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Shakespeare in Silent Films |
Excerpted from Kenneth S. Rothwell, "Shakespeare Film in America: O Brave New World of Bardolatry!" Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.
(Page 2 of 5) From the beginning there was a search for sound to rescue Shakespeare on silent film from its status as a risible oxymoron;4 thus the movie trade journals were crammed with all kinds of panaceas for ending the terrible silence.5 Genteel young ladies brought up to play piano for dinner guests became hot commodities as managers installed them "in a safe environment" to play movie theme music. Edison wax cylinders behind the screen cranked out sound effects, and lecturer W. Stephen Bush of Philadelphia offered theater managers the expertise to "attract the best class of people,"6 though the Gaumont Chronophone talking picture machine was doomed by its tinny amplification.7
At Vitagraph before World War I the camera could not rove but, with rare exceptions, remained stationary and recorded what could be seen immediately "before" it. In the Vitagraph Julius Caesar, one cinematic trope occurs with the materializing of Caesar's ghost from thin air in Brutus's tent before Philippi, after the fashion of Georges Méliès's pioneering trick photography.
4 Kenneth S. Rothwell, "The Conspiracy Against Silence: How Movies Began to Talk," Unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, New York City, 2002; see also Edward Abel and Nick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
5 Trade journals consulted include The New York Clipper, Moving Picture World, New York Dramatic Mirror, either on microfilm or in extensive clipping files at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, or the Museum of Modern Art film library.
6 Moving Picture World (17 June 1908), 547.
7 Early Motion Picture Catalogs, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. The Gaumont sound and image projector was another failed device.
Macbeth (1908). Vitagraph. Library of Congress.