaps less drawn to it. [l54] As performance, as a liminal space for commenting on culture, it is less powerful for the modern American viewer than Arthur Miller, Tenessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill or Edward Albee’s works.

Of course, this production seems authentically Elizabethan but to be so is an impossibility. The actors, director and audience are contemporary. We cannot help but put our own realities into the performance and into the viewing of the production, as per Gadamer’s theories. We think we are getting a glimpse back in time, however it is unlikely that Elizabethan actors performed the roles as they are performed here. What is most authentically Elizabethan is the performance space, but not the production overall. Anthony B. Dawson points out that ‘Renaissance acting theory… tended to instruct the actor not to free inhibitions but to foster them, to exert control over a far too easily stirred body’.[46] Elizabethan actors were thus more inclined to restrict their emotions, to hold-back[l55] , while the actors in this production seem more in line with John Barton’s approach to Shakespeare for the modern actor: to show psychological depth and emotion, to use characterization, motivation and naturalism, terms only present in our theatrical vocabulary in the last 100 years[l56] .[47] However, the lack of visual semiotics to help convey meaning to the modern viewer creates a barrier to understanding and connection. Since the performance space is what is most authentic to Elizabethan theater, this space, the space of The Globe, is essentially equal to Whedon’s Santa Monica home. What his home does for our understanding of the characters and story is what The Globe does to our understanding of the characters in this version. We are, therefore, seeing a version where the setting is both Globe and Messina. The theater space tells us about actors and acting and the historical space of performance as much as Whedon’s home tells us of the life of the Hollywood star and director, and our own culture. The site provides the context which connects viewer with character.

ALMEREYDA’S CYMBELINE

Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline takes place in ancient Britain when Britannia was attempting to sever its ties with Rome. Andrew Escobedo writes that the play ‘dramatizes a tension between the sense of a British nation, awkwardly heterogeneous but linked to antiquity, and an English nation, potentially pure but severed from tradition’.[48] The play was written soon after James I proposed to unite England and Scotland into Great Britain in 1603. It is very much about place, then, about identity through place[l57] . Cymbeline’s refusal to give tribute to Rome asserts that England is its own nation, a modern nation, that the English have an identity separate from Rome. However, at the end of the play Cymbeline resumes paying the tribute. This waffling echoes the difficulty that many felt at the idea of unification, which didn’t actually take place until a century later. Changing boundaries changes identity: what geographical space defines Britishness?

This set of concerns is, however, not particularly pertinent for modern Americans. In an interview for Film Comment magazine by Steven Mears, Michael Almereyda discusses his approach to this adaptation. Almereyda states,

I… tried to approach it step-by-step, scene-by-scene, as a collision between contemporary reality and the world that Shakespeare was defining, and to see how those two things talk to each other and intersect. And there are things that feel very resonant in all of Shakespeare’s work, and we were just trying to focus on what was resonant to ourselves. So there’s a whole element of Cymbeline that I cut out or minimized, that has to do with national identity, about the British Empire, and that obviously didn’t translate into a version that’s set in America with American actors, with themes that seem particular to the moment.[49]

While Almereyda states that his approach was to cut out ideas of British national identity, it is impossible to truly cut out ideas of any national identity. Indeed, his film speaks quite loudly about American national identity. According to U.S. News, there is an average of 100,000 deaths by gun violence every year.[50] The populace are also questioning exactly whom the police are protecting and serving ever since the beating of Rodney King and consequent acquittal of the police officers involved. By choosing a gangland setting, and one in which the police force is corrupt, Almereyda’s film becomes a site of discussion about American sociocultural identity. In addition, Almereyda uses locations which are outside of mainstream quotidian life. These are where the others hang out: under the bleachers, in the back alley, in boarded up buildings, in the rough part of town. Cymbeline and his crew represent the ‘1 percenters’, those outlaw motorcyclists who live off the grid.[51] Almereyda uses this outsider personality type, as seen in films like Easy Rider (1969) and Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966) and the spaces they occupy [l58] as sites of resistance to popular culture and mores.

