1999

22.3

Ever since Sam Taylor’s 1929 direction of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in The Taming of the Shrew and the infamous credit "By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor," theater and film critics, academics, and the general public have contended that film adaptations, and especially those from Hollywood, sacrifice Shakespeare’s language only to replace it with busy spectacle, special effects, and loud soundtrack. Despite the recent surge in Shakespeare films, critical response still agrees that Hollywood is condemned to vulgarize Shakespeare. Readers, theatergoers, and filmgoers, then, are left with an especially acute problem—how to understand Shakespeare’s plays and their film interpretations, especially when those film interpretations punctuate Shakespeare’s text with cinematic tricks. Surprisingly, the film least faithful to Shakespeare’s text helps to solve the problem. An audacious blend of material from the 1590s and the 1990s, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the perfect vehicle to bridge the end of one millennium and the beginning of the new.

The negative reaction to Luhrmann’s film reflects an inability, as well as an unwillingness, to account adequately for Shakespeare’s presence in the movies. There are a few who, like The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, imagine that "there are times when you can’t help telling yourself that Shakespeare was waiting for movies to come along" (73). But in the case of Luhrmann’s film, few critics, including Lane, considered whether it provided a meaningful new way to interpret Shakespeare. Indeed, most dismissed it as an ill-advised attempt to reach a larger and younger audience, an attempt that sacrificed Shakespeare’s language and replaced it with MTV clutter. Donald Lyons, theater critic for The Wall Street Journal, lambastes the film for being more concerned with its rock/hip-hop soundtrack than with any Shakespearean verse" (57); Lane complains that the "poetry is all but drowned out" (66); Geoffrey O’Brien, in the New York Review of Books, calls Luhrmann’s film "little more than a stunt" that downgrades Shakespeare’s language in a "tyranny . . . of the visual" (11-13); Richard Alleva , the reviewer for Commonweal, calls it nothing more than Shakespearean "snackfood" (19); and even David Horspool, reviewer for TLS, praises Luhrmann’s "clever updating" only to fault it more severely for being Shakespeare "restyled , not reinterpreted" (19). Although they represent a wide spectrum in their critical approaches and in the audiences to whom they speak, each of these reviewers would agree that the Luhrmann film is no more than clever cinematic decadence. These reviewers could not be more wrong. The cinematic devices which update and transform Shakespeare’s play are substantive and come closer than any other film to date to recreating the relationship between performance and audience that the original 1597 performance sought to create with its audience.

Of course, on the face of it, nothing could be easier than to conclude that Luhrmann’s film does not interpret Shakespeare in any meaningful way. Although the title of the film proclaims that it is indeed "William Shakespeare’s," the film itself appears to have little to do with the play. It is not set in Italy’s Verona nor is it set in the early modern period. Instead Luhrmann’s film was filmed in a Mexico that calls itself Verona Beach, and in a period that has more to do with the 1990s than the 1590s. The featured lovers, for example, clearly signal they are part of the contemporary youth culture. Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) listens to a walkman while Juliet (Clare Danes) wears a T-shirt and jeans. Perhaps most damning of all, the film cuts great portions of the original text and substitutes MTV-like music videos. Indeed, Shakespeare and performance scholar W.B. Worthen has most recently argued that the film "As a performance . . . is preoccupied less with the theatrical than with the televisual citation" (1105). In addition to cutting out the language, the film also cuts significant actions as well, and Paris’ death by Romeo’s hands and at Juliet’s feet does not appear anywhere in the film, nor do any of the comic scenes with Peter, the clownish Capulet servant.

Offsetting the cuts are obvious updates, objects like The Post Haste delivery van and the Globe Pool Hall that allude to Shakespeare’s language, to Elizabethan London, and to Elizabethan theatergoing. The question is how substantive a bearing these updates and allusions have on Shakespeare’s text. It is difficult to determine, for example, whether rap music and actors pronouncing Shakespeare’s lines with the cadence of a gangsta rapper are there to approximate Shakespeare or to appease Fox Pictures’ notion of what will draw an audience into the theaters. As reported by John Brodie in Variety, the largest portion of the film’s budget went to marketing, and the marketing strategy suggests that casting DiCaprio was done not to make Romeo’s lines come alive but to target a female audience (15). The marketing strategy would readily reveal that DiCaprio was the bait to lure a 24-year-old and under female audience. Fox Pictures ran ads for the film during Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Clueless, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. It is naïve, then, to suggest that giving Romeo a walkman or including rap music on the soundtrack is decided upon solely for artistic reasons. Clearly the Hollywood business machine also shapes casting, soundtrack, and script decisions. Such an acknowledgment, however, should not prevent a rigorous examination of whether the inclusion of rap music, for example, does more than pander to a primarily teen audience.

