Catherine Hardwicke Will Direct a New Hamlet

Yet another big-budget Shakespeare film is in the works. Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke will direct a Hamlet adaptation starring Emile Hirsch (Milk, Into the Wild, Lords of Dogtown).

Al Pacino to Star in a New King Lear

In addition to the new, Julie Taymor Lear starring Anthony Hopkins, we will soon have a version directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino.

Radford directed Pacino as Shylock in his 2004 Merchant of Venice, and the producer Barry Navidi tells Variety that the new film will be "very similar to the classical look" of the earlier film.

Shakespeare-Movie Soliloquies and Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight

Directors usually handle Shakespearean soliloquies in three ways. They have actors speak directly to the audience, as they would on the Elizabethan stage. They have actors speak to the air, as if they were yammering on Bluetooth-enabled cellphones. Or they use a voice-over, as if we were wire-tapping the characters' brains.

Each strategy has its advantages.

Speaking directly to the audience works well for villains, who share their nasty schemes, preparing us to watch with horror as they dupe unknowing victims. The technique also allows for dark comedy. For example, Ian McKellan's Richard III and Harry J. Lennix's Aaron (in Julie Taymor's Titus) act like satanic stand-up comedians, terrifying us and making us laugh with the same speech.

Having actors talk to themselves produces a different effect, allowing us to pretend we're hearing a character's inward thoughts. This works in both comedies and tragedies. In a comedy, we laugh—or chuckle inwardly—when we hear Emma Thompson's Beatrice (in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing) or Helena Bonham-Carter's Olivia (in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night) describe sudden changes of heart. And we pity Imogen Stubb's Viola (in Nunn's Twelfth Night) and Calista Flockhart's Helena (in Michael Hoffman's Midsummer Night's Dream) when we hear them lament that their love is unrequited. In a tragedy, the technique gives us access to the minds of a complex protagonist, such as Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.

Branagh can whisper and be heard by a movie audience, but he still speaks the soliloquies much as Richard Burbage did during the original performance. We can thus see speaking aloud as a holdover from the theater, since in a film we can hear an actor's voice without his lips moving, as if we've got a direct line to his brain. Though less common than the other two methods, this way of rendering soliloquies can be used to great effect, as it is in Roman Polanski's Macbeth. When we hear Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's thoughts, we feel how their crimes have isolated them, locking them in their heads and destroying their minds.

Many directors employ more than one strategy. For example, Polanski sometimes gives us part of a soliloquy as a voice-over and another part aloud, much as troubled people speak fragments of their thoughts. In Oliver Parker's Othello, Kenneth Branagh as Iago sometimes speaks as if unaware of the audience but then addresses us, startling us and implicating us in his plans.

Orson Welles uses two methods for rendering soliloquies in The Chimes at Midnight. He has John Gielgud speak Henry's "Uneasy lies the head" speech aloud (2 Henry IV 3.1.1-31 in The Norton Shakespeare), but he has Hal and Falstaff speak their soliloquies to one another—a method not used in any other Shakespeare film I've seen.

The technique allows Welles to develop what many consider the most interesting feature of the history plays: the relationship between Hal and Falstaff.

We see this with Welles's handing of Hal's first soliloquy, spoken in The First Part of Henry IV after Hal's companions have left the stage. Hal tells us that he hangs out with these men so that he will appear more impressive when he abandons them, a notorious bit of calculation that reminds many critics of the way Shakespearean villains plot their crimes in secret, revealing them only to the audience.

In Welles's film there's nothing secret about Hal's plan.

Hal, played by Keith Baxter, begins the soliloquy as he is leaving Falstaff, whom we see over his shoulder. He stops in front of some twigs and branches. Fingering the twigs, as if contemplating how he might be snared by his loose companions, he begins in a soft voice, "I know you all and will a while uphold / The unyoked humor of your idleness." He stretches out the "while," emphasizing that his time with Falstaff and company will come to an end.

When he looks up, squints, and speaks the next lines, "Yet herein will I imitate the sun . . ." a worried look appears on Falstaff's face.

He still speaks so quietly that we can't be sure that Falstaff hears him—until a few lines later, when Falstaff gives a small, worried chuckle.

