Shakespeare in Contemporary Movies Essay -- William Shakespeare Films

Shakespeare in Contemporary Movies In the middle of expression for Richard, Al Pacinos documentary nearly making Richard III and bringing Shakespeare to the people, in that location is a moment which illuminates the relationship of scholarship, Shakespeare and popular culture. The director is ranting at Pacino for offering (threatening?) to bring a Shakespearean scholar into the film You utter you were going to find a scholar to speak right away into the camera and explain what really went down and Im telling you that is ridiculous, that you know more about Richard III than any fucking scholar at Columbia or Harvard.Pacino tries to calm his friend down by pointing out that everyone, even a scholar, is entitled to an opinion about Shakespeare and that is the point of the film, to collect all opinions. In response, the director, intensely frustrated, explodes, still why does he get to speak directly to the camera? If Shakespeare has become a secular bible for contem porary America, hence the scholars, at Harvard, Columbia, or anywhere else, are the priests who interpret the holy writ for the uneducated masses. When academics insist that Shakespeare be read without translation into modern English, they do so because they believe that a great part of the value lies in the language. But America is a (largely) Protestant country and the masses bring in long since rebelled against the authority of priests and their interpretations of sacred texts. Shakespeare is respected not just as literature but as a repository of great truths at the same time, people often mistrust and reject him as as well as upper-class. Pacino does eventually allow a scholar to speak directly to the camera, but this serves only to undercut his autho... ...est. In each case (and especially in Renaissance Man), what those who use Shakespeare gain is just a way to pair into the world more comfortably. And in Dead Poets Society, Shakespeare is seen as creating a crossc urrent too wide to be healed, leading to suicide. But even in other cases, the fragmented text is a way into the world of military unit and privilege, not a radical reordering of that world. Instead, popular cultures freeing of Shakespeare results only in the individual readers agreeing to take over the business of policing socially acceptable readings and uses of the secular bible.Works citedBarthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York Farrar, 1972. Burt, Richard. The Love that dare Not Speak Shakespeares Name New Shakesqueer Cinema in Shakespeare the Movie. Ed. Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt. London and New York Routledge, 1997. 240-268.