It is interesting that Almereyda chose a motorcycle club as the anti-establishment, anti-police force group. This trope was popular in the 1960s in America with the Hell’s Angels (see novel [l59] by Hunter S. Thompson, 1966) and films like Easy Rider being the epitome of American anti-establishmentarianism. Recently, the outlaw motorcycle gang has regained popularity with the television series Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014). The biker gang represents the yearning to let go, to be wild, to drink heavily, to gamble, to let your hair grow long and have sexual escapades. In short, it is very much the flip side of American puritanical roots. They are free, they live outside of the rules on the open road. While Almereyda doesn’t use the open road in the film, the fact that he chose the motorcycle gang implies this connection. These characters live and thrive in space that is undifferentiated[l60] , or at least unused, by the rest of society. According to Thompson, members of the Hell’s Angels belong to nowhere, having no real address nor telephone number, being ‘as insulated from society as they want to be’.[52] They live on the fringes, constantly moving, underneath the radar of corporate and political America. They live in space, rather than place, as mentioned earlier in reference to Yi-Fu Tuan’s work. Tuan writes,

From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.[53]

Space is outside of civilization, it is freedom, it is the open road. Almereyda uses this idea of space but often places it within the boundaries of the city in liminal sites where one can play with identity and subvert American value structures.

As the film opens, in 1.1, Imogen rides up on her bicycle underneath the bleachers behind a school. This space is known for being where the bad kids in high school go to drink, smoke pot and kiss. Imogen looks like the innocent young girl:

Figure 4: Scene 1.1, under the bleachers.

Still from Cymbeline (dir. Michael Almereyda), Lionsgate, 2015.

blonde hair, riding the bike, coming here against her better judgment. She looks nervous, unsure and insecure. The sound of a skateboard is heard, a symbol of rebellion. Posthumus is an outsider, a skateboarder, likely a dropout from school. He is now the American bad-boy: overly handsome, overly sexual. He kicks up his skateboard and grabs Imogen. He pulls her into the dark and kisses her. Underneath the bleachers is not only an other space, an outsider space, but is also reminiscent of jail[l61] . The latticework of steel and iron that constructs the stands juts at threatening angles, pinning Imogen in place. It is underneath the functional place - it is subterranean, subcultural. The bleachers are meant to be used from above; normal functioning individuals in high school sit on the bleachers to root for the school football team. They are active members of society contributing to American ideals: sportsmanship, camaraderie, and participation. Above all, they contribute to a celebration of place, to patriotism. By placing the characters under the bleachers, Almereyda tells us visually that Posthumus doesn’t fit in. He is an outsider. The space thus makes the characters of Imogen and Posthumus seem more teenaged than the original work[l62] . Here it seems less like they have gotten married without permission but more that Imogen is an innocent who is being swayed into the arms of a bad influence. Almereyda’s production gives us a somewhat spoiled, innocent Imogen (much akin to Sandy Olsson of Grease (1978)) contrasted with this Danny Zuko (Grease) type badboy in Posthumus. Indeed the setting of this first scene is quite reminiscent of that film, when Danny and the T-Birds are on the bleachers singing ‘Summer Lovin’’ and Sandy Olsson sings her part of the song from the outdoor cafeteria, dressed in her preppie sweater and loafers. The boys sing ‘did she put up a fight?’, frighteningly hinting at the possibility of date rape, while the girls sing ‘was it love at first site?’ Almereyda takes Shakespeare’s original concept of Posthumus as both this ‘most praised, most loved’ (1.1.47) character and ‘basest thing’ and created a modern youth, a ‘greaser’ badboy who is both sweet and base, as we see in Danny Zuko. He uses this symbol of high school rebellion to flush out the characters for a modern audience.