When Hal begins to reveal his plan—"So when this loose behavior I throw off . . ."—he speaks more loudly, then turns and looks directly at Falstaff as he talks of how the plan will work. In the background on the right, we see the cart upon which Falstaff's body will be wheeled away at the end of the film. Behind Hal's head is the castle, representing the court world that is his true home.

Hal speaks the final couplet, turns, and walks from Falstaff, toward the castle. Falstaff calls after him, engaging him in their usual banter, but that banter now has a sense of desperation. To believe that Hal won't reject him, Falstaff must ignore what he's heard. This is harder than ignoring the hints Hal gives throughout the plays. By having Hal speak the soliloquy directly to Falstaff, Welles highlights Falstaff's self-deception and heightens the tension between the characters.

He uses the same technique for Hal and Falstaff's other soliloquies. For example, Falstaff speaks his famous "honor" soliloquy (1 Henry IV 5.1.127-39) directly to Hal, who looks toward the battlefield but hears every word. The new context turns Falstaff's comic "catechism" into a real attempt to teach Hal his philosophy of life, an attempt we know will fail.

Welles makes Falstaff's last soliloquy, an encomium to wine (2 Henry IV 4.2.78-111), even more poignant. He does this by relocating the speech to the end of the battle of Shrewsbury and connecting it to Falstaff taking credit for killing Hotspur. In 1 Henry IV, the king doesn't hear this, but in Chimes he does—and gives Hal a look weighted with pain and disappointment. Hal seems on the verge of disputing Falstaff's lie, and Falstaff swallows as if ashamed of what he's doing. The king takes a last look at Hotspur's body and walks away. Falstaff has stolen Hal's chance of redeeming himself.

The silent tension between Hal and Falstaff is interrupted by Hal's brother John, who tells Falstaff that "the king hath severed you and Prince Harry." In 2 Henry IV, this line belongs to the Lord Chief Justice, and Falstaff's rejoinder—"I thank your pretty sweet wit for it"—is directed at him. In The Chimes at Midnight, Falstaff speaks the line to John and, after John walks away, begins the last "soliloquy."

In the original, the speech's opening is occasioned by John's cold mien and reluctance to speak well of Falstaff. In Chimes, Falstaff is blaming John for separating him from Hal, as if the slander of men like John would be the only reason Hal would distance himself.

The next part of the soliloquy—the praise of wine—now seems an attempt to get back into Hal's good graces. Falstaff gets Hal to drink with him and tries to entertain him with his wit, but the look on Hal's face shows us that he is not amused, unlike the men who hoist their cups whenever Falstaff says something funny. Their reaction seems like mockery when Falstaff attributes Hal's valiance to his drinking.

Hal walks away before Falstaff reaches the conclusion of the speech, in which Falstaff says he would teach his sons to addict themselves to sack (white wine). Falstaff implies that he has taught this to Hal when he raises his cup in a toast to the prince, joined by the men behind him.

Hal responds by turning away, and the smile fades from Falstaff's face. Hal drops the cup and walks after the soldiers, leaving Falstaff behind.

The next time Falstaff speaks to him—"My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!—Hal will respond with, "I know the not old man."

Olivier's Richard III: Title Sequence and Opening Scenes

Stirring trumpets and tympani accompany opening titles that announce "Laurence Olivier Present's [sic] Richard III by William Shakespeare With some interpolations by David Garrick[,] Colley Cibber[,] etc."

Besides telling us that Olivier's meticulous 1955 film needed a better proofreader, the description helps us understand the relationship between the movie and Shakespeare's text.

For almost two centuries, from the beginning of the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, people knew Richard III in a version by Colley Cibber, a theater manager, actor, and playwright best remembered as the Dunce in Alexander Pope's mock epic, The Dunciad. Cibber's version begins with Richard murdering the Lancastrian king Henry VI, the penultimate scene in Shakespeare's Third Part of Henry VI, the play that precedes this one in Shakespeare's first tetralogy. Cibber also eliminates one of Shakespeare's greatest characters: Margaret of Anjou, who appears in all four plays, beginning as a young bride and ending—in Richard III—as a kind of living ghost, haunting and cursing the Yorks.

Like Cibber's version, Olivier's starts with a scene from The Third Part of Henry VI (the last, not the second-to-last) and eliminates Margaret. Olivier also includes Cibber's lines, "Off with his head. So much for Buckingham" and "Richard's himself again," lines made famous by the actor-manager who succeeded Cibber at the Drury Lane theater: David Garrick, the most celebrated English actor of the eighteenth century.