Despite the marketing department’s vast expenditures targeting a teen audience, despite the showcasing of DiCaprio, and despite the critics who focus on the MTV-like qualities of the film, Luhrmnann’s film can also be "William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet." In an interview with Brian Johnson for Maclean’s, Luhrmann explains his reasons for updating the play by invoking the Elizabethan theater and its diverse audience: "What people forget . . . is that Shakespeare was a restless entertainer. When he played the Elizabethan stage, he was basically dealing with an audience of 3,000 drunken punters who were selling pigs and geese in the stalls. He played to everyone from the street sweeper to the Queen of England. And his style was to have stand-up comedy one moment, a song and then the highest tragedy right next to it. . . . He was a rambunctious, sexy, violent, entertaining storyteller, and we’ve tried to be all those things" (74). It is in this context that the film’s soundtrack should be reconsidered. The soundtrack contains more than just rap selections; it also includes opera, symphonies, and cabaret songs. Because not one of the film’s reviewers discusses any of the other musical types, it is clear that reviewers are more swayed by the evidence provided in marketers’ press kits than they are by the evidence of the film itself. Rap music appears, but so does Leontyne Price singing Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, a classical orchestra performing Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 and Faure’s Requiem, Des’ree singing "Kissing You," and a performance of Prince’s song, "When Doves Cry." The music selections reveal Luhrmann’s attempt to approximate Shakespeare by mixing stand-up comedy with song and with high tragedy after Shakespeare’s own model. Far from exerting a tyranny over the play, the film’s soundtrack helps to recreate what the play’s original audiences would have experienced in the Elizabethan theater of 1597.

For example, the 1597 performance of Romeo and Juliet would have utilized music—as Luhrmann’s film does—to serve a variety of functions. The play includes in its cast of characters three musicians. These musicians would have entertained audiences by providing background music for the Capulet masque, but they also would have helped to create the dramatic experience aimed at by Luhrmann, one confronting audiences with comedy and high tragedy simultaneously. As a case in point, Act 4, Scene 5 begins with the nurse and the Capulet parents lamenting over Juliet’s death. The stage directions then call for the entrance of Friar Lawrence, Paris, and the musicians. Their appearance on stage here is curious because they never actually perform any music. S.L Bethell attempted to account for this curiosity by pointing out that the musicians’ silence signals the change in occasion from one of celebration, the marriage, to one of mourning, the funeral (111). However, in a period when acting companies could not always depend upon having enough actors and musicians to perform such minor roles, it would have been simple not to have the musicians come on stage at all. Granville-Barker first discussed the difficulties involved in performing this scene in his Prefaces to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s text, however, requires that the musicians come on stage, and that they remain there even after learning of Juliet’s death.

The solution to the curious puzzle of the musicians lies in Shakespeare’s penchant for mixing comedy with tragedy. The musicians are not there to signal a marriage celebration, nor are they there to signal a period of grief; rather, they are there to signal a comic interlude. Andrew Gurr has shown that Will Kempe, the Elizabethan actor/clown beloved by his audiences, would have played the part of Peter, the Capulet’s servant (66, 173). Peter initiates the comedy by walking on stage and demanding that the musicians play "Heart’s Ease." A protracted argument ensues, and when the musicians continue to refuse to perform because "’Tis no time to play now" (4.5.111), Peter himself performs by beginning to sing a popular mournful tune: "When griping griefs the heart doth wound/ And doleful dumps the mind oppress,/ Then music with her silver sound" (132-34). However, after only three lines he comically interrupts himself to question the musicians regarding the aptness of the chosen song. Peter, having received no response, proceeds to allay grief with linguistic analysis. Pondering the phrase music with her silver sound, he deems "silver" an apt juxtaposition with "music" since "musicians"—said with a knowing nod to those for whom he has been performing—"have no gold for sounding." With Peter’s light-hearted punning on the word sound, the scene which began on a tragic note ends on one that is notably comic. Moreover, what is essential to this comic interlude is the musicians’ otherwise curious presence.