Cymbeline arrives on a motorcycle. He comes in from the shadows with Pisanio, calls Posthumus a ‘basest thing’ (1.1.126) and banishes him. Cymbeline is angry at Posthumus for being like him; it is easy to imagine Cymbeline as a youth being the same punk kid meeting girls under the bleachers. He calls her[l63]  a ‘foolish thing’ (1.1.152) and takes her hand, pulling her as if she were a small child. He turns her over to the Queen, who waits in a station wagon, smoking a cigarette. The queen leans back and assures Imogen that she is not like other stepmothers saying ‘be assured you shall find me, daughter, / After the slander of most stepmothers, / Evil-eyed unto you. You’re my prisoner, but / Your jailer shall deliver you the key’ (1.1.171-74). Almereyda chooses the station wagon for this mother to step-daughter talk, which is highly truncated from Shakespeare’s original work, as is the dialogue in the film overall[l64] . The station wagon, and how the Queen leans to the back seat the way a mother does to a misbehaving child on a road trip, creates a space of family values such that the Queen seems to even believe her own lies. She becomes the concerned mother here; the family wagon allows her to believe in the reality she is concocting. It gives her agency to become someone other than herself. The space creates and buttresses her false identity.

While Cymbeline often lurks in the shadows, he is the ‘king’ and so his home is majestic and old. There are four Ionic pillars separating the portico from the rest of the house and a small architrave and steeply sloped pediment with lunette window above. It is thus Palladian Early Classical revival, like the northern facade of the White House.[54] These Greek aspects, as used in American Colonial architecture, create a feeling of authority, order and intelligence[l65] . Americans used Greek architecture in order to claim that they were the direct descendants of the ancient Greeks and thus valued honor, loyalty, commerce, fair trade and democracy.[55] In this context we are also reminded of Greek tragedy, of bloodshed and beheadings. The occupants here do indeed embody both. Cymbeline is the ‘king’ of the motorcycle club, he is the center of power and he does value honor, loyalty and fair trade if not democracy. If he is crossed, there will be bloodshed. This translation from king to gang leader works because both are centered on the same ideologies. This use of Greek architecture symbolizes both American idealism and Greek tragedy[l66] .

Inside the home, Cloten, Cymbeline and a lord sit around the dining room table in 1.2 whereas in the source text Cloten is speaking only with two lords who make their disapproving comments as asides. The room is almost entirely red and yellow: the drapes and placemats are primarily red; the glasses, cups and even the liquid they are drinking are yellow. This mixture of colors echoes the dichotomy of opposites seen throughout the film. Red represents anger, war, power and passion while yellow represents joy, happiness and intellect.[56] The colors of the space thus have a psychological impact on both the viewer and the characters, according to color psychology theories[l67] . The colors themselves create a conflict. The space, then, affects mood, and affects our feeling of the characters who inhabit that space. The dialogue is almost entirely stripped from the scene save a few lines. Cloten picks at his food, his hair ruffled. He seems hung-over. When he says of Imogen that ‘her beauty and her brains go not together’ (1.2.28-29) Cymbeline violently pulls him from his chair and knocks him over. Cymbeline then says the second lord’s line ‘she shines not upon fools’ (1.2.30), further establishing Cymbeline as the protective father. Cymbeline is at the head of the table, the chairs are reminiscent in shape of thrones, but these are trashy folk, and this court is a bit haphazard. The Queen comes down the stairs, clearly dotes on Cloten and he pulls from her. She sits on the arm of Cymbeline’s chair. She kisses Cymbeline and says that Cloten has been his ‘faithful servant’ and will remain so (1.1.174-75). She places a handful of pills on the table next to Cymbeline and he takes them with an air of embarrassment. These are pills taken because of illness and age, not for recreation, thus they contribute to the feeling of a ‘king’ near the end of his rein. There are only five lines spoken in this scene, the rest is done through action and image. Almereyda has thus streamlined information from words to image to show the American audience [l68] that Cloten is a fool, that his mother dotes on him and that [l69] Cymbeline disapproves of Cloten as a match for his daughter and that the king is old and somewhat infirm. The Queen is running the show; she wants the match of her son with Imogen and Cymbeline will do what she says.

