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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 3 of 5) By 1912 the cavernous new "Palace" and "Bijou" theaters (replacing the scruffy nickelodeons) needed feature-length movies to fill seats. Adolph Zukor's importation of Sarah Bernhardt's film Elizabeth broke the back of the one-reel tyranny and added the mystique of the world's greatest actress to the tacky film business. The earliest feature-length American movie turned out to be an ambitious five-reel production of seventy-seven scenes from Richard III produced by M. B. Dudley and shot mainly in New York's Westchester County. As Gloucester, Frederick B. Warde (1851–1935),8 a peripatetic British Shakespearean, brought a convincing miasma of evil to the role and doubtless satisfied the American fetish for "high-class" actors. Despite his stage background, Warde's costume drama is as much filmic as F. R. Benson's contemporaneous British Richard III (1911) was stage-bound in its Stratford-upon-Avon theater. In a supercolossal, pre-DeMillian, no-expense-spared extravaganza, spear-brandishing infantry, mounted knights, and bevies of lavishly dressed ladies-in-waiting fill the mise-en-scène. Scenarist James Keane introduced a two-masted Lancastrian warship arriving at Milford Haven. Warde, as "this bottled spider" (4.4.81), dominates the screen with his serio-comic antics, elaborately wiping his bloody sword after skewering poor mad King Henry.
A 1916 King Lear, produced by Edwin Thanhouser and his talented actress wife, Gertrude Homen, even more graphically showed how an acrobatic camera could heighten reality. The Thanhousers' sweeping shots, in ambition nearly at the level of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), took the action not only "before" the audience but also "above" and "below." A hirsute Frederick B. Warde again starred, with the aura of "class" that insecure Americans thought only the British owned.
8 Frederick B. Warde, Fifty Years of Make-Believe (New York: International Press Syndicate, 1920).
The Merchant of Venice (1908). Vitagraph. Library of Congress.
Richard III (1908). Vitagraph. Library of Congress.