Kenneth Branaghs Loves Labours Lost :: Kenneth Branagh Love Labour Lost Essays

Kenneth Branaghs Loves Labours Lost In our teaching of Shakespearian film adaptation to undergraduates, one of the issues that frequently arises in pattern dealions is the question of how the visuality of the cinematic medium is constructed in tension against the verbal nature of Shakespeares dialogue. The tension between the visual and verbal dimensions of filming Shakespeare is created on two levels firstly, where the rhyme of Shakespeare, functioning as word pictures that stimulate and enhance the imagination of the spectator is set against the capacity of film to show rather than tell and secondly, where the adaptation negotiates with the canonicity of the Shakespearean text through the mode of the popular.1 One recent example is Baz Luhrmanns Romeo + Juliet (1996) in which the play was made to compete radically with what has been called Luhrmanns MTV-inspired editing, pacing and styling. 2 Another is Branaghs Hamlet (1996), where the voiceless effort to retain every single l ine of the play created its own burden of visualisation.3 The creative energy of a Shakespearean film adaptation is a good deal sustained by the dynamic of creating a visual track to match the plays dialogue in other words, by the question of what images can be used to reanimate or do justice to Shakespeares text. Where Shakespeare on film had once been expected to retain the traits of high theatre and art, complete with authentic period costumes,4 recent adaptations have become more adventurous, generously adopting popular idioms and surprising expectations of Shakespeare by visual styles drawn from contemporary entertainment.5 Kenneth Branaghs Loves Labours Lost (2000), the focus of this paper, adapts Shakespeares play to the American movie musical, but it depends less on creating a contemporary visual track that runs parallel to the text than on interpolating an aural one which intercepts and weaves another lyric and melodic text into it. Samuel Crowl argues that the musical i s a very American genre, which he surmises accounts for the relative lack of success of the film (40). In our analysis, we will discuss the conversion of Shakespeares poetic form into the musical form, and explore how the engagement of the spectators aural grow (i.e. through the music and songs) is as important as the visual, if not more so, in negotiating the transfer of Shakespeare to the screen. We have identified three strategies of adaptation which we will discuss in the three sections of this essay firstly, the exchange of poetry with popular song secondly, the construction of spectatorship and listenership as recovery and recollection and finally, the performativity that mediates between the poetic and musical forms.