In 1.4, instead of Italy, we are on the poor side of town. Posthumus sits on the sidewalk with his skateboard. He is near an underpass, the sign of both the troll (living under the bridge) and the homeless. He is in front of an abandoned, derelict building, and is dwarfed by it. The space has echoes of drug use, the escape of those abandoned by society. The location here is Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Almereyda has chosen locations which look particularly run down, derelict, dangerous. They are spaces whose time has passed. They are spectral spaces, ghosts[l70]  who have been partially erased, like a palimpsest. Posthumus, small in the frame, has become homeless. He has been kicked out of the world of money and power and deposited on the streets. He has become what we suspect happens to the ‘cool kids’; he will turn to drugs and crime. Like the buildings which surround him, he too is abandoned. This is a modern day version of banishment. The surroundings thus create a context in which we can believe that Posthumus will become even more of an outsider.

Posthumus is taken to what appears to be a basement or a storeroom. It is windowless, likely underground. Random items are strewn about, as if in storage. It is an other, undifferentiated space, filled with everything from a globe [l71] to an old oven from the 1950s. This haphazard array of items disturbs our ability to pin down the site. There are none of the usual markers of place, it is instead a depository of visual codes which contradict and betray one another. The dialogue about how wonderful Posthumus is has been largely attenuated. Instead, he seems overly macho, not willing to bow down to the challenge Iachamo (Ethan Hawke) has posed. It is a space of misfits and illegal gambling: here, the bet is wagered that Imogen will resist Iachamo’s advances and remain true to Posthumus. That this wager is made at all is central to why Almereyda chose this text for his film. He states:

Posthumus’s pride is just the cover for his insecurity, and that there’s a habit that men can have—especially younger men—to either idealize the women in their lives or consider them whores. It’s an either/or, and there’s no middle ground. The messy truth that they might be just as complicated as men is inadmissible. So, since he’s projecting this idea of innocence on Imogen, he’s altogether too ready to accept the worst, and he does. And the speed at which he falls and flips is very human, and it’s a kind of ugly truth.[57]

Like in Whedon’s film, American values and beliefs about women and women’s sexuality take center stage. Imogen, as in the source text, is imagined first as an innocent, then, when Posthumus believes Iachomo’s lies, she is apparently untrustworthy and deceitful. Imogen is seen as either Madonna or a whore, much as we saw with Beatrice and Hero[l72] . By placing this scene in an underground/backroom setting, the bet seems more likely to occur. The men are drinking and sitting around a table, very much in the attitude as if they were playing cards or participating in some other gambling activity. Imogen, then, becomes quite clearly commodified. She is the money placed on the table.

In 1.5, instead of a doctor, Cornelius (Peter Gerety) is now a corrupt veterinarian who has a drug problem as evidenced by the ruffled hair and half-done tie, and uses his access to drugs via his medical license for underhanded dealings. When the Queen exits the hospital it is through a back door into an alley. The walls are painted brown and the ground is painted green, the colors of dirt and grass, as if the building is under the earth. It is unmarked, and the only indication on the outside of the building which seems to indicate that it is the door to a veterinarians office is a sticker of a hissing cat above the doorknob. As throughout, the location creates this feeling of being behind and below normal functioning society. These are people who sneak underneath the stairs, go in and out of back doors. They are like rats, living off of the scraps from those above.