Luhrmann, on the model of Shakespeare, approximates the effect that the stage convention of the musicians creates with the cinematic device of the unusual soundtrack with its mixture of classical music and rap. Like the stage musicians, the soundtrack entertains the audience—something marketing departments exploited by releasing soundtrack CD’s in conjunction with the film’s opening. As Luhrmann’s film indicates, however, the soundtrack can also shape the audience’s experience of the film and of Shakespeare. The disco song entitled "Young Hearts" is used variously to signal a change in scene, a change in tone, and a change in pace. Such changes also contribute to the audience’s experience of the film as one that, like the original play, challenges definitions of tragedy and comedy. Immediately prior to the song’s introduction, the camera zooms in on Juliet peering out of her balcony window. It is a contemplative and quiet moment, one which the camera emphasizes by maintaining a static focus on Juliet and one which the soundtrack emphasizes by playing a soft, nondescript, beatless music. Then, suddenly, the disco rhythms of "Young Hearts" blare forth and announce a radical change in tone. First the scene shifts to Mercutio, Romeo, and friends preparing to attend the Capulet party; then, just as suddenly , it changes to Mercutio, Romeo, and friends at the party celebrating with costumed revelers. In both scenes, Mercutio (Harold Perrineau) performs a drag-queen act and he—not Juliet—becomes the focus of the camera’s attention, the audience’s attention, and the soundtrack’s attention. The performance serves to break down boundaries between love and sex, between male and female genders, between dark and light skin colors, between tragedy and comedy.

Mercutio’s gyrations on the grand staircase suggest a scene out of the Ziegfeld Follies. His costume both disguises and accentuates his male physique and black skin. He wears a miniskirt and bra in glittery white sequins, white high heels, and a platinum white wig. The music foregrounds sexuality with its loud, frenetic, and persistent beat, and simultaneously the camera mimics the soundtrack’s staccato with liminal glimpses of writhing body parts and leering faces. This post-modern blurring of conventional sexual boundaries finds an ironic counterpoint in the next sudden shift of scene.

The overall experience is a disorienting one, and the spell is not broken until a cabaret singer, Des’ree, begins singing a ballad entitled "Kissing You," a song that the final credits identify as the theme song for Romeo and Juliet. The lyrics and melody of the song clearly indicate that, unlike "Young Hearts," its emphasis is not on the sexual but rather on the romantic. Furthermore, the camera works with the soundtrack to indicate to audiences that the scenes featuring Romeo and Juliet are part of a much different world. Static film shots are the rule as Des’ree performs her song. Romeo breaks away from the revelers and submerges his head in water, thus breaking the frenetic staccato hold of the camera. While the song continues, Romeo peers at luminous fish in an aquarium, and Juliet’s eyes meet his. Then the camera lingers as Romeo and Juliet exchange meaningful glances through the aquarium.

It is often argued that filmmakers like Luhrmann who transpose Shakespeare to film can never succeed because stage conventions and cinematic devices are so different. Such an argument misses an important theoretical point: both stage conventions and cinematic devices call the audience’s attention to the work’s status as a play or as a film. Shakespeare does this in the original play, and Luhrmann follows his lead in the film. As a result both the play and the film remind their audiences that they are watching a performance or presentation of Romeo and Juliet rather than Romeo and Juliet themselves. Finally, both the play and the film remind their audiences that they must participate in the effort to create the illusion of reality.

Romeo and Juliet, the play, calls attention to its status as a play in both obvious and subtle ways. An obvious reminder to the audience is through the figure of the Chorus. The play opens when the Chorus, a recognized dramatic device, walks on stage and proceeds to notify the audience that what it is about to see is a play. In the form of a sonnet this prologue’s first line, "In fair Verona, where we lay our scene," calls attention to performance as illusion and illusion as performance. Next, the Chorus urges the audience to attend to a tale of "star-crossed lovers" that will continue on the "stage" for a two hours traffic demanding "patient ears" and requiring "toil" on the part of the performers (Prologue. 2-14). Words like scene, stage, two hours traffic, and toil remind the audiences that actors are on the stage and will create the illusion that five days will pass in the span of two hours. Furthermore, the sonnet form, because of its associations with romantic lyric poetry, accentuates that the focus of the play should remain on the "star-crossed lovers."

A more subtle reminder to audiences that they are watching a play is through the various references to time. The play is littered with references to daybreak and nightfall and the quick procession of five days. Such references remind audiences that they need to participate in the creation of the illusion. Whether in a public, outdoor amphitheater, or a private indoor hall, the presence of daylight or artificial candlelight can, of course, confound actors’ attempts to create the illusion that in the space of two hours, five days pass. It is only when audiences share the actors’ "toil" that the play can succeed in disguising real time as fictional time.