William Hogarth, "David Garrick as Richard III" (1741)

As a director and the best-known English actor of his own day, Olivier presumably felt himself to be Garrick's heir, especially when performing Garrick's most famous role. The film director Alexander Korda may have been thinking of this connection when he commissioned Salvador Dalí to paint Olivier in costume as Richard.

Just as William Hogarth's painting of David Garrick as Richard is the most familiar portrayal of that actor, so Dalí's is now the most famous of Olivier.

Dalí Theatre-Museum, Figueres, Spain

Those who've seen the film will recognize Olivier's hat and the hand missing fingers. The ring on the pinky may allude to the ring Richard gives Tyrell when commissioning the little princes' murder. The double face represents Richard's double nature and the actor behind the role. In the background is one of Dalí's typical Spanish-looking landscapes, now standing for Bosworth Field, which Olivier recreated on a Spanish plain.

That recreation owes less to history than to legend, as the opening titles emphasize. In making this distinction, Olivier may have been responding to defenses of the historical Richard that began as early as Horace Walpole's in the eighteenth century. These defenses had seen a resurgence after the publication of Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time in 1951, and Olivier apparently acknowledged them in his film's final scenes with a shot of the inscription on Richard's garter—"honi soit qui mal y pense," "shame on those who think of ill of it"—telling the president of the Friends of Richard, "I put that in especially for you people."

Appeasing Ricardian groups no doubt mattered less to Olivier than drawing the audience into the film's atmosphere of medieval romance. With medieval-looking calligraphy, border decorations, and illustrations, the title sequence concludes with "Here now begins one of the most famous and at the same time most infamous of the legends that are attached to The Crown of England," giving us the sense that what follows will be a filmed version of something we might read in a medieval manuscript.

The final title's drawn crown becomes a filmed crown, a trick Olivier reverses at the film's end. As the camera pans down, we discover that this crown is an enormous sculpture suspended over the real crown that the archbishop is lowering onto the "son of York" who is about to become Edward IV. A different angle shows us the other Yorks and their followers, lowering crowns ("victorious wreaths") onto their own heads. We see Richard from behind, his crown in front of royal one, a shot hinting at his ambition, at which crown he wishes were settling on his head.

Later Olivier as Richard will reinforce this impression by carelessly handing his crown to a servant, who drops it. Olivier will register annoyance so mild that we will know how little he values his inferior crown, the sign of his present position in the Yorkist hierarchy.

Olivier introduces the Yorkist factions after Edward's coronation, after the crowd chants "God save King Edward the Fourth! Long live King Edward the Fourth! May the king live forever!" Richard looks over his shoulder, giving us our first sight of his huge triangular nose. Another shot reveals that he's not looking at us but at his ally Buckingham (Ralph Richardson), who in turn looks at Richard's first victim, Clarence (John Gielgud), who stands with his hands folded piously, blinking, his insipid expression contrasting with Richard's and Buckingham's knowing ones. Clarence looks at his mother, at the little princes, and at Queen Elizabeth and her brother and sons by her first marriage, introducing us to everyone who could stand between Richard and the throne.

As these characters leave the coronation chamber, we're introduced to one who doesn't appear in Shakespeare's play: Edward's mistress Jane Shore. She moves her hand toward the king, who almost touches her cheek with his scepter. Jane's eyes gleam, and the queen's face freezes as she moves with her husband into the next room, where Olivier gives us the last scene of The Third Part of Henry VI. After Edward speaks of his son inheriting the crown and has Clarence and Richard kiss the prince, he announces celebrations that suit the "pleasure of the court" (46), and we see Jane in the right foreground. The celebrations begin with a procession through the streets, Jane following the royal procession in a litter.

Her silent presence highlights Edward's loose morals, which Richard will use to delegitimize his son's succession. In later scenes, she will underscore the weakness that allows Richard to manipulate him. For example, after Richard gets Edward to sign Clarence's execution order, Jane hands him a goblet of wine. Distracted by his pleasures, Edward isn't paying adequate attention to serious matters, as we see again when he tries to make peace among the Yorks. When his wife addresses them with her back to him, Edward takes the opportunity to kiss Jane's hand. Hastings will be similarly distracted by Jane, ignoring warnings that might save him from destruction.