Act 1.6 and 2 are delayed. Next comes 3.1, where the ‘Ambassadors from Rome’ are the police force led by Caius Lucius (Vondie Curtis-Hall) and Rome is the fictional city where they live. They are first seen on small JVC monitors through surveillance cameras, much as Dogberry watches Leonato’s house and grounds through these big brother devices. It is interesting that both films utilize this trope in light of the concern with government surveillance in America post 9-11[l73] . In this windowless room, the monitors sit on top of old file cabinets in a dim, green tinted space: we feel as if we are underground, watching the action above. The Romans (police) and Cymbeline meet to discuss the tribute, which is now simply a bribe to the police to allow Cymbeline to continue his illegal operations. A bag full of Hershey’s kisses chocolates are poured onto the table by Cloten. Rather than simply not paying anything, Almereyda uses this visual device to show the scorn which they have about the issue. They mock the police with these candy treats, much as the Dauphin delivers tennis balls to Henry V[l74] . The room is decorated for Halloween: indeed there are Halloween elements throughout the film to further create this underworld, other feeling. A fake spider web is strewn behind them between two trophy animal heads. Cymbeline sits in a ‘throne’ and the Queen wears a cheap costume jewelry tiara on her head. The fake tiara not only plays with this idea of queen, but demonstrates just how distant the ideas of royalty are to Americans. A king and queen are simply abstract ideas, costumes, as real to quotidian life as wizards and fairies. Caius Lucius is also sitting in a throne chair. They are both heads of power, one from the world above, one from the world below. But here we see that the world above is no better than that below[l75] , indeed, it may be possible that Cymbeline is the good guy here if the police force is so corrupt. He stands up to this corruption and says that he will no longer bribe them.

This scene is particularly interesting in light of Henri Lefebvre’s dictum ‘(social) space is a (social) product’ from The Production of Space. Here, he asserts that space does not exist in itself but is produced.[58] Space is defined by our perception. Without the characters inhabiting this space, it lacks power. Other than the two chairs which are throne-like, it is a dirty subterranean space which

Figure 5: Scene 3.1, tribute.

Still from Cymbeline (dir. Michael Almereyda), Lionsgate, 2015.

communicates poverty and lack of power. It is an other space, where those hiding from society go to participate in anti-social behavior. What makes this a place of power is the presence of Cymbeline and his ‘court’. He confers power over the space. However, the visual signs we read here: the wood paneling, the dirty floors, the used felt table and the cheap chairs, tell us that even though Cymbeline has power, it is outsider power. He can only have power in the underworld, in these other spaces[l76] .

Almereyda next goes back to 1.6, the scene where Iachamo attempts to seduce Imogen. Prior to his arrival, Imogen is listening to fifties music, smelling Posthumus’ sweater. It is again a scene as from Grease: a swooning girl who misses her boyfriend. Of course she is half-naked in her underwear, lest we forget that she fluctuates so rapidly between Madonna and whore that we cannot discern which she might be [l77] at any given moment. She is, much like the acrobats in Much Ado, one to-be-looked-at. The mise-en-scene here is fairly innocuous, but this seems so because it is so familiar, and that is just the point. Imogen is the good daughter, the respectful member of society. The scene takes place in an upper middle-class house. She is rarely found in the underground, other locations until she has to hide from society as Fidele, but instead, as here, in a fairly conventional modern living room. Ethan Hawke’s Iachamo arrives in a blue suit and carries an iPad. She has changed and is now wearing a grey sleeveless t-shirt and jean shorts with pre-made holes in them. He flirts with her and shows her pictures of Posthumus with another woman, but they have been photo-shopped – this obvious updating makes a more convincing argument that Posthumus has been cheating on her. He goes quickly in for the kiss but she spurns him. She doesn’t believe the lies even with the photo-shopped photos as evidence and doesn’t fall for Iachomo’s passes. She is trustworthy. She is good. She is the American Girl[l78] . When she is away from Posthumus, she just pines. When Iachamo gains entrance to her room (2.2) through hiding in the trunk and can readily defile her, he resists. He seems overwhelmed by her innocence and cannot bring himself to defile this perfect American Girl. Her purity makes her bedroom a sacred place, as Lefebvre posits. Again, the bedroom serves as a symbol for the vaginal orifice; where Beatrice was violated by Benedick, Iachamo is so overwhelmed by Imogen’s innocence that he refuses to violate the sacred space, this ‘chapel’ where she lies (2.2.33). In Hawke’s performance, we see his Madonna-whore struggle as he looms over her. She is a ‘heavenly angel’ and if he rapes her, ‘hell is here’ (2.2.50). He says ‘no more’ (2.2.42) and returns to the trunk.