Where Shakespeare’s play calls attention to its status as a play through such stage conventions as the musicians, the Chorus, or the time references, Luhrmann’s film calls attention to its status as film through such cinematic devices as the soundtrack, slow-motion, and jump cuts. As with Shakespeare’s play, the self-reflexivity is exerted in both obvious and subtle forms to remind the audiences of the differences between representation and presentation, between real time and fictional time. Jump cuts open the film and characterize the initial shootout scenes between the "Montague Boys" and the "Capulet Boys." This device creates an effect that is both artificial and disorienting as it discourages viewers from looking at the "full picture" and forces them to focus instead on very small details. For instance, once the shootout begins, the camera zooms in along the barrel of Benvolio’s gun to reveal the words "Sword 9mm series."

In Luhrmann’s film, such reflexivity helps to separate the world of Romeo and Juliet from other worlds. Carefully positioned slow-motion shots function to isolate the lovers from the world where real time operates—the world of their parents, the world of feuding families, and the world of violence, life and death. In real time, the camera follows Romeo’s return to the Capulet mansion after the party. The camera follows Romeo as he sneaks behind Juliet and surprises her. Together the two of them fall into the pool. Once in the pool, slow motion intercedes so that the camera can linger over a tangle of legs, hands, hair, and phosphorescent light. The slow-motion device creates the world where love is possible amid the threat of death and violence. The device also requires audiences to participate in the construction of the illusion. Slow motion, like a play’s references to night during an afternoon performance, confounds actors’ attempts to create the illusion of reality unless audiences share the task.

The film reminds audiences of its status as a film in subtle ways as well. There are numerous references to the medium of film. For example, Luhrmann takes the feud between the Capulets and Montagues which opens Act 1 and presents it as a "shootout." Tybalt (John Leguizamo) is introduced to the audience as a character out of an old-time Hollywood Western. When Tybalt enters the fray begun by Sampson, Gregory, Abra(m) and others, he does so like a character out of High Noon. The Western showdown comes complete with holsters, spurs, gunslinging, and a whistling soundtrack. Another reference to the film medium is the movie-within-a-movie interpolated when Friar Lawrence (Pete Postlethwaite) divulges his plan of Juliet’s faux-death via the device of the split screen. On the right of the screen Friar Lawrence narrates his plot, while the left side of the screen shows the film version of Friar Lawrence’s plot featuring the successful delivery of the message to Romeo.

Perhaps the most crucial reminder of the film’s status as film, its self-reflexivity, occurs through one of its location shots—the Sycamore Grove. The location is identified in the screenplay as a demolished cinema. On the screen, however, with its proscenium, stage, and arch, the Sycamore Grove appears as both demolished cinema and demolished playhouse. Above the arch appear the words Sycamore Grove, and it is here that crucial scenes in the film are acted out. It is where Mercutio and Benvolio come after the party to find the errant Romeo. It is where Tybalt taunts first Romeo and then Mercutio into fighting, and it is where Mercutio performs his death scene.

The Sycamore Grove seems to be another case of a clever update with no crucial connection to the text. The original text, after all, does not call for scenes to be performed in a demolished playhouse, much less a demolished cinema. The two words which appear above the arch of the demolished cinema, however, come directly from Shakespeare’s text. Indeed, in the scene prior to Romeo’s entrance, Benvolio informs Lord and Lady Montague that Romeo can be found "underneath the grove of sycamore" (1.1.123). In a 1597 production of the play, the words alone would have created the setting of the Sycamore Grove, thereby highlighting the artificiality of the audience’s introduction to Romeo. So, too, the film heightens the artificiality of this moment. In the film, Romeo sits under the Sycamore Grove cinema arch, with cigarette dangling from his mouth. He is very much the movie matinee idol—alone, with cigarette, and writing in a journal. This is clearly a visual moment and one for which cinema is especially made. However, this is not an example of the tyranny of the visual. For as Romeo sits underneath the Sycamore Grove, a voice-over rehearses the words, "O brawling love, a loving hate,/ Oh anything of nothing first create"(1.1.182-83), while the camera zooms in on Romeo writing the words down in his journal.

