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

Kenneth Branaghs Loves Labours Lost In our teaching of Shakespearian film readjustment to undergraduates, 1 of the issues that frequently arises in class establishions is the nous of how the visuality of the cinematic medium is constructed in tensity 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 song of Shakespeare, functioning as word pictures that stimulate and enhance the imagination of the ravisher 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 caseful is Baz Luhrmanns Romeo + Juliet (1996) in which the assume was made to compete radically with what has been called Luhrmanns MTV-inspired editing, pacing and styling. 2 a nonher(prenominal) is Branaghs Hamlet (1996), where the concentrated effort to retain every single wrinkle of the play created its own burden of visualisation.3 The creative energy of a Shakespearean film adaptation is often sustained by the dynamic of creating a visual track to match the plays dialogue in other words, by the indecision of what images can be used to animate 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 breaker point costumes,4 recent adaptations have become more adventurous, liberally adopting popular idioms and surprise expectations of Shakespeare by visual styles drawn from present-day(a) 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 is 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 experience (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 poesy 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.