In 2.4, when Iachamo returns to Posthumus, the skateboard sits on the table and acts as a transport for the materials that Iachamo uses as proof of Imogen’s infidelity. By using the skateboard, Almeryeda again plays up this image of outsider/badboy. They are back in a windowless room, underground. The couch is ancient, the color yellow predominant. Philario (James Ransone) urges him to reconsider, that the proof is not enough, but Posthumus readily changes his mind: she must be a whore: ‘Tis true, nay, keep the ring, ‘tis true. I am sure / she would not lose it … She has brought the name of whore thus / dearly’ (2.4.123-128). He swears revenge, says ‘O that I had her here to tear her limb-meal!’ (2.4.147). When he emerges from this subterranean space we can see that he comes from a door which is spray-painted black; as if he is emerging from a hole underground. He enters a junkyard, a place of the past, of the discarded. He too is discarded, or so he believes. He emerges as if from hell, from the grave, reborn as a devil who is now untrusting and full of rage. She cannot be trusted, he thinks. The American Girl is a fraud. She is not Madonna, she is a whore.

Almereyda goes outside of the city in the film, to true undefined space, in the scenes with Belarius (Delroy Lindo) and the boys Guidarius (Spencer Treat Clark) and Arviragus (Harley Ware). They are placeless, living outside of town in a shack and out of their truck. Notably, Belarius is black, a group marginalized in American society[l79] . In 3.6, Imogen goes to their shack in the middle of the forest and climbs through the window. She is now dressed as Fidele and has short, ratty hair. She looks punk, an outsider persona, the opposite of her innocent American Girl persona. She now must hide, so she leaves differentiated place for undifferentiated space where identity is lost. It is apt that Belarius is shunted all the way out here, to the undifferentiated fields: his shack might be read as one where the slaves lived, the fields and quarry where slaves toil[l80] .

This space is almost devoid of significant signs. In fact, the lack of visual signs is itself the sign. The quarry is grey and undifferentiated, nearly a moonscape, a void. This empty grey space fills the screen, becomes infinite, creating in the viewer a feeling of terror, which leads to[l81]  a feeling of the sublime, as posited by Edmund Burke. When something seems to lack boundaries, we feel ‘excessively small’ in relation to the world. This facing of infinity leads to terror, and terror and sublimity are usually hand in hand.[59] The terror of infinity, of boundlessness, of placelessness means a loss of identity, a loss of self. Since we create space and space creates us, without it we lose ourselves. This is why we have such a strong drive to create place from space, why we are so attached to the idea of home. Out here, there is no home, there is no place. As Gertrude Stein put it, ‘there is no there, there’.[60] After Guidarius has beheaded Cloten at the quarry in 4.2, and Imogen has taken the potion given to her by Pisanio, they are buried together (Cloten in Posthumus’s clothes) under rocks from the quarry. It is a place where nature is turned into culture – the raw materials of nature are harvested for use in civilization. Now, culture (the bodies) are returned to nature: a liminal space of disruption and rebirth. It is a sublime site of transcendence and transformation. Imogen later revives, pulls the rocks off of their bodies, and begins her return from the ‘dead’, from the liminal, and back to culture and society.

The film, and Act 5, concludes in a boarded up, abandoned restaurant and adjacent parking lot. It is the ultimate spectral space: the lives which went before are gone, yet their ghosts haunt the space. Indeed, this is taken quite literally by Almereyda, as Sicillius Leonatus (Bill Pullman), Posthumus’ father, appears as a spectre[l82] . Where once there was a thriving, vibrant restaurant, now has been erased and written over, like a palimpsest. The current occupants have left the boards on the windows. It is dark. It is a hiding place. It no longer functions. Guns and gasoline and liquor are everywhere. It is a site of failure, a place where the American dream has died. Here, he who has the most guns, wins.  