Both the play and the film are interested in foregrounding language and in using that language to force audiences to help the actors build the world surrounding Romeo and Juliet. F.E. Halliday pointed out how inventive the language in Shakespeare’s play is with its aubades, epithalamions, rhyming couplets, etc. (88). In the original production the language would have told audiences what the world of Romeo and Juliet was like. Though Luhrmann’s film does indeed cut out much of the text, it still highlights the importance of language and uses the language, in a cinematic form of graphics and titles, to engage rather than simply pander to audiences. In an interview with Jo Litson for TCI, Catherine Martin, production designer for the film, explains the importance of the graphics in the film: "They are a way of communicating clearly to an audience that this is where we are and this what we’re doing" (48). To illustrate, each brand name for bullets and for cars is taken from a Shakespeare text. Other graphics in the form of newspaper headlines, TV news bulletins, and billboards call attention to Shakespeare’s words. Block letters appear on the screen notifying viewers that the setting is "In fair Verona Beach." A newscaster reads the Chorus’s opening sonnet, while the words "two households" are intercut with headlines testifying to the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. There is a sign on the side of the road which advertises "Montague Construction," a plaque that reads "Merchant of Verona Beach," a billboard with the words Shoot Forth Thunder, another billboard with the words such stuff dreams are made of, another sign advertising "Out Damned Spot Dry Cleaners," and a sign advertising the Globe Theater Pool Hall. Graphics remind audiences again and again that this is both the world of Shakespeare and the world of 1997, the world of the theater and the world of the cinema.

Luhrmann’s updates, then, are more than simply "clever" or more than simply thinly disguised attempts to pander to the teen audience. One final update illustrates just how closely Luhrmann’s film comes to recreating Shakespeare’s play despite its contemporary, American-acted, cinematic form. In addition to reminding their audiences that they are watching a presentation of Romeo and Juliet, both the play and the film present authority figures who attempt to shape audiences’ responses. The play, for example, opens with the Chorus. The Chorus provides the voice that tells the audience what to expect during the two hours’ traffic on the stage. Curiously, the play does not end with the Chorus, as one might expect. Instead a social authority figure replaces the drama’s authority figure. Prince Escalus, a clearly delineated authority figure, provides a summation of what has transpired. It is necessary that he provide this summation because the experience of the play thus far has been chaotic. If there is to be any resolution and any restoration of stability, then everyone—characters, actors, audiences—must come to terms with the lovers’ seemingly senseless and certainly violent deaths. Nothing less than the future of society hangs in the balance, and so it is not surprising that Shakespeare would give the ending lines to Prince Escalus:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;

Some shall be pardoned, and some punished

For never was a story of more woe,

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. (5.3.305-310)

Luhrmann updates both the Chorus and Prince Escalus. The Chorus is transformed into a newscaster on a TV screen, and the opening newscast summarizes the plot much as the original Chorus would have summarized it for an Elizabethan audience. Prince Escalus is transformed into a readily recognizable late twentieth-century authority figure, the police captain. His name in the film, Captain Prince, recalls Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century authority figure, Prince Escalus, and simultaneously subverts the authority evoked through its association with the contemporary entertainer, Prince. Luhrmann further subverts this contemporary authority figure by transferring the job of summing up from the Prince to the newscaster, so that it is the newscaster rather than the Prince who concludes with his promise that rewards and also punishments will be meted out and with his speculation that people will continue to talk about "these sad things." The film ends with a self-reflexive device calling attention to the film as film and one that results in a final subversion of the newscaster’s authority and of the entire medium of TV. As the pundit’s editorial is delivered, the TV screen becomes smaller and smaller until both it and the speaker disappear into a void.

By transferring authority from Shakespeare’s Renaissance Prince to the TV newscaster, Luhrmann reminds the audience that whereas in the sixteenth century the people would have turned to a prince to be told what to think, in the twentieth century the people turn to the newscaster to tell them what to think. But through the role played by the newscaster what Luhrmann also makes clear to the audience is that illusion is performance and performance illusion. With this incisive update of Shakespeare, Luhrmann emphasizes the dangers inherent in the faux authority figures populating the landscape at the end of the millennium. All in all, Luhrmann’s Shakespeare draws to the surface subversive meanings that are particularly relevant for a Y2K audience of not only local but global diversity.

Early in the century, Walter Benjamin, addressing the problems presented by one of the newest forms of mass communication, stresses the importance of satisfying "an audience" which is "contemporary with technology." Only in this way, he asserts, will something "worthy of human beings" be achieved (585). Luhrmann, like Benjamin, shows the fullest appreciation of the primary need of a contemporary audience: the need to match technology to their sophisticated awareness of its possibilities. Luhrmann continually demonstrates this match of technology to audience, and with his incisive updating of Shakespeare, he has produced more than negligible cinematic excess, he has produced a film that is, in Walter Benjamin’s words, truly "worthy of human beings."

Mary Lindroth
Department of English
Caldwell College
Caldwell, New Jersey 07006-6195

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