CONCLUSION

Shakespeare’s characters, when placed in contemporary America, become more relatable[l83] . Despite the 400 year and 3000 mile gulf in language and locale, these contemporary settings provide viewers second order sign vehicles which bridge this gulf. His words become more ‘accessible’ since we are assisted in our understanding of the written text by visual codes that are indexical. Whedon provides context in which to understand Much Ado by setting characters in Santa Monica, by coupling our knowledge of the ‘Whedonverse’ and Hollywood glamour with Shakespeare’s characters. Whedon’s home provides a liminal space to discuss family values versus raw sexuality, and indeed to even think about independent filmmaking versus the Hollywood system. Almereyda creates a performance at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, allowing our knowledge of urban, other space to shape the outsider identities of Posthumous and Cymbeline. This contrasts to the suburban home where the innocent, blonde Imogen resides, again creating this tension in America between purity and vice. He also addresses issues of gun violence and police corruption, showing the viewer underbelly dealings between those whom we are supposed to trust and those who are supposedly untrustworthy. Both these films create a space to question and think about American cultural norms and values, drawing the audience into the narrative by providing familiar contexts and frameworks.

By placing the characters on-site, they change and become more familiar. Our reading of their motivations and desires is informed by other, similar filmic and cultural codes. [l84] We see in Posthumus some aspects of the ‘cool’ high school kid, the outsider who plays by his own rules. We are reminded of Danny Zuko or Vinnie Barbarino (Welcome Back Kotter, also played by John Travolta) or even Edward or Jacob from Twilight[l85]  (2008). Imogen is placed as a typical Sandy character (or Bella), the innocent girl who falls for the tough guy. Cymbeline is like an elder Sonny Barger (founder of the Hells Angels). Benedick and Beatrice are a sort of Harry and Sally (When Harry Met Sally (1989)), a Catherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, or indeed Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. They are the modern couple that should be together but cannot seem to make it work because they are always arguing.

What gives these on-site productions the most power, however, is how the space that the characters occupy informs their identities. As Patrice Pavis notes, when you insert a text into a space it ‘throws new light on it [and] gives it unsuspected power, and places the audience at an entirely different relationship to the text… This new context provides a new situation or enunciation…and gives the performance an unusual setting of great charm and power’.[61] Pavis states that the space itself performs as much as the actors perform. My analysis here bears this out. The space, which in film becomes much of the visual field, contributes as much [l86] to our understanding of the text as the original ‘score’ or play text written by Shakespeare does. It performs as an equal semiotic element as the spoken words or the actions of the characters in contributing to our overall understanding of character and story. The cultural resonances from these spaces fill in the gaps left by Shakespeare, [l87] and indeed as left by the films themselves. For the viewer, filming at Whedon’s Santa Monica home or in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn brings with them cultural knowledge from outside the text, much as Gadamer and Iser suggest. These spaces are like palimpsests, resonating with history, and these performances come into conversation [l88] with that history.

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[1] Al Pacino (director). 20th Century Fox. Looking for Richard, 1996 [DVD].

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 10.

[5] Brook, p. 10. Attending a performance with high cultural value, such as Shakespeare or the opera, confers membership in an upper social stratum. See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The forms of capital’. In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241-258.

[6] Philip Auslander, Liveness, (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 56.

[7] See Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, (New York: Penguin, 1998).

[8] Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture, (New York: Anchor, 2009), p. xvii.

[9] Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, (New York: PAJ, 1988), p. 22.

[10] Gina Bloom, The Forum at UC Davis: Shakespeare from Page to Stage with Jane Smiley. 2008. [YouTube video].

[11] W.B. Worthen, ‘Staging “Shakespeare”’, in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. Ed. By James C. Bulman, (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3.

[12] H. G. Gadamer, 2004. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and edited by D. E. Linge. Second edition, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 296.

[13] Wolfgang Iser, "The reading process: a phenomenological approach" Modern Criticism and Thought: A Reader ed. David Lodge, (London: Longman, 1988), p. 216.

[14] Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work on a Role. Trans. by Jean Benedetti, (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 13.

[15] James C. Bulman, ‘Shakespeare and performance theory’, Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3.

[16] Ralf Hertel, Staging England in the Elizabethan History Play, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), p. 234.

[17] Brenda Cross, Hamlet: The Film and the Play, with forward by Laurence Olivier (Saturn Press, 1948) quoted in Robert Shaughnessy, ‘Stage, Screen and Nation’, Shakespeare on Screen (Oxord: Blackwell, 2006), p. 63.

[18] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

[19] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place, (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 10.

[20] Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 5-6.

[21] Ibid., p. 2.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Cicely Berry, The Actor and His Text, (New York: Scribner, 1988), p. 48.

[24] Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, (New York: Methuen, 2010), p. 9.

[25] Ibid., p. 8.

[26] Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A theory of production and reception, (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 3.

[27] Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama, (London: Abacus, 1978), p. 29.

[28] Turner, p. 25.

[29] Alden T. Vaughn, Shakespeare in America, (Oxford: UOP, 2013), p. 3

[30] Ibid., p. 1.

[31] Wilfred M. McClay, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, (New York: Encounter, 2014), p. 3

[32] Tuan, p. 6.

[33] McClay, p. 5.

[34] Russell Jacoby, “Cosmopolitanism and Place,” in Why Place Matters, (New York: Encounter, 2014), p. 81.

[35] Ted McAllister, ‘Making American Places’, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America, (New York: Encounter, 2014), p. 191-92.

[36] Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke – Volume VIII, ed. L.G. Mitchell (New York, OUP, 1998), p. 97-8.

[37] J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (London: Cambridge, 2007), p. 8.

[38] William Shakespeare, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, The Oxford Shakespeare, The Complete Works (2^nd Ed), Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2005), p. 569. All quotes and references from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from this edition.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Alison Prato, ‘Producer Kai Cole talks Much Ado About Nothing, Hubby Joss Whedon, and more’, The Credits.org, 2013. [Web].

[42] Brian Redmond, ‘The Madonna – Whore Complex’, Pennsylvania State University Applied Social Psychology, 2016. [Web].

[43] Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, (Indiana: IUP, 2009), p. 7-8.

[44] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, (16.3, Autumn 1975) pp. 6-18.

[45] Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ, 1988, p. 25.

[46] Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Performance and Participation' in Shakespeare, Theory and Performance, (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 34.

[47] John Carlow and Peter Walker, (Directors). Playing Shakespeare. The Royal Shakespeare Company, host: John Barton. 1982. BBC. [YouTube Video].

[48] Andrew Escobedo, ‘From Britannia to England: Cymbeline and the Beginning of Nations’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), p. 63.

[49] Steven Mears, ‘Interview: Michael Almereyda’, Film Comment, March 13, 2015. [Web].

[50] U.S. News, ‘Just the facts: Gun violence in America’, Jan. 16, 2013. [Web].

[51] Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, (New York: Ballantine, 1996).

[52] Thompson, p. 90.

[53] Tuan, p. 6.

[54] Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “Early Classical Revival/Greek Revival Style”, 2015. [Web].

[55] Perry Miller Adato (dir.), Art of the Western World. Host: Michael Wood. Annenberg Media, WNET/New York, 1988. PBS. [Web].

[56] ColorPsychology.org, 2015. [Web].

[57] Ibid.

[58] Christian Schmid, ‘Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space’, Space, Difference and Everyday Life, (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 28.

[59] Edmund Burke, ‘A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’, (Second Ed. 1759), UPenn.edu [Web].

[60] McClay, p. 1.

[61] Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theater: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1998, pp. 337-338.

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